Today I want to briefly talk about the bane of all elemental shamans, Totem of Wrath. This totem is the core caster buff totem that ele shamans bring to a raid. It gives a better spell power buff than the flametongue totem, and it also provides additional crit on any enemies within it's range. So in theory, it sounds like a great thing doesn't it? The problem comes into the sacrifice a shaman must make to provide the buff. Ele shaman DPS appears to be balanced around the thought that we will be using searing/magma totem as an additonal DPS source. However, those totem share the fire totem used by ToW. So the only way to maximize our personal DPS is either to screw over the rest of the raid, or have an additonal person supplying the buff. That is just poor design. I can't think of a single other class that is forced to sacrifice DPS to provide a buff like this.
I ran a Patchwerk 25 last week just for fun, and was shocked to see we had another ele dropping ToW. I gleefully plunked down my searing totem and went to town. It sucks to see the extra DPS boost we SHOULD be able to use at all times. I ended the fight around 6.5k.
So how would I address this if I was Blizzard? The best solution would be something like this:
Totems of Wrath: All of your fire totems now also provide a 280 spell power buff to all raid members for 5 minutes when they are dropped. In additon, as long as a fire totem is active, increases critical strike chance against any enemies within 40 yards.
Or even better:
Brothers of the Flame: As long as the shaman has Flamtongue applied to his weapon he also gains an aura providing 280 spell power to all raid members within 40 yards. In addition, this aura provides additonal critical strike chance against all enemies within the raidius.
Either of these options would provide the same functionality as the current Totem of Wrath, and allow the shaman to actually USE his DPS totems.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
What a difference a week makes...
As briefly outlined in my last post, my guild has been down in the dumps lately. Last week was terrible, as we struggled to fill our raids. Come the end of our 2nd night of raiding we still had 2 keepers up. It was very demoralizing to take such a huge step backwards. We had a bunch of emo convulsions from some less patient people and had a couple of people lay down an ultimatim to the leadership. Fix it, or we are gone.
To be fair, these people had a point. I think we had gotten far too lax about dealing with the problem as it was developing. When people started not showing, we kind of shrugged our shoulders and figured they would be back soon. This was a mistake. We should have aggressively recruited replacements. Well, after the disaster that was last week we did just that. We managed to pull 5 new recruits in to fill the gaps in our roster. We got some of them in for the final night of raiding last week and cleared the rest of the instance up to Yogg. Things were starting to look up a bit. But even that did not prepare me for last night.
Walking into a fresh raid week we immediatly filled up and had 2 people on standby. Already that is a great sign. For the last month we were usually starting FL with 20 people or so, and scrambling to find some friends or trusted PUG people to plug in. I also did not have to heal and was finally able to spend an entire raid night as elemental. Not that I mind healing, I just get tired of gearing one spec as my main, but constantly having to do another job. As we begin clearing the instance, you can just feel the difference a reinvigorated raid and leadership can make. Suddenly, we are one shotting every boss without issues, and chain pulling trash to the next boss while loot is being handled.
When we got to Kologarn and had 6 people doing over 6k DPS and the entire rest of the DPS around 5K or above, everyone started noticing that tonight was finally different. We cleared out all 4 keepers easily, and it was about 20 minutes until our normal stop time. So our initial discussion was if we should just call it there, or head back and clean out an optional like Razorscale since we had a bit of leftover time. We had never gotten all 4 keepers down on night 1, so we were already ahead of our normal pace. Our MT threw down the gauntlet and insisted we go for general. Some people were a bit nervous, as his trash sucks, and by the time we were going to be pulling him we would need to get him down in the first 2 or 3 attempts. Finally we decided if we were ever going to push Yogg seriously, this was the week to make it happen. General went down easily.
The point of this story is that if you have a solid core of people dedicated to the guild, you can turn it around very quickly as long as leadership makes an effort to fix the issues. I was seriously afraid this week might break our guild, but instead now we are looking at a full 2 nights to finally get Yogg down, rather than our regular hour or so. This guild has done great things on a short raid schedule in the past, such as downed Archimonde and went deep into BT before the nerfs. Last night I felt like we were back and having a great time again.
To be fair, these people had a point. I think we had gotten far too lax about dealing with the problem as it was developing. When people started not showing, we kind of shrugged our shoulders and figured they would be back soon. This was a mistake. We should have aggressively recruited replacements. Well, after the disaster that was last week we did just that. We managed to pull 5 new recruits in to fill the gaps in our roster. We got some of them in for the final night of raiding last week and cleared the rest of the instance up to Yogg. Things were starting to look up a bit. But even that did not prepare me for last night.
