by Brian Wood
While BM has come a long way in the beta, it still has not-yet-implemented talents and not-yet-functional talents. But the main problem with BM is that the pet design pass hasn’t been done yet. BM relies on its pets far more than any other spec, and until we know how the pet design will play out, we are left with big questions in our rotation.
Join me after the cut as we take a look at exactly where BM is right now, why our pets are more important than ever, why big red pet is better than ever, and why we can’t say for certain just what the final BM rotation will look like.
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by Chase Christian
I’m freshly back from slaying elementals and cultists alike in the Cataclysm beta, and I’m here to bring you some good news. I already talked about how Vanish was finally fixed and has managed to stay fixed on the beta servers. The mechanic they’re using is a two-stage process, similar to how a space shuttle launches. The first stage is a buff called (unsurprisingly) “Vanish,” which isn’t actually Stealth, but a pseudo-Stealth that keeps us out of sight. The Vanish buff only lasts for 3 seconds, at which point regular Stealth takes over. We can’t leave Stealth for those 3 seconds because we’re not actually in Stealth anyway, which is a pretty elegant way of fixing the problem.
I’m rambling again, as Vanish is fixed and you’ve already heard about it. Blizzard’s newest gift to the rogue community comes straight out of our de facto wish list, again. General mobility worries have been heard from rogues since warriors received Intecept, which is to say we’ve been complaining about it since Day One. An oft-suggested change has been halving Sprint‘s cooldown and duration, and it seems that the dev team actually took the idea to heart. As the screenshot above shows, Sprint is now on a 1-minute cooldown.
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by Gregg Reece
With the latest build, we’re finally starting to see things get a little smoother and the mechanics to make a little bit more sense. Keeping Holy Shield up is easier than in previous builds, and a lot of depth to the types of strategies we can have while tanking has greatly improved. Also, our mastery bonus has been official revealed.
These may not be the talents we’ll end up seeing when the expansion hits, but they’re getting there. Some talents will look pretty close to how they exist currently, while others have absolutely nothing to do with their current versions. Let’s go take a look.
Spec freebies
Avenger’s Shield What was once our pulling ability is now actually one of our primary rotation abilities. It still acts like it used to, but it has a 24-second cooldown
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?by Brian Wood
In Wrath, the SV rotation is more reactionary, and in Cataclysm, it is that and more so.
Despite the frantic gyrations from being focus-starved to actually having too much focus, the SV rotation is probably the least-changed hunter spec rotation in Cataclysm. We use Cobra Shot instead of Steady Shot, we don’t have to worry about reapplying Serpent Sting and instead we get to actually use Arcane Shot from time to time. Join me after the cut and we’ll take a look.
Standard disclaimers
This is still the beta, so while the feel for the specs seems to be solidifying, everything is still subject to change. The current level cap in the beta is level 83. We are not going to discuss what spec does more DPS, or how much DPS each spec does, because that stuff is not yet final.
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by Christian Belt
So my beta testing this week has been pretty focused on the low-level stuff in Cataclysm, rather than clicking Fire Orb and hoping that this time it actually works. I figure this is okay, since Cataclysm itself is an expansion focused not just on the endgame stuff, but also on overhauling the leveling process. So today, put down your spreadsheets and your nerdrage; we’re going to have a brief conversation about leveling.
This isn’t going to be a leveling guide. So much is still unfinished in the beta, and by the time it goes live, a lot will have changed, making any sort of in-depth look at leveling a ridiculously premature activity. The numbers are still very unbalanced, the new spells and talents still raw, rough and unpolished, and the zones and quests still rife with bugs both hilarious and deadly. It’s a beta test; a great many things simply aren’t there. But what is there is the overall feeling that the class developers are working toward with each class. Rather than spend an entire column analyzing the specifics of the leveling process in an unfinished product, I thought we’d look in general terms at how the early levels of magehood feel in this new expansion.
