Monday, November 8, 2010

Diseaseless Blood Tank, GC Comments

I had been considering switching to a Diseaseless tank rotation for a while, and seeing this thread on the official forums reminded me. While tanking heroics I rarely use diseases on trash, preferring instead to drop D&D then BB; by the time you get two diseases up on a target it's likely dead before you even have a third gcd to spread them via pest. Even if you DO get them spread around, you've likely lost hate to your AoEing DPS, even if you had dropped D&D, because diseases generate no snap-aggro.

I haven't tried Diseaseless on bosses yet, simply because putting up diseases is habit after more than a year doing so. I've heard several players talk about how much easier it is, and I can certainly see using a DS instead of refreshing diseases situationally if you need the heal/shield. Here's Ghostcrawler's comment about it:
In the case of "diseaseless Blood," we don't have a problem if tanks choose to sacrifice some of their threat generation for a simpler rotation or other benefits. It doesn't bother us unless ignoring diseases becomes the only reasonable way to play (and with Outbreak available in Cataclysm, applying diseases is even easier). When dps specs were ignoring diseases, we made changes, because the whole DK rotation was based on applying diseases. That's true to a much lesser extent for tanks, but we try to have pretty simple rotation for tanks anyway because they have a lot of other things to worry about and are often having to deal with very dynamic situations compared to what a PvE dps DK might be doing.
 To me, he's stating that they don't really care how people play now, and that if a few tanks don't want to use diseases it's no big deal. However, if everyone stops using them, then they'll make changes; if you read between the lines, he's saying that going Diseaseless is intended to be sub-optimal. If it ever becomes the ideal rotation, then they'll either nerf it or buff diseases. After reading that, I don't see any point to dropping diseases from my rotation as it's clear that we are intended to use them. As GC says, with Outbreak it will only take 1 GCD to apply them, then 1 more to spread them. With Epidemic they actually last quite long, although I won't have that in my spec until Cata hits.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Cataclysm Mounts

As I've stated before, I'm a mount collector. Just got my Green Protodrake last night (see below), which brings me up to 105 mounts! So, let's talk about the mounts they're adding in Cataclysm.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Battle Rez/Soulstone Changes

Coming in Cataclysm, Blizzard is changing how Battle Rez and Soulstone work; you will now only be able to use 1 Battle Rez OR Soulstone (not both) per fight in 10m, 3 total per fight in 25m. With this change, they're rolling the cooldown on Brez back to 10m (from 30). They're also resetting the cooldown on Battle Rez from 30m back to 10m. Now, a lot of people are up in arms about this change; I've even heard it described as the beginning of the end for WoW. However, this change fits in well with the theme of 4.0, which has been the reduction of buff stacking and eliminating the need to bring certain classes or fail.

Additionally, a change like this is NECESSARY to progression raiding. Before this change if you were learning a fight, you want all your resources available for every attempt. That means if you have 2 druids and 1 lock, you want both battle rezzes and the soulstone up for every pull; without them, what's the point in even trying? As a result, many raid groups would have to take 5 minute breaks between wipes to wait for skills to cooldown. But is that fun? Is it cool to schedule 3 hours of raiding but spend an hour of it sitting around waiting for skills to cooldown? Of course not, it's absurd and bad design.

The other problem this addresses is class stacking. In a 10m on live now, you could easily take 3 druids to a raid and get 3 battle rezzes without doubling up on specs or gimping your raid buff composition. Throw in a lock too, and that's 4 combat resurrections; nearly half your raid could die and come back to life. That's too powerful, making druids too "useful" for simply clicking one button and encouraging raid leaders to stack them.

This change is GOOD. It's good for the raiding game, and doesn't affect anyone else since you can still use 5 brezzes in a heroic if you're running with all druids.

Back

Sorry for my absence; Fallout: NV was really addicting. However, I'm back now with regular posts daily on all things Warcraft.