Last month, I linked to one of the more attractive-looking (stat-wise) craftable mail items that will appear in the game with the release of Patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel. The item, Draconic Bonesplinter Leggings, was notable as one of the few early pieces that didn’t have Armor Penetration. The post was under the headline:

A Patch 3.3 mail (physical DPS) item that doesn’t have Armor Penetration

Ah, but now it does. Hunters rejoice!

This will be the third tier of raiding gear in which mail gear is primarily itemized with Hunters in mind. Not only do almost all the raid drops — whether normal or heroic — feature Armor Penetration, but in this patch, every physical DPS mail item available from badges, and one out of two craftable physical DPS mail items, has Armor Penetration on it.

That means we can’t even save our badges to buy alternatives, other than set gear.

So what’s the deal? We know Enhancement Shamans have been raising this issue for a while. Have those complaints gone unheard by the development team? Nope. From the Shaman Class Q&A from early June of this year:

One recurring concern among all shamans, whether they are Elemental, Enhancement, or Restoration, is in regard to itemization… An example brought up regularly is concerning Armor Penetration being prevalent in Ulduar despite it not being the most desirable stat for shamans who choose to play as Enhancement. In addition, many shamans express concerns that the options for upgrades are more limited for them than other classes.

If that’s the case, and they really are receptive to itemization concerns, then why do we see an endless parade of gear itemized with Hunters in mind, without stats like Haste that benefit Enhancement Shamans? Supposing most of the raid drops in the upcoming Icecrown Citadel raid do feature Armor Penetration (and it certainly looks that way), wouldn’t it be a smart move to provide some Emblem-purchasable alternatives that have different stats?

It’s just not normal for raiders to pass on upgrades because the gear is so poorly itemized that lower iLevel pieces, with stats like Haste and Crit instead of ArP, provide a better benefit than the shiny new drops.

Armor Penetration provides a nice benefit to PHYSICAL DPS when it's stacked, but often comes at the expense of stats like Crit and Haste. (Image courtesy Parry! Dodge! Spin!)

It’s been a couple of months since Blizzard announced they’d be simplifying stats for Cataclysm, the upcoming expansion, and Armor Penetration will be among those “odd” stats that will be removed from the game with those changes. So why, if it’s a stat the dev team admits is confusing and will eventually be tossed, is it emphasized so heavily through three consecutive tiers of raid and Emblem gear?

This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head.

It happened like clockwork.

My guild was in its second week trying the 10-man hard modes in Trial of the Grand Crusader, and every time we rushed to the all-important portal switch on Lord Jaraxxus, I was getting my ass handed to me.

Sometimes, it was a combination — the portal AoE would tick, then a Mistress would piledrive me into a Legion Flame, and I’d be dead. Other times, a quick combination of the portal’s AoE tick, along with Jaraxxus’s Fel Lightning, would be enough to two-shot me.

And sometimes, when I was really unlucky, Fel Lightning alone would be enough to send me packing, with combat logs that would read something like this: “Lord Jaraxxus’s Fel Lightning hits you for 21317 Firestorm (1071 Overkill)”

This is one of those weird legacies that has been in the game forever. Nobody currently working on classes can remember why that decision was initially made, so we plan to revert it for 3.2. – Ghostcrawler

Yes, it’s hard mode. Yes, it’s not going to be easy. (And we’ve got him down at this point, so I know it’s possible with some work.)

But the real problem? I’m an Enhancement Shaman with the health pool of a clothie.

Since my first few misadventures in ToGC, I’ve been able to improve that health pool a bit, but I’m still chronically low on hit points. At the time, with a GearScore hovering around 4850, I had about 600 more HP than our Mage, about 1.5k less HP than our regular raiding Hunter, and between 5k and 7k less HP than our resident Ret Paladin and DPS Death Knight.

But, um, wait. Didn’t Blizzard address the issue of low Shaman health pools? Twice?

Yeah. They did. First they wanted us to pour five talent points into Toughness at the expense of essential DPS talents, just so that we could have slightly more health — but still less than every other comparable melee class in the game. And then, in the lead-up to patch 3.2, they finally admitted the ongoing player complaints were right, and pointed to some mysterious, unexplainable game design element of years past which limited Shaman base health pools to about 7% less than every other class in the game.

One-shotted, two-shotted, three-shotted, four...

I say mysterious and unexplainable, because according to Ghostcrawler, not even the developers can remember why our chronically low health pools were put in place.

Now that Blizzard has addressed the issue twice, things are presumably looking rosy for Elemental and Resto Shamans, who do not have to take regular melee splash damage. But we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle, especially when it comes to heroic modes.

Dying to your own mistakes — whether it’s failing to get out of fire on the ground or positioning yourself badly — is part of the game. But it especially sucks when, through no fault of your own, you find yourself regularly one- or two-shotted because you have 5k to 7k less health than the other melee in your raid.

After some trial and error, and after picking the brains of some Enhancement players who have a few week’s more experience in ToGC than I have, it seems the only things we can do are, 1) Use Shamanistic Rage proactively during high incoming-damage phases, 2) Reserving Spirit Wolves for those same phases, and 3) Asking healers to pay extra special attention to us, including hitting us with pre-HoTs to increase survivability.

Despite all that, and despite a markedly improved performance the next time my guild got around to heroic-mode Jaraxxus, I got one-shotted on two attempts before we got the boss down.

Ultimately, this is a design flaw that needs to be addressed, sooner rather than later. We cannot afford to be waltzing into Icecrown Citadel heroic modes with health pools more appropriate to Priests. We don’t have the array of cooldowns Rogues have to minimize — or almost completely eliminate — incoming damage. And when you think about it, we are the only melee class in the game that shares gear with a ranged class. Worse, most of that gear is clearly itemized with Hunters, not us, in mind. (Hello low Stamina budgets and heaping amounts of Armor Penetration!)

What are your experiences in Trial of the Grand Crusader? Got a low HP story to tell? Is your guild thinking of dropping you from its heroic runs because you keel over quicker than a level 73 Priest? I’d love to hear about it. Not because I’m a masochist (although we all are, to some extent, for playing this spec) but because the signal-to-noise ratio on a blog like this doesn’t even approach that of the forums. Maybe if enough of us tell our stories, someone up at Blizzard headquarters might take notice. We can only hope, right?

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary dps?

If I told you the name of my Tauren Shaman, I’d have to kill you. Also, he’s Enhancement.

What is your primary dpsing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

Mostly raids, with occasional PvP.

What is your favorite dps spell/ability for your class and why?

All of them. I think Blizzard did a brilliant thing by merging key spell and melee DPS stats, which allowed Enhancement Shamans to make the transformation to the first true melee-caster hybrid in the game. Enhancement players with long memories will remember the days when we didn’t even have the intellect or mana regeneration to work Shocks into our regular rotation during raids. Now we’re these axe-swinging, lightning-ripping powerhouses with a nice range of abilities and a priority rotation that makes things more interesting than the Enhancement of old.

