Cataclysm Beta: Pamela Redpath

Pamela Redpath is still in the game.  Thank god!  She starts a new quest, in addition to finding her doll, entitled "I'm Not Supposed To Tell You This" about finding her father's lost sword.

Cataclysm Beta: Water graphics a little funky; zone transition graphics a little clunky

It's entirely possible that this stuff is already up for more changes; I don't know.

My first impression of the water graphics:  On my card, with my settings, the reflections don't work properly from most angles.  Whatever is above the water on my screen reflects from the water, even if it wouldn't be above the water in the physical model.

Further, the water seems less 3D and more like a flat pane of smoky glass.  It looks pretty awesome from above (reflections aside), but if you get too close it starts to look flat compared to the old water.  From beneath the water, it just looks like a perfectly flat, dark ceiling.

My first impression of flying between old world zones:  I'm not going to lie.  Flying in the old world is awesome (especially up to things like the top of Blackrock Mountain or the Ironforge Airfield that I've been longing to get to for ages).  However, there is often a very, very sudden split between old world zones graphically.  The Northrend handles transitions by having them be slow and spread out, and/or by simply having each zone be similar and united in their snowy-ness.  The Outland has slow transitions that seem to make physical sense (like going down a mountain path from Hellfire to the lower, wetter Zangamarsh).

Now compare that to the weird fissure that separates the big hot mountains of the Searing Gorge from the big cold mountains of Dun Morogh.  That fissure reminds me more of the Outland in terms of "oh my the world is rent asunder and the terrain is changing like mad" than some of the Outland zone transitions do.

Now, I realize that Deathwing's escape did rend the world asunder to some extent, but there were no major changes in either the Gorge or Dun Morogh, so why are they acting like they're on separate tectonic plates?

Is this something that in any way affects the gameplay or my enjoyment of it?  No, not really.  In a perfect world, the transitions would be a bit less intense (except stuff like the Barrens where Deathwing really did rip it apart).  But somehow, I'll survive...

Cataclysm Beta: New fishing and cooking dailies

I have done one set of the new cooking and fishing dailies on the Alliance side.  The quest givers are, for the moment, standing outside in the western half of Stormwind (they may be in each capital, I haven't checked).

I like them.  The ones I did are much along the lines of the ones in Dalaran.  Go catch me a fish, or go do something simple in the city itself (in my case, flying around and right-clicking on barrels to steal NPC fisherpeople's catfish).

Each quest gives you a token AND a single skill point in that profession.  The closest I've ever seen to the latter reward is in the Death Knight starting area where you get talent points as quest rewards.

What do I like about these?

1. It's easy, mindless, and internally consistent.  All quests shouldn't be easy and mindless, but having a couple each day that are quick and fun is a good thing.  Stealing ingredients and recipes from other NPC foodies in the capital cities is a cute prank that spices up the quest a bit.  It's a simple but believable story.  
2. You don't need to go farm random monsters in random areas to get meat (at least, I haven't had to yet).  That's good.  It's fine when you're leveling or need to actually make food for yourself, but it's frustrating when you're at the level cap and suddenly need to run off halfway around the world to kill a tuskarr.  
3. I am strongly in favor of handing out a skill point upon completion.  I realize that the serious anglers out there will probably complain, and rightly so, that this devalues the vast amount of time they put into leveling their fishing skills.  At the same time, it would still take me the better part of a year to get my fishing maxed out if I started doing the quest every day right now.  Therefore, I think the anglers' concerns would be a bit overblown.  For everyone who would otherwise never put in the time to get the secondary professions (fishing especially) up to max, this is a nice crutch that allows you to do it slowly over the course of each expansion.  It fits with Blizzard's WotLK policy of eventually letting all players experience all content.  I like it.  

Cataclysm Beta

So, I made it into the Cataclysm beta.  That was random.

Thus far, I've spent a day installing the client (which, to be honest, is about the same amount of time it takes to install the retail WoW at this point), signed in, emptied my bags, set up some boomkin and resto talent trees (warning: trees are only about half implemented), and had a helluva lot of fun flying around Stormwind and blowing shit up on the Ironforge Airfield.  I've wanted to do that for 5 years now.

I plan to make some new characters in each faction and try out the 80-85 zones for each faction eventually (right now, things are only implemented through 83, and I use "implemented" loosely, though I don't mean that as any slight to Blizzard - it's early beta and anyone complaining about lack of content now is a bit of a fool).

I'll post thoughts, comments, suggestions, concerns up here, and cross-post them to the beta forums where appropriate.  It gives me an excuse to use this blog again...

Tentative strategy for the Lich King, 10-man

Our guild has finally reached the Lich King!  After discussing the encounter with a 10-man raid leader from Google's guild, I think the best strategy to start off with is as follows (and assumes 2 tanks and 3 healers, which seemed to work fine for us in phase 1):

Phase 1:

• Necrotic Plague,which we dealt with just fine, and the two types of adds.  Keep the Shambling Horrors facing away from the raid, as they have a frontal cone attack.  If possible, misdirect them to the OT to avoid needing to pull them helter-skelter (facing all directions) through the raid.  Also, tranq them when they enrage.
• Infest will be cast on the entire raid every so often, dealing a bit of damage and putting a DoT on people that stays until they are healed up past 90%.  But we seem to be dealing with this easily.

