Lich King Changes in 3.3.3?

We’ve been working on Arthas in 10man and noticed a few things last night.

Change 1:
He wasn’t hopping around like a kid on crack.  He stood in one spot.  You know how Auriaya or any other boss that spawns a bunch of little adds will walk around and reposition a lot?  The Lich King wasn’t doing that.  A very nice change and I’m sure it only increases the DPS on him.

Change 2:
The second change / bug wasn’t so good though.  Prior to 3.3.3 in the transition phase you would gain the debuff for the raging spirit spawn, have a couple of seconds to move and get to a tank before it would stun you.  Now it is more like a spell cast.  When the cast is up it happens.  Someone gets it, gets stunned immediately, and the raging spirit spawn.  It really sucks cuz you find yourself dying just instantly and suddenly.

My guess is 1 is a change and 2 is a bug… that is mainly wishful thinking though and probably the other way around.

Anyone else noticed any weird things going on elsewhere?

EDIT:
Tagra commented, “People used to be able to suicide while the orb was in transit to prevent it from spawning at all, so they changed the orb travel time to prevent avoiding the spirit.”

Rez of the Week – Patch Notes (3.3.3)

If you have tuned in for awhile you might have read my take on Patch 3.3.  If not its worth a read in my opinion, in fact I’d say it was my most favorite post EVA!  I had a lot of fun writing it and so I’m gonna try doing it again.

And so…

It begins.

Ding ding goes the trolly…

QQ goes the priest…

Blizzard has responded to our dismay at the new (now old) bonus on the tier 10. Let’s take a quick refresher on what has transpired with 4p t10 bonus shall we?

Original bonus…

Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

Old bonus…

Increases the effect of your Renew and Power Word: Shield spells by 5%.

New bonus…

This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster’s Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.

I’ve been trying to write this since Monday or Tuesday when I first saw the patch notes changes on World of Raids.  It’s been a bit of a fiasco trying to wrangle it together though and each section has spun me right round.  I’m just gonna hit the points and explain why I’ve had such difficulty putting this together for you.

Spell Usage

I had initially intended to use my own WMO (wowmeteronline.com) as a reference for normal usage of CoH.  I try to use it on cool down but I also use A LOT of renew as well.  Anyway, I got to looking at other random holy priests and found that I use CoH a lot more than most.  It is possible I was simply looking at the wrong people but who knows.  This threw me for a loop though because how could I use myself as a base if others aren’t using it as frequently as I am?  Am I an extreme case that just tries to abuse the shit out of it?

Anyway, here’s the pic of my WMO that I was going to use.

I had to edit it down so that I could fit it a bit more visible on here.  You can find a complete picture of it here.  This was a Festergut fight but its a good look at an extreme setting, Queen or Sindragosa would also be good examples of CoH at its max.

I would have net’d an extra 42,000 healing just from the set bonus if I had it.  That’s a pretty big chunk of healing for just a set bonus.  It is certainly better than the old bonus of +5% renew.

I took a look at it in smaller terms as well.  On average it would have added 370-420 on each of the 6 heals.  Note I don’t have Test of Faith (3/3: Adds 12% healing to targets at or below 50% health).  Even taking the over heal into account I think the set bonus is really good.

Gear

The next thing I was going to look at was simply compare the gear I’d be switching out for it.  That’s when I realized I’m still mainly wearing disc gear and t10.25 is already an upgrade in those slots so no reason I shouldn’t be going for it.

Then I decided I’d just take a quick comparison of t10.25 to the other 25man loot.  What do you lose to pickup the tier pieces?  A quick look at my holy spreadsheet (it uses Bobturkey’s stat weights) shows the tier 10.25 helm, chest, and shoulders as very close to BiS.  Especially if you aren’t doing heroic modes.  The next choice would be gloves over legs.  Why?  Because the crafted legs, Lightweave Leggings, fucking own and the frost badge gloves, Gloves of Ambivalence, aren’t as big of an upgrade over t10.25.

Raw Data (gets a bit mathy)

Then I tried to look at it from simply a raw data stand point.  Just finding the coefficient for CoH was a pain in the ass relatively easy, I just didn’t understand it.  What is a spell coefficient?  Glad you asked.  It is how much of each point of spell power actually gets applied to the spell.

CoH has a coefficient of 40.29% OR roughly 2 out of 5 spell power is actually used for the spell (if you had 500 spell power then CoH would hit for base + 200′ish).  With talents you can bump this coefficient up to almost 52%.  The 4 piece bonus will bump this up to about 56%.  It doesn’t sound like much but as I showed above it can net huge gains if you use CoH a lot.

Conclusion
The 4p t10.25 is definitely good for a CoH spamming holy priest.  I’m a fan of quirky which makes me sad to see the change to it in the first place.  It might also have something to do with the UI as Miss Medicina points out.

