Spec Speculation

Duel specs are apparently on the way *insert trumpets now*. How do we feel about the concept? Dunno, at the moment its a mixture of ambivalence with a dash of shrug and a smidge of oh dear. I have read a few eminent blogger's views, done some navel gazing, found a little bit of smelly fluff and then mused some more. Conclusion being drawn in the Boomdaddy's head is that the jury is still out. It solves some problems and is a nice luxury to have , for sure....but its not without some drawbacks, methinks.On a purely personnal note, I may well invest in the latest gold sink but......


As to what the second spec will be ,I am still clueless. I am balance.I have always been balance.I levelled from 1-80 balance all the way (apart from 2 weeks of resto to help the guild finish Kara, and I will say anyone that levels resto deserves a big Boomkin pat on the back).I chose to do this because I fell in love with initially being a druid and then with the balance spec. I love my feral brethren, but being a bear head banger or a sneaky kitty cat simply doesn't float my boat. Our guilds top tank is feral, he's great, so let him have it.....me, I don't know the dribbly end from the stinky end of bears. I'm balance, Im the Boomdaddy, I was there when Boomkins were laughed at and not allowed to raid. I strove to learn my craft, read all I could, practiced practiced practiced...and by the time my guild hit SSC I was consistently in the top 5 dps, sometimes top.

The appeal of the balance druid for me, has always been the challenge to excel and the utility of the class. Utility, yes. We are the finest class around because we are flexible, hard working and have a set of abilities that are finally seen by guilds as being very attractive in raids. The rush of battle rezzing the main healer, cross healing till they are good to go and then swithching back to deal more death is awesome, and many times raid saving. Ok our dps will suffer and we don't like to be out of top 5 BUT we regularly save the day. If a specific fight needed a cross healer, there we were. I say all this because I don't wont to be a leafy drood. I'm more than happy to cross heal, rez and bring that utility to a raid but that doesn't mean I want to heal as a lifestyle choice.So is there a burning desire to have healing as an off spec? Nope, not even a warm tingle. I fought to make the Boomkin viable for raids whilst being a Boomkin, not a Boomkin with a spare healer in his luggage. My fear is for some of my brethren boomers who may get TOLD to have resto or feral as their offspec, that raid places will be assigned to those that have dps/heal rather than the dps'r that heals.

The whole bullshit "bring the player not the class" is simply going to get worse. By homogenising the classes so much, dumbing down the game content and virtually destroying any need for diversity or crowd contol, Blizzard have not done the player base any real favour. Feel free to throw rocks at my head but that's the way I feel. All the classes were there for different reasons, with different responsibilities....now its all some soupy mish mash. I feel for the pure dps classes on this one. Unless they get a bit of love many could feel the chill when they are left out in the cold. Having a completely viable raid with 25 droods or 25 palaroaches strikes me as hysterical. The current content (hopefully Ulduar will be diferent) simply doesn't require the diversity of TBC and duel specs will make this even more apparent.


It will make raiding simpler, the great unwashed shout! Yes it will, and that bloodywell blucks. The content needs to become harder not easier to keep the game a challenge and to keep its product life cycle in growth ,not decline.

From a guild perspective, duel specs could be great for ensuring everyone has the opportunity to do instances etc that they need. It will ease tank and healer shortages, even if the majority of them are clueless how to play their role. It might be nice "for a change" too. All pluses, for sure. I think our hardcore social guild will tell everyone that duel specs are optional and raiding will continue based on current mains. If people want to duel spec, its completely down to them. My fear is that this will not be the case in all guilds and that's where the little bit of "oh dear" comes in.

Back to Boom

Hmmmmm I have been remiss on posting the last couple of days, due to a lack of any happy content to share and due to car crashes involving knife wielding ,non insured hoodies. But this is about the highest evolution of druids and not my secret agent like life....so on with some news.



25 man Naxx. Don't even go there. Nope, we were shite.Not just bad but shite.Don't know if it was the mix of battle rezzing, off healing, frequent deaths or what...but we were ashamed to be the Boomdaddy. Some how we managed to both suck and blow at the same time....we blucked I guess. Even the tight arsed magetards ate us up and pooped us out like twiglets.


