Signing off

Two days without a post. You can probably smell it in the air. I’m burned out.

Not on the blog, exactly, but on the game. In the last two weeks, I’ve logged into the game twice. I check auctions, chat a little, log out. There’s just nothing I look forward to any more except the blogging. It is still fun to theorize about the game, but because I no longer raid, I’ve lost my source for experimentation.

So I’ve decided it’s time to put an end to it. Blogging here, interacting with the community, and the folks I’ve met through it, have been a tremendous experience. But it is one that has naturally come to its conclusion.

I wish you all the very best, and happy trails, and all that stuff. I’ll leave the site up until the end of the year. If you want to make copies of anything, go for it. It’s all free. And I’ll continue to be on Twitter if anyone wants to say hi.

Now go put a boot in Arthas’ ass for me. Or, you know, a Lava Burst or something.

Damage prevention and Ancestral Healing

Twice now I’ve made requests about getting more damage prevention abilities for Shamans, and twice I’ve been castigated by commenters for ignoring Ancestral Healing. That’s the Resto talent that will proc up to 10% damage resistance (Ancestral Fortitude) for 15 seconds after a critical heal. In the past it would proc an armor bonus up to 25%, but the flat damage resistance was added in a buff pass in patch 3.2.

It’s a nice effect, but it doesn’t meet my needs when I ask for the ability to prevent damage. Because:

1. I can’t precisely control when it gets applied. That comes from the nature of an on-crit proc. I have not fond memories of one of our Resto Shamans holding up pulls in Karazhan spamming rank 1 Lesser Healing Waves with cries of “Hold on, hold on! I need to proc the armor bonus!” When I know damage is coming, I want to take an active hand in preventing it. Not throw good mana after bad spamming overheals hoping to proc the effect in time.
2. It’s invisible. That might sound trivial, but the only way to know that you have spawned the effect on a target is to scrub their buff list for it. Feedback-free effects like this drive me batty. If Blizzard wants us to get our heads out of the UI and pay attention to the world, they’re going to have to start by keying important information visually and aurally.
3. While I don’t like whining about deficiencies with respect to other class’ abilities, it is markedly inferior to every other mitigation effect in the game.

I want damage mitigation to be a first-class mechanic in the game. And for that to happen, every healer (Druids included) needs to be able to effectively stop damage. It is no longer enough to spend your whole time responding to damage that has already been applied.

Hybrid healers and detritus spells

Somewhere in the depths of Blizzard’s database is information about who casts what spells and under what conditions. From that giant heap it’s a simple matter to see patterns of usage. For instance, when they noticed a disturbingly high number of Chain Heals coming from Enhancement Shamans on the General Vezax (hard mode) fight, they acted to stop that exploit.

Because of that knowledge, we can safely assume that the designers know when a spell falls into obscurity. If it remains ununsed for a long time, we know that they do not consider it a design priority to fix. How long has it been since Greater Heal was a part of a Priest’s regular setup? Why are Lesser Heal and Heal orphaned in the priest spellbook? When was the last time you saw a Druid turn to Healing Touch without Nature’s Swiftness? How many Lifeblooms do you see these days?

There’s a fundamental divide here between the healing classes. Priests and Druids hold down one side with a broad selection of multi-purpose healing spells. Shamans and Paladins anchor the other end, each sporting a svelte selection of highly focused spells. Priests and Druids both have a lot of healing spells. A substantial fraction of those spells go unused.

I don’t understand why there’s such a disparity in number of spells available to each healing class. Every healing class is also capable of DPS, and 2 of them can even do tanking builds. No class is a pure healing class. So why are Shamans and Paladins given so many fewer tools to work with than Priests and Druids?

As much as I admire the flexibility of Prests and Druids, I also appreciate the simplicity of the more concise Resto spellbook. I’d like to broaden the Resto Shaman’s situational abilities — ideally without creating a detritus of unused spells.

So here’s my proposal. Discard Healing Wave and replacing it with a Power Word: Shield-like ability. That would give us a anticipatory heal, which we sorely lack, without simply increasing the number of spells. At the same time it would greatly help pull Shamans out of the traditional pigeon hole of raid healing.

A Squarespace usage idea

In case there are any other Squarespace users out there, I thought I’d share a usage idea I just had. I figured out a way to keep my work in progress posts organized in the content management system.

First, some background. The blogging CMS tags each entry with a timestamp when it is created. This can be updated later, but it’s laborious to do so. It also sorts entries by date, so posts that have been works-in-progress for a while tend to get lost in the stacks. (The timestamp on creation is why you’ll sometimes see posts from me show up with unusual times or days.)

Here was my thought — tag each of scratch post with a tag indicating what stage it is in. Unless a public post uses that tag, it won’t show up in the tag directory. Bookmark the tag views so you can easily get to the list of in-progress posts. You can have tags for Notes, InProgress, Pictures, anything that helps you organize the work.

Tier 10 at last

Every other Shaman-related website and forum in the world has the picture, so here’s a picture of Graham Elliot Bowles instead.

From NBC Chicago. What you aren’t seeing in this picture are the itty-bitty boyshorts he’s wearing. I dare you to follow the link.My thoughts? Bowles looks likes he enjoys his lunches. And probably should invest some of his vast supplies of cash in fixing the buttons on that shirt. I hope he’s not in the kitchen like that.

As for the armor, I like it a lot. Very animalistic, which is in keeping with the real Shamans of the world. It looks like there’s some kind of stag head effect that will play on the shoulders periodically, too.

I’m even excited about the helmet. I believe that’s a first.

Ok, so consider the delay acceptable. It was worth it.