I’d Rather Be Wowing!

From the most recent beta build, courtesy of MMO-Champion:

• Misery and Shadow Weaving are now, each, a 3 points talent. The change to the Shadow Weaving is pretty positive. With just 3 points, the chance of having shadow weaving buff is now 100% (increase of 33% per point), while it is still stackable up to 5 applications. Misery change is more straightforward, +1% spell hit chance for each point.
• The tooltip of VT has been changed to reflect the replenishment concept. It still says, however, that it triggers everytime we are dealing shadow damage. Without more information on the replenishment buff, it’s hard to say even with the different “rate” of triggering between the three mana batteries, the effect of it is still the same.
• There is no changes in the VE for right now.
• Pain and suffering receives a bit of nerf, with providing 30% damage reduction from SW:D from the previous 60%.
• At this point, there isn’t any new talent introduced by the freed points of Misery and Shadow Weaving.
• (Edit) Inner fire in disc tree moved up a 1 tier. It is now increase the effect of inner fire by 60% (3 points).

Although it doesn’t mean much at this point, I am getting more confident that we are getting at least one new talent. I’m crossing my fingers that it will be something new and exciting.

A little bit of a side note, on the effort of being positive to the changes, there is an interesting comment on the shadowpriest.com forum. Although we lose the synergy of shadow weaving due to it becomes a self buff, it has the potential in a multiple target situation. We may no longer have to build full stack of shadow weaving for each of the target, as long as we don’t let it fall through. It will be great for scaling up mind sear, for example.

It is also really interesting to see how, in the current iteration of talent trees, 1 point in VT gives 100% change to replenish mana while ret paladin’s equivalent talent requires 3 (although sits 3 levels higher in the tree) and surv hunter’s talent requires 5 points(and sits 1 tier lower in the tree). I wonder if many ret paladin and surv hunter would actually spend that much points for this talent. Only time will tell, I guess :).

From this blue post:

Misery: Causes spells cast at the target to have +3% spell hit.

Shadow Weaving: Buffs only self.

Vampiric Touch: Grants Replenishment mana regeneration buff to up to 10 raid members on dealing damage (0.5% of their maximum mana each second. Similar utility is shared by ret pally and survival hunter)

Well, there goes our Misery talent. Really…+3%spell hit, can someone convince me that this is useful?  They even take less utility from Shadow Weaving. I don’t know what to say.

Don’t want to even compare with the other classes.

Our raid alliance is a progression raid group. When we started moving into this concept of progression, a set of 25 core raiders were selected, in addition to some back up raiders. From these core raiders, the raid leader asked for one things: to let the raid officers know in advance if you are not planning to show up. This request stems from the combination of the need to maintain the casualness of both of the guilds (we are, after all, social guilds) and to allow the raid officers to find replacements without scrambling or resorting to PUG at last minutes. In a sense, maintaining a somewhat consistent raid group. Absent from the raid without notice will “earn” you a strike. When you get 3 strikes, you would be placed to a back up position.

In theory, this is nice. But it doesn’t seem like it’s working out quite so well for us. The main issue is that we don’t have enough raiders, especially healers and tanks, to make the system works. It has been several weeks now that we have the situations where people are not coming to raid days without informing the raid officers. And if they do, they gave them notice only a day (if lucky) or one to two hours prior the raid form up. But because the lack of people in the rosters, being in a back up position, especially if you have main roles in the raid, is not much different from being in the core group. You will get into the raid whenever you decide to show up on that day. This also create a double standard between tanks/healers and dps-ers.

Furthermore, because of the last minute scrambling, often we will have “new” people in the. We use a zero sum dkp and obtaining several items can easily put you in negative dkp for a while (considering how little dkp we usually earn during one run). While it is easy to argue against this dkp system, the system is there to allow “new” raiders to have the chance to win items as well, giving them incentive to join the raid. Also, given a consistent set of raiders, this system should not give any problem because the same people will see the same raise and drop in their dkp.

But what happened is that, newer people would have higher chance in winning an item because their dkp is in the positive. Meanwhile, the core raiders would stay a long time in negative and lost on the roll with the new people, end up being disappointed and less likely to show up in raid consistently. So, what we have is a snowball effect.

I wonder if there’s a better way to encourage people to be more discipline in raiding?

Bummed out because of another cancelled raid? Never fear, cause L80ETC (Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain) is to the rescue!

Catch them at World’s End Tavern in Shattrath City at the hour when you see the following emote (or something similar):

Now, in Shattrath City: The Tauren Chieftains! Playing in the World’s End Tavern at the top of the hour!

