Priest MoP

The preliminary peek at skills and talents for MoP have been revealed. And I just had to get this out before the weekend. (Happy Turkey Day tomorrow!)

Of course, I looked at the mage stuff first.

Polymorph turkey?!?!?!

That might, just might, break my code of being a polymorph sheep purist. Maybe. I think it will amuse me.

For the most part, the mage stuff didn’t strike me as odd. There are a couple OICWUTUDIDTHAR points, but for the most part nothing struck me as weird or crazy. Maybe I’m not looking close enough. Not quite sure how Arcane Missiles will work, but I probably just need to look closer and I’ll beat the mage portion of this topic to death another day. I think I may be holding out to pay more attention after the devs have been yelled at for doing it wrong and have had a chance to tighten up the design a bit.

Now the priesty stuff… there were some items that caught my eye. (You can check out the priest trees here.)

But I don’t need it right now

I’ve been feeling out of sorts for the last week or so, fighting off some insidious bug that has been attacking my immune system from all sides.

To avoid letting the guild in on what a bitch I can be when I’m not feeling well, I’ve devoted a little time to my priest and my warrior.

(Not to mention I’ve got Wonderfulretributionpally bugging me to level so we can tear up Outlands. He’s sitting at the portal and chomping at the bit to have a healbot I think.)

One of the things that I’ve sort of missed on my mage is getting talent points to spend.

Oh sure, I can respec, and do periodically, but it’s not the same as getting a shiny new talent point to spend for the first time.

Back in Black!

Well, actually – Back in Arcane, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Arcane.

Was.

Buffed.

/cheer

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages: Arcane received a little patch love.

I logged on real quick after loading the patch to do Direbrew with some guildies (got me a remote, woot!) and totally forgot about the changes.

Wow, I’m getting a lot of Missile Barrage procs… my mana isn’t hurting very much guess I can push my stacks… hey! My blast stack goes to 4 now!

Oh yeah…

Hot damn!

Logged back in later for the 10 man ToCr raid (normal) and hit up a training dummy with both specs.

Completely unacceptable

Ludicrous.

Disgusting.

Embarrassing.

Mortifying.

Horrendous.

Pathetic.

Gawdawful.

Yes, folks, I got my T8.5 helm and chest.

So what am I all worked up about?

The future of the Arcane Mage

The other day there was a blue post from Ghostcrawler:

We would like to get Arcane back up there. The Living Bomb change is just going to be another reason not to play Arcane — we get that.

I’m not sure it’s possible to get Arcane to within 5% or 1% of Fire, but if we get it close enough then players who just really love Arcane will still be able to play it without feeling they are making a bad mistake. Frost is even more challenging to get up there, but we aren’t giving up on the idea.

On Monday there was a response in the form of a new thread from a gnome mage name Luph. As much as I would prefer to punt her, I have to admit she’s got some good thoughts and Ghostcrawler took the time to respond to some of it. For those behind the filters at work, here’s the meat of her post followed by my disjointed ramblings:

Test Drive

OK. Did a Naxx 10 with the new fire spec.

Had tanks and healers I could trust.

We were bringing through at least 2 people that had not done Naxx before. One I believe had done it on a different character, but the other was completely fresh and hadn’t even read strats or watched videos.

Did pretty darn good at sticking with the rotation/reaction and not pulling *too* much aggro. Invisibility got used a few times.

I didn’t spaz out. I don’t even think I did any major swearing.

Still having a little trouble on trash deciding when casting Living Bomb is worth it. I try to cast it on the second or third target in the pack so it has a greater chance of living long enough to go asplody on everything.

Whenever possible I would time my movement for when I was casting Living Bomb or firing off a Hot Streak pyroblast.

With the aid of mouseover macros I could keep Living Bomb and Scorch up on Grobbulus while taking out slimes. There was an awkward few seconds where the tank drug him behind a slime cloud and I couldn’t reach him.

We did 4 Horsemen by pulling all of them to the back, 2 in each corner. Somehow I couldn’t drop Thane’s mark (even though I was further away from him than Lady B) and went splat. That fight took forever, sorry guys.

It was amusing on Maexxna when the Living Bomb would detonate just as her spiderlings would spawn. Poof! There goes half their little lives!

Loatheb was kind of neat for getting a Hot Streak constantly.

I get let off easy for utility on most fights and was able to just concentrate on damage. Druids and shamans told me to DPS and they would take care of curses. That just about drove me insane seeing little purple raid frames. I was even just on back-up web duty on Maexxna.

I did goof on KT. Had to pop Invisibility to drop some threat and accidentally snagged one of the adds as my target when I came back. I must have been getting tired because it took me a few casts to notice. /facepalm

I got a ring that I *might* be able to use in my hit set, but I’m not seeing it on my list from RAWR. Might just be a crystal for me. Will play with that later.

But no one cares about all that.

Everyone wants to know what I think about the spec now that I’ve given it a fair shake.

Drum roll please…

Warming Up

Short post since I didn’t do a whole lot of WoW this weekend… I worked on clearing out some quests in Outlands towards some achievements and getting quest items out of storage. Many of those quests involved me being something else.

…

I get disguised as a courier. Apparently, this means blond. And sandals. But I got to do some incredible acting and pulled off the mission flawlessly.

Letting my hair down

Accidently release a great evil into the land, blah, blah, blah… Looks like I also stole my priest’s staff.

First Impressions of Fire

Read yesterday’s post if you’re confused as to why an arcane advocate is playing with fire.

Um…. it’s hot?

Actually, my first impression of speccing fire was more along the lines of:

OMG I fucking hate this shit! What asshole is responsible for this insanity?!?!?!

And that was just looking at the glyphs in the auction house.

I was able to make one of my glyphs on my scribe alt, but he’s not high enough level to get the good stuff.

So I’m perusing the AH and see that all the glyphs that normally sell for 10 – 30 gold are listed for anywhere from 60 to 100 gold.

This is a whole new level of highway robbery. This is highway robbery with a side order of skull fuckery and a garnish of ankle grabbing, hold the lube.

(I had the mats for the other two that I need, but can only find a scribe to make one of them. And I didn’t even find him until an hour after I visited the test dummy. Even later I found a friend that had an alt to make the other one.)

Spend a few minutes writing down where all my spells currently are so the stuff that stays the same will end up in the same place between specs – spell steal, remove curse, those goodies.

Take a deep breath and unlearn my arcane PvP spec.