Tag Archive: Cataclysm


Totem Talk is the column for shamans. This installment sees Matthew Rossi contemplating the incoming influx of gear and how current itemization affects shamans. Also, sorry but you get Alliance shamans this week. I can’t wait until I can race change to a dwarf.

The thing is this: I hate doing gear lists.

My editors (I like to imagine them as an old Marvel Comics cosmic entity like The Living Tribunal) quite rightly point out to me from time to time that with Patch 3.3 so close, we’re effectively at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and therefore all sorts of new loot will be entering the game. Loot from the new five mans at Ulduar 10/25 quality! Loot from the new raid exceeding all previous iLevels! We’ll be awash in the best gear we’ll ever see until Cataclysm drops and we start it all over again. And of course they’re right. It helps me to accept this if I imagine that cosmic entity spinning a giant head around with different faces on it like Reliquary of Souls. (No, sorry, we didn’t call it Reliquary of Souls all those weeks just to be corrected by Blizzard. Heck, you guys even brought it back in Icecrown.)

The next couple of weeks, however, I’m going to look not at gear but at itemization itself and how it interacts with shamans. I was inspired by the change to Elemental Mastery, the talent in the elemental combat tree that currently grants 15% crit when activated as well as making your next spell instant cast. On the surface, this doesn’t look like a bad talent all told, so why would we even want to change it? Because of the way shaman talents and spells interact, an extra 15% chance to crit is somewhat useless to an elemental shaman. Specifically, we’re talking about Flame Shock and Lava Burst.

Because of these two spells and their interaction, elemental shamans can basically crit every eight seconds or so. They can guarantee an Elemental Focus clearcasting state to reduce mana cost by 40%. Stacking crit doesn’t really do anything for them: they’re going to crit anyway. Most of the elemental tree has synergy with spell haste in comparison, with abilities like Lightning Mastery and Storm, Earth and Fire already reducing cast time on various spells.

So why does this talent change mean we should discuss itemization for shamans? Well, quite frankly, a great majority of the spell power mail in the game at present has crit and MP5 on it. Crit and MP5 are great for restoration shamans (speaking as a resto shaman, I enjoy both) but we just discussed how elemental can basically enter clearcasting at will (and with talents like Unrelenting Storm, can basically regen mana even while casting, making it even less useful for them): what we end up with is a situation where, within one class we have two specs who use caster mail, but those two specs share almost no gear preferences at all. Haste is good for both, hit is good for elemental (although there are talents like Elemental Precision as well if you’re very shy on hit) and useless for resto, crit and MP5 are both vastly superior for resto and inferior for elemental.

This wouldn’t be an issue if not for gear consolidation. While it’s certainly true that there’s only really two classes that can even make use of caster mail, and only one class for which it is the highest armor choice, it’s also true that the two specs within the class that most utilizes caster mail are so different from one another that they almost might as well be entirely separate classes. Your elemental and restoration sets will only share gear if you absolutely cannot help it or those pieces of gear are so much better than your alternatives that you can’t possibly imagine doing without them.

Ghostcrawler has spoken up in this thread a little bit about the balance of PvE and PvP play that we’ll be seeing in the next expansion. Specifically, he says that they’re slowing the pace of PvP play down a little bit: “Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower.” We’ll have more health overall, and healing spells will heal less. That will make a difference in PvE as well — it’ll take more hits for the boss to finish off the tank, so heal size is expected not to matter as much as healing coordination. It won’t matter if your tank is up to full health as much as it matters whether or not you can help them survive the next hit.

We had a great time as always on last weekend’s podcast — Kelly “Cadistra” Aarons and C. Christian Moore (a.k.a. Colby, a.k.a. C-money) joined us on the podcast to talk about comics and PvP, respectively, and we hit on the most popular posts of the past week as well, including wrapping up Pilgrim’s Bounty, our favorite memories of the game for the fifth anniversary, and how GDKP works — both in terms of mechanics and as a loot system.

