It’s good to see that the design team for paladin gear is still smoking the good stuff, years after the original banana shoulders were released.
Last weekend in Zul’Aman, I picked up a set of Spaulders of the Advocate.
These things are crazy.
It’s lucky I have good posture, or those things would just slide right off my shoulders…
Having recently stumbled across a couple of very nifty addons, I thought I’d give some of them a plug here. First off the block is Talented, an ACE mod that helps with picking a talent spec, planning future specs, and respeccing. It’s particularly useful if you respec between a couple of ‘standard’ specs fairly regularly – for instance, if you spec tank or healer for raids and then back to DPS for your weekday soloing.
Talented is invoked by bringing up your normal talent window; it enhances and replaces it. Here it is in Normal mode:
In Normal mode it acts just like the normal Talent window, except that you can see all three of your trees side-by-side.
From the Mode menu, you can select Template mode to work with the other features of Talented:
Here you have the ability to create multiple talent templates; they don’t actually change your character in any way, they’re just a preset talent spec that lets you play around with your options. You can save each spec as a template (and for convenience’s sake, you can just copy your current spec to a template as well). For instance, I have a saved template called “40/21 Healer/OT” (which is my standard raid spec) and another called “49/12 Tankadin” (which is the spec I use on those rare occasions when I’m needed to change to Protection spec). The templates are available across multiple characters (and are coloured in the menu by class color, so they’re easy to tell apart), so you can see all your characters’ specs from any character.
In addition, you can set Talented to automatically spend all your talent points on a spec when you respec at a trainer, which is really handy for respeccing in a hurry. Ten minutes before the raid and one of our tanks hasn’t shown up? I can grab an benched healer to fill my raid slot and go respec to Protection with a minimum of fuss and bother. Not to mention it solves all those nasty problems where you lag or misclick, mis-assign a point and have to blow anywhere from 15 to 50 gold resetting everything back to zero again so you can get it right this time.
The Mode menu also allows you to export your template: to a chat window, worldofwarcraft.com talent calculator URL, or WoWhead talent calculator URL.
All very handy! I haven’t been using Talented long, but I am expecting it’s going to be rather useful, especially for characters I’m still levelling. Thumbs up.
My guild is coming to the end of our Christmas break period — wherein we restricted ourselves to more relaxed 10-mans, rather than full 25-man raids — and we’ve finished up with a bit of progression in Zul’Aman. Halazzi’s now solidly on farm, and we spent Monday night working on Jan’Alai, the Dragonhawk Avatar.
IMO the boss is substantially easier than the trash preceding him — which is a gauntlet with frankly annoying mechanics — and one of the most fun fights I’ve seen in a while.
The WoWwiki page on Jan’Alai covers most of his abilities and strat points, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit. There are two key things to consider when you’re working on Jan’Alai:
See the video below for Jan’alai in action, complete with some notes about what’s happening during the fight. (Apologies for the first bit being a little jerky; I had too many apps running in the background.)
(Or check the video out at imeem: Southern Wardens take on Jan’Alai)
Time and again, I see posts in various WoW communities asking for information about how to gear up and spec a holy paladin. Rather than repeat the same information over and over again, I thought I’d do a series of posts discussing the issues.
First up is an examination of the roles of a holy-specced paladin. The holy paladin can fill two main roles: DPS (don’t laugh!) and healing. This article from WoW Insider addresses holy paladin DPS (the so-called “shockadin” build) very well, so I’ll leave the DPS issue aside for now and talk about the much-loved healadin.
Patch 2.0, in December 2006, was a godsend for healer paladins; previously we made good healers in a support role (such as raids, and off-healing in PvP and instancing) but we just didn’t have the oomph to solo-heal anything unless we were dramatically overgeared. 2.0 changed that for the better, and in the post-Burning Crusade world, paladins are popular and widely-accepted main healers for raids, 5-mans and PvP.