Grab a guildy or two. Chug a Flagon of Mead or Bottle of Pinot Noir, for those of you with fancier taste, from the nearby Barmaid. Even better, drink Noggenfogger Elixir to channel your inner rock star.

It’s the performance you don’t want to miss. Filled with top of the arts special effects.

Dance! Whistle! Clap! Whatever you do, don’t forget to cheer at them! You’ll never know what you will get in return.

I have to postpone levelling Vhe for a week so to allow one of the guildies’ alt to catch up with her (currently 39, while Vhe is 47). Another guildie and I decided that we should get ourselves Bracers of Nimble Thought. We found the willing tailor to craft them. So, in the meantime I am getting these ready:

• 15 bolts of netherweave clothes (or 90 Netherweave clothes)
• 10 Arcane dusts
• 10 Primal mana
• 2 Primal fire
• 4 Hearts of darkness

And of course, the enchant to go with it:

• 6 Large prismatic shards
• 6 Primal fire
• 6 Primal water

With the exception of Hearts of Darkness, it doesn’t seem to be so bad :).

Monday - ZA cancelled because our MT/RL had other appointment. Our other tank in the guild weren’t online. Nothing worse than having to pug an MT.

Tuesday - TK cancelled because we don’t have enough people (esp. healers). With school starting, a lot people is getting busier. We heard this story before, so not worth repeating. Anyway, after 1 hour later from invite time, we were still missing one more healer The temporary RL (the usual RL was out of town) felt like he had enough and called the raid out. Although disappointed with the outcome, I can totally understand since I was scrambling along with him to find some subs.

Wednesday - SSC was very closed to be cancelled because of the lack of people. We got a sudden cancellation from one of the healer and a few “regular” healers were a no show. But the same temp RL pulled some string and get some friends of his to come along.

First stop, Hydross. Imagine everything that could go wrong in Hydross - that would cause a wipe - and those happened yesterday. Well, I may be a bit exaggerating there. But hey, we usually one shotted this guy. First wipe - totem aggro, one of the raider must have forgotten no offensive totem or they need to recall them during transition. Second wipe - nature resist tank dc-ed right after they move Hydross to her. Third wipe - someone got too closed to Hydross before MT engaged him and pulled him across the line. Fourth wipe - someone either healed and regen some mana/energy while during transition (not exactly sure there, apparently people insist that they didn’t dps him at all during this time). Finally, we got our act together afterward. Pretty darn demoralizing.

Fortunately we ended the raid in a high note. There was a bit of problem with a rogue naga that rampaged one of the satellite island. Then whirlwind took a chunk of the melee dps. But we managed to recover nicely and got him down.

Let’s hope for a better raid time this coming Sunday.

***

On another note, after donning Ruby Drape of the Mysticant for way too long, and not seeing Shadowcaster’s Drape in sight anytime soon, I finally broke into E’s badge bank to get Cloak of Arcane Alacrity. Right now E is 1164 +Spell damage unbuffed with 8% spell haste rate. Although that’s barely 1400 with all the food/flask/wizard oil buff, I am tempting of getting Corrupted Soulcloth Pantaloons to alternate with Pantaloons of Arcane Annihilation for pure spell damage set. I wonder if that would be worth it?

I have been pushing levelling Vhe a bit more lately. Hopefully by WotLK, Vhe can hit 70. She is currently sitting at 45. On the prep for WotLK too, I’m planning to shuffle the profession of Val and Vhe. Val is herbalist and enchanting (I know weird combination right? - only reason is so she can stock up herbs for Ast). Vhe is herbalist and skinning. The plan was for Vhe to drop herbalist and took in inscription. She was just a herbalist to stock up on the herbs for inscription. But since mining will get significant buff on stamina and herbalist is just getting some healing to self passive buff, also since stamina will be converted to spell damage for Val (prot pally), it makes sense for Val to pick up mining. It will beat having to look for ores in AH too. So, at this point, the plan is for Val to be a miner and enchanter, Vhe will be a herbalist and an inscriptor. Of course with that, I need to save up for Vhe’s epic flying mount for efficient farming. So many things to do…so little time :(.

In our raid world, things got a bit of a shook up. One of the guilds that makes up our raid alliance (there are 3 guilds altogether) finally pulled themselves out. We have kinda suspected that one day it would happen. The one thing that we worried about is what would be the consequences. I think that the biggest reason, just from a brief chat with various people here and there, is that the guild is growing, but our raid spot is limited. When we look at it more closely, there are only 5 regular spots given to that guild. Not enough raiding opportunity would probably make it hard for this guild to retain their newly recruits. I think that’s a good decision to look out after themselves and I wish them luck on their new alliance.

