31 Points of Unfinished Work

After the new beta trees were released this morning I've been haveing a good play around with them trying to get a good feel for how they work and figureout any good tricks for my respective classes.

Admitedly I've been very excited about the prospect of a 31 talent tree and the implications for leveling alts is very nice indeed, however my current thoughts on what i've seen of the first draft leave quite a bit to be filled out properly.

Currently there are places in these trees where they completely screw over something that I rather enjoy doing which is filling in talents to full.
Nothing is more infuriateing to me then haveing to leave a 3 point talent at 2 points because I need the points elsewhere (I'm looking at you enduring winter) and with a few of the charecter builds that I've tried out I've managed to tag all of the interesting stuff to full leaveing me with exactly 1 talent point to spare which in the case of the frost tree on the current draft has to be taken somewhere in order to advance properly.

That 1 talent point barrier is annoying as hell to me especialy when I have no idea where to put it, I get the same problem with my priests builds.


I think the problem right now is that blizz have trimmed the fat a bit too far down so we now have too little talents to choose from, Perhaps balanceing out the tiers so that theres always exactly 5 points to spend in 3 and 2 point talents to get to the next level without any issues, in cases where theres an ability you can balance it out with either 2 2 point talents or 3 3 point talents either way they need a bit of balance adding to them in order to make them more appropiate.

Thankfully this is only a priliminary look at the whole escapade and they have specified that some classes have not had as much grooming as others have which means I can at least look forward to what I hope will be a significantly cleaner 2nd draft.

It's too early to tell how it's all going to work out in the end.

Playing with Styles

Something that i'm realy getting into after looking over the current beta talents for cataclysm is the enhanced ability to spec in a prefered style, i've even managed to chalk up a good level 80 talent build for an easy solo grinding spec with large healing capabilities for grouping with.

This has also got me thinking about how I may be able to change my play style in cata to suit me better, one of the things I'm thinking about is changeing my currently abandoned DK or maybe even refiting my warrior in order to create a "Dodge Tank" charecter.

This would involve haveing lower effective health with the trade off of outright avoiding most melee damage, I'd like to try it out with a Blood Tanking spec as I could then include a heavy emphasis on Parry in order to obtain some assemblance of magic avoidence though spell deflection.

I'm sure some people can remember back in TBC when night elf rogues could spec in a specific way and take advantage of specific charecter buffs and debuffs in order to obtain a 100% dodge chance which effectively allowed them to tank anything which did not cast spells (which included some of the highest level bosses in the game at the time).

I'd be interesting in createing such a charecter set up when cataclysm comes round just so I could see how it would play out, I'm sure they will be people who will complian that I have low health for a tank but It's experiments like this that make the game interesting.

I'm even contemplating taking the recuperation talents in the Combat tree for my rogue to use so that I can become far more self-sufficent then I am now, which should make soloing far more interesting and also reduce the need for me to carry potato bread with me everywhere I go.

So my plans for cataclysm is to have my Healers DPS, my DPS heal and my Tanks to dance (Imagine someone with a long sword dodgeing and parrying blows in a chain sequence, it makes me feel like the person would be sword dancing).

A Handful of Side-grades

Everyone keeping track of the Undergeared project on Gevlons blog has seen my current level of performance on Festurgut on my Priest, I managed to pull 4.4k DPS as shadow which was better then the 4.1k I pulled on the 2 tries previous but I'm not proud of the performance as most of the gear I was using was my healing set.

Fortunately for me I can use most of my gear in a double dip scenario but if i want to perform better in future combat situations I need to gather some more items to create a more apropiate shadow set.

2 items I've managed to replace are the MP5 ring from occulus with the spirit ring from drak'tharon keep, now there are still better rings out there as spirit is only good for a pittance of spell power and a bit of regen, I'm still hoping to obtain the crit ring from Violet Hold or possible the haste rings from VH or UP as they would provide me with better itemisation for the set.

I also managed to replace my wand from the Argent Crusade MP5 wand with the Spirit wand from gundrak, this is a huge upgrade as the previous wand had no intelect on it and less spell power then the wand i've got now making the new one better for both healing and DPS.

Perhaps best of all is that I managed to obtain the Forge Ember from HOS which replaced my MP5/on use SP trinket from HOL, which although it lowers my burst damage it gives me a higher sustained damage and better itemisation for DPSing with, I may even find it an upgrade for healing with as it gives more crit for my Disc set and a spell power burst.

On top of that I replaced a lot of my gems with more suitable ones which should help me out a bit during future raids.

