An Ode to Treants

Yesterday I stayed home from work with a sick day so I did not blog.  Looks like there were some good releases in the last 48 hours.

The patch notes are listed below (far below).  MMO Champion is the source, and these are definitely not official.  There is a significant chance that these are fake, but they lead to good discussion.

In my opinion, these changes are real.  I don’t see any change that isn’t called for.  Resto druids do need to be nerfed so it is not required that you have one in order to be a top team in 2v2 and extremely strong in 3v3.  Yes, they are weak in 5v5, but dominating 2/3 brackets is good enough for any class.

In this posting I want to discuss other notes, and not purely if resto druids need a nerf or not, so I’ll go on to the other changes.  There is defintely much more to say regarding resto druids and their viability in the different arena brackets.

Some changes that will affect my moonkin are the treants buff and the cyclone nerf.  I like both of these.  Cyclone is extremely strong and I don’t mind a bit of a nerf.  20 yards is still plenty long and it’s still a very usable form of CC.  I’m not sure what the point of 15% entangling roots from a treant is.  With three of them hitting extremely quickly it will be on the target in no time.  This will make moonkin build, as opposed to a 27/0/34, more viable.  One question that immediatly comes to mind is if the treants entangling roots counts as yours.  If I have a warrior rooted, and I summon treants on a shaman, and those treants root the shaman, does that mean the warrior is automatically free?  That would be bad…

For moonkins, mana back on spell crit is a huge buff.  Owl’s have been complaining about the melee restoration of mana for a long time.  It was practically useless.  Who is going to go hit a boss and risk AoE effects or pulling aggro (I’m not sure about the aggro part, but if you have higher threat than the tank but are ranged then you get a buffer zone of like 30%… if you step into melee range then you may have the same threat and become the automatic target… not sure about this at all).

Hunters: I would like to see a bit of a nerf to BM specs but they suffered for a long time so might as well give them a few more months as a super strong class.

Mages: I really don’t see why they continue to buff mages since they are already plenty viable in arena.  Increased blink range is not needed and they already have enough escape mechanisms.  However, I’ll admit I don’t know much about them and the mages are calling the new notes a nerf.  Every class complains when they get a small nerf, regardless of how needed it is (which bugs the hell out of me… go play a game where you can put in a cheat code for god mode if you don’t want the challenge).

Priests: why oh why do they keep trying to make lightwells good?  Maybe top raiding guilds use them, but in my TK/SSC experience I have yet to see one.  The mana burn buff/nerf is good.  Reduce the time to cast to avoid interruption, but stop making it so damn powerful.  Mana drain teams need a nerf, and this includes hunters.

Paladins: they need some love and this is a good buff against warlocks.

Shaman: sounds like a pretty big nerf to elemental shamans which is good.  Talk about a relatively skill-less class to play in 5v5 that is very strong.  Resto shamans, on the other hand, got a buff.  I’m happy about this.  Resto shammys are usually a bit easy to kill and with the hunter arcane shot on their shield they really need some added survivability.

Warlocks: good, more nerfs.  Keep em coming.  I’m tired of seeing shitty warlocks win.  I remember pre-BC a warlock could beat me naked (I was a warrior).  But that was a good lock.  They have all the same tools now and it’s time to stop letting the 8 year olds be overpowered and let the skilled players shine.

Warrior: endless rage buff is good.  No warrior was getting their 41 point arms talent and maybe this will allow some diversity in arena.  Plus, MS warriors are a bit more viable in raiding although fury should still shine.

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MMO Champion:

Druid

* Cyclone range reduced to 20 yards, down from 30.
* Lifebloom healing coefficient reduced by $
* Natural Perfection now reduces damage by 2/3/4% down from 1/3/5%
* Tree of Life: You may now cast any Restoration spell in this form.
* Improved Tranquility: Now also reduces the mana cost of Tranquility by 10/20%.
* Moonkin Form no longer gains 150% attack power or mana returned from melee hits, but now refunds 2% of your total mana every time you critically hit with a spell.
* Force of Nature: Treants now have a 15% chance to proc Entangling Roots on the target.
* Nurturing Instinct: Increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 25/50% of your Attack Power.

