Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Hey guys!  Yes I still live   Though I’ve been on a bit of a WoW break (first in 5 years) I still have been keeping up with the news.  Looks like Cataclysm stuff is coming in slowly now, but at least it is something.  I find it funny here we are in March already, and I recall people in November saying we’d be in the expansion by now   Maybe it will be here by Christmas!

So first we had the stat change discussion, pretty boring nothing to exciting there.  But yesterday we had the post on mastery!  Now that was exciting and very interesting in deed.  One of the most interesting things is when they gave examples, they used the Priest class which seemed like a first for me!

Holy Priest
For each talent point spent in the Holy tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.

• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent from the Discipline tree, which many Holy priests consider to be a “must-have.” Regeneration will also probably be determined by whether you are in or out of combat, and not the “five-second rule.

• Radiance – Adds a heal-over-time effect to direct heals, such as Flash Heal. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

Discipline Priest
For each talent point spent in the Discipline tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.

• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent.

• Absorption – Improves the amount of damage absorbed by spells such as Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

They describe later on in the post you only get the bonus from the tree you spend like 50 points in.  I guess part of it is still up in the air.  The interesting thing about the two healing trees is that Disc gets a static healing buff just like holy.  Though that doesn’t mean they are going to be the same.  We have never got much generic healing bonus in the past though that has always been a complaint of many Disc whiners.  I like the Disc Mastery talent, truly what our tree is suppose to excel at.  Though I found the Holy one slightly amusing, a HOT to every heal spell sounds neat, but HOTs were never Holy’s specialty, I mean really Priests have only one HOT   I guess “More Healing” wouldn’t have been very exciting though

The blues in the thread (Eyonix and Ghostcrawler) stressed that we do not have the whole picture yet and there is more to come that will bring it all together.  Interesting they will not be back filling with Mastery stat, it will only be on the new gear we get in Cataclysm. Suppose to be more news to come soon hopefully.  This kind of stuff is what gets me jazzed about the game again.  Here is an interesting quote from Eyonix:

I’ve never been more excited about this game with what’s to come (and I’ve been playing for over 8-years), than I am now. I cannot wait to share more information with you, and I can’t wait for you to experience it first hand.

Of course Eyonix used to post this kind of stuff in the Priest forum about Priest changes that never turned out to be what the community wanted, or expected and was ultimately a let down.  Though I guess we will wait and see what else is in store for us.

I must admit even though I’m on a break, cataclysm has me as excited for the game as I was over 5 years ago before WoW came out

I spent my entire play time today messing with Pitbull 4.  I installed it and wanted to get switched over to using it.  I figure since cknight is in far development with 4 he will eventually stop supporting 3. Plus Inien has been telling me how great it is and there were a few things I wanted to be able to do in my raid frames that I couldn’t figure out how to do in Pitbull 3.  There is a large learning curve on Pitbull 4 but Inien got me going in the right direction.  I’m attempting to compress my raid frames and convince myself I don’t need so much information.  I’ve also made some changes to make it so when I DPS I’m better at it.

I know this is a work in progress, but I have it good enough that my party and 10 mana frames are usable.  I will need to do some tweaking though for sure!

Patch Tomorrow Yay!

Just posted my entry for the wow mosaic over on the wow aniversary site.

This is Inien on the left, my son in the middle and me Laneer on the right!  We got our Alliance banners and my collector edition box sets in the background   We’ll see if we make it in!

No energy tonight, tried to play but gave up after one quest.  Was about to log when I chatted a bit with Inien and he mentioned PTR changes.  I loaded up MMO-Champion and noticed Priest changes, oh Shadow I thought.  Then Just below those I saw this!

Power Word: Shield; This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets.

I was shocked by this.  They changed this a Loooooong time ago.  In fact I went to my patch.txt and looked.

• Patch 1.2: – Power Word: Shield: Now usable on party members only.

• Patch 1.3: – Power Word: Shield – Now castable on all raid targets.

It originally could be used as freely as any heal spell.  When they changed it I think the reasoning I always heard was someone could cast a rank 1 shield on you, untalented (back when the PW:Shield talent took the cooldown from 30 to 15 seconds) and you would be locked out of using a shield for 30 seconds and the shield was crappy.  It was essentially a griefing  change supposedly.

Well now the cooldown is always 15 seconds so that really doesn’t do it, and they are taking out spell ranks in 4.0 so I guess there is no reason for it anymore?  Plus I’m hoping they find a way for two Disc Priests to be more useful together, i.e. the Weakened Soul is tied to the Priest some how.