The impact, surprisingly, was not too catastrophic. At least for right now. It turns out that two of their members still choose to raid with us. And their guild leader is kind enough to allow that. In term of filling out the raid, between the two guilds, we seem to handle it quite well. But of course we still miss the usual jokes that would now be absent during raid :(.

***

Last Monday, we went to ZA with one of the pally tank that was recruited by the guild that recently left our alliance. This pally tank claimed that he has full T5 and all the resist set. Perfect, don’t you think? I’ve been wanting to bring E more to ZA and this provides the opportunity to do just that.

I remember this one blog post that two alpha males in a raid group don’t usually work out. As soon as we started, he took charge assigning mark targets to our raid leader. Since he is more experienced for the instance, our raid leader let him. But it wasn’t without moments where it really apparent, that our leader had to bite his lips, so just not to start an argument. During Eagle’s gauntlet, for example, our raid leader had to put his feet down on the tanking arrangement.

Now, I have to give him credit that he is a great pally tank otherwise. The only thing is that we felt that he is too overconfident. He forgot that raid is a team effort and not an individual effort. At the Dragonhawk boss, he insisted to let both side hatched and he would tank all of them. I thought he was going to use his resist set for it, but he didn’t. Keep in mind that he used to play in a guild that is downing BT before it broke up. So he played with people that just have better gears than us. The sucessfulness of him tanking both sides, in the past, would also need to be credited to the healers that were able to keep him alive. And he just didn’t seem to be aware of that. Since it wasn’t the case in our run, and he was not making it easy for our healers by not equipping any of his resist set, it is easy to see why we wiped.

So, we have this situation where there’s this new member, but we felt like we have to prove ourselves to him constantly. Our more challenging pulls were regarded as easy to him. A gear  dropped that would be good a upgrade for some of us was claimed to be worthless by him. At one point our raid leader has to say in the guild chat, “if this pull is so easy, and we couldn’t do it, is that mean we are idiots?” Ast, voice of reason said, “He just want to calm us down.” But the truth of the matter is, his behavior was enough to show that it wasn’t his intention all along. And that came out finally when he came out with another of our guildes to summon someone, he sarcastically said in “/s” that he is farming for bear mount (followed by lol). When this guildy casually stated that we are not all that bad, aren’t we - he replied, “no, you guys just sucks.” And this comes for the guy that accidentally pulled another group, wiped us out (pretty much throw our chance for the 3rd time chest), and also walked right into a bomb during Dragonhawk while tanking the birds (now I know it is hard for pally tank to see everything, but he did claim that he could do it easily).

His name then came out during our Wed’s SSC run. He was booted from the guild because he wasn’t being cooperative during the Tuesday’s raid (which I missed). It turns out he wasn’t very happy not to be given any tank duty during the trash pulls in Mag. Since the trash pull consisted of only 3 mobs, only 3 tanks were used. He was the “new” member, so he didn’t get any assignment to tank any of them. He nagged about it, proceeded to remove himself from the raid later without notifying anybody, and started calling people out in their guild chat.

Just because you are an excellent player, it doesn’t give you a right to be a jerk. Eventually we will learn about your ability and give you the place and praise that you deserve. But it certainly won’t come right away - not 5 min into the raid. And no amount of bragging would do you good. It would just make it more embarassing when you failed.

***

It seems like it’s a long journey just to get our hands on him (and his 3 “friends”) once again. At our last attempt of the day, after 4 wipes, we got him down! And with that our alliance is now 4/6 SSC.

On our first attempt, we tried the strategy that we did on our very first attempt. The kill order was hunter > shammy > priest > Karathress. We failed quite miserably. The main reason is that spitfire totem was way too far from the rest of dps. It doesn’t take a long time for it to annihilate the shammy’s tank and then proceed to kill the rest of the raid.

Luckily we had another raider that has gone through SSC and he shared his guild’s strategy with us and it works a lot better. The kill order was changed to shammy > hunter > priest > Karathress. Priest is tanked in the lower right corner of the room. Hunter was tanked in the upper right corner. Shammy was tanked between them, with pillars dividing us. The healers for shammy was asked to stand in front of the pillars to avoid the mana burn. Meanwhile, Karathress was kited along the platform, especially after shammy was killed.

Our next 2 attempts failed mainly because hunter’s tank kept loosing the pet, and the pet was killing all the healers. Apparently, the pet spawned when hunter was on the way to the tank and the tank couldn’t get him back. It also didn’t help when the paladin tank suddenly went offline, although due to his lead in aggro, plus the passive threat generation, we still managed to get his target down :). We switched the tank around and had a much better attempt afterward.

