Whether you believe Ensidia or not seems to be largely related to if you are European or an Americunt.

Either way there are more pressing matters to discuss which not many people have picked up upon.   What are these issues which are more important than top-end guild ban dramas?  Simple:  It’s too easy to gear alts.

No I’m not talking about ’scrubs’ getting gear for completing join-the-dots level difficulty encounters.  I’m talking about how good players, decent players like you and me, inevitably end up filling the lack of raid time in the week with the creation of more and more alts.  This wasn’t such a problem back in the day when it took a long time to get to levelcap, as most of the time was spent leveling the alt up to 80 only to come to the realization that you couldn’t get any decent gear on it for shit because you couldn’t even get heroic groups.   But now, all you have to do is type in the name of your character and you’re practically at level cap within a day.  Couple with that the relative ease of getting gear on your new level 80 the problem becomes more realistic.

Now I’ve probably lost you.  What is the problem with being able to gear up alts nicely in 3.3?  Well you may ask, because not so long ago I was even rejoicing at the fact that my warrior, shadowpriest, deathknight, hunter, paladin, rogue.. …. would soon be decked in 232.  And therein lies the problem.  The cycle has changed to allow you to gear but the inevitable conclusion to gearing an alt with the best gear you can get from heroics/pugs is that where do you go then?  The only answer is raiding.

This in itself isn’t new – hardcore players have been running alt raids for a long time.  Usually only 1 alt per person though, players would raid on a main and then their alt every week.  Few players had more than 1 alt that they raided on, but that has now changed from the combination of 3.3 (specifically dungeon queue system) making it easy to gear up other wise forgotten level 80s.  Raiding on 3 or more chars a week has the following consequences.  Either the player has a lot of spare time and embraces the extra play time and learns more class abilities and becomes more versitile.  OR: he/she comes to one solid realization that none of these characters are likely to ever see anything like BiS gear setups before the new Expansion hits, at which time the gear will become worthless anyway.  Added to the issue of raiding the same dungeons 2x per character per week …  Sure the realization requires something who thinks cynically and in the long term more than the short term – but even for the most ADHD addled player there will be the nagging doubt in their mind.

If you do come to the latter conclusion, the future only holds distraction and boredom with the game in general.  Such boredom may well infect your desire to gear your main character too – which can prove fatal.  All that is required next is something to happen in real life which requires you to take a few days away from the game, may be you miss 1 raid at a crucial point and that’s it.

You’re done until the expansion hits.

Annoyingly this video isn’t a full kill as it only starts at 50%, but since its the first uploaded video of a live kill (not ptr) of a new boss I think it deserves a mention. Oh yeah and the music really sucks, I’d put it on mute if you don’t want to rupture your ears.

NOTE: This isn’t an Apex kill – quite obvious when you think about it since the patch hasnt even gone live in euro yet – but since I already had one complaint…. Another obvious hint to it not being an Apex video is the seriously bad music choice.

Watch in High Quality and preferably in widescreen / fullscreen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7v2y6cYrJk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzCB6HMC6Kg

As always, since you can’t embed the HD versions automatically from youtube anymore – make sure you click the hd button. Better yet, click the link below the player to view it on youtube directly so you can put it into widescreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsbL2p4FNo

Apparently that’s a load of Betty Swollocks though, as pointed out in this blue post: (source)

Just as a point of clarification. The Professor Putricide encounter is working as intended. You are only allowed one abomination up at any given time in both 10 player and 25 player modes.

And to prove it really isn’t bugged we have at least 1 kill reported by wowprogress.com for Paragon.

Go Finland!

Edit: Their video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8WSshUGBhk

We ran a 2 healer setup as standard with an enhancement shaman who had resto dualspec just in case.  I would recommend that running a 3 healer setup will save some headache on all 3 of the new bosses.  In the end the only boss we swapped in the extra healer for was Putricide himself, however there is no issue with DPS on the other two and it was touch and go with 2 healers having not done those fights before.

Rotface was quite a bit harder than Festergut, but I think this could mainly be because we didn’t really quite know what to do having only a few people in the group on PTR previously.  As a result a fair bit of the fight could have been easier but we kind of brute-forced some things, like just healing through certain damage which could actually be avoided.

Festergut however was pretty much a faceroll, if you’re wondering which one you should go for first in order of progression I’d definitely say GO LEFT before going right.  Not only is Festergut easier, but there is also less damage flying around once you get some spores popped, tank damage is pretty high but raid damage is a lot lower than Rotface.  Again two healers worked pretty well for us here but I’d take three for safety in future, as there shouldn’t be much danger of getting an enrage if you lose 1 dps.

