Hello everyone! How is the day going so far? Hopefully good for you!
It's been a while since I've posted on here.. And I figured that it was just about time for me to start this up again, now that things aren't as chaotic here.
The first thing that I would like to touch on.. Is World of Warcraft. The new expansion is next month.. And I already miss the background on the log-in screen from Cataclysm. It just felt more.. Epic. But I'm sure the MoP background will grow on me.
They just introduced patch 5.0.4., which revamped much of the game. Talent tree are almost non-existent. Now instead of getting a talent point about everyone 2 levels, you get 1 "skill" from the talent tree every 15 levels. Most of the old talents in the trees, such as for Protection, Retribution, and Holy, (For Paladin) are now integrated right into your spell book, whether they are passives now or not. You get your old talents for "free" from which ever tree you decide to use. It's an interesting set up.. And something all of us will have to get used to.
Another big thing that they changed.. Is Blizzard placed a hard cap on your mana pool. For healers, at level 85, 100k is max. For my protection Paladin, I am capped at 20k. Which is fine by me, I don't use a whole lot of it. Consecration (The Paladins AoE holy/fire skill) now only costs 1200 mana. Which is.. A blessing (pun intended). It used to cost around 14k, and it was a pain in the ass to use just because of the high mana cost, and it wasn't worth getting the talent points to reduce the cost of it. So that's one thing that I am excited about. Paladins can now also hold 5 charges of Holy Power, instead of the normal 3. So that will be interesting as well. I used Word of Glory with 5 charges, and it healed me for 85k. Can you imagine that for Ret paladins in PVP? I feel it will be a little too strong, especially since they removed the cooldown from Word of Glory, and it is now on a 5 second cooldown.
Threat seems to be harder to hold as well. Which honestly I think is a good thing. You won't be able to just run into a dungeon and tank and spank your way through the whole thing, because aggro was never an issue. At all. AoE tanking with the Paladin was so simple. One shield throw, and they could dps the mob down and I wouldn't have to worry about it. Now, it's a lot more difficult, which makes it fun. Hammer of the Righteous cooldown has been increased, the AoE range on it has been decreased, but to make up for it, would have Consecration. Which I need to get into the habit of using more often.
That's all from the Paladin tanking point of view, sorry that I won't be able to cover all the classes.. That'd be a chore, let me tell you what.
More general changes is account wide achievements and mounts, as well as pets. If you have a rare mount on one character, you will now have it on all of your characters (I'm excited to have my turtle mount on my Paladin now). So that is a major perk about this patch.
Earlier I mention about healers are capped at 100k mana. Even though some of you will think that is a load of BS, they balanced things out with it. You heal more now (My brother plays a Shaman, and I was getting healed for 65K+ at times from him) which means that you won't be burning through mana so fast. Another thing that I would like to note (At least for pally tanks) is that mastery has been nerfed a lot. I was capped at the 102.5% avoidance. And now.. Not even close. I believe my block is now around 37% or so. But my parry has jumped up a considerable amount. That's because of the stat tweaks and such that happened in the patch. I won't be covering it in this blog post. But you will have to look it up. There is a lot that has changed.
In all honestly, I am very excited about the changes. It will freshen up the game. And even more then that, I am excited about the next expansion. Here's to hoping that the dungeons will be difficult, and the raids even more.
That's all for today folks. Have a good one, and we'll chat with you again in the near future.
-j-
