Important Quests

oh dear...

-Dueg

Learning from the Best

Gnomes are creepy

-Dueg

Subtlety

Oh how you ladies love to play coy

-Dueg

Pure Genius

I just made that guy's day

-Dueg

I Can Explain!

So yeah, I’ve started volunteering at a local smart growth advocate’s office and basically I’ve been super busy the last couple of weeks.  Coupled with having a lot of things going on in my real life such as wedding planning and all, I just haven’t really been able to make my usual daily write ups.  Basically during the day I’m going to all the local villages and community centers and trying to determine walkability and whether or not the local township is doing things right.  I then come home and do a big long write up on each individual village.  Mix that with the fact that I’m still looking for regular, payed work and things are jsut becomign a little hectic in my life.

No matter though, because I’ve made a decision.  I’m enjoying making these comics lately, I’ve decided I’m going to try and do them fairly regularly for the mean time.  I’m no Cadistra or anything, but I do have a twisted sense of humor, so I figured, hell, might as well give it a whirl.  I’ll still try to post some regular articles every once in a while, but since my play time has dropped so much lately, I really haven’t been able to keep up with that lately.  Anyhoo, for the time being, I give you comic #3, enjoy!

Steal one little donation box...

-Dueg

Ugh, I suck

Heya everyone, sorry I haven’t posted int he last couple of days, but I had to go to New Jersey for a wedding yesterday and Mrs Dueg and I are kicking our wedding plans into high gear.  But as an amends, I present you with a follow up to Thursday’s comic, enjoy!

What a rapscallion

-Dueg

Random Thursday Comic

Dueg does the job, Dueg gets paid

-Dueg

I Remember…

…when dwarves were the best priests

…when mind Soothe was a 100% aggro radius reduction

…when spirit was pretty useless

…that damn Tauren boss in Deadmines killing me every time

…when 100 gold was a LOT of money

…when seeing the blue undead horse was truly awe inspiring

…when getting your party buffs meant grinding the hell out of instances or spending a ton of gold

…when there was only one legendary weapon in the game

…being scared of dinosaurs in Un’Goro

…standing in front of those weird gates in Silithus and pondering

…staring in awe at my screen the first time I fell into that lake in Mauradon

…when shamans were horde and paladins were alliance

…having to land and pay at each flight point on the way to my destination

…actually paying attention to the various zones and quests of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms

…Captain Placeholder

…casting Shackle Undead on Forsaken players and enjoying myself immensely

…when the only form of PvP was getting ganked in Stranglethorn or Hillsbrad while trying to quest

…when the only way to get a weapon with a graphic on it was to get an enchantment

…when it seemed like the Ashbringer story line might actually go somewhere

…when it seemed like the Discs of Norgannon story line might actually go somewhere

…marvelling at how fast a 60% speed bonus was and feeling like I was truly flying at 100%

…when the only flying mount you saw was the one you paid to ride

…having to wait while those slow ass paladins buffed everyone

…when everyone had to run to the instance

…when your faction’s auction house was either in Orgrimmar or Ironforge

…swearing I would never go horde

This bit of nostalgia brought to you by my epic case of writer’s block.  What do you remember?

-Dueg

Priests, Awesome Class or the Awesomest Class?

Who knew?

Hey everyone!  Sorry about missing out ion my usual weekend posts, but as I said on Friday, I went upstate to Cooperstown for the weekend and it was pretty awesome.  You haven’t lived till you’ve seen a full blown tractor parade, btw.  When I got back, I, of course, had many many blog posts to read and updates to sift through to see how things had changed and what updates were coming.  This process involved swinging on over to MMO-Champion in order to check the latest relevant blue posts on priests and see what was coming out of the Argent Tournament next patch.

I was delighted to see that they had posted the full informal shadow priest Q & A since I hadn’t had a chance to read through it before I left for the weekend.  Though I’m usually healing in a raid or group environment, I do still have shadow as my off spec and, as such, like to keep abreast of changes involving them.  I thought it was a fantastic Q & A with some poignant questions and observations regarding shadow priests and their roles in PvE and PvP.  However, reading through the full post, I kept getting the same vibe from Ghostcrawler in his answers of “the devs think the class is fine for the most part and you just want to be OP again.”

