Welcome To The Suck

One of the Hunters in our 25 man raid is a Dwarf named Rui.  He’s a good hunter, solid dps, doesn’t make a habit of standing in the Fire, never pulls aggro… in short, nothing like the guys who are the first to get squished by Vault of Archavon bosses when you’re bored and PuG it late on a Wednesday night.  Anyone who runs with a regular raid knows that there are always “characters” in those raids.  For example, we have an excellent healing paladin named Tinuviel, but she’s pretty much known as Afkviel for reasons that I hope are obvious from the nickname.  Rui is the guy who always disconnects.  His connection sucks harder than an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.  I think Hoover is his ISP or something.  It’s become something of a joke over time.

“Everyone buffed?”
“Yep.”
“Tanks ready?”
“Ready to go.”
“Rui disconnected yet?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, let’s get this show on the road, pulling in three…”

Well let me tell you, since patch 3.2.2, I’ve been Rui, and it’s not as funny in the flesh as it is from a distance.  For years, I’ve been the guy with the connection made from solid granite.  Never miss a raid, never go offline, always there.  After patch 3.2.2 rolled out, every time Gormok the Impaler so much as looks at me in a funny way, I get dumped out to the login screen and cannot reconnect as long as the fight is going on.  And then it takes 15 attempts to connect to a character in Dalaran.  And so it goes on.

Yesterday the daily cooking quest was Rhino Dogs and the daily fishing quest was the Ghostfish, both conveniently located in Sholozar Basin.  So I hearthed to Nesingwary Basecamp, flew over to Rainspeaker Canopy to pick up this weeks’ Oracle egg and went fishing.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m pretty sure that your fishing bobber shouldn’t time out before you can see the fishing channeling bar appear.  And I’m also relatively certain that casting a line isn’t supposed to take fifteen seconds.  On a similar note, as a level 80 mage covered in 10 man Heroic and 25 man Crusader Coliseum gear with an average item level of 240, I shouldn’t be dying from the bleed of a level 76 non elite Rhino’s gore effect in the time it takes for me to get an Arcane Blast off.

There are (at latest time of checking) 32 pages of complaints on the US forums and 10 pages (in the busiest thread) on the EU forums about the instant disconnects people are suffering from Crusader Coliseum and the associated lag that plagues you afterwards.  There are no Blue solutions, but the cures suggested by the community range from clearing your dns cache (whatever the hell that is) to sacrificing a virgin to the Blood God at the next full moon.  Personally, I’ve tried everything bar reinstalling Warcraft, which is something I’m not going to do because the only difference between having a rock solid connection and one made of swiss cheese and spaghetti is that patch 3.2.2 rolled out.  And I’d not be exaggerating if I were to say I’m not best pleased with the state of affairs.

But the suckage doesn’t end there.  Usually, after being online for three hours or so, my latency will drop from 4500ms to something approaching playable and I can think about getting into a group to do something useful.  Last night we threw together an Onyxia raid for alts, and I came along to tank on my warrior, Gorn.  Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but when the raid leader says “Gorn, you tank the boss, I’ll tank the adds”, I take that to mean that the raid leader is going to tank the adds.  I don’t take it to mean that I’m going to tank the boss, help him tank the whelps, tank the elite adds when they show and hope he’s not busy admiring his nails and is quick with a taunt when the last elite is up and the boss lands at the other end of the fucking instance, because apparently, that’s exactly what “You tank the boss, I tank the adds” does, in fact, mean.  Sadly, since my balls are made of flesh rather than Madame Eva’s finest crystal, I obviously interpreted the instructions the wrong way.  Silly me.  Entirely my fault obviously.

Well, we got her down on the second attempt and at least I got a new hat out of it.

Changes

Well I finally managed to get some toons onto the EU Public Test Realm, and while I realise this is all subject to change, I’m cautiously optimistic.  Allow me to explain.

We’ve been farming Brutallus in Sunwell Plateau for some time now.  I say “farming” him rather than saying he’s “on farm” since he’s anything but an easy fight.  When I came back to the game we’d downed him maybe twice, and I arrived back in the raid wearing Tier 5 gear.  It goes without saying that I was seriously undergeared for Sunwell, the other mages all had their 4 piece Tier 6 bonus, I didn’t even have a single piece and only had one BT-level ring that compared to their gear.  Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to get close to their gear level and within a  month I was sporting 4 pieces of my own Tier 6 with the gaps made up from badge loot and Zul’Aman gear.

But I still struggled to match their dps.  Well to cut a long story short, despite conflicting advice on the Elitist Jerks forums about the relative value of spell haste, I’m convinced that haste is the way to go.  The other mages had massive amounts of haste and lower hit and crit rating than me, and once I re-gemmed for haste I finally managed to get 1950 dps on Brtuallus.  Not as good as some, but enough to justifiy my raid spot.  It’s obviously not as simple as that alone, the group you’re in makes a HUGE difference to a mage, but this post isn’t about me improving dps on one fight, it’s about the new talent changes in the upcoming patch.

