Moonkin damage buffs on PTR build 16577

By Lissanna | Published: February 12, 2013

A new patch has been found by both MMO-champion and WOWhead. It looks like moonkin are getting a substantial DPS buff (9% to wrath, starfire, & Starsurge). There are also adjustments to mages (a 23% buff to frostbolt for frost mages – which addresses some of my concerns about frost mage damage for the next patch) and also buffs to several other classes. In general, the patch notes really look like:

(except for arcane mages, though, since their stand-still damage came out too high. Also, thank you to whoever added this to the meme generator, lol).

That out of the way, it looks like the 5.2 patch is shaping up to overall be a net positive for Moonkin and Restoration druids. With the patch going live in a few weeks, things are really looking good for my feathered and leafy friends. I will have my 5.2 healing guide updates (along with any important updates for the leveling guide) ready to go on patch day.

The plight of a stationary spec in movement-heavy encounters

By Lissanna | Published: February 9, 2013

Today, I’m going to talk about some of my problems with frost mages in the 5.2 MOP patch.

With the Invocation talent change, my frost mage was still running OOM before the Invoker’s Energy buff faded, and so I was having to use evocation early (thus losing out on the benefit of the change they made to increase Invoker’s Energy buff duration).

Lets look at some of the changes:

“Water Elemental Freeze no longer does damage and only provides Fingers of Frost on a successful freeze.”

This means that water elemental’s freeze no longer generates Finger of Frost procs on PvE raid bosses. This results in a net loss of 4 to 8 Finger of Frost procs every 2 minutes (and a loss of 12 to 24 procs over a 6 minute fight). If you hit two targets, you got 2 procs, and 1 proc if you hit one target.

“Fingers of Frost now has a 15% (was 12%) chance to activate from Frostbolt, Frostfire Bolt and Frozen Orb, a 5% (was 4%) chance to activate from Blizzard, and a 10% (was 9%) chance to activate from Scorch.”

Since scorch was removed entirely from the frost spec, this actually causes a bigger problem – because we lose a second ability that generated FOF procs for frost mages (and importantly, we lost our only ability that really allowed us to generate potential FOF procs while moving). The 3% proc chance increase to our primary spells will likely still result in a DPS loss overall, since a 3% chance to proc on each of our spells isn’t comparable to a guaranteed 12 to 24 procs across a 6 minute fight plus the procs we potentially got from using scorch during periods of heavy movement in fights.

Thus, if scorch is going to be something frost doesn’t have access to, and our pet can’t give us on-demand FOF procs, then we need the FOF proc rate for our spells overall to be re-evaluated. Otherwise, frost mages really need to be given an alternative ability to generate FOF procs, especially one that could be used while moving. Alternatively, Fire Blast should take on that 10% proc rate that scorch previously had, since Fire Blast will be the on-demand instant that we may want to use while moving more often now, since the cooldown is short and most movement happens in small chunks (I have to move three or four times before Ice Floes comes back off coolodown. Given FOF procs are less frequent and less predictable, we’re less likely to be able to use ice lance as a movement DPS mechanic, since Ice lance hits like a wet noodle without FOF procs). Adding fire blast back in as a viable part of the movement rotation will absolutely require it to generate FOF procs, and would help compensate for losing Freeze and scorch from frost mage’s PvE rotation. At this point, it looks like the frost mage rotation may actually be the absolute most frustrating rotation due to lack of anything we can do with all the heavy movement fights. Frost went from my most fun spec to the most frustrating spec just with the loss of scorch from my movement rotation. While I didn’t use scorch for every fight, there were plenty of fights where it felt like I at least had options of things I could cast if I wanted to. Having my frost pet do the bulk of my movement damage is too passive and doesn’t allow me to feel like I’m in control of the DPS I’m doing while moving. Even if scorch didn’t generate a high % of my total damage done in a fight, it still made me feel like I was in control of my own DPS.

“Frostbolt now deals 24% more damage, but the debuff no longer increases subsequent Frostbolt damage.”

