Random Musings

So it's been over a month since my last post (insert "my life is so tough" story here), and I finally have the time and energy to make another one. This will basically be a collection of my WoW-related thoughts since my last update. It'll be like reading a whole month out of one of those motivational calenders at once, only with more awesome. So take a seat and start taking notes.

5v5 Arenas and Synergy: Why Some Classes Are Common and Others Are Not
I got to thinking a while ago on why exactly warriors and paladins are so damn common in 5v5, while very few teams run druids, rogues, and warlocks. The answer is not just Divine Shield and Mortal Strike, the answer is that warriors and paladins are pretty weak on their own, but they synergize extremely well with each other, and with the rest of a team. By contrast, rogues, warlocks, and druids are primarily solo creatures, who are very well-rounded in 1v1 due to their lack of glaring weaknesses, but because of this, they also have no great strengths to bring to a team either. In other words, they lack synergy.

Illumination Nerf: The Sky Didn't Fall
As the title says, the illumination nerf, while causing some problems, hasn't caused the obsolescence of the healadin. While our paladins now face stiffer competition from other healers on the epeen meters, I have yet to see a tank die because a paladin ran OOM, and I can still keep my 1935-rated (at the time of writing) 5v5 team up as the only primary healer. And in the end, that is the only real measure of healing effectiveness.

SA Nerf and Tanking
Over the past month, I've wound up being forced into the main tank role in several heroic 5-mans, and even in Karazhan. Thankfully, I've rescued a lot of tanking gear from disenchantment, so I was up to the task in that department, and I found that, despite the SA nerf, I was still able to adequately preform all of my duties as tank in most encounters. Where I found myself hurting was when I was off-tanking Moroes: I handled the adds just fine, but as the fight wore on, I didn't have enough mana, despite an innervate and a mana pot, to generate enough threat on Moroes, so he ran to healers and DPS after the gouge, making the fight much harder than it needed to be. It was still a kill, but from my experiences, a lesser geared raid would not be able to do this fight with a paladin offtank, and that is not a good thing.

Finally, Some Good Post-2.0 Paladin PvP Videos
Ever since 2.0 hit, paladin PvP videos have mostly consisted of large crits by ret-spec paladins wielding top gear. These videos are fun for about 2 minutes, but in the end, what I like to see is some tough situations overcome with skill and ingenuity. 3 videos in particular seemed to capture those elements very well.

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=39545
Holydiver's first (and hopefully not his last) PvP video. The only ret video I've seen that really impressed me. Primarily outdoor PvP, and a minimalistic editing style make it an entertaining watch, and there are some good, intense fights as well.
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=41342
Cosaga's 4th movie. A bit too heavy on the RP/storyline elements for my taste, but he does a great job of putting the 40/0/21 spec through its paces, showing arena healing and solo PvP.
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=41171
Fury of the Light, a 40/0/21 movie from Deadlyblonde. I don't really like the editing, but there are enough great fights and big numbers to make a solid movie.

On a related note, if there's a good PvP video you think I missed, feel free to toss it in a comment.

41/20: The Ultimate Workhorse Spec(?)
41/20 is viewed as the quintessential healbot spec of TBC, but I'm of the opinion that the reason this spec is so popular is due to its versatility. Not only can you heal well in PvE, but with the prot talents, you are also a very tough Arena/PvP healer, you make an acceptable tank for non-heroic 5-mans, and you can also do some decent PvP damage. And while other specs will do better than 41/20 at 1 thing, I have yet to see a spec that can do it all like 41/20 can.

Why 5pc Sets Suck
It seems like one of the most persistent complaints of paladins is bad itemization. And indeed, this complaint holds weight in most cases. PvE Healadin plate is loaded with far too much spell crit and not enough MP/5, Retadin and Tankadin plate has far too much spell damage, and the non-set armor pieces are often tailored exclusively for warriors (and until 2.1, some of them were even warrior only). The cause of this is 5pc tier sets. Judging by the way they make sets, blizzard has a certain amount of each stat that they want each class to have. Because off-set items do not have paladin-specific stats like spell damage, int, and spell crit, our tier sets get loaded up with these stats, even if we don't really want them there. And to make things worse, due to the way itemization points work, we end up losing a lot of the stats we do want because of the large amount of secondary stats that get piled on to our tier sets. For instance, the tier 6 healing helm has zero MP/5, but a ton of spell crit. The solution to this is to return to 8 or even 9 piece sets like pre-BC. This would allow Blizzard to spread out our secondary stats out over more pieces, leaving more points for primary stats.

Patch 2.1: Raiding is Fun Again (But also a bit too easy)
Patch 2.1 was really the fix that raiding needed. Less consumables, better gear, fewer cockblock encounters. Even with having to use more mana pots, I still spend about 35% as much on consumables as I used to, and logging in to like 100 +heal, 7 MP/5, and about half a spell crit on patch day really made up for the lack of elixirs. Raiding has gone from being about farming and grinding to being about killing bosses, which is how it should be. My only gripe is that a few of the encounters seem to have been tuned a bit on the easy side: Has gone from Hydros to Lady Vashj since the new patch, and all of the bosses took less than 1 night to learn and kill. Some of the bosses did need to be toned down a bit, but a guild that raids for about 16 hours a week should not be able to clear an entire instance in a month.