Epic gems post 3.2

All this talk of PvP and Arena leads me back to something more on topic for this blog, which is a big money making opportunity. In a few weeks, Arena Season 6 will come to an end. A week will pass to calculate who the big title winners are and then Season 7 will begin. New Arena seasons mean new gear and new gear needs to be enchanted and gemmed. When 3.2 hit, Jewelcrafters were prospecting for the new epic gems and the rest of us were using Emblems of Heroism, transmutes and honor to buy our epic gems. When Season 7 begins, the Emblems will have already been spent, transmutes are on a 20 hour cooldown and Honor will be saved to buy gear. This means that there should be a major shortage of epic gems to buy. Players with less money will likely resort to the old rare/blue quality gems for their new gear.

So, how should we enterprising players prepare? Spend all your honor on epic gems immediately and start grinding battlegrounds. Don't forget to queue for Wintergrasp when you can for the huge chunk of honor for 20 minutes of "work". Lastly, look for good deals on Saronite and either prospect it or have someone else prospect it. Basically, do everything you can to stock up on epic and rare quality gems. If you happen to be a Jewelcrafter/Enchanter, use the junk gems that are left over and start making rings to disenchant.

Or should you? At 10,000 honor per gem, it would take about 3 hours to grind battlegrounds for one gem, not counting the badge trade in for honor. In 3 hours of grinding with any gathering profession, you may end up with more gold than you would from the sale of one cut epic gem, even if the gem prices go up from their average of 200-250 gold. On top of that, you won't have any honor left to buy your own PvP gear, if that kind of thing is your bag, baby. I suppose it all comes down to what you consider fun while playing the game. My wife loves farming while some detest it. If you love battlegrounds more than picking flowers, then this may be a golden opportunity for you to make money and have fun playing at the same time, especially if the price of gems goes up due to the increased demand.

Paladin nerfs, part deux!

The patch notes for 3.2.2 are up and Prot/Holy definitely got nerfed.

Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.

How does this all play out? It means the stun (Hammer of Justice) now has a 30 second cooldown (up from 20 seconds) and spell power went down by about 450-500 depending on gear. A deep Holy paladin should now be able to out Flash of Light a Prot paladin. The question now is: do the benefits of being deep holy (instant heal, bigger heals, haste buff) outweigh the benefits of a 30 second stun cooldown, long lasting/undispellable Divine Plea and a 3 second silence? I suspect for 2v2, Prot/Holy will still be the preferred talent spec. In 3v3, the reduced healing and lack of an instant heal may not cut it. Since 2v2 ratings won’t count for the new top tier of PvP gear, I suspect the vast majority of top level Arena paladins will go back to a deep holy build.

Paladins weren’t the only ones getting a nerf next patch. Rogues got some too, which should make a lot of people happy. And by a lot of people, I mean everyone but rogues.

Fan of Knives: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 30%.
Combat
Throwing Specialization: This talent no longer causes Fan of Knives to interrupt spellcasting.

Blizzard hates Paladins...again

Ghostcrawler recently announced that they will be doing something to "fix" the problem with deep Protection spec'ed paladins in healing gear. This one hits close to home because I found that the prot/holy spec was much better than any other Holy spec for 2v2 and possibly 3v3 arena. The main problem for Blizzard is the deep Protection talent Touched by the Light which when used with full PvP healing gear, can put a paladin's spellpower well over 2200 and I've had Flash of Light crits for 8000+. It's such a major problem for Blizzard that apparently they won't start the next season of Arena until they fix it.

I haven't done any serious Arena games in a while, but I was planning on getting back into it once things settled down post 3.2. Since I'm pretty much forced to heal in Arena because of the many problems I have with Retribution, I found the Prot/Holy spec to be incredibly fun. Lots of stuns and throwing shields meant I was doing more other than standing there casting Flash of Light over and over and over again, with Holy Shock thrown in every now and then. It was the perfect Arena healing spec for me and MANY others and now they're going to gut it. This, right after they gutted Retribution by giving it a completely lame Seal of Command. Some dedicated Ret players have figured out that a specialized Seal of Righteousness build gives better burst than the lame Seal of Command that Blizz force fed to us as the PvP seal. If the Righteousness build becomes popular, expect to see the nerf bat smash it "to the ground" just like everything else that was good for paladins.

