Category: patches

Permanently Grounded

Kurn / / patches, ramblings

Forgive me, dear readers, it has been three months since my last blog post. I don’t even necessarily want to talk about what I’m going to talk about here, but, well, I couldn’t help myself.

The Announcement

This week, Ion Hazzikostas, the lead designer of World of Warcraft, had an interview with Polygon, in which he stated “that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”

Let me be clear, readers — I kind of didn’t mind the concept of not flying until the “first major patch for Warlords of Draenor”, which was how this was announced to players before the game even launched. One might assume that flight would have been reintroduced in 6.1. When that didn’t show up, I personally thought “oh, hey, I guess they’re waiting for the next tier when we get into Tanaan Jungle. That’s fine.”

Apparently, this won’t be the case.

Some Thinking & Some History

So, I’m not pleased. But I took some time to try to figure out why I’m not pleased. How does the prospect of continuing on just as I have really affect me? Does it affect me?

Having started in Vanilla, where you not only didn’t have flight, but you didn’t even get a ground mount (and a slow one at that!) until level 40, I wasn’t used to flight when I started playing the game. The world was vast. Immense. Boats, flight points, all of these helped out a great deal, but to this day, it’s still a pain to go from, say, Un’Goro Crater up to Winterspring. The old world is freaking huge.

The new continents in each expansion… well, they’re not that big. They’re landmasses that don’t really come close to the size of each old continent in Azeroth. Which, you know, that’s fine. It’s an expansion. You’re not going to spend the rest of your WoW career in Outlands or Northrend or Pandaria, right? The old world is going to see a lot more action, particularly since we revisited it in Cataclysm, than the other continents and areas, which are much more transient in nature.

They introduced flying in Burning Crusade, but what a lot of people either don’t know (because they weren’t there) or don’t remember (because it’s been a long while!), is that flying was still incredibly rare! Epic flying was stupidly expensive (5000g) and regular flight was, well, I think it was around 600 gold. Gold, in those days, was really difficult to get. The people in my guild basically pooled their money to help people get epic flying. I think there were six or seven people in this group with my brother, all of whom would kick in some cash to help someone get their flying, and that person would then pay people back over a (long) period of time.

So it wasn’t always easy for someone to get flying, much less epic flying. I spent a great deal of time on an alt on Proudmoore, post-raids, chatting with my RL Friend the Resto Druid who was raiding on Pacific hours. I’d be doing circles on a ground mount in Nagrand, mining adamantium and fel iron and using my engineering thingy to get motes of air. This was perfectly reasonable and fine. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by not having flight on that character. This, despite the fact that there were several areas in Burning Crusade that required flight — various dungeon instance entrances (and this was before dungeon queues!), various farming spots… Back then, you couldn’t get to Elemental Plateau without flying (or being awesome friends with a warlock and some others who could fly!).

When Wrath of the Lich King launched, I grumbled a bit about not being able to fly, particularly after that Wintergarde Keep quest where you DO get to fly to save the various people from undead things, but when I hit 80, I threw my 1000 gold at the trainer and I COULD FLY AND IT WAS AMAZING. I didn’t even have the super-fast flying on Kurn then, it was only 280%. (I would later get 310% flying when I completed What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been in late 2009.) Various raid instances were either impossible or very difficult to get to without flight if you didn’t want to rely on a summon. Naxxramas and Ulduar come to mind.

Flight in Cataclysm was, and let’s be fair, totally expected. If they were going to blow up our old Azeroth, flying just made sense. (Ultimately, I would probably trade flight to not have lost Auberdine and Southshore, though…) But think about things like where the raid entrances were! Nefarian’s balcony up at Blackrock Mountain, the top of a spire in Twilight Highlands, the instance entrance for Throne of the Four Winds… I mean, we were clearly meant to be flying in Cataclysm content, the same way we were meant to fly in parts of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. What was different here is that, for the first time, we were permitted to start flying at the start of the expansion.

In Mists of Pandaria, I did the same as I usually done — levelled up, threw gold at the training and luxuriated in the glory of flight and its freedom. I wasn’t really bothered by the fact that I couldn’t fly until 90.

Throughout all of these expansions, there were places where flight wasn’t allowed.

In Burning Crusade, there was the Isle of Quel’Danas, plus the entire old world, even the new zones for draenei and blood elves.

In Wrath of the Lich King, there was Wintergrasp. I recall frequently clipping the edge of the zone and getting dismounting and cratering. Oh yeah, plus the old world.

In Cataclysm, there was Tol Barad, plus the draenei and blood elf zones and… that was about it, because you were in the old world and you could fly from the start.

Then in Mists of Pandaria, you had… well, the Timeless Isle and those old draenei and blood elf zones. You could fly pretty much everywhere else.

In Warlords of Draenor, you just can’t fly. Period. And now we have confirmation that we will not be able to do so.

So I find myself thinking about how this affects me. Does it affect me? Can I go back to just being on the ground? I mean, I played for over a year on the ground in Vanilla, plus lots of time in Burning Crusade, the levelling-up time in Wrath and Pandaria, plus my time in non-flight zones (Timeless Isle, most recently), as well as these first few months of Warlords of Draenor.

Managing My Own Expectations

I can, of course. I have done so for the last several months. And what the last several months has mostly meant is logging in, doing Garrison stuff and occasionally flying out to Nagrand (via flight point, obviously) to trap 21ish clefthoof bulls.

Will having the ability to fly change my in-game priorities?

No.

Does it actually change the quality of my in-game life to not have flying?

No, because I haven’t had flight since Pandaria anyhow.

So why am I displeased?

I’m displeased because it was heavily implied that we’d have it at some point, but while re-reading the phrase from Bashiok, it’s clear to me that they never planned to bring it back. Read it for yourselves:

We intend to disallow flying while leveling from 90 to 100, and have flying become available again in the first major patch for Warlords of Draenor.

 

Reading that initially, I read “We will disallow flying while leveling from 90-100” and then “but flying will be available again in the first major patch”.

They covered their asses well. Look at that. We intend. Just because they intend something doesn’t mean it will happen. Personally, I saw that and assumed because the first part was true, it would follow that the second part was true.

My fault for assuming, I guess. But I think a lot of other people made the same assumption.

The Loss of Trust

As such, a lot of people are talking about trust for Blizzard right now. Frankly, I don’t have any trust for them any longer. They lost me in Firelands. Up until then, no matter what nonsense they threw at us, I was pretty much okay with them, believing that there were things I didn’t know, believing that there were things I didn’t understand, other kinds of factors that led to their various decisions. I supported them, believing that they knew what was best, believing that they were doing good things for the game and for the community.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when, despite the introduction of LFR, content nerfs continued through Dragon Soul. And, as a result, I left WoW for about 13 months. (And then resubbed a few months after that, but I have not raided in any kind of serious fashion since then.)

Flying isn’t the end-all and be-all for me. It’s that we were led to believe flying would come back this expansion. It doesn’t affect my daily WoW life that I can’t fly, but I don’t take kindly to being led to believe something will occur that won’t. (Hey, where is the dance studio, anyhow?!)

There’s also the fact that some mounts are really meant to fly. My Violet Proto Drake is not meant to waddle on the ground.

Nor are my drakes from Dragon Soul (I have both the meta and the one from Heroic Madness), my bird from the Firelands meta or my Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher.

It’s not as though I don’t have some nice ground mounts — I have Baron Rivendare’s mount, which is awesome. I have my paladin’s charger, also awesome. But using these huge flying drakes on the ground is pretty dumb-looking. I like using some of these fancy mounts. But not to see them waddle on the ground. To see things I worked really hard for get relegated to use in the old world… it’s disappointing. Someone on Twitter is even talking about false advertising in terms of buying mounts from the shop. (I don’t know that I’d go that far, but, to be fair, I’ve never bought a mount from the shop.)

Speaking of posts by people on Twitter, don’t miss Ross‘s post at Feckless Leader: “Yep, We’re Still Talking About Flying“, in which he talks about how maybe this is the beginning of the replacement of flight, not just the flat-out removal of flight. (I wish I had his hope and trust.)

And, of course, if you don’t regularly read Alternative Chat, shame on you. Go read her post about flying.

But What About THE GAMEPLAY?!?!

Hazzikostas talked about how it’s silly for people to fly to their mob, land on the hut, kill the mob and fly off again.

Okay, that’s fair. So stop having such simplistic quests. Add in “kill X number of mobs” to the quest. Or put the mob in a cave. Or underwater. Or something.

Frankly, I will say this — the terrain of Draenor sucks. It’s all hills and canyons and how in the actual fuck are you supposed to get up THAT hill and how do you get out of THAT canyon and seriously? This would be a lot less frustrating if I could fly!

Half the reason I don’t go out into Draenor is that I don’t really have a reason to do so, but when I do go out there, venturing out from my Garrison, I end up frustrated as all get out because there’s no obvious way to get to point B from my point A. The maps are not remotely detailed enough to take height into consideration. I see my objective on the minimap and, in the world, it’s like three stories over my head, dangling off a cliff. How do I get up on that cliff? The challenge should be in getting the objective, not in navigating the inhospitable terrain to get to the cliff, the way I see it. If the terrain weren’t crazy, I wouldn’t mind being without flight, really, when I’m out in the world.