This was exciting enough news that I stopped heading off to bed to make this post   I hope this change sticks, not that I am constantly around people I’m not grouped or in a raid with anymore like the olden days.  But it is nice to be able to help out someone with one of my best and favorite spells.

Before I got on tonight I started looking at all the tweets I missed today working too hard and found out a bunch of stuff came out on 3.3.  I read up on the new 5 man dungeon coming in 3.3 and it sounds awesome.  I’m so excited about this because 5 man content is by far my favorite and most enjoyable thing in WoW.  The new dungeon has 5 wings, and sounds like it is very story driven which goes well with the rest of WOTLK.  They put 3.3 on the PTR today as well.  As usual you can find the best notes on the PTR goings on over at mmo-champion.

Looks like they have made quite a few changes to make leveling easier for casters after the nerf to regen.  They increased low level regen and have it gradually nerf itself.  Then they lowered the cost of the lower rank spells. Other than these changes there were not many class changes.  For Priests they mention pets (Shadow Fiend) now have 90% avoidance on AOE damage, except in the case of PvP.  MMO also notes that Prayer of Mending is procing Inspiration now and initially I was super excited by that.  Then when I ended up playing later I found out it is already doing it in the 3.2.2 patch

After going through all that I got on  and noticed the Heroic Daily was Utgarde Keep.  I joined up a group for that and did that one super fast.  It was funny I was with two Shadow Priests, and a ret Paly with a Death Knight for the tank.  The Death Knight was very good, and very well geared.  He also sprinted through the instance which was fun   That is the only way the older instances can really be fun now because you out gear them so bad is to do HUGE pulls and go FAST.  I tried to get the group to not break the ice on the first boss so I could get that achievement but some how I still didn’t get it.  I did get the 1000 stone keeper shards at the end, not that I ever use those for anything

After that I had a tiny bit of energy left so I decided to do a Trial of Champions.  I still have one more pet to get and probably want to get that finished soon   My ToC group went pretty well though I managed to kill myself at the end, I wasn’t paying attention to my own health enough in phase 3, I died at the same time as the stupid black knight   All these are just serving me well to gear up my future Worgen Warrior   I’m saving my Triumph badges right now for the helm. I hadn’t done ToC since the patch and it looks like they make the first boss guys reset after the jousting battle automagically instead of everyone running out of the instance now   That was awfully nice of them.

All the 3.3 news goes in line with what has been going around on the Cataclysm forums I think.  With it going on the PTR this month, it probably means that it will go live in December.  Which would probably put the expansion at April or May baring any surprise 3.4 patch hehe  I think this is the impression Blizzard was giving at Blizzcon.  That the expansion would actually be out before the next Blizzcon.  Initially I kept thinking people were insane for talking about it that soon, but I’m not sure 3.3 would hold much longer than May.  It sounds like they have seriously been working on it for quite a while.  I have been wondering about beta too since they didn’t give out beta keys at Blizzcon this year my prediction is they will invite the random way like they have in the past.  I also am going to predict that the subscribers of the new magazine will get a beta invite

Oh and also if you missed it Blizzard updated their website.  It looks very nice with lots of pretty graphics now   I also noticed they improved their employment system as well.  My dream job, the Cinematics Systems Administrator is STILL open, despite me being perfect for it, and applying for it twice for the past 6 months.  I’ll have to get my resume up their again in their new system.  Oh Blizzard why won’t you hire me!

I haven’t had any time to really get on this week.  It has been crazy at work and by the time I get home I don’t even want to look at a computer.  I have been keeping up reading the Cataclysm forums on my blackberry when I have a moment.  I have all but stopped reading the other forums, they just bug me.  Too much whining and crying about silly things.  Not that the Cataclysm forum doesn’t have its share of trolls, but there is a lot of interesting discussion going on all the time.  I like this phase of the expansion with all the speculation and wish lists, and the like

I’m pretty excited about Cataclysm for quite a few reasons.  A very significant amount of the game is going to be changing and that is exciting.  We got revamps of existing systems, additions of new systems, new graphics, and new races!  I’ve mentioned it before I think but I do plan to make a Worgen.  I am going to go with a Warrior which will mean I’ll have the 3 basic archetypes covered now with a Priest, a Mage and a Warrior   I am purchasing all the heirlooms I can for him so he’ll have a bit of an advantage in the field anyways I dunno I might even have enough time to make him a set of 22 slot bags if I remember to go make cloth every time

Since I had been thinking about alts I decided it was time for that page to make a come back.  So I’ve added the Alts Page back into the system with a list of my current alts.  In other site news stay tuned for an update to My UI section still.  Also I have a write-up in the works for my thoughts on Disc Priests in Cataclysm.

