Malchome's Mind on Gaming

Well I have been watching thread meters, mmo-champion and the Blizz Blue tracker on the forums reading over the QQ and quasi discussion about the balance of this ability.

Having tanked a little bit on all 4 classes, something like LoHs for Paladins need to be there as an “oh shit” button.

In my opinion how I would balance the ability would be the following.

• The base ability becomes 20% of health usable on yourself or another.
• Though a glyph you add 10% to the ability
• Talents
  • Protection
    • Change “touched by the light” such that the +10% crit heal is now +(5/10/15)% LoH healing on Self
  • Holy
    • Give similar effect to the touched by the light effect and maybe a mana boost or something extra to caster if cast on another target.

End result gives in the ballpark the following table.

You may ask why I favor Protection in this case? At 45% it is similar to what Warriors and Feral Druids get when you combine “Last Stand/Survival Inst” + the Rage based Regeneration ability and have it glyphed.  Paladin’s don’t have a Last Stand per se so just giving a flat out boost would be acceptable while still “nerfing” it from 100%.

I know in the end that balance testing would be needed if anything like this was implemented but at least IMO this seems like a good compromise to the issue.

The other issue that is a problem for Prot. Healing is that they just need to remove Spell Plate, but that fix which would finally put an end to the issue is too big to be dealt with in a non-Expansion content patch.

I have seen posts and threads where Saronite has become cheaper and cheaper and since the 3.2 and 3.2.2 the AH has gone all to hell.  The major reason for this is the over demand for Titanium Ore.

Thank you Blizzard for making an already scarce resorce and making the demand for it increase many times over by allowing it to be prospected.  Additionally the dust can be turned in for JC daily badges which are required to get most of the patterns for Blue and Epic gems.

Titansteel and everything that requires Titanium to produce has now inflated greatly in price so much so that it is not really worth making the epic items becuase they sell less than the cost of the mats.

In the future if a profession changeis going to beimplemented that is going to drastically change the landscape of supply and demand then please implement alternative ways to acquire the scarce resource.

A simple change that would have let the market stabilize a bit would have been to allow Alchemists or at least Transmutation Specialized Alchemist have no cool down on the transmute Saronite into Titanium.  If nothing else at least remove the shared cool down with the epic gem transmutes.

The transmutation side of Alchemy is in apathetic state and does not look like it will get any better.  Well at least until the next expansion.  At least then the cool downs for most of the transmute in both Alchemy and Tailoring will be removed like they were for TBC materials with the release of WotLK.

Hopefully when the new expansion is released professions will actually really be worth something other than and time and money sink.  The real way to do that would be to create more interconnectiveness between the professions.

I have been thinking about making a post about this subject but BBB beat me to it.

Honestly I don’t have the time to write a post for every topic or concert I think about in the game and the various systems.  However since BBB did a good job breaking down what you have to do to get Critical Hits pushed off the table for starting tanks, I want to take this moment to rejoice in the change coming in the next expansion.

Fast Tube by Casper

Right now I am dealing with this BS every time I get a new piece of gear for my Warrior.  What is making it difficult for me is that there are 2 defense trinkets that were added in Wrath.  1 from Loken who has yet to drop it for me.

Loken – N: Seal of the Pantheon
Thaddius – 10:  Repelling Charge

This change is a side effect of the gear homogenization.  Which makes it a pain in the ass for all non-druid tanks to keep the un-crittable state.  I did not say difficult, you can still do it, just an annoying requirement.  Really all of these issues could have been resolved easier if oh I don’t know entire sets of gear were craft-able.  Now a fresh DK, Warrior, Paladin can hit 520 easily at 80 just from the Tempered Saronite set.  What would have been even better would be a 4 set bonus that adds the last 20 defense.  Then you could at least keep those 4 peices while replacing the rest with epics as you do dungeons and other content.  It would be nice if there were even a good amount of Heroic and Valor Emblem gear that had a healthy helping of defense.  There is some don’t get me wrong.  The problems with all Blizzard itemization is they do not proved a complete set of gear for any facet of their game without having to piss with other unrelated content.

