This post is in response to this week’s Shared Topic over at Blog Azeroth. It was originally suggested by Wrathbringer from Metal up Your WoW. For additional takes on this topic, I invite you to read Runycat’s Recruit a Friend (or Yourself) and Megan’s New Rules, Part I.

You may remember a while back how excited I was when MMO Champion discovered the presence of unicorn-esque Zhevra mounts in the game files. I previously had reason to believe that these mounts would be acquirable through quests from the Hemet Nesingwary expedition in Northrend. It turns out, however, that these amazing ground mounts are only available to those who can convince a friend who is not already playing to play the game for two months or more. I find this incredibly, ridiculously frustrating for a number of reasons.

First of all, everyone that I know that would enjoy playing World of Warcraft already has an account, active or otherwise. This program should extend to encouraging canceled accounts to renew. Why should a friend who tried the game, became disenchanted with the leveling curve (or quests, or hair selection, or whatever), and canceled have to purchase an entirely new account? This new program should have been added onto the lackluster Scroll of Resurrection program already in place for renewals. A returning player should be viewed as at least as valuable as a new player.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since the first day of release. In City of Heroes/City of Villains, they issue Veteran Rewards at various playtime milestones, both to encourage and reward their long-term subscribers. While I thought that was really neat for CoX, I didn’t really expect for Blizzard to follow suit … until they implemented a new program that makes me think they value a potential new customer more than they value my years of past and future dedication. Every year that you play should afford a percentage-based experience bonus for alts that you create.

As you may know, I play with my husband. Shouldn’t we be able to "link accounts" to help us level new characters without having to buy a third account? This “linking” could be available to any two accounts from which character transfers would be allowed (same last name and/or billing information). To obtain the same benefits that a new player would, not only would we have to purchase a new account, but we’d later have to pay $25 to transfer the character onto one of our existing accounts or continue paying an additional monthly fee. I understand that Blizzard is in business to make money, but surely encouraging the creation and advancement of alts will make them money in the long term.

As it stands, Blizzard is essentially charging $X for 300% bonus experience, 30 free levels, and a special mount not available through any other means. In my mind, this puts them a step away from allowing players to purchase gear directly from them. All in all, it feels very much like receiving a fantastic pricing offer in the mail from my cable company/ISP but when calling in to switch to the new plan with all its bells and whistles, being informed that only new customers are eligible for the deal and that I shouldn’t have received the offer in the first place (true story).

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Thanks to the generosity of a reader who asked to remain anonymous, I’m now the ecstatic owner of a beta account for Wrath of the Lich King! The reader in question e-mailed me yesterday afternoon, surprised that I hadn’t yet gotten my hands on a beta key and generously offering me the one he had. Once Valenna pried me off the ceiling over my cubicle, I accepted his offer. I tried to send my benefactor a Tree-Shirt to say “thank you,” but he graciously declined.

By the time I got home from work yesterday and got the beta client installed and patched, it was 11 o’clock, so I didn’t have as much time to play as I would have liked. I managed to convince myself not to call in sick to work today, but I’m watching the clock for 5 PM! In my so far limited time in Northrend, I did discover a few things I thought worth sharing:

• Playing with the default UI is painful. Most addons aren’t WotLK-ready, yet, including any of the mainstream action bars. Luckily, WoWInterface.com has created a whole new category for those addons that are working in the WotLK beta, including a new action bar addon called N52Bar that’s modeled after the layout of my Nostromo game pad. That’s all I’ve installed so far, but I’m going to add a few more tonight, including agUnitframes, Outfitter, and hopefully Baggins.
• There are a lot of monsters in Northrend. A lot. And they all want to eat me. Also, much like fiery ground effects, floating ziggurats = bad.
• Phaelia looks much better with no marks on her face. I’m so happy that they’re allowing us to remove/change them. I ended up picking the Dwarven hairstyle with the hair pulled loosely back to the nape of your neck with a single braid. Very Gaelic chic. I’ll probably change again tonight. At 12 gold a haircut, it’s a good thing I brought a bunch of money with me!
• Respecs only cost a copper on Beta. That made the accidental misclick of 2 points in Natural Perfection a LOT less frustrating. It also means that I’ll get to play with lots of different talent specs.
• I love the new learned pets and mounts system. It was really nice to be able to clear out so much bank space, though a bit disconcerting when my Frost saber POOFED on me when I went to mount for the first time! (I seriously freaked out before I remembered that he had been added to my mounts list.)

