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I’ve been hesitant to do heroic Shattered Halls, especially without a pala tank, because of the amount of mobs that are pulled at once. However, I went last night. I’ve always went with rogue/mage/xx as DPS in the past. This time? No. This group consisted of myself (resto druid), a shadow priest, a boomkin, warrior and feral druid as tank. Our CC was Mind Control, Hibernate and Entangling Roots. Did we not die style? No. I think we wiped three or four times ’cause of reckless pulls. Did we beat the 1 hr times to save the sacrifice victim? Yes, sir, we did. Daily heroic quest + heroic mode quest - repair = roughly 40g profit. It was great fun!
Prior to this run, I went heroic Magister’s Terrace with some random people: warrior tank, pew pew retri pala, warlock and a rogue. Did I have to franatically HOT people up during the Selin Fireheart and Vexallus encounters? Not at all. Seline Fireheart was especially more of a breeze. Vexallus still required non-stop casting of HOTs left and right, but Wild Growth certainly made it easier on the GCD.
At one point we somehow managed to pull two groups of mobs almost simultaneously. I’ve no idea how it happened. In fact, I didn’t realise we had pulled another group. We probably had eight mobs running about, and surprisingly, I didn’t get aggro once from any of them, despite healing like crazy. I simply love going into one of the harder heroic instances, with random people, and be able to survive a pull like that.
We managed to get Delrissa and her friends down on the third try. To be honest, I expected more attempts for us to succeed. We had the rogue Sap one of the adds, had the warlock Banish the little imp and the others were running loose. Using Fear was out of the question, as CoR no longer prevents fear effects: no more fear-juggling — something I will miss being able to do on my warlock.
I don’t usually check my healing meter, unless after a raid, but after this run I simply had to. As it turned out, I did a bit above one million healing during this run with about 10% overheal (mainly from LB).
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We like the mechanic of having to harvest a special reagent for some spells. We don’t even think the spells are a big problem, with the possible exception of summoning a lot of people (and we are working on an idea for that last part).
Where shards really fall down IMHO is in the inventory management. We want them to be limited, but the way we handle that now feels a little old school, like inventory Tetris in Diablo. We do have a few ideas on how we want to fix it, but obviously I don’t have a big announcement to make on the subject yet or I would have made it already.
- Ghostcrawler, from the official WoW forums
Yes, there may yet be hope for the ever so in-your-face soul shard management.
In other news, I haven’t actually tried out my new deep affliction spec. I hardly count chain-pulling a level 66-67 underground tomb a certified way of determining its effectiveness. However, from what I can tell so far, Haunt seems like a most welcome spell to the affliction tree’s arsenal. In one occasion I had it heal me for roughly 1300 HP — Yes, please!
I can almost see myself trying out arena and dedicated PVP with Taash come level 80 because of this talent. It’s like a reworked version of Lifebloom only it does damage to a foe instead of healing to a friend, but the dispell mechanic is the same: dispell Haunt and the warlock gets healed vs. dispell LB and its target gets healed. Yet another spell that dispellers have to think twice about dispelling! I like it.
Did I mention the new spell animations to Drain Life, Drain Mana and Drain Soul?! They look awesome. I actually had fun grinding some shards last night ’cause of that reason alone. I was also trying to get a good screenshot of my UI as it looks like now:
It’s based on Caith’s UI and uses its kgpanels and pitbull setup, only it’s been reworked to fit my resolution (which I can’t remember what it is, silly me) and tweaked here and there. On a slightly other note, as I was fixing all this I was logged in on my druid, and as such, there is no frame for my little demon setup yet. Oh noes! Another note, my buffs and debuffs addon doesn’t support ButtonFacade yet, which is why my buffs’ borders look ugly.