But it is crazy. The ground is never just flat. This is not Vanilla. And I’m glad it’s not Vanilla. I remember walking into Hellfire Peninsula and being like “HOLY CRAP, THE GROUND IS SLANTED” when Burning Crusade launched. And I like that. I just don’t like being forced to travel around and over and up and down for the sake of absolutely nothing. There is no reason to make the terrain as treacherous as it is in some parts except to slow us down and annoy us.

That’s when I miss flight. It doesn’t make the gameplay any more enjoyable for me. It makes me feel as though I’m a rat in a maze. And that? That does not endear me to the designers of the game.

Want to hear more about this and other subjects? Don’t forget to tune in to the Kurncast — a (mostly) weekly podcast, (mostly) focused on World of Warcraft. Tune in today, on iTunes or Stitcher!

Old Habits Die Hard

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, lfr, mists of pandaria, patches, raiding, ramblings

With the news that Patch 5.4.8 would bring with it the ability to add two more upgrades (4 ilvls each) to 5.4 gear, I laughed to myself. Why? Well, because there are several instances of Blizzard saying they won’t nerf Siege of Orgrimmar (at least not in the blanket-nerf sense of the word). The most recent one was just a month ago, back in April.

And yet, they’re adding up to 8 more ilvls to every piece of SoO gear, every piece of Timeless Isle gear, every piece of SoO crafted gear… Granted, as Watcher states, it’s “nothing” compared to a zone-wide 30% aura:

But Valor upgrades are still a nerf. I went through that in this old post of mine from last September (wow, was I ever off on the timing of the expansion…) and I still maintain my opinion that it’s a nerf. That said, I am also still a fan of the fact that the onus is on the player to make their raids easier.

Anyhow, I laughed to myself at all of this and was, once again, pleased that I’m not raiding in any serious capacity at all.

That said, I had the intention to cap Valor so I could walk into 5.4.8 with 1000 or 2000 VP and upgrade the crap out of what I’m wearing. I figured we still had a week or two.

And then we were told on Monday that, OH HEY, PATCH DAY TOMORROW.

Wanna know how much Valor I had earned in the last, oh, two weeks?

Five.

That’s right. Five Valor. I did one quest for 5 Valor or something. That’s it.

So, forgetting for a while that I am no longer a progression raider, I got online and did my 200 VP Epoch Stone quest on Timeless Isle. In so doing, I also earned 50 VP from killing 20 elites on Timeless Isle.

Total VP: 255.

This was substantially less than 1000.

So I did the unthinkable. I queued up for the first couple of wings of Siege of Orgrimmar LFR. Late on a Monday night.

Wing 2 popped for me.

By some miracle, we didn’t wipe on Galakras, despite there being ZERO tower group organization.

Both tanks left shortly after that mess. And then we got some extremely talented players who were, and let’s be fair to them, total douchecanoes. One of them was the tank, the other was a DPS warrior. Both were very well-geared and knew their stuff, but oh my God. The language. The foul, foul, FOUL language, full of slurs and pejoratives!

I was going to leave, but I didn’t. I’d already put in 30 minutes of waiting for the queue, plus 20 minutes on Galakras, plus another 10 of waiting for two new tanks to show up.

Someone ninja-pulled on Iron Juggernaut and we wiped. Then we actually had a good pull and killed that. Killed Dark Shaman. Then wiped on Nazgrim because people still apparently don’t know how to kill adds… Finally got Nazgrim down, adding 90 VP to my pathetic collection, bringing me to 345 total. (Also, no Secrets through those bosses.)

My other queue popped for the first wing and I was going to take it, except I was still annoyed and I was tired and…

… and I’m not a raider.

It’s as though a lightbulb went off. Who the eff cares if I don’t max out my VP? I certainly didn’t care until faced with the fact that I could do more stuff with my VP today. Guess what? I haven’t even fully upgraded most of the gear that I’m wearing. (Part of this is because I want to get better gear before upgrading.) So, really, what the heck is the point in trying desperately to cap to get to 1000 VP before servers go down? There’s no one relying on me to “do my part”, there’s nothing driving me to do it, except my own expectations.

I declined the queue and thought about this.

Even though I haven’t raided seriously (as in, not LFR) since the end of Dragon Soul, I am still wired to try to maximize my potential. It took a lot of effort in the first place to stop VP capping even when I didn’t want to any longer. For so long, it’s just been part of my WoW life to do unpleasant tasks “because I have to!”

But I don’t “have to” any longer. (And true, strictly speaking, I never “had to”, but I felt I had a responsibility to my raid teams to do whatever I could.)

It’s going to take some time to adjust to this whole “I can do whatever I want” thing. Breaking such a long-standing old habit is definitely not as easy as one might think. Even now, I’m filled with residual “dammit, why didn’t I cap VP for three weeks prior to today?!” thoughts and I even have a bit of guilt resulting from it.

You’d think that not having played for ~17 months would have cured that right quick, but no. It’s as though my “decompression” from being a raider was just on pause until I got back into the game and NOW I’m dealing with what it’s like to not be a raider.

It’s still so very, very strange.

Thought I’d share. :)

On Connected Realms

Kurn / / guide, guild, kurn.info, patches

Back when I first started playing World of Warcraft, I, like everyone else, was faced with a choice. At the time, I was completely unaware of how important this one choice was. I doubt most other first-timers had any idea, either. That choice was, of course, selecting a realm.

The realm I chose was Eldre’Thalas. Why? There were two reasons. The first was that it was a “Normal” server, meaning it was PVE. I had (and still have) no desire to be ganked unexpectedly.

The other reason why was because I thought it “looked cool” by virtue of having an apostrophe. That’s it. That is the entire reason I chose my home server, among 45 other PVE realms. Subsequently, that is why I met a bunch of awesome people in the guild of Fated Heroes, why I stuck with them to form Apotheosis (BC-era) and why I came back, post-Wrath, to bring Apotheosis v2.0 to life.

Because the server name looked cool.

When I look back on things, I recognize how huge a choice that was. At the time, there were no character transfers. Even now, character transfers cost $25 to pop from server to server (and believe me, I have spent a fair amount of money on transfers!), so the choice of a server is still a fairly important one. True, it no longer takes 20-30 days played to get a single character up to level 90, much less level 60, but server choice is still important, though it’s becoming less so.

With the release of Patch 5.4, Connected Realms (previously known as Virtual Realms) are being tested and implemented. Nethaera informed us on Wednesday evening that the first two realms that will be connected in this fashion are the US realms Bloodscalp and Boulderfist.

According to the US WoW RealmPop site, here are the statistics for both of those servers.

Bloodscalp:
Server type: PVP/Normal
Server timezone: MST
Alliance population: 13,581
Horde population: 32,167
Total population: 45,819

Boulderfist:
Server type: PVP/Normal
Server timezone: PST
Alliance population: 21,887
Horde population: 44,472
Total population: 66,459

I admit, this first connected realm confuses me a little bit. The Connected Realms FAQ explains that they wanted players from two (or more) lower-pop realms to play together. So why Bloodscalp and Boulderfist first? Looking at the list at RealmPop, Chromaggus has less than 16,000 characters in total. Garithos isn’t much better off, sitting at 17k. Balnazzar and Gul’dan are around the 18k mark. All four of those realms are PVP/CST realms. It seems to me as though the logical thing to do would be to group those four up pretty quickly, no?

Then again, maybe they want to start slowly, in the sense that they might want to try out this technology with just two (instead of four) realms to begin. And just two of those servers connected together would only be a total of about 32-33 thousand characters, which isn’t ideal. (Hell, all four of them merged isn’t a great population, either!) So I can understand that.

The other reason I’m confused is that they’re looking to create such a LARGE connected realm. ~46k + ~66k = ~112k characters. Either I missed a conversation/blue post out there, or I was extremely wrong in thinking that Eldre’Thalas, with its estimated population of ~74,000 characters, would remain a standalone realm. I was very surprised to see Boulderfist included, with just about eight thousand fewer characters on it than my original, home server.

The idea of Connected Realms was really interesting to me, on a community level (which I’ll get to in a moment), but it was all academic to me, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I haven’t actively played since November of 2012. However, the idea that Eldre’Thalas may be included in this, at some point, brings it home. It’s not that good ol’ Eldre’Thalas can’t use more people (I’m sure that the Horde of ET, the few of them that remain, would agree with that sentiment), but the instant that you connect two or more realms together, the community changes.

Let’s talk a bit about community.

Back when I started playing, in October of 2005, my server (and I can’t speak to other servers because I only had characters on Eldre’Thalas, at that time) had a bunch of personalities. As you levelled, you knew of pretty much anyone who was a good player, bad player, moron, genius, scammer, you name it.

There was Atlas, the rather infamous leader of The Final Sanctum, who was, by all accounts, a jackass.

There was Suttles, who you could always count on to be yelling inappropriate things.

There was Warninja, who was always happy to open your lockboxes on the Ironforge bridge.

There was Joejoemco, who was pretty much always responsible for insane feats of kiting. Like, if Borelgore (from Eastern Plaguelands) was sitting dead in Ironforge? Yeah, that was Joejoe’s fault.

There was Rastlin, the Horde shaman, who was awesome about creating flasks and rare-ish alchemy items for people, back when you needed to go to Scholomance or Blackwing Lair to find an alchemy lab to make flasks, even arranging things with Alliance folks via the neutral AH, if I’m remembering right.

