Patch 3.3 nerf batch 1

The patch notes do not look good for paladins these days.

First, we had the changes to Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian:

• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

The tooltips for these two talents will be massive...
These changes have been called buffs or nerfs depending on who you talk to. For a raiding paladin, they are downright nerfs. The old version of the talents had much better damage absorption, but did require the paladin to bubble to not kill himself. The new version makes Divine Sacrifice without Divine Guardian (which is the most likely case for retribution paladins) a lot less useful.

What's the deal here? We have a damage absorption talent that cannot be used by a main tanking paladin, but still exists all the way down in the third tier in the tanking tree, which is hard to reach for both holy and (especially) retri paladins.

Apparently, this "raid wall" talent was too powerful and they had to move the raid wide part of the talent down to the fourth tier Divine Guardian (which earlier "just" increased the amount of damage absorbed by the then raid wide Divine Sacrifice), where fewer people will be able to reach it.

While these changes annoys me, they do not come close to the feelings I have for the following changes:

• Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)

• Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

• Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.

• Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

Yes, you guessed it: PvE paladins get nerfed because of PvP. Again.

I don't PvP much with my paladin these days, but by looking at the number of PvP nerfs that has hit the paladins in WotLK, paladins must have been completely dominating the PvP scene (and still I don't see paladins dominating in the top-rated arena teams...)

The nerf to Sacred Shield makes it totally worthless for anyone except the holy paladin. As a tankadin, I often cast this on myself (if I don't have a holy paladin casting it on me) to reduce the incoming damage, but that is pointless now.

Actually, I don't even see the point to keep Sacred Shield as a baseline ability for paladins anymore, since it is useless without Infusion of Light, which is deep in the holy tree. If Blizzard wants only holy paladins to use this ability, then just put it in the holy tree and remove it as a baseline ability. Now the untalented Sacred Shield is a joke.

The nerf to Aura Mastery is clearly also a PvP nerf. It's the exact same nerf that Hand of Freedom got a couple of patches ago.

And then we come to my favorite "change": Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

What has Blizzard been sniffing this time? Gnomish Ultra Glue (c)?

Lay on Hands has saved by butt so many times, I cannot count them all. It has a looooooong cooldown, so I save it for those very special moments where my healer is dead and the boss is starting to chew my face off after I have been auto-ressed by Ardent Defender.

Removing the self-cast on Lay on Hands would remove one of the few tanking cooldowns paladins have. I have even suggested getting LoH off the global cooldown, so it would be a more reliable tanking cooldown....

What's the reason for this nerf?

PvP? I don't think so. You cannot use LoH in arena, and you will only be able to use it once in a battleground. That's hardly a reason for a nerf.

PvE? I can only assume that it is because of the extra survivability it gives paladins when they solo content. Is that really something you want to balance talents around? Or is it because raiding holy paladins sometimes use it to get mana back when they have the talent glyphed? We are still talking about an 11 minute (talented and glyphed) cooldown, guys!

I read a new post from Ghostcrawler where he says that they have removed the change to LoH in their internal build. That doesn't mean that we can rest assured that the change will not go live. It means that Blizzard considers this talent broken, and that they are not finished messing with it yet.

Personally, I don't like where these changes are going. I am also very tired of getting nerfed because of PvP.

Atleast Icecrown Citadel looks cool. Although I'm not exactly thrilled about that the first boss in there wipes raids by passing gas. Is Blizzard catering to the 6-year olds now?

Giants Dancing on my Brain

I missed our Ulduar hard mode raid yesterday due to migraine, which sucked. It's not really possible to raid when it feels like you have two enraged giants tap dancing on your brain, while a ravenous shark is gnawing away at the back of your head.

So I missed out on the Iron Council and Hodir hard modes. Since we did the Flame Leviathan and XT-002 hard modes on Wednesday, at least I got those checked off on my list.

Our little ten-man group got heroic Anub down to 17% a couple of times on Saturday. 17% is still miles away from a kill of course, but we feel that we've got the kill in sight. My gear for the fight is shaping up, but I'm still short 8% from being passive unhittable. The gear set is still making a difference, since the amount of damage made to me is significantly lower than it used to be in my EH gear.