On the Test Realms last week, unbuffed, ungrouped and with sub-optimal enchants (+40 dmg rather than Soulfrost) I managed 2050 dps as a Frost Mage on Doctor Boom.  Compare that to a fully raid-buffed Fire Mage with the best group setup and all consumables getting 1950 dps. 

Impressed with the new Frost Talents yet?  I was. 

Arcane on the other hand, just seemed a bit “meh”.  In the same setup the best I could do was 1100dps.  Now I accept that you can’t expect to get the most from a new spec straight after visiting the trainer.  I also accept that it’s entirely possible I was using the wrong rotations or the wrong spell as my “filler” between Arcane Blasts (I was using Frostbolts).  Perhaps I should even have been using Arcane Barrage instead of Blast around my filler spells.  All of this may be true, but even so, 1k dps vs 2k dps seems like it can’t be explained by crappy rotations alone.  If there are any other Arcane Mages out there with a different experience, please feel free to point out what I’m doing wrong because I really, really want to like Arcane.

As for Fire, well I ran into a little problem testing Fire, in that I can’t get onto the PTR lately.  I did have a play around with Fire, but didn’t do any comprehensive testing.  Fire feels ok, but I’d like to do some dps tests to see exactly how it stacks up against Frost.

Meanwhile, The Mighty Jingles had a play around with Affliction.  I was just messing around, not doing any serious testing, but Affliction sure is complicated now!  It seems like you’re fighting your cooldowns rather than the mobs.  There are some nice talents in there, but some can be counterproductive, like your Shadowbolts resetting the timer on your Corruption, for example.  Sounds great on paper, but unless you time your Shadowbolts precisely you can end up resetting too early and losing DoT ticks.  It can actually lower your dps!  There’s just too much cooldown juggling going on there to be comfortable in my opinion.

Aluriel also popped over to the Test Realms and was immediately critted in the face by a wall of confusion.  Don’t get me wrong, the new Priest talents are lovely in my humble opinion, they’re not the issue.  Aluriel’s problem is that she doesn’t know what to wear!  Some of her healing gear seems like it would be better for dps, and some of her dps gear looks like it would be better for healing!  This is what I believe is referred to as “an embarrasment of riches”.  It’s quite a nice problem to have so I’m not complaining.  As far as the dreaded spell downranking nerf is concerned, Priests are better off than most in this department.  With the proper talents we can regain mana from overhealing, we can gain clearcasting at an increased rate and our Shadowfiends benefit immensely from the shared spellpower mechanic.  We can also, in a pinch, use the neglected max rank “Heal” rather than Greater Heal, which in Aluriel’s case, still heals for a reasonable 2k.  I’m pretty happy with the direction Priests are going, all in all.

After hearing good things about Protection Warriors I took the plunge and transferred Gorn over to the PTR too.  All of the rumours are true.  Protection is FUN!  In a mixture of Kara/Tier 4 epics and blue quest and reputation reward tanking gear, Gorn was storming through the Quel’danas dailies like a man possessed.  Shield Slams were critting for 2k,and they were critting regularly, as were Heroic Strikes and Devastates.  I’m not saying he’s anywhere near Calli’s dps, because he clearly isn’t, but grinding as a Protection spec warrior isn’t an exercise in having your teeth pulled anymore.  I’m predicting a happy, fun-filled future for tanks.  Oh, and Shockwave?  I want to marry it and have its babies.

Spell Downranking and Mana Cost Inflation

It seems there’s another beta build on the test servers and there’s a fairly massive change been slipped in. WoW Insider just reported that downranked spells now cost much more mana than maximum rank, sometimes more than 100 mana more than the highest rank.  How is this going to affect you?  Over to our panel of experts.  Calli, you first.

*yawn*  Oh sorry, you wanted a comment? Well I guess that on fights like Morogrim Tidewalker in Serpentshrine Cavern, Mages are going to have use max rank Frost Nova to root the murlocs in place and keep them away from the healers, assuming your raid uses that strategy and doesn’t have a tankadin or a Water Elemental to do it from a safe distance.  The increased damage is fairly trivial, so threat shouldn’t be an issue.  Can’t see anything to get excited about, personally.

Ow! Put the stick away!  Ok, ok..  pvp implications…  Well the days of spamming Rank 1 Arcane Explosion to flush Rogues and Kitties out of hiding are well and truly over.  Yes, the Rogues are rolling their faces all over their keyboards in utter glee at this one.  Rank 1 Frostbolt will probably still be used to get that initial snare off quickly but it’s probably going to be a lot more situational now, and the days of spamming Rank 1 Frostbolt to get that Winter’s Chill debuff up are probably long gone too.  Rank 1 Frost Nova in pvp is also dead and buried.  Speaking personally, I’m a raiding Fire Mage who’s already paid the pvp penance to get the trinket, so I have no need to either use downranked anything or pvp at all anymore.

Now on the other hand if I was a Frost Mage who did Arenas or Battlegrounds…  ouch.  Shinano, over to you.