If you also happen to have a beta key and have an active character on the PvE server, please say hello! My character name there is THAELIA (the name “Phaelia” was taken /shakes fist at her impersonator). Maybe if there are enough of us that are as-yet-unattached, we could form an all-Druid, all-the-time guild. If we do, we’re totally getting a rabbit tabard to symbolize our ongoing dedication to acquiring Critter Form! We could even call the guild, “Critter Form or Bust” I’m soooo not getting tells now, am I?

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Sorry things have been quiet around here lately. I’ve been absolutely swamped at work the past couple of weeks which is where I do most of my blogging and blog-related activity (like answering e-mails). Here’s a wrap up of the changes affecting Druids over the past week, along with some of my impressions.

• Koraa Follows up on Lifebloom Change
• Downranking No Longer Possible
• Spell Pushback Changes
• Feral Summary

Koraa Follows up on Lifebloom Change

Developer Koraa went on to respond to further questions about the previously reported coefficient reduction of Lifebloom, asserting that Blizzard rarely nerfs an ability for the purpose of PvP balance if it effects PvE, confirming that this is an intentional PvE nerf. She goes on to explain that Flourish, Nourish, and talents like Living Seed are intended to help compensate. It appears that she did, in fact, misspeak in her earlier post about the intention for Druids to be high throughput healers, which is comforting.

I’ve noticed many players use the "PvP excuse" as a way to dismiss that abilities or spells are too good in PvE. For example, Illumination… that wasn’t nerfed for PvP reasons (like many believe).

Whenever we change abilities we always consider the outcomes for all aspects of the game, very rarely will we change an ability that will reduce it’s effectiveness in PvE or PvP for the sake of the other. And if we do, it’s intended.

In the case of Lifebloom, it’s too good in both aspects of the game. Again, it’s not our intention to merely just reduce the effectiveness of Lifebloom, but to also introduce new healing mechanics (Flourish, Nourish, talents like Living Seed and the improvements to Tree of Life) to compensate.

HoTs are intended to be effective in HPS and efficient, but have the drawback of requiring time to heal. The issue today is that you’ll HoT a player who got hit by a big AOE, and some other class will use a downrank direct heal and cause you HoT to be ineffective. This is being addressed through downrank penalties. We want other classes to say "Hey, I could heal that guy back up who just got hit by that AOE, but I’ll let the Druid do it instead and preserve my mana." Note that I’m not saying random AOE damage is not what HoTs are only intended to be for, I’m just using that as an example.

Of particular interest is the quote, “The issue today is that you’ll HoT a player who got hit by a big AOE, and some other class will use a downrank direct heal and cause you HoT to be ineffective.” which speaks directly to another important change coming down the pipeline …

Downranking No Longer Possible

Developer Wryxia explained a significant change to the game’s spellcasting system that’s coming in Wrath of the Lich King:

As you may have noticed, in this latest build we have updated spells and abilities using mana. These no longer cost a fixed amount and instead they’re a percentage of your base mana, not including any mana increase from Intellect. For the most part this should mean mana-based spells and abilities are costing roughly the same amount as they do in the live game, though there might be some slight changes either up or down. But we have tried to keep them as close as possible to the same mana cost for a level 70 as they are now in the live game.

What will change though is that lower rank spells will lose their appeal. We have made this mana cost change purely to prevent downranking, which is an unintended technique that we were not at ease with. We’ve previously tried ways to discourage it, but have decided that we’d rather find a solution than continue to find ways to penalize those who choose to downrank. The solution we chose was to make downranking obsolete, encouraging people to always use their highest rank of each spell and nothing else.The highest rank of a mana-based spell or ability will now remain the most powerful effect, but at the same mana cost as earlier ranks.

We’re certain that for some people this will cause a period of readjustment. Hopefully removing a few more of the extra buttons you’ve been pressing will eventually be seen as a good thing; it might also be easier for some people to do their role without having to learn to downrank. We are anticipating such a big change may have some teething problems, perhaps causing balance issues, and we’re all set to deal with them as they arise. In the meantime, we appreciate any comments and feedback related to this change.

