Repopulating the Old World: Cross Realm Zones

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you.
How can I when you build the great wall around you? - Tori Amos, China


In a move that surprised everyone, Blizzard has announced that they are going to begin testing Cross Realm Zones in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. I love this idea like a big sloppy Dwarfling kiss, and given the subject of my last post, the timing of this announcement is particularly serendipitous.

I am a unrepentant Wrath Baby; I created my first character in the very twilight of the Burning Crusade expansion, mere months before Wrath of the Lich King went live. Because of this I have never experienced the Old World as the thriving, vibrant place that it was in Vanilla.

For me and thousands of other people who joined the game late, levelling in World of Warcraft is a solitary experience. The wilderness of Azeroth outside of the major cities is filled with bears and bandits and monsters of all types, but even on busy, highly populous servers, meeting another character is something of a rare occurrence. It's a lonely life, being a lowbie in Azeroth, but the new Cross Realm Zones aim to change that.

The way that Blizzard is trying to implement this is quite brilliant, if you ask me. Basically, certain realms will be linked together based on population, and each of those realms will share certain zones that are flagged as "Cross Realm". Using the Barrens as an example, a character on Sargeras would walk out of a realm-exclusive Orgrimmar into a Barrens shared by 5 other servers, and would see and interact with characters from all of those realms normally, just as if they were all on the same server. At the same time, Blizzard will have the ability to keep highly populated zones (Cities, to be sure) exclusive. This way Stormwind won't be crushed under the weight of thousands of people standing at the fountain oogling the fifteen thousand naked Night Elves dancing on the mailboxes.

I think this feature is fantastic. Not just a technically brilliant solution to make an older technology scale and adapt to the changing reality of the current, max-level focused state of the game, but also as a step to the ultimate goal of eliminating realms completely. I talked about this back in January, but the elimination of the barrier walls around the different realms is a very clever way for Blizzard to extend the life of the game. Right now, if Blizzard chooses to do so, the only realm-specific areas are the main cities, the Auction House and any zone that is going to be populated enough not to be a concern like the Cataclysm zones and the new Mists of Pandaria zones.

As a social, massively multiplayer game, it is always a little bit odd to run around the world outside of the two major faction cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and see, well, nothing. By repopulating the Old World, new players will finally get an experience that is close to what older players experienced when WoW was new and when having a maximum level character was rare: A world that is full of people to interact with.

It really doesn't matter that there are no group quests in the game any more, nor is there any real need to team up with people to defeat the quests that people are given. Having a lot of people busily running around doing there own thing is exciting. It adds an immense amount of flavour to the game.

Like the bustling sidewalks of downtown New York, it's all about vibrancy and life and activity; it's about the soul of this game, which is missing in the low level zones. Bringing that kind of life back to zones other than the cities is going to go a long way to help make new players—and old players who love lowibe alts like myself—remain excited about this game for years to come.

After all, it is World of Warcraft. Bravo, Blizzard. Well played.

To Beta or Not to Beta

"It is my desire ... to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm sure this post will frustrate a lot of people who have been anxiously awaiting their Mists of Pandaria beta invite, if there is anyone left who doesn't have one.

As a Annual Pass subscriber I knew that I was going to receive a Beta Invitation eventually as it is one of the perks of committing to keeping a WoW account active for a year. It ain't all about shiny horsies, after all. When it finally did arrive I was thrilled; I had never had a closed-beta invite to anything before so this was something new. I was always a little jealous of people who could claim that they started WoW in the beta, so this was my chance to get into something at the very beginning.

Of course, as a blogger, the beta of a new expansion provides a vast new range of subjects to talk about. There are a lot of changes coming that need to be discussed and opined on, not to mention entirely new and gorgeous vistas that are awaiting my virtual, gnomish-engineered camera. There are endless topics in the beta to write about because the beta itself changes constantly. No blogger in their right mind would pass up the such a rich source of writing material, would they?

Well, perhaps I'm not in my right mind, but after the initial excitement I've decided not to participate in the Beta.

Don't hate me if you don't have one yet, let me explain...


NO TIME FOR LOVE, DOCTOR JONES

With the great heaving chaos that is my life right now, any chance I get to play WoW is a rare and beautiful thing. It often comes in the few fleeting moments between when the Dwarfling is put to bed and the daily chores are done (which means cleaning up the swath of destruction that she leave in her wake) and when I go to bed. Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes less. And sometimes all I can manage is to stagger to the couch and pass out, leaving the great, menacing evil-doers of Azeroth unmolested for a night.

There are two great drawbacks to spending my very limited amount of playtime on a Beta server as opposed to the Live servers. One is that everything that is done in the Beta is transient because it will be reset to zero when the Beta ends and the expansion is launched. So any time and effort that I put into a Beta character is wasted and I think better spent progressing my characters on the Live Realms.