There was Thack, the main tank of Eternal Force, who was That Guy standing in Ironforge in full Tier 3, on his black scarab mount, having been the guy to ring the gong on the server back when the gates to Ahn’Qiraj were opened.

Since, at the time, battlegrounds weren’t split between battlegroups, you also got to know cross-faction folks pretty well — or, at least, you recognized who murdered you brutally in Warsong Gulch. (Dar, the orc hunter, is who taught me what the hell Scattershot was by using it on me, causing me to exclaim “what in the fuck was that?!”. Elu, the tauren druid, showed me what a bear could do for flag carrying.)

Once you connect realms, the community changes.

However, since the peak of WoW’s population, back in late Wrath of the Lich King, since the introduction of Looking for Group and, later, Looking for Raid, plus the fact that battlegrounds and arenas are battlegroup-wide, there’s very little community remaining on many servers. Larger servers, such as Proudmoore (where I raided for nine months), had enough Alliance-side population to actually have personality. With pugs running constantly, plus gold DKP runs and pre-made groups, Proudmoore was a thriving community (disclaimer: I haven’t had a regularly-played character there since May of 2010). It was so different compared to Eldre’Thalas and its relative silence.

I came back to Eldre’Thalas after about an 18 month break during Wrath. I barely recognized anyone. People applied to Apotheosis, saying they’d been life-long ETers and I was like “who the hell ARE these people?”, although I did recognize the names of guilds they’d previously been in.

Even during Cataclysm, I didn’t recognize a lot of people. I still feel as though there wasn’t a ton of real community on the server. My guildies mostly stuck to in-guild activities, as did I. I tried a normal 10m pug of Dragon Soul on my hunter at one point. I was pulled in on Blackhorn (I was obviously replacing someone who had given up in frustration) and spent two hours working on that fight with these people and we couldn’t get it down. That and Baradin Hold pugs were pretty much the extent of my forays into server activities.

So, if  connected realms change the community of realms where there’s not a lot of community to start with, then this should be a good change, no? I kind of think so.

The other strange thing about Bloodscalp and Boulderfist’s imminent connection is that these are two Horde-dominant servers. Once connected, the total approximate Alliance population will be 35,468 characters compared to the Horde’s 76,639. And these are PVP servers. True, it’s not as though the Alliance aren’t already used to being completely outnumbered by the Horde on these servers, but good Lord, that’s more than twice the amount of Horde as Alliance. One would have thought that Connected Realms would not only bring up overall populations but seek to perhaps even out the faction imbalances, no? Well, I guess not.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Connected Realms are a good idea, even if the idea is not quite unfolding the way I had thought it would. Ultimately, linking realms in this fashion does not make life difficult for anyone (except auction house fiends) and, in fact, helps to build community (where there might not have been much) between separate servers that are now linked.

There are still some unanswered questions I have, in addition to the ones I posed in my last post on the subject:

Old questions:
1) How many realms will be in a Virtual Realm?
2) With which realms will others be connected? Are they going to tack Chromaggus on to Tichondrius, for instance? Or will they do it by lumping together five to ten low-pop realms to be one large Virtual Realm?
3) Will Virtual Realms have names?
4) Will players be able to transfer to a Virtual Realm (and then get randomly dropped on a server within that VR) or will they continue to transfer to individual servers?

New questions:
5) What is the ideal population size of a Connected Realm?
6) When will the actual lower-population realms start to be connected to others?
7) What’s the approximate cutoff that makes a realm “too big” to be connected, if such a number exists?
8) Is there any interest in making sure factions are better balanced?

Oh, and while I was poking around the official forums, looking for people’s reactions, I found this post in the Bloodscalp forums about Connected Realms and had a good laugh, so I absolutely have to share it! :)

Also, don’t forget to check out Kurn’s Recruitment Checklist, to better aid you in your 5.4 recruitment push, and if you need a bit more help, there’s always Kurn’s Guide to Being a Kick-Ass Guild Master! In particular, Module 2: How to Recruit is full of great recruitment info (as you may have already gleaned).

Finally, I’m starting work on my second Kick-Ass Guide! This one is targetted at raiders and will be a lot shorter than the guild master guide. I hope. Well, at 358 pages, the guild master guide is kind of massive, so hopefully it won’t be too difficult to release a shorter guide in a shorter period of time. The GM guide took me close to four months, so I’m aiming for half of that time before the Raider guide is out. Keep yourself up to date here or follow me on Twitter (@kurnmogh) or sign up for my mailing list over at Kurn’s Guides! :)

5.4 PTR Holy Paladin Changes

Kurn / / paladins, patches

Admittedly, I haven’t kept up on all kinds of patch notes in the last several months, but several of the changes noticed in the 5.4 PTR struck me as really interesting.

My instinct is to cringe and brace for impact whenever I see “Paladin” in the patch notes or the noted datamined changes. Rarely when you see a class name are they actually buffing the class. It’s usually some form of nerf.

So what are these changes that I strongly suspected would be nerfs?

1) Eternal Flame initial healing has been reduced by 30%. Boom. Nerf.

2) Sacred Shield stuff that is unlikely to actually be implemented on live. Would have been potentially interesting but probably still would feel like a nerf compared to current Sacred Shield.

3) Sanctified Wrath: Holy: now also increases the critical strike chance of Holy Shock by 20%. Buff!

4) Selfless Healer stacks now also work on Divine Light in addition to Flash of Light. Buff to this talent, no question.

5) Mastery: Illuminated Healing no longer activates from periodic healing effects. HUGE, HUGE NERF. (They’ve mentioned that this really is aimed at Eternal Flame and level 90 talents won’t be punished by this.)

6) Divine Plea no longer reduces the amount of healing done by 50%. A long-overdue change, in my opinion.

After reading the post by Rygarius in the official forums, you can better understand what on earth the devs are thinking here. What you can glean from the post is that too many Holy paladins were taking Eternal Flame, so they nerfed it (directly and then indirectly due to the fact that mastery shields will no longer proc off periodic healing effects) in the hopes of people taking some of the other talents at the level 45 mark in the tree. They admit that they don’t like the new version of Sacred Shield and that they will likely revert it. But they buffed Selfless Healer to give people what they think is a viable choice at that talent level. I’m also certain that they’ll screw more with Sacred Shield to ensure that prot paladins don’t ALL take the shield.

Blizzard has said, time and again, that if a talent is “mandatory”, the choice in the situation has been removed. As such, all three choices should be viable and should be able to be swapped around. That’s likely why Sanctified Wrath got a boost to Holy Shock’s crit, so that it would be better represented next to Holy Avenger and Divine Purpose. It seems as though Holy Avenger is getting a lot of use in fights with high-damage phases. Pop Holy Avenger, throw out a Holy Shock, gaining 3 Holy Power, then Light of Dawn, then Holy Radiance, gaining 3 HP, then Light of Dawn, etc, while Divine Purpose is better for fights without a ton of incoming damage… or for those who aren’t so good at remembering to hit a cooldown but still want a benefit. It seems that Blizzard devs felt that Sanctified Wrath could use a bit more incentive for holy paladins.

So I’m unsure that Sacred Shield will remain the way it is on live realms today. As to Eternal Flame, they said that because they’re nerfing it to no longer work with mastery, they’ll probably bump the initial healing back up, but that there are no plans to revert the change in how it works with the mastery, because it’s just too dominant for the holy population. They said, though, that if it’s needed, they’ll compensate by buffing healing elsewhere, because they think holy healing is at a good level, even with all the healing people were doing through Eternal Flame and the mastery shields it created. They’re not nerfing it because holy paladins are too good — they’re nerfing the talent to make it less attractive because there’s basically not another compelling choice for holy paladins on that tier.

I’m really glad we got a blue post about it, to be honest. It sucks to try to guess why something’s happened, so props to Blizzard for being so open about what they feel is a holy paladin problem. I strongly suspect we’ll see even more information about the level 45 talents in the coming weeks.

Them New-Fangled Virtual Realm Things

Kurn / / guild, patches, ramblings

Late last night, the 5.4 Public Test Realm patch notes were released. In amongst all the typical class changes was this little bit of information.

New Feature: Virtual Realms

  • Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.
  • Players belonging to the same Virtual Realm will have a (#) symbol next to their name.

Now, admittedly, we don’t have much information about Virtual Realms at this point in time, nor do we even know if this will make it through the PTR process to make it to live. But why let a silly thing like logic stop my speculation? ;)

It seems to me, at first glance, that Blizzard has managed to come up with technology to essentially merge low-population realms without actually merging them. Merging realms would, after all, be like admitting defeat, that some realms are ridiculously unpopulated. Currently, on US realms, the most popular is Tichondrius, a PVP/PST realm with over 222,000 characters (as per realmpop.com). According to the same source, the least-populated US-based realm is Chromaggus, a PVP/CST realm with about 17,000 characters. Do you see a difference? ;)

TIME FOR MATH. (Crap.)

Assuming the numbers provided by realmpop are correct, there are approximately 17.5 million characters on 246 US-based realms. The average is, then, around 71,100 characters per realm. Now, of course, that’s just characters and not players, but you can see that if the average (the mean, of course) is around 71,100 characters, realms like poor Chromaggus are woefully underpopulated.