Before the giants started their dancing lessons on my cerebrum and the shark still hadn't reached my medulla oblongata, I attented a 25-man Trial of the Crusader raid with my shammy as dps. I have now completed Trial of the Crusader as all possible roles: Tank (paladin and death knight), healer (shaman), melee dps (rogue and warrior), and ranged dps (shaman).

As in almost every other raid, ranged dps is the easiest role. You tab between targets, keep up your rotation, and make sure not to stand in fire. That's it. Kudos to people who don't fall asleep while doing this every raid ;P

I'll try to make my next post a little bit more useful. Like discussing patch 3.3 and the pleasure of tanking in a dress again, or something.

P.S. If you were wondering: The giants were of course singing as well:

We're dancing on his brain
Just dancing on his brain
What a glorious feelin'
We're enraged again

True story.

The Beasts Are Down

We finally downed Northrend Beasts on 25 man heroic yesterday, and it was a darn good feeling. Getting the heroic version of the tanking chestplate was also a good feeling (and adding the stamina trinket from normal Faction Champions just an hour before that made my loot day complete). That chestplate has three sockets and insane stats and will make a nice addition to my gear collection.

The reasons for our success yesterday were mostly better dps and better survivability. We reached Icehowl several times with only one or two dead, and the last worm almost dead. On our kill, Dreadscale was even dead before Icehowl entered the arena.

We run with three tanks; a warrior, a druid, and yours truly.

I pick up Gormok at the start, popping wings and swinging away all that I can. Even with stamina gear I can keep our dps behind me on threat (when they start catching up, it's time for the first tank switch). When the worms enter, I grab Gormok while the other tanks get a Hand of Protection from our two holy paladins. As soon as Gormok is dead, I bubble off my stacks of Impale and taunt Dreadscale off the druid, who by then should have the first Burning Bile, which he spreads to whoever needs it (often the warrior tank).

The druid and I switch tanking on Dreadscale depending on Burning Bile application. When he enrages, I usually pick him up. And when Icehowl enters the arena, I pick him up as well (Dreadscale should be dead by then).

On our kill, we actually failed on one of Icehowl's charges. I watched him go all big and red, quickly popped Bubble Wall, saw Ardent Defender's self-ress proc, and then I was finally topped off and could continue tanking. That was a couple of sweaty seconds...

We had a couple of attempts on Jaraxxus, but the portals and volcanos were not killed fast enough, and poor me was swamped in mistresses and infernals on every attempt. We then called the raid early to celebrate our progress.

In our 10-man on Saturday, we got heroic Anub down to 23% even though we had switched out half the team. We always leave him with more than 20 attempts remaining, since it's just a "fun raid" that has a stricked time limit, but it's nice to see that we can get that far with a casual raid.

Did 3.2 Kill Serious Raiding?

Now you probably wonder what in the world I'm talking about. Why would a content patch like 3.2 kill serious raiding? We've gotten even more raid instances to raid! Have I lost my mind?

Well, for our guild, the 3.2 patch killed serious raiding. With "serious raiding" I mean several raid nights a week spent on hard content, many wipes, high repair costs, grinding teeth, and adrenaline pumping.

Since Trial of the Crusader was introduced, our guild can't seem to get enough sign-ups for Ulduar. This is a shame, since we have so much left undone in there. We have several hard modes left, and thus we are very very far off from even seeing Algalon.

It's understandable that people aren't interested in wiping in Ulduar when they can easily farm Trial of the Crusader for shinier epics.

OK. So all this QQ about lack of serious raiding must mean that we have Trial of the Grand Crusader on farm as well, right? Well, no. We are still stuck on Northrend Beasts in TotGC-25. We always seem to lack the dps to kill off the last worm before Icehowl enters the arena. The reasons for lacking dps are two: Gear and people dying when they shouldn't.

So to increase our chances to progress we farm. On Wednesdays we do Onyxia-25, VoA-25, and TotC-25. That usually takes about 1.5 hour. After that we try TotGC-25 for a couple of hours. This means that the guild's entire 25-man raiding takes place in one night.