Hunter

* Improved Mend Pet now has a 50/100% chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic or Poison effect, up from 15/30%.

Mage

* Blink mana cost reduced roughly 40%
* Improved Blink now increases the distance you Blink by 15/30%, and you have a 15/30% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Fireball, Frostbolt, or Arcane Blast spell by 50% after you Blink. (Might just do one of these effects…)
* Prismatic Cloak now reduces damage taken by 3/6%, up from 2/4%
* Mana Cost of Slow reduced roughly 40%
* Arcane Fortitude now increases your armor by an amount equal to 100% of your Intellect, up from 50%.
* Mana Shield now scales with spell damage. (Max rank with full S3/best gear will absorb around 1Kish, added damage absorb doesn’t cost/consume mana to the shield, it will always cost what the tooltip says)
* Improved Fire Ward is now Molten Shield
* New Talent: Molten Shield – Reduces all damage taken by 2/4% while using Molten Armor, and causes your Fire Ward to have a 25/50% chance to reflect Fire spells while active.
* Frost Warding: Chance to reflect Frost spells while Frost ward is active by 25/50%, up from 10/20%.
* Icy Veins no longer increases the chance your chilling effects Freeze the target, but now reduces pushback by 100% for 20 sec.
* Icy Veins spell haste bonus no longer stacks with Bloodlust.
* Ice Flows now gives you a 15/30% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any Frost spell.

Priest

* Mana Burn effect reduced roughly 50%.
* Mana Burn cast time reduced by 1 second.
* Improved Mana Burn: Now increases the amount of mana burned from your Mana Burn spell by 10/20%.
* Focused Will now reduces damage by 2/3/4% down from 1/3/5%
* Lightwell: Charges increased to 15, up from 5.

Paladin

* Turn Undead no longer fears the target, and now incapacitates it.
* Turn Undead now works on demons. (Prob will be renamed to a diff spell)
* Turn Undead is now subject to diminishing returns.
* Turn Undead now lasts 10 sec. in PvP.

Rogue

* Envenom no longer consumes the Poison applications.

Shaman

* Lightning Bolt: Spell coefficient reduced by $
* Lightning Overload can no longer proc on instant cast spells. (aka NS+CL won’t proc it)
* Lightning Overload can no longer critically hit.
* Tremor Totem and Poison Cleansing Totem now pulse every 3 seconds, down from 5.
* Earth Shield mana cost reduced by 50%
* Earth Shield now has 6 charges, down from 10.
* Healing Grace: Now also reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 10/20/30%

Warlock

* Life Tap: Spell coefficient reduced by $
* Life Tap now consumes toughly 10% more health when used.
* Demonic Knowledge now increases your spell damage by an amount equal to 4/7/10% down from 5/10/15%
* Improved Shadowbolt: Now only works for the Warlock.
* Improved Shadowbolt: Now increases Shadow damage by 3/6/9/12/15%, down from 4/8/10/14/20%
* Incinerate spell coefficient increased by $

Warrior

* Endless Rage now properly generates 25% more rage from damage dealt (previously only 12% cause of a bug)
* Improved Hamstring: Now has a 10 second cooldown.

Items

* Mystical Skyfire Diamond now reduces the next spell cast by 20%, down from 50%. (It also might just be changed to straight stats, still in debate. Don’t be surprised if this metagem just gets added stats with the current effect in the initial 2.4 notes, it’s still being worked on.)
* Shaman Gladiator 4-set bonus now reduces pushback by 30%, down from 70%.

Levels 60-70 are beasts.  Extremely long.  I’m a bit burned out with leveling.  Remember, I quit my raiding warrior to level a ret pally to 59, decided I wanted a moonkin and immediately leveled him to 63 (currently).  These last 10 levels are really damn long and I’m struggling to hit the 70 mark.