I Still have a few items that i would like which include the DPS trinket from Occu, the Crit belt from Gun'drak and Another blue helmet so I can get a better DPS meta gem which can come from either Occu or Strat.

What Trade Chat Actually Means

Boredom post here:

Statement: "5.6k gs required"
Translation: "Will wipe on trash and disband within 5 minutes, will also take at least 40 minutes to assemble the group"

Statement: "Need more for ICC25, aiming 7/12 link achieve"
Translation: "Might make it to saurfang if your lucky but will then wipe once and disband, Will take at least an hour to form the group and unfortunately for the group leader the item he's reserving will not drop"

Statement: "Need dk tank for VoA 10 cr"
Translation: "not you, never you, come back when you have 50k health unbuffed and when all items dropped within are useless to you, lololololol"

Statement: "Looking for a tank and healer for heroic farming"
Translation: "Looking for 2 people to run though heroic instances where the rest of us will afk and wait for you to finish, the group will eventually disband when either the tank or healer gets sick of boosting lazy people or when they get an ICC heroic which will then wipe them"

Statement "LFM Totc10 5.5k GS required"
Translation: "LFM to wait forever while i try and form a totc10 group to boost my 4k gs arse which even if it does form (highly unlikely) will disband on Faction Champs (if your lucky enouth to make it that far) and will likely have a ninja as a raid leader"

The last statement annoys me the most as if you have a gearscore that high odds are you'll never have to set foot in totc10 ever again, I find most of these statements to be true aswell.
Be perticularly weary of groups that are spamming trade again after pauseing for 20 minutes, it usualy means they have just wiped and anyone left is made of pure fail.

How a Tank is born

Due to some recent luck i've managed to get my warrior in a guild as an off-tank and while the DPS certainly need to improve before we can start easy clearing hard raids i'm finding it fun to mess around on my new tanking class.

This recently lead to me wondering exactly how I choose to roll a tanking class in the first place, what made me leave the comfort zone of my mage, priest and rogue and play a class thats designed to go first in combat.

I think one of the key contributers to my new fondness of tanking is quite honestly haveing been a specialist tank on raid encounters on my other classes.

My priest and mage have both tanked mimirons head before and i've had quite a lot of fun working out exactly what spells that lie dormant in my spell book would help me furfil this roll better.

My mage has even tanken it one step further as i've actively tanked the zombie spawns on gluth in naxx before and this was a realy hard task for a arcane mage to do but i somehow managed to pull it off after a bit of practice.

From these specialist tanking roles these cloth casters have created a small seed inside me making me wonder why i havent choson to play the role of the tank.
Looking back at it the responsibility and high entry barrier certainly put me off in the past but haveing taken that responsibility in special cases it becomes a lot less scary.

I had a lot of spare time so I decided to play a plate class and do a bit of experimenting into the whole tanking aspect of wow, this led to a very poor choice in playing my DK up to 80 while leveling with friends, hitting the def cap was much harder back then especialy for a class with no shield slot and the squishy nature of DKs was a bad stigma to have.

Needless to say that this charecter was scrapped, it wasent so much because of the whole cap issue thing it was more that the class did not agree with me, the rotation while tanking felt clunky and badly done so i never managed to master it very well.

I'd tried tanking on my paladin too but that felt equaly misplaced as i ran out of mana incredibly quickly in low level dungeons and that essentialy put me off playing the class as a tank at all.

My warrior on the other hand seemed to agree with me from the get go, the aspects of the class seemed to just click with me and i found myself playing protection as if i was in a state of constant fury.

Everything was kept quite simple from the start and new tanking abilities were added at just the right pace to keep me learning, it's no wonder the warrior was considered the only tank back in vanila wow as it seems just so well suited to the roll.

So i managed to get the class evolved right up to the point that I could start seriousley considering raiding with him, i'd learned the encounters for most boss fights and have managed to aquire much experiance from running dungeons while gearing.

There seems to be a sense of nervousness that I get when i'm tanking using the warrior class which is quite scary for the first raid that i did but everything managed to work well.

So from humble beginnings of being a specialist tank in raid encounters a new tank can easily be formed with enouth time and effort.
I'd encourage most players who are experianced at playing the game to roll a tanking class as it's one of the best ways to experiance encounters and a very nice experiance to have.

I can almost envision me taking this class and role into cata with ease and manageing to play it properly as a main, but wether it can stand up to my love of healing is another matter.
At least it'll keep me a lot to do when i finally manage to get round to leveling alts to 85.