But if I was going to pick just one ability, it’d have to be Stormstrike — seeing a massive double-crit, followed by a thundering Windfury proc, and the booming sound of Shock and Awe signalling a Maelstrom five-stack…yeah, that’s satisfying.

What dps spell do you use least for your class and why?

Sentry Totem. Do we still have that? It’s similar to special in-game items like the disco ball and Simian Sphere — good for bringing out once in a while for a laugh, but absolutely useless in every other respect. And Water Shield, because it used to be a staple of raiding until Blizzard gave us so much incentive to use Lightning Shield.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your dps class and why?

We can put some serious single-target hurt on bosses. Now that Death Knights and Hunters have all our buffs, we’re not exactly the ultimate physical damage amplifier anymore, and we have the weakest form of AoE out of any DPS spec. (If you can even consider our totems as AoE.) But we contribute where it counts, and we’ve still got Bloodlust!

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your dps class and why?

We still suffer from what I believe is developer neglect. By this, I mean the fact that our gear is still optimized with Hunters in mind, we are underpowered until we reach certain gear plateaus, and while Blizzard is quick to hot-fix problems with Paladins and Death Knights, we’re used to waiting through entire patches (or expansions) for Blizzard’s development staff to finally admit the community is right, and changes have to be made.

We saw that pattern with weapon itemization, gear itemization, our prior lack of talent-provided Expertise, our prior lack of real mana-regenerating abilities, and our historical problems in PvP with mobility and survivability. The modus operandi is for Enhancement Shamans to politely raise an issue with Blizzard’s developers, then become annoyed and increasingly indignant when no one from the development team responds, or they’re just told flat-out they’re wrong. Thus, Koraa’s infamous explanation that Spectral Transformation (the most glorious ability we’ve never had) was too similar to “an iconic Druid ability” to be implemented in the live game.

Maybe that wouldn’t sting too much if it didn’t come in the wake of buff homogenization, but we’re way past the days when totems were something special, and nowadays there’s even blasphemous talk of giving Bloodlust to another class! I’d gladly go back to the days of Totem Twisting if it meant we got to keep our unique buffs.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best dps assignment for you?

Enhancement Shamans excel at pouring on the boss damage, interrupting casts and dispelling. We’re not going to equal the power of a priest spamming mass dispel, but on fights like Lord Jaraxxus and the Faction Champions, we can clamp down on harmful casts with our interrupts and provide targeted dispells with Purge. The nice thing is, our DPS doesn’t suffer because of it. And like all Shaman specs, we’re indispensable in our ability to make life easier for the raid with spells like Tremor Totem and Cleansing Totem.

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with most and why?

Nowadays, Rogues, and I never thought I’d say that in TBC. While two of our regular raiders have Rogue alts, we don’t have a dedicated Rogue to bring to raids on progression nights. There are so many ways a good Rogue can make life easier for the raid, and you really start to appreciate that when you don’t have one. Ditto for Warlocks — so many of them seem to have re-rolled in WotLK, and on my server we have a serious shortage of good ones.

Buff-wise, my dream raid would be: Retribution Paladin for Improved Blessing of Might and an additional 3% crit. Feral Druid for another 5% melee crit. Boomkin or Elemental Shaman for an extra 5% spell crit. A Rogue and/or a Warrior for their armor-reducing debuffs. Plus all the other usual stuff — Blessing of Kings, Mark of the Wild, etc. And Focus Magic! I’ve convinced a few Mages I run with to give me the buff, and the uptime on the return buff from my frequent spell crits have made them believers. One friend now insists on giving me her Focus Magic when she plays her Mage: “No other specs give me more FM procs than Holy Paladins and Enhancement Shamans.”

What dps class do you enjoy dpsing with least and why?

Anyone who faps to the damage meters, regardless of class or spec. (Although many of them happen to be Hunters, Mages and Rogues. Go figure.)

Few things are more ridiculous than that guy who’s always spamming the damage meters in raid chat whenever he happens to be in the top spot. Damage meters are tools best used by raid officers to determine who might need help with their gear or rotations, and the best officers provide that help quietly and discreetly. Egos are fragile things, sure. But it doesn’t help guild morale when fellow raid members are engaged in an e-peen measuring war, and ultimately it hurts the raid when players put their own DPS numbers ahead of the needs of the raid.

That Mage who does 7k DPS might be great for the first 15 seconds of Sarth 3D, but he’s useless if he dies to a Shadow Fissure because he thinks finishing his cast is more important than surviving. Likewise, what good is a Rogue who refuses to help shut down a Faction Champions healer because it’ll have an adverse effect on her personal DPS?

In a recent ToC 25 pug, a few players were fapping furiously to their damage meter numbers, and while others were explaining that they *were* on top of the damage charts, until they died.

A Tauren Warrior in the raid put it in perfect laconic terms: “Fellas, DPS is the amount of damage you do while you’re alive.”

What is your worst habit as a dps?

Getting complacent. On progression fights, when I know we have to do everything right to succeed, I’m focused and alert. But on farm content, I have a bad habit of dying to stupid shit sometimes because I start to go on mental autopilot.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while dpsing?

We’ve already talked about the players who fap furiously to the damage meters. That’s number one right there. Aside from that, I really don’t have much tolerance for nerd ragers and others who take the game too seriously. In my mind, the best raid leaders are the ones who take everything in stride and exert calm, and that’s the way I try to be when I find myself leading raids. But when people blow up on strangers on Ventrilo, or throw fits over minor setbacks, it ruins the fun. We play this game to relax and have fun, right? Right?

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other dps?

We’re more dependent on gear than some of our counterparts, we don’t have any real AoE, and we’re limited by the artificial hybrid DPS cap. Oddly enough, in The Burning Crusade (and early WotLK) I found it much easier to consistently top damage meters despite our poor itemization.

In this patch, it’s a struggle to stay at or near the top, even with all our shiny new toys. While a big part of that is the nature of the fights in Trial of the Crusader, we’re also victims of our own versatility — Blizzard is well aware that we alone benefit so massively from melee AND spell buffs, and it seems they’ve intentionally designed our DPS potential to be reached only with the full diversity of raid buffs. Thus, there’s a drastic difference between the potential an Enhancement Shaman has in a 10-man raid vs a 25-man raid with a full compliment of buffs.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a dps’er?

I gauge success by whether we get a boss down, and whether or not I’m still standing at the end of the fight. One of my favorite moments in WoW was getting Sartharion +3 down, in patch three point oh-something, before Ulduar dropped and we were all rocking Naxx gear. We couldn’t power through it with gear, we had to do it the hard way, and most importantly, my toon was among those still standing when Sartharion keeled over and the achievement flashed on our screens. I hate, hate, hate being dead and unable to help my guildies finish a kill, and my most important evaluation tool is my health bar!

I also use Recount to cycle through the information on my individual spells, so I can track the effectiveness of small tweaks like re-gemming or a new piece of gear.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?

