Can we have wings?

Finally something worth blogging about. A new beta build is out and it includes some very interesting new talents in early discipline to get our shadowy juices flowing. (Don't linger on that metaphor too long.)

Evangelism revamped — you have a 100% chance when you Smite and a 40% chance when you Mind Flay to gain Evangelism. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts for 15 sec. Evangelism (Smite ) — increasing the damage done by your Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance spells by 2/4% and reduces the mana cost of those spells by 3/6%. Dark Evangelism (Mind Flay) — increases the damage done by your periodic shadow spells by 1/2%.
Archangel revamped — consumes your Evangelism effects, causing an effect depending what form you are in. Archangel (Caster) — instantly restores 3% of your total mana and increases your healing done by 3% for each stack. Dark Archangel (Shadowform) - instantly restores 3% of your total mana and increases your shadow damage done by 3% for each stack.

This is seriously cool shit. This is what makes me want to play a shadow priest. I know it's just words on the screen right now, but these are powerful, evocative words. This is crack for roleplayers. I don't care about the numbers, I just want WINGS.

And paladins, don't give me none of that avenging wrath snowflake crap. I'll swap you the wings for prayer of mending (it's basically a healing boomerang, you were totally robbed to start with).

Oh, and weirdly, mind flay is now five seconds long. I have no clue what that is all about. I might get around to thinking about it. Then again, I might not. Who cares, I am a DARK ARCHANGEL.

Hmm, maybe they could try saying that out loud a while and clip it to DARK ANGEL.

I AM A DARK ANGEL.

Oh god, it's like a drug.

New talent trees: awfully familiar

MMO Champion is reporting that new talent tree system has been released on the Cataclysm beta realm. This is the one where you lock yourself into a single talent tree at level 10 and work your way up to the 31-point talent before unlocking supporting trees. The number of points you get to spend has been halved.

The interface screens show that, for opting to go shadow, you are rewarded with mind flay instantly, plus threat reduction and pushback protection on shadow spells. Some of the other classes have a bit more meat on their UIs (shaman for example), so I'm hoping there may be more bonuses for shadow in a later build.

I'm unable while at work to fully check MMO's talent calculators, but from the priest class page I can say the new talents look... awfully familiar. If I was confident that these were accurate and thought-out by Blizzard, I would be disappointed to say the least. In a world where talent points had been halved to allow more interesting and dynamic talents, I would not expect to have to spend two of them on improved shadow word: pain, for example, which was never much of an improvement to start with. And I am rather alarmed to see that our crit bonus looks like it's been slashed to 40 per cent.

But I'm not going to panic. I'll just assume that these are placeholder talents while the Blizzard boffins crack their heads together and come up with something inspiring. Please. Pretty please.

Edit: home now. Here's the build Leigh talks about in the comment below. Everyone seems to be in agreement that they haven't 'done' shadow yet, so I'm just gonna chill...

Forget Forumgate, we haz talent newz

Yesterday, Blizzard was left bloody and mauled over its plans for using real names on the forums and the disaster was about to go nuclear. But today… who cares? We have a COMPLETE TALANT OVERHAUL to coo over. Coincidental timing? Unlikely. This is a very smart move by Blizzard to take back control of the agenda. Very smart. They might have been planning to share this in a few weeks, with some of the details fleshed out. Never write off a PR machine, they are the cockroaches of the corporate world.

This blogger is no Glamour-reading, celebrity-whoring pushover. I do not forget so easily. Real ID is a total screw up and I’ll be back to crow and gloat just as soon as it comes back to explode in Blizzard’s face. And it will.

But I am forced to reluctantly admit that the aforementioned COMPLETE TALENT OVERHAUL is far too compelling to ignore. It is no less than a single brilliant solution to all the problems the talent system has ever encountered. Or nearly.

You remember recently when we were shown the new priest trees for Cataclysm? Despite all of their ambitions for removing passive talents and making talent trees more dynamic, little had changed. Recognising this, Blizzard has come back with a fresh approach.

The number of points available to spend will be halved, relieving Blizzard of the need to pad out trees with volumes of passive bonuses. And classes will be locked into a single specialisation up to level 70, leaving Blizzard free to position talents in a more logical order, free of the worry that players of other talent specialisations will be able to nab the juicy ones for themselves. Some of the class-defining core talents will be given not through talents but as rewards for choosing the relevant specialisation, excluding them completely from the reaches of everyone else. Potentially, we’ll be able to get our mitts on these spells and abilities at more convenient times, and raiders will be less at the mercy of PVP-balancing compromises. Win-win.

The dull business of boosting a character’s power in their chose role, by increasing damage, crit, defences and the like, will be intrinsically linked to a character’s chosen specialisation.

The mastery bonuses we have read about will also change as a result of this overhaul but I expect shadow priests will retain their shadowy orbs in one form or another.

You will be unable to spec into secondary trees before spending 31 talent points in one tree, but I don’t think this will be much of a hardship for most. I only ever recall going into a support tree early on once, as a demonology warlock for suppression, and we know they are reworking hit talents anyway.

I know it must be quite un-nerving to see me in a positive, optimistic mood, but these changes really do feel instinctively… right — and I haven’t been able to say that about much for a long time. What do you think?

In need of some direction

Path of the Titans has gone the way of the... er... Titans. Instead, we'll be getting another layer of glyphs. Warning: old-style Misery rant ahead.

