February 28, 2010

WoW Patch 3.3.3 PTR changes for mages

So anyway. It's always an exciting time around here when a new patch hits the PTR. We all wake up, head down to the living room and gather beneath the tree to open our presents. Sometimes the bounty is rich, and we reap a choice harvest of new content and features. Other times the crop is more meager. And while patch 3.3.3 doesn't seem to have brought with it the largest pile of new stuff we've ever seen, it's turning out to be a bit more generous than I'd have previously suspected.

Yes, for those of us who play this game, a new patch is just like Christmas. You just never know what you're going to get. Will that gaily wrapped parcel contain an N64? Or a hideous sweater? A huge buff? Or a soul-crushing nerf? Let's all head over to the PTR together and start unwrapping, shall we?

Arcane



  • Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.

This, in essence, removes any small stress you might have once felt about keeping Arcane's raid damage buff up. Now it'll simply always be there, instead of being a near-constant proc from critical strikes. A slight but welcome change.

This, on the other hand, is a massive, steaming pile of crap. Farewell, Incanter's Absorption, we hardly knew ye. This talent was one of the most interesting, potentially powerful, and plain fun mechanics available to arcane mages, and now it's just not worth the talent points. Let's hope as the PTR progresses this talent will regain some of its former glory.

To break it down, let me use the following tortured metaphor:

Imagine you are presented with two delicious pies to choose between. One of them, the baker tells you, is more delicious than the other. This particular pie is an acquired taste, though, and will take some time to fully appreciate. Also, it is full of sharp razor blades, and thus will require great care and skill in order to eat it without maiming yourself. Still, you think to yourself, the pie's so tasty, it's worth the extra trouble.

Then the baker tells you that you are only allowed to eat it with your hands tied behind your back, using only your face.

This concerns you.

Finally, he discloses that he has taken a huge dump in the tastier pie before baking it, making it far less delicious than it once might have been.

Suddenly, the other pie looks like a far wiser choice.

Incanter's Absorption, like so many of the more interesting mechanics in this game, seems to have proven too difficult to balance for Blizzard. Teamwork, timing, skill, and luck all played a vital role in determining its usefulness. Unfortunately, some mages have apparently used it a bit too skillfully, and so a nerf has come.

Previously, if you had a priest willing to shield your mage, you could stack up the spellpower bonus to the 5% of your maximum health cap, which for many mages was a very high amount, something in the neighborhood of 1,000 spellpower or more. Under the right circumstances, with the right raid group, against the right bosses, this could be--and often was--an extremely powerful buff.

With the PTR changes applied, the mage is limited to his own shielding spells to build up the buff. Since Mana Shield is too great a drain on your mana pool to be a reliable method of stacking the spellpower buff, the only viable options are our warding spells. This means that we can now only absorb up to about 6,000 points of damage every 30 seconds, and that means a maximum buff of 900 or so spellpower for 10 seconds, and then only in fights in which you are taking frost or fire damage. All this at the exorbitant cost of a global cooldown and three talent points. The removal of the 5% cap doesn't factor in, since the only way to reach the previous cap is to use Mana Shield, which will severely gimp your mana pool, eventually costing you far more DPS.

The bottom line is that it is now more prudent to place those three talent points elsewhere, relegating this spell to a rare oddity that some mages will cling to because it was once a great deal of fun, and optimal builds will simply skip over.

A better solution would have been to simply lower the cap, leaving the talent intact, instead of rendering it impotent.

Really, I just want my razor-blade-filled pie back.

Fire

  • Combustion cooldown has been reduced from 3 min to 2 min.

Here's what Ghostcrawler had to say about this one...



Ghostcrawler


The Combustion change was to let its cooldown line up better with e.g. trinket cooldowns. It just felt awkward at 3 min.




...which makes a certain kind of sense. Now you can blow your combustion cooldown every time your trinket cooldown comes up. That's good. But the thing I like most about this is that we're getting those three almost-guaranteed crits a third more often. That should prove to be a solid DPS boost for fire mages, and coupled with the craptastic nerf to Incanter's Absorption should bring fire more in line with arcane's DPS output. A little more guaranteed crit for a spec that's so infinitely dependent upon crits is welcome.
  • Burning Soul now reduces the threat caused by Fire spells by 10/20%. (Up from 5/10%)


This is another solid DPS boost. A threat reduction of 10% translates loosely into 10% more time you can spend blasting away instead of reigning yourself in. This should provide a slight boost to overall damage output. Fire needed a more consistent, less RNG-based boost, and these two changes are a good start.

This glyph change only continues the trend:


  • Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.