This was a really nice quality of life change overall, so that our damage will overall increase on fights with frequent target switches. Still, however, frost as a raid spec in 5.1 has been under-performing in raids compared to all the other raid specs, based on logs coming from the raids right now. Given that the loss of scorch and freeze will potentially overall impact Frost PvE negatively, frost’s overall DPS needs to be evaluated and watched much more closely (not that anyone is bothering to even play it to test on the PTR due to under-performing in the first place). This is especially important given that frost now has no real movement DPS mechanic at all, and ALL fights require heavy amounts of unpredictable movement in normal or Hard Mode difficulty.

If fights required zero movement, frost PvE would be fine in 5.2. However, the encounter designers don’t give us the luxury of Patchwerk fights anymore (and haven’t since, well, Patchwerk). Overall, I feel as though frost mage design is being done without encounter mechanics taken into consideration, and that frost in particular is being punished with changes targeted at Fire and Arcane specs. The three times I used blink in Hard Mode encounters on Thursday night, I blinked into bad stuff and instantly died. Blink isn’t a movement DPS mechanic, and frost mages don’t have any on-demand movement spells that do any real damage (Ice lance unbuffed hits for 8,000 damage).

The loss of two abilities, which increased our movement damage potential, has the potential to really hurt Frost PvE in 5.2. Since the goal of any playstyle is to “always be casting”, the fact that encounter mechanics in 5.2 prevent frost mage PvE from being able to “always be casting” is problematic. There aren’t encounters that allow for a “move, stop, cast” playstyle outside of 5-mans and some LFR encounters. Raiders have really had two choices in PvE raiding since Cataclysm: either “Move while casting, stop while casting, cast while standing still for a few seconds, and then move while casting again a few seconds later,” or just don’t bother going to raids at all. Looking at mage representation in raids this expansion, it really looks like not going at all is turning into the more attractive solution to a lack of movement DPS. Designing classes for Vanilla raid mechanics in MOP does a disservice to the raiding community. Either frost needs to have significant buffs to our stand-still rotation, so that we can compensate for our lower DPS up-time compared to everyone else, or frost mages need a better option for movement fights. Having poor mobility DPS is very much like having your hands tied behind your back and trying to play by mashing your face on the keyboard – it can be potentially effective, but it sure as heck isn’t fun. Given that the movement DPS of arcane & fire are also under attack by Blizzard (while at the same time, they hand out new fun movement mechanics to most of the other ranged DPS), it doesn’t make being a mage at all very comforting right now.

Patch 5.2 resto druid buff update

By Lissanna | Published: January 16, 2013

Restoration druids are getting a pair of buffs in 5.2 that should help your overall healing. Lets take a look at what hit the PTR today.

10% overall healing buff

First, there is a “new” passive called “naturalist”. This is a straight 10% buff to all your healing spells. This helps off-set the fact that druids are trailing behind other specs on logs for raids, as well as struggling to keep up on PvP output with HOTs.

The name “naturalist” is from one of our old junky talents. However, this new version is quite welcome indeed.

Change to healing shrooms

Wild Mushroom will now gain 75% of the overhealing performed by the Druid’s Rejuvenation effects, up to a maximum of 100% of the Druid’s health in bonus healing, and growing larger as they do so. When Wild Mushroom: Bloom is cast, this bonus healing will be divided evenly amongst targets in the area of effect.

The change has two main things that I want to highlight:

Rejuv’s over-healing is now getting absorbed by the shrooms.
Their overall healing should go up, and they’ll likely provide decent burst healing in some situations.

The post on the healing shroom changes from the R4HT blog is particularly well written and I’d recommend reading it, so I won’t dwell too much on it here. Overall, the shroom changes don’t fix several quality of life problems (number of GCDs and overall setup time, lack of mobility, overall being awkward to manage). That said, they should overall heal for more in 5.2 than they do now, which increases the probability that they’ll be useful. I’m still not totally sold on the new version, but it is at least a step towards making positive changes. I’m sure this won’t be the last round of shroom changes.