TLDR: if you’re going to add more glyphs to the game, you’d better make sure you know exactly what they are for, and are clearly differentiated from all the other aspects of class enhancements and customisation. Right now, I just don’t see that they are.

I never had Path of the Titans, so I won’t miss it. I never understood it either, so I’m not going to mourn its passing. But it did at least have the feel of something interesting and unique.

With its passing, we are going to get... medium glyphs instead.

/cast doubletake

What was that? More glyphs? Glyphs that aren’t major or minor but are... medium? Seriously? Somebody kick the copywriter and see if he’s dead.

Glyphs already lack a clear purpose, do we really need to go around making it worse? Rohan of Blessing of Kings said it best when he pointed out how many glyphs are virtually indistinguishable from talents, or even enchantments and gems.

Glyph of shadow, for example, is not an interesting glyph. It provides a small, passive boost to damage. It requires no thought whatsoever. There aren’t even any viable alternatives. It is basically just a quick and dirty way to boost shadow dps.

The glyph selections for all classes are padded out largely with glyphs that function in exactly the same way, either boosting the numbers of a specific spell or talent for an overall improvement in performance. In other words, as Rohan said, they are talents.

Inscription was not always supposed to work this way. Once upon a time, it was conceived as a profession which enabled players to change the way their spells worked. Glyph of mind flay worked like this, extending the range of the spell at the expense of its snare. That was just stupid and I’m not advocating a return to the days of our borked range, but you get the point: you had to make a decision, and it had far-reaching implications for how you played your class.

We’ve got some serious differentiation problem between major glyphs, talents, and enchants. (Oh and look, set bonuses do exactly the same thing.) And then we’ve got these annoyingly dull minor glyphs which at best save you a bit of gold on regents but mostly seem to just save you mana when buffing. Woot. Now we’re getting a whole bunch more that do... what exactly? Well, apparently medium glyphs are supposed to introduce the “fun factor” to abilities.

STOP RIGHT THERE.

Here’s a truism about life in general. If you need to tell people something is fun, chances are it probably isn’t.

I am now more certain than ever that Blizzard does not understand the purpose of its own profession. If it is, indeed, to enable players to customise their own spellbooks then they have to get much, MUCH smarter at designing glyphs. Shadow has only six viable end-game raiding glyphs and none have any impact on how we play. Even allowing for the fact that we are a hybrid class with other purposes, you can see how a good chunk of priest glyphs were thought up on a Friday afternoon by the work experience kid (see glyph of shackle, fade, inner fire etc).

I agree with Rohan that the original concept for glyphs was much stronger than it is now, so let’s go back to that. Let’s have glyphs that really do present us with some tough choices. If I want my shadow word: pain to hit harder, what am I willing to give up for that? Will the glyph double its mana cost, so I can’t tab spam? Will it reduce the spell’s dispel resistance, so I can’t take it in pvp? I’m clearly not a game designer, but I bet Blizzard’s combined talent could come up with the goods if they put their minds to it.

If we manage to get to even that point, where there are more interesting glyphs than there are slots (a huge leap from today for some classes), glyphs can’t just be about boosting dps, or healing, or reducing damage, because then you’re just adding talents. And another layer of glyphs is not going to alleviate the best-in-slot problem, it’s just going to aggravate it. Instead of three mandatory glyphs, we’ll just have six. Or eight, or however many new slots we get.

And I really don’t want to see on-use glyphs either. They’d just become ghetto trinkets.

I’m not saying it’s easy to design a system like this – theorycrafters will always attempt to assign relative values for raiding. You’ll always end up with one glyph that’s supposed to do more dps than another. And I think this was Blizzard’s problem from the start.

But you know how not to fix it? Add yet more of the bloody things.

If you can't create something with a clear, unique purpose, what exactly is the point of it? If you switched off glyphs tomorrow, would anyone care? Would anyone even notice?

Cataclysm: priest talent preview

I'm sure you've seen these already; I'm a little late to the party. I'm moving jobs this weekend, from one department to another, which may give me some more time to blog again. It's been hell, so I can pray for a breather:)

We're told: "These talent trees aren't done. They're just far enough along that we're seeking feedback." Which is good. I'm not sure though, looking at the priest, what exactly they want feedback on.

This is not revolution; it's not even evolution, so much as it resembles tinkering. And that's fine if you think the priest is solid. If pressed, I'd say they're in a pretty good shape. I like shiny new things though, and this certainly doesn't deliver on that count.

We have, so far, a shadow tree that very closely resembles live. A few talents are missing (we knew about those already) and a few have filled the gaps, notably:

