Why now? | Alts Ahoy All of a sudden Nasirah enjoys playing a shaman where it was boring before. In this post, she muses on why her mind has changed.
How to annoy NPC's - Keep Clicking on them! | Pugnacious Priest Amusing detective work shows what happens when you annoy an NPC, including quotes on what they'll do to you if you don't stop. To bad you can't back-talk them too.
Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.
Last week we talked a bit about gear and spell power, and various related things. I mostly approached it as supplying my personal experiences, but a lot of people wanted numbers. Specifically, how your current gear will translate into the new spell power mechanic.
A kind fellow named Dan helped us out with a little bit of that in the comments section last week, so let's expand upon it somewhat. Again, this will focus mostly on the Healer and Caster aspects of the Hybrids. You Melee guys don't really need to worry about how spell power will change your gear.
Alright, so the question is this: If you have a choice between taking +Damage gear or +Healing gear in the current game right now, which would be a better choice for taking with you into Wrath of the Lich King leveling? Let's make liberal use of Wowhead, shall we?
I'm resisting the urge to post more about downranking and shamans because I want to let it shake out a little bit more. However, since the change to downranking and the XP change happened at the same time in the beta, it's made my attempt to explore various specs a little harder to do: in order to see what all the new abilities can really do, I need to burn my way to 77 as fast as I can. Having done that on my warrior, I now move to leveling my horde shaman as fast as I can, and for that, there's still one spec that's the best in my opinion. So I took my resto/elemental geared orc shaman and started gearing him up in quest drops as an enhancement shaman.
I've deliberately been avoiding the Alliance side as my mains nowadays are in that faction, so I'm in part using the beta to catch up with old friends (and it helps that my Horde toons have worse gear, as it allows me to evaluate if you can get good enough gear questing to get through the zones) and I have to say I'm liking the Horde's quests and settlements, it's all tied together very nicely. Borean Tundra has lots of flavor quests that work well with a shaman, there's plenty of decent gear to help give you a leg up (in the picture above the only piece of gear that shaman is wearing that didn't come from Northrend quests are his shoulders) and the mobs, while not totally weak pushovers, aren't especially daunting for you if you're not geared to the teeth.
The spell power changes (I've been admonished not to detail how spell damage or damage/healing converts as it has been covered too many times already by commenter Mizatt) has had some interesting consequences: I've taken a trinket that has crit strike and spell damage on it as the crit works for both my melee and magical attacks, and as I've commented before you get a lot more out of your shocks and spells now with the addition of Malestrom Weapon.
People are still reeling from the downranking change on Beta, but as the dust clears and Blizzard continues to stick to their guns, it may be that we'll have to live with it. One thing Blizzard has said, however, is that if it looks like there's genuine void created somewhere by the loss of downranking, they'll fix it.
One genuine void is that of rank 1 Earth Shock. Shamans have longed used the spell as a spell interrupt when they can't afford to spend the mana on a max rank shock, both in PvE and PvP. With the new mana cost rules, that cheap interrupt is now gone, complicating a shaman's already touchy mana preservation issues.
Luckily, not all is lost for Shamans, as Koraa says that they are creating a rank 1 Earth Shock spell equivalent that should show up in the Beta at some point in the future.
This, at the least, is a good indication that Blizzard means to make good on plugging up holes left by the abolishment of downranking -- or at least the holes that the dev team sees as needing to be plugged. Will we see a replacement for rank 1 Moonfire for totem killing, or for rank 1 Arcane Explosion or rank 1 Consecration for flushing out stealthers? That remains to be seen, but it seems much less likely, since those are roundabout ways of using a damage spell for a non-DPS reason rather than the straightforward purpose of using rank 1 Earth Shock as a cheap spell interrupter.
Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.
Remember a few weeks ago, I mentioned how if you want to be extra-cautious about preparing for Wrath of the Lich King, you should figure out a calm, easy way to farm gold that won't burn you out? After having hit the current level cap on the beta realms... I still recommend that, if you want to be extra prepared. If you're a very casual, don't worry about it too much, really. It's not that big of a deal. Leveling will get you enough for the bare necessities. If you're the type that wants to start leveling professions and gearing up immediately upon hitting the level cap though, think about going into Wrath with at least a couple thousand in your pocket, which really isn't that hard of a task.
Moving past that, though, a lot of people have asked about gear across all classes, but mostly Hybrids. Hybrids have asked because all of the Healing classes are amongst them, and if you're a Healer you may not necessarily have a set of DPS gear. My first comment on this: Don't worry. Really.