Transitions (70%, 40%):

• Break off dps 3% ahead of time if a Shambling or a Valkyr is about to spawn.  Deal with it.  Pull the LK to the edge as you push the last 3%.  The LK will then run back to center before channeling Remorseless Winter.  Take this invitation to kindly leave the main platform.  
• LK will cast Pain and Suffering, a cone shadow damage spell with a stacking DoT.  Thus the raid should form an arc, not stack up.
• Ice Spheres will spawn.  These have very low HP (around 6k) and can be killed by a single hunter as they start to head for the outside edge.  (If they reach us, they'll knock us off.)
• Raging Spirits will be summoned from players.  They cast Soul Shriek, a 20k frontal cone that also silences all targets for 5 seconds.  Tanks need to grab these immediately and pull them to the edges of the raid's arc formation, facing away from the raid.  They must be killed, or nearly all killed, before the transition ends.
• Quake destroys the outer platform at the end of the transition.  Make your way off it.  Quickly.

Phase 2:

• Infest is still with us.  Still shouldn't be a problem.
• Defile will be cast on one player at a time.  This is the one that places a pool of black on the floor.  It deals shadow damage each second, and grows larger for each person it deals damage to.  If three people are in it, it will grow faster than they can run out of it, or so I'm told.  To counter this, we should all stay as spread out as possible the entire time.  We'll have a two second cast time to see who he is targeting.  That person should run, and will hopefully only take one tick of it by the time it lands (it lands where they were standing at the time the cast started).
• Valkyr will spawn.  They'll grab someone and drag them off the platform.  Just before they spawn, we need to all collapse to the center of the platform (barring any Defile placed in the center).  Once someone is grabbed, everyone else needs to chain, daze, etc. in order to slow the thing (it will only slow to 50%), and then take it out.  Then spread out again and turn back to the LK.  
• Soul Reaper will be cast on the highest aggro target.  It will put a ticking bomb on the tank, dealing 50K shadow damage after 5 seconds.  At that point, the LK also gains 100% haste for 5 seconds.  Hence the idea is to have the OT grab aggro during the 5 seconds before the 50k lands, in order to avoid having the MT take 50K and then take lots of LK blows.  The MT should still blow a cooldown.  If Puya was MT for this phase, he could probably do it without switching, by alternating Barkskin and the 4t10.  

Transition again.  This is the time to blow Heroism, to make sure we're clear of Raging Spirits (more of them in this transition than in the first one) going into Phase 3.

Phase 3:

• Defile is still with us.  Infest is gone.
• No more Valkyr.  Instead he will summon a flock of 10 or so Vile Spirits.  These will hover for 30 seconds, and then cast Spirit Burst, which is a 5 yd AOE kamikaze targeted on a player that deals 15k shadow damage.  The idea is to AOE as many of these down during the 30 second window as possible.  We'll already be spread out for Defile, so the AOE shouldn't be an issue.  
• Soul Reaper is still with us.
• He'll cast Harvest Soul.  This deals 7.5k shadow per second for 6 seconds.  Then it teleports the victim into Frostmourne.  There are two things in there.  A good guy, and a Spirit Warden with 250k HP.  Player damage is doubled due to Harvested Soul.  You need to kill the Spirit Warden before it kills the good guy, else it will kill you.  If you're dps, you need to interrupt the Spirit Warden's channeled Soul Rip, which deals increasing damage to the good guy over 6 seconds.  If you're a healer, you might as well try to interrupt it too.  If you're a healer, you need to heal up the good guy (remember, he won't be on your raid frames, so plan accordingly!).  The good guy will deal more damage to the Spirit Warden as he gets up to full health.  

Actually, I think it's really quite doable :)

Serious changes to healing throughput as percentage of total health in Cataclysm

We knew this already, but the Paladin preview that came out today had an interesting tidbit:

Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem. 

Divine Shield currently lasts 12 seconds.

Blizzard is contemplating having a Paladin, currently the highest throughput single-target healers, be unable to heal themselves to full over a 12 second time span.  That is a large, large change.  That may be even slower than healing in vanilla was, and it suggests that tanks will either have enormous health or will take very low damage relative to their total health pool.

Excellent post by Big Bear Butt on the loss of tree form

Big Bear Butt points out that we like our tree form, even if it isn't necessary from the standpoint of game design:

I know that Ghostcrawler seems to feel that the Treeform mechanic doesn’t add anything to the game, it doesn’t bring anything special to the Restoration Druid’s table.

It does.

What it brings is Treeform itself. What he just doesn’t seem to grasp is that Treeform, for a Restoration Druid, is a goal in and of itself. Not something to be pity Glyphed, but an outwards symbol of a Druid Healer’s resolve.