balance, buffs, nerfs, Patches

3.0.9 is slated to be released tomorrow with no testing time on the PTR. What does this mean? It’s all balance changes that are simple enough to not require any public testing. A lot of the changes look to be targeted mostly at PvP but a handful have PvE implications.

Hunter

• Beast Mastery damage boost. They realized they over-nerfed it and are undoing some of the changes. BM should be close to competitive now, giving hunters a choice of specs in raids.

Mages

• Arcane DPS was nerfed a decent amount (1-2% or so). (Corrected, misundersood the patch notes)

Paladin

• Divine Plea is much less usable for Holy Paladins. It’s still there in a pinch but will most often not be used. This will cause Paladins to have to keep a close watch on their mana versus the nearly limitless mana situation they’re in now.

Rogue

• Significant buffs to DPS. This should bring them up into the range of the rest of the classes, possibly near the top of the list. Rogues were in dire need of this boosting and thankfully Blizzard’s expedited tuning/balancing policy has brought these changes now rather than in 3 months when 3.1 comes out.

Overall a small patch but with some very good balance changes. With all current raid content being so trivial it’s not hugely important to weigh the consequences of all these changes, but I like to stay apprised of what’s going on.

achievements, balance, buffs, malygos, nerfs, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

Now that we’ve seen the changes in action, I can give a brief summary of our observations raiding this week on how it all panned out. For the guilds out there trying to min/max and stay at the forefront, keeping on top of changes is very important. Not just reading about upcoming changes, but evaluating recent changes and utilizing them to maximize your raid.

DPS

• Hunter: Survival is definitely the top of the pile now. This is  great relief to our hunters who generally much prefer Survival over Beast Mastery. The absolute maximum DPS hunters can put out is maybe 5%-10% lower than it was before, however this high DPS was reliant on pets which are notoriously unreliable. Survival is far less dependent on the pets.
• Mage: At worst, it’s as high as it was before with less variance. Under the right conditions, it can be even higher thanks to the arcane spec becoming top dog in potential damage dealt. If you supply arcane mages with enough mana they will do obscene DPS. This DPS is high enough that my nerf sense is tingling. Exploit it while you can.
• Elemental Shaman: Extremely buffed. They are going from the bottom of the list to near the top. We still need to see this in action in 25 mans, but they are top of the list in 10 mans constantly and doing very well in 25 mans. Blizzard said their intended goal was for them to match Moonkin DPS and it seems like right now that they are exceeding Moonkin DPS by at least a few percent and possibly up to 5-10%. The exact numbers still need to be pinned down, but expect good elemental shamans to be making a strong showing.
• Rogue: Still sucks. I feel for them if Blizzard waits until 3.1 to fix their DPS.

Healing

• Priest: The sky isn’t falling, Holy is still viable and still a strong performer. However, the rest of your raid needs to adapt to not being able to lean on CoH as much as it did before. Most people probably didn’t even realize how much their healing strategy was crafted around relying on CoH to handle the majority of incidental damage. The raid was just *full*. Not so anymore and other heals are having to pick up the slack.
• Druid: Prior to this patch there was two rough camps of druids. Those who spammed the  ever loving shit out of Wild Growth and those who didn’t. Wild Growth is the poor man’s CoH but it could still inflate your healing numbers. For those who relied extensively on Wild Growth you will have to get used to filling a larger percentage of your casts with other heals. For those who didn’t, nothing has changed.
• Shaman: Yaaay you can Chain Heal again without getting your heals sniped left and right by CoH. Chain Heal will once again be in high demand as it remains the main un-cooldown encumbered multi-target heal.

Encounters

• Sartharion with Three Drakes is more difficult. The changes to Twilight Torment put a lot of additional pressure on your raider healing. They also force you into either using a Death Knight tank or using other tanks with a lot of cooldown support from healers to survive the huge breaths. This makes it more difficult from a coordination perspective as well. The Twilight Changes only affect the choke point of the fight but this is also the place where most of the wipes will happen so even though it seems like a minor change it’ll still be a huge factor to contend with for guilds learning the fight.
• Malygos in Six Minutes isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. You basically kill the sparks as they come in. Pop bloodlust 10 seconds after the first vortex and transition him before the second vortex. If you can transition him to phase 2 before the second vortex then you can almost certainly get the achievement. You should be able to get him down below 35% before he flies away. Don’t suck at phase 2 or phase 3 and you’re good to go. We killed him in 5:30 though we didn’t get the achievement because we forgot to wait for the timer to reset from the prior attempt. The strategy page at StratFu - Malygos in [Six] Minutes is updated if you’re looking for more specifics.