So why not actually merge realms? Why come up with Virtual Realms which, to quote Blizzard, “will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm”? Well, there were some problems with the idea of realm merging. Such as what? Such as names. If you’re on one realm with the name, oh, I don’t know, Kurn, but someone on another realm has the same name, which one of you is Kurn and which one of you is forced to use something like Kurnmogh? (Yes, when I first made my toon, Kurn was taken and so I became Kurnmogh.)

Guild names are similarly problematic.

Further, does merging realms actually solve any problems? Temporarily, yes, but maybe not in the long term. Say that the bottom 20 realms are merged into two realms. Apart from all that craziness going on with names and such, say you were on the server Auchindoun, which, in my example, would be merged with Blackwing Lair, Haomarush, Blood Furnace, Detheroc, Jaedenar, Dethecus, Ursin, Rivendare and Coilfang. So say you’re on Auchindoun and get merged with those other 9 servers. That’s up to 10 different Kurns or 10 different Apotheosises (Apotheoses?) that would have to be organized in terms of names alone. Then, what if this NEW merged server starts losing people? What if others go elsewhere or quit or whatever? Would THAT server be merged? If so, you’re now looking at a second merge upheaval, basically. Merging realms is just not a solid, long-term solution for low-pop servers.

Virtual Realms, however, has solved all of that problematic “upheaval” crap. No need to shut down a server when you can stick people together anyhow. And everyone can keep their own names! I could be Kurn of Eldre’Thalas and have another Kurn on Skywall and if those two realms were part of the same Virtual Realm, there’d be no conflict. Bam. There goes the biggest single headache that comes with the idea of consolidating servers. People can have the same name on the same Virtual Realm and what will distinguish them is the server they’re on and a little # symbol.

Further, Virtual Realms will mean you can join a guild on any of those servers, raid with anyone from those servers, basically do anything with that group of servers the same way you currently do server-only activities. This is kind of interesting. Multi-realm guilds? “Hey, we’re Apotheosis of Eldre’Thalas (and Skywall and Ursin and etc)…”? How’s that going to work, exactly? I’m not against this at all, just wondering how a realm-based thing like a guild is going to be accessible from other realms. Actually, in terms of recruitment, you’ll suddenly have access to something like five or ten times the population you normally do. And all those people could join your guild without paying transfer fees. Good Lord, could advertising your guild in Trade chat actually be worth it???

Virtual Realms will also mean sharing one Auction House. As someone who was quite enjoying the gold-making aspect of the game at the launch of Mists of Pandaria, that’s interesting. A more active Auction House almost certainly means the prices for everything are cheaper, because there’s more of whatever it is you’re trying to buy. For low-pop realms, this may have the repercussion that someone who makes gold reliably by farming hard-to-find materials (like past-expansion herbs and ore — Goldthorn and Fel Iron Ore, I’m looking at you!) may be out of luck because supply will rise and demand will drop. Similarly, if you have the market cornered on a certain kind of item, chances are that you will no longer be the dominant person on the AH with that item. Even if you are, you may be forced to cut your prices significantly to remain competitive.

I think Virtual Realms will be huge for improving the game experience for thousands of people out there, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions:

1) How many realms will be in a Virtual Realm?
2) With which realms will others be connected? Are they going to tack Chromaggus on to Tichondrius, for instance? Or will they do it by lumping together five to ten low-pop realms to be one large Virtual Realm?
3) Will Virtual Realms have names?
4) Will players be able to transfer to a Virtual Realm (and then get randomly dropped on a server within that VR) or will they continue to transfer to individual servers?

We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess, but this is certainly one of the more interesting things I think Blizzard has ever done.

Holy Light of Dawn Nerf, Batman!

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, paladins, patches

I was having a pretty good Friday. Thursday night, Apotheosis killed the Twilight Ascendant Council, so I was feeling pretty good going into Friday. In the afternoon, a friend called me up and we made plans to get dinner and a movie. While at dinner, I discover that my best friend gave birth to her second child earlier in the day. It was a great Friday.

I got home and see this:

Beacon of Light no longer triggers from Light of Dawn.

(Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2259389)

(Please note that this change was reverted. You can read more about it here at Kurn’s Corner: Post 1, Post 2.)

For those holy paladins who made frequent use of this mechanic, this is a crippling blow to their healing numbers and their overall style of healing that has had a few months to develop.

Kurn, slow down. What the hell are you talking about?

Right, sorry. Let me talk about the style a little bit before I explain how this change deserves the term “crippling blow”.

In Cataclysm (and since the 4.0 patch), holy paladins have had two real methods of healing.

Method 1: Beacon a target (likely a tank) and heal the beacon directly, making use of Tower of Radiance to build up holy power in order to use spells like Word of Glory and Light of Dawn.

Method 1 is close to old-school healing and paladins still do really well when it comes to single-target healing. The major difference between this style and Wrath-style healing is that we are generally beaconing the target we are directly healing. Since 4.0, Beacon of Light has only transferred 50% of our heals (including overheals) to our beaconed target, so it’s not as though we can heal one target and beacon another and not have to worry about the beaconed target any longer. No more “set it and forget it” healing when we have a second target to heal, especially if it’s a tank. In current content, I’m pretty sure I can’t keep two tanks up all by myself. And that’s okay. I can still mostly keep one tank up on my own.

Method 1 is my preferred style. I’ve spent my whole WoW career focused on healing single targets and tanks. This is what feels comfortable to me. It’s also fairly clear that Blizzard intends for us to do things this way because of the very existence of the Tower of Radiance talent.

Method 2: Beacon a target (likely a tank) and heal the raid, making use of Holy Shock and likely Blessed Life procs and possibly using Crusader Strike (or, on occasion, directly healing the beacon if you’re even specced into Tower of Radiance, which you may not be!) to get Holy Power in order to cast Light of Dawn (preferably glyphed) to heal the living crap out of the beacon target, while doing some moderate raid healing.

In this way, you are still doing a great deal of healing to the beacon target, but the heals tend to spike; low heals here and there, then a big spike when you get 3 holy power for a Light of Dawn.

Here’s an example of some heals my fellow holy paladin cast during one of our recent raids, with some annotations to show where the beacon heals are coming from and where the holy power is coming from.

[22:42:26.717] Holy Paladin Divine Light Fury Warrior +30777
[22:42:26.993] Holy Paladin Protector of the Innocent Holy Paladin +*826* (O: 5877)
[22:42:27.412] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 18147) — from the DL
[22:42:27.756] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 3952) — from the PotI

[22:42:28.535] Holy Paladin Holy Shock Kitty +*4418* (O: 10545)
[22:42:29.067] Holy Paladin Protector of the Innocent Holy Paladin +4162 (O: 198)
[22:42:29.367] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 7793) — from the HS (1 HP)
[22:42:29.736] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 2571) — from the PotI

[22:42:30.686] Holy Paladin Enlightened Judgements Holy Paladin +*0* (O: 4414) — judgement
[22:42:31.519] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 2602) — from EJ

[22:42:32.532] Holy Paladin gains 1 from Holy Paladin’s Blessed Life — 1 HP

[22:42:35.419] Holy Paladin Holy Light Hunter +12396
[22:42:35.847] Holy Paladin Protector of the Innocent Holy Paladin +5310
[22:42:36.054] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +6198 — from HL
[22:42:36.537] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +2505 — from PotI

[22:42:36.537] Holy Paladin Holy Shock Hunter 2 +10011 — 1 HP
[22:42:37.116] Holy Paladin Protector of the Innocent Holy Paladin +4987
[22:42:37.591] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +2420 (O: 2586) — from HS
[22:42:37.926] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +0 (O: 2352) — from PotI

[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn Enhancement Shaman +0 (O: 8401)
[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn Ret Paladin +7402 (O: 955)
[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn Fury Warrior +0 (O: 8596)
[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn DK Tank +*12149*
[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn Rogue +8935 (O: 928)
[22:42:39.400] Holy Paladin Light of Dawn Frost DK +8300
[22:42:39.813] Holy Paladin Protector of the Innocent Holy Paladin +0 (O: 5272)
[22:42:40.250] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +4200 — from LoD
[22:42:40.250] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +4178 — from LoD
[22:42:40.250] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +4055 — from LoD
[22:42:40.250] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +4109 — from LoD
[22:42:40.250] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +4150 — from LoD
[22:42:40.688] Holy Paladin Beacon of Light DK Tank +2487 — from PotI

Over ~13 seconds, the paladin did a lot of healing to the raid and did about 86k in healing to the beacon target, a DK tank.

This is how it broke down, via timestamps:

22:42:27: 22099 — Big chunk from a DL beacon
22:42:29: 10364 — small
22:42:31: 2602 — smaller
22:42:36: 8703 — small
22:42:37: 7358 — small
22:42:40: 12149 (direct LoD heal) + 23179 — huge

So while it was “only” about 86k to the tank, he healed a lot of raid members, too.