The other drawback has to do with the eternal frustration of crashes and inconvenient bugs. There is nothing more infuriating than having a glitch cost precious time when on a limited play schedule. I don't think I could handle the instability of the Beta. I think it would create far more tension than it would solve for me. And I get enough of that with the low level PVP that I've been indulging in lately.


THE TEXTURE OF ANTICIPATION AND EXPERIENCE

The other, less concrete reason has to do with spoilers. I'm the type of person who values the quality of the experience as much as the experience itself. How something is done is just as important as doing the thing itself. A Beta, with all the bugs and unfinished bits, is not a great way to see content for the first time if the texture of the experience is a primary concern. Seeing things perfectly polished in their final forms is what I'm after, and if that means waiting, then so be it.

However, the other side of this particular coin is that on launch day it is going to be virtually impossible to see things the way they should be seen. The giant crush of people descending on the new zones will make things chaotic and mucky, as has happened with every expansion so far. The Pandaren starting zone is going to be wall-to-wall bear butts competing for the same quest mobs and objectives, people will be griefing with their gigantic mounts on top of quest-givers and things are going to be in a general state of higgledy-piggledy. Not really the best way to experience brand new content either, is it?


ON THE OTHER HAND...

Of course, when I see things like this I can't help but be tempted by the Beta.

Taken from the official WoW site.

From what I've seen so far I am incredibly impressed with the quality of the visuals of Mists of Pandaria. It looks simply amazing; the best work that Blizzard has done so far, I think. I would love to experience it first hand and create some stunning Images of Azeroth posts, but time simply is not on my side.

Illuminated Healing in 4.2: New! Improved! 100% More Shiny!

I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams
They fade and die. - lyrics by James Kendis, James Brockman and Nat Vincent[1]

Ahh, Holy Paladin Mastery. You are so young and yet have lived a very checkered and unappreciated life. Greeted with an overwhelming wave of indifference when you were born which turned into outright hostility as you grew up into an awkward adolescent that no one knew what to do with. It became so bad that people could barely look you in the eye any longer and simply reforged as much of you away as they could, pretending that you didn't exist. It's not really fair, is it? We all had such high hopes for you.

Patch 4.2 represents a coming of age of sorts for Illuminated Healing. The awkward teenage years of short, non-stacking, pimple-like bubbles are gone. In it's place is a more mature and grown-up Mastery ready to take on the real world and make a difference.

Alright, I think I've taken that metaphor as far as I can go. Consider yourself spared the Clearasil jokes.

MASTERY PRE-4.2

As a stat for Holy Paladins, Mastery in 4.1 is generally considered beyond worthless. It is the automatic choice for reforging. Our mastery ability, Illuminated Healing, puts a shield on the target of a Paladin's single-target healing spells for 12% of the healed amount, modified by mastery. Sounds great, in theory. Who wouldn't want an across-the-board 12% increase in their healing effectiveness due to the mitigation of incoming damage? Discipline Priests have made a living with doing just that through two expansions now.

The Evolution of Illuminated Healing

The problem is that it just doesn't play out that way in reality. The shields are too small to be meaningful. They don't last long enough to reliably be counted on to absorb damage. And they don't stack - meaning a heal cast on a target with a shield on it will overwrite it with a new shield based on the new healing spell. These three things combined means that most of the Shields simply go to waste and the ones that are used are small enough to be insignificant.

Throughout Cataclysm, Blizzard has been steadily tweaking Illuminated Healing with a series of small buffs. It's very apparent that they are being cautious with our mastery in an attempt to ensure that it doesn't become overpowered. Each patch has come with tiny little buffs and balances to answer the ability's critics in the hopes of finally making Mastery a desirable stat for a Healadin. 

MASTERY: NEW, IMPROVED AND READY FOR PRIME TIME

Patch 4.2 finally answers the final critique of Illuminated Healing with the addition of stacking shields up to 33% of the Paladin's health. Here is the patch note detailing this:

Illuminated Healing (Mastery) has been adjusted slightly so that if a paladin refreshes an existing copy of his or her own Illuminated Healing on a target, the new absorption amount will be added into the old absorption amount and the duration will be reset. The total absorption created can never exceed 1/3 of the casting paladin's health.

The reactions to this change have ranged all over the place. Kurn, Rohan and Adgamorix all posted widely varying opinions on the subject, as have many others.

I look at this change, and the changes that have preceded it and am satisfied. I think that Blizzard has finally got Illuminated Healing to a good place and it will finally start working as it was initially intended to: To have each direct heal that a Paladin cast give it's target a shield to reliably be counted on to mitigate a portion of future incoming damage. And now that subsequent casts will increase the amount absorbed and refresh the duration, it's much less likely a shield will go to waste.

