Newest Alt

Right, so I’ve actually been playing it for some time now, but I’m actually leveling a druid! Epakoto the tauren just hit level 40 yesterday and nabbed Leader of the Pack for that oh-so-good +5% crit chance buff.

For the longest time, I haven’t been able to level a druid past the 10-20 range. And levels 1 through 10 tip so far towards unbearable it’s just mind-numbingly frustrating. Much like hunters who spend their first 10 levels without a pet, druids spend theirs without any forms and are forced to act like some sort of hybrid balance druid. Hybrid spellcaster mixed with some sort of melee toon without any special abilities. Yep. Cast Wrath a couple times til the mob reaches you and then auto attack until it dies.

Bear form at level 10 does not really help. If you go bear, you get to act like a warrior for their first 10 levels, spamming your own version of heroic strike without the benefit of Charge to build any initial rage. What I ended up doing was casting one wrath and following that up immediately with a moonfire, and then closing in to melee for the rest of the mob’s health bar. This seemed to work better (and maybe be a little more stimulating) than attacking stuff in bear form.

What I’ve heard is true ehough, though. It does get better with Cat form. In addition, shortly after 20, I made it to 24 and started leveling right alongside a friend who is playing an enhancement shaman. The two work well together, especially with the group buffs provided by Unleashed Rage (+10% AP when the shaman crits) and LotP (+5% chance to crit). As well, now that she’s got Stormstrike, everything we attack dies pretty quick-like.

If we fight an elite (one for a group quest or whatever) or end up taking on two many mobs, I usually switch to bear and start spamming swipe to keep them all on me. With a decent amount of dodge and way more armor in that form, it tends to work better that way I think. She’ll keep me healed as we beat them all down. Otherwise, she is usually “tanking” (leading dps a lot from SS+WF burst usually) and if she needs healing I’ll toss a Rejuvenation and shift back, continuing the rampage.

Granted, the mobs were all levels 36-39 (with me at 39 and her at 40) or so, but we stormed through the entirety of Zub’dwai or whatever it’s called there north of Grom’gol. It was pretty fun.

These two would probably level all the way to 70 and eventually 80 together quite well.

Yay for Epic Flight Form

Helped a pair of irl friends with level 70 druids get their epic flight form quests finished last night in Heroic Sethekk. We had planned on starting at 9, but ended up having to wait until 10:30 or so for our 5th to get home from work. From there, it went fairly rough. More crowd control would have been most handy, all we really had was a succubus which kept getting destroyed by things.

Warrior tanking on multiple mobs is so very precarious. For one thing, Thunderclap is not usable while the warrior is silenced, which makes very little sense to me. Also can’t taunt, which does make sense, but I’ve known about that. Also, if I end up getting stunned by one of the Talon Lords or whatever they’re called (they use “Talon of Justice“, lawl) before I’ve had the chance to use TC, well…things get even harder.

Our poor healing tree druid had very few hit points as well, so often a stray random charge from the birds would do her in instantly (as I was never quick enough on the intervene to take that attack).

However, the Anzu event was one-shotted. Awesome job by both druids keeping everyone decursed and all of the statues alive pretty much the whole time (from what I could tell). That was probably the easiest part of the instance for us.

Oh, for the record…

Prot Warrior Tank (me)
Feral Druid
Dest Warlock (also Marks Hunter; used the hunter for the Anzu fight and the pull right before the final boss for some more reliable CC)
Elem Shaman
Resto Druid

Lastly, the dual Ravenguard pulls were too much for me. We had the feral druid tank the primary dps target while I offtanked the other on those. Worked much much better for the Resto Druid’s HoTs to manage through.

Image from boards.clan-blackstar.org.

20-minute Duel

Now, I’ve heard of longer (and been in one longer (holy priest vs. holy priest)) but this was still mind-numbing. After Gruul’s yesterday (downed Maulgar, decided to leave Gruul himself alone for this week), a feral druid friend challenges me to a duel. I’m in my gear of choice (my healing gear), so I mana up and it commences.

I do my usual anti-melee tactic of keeping Ret aura up and trying to keep him in my consecrate while hitting him with Holy Shock and JoR. He’s doing druidy things, biting and clawing away, mostly in bear form. (I’m not sure what those bitey/clawey things are called as druidism isn’t my forte.)