Meanwhile, this is what my ~13 seconds looked like:

[22:42:28.083] Madrana Holy Light Prot Pally +*3433* (O: 14287)
[22:42:28.524] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +*0* (O: 6877)
[22:42:29.367] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +0 (O: 3438)

[22:42:30.688] Madrana Holy Shock Prot Pally +0 (O: 8780) — 1 HP
[22:42:31.021] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +0 (O: 4163)
[22:42:31.717] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +0 (O: 2082)

[22:42:34.200] Madrana Divine Light Prot Pally +2801 (O: 26806) — 1 HP
[22:42:34.200] Madrana Holy Shock Prot Pally +0 (O: 8787) — 1 HP
[22:42:34.643] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +*7077*
[22:42:35.419] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +3538

[22:42:36.902] Madrana Light of Dawn Madrana +7240
[22:42:37.116] Madrana Light of Dawn Resto Shaman +8038
[22:42:37.116] Madrana Light of Dawn Fire Mage +6838
[22:42:37.116] Madrana Light of Dawn Shadow Priest +7013
[22:42:37.116] Madrana Light of Dawn Moonkin +*10750*
[22:42:37.591] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +*6355*
[22:42:37.591] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +3620
[22:42:37.926] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +3705
[22:42:37.926] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +3625
[22:42:37.926] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +3717
[22:42:37.926] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +5697
[22:42:38.238] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +0 (O: 3177)

[22:42:40.250] Madrana Divine Light Prot Pally +21437 (O: 9401)
[22:42:40.688] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +0 (O: 4278)
[22:42:41.510] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Pally +0 (O: 2139)

130470 healing to my beacon target in ~13 seconds, broken down this way:

22:42:29: 21158 — big
22:42:31: 10862 — small
22:42:35: 41932 — huge
22:42:38: 23541 — big
22:42:41: 32977 — huge

So while my heals on my beacon target, a paladin tank, were generally bigger and more regular than my fellow holy paladin’s heals, I also didn’t really do a lot of raid healing. In fact, I’m sure that if you add it all up, he did more healing than I did in that span, especially because a lot of my heals overhealed my tank.

You can see that these are two distinct styles with different focuses. There are different specs for them, different glyphs and it changes how you generate holy power.

So, what does this Light of Dawn/Beacon of Light change mean?

It means that Method 2, which is beaconing a target like a tank and going to town on the raid, becomes a lot less viable. Light of Dawn was that guaranteed big, instant heal. 20k, easily, as long as people were in front of you and you had three stacks of holy power. You really need that extra oomph to help steady out your beacon target. If you could time it well so that just as soon as your target needs that hit, you had that 3 charges of holy power and were properly placed to maximize the number of people Light of Dawn would hit, you were golden. My fellow holy paladin is AWESOME at this and that’s why I put him on the raid and assign him a beacon target and I balance the healing on that target knowing how good he is at getting that LoD to go off at the right time.

With this change, I COULD continue to have him on the raid, but would have to compensate for the lack of big heals from LoD. It would probably be easiest to stick him on a tank full time, which I don’t think he’d like very much. (We’ll talk about it, buddy!)

So can paladins still raid heal?

Eh. Kind of? There’s no excuse not to pick up Tower of Radiance and Eternal Glory now, since our use of Word of Glory should skyrocket since we’re not going to be using our holy power on Light of Dawn very much anymore.

If your paladin is good at using Holy Radiance and is willing to make sure they’re raid-healing using Word of Glory (which will still transfer to the beacon) and direct heals, there’s no reason they can’t raid heal, but I can’t help but think that all priests are better at it than paladins are, with Prayer of Healing, plus Circle of Healing and Sanctuary. Druids can use Wild Growth more frequently now and get extra healing via their mastery by layering Rejuvenation on top of Wild Growth, not to mention, they have Efflorescence. And then shaman are still able to use Healing Rain and Chain Heal… it’s going to be a tough job to raid heal going forward without relying on Light of Dawn for those little spikes on the raid and the cumulative effect on the tanks.

I would be more inclined to put holy paladins on the tanks, but a good player should be able to still raid heal. It’ll just be more difficult.

Any ideas for how to fix paladins, if, indeed, you think they’re broken?

I’m not a numbers person. I don’t look at the healing meters and go “ZOMG I R GUD” if I happen to top them. (Which rarely happens because I’m focused on my tank.) If I did my job, I’m satisfied and my job will mostly consist of healing a tank. I like that job and I feel I’m still able to do it.

However, removing this more dynamic style of healing is going to suck. Why even bother to cast Light of Dawn now? The healing it provides is pretty low at 6-8k a person. With 130k or so raid-buffed, even 10k hits aren’t all that huge. Part of the fun of being a paladin in early Cataclysm was the ability to help out on the raid while healing the tank or helping out on the tank while healing the raid. It seems as though we will be able to do one or the other, but not both — and we’re heavily slanted towards single-target healing with our current spells.

What I would do:

– Restore Holy Light’s Holy Power generation via Tower of Radiance: More holy power to use leads to more LoD use, even if it doesn’t benefit the beacon any longer.
or
– Restore Light of Dawn’s power back up to its level before it got nerfed in terms of strength (either 40 or 60%, I can’t keep all these numbers straight): A stronger LoD means we won’t NEED to cast it as often to still help out on the raid.
or
– Lower the cooldown (and possibly slightly lower the mana cost) of Holy Radiance: If Holy Radiance is used more often, we won’t need to keep trying to use up holy power in order to help out on the raid.
or
– Give us a mastery that actually doesn’t suck.
or
– Chuck Beacon of Light and Light of Dawn and completely redesign the Holy tree in a way that makes us WANT to spend points in it: No details on this because I don’t even know what I’d like to see. I do know that when I look at resto druid trees and holy priest trees, I get jealous, because I can see where it’s an actual choice to pull points from their main trees and put them in disc/shadow or feral/balance. I resent having to spend 31 points in the holy paladin tree and would go another 5 points deep in ret if I could (without losing my 5 in prot). I feel like I should want to drop as many points in holy as possible and really have to make a tough choice to drop talents into prot or ret.

That’s all my opinion, mind you.

But wait! Kurn, what’s this about a Conviction nerf?! Two nerfs in one day?

Sadly, this is true. Holy Radiance crits no longer trigger Conviction. This will lead to less uptime on Conviction, which leads to lower healing overall. Granted, even in 346-level gear, I had about 80% uptime on Conviction. Nowadays, I have about 90% uptime on it and I don’t abuse Holy Radiance on cooldown, so I don’t expect to see too much of a difference in my overall numbers due to this.

Crappy day to be a holy paladin?

So what else is new?

The funniest thing about all this is that when Holy Light was changed to no longer grant holy power through Tower of Radiance, Nethaera was like:

It is intended that Protector of the Innocent and Light of Dawn transfer healing through Beacon of Light. Furthermore, we didn’t feel that changing either of those would have fixed the problem.

(Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1532043235?page=70#1386)

Yeah. You guys got some ‘splainin’ to do.

4.0.6 PTR Changes

Kurn / / paladins, patches

Boubouille over at MMO-Champion has listed a bunch of changes for the new PTR, which is testing out 4.0.6.

The changes that directly affect holy paladins are few (as in, 1) but it’s a buff, at least, not a nerf.

* Divine Plea now gives you 12% of your total mana over 9 sec, up from 10% of your total mana over 15 sec.

* Light of Dawn base healing has been reduced by 40%, from 1008 – 1124 to 605 – 675.

* Tower of Radiance no longer affects Holy Light.

The change to Divine Plea is a good one, probably meant to encourage us to remember that it doesn’t completely suck. The increase in mana gained is nice enough, but packing it into 9 seconds is the real buff. That’s only 9 seconds with 50% reduced healing done. This can mean a great reduction in the use of /cancelaura macros AND a reduction in cooldowns being blown in order to counter Divine Plea’s healing reduction. 9 seconds isn’t very long; there are several moments where you can easily take 9 seconds to do less healing if you need the mana back. If you feel that you can’t do that, for example in the early phases of Halfus, that’s when you blow your cooldowns, since the fight after the first couple of minutes gets easier.

Also, the actual patch notes are out. Here’s a link to them at MMO-Champion.

Of particular interest to us:

Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.

So that’s 18% mana over 9 seconds, glyphed, instead of 15% mana over 15 seconds.

That’s a positive change and I’m pleased to see it on the PTR.

*** Edit *** For crying out loud, three separate updates with paladin stuff? Really?

There was another push of updates last night while I was raiding.

General Paladin Stuff:

* Inquisition is no longer dispellable.
* Rebuke can now be trained by all paladins at level 54. Existing characters will need to visit their trainer, even if they had talented Rebuke before.

We rarely use Inquisition, but there are some cases where we probably should (Halfus post-enrage when you’re spamming the crap out of Exorcism?). But Rebuke? That’s the new-with-Cataclysm retribution talent that is an interrupt. Baseline now? That’s EXCELLENT news. I know pally tanks are OVER THE MOON about this. I’m pleased to have the utility, myself.

Holy
Denounce now has a spell overlay.

I don’t spec for Denounce, although I’m thinking of having a second spec with it for burn phases on Magmaw, for instance. A spell overlay (“power aura”) for it could come in handy.

With regards to the other listed changes, no worries, we are NOT being nerfed again. The Light of Dawn nerf is simply the official change for what they’ve already implemented. Same with Tower of Radiance.

So it’s a pretty boring PTR for us PTR that’s not too game-changing for holies, but it’s definitely a positive PTR for paladins as a whole, particularly with the decision to make Rebuke baseline.

The End of the World as We Know It

Kurn / / achievements, apotheosis, healing, icecrown citadel, patch 4.0.1, patches, raiding, ramblings

Extended maintenance is well underway on US servers and patch 4.0.1 will be implemented on live servers by the time they come back up.