The upside is we finished off 25 man Naxx again last night followed by Sartharion 25 with one drake up. I didn't capture the figures for the final two bosses in Naxx, but on the big cuddly dwagon (plus friend) the BoomMummy came in second placed dps and the Boomdaddy came in 5th. 3380 dps and 3090 dps respectively. A little pride was restored to the Boomkin nest at least. Warlocks seem unbeatable in raids at the moment...but that may change a little now the Boomdaddy has a new toy......drum roll

Good Head Love

Yep, the T7.5 helm voucher dropped and we were high enough placed in the epgp list to nab it, Sorry Boommummy. That little beauty gives me the 4 set bonus (helm, chest, gloves, shoulders) and we are a token or two away from the legs also. Happy days. It's meant we can swap our crit legs for the haste leggings of the winged serpent. Stats stand at 1742 spell damage, 299 hit, 27.66% crit (now effectively 32.66% with the set bonus..weeeeee) and 333 haste.

Roll on the next raid to see if any of that makes any difference!

The missing stats.......

Ho Hum. Well, we knew it was going to be tough to get a top 5 finish with the quality of some of the other dps. Boomdaddy is a tad dissapointed not to break 3k dps across all the bosses but that cant be helped when we are completely useless at Heigan. When i say completely useless that may be an exageration, we do have one use. Designated dead body. For the good of the raid we lie down quietly in order to show everyone where the lava burst come up from. True story. We do also have to admit to being a little pissed for the second half of the raid, as the wine was tasting rather too good. Bad Boomdaddy.

On the good side, we did like 58% crit on wrath and the whopping 79% on starfire. When we finally get the fourth piece of T7, we can add another lovely 5% crit across the board on top of that. Yummy scrummy. With regards to the new spec we think we need a few more raids to see if its any better. Improved faerie fire, is just a pain in the chocolate starfish at the moment, as it screws my rotation to buggery. We will give it a proper go though and see if we can click our way through it.

Naxx 25 second leg is in an hour and i have put 3 sticky notes on my monitors saying "TURN ON COMBATLOG YOU KNOB-END", we shall see if that was subtle enough to get through the Boomdaddy's thick skull.

BoomMummy Gloats

Hmmm, well! Its looks like the Boomdaddy has finally come over to my way of thinking. As I was saying in my last entry, crit = boomlove, and it seems to message has finally got around!

The Boomdaddy’s spec is now very similar to mine, with just a couple of minor differences. I don’t have the 5 points in the Resto ‘Furor’ (instead, I have my 5 points in Balance ‘Genesis’). I also have 3 points in ‘Brambles’ rather than Improved Faerie Fire. I tend to use my dots a lot, and try to keep both up in raids, so Genesis is quite useful for me. I could quite happily swap Brambles for Improved Faerie Fire – but I do love my little trees! Any chance to get them doing a bit of extra damage I’ll take (even if they miss too much on bosses, the naughty little buggers!).

I never went for the resto-mana-regen spec – wanting to try to maximise my mana through crit. Even on the early raids with the guild, this worked out okay (although I did have a couple of pieces of big mp5 kit, which kept for fights where I knew mana would be tough – hey, they dropped, no healers wanted them – who was I to say ‘no’?). Even before I was hit capped, I was whacking out a good bit of damage in the raids with this spec.

Now I’ve got 4 pieces of T7, and along with a few other nice purples, I have enough crit to keep the mana going and I never use the mp5 kit anymore. For some odd reason I’ve managed to get over 300 hit and haste without trying very hard (must have been on the vodka when I did that). So the Boommummy is generally feeling quite pleased with herself! Well, I would be feeling very pleased with myself if I could get my hands on those bloody illusive kit upgrades. Things seem to have dried up for poor little me recently. I still need the T7 helm – 7.5 would be lovely – still need something to replace the blue Kirin Tor dagger… I just don’t seem to get the drops. Ah well – roll on Ulduar! Let’s hope there’s lots of gorgeous things in there I can stuff under my feathers!

p.s. Boommummy will get back to raiding soon – she’s been busy dyeing her feathers and varnishing her beak! Looking this gorgeous doesn’t happen by accident you know... XXX

Fandabydosey, its Friday

Naxx 25, post match report. Well there would have been if I hadn't only just remembered to turn on WWS before the Widow fight and then not got dc'd straight after...sigh. I thought the report was still running and was looking forward to some serious data from 2 wing clearances +2 bosses, but alas all i have is the poxy Widow stats. Im annoyed, as we were very interested to see if the new build was raid-tastic, but also due to the fact that guildies were pumping out some serious pain to all the Naxx inhabitants and it would have been a great report for thr guild forum. A few of the bosses went down in record time and there was a minimum of fuck ups...all in all a very decent show from the finest hardcore social guild on the planet. Below is the overall dps for the one fight.

