The Witch Doctor is currently enjoying a two week vacation away from the internet.
Happy holidays, and see you in 2008 
Archive for December, 2007
So I’ve left my guild.
It was a sad situation really. Me and Mr. Witchdoctor have been in this guild since day one, and have met a lot of wonderful people there. Unfortunately, we’ve also met a lot of… let’s say, socially challenged types. And, without going too much into the hows and whys of our decision, the person that was appointed as our new guild leader one month ago falls squarely into the latter category.
It’s pretty telling that his only response to our leaving announcement was to disable our guild forum accounts. Not a reply, not a whisper, not even a single “bye”. This only reinforced our opinion that leaving was the right thing to do.
But, of course, it’s still sad.
In happier news, here, have a screenshot of my paladin.
My first alt to reach level 40! I’m so proud ♥
This was one of the shaman changes in patch 2.3:
Earth Shield: This ability will no longer be overwritten when the new Earth Shield would do less healing.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except that it doesn’t work. No matter how many charges are left, I can’t overwrite an existing Earth Shield with a new one. What makes it even more annoying is that it completely disregards trinket use, so I can no longer overwrite a non-trinketed Earth Shield with a much, much more powerful one.
Temporary fix: ask your tank to manually remove his Earth Shield. Not the most elegant solution, but it works.
But what if you discover too late and you’ve already popped your trinkets? Temporary fix #2: cast Earth Shield (rank 1) on yourself, making it disappear from the tank. Then cast it on the tank again. 600 mana down the drain, but at least you didn’t waste your healing bonus.
But it gets worse. For patch 2.3.2, Blizzard had planned to reduce the mana cost for Earth Shield but add a 30-second cooldown. PvP-flagged shamans worldwide protested loudly, and rightly so. A buff that’s so easily dispelled shouldn’t come with such a long cooldown. Thankfully, this change has been removed from the patch, but only until the developers have looked into the dispellability of Earth Shield. (Yes, dispellability. That’s a perfectly fine word and you know it.)
I don’t PvP much, so I can only hope they will look into the buggy “A more powerful spell is already active” error as well. Combining a cooldown with the inability to overwrite an Earth Shield will make me a sad panda indeed.
Cue some suspense music. I’m going to delve into a controversial subject…
Hybrid classes don’t tend to be good examples of friendly coexistence, and shamans are no exception. On the WoW forums we find a small but vocal minority with a wide variety of opinions on just about every aspect of our class. There are roughly two extremes to be found; on the one hand we have the rigid, old-school types, and on the other (at lack of a better definition) the new and experimental generation. Compare the following claims:
A REAL shaman wears mail
A REAL shaman is Horde
A REAL shaman uses a shield
And if you’re not using a shield, then you had better be enhancement and dual-wielding two slow weapons
With:
It’s okay to wear cloth
It’s okay to wear leather
It’s okay to use a staff or some funky off-hand frillies
It’s okay to be Draenei
On first glance it would be easy to lump me in with the first group, being a mail-wearing, shield-bearing, Horde-as-can-be shaman. But the truth is: I love Draenei shamans, and my own little space cow is of course the cutest of them all 
But, seriously, the whole Alliance vs Horde debate is a complete non-issue. I for one am happy that shamans no longer need to be balanced against paladins (and vice versa).
There is one area where I’m more conservatist. It’s the eternal question: should restoration shamans wear cloth and leather?
A commonly heard answer is: of course they should, healers aren’t supposed to get hit anyway, so who cares about that difference in armour?
My own answer is: exceptions aside, no, they shouldn’t.
One reason for my answer is that the statement above is only partially true. Okay, healers aren’t supposed to get hit. Tanks aren’t supposed to lose aggro. Traps and saps and sheep aren’t supposed to break. But what do you know? Shit happens, and when it does, then all the little bits count for something.
But there is another, much more important reason, and this one requires some more in-depth knowledge of the game mechanics.
There are four healing classes in the game, and they all have their own special abilities, strengths and weaknesses. But they also share some common ground. More specifically; we have the “squishies”, which are priests and druids, and the “shieldies”, which are, you guessed it, shamans and paladins.
