Patch Titbits

Well Patch 3.3 is on the PTR and there are titbits for  balance druids so in no particular order

Druid tier 10.

I don’t like the graphics at all. From the  two pieces of  briarthorn attached to the headpiece  past the carnivorous plant life on the shoulders (cousins to Seymour from Shop of Horrors) to the oversize girdle  that’s claiming to be a belt.   I like my T9 corset look I don’t want a  girdle.

Back to the helm and its faceplate, what is that even meant to be? A bug with thorns or another of Seymours cousins with the faceplate representing dripping green goo from its mouth?

And those gloves we’re meant to be in ICE crown you’d think there of all places we’d want proper gloves not  fingerless ones, or maybe they think we get enough protection from the cold with all the fur from our forms.

I know we’re druid our  sets are meant to be nature themed (though  not always) I’d hoped for something a bit more thematically tuned to Icecrown or generally winter themed.  Dress us in Yeti skins, I’d much rather that set of horns than a couple of briarthorns on my head.

Well on to the set bonuses.  The ones discovered initially were well  placeholders. They changed them within about 24 hours of them being released so now we have:

• 2 Pieces (Balance): When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 15% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 seconds.

Why do I need to spend 13 points in the resto tree to gain a balance set bonus?  Why can’t it  proc of Nature’s Grace, (tweaked for the fact NG procs a lot more than OoC) I have zero control over OoC procs. The number crunchers reckon it procs on average twice every 60 secs so  that means I get 12 secs of this proc every minute. So assuming a tank n spank with no fire to move out of etc this will apparently convert into a 3% dps increase. Compare that to T9 (moonfire dots criting) which is (again according to the number crunchers) a 4%dps that you don’t need to be standing still to benefit from it.

• 4 Pieces (Balance): Your critical strikes from Starfire and Wrath cause the target languish for an additional 5% of your spell’s damage over 4 seconds.

“Cause the target languish”  erm okay not sure what  version of English is being used there.  The common consensus on this appears to be that some sort of  dot will be applied that  adds 5% of the crits damage over  4 seconds though there are questions about how it works.

Right more design advice to Blizz here,  make life easy for yourself, stop  coming up with new set bonus’es for each tier. Reuse the ones you know the players like,  the stats on the gear plus a familar  set bonus will still make sets preferred over the non set gear of the same ilevel. Change it with each expansion to reflect new spells, talents but within that expansion find some good ones and leave them be.

New Idol

• The periodic damage from your Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells grants 44 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Given the Idol of Lunar Fury does  much the same thing using just moonfire and has pretty much a 100% uptime I won’t be rushing out to spend  emblems on this one.

It is better, five stacks will create 220 critical strike rating and  the 15 secs give you a sliglhty bigger buffer zone before it wears off  but  one moonfire dot gets me 200 for 12 secs I need 5  moonfire/insect swarm dots to get the 220, so about nine seconds at a beginning of a fight to kick in  assuming a 100% proc rate.

Kudos to Blizz though for creating idols that actually do more than buff one spell. I’ll be more than happy if this  type of idol (our dots providing a crit/ haste/ dmg buff for everything we cast) becomes the standard and we  no longer see ones that buff a single spell.

Rebirth

• Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Nice, especially as  mine is glyphed so no reagent cost, we run with between three and five druids in 25 mans so its not a major buff for me but definitely useful for 10 mans or the odd raid where we have only one  druid.

Battle.Net

YesI got the memo, I’ve made the change over but I don’t like it.  It’s not that they want us  logging on using a more ‘modern’ system. it’s that they’re planning on:

Our vision is for the new Battle.net to become the ultimate Blizzard Entertainment social network, in addition to its matchmaking foundation. Simply logging in to Battle.net will make it easy to find and chat with your friends across World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and future Blizzard Entertainment titles, including Diablo III. Keep track of all your buddies in your friends list, view their online status and presence information, voice chat, send out party invites, and broadcast messages to your friends. Detailed character profiles let players keep up to date on friends’ progress and achievements.

I don’t want random people keeping track of me not even my friends sometimes. If I’m not on a toon you know about it’s because I want to be left alone and from what I can see with this system its your log on identity they intend to use not your character. I just hope there’s an opt out option for this.

Patchwerk want to play

We downed Patchwerk on Heroic last night. I may have said this before but I find the 25 man Naxx a slight anticlimax after the 10 man. You’ve seen the boss and learnt the fight on normal mode then you go kill him with more back up on heroic.

Still a guild first is a guild first, we’ve already cleared the Spider and Plague Wings, I seem to have forgotten to mention those though, and of course completed Naxx in Normal 10 man mode.

We also downed Grobbulus the second boss, erm I kind of forgot to take a screen shot of that as I was busy admiring my new shoulders the Mantle of the Fatigued Sage. Thats the last bit of my T6 gone now. I do look a tad clownlike at the moment though. I also got some new bracers Swarm Bindings off  Anub’Rekhan earlier in the evening. So both needed enchanting.

The shoulder enchant was a bit expensive as I had to mill 6 stacks of AH herbs to get the two icy pigments I needed for Snowfall ink to make the Master’s Inscription of the Storm . At which point I remembered I was still hated by the Sons of Hodir, the faction that provides shoulder enchants for non scribes.

I sort of remember this little fact every so often then do nothing about it,  but I took myself off to WoWwiki to find out what I needed to do, and basically it was  click on the strange nugget I’ve been carrying in my bag without noticing for the last 10 days and complete the questline. So now I’m friendly with them. Not likely to be one I grind as their main rewards are the shoulder enchants but at least they don’t hate me any more.

