Glyphs, Talents, and Reforge

Please stop being so restrictive about the Glyph/Talent UI. It's driving people nuts, I loathe the moment I have to change!
Philosophically, we don't want automating talent or glyph swaps. Once it's easy to reglyph every pull, players feel like they must. (Source)

The above is about addons on the talent/glyph ui.

In Vanilla there was one spec, no glyphs, and if you wanted to change your talents you had to go to your trainer. He would then give all your talent points back and you could redecide how you wanted to spend those points.

Back then it was actually possible to spend your points halfway over 3 different trees if you so desired. The only requirement was that you had filled up the previous talent tier with enough points to open up the next.

There was no gemming your gear, no reforging, no glyphing. No nothing. You picked a spec, figured out what your role was, and went with the best spec for that.

During raid, you had no option then to just deal with it. And sometimes classes would be switched out, and the high-end raids would sometimes send people out halfway through to have them respec quickly and summon them back.

This was comparatively a lot more costly, but much easier, because at some point you would know your specs so well that you could just fill them in blindly almost. As long as you made sure to enchant all your gear you were good to go once the summon came.

Now when you get an upgrade you often cannot even wear it directly. Because without reforging, gemming and enchanting it it would quite often be a downgrade to your perfectly tuned set.

In fact, what happened to me the other day is that I got a neckpiece of ilvl 496 which replaced my 463 neck. 30 item levels up, but I could not use it because I would be so far under the hit cap by swapping it out that it would be a problem.

This makes me wonder if Blizzard has gone overboard in the options to finetune your character. Each time you win a piece all other items have to be reforged to be in tune with the items you already have. Gems have to be replaced, enchants have to sometimes be redone, etc

Hit and expertise are the worst for this as the blues have already admitted, but also haste forms an issue since for quite a few classes there is a haste cap. Mistweaver monks included, in between the different haste plateaus the stat simply doesn't do a lot and you're better off with crit or even mastery.

And then there is the retalenting and glyphing. I have to admit, I was excited when I learned that we would be able to reglyph and talent on the move. I'm not so sure anymore.

It feels like I'm at a disadvantage if I don't reglyph/retalent for every fight. So pre-fight check is no longer a matter of having all your buffs (flask, food, and casted buffs), it now includes do you have the correct talents and glyphs.

It feels as if more time is spent in between fights just to finetune it so you have the edge, more time spent in between and less time on the actualy fight. More time spent on preparation and less on actually having the fun. Or is the preparation supposed to be the fun?

Another problem on top of this is that when you do change a talent or glyph it changes the way you fight, or heal so drastically at times that it takes a couple of attempts to adjust. So while it may be the better glyph choice for the fight, it may change the way you do things so much that you'll do worse at first. Glyph of Uplift is a good example for this.

With glyph uplift costs mana, without it costs chi. Sounds simple, but it affects so much more. Because you're using mana for uplift you need to use a different spell to spend your generated chi, to generate mana tea. This changes your rotation. However, if you do not change your rotation and make sure to spend the chi to get mana tea you're running out of mana real fast, because not only does uplift no longer spend chi, and hence generate mana through mana tea, it also costs mana.

Or glyph of mana tea, allowing you to have instant mana tea, but only 2 charges at a time. But it still costs a global cooldown, so if you do not have those to spare you cannot just use more mana tea at a handy moment. To know if you have to use the glyph or not requires you to know before the fight whether you'll have downtime to drink your mana tea.

So one glyph can change your healing style so much that you can easily screw it up, yet it is expected that you know how to work with all this.

I'm liking this new method less and less. Yes, I have choices, but all those choices are diminishing my time spent on the actual fun, namely the fight and learning the fight.

And since the fights are built around having the option to reglyph and retalent I cannot just ignore this part of the game. I have to play the game as it is designed even though I would much rather just focus on the gorgeous raid fights themselves.

Not to mention the costs involved with changing everything every time, meaning that you have to go farm for those costs. An upgrade will generally cost about 400 gold - 8x reforging + new enchants, + new gem. And then it's not even a weapon which upsets stuff even more.

I find myself longing more and more for the days where the difficulty was in figuring out how the fight worked, not how my character, gear, talents and glyphs work for each and every fight separately.

(and please Blizz don't go with reforging on the run, because then I have to add that to my pre-fight check as well).

Dissecting Da Boss

Yesterday in the car home I was discussing boss abilities with Thror and how most can be brought back to standard abilities. In fact, once you understand the basic abilities, raiding almost becomes like dancing. You dance left and right, and make sure to press the buttons at the same time. Make sure you stay in the right rythm ;)

After that we had some fun coming up with new boss abilities. I figured that it would be a lot of fun to write about this and got all excited about that!

At first I figured one post would be enough and started writing....turned out I had quite a bit more to write about than one post. So I'll turn it into a series of posts and come back to it when I feel like it.