Later in the week the guild has several TotC-10 runs, and a couple of TotGC-10 runs. Farm. Farm. Farm. We actually farm 10-man content to be able to progress in 25-man content. Is it just me who thinks that is a bit awkward?

In a normal week, I do TotC-25, TotC-10, TotGC-10, and some tries on TotGC-25 on my paladin. I also do TotC-10 and TotC-25 on my shaman. Just guess how tired I am of farming that frigging coliseum? I'm killing the same stinking bosses five times a week! And they fall over easier than a twenty-dollar hooker.

Some people seem to be content with this. Farming easy instances to get shiny epics? What's not to like? Getting big upgrades to your gear without the risk of dying? Sweet!

And while people roll around in the purples from Coliseum, Ulduar is empty and unfinished.

Looking forward, at least Icecrown Citadel is more than one room.....

Busy Weekend

After being away for a week, I had some catching up to do!

On Friday I did a 25-man VoA raid with my resto shaman, which gained him the T9 elemental pants and the T8 resto gloves (so that I now have that imba 4pc T8 bonus). The raid leader was a completely clueless and undergeared tank, but the raid went smooth thanks to a couple of good healers and some very good dpsers.

A group of friends put together a 10-man Trial of the Grand Crusader raid just for fun on Saturday. It went better than expected. We only wiped once (an annoying 1% wipe at Twin Valkyr) before engaging Anub'Arak.

I must say, the difference in difficulty between heroic 10-man and heroic 25-man is staggering. Most of us is wearing several pieces of 25-man gear, which of course makes it easier, but still...

We totally screwed up on the first Twins attempt, and still got them down to 1%. I was the last man standing, dpsing them both with everything I got, and sadly with Lay on Hands on cooldown (I had to use it earlier in the fight when my healer died due to getting hit by orbs). The cheering on vent was hilarious, especially when Ardent Defender ressed me and I kept hitting them ladies with my sword until the bitter (second) end.

Anub'Arak, on the other hand, was a hard nut to crack. We did 11 attempts on him before calling it since it was getting late. We got to phase 3 several times (best attempt 26%), but we seemed to lose people too often in phase 2, which made phase 3 very hard.

On Sunday I brought my resto shaman to the guild's second 25-man Trial of the Crusader raid. Since the nerf to Faction Champions, these raids now run smooth and with few deaths. Afterwards, we went to Onyxia and downed her as well. I have now done Onyxia both on 10-man and 25-man on my shaman, but I still haven't done any Onyxia raid on my paladin (you will get your chance Arnax, don't worry).

My wife got the retribution paladin helm from Onyxia, only days after spending 75 Emblems of Triumph on the badges helm. I can understand her frustration :)

We had an Ulduar hardmode raid scheduled for Sunday evening, but it was cancelled due to lack of signups.

I'm spending a lot of my game time on my shaman these days. Healing on my shaman is a lot more fun than healing on my paladin ever was (Arnax can feel safe with his prot/ret dual spec, since I don't see him ever doing any healing). Arnax is still my main, and I always bring him out for the serious stuff. I have loads of reputation and quest grinding left to do on him, but I'm the kind of person who needs variety in the game, and switching from tank to healer (or dps) in raids is a good way to keep the game feeling fresh.

But don't worry. This will not turn into a shaman blog....

Back at the Keyboard

I'm back after spending a week in the deep dark forests of Finland, where I attended a training course for Software Architects.

In my absence, my guild has accomplished the following:

• Forged the guild's first legendary mace (congratulations, Diabbix!)
• Downed Onyxia in an official guild run
• Cleared Trial of the Crusader with TWO guild runs

It's great that our guild can manage to run with two groups in Trial of the Crusader, since it means more of us can get to experience the fights, and get the nice loot.

It's too bad that I couldn't be there when Diabbix got his mace, but that's life. Getting the legendary mace is a nice guild achievement, and we have a couple of priests with fragments in their bags, waiting for their turn. But signups for Ulduar has waned significantly lately, so it might be hard to accomplish.

Well, time to log on. I have to catch up on some of the dailies....