Monday, August 24, 2009

Three spell wishlist - and a flannel shirt

First - I wanted to burst out into some "I'm a lumberjack and that's OK" song, because that's one achievement I'll never do again. It wasn't super difficult, other than our 3rd tank was really our rogue on his alt. Decently geared, but still...not a lot of raid tanking experience since say...Magmadar. Fortunately it's mostly just stand here and don't get instagibbed - and watch for sun beams, and roots, oh and fists of stone - don't forget the ground tremors.....

Yeah - never again.

We also got the "Back to Nature" achievement, and worked two new players through 1 Light. I also managed to pick up some new tank gear from ToC...and three more fragments. Twenty-Three is the count now, and I have a standing invite to a Three lights kill as soon as I have all Thirty. Here's hoping it happens fairly soon. I'm afraid with ToC Heroic coming out soon, our Ulduar PUG may fall by the wayside.

Three Spell Wishlist

Cataclysm isn't anywhere near in our future, but since GC mentioned that every class would get a few new spells - I thought I'd at least put my ideas out there.

Protection

As much as I'd love to call for some kind of new Protection shiny, I'm really struggling to find what that would be. Ardent Defender is already six different kinds of over-powered, we have two great taunts, and our 9/6/9 rotation is as easy as it gets. I suppose a new situational button - like spell reflect - would be nice, and it would be nice to have an interrupt shorter than 20 seconds (and that's 4 talent points to get as well).

I'm sure that other protadins might disagree, but really all the necessary tools are there. We have an amazing front load on threat, ranged pull, one of the best "OH SHIT" buttons in the game, and the amazingly overpowered Ardent Defender. Sorry, but our toolkit is pretty good. A short CD interrupt would be really nice though.

Ret

I'm not sure what Ret needs either. It's not tuned right to be sure, and I'm definately not the best retadin around. I really am not a fan of the system, I always feel like I'm tripping over my cooldowns. It might have something to do with my keybinds being primarily set for tanking and healing, but there's still something that feels off. Repentance is a pretty nice CC (in PvE, the CD is really long in PvP), but like prot we could really use some sort of interrupt on a shorter CD.

I'm fairly certain we'll get another "Hand" type spell, maybe one that boosts damage? Hand of Enlightenment - increases haste by x% for 12 seconds - or something. Right now all our Hands are set for being helpful. Maybe a Hand of Pain - increases damage taken by x% for 10 seconds. Make the CD enough so you couldn't use it all the time, maybe like heroism. It would be tough to balance so that it didn't become overpowered - especially if it was a baseline hand that every paladin had.

Holy

True. A. O. E. Heal. The changes to BoL are fantastic, in that we can now go back to whack a mole on the raid without worry of the tank dying. Unfortunately we're still stuck with the 2(3) base healing spells. Big Hammer or Little Hammer. Maybe if the HoT that we get from SS/FoL combos became baseline for FoL, or if the splash from HL became smart instead of hitting that rogue who avoided all the damage. Or maybe, just maybe, a medium sized heal.

With the current state of things, bombing HL is only really viable if you can get in some melee swings to proc SoW. This is where we used to see the downranked HL come into play. Not so big as to be insane, but bigger than FoL.

Did I mention an interrupt yet?

How about something from another school besides Holy. I know we're drawing on the power of the light and all - but to be completely locked out of every ability is a bit much. At the very least take judgements and attacks off the list.

Proc based healing. Maybe something along the lines of the druid eclipse where you can proc into faster or bigger heals. Just something to give it some jazz(hands).


Hmm - maybe there's a reason I don't work for Blizzard designing spells and talents.....

2 comments:

  1. Two comments:

    1: They're removing the 20 second HoJ. I think it's the later talent that they're reducing a bit so that 30 second HoJ is the fastest, though it might be 40 second. I can't remember exactly, other than seeing in the 3.2.2 notes that 20 second would no longer be possible.

    2: I like the way the shaman healing plays a lot. It's particularly due to inter-spell synergy. A few examples include that you want to slip a Riptide in before casting Chain Heal if you can, because it will consume the HoT and do 20% more healing; and every time you cast Rip Tide or Chain Heal you get a buff that helps your two main heals, increased crit for the small one and reduced casting time for the big one. We have a tiny amount of synergy in that FoL on the tank will leave a HoT, and crits of Holy Shock will buff your next FoL or HL. That's nice and all, but shamans get their next two spells buffed every time they cast the spell, instead of one buffed only on a crit. It really makes it interesting to use more than one spell.

    I'd like it if instead of just making HL spam be a mana hog, if they just made the most efficient rotation include some extra spells. For example, Illumination could be changed back to 60%, but only for your next HL after casting a HS.

    Something like that which makes it useful to use more than one spell instead of just figuring out which spell is the most efficient/highest throughput and only using that.

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  2. Ah yes - I'd forgotten about the HoJ change - though I am surprised that they are taking it out with the change to Str for SP instead of Stam. Dang PvP healers running in Prot (no - I never did this. Ok, maybe once, but I didn't inhale).

    I don't know that we're going to see that synergy you're looking for - at least not at that level. GC has stated more than once that they have 'hard' healing classes like priests and druids - and then 'easy' healing classes like Paladins. I think what he meant was that they didn't want Paladins to have 131241 spells to choose from, because they wanted to keep one of the healing classes kind of basic. I don't mind this, but I think your thoughts are a good start - more interaction between spells.

    Who knows - it's so far out we could all get unicorns before it's released.

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