Monday, July 20, 2015

The patch cycle

Tier sets and trinkets threaten to change my gameplay with every new drop. I think the designers have let the final tier of the expansion become an excuse to go fucking nuts with any and all class bonuses. So now I feel like a complete dolt for thinking item level was going to matter at all when it's actually all about the bonuses.

I understand Rushing Jade Wind is popular now. Makes sense to take it into fights with heavy stacking, but it's the definition of situational, and it's really not a situation that happens so consistently that you need to improve the spell that you already have for that situation-- at least not at the expense of one of our most powerful cooldowns.

Apparently, Xuen has been declared underpowered this tier. I'm not sure how they are measuring relative "power" in this case, because one talent is a spell that costs a a shitload of mana and only hits the people standing right next to you, while the other doesn't even cost a GCD and does more than half a million healing. Xuen saves lives. Having a tiger up is like having another half healer for 45 seconds. It makes a hard phase easy, even if you don't happen to be standing next to all the people who need healing.

It's obvious what's happening. Monks have too much regen, again. Same as last expansion. Rushing Jade Wind is a mana dump. The ridiculously slow GCD we've been given this expansion probably doesn't help either-- it's not surprising that Mistweavers feel like their GCD is limiting them more than mana.

If you're overflowing with mana you don't need to waste a talent on a spell upgrade that will only help some of the time-- just cast more Surging Mists. One of the strongest points of our class is the 0.5-second channel fast heal combo. If you're not using this every time a raid member is in danger you're not playing a Monk properly.


I joined a new raid. They have some great players but they care way too much about gear and have a stupid policy of prioritising healers and tanks. It kind of makes sense, until you consider the central leadership of the guild all play tanks and healers, and then it makes perfect sense.

I think I'll ask them whether they think this policy might affect raider turnover. It's not unusual to have something of a "curve" to your raiders' performance, but I can't help but notice that this guild is overflowing with skilled healers and tanks (even ones that aren't guild officers) but has only a handful of DPS with a similar level of performance.

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