• Spirit tap now returns 15 per cent of total mana when you deal the killing blow, in addition to increasing mana regeneration by 100 per cent for 15 seconds. So much improved for the levelling priest, but without improved spirit tap, it's back to near-useless for the raider.
• Dark thoughts, a new tier one talent, now reduces spell pushback by 70 per cent at max rank. We used to get this from improved shadow form (more on that in a sec) but this position will make be handier for smite spam at low levels and could save burning through mana on shields.
• Empowered shadow orbs, a new talent on tier four, boosts the effectiveness of our mastery bonus.
• Mind melt has undergone a bit of a transformation. It now increases shadow word: death damage by 30 per cent on targets under 25 per cent health, and it empowers our new nuke, mind spike, to reduce the cast time of mind blast by 50 per cent, stacking twice for an instant mind blast. As mind blast sits on the global cooldown anyway, this is clearly aimed at pvp. I'm not sure if we'll even be casting mind spikes in a raid, but if we do, it will only be a small help on highly mobile fights.
• Shadowform has lost its innate threat reduction. I'm not surprised, either. It was silly to have two talents in the same tree that both reduced threat; nobody bothered picking up shadow affinity. Now we'll need to again.
• Instead of reducing pushback, improved shadow form now includes a five per cent crit aura, like a shaman's elemental oath and moonkin form. Improved moonkin form still increases haste of course, which we were once lined up to get instead of crit. I'm sure Blizzard's raid buff strategy will all become clear with time; right now, I'm lost.
• Our new talent, shadowy apparition, makes an appearance at tier eight. Shadow word: pain ticks have a six per cent chance to summony a shadowy version of ourself that moves slowly to the target and deals 15 per cent of our mind blast's damage when it arrives. So far so forgettable. 15 per cent of mind blast damage is fairly lame. But the chance to increase a shadowy form jumps by 60 per cent when moving. Expect to see a lot of twitchy shades at the target dummies while they figure out if this is worth trying to force in a fight. My guess: probably not.
• Pain and suffering has not changed. I bet it's still buggy as hell too.
• Twisted faith now increased spell hit by 20 per cent of our spirit. Apparently it's a crutch for offspec healers who go dps in their holy togs but it's also going to make healing gear more attractive to shadow priests under the hit cap.

So there we have it. For now. As others noted instantly, there is a dearth of supporting talents in the discipline tree (holy, we have been told, will never be an option for a secondary tree). So the current build would enable you to pick up every single point in the shadow tree and still have one point left over at 85. I suppose you could go for inner focus instead, and have something like this. Still more points than we need. 

So that's where Blizz needs to concentrate. Either discipline must be more useful to shadow at lower levels or they need to throw in a few more shadow talents somewhere.

PS. Haste buff?

Did I dream that shadow priests are getting a haste aura? Work is rather stressful at the moment; much of life passes like a halucination, so I won't be surprised if I made it up. But a haste aura... sounds neat. I wonder which class we're screwing over to get it?

On pug etiquette

The debate around random groups seems to hinge on the quality of the players you get: either they are rubbish, or they are not rubbish. Observers can be found at both ends of the spectrum, strenuously arguing their corner.

Honestly, I don't care about the quality of players available, except in the extreme. You can succeed in most situations with bad dps, and even bad tanks or healers do not automatically mean failure if other players in the group are skilled enough to compensate. Only the perfect storm of five idiots is guaranteed to fail, but this is a very rare occurrence. (And no smart arse ask me when I've ever been in one, thank you very much...)

In my experience, pugs rise and fall not on the skills of the players but their emotional maturity, their manners, and consideration.

I do not vote to kick bad players. They are there to get better gear, and to learn to play more effectively. I am more patient of the bad player who says 'please bear with me as I'm new to this spec' than the tier 10 jerk who zones in and goes AFK so you can earn his badges while he watches TV. This has happened to me. Many times. I vote to kick for a 10-minute DC, for wiping the group unnecessarily, for harassment of other players, and for general asshattery.

And if I had the power to summon back every tank or healer that has quit for no reason and with no warning and vote to kick them myself, I would.

But if a player can barely muster 1k dps while we are otherwise making good progress, I don't care. Clearly the bar for acceptability lies a little higher for tanks and healers, but the principle is the same.

If I think my fellow players are basically all brain damaged, I will choose a break in combat to politely take my leave and suffer the consequences.

The upcoming changes to the 'vote to kick' feature are therefore a mixed blessing to me.

While they assume that frequent vote kickers are all elitist bullies out to destroy the confidence of new players, we have no evidence of this. What if they, like me, are on a mission to cleanse the game of twats?

Need more information

Edit: Bugger. A blue post completely invalidated the point of my post. I'm still going to make you read it. Flick through to the bottom for the answer.

Has anyone figured out how Blizzard is going to implement haste scaling for hots and dots in Cataclysm?

The fact that haste will no longer shorten the duration of ticking spells is awesome sauce. But the new design, where haste adds ticks while the duration remains the same, is hurting my brain.

Right now, haste scales smoothly — that is, every additional point you get of haste does something. It might not do a lot, but it all counts towards whatever effect haste provides to your character.

But I just can't wrap my head around how that's going to work when it adds ticks. Unless the ticks are really small. Or oddly spaced.

Take vampiric touch. It ticks once every three seconds for a duration of 15 seconds. Five ticks in total. If haste scales smoothly, the first item of gear you get with haste has to add at least one more tick. Just one tick, of equal power, is a 20 per cent boost to the spell. Clearly that can't happen, otherwise hots and dots will scale astronomically.

It could add a percentage of a tick to the end of the spell, shuffling all other ticks back a bit to squeeze it in. So lets say every point of haste adds 0.05 per cent of a tick. One point of haste would instantly push your three-second ticks to 2.14 seconds, and your seventh tick, at 15 seconds, would tickle like a girl for a couple of spell damage. But that's just weird.