That we’re all chronically underpowered and/or incompetent. I’ve seen more than my fair share of Enhancement Shamans who went the cheap route and enchanted their weapons with 50 AP instead of Berserking, or decided to dual-wield daggers instead of slow weapons. Enhacement players have the benefit of arguably the best, most thoroughly-researched and authoritative spec guide in the game, thanks to the guys at Elitist Jerks and the mathematically gifted Shamans who helped compile the Enhancement Theorycraft wiki. All Enhancement players should make it a priority to read Elitist Jerks.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new dpsers of your class to learn?

Although our rotation is now more complex and based on a priority system, I still think most of the “skill” involved in playing well revolves around gear and stat choices. In that sense, a lot is determined before you even step into a raid. Newer players should realize some of our gear and stat choices may seem counterintuitive based on what they know of other melee specs, and it isn’t always easy to determine when something is an upgrade. On a related note, players who’ve rolled Shamans as alts might find the totem system — as vastly improved as it now is — still takes some getting used to.

What dps class do you feel you understand least?

I don’t know much about Shadow Priests, and the specifics of Druid and Paladin tanking remain mostly a mystery to me.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in dps?

Shock and Awe to give me audio cues for things like Maelstrom five-stacks, Dominos to arrange my UI in a way I’m comfortable with, and DBM to help me stay alive. My favorite macro is tied to Ancestral Spirit: Upon casting it, my Shaman says, “Rezzing ____, every time I use my mana for something other than DPS, kittens cry.”

What stat to stack, and why?

I’m hit capped, expertise capped, and I have more than enough crit, so I’m at the point right now where Attack Power is my first priority, and extra Haste has now become the stat to look for in addition to AP on all potential upgrades. Now if I could just find some Hunter mail that has Haste instead of Armor Penetration, I’d be set…

Another week, another failpug story, but this time it’s not mine.  Poor old Gnomeageddon takes the prize for Failpug of the Week and puts the “ew!” into “pew pew!” with this absolutely horrific tale of woe.  The Deathtards may be the new kids on the block but there’s always a Huntard somewhere willing to go that extra mile to reclaim the title.

The DPS questionairre seems to have caught some attention, with WoW.com giving it some link love, which explains the umpteen bazillion hits I took earlier on in the week.  But all the hot news is about the PTR, patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel!

So, what’s in it for mages?  Well first of all, Arcane is getting a utility buff with the change to Arcane Empowerment meaning that we’ll be giving the same 3% damage buff to the group/raid as Hunters with Ferocious Inspiration or Paladins with Sanctified Retribution.  Simply crit with Arcane Explosion, Missiles, Barrage or Blast and everyone gets the buff for the next 10 seconds.  The big changes, however, are in the Fire and Frost trees.  Fire gets the following very boring changes:

Mana cost of Blast Wave and Dragon’s Breath reduced.
Interrupt immunity granted by Burning Determination is now 20 seconds.
When Firestarter is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.

*yawn*

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?  Is this a change to Scorch I see before me?  You bet your pearly pink panties it is!

The debuff from Improved Scorch no longer stacks, and instead can apply the full effect from a single cast of Scorch.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!  Fire mages rejoice!  You no longer have to waste a useful Major Glyph slot to provide a buff that any other class gets either natively or with talents!  What happened to the Glyph of Scorch?  A 20% Scorch damage increase or something, who cares?  It’s still junk.  Moving on to Frost, the fun just continues!

Fingers of Frost: This talent now triggers immediately on casting a spell rather than being delayed until the spell strikes the target.
Frozen Core: This talent now also causes Ice Lance critical strikes to reduce the cast time of the mage’s next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 seconds.

All good stuff, but nothing to make you wish you’d packed a spare set of underwear.  Until we get to the Deep Freeze change, that is:

This spell now deals a large amount of damage to targets permanently immune to stuns. In addition, when this ability deals damage it will no longer consume two charges of Fingers of Frost for those mages with the Shatter talent.

And that is just..  just..  well awesome doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Put into simple terms, “targets permanently immune to stuns” means raid and dungeon bosses.  Or in other words, Frost now has a 51 point PvE talent.  Enough to make Frost competitive in raids?  Possibly, I don’t have any numbers, but it’s going to be fun to find out.

Oh and Glyph of Water Elemental now makes ole Frosty a permanent pet.

Calm down, Frost mages, really!  There are children present!

Sadly it’s not all beer and skittles.  The following pearls of wisdom from the game developers made baby Jesus cry:

Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live.

and…

We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.

and…

There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.

There’s even more stuff about how you won’t be allowed to do X until you’ve done Y and so on and so forth, yadda yadda.  But with the help of my trusty Bullshit Translator, we can have everything converted into proper English in a jiffy!  Wait for it..  here it is:

We want to spin this shit out for as long as possible in order to free up resources for working on Cataclysm and Starcraft 2, so we’re going to drip feed you the next raid instance and force you to progress at a pace we choose rather than the pace your level of skill, gear and determination entitles you to.  Yes, this does mean that you’re going to end up clearing all the latest raid content in a night when it’s first released.  You can then either call it quits for the week or go back to farming Crusaders’ Coliseum again for the rest of the raid week.  No we don’t care.  Tough titty.

We will, of course, spin this in such a way that it will appear to the stupid and those without a Bullshit Translator that we’re releasing content this way because we only want the best for you, our loyal customers.  Not because we have to make this shit so easy for the common herd that the seasoned raiders burn through it in a night and want more.  Oh no.  Not us.

And they call me cynical.  Pfft.

Ron Pardo, the Vice President of Game Design admitted in an interview with John Funk of WarCry today that the addition of the arena system was a mistake for the World of Warcraft.

No kidding.

It’s easy with hindsight to see what a mess arenas have caused with the game and I know Blizzard started the arena system with the best of intentions. But the warning signs should have been obvious during the initial design phases. Attempting to achieve balance with all nine classes for small-scale combat directly clashes with the large-scale game philosophy underpinning the World of Warcraft. If certain classes were originally designed to fit specific roles within 5-man instances and 20- and 40-man raids, the only way to achieve balance for all the possible scenarios of arena team composition was by homogenization of the classes. Check any of the talent descriptions in the trees for the various classes today and you’ll unfortunately find many talents have almost identical effects and tooltip wordings.

The second unfortunate consequence of balancing for arenas has been the sudden and frequent tweaking to the class talents. How many patches have we gone through since the advent of Burning Crusade where many of us felt like we had to relearn our classes from the ground up? I definitely want my class balanced, but having significant changes every other month (or even every few weeks sometimes) detracts from the time and focus needed to skill-up in your abilities. And I can’t even imagine the amount of work this must be for the developers. Imagine how much time Blizzard must now spend on specific class balance for a part of the game that only a small percentage of the population actually participates in. People may think that the recent vanity pets may hinder good game development but I’d place my bets on balancing for arenas as the real resource hole.