Originally, the goal was to hit 70 and arena this weekend.  It’s just not going to happen.  I’m almost 64, but these levels are so brutally long that there’s no hope of hitting 70 before Tuesday’s server reset.

So, the new goal is next weekend.  That is definitely realistic.

Since I’m so bored of leveling, I have been doing quite a bit of BG’s.  I am absolutely loving AB and WSG as a druid.  It is really fun ninja’ing flags and surprising the hell out of people by popping treants on them from stealth.  If you haven’t ever played a stealth class in AB, then I can guarantee you that you have no idea how many people are just lurking and waiting for an opportune moment to ninja.  I’ll wait 5 minutes until the defenders get bored, all but one leave, pop my treants and kill the one remaining, and ninja away.  Patience is the key.

I have no idea why horde is so much better at AB than alliance.  I have only been in one losing AB, ever.  Granted, I haven’t played a ton, but I’d say my record is 20-1.  It’s not that horde is communicating better, necessarily, it’s just that people know what to do.  Alliance moves in one big mob, while horde is much more fluid.  There is no reason to assault one base with 12 people when you could be assaulting three with 4 each… you can either assure yourself one base or have a very good chance at getting two.

I think the biggest reason that horde wins AB is that they always seem to control the blacksmith (BS).  Maybe this is a map advantage and it’s marginally closer, but I don’t think so.  There has been more than a couple times where alliance is first to the flag, but horde usually kills them and retains control.  BS is so key to mobility in the battleground, and honestly I’d rather have only BS than all four around it.  As long as we have BS then we can stage attacks with ease and eventually get at least two of the other four.  That is why I always charge BS at the start of the BG.  I want to do all I can to make sure horde wins it.

My weekend WoW started off well.  I decided that skinning really wasn’t making enough gold and that I’d need to change to herbalism if I wanted to have 5k upon hitting lvl 70.  So, the powerleveling began.

Herbalism is much easier than mining, but not as easy as skinning.  Still, it only took about 5 hours to go from 0->300 and since I’ve been in outlands questing I’m already at 365.  With mining maxed out, and herbalism almost complete, hopefully the AH will be kind and give me the gold!

When I was nearing 275 in herbalism, I went to Un’goro.  At the time I was level 62 so most alliance in the area were significantly lower than me.  I ganked a shaman/rogue combo a couple times (didn’t camp, they just happened to be where I was twice).  However, the most fun gank was right as I was nearing my 300 mark.

I was mounted up, looking for herbs and the occasional thorium vein.  A warrior was running away and so I decided I might as well chase him down.  As soon as I got a bit closer, I saw the warrior charge into a lock who was turning in a quest to the Tauren on the SE part of the map.  Beautiful.  I get a gank w/o guild (GwoG).  I rooted the warrior, asked my treant buddies to help out, and started dancing.  Those little trees beat him to a pulp and I never had to stop the fantactic dancing groove I started.

This is why it’s an Ode to Treants (albeit there is no actual ode… maybe someone more creative than I can come up with on)

For top arena players, I believe there is only one profession that can actually help: enchanting.  Since you can enchant your rings with +8 to stats you gain an “advantage” over other players.  As far as I know, all other professions are replaced with PvP gear.  Blacksmithing’s armor and weapon are replaced, leatherworking’s items are replaced and you can get the leg kits from other players, and jewelcrafting is replaced by BT-level gems (this one I may be wrong in).

However, since I’m nowhere near a full PvP set, and I don’t have much gold sitting in the bank, I’m not ready to pick up enchanting just for the minor upgrade.

I have been leveling up with mining and skinning.  At level 58 I was ready to hit outlands, but my mining was only at 275.  Knowing it would be painful to pass by outland nodes and not be able to mine, I decided to raise my skill to 300.  Four to five hours later I had it… but man was that a brutal few hours.  I vowed to never again let my professions slip while leveling a toon.  That’s probably an easy promise to keep since I have absolutely zero plans of ever leveling a toon from level 1 again.

