Stars and Dragons

Starcraft 2 has been consuming a lot of my playtime recently. RTS games were my first real gaming love, and this one sets a new standard. The single player is everything I ever wanted from a game, amazing. Multiplayer is great, especially playing in teams is fun. I’m enjoying myself too much to do a lot of WoW stuff now.
However I did manage to jump in a raid yesterday and down Halion on my first night of trying. Really nice fight, and cool to heal. Then I did my first few attempts on the Lich King. That fight is really cool. We did not reach phase 3, but it was nice to see that last boss of ICC for a bit.
Anyway, back to SC2 it is.

Holy Power Toys For Retribution

Since Holy Power has been announced a lot of excitement has surrounded Paladins in the Cataclysm Beta. The spec that currently has the most going on with Holy Power is certainly Retribution. That is where you can currently find most of the Holy Power consuming abilities, and it has the most interaction with the new resource.

Gaining Holy Power

Crusader Strike is our main Holy Power generator, giving us a Holy Power charge each time we use it. It becomes available at level one for all specs, so we can start generating power straight away. If we get talents to bring down the cooldown to three seconds, as Ghostcrawler said we will be alternating between Crusader Strike and one other ability every time. Building up three Holy Power will be very quick, so we get easy access to our strong new attacks.

Divine Purpose is a talent that

Armor Specialization

The latest Cataclysm beta build includes Armor Specializations for all classes. This means that when you wear a full suit of the highest armor class you can wear you get a 5% bonus to your primary stat. For Paladins this means wearing only plate. Ret will get a 5% Strength bonus, Holy 5% Intellect. Yummy, free Intellect.

This means it is very unlikely to be a good idea to equip one non-plate piece. Maybe if you have a number of better mail, leather, or cloth pieces, it is still an improvement, but it needs to offset a large amount of Intellect or Strength now.

Besides the free stats, the main advantage of this

PvP Gear: Resilience

One of the things you notice when you just start in PvP is that you die very easily. Ever wonder why a heroics boss has 900.000 hp? Because three guys hitting you with fireballs hurts. This can be quite frustrating for a new PvP player. Luckily there is an answer: resilience. Resilience does a number of things, but in general it reduces the damage you take when fighting other players. So the fireballs will hurt less, hopefully enough for you to run up to the mage and smash him with a mace.

The protection that resilience provides comes in four flavours:

Choices in Cataclysm trees

One of the stated design goals for Cataclysm is to give players more choice. I have seen posts on forums claiming that the 31 point talent trees present us with less choice, something extensively commented on by Ghostcrawler. While we may have fewer talent points to spend in fewer talents altogether, this means we have less options, which is not the same as having less choice.

Options versus choices

In the current trees there are simply bad talents. Sure, you can choose these, but doing so is a bad thing. Since you generally do not want bad things, this is not really a choice, just the illusion of choice. You have the option of picking them, but you should not. There is something to be said for filtering out good players by their talent spec, but on the other hand, the skills involved with this are not so much playing WoW, as using spreadsheets and reading forums. I can understand why Blizzard wants to move away from this.

Holy Power

The biggest news of the Twitter Dev Chat this weekend was definitely the revealing of the new Paladin resource/mechanic: Holy Power. Now some people have already commented on the lame name, as well as on what it does, so you should check out Blessing of Kings, Suicidal Zebra, or Righteous Defense. To recap, Holy Power is a combination of Combo Points (we build up three points with Crusader Strike or Holy Shock) and Runic Power (it stays on us independent on our target). We can use up all points on a special ability, or to buff abilities we have now. The list of Holy Power abilities is:

An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

The most interesting for Holy is Word of Glory. Since mana is supposed to matter a lot in Cataclysm, a free heal is really nice. Also it is instant, meaning it keeps us mobile and arrives at a target fast. We will probably be trading off small Words of Glory when we need to spread the love, while saving up for a big one for heavier healing. This is assuming Word of Glory does indeed scale with Holy Power built up, but this is most likely. Holy does not seem to get much from the other abilities, so I am hoping we get something else from Holy Power actually.

For Retribution there are some more opportunities there. Do you use Inquisition to buff damage, use the increased damage from Divine Storm, or use this beauty:

Templar’s Verdict: An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt:
1 Holy Power: 55% Weapon Damage
2 Holy Power: 125% Weapon Damage
3 Holy Power: 225% Weapon Damage

It will be interesting to see how this all makes the priority queue more interesting. I am expecting a Ret Pally to want to keep up Inquisition, make use of the increased Divine Storm damage whenever possible, and finish off with Templar’s Verdict only when the Inquisition buff is not about to fall off. This would seem to be the way in which all the abilities are relevant.