Why I hate the level 90 Mage talents

By Lissanna | Published: January 9, 2013

I have been raiding on my mage for all of Mists of Pandaria thus far. I really enjoyed the mage class leveling up from 89 to 90. However, as succinctly discussed on a youtube video by MikePreachWoW, the level 90 mage talents are the exact opposite of fun. The level 90 talents are largely a management problem that reduces the fun of the mage class, adds needless complexity, and goes against everything in the game’s encounter design. Lhivera’s Library has tried to fight against some of these types of critiques in posts, but this doesn’t change the fact that every raid day, I dread having to manage my mage’s level 90 talents when I’m learning new boss encounters.

Lets look at why all 3 of these talents (at least for PvE) work against me in raids and spoil my fun:

Invocation

This is currently the talent that I use in raids. The goal of this talent is to use Evocate (a 4 to 6 second channel). If you are able to successfully complete this Evocate channel, then you get a massive damage buff that is the difference between sucking and being the worst mage ever, or actually being competitive. Mages who are able to maintain maximum up-time (note, by this I don’t mean casting evocation before the buff ends, but in starting your evocation cast as soon as the buff drops since evocation doesn’t do damage) on this 25% Invocation damage buff are able to be incredibly powerful. Here is why Invocation is the one thing I hate in raids but do anyway:

Invocation causes me to die more often than I otherwise would die in raids. It encourages risky behavior. If I have 2 seconds left in my invocation channel and I’m standing in something likely to kill me in the next 3 seconds, sometimes I will choose to not interrupt my evocation cast and hope for the best. On bosses when I know I will have a period of time when I can stand still, I can try to time my evocation – but this often means evocating early before the buff has fallen off and costs me DPS.
Forcing you to complete a long evocation cast works against encounter mechanics: When bosses have random spells that make you have to move randomly, then more often than not, you will get randomly selected to move half way through your evocation. Your choice then is to take a huge damage loss or potentially blow up your raid. Any mechanic that encourages you to “stand in bad” just to have equivalent DPS of other players is a crappy mechanic. Interrupting your evocate means you end up having more downtime when you are not doing any damage to the boss, and this can be problematic if you are in a burst phase or heroism was used and you are losing out on precious damage time.
Managing Invocation is a giant pain in the neck and works against encounter mechanics and causes needless stress. While Llhivera argues that we’re not balanced around having maximum up-time on things like invocation’s damage buff, the fact is that if the best performing mages in the world can have close to the maximum up-time on invocation’s damage buff, then the class has to be balanced around maximum up-time. As these buffs from our level 90 talents are multiplicative, they are going to be stronger and stronger and stronger as the expansion goes on. Llhivera argues that the level 90 talents are burst cooldowns, but they aren’t used as burst cooldowns – they are used as constantly maintained buffs where the goal of any reasonable person is to keep the buff up as much as possible, and it goes against human nature to do otherwise. When my buff falls off, I do everything in my power (including standing in bad stuff) to keep the buff up longer. Claiming not to balance this buff around maximum up-time is turning out to absolutely not be true, as seen by the fact that mages are actually pulling this off and causing the class to get massive damage nerfs every patch thus far this expansion. The up-time of a burst cooldown should be determined by having a cooldown on the burst (eg. icy veins) rather than having that burst come from overcoming mechanics that set you up to fail.
A passive damage buff is boring and was the type of talent they were trying to get rid of in Mists talent trees. A passive damage buff that is obnoxious to maintain is the opposite of fun. While arcane mages always used evocation in their rotations, it doesn’t work well in frost and fire rotations because they were never designed to take 5 second breaks when trying to ramp up all the different procs and such that fire/frost relies upon. The psychological effect of the talent is more problematic than the math theorycrafting side of the talent.

Rune of Power

Rune of power has similar problems to Invocation, only these problems are so much worse because this talent requires you to not ever move in raid boss encounters, which is an impossible task. Rune of power is actually my least favorite thing I’ve ever dealt with in the entire game.