Talking rep grinds, I made revered with the  Oracles and am carrying a  Mysterious Egg around in the hope it’ll hatch something companionable and have identified my next pet source.  I need to complete the  Higher Learning Achievement which should net me a  Kirin Tor Familiar.  I may even have 50 before the patch introduces the new 100 pet achievement.

As to the weekends focus

Get a UI page up on this blog with my addons listed to make the next  rebuild that much easier I did it. It’s a bit rough and ready still and has made me wonder what else is out there in add-on land that I may find myself unable to live without

This that and the other

I’ve had a fun night tonight.

Started off by  getting “Friend or Fowl“. I flew over to Howling Fjord and ‘tagged’ a whole load of turkey’s with faerie fire then when I had their attention  hit starfall and ran towards a second bunch. It was closer to 15 turkey’s in 30 seconds than 3 minutes.

Then into my first Northrend Instance,  heroic Utgarde Keep (as it was the daily) which netted me both the normal & heroic achievements.

Then I had to stop playing and go buy a new microwave oven because ours died last night, and without it I might actually have to cook my son dinner.

Back online and into my second Heroic Drak’Tharon Keep. That earnt me three Achievements  the completed normal & heroic and Guru of Dakuru

I also got some new gear. The  group was 3 druids a Death Knight and a rogue so no fighting over cloth drops Savage Wound Wraps or Cowl of the Dire Troll. Leggings of the WInged Serpent dropped of the last boss and I won those as well. My first Northrend epic.

Inbetween all this fun I’d been quietly thumping mobs. You can see they think I’m mad

But there was a reason for all this fisticuffs.

Note the server shutdown note. I picked this up with 394 unarmed at 1:25, thats 35 minutes before server shutdown and it took half an hour to get the last 5 points.  The scalebane above  died when I was on 399. I started on the second one (below) before the Server Shutdown notice popped up and suddenly it became a

race between me & the server to get that last  skill up. Hidden behind the Achievement the second one was down to 69%. I let him live.

He may not be so lucky when I skill up 3 other weapons though.

All in all I achieved a lot tonight, none of it (except maybe the microwave oven ) can I talk about at work and expect to be understood *grin*

Happy Hallows End

I wasn’t going to get drawn in by Achievements no not me I can resist. Erm well no I can’t it seems. I really wasn’t going to try for the Hallows End one, then I got a Sinister Squashling from an orphan and suddenly the game was on

All the achievements needed for the meta done and with time to spare. Which is good because inbetween chasing Hallow Ends achievements I’ve been farming Stratholme & Scholomane for Argent Dawn rep to achieve exalted. Which means I’m now exalted with 10 factions.

Not one of them an Alliance Capital though. I umm and ahh about that one the way they changed the discounts it makes sense to get exalted with them but I find doing low level quests a pain though I did get to revered with Exodar just by doing the Azuremyst quests so it should be possible, not in the next two weeks though as I’m back at work on Monday.

We’ve also been raiding and suddenly I have new gear.

Thunderheart Shoulderpads. This gives me the 3 sec extension to moonfire, it seems a bit moot with the current moonfire/starfire glyph combination but as I’ll be leveling without the moonfire one it’ll help there.

I also picked up the Nethervoid Cloak so I won’t be going into Wotlk with my Gruul one after all

I took a chance on Rejuvenating Bracers too which are now as good for dps as healing.

I’m struggling a bit with what is and isn’t worth picking up, it seems every stat has some use to moonkin now, though I turned down Hammer of Atonement it has exactly the same stats as my dagger but a lilac hammer is only marginally less yuck than the pink hammer I’ve moaned about for months

We did go back to Sunwell Plateau and saved Kalecgos from the Sathrovarr the Corrupter. Now even nerfed thats an interesting fight that requires you stay awake,

It takes place in two dimensions you have to kill Sathrovarr in one before he kills Kalecgos human form while also fighing Kalecgos dragon form in this dimension.

Then we fought our way to Brutallas and got to see the cut scene where he defeats the blue dragon Madrigosa. Then we wiped at him, but we’ll be back

I tried to get a decent screen shot of hurricane in MH but couldn’t quite catch one that had loads of big yellow number while also mad scrolling of mana regen, but this one almost captures both. It’ll be gone soon, well the mana regen, but it was fun while it lasted.

I won’t miss the one button spamming I was reduced to with the mf/sf glyph combination. Somewhere somewhen Ghostcrawler when singing the praises of Eclipse said he wanted to make Boomkin spell rotations more interesting. All Patch 3.0.2 did was make them less interesting.

Pre Patch once hurricane was on cd I’d be tabbing through mobs dotting them with mf & or IS as a poor mans AOE. On single targets I’d open with imp:ff & is then the standard mf/SFx3 chucking in an imp:ff every so often (not dead on 40 secs).

Yeah my damage is much better post patch, but I could probably have trained a hamster to do it.

Echoes of Future Past

Its about as official as it gets 3.0.2 is coming Tuesday. So as promised in this post I’m archiving my level 70 stats so I can look back on them from the giddy heights of 80, not to mention on Wednesday when I respec.

First off my ‘naked’ stats. No buffs not even MOTW

and now the raid ready ones. Hmm that haste rating is pathetic, but then its not my haste gear. Well haste ‘gear’ may be a bit over optimistic as all I really have in the way of haste gear is the Belt of the crescent moon so even at my best that less than 3% haste

The gear I’m wearing

going behind a cut as it gets very long