Patch 5.3 Primer for Enhancement

Patch 5.3 is upon us! With this patch we will see several buffs to our damage and a couple of quality of life changes to boot. While these changes may not address things such as the long ramp up time for our AoE damage, they should bring our overall damage up enough to make us more competitive with other classes/specs in Throne of Thunder.

*  Lightning Bolt can now be cast while moving.
The effects of the Glyph of Unleashed Lightning (a glyph that has been revamped; we'll get to that) has been baked into the shaman toolkit, minus the increase in Lightning Bolt's cast time. What does this mean to Enhance? Not a whole lot really. This will be handy in those situations where we're on the move and may not have a full Maelstrom stack available. For high movement encounters, this change may yield a minor DPS increase for us.


* Glyph of Lightning Shield (previously Glyph of Unleashed Lightning) will reduce damage taken by 10% for 6 seconds after Lightning Shield is triggered. 
At first glance it seems like this glyph could potentially become a "must have" item for both PvP and progression raiding alike. However as it stands now, it is not triggered by Static Shock, which means that in order to receive the damage reduction effects, we must receive some sort of damage (spell, melee, or ranged attack, according to Lightning Shield's tooltip) before we receive the 10% damage reduction. This pretty much means that Glyph of Lightning Shield is reactive, versus proactive.

Bottom line, unless you're receiving some sort of semi-consistent direct damage, this glyph may not be worth a slot. Of course this glyph can have its uses, but it'll be very dependent upon the situations you find yourself in. Personally, I think I'll love this one for soloing.


* Feral Spirit: The summoned Spirit Wolves are now immune to movement impairing (root and snare) effects.
This change seems to be more of a quality of life change for PvP, though there are some situations in PvE where roots/snares occur. Though we may get stuck to the floor, our pups will still be able to chase down whatever it is that we're attacking, keeping up the damage pressure and giving us some passive healing in the process.


*Lava Lash now deals 300% weapon damage, up from 250%.
Single target damage buff? I'll take it!


*Stormstrike now deals 450% weapon damage, up from 375%.
Another nice buff to our single target damage. No complaints here.


*Mental Quickness now coverts 65% of the shaman's attack power to spell power, up from 55%.
This is a little buff that will effect a number of different aspects of both our damage and utility toolkits. Without going into heavy details, this change should slightly boost our AoE damage output, increase shock damage just a touch, and will also bring up healing throughput just a smidge.


That about covers it, barring any hotfixes. Now get on out there, swing those weapons, and enjoy the buffs!

What the...

This here is the new druid Tree of Life form.

Uh...they took away the lovable grumpy tree form for this? Now, don't get me wrong...I don't have a whole lot of room to complain since I'm mainly feral, but I have gone resto from time to time. Gone are the days where I could grind instances for badges, angerly waddling around in circles, spamming my HoTs. No more epic ass-tentacle shaking dance, no more heart breaking /cry emote.

Blizz, what did you do to the life giving druids?!?! Whyyyyy!!!!

/sigh

Damn, I'm glad to be feral.

Patch 4.0.1

Ahhhh patch day. How I look forward to all of your changes, yet dread how much space you take up.

That's right, today is officially patch day. The new talents system goes live, as does reforging, the changing of stats (ArP -> Crit, Sp -> Int, etc), our spell books will look completely different, we can track multiple things now, and our new glyph system will come into play...along with a very nice list of other things that are being implemented.

While this is all incredibly exciting (really, I think as soon as I can I'm going to go pet farming on my hunter), I'm sitting here wondering about what I can strip from my laptop's memory in order to fit this rather hefty patch. Most of my images have been backed up, so I could easily dump most of that, but I doubt that alone won't come close to giving me the space this patch may require. So far I've pulled out Warcraft III and Warcraft: Frozen Throne (I was nearly finished with Frozen Throne >.<), and even that hasn't given me enough download room. Microsoft Office, I think you're next. Back to the days of relying on Notebook! Sigh. I wonder if there's anyone else who runs on horribly outdated machines (not by choice) that are having to scramble to try to find somewhere to put these epic new changes. Ah well, such is life!

In other news, I'm still online (obviously) and this has let me do a few things. For one, I've been tinkering a bit with Project Jenesee. I haven't been doing any writing in the past few days, but I have kind of worked out how I'd make Jenesee and her sister, Gypsy, look for the story. I'm not 100% on their gear yet, and that may change later on depending on the different gear/gear sets I come across, but I am rather sure on how they look facially in game at least. I've also managed to get Gypsim up to the massive level of 5 in my free time, so I'll have a rather useless armory link up for her in the Jenesee blog soonish! In hindsight I almost wish that I had rolled these two on a role playing server just for interaction with other characters, but Hyjal was just too convenient. Hopefully I'll be able to get some more work done on these two prior to having to finally go offline.

So yeah, babbling. I do it a lot.

Here are the current images of Jenesee and Gypsy. Think more of later on in the storyline, where the actual juicy and entertaining bits will finally come into play!

I really love both of these item sets. I may go for an old(er) school set of 'lock tier for Gypsy, but for now the current tier 10 works well for her I think. I'm sure the gear will change as the story progresses, but for now these are my "official" placeholders, I guess you could say.

Yes, they're gingers. Learn to love it! How can you have a warlock that isn't a ginger? (Ginger love!!!)



*Ahem* Anyways...yeeeah! Hopefully if all goes well, more on the Scepter quest line later on tonight! If not, well, just know that I will be a sad panda. A very, very sad panda. Those book pieces are reeeeally heavy, and by that I mean they take up too much space in my already limited inventory after all. That, and I'd love to see the end of this quest line, pronto ; )


Okay, enough almost pointless babble. Time to strip!
...by that I meant this laptop. Dirty people.