Here’s my ideal “core” healadin spec:
40/0/0: The Bare Minimum
This build has the absolute minimum you want in Holy as a main healer. Looking at the talents:
Key talents I didn’t include:
(Tangent: I used to have this spell back when crit heals were free (not just 40% of normal mana cost as they are now) and would trigger it + Divine Favor + Holy Light for a mana _refund_ on the Holy Light. The mechanic was: Holy Light is cast at a mana cost of 440 [usual cost is 880 but Divine Illumination halves it], spell crits due to Divine Favor, Illumination refunds 100% of the original mana cost of the spell, ie 880 mana. Net result: one free crit heal plus a free 440 mana, enough for two extra Flashes of Light.)
Once you’ve got this basic build, you can spend the other 21 points as you see fit. Mine are all in Protection to make me an OT (as I generally need to AoE tank trash in Karazhan and Zul’Aman every week). Here are some suggestions for the 21 points:
The above are just a few variants on the 40/0/0 Bare Minimum core spec, providing options for whatever playstyle you prefer. In upcoming posts, look out for a discussion of gear and buff choices, theorycrafting about mp5 vs spellcrit vs +heal, suggestions for playstyle and lots more pally fun. :)
(When you consider that the blog is called Banana Shoulders, and I started off talking about paladins in my very first post, this has been a long time coming!)
Well, it’s been a while since my last post; sadly RL has intervened. (Fear not, the “Write Post” window has been sitting open in my web browser the entire time, looking at me accusingly.)
Time to cover two things: first, a new addition to the blogroll: Moar HP Than Jesus, a druid (tanking) blog from a friend of mine (who has apparently been WoW-blogging since October and never told me!).
Second, the fourth and final cooking daily, which hadn’t appeared on my server until a couple of weeks ago.
Manalicious
The Rokk will give you a quest to go to Netherstorm and gather 15x Mana Berry for a tasty dessert. You can find the mana berries in Netherstorm, in the ecodomes (not the manaforges, which is what a mage friend of mine assumed, leading him to spend a fruitless [ha!] hour combing a blood-elf-infested area closely for some totally non-existent berry bushes) on bushes like those shown to the left. If you don’t have the quest, they blend alarmingly into the ecodome foliage, but if you do have the quest, they develop a case of gold sparklies to help them stand out (as shown in the picture to the left) until you’ve gathered all 15. If you have herbalism as a profession, your Herb Tracking ability will show the berry bushes as gold dots on your minimap, until you’ve gathered all 15.
Well, so far we’ve seen a couple of the cooking dailies hit the live realms, and as the info I’d provided so far seems to be popular, here’s a bit more info:
The quests are given by The Rokk (<Master of Cooking>) in the Lower City, at around 61,16 coordinates. He gives a new one each day, which changes when the daily quests reset. Here are two known quests so far:
Revenge Is Tasty
Requires 1 Giant Kaliri Wing (drops off Monstrous Kaliri at Skettis, a quest item so you can’t farm for them in advance) and 3 Warp Burgers (made with 1 Warped Flesh each, which drop off Warp Stalkers in Terokkar at a 50% rate and Warp Chasers in Netherstorm at a 25% rate). Combine the Giant Kaliri Wing and the Warp Burgers in the cooking pot provided, and turn in the resulting Kaliri Stew.
Super Hot Stew
Requires 1 Crunchy Serpent and 2 Mok’Nathal Shortribs, which are made with meat from windserpents and raptors, respectively, in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Once you have the two components, go to Forge Camp: Terror in Blade’s Edge and kill yourself an Abyssal Flamebringer; stand over the body and use the provided cooking pot to combine the Crunchy Serpent and Mok’Nathal Shortribs into Demon-Broiled Surprise. Turn in the Surprise to complete the quest.
There are at least two more possibilities for the daily quest; I don’t have details on either of them yet. I’ll post again when I’ve seen them.
The cooking dailies require 275 cooking to complete; I haven’t yet checked to see if they also require level 70. The two quests listed above both require access to flying-mount-only areas (Skettis to get the Kaliri Wings, Blade’s Edge Plateau to kill the Abyssal Flamebringer), but a sub-70 character summoned to the area may be able to do them.