Summary

Raid DPS is overall slightly higher, raid healing output is slightly lower, and most everything else is the same. From an individual perspective, things may not have changed or may have changed greatly, but from an overall raid perspective things are mostly the same. We haven’t cleared Naxx this week but that’s not usually a difficult thing to do anything. We’ve done Sartharion 3D, Malygos in 6 minutes, and I personally did an 8 man Naxx that got Undying (priest and shaman healing).

achievements, buffs, malygos, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

As usual, there’s undocumented changes in this patch. Most undocumented changes get dug up elsewhere, but raid changes tend to not be found until the patch actually goes live because no one is testing raid content on the PTR unless it’s a new zone. Here are the changes, I’ll keep this updated with new finds:

• You Don’t Have an Eternity: The timer was increased to 6 minutes but you can only have two sparks at a time. This makes the achievement significantly more difficult just due to DPS requirements. I would say that being overgeared for the encounter is now basically a requirement to get the achievement. I’m not entirely sure how feasible this achievement is with the gear currently available.
• Sartharion with Three Drakes: You can no longer remove Twilight Torment as described in The Twilight Torment Dance. This means you absolutely must handle the huge breaths that can hit for up to 75k with cooldowns. This definitely makes the fight more difficult and places more emphasis on DPS to get Shadron down as soon as possible. This also means that you raid will be taking a lot more damage while Twilight Torment is up because everyone will always have the additional 75% multiplier instead of just having it half the time. This change combined with the nerfs to Wild Growth and CoH should make the fight significantly more difficult.

gold, Patches, predictions

With the removal of the Titanguard enchant, the best survival enchant is now Mongoose (so I’ve been told). Outlands enchanting materials are relatively cheap, but that’s because there’s no demand for them. The supply is extremely limited for obvious reasons. If you can get ‘em cheap, buy Void Crystals, Large Prismatic Shards, Arcane Dust, and Greater Planar Essence. This is by no means a guaranteed deal, but if it turns out to be a big profit then I sure as hell am going to gloat over it.

Patches, predictions, Ulduar

I tend to have a knack for predicting future patch release dates pretty accurately, so I figured I’d get a record of my predictions this time around so the world can see how awesome I am.

3.0.8 Release - Next Tuesday, January 13th. Many including me anticipated its release today and in fact I think it may have been planned for today. I’m guessing there was some last minute problem over the last couple days that pushed it back.

3.1 PTR - The moment of truth, when the world gets its first taste of Ulduar and when top raiding guilds begin preparations for the sprint to the end of the next tier of content. My guess is we’ll see it in the first half of February, sometime between Feburary 3rd and February 13th. PTRs usually aren’t launched on Tuesday and are often launched towards the end of the week, so look for it on a Thursday or Friday.

3.1 Release - The sprint begins. Top guilds will get through most of new raid content fairly quickly and begin working on the few encounters left undefeated from the PTR as well as the difficult achievements. Based on comments about the number of encounters, the fact that both 10 and 25 man content is being tested, and Ulduar being the first instance with a large amount of difficult achievements with loot rewards, my guess is the patch will have a longer than usual testing period. I’d expect it to be on the PTR for a bare minimum of a month and probably closer to a full two months. Therefore I place my release predictions in the first half of April, either April 7th or April 14th.

I would be surprised and extremely proud if my predictions were spot on but in all likelihood they’ll be off by a few weeks. Still, the approximate timeframe most likely is correct so you can begin planning around those dates.

Patches, Ulduar

This post is mostly directed at guilds who have already cleared all the content including Sartharion with three drakes, but others may find it useful. If your goal is to be as competitive as possible, you always need to keep an eye towards the future. The first trickles of information about Ulduar are starting to come out, and the patch schedule seems to be lining up for Ulduar to be in testing within 6 weeks, perhaps sooner. The 3.0.8 patch will most likely be released this Tuesday or next Tuesday and the turnaround for testing a large content patch following a minor patch is usually about a month. click here to read entire article

auction house, gold, Patches

One of the easiest ways to make gold in World of Warcraft is to get a good read on upcoming patch changes and planning accordingly. There’s usually some change or another that will cause a change in the price of goods and if you pick up on this you can stock up and make a killing. Fortunately for you, I’ve put together a quick list of some probable moneymakers for the coming patch:

• Ink of the Sea - A conversion is being added allowing you to trade 10 Ink of the Sea for 1 Snowfall Ink. Right now there is a glut of Ink of the Sea on the market due to people trying to make Snowfall Ink for Darkmoon Cards. If you can get stacks of ink for 40g or less I recommend buying all you can get.
• Eternal Life - The limiting factor on Darkmoon Cards is Snowfall Ink currently. With the conversion being added there will be more available making the limiting factor Eternal Life. If you can get Lifes for 30g or less I recommend buying them.
• Dream Shard - The materials used for some higher end enchants are being changed to use more shards. Blizzard said that they don’t like how cheap shards are now and want them to be in higher demand. If you can get shards for under 10g I recommend stocking up.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Nikitabanana for a heads up on the new recipe for Icy Prism. This would indicate. The recipe has a cooldown so its financial impact may be minimal, but I’d expect demand for Frozen Orbs to go up a little and supply of rare quality gems to also go up a little (and prices to go down).

I’ll update this post with more if more changes are found.

balance, buffs, nerfs, Patches

Preparations

Patch 3.0.8 will be the first major balancing pass post WotLK launch. I and the people in my guild try to keep as up to date as possible on upcoming changes so that we can plan around them and know what the expect come patch day. Most World of Warcraft patches have tons of changes and only a few are significant and relevent to raiding. This post will cover those important changes in patch 3.0.8 and their ramifications for raiding. Keep in mind that 3.0.8 is still in testing and there will most likely be further changes before it is live.

Summary

• Overall Raid DPS nerfed
• Hunter Nerf
• Rogue Bugfix
• Elemental Shaman Buff
• Multi-target Healing Nerfed

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