Lastly, the saddest thing about the introduction of arenas was how it relegated battlegrounds, their design, and battleground participants to being second-class citizens. Skills needed to successfully win in battlegrounds were looked down upon since battlegrounds supposedly took “little or no skill” according to arena participants. The refrain was that you couldn’t measure individual performance in a battleground so therefore it wasn’t a real test. Never mind that battlegrounds required situational awareness, communication skills, the ability to understand objectives and strategies, and tactical teamwork. What happened was a lackluster approach to battleground design (Eye of the Storm), no context for them within the expansion (no backstory or group reputation for the new battleground), and second-hand “welfare epics” as gear rewards for people who played battlegrounds. Not to mention, the bad blood that subsequently developed between raiders and battleground players on one side, and arena players on the other side.

Blizzard apparently regained their senses with Wrath. Better designed battlegrounds were introduced and Cataclysm shows a return to some battleground prominence with the new rated battleground system. I hope this trend continues. As someone who has played battlegrounds since they were originally introduced, nothing would make me happier than seeing arenas completely shut down, kicked in the pants, and thrown out the back door after Cataclysm.

Thanks to MMO-Champion for datamining the Shaman Tier 10 set today. As many readers of this blog know, it’s been a long wait — from the first incremental previews of a few Tier 10 sets, to the near-complete galleries of recent days that showed every Tier 10 set except Shaman — and now we finally get to see our Patch 3.3 Tier set, albeit on a Human male model.

(As several of the comments on MMO-Champion note, “WTB previews on an Orc, Troll or Tauren model!”)

Shaman Tier 10 set courtesy of MMO-Champion

This was certainly unexpected, as earlier in the day MMO-Champion had a Tier set recap with everything but the Shaman set.

I’m not quite sure what to think of the new set yet. I’m pretty sure this set — like the others — will look significantly more bad-ass on a Tauren or Orc than it does on the thinner Human model used for the previews. There’s just something about the way shoulder pieces sit on those hulking models that makes them look more intimidating.

Second, the image gives us just an inkling of what the in-game animations might look like — will they simply be a blue glow, or will we see trails of blue-ish smoke similar to the effect seen on Pauldrons of the Devourer? One thing’s for sure — this is a departure from the mainly red-themed sets of recent Tiers that seemed so appropriate to Horde shaman.

Although the set seems to have been met with an enthusiastic reception on MMO-Champion, I’ll reserve my own judgment until I see the models in full, animated 3D.

From the department of missing tier sets, some news: We still haven’t seen a single screen shot of the new Shaman Tier 10 armor set from Icecrown Citadel, but thanks to MMO-Champion, now we know its name: Frost Witch’s (Garb/Regalia/Battlegear.

Going by previous naming conventions, we (Enhancement Shamans) will wear the Frost Witch’s Battlegear.

I was initially disappointed when I read the news, but on second consideration it might not be that bad. It depends on how you visualize the word witch. There’s the Wicked Witch of the West (lame), and the Wicked version of that same witch (also lame), and you’ve also got the Salem “witches” (not very fun), but then again there’s the Witch-King of Angmar. And he’s badass. So badass, Blizzard decided to lift the character pretty much wholesale and splice it into its own lore.

Besides the superficial and visual similarities, the backstory of the Witch-King is echoed in the backstory of the Lich King — both are former mortal men, both are former royalty, and both became corrupted by inanimate objects imbued with dark magic. If you want to take it even further, both of them like to retreat to angular-looking fortresses with towering black gates and spires when they’re not terrorizing the rest of the world.

And, yeah, as a player of Battle for Middle Earth II, I’d noticed this at the time:

The ridiculous thing is, EA managed to nerf the Witch-King in very expansion that was named after him. In vanilla BFMEII, Mordor was laughably weak in the early game, but capable of an insane level of cheesiness in the mid- to late-game. I have many fond memories of leading Mountain Trolls and Nazgul, with the Witch-King at the forefront, against opponents in multiplayer.

But EA has such a disregard for its playerbase, that it’d rather devote all its developer resources into the next title than squash simple little bugs and cheat-permitting holes in an otherwise beautiful, memorable game. Seriously, BFMEII was the best multiplayer RTS since Age of Kings. But EA sucks, and Blizzard takes the longevity of its games seriously, which is why I’m playing World of Warcraft and not one of the EA shit festivals.

So, yes: Witches. Let’s hope for Angmar, and not the West.

In January of this year, a first-time add-on developer contributed a simple piece of code to a few of World of Warcraft’s popular download sites.

Dubbed Gear Score, the mod was aimed at raid and PuG leaders, as an alternative to alt-tabbing out of the game to manually check the Armory pages of prospective group members. For the better part of eight months, the add-on remained relatively obscure, a toy for the developer’s friends, family and guild-mates.

It wasn’t until Gear Score 3.0 — which incorporated a built-in Armory tool — was released that the add-on’s popularity spread like a viral video, racking up thousands upon thousands of downloads and becoming a staple in almost every pick-up-group player’s toolbox. It’s hard to pin down exactly when Gear Score entered the wider consciousness of the World of Warcraft playerbase — probably some time between the first angry rants aimed at the add-on’s users, and the sudden use of the program’s name as a verb: “Dude, there’s a Ret Paladin who wants to join, can you Gear Score him?”

…if a player has great gear they need almost no skill or knowledge of the fights to succeed. For example, run Halls of Lightning with everyone in Ulduar gear, and you don’t even have to run away from Loken’s lightning blast, which will one-shot any player who actually needs gear from that instance. So it’s not that GearScore makes users assume that a player with 4000 score is more skilled, it’s that users don’t care what your skill level is, because with high enough gear you don’t need any skill.

Never has an add-on been so devisive, inspiring diatribes that grow into monstruous threads on the game’s official forums, or posts lamenting the growing notion that gear is the most significant factor in evaluating a player’s worth. Even the developers have responded, with Ghostcrawler joking about implementing an iLevel 300 shirt to “mess with mods that attempt to boil down players to gear scores.”

Yet for every player who thinks the add-on makes other players too lazy, too critical of others, or too dependent on gear as a barometer of skill, there’s another who thinks Gear Score — used in moderation — can quickly help them determine if a player is clearly not ready for certain content.

“If someone does have full greens and tries to pug heroic TOC25, addons like Gear Score are a good way to go ‘Whoa WTF?’” notes a Warrior on the official forums. “It’s all in how it’s used.”

It took only a few short weeks for legions of players to catch on, spending their downtime in cities like Dalaran, mousing over passing players to query their scores. As the number of players who were being rejected from pick-up-groups grew exponentially with the popularity of Gear Score, the backlash started to gain traction.

If skill is really more important than gear, the detractors wondered, shouldn’t there be more ways of evaluating players besides — or in addition to — gear?

As it turns out, mirrikat45, the developer of Gear Score, has thought of that. His solution: Revamp Gear Score into a more robust indicator of player effectiveness by offering a baseball card’s worth of totals and statistics. Although busy working out the kinks in the latest iteration of Gear Score, mirrikat45 took some time out of his day to talk with Stormstrike about his add-on, the way it’s used by players, and what kind of functionality we can expect from the newest version.