While Terenas was doing his level best to create the Alliance, Doomhammer was replacing those he’d been forced to purge, sending for more orcs and ogres to come through the Dark Portal, making alliances of his own with native trolls, and even achieving control over the dragons of the Red Dragonflight through the Dragonmaw Clan’s control of a powerful artifact. While moving north to destroy the humans once and for all (and invading the dwarf kingdom of Khaz Modan in the process, helping motivate the dwarves and gnomes to join the Alliance, going so far as to push the dwarves and gnomes into the fortified city of Ironforge): it was during this process that the orcs made enemies of the high elves of Quel’Thalas and allies of the Amani trolls of Zul’Aman and their leader, Zul’jin. Yay, yet another name with a mysterious apostrophe in it!

It’s interesting to note that Doomhammer’s northern march seems to have made as many enemies for the Horde as it gained them supporters. He got the goblins to work as mercenaries for him, took over Grim Batol and plopped the Dragonmaw there to keep watch over Alexstrasza and her brood which the Horde used as weapons, twisting life into death. There’s an interesting bit of politics here, as the Dragonmaw leader Zuluhed the Whacked was loyal not to Doomhammer but to Rend and Maim Blackhand, sons of the slain Blackhand the Destroyer. Despite this, Orgrim was willing to trust the old shaman and current warlock when he approached the new warchief with tales of a vision of a dark artifact that could help bring victory to the Horde. Visions that later proved to be of the Demon Soul, visions sent by Deathwing himself.

So, manipulated by the insane Aspect of Earth, the Horde used the Demon Soul to bind and enslave the red dragons and in so doing gained a powerful weapon (the dragons themselves) that helped them menace the entire region, which led to the formation of the Alliance that Deathwing would later manipulate to nearly place himself on the throne of a human kingdom.

Doomhammer proved himself a canny warchief and one completely unwilling to discard any advantage. When Gul’dan woke up and found the great bulk of his supporters suffering from a sudden case of the dead, Doomhammer quickly made sure that Gul’dan understood he was no puppet to be manipulated. Why he didn’t kill the man who’d ordered the assassination of his best friend Durotan is simple. A pragmatist, Doomhammer intended to win the war with the humans and their allies. There was no going back through the Dark Portal, as Draenor was so tainted it couldn’t support the orcs anymore. Like it or hate it, Doomhammer saw the war in terms of the survival or destruction of his people and didn’t really care about the natives of the new world he was on. Their deaths were meaningless to him. Seeing that, Gul’dan quickly made a deal with Doomhammer, offering to give the Horde back the magical power it had lost when Doomhammer had caved in the skulls of the Shadow Council. Thus, the first Death Knights seen on Azeroth were born, as Gul’dan chose to place the spirits of his slain Shadow Council minions in the bodies of Knights of Stormwind. Teron Gorefiend was the first of this new dark order.

All in all, the Horde push north managed some very notable successes under Doomhammer… the penning in of the dwaves and gnomes, the enslaving of the red dragons, the alliance with the Amani trolls cemented when Doomhammer’s forces helped free Zul’jin from High Elf captors.

It was Zul’jin’s presence as an ally that allowed the Horde to reach Quel’Thalas. This allowed Gul’dan access to the ancient elven runestone from Caer Darrow, gave the Horde the chance to pen the Alliance in at Aerie Peak, and penetrated deep into elven territory. It seemed a great victory, but in fact it was the beginning of the end for the Horde’s forward progress. Up till this point, the High Elves didn’t see any more reason to fear the Horde than they did the disorganized trolls they saw as rabble and had defeated thousands of years earlier. While the high elves had honored their pact with Anduin Lothar as detailed in our Alliance KYL, it took this show of force by Doomhammer’s Horde to wake the elves up. The Horde was a serious threat, and they’d been complacent thus far.

This marks the end point of Horde expansion: finally, Lothar had a force that could contend with the Horde on both land and sea. With his trusted lieutenant Turalyon, Lothar began a counteroffensive push that used all the strengths of the various Alliance forces… gnome and dwarven air support including the powerful Wildhammer Gryphon-Riders, elven sea power, human infantry and cavalry… and he began by playing against the tendencies he’d observed in dealing with the orcs by dividing his forces. Turalyon commanded a force that worked to solidify elven support by clearing the Horde from Eversong, while he himself took a force to the Hinterlands surrounding Aerie Peak to push the Horde back there as well. This didn’t keep Gul’dan from cutting up the Caer Darrow runestone and making Ogre-Magi with it, of course.

