5.3 – What I luv ’bout it

Ahh patch day.  That rare combination of Christmas morning and your first glimpse of a real life boob.  Sure, we don’t have a new raid to spend hours wiping in but that doesn’t mean there aren’t shinies hidden among the patch notes.

Here are the things I’m looking forward to most on Tuesday:

1. New busy-work in The Barrens!!!!!

j/k

ok, seriously now.

1. Loot Specialization – You can now select what role you would like to receive loot in LFR and with bonus rolls for.  No more do you have to quickly switch specs after a pull to use a bonus roll for it.  Just select your OS from the menu.  Nice!
2. Lesser Charms now have a chance to drop from any level 90 mob.  I may have to still do a few, but here’s hoping the drop rate is generous and I can finally retire the thumb tack I use to stab myself during dailies. Yay!
3. Item Upgrades – If you’re like me you have long since run out of things to buy with Valor, main spec, off spec, everything.  Not to worry.  The Item Upgrade guy is coming back to give us a VP dump.  And apparently comrade Obama’s economy (j/k – please don’t hurt me) hasn’t been good for the poor guy because he’s giving us all a huge discount.  You will now be able to upgrade a piece completely (2/2) for just 500 VP.  That’s two pieces fully upgraded each week.  Woot!
4. Lightning Bolt can now be cast on the move, baseline!  This may actually make me experiment with the Telluric Currents glyph since I can now make some use of it during movement.  I’ll give it a go I guess.
5. Oondasta’s Spitfire Beam no longer increases in damage with each jump, but instead deals a flat 200,000 damage.  Now sure, I have till now on occasion killed Oondasta.  But it is just as often a brainless gold sink of chain-wipes with no loot at the end of the tunnel.  This change should make the encounter considerably more pug friendly.   And no, I gues I don’t really need anything he has anymore but my alt does 🙂
6. Bonus Roll bad luck streak protection.  We’ve all been there.  The soul-crushing ache of wasted Mogu Rune after wasted Mogu Rune.  It makes Bacon a sad dorf.  No more!!
7. Holy Paladin nerfs.  I know, I’m a baddie for even putting this on here.  But if I’m honest with myself, I like seeing big green numbers.  I like doing well on the log and the glass ceiling we’re stuck under (read: absorb healer tyranny) is a bummer.  The good player in me thinks this may actually hurt our raids a bit though.
8. Transmog from your void storage.  Yes!!!!
9. Dungeon journal now seperated into seperate tabs for bosses and better organized.  As of now, it’s a pain to use.  Tuesday, should be better.

And, why not?…   My list of things I’m not looking forward to on Tuesday:

1. Buffs to Healer raid CDs.  Everyone except Shaman is getting a large buff to their 25 man raid CD output.  Part of me says “Yay! The raid will benefit from this!” and another part of me says “Screw that!  Must.be.on.top.of.WoL.”.  All in all, this will probably help your raid but I think it will only make it more apparent that Shaman are hopelessly tied to our major cooldowns for our throughput.  With that advantage out the window,  we’re stuck with our mastery and mana tide to get us raid invites.  Hope you 25man raiders are in a guild that likes you 😉  Start baking cookies now.
2. More dailies.  Honestly, I can’t even tell if it’s actually dailies or just some collections like on Isle of Giants.  Either way, it doesn’t sound fun to me.  I don’t want this to be a blatent QQ, but… When did Blizzard get the idea that just because they’ve created stuff for us to do and put rewards attractive enough for us to actually do it, that they’ve added content to the game that will keep people playing?   This is not the case.  People resub to PvP, or Raid, maybe to do LFR, maybe to RP, or just because they like their guild.  They do NOT resub because there’s new busy work coming out Tuesday.  The fact that we do it does not neccessarily mean that we like it.   But yes, whether it’s dailies or collections, I’ll be doing it. <insert tack into forearm>
3. Hugely reduced XP needed to get from 85 to 90.  Apparently Blizzard got the memo that I had just leveled my 5th toon to 90 and had no intention of leveling more this expac.  So it was now safe for them to nerf the xp requirement.

That’s it!   Overall, this is a good, solid, feature heavy ‘in between’ patch .   I can’t wait.

>luvbacon<

Here’s a preview of my patch day mailbox dance.

 

My weirdo R-Sham build

Being the nonconformist (read: special snowflake) that I am, I like to experiment with different stat builds and priorities for 25man healing.   My latest ‘snowflake’ build is working pretty well for me.  Check it out.

• Legendary Meta – Lotsa freebie spells make luvbacon a happy dwarf.
• t15 2-piece – This makes haste much more attractive, since each extra tick of HST hits two people instead of one.
• Gems – Blue = Int/Spirit, Red = Int, Yellow = Spirit/Haste
• Haste – 6077 Rating.  This is equal to the 3764 breakpoint with Anscestral Swiftness.  But since I don’t have the 5% haste from the talent to lean on, I have to get there the old fashioned way.  More on this in a sec.
• Mastery – 5200 Rating. This is roughly 50% mastery.  The point just before it starts giving diminishing returns.
• Spirit – Take what you get from gems and gear.  Never reforge out of it.  I sit at around 12k spirit.  Which is more than enough with the legendary meta.
• Crit – Stack it till the cows crow.
• Elemental Mastery talent – This should be macroed with HTT.  I don’t bother to macro with ascendance because I don’t want to risk not having it up for HTT.  This puts me at 56% haste for Healing Tide, giving me 13 ticks of HTT!  That’s more than double the number of ticks you get with 3764 + AS + Spell Haste buff.  That excites me!!
• HST Glyph – With the t15 2-piece, this one goes from a ‘Great!’ glyph to a ‘You’re just not using your noodle if you don’t take it’ glyph.  It’s one of the few places in-game from which you can still get elemental resistances, and with the 2-piece, you get those resistances on twice as many targets!  Sure, it’s not sexy and won’t bludgeon your co-healers’ fragile egos, but it may just help you drop a boss or two.

I found toward the end of tier 14 that I much prefered Elemental Mastery’s boost to HTT over AS’s occasional instant heal + wasted haste.  So I began experiementing with builds that did not include AS.  I came to this build because I was having difficulty reforging down to the 3039 haste neccessary for the low breakpoint (without Anscestral Swiftness) and because I now had my T15 two-piece, making the upper breakpoint much more desireable.

This seems to be giving me more throughput.  Though with all the variables in raids (more/less firestanding, CD usage, assignments, occasionally dropping a healer, etc.), it is difficult to tell for sure if my setup is completely responsible.

With Shaman healing in such a weird place this tier and no real changes to improve our spread healing on the horizon, it’s vitally important for us to take every advantage we can to maximize throughput.  Because I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be just a mana battery for other healers.  That’s what their personal regen is for.

Tell me what you think.

>luvbacon<