    Ghostcrawler


    The Fireball glyph change was because some Fire mages were getting such absurdly high crit rates that even more crit wasn't attractive. We weren't trying to make this particular glyph ridiculously powerful.



    The actual dps increases are something more like adding Pyroblast to Torment the Weak and Empowered Fire. That may have missed the most recent patch notes.



This change, like those above, provides a more static boost. The extra crit wasn't a huge help to more powerful fire mages, as Ghostcrawler points out, but the shortened casting time will most definitely be. In case you were wondering, the removal of the DoT effect remains on the glyph.

And the second part of that quote reveals something not yet in the patch notes, the addition of Pyroblast to the spells affected by Torment the Weak and Empowered Fire. This should prove to be a significant straight-up DPS boost for fire when it goes through. I'm always in favor of anything that makes Pyroblast, the single most powerful mage spell in the game, even more powerful.

Frost

  • Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.


Excellent. Frostbolt needs this kind of buff to bring it in line with the other specs' primary nukes. Frost needs a lot more, but a buff to Frostbolt that scales as our spellpower increases is a step in the right direction.



  • Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.


I'm excited about this. Fireball was always a suspect choice for this proc. A properly-talented frost mage would have zero talent points invested in making Fireball more powerful, but Frostfire Bolt, on the other hand, benefits from a large number of frost talents. I'm not even sure why Blizzard would even leave Fireball on the talent as an option. Frostfire Bolt will be the more powerful choice in every situation here.

So where does all this leave us? It's clear from these patch notes and comments like this...


Ghostcrawler


I would also expect Arcane damage to fall overall with the Incanter's Absorption change. (Torment is also gratuitously overpowered, but that would be too big a change for now.) That should get Fire a lot closer to Arcane. Getting Frost up there too is harder, but we're still trying.





...that the devs are trying to level the playing field between the mage specs. This idea cuts both ways. To bring fire and frost up to the level of arcane, those two specs are receiving a few buffs. I'm all for buoying up under-performing specs. But why does doing so require knocking arcane down a peg? Let me say this another way:

I'm near-sighted. Seriously, blind as a bat. Don't ask me how many fingers you're holding up because I don't know. I negotiate my surroundings via sonar. I'm more than a little jealous of folks with natural 20/20 vision. I'd love to have the same eyesight as everybody else. I can accomplish this equality in one of two ways:
  1. I can improve my own vision by wearing glasses, contact lenses, or getting eye surgery. Or...

  2. I can gouge everybody else's eyes out.


Which sounds more reasonable? Keep in mind that we're talking about normal people here, not warlocks. I have no inherent desire to disfigure regular folk.

I just wish the developers could find a way to make all three specs viable without hobbling the most powerful of the three. What's stopping them all from being powerful?

WoW Gold Capped: Auction house addon list


Every enterprising entrepreneur needs tools to manage their business. These tools will help us overcome the inherent inefficiency of the default UI. The new interface changes coming in patch 3.3.3 will solve some problems (mostly for posting en masse) but will not help us with other parts of the equation.

Auctions

The first thing you'll need is something that will let you manage auctions. I use different addons for different businesses:
  • Auctioneer is the most rounded and full featured auction house addon available. It keeps a local database of item prices for long term trending data, it has pricing modules that can help you intelligently and automatically price your goods, it can be used to automatically disenchant, mill, and prospect raw goods, and it has a feature that lets you find the best deals for the items you watch. There will be an exhaustive guide to these features coming soon, but for now, download it.

  • QuickAuctions3 is a single-purpose addon that will be invaluable for any market like glyphs, where you have hundreds of types of items, some of which require listing several auctions at a time. It does two things better than auctioneer: it allows you to cancel undercut auctions efficiently and define more granular undercutting scheme.

  • Lastly, there's a tiny addon called AHSearch that lets you save searches and access them with a dropdown list. Not efficient for watching hundreds of items, but efficient for commodities.
Mail

The next thing you will need is a good mail addon.
  • Once you go postal for incoming mail, you never go back. The game's mailbox is capable of serving you 50 mails at a time, and once you pull 50 in from the server, you need to wait 60 seconds before you can get the next 50. Postal knows this, and tells you how many more messages are queued on the server, as well as lets you open all your auction mail automatically. Pro tip: if you've tweak postal to go as fast as it can go, you'll have 40 seconds (depending on lag) of downtime between batches of mail. You can /reloadui to force the next batch to appear, however if you have a lot of addons going, this process might well take more than you would have gotten just by waiting.