It did, however, push the Horde back, first out of Lordaeron proper and then further back out of Khaz Modan and the Arathi Highlands. Tol Barad was retaken and used as a base to push further into Dun Algaz. However, the seeming defeat of the Horde turned out to be part of a much more complicated series of events. Uther the Lightbringer discovered that Aiden Perenolde, one of the kings who helped found the Alliance and head of the kingdom of Alterac was in league with the Horde, and had allowed a Horde force through his kingdom: Lordaeron itself was soon under siege! Doomhammer had turned the tables on Lothar and managed to get the Alliance to overextend itself forcing the Horde back, while preparing to move a major offensive to the very walls of the greatest of the human cities. While Uther and his forces broke the back of Alterac in reprisal and cut off Horde reinforcements, it was beyond the Alliance forces to dislodge them.

However, luckily for the Alliance, Gul’dan didn’t care even remotely about the Horde, Doomhammer, or victory at Lordaeron. Since he’d awakened he’d been biding his time, strengthening his position, and making himself useful to the Horde so that at the fateful moment when Doomhammer was busy elsewhere (namely, attacking the most fortified city the humans had with the vast majority of his forces) he could move for his true objective: the Tomb of Sargeras that Medivh had waggled at him as a carrot to get him to build the Dark Portal. Now, with that information liberated from Medivh’s dying thoughts, with two clans (the Stormreavers and Twilight’s Hammer) loyal to him, and with Doomhammer the Backstabber’s back turned, Gul’dan stabbed by sailing away for the Tomb on the island of Suramar and leaving Doomhammer and the Horde deprived of key magical support.

This act sealed the Horde’s fate and effectively handed victory to the Alliance. Gul’dan and most of his forces were eaten by demons, which as it turns out might have been for the best for them, as those that managed to escape being demon chow ended up as dragon chow when an enraged Doomhammer caught up with them. However, since Doomhammer had taken the dragons to punish Gul’dan and his men for treachery, the Horde had no

For those of you unfamiliar with rock collecting, I’d like to point out exhibits a and c. These are Blizzard’s latest geologic additions to the game, added during The Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I feel they have both had a huge impact on rock collecting and Blizzard’s philosophy on it. You see, exhibit a, Rock, is the first of its kind in that it is extremely common. It’s so common that many elite rock collectors scoff at it, saying it is unremarkable. The same has been said about A Very Pretty Rock, which was criticized as “treading old ground.”

I personally disagree with these assessments, though. Previously, very few players were exposed to rocks as it was regarded as a pastime of the elite. Now though, because of these new WotLK rocks, many new players are being introduced to rock collecting for the first time and their influence on Blizzard is making many great changes and development to rock collecting. I think the brash comments from veteran rock collectors are just the result of feeling overwhelmed by the surge of new faces in the community. By the time Cataclysm comes out, I think we’ll all find that the increased interest in rock collecting will really help to innovate it to new heights. Archaeology, anyone?


Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Why yes, that is the most disgusting whale you’ve ever seen. Unless, of course, you’ve witnessed local authorities taking dynamite to a beached whale to get it out of the way since they couldn’t move it just by pushing the thing. That is disgusting. Whale guts landing on cars a mile away? No thanks. I’ll take the guy pictured above over that.

Moonkinmaniac asked…

“On the WoW calendar there’s an undead whale picture. What the heck is it? Is it a rejected project for the current expansion or possibly one for Cataclysm?”

I hopped over to the Petopia link you supplied and took a look at it, and I’m going to guess it was concept art that didn’t get modeled for Wrath of the Lich King. If you remember questing in the Western Plaguelands, there was a string of quests that made it very clear the wildlife of the region was being impacted by the plague as well. Maybe not in the same ways that it harmed the humanoid races, but there was an impact nonetheless.