While alternately exciting and depressing, depending on with whom you’re speaking, the one thing the everyone can agree on is that the pre-Cataclysm patch can be described as game-changing.

I both love and hate expansions. I love them because of the new challenges to face and I hate them because I go from knowing basically everything pertinent about my classes to knowing zip. Nada. Zilch. Niente. Rien. Nothin’.

Or, at least, very little. I feel fairly prepared with regards to my paladin, although I’m still feeling “not ready” to let go of my big Holy Lights or my 100% beacons or my 25% mana/1m Divine Plea… But I’m unprepared for all my other classes.

That, however, is a whole other post.

Expansions also mean changes in terms of guilds. Changing toons, specs, even changing guilds. Rosters go through insane amounts of changes between expansions.

Last night, I may have had my last raid with the guild I’ve been in since June. We’ve had a hell of a few months, let me tell you. I joined when they were 7/12 HM in ICC25 and now we’re 11/12 ICC25 HM.

This last reset, Thursday, we finally got heroic Sindragosa. It was the messiest kill ever that involved a bubble taunt by the sole remaining tank and only four people were alive at the end. She had enraged. And yet, she died. Finally. That got most of the raiders their heroic Frostwing Halls achievement, towards their Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25) achievement, which is excellent. That’s been their goal for several months and so most of them are one step closer to that drake. Most were just missing Been Waiting a Long Time for This, All You Can Eat and Neck Deep in Vile.

The guild may or may not continue raiding into 4.0.1. I’m personally of the mind that we will not be able to do half the stuff we do now if all healers are as screwed changed as I think we are. Combine that with parry’s nerf (50% mitigation instead of 100% avoidance), (apparently, I still don’t know how to keep up to date on that “tanking thing”…) changes to block (30% mitigation)… I don’t think that getting rid of Chill of the Throne is really going to do enough to compensate. Anyways, it’s possible that I’m wrong and things are not completely borked and we’ll be able to continue raiding. So things are kind of uncertain.

Man, I hate uncertainty…

Anyways, I walked in to the raid last night knowing we had Putricide, LK and Halion up. I walked in there knowing that this could be my last raid with this guild. I have had a LOT of fun with these people. And before 4.0.1 hits, we got to 11/12 ICC 25 HM. It’s not my first time doing these things, but let me tell you something — when we killed Putricide on heroic 25-man for the second time for this guild, it felt fantastic. It was a beautiful kill. 24 people alive (the 25th had the plague and sacrificed himself for us) and some flawless transitions.

It also ensured five more people in the raid got their heroic Plagueworks achievement, including our primary raid leader, who has always been kind and has always listened to my suggestions, even if my suggestions weren’t always implemented. I was so psyched to get this for her that I even did a silly little fist pump when Putricide died tonight and those five people spammed us with their achievements. Even though that was… probably my 7th heroic Putricide kill, it was definitely in my personal top 3 kills. The top was my own first kill, the second was this guild’s first kill and tonight’s kill is just behind those two.

So faced with an ICC instance where we had killed Saurfang, BQL, Putricide and Sindragosa, all on heroic… we had to look at heroic Lich King.

When one of the officers started detailing the strat for P1 and dealing with Shadow Traps, I paused for a moment.

“The person marked will run out and drop it outside of the raid.”

I blinked.

I have spent, oh, about 30ish attempts on heroic Lich King. That’s not a lot of time or energy. It also happened back in May.

But that still didn’t sound right to me. And then I remembered how my last guild did it, how we split up into one melee group and two ranged. Like this (click for a larger version):

So I let the RL and the GM know that I was pretty sure the strat we were about to try wasn’t going to work and why, but told them I wasn’t 100% sure.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Shadow Trap gets cast and most of the raid goes flying. Hilarious! I wish I’d frapsed it! We lasted 43 seconds. That is less time than the opening speech portion takes. I laughed.

We tried one more attempt on heroic, just for fun, which went a little bit better, before switching it to regular and trying Been Waiting a Long Time For This.

I warned the healers that it was mana-intensive. I even called for an Innervate, which I nearly didn’t get because our bear druid was busy tea-bagging someone who had died. :P (The same thing actually happened to me in my last guild.)

Also a messy kill, but a kill and achievement nonetheless.

On to Ruby Sanctum!

We cleared through fairly easily. And no. The boots did not drop. Which means that Walks and I are stuck with our 245 or 258 Boots of the Courageous or stuck crafting the plate 264 healing boots. Ah, well. Would have been nice to have an upgrade instead of downgrading or staying at the same item level. Killed that dragon 11ish times and still, no 271 plate boots.

Overall, though, a productive night. Got lots of people at least one achievement, got a few people two. Played with heroic Lich King. Cleared Ruby Sanctum.

And through it all, I knew it was a good chance this was the last time I’d ever raid with these people. I knew that soon, it’ll be time for me to lead, to raid with the newly-reformed Apotheosis of Eldre’Thalas.

I’m not going to lie — I’ve enjoyed being a member. No leadership responsibilities, no healing assignments. (Okay, so I took over organizing judgements, but when no one’s judging light and you have five pallies in the raid, someone has to!) (Okay, I also organize who beacons who and who shields who with Walks, but that’s just common courtesy so we don’t always overwrite each other, although Walks consistently does overwrite my damn shield on Sindragosa. ;D)

But I’ve also had to rein in my leadership skills a few times and my poor raid leaders and GM have probably heard enough from me to last them forever! ;) It’s a difficult thing to do, keeping your mouth shut and giving another strategy a chance when you’ve seen another one work flawlessly.

Like I said, though, I’m awfully glad that I got to finish out Wrath with such a great group of people. I’m moving my paladin back to Eldre’Thalas as soon as the guild’s leadership calls it an expansion, basically. That could be as soon as this week or next week or the week before Cataclysm launches.

I may have raided for the last time with these people and honestly, while I won’t miss a couple of them, I’ve had a great time. I feel like I accomplished something by helping them get to 11/12 and a stone’s throw from their drakes. So if this is where we part ways and this is where Madrana goes home… I’m satisfied. Last night was a great way to end raiding, if that is, indeed, the end. Some hilarity on LK, some success with HPP and Been Waiting and a Halion one-shot.

And now, it’s the end of the world as we know it and, though I’ll roll with the punches, I don’t quite feel altogether fine.

Live Realms Updates

Kurn / / apotheosis, general, guild, icecrown citadel, patches, raiding, ramblings

Just a few thoughts flitting about my brain.

1) I got the ZG achievement today with my brother. The funny thing is that we’d both cleared ZG, many moons ago, back probably during the summer of 2006. I’d even cleared it on my hunter, the toon I’d gone with today. Hell, back in the day, I was one of the kiters of the windserpents you kill to poison you, which poisons Hakkar, blah, blah, etc.

Today, my brother and I went in and killed all the aspects plus Gahz’ranka and Mandokir (no Jin’do, though), then did Hakkar. Remarkably easy, sad to say.

I got the Heart of Hakkar and turned it in — had I done this pre-BC, when I was actively running ZG with Fated Heroes, I would have had the achievement on Kurn already. Anyways, it was nice to go in and kill Hakkar again. I can’t remember the last time I did it.

All that rep plus 18 Zandalar Honor Tokens (from bijou and coin turn-ins) and I am 2130 rep from exalted with the Zandalar tribe. I’ve been running ZG for a couple of weeks, farming the Tome of Polymorph Turtle and for mounts and such, but mostly because Kurn deserves to be exalted. Zul’Gurub was my first raid instance (outside of raid groups for dungeons, back in the day) and it was such an amazing sense of accomplishment to have seen my guild progress from taking 3 hours to kill Venoxis to 20-minute Venoxis runs, from wiping on Jek’lik to clearing the instance, including Jin’do.

I’m going to have a proper post about this, soon, but Zul’Gurub deserves better treatment. Zul’Gurub is the reason I started playing this game (that’s a long story, but I’ll explain it in my other post) and it’s being removed for Cataclysm.

ZG is my favourite raid instance, bar none, and is filled with memories of each and every pull and each and every boss. I can take you there and show you where this one warlock always seemed to fall off the bridge on his way to Venoxis. I can take you there and show you how half the raid always seemed to hug the bat riders. I can show you the first bugged fish we ever saw, who actually followed people up on to land and evade bugged while killing us.

So Kurn’s going to finish repping up with those Zandalarian trolls. And I’m glad I finally got the official achievement for an instance I’ve spent so much time in.

2) Somehow, I keep getting roped into doing ICC10 with my brother on the weekends. This whole “DPS” thing is so very strange. I find myself clicking raid frames to try to cleanse people. Actually having to pay attention to what’s happening on the game field, you know, like adds and stuff? Boss health? hahaha, so very, very foreign.

I’ve gotten darn good at dropping snake traps on Putricide, though, and using Disengage in a variety of situations. Juggling disco balls on BPC, well, I’m getting there. ;)

3) New raid lockout system. I like it. I hate 10s and the only reason I’m doing 10s with my brother is because hey, it’s my brother. So I won’t be bitching and moaning about it. We are stuck with the new system in old content for like, a maximum of two months. I understand it means some 10s or 25s are adversely affected and that’s too bad. But I love the new system’s idea. I wouldn’t have implemented it now, were I in charge, but I think it’s fine. <shrug>

4) In terms of live raiding, we nearly 24-manned heroic Putricide until, at 17%, our third tank got DCed. The wheels kind of fell off the bus after that, even after he reconnected a few minutes later. I know I spent most of the rest of the raid laughing my ass off, which is entirely the fault of my GM and my RL. Hope to get heroic Putricide down on Monday and then work on Sindragosa, really. That would be sweet.