First I want to ask you about the general response to Gear Score. As a player who took a long break from the game, I came back to WoW (and to raiding) to find everyone was using your add-on. I read your blog, and it seems like Gear Score was added to Curse and the other popular add-on sites in late August, is that right?

GearScore was created in January of 2009, at almost the exact same time as Wow-hereos. However GearScore didn’t become popular until I released the 3.0 version with the in-game armory. (In late August.)

Can you describe the explosion in popularity of Gear Score? Did it take you by surprise? And do you have any information on how many people use it?

The explosion was partly by suprise. And some of that explosion was the cause of a few problems within the addon. It’s hard for me to say how many people are using it. I have several thousand downloads / day from Curse, but its hard to see exactly how many of those are just updates and how many are new users. In addition many websites out there pull addons from other sources and allow people to download them from there. Further more, I don’t track downloads from the blog either.

…the majority of critics have absolutely no idea how the addon works. They make crazy assumptions, such as ‘Your GearScore is simply the total of all your item levels,’ or perhaps the average item level. They don’t realize the addon contains an in-game armory so that it cannot be “tricked.” They assume that putting on “Darkmoon Card: Greatness” will drastically ruin your score and therefore the addon is completely flawed.

From reading your blog, it’s obvious you’ve heard some of the criticisms and are working to make the add-on more robust, so it provides more than just an evaluation of a player’s gear. In the new version,  users will be able to see if a player’s gear is appropriate for their spec, and get detailed histories of their raiding experience. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to add those extra features? Is there anything else on the horizon, in terms of other categories with which to evaluate a player’s contribution to a raid?

Well, first, I added them because I wanted them! And so did a lot of my friends, family, and guild members. I also wanted to emphasize that GearScore isn’t everything, that there are other aspects you should take into account when inviting players. However usually for a pug leader with a time limit, the amount of time it took to take these other aspects into account was encumbering. These updates allow for more efficient information, in an easier to read display.

GearScore 3.1 will reveal if a player is wearing gear itemized appropriately for their spec, among other changes.

Let’s also talk about technical limitations, if you don’t mind. What bits of data do you wish Blizzard would make available for add-on developers like you? What kind of features would you like to implement, but cannot, due to the limits of lag and in-game data mining?

When I first wrote the addon I calculated stats directly off the items, so if it was enchanted or gemmed it would naturally have a higher score. To combat latency issues within Dalaran, Blizzard removed gem information from itemlinks seen on characters in the game. (Which means that when you first inspect a player you must wait a few seconds to receive gem information. For the most part the average user won’t notice anything, but addons will).

This addon was indeed my first. I had messed around with some of the code before but never put any effort into a real addon. I’m very good at learning technical systems of any kind and was able to quickly learn the language and had the first version of the addon out within a couple months…I would love the opportunity to work in any kind of game design and plan to begin writing my own apps for the iPhone.

This caused all kinds of bugs, because Blizzard never added a method to determine WHEN the gem information is actually ready. To combat this change I had to calculate my formula in another way that still came to the same value. Doing so however removes my ability to calculate the value of gems and enchantments, a major criticism of the addon. My wish is for blizzard to add the gem information back into itemlinks or to make an event “GEM_INFORMATION_READY” which we could simply wait for, before scanning a player’s Gear.

Among the new at-a-glance features is a tab that displays dungeon progress, with mouse-over information detailing the specific bosses a player has killed. (Image courtesy mirrikat45)

For every player who has ranted about Gear Score on the forums or blogs, there are others who see it as an extremely useful tool for quickly determining if players are really ready for certain content.  Is there anything you would like to say to critics, or those who don’t seem to realize that gear is just one way of measuring a player’s effectiveness?

This is a difficult thing for me to comment on. I’ve spent a lot of time on the forums speaking to people about the addon.

The first problem I run into is that people don’t always hate the addon in particular, they seem to hate the words “gear score,” and often times they don’t realize there is a difference between the addon and wow-heroes. The next problem I run into is that the majority of critics have absolutely no idea how the addon works. They make crazy assumptions, such as ‘Your GearScore is simply the total of all your item levels,’ or perhaps the average item level. They don’t realize the addon contains an in-game armory so that it cannot be “tricked”. They assume that putting on “Darkmoon Card: Greatness” will drastically ruin your score and therefore the addon is completely flawed.

Furthermore they make crazy assumptions about “EVERYONE” who uses the addon, saying things such as “everyone who uses it is a moron” or “tanks put on cloth gear just because the item has higher GearScore.” All the assumptions about the addon are completely false, and I highly doubt that even a small number of players act in the way critics assume they do.

Before I continue, let me describe the “misuse” a lot of my critics say the addon causes. They complain that people use my addon to keep those who need gear out of instances because my addon encourages players to ask for “4000″ GearScore just to run heroics. This isn’t true. The addon states right on the main screen that 2600 is more than suitable for  Heroics.

The players are using the addon correctly, however they are just looking for unreasonably high values for heroics. Why? Because they don’t want to spend more then 15 minutes in the instance. This is a problem of laziness being rewarded with more emblems. The more emblems per hour you can farm out of heroics, the more benefits you get. So in a way, the game itself encourages players to run speed runs. Without GearScore players just ask for “6000 DPS” or “Link [Overkill Achievement],” or they just inspect you or look up your Gear on Armory, IMBA, or wow-heroes.

Heroics are very easy, and having high gear makes it even easier, so that if a player has high gear they need almost no skill or knowledge of the fights to succeed. For example, Run Halls of Lightning with everyone in Ulduar gear, and you don’t even have to run away from Loken’s lightning blast, which will one shot any player who actually needs gear from that instance. So it’s not that GearScore makes users assume that a player with 4000 score is more skilled, it’s that users don’t care what your skill level is, because with high enough gear you don’t’ need any skill.

Look at it the other way, and when you see players looking for raids or groups for current level content they ask for reasonable GearScores and also tend to say “Must know the fights”. Although many players still make you link the achievement to prove you know the fights. This suggests to me that the users of the addon know the fights wont be easy, and still want you to not suck. And the fact that they tend to ask for reasonable GearScores leads me to believe that most of the “abuse” and “misuse” who-ha is highly exaggerated.

Blizzard has on multiple times stated that they don’t see a problem with gear checks or gear evaluating levels. They have stated that they noticed the problem with the community shifting to “speed” runs and focusing on efficiency. They have also stated that they have plans for Cataclysm to alleviate this problem.

And finally, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to include a little bit about you. Is this your first add-on? How did you get into coding add-ons? Is this just a hobby, or is it something you hope might segue into a full-time job with a games company?

I’m 23 years old, from Oregon originally, but living in Washington at the moment. My main is a Restoration Shaman, but I do have a warlock, druid, paladin, and hunter alts. I don’t have much time to play them because of the time demands addon programming costs.

This addon was indeed my first. I had messed around with some of the code before, but never put any effort into a real addon. I’m very good at learning techincal systems of any kind and was able to quickly learn the language and had the first version of the addon out within a couple months.