Will we be able to pump up the shield to maximum quickly and efficiently before the pull? No, but that's alright because that's not the way it's intended to work. Are we going to be able to quickly shield a raid using Holy Radiance? No, but that's alright because that's not how it's intended to work. Will we be able to shield both the target we're healing and the tank we have Beacon of Light on in a single cast? No, but that's okay too.

All of those things would be extremely nice, but likely would be unbalanced. As it is, Blizzard can't help but nerf all of our single target heals every single patch, so let's not give them any more incentive because of an overpowered Mastery.

I feel that the intent of our mastery is to provide a buffer: The more we heal a target, the smoother and easier to manage future damage becomes, and I think that this buff goes a long way to making this concept finally work.

IS MASTERY DESIRABLE?

The big question this change brings up is: Should a Holy Paladin gear for Mastery?

I still believe the answer is no: Haste is still a better throughput stat for Holy Paladins. I am still a big fan of a Haste-heavy build if for no other reason than to increase the responsiveness of my healing. To me, it feels better to be casting quickly and more often. Mastery is still valuable with this gearing strategy since quick heals will allow a Paladin to stack shielding quicker.

However, the changes to Illuminated Healing coupled with Critical Strikes now healing for 200% certainly do make an argument that a Critical Strike and Mastery gearing strategy could prove to finally be viable come 4.2. Slow, frequently critical heals that leave a shield twice the size of a normal heal could prove to be equally effective as faster heals that crit less - and may be easier on the mana pool, something that may prove important as we move into the Firelands to play with Ragnaros and his diabolical minions. I am no theorycrafter, so I will let others do the math on this one, but I'm curious to try it out and see how it works.

That being said, I think that Mastery is still not as important as either Haste or Crit, regardless of which gearing strategy you decide to go with. My order of preference for secondary stats is as follows:

SPIRIT > HASTE = CRIT > MASTERY

In this scenario, Haste and Crit are equal, but separate. Choose one at the expense of the other. Either way, Mastery is still not something that a Paladin should go out of their way to get, but having it on otherwise well-itemized gear is no longer quite such a detriment.

In this sense, Mastery is still a bit of a troubled child. No longer is it completely worthless, and Illuminated Healing is now quite good, but that extra little bit of shielding that the Mastery stat provides pales in comparison to what Haste and Critical Strike provides. I guess it's not out of the Clearasil years quite yet.

But honestly, short of scrapping and redesigning the Holy Paladin Mastery ability completely with something better, I'm not sure what Blizzard can do to make a Holy Paladin want to go out of their way to gear for it.
 
  

More Paladin Changes on the Patch 4.0.6 PTR - Patch Notes

Courtesy WOW Insider, new patch notes have been released today for the 4.0.6 PTR and there are some very interesting changes coming for Paladins.  Of course, it’s best not to get too excited over these changes just yet, as these changes may not make it out of the Play Test Realm.

Forbearance:  The duration has been lowered to 1 minute, down from 2.

Forbearance, of course, is the debuff that Paladins are given when using one of our major cooldowns (Divine Shield, Lay on Hands and Hand of Protection), preventing the paladin from chaining together very powerful spells for a certain period of time, currently 2 minutes.  The reduction of this effect to 1 minute is a lovely “Quality of Life” improvement for paladins, allowing us a great deal more flexibility as to when we can use our major cooldowns.  The 1 minute limitation still prevents us from casting the wonderfully overpowered Divine Shield/Lay on Hands combo (every PVP paladin’s dream, I’m sure), but doesn’t restrict us unduly from casting our cooldowns when needed. 

This is a very nice change that I would love to see make it onto the live servers, especially because…

Lay on Hands now causes Forbearance on the target.  It used to only cause it when cast on the paladin.  This was an old design from when Divine Protection caused Forbearance and the paladin didn’t want to prevent a tank from using their defensive cooldown.

From the perspective of a group with a single paladin healer, this is no big deal.  I only have two Forbearance causing cooldowns that can be cast on other players, and they typically would go to different targets anyway.  Where this will affect things is in a raid with more than one holy paladin.  I suspect that this is to prevent raids from gimping boss fights by allowing the tank to ignore a mechanic and take a huge amount of damage, knowing that there are two 100K heals available at a moments notice to pull him through.  Chaining two Lay on Hands back to back on a tank could allow the tank to survive an insane amount of damage, possibly completely neutering certain boss mechanics.  This could lead to a situation where the optimal way to do an encounter would require that there be two paladins healing the raid, which is the exact situation that Blizzard is trying to avoid.  The reduction in duration to Forbearance, however, should still allow two paladins to heal together in a raid effectively without being unbalanced or prone to “Unforeseen Creativity” from the perspective of the developers.