My health is lowest first. I bubble, DF+heal up, he shifts out and heals a bit. My health is lowest next again, I BoP and heal, he tries to moonfire me down. No good, back at it we go. I eventually go low on mana, and judge/seal wisdom to start restoring that.

Eventually (3 Divine Shields and another BoP) later, he gets to the point where he cannot shift back into a form because he’s out of mana. I make sure to mana tap to keep him that way, and from there victory is mine. There was a very close call where my BoP saved me at 200-300 health and I had to Holy Shock heal myself to stay alive through the impending moonfire.

This duel was also the 2nd time in memory where Judgement of Justice came in handy. At one point I’d stopped to heal myself, he shifted into Cheetah to gain some distance to heal himself. My heal done already, I judged justice and was right on his tail (literally) within no time. (The first time was in an arena where I had to chase a hunter around after my rogue teammate had died and killed the hunter’s priest teammate already. Thanks to Blessing of Freedom, I was able to stay by him most of the time save for once where he got his wing clip off while the blessing was on cooldown. He hit AotC, I hit him with Justice. No faster for you, silly dwarf.)

[/edit: Another interesting part of the whole affair was that I didn't have many of these abilities available on my main bar and was switching between bars a number of times throughout the fight. Specifically to refresh Seal of Wisdom and to access Seal of Justice.]

Hunters and Druids and Paladins, oh my!

[Merciless Gladiator's Ornamented Gloves] today when I get home, yay.

I did 10 arenas last night with a friend to help him get the games in since his usual partner was unable to. 5 games with his hunter, 5 with his druid. They went fairly well, we managed to increase their rating a bit, but the last game we did…was against another paladin and druid. That went on for half an hour.

Neither team really seemed to know what they should do. The druids couldn’t kill each other, there was too much healing. The druids couldn’t kill the paladins for the same reason. It was nuts, I had to re-bless, got innervated twice…

In the end we lost though…not that it mattered, I think I would have been done and gone to bed before much longer anyway. What happened was I got too far behind, or he got too far forward (distance-wise) and he missed a crucial heal so they were able to burst him down the rest of the way. Darn Hammer of Wrath got through BoP.

Anyway, working with a hunter wasn’t too bad. Toss him Blessing of Freedom and he’s set to go for most occasions. We went 5-0 partnered that way (as opposed to 3-2 with the druid). The first game we did was against some poor lone gnome mage, either he queued solo (can you do that?) or his partner didn’t make it. None of the matches were overly difficult (the team rating was low at the time), so that may have affected the 5-0 standing heh. Perhaps we should have done it the opposite way with the druid for the first five games and then switched to the hunter, since he’s got more experience with the hunter. Regardless, except for that very last game againt the other paladrin/druid, and how damn long the queue times were (8-11 minutes between games…yay for double monitor setup so I have something to do between games), it was fun.

Retribution

I talked about this before in my Paladins in PvP and Paladin Talents posts, but I’ve been thinking about it more lately. I know the Protection tree needs help too (and paladin tanking itemization), and I’ll support that cause, but tanking has never been my thing with any class. Not my cup of tee…it feels less glorious. I’ve also wondered if maybe I don’t like it because there’s no “big numbers” in it…in dps or healing, you get big crits, etc…not so in tanking in my experience.

Back on topic (way to start off with a tangent, eh?), it is not only true in PvP, but also in PvE that a Retribution paladin can be considered a burden to your group, a near-wasted spot. Sure they have their potential uses, but these are uses that can (much like the current status of paladin tanking) be out-performed by other classes in their different roles.

What a Ret paladin can do is bring semi-decent dps, act as a dispeller, increase the damage dealt by their party by 2%, increase the crit chance of everyone in the group/raid by 3%, and refresh judgements for all paladins.

Blizzard’s answer to the former hybrid complaints was instead of simply allowing the hybrids to perform as well as other classes in their different roles, they gave them unique ways they could enhance themselves and the others in those roles.

Leader of the Pack for druids, essentially a +5% crit chance for the druid at all times, becomes a +5% crit chance for everyone when in a group. Same with the Moonkin’s aura, and the Tree of Life’s +healing boon.

Elemental shaman get a totem that adds +3% crit and hit to spells which can affect everyon in the part (and stacks with the moonkin buff I might add). Enhancement shaman increase the attack power of their partymates dramatically with totems and their shamanistic rage. Resto shaman get Mana Tide totem, which they’ve had for a while but is a very nice addition to any group.

