 There is no such thing as perfect class, each one has some weakness(es). Which is fine by me but some things are just plain horrible and I can’t understand why steps have not been taken to correct them. Or maybe there is something in the works but I seriously doubt we’ll see anything before Cataclysm. Here’s two things that piss me off the most. Eclipse In Burning Crusade the casting rotation for balance druid was very simple; dots up, spam Starfire. It was boring but it had predictability and control. Then along comes the pre-WotLK patch with new talents and Eclipse is introduced. Certainly it made the casting rotation more interesting and you had to pay a little more attention to it but the downsides of the mechanic are just freaking annoying. Basically the casting rotation is just one big RNG fest now. Only way you can control the proc going off bad time is not to DPS at all beyond applying dots. Also with the rather short duration of the Eclipse proc came debates when you should apply dots during Eclipse or should you do it at all. This is something people still don’t seem to agree about. Thankfully Eclipse improved a little in patch 3.2 by Lunar and Solar procs having their separate cooldowns. That was the end of debate which proc is better and at very least meant applying dots at ‘wrong time’ would not cost you so much DPS as it previously did. However the fact that you still can’t control it makes it very frustrating mechanic. How well you know the class, push your buttons, what kind of gear you got and how well you minimize movement during encounters are the main contributors to your DPS. But once you perfect that you’re going to hit a wall, and once you bump into it you can’t help to notice how someone has spray painted ‘RNG’ on it with big pink letters. No matter how well you know your stuff a big chunk of your DPS will be determined by pure luck. If it does not proc, or it procs in bad time you’re pretty much screwed. Sure you can stack crit rating like mad to try and maximize the odds but is not going to solve it – you’ll still have awkward times when the bloody thing just is not playing ball. I’d rather have DPS rotation with 10 different spells than this. At least I would feel like I’m in control and can actually do something to improve rather than this. Movement Many encounters are heavy on the movement, which is fun, I like those more than tank and spank fights. However high movement fights are the ones where your DPS will be even lower compared to pure DPS classes because they got some ability to help their movement. Warlocks got teleport, mages can blink and hunters got disengage. Sure they’re not perfect but balance druid does not have anything – and neither does other hybrid ranged DPS either (elemental shaman, shadow priest). I don’t mind being slightly lower on potential damage as hybrid vs the pure but I think the movement fights give unfair advantage to the pure classes. Also with the unpredictability of Eclipse you often just waste most of your proc because you had to run somewhere. Well aren’t they the unholy duo, Eclipse and movement. Gragh. Often I just feel like I’m dragging this huge iron ball in a chain on my feet while trying to play. What balance druid really lacks in my opinion is the feeling that you’re in control. Too many vital things are just based on pure chance. These two things are what I would really want to see improved in Cataclysm but I don’t have very high hopes about it happening. Let’s keep fingers crossed anyway. |
 Last week me and few others finally completed long journey of Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 player). I know by now some of the challenge has weared off when everyone is wearing better gear and all that but it still was fun and at least somewhat challenging effort. By the time Trial of the Crusader rolled out I had got really tired of Ulduar… but after not going there for a while it felt nice and refreshing again which made this achievement all the more fun to do. It took fair few weeks since we really didn’t go there more than once a week for 3 hours with maybe couple exceptions. Extended raid lockouts really came handy with this since if we’d had to re-clear every time it would have taken way longer. Now when I’m not so much tied up with *cough* Dragon Age *cough* anymore let’s take a look on all of the meta achievements required for this one. My least favorite fight with the most annoying way possible.. blergh. My role every time was just to be shot up Leviathan and destroy the turrets. Can’t say there’s much to it. I use Wild Magic Potion first time I’m up there but beyond that there’s not much to do than just blast away. When I was back at gunner spot on Demolisher all I pretty much did was shot down Pyrite and loaded it. Can’t really speak for other vehicles and how difficult they were since I’ve never done anything else. Stokin’ the Furnace (10 player) Speed kill and hence not much special to do… pew pew. Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare (10 player) This is one of those achievements you’d call ’silly’. Razorscale’s flame breath does 15k damage so you need to keep those Guardians alive and under 15k health. What you should do is just have one tank pick all Guardians, have someone DPS them a little but not too much since the NPCs also attack them and if you bring them down too soon you risk killing them. If you do not DPS Razorscale at all you get more tries on flaming the dwarves. You’ll most likely hit the enrage timer once and wipe, but on 2nd pull you miss only few dwarves and can do DPS on Razor too. You kill the heart and XT gains damage and health boost, gravity bombs spawn void zones and light bombs spawn adds to be killed. It’s only really about more intense healing, being more careful with gravity bombs and killing the spawning adds asap since they damage the whole raid when they’re up. Really simple all in all. I Choose You, Steelbreaker (10 player) Heh what am I going to say about this.. my job is always so easy. The challenge in this is for the healers and tanks.. so I as DPS don’t have much to worry about. Don’t die and dps as well as you can? DPS left arm down to low, DPS middle to less than 30% but not under 15%, keep killing right arm until Kologarn is under 30%, then kill both left and right arm under 12s from each other and you win. Can’t say there is much to it. Do what you’d normaly except do not kill the cats. Once again nothing I as DPS didn’t have to worry about. I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare (10 player) Oh look a DPS race. Free mage first, try to stack buffs as well as you can, DPS the heck out of it and you win. Use Wild Magic Potion when you got storm buff, moonlight buff and lunar eclipse. Lose Your Illusion (10 player) Reach Thorim under 3 minutes, stay spread to avoid chain lightning jumping, stand away from walls to avoid blizzard, when you see lightning charge building up run away from that side of the room. Shapeshift if you got slow effect from Sif’s frost bolt. When running away from lightning charge it’s hard to keep the spread and avoid chain lightning but it would be worse to get hit by lightning charge. Just run back once it’s safe again and keep the optimal spread. Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood (10 player) Leaving the Elders alive mostly just means she and her adds will hit harder. You’ll do what you’d do normaly anyway.. just do it better. Although now you also need to free rooted people. As a druid you can just shapeshift out of them but not everyone has that luxury. I found it handy to have a macro with /target strengthened iron roots to quickly get them down. In my opinion this is one of the harder achievements in Ulduar. It’s not overly complicated or anything but it’s a lot of different stuff you need to do which makes it very technical. Ok this was the hardest by far in my opinion. Very big awareness fight.. there’s tons of stuff that could kill you if you’re not paying attention. Also it is heavy on movement so as balance druid it was a nightmare.. we get very heavy penalty from having to move around and losing eclipse time. I really enjoyed it though. This for me felt greater than anything since Sartharion 3D back in the early Wrath. I Love the Smell of Saronite in the Morning (10 player) Err… what the.. This was way way easier than I would have thought. All I did was exactly same thing as on normal mode. Avoiding shadow crashes is very easy, only thing where you really have to shape up is when you got life leech and well.. that’s not so difficult either. My screen lights up like xmas tree when I got it so.. hard to miss and not move. I suppose it’s just how fast you pick a direction to run to. I think the challenge was again on the healers since they could not get mana back with the crystal pools. One Light in the Darkness (10 player) Had not seen this guy for a good while so it was somewhat about re-learning the encounter again. But then again… you do not have to do anything special. Do what you’d do on normal mode anyway, just do it better. All in all it was really fun experience doing all these achievements. Now when they are done we’ve had couple tries on Algalon and so far.. well. It does not feel impossible but it needs some work. I’ll be sure to at least tweet about it if something fancy happens. Thanks for everyone who participated in doing this stuff, including you special guest stars who filled in few times. |
