The Pre-expansion Month; or "Why Did I Pay For This?"

The new Blackrock Spire is short but sweet. I ran it a few times just for fun. (I know, right. Does anybody play video games for fun any more?) Also because it's the only challenging healing environment that exists right now because the rest of the game is fucking broken.

"But Coreus, it will all work out at level 100! This version of the game isn't designed for level 90 so it's unfair to--" Yeah let me just cut you off there. If it's not designed for level 90, why did they put it out while we are all stuck at level 90? A week or two before the expansion is understandable when the changes are this drastic, but we are spending one whole subscription period in limbo between working versions of the game.

If I'm starting to sound a bit like a broken record on this subject it's only because I can't do Proving Grounds, I can't do Arenas, I can't do Brawler's. The Black Market is gone. PvE is a joke now but I can't even put out decent numbers because my class is dependent on abilities and stats that are not in the game yet.

I know the game never has been perfect but this is the definition of breaking it.


But anyway, Blackrock Spire. I feel like I'm doing more damage (relatively speaking) than I was before, but that's not something you can really judge in a 5-man dungeon, especially when you significantly outgear it.

There were some wipes, but only because BRS was designed in 1996 when claustrophobic three-hour-long maze-like dungeons were the new hotness. So we still have to deal with low ceilings, tiny doorways, mobs strategically placed within aggro radius around corners and not a single clue which way is forward.

Now I'm worried that they're doing another Cataclysm and making the game too hard again. I mean I'd be happy with that but I understand the other eight million players aren't so easily entertained.

I keep instinctively trying to switch from melee straight into direct healing and have a minor panic attack when I realise that it's not working and everybody is still dying, then another panic attack when I realise I could have changed stance by now if I'd remembered to do that first and everybody is still dying.

Blizzard seems to have recognised that smart heals were ironically dumbing down healing, so every untargeted healing event now follows the "random injured target" paradigm, with the exception of Renewing Mists which I assume would be just terrible if it wasn't intelligent about its targets.

The annoying thing for melee healing now is the number of buffs we need to juggle. Tiger Palm, Crane's Zeal and Rising Sun Kick all need to be kept up, while managing Chi and Vital Mists, and if you have any cognitive resources left on top of that, a glance at the group's health bars every now and again can be useful.


I've been pondering doing that thing where you keep 25 completed quests in your log for some quick XP once we can level again. What I thought was funny when I googled it was all the people who went to the trouble of writing a whole big paragraph about how that would be a waste of time and there's no way they would waste their time doing anything pointless like that.

Fistweaving is awesome now

My guild's new "combined" Mythic raid killed Garrosh this week. "Post nerf" if you will. "Totally carried" if you will. That might be an overstatement, but I just never feel like I'm playing properly if I'm at the bottom of the healing numbers.

I need to reiterate at this point that it's fucking bullshit to ask us to pay for one whole subscription period of "between expansions" where half the game is broken because the game is now designed for a level that does not exist. Most of the information online is now out-of-date, the rest is irrelevant to the current state of the game.

With that over with, I'm gradually hating the Mistweaver changes less. The unobvious tradeoff for slow stance changes is that the melee stance has been developed into a much more "complete" specialisation.

Melee is now actually interesting, not just the same two abilities over and over. Blackout Kick finally justifies its Chi cost by causing literally five healing events per cast, and we now have burst AoE healing. We're doing junk for damage, but honestly that was never the point.

I've been meleeing between critical healing phases because mana regen is so ridiculous and tanks are so self-sufficient that we suddenly have a lot of downtime and I would probably get totally bored with raiding if I didn't.

Detonate Chi is the main burst AoE ability for crane stance and seems to have a spectacular synergy with the improved Blackout Kick-- five separate heals means five times the chance to spawn orbs. I'm a bit confused about whether this ability does five heals from yourself and five from the statue; or whether it chooses five targets from within the combined range of yourself and of the statue. I've tried google and a few theorycrafting forums but haven't found anything.

Detonate so far seems like it's been mostly ignored by theorycrafters, since they seem to assume that (a) your balls will expire while there are people in range (b) those people will probably need healing at that moment. When we could glyph our balls to last for three minutes it was a lot easier to justify leaving them around for people to use later on in the fight. But the whole point of this ability is burst throughput, not increasing overall healing. Our first job is to keep people alive, as much as we obsess over numbers most of the time.

I get that it's not really possible to track your active healing orbs so it's hard to measure, but I strongly suspect that both Detonate Chi and Blackout Kick are probably being undervalued by the theorycrafting community at the moment, especially in the current half-broken environment. Every time I've remembered to use it has resulted in a massive amount of Gift of the Serpent healing-- you can't explain that.