Speaking of my current guild, my GM and RL want me to go to the guild meetup in Vegas next year, which would mean my saying to Apotheosis: “Sorry guys, can’t raid for the next few days, I’m going to VEGAS with my OTHER guild!” This still amuses me greatly, but it’s not why they were cracking me up. Seriously, I’m going to miss casting Hammer of Justice on my GM while one of us is MCed on Lady Deathwhisper. I’m going to miss my RL calling the triangle “panties”. I’m going to miss the vast majority of the raiders in this guild, particularly this one gnome mage, who is definitely my second-favourite active mage and in my top five of all-time mages. (Majik, Tandrace, Dar, then probably this mage and then Kylon, I think.)

5) Apotheosis will be opening recruitment soooooon. We’ve already snagged a few people with whom I was at least vaguely acquainted, but keep your eyes peeled for an announcement at our website:

http://www.apotheosis-now.com/

Okay, time to grab a drink and go lead ICC10.

What Holy Paladins Need to Know for 4.0.1

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, guide, paladins, patches, ptr

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***

*Small updates on Monday, October 18th, 2010 – Spell coefficients, a note about Enlightened Judgements vs. Paragon of Virtue*

*Update on Monday, November 22, 2010 – Glyph section somewhat out of date, links to 4.0.3a post.*

With 4.0.1 here as of Tuesday, October 12th, there are several things every single holy paladin absolutely needs to know. I’m going to try to break this down into TALENTS/SPELLS,  GEAR/STATS and GLYPHS. With regards to gemming, both Runed Cardinal Rubies and Brilliant King’s Ambers turn into Brilliant Cardinal Rubies, giving us 20 intellect. We can no longer gem for spellpower. I’m not changing out my gems quite yet, but as we gain levels, we might want to re-examine our gemming.

TALENTS/SPELLS

1) We cannot spec 31/5/5 at launch, because we only get 36 talents at 80. We are not going to be balanced for content at 80 with only 36 talents to spend. Assuming the talent trees stay the same, we have to drop 31 points into holy and then have a tough choice to make. Where do we put the remaining five talents?

Our only real choices:

0-3/3 Divinity: 0%/2%/4%/6% extra healing done to and by us. This is the same talent as the one that exists on live today, only it’s three talent points instead of five.

0-2/2 Eternal Glory: 0%/15%/30% chance for our Word of Glory not to consume Holy Power. This is an amazing talent that allows us to throw out more mana-free heals.

0-3/3 Crusade: 0%/10%/20%/30% extra healing (and damage) on Holy Shock (and lots of damage stuff by 30%). I kid you not, Holy Shock is an amazing spell in Cataclysm. 30% extra healing to it is not insignificant.

0-2/2 Improved Judgement: 0/10/20 extra yards on the range of Judgement. Combined with the extra 5/10 yards on Enlightened Judgements in the holy tree, we are looking at regaining our 40 yard range by dropping two points here.

My recommendations:

3/3 Divinity: 6% flat increase on healing. Do it.

0/2 Eternal Glory: Mana matters, but is not as huge an issue at 80 as it is at 85. The mana costs at 80 are not huge.

From a very early beta build:

Flash of Light: 1658
Holy Light: 263
Divine Light: 1842

Holy Light did get bumped to 9% of base mana sometime after I got these values, which is about 396 mana at level 80. I’m not sure if these values are even still remotely accurate. However, I know that mana wasn’t a huge problem until I hit 82-83. Bear in mind that a lot of things have changed since I was level 80 in beta and I might change my mind on this, but based on the trees right now and my beta experience so far, Eternal Glory doesn’t need our extremely precious two points. If mana is terrible, this should get consideration, but the level 80 values weren’t too bad.

2/3 Crusade: No, really, my hand to God, Holy Shock is used constantly. Holy Shock reduces cast time on FoL, HL and DL and is not an insignificant heal itself. We want Holy Shock to hit as hard as possible. Which means…

0/2 Improved Judgement: I hate that I’m not picking this up, but we’re out of freaking points and we have the base distance of 10 yards on the judgements and an extra 10 yards over in holy. Plus, there’s no more Judgement of Light or Judgement of Wisdom. Judgement is seriously JUST damage and to proc Judgements of the Pure. Judging is now a selfish thing that you do once a minute, so it’s not worth it, with so few points available to us, to drop even a single point here.

So, as of right now, my recommended spec for 4.0.1 is:

31/3/2

Bear in mind that 2/2 Enlightened Judgements can be swapped to 1/2 and you can grab 2/2 Paragon of Virtue, although I think the range is a better choice for us right now in Wrath content.

2) The Holy Power Resource. I nearly forgot to mention this, actually. Holy Power is a secondary resource, meaning it’s used alongside mana, not instead of it.

As you can see, you can have 0, 1, 2 or 3 charges of Holy Power.

For the moment, the only thing that a holy paladin can really use Holy Power for is to heal with our new heal, Word of Glory. Word of Glory with 1 charge of Holy Power heals for less than 2 charges, which heals for less than 3 charges. Word of Glory is an instant-cast heal that is basically a clone of Holy Shock, only there’s no cooldown and it doesn’t use mana. It’s solely dependent on Holy Power.

How do you generate Holy Power?

a) Crusader Strike, which is now baseline for all paladins. (This will be, admittedly, not something we probably use to generate Holy Power all that often.)

b) Using Holy Shock, which is now a passive just for picking holy as your spec. Every time you use Holy Shock, you get a charge of Holy Power.

c) Directly healing your Beacon with Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light. Doing so generates one charge of Holy Power, if you’re specced for 3/3 Tower of Radiance. And you should be.

3) There is no more Flash of Light spec/style, no more Holy Light spec/style. These distinctions are gone. You cannot spam Flash of Light. It is expensive in the new Cataclysmic world. You cannot spam Divine Light, our new big heal, which is sort of equivalent to Wrath’s Holy Light. It’s also expensive. Holy Light is dirt cheap, but heals for itty bitty chunks. We need to adjust to our new heals – the potency of Holy Shock, the weakness of Holy Light, the cost of Flash of Light and the additions of Divine Light, Word of Glory and Light of Dawn. Holy Radiance only comes into play at 83, so we can ignore that for the moment. (But it’s a lot of fun.)

4) Mana matters. We have lost Illumination. Seal of Wisdom is gone, replaced with Seal of Insight, which works a bit like Seals of Light and Wisdom combined, but procs from Seal of Insight only grant us 4% of *base* mana, not *maximum* mana the way Seal of Wisdom did. Further, Divine Plea is nerfed: 10% of mana over 15 seconds, two minute cooldown, reduces healing done by 50% while active. This can be glyphed to 15% of mana back, but that’s still a huge change. We cannot rely on it the way we have throughout this entire expansion. Nor can we rely on Innervates — your druid companions will almost certainly be using this on themselves. Innervate will also only work off the casting druid’s maximum mana, so feral Innervates will be useless. Even Replenishment has been changed. Instead of 1% of maximum mana per 5 seconds, it’s 1% of maximum mana per 10 seconds. What’s that? Mana Tide Totem will still be awesome? HAH. It will now increase party members’ Spirit by 200% for 12 seconds, on a 3-minute cooldown.

I say again, mana matters.

5) Beacon of Light only heals for 50% of what you heal others for. That’s right, the OP awesomeness of our beacon is gone. Combined with the Tower of Radiance talent, it’s clear that we are no longer going to want to set a beacon on someone and just ignore that target except for refreshing beacon, as we currently do.

6) Sacred Shield is gone and its effect has been rolled into our mastery. Mastery is a new stat that all 30 specs can make use of and each spec has its own. Ours is called Illuminated Healing and it means that when we cast a heal on someone, we create a shield the size of 8% of the heal on them, which lasts for six seconds or until it’s been consumed by damage. The 8% scales up with more mastery, which is increased by getting gear with mastery rating on it. Word has it that these shields our heals create are supposed to “roll” or at least not have a smaller shield replace a bigger shield.

7) Blessings have changed. For starters, Blessing of Wisdom is gone. You can find its mana regen properties in Blessing of Might, along with the attack power bonus. Blessing of Kings now only adds 5% to various stats and adds some token resistence to magic schools. Kings does NOT stack with Mark of the Wild. They are identical. Further, these are all 60-minutes and raid-wide and require no reagents.

8) Divine Intervention is gone. Farewell, old friend.

9) Resistance auras have been merged together. So have resistance totems.

10) In case you missed it above, Judgement NO LONGER applies the Judgement of Light OR the Judgement of Wisdom debuff to mobs. Goodbye, passive healing and goodbye passive mana regen.

11) Lay on Hands cooldown reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

12) Our spell coefficients have changed. Thanks to Ophelie from The Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon for doing all the scary math for us. Here are the new spell coefficients.

GEAR/STATS

1) In order to benefit from our armor specialization, you need to wear all plate. Wearing all plate grants us an extra 5% intellect. This is godly, since our spellpower is based on our intellect. Do it.