There should be an entry level set of gear for dungeon and raid content available through all PvE content.

1 set from questing.

1 set from dungeons.

1 set from crafting.

Another design change that would be nice to see would be a definite progression of dungeons/heroics and raids.

Another tip for the itemization department would be that only your non-random loot can you expect with any amount of accuracy your player base to have when designing the next iteration.  So ya all that new epic gear that has small amounts of defense but tons of parry/dodge/block is great only if the player was lucky enough to be in a raid where the item dropped and they got the time.  Which since your player base moved away form guilds to a PuG mentality for raiding means that the old DKP systems that you forced the player base to rely on to distribute gear fairly falls apart.  I will be posting again about Guild systems soon.

Anyway no matter what anyone says the removal of the Defense Cap mini-game for tanking is a welcomed improvement.

*****Update*****

There is one more added from patch 3.2.2 as a reward from the quest with Onyxia’s head.

Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman

I was reading the new PTR patch notes on MMO-Champion last night and this morning and thought I would make a point about this little item.

Enchanting:
Abyssal Shatter – Disenchants an Abyss crystal into greater cosmic essence or infinite dust.

Why is this in the patch, the answer is simple since 3.0.x Cosmic Essence and Infinite Dust have been the cockblock of skilling up enchanting.  You had to dis-enchant insane amounts of green gear to get the Essence and Dust requirements for most patterns after 400, ya 50 points to go not the 425 range that you seen in most of the other professions.

As extra insult to injury the material costs on tailoring items, the previous bread and butter DE fodder were raised as well which was a double whammy to the majority of cloth wearers who were Tailor/Enchanters.  The current best DE fodder comes from some early and mid-level leather working patterns because the non-heavy borean leather patterns are actually reasonable cost effective.

Now since the new 5 man drops Epics only in both Normal and Heroic mode Abyssal Crystals have devalued greatly.  They were a little over priced but now are a little too cheap.  This like many issues with wow comes from a lack of planning.  I know the dev mean well, and they want to give us a good game.  However the in game economy is just another vector that should be factored in when charting the course to WoW’s future, one that seems to almost always get overlooked.

To end on a positive note the next expansion more than any previous patch and or expansion has the greatest potential for change and improving all of the little side systems that go and support the game overall.

For the next month or so I will be fine tuning some ideas and rebuilding others from the ground up to eventually post in the cesspool that is the suggestions forum.

Well I had one of those moments last night.

In one of the comments under my 3.2 killed Crafted Epics post, I mention how my reasonably fresh 80s a Priest healed a H-UK.  There were a few problems and we ended up having one of our DPS switch to tank speck and the tank switch to DPS.  As the new tank was slightly better geared.  The rest of the instance went reasonably well, we still had another wipe but if anything it was only a death here or there the rest of the time.

Well after doing a few battle grounds and seeing my numbers suck and trying to figure out what I needed to do about it, we ran a normal CoT:Stratt.  We ran into the new instances can not be launched issue again for 15-20 minutes.  Long enough for me to log in here and create another fuming post about the instance servers.  After writing I decided to cancel it’s publish as it was just too negative.

So now beating around the bush what was my noob moment last night.  Halfway through the run I realized that my spells were not up to date.  I was 1-3 ranks behind on almost all of my healing spells! My hots would tick for between 3-400 more per tick and my heals were 2k more potent each cast.  That is a hell of a lot.  My first reaction was wow do I feel stupid now.

Then I remembered hey you healed a H-UK with lower rank spells and it still succeeded despite your stupidity.  This goes to further my point that new 80s can get good gear and Epics if they know people already established in higher end content.  Also that means that even though my numbers sucked I could still heal well while handicapping myself like I did.

The lesson to be learned from this however is that if you level Dual-Spec like I did with the Priest check your alt-spec after training and manually update your spells.