Today I'll go with the first 3 abilities that came to mind, and 1 idea for a new boss ability.

This player has no idea....

'The Bomb'

One person gets chosen to be the bomb this person has to stand away from everybody else because everybody close will be blown up. Remarkably, the person itself is often not all that harmed.

Boss examples: 
Feng the Accursed - Arcane Resonance - Mogu'shan Vaults

Baron Geddon - Living Bomb - Molten Core
High Astromancer Solarian - Wrath of the Astromancer - Tempest Keep









'The Puddle or Cloud'

Defile would quickly take over the entire platform. 

Somewhere in the room, quite often under someone, a puddle or cloud of bad will form and everybody has to get out.  These puddles may or may not have extra bad, for example expanding when you stand in it.

Sometimes they stick around for the fight and you have to put them tightly together to prevent the whole room from flooding, and sometimes it requires you to stand apart so that as few people as possible get hit by it when it forms.

Boss examples:
The Lich King - Defile - Icecrown Citadel

Conclave of Winds (Anshal) - Soothing Breeze - Throne of the Four Winds (reversal, circle heals enemy and pacifies you, not directly damaging.)
Northrend Beasts (Acidmaw) - Slime Pool - Trial of the Crusader (worms drop acid clouds that need to be gotten out of)
Mimiron - Ulduar - Firefighter. So. Much. Fire

One of our raid members still has nightmares about this phrase I think...

'Hide or Die'

The last one for today is the mechanic where something, most often the boss itself, explodes and the only way to survive is to hide behind something. When a boss has this ability it is often combined with players who become blocks of stone or ice so you can hide behind the player.

Sometimes however you have to hide behind the environment, or even behind the boss.

Boss examples:
Sindragosa - Ice Tomb - Icecrown Citadel
Sapphiron - Icebolt - Naxxramas
Shade of Aran -Arcane Explosion - Karazhan (get out of the Arcane Explosion or die)

The Ability I would love to See

'Don't Touch Me'

Of course fights should be about doing something, not about doing nothing. Yet, I would love to see a boss where every hit to the boss will drain life from the hitter and give it to the boss. Some of the Sha should probably work like this. In fact, I was well surprised that we can even beat a 'Sha of Anger' when you have to beat him with more anger and fighting...I had figured this would only feed him.

How to kill the boss then? Simple, by killing his cohorts. Kill the adds, kill the boss. Of course the adds have to be tanked closed to the boss, otherwise the boss goes pissy. There has to be a reasonable risk that if you do it wrong you hit the boss anyways, right?

It would be a nice change to have to carefully pick and chose your abilities. Carefully tank the boss without doing too much damage.

Not being able to do your full rotation because it includes cleaves would naturally piss some dps off, but then, which fight doesn't?

PS: Thanks to Thror for thinking along with the boss examples

Feng the Accursed - Tactics

We beat this boss last weekend, and below is what we learned throughout the fight.

Composition:
- 2 tanks
- 3 healers
- 2 melee
- 3 ranged

We used the strategy guide from Icy Veins. Their guides are generally pretty damn good, but I can totally imagine that people would like a visual indication of where to stand that is not moving and flashing all about like the videos.

If you do like a video I can advise the video guides from Fatboss. I generally find those fairly clear :)

Phase 1.

Tips:

- Stack up properly in the center to make it easier on the healers, epicenter does a load of damage and heals have a hard enough job as it is. 

- Do not attempt to cast the nullification barrier on the ranged. This may work for some teams, it caused us only a lot of trouble because the boss would move along with the tank. 

- Make sure that melee can be under the barrier

- This is a tank fight, if your tanks are not good enough....good luck. 

Tips:
- Create a weakaura for the Wildfire Spark
- If you do not want to use weakauras, turn on your chatbubbles. DBM will make you say that you're affected and a chatbubble can function as a weakaura
- If you have really high dps you may be able to get the boss to the next phase before he gets to his 4th draw flame, you then want to use the nullification barrier on the 1st and 3rd draw flame.
- Use heroism in this phase, especially when starting on this fight. This phase is the hardest and you will wipe on it a couple of times. We used heroism here, and the first time we got out of this phase into the 3rd phase we wiped, but the second time we got into the 3rd phase we also killed him. Phase 2 is definitely the hardest.

Tips:
- Use any movement speedups to get to the boss faster when he does arcane velocity
- Do NOT overshoot the boss (roll did exactly that for me >_<)
- If you can save at least 1 big raid cooldown for this phase


If any of the more experienced raiders have tips to add please feel free to do so :)

The Stone Guard - Tactics

I wanted to post this on my guild forum for my raid crew, but I couldn't get the pictures there. So I figured I'd post it here. Maybe it'll help someone else as well. 

If anybody has helpful comments please let me know, my raid group has not done this fight yet, and this is just meant as preparation for coming weekend.