This change is too bad, but understandable from a balance perspective.  Let’s let inflating gear levels neuter the bosses, like always.

Lay on Hands cannot be a critical effect and will not be affected by most abilities which modify healing (such as Beacon of Light).

D’oh!  This one hurts.  One of the most beautiful and elegant things that a holy paladin could do was to cast Lay on Hands on a DPS, have it crit and then have half of that healing to go the Beacon of Light target.  Seeing that many large, green numbers show up on my scrolling battle text gave me a severe case of the giggles most times.

Again, from a balance perspective, I can understand this one.  But I don’t like it.  I don’t like it at all.

Rebuke can now be trained by all paladins at level 54.  Exisiting characters will need to visit their trainer, even if they had talented Rebuke before.

This change has been out for a while and has got some people very, very excited.  It’s absolutely fantastic for Protection Paladins since they’ve desperately needed a real interrupt ever since… well, forever.  It also allows a Holy Paladin to add even more utility to their arsenal.  My only question is where the hell am I supposed to put yet another button on my action bar?

The interesting thing about this change is that if a Holy Paladin wants or needs to be using Rebuke, they are going to need to heal within melee range of the boss.  This is interesting since it would also give us access to Crusader Strike to generate Holy Power.  Given the very short radius of Holy Radiance, the melee nature of CS and Rebuke, I’m wondering if that is exactly where Blizzard wants Paladins to do their healing. 

Protector of the Innocent heals for 30% less.

And the nerfs just keep on coming.  With Protector of the Innocent healing for the amount that it does right now, I am almost completely able to ignore my own health bar and focus on the group.  I doubt that this is an intentional design; hence we get this reduction in PotI’s healing.  No big deal, really.  Frankly, I think the biggest result of this change will be a large decrease in my Overhealing Done numbers.

I think these changes, added to the ones that we have seen previously add up to a lot of not much. The reduction in Forbearance is nice but not game-changing, as is the change to Divine Plea and it’s associated Glyph that we heard about last week. I think Paladin’s are in a good place right now, and the minimal changes that Blizzard has proposed really amount to not much more than a simple fine-tuning.

Divine Plea Buffed From the Brink of Irrelevancy? (PTR)

Patch 4.0.6 is heading to the Play Test Realm according to MMO-Champion.  This is not a content patch, so no new raids or anything, but is a bug fix and update patch. 

For Holy Paladins, there is not much in the way of changes coming.  As with Ghostcrawler’s post last week, it looks like Holy Paladins are in a good spot right now. 

One small but significant change is coming down the pipeline, however: Divine Plea is getting buffed.

Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

In addition: Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.  Up from 5%.

This is a nice, small buff to a good ability that will make it substantially more useful. Couple this with the new glyph and we have a real winner here.

The biggest problem with Divine Plea the way it is now is the 50% healing reduction while it is active. This buff gives us more mana returned in a shorter period of time, thereby reducing the impact of this limitation. The extra 8% 3% mana is just Awesomesauce flavoured icing on the cake.

In this healing environment there is seldom a time when 9 seconds of reduced healing will spell the death of a tank. And within the space of that time, there are many other things that a Paladin can do that aren’t heals and won’t be affected by the debuff. For instance, depending on Haste you would have 6 or 7 global cooldowns during that time so you could cast:

Judgement, (1.5s GCD)
Holy Shock, (1.5s GCD
drink Mana Potion, (1.5s GCD)
Cleanse, (1.5s GCD)
Hand of Salvation, (1.5s GCD)
Judgement, (1.5s GCD)
Holy Shock, (1.5s GCD) and then resume healing normally.

In this particular example, the Holy Shocks are used less for the amount of healing they would do, but rather to build Holy Power for an immediate Light of Dawn or Word of Glory when Divine Plea is finished. Of course, there are any number of different utility spells you can throw into that 9 seconds: Hand of Freedom, Hand of Protection, more Cleanses, Aura Mastery, etc. Even spamming Holy Light with its extremely low mana cost would be an option.

All in all, I’m very pleased with this tweak. I think it will go a long way to making it worth hitting the Divine Plea button again. I hope that it survives the PTR.

On the nerf side, our Blessings are getting a bit of a mana cost increase:

The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.

Since Blessings are normally cast outside of combat, this is mearly a “Meh”. I don’t suspect that this will change anybody's playstyle, except I may be slightly more reluctant to rebuff in the middle of combat for a Battle Rez.

Full Patch Notes from MMO-Champion are here.