The truth is, the default WoW UI is not very good at alerting the player to procs – and Blizz really does need to design their tier bonuses with the default UI in mind.

What pieces do I wear?
Chest / Helm / Shoulders / Gloves

t10 4p change… discuss!

There has been a lot of debate over our tier 10.  Some people love it, some, not so much.  Personally I’ve already geared in a different direction that doesn’t include the 4 piece bonus so I haven’t had a chance to try it out.  I’ve been of the mind that while its mostly useless for Disc it could add quite a bit of bonus healing to Holy.  That is merely speculation though.

Old - Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

I’m not going to get the chance to ever try it out though.  They are changing it to something… watered down.

NEW – Increases the effect of your Renew and Power Word: Shield spells by 5%.

Is this a good change?  It’s really debatable (which I’m sure it will be debated).  I know I’m certainly gonna throw my hat into the ring.

Holy:  Suxor change.
Disc:  Hmmm… good change.

But do I like it?  Nope.

Yes, I realize I’m a bitchy pessimist but just hang with me a moment.

Set bonuses I think they should be more glyph like.  They should alter the basic functionality of the spell, or at least modify it in someway.  Interesting interactions that while not overpowered are still very awesome.  Take a look at our Tier 7 for example, it didn’t do anything major but increased the jumps on Prayer of Mending by 1.  Ground breaking… no, very useful… yes.  Simply increasing how effective a spell is nice… but not interesting.

Prior Set Bonuses -

Tier 4 -

• 2p – Your Prayer of Healing spell now also causes an additional 150 healing over 9 sec
• 4p – Each time you cast Flash Heal, your next Greater Heal cast within 15 sec has its casting time reduced by .1, stacking up to 5 times.

Tier 5 -

• 2p – If your Greater Heal brings the target to full health, you gain 100 mana.
• 4p – Increases the duration of your Renew spell by 3 sec.

Tier 6 -

• 2p – Reduces the mana cost of your Prayer of Healing ability by 10%
• 4p – Increases the healing from your Greater Heal ability by 5%

Tier 7 -

• 2p – Your Prayer of Mending will jump an additional time
• 4p – The cost of your Greater Heal is reduced by 5%

Notice anything interesting about tier 4 and 5?  Do they look something like Glyphs, hmmm?  Do you remember the Greater Heal 2p bonus?  OMG, getting that bonus was like eating your cake and still having a dozen extras!  It was gi-fucking-normous back in the day.  A relatively simply set bonus that effectively reduced the mana cost of G.Heal allowing us to use it more.

The druid set bonus that lets their rejuvenations jump around like Prayer of Mending, that’s a pretty awesome functionality change while still allowing the spell to do its job.

Let’s get back on the change at hand though.  While the old bonus is debatable good, there isn’t much of a debate about the new bonus.  Simple math can tell you if its worth it for you or not.  Are you disc?  Do you spam PW:S?  Then yes, it is worth it.  You know that the absorb damage is going to happen.  Renew is an awesome spell but a 5% bonus to it I don’t see really being worth that much.  In the days of needing to constantly be at full health… people often aren’t low enough for renew to take most of its duration without being sniped.

Anyway, thats just my 2 cents.

Edit:  On the same day Thespius of World of Matticus made a similar post.  He’s got some useful math’s from other people as well as an… interesting point of view on the issue.

Where’s my 333?!

Oops!  I got up early so that I could write up for 3.3.3… but the bastards didn’t release it this week.

How selfish of them.

I’ve decided to go ahead and go back to WoW, give it another shot.  I’m gonna limit my playing to ONLY raid nights and see if that does it.

My only desire to play at the moment is simply to login and chat with friends.

I’d still like to clear Icecrown Citadel though.  The buff started this week which should trivialize the encounters quite a bit (at least on 10man).

My 10man group went ahead and went last week without me and got Sindragosa to 3%.  We’ve had a bit of a snaffu on her since she came out that has kept us from the Lich King but that’s okay, we still rocked that zone.

The 5% increase effects both healing and damage and is supposed to get up to 30% at its max.  I can imagine that trivializing the zone quite a bit.  It’ll be awesome to get those skeletal dragons to ride on.

Here’s to drake hopes!

EDIT: The 5% increase I spoke of above effects not only healing and damage done but also increases maximum health by 5%.  You could opt out of the buff if you want… but that would be fucking retarded.

World of Raids has some more information on it but here are the dates of when the buff increases.  Notice how it says August 3rd for the 30%?  This really makes me wonder about the expected release date of Cataclysm.  I had honestly expected it as early as May or June but this implies that maybe its more like September or October.  I wonder what else will be released OTHER than Ruby Sanctum?

5% (March 2nd, 2010)
10% (April 6th, 2010)
15% (May 4th, 2010)
20% (June 1st, 2010)
25% (July 6th, 2010)
30% (August 3rd, 2010)