I suppose they could calculate what would be the combined final total damage of the dots, and even it out, but that would be rather odd too — because then, at certain levels of haste, your dots individually would tick for much less even though they were still ticking for more in total. Would that make dispelling in pvp unfairly effective?

The worst possible solution would be if haste didn't scale smoothly at all, but incrementally. Imagine if all haste did was shorten the period between ticks. Let's say it took 20 haste to shorten the interval by 0.1 second. You would need 500 haste to add a tick to the spell's 15-second duration. 499 haste? Dead weight. 999? No better than 500. These numbers are arbitrary, but under this system they must necessarily be large to prevent a spell rapidly growing overpowered. So gearing your character to take advantage of haste would become nightmarish.

All these ideas are very unsatisfactory. Would like more information please. Can someone in the US please ask a forum post — where, you know, Blizzard actually reads them?

And here's the answer, apparently. Thanks mmo champion.

It's probably more accurate to say that haste will lower the duration until you earn a whole additional tick, at which point the duration will go back up again (but with more damage/healing because of that extra tick). Getting more haste will never be a bad thing, but there will be break points where haste is more valuable than others. You should also never want to cancel the spell early.

This is definitely one of those cases where we'll have to see how it feels, but it is more intuitive when you're actually casting spells in the game than it might sound on paper.

We'll just have to take their word for it :P

The utility paradox

Why bring a shadow priest? I play in mid-range casual guilds and have never had to justify my spot beyond personal, competent performance (or lack of). But if you're a top-end raider, this question matters.

that's why the recent Cataclysm news is a cause for anxiety. Shadow priests (and boomkins) are losing a key debuff (misery), and replenishment is being toned down, but the hybrid tax, which keeps theoretical peak hybrid dps a short way below that of the 'pure' classes, is still very much a reality.

The fewer reasons you have to pick a specific class, the more you are going to pick purely on dps potential. So what happens if shadow priests have nothing unique or significant to add, but do five per cent less damage than a mage?

Blizzard's raid philosophy of 'bring the player, not the class' rightly demands that no one class or spec should be invaluable to a raid. This is both a pragmatic decision (10-man raids just can't fill every hole) and an idealistic one (it shouldn't matter what classes you and your mates rolled when you go raiding).

So here then is the paradox: in attempting to ensure hybrids are not special snowflakes that raids can't do without, Blizzard is in danger of ensuring raids only take pure dps.

You could argue five per cent isn't a lot. Perhaps you could even make that up in skill and gear at some levels of raiding, but then the same is also true in reverse. And to be sure, the tax on hybrid dps is lower now than at any time in WoW's history — but so too is the range of tools and buffs that hybrids bring. As Euripedes eloquently observes, utility is no longer the sole preserve of hybrids.

The only remaining argument for maintaining a hybrid tax is the base flexibility of the classes to switch between dps and healing or tanking, but this is a misleading argument. I think to suggest that raids take hybrids over pure dps for their ability to rescue raids at a clutch is rather far from the norm. Even then, if the damage playing field was completely even, I would argue that most raids would chose the utility that pure classes bring over the theoretical flexibility of a hybrid.

The more I look at it, the more the hybrid tax seems counterintuitive to, even incompatible with, the 'bring the player not the class' philosophy. Is it time the tax was finally dropped?

Is dps easy mode?

I normally read the Greedy Goblin in the way that lawyers and doctors watch Gerry Springer on their days off — largely for the shock value and the schadenfreude, but with a smug belief that none of it really applies to me.

And then I read this post, in which Gevlon accuses Blizzard of placing all the responsibility for a raid's success on the shoulders of tanks and healers, effectively giving dps a free ride. As you know, I've been chain-healing my ample Tauren butt off lately and this analysis hit a slight nerve.

To be fair, I think Blizzard has come up with lots of devices and strategies to test the dps this expansion — not just enrage timers. Fires, and debuffs, and weird-old buffy things and caster tanking and a zillion phases and target switches. And dps tactics are a lot more complex and interactive than they used to be (unless you're a frost mage). I think the days of facerolling your way through fights that you don't outgear are long gone. It feels like tanks 'n' spanks are very much the exceptional bosses now, instead of the norm.

But I'll admit Gevlon's view feeds a little pocket of righteous anger that bubbles away inside of me every time I wipe to one of Blizzard's Machiavellian encounters. Because every time Blizzard tries to shake up the dps a bit, they invariably take a collateral swipe at the healers — it's either things that healers have to look out for too, or else things that healers have to cope with incidentally if the dps aren't on their toes. (It goes without saying that tanks have it hard too, in my eyes.)

In Cataclysm, healers are going to have to manage their mana pools far more carefully than they do now. They will have a larger array of healing spells to pick from, and casting the wrong one at the wrong time could have far-reaching consequences. The enrage point will be when healers oom, not when bosses get bored and one-shot the tank.

So yes, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of agreeing with Gevlon, and grumbling uncharitably about the injustice of this stupid game.

But a small part of me feels a little soiled, like I've just caught myself enjoying Fox news. Somebody put me straight, please.

Merlot feels whelmed

Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?
Bianca: I think you can in Europe.

— 10 Things I Hate About You

Good job I went to bed instead of waiting up for the priest preview: it turns out there wasn't much to wait up for after all.