We've been a little husky the past few weeks here at Phat Loot Phriday, so this week we're aiming to fix that, and get back to what this column is all about: gigantic spiky, glowy things that you can kill with.
Name: Torch of the Damned (Wowhead, Thottbot, Retribution) Type: Epic Two-hand Mace Damage/Speed: 396-595 / 3.80 (130.4 DPS) Abilities:
+51 Strength, +45 Stamina
Improves crit strike rating by 38, improves haste rating by 50.
Great for Paladins, and any other class that uses weapon damage for certain abilities. Warning: this gets into some deep math, and you guys know I'm bad at that, so expect to see some more number crunching in the comments. Basically, Seal of Command, a Ret Pally talent, gives a chance to add 70% of the weapon's damage to any normal attacks, and since most weapons trade off speed for damage (as in, the slower the weapon, the higher the damage), slow weapons are better -- you'll get more damage output when SoC procs. And since this weapon is very slow and very powerful, you'll get more damage overall out of Seal of Command.
The Haste rating is also good for Paladins, not because it will help with Seal of Command (SoC is a procs-per-minute talent, so no matter how many times you hit, you can't get it to proc more often), but because it'll let you hit more often, which means more white damage. Any class that benefits from big swing damage (Windfury is awesome when it procs with a huge weapon like this) will love this mace.
Oh, and anytime we mention a two-handed weapon, Matthew Rossi's eyebrow twitches until we mention Titan's Grip. Imagine seeing a Warrior wielding this baby... and something else at the same time. Yeah.
How to Get It: Drops from the Essence of Anger, which is part of the Reliquary of Souls in the Black Temple (which, trivia for you, was influenced heavily by Sinistar, an old arcade game). Essence of Anger is the third phase, so get your 25 man raid up to that point, be one of those silly Ret Paladins (silly Paladins -- DPSing is for Hunters, Locks, Mages, and Rogues!), and spend your DKP or win the roll, whatever you need to do. Then you too can haul around this big purple spiky Mace, swinging it at will and bringing your enemies to their knees with just one proc.
Getting Rid of It: You probably won't, for a while. But it does disenchant into a Void Crystal, and vendors will buy it back for 18g 43s 86c
I was all set to tell you that I'd had a couple of interesting PuG runs in the beta testing out restoration spec, and that all was relatively well. The new spells are interesting and even powerful, at least at the five man level, I was about to say. I would have told you about successful and unsuccessful runs in both Utgarde Keep and the Nexus. All of this would have been what I wrote about today.
However, for most of yesterday the beta was inaccessible and when it finally came up again, it was patched, and that patch kicked me in the metaphorical testicles. I don't think I've been as shocked by a change to the game, especially one that's apparently intended like this one is. My first thought was that I'm not going to be using rank 1 healing wave to stack healing way on a tank before a pull anymore. In fact, several of the pieces of advice I gave back last September (wow, it's really been over a year) on beginning to heal as a shaman are now outdated.
I understand that this change isn't just aimed at Resto shamans nor does it just affect them, but it's a big change for at least how I heal, so I'm going to discuss it along with other aspects of the class that I've observed. Note that most of these are from before patch 8788 but they should still be valid... well, as valid as any observations about a patch on a beta server can be.
Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.
Before I start, while you read this remember that the Wrath beta does not currently allow you to hit the level cap. Everyone is level 77, and there's a lot that is unfinished. This is more anecdotal about the state of things, and not really analyzing how things will look in the end. You still with me? Good.
I decided to try out incredibly, insanely buggy Lake Wintergrasp when the beta realms went up yesterday, and later on I gave the new Battleground a whirl, too. Through all of this, there was one constant: Holy crap Ret Paladins are OP. No, really. I know, it blew my mind, too. Retribution Paladins. Overpowered. Hell has frozen over.
The fine folks at MMO Champion have found a heaping helping of, among other things, shaman glyphs for the new inscription profession in the latest beta build. As juicy as that is, there's far more of interest: deep elemental got heavily worked over, with enhancement and restoration seeing some changes too.
A whole lot of Wrath of the Lich King content after the jump.
Totem Talk's Matthew Rossi is in the beta now, and has been playing his shaman around the Howling Fjord as much as he could get away with. Today he'll be talking about his experiences with the quests, the drops, and the mobs leading up to Utgarde Keep.
It's kind of a precarious situation to discuss things like this. On the one hand I'm sensitive to the idea of spoiling content for people who want to experience it firsthand, and on the other I am also sensitive to the demands of those who want to know what's coming. The easiest way to deal with it is to load up on spoiler warnings (and in this case, not much I talk about in this column will be a spoiler, it's all things that have been revealed in other places) and to post behind the jump, which for the most part will be the tactics employed here.