This was probably just a concept art, but they decided to go with the orcas you see off the coast of the Howling Fjord instead.

Every week, Matthew Rossi writes The Care and Feeding of Warriors. Every week, he claws at his feeble brain to come up with a header paragraph, which really is kind of unfair. Warriors shouldn’t have to think. Do you have any idea how many blows to the head we take?

So yeah, turns out I should probably have shut up and not told you guys that prot was actually good at PvP. Sorry about that. I’m not going to actually freak out until I see how they plan to balance prot so we’re not good at PvP anymore, since I barely even PvP and am far more concerned with prot as a PvE spec, that is to say, tanking with it. If they make a bunch of changes and my threat stays the same and my survivability stays the same and I’m not seeing any major hits to my tanking, then whatever, I’m sure there will be enraged prot warriors still but I won’t be one. If, however, I see a 2k threat loss and I’m dying like a chicken trying to tank a bloody heroic, then yeah, I’m gonna be upset.

I’ll probably skip ‘fevered pet’ and move straight into ‘enraged mouth breathing’ territory. I can think of all sorts of ways to tweak prot in PvP that wouldn’t have much of an effect in PvE, and I know the folks at Blizzard are better at class design than I am, so waiting and seeing is the order of the day. That being said I do find it irritating when we get told over and over again that we’re fine until suddenly we’re not. Just saying, some consistency would be nice.

I should probably also share something I admitted on Twitter the other day: yeah, I went ahead and race changed to draenei. Yeah, after writing a long post about how I probably wouldn’t, I did. Effectively all of my alliance toons are now space goats. I didn’t do it for the racial, mind you: ICC tanking gear is positively ridiculous in terms of hit, I’m swimming in hit. I did it purely because I wanted to play a draenei.

spazzertech asked…

“What’s going to happen to the world with Cataclysm drops and the expansion isn’t purchased? In Burning Crusade, you couldn’t enter Outland without the expansion. In Wrath, you couldn’t enter Northrend. So what about Azeroth in Cataclysm?”

The old world changes will impact everyone, whether you have the expansion or not. Brand new players with nothing but vanilla WoW will still see the new level 30 quests in the Wetlands or whatever. They will not, however, have things like worgen and goblins. They also will not have the new zones like Hyjal.

Cataclysm is meant to bring 2004 content up to the 2010 level, and breathe new life into the world. The old world is pretty dated, so it’s probably needed.

David asked…

“Anyone know of a good Enhancement Shaman blog/website out there? My searches have been coming up blank so far.”

My favorite one is actually a general melee blog. Big Hit Box is great stuff, I highly recommend it.
Cocles over at Loregy.com (who I actually got to meet the other day — good guy, and check out his license plate) has an interesting idea about something he spotted in the information about the Cataclysm zones the other day. Thousand Needles is getting a revamp, including possibly a new instance, and Cocles says that could mean something awesome: the return of the Grimtotem clan (just a warning: there is a more serious spoiler later in that post).

I’m in. I love the “dark Tauren,” and would love to see more from them. Plus, while we’ve seen plenty of troll instances, Cocles says we haven’t seen a Tauren instance in the game (and all we can think of is good old Mr. Smite). And we haven’t really heard from the Grimtotems since that whole issue with the spirit beast taming. It’d be nice to fight some cows for once.

Personal banks act like guild banks across alts…

Q. Would you be willing to make personal bank storage look more like guild storage and available to all characters on a realm?

A. This is something we discuss a lot. It actually helps with keeping mail volume down as well as a player convenience.

OMG, YES PLZ!… err… That would be nice as well. For those of us with a server full of alts (most of which leveled up to their mid-60s or higher just for professions) this would be an awesome change. I’ve got an alchemist, scribe, leatherworker, engineer, and enchanter who are constantly sending mails back and forth. It would be a lot easier to just toss the raw materials in the bank, hop on the alt, get them out of that character’s bank tab and then make whatever it is I wanted to make. No more mail lag or alt hopping to grab the needed items from each and every character. For those of you with personal guild banks already, I’m sure you can see further ways to expand on this.

