Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I’ve seen some good posts buy Ghostcrawler recently and I wanted to share a couple that I hope people really take to heart.  I really like Ghostcrawler, and I love how Blizzard doesn’t take any crap, they have a vision for the game and they are going with it.  They don’t have 11.5 million players because they don’t know what they are doing The first one in response to someone talking about Priest nerfs.

It is interesting too me how many of these “My class has no niche,” “My class has nothing special about it,” “My class needs to be overhauled” discussions come out after a nerf. I think a lot of players mentally substitute power for fun, and when they’re brought into line, the class stops being as fun for them.

I understand that a lot of players want to be the hero. They want to get invited to a raid or Arena team because they’re so awesome. You want people to cheer when you get invited. It’s a rush – I get that.. But except for the very high end of play, your skill and gear have a lot more effect on your contribution than the class design.

IMO, the players asking their peers “How can I better handle this situation?” or “Which would be a better gear choice for me?” are generally going to see their performance go up more than the guys asking “Hey, how ’bout you buff me?”

This particular statement means a lot to me, and especially to those whining about Discipline spec.  I really enjoy this spec, it is not a big numbers, meter blasting spec, but it is really fun.  It is fast and furious, and it is different from the way I had played most of my WoW life.  People constantly complain it is not viable, or you can’t do this or you can’t do that.  I say it is all about how you handle the situation.  A good Disc Priest can get the Job done, we just have to do it differently.

The other post I found very interesting was over some complaints on the stat changes that haven’t even happened yet People were pulling the usual “Oh you’re dumbing down WoW ” crap and whining about catering to casuals.  Ghostcrawler responded as to why it was necessary and someone replied this:

I’m sorry, but I fail to see your logic. If players are itemized poorly, it’s because they don’t care to do enough research to learn how to properly itemize or how to successfully itemize to fit their play-style.

Then in typical awesome Ghostcrawler fashion he came back with a resounding:

I find many of these arguments to be elitist. This is not a “catering to the casuals” issue. This is an issue that even some of our most educated and math-savy players could not make gear decisions without the help of external tools. We’re much less concerned about more casual players because the specific choice of upgrade will mean less for them (skill outweighs the contribution of stats for all but the absolute best players) and they often choose pieces based on things like art over stats.

I’m talking about very hardcore raiders who no longer could eyeball a piece of gear with any degree of authority. I might believe that some very few of you are so proficient with the math as to be able to eyeball the stats, but I think you are vastly overestimating the number of players who can or do. Remember, the formula to convert armor penetration into damage was so complicated that we had to take the unusual step of actually spelling out how it was calculated.

With this change will you still have to make hard choices about upgrading? Absolutely. Will there still be quasi-religious debates about which neck is best in slot for a given spec? Of course. Will you still need to understand the mechanics to make the best choice for your character? We think so. One of our overall design philosophies for WoW (and Blizzard) is to be simple but have a lot of depth. Some people mistake needless complexity for depth.

Meanwhile, we think there is a lot of benefit of getting rid of problematic stats like defense and accomplishing things like letting casters improve by focusing on throughput over mana pool.

I completely agree with him and think some people need to get off their high horse and be realistic.  I hope a lot of people will read this post and realize the error of their ways but I’m kind of doubting it.  The people who say things like this really do have a false sense of entitlement.  I’m a caster and I don’t PvP so I think I had a good handle on all of the stats I use, but there is plenty to know and it is difficult to make a decision about something, especially something very close to what you have.  I think what the plan is should be fine.  People act like with this change you won’t need to know anything anymore when it simple isn’t true.  You will still have to balance your stats, your mana pool/regen how much crit and hit you want.  Plus we are getting a new stat for Mastery which adds a new interesting element to the game.  Not to mention the new ability to reforge an item and alter its stats in addition to gemming and enchanting.  There is plenty of depth as GC put it for the more hardcore, while still being simple enough for people to make good decisions.

Anyways I thought I’d share my thoughts on these two posts and why I liked them.

Before I go into my playtime story today (which is a good one) I wanted to touch on the subject of the recent blue (Ghostcrawler) attention to Priests.  On the one hand it feels good to see a lot of Blizzard attention being given to Priests.   I’m not complaining, but generally we are left alone, this is mostly due to there being nothing truly wrong with our class most of the time.  Lately there has been MUCH whining about Priests, and  I think it was spurred by both the formation of the Healing forum, a few misinterpreted comments of GC and the upcoming nerf of Circle of Healing.

For some reason a whole bunch of Priests have developed some sort of inferiority complex against the other healers.  People continue to put too much stake in healing meters, and keep trying to redefine our role in WoW as healers.  I find most of the complaints entirely miss placed, and I do not feel it is representative of healing Priests as a whole.  I made this post to a heated discussion that involved GC responding to a very non constructive post.

I do not believe Blizzard can please the majority of the people whining.  Plenty of it is stupid like “I have to look at health bars all the time” or “I have no role in raids”.  I do believe there are some problems with the Priests, mostly bugs in our talents, a few talents I would say are under powered, Renewed Hope for example but I still have it.  A lot of the bugs in the talents are even fixed in 3.08.  I think our biggest issue, and the one people should really be whining about is our level 80 spells Divine Hymn is completely worthless.  I do hope they do something about that one.  Over all though I think we are good healers, I enjoy being a Priest.  In fact I read a post recently I believe in the Priest forum that was talking about a thread from the tanking forum.  Most tanks preferred Priests as healers over all the other specs of healers.

I’m looking forward to 3.08 for both my Priest and my Arcane Mage.  My only hope is that GC takes everything with a grain of salt.  The whiners do have him convinced there is a problem, hopefully whatever he does to please them doesn’t negatively effect those of us who are happy.

I added a quote rotator for amusing or revealing quotes from the CMs or devs even I guess    Though they post the forums few and far between.  I don’t have many right now please feel free to email me forum links with amusing quotes!