by Luebbers, 2 days agoI ment to play the paladin some more but when I got to hyjal there was a gank squad running around. I attempted to pvp but a 83 shaman decided that he'd rather see me dead than alive more then a few times. I can, however, give a basic run down of how I understand the new ret style.
So like you have 3 seals, your seal of wisdom and your seal of light are in one uber seal "seal of Insight". You also have seal of rightousness and a revamped seal of vengenace. They changed vengenace's name to seal of truth but the tool tip still says vengence and as far as I can tell it's the same old vengenace. Old seal of command has be turned in to a talent that just makes whatever seal you're currently using in to a cleave. Very nice.
Divine storm no longer has a cooldown. Yup. The big catch here is the damage it does it based on how many stacks you have of something called "holy power". With no holy power DS was doing about 500 damage per target for me.
So you get a stack of holy power by using crusader strike and it maxes out at 3. Having the holy power buff doesn't give you any sort of buff but rather it's used as sort of a resource for a number of abilites. As stated above it makes your divine storm not suck total ass. You also need it for a single target melee attack known as Templar's Verdict, a healing spell know as, um holy word or some such shit and I'm to understand a self buff at higher levels that adds something like 30% additional holy damage which basiclly needs to be up 100% of the time in raids ala hunger for blood or shadow word: pain.
Holy word, or whatever it's called is a semi bitter pill. Your art of war no longer procs instant flash of lights, it infact is now only used for exorcisim. Holy word is the now ret's best quick heal as it's instant but it also sucks up your holy power. At a full stack of 3 I was getting healed for about 4-4.5k.
All in all I'd say ret feels alittle bit less facerolly then it used to. Its still much easier then some of the other classes I've tried leveling wise. Very quickly, I spec'd my mage in to fire. Scorch was doing about 2k, fireball about 4k and pyro for 5k. It just doesn't seem, well, balanced. As it is, mages, atleast fire mages, will have a much harder time leveling.
by Luebbers, 3 days agoI figured I might as well turn this in to a pseudo blog for the time being about my experiences in the beta. So here it goes...
I've leveled the hunter up to just shy of 81 in Vashj'ir. So First off this zone is all fucking underwater, but they give up an infinite breath and 60% swimming speed buff pretty early in to the story arch. Its very very overwhelming at first, you have 360 degrees to worry about underwater. In the first bit of quests there are naga swarming all over the place and I pulled add after add making me regret coming to this zone over Hyjal. The zone grew on me, well sort of. As the zone expands and you unlock more of the story here you become accustom to your surrounding and thus pull less adds. The quests are all tight and very quick. I only ran in to two quests that brought me trouble and both where due to the large number of people jammed in to a small area.
Will I start here rather than Hyjal when Cataclysm launches? Well I don't know. While I do think this will be the road less traveled, it still has a very bumpy start even despite the fact that I've done it already and by comparison it will be less crowded. I haven't done enough of Hyjal yet to say for sure for sure but I'm probably leaning towards swimming 100% of the time over the same fly to quest, kill, remount and fly to the next quest.
Ok. Focus. Brief as I can make it. It's a rough start, a hard transition, a pain in the fucking ass. Is it better? Oh for sure. The biggest problem with it is that in many ways it makes it feel like you're playing a whole different class and we all know that change is bad. I think aim shot was my first pillow that softened the transition. Ok, so for half of my focus and 2.13 seconds with my current gear I'm going to nearly 100% crit for most of the mobs health. Let me go get you a number...ok so 17k,16 oh and a 19k...nice. oops a 25k. You get the idea. It's a lot of damage. So I've landed on this as a leveling rotation. I'll send my pet in as I cast aimed shot, as son as it lands I toss Chimera out and then steady once or twice until killshot comes up. There is zero reason to venom or sting because of how fast we burn down the mobs. Unless you are lower on hp, then a widow venom isn't such a bad thing.
It only becomes a problem when you get adds, where I basically have to tell my pet to get them off of me as I run in circles or when a mob as some sort of charge or another way of getting in your face. You see kiting is nearly impossible because of the passive regen rate. My chimera shot costs me 44 focus, my concussive shot costs me 35 focus, and scatter costs 35 which means you have to chose whether to snare or do damage while kiting. I mean there are traps but in a 360 water world they're much harder to land.
I don't have fox yet so theres that but making moving a doing anything impossible before level 83 seems silly. Maybe I just need to get used to it or rethink how I need to be kiting but I sorta doubt thats the issue here.
I've also had some time to play with ret and disc but I'll write those up later...those aimed shot crits make me want to hit 81.
by Luebbers, 5 days agoStarted the beta install right this second. I should have it up in running tonight or tomorrow.
I don't think I can do videos with my pc but any info or picture requests, those I'll take.