Brief shadowy summary (and the full thing for those who haven't see it yet — thanks, as always, to mmo champion):

• New spell: mind spike, learned at level 81, which deals 'shadowfrost' damage and debuffs the target to increase the damage of the next mind spike. Short cast, spammable, and will not be locked out with other shadow spells.
• As per the warlock preview, confirmation that all hots and dots will benefit from crit and haste innately, and that haste will not reduce the duration of the spells but increase the number of ticks. Unlike the warlock preview, though, no hint that we'll be able to stop worrying about clipping.
• Devs are determined to give shadow word: death a place in the shadow arsenal as an execute spell (good luck to that).
• Shadow should be better equipped for short fights and less susceptible to school lock out.
• Shadow talents are in for a bit of an overhaul to strip out all the passive boosters.
• The misery hit debuff will go.
• The shadow mastery bonuses will provide spell power, crit and a chance to create 'shadow orbs' — which boost spell power and may interact through talents with other spells.
• Lots of noise about healing, power word: barrier's back on the table, but you're all going to be ooming every five minutes.

These few statements of intent are fair enough — and the noises about burst and spell lock out should be cautiously welcomed particularly by pvp priests, I think.

I'm struggling to see at this stage how dots can scale smoothly with haste if their length doesn't vary, but no doubt this will all become clear over time. And I wish the developers had a consistent view of how dots will behave for shadow priests and warlocks — if locks can't clip their dots, surely priests shouldn't be able to either. But it could be an omission, or indeed a very sensible distinction. No need for nerd rage yet. Edit: an enlightening, if not emphatic, clarification came from Ghostcrawler later, to the effect that they'd like to prevent dot clipping in general.

Mind spike doesn't interest me. No doubt it will have its uses, but it just doesn't grab my imagination. The shadow orbs, however, could be very cool, if only visually. I hope they resemble the old troll priest racial, like our very own purple water shield.

Of course, it's just a very early preview. We don't have enough information to speculate about shadow performance or talent builds or any of the things we're itching to hear about. The fact that we are loosing the misery debuff might worry priests who rely on their utility to secure raid spots. But I say it's too early to panic.

In fact, this preview exercise leaves many questions unanswered — and raises a few more than it answers. I got pretty excited about the shaman preview, so why do I feel so underwhelmed by this?

Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow

Damn those tricksy US developers, it's my bed time already and no sign of the priest preview. But on the bright side, tomorrow I shall have something to do at work that is fun.

And this little gem from the warlock preview will send me to sleep feeling all warm inside. Wouldn't life be great if priests got the same treatment?

All warlock damage-over-time (DoT) spells will benefit from crit and haste innately. Haste will no longer act to reduce the DoT's duration, but rather to add additional ticks. When reapplying a DoT, you can no longer "clip" the final tick. Instead, this will just add duration to the spell, similar to how Everlasting Affliction currently works.

Night night campers :)

Forget everything: class preview incoming

Our first fleshy taste of what Cataclysm will mean for priests is due tomorrow (Wednesday, 7 April), as Blizzard prepare to release a full range of class previews.

In the words of Bashiok:

"The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the news spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we're currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes."

It's only a day away, but I can't help speculating a little about what we're going to see for shadow priests. Plus, it's a Tuesday morning, and fantasising about WoW is infinitely more pleasurable than the pile of work haunting my inbox.

Wrath has been a bit of a rollercoaster for shadow priests, but I think our current situation is solid. Our mechanics allow skill to shine over gear, and our array of spells enables us to do competitive damage, scale well, and adapt adequately to most circumstances. I think the basic design philosophy of 'keep dots up and use filler spells to their maximum' is unlikely to change. What we can expect is a more varied array of 'active' talents and a stronger focus on managing our own resources in long fights.

Mana management
We've already been warned that spirit will not be a dps stat in Cataclysm, so I am braced to say farewell to spirit tap. It's not the great talent it used to be, but for all of its shortcomings, it remains the only way a priest has of regaining mana beyond drinking until they hit Outland and eventually pick up dispersion and shadowfiend. So I hope that in the shakeup of talents and spell acquisition, we see changes designed to address mana issues early in a priest's life.

And I hope to finally see the death of replenishment in raids. If developers are serious about balancing mana regeneration around a class's own talents, and making a clear distinction between healers and dps, then they really ought to drop this elephant in the room once and for all. I could live with it as a self-only effect, as long as they drop the silly, druidy name and give it a title more becoming of a master of dark powers.

Better still, if we must have it, please unlink it from it's clumsy mind blast trigger. Vampiric touch was once conceived as a leech effect, it would be nice to see a return to that evocative design.

Dee pee ess
As I said, I think raid damage is in a fairly good place right now, but levelling priests could do with a boost to early damage. Damage before mind flay is shameful. It takes a glyph and holy fire at level 20 before our key nuke, smite, can even match a lowly wand. Other classes have it much easier, particularly melee.

They could fix the situation easily by increasing shadow word: pain's base damage — the spell is massively underpowered, particularly at low levels, let along in end game. Inner fire could also provide spell power from the start instead of only at higher ranks.

Developers have also hinted in the past that we may get an entirely new, spammable nuke in Cataclysm — something I currently struggle to see the need for in raiding but which might be a perfect fit for early levelling (more on this below).

