Weekend (7 May) - Nada, Until Monday

Weekend (7 May) - Nada, Until Monday

The weekend was full of RL baseball for the most part as we went to both day and night games. Philly did do a couple of BGs, but I'm still baffled over some kind of glitch when I attempt to mouseover heal Philly. I can mouseover heal other players in the BG, but not Philly. Makes staying alive rather awkward. If I can't figure it out I may have to put in a trouble ticket, but that's a long shot - Game Masters don't typically deal with macro issues.

I've been looking over the new class that Mists of Pandaria will bring, called Monks. Although this is a new class, it has clearly been patterned after druids, sprinkled with rogue-ish style melee abilities. Monks will be able to tank (Brewmaster form) and heal (Mistweaver). Monks will also have a melee form (like cat form) and a ranged DPS form (like balance/moonkin form), but there isn't any information on those two forms yet. Monks will play more like rogues than druids, though, even as a healer. Many talents require monks to actually roll their body into a ball and bowling ball their way through mobs and players, for damage and healing. Mistweaver healing is mostly group heals - in fact, they may not need to directly target friendlies at all. Most monk heals do both healing and damage. That seems to be the model for MoP - the line between a healer and a DPS is getting very squishy, with nearly all classes able to do both to a much larger extent than before. What bothered me, though, is that the signature ability at level 90 for all three forms - tank, DPS, and even healer - are damage only abilities. So, as it looks now, monk healers have no level 90 healing spell.

So far, what I've read hasn't really got me interested enough to think I might roll one. Like I said, monks seem to play more like a rogue than a druid, with a lot of melee style contact, even when healing. I prefer healing classes that can move and heal at range. And I'd prefer to focus on healing instead of also having to consider damage roles as well. Perhaps this melding of DPS and healing is really focused toward PvP, which would be fine, but based on what is out there right now, pve healers will be expected to contribute to DPS as well. Personally, I'd rather be a healing specialist.

Late Monday night Philly took to the battlegrounds again. The macros that Philly was using were pretty old, although they had been working fine until Philly reached level 85. That might be a coincidence. I think what really happened is that a patch or hotfix changed something that affected how those old macros worked. I upgraded the macros to match the newer and more extensive macros I wrote for Wild.

Philly's first test was in Twin Peaks. The updated macros worked. Philly also had a lot of fun as the horde team was good. We won 3-0! Philly also joined an Eye BG that was already in progress. That wasn't so good, as it was obvious the horde were well on their way to losing. Philly hung in there as a double check on those macros and to scrape a few more honor points together. Philly hates her priest counterparts on the alliance, especially those in shadow form. Philly needs to learn to mana burn them before they can mana burn her, as more than once Philly found herself without mana because it had been stolen away from her. Overall, though, she did ok considering her gear level.