I do some Insane things sometimes. World of Warcraft is a game that I love and have poured a lot of hours into the last 5 years. No game has captured me the way that WoW has. When the Burning Crusade expansion had come out I had a hook up at EBGames. They had given me the copy the Friday before its release this way I could have it installed and ready to go before midnight. I had taken a couple of days off along with my best friend and we had some fun leveling through the content. I remember logging off at 11:59 at the Dark Portal and logging back in at 12:01 able to walk through the Dark Portal. We quickly made our way through the quests and were treated to a whole zone to ourselves. With our head start we were able to stay ahead of the masses as we made our way through outland.
Fast forward 18 months and the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. I was even more engrossed into the game and had planned to have over a week off in vacation time to play the game. My connection at EBGames was still active so me and my best friend got the game around 6 pm that night. We had the game installed and flew around outland finishing up over 20 daily quests that we would have ready to hand in as soon as they turned on experience. As soon as it turned midnight we killed a mob to make sure we got exp and proceeded to run around handing in our quests. We flew out to Menethil Harbor and jumped on the boat heading to Howling Fjord. We were screaming on vent to each other as we entered Northrend and seeing the new land we would soon be exploring.That week we had played 18 hours a day every day. We would play til 5 am in the morning head to sleep and come back at 11 and go straight til 5 am again. The zone had belonged to us and we had first dibs on all mining and herb nodes. There was a race to 80 on the server. We were always within the top 10 people as far as level goes.
While we didn't finish first or second we dinged 80 within 4 days. We quickly jumped into heroics claiming our triumph badges and epic purples. We got together with the other 80's on the server and killed Sartharion to claim server first and the nifty Obsidian Slayer title to go with it. We had our entry into Naxx toppling over a lot of bosses and claiming their loot as our own.Yes I am a bit insane at times. I hadn't left my house in over a week. I just went to the bathroom every so often and I had food stashed in my room to munch on. And so the cycle is set to repeat itself. Cataclysm is coming out this year and I have my vacation days saved up. I have made my friend promise to come along for the ride and I've confirmed with my contacts at EBGames. I've talked to my girlfriend about what is happening and while she isn't happy she begrudgingly accepts that this is a part of me.
Over the last few weeks Blizzard has released a ton of information for Cataclysm. We got a preview of the new mastery system, new stat changes, tanking changes, and new class spells for almost every class. Of coarse the one class they haven't done yet is the one class that I play as my main. Overall I like the direction that Blizzard is going with the game. When BC and Wrath came out there was a massive buff to every class and a ton of new spells to go along. With Cataclysm its less about massive buffs and more about tuning things to work correctly.
You have to read between the lines sometimes to understand what Blizzard was trying to do. During Wrath Ghostcrawler said balance was like a bar stool. It doesn't matter how long or short the legs are, as long as the bar stool is even it works. With that there was super inflation on all stats. Doing 2,000 dps was great when you started naxx. Now if you can't beat 10,000 dps in Icecrown you are not pulling your weight. The difference in gear was astonishing. Also we all remember how easily we blew through everything once 3.0 hit. Sunwell became a joke to get through if you knew what you were doing. This applies to all classes. Avoidance was through the roof, healers never ran out of mana, and you could easily just aoe everything in the game.
Blizzard has noticed that and they want stuff to matter again.
First there is tanks. It was incredibly easy as a paladin to hit that magical 102.4% avoidance/mitigation threshold without even stepping into Naxx. As a result right now I'm sitting at almost 60% avoided damage. That is why Blizzard had to implement the chill of the throne debuff. With Cataclysm we are going to see a huge drop in our avoidance and a big jump in our Health Pool. We will probably be closer to 10-20% starting off avoidance. As tanks we will be taking hits but powerful enough to survive through it.
When it comes to healers mana will matter again. All healers will have 3 direct heals. Its based on speed vs efficiency. With the new health pools Blizzard had said it will take 2 or 3 big heals to get from almost dead to back to full. On our Lich King kill we only had 5 healers the entire raid. This is probably not going to be an option in Cataclysm since there will be more healing overall, less over healing, and more time to bring a wounded member back up to normal.
I"m not sure how exactly DPS will scale in Cataclysm. The big thing is to make it so that dps rotation isn't as strict so that the difference between a wrong button press wont be a huge dps loss. With that said they want our special attacks hitting for more and our auto attacks not contribute for so much of our dps.
Overall I am happy with the philosophy of how Cataclysm is shaping up. A lot of people are crying that there is a bunch of nerfs but its not really a nerf considering that everything is changing. They are making a lot of changes to talents to make choices more relevant instead of just straight up dps increases with little thought. With all the information that Blizzard has released it seems as if beta is right around the corner. We'll have a better idea at all the cool stuff Blizzard is about to release.