I’m currently wearing two mail pieces: Heroic Unclean Surgical Gloves and Earthsoul Boots. I plan to swap to Gauntlets of Overexposure from the Emblem of Frost vendor, which are identical to Fallen Lord’s Handguards from regular Lady Deathwhisper on 25m.

Ideally, Halion will drop his boots, Foreshadow Steps, (although Walks and I both know these are clearly a myth and do not actually exist). If they don’t drop for me by the time 4.0.1 drops, I will probably switch to my old 258 boots, Boots of the Courageous from Icehowl in TOGC 25, since I didn’t get the Protectors of Life crafted. The Earthsouls were better. Anyways, obviously not everyone is killing Halion with regularity, not everyone is killing Deathwhisper on 25 every week, so your options may be a bit more limited.

I would be inclined to say switch to plate however you can, but keep in mind things like haste (see point #2) as you do so.

2) The amount of haste we want is going to rise. Bear in mind that Judgements of the Pure is dropping from 15% haste to 9% haste and the 3% haste from Swift Retribution/Improved Moonkin is GONE. That means the soft cap for haste that you want to aim for just jumped up from 676 to something like 1017 haste or thereabouts for a 1s GCD, given JotP + 5% spell haste (from a variety of sources — moonkin aura, shadowform’s aura and a shaman’s Wrath of Air). *** This number changes to 894 haste in 4.0.3a ***

That’s a large number, I know. Do not panic.

Why did we want to hit a 1s GCD in Wrath of the Lich King? We had a lot of spells that we needed to cast that were instant. Things like Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, judging regularly, using Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice… these are all on the GCD and with 1s GCDs, we’re able to hit these and get back to healing that much faster.

With the removal of Sacred Shield, the movement of Divine Guardian way out of our reach, the fact that we only need to judge once a minute, can we afford GCDs that are longer than 1s? Maybe. Though we’re losing Sacred Shield and judging 2-3 times a minute, we are gaining Holy Shock as a useful spell, which, thanks to Speed of Light, also gives us 30% haste to our next Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light.

This haste can offset the longer cast times of Holy Light (3 seconds base, 2.5 seconds with 3/3 Clarity of Purpose, no more Light’s Grace!) and Divine Light, but it means using Holy Shock pretty much on cooldown.

We also gain Word of Glory, which is essentially a clone of Holy Shock, only it’s dependent on Holy Power instead of mana. Just like Holy Shock, Word of Glory is also instant. We also have Light of Dawn as our 31-point talent, which is an instant, conal heal that doesn’t heal for a ton, but can hit a lot of people at once. So, we lose:

– Sacred Shield (1/minute)
– Frequent judgements (2-3/minute)
– Divine Sacrifice/Guardian (1-2/fight)

Our commonly-used instants are now:

– Beacon of Light (refreshing every 60-90 seconds, depending on glyph)
– Holy Shock (6s cooldown, glyph no longer lowers cooldown, more if Daybreak procs)
– Judgement (1/minute)
– Word of Glory (when 3 Holy Power is accumulated)
– Light of Dawn (situational, but up to every 30 seconds)

So is it important to maintain as close to a 1s GCD as possible? Yes, I would say so. However, the other major benefit to haste rating is the lowering of cast times on various heals and that’s where Holy Shock and Speed of Light come in very handy. That’s why you shouldn’t panic. A 1.2s GCD isn’t as optimal as a 1s GCD, obviously, but don’t panic because your casted heals after a Holy Shock are still going to be pretty snazzy.

Some early beta build numbers are below. Bear in mind that in order to proc Speed of Light, you have to cast Holy Shock before the casted spell.

With 1026 haste only:

Flash of Light: 1.14s cast
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.68s cast

With 1026 haste and JotP:

Flash of Light: 1.05s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.54

With 1026 haste and Speed of Light (3/3):

Flash of Light: 0.879s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.29

With 1026 haste and JotP AND Speed of Light:

Flash of Light: 0.806s
Holy Light & Divine Light: 1.18s

A Speed of Light-hasted Holy Light casting in 1.18s is even a bit faster than I currently get on live.

I’m going to do my best to maintain my current haste rating of 1036, which I add to with 40 haste food. However, as previously noted, I need to replace my boots and my gloves with plate equivalents. IF I get the boots from Halion, I’ll be at 1016 haste. If I don’t, I’ll be at 1006, since I’ll drop to my TOGC 25 boots. (I ALWAYS keep everything I wore in the previous tier, just in case I need a resist set or something.)

3) Librams are now stat-sticks. That’s right, we get our very own ranged weapon slot for our relics (and many will no longer be class-specific in Cataclysm!) and they add to our stats. What this means is that, almost certainly, the higher the ilvl libram or relic you have, the better stats are on it. Pallies with the Libram of Renewal will want to get Libram of Veracity which turns into this lovely thing or, if you can spare the Emblems of Frost, the Libram of Blinding Light. (I know. I kind of died inside.) But it turns into this:

GLYPHS

*** This section is outdated for 4.0.3a, please see the 4.0.3a post for updates on some Glyphs and some Glyph choices ***

Glyphs are changing. They’re not going to be consumed any longer, but rather learned. We also have a new kind of glyph: Prime glyphs, in addition to Major and Minor.

Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket says that we’ll get 1 Prime/Major/Minor at 25, 50 and 75, so we’ll have all 9 slots at 80.

What this means for holy paladins is that we want to get all of our glyphs and we want them ASAP.

First off, what glyphs do we want?

Prime Glyphs, by the way, are supposed to be the no-brainers of the glyph world and they exist in order to let us be more choosy in terms of major glyphs, while minors are supposed to be more cosmetic.

PRIME

1) Glyph of Divine Favor. Divine Favor has changed, as you can see by the talent in the talent tree. This glyph extends the duration of Divine Favor by 10 seconds. This is lovely.

2) Glyph of Holy Shock. No longer does this reduce the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 second. This now increases its crit by 5%.

3) Glyph of Seal of Insight. This works just like the current Glyph of Seal of Light. While you have Seal of Insight active, all your healing is increased by 5%.

4) Glyph of Word of Glory. Increases the healing done by Word of Glory by 10%. Get this.

I would start out with Holy Shock, Seal of Insight and Word of Glory and eventually get enough crit to drop Holy Shock and pick up Divine Favor.

MAJOR

1) Glyph of Beacon of Light. Unchanged from live, it makes your Beacon last 90 seconds instead of 60 seconds. Yoink!

2) Glyph of Cleansing. Reduces the cost of your Cleanse by 20%. Not something I would personally invest in.

3) Glyph of Divine Plea. This used to be for prot pallies, but this is ours, now. This allows you to get an extra 5% mana back when you use Divine Plea, so you’re getting 15% mana back every two minutes instead of 10% mana back.

4) Glyph of Divinity. Same as on live, will grant you mana back and grants double the mana it normally does to its target. Actually has a spot in my glyph book, now.

5) Glyph of Light of Dawn. Reduces the cooldown of Light of Dawn by 10 sec and the amount healed by 20%. I wouldn’t touch this. LoD already heals for such a small amount (3k or so per target) that we do not need LESS healing done more often. I don’t think, anyways. This is a situational glyph, but I’ve been glyphed for it more often than not. This is golden on Infest on the Lich King, although this spell and its glyph are both changing in 4.0.3a.

6) Glyph of the Long Word. Your Word of Glory heals for 50% less up front, but provides an 50% additional healing over 6 seconds.

So what I would take here is Glyph of Beacon of Light, Glyph of Divine Plea and Glyph of Divinity. I’m not a fan of Glyph of the Long Word.

MINOR

1) Glyph of Lay on Hands. Reduces the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 2m. Since Lay on Hands is a 10m cooldown now, this brings it to 8m. Lovely.

2) Glyph of Insight. Reduces the mana cost of Seal of Insight by 50%. Doesn’t sound like much, but at 85, that’s like, 1500 mana savings or something, since the seal costs over 3000 mana.

3) Glyph of Blessing of Kings. Reduces the mana cost of Blessing of Kings by 50%.

4) Glyph of Blessing of Might. Reduces the mana cost of Blessing of Might by 50%.

Obviously, Glyph of Lay on Hands, particularly since I recommend Glyph of Divinity. The other two are up to you, but those are the only minors a holy would find at all useful.

Also, El (of El’s Extreme Anglin’) says that there are several glyphs that will be turned into new ones.

Here’s the conversion chart.

Among them, some that affect holy paladins:

Flash of Light -> Word of Glory
Holy Light -> Divine Favor
Seal of Light -> Seal of Insight
Seal of Wisdom -> Light of Dawn (so many people will have this — make sure to replace it!)

Okay, I think that sums it up. It’s a long post, I know, but I will definitely update this post going forward, since there will undoubtedly be changes to the beta and PTR before 4.0.1 launches and probably some 4.0.1 changes that will, uh, surprise us…

And for those of you who like to tank in your spare time (or tank most of the time and heal in your spare time), here’s the Righteous Defense guide to Everything you need to know about Prot and 4.0.1 at 80.

Please bear in mind that this guide is somewhat out of date as of the launch of 4.0.3a. Please see that post for updates.

*** All content copyright © Kurn’s Corner, 2010. Reproduction of this guide in full or in part without express permission from the author (“Kurn”), represents copyright infringment and violation of copyright law. Please, if you like this guide, link to it, do not copy it. ***