Arajal
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Periodic guest blogger for the World of Matticus WoW blog.
You've actually made a very good point. Only needing to sacrifice one second versus needing 2-3 seconds can make a world of difference in a healing spell's appeal for a DPS class. Indeed, an extra HoT on a destro warlock could free up a few extra moments of DPS that would otherwise be spent on removing the harmful effects of the embers.
@Zonk I was thinking the same thing, Zonk. With this change, Chakra looks more akin to my forms or a warrior's stances. The main reason I can see for them not implementing Chakra as a "mode bar" is due to the limited duration. If you look at a class that does have the UI element, it's often used for permanent status changes, e.g. Blood Presence. Now, if they changed Chakra into a sort of stance system for Holy, then I'd say it'd behoove them to use the bar for each Chakra state.
All that being said, I have all my forms hotkeyed in places aside from the form bar, including the ones that may not need to be (Flight Form/Travel Form/Aquatic Form).
Excellent post, Matt. This hit the nail on the head in regards to something I've been trying to verbalize for the longest time. Many of the druids I've advised in the past have always asked me how they can do better after I've shown them proper gearing, talenting, etc., and it always comes down to how they react to different situations. I agree with you that, in order to go from being a good healer to a great healer, it takes drive, focus, determination, and thinking outside the box. That's certainly how I've gotten to where I am as a healer.As a tangential note/ethos appeal, my guild managed to down Heroic Madness last night. That fight can get pretty intense from a healing perspective.
I should probably also mention that the Glyph of Dark Binding you guys just got is the priest equivalent of the druid Glyph of the Moonbeast, which allows balance druids to cast the baseline druid heals in moonkin/astral form.
That 4pc resto druid bonus is identical to the current PvP resto 4pc we have now. While these set bonuses are nice, it looks like Blizz is keeping their effects low-key and simple for the first tier of MoP. Of course, this is beta, so these could always change.
I think something similar happened back in Vanilla, during the early stages of the Naxx 1.0 patch. I remember everyone being excited to watch the top guilds fight their way through the boss encounters, always competing with each other as they went from wing to wing. The only difference was the fact that this went on for weeks, as Naxx was a very large instance and had a very high difficulty for the time. And that's not to mention the logistical nightmares of 40-man raiding those guilds must have faced.
The druid has complete control over the Symbiosis link. That means controlling who is linked, when they're linked, and when they're *not* linked. A druid can cancel the link at any time. While this spell will be a wonderful tool for raiding, PvP, or group content, it's also susceptible to being used as a griefing tool (read: Matt's Lifegrip comment).
As I'm currently unable to access the beta where I am, I can't get in and test it yet. But once I can, I'll be all over this.
Who knows, I might be able find the time to throw another guest post at Matt about Symbiosis from a druid's perspective.
@psynister Only healers are having their mana pools expanded and tweaked. DPS casters will run off their base mana pools.
@mattuzzi Possibly, but considering that as content gets more difficult, more mana needs to be expended to maintain the amount of healing needed, we may still end up wanting spirit nearly as much as we'll want int. Even in the current model, I've found myself gearing a bit more towards spirit for fights like Heroic Spine, due to the fact that, even with all the perks of stacking int, I still come up short on having enough mana towards the end of the fight. In T15, if fights end up requiring the same amount of relative healing as H Spine, I could very much see us valuing spirit and int equally..
These changes should definitely help break up the current monotony of itemization for healers. In Cataclysm, the only other stats I worried about when gemming were haste and mastery, both of which were tied to int in an orange gem. With this change to int/spirit and healer mana pools, it gives us our choice of itemization back, rather than just chanting the mantra of "int, int, int" over and over again.Your comparison of the new mana system to energy is very apt in my opinion, Matt.