 It has been 6 months since I started working on this blog and I thought I should take a look back on how’s it been going. There has been ups and downs but mostly it has been very positive experience. My main goal from the start was just to have fun with it and I achieved that. Also it definitely has been a learning experience… and I’m not only talking about the technical side. I’m not new to writing but it still surprised me how much work writing one post takes. How does one write with those Moonkin claws then Slowly. Average amount of time it takes me to write one post is 5-7 hours. First I stare at the screen for few minutes, then write one sentence, stare at it for couple minutes, scratch my head a bit and write another sentence. Lots of coffee infused creative breaks too when I just listen to random music, sip my coffee and plan what to write next (np: The Dresden Dolls – My Alcoholic Friends). I’m not sure why it takes so long.. can’t I come up with things very fast or do I just want to really really think it through first. Oh well.. it can only get faster over time so whatever. This is main reason why I don’t write more often than roughly once a week. After the text is done it takes me maybe an hour to do the artwork and code. It may be just screenshots and working with Model Viewer but it does take some time. Especially if I don’t have a clear idea what I want to do and just mess around to see what would be nice. One thing I hate in Wordpress is the visual editor. I tried it once and the post looked absolutely terrible and I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. Positioning pictures was a total nightmare. Good thing I’m familiar with html to some extent so I could just write my own code and get exactly the kind of results I wanted. Biggest challenges Technical stuff. Since I wanted to do a self hosted blog and I had no prior experience about Wordpress or any other blogging platform it took a lot of reading before I could start. I kept reading and re-reading the instructions and to be honest it just felt more confusing everytime. Eventually I just tried to install it and see if I got it right or not… and you know what I got it right the first time. Huh. Guess it sounded more difficult on paper than it actually was. That obstacle I passed but there’s another I still haven’t solved and it is absolutely driving me insane. Talking about properly setting up the RSS feed here. Yes it’s up there and it works but it does not work the way I’d want it to work. Problem is it’s not showing full text in feed. I’ve set it to display ‘full text’ from options but no result. And I read something that some older RSS versions are not able to display full text but RSS 2 should and I think I’ve set it to that… I think. I’ve done googling, reading through Wordpress and Feedburner manuals, various forums and Elune knows what else but I just can’t get it to work. I realise it is terribly annoying to subscribe to a blog and not be able to read posts on conviniently on your feed reader and I apologise my readers for that. If anyone knows what might be the problem and how to solve it please send me an email and be my hero. Time for fun There’s a few posts I’ve really enjoyed writing. The story of my main character was so much fun to write. And not just to write but also go through literally hundreds of old screenshots from times long gone. Raiding Molten Core in Tier 0? Feels like a lifetime ago. This post also has attracted most reader comments so I’m glad others have found it fun to read too. Changes to make Scarlet Monastery heroic I’m sure everyone has an opinion about what classic instance they would want to see revived. I did too and when this topic came up at Blog Azeroth I could not let it pass. As I was writing this I actually was at Scarlet Monastery.. checking out the rooms bosses where in to figure out what kind of mechanics would fit in and I also read through their current abilities to see what was cool and could work at higher level too and what I would change or add. I love reminiscing. I’m not saying everything was better back in the dawn of WoW but things definitely were more crazy which makes it so fun topic. In the year 2000 For now I will keep going as I have now but I also do have some plans to evolve the site a bit. I don’t want to say anything definite because I don’t know can I pull it off in the end but let’s just say I’m looking on different ways to add more content besides just text. What’s kinda holding me back right now is lack of disk space to work with. Yes it sounds silly but I don’t really want to delete anything and I’m running pretty tight budjet at the moment so… Maybe something comes up early next year. We’ll see. As far as writing goes I tried to make clear from the start that even though this is a balance druid blog I will also write about more general things. However if I can look at those other things from druid perspective I will do that. I think it has worked fairly well so far and I will keep at it. Completely non-WoW posts will probably appear eventually but they will always be in minority. Lastly I want to thank all my readers for their interest and support. I know I have hardly advertised this site anywhere so how you found your way here is a total mystery to me. I hope I can keep you interested in future too. /hugs -DP |