First, however, let me say this much: I have seen my character, a shaman with Kara/T4 quality mail, take a large jump in his DPS. His attack power is up by an easy 300 points. If you are a shaman who has collecting what we used to call 'hunter mail' you will see a serious reward for equipping it in Northrend. The chestplate in the screenshot is what I'm wearing now: on live it grants 88 AP. On test, it's granting 156 AP, since I have the talent that converts int to AP. Clearly (and yes, I'm aware it's an unfair comparison, as that quest reward is leather) you're not going to be dumping your epics for the first quest rewards you come across.
Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.
We've chit-chatted about the new Spell Power mechanic off and on, but we've never gone into serious detail about it yet. Why? Well, we didn't really know how it worked. We knew what it does but very few of us had a real hands-on experience with it. That has since changed.
Spell Power has done very very good things for the Hybrid classes, pretty much across the board. Obviously it will not drastically change Feral, Enhancement or Retribution, but it actually does add to those last two as well to some extent. Primarily it changes the Healing and Caster specs of the Hybrid classes, obviously. It brings back a lot hybridiness* to classes that... really haven't felt that way in quite awhile.
Decent healing is often a key factor in determining victory and defeat in a battle ground.Resto and Holy specced characters have quite the job set out for them.Druids, Paladins, Priests, and Shamans regularly face a healing quandary.Is it better to spend time and man healing another player or continuing to do as much damage as possible.Zanhart of Medivh believes that any character than can heal in the battlegrounds, should heal.He finds it particularly insulting when a player heals him or herself while comrades die around them.
Some agreed with him that anyone who can heal should, but most people dissented.There were several themes to the responses:
Paying a subscription fee allows any player the right to play however they like.
DPSers in substandard gear are a waste of heals and mana.
Non-healing specs often have such poor healing abilities that the battleground is better off with them continuing to dps.
Yet more news from the beta: while not as massive as the revamp to the Death Knight from the last patch, shamans have seen a fair amount of change in the most recent beta patch. The relevant changes are highlighted on Nethaera's post, (and our own Alex Ziebart covered the entire patch) and we shall discuss them after, as always, the jump.
The beta client was patched against last night, and the process was nice and smooth. The realms were actually up earlier than their estimate, which was a shocking difference from what we see on Live realms. Of course, Live realms see maintenance at the same time, so maybe that was the difference. The patch wasn't a big one by any means, it was actually quite small compared to the last one.
This patch is mostly Mage and Shaman changes, but it also contained the beginnings of Blizzard's built-in threat meter. I can't say its the greatest implementation ever, but it's a start and the information it provides is already proving itself infinitely useful to mod authors such as the fellow behind Omen. More on that another time though, you're here for the patch notes and the patch notes I shall provide. Check behind the cut for the recent changes according to the candlestick.
First off, some news that may be good, may be bad: Paralysis is going away. As we remember, Paralysis was the deep elemental talent that added bonus spell damage and a chance to paralyze to your lightning and chain lightning. At this time, I have no idea what they're replacing it with or why it's being taken out: Since there's a deliberate change to the coefficient on lightning spells in Wrath as well, described as being there to balance out new abilities that provide a nature school debuff (whereas previously LB and CL had a higher coefficient because there weren't many such abilities), I find myself wondering if Paralysis simply wasn't scaling well enough to be of use. Since I can't test this (curse you, Beta gods) I'll just have to take it on faith that Paralysis' removal is a good thing.
Obviously this isn't a huge deal... it's beta, stuff gets changed... but it does have me thinking about how leveling from 70 to 80 is going to feel. To a degree, leveling a shaman is like being starving at an all you can eat buffet: you have so many choices that you might end up not being able to choose at all. Even as someone who really, really enjoying leveling enhancement (so much so that I did it twice) the pull of trying out a restoration spec under the new spell power rules has its appeal, or just ouright committing to the pew pew of elemental combat. (Part of it is that I just like typing elemental combat. In my head it's like the theme song from the Mortal Kombat movie, only with Neptulon and Ragnaros instead of Sub-Zero and Johnny Cage.)
I'm resisting the urge to 
People are still reeling from the 
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Decent healing is often a key factor in determining victory and defeat in a battle ground.
Yet more news from the beta: while not as massive as the revamp to the Death Knight from the last patch, shamans have seen a 
The beta client was 
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