All in all this sure freshens Paladins up in Cataclysm, giving us some new toys to play with. There was more in the Developer Chat, that I plan to comment on soon, but Holy Power sure was the coolest thing.

Quel’Delar

At one point during WotLK I spent some time saving up money. I thought it would be nice to sit on some gold, for when I wanted to start leveling another character, or get epic flying for one of my toons. But for a while that money just seemed to be sitting there. Thinking about the potential weapon upgrades for my Holy gear, and the little time I spend raiding nowadays I figured I should go for Quel’Delar. I had the gold, and didn’t feel like trying my luck in the dungeons, figuring if one did drop, I could just sell it and recoup the cost anyway.

Now if you are looking for a new weapon outside of raiding and have the gold lying around, I can really recommend dropping the gold for a Battered Hilt. The reason: the quest line. It is quite amazing, and definitely one of my favourites so far. One of the coolest aspects (and this might be a bit of a spoiler) is that you get to go to the Sunwell, which was previously only accessible as part of the last raid of BC. Since I barely managed to get to 70 before WotLK was released this was a lot of fun for me. Other than there is the fun laundry business in Dalaran.

The most awkward bit of the questline is the part where you have to go into Halls of Reflection, without actually doing the instance. I felt a bit bad about forcing a whole group to go through the motions just for my sword, while it is a tad hard to do it alone without just the right setup. Even though you can use Uther as a tank, as a melee class I found I was not able to do enough damage to get credit for the kill, while staying out of the whirlwind. In the end I asked a guildy to tank it for me while healing him, and it was a breeze.

The sword itself looks quite nice and has good stats as a healer sword. I have not really looked into it as a dps sword, but the stats seem to be ok for that as well.

Just make sure you do not pay too much for it: watch your auction house for a while to see the price range for a hilt. That, or just get lucky with a drop.

PvP Retribution Spec

I started my PvP journey in my normal PvE spec, just to see how it would go without spending the gold on a respec and glyphs. It worked out pretty ok, I managed to do some damage and generally be a nuisance with Repentance, taking two Arathi Basin wins.

But in order to really get going, I wanted to change my spec to a real PvP build. Now it is not horrible different from a PvE build. You still want to go all the way down to Divine Storm, which is nice when some enemies are bunched up, there are just some subtle change in the talents you pick up in Retribution.For instance I did not grab Vengeance, since it is more of a sustained dps talent.

My off-tree talents are a bit different. For PvE you might go Aura Mastery or Divine Sacrifice/Guardian. My PvE spec included Aura Mastery, but for PvP I wanted to take more of a personal survivability build. To that end I picked up the PvP talents low in the Holy and Protection trees, such as Unyielding Faith and Stoicism. Along with that I took Improved Righteous Fury for the damage reduction, since threat does not matter.

While the changes are mostly defensive, there is some offense in there with the Seals of the Pure (which was in my PvE spec, but is now used for stronger Judgments using Seal of Righteousness). Also I decided to see if Eye for an Eye is worth it. Since I end up getting critted quite a bit (thanks to my lack of PvP gear with resilience), I hope my enemies will feel at least some of my pain.

My glyphs are also aimed either at improving my Seal and Judgment damage, or my crowd control.

All this has lead me to go for the following spec, to which I will be making changes as I go along.

PvP

I have never done a lot of PVP on any of my toons. While leveling I was always frustrated by the fact that you could really only do Battlegrounds every 10 or so levels. At the time they didn’t give experience anyway, and I enjoyed the PvE part of the game a lot more.  In the endgame the same thing happened, I enjoyed dungeons and raiding a lot, so I spent most of my time there. I tried equipping my hunter for PvP and played some BGs, but I spend most of my time healing on my Paladin or leveling alts. I may have hopped into Wintergrasp once or twice just to check it out, and tried healing in BGs when I got some Holy PvP gear from VoA, but that was it.

Part of the reason I’m not too fond of PvP is that I suck at it. Horribly. I’m king at getting myself killed and not doing nearly enough damage to anyone else. I did kind of stay alive as Holy in BGs , with Beacon on me, but in the end I felt I had to smash face in order to really have fun in PvP.