With 2.3 scheduled to roll in a couple of days, one of the changes I’m eagerly anticipating is the revision of healer gear. Almost all healing gear is being modified to add spell damage as well, approximately equal to one-third of the item’s +heal value. As an example, Breastplate of the Lightbinder (a plate healing chestpiece with +88 healing) is being updated to add 30 spell damage in addition to the +heal.
This is a welcome change for almost every healer in the game; healers have long bemoaned their itemisation, and the frustration of one’s complete inability to quest and farm has led to a lot of healer burnout (which is bad for pretty much everyone, as high healer turnover harms raid groups and guilds alike).
This change, however, is going to make raiding life a lot more interesting, from two perspectives:
Paladins
Holy paladins can generate a pretty solid amount of DPS (stop laughing, I promise it’s true) with what’s known as the shockadin playstyle, relying on Holy Shock and Seal/Judgement of Righteousness to deliver a decent amount of holy spell damage (which has the advantage that Holy resistances are very rare, too). As an example, with about +750 spell damage on my DPS set, I can pull around 350 sustained DPS – which is far from great, but I’m specced for healing/offtanking. If I ditched the OT part of my spec and sacrificed a little bit of healing efficiency, I’d be looking at more like 450 DPS – considerably more against demons and undead. (In fact, I’m going to go test this on the PTR after I’ve written this post.) In comparison, in healing gear one’s DPS looks more like the 80-100 range.
However, raiding shockadins are so rare as to be all but non-existent; holy paladins on raids are pretty much always healers. At the moment, despite the fact that we wear plate and a goodly portion of our raid synergy (the seal/judgement mechanic) comes from melee, there’s zero incentive to get into close combat – the bonus of a judgement on the target is generally not worth the added healing load of an extra body in melee. So healadins sit back, the seals and judgement on their actionbars going virtually unused.
This may change in 2.3 – obviously, a healer paladin is still going to need to spend most of their time healing. However, the potential to actually deal some worthwhile damage while still in healing gear really suits the paladin’s nature as a hybrid; assigned to spot-healing (or a pull with lower healing needs)? Join in melee, put up judgement of light on the target, and half your healing work is done – you can whale away with seal/judgement of righteousness while your melee swings keep judgement of light active, and just throw some flashes of light to top people up. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen on every fight – or even most fights – but the fact that it’s at least a worthwhile option adds some much-needed versatility to a spec whose contribution to a raid consists of mashing two buttons.
Speaking as a healadin, thumbs up.
Off-Healers
Many raids have one or more off-healers – people who can heal if needed, but are far better suited to pewpewing away. Shadow priests, elemental shammies and boomkin are the classic examples (since holy shockadins just don’t tend to raid, and ret pallies/feral druids/enhancement shammies have totally different gear needs for their roles). Using these people to best advantage tends to be a dilemma for heal leads and raid leaders: what happens when you have a target who needs a bit of healing, but not much? Why, you put an off-healer on the job. But what do they do in between, or after the healing? They pewpew half-heartedly while stuck in heal gear.
The High King Maulgar fight is a perfect example, for those of you familiar with Gruul’s Lair. The offtank for Blindeye needs some healing, but not that much, and not for long; Blindeye is the first kill target, and doesn’t do much damage even while he’s up. An off-healer would be perfect for healing the Blindeye offtank, but what gear should they wear? If they wear healing gear, they’ve got all the DPS ability of a bag of wet feathers and they may as well AFK for a coffee once their heal target’s done tanking Blindeye. If they wear DPS gear, they’ve got sod-all in the way of mana efficiency and conservation for healing (since healing and DPS mana regen/conservation mechanics tend to be different for most classes), so by the time they’re done healing they’re low on mana, and there’s nothing sadder than seeing a shadowpriest resorting to wanding.
2.3 fixes this kind of dilemma. You put your offhealers in healing gear, and they’ve got the mana longevity and efficiency to finish their healing duties with a goodly amount of mana left – and then they can turn to pewpewing and still do 60-75% of the damage they’d do in full DPS gear. (Of course, this assumes that your offhealer is nearly as well-geared for healing as they are for DPS, but in my experience that’s generally true.) Suddenly, your hybrids really are hybrids, able to do more than one job reasonably effectively, rather than people who can do more than one job – but only one at a time.