Jade Crackling Lightning has changed function completely. This ability used to be ridiculously strong; dealing almost the same damage as the more complicated melee rotation but without the range or movement requirement, and it follows people around line-of-sight breaks. I know, right? But it never comboed well enough with any Chi spenders to be a cohesive playstyle; I always felt like using it as a primary damage ability was cheesing the game.

Now the duration has been reduced from eight seconds to one-point-four and all four ticks generate a Chi. Also it costs about a quarter of your mana bar-- it's the "fast heal" of crane stance, generating four Chi in the time it takes a basic melee attack to generate one, so you can keep pumping out kicks and orbs. Also I think it might do damage to its target, but I haven't confirmed this.

Revival and grape bubble (I literally can't remember the name of the big green absorb bubble ability) are both unrestricted by stance thank god. And for that matter Surging Mist actually is not a terrible substitute for proper healing if you just need to top someone off. Revival is ridiculously strong at the moment, probably just due its design-- I'm pretty sure that it is simply the one spell with the most healing throughput.

Good to know Monks still get something OP.

Mistweaver crisis!

I raided Mythic last night and I'm pretty sure my class is ruined forever. They turned the most innovative healing class in the game into this weird emulation of a classical healer that is allowed to deal damage only under strict regulatory guidelines outlined in paragraphs one through three of Stance of the Spirited Crane.

Over the course of the raid I did eventually get used to the weird timing of half-second GCD followed by 1.5 second GCD, and I figured out that Surging Mist is now just Heal with the ability to "cheat" the cast time...


I guess I can't help but see all of this as a big huge nerf. Back in July last year I posted about my first experiences with this class, that I loved the high skill-cap of doing two jobs at once with one set of resources, how smoothly you can transition between damage and healing, and I loved how active the class felt, having a multitude of support abilities and a multitude of responses to any situation and being able to choose the most fun.

Now the class is literally slower, with fewer support abilities, and a deliberately un-smooth transition between pure healing and damage healing.

Skill capping a Mistweaver now means changing stances in low damage phases, then dumping your Chi and changing stances again, and again and again, and again and again.

Have you ever been forced to change stances in combat? Wasn't it the most fun you've ever had playing WoW? Yeah I get to do that now. I assume that Warriors and Warlocks are stuck with an extra GCD of fun when they change stances, right? Right? It's not just my class getting fucked in the arse?

That cross nanny metaphor perfectly represents how I felt about stances while raiding last night. Melee abilities are simply not allowed while healing. And direct healing is simply not allowed while damaging. It wouldn't be proper.

This happened before with Paladins in early wrath. Stop taking away my fucking melee healing. I enjoy it. I paid for another fucking expansion because I was having so much fun with it. Why bother creating brand new innovative gameplay only to savagely homogenise it?



Assuming anyone made it this far into my rant, there's a question I've been pondering out of curiosity. Many class abilities get tweaked early on if players weren't using it as intended, but removal implies that the whole concept was a mistake to begin with:

In all of WoW's history, what active class ability (button) was in the live game for the shortest time before being removed completely?

The best WoW change ever

"When someone applies to your Group Finder group, you can see their Proving Grounds achievements."

I can't help being optimistic sometimes. I'm just so, so, so, so fucking sick of itemlevel. Plenty of players wont even be polite to you until you've told them you have a good itemlevel. I've taken to telling people my itemlevel any time I think I'm being judged as a player just as a way of minmaxing social leverage, and I hate it every time. I feel like I'm part of the problem every time I buy into it.

Now, Proving Grounds; as well as being one of the more fun solo activities that exists in the game today, are being presented to players as an easy way of judging other players. Key word: easy. Because you will never convince players not to rank every other player against themselves; gamers are a competitive bunch. And average itemlevel was never the best way of judging a player, just the easiest. All Blizzard needs to do is make one that's even easier.

So when you start a Group Finder group, each applicant will have their Proving Ground score attached. Yes, we're still judging people, but at least this one can make some distinction between a skilled raider and a social raider.

I guess all of this is predicated on players actually using this new Group Finder feature, which is hard to predict. Blizzard has a long reputation for trying to replicate third-party functions without bothering to give people a good reason to change their established method. But honestly, Openraid requires external registration and doesn't integrate with the game, and OQ is a huge piece of intrusive bullshit designed by idiots, so I can see there being reason enough.

Now bring on the PG balance complaints! As long as resto druids don't have it easy like last time I'll be happy. Those guys can stand to be brought down a peg imo.