After the day I had there was just no energy left over for WoW.  I got on but just couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to do with my low energy levels.  Then I see Inien (grats btw) get his sewer rat!  He was just doing the fishing daily and got it by pure luck.  I had been hoping that would happen to me too but for some reason I have a feeling the game is going to make me work for it   I’m closing in on the 100 pet mark and that Rat would help out on that

So out of pure jealousy I fished for a little over a half an our in the sewer before bed.  I didn’t have the energy for anything else anyways.  Fishing is pretty relaxing for the most part (not RL fishing though).  Of course all that fishing did not yield me a rat, just a lot of bones, carp and vials.    Hopefully this isn’t like Mr Pinchy whom I never actually caught during BC and only got afterward even though the amount I used to fish during BC was at least 5 to 10 times more

What I should have done is updated my addons.  I noticed I’m getting pretty far behind in versions.  I still do mine by hands now, I haven’t wanted to trust any of the new applications.  I really miss wowace, I hate that they got merged into curse   I plan to update my UI section as I do this update because I know it is out of date.  I’ll try and do that tonight

It is funny what you can find on your hard drive when cleaning up.  In my documents folder I happened across the PDF of my original WoW CE, the Expansions, and the creation of my original account.  Yes I am a pack rat, but you already know that you’ve seen my bank!

Then I moved onto my Pictures folder and found I had a bunch of old WoW screenshots.  The date on the files say June 5th 1999, but I don’t think WoW would have been this far along with EQ was first starting so I’m going to assume they are from later than that.  Certainly probably early beta or alpha.  I uploaded them all my my flickr account and created a set for them.  I really should upload all the screenshots I have in my WoW folder, they do go back to 2004.  It is funny because my original screenshots in PDF because that is what the Mac client initially defaulted too

Then of course I found my old stuff on Rotgrip  This was a running joke in my old guild FEST for a while.  In fact that was my nick name Rotgrip.  This was because I was wearing Rotgrip for a  long time while raiding.  I never got an upgrade for many many moons.  I strangely can’t remember what I replaced it with.  I believe it was some shoulders from AQ40 Yes I have the T2 helmet, Benediction and Rotgrip!

Anyways that was my trip down memory lane.  Look for me to upload the rest of my screenshots in my archive soon.  I think that would be a neat thing to have around.

Finally got around to signing up for the Premium account over at wowhead.com this morning.  I did so not because I care about the extra’s but just to support the site.  Being in IT I know what it takes to do things right, and wowhead does so many things right.  The dedication of that team deserves some acknowledgment I think.  If you use wowhead I encourage you, please upgrade to their premium site and support them!

My endorsement of wowhead is completely of my own opinion.  I would never ask a reader to do something I didn’t do myself so check out my wowhead profile and you can see I indeed am supporting wowhead!

Just saw the 3.2 Patch notes from the PTR on MMO Champion.  Man they hit Priests a few times with the nerf bat, especially Disc Priests!  I’m not sure if the Inspiration is a buff or not.  I’m going to guess it would be for anyone but the tank maybe not.

• Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.

I guess Prayer of Healing was too powerful. This will reduce the over all healing of the glyph as well.  People have been saying PoH was too powerful, I guess they got there wish

• Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.

This really really stinks.  I don’t get it, they decided not to nerf the glyph that let us have the lower cool down, now they increase the base cool down so now you HAVE to have the glyph just to get it back to where it was before the glyph existed.  I hope this change does not go through.

• Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.

I’ve never looked at hard numbers on the current Inspiration version.  Right now it increases your targets armor from items by 25%, so I’m not sure what hat equates out to actual mitigation.  However on anyone but the tank this would be a buff because very few other classes have armor.  So you crit heal a mage being beat on and they take 10% less physical damage.

The changes to PoH and Penance are disapointing enough to override any positive from Inspiration for me.  Especially Penance which is my favorite spell.  I hope there are some more undocumented positives or 3.2 is going to be a sad Patch for the Priest class.  I would say the first change is probably a PvE change while the other two are PvP related.

• Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

I noticed this tidbit too which was basically a small nerf to Replenishment, but would effect me I’m sure.  You basically get .25% less now.