Another Blizzard poster by the name of Zarhym commented on this change, as well:

In the latest WotLK beta push, we made a large change to the mana cost of spells. All player spells now cost a percentage of base mana rather than a fixed cost. Base mana is a special value determined by the player’s level and class, regardless of any effects or items that increase intellect. It is the size of a player’s mana pool if the player has zero intellect.

This change was made primarily to prevent downranking, as it’s a technique that was never quite intended. Rather than continue to find ways to penalize players for casting low-rank spells, we decided to essentially make doing so obsolete. If rank 5 and rank 6 of a spell cost the same amount of mana, but rank 6 does more damage/healing, then there is no reason to consider casting rank 5.

So, each spell line (eg. Frostbolt, Shadowbolt, Greater Heal, Rejuvenation, etc.) has a fixed percentage of base mana that it costs for most of its ranks. That means each time a player gains a level the cost will go up some. The percentages were picked to attempt to keep the costs relatively similar to what they are currently in World of Warcraft. For most spells, that percentage will drop some when the player receives their highest-rank spell in existing Burning Crusade content. This was done to better fit the existing cost curve, and to keep the mana cost for level 70 players as close as possible to existing costs. Level 70 characters will see most of their maximum rank spells change in cost slightly up or down, but not by significant amounts.

We anticipate there being some balance concerns due to this change, and our development staff will be ready to implement new spells, abilities, or talents to resolve those issues as the testing process continues.

This is a significant change to those healing classes who rely on having multiple ranks of their largest heal available to them, adjusting their selection based on their target’s current health, most notably Priests who frequently downrank Greater Heal. Healing Touch-based Druids would also be affected by this change, but I suspect that HT-based builds may be going the way of the dodo in Wrath with the introduction of Nourish and improvements to Regrowth. What this will effect is the downranking of Lifebloom. While in live we only have one rank to work with, Wrath will introduce two new ranks of Lifebloom. While mana costs aren’t yet set in stone, our third rank of Lifebloom is projected to cost about twice the mana as our first, representing a significant increase in the cost to maintain a stack. This combined with the reduction to its heal over time coefficient will likely go a long way toward bringing Lifebloom down a couple of steps in terms of efficiency.

According to an earlier quote by Koraa, Blizzard was concerned about HoTs being overwritten by downranked spells. It seems that Blizzard’s intention is for HoTs to see a greater percentage of effective healing done. An admirable goal, but the main reduction to effective healing from our HoTs is not because Priests, Paladins, and Shamans are actively downranking single target heals but instead because of AoE and multi-target heals like Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and Chain Heal. With the addition of the Paladin AoE heal, Beacon of Light, and Flourish, these “fire and forget” group heals are going to be even more prevalent in Wrath.

Lifebloom is currently cheap enough to throw on a target on the chance that something else doesn’t “overwrite” the HoT. Nonetheless, Regrowth is already often a better choice for raid healing.This will exacerbate the difference, and this makes using a slow-acting Rejuvenation and the HoT-portion of Regrowth less viable for raid healing. While the stated intention is to allow heals over time to be used for raid healing, the combined effects of increased mana cost, a decreased HoT coefficient, and more widespread group healing will have the reverse effect.

This change will make using an addon that displays incoming heals practically essential, and I hope that we’ll see something built into the UI that makes this process smoother and less resource intensive. Non-Druid healers may also want to consider configuring their raid frames so that heals over time — even those they didn’t cast themselves — are displayed since mana conservation is going to be a much larger concern. Of course, this would have been helpful to the raid as a whole before the downranking change, and it’s certainly not a widespread technique. Healers are often too concerned with not handicapping their own stats.

Finally, the elimination of downranking will have a significant effect on one of our deep Restoration talents, Replenish since it will no longer be possible to derive its benefits by casting a 20 Mana (assuming Tree of Life) Rank 1 Rejuvenation.

