Patch Musings

[Silk]

Notes are up in the usual places.

Will we be doing crusader's colliseum? Can't find many details on it at work so no idea if it's the next thing up from Ulduar or something else entirely.

Nice that emblems of conquest will now drop in naxx10, I think it would be benefitial to many guildies if we could fast-track through there a few more times for lots of conquest/valor badges. Happy to tank, but would be cool to see some Ulduar geared folk in there to really sail through it quickly.

Occulus / EOE should be easier now. If anyone needs the Occulus give me a shout some time, as I do too (as usual it's the one dungeon blocking me from certain achievements). I find EOE easy, so guess now it will be even easier.

Paladin changes look good overall, but somewhat confused over the many changes to seals. Command is now a flat out 36% damage increase. Corruption is a 33% holy increase, but only if 5 stacks are on target and here's where I got confused:

"the effects from these seals can only be triggered by auto-attacks and Hammer of the Righteous. "

Does this mean applying stacks, or the triggered 33% holy damage from attacks/judgement damage? if the former, retradins need not apply except for raids where fights actually last longer than the 15-20 seconds it would take to get 5 stacks. In otherwords, pvp and solo play = command, unless I'm missing something.

If the latter, I guess solo/pvp retradins could get those 5 stacks up before the fight is done, but the target should in theory be dead before then so I'm still leaning on seal of command as the preferred option.

Either way sounds to me like corruption is gonna do more damage in long fights once you get your 5 stacks to bring it above and over what command can do, whereas command is gonna be more useful in short fights where you'd never hit 5 stacks anyway.

Protection changes sound very nice.. try to kill me, heal me instead. Win. Wonder if it works in PvP.

PvP - like the changes, like the fact some matches have been shortened. Will try the new instance.

 

[Lideon]

Hey

From what I have read about the new Call of the Crusade.. is that it is a new 5man dungeon (heroic and normal), and also a new raid 10/25man... both having normal and heroic modes (25man no longer referred to as heroic.. you have 25man normal and 25man heroic.)

Yeah I'm looking forward to the new changes as well, the new changes to the emblems system means gearing up will be slightly easier, I'd like to add that they have added a new boss to VOA. Maybe we should start doing guild runs there, as its a possibility to get T9, T8 and T7 all in one go!

Anyhoo just waiting on the last mb to download and them maybe with a stroke of luck Scarshield Legion shall be online with no extra maintance required like the US servers.

Lideon

 

[SgtFury]

Go to MMO champion if you want more information, its really useful.... although I just had a shudder looking at the video where the 5 man dungeons are going to include chargers and the lance part! Booooo

 

[Windzarko]

The new raid works a little differently from past ones: it has four different modes:

10-man
25-man
10-man "Heroic"
25-man "Heroic"

They're not calling the 25-man version of a raid the Heroic one anymore; the Heroic modes for this are more difficult and you have only a limited number of attempts (you have 50 wipes allowed in the entire raid lockout period between all the bosses). The more attempts you have left when you reach end, the better the loot. Also, all the loot from the Heroic versions have the same name and appearance as the normal items, but with the word "Heroic" in little green letters underneath and item name, and the item will have an increase on all the stats.

The Heroic mode can only be accessed if at least one person present in the group has cleared the normal mode (at this point I'm assuming that means you have to have cleared 10-man normal to get at 10-man Heroic, and have to separately clear 25-man normal to get at 25-man Heroic. I can't find info to back this up anywhere, but it's the impression I've been under for a while now).

Finally: there'll only be one boss there this week. It'll unlock one additional boss per week until the final boss in unlocked. If memory serves, there are five encounters in there (Northrend Beasts, Lord Jaraxus (spelling?), Faction Champions, the Twin Valkry, and the final boss (Azjol'nerub was merely a setback..)).

I'm not sure as to the difficulty, but my hope is that we can set a strong 10-man group on the first boss this week and, if it isn't crushingly difficult, we can try and set up other groups to go at it afterwards.

Oh, and one final fact; there is not one single trash mob in the entire raid, on any of the four settings.


And now, for the Paladin changes:

Many people are going to be confused by what's going on with the seals, so here's a quick explanation.

For Prot, you'll still use Seal of Vengeance/Corruption. You'll notice very little difference, since you auto-attack quite fast and HotR was the only multi-mob ability you had that spread seals before. The only change you'll notice is a damage increase.

For Ret, Seal of Blood is now gone forever (*sniffle* I'll miss you...), and we now use Seal of Vengeance/Corruption as our primary PvE DPS seal. In short fights, or fights where you'll have to switch targets a lot, Seal of Righteousness is the one to use, since it'll be boosted by the Seals of the Pure talent (mandatory for Ret now) such that it'll be stronger than Command. Command is useless until you get to a really high gearing standard (ie when your average itemlevel is over 250).

Now to explain how Vengeance/Corruption will work:

1) Auto-attacks (ie your white swings) and HotR (Prot only) are the only things that can stack up the DoT effect of SoV/SoCorr.
2) Once you reach 5 stacks of SoV/SoCorr, your auto-attacks will start proccing an additional 33% weapon damage hit as holy damage on every swing. This proc will always go off when you have five stacks, and will do double-damage on crit.
3) Your Crusader Strikes and Divine Storms will not add to the stacks of the DoT, however they will still proc the extra Holy damage each time you use them. They're also a little different in that they'll start proccing the extra Holy damage even before you have 5 stacks of the DoT; each stack increases the amount of damage, until it does 33% at 5 stacks. It does around 7-8% at the single stack.
4) The holy proc off attacks at 5 stacks (be it from auto-attacks) or from CS/DS cannot miss, and cannot be dodged or parried. However it will only go off if the the triggering attack does not miss and is not dodged/parried.

A little complex, but over a period of time it works out as a nice DPS increase. Also, because of the way the Holy Proc and the applying of the DoT works, any "chance on hit" effects you have on gear or enchants go berserk. Each time you auto-attack, it applies (or at 5 stacks, refreshes) the DoT via an invisible, zero-damage attack which counts as a melee hit. Auto-attack, CS, DS, this invisible hit, and the holy proc all work to set off on-hit trinkets and effects far more often than before (example, I'm likely looking at having Berserking up far more than before).

 

[Silk]

I've been waiting since MC for them to release a raid instance without trash. About time.

I'm up for trying the new 10-man (even though at i37), maybe we should set up an event?

Thanks for the clarification on seals - pretty much confirms my theories, hadn't considered SOR though.

 

[Windzarko]

SoR is only going to be better than SoComm because of the talents in Seals of the Pure; without them, SoComm would be very marginally better. Also, if I can remember rightly from all the furious theorycrafting over at ElitistJerks, SoComm is better in a longer fight where for whatever reason SoCorr isn't viable. The main instance of this turning up would be PvP where the people you're fighting are doing a lot of dispelling. The SoCorr DoT effect is easily dispellable, so if you're sticking to a single target but the DoT is being remove, SoComm is the way to go.

In my opinion, though, it just isn't worth the talent point now that we have to squeeze five points out of our tree to go into Seals of the Pure. Even with the fewer points I'll be having in Divinity, this means that Divine Purpose and one point of Vindication have had to go on the chopping block >_<

Ah, well; as soon as the realms are up, I'll be playing around with it. I only found out for sure about the CS/DS procing the holy damage on an incomplete stack part last night (it had been back and forth on the PTRs and I'd assumed it wasn't making it into the live build), so I'm a bit more at ease about the changes than I was before (ie the sky is no longer falling).