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by Allison Robert
Tanking on a bear feels like it’s turning in the direction of protection warrior tanking, which is a good thing, but I’m not sure how close Blizzard is to being done with the tree. As such, don’t take this as anything other than a few observations specific to the current beta build, and a limited few at that. The dungeon finder’s broken at the moment, so groups aren’t as easy to get.
How good is Pulverize?
Pulverize, on the outside, is a pretty sweet deal. It provides instant threat, an indirect threat buff in the form of additional crit, additional Savage Defense uptime and — for now — more rage generation, although that’s likely to be changed (which means Primal Fury in its current form won’t survive). But it does have a problem, and that’s that it turns Lacerate into something within shouting distance of the current incarnation of Swipe. In other words, it’s a skill that you wind up spamming, not because you want to, but because you kind of have to. And Lacerate is a much clumsier tool than Swipe for that purpose.
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by Matt Sampson
This time around, I thought I’d cover a question of increasing frequency: how will elemental scaling work in Cataclysm? After the rollercoaster ride of changes through Wrath of the Lich King, most shaman are a little worried about how things are looking. Since we’re still in the early days of the beta, and since we can’t get to level 85 yet, it’s a bit difficult to do any in-game testing or experimentation.
However, that’s never stopped me before. Rather than building a complex model on things we don’t yet know the mechanics for, what we can do is look at how Lightning Bolt is going to work. Since LB comprises 70-80 percent of our damage, it’s a useful measure of how damage increases with spellpower and critical/haste rating. So for some baselines, we’re going to assume all the raid buffs are present, that the spells can’t miss or resist, and that we’ve got 2.2k intellect, 15 percent haste, and 25 percent critical strike chance. I’m also going to assume a 5 percent mastery value, for when the mastery bonuses come into effect.
We then need to split things up into how they affect the spell. First we look at spellpower bonuses, damage bonuses based on passive talents, buffs and debuffs, which all need to be handled separately. Then we top everything off with critical damage multipliers, factor in Elemental Overload, and top it all off with haste.
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by Daniel Whitcomb
Our adventures in beta continue, as promised, with a new zone and a new spec. With Hyjal behind us, the next logical zone to head to is Deepholm, and such is where I headed, after a suitably epic breadcrumb quest sequence. My spec was dual wield frost.
Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from with this testing, I should note that I have been equipping quest rewards if they’re itemized for death knight usage, even if they’re downgrades, in order to get an idea of how much survivability and damage potential your average casual death knight will have.
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by Christian Belt
Another beta build hit a couple nights ago — as they tend to do — and it brought a number of class changes. A quick glance at the new talent trees revealed the expected (some talent position swaps, a few talents vanishing, some tooltip alterations, the occasional loss of a rank here and there) and the … unexpected. Three changes in the fire tree, particularly, caught my eye:
Yes, the tooltip for Molten Shields really is “Redesign!” With an exclamation point. For emphasis.
So clearly the fire tree is in a certain amount of flux? I became instantly excited. The fire tree, perhaps more than either of the other two trees, really has been due for some focused attention.
Let’s get started.
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by Matthew Rossi
Before I started this project, I made sure to keep to the following self-imposed rules.
- No heirlooms. This is 100 percent quest rewards and random drops. (Yes, the Wyrmslayer Spaulders dropped randomly for me while questing in Felwood.) I didn’t run any instances because after level 30 or so it got really hard to find an instance group at the levels I was at, but that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule.
- Try and exhaust a zone before moving on. This means doing as many quests as I can, no skipping around, and experiencing as much of the new versions of old zones as possible. Turns out you can actually do fairly well that way. There are a lot of quests out there now.
- Switch talent specialization every four or five levels. There was no real rhyme or reason to this, I just wanted to see how talent specs felt at different levels. Blood Craze is very strong now. Combined with Bloodthirst and the heal from Victory Rush, a fury warrior can easily take on groups without falling over dead or running away. The old warrior strategy of “kill them before they kill you” is actually somewhat viable now.
So let’s discuss the experiment. What did I find were the pros and cons of the new system? What’s good for warriors and what’s bad?
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