Increased backpack size…

Q. Any plans to increase the size of the backpack?

A. Yeah, it’s something we discuss a lot. On the other hand, the madness has to end somewhere. I’m not sure I want a 100 slot bag with that much stuff to manage. We’d need to make sure you could easily upgrade the existing backpack; we wouldn’t want anyone to manage to just be without any bags.

I imagine this will be done similar to the riding system or any of the other things that require money and a certain level to obtain. You’d likely have an NPC in each of the major city banks offering the option to upgrade your backpack or offering a quest to do so. This would keep the upgrade process gated and allow for players to only get larger backpacks at points the developers believe players will need them. It’s a sad day when what started out as your ‘big’ backpack is now your ‘I really wish I could replace this’ backpack.

We still have no idea if we’ll see these changes in Cataclysm or even the expansion after it. However, storage is a concern to us pack-rats out there and being able to manage it a little easier is always appreciated.

Coming out of the Twitter developer chat tonight was this question and following answer, given by Ghostcrawler and J. Allen Brack:

Q. With the new skins for druid forms, what is the chance that warlocks might see race/faction specific demon skins or maybe a new one?

A. When you look around, there are a lot of say imp or voidwalkers we could use. It’s something we talk about quite a bit. As for new demons, I hear warlocks are going to be getting some new spells for the next expansion…

I did say at the start that there wasn’t anything outstanding. To be fair this did mean we no longer had to head out and find things to kill for our fragments of soul. Instead we find a load of locks lining up by the practice dummies before and after raids, presumably gathering wooden practice souls.

Well, Ulduar was fun and destruction fairly interesting, the tiered items pretty nice (if a little weird); things were ok and moving along. Then the Argent guys finished their arena and… well, not much changed really. If you weren’t raiding but leveling then you could summon your mounts sooner and just by speaking to the trainer. Also Banish could be removed by yourself or some other warlock with a sense of humor. For those that were raiding, demonology (or more specifically Demonic Pact) was making a name for itself and felguards making a raiding return.

Now we’re seeing Arthas’ homestead invaded and the pull between affliction and destruction hotting-up as they are both up to fighting weight — with demo looking on in amusement throwing spell power to them both. It certainly feels a different world that we woke up in 12 months ago and there sure seem to be less locks kicking about these days (where did all those death knights and paladins come from?).

Looking forward to the next year seems a little odd since there’s high hopes that it will contain the release of Cataclysm – the expansion set to shake up the warlock class as much as Deathwing shakes Azeroth. Certainly I hope for a shard system that feels more like a benefit than a burden. I quite like the sound of the new system as it has been communicated so far, but I do have some reservations that it’s just going to be another set of numbers to watch. This is the burning of a soul — the very essence of a being — to unleash its power for our own aims. It should be something emotive and worthy of the sacrifice made, not a simple resource like a rune or a candle.

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. “The avarice never ends! ‘I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored and sell it to make glue.’ Look, I don’t wanna make waves, but this whole Christmas season is stupid, stupid, stupid!” ~ The Grinch

Hmmm… a look back at changes for warlocks in 2009. Well there was… no, wait, that was 2008. Well what about… nah, that’s planned for Cataclysm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Nothing particularly outstanding has happened in the warlock area this year; but so much has happened and, well things have changed. It’s like waking up each morning and something is subtly different. Your blue toothbrush is now red… The sofa is now against this wall, not that one… each change is pretty unremarkable in it’s own right but by the end of the year you are a stuntman living in LA married to a small, blond Portuguese skier who when she’s not training does abstract painting, practices yoga and brews her own beer.

As we surfaced, bleary-eyed into January our memories of sacrificing succubus and SL/SL were fading faster than those of December 31st. Those heady days of power that also led to FotM wannabes flooding our ranks. Skill and complexity had been leaking out of the class for a while and Naxx wasn’t really providing any of us with much of a worthwhile proving ground. Affliction spell rotations were causing carpal-tunnel injuries on those who were determined to take the cold-turkey approach to dropping their addiction to Shadow Bolt spam. Fans of demonology were taking felguards like some sort of methadone for simplistic raiding, meanwhile retaining the use of their fingers.