Speaking as a healer lead, thumbs up.
Many professions and classes give some tracking ability: paladins can sense undead, warlocks can sense demons, hunters can track just about everything, miners can find ore nodes, and so on.
Unfortunately, it’s an all-or-nothing deal, and that’s never made sense to me – from a gameworld logic point of view, and from a usability point of view. If you can track big ogrey footprints and little goblin footprints with your ‘track humanoids’ ability, why can’t you choose to ignore the goblins and only locate the ogres?
And from a usability perspective, nothing’s more frustrating when you’re on a farming round than having your minimap cluttered with dots for things you don’t care about. Ask any herbalist how much fun it is(n’t), scouring Zangarmarsh for felweed only to be constantly stymied by little yellow dots for glowcap all over the place.
I’m not sure how I missed the news of this until now, but DC Comics has teamed up with Blizzard to publish an ongoing WoW comic. The first story arc is a twelve-parter, although I’m not sure if it’s continuing to a new story or ends a limited run there. The first six pages are available for preview here.
More news as it comes to hand; I’ll try and pick up the first issue when it’s released on Nov 14th, and give it a bit of a review. It’s definitely got potential, though – I think WoW lends itself very well to comics, much more so than the novel lines. It’s such a visual setting that it’s hard to do it justice in prose (especially given the nature and typical quality of tie-in genre fiction), whereas a comic is somehow cooler.
Coming up in 2.3, there’s a new guild bank feature. It’s accessible from any bank and easily seen – it looks like a huge vault door in the bank. A few folks from our guild have been playing on the test realm to get some early experience with Zul’Aman (the new 10-man post-Karazhan raid), and while I was there I figured I’d check out the guild bank. I know a few of my friends are Guild Leaders of their respective guilds, so this might be of interest.
A guild bank doesn’t have bag slots like a player bank, but it does have the option to buy multiple tabs – up to six, at present. The prices on the test realm are punitive for more than a few tabs: the first tab is 1 gold, the second is 10g, the third is 100g, the fourth is 1,000g, the fifth is 5,000g and the sixth is 10,000g. I can’t imagine many guilds will be buying the last two tabs, not when you can still run regular banker alts to hide less-relevant items.
This is the guild bank interface after buying two bank tabs. The tabs are the ? buttons down the right hand side; the + button below the ?s is used to buy new tabs and I assume only the guild leader can see it.
You can see the tabs for the logs at the bottom of the window; unfortunately I couldn’t check out the features as clicking on either log tab immediately disconnects you from the server. Thumbs up Blizz! (Yes, okay, it’s a test server for a reason. I’m sure it won’t go live with that issue.)
I haven’t actually tried out the withdraw/deposit buttons down the bottom right; I think they’re for putting money into the bank and taking it out again.
And here we have the ugly side of guild banks. Here is the bank in use: it’s a HUGE MESS. From a usability perspective this is terrible; it means every guildie has to mouse over every single slot and check the tooltip to see what an item is. A text list in the forums is WAY easier to deal with for users (although much more of a hassle for administrators); at least then only the banker has to know what’s what, and generally will be more familiar with the items they’re holding than an average guildie.
Seriously, Blizzard, I know you’re invested in giving people interfaces full of pretty icons and no text labels, but that only works with inventories where you’re only managing 10-30 items with wildly different icons. For guild banks, with hundreds of items? Wrong design paradigm. Learn to love text labels, or better yet, text-based lists.
Until then, I long for the day someone releases a Guild Bank addon that redraws the guild bank as an operating-system-file-browser style of interface, with small icons and text labels next to them.
And on a less whingy note, here’s the interface for setting bank access permissions, based on guild rank. It’s basically fine, although I’d be happier with an option to allow people to withdraw unlimited stacks a day (eg. for officers moving things around).
I’ll be interested to see how much of this makes it into live realms without tweaking. I can’t believe Blizzard – who are normally so good with usability issues – thought that guild bank interface was a good idea.