Wednesday 14 July 2010

31 Points of Unfinished Work

After the new beta trees were released this morning I've been haveing a good play around with them trying to get a good feel for how they work and figureout any good tricks for my respective classes.

Admitedly I've been very excited about the prospect of a 31 talent tree and the implications for leveling alts is very nice indeed, however my current thoughts on what i've seen of the first draft leave quite a bit to be filled out properly.

Currently there are places in these trees where they completely screw over something that I rather enjoy doing which is filling in talents to full.
Nothing is more infuriateing to me then haveing to leave a 3 point talent at 2 points because I need the points elsewhere (I'm looking at you enduring winter) and with a few of the charecter builds that I've tried out I've managed to tag all of the interesting stuff to full leaveing me with exactly 1 talent point to spare which in the case of the frost tree on the current draft has to be taken somewhere in order to advance properly.

That 1 talent point barrier is annoying as hell to me especialy when I have no idea where to put it, I get the same problem with my priests builds.


I think the problem right now is that blizz have trimmed the fat a bit too far down so we now have too little talents to choose from, Perhaps balanceing out the tiers so that theres always exactly 5 points to spend in 3 and 2 point talents to get to the next level without any issues, in cases where theres an ability you can balance it out with either 2 2 point talents or 3 3 point talents either way they need a bit of balance adding to them in order to make them more appropiate.

Thankfully this is only a priliminary look at the whole escapade and they have specified that some classes have not had as much grooming as others have which means I can at least look forward to what I hope will be a significantly cleaner 2nd draft.

It's too early to tell how it's all going to work out in the end.

Monday 5 July 2010

Playing with Styles

Something that i'm realy getting into after looking over the current beta talents for cataclysm is the enhanced ability to spec in a prefered style, i've even managed to chalk up a good level 80 talent build for an easy solo grinding spec with large healing capabilities for grouping with.

This has also got me thinking about how I may be able to change my play style in cata to suit me better, one of the things I'm thinking about is changeing my currently abandoned DK or maybe even refiting my warrior in order to create a "Dodge Tank" charecter.

This would involve haveing lower effective health with the trade off of outright avoiding most melee damage, I'd like to try it out with a Blood Tanking spec as I could then include a heavy emphasis on Parry in order to obtain some assemblance of magic avoidence though spell deflection.

I'm sure some people can remember back in TBC when night elf rogues could spec in a specific way and take advantage of specific charecter buffs and debuffs in order to obtain a 100% dodge chance which effectively allowed them to tank anything which did not cast spells (which included some of the highest level bosses in the game at the time).

I'd be interesting in createing such a charecter set up when cataclysm comes round just so I could see how it would play out, I'm sure they will be people who will complian that I have low health for a tank but It's experiments like this that make the game interesting.

I'm even contemplating taking the recuperation talents in the Combat tree for my rogue to use so that I can become far more self-sufficent then I am now, which should make soloing far more interesting and also reduce the need for me to carry potato bread with me everywhere I go.

So my plans for cataclysm is to have my Healers DPS, my DPS heal and my Tanks to dance (Imagine someone with a long sword dodgeing and parrying blows in a chain sequence, it makes me feel like the person would be sword dancing).

Thursday 1 July 2010

A Handful of Side-grades

Everyone keeping track of the Undergeared project on Gevlons blog has seen my current level of performance on Festurgut on my Priest, I managed to pull 4.4k DPS as shadow which was better then the 4.1k I pulled on the 2 tries previous but I'm not proud of the performance as most of the gear I was using was my healing set.

Fortunately for me I can use most of my gear in a double dip scenario but if i want to perform better in future combat situations I need to gather some more items to create a more apropiate shadow set.

2 items I've managed to replace are the MP5 ring from occulus with the spirit ring from drak'tharon keep, now there are still better rings out there as spirit is only good for a pittance of spell power and a bit of regen, I'm still hoping to obtain the crit ring from Violet Hold or possible the haste rings from VH or UP as they would provide me with better itemisation for the set.

I also managed to replace my wand from the Argent Crusade MP5 wand with the Spirit wand from gundrak, this is a huge upgrade as the previous wand had no intelect on it and less spell power then the wand i've got now making the new one better for both healing and DPS.

Perhaps best of all is that I managed to obtain the Forge Ember from HOS which replaced my MP5/on use SP trinket from HOL, which although it lowers my burst damage it gives me a higher sustained damage and better itemisation for DPSing with, I may even find it an upgrade for healing with as it gives more crit for my Disc set and a spell power burst.

On top of that I replaced a lot of my gems with more suitable ones which should help me out a bit during future raids.

I Still have a few items that i would like which include the DPS trinket from Occu, the Crit belt from Gun'drak and Another blue helmet so I can get a better DPS meta gem which can come from either Occu or Strat.