Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Well it looks like things came out after I went to bed with the new patch 3.1 and as of this morning the PTR seems to be up but a little unstable.  I logged in after it patched looked at my talents for about 1 minute then the world server crashed   You can read all the notes over on MMO-Champion.

Looks like they messed with a lot of things in Disc, some I’m not happy with.  First of which there was no AOE Shield!   I dunno if they scrapped the idea or just haven’t got it on yet.  Second was they messed with Rapture.  It now only gives mana from the shield and nothing else, not even divine aegis.

Some good things though, Divine Aegis now stacks and can be up to 10k on a level 80 character.  When your shield breaks and gives you mana back from Rapture it also gives the person you shield mana/rage/runic power.  They put in a talent that removes the 4 second cool down on PW:Shield FINALLY and as a bonus decreases the mana cost.  They also put in a new talent for flash heal that reduces its cost by 15% and increases it chance to crit on targets below 50% by 10%.

With all the reductions in talent costs and the removal of a few I can get everything I had been getting, plus the new talents and manage to get Improved Healing to make Penance even more efficient

It is time to go to work, so I’ll be following up later with some testing   Oh and the mana changes?  My out of FSR mana regen is about HALFED, my in FSR regen is about the same.

I wasn’t really in the mood for WoW tonight for some reason.  I did get on to do my cooking daily, and my inscription research on Laneir, but other than that I did other things.

I did keep an eye on the PTR however and get myself copied over finally as I watched the queue slowly shrink.  People are really riled up now but it probably won’t be another day or two before it is up from the sounds of things.

We had a party today and there for I didn’t have any play time.  I decided to get on  just before bed to do my Oracle dalies.  I’m only two days from revered so I can start hatching eggs and I didn’t manage to do them on friday.  I did that and came back to town to put away stuff and check my mail, Inien had apparently been on shortly before I did.

Just as I was about to log I took this screenshot I thought it was interesting for the week I was up 5 gold!  I’ve spent a lot of gold this week because I thought I’d buy a gryphon and a hippogryph so I had more variety in my flying mounts.  I have been questing as well as the dailies I’ve been working on so I easily made all that gold back.  I am still confused when I see people in raids, or on the forums say they can’t afford to repair or buy epic flying or whatever.  Blizzard made money come just by playing the game.  I don’t actively try to make it, I just get it.

After logging I check MMO-Champion and was sad to see despite my best efforts I missed the first run on the PTR.  I really wanted to be there for the Priest changes.  I guess I’ll keep watching for that empty queue to try and copy myself over.  I still hope the priest changes are there when they open because I can’t wait to see them all.

I noticed over at MMOChampion that the latest build of 3.08 had some interesting changes.  Most notably the ones that effected Priests were under general.

• Shield Wall, Barkskin, Guardian Spirit, and Divine Protection are now off the Global Cooldown.

This is something that had been requested since beta, taking Guardian Spirit off the Global Cooldown.  Basically it makes it more usable for yourself as your not wasting part of the buff waiting to cast again.  This is a good change and makes the spell more useful when not in a raid with another healer.

• Dispel Resist talents have changed to protect only beneficial spells and damage over time effects.

This effects those PvPers that use Silent Resolve to mitigate dispels.  I myself only have it for the aggro reduction.  I’m assuming the change here is that it is specific now to DOTs and Buffs and will not protect debuffs I assume?

Other than that not much interesting for Priests.  I’ll log in later to confirm Penance is still working properly   Still so concerned that fix finally makes it to live because it annoys me so much (the facing your target issue).

I know I’m slow in posting about this one but its been a busy week.  Anyways they put up 2.4.3 and there is quite a bit of comotion about a few of the changes.

The top 3 forum QQ points in order they appear in the patch notes.

• Mounts at 30?! Yes, it’s true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.

Yes, people are actually complaining that you can get mounts at level 30 now instead of 40.  Warlock and Paladin castable mounts were almost moved to 30.  This proves once again that people will QQ about anything.

• Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue’s health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Now I don’t follow arena much but apparently this change was necessary because rogues in T6 with this talent could go in and completely own.  Basically rogues didn’t really need to wear PvP gear like everyone else, or not much.  So supposedly this balances that and the QQ is a flowing!  How can you make a PvP talent require a PvP stat! Ahhhh the humanity!

