Impressions of 4.0.1Follow

Finally downloaded TreeCalcs, did some quick number crunching, and it is interesting.

So for me, sitting around in my 10-man t10 gear here's my old numbers:



Versus my new numbers



The biggest thing that's not on there is the Time to OOM. Before I was a sitting at about 7.5 minutes in my throughput set, with a net Mp5 of -420ish in a RJx5+WG rotation. Now in the default of 'roll a LB stack, RJ, and WG on cooldown' I'm at net Mp5 of +26. Meaning I shouldn't run out of mana if I stick to the rotation.

I'm going to tinker some more to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, but that's just fascinating to me. In the meantime I'm feeling a lot more powerful.

Also mastery is looking to be quite good as a stat. Plus, if I can really spam RJ constantly, I won't have to worry about the other points in revitalize, since I'll likely be keeping it pretty near on CD.

I see why they did away with the 30% buff now.

I spent most of the day redoing UIs and moving people out of Dal as the lag there was terrible.

I got my healer organized 1st and was Smite spamming to heal, which was fun.

Tried to cat DPS but didn't have any sort of buffs working then so it didn't work out so well.

After I fixed that and got back on the druid it was late, so I tried bear form of the heroic boss dummy. Mangle procs were cool, keeping Pulv up was easy, not hitting Swipe was hard and getting OoC procs for Maul was hard as well asI used to being more spammy.

I often would have to Maul even with out OoC procs as I was flooded with rage on a dummy as a tank. That was very weird as I was getting no rage from damage or dodges. I did reforge to be close to hit and expertise capped, hard cap not soft, by removing haste.

Cat gear is still somewhat a mess and still needs a bunch of new gems. I did drop 4T10 all ready for better stats on other gear I had laying around. DPS seems a bit lower but not as low as I thought it would be.

Going to try and actually tank something today, maybe DPS if I can get some timers working.

My impressions of 4.0.1 and AOE tanking is:

OH MY GOD, WHAT JUST LANDED ON MY FACE?!

Swipe on cooldown just made me cough up blood out of depression and preemptive stress.

As for my impressions of 4.0.1 and healing:

Hmm, interesting...

HoTs have been changed around somewhat. Regrowth is more of an OSHI- heal right now, with the short cast, huge mana cost and short HoT duration. Lifebloom now works well with tank healing, since you can keep that 3-stack up for 244 mana every 10 seconds. Nourish also works well with tank healing, since it refreshes Lifebloom at a low mana cost as well. Healing Touch is probably our go-to direct healing spell now, with the same cast time as Nourish, but the larger heal and mana cost.

Right now, though, I do fine with just Rejuvenation and Wild Growth. I toss out a Lifebloom once in a while for fun and Replenishment, but mostly it's just Rejuv + WG spam like in the old days. Swiftmend is now very nice as it procs Efflorescence which is like a mini-WG.

I did find that I ran out of mana fast if someone started taking lots of damage. Spamming Regrowth isn't really a viable alternative to the old Nourish spam. Not only does the HPS suck (9k crits instead of 12k Nourish crits in the old days), but the MPH will kill you. Or your child.

Still don't know where to put Nourish and Healing Touch in a 5-man. I've got Swiftmend and Regrowth if stuff hits the fan. I've got Lifebloom and Rejuvenation to keep the tank up. I've got Wild Growth and Efflorescence to keep the mDPS up. Perhaps I can use Healing Touch for some rDPS healing, except people seem to stand within Wild Growth and Efflorescence range constantly.

And 33k mana is just lol. Not noticing any mana issues here.

Glyphs are easy to change, just buy Vanishing Dust. Its cheap.

Yeah, I don't get why they gave scribes the ability to make the vanishing dust if the vendors sell it as well. That's kind of goofy.

Did you just really come in here and say yours is smaller, but that's okay because it's more fun?

Priests...

Never good to show up with 2 tools that are both too small.

Plus, as a bonus I don't have to say things like "come touch my Lightwell."

No joke, the swaths of people I saw who were like OH GOD MY SKILLS ARE GONE WHERE ARE THEY HOW CAN I GET THEM BACK EMO EMO EMO WOE IS ME during the short 30 minutes I spent trying to work on my UI blew my mind.

I seriously hope these changes smarten up the community, this really isn't that difficult to figure out.

What is this Efflorensce spell you guys keep talking about? I don't see it in my spellbook as a future trainable spell, and I've mostly filled out the restoration tree. Am I just blind? >.>

Basically, with the talent, whenever you cast Swiftmend, a patch of green goo (I think there's an error with the graphics on it, it's supposed to be a clear green dot on the ground) will spawn and everyone standing on it will be healed (over 7 seconds) for 60% of the Swiftmend's healing.

So if your Swiftmend crits for 15,000 (common number), your Efflorescence patch will heal anyone on it for 9,000.

If you turn on the built-in damage/healing battle text, then do a Wild Growth + Swiftmend on your group, your screen will literally turn green with numbers. From what I've gathered, Efflorescence cannot crit, however.

I've run the game on Ultra and Fair settings, or whatever the second-lowest one is called. At Fair settings (I'm gonna call it Fair because I'm not sure if that's the actual name) the green circle seems to not appear at all, but on Ultra it shows up sometimes. In both cases you should be able to see a faint green glow in the air above it and on higher details you'll see leaves falling... uh... up... I think those leaves are actually falling up.

Haven't tested it with projected textures turned off. I usually keep it on because otherwise I can't see stuff and 'OMIGOD FIRE AND UR STANDING ON IT DUM DRUID!' happens.

Edit: I think Blizzard might have implemented some kind of "smart" graphics A.I. The leaves seem to appear only when there isn't too much stuff on the screen at once. Like if a Death Knight spams Blood Boil (hate that new spell animation) and I cast Efflorescence, it doesn't appear to pop any leaves. Casting it on myself, alone in a corner of Thunder Bluff (*sniffles* ... Lonely... I'm Mr. Lonely), it shows the circle and leaves and all.

Edited, Oct 19th 2010 4:29am by Mazra

Yeah with my laptop as crappy as it is, I have to play with the lowest settings possible. I turned off Projected Textures for now because I'm not raiding yet so I figure I don't really need it. The black holes of death in ZD still showed up, even with it off. My fps improved a fair amount by doing that.

Moonkin came out seriously OP. Now they hotfixed and we`nt anymore =(
But it`s all well. We improved, and that`s always good.