Now I am level 62 (right as the cusp of leveling to 63).  My mining is maxed out at 375.  The problem is skinning seems to be rather worthless.  I don’t see any money coming from it.  I had the goal of dinging 70 and purchasing my epic flight form (pre quest) immediately, but I just don’t see skinning as helping that cause.  Vindisiel, on the other hand, has mining & herbing and is rolling in dough.  He thinks that herbalism makes more than mining.

So, what do I do?  Do I drop skinning and go back to the starting areas to level herbalism?  The nice part is I have an epic ground mount so it wouldn’t be terribly bad, but I feel like I’ve already wasted enough time on professions and I just need to focus on 70!  I’d hate to jeopardize reaching level 70 next weekend and getting some arena points before the Tuesday reset.  On the other hand, I have 7 long levels to go… that’s probably around 70 hours of play time where I will be using my professions and selling stuff on the AH.  Skinning, being rather worthless, could cost me 1-2k gold that I could have made if I was herbing.

I haven’t quite decided what to do yet, but I’m guessing I’ll drop skinning tonight and pick up herbalism.  I have about 1k gold right now (if Robvanwinkle pays me back the 500g I loaned him) so I think if I get my herbalism up I have a chance at dinging level 70 with the gold to pay for epic flight form.

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As a side note, my old main Jugz has her epic flying mount.  I didn’t get it for months after leveling 70.  Instead I leveled my blacksmithing and engineering up so that I could have nice epics and raid.  I don’t regret this by any means since this is before the time when PvP gear was extremely easy to get.  I saved up the 5k gold by farming marks of sargeras and fel armaments.  I actually enjoyed the farming (mainly because I had nothing else to do on Jugz) but when I finally got the epic mount it was kind of a let down.  Since I didn’t have any gathering skills, and it’s not a PvP server where you can chase people down, there really wasn’t a point to it.  I do, however, think Simoncowell will have some fun in epic flight form and with two gathering skills it will be worthwhile (plus the ganking factor!)

As we hit 70 and actually enter arena, I’ll blog the details of what has worked and what hasn’t.  Here is my initial strategy:

All stealth and try to stay close together to minimize anyone finding us.  We select our focus fire (FF) target, my druids target (SC for Simoncowell) and Vindisiel’s target (VD).

From stealth, release treants onto FF target.  This should shock the opposing team and cause them to look for a split second.  This will give time for the rogue to start the stun lock.  Both druids change into moonkin, put insect swarm (IS) and moonfire (MF) on FF.  Then, both druids cyclone thier target.  Go back to FF target for a quick wrath, and then start the cyclone spamming on their target again.  Hopefully, by this time our FF target is pretty much dead.  It had treants, 4 dots, and a rogue beating on it with minimal heals (since its healer was cycloned).

Now, that’s in a perfect situation.  Obviously it will not go nearly as smoothly as that.  Here are a few things that would change our strategy:

1.)  One, or more, of the targets is stealthed.  We will not be able to set up our targets as easily, but we can still assign one of the moonkins to cycloning the stealthed target.

2.)  Mages & Pally’s.  These both have immunity which means they can’t be burst down (since they’ll iceblock or bubble).  Mages will have to be cycloned and hope the FF target is down before we need to deal with them.  Their counterspell will hurt, but we do have 2 classes of spells (arcane and nature) and we can’t be sheeped.  Pally’s will be bad because after the first cyclone they will bubble allowing for heals.  My initial solution is that when we see the pally bubble, then cyclone our FF target causing none of the heals to get through!  This will take some testing.

3.) AoE on our Treants.  For the most part I don’t see this as a bad thing.  They’re there to deal some damage, but mostly as a distraction.  If a player is wasting 3-5 seconds dealing with the Treants, then that is a win in my book… those buggers did their job well.