I quite enjoyed the fight. There’s some mobility involved, also the fast reaction to get to the spitfire totem. It certainly beats the monotony of Morogrim’s fight. This fight, however, further strengthened my existing irritation to why oh why totems have to be immune to MF.

Next would be Leo. I just hope we have enough time this coming week to give him a try (meaning everything else need to be one-shotted properly ^^ ).

Coming out with title is big challenge, don’t you think? I hope it’s not too misleading :).

Well, let’s begin with some screenies, though not much in quantity.

(1 & 2) I’m closing to completing all the quests in Borean Tundra. Although the area may not be too aesthetically appealing compared to HF, I do enjoy the diversity of inabitants, the story lines and the entertaining quests that I found there. Shots 1 and 2 are meant to give you a “teaser” to the some of them :).

(3 & 4) The first time I travelled to the fishing village of the Kaluak Tribe in Borean Tundra, there’s a quest that send me to another village in Dragonblight. I was supposed to talk to the dockmaster and acquire my method of transportation through him. The dockmaster asked me if I want to take sea turtle there, expecting a unique ride in a turtle, I was disappointed when he immediately teleported me to my destination. I haven’t been to any of the Kaluak village lately (there’s another one in Howling Fjord), so when I went there I was thorougly surprised to see that the sea turtle has been implemented. I especially love the touch of “carrot on a stick” that is being used to move the turtle around. Although you can still be teleported to the other villages (not sure if this is intended), the sea turtle boat is fully functional.

(5 - 9) What can I say, I’m girl - this kinda of things interest me :). I heard about the new hair styles so I thought I modeled some for you. As of today, the new hairstyles is not available in the character creation screen. So, I can only take some screenies for female Draenei in the barbershop. I rememberd that several weeks ago Phaelia posted an article of the supposedly new hairstyles. Comparing the screenies, they are the same style (although it is missing one of the draenei hair styles). So if you are curious to see other race’s hairstyles, check that article out.

***

As you might have known, the last two patches bring you ton load of JC recipes. But especially in the last patch, it introduces you to recipes buyable only with Dalaran Jewelcrafting Token.s Looking through the list of recipes, most of them cost about 5 tokens, where some of them cost about 8 tokens (I think the meta gems). There are about 4 pages full of recipes. Visiting the JC trainer in Dalaran,  he now offers a list of 5 (or 6) quests. Each of the quest ask you to get 2 types of green quality cut gems and an item dropped by random inhabitants of Northrend (Vrykul, iron dwarves, proto dragons, to name a few). Taking one of the quest reveals that it’s actually a daily, and automatically the 4 remaining quests becomes unavailable (dropping the quest, I assume, would give you the whole list again). So from the look of it, you can only get one Dalaran token per day. It is going to take a long time to complete all the recipes. Yay time sink for JC is found :). I am at least satisfied with how Blizzard to go about it. Giving a variety of quests to choose from (it may be become random in the future - like the current cooking/fishing quest), avoids some gems to get much higher values than the rests.

So I took one where I’m supposed to kill any Vrykul for its amulet. Unfortunately, either I am killing the wrong mob, or the quest item hasn’t existed yet, after 15 long minutes, I am not seeing any drops. But traveling to HF is not totally worthless. It turns out that grand master jewelcrafting is now available in HF (not yet in BT), but you cannot learn anything from him until you complete a quest for “Gem Perfection” where you need to give him some raw gems (2 yellow, 2 green, and 2 purple - northrend kinds). That’s a good news, because prior to that, you can only learn new JC recipes in Dalaran. it’s not such a so good news, however, because unless you are miner, few days/weeks into the expansion, expect to see outrageous amout of g for those gems and ores. On the other hand, if you are a miner, congrats on the very good money making opportunities :).

***

It can be surprising what you can learn from paying attention to the general/trade channel. So I found out that, as of today, the next bandage (heavy frostweave) can only be learned through a book. The catch is, the book is a random world drop and it is a BOP. Let’s hope that it won’t make it to live, shall we?

I was a bit curious on the functionality on some of the shadow priest talents. So I decided to play around with the talents while logging it. This experiment is not completely sound, but there are still some things that can be learned. If you are looking for some mind-boggling revelation, you won’t find it here. I think these results just further confirm what has been said in shadow priest forum. Like I said, it’s just for my own curiosity.

Experiment 1 (Twin Disciplines)

So I started to allocate my talent points in the shadow tree, just enough to get VT. As a result, I had to put some on shadow weaving as well. But I carefully looked and marked when and if shadow weaving occurred. I had 1194 pure shadow “power” (this the the value in your character sheet, to further distinguished it with spell damage). To also avoid any changes in my shadow power, I took off my Darkmoon Card: Crusade.