New talents and spells?
New spell ranks are going — or rather, won't be learned but will increase automatically as we level. I'm curious to see what this will mean for our regular visits to the trainer. Currently, new spells are learned very unevenly: there's a huge glut of them early on, and large gaps without any between the round levels (20, 30, 40 etc). Could we learn spells less frequently, will the present higher-level spells be learned earlier on, or will there be a mass of new spells to fill the gaps?

We'll almost certainly get new spells as a reward for levelling to 85. My biggest hope is finally to get the dark prayer I have been pleading for for so long. A channelled spell that boosts damage (and possibly healing) temporarily would be a dream. Please Blizzard, I would only write nice things about you from now on :)

As I mentioned above, there was talk a while back of a possible new, spammable nuke, and while I can see this having some application early on, I'm not sure how it could work in end game. Two possibilities that I can see so far: one, it replaces something from our active range of spells (what, I'm not sure), two it becomes an addition to our active range of spells. The first option doesn't appeal to me, the second frightens me. I'm a simple shadow priest, I don't want to have to manage another variable. But it's too early to worry, we don't even know if a spell is incoming.

Finally, we've been promised more active talents and fewer passive 'improves x by y' talents. I don't think we'll see the full talent trees tomorrow, and even if we did it would be way too early to speculate about builds. But we're likely to get a feel for the way the new talents will go. It would be nice to see some possibility for hybrid builds, or even just more variety in build options.

Roll on Wednesday!

Cataclysm: new world order

We've been given the first concrete information about how the new gear stats will work in the expansion, Cataclysm. As you'd expect from something with such a name, it's going to be a bit of a shakeup.

The plan is for these changes to come into effect before the expansion is released, probably alongside wholesale talent revamps, so we have the joy of logging in one day in the not-too-distant future to see our gear reworked and our talents completely overhauled :)

It's much too early to worry about what this might mean for shadow priests. At this stage, in fact, very little would appear to be changing. Spellpower will vanish from our gear, while intellect and stamina will increase. Intellect will provide spellpower indirectly, so that we won't miss the lack of spellpower numbers on the gear. Hit, crit and haste will stay the same, and continue to function in the way you're used to. And spirit will probably vanish from most of our items.

The changes to spirit may be a cause for intrigue. This stat will no longer provide any benefit to caster dps. So we can expect talents such as twisted faith to disappear, as well as our mainstay glyph of shadow. We are promised mana regeneration in other ways — perhaps through buffs to dispersion and shadowfiend (although how shades are expected to level to the point where they can get them is another matter; this, we are told, will change too).

Divine spirit will go too, I assume, as we are told there will be no raid buffs for spirit in the new world order. To be honest, divine spirit was never the best buff in the world, but I like it. I like the shiny-blue-man icon, I like the connection it gives priests to spirit (their most idiosyncratic stat), and I like the fact that it's something melee don't want (I'm so sick of those DK buffs clogging my screen and making my hands glow). So I will mourn divine spirit and remember it fondly.

The spirit changes could actually cause many dual-specced priests a problem: we might be left with some big holes in our off-spec gear if we're not careful. It really depends on how Blizzard decides what gear currently constitutes "dps", how they convert that gear, and how they rework mana regeneration for healers. There is a chance discipline priests will need spirit as much as holy priests, so all those months of stocking dps cloth could leave us with a bit of a headache. We'll have to wait and see how this one plays out.

In the longer term, this change to spirit might go someway to restoring the once-rigid dividing line between healing and dps gear, and reduce the competition on healing priests for gear.

The introduction of a new "mastery" stat on items should also dissuade leather, mail and plate-wearing casters from rolling on cloth, because the intention is for this stat (function still a little vague at this time) to only apply to that item's primary class types (e.g. druids for leather, shaman for mail etc).

Things are starting to look interesting again. I can't wait for the bun-fight on talents to begin.

On heroic difficulty

We are used to a linear end-game progression route that starts with heroics and steps through each raiding tier in turn. This is essentially what happened at the start of the expansion, although Naxx proved to be such a low starting point that many people skipped heroics and dove straight in to raiding.

Subsequent patches raised the level of badges dropped by heroic bosses and consequently the level of gear available through heroic grinding. In essence, heroics become a shortcut for bypassing the conventional route of progression and spring-boarding straight to the current tier of raid content.

There's a lot to commend about this design philosophy, which gives unlucky rollers an alternative to boss drops for gearing and ensures a manageable route into raiding at any time during the expansion — good for alts and good for late bloomers. But it also, unavoidably, devalues the heroic experience by encouraging higher and higher geared players to faceroll their way through content that mostly sits, in difficulty, somewhere below Naxxramas.

So here then is a basic flaw in the philosophy — the place of heroics in the progression path keeps getting higher, while the relative difficulty of them keeps getting lower. And what shocks even an unapologetic casual player like me is that they keep making them easier.

This doesn't make much sense to me. The longer an instance is open, the bigger the pool of people who are over-geared for it gets — and current end-game design ensures there will always be a plentiful supply of over-geared players willing to run the easy instances. If Blizzard is intent on replicating the current badge system in Cataclysm, I hope they recognise that, far from working hard to ensure they are easier over time, their biggest challenge will be in keeping the instances interesting and enjoyable to all players at all levels of raid content.

New five-man instances definitely help break up the monotony of grinding content you massively over-gear. The heroic versions of the ToC and Icecrown five-mans are very well-designed instances in their own right, and at their time of introduction gave many players access to improved rewards. But there were no new five-mans with tier 8 and only one with tier 9, so in Wrath there just haven't been enough new instances to balance out the originals.