I'm really getting sick of the constant nerfs to paladins. I don't know why they are in the cross hairs so often. I have a feeling that the top 100 teams next season will be nearly paladin free just like they have been for so long now (excluding this season). These kinds of changes aren't really doing much to motivate me to play the game and given my recent lack of motivation I'm not sure I'll be doing much in game other than trying to sell yetis and ammo. Oh yea, they nerfed ammo sales too....

For those who care to read, here's the source Blue posts:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/19110155361-cannot-kill-self-healing-prot-pallys.html

The Circle is Now Complete

(Rorik at Light's Trust in Dragonblight)

I have to admit it, I’m a sucker for Star Wars quotes. I love using them when I can. Not the new prequel movies mind you. I only quote from Episode IV, V and VI. I’d much prefer if the new movies were never made. Anyway, the circle in this case is me going back to Protection.

Long ago, when the Burning Crusade first came out, my wife and I decided to try out this Warcraft game. I decided that once I could, I’d level as a Protection Paladin. I liked tanking monsters while my wife’s hunter Tamaril did the pewpew and killed stuff. It’s in my nature to be the meat shield while she stands at a safe distance. Leveling to 70 as a tank was fun. Even without Tamaril there to kill stuff for me, I’d go around Hellfire and gather up as many vultures as I could and tank them all without dying. To me, it really embodied what a Paladin was. Sword and shield, against the odds, bashing skulls in. It just felt like what an old school D&D Paladin should be. Once I hit 70, I realized that tanks were only for raiding and PvE and I really hated PvE. So, I went Holy and hated that even more. That left me with Retribution. So, when Ret got its first major facelift in Burning Crusade, I respeced and stayed Ret until I started Arena Season 5 after I hit 80. I’d go back and forth between Ret and Holy - Ret for questing and raiding (which I don’t mind in Lich King) and Holy for Arena with Krys, my Survival Hunter partner in 2’s.

Last week I read on Arena Junkies a thread talking about “Deep prot healing spec for 2’s” and was really intrigued. I read up as much as possible on it and saw the advantages. Protection got some major buffs recently that have great utility for PvP.

Avengers Shield silencing for 3 seconds? 20 second cool down on Hammer of Justice? I’ll take it! The other great thing is that spell power scales off of stamina! So, I came home, respeced my typical Holy spec and went deep protection with some Holy talents for increased healing. I had come home to the spec I was using to level to 70. It feels more natural to me than Holy ever did and it’s a blast to play. I use my Holy gear to do Arena matches. My Flash of Light crits can hit for 7300 health, take 2% of my mana pool and I don’t have my Glyph of Seal of Light yet. With more PvP gear and the glyph, I may be able to hit 8k Flash of Light crits. I have to make a few minor tweaks to the talent build, like a few points in Redoubt so I can tank melee better. The crowd control is beyond belief and I feel it really helps give Krys the ability to get a killing blow. What’s really great is that I’m dual spec and change to Ret for questing because I hit like a wet noodle.

It feels good to be a tank again.

The WoW Index

I've been working on a project for this site which is to display an index of the top auction house consumables. It hasn't been going as planned. I originally wanted to mimic what the Dow Jones Industrial Average does, but coming up with a way to determine each items sale price is a bit troublesome.

The problem starts with the fact that the auction house isn't really like the stock market. If you want to buy a share of Walmart stock, you look up the price online and that's what you pay. There isn't 50 different prices for Walmart stock. But that's how the auction house works. This means that the auction house in WoW is more like a commodities exchange like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which sells stuff like corn, lumber and gold. Even that comparison is a bit of a stretch.

So, the WoW Jones Industrial Average will be more of a collection of graphs that I compile using the addon Market Watcher. I'll have my first graphs up soon showing how the price of things like saronite, buff food and flasks have gone up and down over the past weeks.

In non-economy news, I've started doing Arena matches for season 6. Starting from 0 points is kinda cool. A loss doesn't mean much other than a way to learn from our mistakes and a win is about 45 points or so. For 2v2, I've been playing with Krys, the hunter I've PvP'ed with for a while now. For 3's, it's me, Krys and my wife's death knight. The DK has some pretty low grade crafted gear right now, but we're still managing to win some. Things seem more "bursty" now compared to last season, even though Krys and I have more resilience. Maybe it has something to do with how Holy was changed around from last season. I'm definitely having issues keeping up with damage, even in 2's, compared to last season. Warriors are absolutely sick now. I have to keep far enough away from them so that if I need to bubble, the warrior won't just immediately smash the bubble and kill me. I guess I'll have to spend more time on Arena Junkies trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.