However, lest you deride the 3/3 talent mercilessly, consider the fact that assuming assuming a 20k mana pool in Wrath of the Lich King, we can use a Rejuvenation to gain an average return of 120 mana:

Mana /Tick = 0.15 * (0.02 * Total Mana)

In Tree of Life, Rejuvenation is projected to cost around 516 mana. This change will make a Rejuvenation effectively cost 120 less mana when cast upon oneself, which is a 23% mana cost reduction. This mana is effectively “transferred” to someone else if you cast it on them. However, this gets back to the basic problem that Rejuvenation is too slow acting to not get overwritten by another healer. Even if a healer opts not to overwrite the Rejuvenation that’s been cast on her, another healer almost certainly will, at least in a 25-man raid.

Of course, the obvious solution to this problem is to modify the talent such that it reads, “Makes the target immune to group heals.” Heck, I’d just settle for making them immune to Brain Heal.

Spell Pushback Changes

A change with tremendous PvP-implications is that being made to the way that spell pushback works. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, spell pushback refers to the delay incurred while being hit and casting a spell. To quote the current description at WoWWiki:

The first attack will set your casting time back by 1 sec. Any [subsequent] attack will set it back by a lower amount. The amount decreases by 0.2 sec with every attack, down to a minimum of 0.2 sec per attack. However, no attack will actually increase the casting time. For example if you cast only 0.2 sec. of a spell, it would only be set back by that amount.

This means that three successful hits could delay your spell’s casting time by 2.4 seconds; four would delay it by 2.8 seconds. In Wrath of the Lich King, this dynamic is being changed:

• When casting a spell:
  • The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time.
  • All hits after the second will have no effect.
• When channeling a spell:
  • The first and second hit reduces current duration by 25% of total duration each.
  • All hits after the second will have no effect.

This means that the maximum pushback for any number of hits will be 1.0 seconds, making it much easier to deal with fast-hitting pets, Rogues, Feral Druids (sorry, guys), and a group of melee whose interrupts all happen to be on cooldown. While this may initially seem like a buff to healers and spellcasting DPS of all sorts, keep in mind that one of the strengths of a Restoration Druid is their ability to use insta-cast HoTs, both to “heal on the run” and to guard against spell interruption and pushback. This change will be make Priests, Paladins, and Shamans more competitive relative to Druids. Despite this, I view it as a positive change that will make healing less tedious and frustrating in PvP.

For a Warlock’s view on this change, I invite you to visit Horns’ post, Spell Pushback Gone.

Feral Summary

There are way, way too many posts regarding Feral tanking for me to post on a blog labeled “Resto4Life", and this post is already growing like the opposite of a shriveled up, rotten broccoli-looking Tree of Life, so I’ll try to summarize what I’ve read so far:

• Bears will become more viable MTs at the expense of some of their OT ability. It will still be possible to OT if that is your desire.
• With the addition of a new tanking class and improvements being made to Bears and Paladins, a Protection Warrior will no longer be required for a raid to be successful.
• Bears will not see the high armor values they saw in TBC due to the desire to streamline the items dropped in raids.
• Ferals they will get potions and weapon procs and are intended to be able to perform better than in TBC.
• Blizzard does not consider the "convenience" of a hybrid tank/melee DPS to be a compelling enough reason to bring Feral Druids to a raid. By forcing a Feral to choose between a primarily tanking spec or primarily cat spec, they hope to make each character more desirable overall.
• "We will be really disappointed if there aren’t bears main tanking Naxx and later raids, and cats that, if not consistently as high as Rogues, are at least a lot closer than they are now. "
• Druids are not yet considered "finished" and are due for a review before ship. "We’re not done with Ferals" is stated about 4-5 times.
• Blizzard does not intend for "talent bloat" (among existing talents) to be the way to force Druids to choose between Cat and Bear, but instead wants to introduce new talents that will strengthen one role or the other.
• Feral tanks need more attention to bring them up to par with Paladins and Warriors.
• Ferals may see an increase in utility to make them more viable, though no concrete information is available.
• Bears will have larger health pools and Warriors will have higher mitigation.

Finally, kitties can rejoice in their newfound faster feet with Feral Swiftness now active indoors. Just be careful as I’ve known a few cats to have difficulty avoiding walls indoors!

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It is with great pleasure that I share with you the first real preview of the new hairstyles for female characters in Wrath of the Lich King! The contents of these images were discovered (NOT created) and submitted by community figure Andrige, best known for his modified shapeshift skins and a host of other Druid-related art projects. He sent the female images to me and the male images to John of Big Bear Butt. You can check out the male preview here!

