Shadowlands: What Should I Play?

Class Icons.

You can vote for which class I should play at this straw poll link: https://www.strawpoll.me/20918880

I’m having a bit of trouble deciding what I want to main in this upcoming expansion. This problem is generally amplified by being unable to get beta access to test the characters to get a feel for them. So far, I’ve made very little progress eliminating options. I’m further undecided because I’m not even set on a role. While I lean heavily towards dps main, the value of being able to tank mythic dungeons or heal PVP is not lost on me, and maybe tank or heal? Or maybe a class that can do all 3, but, then I’d probably only be exceptional at once of those. So, what do I choose: Melee or range? Tank, dps or heals? In this post I’ll break down the what and the why and there could be some links to some resources to make your decision too.

The Contenders:

  • Paladin: Ret MS, Prot/Holy OS
  • Death Knight: Unholy/Frost MS, Blood OS
  • Demon Hunter: Havoc or Vengeance MS/OS
  • Monk: Windwalker MS, Mistweaver OS
  • Mage: Any Spec
  • Hunter: Beast Mastery or Marksman MS/OS
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What to Play in Mists of Pandaria?

With World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Mists of Pandaria, only 3 days and 10 hours away (as of the time of this writing), I’m finding myself in a bit of a pickle – I’ve yet to choose a class and spec that I intend to play. For some, this choice may be simple. Perhaps you only have one character at the Cataclysm max level of 85, making it the most sensible choice to level. I’ve managed to get every class leveled to max which completely exacerbates my indecision. Should I stay on my Death Knight to keep dishing out the diseases and protecting my face with blood shields? Should I revert to my previous main and lay down some holy wrath or healing on my Paladin? Any other class is also an option, except my poor abandoned rogue. I don’t much care to pay for a server transfer to get him on the same server as my guild. Maybe I should make a list:

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Daily Thoughts: Fears of Tanking – The Conclusion!

This is the third part of a series I’m doing on my fears of tanking Cataclysm heroics. If you haven’t been following along you can read the FIRST PART and SECOND PART now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. To quickly summarize for those too lazy to go back and read the past posts, I had expressed a general hesitation in jumping into tanking the relatively serious Cataclysm heroics, particularly with unsatisfactory gear. I finally decided on an acceptable gear level for tanking a heroic: An item level of 333 and at least 130k health. This coupled with at least the cheap versions of the spec appropriate gems and enchants should put me in a place for success – as long as I don’t suck!

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Daily Thoughts: Argaloth

For those who were worried that cataclysm wouldn’t be hard, my repair bill after the Omnitron encounter in Blackwing Descent would serve to lessen those fears. There are also, though, quite a few who are now worried that cataclysm is too hard. For those people, I’d like to refer Argaloth. He is the first boss in Baradin Hold, the new VoA like boss area in Tol Barad. He drops current tier pvp pieces along with, you guessed it, a couple pieces of PVE tier. I’m not entirely sure if he has a stronger bias towards PVP, as so far after 3 kills and 6 epics, my guild has only seen 1 tier piece. Even better, it was for a class not represented in that raid. Either way, we still have a way to get some epics without too much trouble. Argaloth does serve the function as acting as somewhat of a gear check. Think of it as the entrance examto cataclysm raiding. In 10m at least (and I’d guess 25m would be similar) each dps player must average 10k dps during the encounter to not hit his rage timer. This really isn’t hard with basic heroic/badge gear and some cheap gems/enchants.

Wowhead was nice enough to put up a little description as well as strategy for Argaloth. Check it out after the break.

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Daily Thoughts: Ret Gets Buffed in Patch 4.0.6

The above chart was featured in a WoW insider Scattered Shots article, you can see the full article HERE.

Notice retribution at the very bottom of the raiding dps specs. Now, this doesn’t include the traditionally low raiding performance “pvp” specs such as subtlety rogues, but ret pallies are still easily 25% below the top performing dps spec and also lower than the next lowest by almost 1,000 dps. Naturally, I’d love to run around topping the meters, but balance at least is much preferred to the current state of affairs. Did we paladins despair though? Of course not! We knew at some point the useless mastery would be reforged into something we wanted, at least a little, and boost our dps. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom (is always wisdom when they’re buffing your class right?), also buffed our bread and butter attack, Crusader Strike. Check out the paladin class changes.

Paladins

  • The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.
  • Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%.
  • Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

Talent specializations

Retribution

  • Divine Purpose: The chance for applicable abilities to generate Holy Power has been reduced to 7/15%, down from 20/40%, but instead of generating 1 Holy Power, the next applicable ability used consumes no Holy Power and acts as if the paladin has 3 Holy Power.
  • Hand of Light (Mastery): A percentage of the damage done by Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm is done as additional Holy damage.
  • Repentance is no longer broken from damage done by Censure (Seal of Truth).
  • Glyphs
  • Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.

The two biggest changes we have here are the 20% more base damage to crusader strike and our mastery changing. Mastery is now a passive holy damage buff to key attacks and our old Divine Purpose talent has become the same as what Mastery was.  Depending on what this percentage ends up being, we could see a very significant boost to damage. This mastery also gives blizzard an easy knob from which to tune our DPS if it’s ever too low or too high. Holy paladins are also probably a little excited about the slight buff to divine plea which provides an extra 2% mana (3% talented) over a shorter time span.

I’m really excited to see ret damage come up to par with our other dps pals and for the first time was considering copying my toon over to a test realm to see the changes first hand before they went live, alas, the page isn’t currently loading. Maybe there’s a bunch of other enthused paladins clogging up the internet.

The rest of the 4.0.6 patch notes can be viewed HERE.

Daily Thoughts: The Cataclysm Paladin

I’ve spent a lot of posts recently talking about zones (and yes I’m still going to do that Twilight Highlands review at some point), factions, and other such things and not much time on the actual playing my class. The big changes specifically to Paladins in cataclysm (if you don’t count Holy Power from 4.0.3) are the new spells:

Inquisition is our new self buff. It increases all holy damage by 30%. Retribution gets a talent that extends the duration of this buff to 10 seconds per Holy Power used to trigger it. This is meant to be kept up as much as possible similar to Slice and Dice for combat rogues and is a pretty significant DPS loss if not used.. Holy Radiance is pretty much making us a moving healing stream totem, and does an AOE heal to nearby targets. I haven’t got much play testing with this spell, as I’m running ret main now, but I really haven’t heard anything too exciting about from those doing Holy main spec. Finally, Guardian of Ancient Kings is amazing. This buff has a long (5m) cooldown, but skyrockets a ret paladins DPS when used. From what I hear from the other specs, it seems it’s a better friend to ret than the other uses. Each spec gets a specific purpose, one for taking, extra heals for holy and more damage for ret. Follow me after the break for some more…

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