What can paladins do? They already have a decent repetoire of defensive auras already and a number of blessings for different occasions. The problem is for the Retribution tree, none of the talents it offers are considered at all essential. Improved Sanctity Aura, for example, is +2% damage by all members of the party. This can really add up, however unnoticeable it might be. Add this in with the +3% crit chance for by everyone in the raid (via Sanctified Crusader) and you have something comparable to the druid’s LotP.

But then your damage isn’t up to what a druid can do. And druids can provide this buff in dps or tank form…a paladin looking to tank what a druid can tank would not have Sanctity Aura, much less Sanctified Crusader. (I don’t know if tanking druids get LotP or not, but in my experience they do, and can get it as off-tanks just as easily).

Also, I’ve noticed something about the talent trees for the other hybrids. Many of the talents in them are inherently hybridized and synergistic to other talent trees! The Elemental Devastation talent in the shaman elemental tree gives a bonus to melee critical strike chance when they crit with a spell. The Naturalist (if I remember right) talent for druids in the restoration tree increases damage done in feral forms and healing done in caster forms.

Paladins don’t have anything like this, except where they have talents that could sort of maybe work synergistically with other builds, such as Divine Strength in the holy tree being for dps or Sanctity Aura possibly working well with tanking or Holy Shock kind of doing damage or kind of healing…but nothing like the other hybrids seem to have where one talent works as two things.

Where paladins seem to be the modal hybrid class (they spec into one thing to do that one thing), the others have much more potential for real fluid hybridity (they really can do more than one thing decently well with a certain distribution of talent points). Additional reading over at Blessing of Kings.

Healing in Warsong Gulch

Keeping your teammates alive in WSG (or any of the battlegrounds) can be a rewarding task. Rewarding in the sense that your team has a much greater chance for victory because those health bars are being refilled through your efforts.

However, healing as a paladin in WSG can be difficult because of how mobile combat is. Since your main heal spells have cast times, it makes healing targets on the move an iffy proposition. You have to stand in place to cast. When there is a lot of fighting midfield and the combat is essentially staying near you, you can throw heals to your heart’s content. But when your team’s flag carrier is trying to cross the field, each heal you toss them (unless they actively try to stay near you) puts you farther behind. In many cases I just toss them Blessing of Freedom and hope for the best. (Often that is all I get to do anyway as the enemy team turns their attention to me.)

However, when the flag stops in our base in those stalemate situations where both flags are taken, we do decently well. Less movement. I mean, we have Holy Shock when we’re moving, but that’s not very much healing at all. We can basically just BoF and spam cleanse. As for CC, we can HoJ someone once every minute. (Or a bit less with talents.)

So in those situations, it would seem that a priest or a druid would be better. For a priest, you have shield, Renew, and Prayer of Mending to cast while you’re moving…and their quick cast heal is a decent-sized heal. Druids have a number of HoTs, and while their better heals do have cast times they have the added benefit of Travel Form to allow them catch up (and escape when they’re targetted). In addition, priests have instant AoE fear to send 5 targets running away, and druids can root/cyclone (root/cyclone again, have cast times, but yay Travel Form).

Shaman seem to be in the same boat as paladins. They can get them darn rogue poisons/hunters stings off and cast Earth Shield (if spec’d all the way into Resto), but their real healing spells take time to use. They can also drop Earthbind and Grounding Totems though, which can help keep the carrier safe.

And that’s about it. I’ve often felt useless when trying to heal a flag carrier as a paladin, especially when they opt to leave me behind when I’m healing them. I feel I shine best as a healer in those mass melees where the combat isn’t moving too much…I’m always a target, but hey, 13.5k armor, 8.5k health…I’m no protection tank, but I’m no easy kill either. It’s good fun. It’s actually quite enjoyable to heal someone up from low health and then seeing Shadow Word: Death land, or stymying a warlock trying to cast Drain Soul…or seeing some other paladin trying to cast Hammer of Wrath stop casting it because the target isn’t valid anymore. Of course, it’s probably just as gratifying for them to kill my allies through my healing. /sadface

This is data collected from an interesting site. It’s really kind of a facebook/myspace for your WoW characters, but the addon you can download collects a lot of data from in-game and uploads it to this site. There’s other info in there, like data from our raids, what’s in my bags, etc. If I got the link wrong I’ll update it later, you can access it from here at least, click on the “Battles” tab.