4.) Druid healers.  They’ll be in stealth longer than us, most likely, which means they’ll get the first cyclone off.  However, we’ll see about that.  Any druid who stays in stealth too long, or takes time to cyclone us, may not have the time to heal up the FF target… remember, we’re putting a ton of DPS on that guy and a healer is going to be ruining their pants.

5.) Warriors. That damn charge/intercept.  Luckily most warriors seem to roll with druids, which means the warrior can be rooted (no defensive dispell).  However, it may prove better to just rage starve them (if you never hit a warrior, they can’t hit you very hard… believe me, I know.  It’s near impossible to take out a priest or druid bear if you’re trying to burst through their PW:Shield or ridiculous high armor).

6.) Hunters.  Holy crap I’ve got my ass kicked by hunters during leveling.  Granted, I usually can’t use LOS of them and I don’t yet have cyclone, but a beast master hunter scares me.  They will likely be a FF target to get them out of there!

Many more problems to come…

Since I can’t play at work I am relegated to thinking about optimal builds and strategies.  We are going to try a 2 moonkin, 1 rogue 3v3 team.  My hope, which may be totally unrealistic, is to reach 2k before season 4 comes out.  I have experience in PvP, but Seacrestout (rogue) and Vindisiel (moonkin) are relatively inexperienced.  However, both are very good raiders so I think there is hope.

I’m thinking my build will be 42/11/8.  This will allow for feral charge (escape mechanism and an additional way to lock down a healer) and cheap shapeshifting.  However, since I’m only level 62, I have not had a chance to use feral charge in PvP.  There is going to be quite a bit of learning during the next few weeks.  I’d be very happy if we could reach 1650 next weekend.

My problem is that I don’t know where to allocate my 42 points in the balance tree.  Can I avoid “Balance of Power”?  I don’t know if the 4% to hit is used in PvP… I think that’s +hit instead of spell penetration.  Granted, I think it gives me 4% defense against incoming spells, but I’m not sure that’s worth the talent points.  Also, in my current thought I can’t max out “Wrath of Cenarius” which may be gimping my DPS.

I’m spending a ton of points to get this feral charge… I’ll need to truly test it out to see if it’s worth it.

I hear blogging is addictive, so I figured it would fit my personality and I’d give it a shot!  Treants will be dedicated, at least initially, to my World of Warcraft experience.

A bit of history:

Played WoW since release.  I took a break for about 1 year and returned after TBC was released.

I have ran a guild that, at the time of my departure, had downed 4/6 SSC and 2/4 TK.  I quit the guild because I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to raiding 4 nights out of the week.  I still play a ton, but it’s not required that I’m there… it’s actually a game again that I just log on when I want to, not when I have to.

Myself and a few guildees decided to reroll on a horde PvP server (we were on an alliance PvE server for raiding).  Originally I leveled my ret pally, Johntesh, to 59 before I had an epiphany: roll a moonkin and try 3v3 with two moonkins and one rogue.

So, I stopped leveling my pally and immediately created my moonkin, Simoncowell.  My druid is now 62 and getting ready for arena.  My friends, Seacrestout and Vindisiel, are the moonkin and rogue that will make up the 3v3.  Hopefully we’ll all be lvl 70 by next weekend (Feb 9) and we’ll start the arena dream.

I do have a bit of arena experience.  My warrior, who was my main in the raiding guild (fury spec), reached 1950 with a resto shammy and disc priest 3v3.  However, I have now realized I really wasn’t that good of a warrior.  I didn’t use intervene to get back to safety, I didn’t have all my abilities keybinded, I turned using keys instead of the mouse, etc.  I hope that I’m able to do better as a moonkin.  I think I will since I’m not raiding anymore and I’ll have much more time dedicated to arena/PvP.

Anyway, stick around, read the blog if it interests you, and drop some comments here and there!  For now it’s not blocked at my work, which means I’ll be posting often!