But now that I’ve seen a lot of the PvE content, and I find myself not having time to raid the whole of ICC (that was one of the reasons to love ToC, it doesn’t take more than one night), I figured it was time for something else. My plan is to change my off-specfrom PvE Ret to PvP Ret, keeping my Holy PvE spec for doing dungeons and the occasional raid. I have some emblems of Triumph lying around anyway to get me started, and will just do a bunch of random BGs and see where that takes me.

I plan to write some posts about how I fare, and especially how to survive in PvP if I ever manage to figure that out. Hopefully I will learn some moves, and gear up accordingly in order to start enjoying PvP more. For now, at least it gives me something else to do besides running the same dungeons every day.

New Raid Rules

The new raid system for Cataclysm has recently been revealed, and there’s been a huge storm of excitement all around it. I want to start out by saying that I am very positive about the changes, and I’ll use this post to go into detail why I believe they are not just good, but necessary.

The change basically comes down to this: 10 and 25 mans will be the same raid (with the same lockout and loot), and heroic modes will be available for bosses in both (again, same lockout, same loot). 25 mans will give more loot per player, but not better loot. So per raid you have one lockout, and better loot only for heroic modes, with more loot for 25 mans. Simple and elegant if you ask me.
In short Blizzard has taken the stances that rather than develop content that dictates how you play, they are asking you to choose a play style (10/25 man, normal/heroic) and use the content they have provided. So no longer is your play style decided by the content , rather it has been turned around. You choose how you play, not Blizzard. I’d say this is an improvement, as it puts the decision of how to play with the player. Simultaneously it still allows Blizzard to provide us with content that most players will be able to see, which means they can pull out more of their resources to make it.

So why is this change needed? The main reasoning behind it seems to be that raiding “difficulty” comes in two dimensions. An idea that came up between Naxx and Ulduar. You can differentiate based on player skill and on raid size. In Naxx the only distinction was based on size, you either ran normal/easy mode/10 man or difficult/heroic/25 man. Not to say that the 25 man was necessarily more difficult, but the argument was, it requires more organization and thus should give better rewards.
In Ulduar the second dimension was added, that of hard modes. In these case it was not just organization, but actual difficulty of the encounter that was used to allow players to get better gear. And this makes sense: if you play a harder game, you should get a better reward.
The question that arises is: if the reward for downing a more difficult boss is better loot, then what should the reward for more organization be? So far it had been better loot. But was this really fair? Now one might argue that 25 man raids were still more difficult, but imagine (for as far as can be measured) normal 25 mans are as hard/easy as normal 10 mans. How is it fair that you get better gear, since you are doing pretty much the same thing? Yet at the same time, there is more organization involved, which should count for something.
The answer Blizzard has provided to this problem is very elegant: more organization should be rewarded with more gear, instead of better gear. This provides some added incentive, but does not reward players more for continuously doing the same within one week.

The main advantage of this is that players are not being forced (actually, they are no longer able) to run the same 25 and 10 man raids in one week in order to keep up with badges. I’ve compared it to watching the same tv show twice in one week. It is boring, and makes no sense. The main reason why it is done, is because after a few 25 man runs you out-gear the 10 man raid and just blow straight through it. Is that what this game should be about? I don’t think so.

One of the arguments against this change has been the question: how do we gear up new guild members? Currently they can be taken through a 10 man raid, get them geared, while still allowing the raiders who take this new member to do the 25 man. This will no longer be possible. Of course it has only been possible since WOTLK, and we can just look back to older expansions to see how it was done: run the previous tier raid. The gear of the previous tier should be a) available through old raids and heroics and b) enough to get you started with both 10 and 25 man raids of the current tier.

Finally I want to address the main problem that has sprung up around the web: why run 25 mans? The main reason should be “because I like it”. You’re playing this game for fun, and if you like downing bosses with 24 other folks, by all means do so. No it will not get you better gear. It will gear you slightly faster because you’re going through some more stress during organization. Do you on the other hand enjoy seeing the content, don’t mind gearing a tad slower, and don’t want the hassle of a big team? Raid 10 mans. Like I said before, decide how you want to play, and play that way. Your reward will mostly be in the joy of playing, not in your gear.
I’ve seen loads of people say they prefer 25 mans, but they are afraid it is no longer worth it. Well, if you enjoy it, it is worth it. And judging by the amount of people, I’d say there’s likely to be at least 24 people who agree with you on your realm.

All in all, I think the new raid model is great: it frees up people to decide for themselves what play style they enjoy. People get rewarded fairly for doing more difficult fights, and still somewhat for more organization. There is no more need to run the same content over and over and over. To conclude, my main hope for this is that it frees the designers up to make some extra content, making the game even more fun in the end.