Twin Disciplines (5 points): Increases your spell damage and healing up to 5%.

Note that TD doesn’t actually change your spell power. So, the number in your character sheet will not change when you put points in this talent. I started with 0 point, kill 5 mobs with just VT, SW:P, and MF. Then I put another point, repeat the same process until all 5 points are allocated. Afterward I parsed the combat log manually (so there may be some human error there).

So far everything looks good and consistent. With 0 points in TD and 3 stacks of shadow vulnerability (6% more damage), my VT, SW:P, and MF ticks for 519-520, 652, and 567-568. With 5 points in TD, the numbers become 554-555, 684-685, and 595-596. TD does increase 5% of the damage done.

With that in mind, don’t you guys think that this talent is too good for being in the first tier (not that I am complaining)? Heck this actually increases our damage, and not just our spell power. I mean, our darkness talent is buried in the 6th tier, and that only increases our shadow damage by 10%. I am foreseeing a nerf for this.  Or hopefully a buff on our end, but what’s the odd on that ??

Experiment 2 (Pain and Suffering)

Continuing from the previous set up, I put more points in the discipline tree to get Meditation. Then I put some more in shadow to get Pain and Suffering. All the additions shouldn’t change damage wise.

Pain and Suffering (3 points): Your Mind Flay has a 100% chance to refresh the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain on the target, and reduces the damage you take from your own Shadow Word: Death by 60%

I’m going to focus on the SW:P because SW:D is bugged right now that it doesn’t actually do any backslash. The common questions in here are:

1. Refreshing SW:P, is it going to interfere with the ticks?
2. Which value of shadow power will be used by SW:P? In other words, if your shadow power changes after you cast your initial SW:P, does it got taken into consideration when it refreshes?

To answer the first question, I compared the number of ticks to the period of the fight and also to the number of ticks obtained from the previous experiment. Each fight was pretty short, only around 12 sec. So we should be seeing 3 ticks with the same spell rotation (VT, SW:P, then MF MF…). With and without PS, in all of the fights, I see 3 ticks in my combat log. So, I am confirming that the way SW:P is refreshed does not interfere with the actual ticking. Looking at the combat log more carefully also shows that SW:P ticks every 3 sec, regardless to when SW:P is refreshed by MF.

For the second question, I equipped my crusader card. So each MF has the potential to change my shadow power from my initial cast. I actually fight a lot of mobs with this setting so I can get some values with the same of number of shadow weaving and an increasing number of crusader stack.

For VT, as expected, the number of damage remains constant, since VT’s damage only take into account the shadow power at initial cast. For MF, the damage increases as the number of crusader stacks increases. For SW:P, it turns out that it acts just like VT, regardless to the the number of crusader stck when it refreshes. So the conclusion is that SW:P takes into account only the shadow power at initial cast, regardless if the shadow power increases or decreases after it is being refreshed.

If this behavior stays during live, this could add a twist on our spell priority so that maximum number of shadow power can be achieved before SW:P is maintained by refreshing MF. I can imagine triggering crits for the imp spirit tap buff through IF and MB/SW:D, popping a trinket that gives you an additional spell power for X seconds, or downgrading some spells just to get max number of stacks, before casting SW:P or re-casting SW:P. In my own opinion, I don’t think this is an intended behavior and it would probably be fixed when it goes live.

***

Well, I was going to make a comparison to the dps increases with the all the new talents and I just realized that I didn’t have a comparable data since I was not using my crusader card at the beginning of the experiment and I was using it at the end of the experiment. So that may have to wait for another day. I need to find something like to Dr. Boom to check all this.

On another note, E just dinged to 74. She just gotten her next rank of MB and MF, but haven’t used it yet. Finally something usable :). I’m excited to try them on.

For the non related shadow priest news, we can now mount in Dalaran, yay. But the mounting is broken in other major cities like SW and IF.

The login screen gets a very surprising facelift that includes a dragon. The map of Dalaran also gets a nice upgrade although the “hole” problem still seems to be prevalent in Dalaran. Thank goodness for Levitate *wink wink*.

For the rant section of the post:

I don’t know why people think it’s necessary to jack up the prices in AH. It’s not like the gold you earned in beta got carried over. What it does is just preventing people from testing the contents, especially the crafting contents. Thank you though for everybody that put up reasonable prices for mats and quest items.

Also, all these news about new recipes - like the new tailoring embroidery - just confused me because not all of them are implemented yet. Sites that reporting all these things should make it clear whether the information is data mined or live in beta (or maybe I just need a better reading comprehension).