I happen to disagree myself.  I feel like the class does need another nuke or to make Mind Flay a more PvE friendly spell instead of filler or that Devouring Plague needs to be made into a single target only spell with no cooldown.  As a shadow priest, the only way to truly shine in raids is through AoE damage or have gear out the yin yang.  But it appears as though the devs pretty much think the class is good where it’s at and though they might tweak it at some point in the future, there’s no plans to do so now.  The funny thing is that if you look back through the archives of priest changes since Wrath landed, that seems to be their philosophy regarding priests in general.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been any changes.  Just like everyone else in the game, we had sweeping changes in our talent trees in 3.1 and the tweaking of a couple of our spells to improve their raiding and PvE capabilities.  Since then, however, we’ve seen minor nerfs with almost no improvements overall to the class in subsequent patches, cutting back on the effectiveness of some of our bigger spells because of it.  So I decided to meander on over to the official patch notes for the upcoming 3.2 patch and peruse through it to see what buffs we could expect along with all the other classes.  I’ll list all of them for you now:

Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.

That’s it, and I’m not even sure how much of a buff that turns out to be in the end after all the math is done.  The only other two changes are nerfs, one lowering the cooldown on Penance from 10 to 12 seconds, which is a huge nerf for disc priests, and a nerf to the effectiveness of Prayer of Healing, a 28.1% reduction of the bonus it gets from your spell power.  Every other class seems to be getting either a buff or a major change to try and improve them while it appears as though priests have slowly been becoming OP in the dev’s opinions, or that we kicked their dog.  This, of course, is crap.

In raids, priests are the muscle of the healing team, constantly banging out big heals all over the place.  Both of these nerfs to the two trees deals a blow to the healing priests’ overall healing total and in the case of the discipline priest, puts further restriction on their prime healing spells.  I’m also befuddled as to why they would encourage us to cast Prayer of Healing with Serendipity in 3.1 and then stifle that same spell in 3.2.  It’s not as if the spell is cheap or anything, casting it over and over again will burn your mana bar so quickly that it’s only truly effective in predictable AoE damage situations.  But now, not so much.

Not to mention that the Replenishment nerf will hit Holy Priests especially hard.  In long fights with things set the way they are now, holy priests still have to tiptoe and dance a little here and there in order to last to the end.  We can’t just chain cast because we have bigger mana costs on the spells that Blizzard wants us to start weaving into our rotation.  So what they’re saying to priests is “Oh, hey, use these spells now, they cost a bunch, but they’ll be the best way to keep your raid alive in Ulduar.  Oh, and btw, one of them now sucks a little bit more in addition to costing an arm and a leg.  Oh, also, we feel like you’re not worried enough during boss fights, so now you have less mana regen.  We’ll be over here if you need us, but you won’t, cause you’re awesome.  Ta ta.”

Of course, I must put the caveat here that the patch has not gone live yet and changes could still be made.  But for the most part, the priest as a class has seen few benefits added to balance all these nerfs they’re laying on us since 3.1.  Plus, if they’re not close enough to implementing anything new that they feel comfortable adding it to the PTR, you’re probably not going to see anything major added in the next couple of weeks.  I will also say that I can’t judge with accuracy whether a lot of these changes to other classes are big buffs or anything, there is at least more than one beneficial change to other classes that involve more than one talent tree.  I agree with Blizzard that my class is the best one in the game, but c’mon, throw me a bone here, will ya?

-Dueg

The Weekend Cop-out, Wherein Dueg goes Upstate

Heya everyone!  Quick post today to let all my regular readers know that I’m gonna be out of town this weekend and won’t be making any posts until maybe Sunday night, but probably not till Monday.  I apologize to everyone for the lack of Friday Strats posts lately, which I was supposed to start up again today and for anyone who will be missing the Saturday RP this week.  However, when you’re fiancé’s parents offer you their vacation house in Cooperstown, NY, where the baseball hall of fame is located, for the fourth of July, well, you go.  Sorry again, but I’ll be back in a few days and until then, you’ll just have to be satisfied with knowing that I’m having an awesome time!

Happy 4th!

-Dueg