MMO-Champion supplemented Blizzard’s official update on the Patch 3.3 PTR changes today with a post packed with juicy new screenshots, including several new sweet-looking boss models, a trio of new five-man dungeons in Icecrown Citadel, and a a new vanity pet.

First, a potential spoiler: With the latest PTR build, Blizzard’s added a long list of new sound files associated with the scripted elements of the upcoming Icecrown Citadel raid. MMO-Champion has transcripts of the sound file, including dialogue from Uther the Lightbringer, High Overlord Saurfang, and several other prominent heroes from the game’s lore. We’ll repeat MMO-Champion’s warning here — if you want to go into Icecrown fresh, and you’d rather be surprised by what unfolds, don’t click on the link.

The post also features an updated list of Achievements players can earn in Icecrown Citadel (but only lists the 25-man versions at the moment), as well as screen shots for a couple new boss and mount models. Players will be able to obtain Invincible, a warhorse that formerly belonged to Arthas.

Invincible, Arthas' mount. (Image courtesy of MMO-Champion)

Not only does Invincible look more bad-ass than any other warhorse mount in the game, it’s also got wings and (as the filename suggests) presumbly can be used as a flying mount as well. The presence of wings, along with the fact that Invincible belonged to one of the most important lore figures (an evil Shadowfax, if you will), gives me hope that Blizzard will give the mount a separate flying animation, unlike the awkward Headless Horseman’s mount, which looks like it’s pedaling through the air on an invisible exercise bike.

And lastly, MMO-Champion has a Tier 10 set round-up, once again sans Shaman. If you’ve been waiting for a look at the Shaman Tier 10 models (and the search terms pointing to this blog confirm quite a few readers have been), the administrators at MMO-Champion feel your pain:

“The only thing I can give you for the moment is a great big hug while you cry on my shoulder.”

Related reading:

Cooldowns reduced on Earth and Fire Elemental totems in Patch 3.3

Tier 10 Enhancement Shaman set bonuses

Updated PTR notes from Patch 3.3 bring some welcome changes for Shamans:

• Earth Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Fire Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Obviously, it’s disappointing that Shamans still can’t use their Elementals in arena, but this should be welcome news for most players.

Viewed one way, the reduced cooldowns are tantamount to a free glyph slot, achieving the same effect by cutting the cooldown in half. Whether anyone’s even using those glyphs is another story — I’ve only come across one Shaman who did, and he was definitely on the more casual end of the spectrum.

"1010 Wins!"

But the real benefit here is ostensibly the ability to use Fire Elemental on every boss fight. At this point, every Enhancement Shaman worth his or her salt knows to drop Magma Totem during encounters, even if they’re strictly single-target: While Searing Totem scales with Haste, Magma still provides the largest DPS burst. On encounters featuring adds or AoE components, Magma’s value rises even higher. *

But what we’ve seen in Trial of the Crusader is a series of highly mobile fights — on the PvP Faction Champion encounter, or Anub’Arak’s burrowing phase, reliance on Magma Totem becomes a liability. There’s simply too much movement for us to get much DPS contribution from such a stationary totem. And if your guild routinely one-shots everything in the instance, you’re not going to have enough downtime in between bosses to bring out your Fire Elemental for every fight.

The 10-minute cooldown should change that — even if the cooldown is still ticking when a new boss is being pulled, the length of the encounters and the shorter cooldown should mean we get to use Fire Elemental on more of those phases where high mobility is a requirement.

* There have been indications by Theorycrafters that Searing Totem could pull ahead, but would require currently unattainable amounts of Haste and upwards of 4,000 spell power — a number Enhancement Shamans are unlikely to reach any time soon.

no t10 yet is a result of massive internal argument in the art dept between kilts versus pants

go pants!  - Vagoo, Cho’gall

 

There are many shaman t10 ideas floating around. i personally am supporting one of either of the following:

Coconut bikini and grass skirt

Codpiece, assless chaps, and black leather harness.  – Judrak, Proudmoore

I found this gem while browsing the Shaman section of the official forums today:

ok this shaman got a 8k lava burst on me non crit today and then a 5k frost shock. thats 14k damage. i cant even do that much and im a pure class. im kinda new but i shouldnt be beat like that from a shaman to say the least. it seems like mage cant even same amount of damage that shaman can do sometimes.

An Elemental Shaman killed a Mage who was wearing 205 resilience. We can’t be having that, see. A hybrid killing a pure class? Unthinkable. A Mage in all greens should be able to nuke down an Elemental Shaman, no problemo. Why? ‘Cause he’s pure, of course!

A few thousand more posts like this, and Ghostcrawler might begin to regret his choice of words.

One of the things I wanted to do when I launched Stormstrike was get some interviews going — from high-powered Enhancement PvP players, to add-on developers and writers of other blogs.

I’m pleased to announce the first few interviews are coming together, and will be featured on this blog regularly, starting with an interesting interview with a popular add-on developer who’s had arguably the biggest impact on in-game behavior in recent memory. Who is he? Stay tuned to find out.

In the meantime, here’s to hoping that new Shaman Tier 10 set shows up sometime before Icecrown…

My, you're a tall one!

As the more alert amongst you may have spotted already, the paid race change service that everyone and their tennis partner said would never happen… happened.  And I finally got to realise a long-held ambition…

CALLI IS A GNOME!

Let’s just count the good points.

1.  She’s a Gnome!
2.  5% more intellect, that’s 29,500 mana self buffed, friends and neighbours!  She’s one helluva smart gnome!
3.  She’s as cute as a button!
4.  Reaching your keys under the sofa has never been easier.
5.  Smaller target!
6.  Extra humiliation factor when she slaughters horde Tauren!
7.  She’s a Gnome!
8.  Groovy dance!
9.  Squeaks when hit in combat!

And now the bad points.

1.  No more human racials, might actually have to get a pvp trinket now.
2.  There is no 2!

Gnomegeddon, you better watch out, Larissa’s got competion now!

While we’re on the subject of race changes, Galadan’s had a complete makeover too.

Get yer coat, you've pulled.

Now there’s a fine figure of a Dwarf if ever you saw one.  The changes are more than skin deep, however.  Galadan has also changed spec.  After being Holy for five years, I finally gave up trying to heal 5 man instances on him effectively.  He’s a great Main Tank healer, but in any instance where the entire group takes damage at the same time, which is like, every frikkin’ instance in the game, trying to keep everyone alive was making him so stressed his hair fell out.  So Galadan has crossed to the Dark Side and is now lolret.  Or is that retlol?  And should it be capitalised?  I can never remember.

You may recall this post where Galadan dabbled briefly in the waters of Retribution Cove and Protection Bay, before hastily retreating to the calm and serene safety of Holy Valley.  Well that was before Wrath of the Lich King and the big changes to Retribution.  And let me tell you, Retribution is actually more interesting than watching paint dry now.  You can still pop a Seal, Judge, autoattack and go make some coffee while you wait for the bad guy to die, but that’s so 2005, darlings.  Yes, I know, late to the party again, so sue me.  I missed the Retribution train when it boarded at LOL Central early in Wrath, but that means I also missed the “To the ground, baby!” phase, and now that Ret seems to be nicely settled I thought rather than just retire Galadan completely until Paladin healing in 5 mans wasn’t so stressful, I’d have a go at Retribution.

