Blizzard giveth, Blizzard taketh away

The posts about 3.2 have been around for some time now, and being a casual blogger, I never hoped to compete with the likes of WoW.com or MMO Champ for news. Instead, I'll try and offer a few insights and analyses to the mage and shaman changes respectively.

The general changes are pretty interesting - although my kneejerk reaction to Emblems of Conquest dropping in friggin heroics was "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'VE WORKED HARD AND LONG TO EARN ENOUGH TO SOON BUY MY FIRST TIER 8 PIECE, AND NOW ANY FRESH LEVEL 80 CAN WALTZ INTO THE HEROIC GRIND AND BUY ILVL 232 STUFF A WEEK LATER Q_Q!", I think I can appreciate the slack Blizzard are cutting people who are gearing their third or fourth alt (such as myself, in a distant future - I'll not be fucked over when the next expansion comes, but rather have some 4-5 level 80's to grind to max level for some added fun). At the same time, why T8? Why not bump heroics/Naxx-10 to Walrus and Naxx-10 end bosses/25 normal bosses to Conquest Badgers? It's gonna be slightly longer before we have people in full ilvl 232 gear destroying Ulduar PuG's at least. And yes, I think a time will come when the average gear and fight awareness level allows most of Ulduar to be PuG:ed.

I don't really care though, cause deep inside, I'll know that I earned my badges when it was still hard, and that I am better than everyone else, so I'll be fine, and it'll be an overall gain. Mount changes look good, and again, while giving a free ride to new players, it offers well needed speed boost to levelling alts. The new raid instance seems rather lackluster and is not consistent with old dungeon design, and frankly, I've never been that psyched about "tournament" or "gladiator arena" type of gameplay. While I'm sure Blizzard will stick some nice and interesting mechanics in there, the idea of "let's have them fight wave after wave of adds" is a bit overdone and lazy. Mount Hyjal comes to mind, and I remember how frustrating it was to wipe on the last wave before the boss and have to do them all over again.

As far as mages are concerned, we are still getting shafted. We are decent for damage, it's only we have to work 36%* harder to get the same results that are facerolled by other classes. We only show up high on the meters when RNG permits. We are, for almost all intents and purposes, the only class that ever runs out of our chief resource. We've not seen any significant quality of life changes for a long time, and they look to be sparse in the future.

And as much as I would like to pretend that showing up high on meters is all that matters, this isn't true. We have quality of life issues that makes the game less fun to play, and they aren't being adressed. They are tossing us a small bone - they are making the invisibility fade timer noninterruptible. We still have to wait 3 seconds for the threat to drop, and it's still something we need to put effort into clearing off (when it's used as a threat dump we want to keep DPS:ing as soon as it has had effect, just like Feign Death for hunters - it's useless for solo play anyway cause you can't see any mobs when it's up...) with right clicking or keeping a macro. I cannot begin to explain how miniscule this is, especially compared to how they are, and have been, basically nerfing everything regarding our mana the last couple patches, and are continuing to do so because of replenishment. They've band-aided Evocation from once being a talent to having two minutes cooldown for arcane mages who like to eat through their mana. But it still requires us to do 0 DPS, it has a fairly unforgiving cooldown, we have to stand still, any damage, movement or pushback will severely diminish the gains since a tick is worth 3.5-4k mana, and with some bad luck that you totally can't compensate for, you'll have to move out of a Kel'Thuzad void zone the exact second you start the cast, quite possibly gaining 0 mana and being forced to wand the next two or four minutes. Game design that prevents the player from playing the game (i.e., keeping up some DPS in the case of mages) is inherently bad game design. They are nerfing replenishment and are tacking mana returns onto ignite at the same time they are lowering the mana cost of Arcane blast, but that does not solve the root problem. I even saw convincing maths showing that you need to take these new changes a lot further than Blizzard is doing for it to not be a very obvious nerf. I'm not begging for buffs (well, to our mana managment, I am), but at least do not nerf anything. Replenishment really screws with the games mechanics - Blizz does not want DPS:ers running out of mana, and they want healers to do it. Giving them all the same mana buff is not gonna help achieve that.

The Q&A brought some great questions and actually some good answers too, in the cesspool that is the official forums. The mana gem/health stone shared CD is being removed. The fights where me being able to eat a health stone would have saved the raid from wiping is probably not more than one, but at least the squishiest class around will be able to cut the healers -some- slack by gaining some much needed self-heal capabilities.

The T9 bonuses look weird, and while datamining is unreliable and we are in for some fixes, it shows some very boring thinking from Blizzards side. The two-piece is basically a free armor glyph. That's nice since it frees up a spot for Impr.... argh, no, sorry, I can't bear to type that. Improved Scorch is crap and needs to be fixed and homogenized with Winters chill and Improved Shadow Bolt to be a shared caster debuff. Anyway, it gives more armor to Ice armor, more regen to Mage armor and more Spirit->Crit rating for Molten armor. Pretty boring, to be honest, since Warlocks and Shamans have similar armor-type mechanics. It would be nice if it affected the way we play and help distinguish us as mages. The four-piece is a straight 5% crit bonus. The T8 four-piece, while heavily increasing our dependence on RNG, was fun, flavouristic and very much inline with how we play the game. Getting straight damage upgrades is boring, this is true for any magical weapon in a roleplaying setting, and our tier bonuses are the closest we get to a "magical weapon" as they come in pen and paper roleplaying. Most of them look rather lackluster, and some even make no sense (datamining issues no doubt), so I hope we get to see a lot of changes to these.

My mage is looking less and less appealing, and levelling my alts in those boring areas where I'v already levelled six alts seems like the reasonable thing to do. And I seriously do not belong with the crowd who reroll the Flavor of the Month. Maybe I'm tired of DPS all over. Maybe I want to heal more or tank instead. I dunno, but I intend to find out by getting my alts in shape.

For shaman, especially resto, it looks promising. Numeric buffs across the board - base health %, totem drops, CH jump distance - it's all good. However, what's really nice is what's been done to the way resto heals. Tidal waves no longer brings LHW haste but crit, NS is now up every 2 minutes, Healing Way is a straight HW buff (combined with Tidal waves haste we'll see some more use of HW than "OSHIT" every three minutes), Ancestral healing goes from armor bonus to physical damage decrease (should be straight damage decrease but it feels as if I'm asking for too much here...), homogenization when Cure Poison and Cure Disease gets slapped together and a big ole buff to Water Shield should make any healing shaman happy. Enhancement will benefit indirectly when rogues get axes, but since we still want slow ones and rogues fast ones I doubt it will be that big of a deal. Shamanistic rage gets a nice fix and makes shamans more like arcane mages (more total mana spent, less mana wasted, shorter cool down on active mana regen), and since I don't play elemental I won't delve into that.

I guess that concludes it - some mage QQ, some shaman happiness, and some general stuff. Here's to hoping that 3.2 is a long way into the future still (despite being up on the PTR already) so we can enjoy the current content when it actually is endgame.

* I made these statistics up.