  • For outgoing mail, it's a little more complex. There are addons that were designed to automatically mail certain configurable items to specific characters, however they're out of date. QA3 has a beta feature for this, but I haven't tried it yet. My quick and dirty solution is to use Postal's dropdown list for alts, and use a macro that will fill up my mail with items based on either name or quality.
    • Here's the macro I modified for mailing by name. Simply change "Saronite O" to whatever it is you're trying to mail:

      /run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local item=GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot) if item and item:find("Saronite O") then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

    • And here's the macro I use to send greens for disenchanting. Be careful about this one-- it will try to send anything that's green quality, so if you have a non-soulbound green you don't want to send, you might want to use the name macro instead:

      /run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local texture,itemCount,locked,quality=GetContainerItemInfo(bag,slot) if quality==2 then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end en

Inventory

The next indispensable addon you will need is something to manage your inventory. When you have a banker with tons of similar looking products and mats, it can be a real time saver to be able to open the filter window of Bagnon and just type in "scroll" to locate all your enchantment scrolls. A nice fringe benefit here is that you can see what's in the bank or bags of any of your characters without having to go to the bank (or that character).

Another addon that can tell you about your inventory that's not at hand is Altoholic-- I don't use it, however, because it's too resource heavy. If you already use it for alts, however, it will add some functionality to your auction house business.

Crafting

Lastly, while you certainly can use the default crafting UI, it's pretty bad. There are no queues, there aren't any market prices, and it's about as dumb as a bag of rocks. If you want to trade up, I highly recommend LilSparky's Workshop (as mentioned in my last column), as well as the LilSparky fork of Skillet. The guy who writes LilSparky is keeping this duct-taped together, but barely. This Skillet fork is a little buggy sometimes, so be prepared to /reloadui, and remember, you can always bypass it by shift-clicking on your tradeskills.

  • LilSparky, on its own, will add information to just about any tradeskill window showing you your cost to make something, as well as the current market price.

  • Skillet's killer feature is that you can open your profession window, sort by profitability (or price), and then just craft the things you will make money on. It also supports a queue and shopping list, so you can go through adding all the profitable items that you may not have the mats for now. You then drop by the vendor to pick up your vendor components, your banks and alts to pick up any thing they have that you need with a single "purchase" button. Note: this is the buggiest feature of this addon, so be careful the check what you are about to buy. Sometimes it forgets that you have some of your required mats already.

Addons

The default method of managing addons is manual and annoying. Addon Control Panel (slightly aged WoW.com profile here) helps with the headache. It lets you define profiles and switch between them with a simple UI reload. Also, some addons can be loaded without requiring a reload!

Now what?

Once you have all this stuff installed, start doing regular auctioneer scans so your computer has a good idea of what things are worth. Also, go into every tradeskill you have, and sort LilSparky's data by profitability. Focus on the things you know will sell-- raiding or pvp consumables, permanent gear enhancements, quest items, profession leveling items, etc. If you can't tell, research the item and guess, and learn from your successes and failures. Each profession has something that's profitable, all you need to do is find it!

WoW Cataclysm: New Caverns of Time

The recent Twitter dev chat confirmed what is fast becoming a tradition: We will be getting a new Caverns of Time instance with the upcoming expansion. It's certainly not something I have much trouble with. The Caverns of Time are an excellent tool for looking back and understanding old pieces of the story that brought us to the current world as it is. Unfortunately, the devs were not willing to drop any hints as to the exact nature of the new instance, but we can, of course, make our own guesses.

The original questioner suggests War of the Ancients as a possible destination. In a way, that might be an interesting battle. It would, if nothing else, give us some insight into the character of Malfurion Stormrage, who promises to be a key figure in the expansion. That said, Rhonin, Broxigar, and Krasus have already traveled back in time to deal with the War of the Ancients, and you'd have to think that if you keep shoveling more time travelers back there, something's bound to give.

As far as my own preference, I'm really hoping to see the Fall of Stormwind to the Orcs as a mission. Many players seem to have only joined for Warcraft III at the earliest, and most do not read the novels or comics, and may not understand how deep the Alliance and Horde rivalry truly goes, and what battles happened in the distant past that have created the type of atmosphere of growing distrust and anger than has only been exacerbated by the events at Wrathgate.

For me, I'd love to see an instance that begins in the Stormwind Throne Room where Garona has just assassinated Llane in front of his sons' eyes. Then we would have to lead Varian out of the castle and through the streets of Stormwind and to Anduin Lothar, who is directing the retreat of the civilians and preparing for the march north to Lordaeron. It would be a great way to get some background on the Horde vs. Alliance thing that promises to heat up even more in Cataclysm, and allow the Alliance to get some quality time with some of their greatest heroes, especially the lion himself, Lothar.