Achievements are another way that heroics have retained some attraction beyond the basic challenge of the encounter and the gear they drop, and some of the most interesting fights were the ones that — for a time at least — challenged you above and beyond the standard encounter.

So I think Blizzard would do well to learn from its successes in Wrath and stop over-analyzing the accessibility of instances. More five-mans at each level of raid content would add a stronger feeling of progress and achievement in heroic grinding while a greater emphasis on soft-trigger hard modes would serve to extend the freshness of instances at each level.

Hard isn't always bad, difficult doesn't have to mean annoying — even to 'casual' players like me.

Random thoughts on hit

I had a shower moment this morning. The shower is where I get all my best ideas, like 'oo, I should start a blog', and 'does conditioner work on pubes?'. This time it was about hit. Because Merlot has been locked in a wrestling match with hit since Naxxramas and is growing weary of it.

Hit is, by far and away, the most valuable stat to any caster dps — but you can easily amass enough of it to guarantee every single spell will land. All hit beyond that point is worthless, which is why Merlot, and probably most other casters of at least Ulduar level, burn considerable calories fretting over how to maintain but not exceed that magic balance.

The aim is to get as much hit as possible on as few items as possible — but that's a lot easier said than done. You may be forced to equip items that are of poorer quality, or even pass on upgrades that would result in too much of a hit loss. This is what gives rise to the popular feeling that hit is deadweight, the anvil of stats, constantly holding you back from bigger and better dee pee ess. Which is a shame, because it's a real trooper right up until the cap.

I'm about 40 points over the soft cap at the moment (allowing for misery). I can swap out hit gear, but the alternatives I have access to are inferior even accounting for the hit. I could swap out gems and enchants, but at the rate of gear turnover that option gets prohibitively expensive. Or I could start to spec out of shadow focus, but there are really no alternative talents that would increase my dps by any meaningful amount. So for now, I'm stuck.

For frequent raiders with a constant stream of new item options this might not be that annoying, but for a casual raider like myself who may get to roll on only one upgrade a week, it's a pain in the arse.

But as the hot water washed over me and I got shampoo in my eye, the solution came to me. Two, in fact.

First, I thought, we could change the goalposts. It feels wrong that the gulf between heroics and your first raid should be so large, while the amount of hit you should need in an entry-level raid is the same as the amount required against the ultimate badass of the expansion. Someone once decided all heroic bosses should be two levels above, while raid bosses should be three, but these are arbitrary checkpoints.

What if the level between you and a raid boss increased every tier, but the hit requirement increased more smoothly? This would ensure that we continued to prize hit on all gear as we progressed, and not come to see it as something distasteful to avoid wherever possible.

This would also have the advantage of reining in stat inflation in tank avoidance and prevent other combat mechanics like armor penetration from getting out of hand.

If that seems distasteful to you, I had another more radical solution. What if hit didn't affect the chance to land a spell, but the damage that spell does? So all spells have a hundred per cent chance to land (before resistances), but the damage they do relative to a target's level is modified by the caster's hit rating. Hit instantly becomes a desirable stat regardless of your hit level. Maybe there's a hit cap, maybe the effectiveness of hit diminishes at high levels, who knows. But in principle, it could work, right?

I know neither of these ideas will float, but it's nice to dream. For a few minutes there, while my conditioner got to work, I stopped fuming about my hit problem and imagined a world with one less thing to worry about.

Then the water ran cold and I reverted back to my rest state of nerd rage. And now I'm back to planning some gear upgrades that won't drop me below the cap.

RIP SW:P

In a recent test realm build shadow word: pain vanished from the tooltip for shadowform, removing it from the list of shadow priest dots that benefit from haste.

I didn't jump on it at the time, although with hindsight the writing was clearly on the wall for shadow word: pain. This weekend, a blue post confirmed the change and explained why:

We removed shadow word: pain from scaling with haste because we thought shadow dps was too high with all three dots hasted.

There is a bug where you can get big sw:p dots and keep them rolling at that magnitude forever since the spell gets constantly refreshed. It's a nasty bug to fix. However, that isn't why we removed sw:p from shadowform.

That last sentence is completely baffling because unless I have just developed sudden onset aphasia that's exactly why they did it. So we'll just ignore that bit. There's some other stuff about best-in-slot gear and theorycrafting, I stopped reading. The message to take home is that Blizz thought shadow was doing a little too well on the test realm and they've come up with an easy way to rein it back in.

I'm completely ok with that. If I'd wanted to be top-dog dps I'd be playing my lock right now, or my hunter, so I understand when Blizzard takes action to maintain class balance. But, as usual, I'm a bit disappointed about the way they've gone about it.

Shadow word: pain is already the weakest of all our dots. It has been riddled with bugs from the start of the expansion, outpaced in damage by devouring plague, and practically dwarfed by vampiric touch. Without haste scaling, that weakness is only going to be amplified. This for what was, in Burning Crusade, a class-defining spell and one of the most lethal dots in the game.

I know this isn't game breaking: if Blizzard gets their numbers right, whether one spell ticks for two hundred or two thousand is irrelevant at the end of the day. I'm just very sad to see such an iconic spell decline so miserably over the course of only a few months.