And it rocks.

The best part is, in Wintergrasp, thanks to the utter carnage that Ret Pallies wreaked early in Wrath and despite my being completely inept where pvp is concerned, people see a ginger-bearded Dwarf Paladin with a massive two-hander running towards them,  screaming incoherently at the top of his lungs and they… run away.  Try it yourself, it’s hilarious.

Manchmal gibt es echt offizielle Statements von Blizzard, bei denen weiß ich nicht so genau, ob ich lachen oder weinen soll. In diesem Falle geht es mal wieder um Paladine. Diese hatten in den vergangenen Tagen, sagen wir mal… ihre Bedenken geäußert, weil man den Eindruck gewinnen konnte, Patch 3.3 würde ein wahres Nerffest für Paladine. Mal abgesehen davon, dass Ghostcrawler in seiner Antwort eher unentschlossen in der Gegend herumeierte, fand sich da schon ein sehr lustiger Randkommentar. Aber seht selbst:

The paladin class isn’t just supposed to be for support anymore, but at the same time, the original intent for many paladin abilities was to help the group. Over time however they have contributed into making the paladin into a “one-man army,” able to play offensively, defensively and heal without say the stance changing or shapeshifting or sometimes event talent specialization required of other classes. Many of the LK balance problems we’ve had with the class are because of that core issue.

Ist klar. Paladine sind also eine Einmannarmee. Wenn ja, dann sind Paladine aber mit Sicherheit die langsamste und ineffektivste Einmanarmee, die es gibt. Sind zwar schwer zu töten, töten aber auch selber nur schwer was. Wenn das die Definition einer Einmanarmee ist, dann frag ich mich, ob T10 nicht vielleicht besser so aussehen sollte:

In the wake of Ghostcrawler’s post explaining the much-bitched-about “hybrid tax,” WoW Insider’s Mike Schramm responded today with a post that said the penalty is justified:

Is that wrong? Not at all — it may disappoint some people (and Ghostcrawler probably knows, but we’ll remind him anyway that posting even this clearly on the forums won’t put a lot of complaints to rest), and it may cause some rerolls, but it definitely makes sense. Flexibility is an asset, and not having that flexibility in a pure class does mean that they should get out of paying that tax. If you only do one thing, you should be able to do it better than someone who has the option to do all three. And as he says, what you want to do with the class has nothing to do with how Blizzard is balancing them overall. It doesn’t matter if all you wanted to do when you rolled that priest was play shadow — they need to be balanced as hybrids.

For the uninitiated, the “hybrid tax” is Blizzard’s design philosphy that the “pure” classes (ie. those that cannot respec to another role besides DPS) should have the potential to do more damage.

GC qualifies his new sticky with the caveat that the tax applies with “all things being equal.” That is, the difference in DPS should be apparent if all classes are geared equally, if an encounter favors all classes equally, if the players are of equal skill, if the person playing each toon has the same latency, and so on. He notes, correctly, that that’s rarely the case.

"The new Civic Hybrid: 5% smaller, 5% slower, and 5% less comfortable on the road!"

Ghostcrawler claims ignorance about the origins of the “5% hybrid tax” and tries to fob that definition — which has caused so much drama over the years — on a player, but conceding that it could have been “something we threw out at some point as an example.”

But here’s the problem: The “hybrid tax” is a PvE-only term, and hybrids do not exist in raids.

In vanilla WoW, it was conceivable that a raid leader might bring a healing/DPS hybrid to a raid (that is, a toon specced to do both, at the same time), but certainly not for anything other than farm content. Aside from that, hybrids were expected to heal, and specs like Enhancement and Retribution weren’t considered suitable for progression raiding. As a community we WoW players have a short memory, and it wasn’t so long ago that even top guilds like Ensidia (at the time, Nihilum) refused to bring hybrid DPS classes to their raids. (“…we’ve always been very old-fashioned regarding specs.”)

If this sounds insane, that’s because it is — remember that, at the time, guilds were requiring all raiders to level Leatherworking for the sole purpose of stacking haste drums to power their way through Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau.

And remember that, before the homogenization of buffs in Wrath of the Lich King, every hybrid brought unique buffs, especially Enhancement Shaman — before the advent of the Death Knight, Enhancement was hands-down the most powerful group-buffing spec in the game, with the old-school Windfury Totem, Strength of Earth, Grace of Air, Unleashed Rage and Bloodlust. Nowadays, all of those buffs can be replicated by other classes with the exception of Bloodlust, and the way things have been going, it would not be surprising at all to see a “Scroll of Bloodlust” pop up on a PTR sometime in the future. (Coincidentally, it was a WoW Insider columnist who suggested Bloodlust should be given to Rogues in a post earlier this year.)

With Wrath of the Lich King, and its widespread homogenization of buffs, hybrids have lost all but the tiniest remnants of the unique raid utility they formerly brought to the game. But that isn’t even the real issue.

Ultimately, it comes down to fun. For all but the most obsessed of us, fun is still the primary motivating factor in why we play the game. It’s why we raid, why we PvP, and why we sometimes sit near a pond for hours with our favorite music blaring, casting a digital fishing pole into a lake made of binary numbers, hoping to catch non-existent fish.

Simply put, arbitrary limits on how powerful a class can be takes away from that fun, causes drama, and causes frustration for the players who rolled hybrid classes in the first place. No one buys World of Warcraft, sits down for the first time in front of the character creation screen, and ponders their damage-dealing capabilities in end-game instances once they hit the level cap.

Blizzard can get away with this because no other MMO has the polish, the reputation, the pedigree or the overwhelming popularity of World of Warcraft. Yet one day, a WoW-killer will come along. It will be as polished as WoW, it will be developed by people who learned from WoW’s mistakes just like WoW’s developers learned from earlier MMOs, and it will do away with the archaic artificial limits Blizzard won’t let go of.

Sure, that won’t be the only factor in a WoW-killer, and in truth it will be only a minor one. But it’s balance issues like this that are among the most frustrating things in the game, and it’s even worse when there’s no logic behind it other than some outdated notion of which classes get brought to raids, or what certain players are “entitled” to. In truth, the hybrid tax smacks of the same lack of backbone that leads to the developers caving on the other demands of a petulant playerbase — hence, rating requirements on arena gear, wide gulfs in statistics on gear dropped in hard modes, and in-game items only available to those with inhuman amounts of free time. Some of that’s improved over the years, a lot of it hasn’t.

As long as it’s the only game in town, World of Warcraft can hold on tight to these outdated notions. When a real competitor comes along, something tells me WoW’s development staff will be very quick to change their tune.

Update: WoW Insider’s Mike Schramm isn’t the only one agreeing with Ghostcrawler. Question: If DKs and Warriors are less “pure” because they can, 1) tank, and 2) DPS, and thus “should” be capable of higher DPS numbers, why aren’t Shaman in that second tier of “less pure” classes?