Rune of power requires you to stand still for 35 seconds to fully benefit from this talent. There is not a single encounter in Mists of Pandaria raiding where using Rune of Power is a fun decision because every encounter is designed based on forcing the players to run around and move all the time. Being able to cast rune while moving is unhelpful because we’ll still have to move again in 10 seconds after we put down the rune. I had to abandon rune of power (a spell that does no damage when you cast it) when I was having to re-cast rune of power every 10 or 20 seconds because of constantly having to move in raid encounters.
Rune of power encourages you to stand in bad stuff and die. First, Rune of power covers up bad things on the floor so you can’t see them, and you can’t see your rune of power when all the other spell effects in a 25-man raid are covering it. Since my other option is Invocation (another talent that requires me to stand still often during the fight), this is the option between death by a thousand needle pricks versus death by being stabbed with forks. There’s no fight where either Evocation or Rune of Power make sense to use – they don’t interact well with encounter mechanics. Instead, raid encounters require you to spend more time managing either rune of power or evocation than you spend on anything else you do in the encounters. Anything that a DPS class is casting and managing that would be a DPS loss if it wasn’t for the huge DPS buff attached to using the ability, is a huge annoying burden that every class has had issues with (eg. improved soulfire for warlocks, every time they try to put Faerie Fire in the moonkin DPS rotation).

Incanter’s Ward

Gives you a passive buff when you don’t cast anything (boring) and then if you cast Incanter’s Ward right before you are about to take a huge amount of damage, that damage can be absorbed to give you an even bigger damage buff. That damage buff is contingent on you taking damage, and if you screw up, you lose both the effect of the burst damage and the passive bonus for the entire 25 second cooldown.

While this talent has PvP uses, this turns out to be absolute crap in most raid encounters. The passive damage buff alone isn’t as strong as spending all your mental energy to maintain Invocation or Rune of Power. So, you end up being better off standing in bad stuff and relying on your healers to keep you alive while you DPS than taking the passive bonus from this. Even if you benefit regularly from the “use” effect, you still get better (and more reliable) DPS returns from Invocation, even if casting evocation regularly ends up being a giant burden, as well.
The DPS cooldown requires you to take damage and increases your number of PvE deaths. The cooldown effect requires needless management in PvE. The cooldown use effect requires you to be psychic about when you are going to take 24,727 damage in the next 8 seconds (the current size of my absorb bubble). The most reliable way to make sure I get my full 30% damage is to actually stand in bad stuff until the bubble is absorbed. This killed me often enough in PvE that I had to stop taking the talent.

Conclusions

So, of the 3 talents, I’m currently using Invocation all the time right now. Why? Well, I have some control over it and the two other talents caused me the most deaths in raids compared to invocation. I’m not going to propose fixes for these talents because I honestly don’t believe there are fixes. The point of these talents are to encourage you to play poorly by standing still too often or taking needless damage to increase your DPS - and it turns out that this actually hurts the ability for me to enjoy the mage class. If I was level 89, and didn’t have any of the level 90 talents, I would love playing the mage class far more than I do as being at level 90 and having to manage my needlessly overcomplicated level 90 talents. These talents are marketed as being “fun” and “optional choices,” they fail at being either. While they were marketed as being things that you should choose for encounter-specific things, none of them work with any of the encounters, so this ends up being a false choice and impossible to figure out – so most mages pick the one that provides the most damage most of the time and just stick with it across encounters.
EDIT: after I wrote my post, a new version of invocation showed up on the PTR patch notes. While I like the idea of the 5.2 invocation version a lot better (it’s a significant quality of life improvement if it reduces the amount of time you have to stand still), this doesn’t solve the problem of that I feel the whole talent tier is not living up to Blizzard’s overall design standards for talents.

Patching in the New Year

By Lissanna | Published: January 1, 2013

Happy New Year everyone! The 2o12 year was very exciting, with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion! The start of the new year will soon bring us a new PTR patch with new content and fixes.

