Wednesday (13 Mar) - Curious About Class Changes

Wednesday (13 Mar) - Curious About Class Changes

It is normal for see class changes after a significant patch. I haven't paid much attention to that, since I'm not raiding, but I got curious when I saw that the two classes I'm most familiar with, druid and monk, both received pretty extensive overhauls. Even more so was the fact that the two roles I played the most - healing with my druid, and melee with my monk, were the two roles that needed the most tweaking. Monk damage dealing has been below par, and got a lot of attention. A couple of things stuck out for me. First, is the way monks must juggle two resources as well as cooldown abilities in order to maximize damage output. I've always found that cumbersome and inefficient with Fist. Additionally, there were several interesting spells that really didn't fit anywhere and so were rarely or never used. The tweak is to change some spells that relied on resources and make them cooldown spells. The idea is that since these spells are now "free" to use (ie, they won't use resources that I would otherwise save for a better spell) whenever their cooldown is available, those spells will be used more often. Finally, monks were tweaked to improve - slightly - their burst damage. Monks are designed to deliver a steady flow of damage, rather than burst, but what little burst they did have needed to be upgraded.

The second significant tweaking was to what is called fistweaving. This is a combination of healing and damage dealing. The monk is specced for melee damage dealing but is also healing. This is possible because of the way that monk spells are designed. When playing this way, neither damage dealing or healing is as good as a monk just doing one or the other, but it seems that there are many raid situations where a "fistweaving" monk is valuable. I know this from talking with Bloodknuckle, who plays a fistweaving monk, and loves it. I hope the tweaks make him happy.

Druid healing also received an overhaul, getting "an across-the-board buff to healing, as well as mana savings on Rejuvenation." Any time a "tweak" is "across-the-board" you know there are major problems. The rejuv spell has always been the anchor spell of druid healing, and any problems in that area also creates major problems. Designers tried to blame the druid healing problems on discipline priests stealing healing from druids with their shields, but no druid is buying that. To be fair, I checked the changes to discipline priests. In fact, disc priests did get their shields nerfed, along with a number of other changes that likely angered the priest community. Guess I should pay more attention to my discipline priest, Philly, too. Philly, when she was active, played mostly PvP, and in patch 5.2 they were "under-performing." Without trying to dice and slice specifics, discipline priests were buffed for pvp while shadow priests were considered over-powered for pvp and got nerfed.

This is all pretty academic, I know, since no one is raiding or doing pvp. I was curious to see if I could even understand what was going on anymore, and the answer was yes. If I wanted back into the game for real, I could do it. Do I want to? The answer is still no, for now.

By the way, as I write this on Thursday morning, there is another maintenance ongoing that has shut down WoW. Since patch 5.2 came out, there has been a proliferation of maintenance downtime, although most of the time they are pretty short. This one was supposed to last 45 minutes. That time has now been extended to two hours.