Thanks, Andrige!!

Disclaimer: Andrige wanted me to mention that, because he isn’t familiar with all of the existing hairstyles, that it’s possible some of these may already be in the game. Also, there don’t appear to be new hairstyles for Dwarves, yet. Some hairstyles look as-yet incomplete like the right-most Night Elf style with the bald spot.

Personally, I am a little disappointed that so many hairstyles appear to simply be crossovers from one race to another (Blood Elves appear to borrow styles from Night Elves, Gnomes, Humans, and Draenei). They look nice enough, and I can appreciate that it reduces development time to reuse previously created content, but I hope there are some new additions, as well!

P.S. For a nice preview of the new barber shop, check out Banana Shoulders’ guide, Shave and a Haircut!

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In addition to the newly-discovered Glyphs, these are the Druid-related patch from the latest build on the Beta servers:

Feral

• Primal Tenacity now reduces the duration of Fear effects by 10/20/30% and reduces all damage taken while stunned by 10/20/30%.
  Old version: 5/10/15% fear reduction and 5/10/15% damage reduction while stunned
• Infected Wounds effect now reduces the movement speed of the target by 10% and its attack speed by 3%.
  Old version: 10% reduction to both movement and attack speed
• Challenging Roar now has a 3 minute cooldown, reduced from 10 minutes.

Restoration

• Replenish now gives a 5/10/15% chance to restore 10 Energy/5 Rage/2% Mana or 10 Runic Power per tick.
  Old version: 5/10/15% chance to restore 10 Energy/4 Rage/2% Mana/10 Runic Power per tick

Flourish Amount Healed Unchanged; Nourish Dynamic Changed

MMO Champion is reporting the total amount healed for Rank 1 of Flourish as 1610, which means the overall amount healed as not been nerfed as we had feared. Everyone celebrate, but do so quietly so as not to attract the attention of the nerf bat!

As expected, a change has been made to Nourish whereby it heals for an additional 20% provided you have a Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, and Regrowth running on the target. I say “expected” because with two Restoration Druids and a Priest in the raid, you could feasibly have healed for 35% more (Lifebloom x 2 + Rejuvenation x2 + Regrowth x 2 + Renew). Gift of the Earthmother appears to remain unchanged, still restoring 5% mana cost on Healing Touch and Nourish per heal over time on the target. It’s probably safe to expect a change similar to the one made to Nourish, however.

Balance Druids to Benefit from Improved Scorch

A recent change was made to the Mage talent, Improved Scorch:

Improved Scorch – More damage types added, now your Scorch spells have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Fire, Frost and Arcane damage, increasing damage taken by 2/4/6/6/10% and lasts 30 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

This means that a Balance Druid can expect to receive an additional 10% damage on all Starfire, Moonfire, and Starfall spells, assuming a Mage with 18 points in Fire is present.

Changes to Energy, Mana Regeneration and Potion Mechanics

Mana- and Energy-users can expect to see an interesting difference in the way they regenerate mana. It now regenerates steadily over time rather than waiting for 2-second “ticks” to increase. The overall effect is a more constant stream of mana, though it not clear if the actual formula has changed. You can view a video of this new mechanic via Filefront here.

Say goodbye to chain-potting in the expansion. Blizzard is implementing a "one potion per encounter" debuff called Potion Sickness:

While I’m personally pleased at the idea that I may not have to bring 20 Super-Duper Mana Potions to each raid (or whatever they’re called in the expansion), I recognize that this as a nerf to Alchemists who use trinkets that afford them X MP5. Also, keep in mind that, while I’m sure at this point that most of us are accustomed to having ample regeneration and not needing to chain pot, that probably won’t be the case  when we reach level 80 and start to gear up. Mana management and personal mana-restorative abilities will become essential for raids. This also places increased pressure on DPS to complete encounters before their healing corps runs dry.

Note also that this debuff will apply to Super-Duper Health Potions, a consumable frequently brought in mass quantity by tanks. Healers will have to be more careful not to have our tanks need the use of such consumables since they are no longer going to be available more than once per encounter.

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