Posts Tagged ‘Stacks’

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. Here you will get a glimpse into some of the changes we have in store for the warrior. The information you’re about to read is not complete, and is only meant to act as a preview for some of the exciting new things to come.

New Warrior Abilities

Inner Rage (Level 81): Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time. This is a passive ability so it won’t need to be activated by the player. The goal for this ability is to provide a benefit for hitting max Rage instead of it feeling like a penalty. However, we also don’t want warriors to feel like they’re supposed to pool Rage and do nothing until they hit 100, so we’ll be closely monitoring how this plays out during the beta testing, and making adjustments as needed.

Gushing Wound (Level 83): This ability will apply a bleed effect to the target. If the target moves, the bleed gains an extra stack and refreshes its duration, up to a maximum of three stacks. The ability is currently planned to have no cooldown, cost 10 Rage, and have a 9-second duration. Gushing Wound is designed to be weaker than Rend with one stack, but better with three stacks, which will be reached when fighting a moving target.

Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land.

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In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, warlocks will receive changes to their class talents and abilities. Outlined below are some of these changes. Keep in mind that this is an early preview and that these modifications are still under development, so you may see further adjustments to the listed changes as we get closer to launch. That said, here is a first look at these new warlock spells and abilities!

New Warlock Spells

Fel Flame (level 81): Quick-hitting spell dealing Shadowfire damage. This is similar to the mage ability Frostfire Bolt, in that the lower of the two resistances (in this case shadow and fire) on your target will be used for calculating its damage. Additionally, Fel Flame refreshes the duration of Immolate and Unstable Affliction. Our goal for Fel Flame is to provide a spell that’s good for mobility and for use by Destruction and Demonology specs. Also, did we mention it uses green fire? Yep. Instant cast.

Dark Intent (level 83): Increases the target’s chance for a critical effect with periodic damage or healing spells by 3%. When the target lands a crit, you get a buff to your damage for 10 seconds. This effect stacks up to three times.

Demon Soul (level 85): Fuses the warlock’s soul with his or her demon. This provides warlocks with a self-burst cooldown to use. The specific effects granted by Demon Soul depend on the demon chosen. Demon Soul lasts for a certain number of charges or until it expires (around 20 seconds), depending on the demon used. 2-minute cooldown.

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I’ve purposely kept myself out of the normal raiding activities of the guild for a couple of months now. The state of Restoration Druids in my opinion has just become worse and worse with each successive patch which made me loose a lot of interest. I can’t deny however that I’ve missed it to some degree and thus I’ve slowly started to make my way back into it.

The difference this time is that I am primarily specced as Moonkin. I do still have a Resto spec set up as my secondary, but unless major changes are made to bring back the ability of Druids to roll Lifebloom stacks I just can’t see myself embracing Restoration as a main spec.

My first run back into raiding and the guild puts me up against Thorim, a boss that had not yet been killed by Foederati. I managed to squeak out just over 1500 DPS which isn’t overly exciting compared to the more than 3700 the other raiding moonkin in the raid did but I was happy with the initial outcome. My gear is still primarily set up for being a raiding Resto, so that does hamper my DPS some, and the fact that I have virtually no experience raiding or even instancing as a moonkin, emphasizes that I have a lot to learn to get up to that 3700 mark.

I did some tweaks after that run and I’m looking forward to giving it another go. I dropped some Resto talents that didn’t really add anything to my DPS and picked up Furor, Natural Shapeshifter and the Master Shapeshifter talents. I also trimmed some talents in balance to streamline things a bit, dropping Owlkin Frenzy and Typhoon. So basically right now I need to working on setting up a good base spell rotation and work on improving my gear.

Oh, and we killed Thorim for the first time that night, which reminds me I need to get the Screenshots caught up on the Guild Home Page.

I’ve only really started to appreciate how much I hate patch 3.1 and now they are putting out patch 3.1.1 to fix some bugs and generally make the game suck even more. I suppose that as a Resto Druid I am simply in morning and depresion over the death of rolling lifebloom stacks, a strat that I had grown to love as a play style in the Burning Crusade. Libebloom’s only real purpose now is to feed it’s self to the bastard child that has forced us back into direct healing, Nourish. I’ve only stepped inside Ulduar once as a Resto Druid and it was enough to solidify my decsion to move to Moonkin as my primary spec and to really give me a taste of how far into the toiliet WoW seems to have gone. Blizzard seems to have completely ran out of ideas for how to make the game feel new and exciting, so they resort to tactics of forcing even more boss mechanics onto raiders, or force healing raiders to not only watch the life totals of everyone in teh raid while singing the star-spandled banner backwards, and hopping on one foot, but now we also have to conserve mana, and we now get to yell at our fellow raiders when they accidently don’t move fast enough. Blizzard has successfully ingrained the idea into the raiding guilds that it is ok to bad mouth and attak the people you thought were friends becuase that is the only way that your guild will ever progress. Even the Argent Tournament is nothing more than another dressed up daily grind fest. The fun that used to be WoW is quickly dieing for me.