The designers have taken a very pragmatic approach — they needed to tone damage down and they found an easy way to do it. But it's not good game design to go around making two essentially identical spells work in different ways for convenience's sake — or to use flaws in the game that they have ignored since the expansion launched as the excuse for doing so.

Ok, so the bugs are too tough to fix: remove the refresh mechanic then, or nerf it to one of those 'extends duration by up to xx seconds' deals. Or nerf vampiric touch's spell co-efficient, which was basically doubled as a quick-fix buff to start with. There are a hundred ways you could balance shadow's dps without guaranteeing that one of the class's core spells fails to scale with gear and falls more and more into disrepair.

We'll all continue to cast shadow word: pain because it is basically free damage — and maybe that's the real point of the spell's current fortunes. But I'd gladly put up with a few more complications to see it restored to its former position of fear and respect and see it finally scaling properly with gear.

LF tank, last spot

The perennial tank shortage has struck Darkspear again. Pugging heroics is torture, even for the daily. And what fills me with dread is the thought of competing not only with my server for a suitable meat shield, but the entire battlegroup.

Because that's the worrying prospect facing us in the next patch when Blizzard introduces the new grouping tool. It sounds fantastic on paper, and wow.com has certainly spared no expense in singing its praises. Group with anyone, get transported automatically to the instance, and pick up a bunch of special rewards in the process. But look at the facts: take one server with a tank shortage, lump it with half a dozen similarly tank-deprived servers, and the problem grows exponentially. Has anyone done the maths on this?

The picture for healers — once in the same endangered boat as tanks — is very different. Not only do we see plenty of main-spec healers, but a decent proportion of main-spec dps have healing off-specs. On my resto shaman, I even find myself in the ludicrous position of going off-spec dps because of a healer surplus.

The duel spec facility saved healing, so why then are we still scrambling around for tanks? The same number of classes can tank as heal, and while I don't have the numbers on server populations, there must surely be a roughly even split between the two groups. There ought to be more tanks flying around than there are, even if most of them were off-spec.

What I think is that tanking is harder than healing or dps — not that all dps and healers faceroll, but the baseline for skill strikes me as much higher for tanking. And the entry bar for gear is a little higher too, so that potential tanks have to spend a little time collecting gear before they can throw themselves into heroics — moreso than healers and unlike dps who are good-to-go on the ding. And there's nowhere you can train yourself to tank, you've just got to bite the bullet and jump into an instance.

I don't know if tanking should be easier or the rewards greater. Or maybe, for the people who do tank, it should actually be harder: more challenging, not less. Either way, I don't think the problem is going to go away. I think when the new patch lands we'll see a momentary glut of tanks trying out the new instances and farming the next tier of badge gear. But if the underlying problems (whatever they are) aren't fixed, we'll be back in this position in a couple of months, but with an even greater surplus of frustrated dps.

Consolidating healing buffs

So as we've seen, if the current PTR iteration of vampiric embrace makes it to live, the spell will become a 30-minute self buff, providing its health regeneration effect to our party passively. It's a nice change given the sad state of neglect the spell has fallen into in recent patches, and means it's much more likely to find some use in future raids. But it's not going to fix the spell's two biggest problems — the party-only restriction and the minimal amount of health returned.

One way to put vampiric embrace firmly back at the core of shadow priest design is to push its effect raid wide. It's not as if there aren't already raid-wide healing effects in the game. The most significant is judgement of light, a spell so effective that in some fights it can hold its own alongside the healers, but death knights and feral druids can also provide healing effects through talents.

The healing from these abilities admittedly is only accessible to some or all of the dps, but they have one significant advantage over vampiric embrace: while the utility of vampiric embrace deteriorates as the raid size increases, for these other effects, the benefits actually increase.

In a world where just about every kind of buff imaginable has been dished out and duplicated across multiple classes, healing effects stand out as messy and inconsistent. If Blizzard were to consider all of these effects as a whole, they could easily establish some rules to ensure they don't stack uncontrollably and become overpowered, while giving shadow priests a compelling reason to value the ability and possibly even reconsider the 'improving' talents.

While they're at it, they might also like to look again at healing stream totem, which suffers from similar problems. I could say a lot more about water totems, but this is supposed to be a priest blog :) It's also not a good time to start comparing classes unfavourably to paladins, given the recent assault on our holy brethren. Our prayers are with you guys.

Bad timing

If you are ever bored enough or autistic enough to read through every post on this blog (and I wouldn't recommend it) you'll notice a patter emerging. All announcements of any significance pertaining to shadow priests happen while I'm NOT HERE. Case in point. It's like those corny living statues that appear wherever tourists congregate - they only move when you turn your back.

So anyway, I take one tiny little holiday and all this stuff happens. Stuff I need to read more about before I decide to jump up and down and make whooping noises. But in my head I am already practicing the snoopy dance. If all it takes for Blizz to buff shadow is for me to take a holiday, I'll gladly zip off more often. Now accepting donations to the Shadow Buff Fund.

I'm sorry dear reader(s), a proper blogger would have worked through their vacation to bring you the news as it happens, along with baffling equations and a pop-up graph. You deserve better. But I promise to blog through any Shadow Buff Fund vacations, which after all probably count more as a business trip than an actual holiday anyway. For tax puposes.

I'll be back soon, post jet lag, with those whooping noises.