Lets take a look at what is currently on the table for druids in 5.2:

Cyclone was nerfed, especially for feral cat PVP. Only feral has the increased cooldown time, but I believe that the new diminishing returns affects everyone. In addition, typhoon given an increased cooldown for all specs. Faerie Swarm’s snare effect was limited to one target at a time. However, mass entanglement had the cooldown lowered significantly.
A change to displacer beast, which was previously the least useful talent on that movement tier. the new talent is a teleport with a movement speed buff after teleporting. They removed the stealth mechanic from the talent, which wasn’t designed to actually work right in the first place. Overall, it’s a minor buff to the talent, but still won’t be my favorite for PvE.
Buffed Cenarion Ward on the healing tier. There has been some math floating around that suggests the healing could be powerful for resto druids, but only if it doesn’t result in primarily over-healing. The mana cost (and the fact that it’s another HOT rather than a direct heal) means that we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out long-term compared to the other available burst heals on that tier for each of the specs.
Several scaling buffs to bear guardian druids (tooth and claw, frenzied regen, and the guardian mastery all buffed).
Buffs to the Force of Nature and Soul of the Forrest talents to help potentially make them more popular. We will need to see how these play out in PTR testing relative to the much more popular Incarnation talent on that tier.
Nature’s Vigil had both the cooldown and effect decreased. This will make the burst effect smaller (a 10% damage bonus instead of 20% for the duration), and since it can now be cast twice as often, that will mean that it is no longer in synch with the Incarnation burst talent, which was being macro’d together by moonkin.
Rejuvenation was buffed for restoration druids by having a lower mana cost. This will mean that you can use more rejuvenations before you run OOM.

Different day, same problem:

Healing Mushrooms still has not been addressed in the current set of 5.2 patch notes. We’ve been discussing shrooms since Beta and it would be really nice if the spell was actually worth putting on resto druids’ bars. Right now, however, healing shrooms are really a trap and need to be fixed so that they are a tool that makes sense in our toolset. It has been on the radar of the developers, but we still haven’t heard any real news. We really need to see some sort of fix for healing shrooms in 5.2. We’ve now had plenty of time for shrooms to show their design flaws on the live servers.

Managing your gaming time with school responsibilities

By Lissanna | Published: December 20, 2012

Wow Insider recently had an article in their “drama mamas” series about a college student who was having a difficult time with balancing his gaming and college studies. The article does a nice job of talking about the importance of learning self-discipline and time-management skills. Their most important advice is to make sure that you put in the effort to prioritize the right things (like passing your classes, doing your job, paying attention to your family), and then setting a schedule of when WOW is (or isn’t) the right activity for you to do.

The problem of dynamically changing schedules

I spent 6 years of graduate school as an active World of Warcraft player. I have now graduated with my PhD, but my academic work life still follows the college schedule I used to have, so I still have a schedule that changes fairly dramatically with paper and grant deadlines. College in general has the difficult problem of having constantly changing time demands. Attending school means that you may have some huge deadlines on weeks like finals, followed by weeks with little or no work, and then a huge schedule shift as you start a new semester with a whole new set of demands.

Raiding times are usually fixed schedules

The constantly changing demands of a school schedule makes gaming and college life balancing difficult. However, these types of demands don’t have to prevent you from being able to do your favorite gaming activity. If you are in a raiding guild, the two to five days a week of raiding tend to be at specific (non-flexible) times. When I transitioned from a normal 9 to 5 job to a much more random graduate school life, I quickly learned that I had to stop playing in a raiding guild that was going 4+ days a week and raiding until way past what should have been my bed time. However, I didn’t want to quit playing WOW (it was what helped keep me sane, gave me a way to talk to my friends and family, and was really my main social outlet on days when I was studying or writing at home for long periods of time).

The Balancing Act

How much free time do you really have? The best approach for me was to find a guild that fits the amount of play time I generally have during a week. Figure out how much time you usually spend on your other more important responsibilities, and then you can budget your gaming time for times you tend to be less productive at studying. If you know that you may only have 10 hours a week free to game, then don’t pick a guild that raids 15 hours a week. In fact, make sure you schedule other non-raid game activities (daily quests, farming, etc) into your budgeted time for the week.