Shaman can only, 1) DPS, and 2) heal. We don’t have a tanking spec. Druids have a tanking spec, a caster DPS spec, a melee DPS spec, and arguably two healing specs, although I admit I haven’t heard anything about the viability of Dreamstate since TBC. Still, do we get an extra 1.7% DPS because we can’t tank? How about a cookie? But I’m sure I’m not the only one who notices this is a slippery slope…

As of yesterday, Tier 10 visual previews of 9 out of the 10 classes have become available. The only one yet to be revealed? Shaman.

Of course, we know what the two- and four-piece Shaman Tier 10 set bonuses are, and though we can’t yet see them in action, they appear to be pretty sweet. (Read this post for how the set bonuses can stack on top of existing procs for some nasty burst damage.)

"I pity the fool who uses recycled armor art for Tier 10!"

We’re confident that as soon as Blizzard finishes telling us about the new lag reporting feature, the important changes for new players, the new fishing tournament, the new race change service, and this week’s WoW comics, we’ll finally see the Shaman set. Definitely. Maybe.

In the meantime, if you’d like to see what the new Tier 10 armor looks like on your alts in glorious 3D, check out the wowhead blog’s (“as far as we know, Shamans are still missing”) 3D preview here.

I think this is an important change. Sure, we can make jokes about “noobs” but a lot of people who try WoW out for the first time have no experience with MMOs, and let’s not forget this game has a wide-ranging demographic.

Off the top of my head, I know a 67-year-old grandmother who plays a Resto Shaman, another grandmother who plays a Blood Elf Hunter, an ER doctor in his 50s who uses the game as  means of spending time with his kids. And I’m always surprised when a random, well-played pug member turns out to be a grade school kid. (Which is why it’s a good idea to watch your language in PUGs, even if you assume most kids that age would have their language filter turned on.)

Speaking from personal experience, I began playing WoW in early 2007, when the game basics had long been second-nature to most seasoned players. I had experience in online gaming, but WoW was my first MMO. I’d played lots of RTS games before (Age of Empires, Battle for Middle Earth II), lots of FPS games (Quake, Unreal Tournament) and quite a few role-playing games, going all the way back to the original Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES.

But I had no concept of talent specializations, instancing group dynamics, the mechanics of aggro and the difference between soulbound and non-soulbound items. When I began playing WoW, I was so clueless it took me a couple of days to figure out that in-game currency was returned to the player through the mail after they lost an Auction House bid. So I spent way too much time grindng the Harpies outside of Thunder Bluff to get my first overpriced greens, which I’m sure looked hilarious: “Why is this level 15 Shaman spending hours slaughtering Harpies three levels below him?”

"We keep the noobs fenced in, for their own safety."

Along the way, I met some extremely helpful players, starting with the Druid who led me to the stashes of Ambercorn beneath Mulgore’s tree groves — back then, we didn’t have sparkly graphics to clearly mark quest items, drinks only cost 10 cents, and we had to walk uphill both ways to Thunder Bluff. None of that Purified Draenic Water for us, thanks.

But on a more serious note, griefers who invite noobs en masse to raid groups for the sole purpose of stranding them in their starting zones without quests or any direction on what to do have undoubtedly ruined the early game experience for more than a few players, and who can say how many people let their 14-day trials expire out of frustration because of incidents like that?

They’re not idiots, they’re noobs, and all of us were new to this game at some point. I’m glad Blizzard is taking steps to make it easier for those folks in Patch 3.3 — not only is it beneficial to everyone to have new blood in the game, it also signals a belief by Blizzard that, five years into WoW’s lifespan, the developers still expect significant numbers of new players joining in on the fun. And that’s a good sign for all of us.

I took another look at my Tier 10 Enhancement Shaman set bonus preview post and realized I may have been underselling the four-piece bonus. A second look at the roughly one-in-seven chance proc shows some enormous potential for stacking absurd amounts of Attack Power.

Sure, it’s pure RNG, and like trinkets that have “equip” instead of “use” effects, it only lasts for a short 10 seconds. But this is all about burst damage, and it’s scary to think what the Tier 10 four-set proc can do in combination with our other procs.

We be gettin' crazy amounts of AP from dis proc, mon.

A well-geared shaman can easily hit 6k Attack Power while raid-buffed. With Unleashed Rage, that brings it up to 6,600. If the four-piece set bonus procs, that shaman is suddenly up to 7920 Attack Power. If the stars align, that shaman might have a double Berserker proc. Now he’s up to 8720 Attack Power. Toss in the proc from Totem of the Quaking Earth, and the shaman tops out at 9120 Attack Power.

Now, toss in Bloodlust, an offensive spell crit to trigger Elemental Devestation, and the 12% increased damage from the new Shamanistic Rage, and we’re looking at potentially ridiculous burst DPS in patch 3.3.

I’d be stupid to sneeze at that.

The past week has seen a flurry of data-mined art depicting Tier 10 sets for almost every class besides Shaman. Maybe that’s a good thing, because Tier 10 sets for classes like Rogues and Hunters don’t seem to be going over very well, at least aesthetically.

The good news is, MMO-Champion’s given us a preview of Tier 10’s two- and four-set bonuses, including the bonuses for the as-yet unrevealed Shaman set:

• * 2 Pieces (Enhancement): When you activate your Shamanistic Rage ability you also deal 12% additional damage for 15 second.
• 
  * 4 Pieces (Enhancement): Each time the beneficial effect of your Maelstrom Weapon talent reaches 5 charges, you have a 15% chance to gain 20% attack power for 10 seconds.

The two-set bonus seems ridiculously good, especially compared to Tier 9 and considering Shamanistic Rage is on a one-minute cooldown. I’m sure I’m not alone among Enhancement Shaman in not using Shamanistic Rage very often when it comes off cooldown — in a way, Improved Stormstrike does its job almost too well, and the rare times I find myself hurting for mana are during extremely mobile fights like Anub, when I find myself re-dropping all four totems because the raid has run out of range.

With the two-set bonus, there’s incentive to use Shamanistic Rage every time it’s off cooldown. Players can also use it like an on-use trinket, timing it with Bloodlust and Feral Spirit to squeeze even more DPS from the ability.

The four-piece bonus is a little more confusing, as a percentage-of-a-percentage. Essentially, more than one out of every seven times you get a Maelstrom five-stack, you’ll gan 20% of your Attack Power. But only for 10 seconds. This set bonus is trinket-esque as well, with the caveat that you cannot control when it procs, adding yet another RNG element to Enhancement DPS.

Still, compared to Tier 9’s universally reviled set bonuses, Tier 10’s bonuses look flat-out incredible. Here’s to hoping they stay intact through the PTR to the live patch.

Update: See this post for information on how the Tier 10 Enhancement Shaman four-piece set bonus can net you more than 9k Attack Power (and a lot more than that, combined with other Icecrown Citadel gear) when combined with procs from Unleashed Rage, Berserking, and items like Totem of the Quaking Earth.