Walking into a fresh raid week we immediatly filled up and had 2 people on standby. Already that is a great sign. For the last month we were usually starting FL with 20 people or so, and scrambling to find some friends or trusted PUG people to plug in. I also did not have to heal and was finally able to spend an entire raid night as elemental. Not that I mind healing, I just get tired of gearing one spec as my main, but constantly having to do another job. As we begin clearing the instance, you can just feel the difference a reinvigorated raid and leadership can make. Suddenly, we are one shotting every boss without issues, and chain pulling trash to the next boss while loot is being handled.
When we got to Kologarn and had 6 people doing over 6k DPS and the entire rest of the DPS around 5K or above, everyone started noticing that tonight was finally different. We cleared out all 4 keepers easily, and it was about 20 minutes until our normal stop time. So our initial discussion was if we should just call it there, or head back and clean out an optional like Razorscale since we had a bit of leftover time. We had never gotten all 4 keepers down on night 1, so we were already ahead of our normal pace. Our MT threw down the gauntlet and insisted we go for general. Some people were a bit nervous, as his trash sucks, and by the time we were going to be pulling him we would need to get him down in the first 2 or 3 attempts. Finally we decided if we were ever going to push Yogg seriously, this was the week to make it happen. General went down easily.
The point of this story is that if you have a solid core of people dedicated to the guild, you can turn it around very quickly as long as leadership makes an effort to fix the issues. I was seriously afraid this week might break our guild, but instead now we are looking at a full 2 nights to finally get Yogg down, rather than our regular hour or so. This guild has done great things on a short raid schedule in the past, such as downed Archimonde and went deep into BT before the nerfs. Last night I felt like we were back and having a great time again.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Summertime blues
Raid Update
The elusive Yogg kill still taunts me. Is it because we are scrubs and cannot figure out his mechanics? Is it because our DPS sucks? Are our tanks reatrded?
No my friends, it is the dreaded summertime. Filling raids has become difficult, as once 100% attendance college students head home or get summer jobs. Other people get busy with this thing call "Real Life". I hear it has good graphics. This basically means we always end up with about 20 people that are regular raiders ready to go, and then try and peice together the last 5 spots with friends that have no idea what they are doing. This is the unfortunate drawback of being in a non-hardcore style of raiding guild. We do not have strict attendance requirements, and we do not raid more than about 9 hours a week. This means we end up wasting a ton of time each week training people or making people play an offspec to fill a role. We wipe to stupid things like killing one of the 3 Freya adds, or not moving away from everyone when you have the General's life drain. We still clear everything up to Yogg, but we just run out of time for serious attempts. It is frustrating to take steps backwards when raiders disappear on you.
This last week was our first night with more than an hour of work on him. We ended up getting into Phase 2 several times, but we were still in the learning mode, so several people did not understand what they were supposed to be doing. It was still good practice, as I believe everyone now has a good understanding on how to deal with Phase 1. The fight does not seem overly tough, and I am sure we could have it cleared if we could just get all of our raiders to show on the same night.
3.2 opinions
I am sure by now everyone has been reading the 3.2 details that have been all over the place. I am not sure what to think. The shaman specific things are great. I love all totems on one global cooldown. It's about time! I also like the resto buffs, but am a little doubtful they went far enough with fixing Chain Heal. They needed to bump the bounce up to 15 yards or so IMO. I don't feel a few more yards will cut it. I have not seen any raw throughput numbers to know how good the 40% reduction per jump is compared to the current 50% Obviously it is an improvement either way, I am just unsure how much. Now if they could only make elemental provide the ToW buff and still let us use our DPS totems I would be happy.
As for the other big changes, I am torn. It just seems we keep sliding further and further into the "casual" side of the game. While our guild straddles the line between casual and hardcore, I personally dislike the constant dumbing down of everything. Having one token for your entire gear set? Letting everyone buy Tier 8.5 just from heroics? It is a bit much. When do we get a menu to choose whatever we want from the boss loot table? However, I applaud the move of splitting hard-modes into a seperate raid lockout with a pull-limit in place. Great idea to let everyone clear it the normal way for the week and then have a fresh instance just to work the hard modes.
DK project
In non-shaman related WoW news, my DK tank project has now hit the wall where I can only get anything by raiding after only 2 weeks at 80. I ended up tanking a Naxx 25 and got about 5 peices. While I am happy she is getting geared, I am not happy I have nothing to do once again but raid, or go level another alt. I guess with the badge changes coming, I can gear her up through heroics again and just hit the raids when I can on the weekends.
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