Does your raiding guild allow you to put school first? With the importance of flexible schedules, it is important to also find a guild that lets you cut back on your number of raid days periodically around the time of major deadlines, such as finals week. My guild has a calendar and forum system that we use to track when people can and can’t raid. So, while we have 2 days a week of 25-man raiding, we don’t require 100% attendance to maintain a raid spot . Instead, we have a 77% attendance requirement for our lower raiding rank measured over a 3 to 6 month period. This allows for short-term problems to take away from game-time, but requires you to be present in the long-term. People who want to raid more than those 2 days can sometimes go on 10-man off-night things, depending on the tier of content, and there is almost always someone around to run LFRs, 5-mans, etc.

Now, the guild still raids with a fairly hardcore mind-set and the higher raiding rank requires maintaining an 84% attendance record for the 25-man raids. We have had a handful of people looking for a casual guild who still found us too much of a time burden in terms of the preparation (getting valor point capped, spending time to learn the bosses, etc). The important part is that I am able to cut back my raiding around the time of important deadlines (such as my dissertation defense last summer, and now my problem of having grant deadlines bump too close to raid times). For me, it has been important to have things to think about other than just obsessing over work. However, when deadlines get close, my play time goes down. After deadlines pass, my play time goes up. Being able to flexibly change my play schedule around my deadline schedule is the only reason why I was successful at both school and WoW. I even resorted to getting guest posters for this blog when my schedule didn’t allow me to write quality posts as frequently.

Communicate absences in advance. An important feature of our guild’s more flexible scheduling is that we still require people to post about known absences in advance, so that we can adjust our scheduling to make sure our raids stay full. You can’t just repeatedly disappear without telling anyone and expect to still have a raid spot for very long. So, keep in mind that as guild officers or guild members, communication about scheduling is really an important part of maintaining the WoW vs Real Life balance. My twitter stream is often full of messages of people saying things like: “Two people didn’t show up for raid. Not sure why!” Just like you shouldn’t feel pressured to raid at times when you need to put real-life obligations first, you also shouldn’t just ditch your sport’s team and leave them hanging. Keep in mind that the rest of your WOW raiding team had to schedule their play time, just like you have to do. However, good communication means that everyone can win (eg. if you know that three people on our 10-man team have finals on the same week, you can cancel that week’s raiding far in advance, instead of stressing everyone out!).

Sometimes, raiding isn’t the right activity. If even committing to the same two days a week is too much, there are many other options for people who don’t have time for progression raiding. It is important to remember that gaming can sometimes be about more than just progression raiding. In addition, it is important to realize when it’s just not the right time to be raiding for you. While I have had the ability to be part of a guild that raids two days a week (at a progression pace I can still enjoy), sometimes, life just needs to come first. If raiding is interfering with your real life obligations, sometimes walking away from raiding is the right thing to do. My guild has had several past raiders eventually quit raiding, and instead play the game with more casual activities that don’t require as much advanced planning and effort.

Conclusions. Time management is hard. It is especially hard when things that are more “fun” tend to be more motivating. So, it is easy to slip into doing fun things and neglecting your studies as a college student (video games are just one of dozens of things that can distract you from your work). Keep in mind that all things (including video games) are better for you in small doses. Spending too many hours per week playing games is bad only if it distracts you from your other responsibilities. Keep in mind that depression and other disorders tend to have onsets during the college years. Most colleges do have mental health services for people who show signs of depression or anxiety, and often times poor grades has more to do with an underlying psychological problem rather than just video game playing.

However, if your problem is just about not wanting to manage your time properly – that isn’t the fault of the game, and it is something you can work hard to change. It is important to take responsibility for your schedule and put real life first. Remember that you only get one shot to do well at school, but that the world of Azeroth will still be here after you finish your finals.