August News/Discussion

[Kevin]

This is horrific for healing efficiency and you can bet since they just pushed the change out, they haven't rebalanced encounters around it. All healers rely heavily on spamming lower ranks of spells to keep MTs alive during heavy-hitting boss fights.

"Lol cancel heal" you say? Risky - if you cancel the heal at the wrong time, the tank's got no heal coming for 3 seconds, which is usually dead-making by Morogrim and beyond.

Eh I cancel heal in T6 content all the time. My shaman doesn't really do much downranking anymore. The deeper we got into content the less and less downranking I did because my gear got better and better and running out of mana even with being inefficient wasn't nearly the concern it used to be. Besides I've gotten so used to cancel healing since I've been doing it since, oh Scarlet Monestary days (so for nearly 4 years across all the healing classes) that it's just natural for me to do it that way. I'm not saying that this isn't a very significant change but I don't see it as the end of the world. Blizzard has been trying to get rid of it for a long time because it's not what they wanted to balance the game around. Will it affect how I heal? You bet it will since I do still downrank for various reasons and on rare occasions I've done the be completely mindless and just spam a lower rank spell for 5 minutes (oh how fun and engaging that makes an already mostly boring job but it's the best option in some case). But I'm hoping they get the balance right with the changes.

I have no idea if they'll get it right though.

This affects my hunter in PvP a fair bit too. I down ranked quite a bit on various skills because a rank 1 arcane shot when you are nearly out of mana (or are out and are just getting viper regen) is a lot more damage than not doing anything at all and can mean you kill that druid before he gets away to drink. It affects my tanking paladin with the different ranks of consecrate for aggro and mana conserve. It does all kinds of things to my shaman (who is resto) as I use a lot of rank 1 shocks for various reasons and I did more downranking in PvP of heals then I did in PvE since mana conservation was way more critical to a win or loss in PvP than it was in PvE in most cases.

Again I see this as a much bigger impact on PvP than on PvE, but as mentioned, Blizzard has been looking at ways to get rid of it in PvE for a long time because it was never how they intended people to handle stuff and they obviously did not like trying to design for it (like with the pre TBC potions and flasks which is a change that I'm soooo happy they put in. I actually started to use consumables way more when they made the change. Before it just annoyed me more to use some because it just felt like what is the point if I'm not going to go all the way on consumables and going all the way took way too much farming. Yeah my logic is very very flawed but that's how it worked for me. :)


The hunter changes look nice though. I've been playing as beast recently just because, but I've been survival a long time in TBC. I was beast for much of pre TBC until my focus became mostly raiding then I went marks until they put in the TBC talents it was obvious to me that beast would be better DPS so I went back to beast, stayed beast for early Kara, then went survival when it was clear that expose weakness was doing more for the raid than me being beast was. Then I stopped playing PvE and did mostly PvP and being survival in PvP was just way more fun so I stayed survival for PvP and PvE. So anyway I've missed deterrance a lot in several different situations. I still wish scatter shot would be trainable though. PvP without scatter shot just sucks I feel too much like a glass cannon as beast because you are a one trick pony that gets your one big burst then you are just so weak until that trick comes back. As survival I got used to be able to survive in 3 on 1 situations long enough for help to arrive, and I was much better and surviving the DPS while I killed the enemy healer. That just isn't the case as beast unless I have my one trick. I lot of that ties into not having scatter shot. The weaker traps, the lack of the sleep sting, no deterrance no counter attack, less HP, they play a part too, survival is the right name for the tree if played well in PvP. But I do like some of those skills being baseline. I still would prefer to have scatter as any spec, but I do understand why they don't, and it's for PvP reasons. I'll be happy to always have my deter button though.