The “squishie” group can’t equip shields and are thus stuck with using some off-hand frilly or a two-handed healing staff. Both classes rely quite heavily on spirit, not only for mana regeneration but also for their raw healing power, with spells and talents like Meditation, Spiritual Guidance, Innervate and Tree of Life. Because they stack so much spirit, they benefit a lot from staying outside of the five-second rule. This in turn merits the so-called “burst casting”; casting a lot of healing spells at once, and then not casting anything for a while to regenerate mana. It’s no coincidence that both priests and druids have a wide variety of Heal over Time spells at their disposal; it is these HoTs that make burst healing such a viable option for them.
The “shieldie” group on the other hand is easily recognised by the big healing shields they tend to lug around. They don’t have any real HoT spells, Healing Stream Totem and Judgement of Light are nice little extras at best, and the Draenei racial has too long a cooldown to be properly integrated into one’s healing routine. As a result, shamans and paladins are often found casting non-stop, and they spend a lot of time inside of the five-second rule. The game actually rewards this constant stream of quick, down-ranked heals by talents such as Healing Way and Illumination, through the simple reasoning that the more often you cast, the more often you’ll land a crit heal. (Note that priests have a talent similar to Healing Way, namely Inspiration.) And when you know that there isn’t a single spell or talent for either class that is based on spirit, it should be no surprise that it’s of little value to them. Both shamans and paladins rely primarily on MP/5 for mana regeneration.
With all of this information in mind, go ahead and investigate what kind of stats are typically found on healing cloth and leather.
The answer: Intellect, Stamina, Spirit and +healing.
And what kind of stats do we typically find on healing mail and plate?
Answer: Intellect, Stamina, +healing, MP/5 and spell crit.
Put one and one together and you’ll understand why I claim that, exceptions aside, shamans should try to stay away from cloth and leather. A resto druid in cloth? Sure. A holy paladin in mail? I can see that happening too, although there is a lot of good healing plate out there. But a shaman in cloth? No. If they care about not only having a proper healing bonus, but also a healthy amount of MP/5 and spell crit (and yes, armour too), then mail is the only way to go.
You don’t have to take my word for this. There are some excellent spreadsheets available that will show you that, no matter what point of the game you’re currently in, the available restoration and even elemental mail items are much better itemised for resto shamans than their cloth and leather alternatives.
And yes, there are always exceptions. Would I upgrade my Rugged Mountain Bracers for Bands of Negation, if they dropped? Hell yes I would. Except that I’ve been trying time and time again to upgrade to Primal Surge Bracers, and as these stupid things simply refuse to drop I’m currently farming materials to craft myself a pair of Netherstrike Bracers. Elemental-oriented as they might be, they still outshine the Bands of Negation by a large margin.
In conclusion… all of this is just my opinion, based on my own research. As stated earlier, this is a controversial subject, but my arguments are debatable and my opinions are flexible, so if you have any thoughts on this subject, feel free to share
This is the result of me being really bored at work. Now, if this doesn’t scream “I am a big nerd” right in your face then I don’t know what will… but Mr. Witch Doctor insists that I post it up, so here you go.
(sung to the tune of “Thou shalt always kill” by Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip)
Thou shalt not be a corpse camper.
Thou shalt not slap or spit on other players.
Thou shalt not beg for money, boosts, armour, weapons, bags, guild membership or attention.
Thou shalt not think that any player that gives you free items or gold is a stalker. Some people are just nice.
Thou shalt not be a ganker.
Thou shalt not use any weird letters in your character name.
Thou shalt not jump off elevators.
Thou shalt not judge a player by their arena team rating.
Thou shalt not judge a guild by their progression status.
Thou shalt not buy gold online. Thou shalt not buy levelling services.
Thou shalt not tell low-level players to leave Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin or Alterac Valley.
Thou shalt not be such an elitist.
Thou shalt bring your own potions, food and elixirs to instances and raids. Thou shalt not run out of arrows.
Thou shalt not be a forum troll.
Thou shalt not start a monopoly on the auction house, drive up the prices and ruin the server economy.
Thou shalt not return to the same lowbie town week in, week out, just cause you’re scared to play in your arena team that you’re never gonna fucking win with.
Thou shalt not put guilds, items or NPCs on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.
