An interesting day today. I was starting to think the blues had all but forgotten us. Sometimes, however, I wish they had:
Tier 8 nerf
The day has come. Well, it hasn’t actually, but it will. When patch 3.3 hits the servers, tier 8 is finally getting nerfed. It’s not like we didn’t know it was coming. Just a few days ago they nerfed elemental shamans’ tier 9, and we have been struggling with tier 8 for way too long.
The bonus from 2 piece tier 8 is getting nerfed to 7%, less than half of what it usually gave. But it’s not a massive bother. Any moonkins coming after that will be swimming in triumph badges to just get tier nine instead, and the rest of us will move on to tier 10. This makes tier 9 viable as a full set, but unfortunately, it had to happen as a nerf.
Tier 9, unless you have four pieces of ilevel 258, is slightly worse than keeping 2pt8, and I can’t realisticly say that I will have more than maybe one or two pieces of 258. It may only be a few hundred DPS, but it’s still a nerf that isn’t really justified. It means that we will actually go into Icecrown a little worse than just before the patch, and it seems a bit unfair.
On the other hand, there is still another month until 3.3 hits Live, so we may still see even more changes – a buff to tier 9, perhaps, or the long awaited fix to our talents. One can dream.
Tier 10 buff
The big guys at Elitist Jerks were contemplating that the 2pt8 was actually worth holding on to until you managed to get four – yes, four – pieces of 264 tier 10. That’s the second level of tier 10, which you get from trophies inside Icecrown Citadel 25 man (presumably). This tells us a bit about how weak the tier 10 bonuses are, and because of that, Blizzard has buffed the four piece bonus.
Instead of doing 5% of our criticals as a dot, the number has now been bumped up to 7%. Not a massive buff, but after considering the massive stat increase we will se when switching to tier 10, with our crit being much higher, I think it’s alright. I can certainly live with it until i see how we actually fare in a decent set of ICC25 gear.
Evil Blue Curse
Blizzard doesn’t like us to depend too much on addons to DPS. Strange, really, because the easy fix is to just make it possible to function without them. In our case, they decided to simply prevent the addon WiseEclipse from working, by making sure that you cannot proc an eclipse more often than 15 seconds apart. This means that once you get lunar eclipse, you have to let it run off before you can proc solar eclipse. You can still use WiseEclipse, but it wont have any real function, as the final crit you do will not proc solar eclipse. This is a minor nerf, but couped with the tier 8 nerf – and the indifferent tier 9 bonuses – we will probably see a small, but noticable drop in our DPS when we enter Icecrown.
There has been a lot of people on the MMO-Champion forums today that seems genuinely stu.. confused about the wording of the eclipse change: Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse. They seem to think that Eclipse has been reverted back to its old form, but I can assure you that is not the case. The 15 second cooldown will start when you gain eclipse, not when it runs out, so you have two cooldowns to consider: A 30 second cooldown of the respective eclipse you procced, and a 15 second cooldown of ANY eclipse. In practical terms it means that you can’t proc another eclipse until the previous has run off by itself.
I was one of the few that misunderstood the nerf, bah, shit happens.
There there *pat*
While the world despairs, I’m thrilled. Let me explain why.
Firstly, the WiseEclipse nerf cannot truly be considered a “nerf”. Blizzard did not introduce the functionality and there can be no expectation that they’ll maintain the functionality of an addon, especially one that plays the game (albeit to a limited extent) for the player. They broke the addon, sure. That was their intent, sure. But they did it to get the mechanics working the way they originally intended.
Secondly, as Qieth mentioned, the 2T8 nerf comes as no surprise. This is something they *really* should have done at the same time they buffed Eclipse back when 3.2 was released. It still would have been a worthwhile bonus, but without being overpowered. I’m actually happy about this nerf because, while it will result in a not insignificant DPS loss, it puts that particular set bonus at an equal level with other set bonuses.
Now why is all this good, according to me? Well, it removes the two glaring distortions to our DPS. Both of these resulted in unrealistically high DPS for our class and, in the case of 2T8, the buff was only temporary. Without WiseEclipse and 2T8, we’ll finally get to see where our DPS *should* be, relative to other classes.
*Hopefully*, Blizz will notice how far behind we are and buff our *core talents*, not our set bonuses, to compensate.
The 4T10 buff is nice and definitely welcome, but we’re still stuck with a greatly underpowered 2T10 bonus that is even more RNG-dependent than Eclipse.
Ill jolt that down on the “To be written” list: Pures vs Hybrids – why shouldn’t we compete? (working title)
I have to get home and finish the big, big post i have planned to release tonight..
I think at this time, hybrids should be 100% as effective as pures. The reason is that there aren’t any fights that leverage our hybrid nature. Dual spec actually made this worse in my opinion; now you can be 100% a healer for one fight, 100% a dpser for another. This combined with how Blizzard has designed the encounters means that there is less need for a group to bring someone who can perform multiple roles (“stance dance”) mid fight.
I would love to see more fights that required an overwhelming amount of heals during one phase, and an overwhelming amount of damage during another phase. This would be a drastic enough difference that you need you elemental shamans, balance druids, and shadow priests to sometimes heal. It would not be 50/50, more like 75% of the time dps’ing, 25% of the time healing.
*THAT* would be “hybrid.” Rolling a druid and choosing balance spec *ISN’T* hybrid, it’s pure. You’re not going to be asked to do anything besides heal.
It would be also nice to see more fights where boss immunity to schools of magic shifted at times to force people to output more than one school, though that would heavily favor balance druids and effectively kill ele shamans.
Druids should be a more unique class unto themselves… not the greatest damage, but they buff the raid well, they bring a combat res, innervate, and they can shift forms during phases that require an “extra” of something else.
Also, it would be OP for pvp, but I’d love to see balance talents/gear make you a *decent* tank for single target adds. Then our hybrid nature could be utilized *even more* in raid situations.