The LEFT side (Festergut) being easier is also compounded by his dog ‘Stinky’ also being easier than ‘Precious’ (marginally).

I’m just uploading the video of our 10 man Putricide kill right now which I’ll post here asap for anyone who’s interested.

This only a slight exaggeration of what happened with the twitter event.

It’s not for want of decent questions being asked, but these were just glossed over and instead questions as fucking stupid as “When Race change is live will we be able to change to any race in our faction no matter what class we are?”.  Pretty much the standard deal with Blizzard, answer only the questions which fall into one of three categories:

1. Questions you’ve already answered before.
2. Questions that have no relevance for anyone except the person asking, because he/she is probably mentally retarded.
3. Questions in which you can easily answer something along the lines of “We’re not sure yet” or “We have no plans yet” without seeming like total douche bags.

Almost all the questions about Icecrown and/or Cataclysm were things that had already been answered at Blizzcon.  While actual informed questions such as anything along the lines of “Do you really think raiders like raiding 5 of the same bosses 4+ times in one night?” or “Why is it that you deem the 3.2 content patch a success when it is universally loathed by all but the most casual of casual players?” are simply ignored.

No but it would be far too much to ask that they actually answer any of the tougher questions or questions which would provide us with new insight into how they manage to release content which is so obviously flawed even after over 5 years of experience.  Somehow they seem to think that players of this game actually like the idea of being forced to go back to old raid dungeons and heroics in order to get their CC upgrades, and soon their Icecrown upgrades.  Newsflash for them, WotLK heroics were a fucking joke even at the start of the expansion – why the fuck do you think we want to keep fucking doing them every fucking content patch.  Are they getting any better? No they’re just getting even more faceroll, boredom and burnout inducing than before every time.  The only idea that I can conceive which they must have in their heads to make them force us though these hell-pits every patch is that they want new players and newly dinged 80s to have someone to group with.  But that doesn’t happen even on a highly populated server like mine – all that happens is that heroic PuGs start asking for better and better gear. And understandably won’t take anyone without full 213/226 gear into their group for Oculus because they want to get the whole thing over as soon as possible, but like a bad case of genital herpes it just keeps fucking coming back.

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

Obviously a good change, and I’m sure anyone who has done any of the CC heroic modes will agree that waiting ~16 minutes for your combat rez to come back up after a wipe or even a successful kill was starting to get pretty dumb.  I would have preferred they had done something similar to Bloodlust’s debuff mechanic for combat rez.  For example it has a 3 minute timer but places a 10 minute debuff on the druid when he/she casts it that prevents it being cast.  That way if you wipe then it’s always available for the next fight – however reducing the cooldown to 10 mins is a decent compromise.

Item – Druid T10 Restoration Relic (Rejuvenation) – The periodic healing from your Rejuvenation spell grants 32 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 8 times.

Then you have this tier 10 resto druid idol and two things struck me.  Firstly it’s pretty boring how we’ve been pigeon-holed into always having a rejuvenation based idol.  Ok I get it rejuv is awesome but this idol could just have easily only procced from wild growth (and therefore stacked instantly to 8 practically every time you cast wild growth, although they’d probably have to up the spellpower for it to be worth it.  But the main issue here is that there is almost no difference between this idol and the current tier 9 idol.  In fact the new idol will just take longer to ramp up to full spellpower at the start – and gives you hardly any extra.

The current idol procs instantly for 234 spellpower and has 100% uptime if you have at least 2 rejuvs running. The new idol procs 256 spellpower in 32 spellpower segments with 100% proc chance per segment per tick of rejuv.  It just seems to me the difference isn’t very pronounced, sure people will go for the t10 idol but probably not as a ‘first piece must have item’ like the t9 one was, as you’re only gaining 22 spellpower.

Personally I’ve never liked the whole relic procs idea that came in with t9.  It seems very lazy design to simply give classes a major stat boost for something they’re already doing in their rotations / general healing.  How much better would the t10 have been if they upped the spellpower a bit, to say 280, lasts 20 seconds – and made it a flat proc from something other than rejuv – for example swiftmend.  Suddenly you actually have to work a little tiny bit for your idol proc rather than just getting spellpower bonuses for doing what you were going to do anyway.

Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation – Your haste now reduces the time between the periodic healing ticks of your Rejuvenation spell.
Gift of the Earthmother now increases your total spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10%

I’ve put these two together because they are clearly part of the same issue.  If rejuv ticks are to be hasted, then of course the 359 haste softcap has to be moved and the only way to really do this is to nerf GotEM, so that’s what they’re doing.  This nerf only makes sense if the idea of hasted rejuvs is going to go live – which they already mentioned it might not – so I’d fully expect to see this change to GotEM removed if hasting does indeed not go live.

Of course I’m talking about a haste softcap as it exists on live today, but even if GotEM wasn’t nerfed the ’softcap’ would no longer really be a true cap.  As it is right now any and all haste you have past 359 is essentially worthless on *most* fights.  However with Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation haste would suddenly be worth taking past 359 – arguably not worth more than crit currently because of the t9 bonus but then t10 doesn’t have that bonus so we’re going to ignore that for now.  But by nerfing the amount of haste your instant spells gain from GotEM by 10%, if you want to hit a 1.0 sec gcd for instants now you require ~856 haste which is a pretty big increase over the old 359.  Of course due to item inflation in 3.3 the top level gear is going to have insane amounts of haste on it and crit goes back to being a lot less useful once you replace your t9 set for t10.  This change might even force some druids back into 3/3 Celestial Focus in order to reduce the needed haste back down to a more obtainable ~736 (with 3/3). I personally think the GotEM change is a good one, although technically a nerf, at least now when you get your brand spanking new gear you wont be as annoyed to find out it’s covered in haste as you were in 3.2 – since you’re actually going to want to have that haste.

What I really don’t like though is the idea of hasted rejuvenation.  The whole concept seems to be flawed, based around the rather giddy idea that most other blogs have on the subject, that ticks wont be nerfed once hasting comes in.  Of course they will be, if suddenly your rejuv is ticking, say, 15% faster than it used to – do you really think Blizzard will let you just keep that?  They’ve already made it clear that they think rejuv is overpowered so I doubt it will take that long for them to nerf the tick amounts down to compensate for the increased tick speed.  And then what are we left with? A spell that essentially does the same healing it did before but now requires a lot of haste stacking to maintain it, sure it will now scale with haste but all that means is that those of us at the very top of the gear chain will have a slight benefit.  Those in the middle will have no benefit and those at the bottom will have a nerf.

I’m not going as far as to say it’s a completely bad idea, as who knows what fights the future brings who’s mechanics will probably favour the new shiny fast rejuv, I see it as more of an unnecessary change.  Certainly the change to GotEM makes it more attractive, but still an obvious crutch to hold up what in the long run will probably turn out to be a bad mechanic.

Druid T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
Druid T10 Restoration 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) – Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

Wild growth no longer reducing healing per tick? That sounds like it might be too good to be true, since for most of WotLK resto 2 set bonuses have been pretty lacklustre.  Perhaps they decided that the rejuvenation crit bonus of tier 9 was going to be a tough one to beat with just another 4 piece bonus and so they’d need the combination of both bonuses being pretty nice in order to persuade people that the tier 10 perks were better.  At least it’s not going the way of t8->t9 conversion where clearly someone in the design team just said ‘”oh shit, tier 8 4p bonus is way better and scales much higher than tier 9 4p – we’re going to have to nerf  it by 50% just to get people to upgrade…”.

So yeah, I like the t10 2p, but I’m uneasy about the wording for the t10 4p.  As some of you might have noticed the word “jump” is a bit of a problematic one here.  ”Jump” signifies that there is a 2% chance when rejuv ticks that it will remove itself from the current target and randomly jump to a new target.  I’m sure I’m not the only one that would see this as problematic, in fact I’d go as far as to say if this went live in that fashion that no decent druid would be using t10 4 set and would probably stick with just 2 or 3 pieces for as long as they could get away with.  The only way this 4 set will work is if it isn’t a “jump” but more of a “copy” or “spread”, ie: 2% chance for the rejuv to apply another rejuv to a random person in range while the parent rejuv remains on the designated target.

To be fair to Blizzard this is probably how it will (or even does, since we can’t test it yet) work, since there really is no way that the wording taken at face value would ever be considered an actual buff to rejuvenation.  Can you imagine? You rejuv a guy on 50% hp and after 1 tick it just goes to some other random guy leaving the original target without a hot?  Yeah, I don’t think so, but that is how it’s worded right now.