Fourth place for the Boomdaddy, its not top 3 but its not bad. Bloody rogue was top again,if he wasn't lovely he would be on the shoot in the face list. Sneaky, thats what they are, sneaky. As you can just about see, the elemental shammy came in just behind me. He's high up in the guild, so we let him hit stuff on his own and get ahead on the charts so that he feels special, bless him. 3205 dps is getting there but again it would have been necessary to have had all the boss fight data in order to make an informed decision on the new build.

Now this, the Boomdaddy likes. 55% crit rate on wrath and 79% on starfire. Thems the onions alright and no mistake. No misses, just shows that 275 hit is fine if you have a spacegoat and a priest of shadowness in the party. Moral of story this week, is to get a tad more hit for 10's and stack other loveliness for 25's....job done. On the crit/mana regen scorebaord we estimate 6325 mana cash back in the 2 minutes 32 second fight. That would get the BoomMummy moist for sure.

Edit 1. The lovely hunter in the raid managed to succeed where I failed miserably and captured all but the first fight on WWS. Webmistress is working on the pictures now and should be up in the next hour or 2. As far as our estimate of 6325 mana regen from crit goes, we suck the sweat off a dead man's balls when it comes to maths. Having studied WWS further, the actual figure was a whopping 17,868! That will help take the OOM out of Boom, for sure.

Pre Raid Reshuffle

Naxx 25, looks like a goer for tonight. Yay, as no real raiding in a while has made me grumpier than ever! With a heavy heart I have to share some very serious news, yes I'm respeccing. I'm dropping the super cool Boomdaddy mana -regen build in favour of something with a little more bang for your buck.

Good bye to best mana raid build money can buy 55-16

and say hello to my new fwend 64-7

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating of course, but there are some very heavy hitters on the raid tonight and the Boomdaddy doesn't like to me made to look a douchebag. The main reason is though, that on the last few 25 man raids, I have finished with a very full mana bar and not enough dps. We may even goto 66-5 as there are 3 other droods in the group all with 2pts in IMW.

Master stroke, or Mongolian cluster fuck? 5 hours and we will know.

Patchy Mcpatch 3.1.0

There is alot of buzz around about the ptr and about patch 3.1.0. As usual the list of tweaks and modifications to the Boomkin class is nose-bleedingly long. God knows how blizzard developers get so much thoughtful, incisive and big brain work packed into the half hour on Fridays between their 5th Kryspy Kreme and scratching their balls.

Balance

Owlkin Frenzy is now properly considered an Enrage effect. Now also does not trigger from spell hits, only physical ranged and melee attacks.

Hats off to them. One possible change listed and its a bag of bollocks.Good work fellas.



Owlkin Frenzy
Rank 3
Attacks done to you while in Moonkin form have a 15% chance to cause you to go into a Frenzy, increasing your damage by 10% and causes you to be immune to pushback while casting Balance spells. Lasts 10 sec.

This talent has really always been for the PvP specced Boomkin, as its application in PvE is limited at best. This change however will solidly stick it in PvP only builds for good, if it gets through to the live realms. As Gray pointed out , the only time in Naxx that any Moonkin could benefit from this talent, would be if they consistently stood in the lava AOE during Sartharian. Even then the healers are probably going to be thinking "BBQ chicken on the menu tonight then" if you pull that kind of nonsense.

Are we bothered? Yes and no. No, because we are a raiding Boomster and do not use this talent in our build. Yes ,because it further nerfs balance druids in PvP and as I wrote the other day, things just aint rosey in the Boomkin garden of BG's.

I suspect that they will scrap it before the patch goes live, but only if the developers got sprinkles on the last doughnut. Otherwise their response will be "You have THE dance ffs, what more do you want?".

One other nugget that may have slipped through some druids fish-nets , is this quote by Ghostcrawler regarding mana regen changes in 3.1.

Mana Regeneration changes in 3.1 and effects on Innervate

I don't think it will suddenly make druids regem from Spirit to Int. We'll see.If you mean these changes will nerf Innervate, yes, it will. On live Innervate can be 120% of your bar, say 25,000 mana. Historically it was more like 75% of your bar, and it should be closer to that with these changes.


I'm going to leave this one for a full post on mana regen changes but I'm feeling a little edgy.