Thrall – Is just an orc
Jaina – Just a girl
Cairne – Just a cow
Bronzebeard – Just a dwarf
Sylvanas – Just an elf
Anduin – Just a kid
Zul’jin – Just a troll
Arthas – Just a man
Nihilum – Just a guild
Death and Taxes – Just a guild
Ashbringer – Just a sword
Netherdrake – Just a mount
Outland – Just a zone
Northrend – Just a zone
Death Knight – Just a class
World of Warcraft – Just a game
Thou shalt give equal worth in end-game to players with offspec classes as to those that use cookie-cutter builds.
Thou shalt remember that engineering, blacksmithing and leatherworking were never profitable and never will be.
Thou shalt not spam “Krol Blade” on the trade channel, thou shalt not spam “Krol Blade” on the trade channel, thou shalt not spam “Krol Blade” on the trade channel.
Thou shalt not play on private servers.
Thou shalt not be a cave defender.
Thou shalt not scream “heal” to the healer.
Thou shalt not dance on mailboxes.
When I say “kek” thou shalt not say “bur”.
When I say “ding” thou shalt not say “dong”.
When I say, he say, she say, we say, mooooooo – kill me.
Thou shalt not tank without a shield.
Thou shalt not pull with a pyroblast.
Thou shalt not wish your girlfiend was hot like a male bloodelf.
Thou shalt spell the word “Please” P-L-E-A-S-E, not P-L-Z, P-L-X or P-L-O-X, regardless of what your native language might be.
Thou shalt not express your disappointment at the fact that your group wiped for the fifth time by saying “noobcakes”.
Thou shalt play for yourselves.And thou shalt always kill.
Boring. That’s probably not what the level 70 instances were intended to be, but that’s exactly how I started to feel about them. The first few times you run an instance everything is new and exciting, but after a while the boredom kicks in, as well as the autopilot.
But wait. Did I become such a fabulous healer? Did I pick up a lot of incredible new gear to make the healing easier? Did I learn new tricks and techniques to become more efficient? Far from it. As this - completely scientific - graph shows, there was in fact something else going on:
The difficulty curve of normal instances are tuned in such a way that at a certain point, healers are mostly there for compensation. This means that when something goes wrong I have a lot of work to do. But usually, the average pull in an average guild run is a perfectly timed and beautifully executed ballet of tanking, DPS’ing and Crowd Control. Our uncrittable tank takes only minimal amounts of damage, and the others don’t take any at all. So what’s left for me to do? I toss my totems and turn my attention back to the television. Or I sling some lightning bolts in a pathetic attempt of getting my name on the damage meters.
Sure, it’s nice to not have to corpse-run all the time. But do I really contribute to that?
Needless to say, I needed a new challenge. And patch 2.3 was the little push that we needed, as the addition of the daily heroic quests drew our attention to the easier of the heroic dungeons.
We tried Ramparts first. I was nervous, but we did surprisingly well. Then we did Underbog, and Slave Pens, and Underbog, and one more Underbog, and Slave Pens again.
It’s a completely different experience. We’re wiping again. What’s worse, we wipe on trash, on bad pulls, on resisted freeze traps, on totem aggro (oops), and on a whole lot more silly situations. I regularly run out of mana again. I have to be on my toes the whole time; if I slack for a second, the tank is dead.
So if it’s really that much more trouble, is it really worth it? The short and simple answer: absolutely. And this is why:
(the sharp incline at the left indicates how you won’t need any skills if the group doesn’t have them either: you’re better off disbanding and doing something more productive)
Maybe we wipe more than we used to, but so far we’ve always made it to the end. And as we all hearthstone out with our new badges (and maybe a primal nether), I’m proud in knowing that a large chunk of the effort involved was mine. It’s strangely flattering to learn that I am not, in fact, a dead weight to my group, but that I’m indeed capable of healing heroics – or at least the easy ones.
Thanks to Phaelia linking to my humble little blog I realised it’s about time I shake off my altitis, (I’ve got one of every class now…) play my shammy a bit more, and write some updates again!
So please consider this a filler post until I’ve got something more content worthy to write about
| Orc Hunter |
 
Orcs are among the scarier of races in Warcraft. They’re badass and violent, and you can spot ‘em from a mile off from their greenish skin. As an orc, you probably get into lots of trouble - but sort it out with lots of pummeling. As a hunter, you prefer to be on the sidelines. You would rather see all angles of a situation - probably to find the best position to shoot from. You like animals, but mostly because they (might) do your bidding. |
| Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com |
I must admit to being mildly disappointed.
