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).

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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