• Curse of Elements: This spell now applies to Arcane and Shadow damage, as well as Frost and Fire.

Subsequently Curse of Shadow has been removed of course, and combined into one spell.  Again you wouldn’t think people would complain about this one.  The QQ ranged from “Shadow isn’t an element” to “why didn’t you add holy and nature”.  Blizzard thought putting the two spells together was nice enough for now.

Lastly though not something to QQ about, they FINALLY added 28 slot Herb bags into the game much to the excitement of Inian.  So I copied over Laneer and flew over to take a look.  Must be revered with the Sporeggar (I’m exalted thank goodness) and you’ll need 25 mushrooms.  Mats are 6 Primal Mooncloth and 2 Fel Lotus.  Not too rediculous

I did my ogr’la dailies and am now just 1 more day off from being exalted with them.  Then I can finally stop doing them because I dislike the smelly ogres really!   Inian and I worked on our Kurenai and Consortium faction today while attempting to get a Heroic BloodFurnace going since it was the Heroic daily.  It would have been perfect too because I could have made progress on my Honor Hold faction but we could never find a stupid tank!  It eventually got too late and we just worked on our faction farming the rest of the evening.  I ended up replishing my arcane dust with all the netherweave we got   I’m definetly on target for having all the Outlands faction( well the ones I can get) exalted before the Sunwell comes out.  That new faction will come with all the nifty new dailies so that one will get finished probably long before WOTLK   Don’t ask me why I work on all these factions except for it is something to shoot for I suppose.

I played a around a little more on the PTR earlier.

I got out all the pets in my bank and this one turned out to be the largest!  He is as big as an adult elephant!

They fixed the bugs I had on the mounts but I did notice a weird clipping thing going on when flying through the swamp.  It just doesn’t look right not sure whats going on.

I did one of the new dailies, to power the portal to the sunwell island.  For some reason this one needs to be powered, by energon cubes from the consortium guys no less.  So you have to go to that place out in blade’s edge no one goes to.  This is me out of phase collecting the cubes while being attacked by buff little mana snakes   The quest yileded a 68 green (arcane wrath gear) and 1 Badjge of Justice.  Neat huh!

So I haven’t had time to get on here and Rant about 2.4 yet.  I’ve only played around a little on the PTRs so far.  The new content looks great, I mean there is ALOT of it.  I’m extremely excited about this part.

There are a few bugs, in the Mac Client, Netherdrakes have huge beams shooting out the head and ass

And Dreadsteeds are wonderful rainbows!   The October Fest Ram also had some beams shooting out of it too.

And if the PTR is any indication your going to have to keep your guard up constantly on the island.  There was soooo much PvPing going on.  There are not many places where the guards are actually protecting you. As usual if you act at all even in defense and you do get near guards you both die

One of the latest builds had a funny bug where creature scaling was messed up.  Murky wasn’t exactly giant, but he was as big as a gnome

So anyways onto my Rant yes 2.4 looks great content wise, but they have been slowly but surely added the class changes in.  I don’t think they wanted everyone to see them all at once.  As far as Priests were concerned they started out with major mana burn nerfs, followed by making Resilience effect Mana burn.  I don’t really care about it but a lot of people did.  But then they messed with my PI making it  a 20% spell haste instead of 20% damage.  They also took away my spell interrupt by making Chastise a 2 second root instead of disorient.   I’ve heard its instant now but I keep forgetting to look when I go in.  Lately I’ve just been messing with specs. Now that they messed up PI  I’m going to go back to a Healing/Damage build instead of a Damage/Healing one.  I’m going to go back to my old trusty 24/37/0 build. This will probably help me anyways as I end up healing the new 5 man

So far they have only nerfed Priests and have yet to give us any buffs.  I hope we see one before the end of testing but I’m not going to hold my breath.  I guess I’ll just look forward to all the new content and not what they are doing to my class.  What makes me mad is they appear to be balancing the entire game around the arena.  Probably for their precious new “E-Sport”…  This makes me very annoyed because that is a tiny part of the game, a very tiny part and a stupid one to balance things on.  I’m afraid of what the game is going to look like if they continue down that path.

I decided to play a little with Pain Supression now that they changed it so I jumped on the test server and respeced. It looks different now I think, I’m not sure if it had already been changed since the last time I saw it but it is still very obvious your using it, thankfully it has a 65% chance to resist dispell.