Author: Phaelia

Dressing to Impress

Phaelia in Phaelia 7 Comments
wardrobe

Because there simply isn’t enough to keep me busy in Legion (har har), I often spend spare time collecting transmog items — the more Druidly, the better. In fact, six of my favorite words are You have not collected this appearance. When I first started “shopping”, I didn’t really make a plan, assuming that anything I managed to acquire was going to be great, but I eventually found myself running the same dungeons over and over, mostly because they were easily accessible. Even when I began to specifically target set pieces, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how setting raid difficulty worked. As it turns out, setting your Burning Crusade raid’s difficulty to Mythic doesn’t actually set it to the highest available level of difficulty!

For the longest time, I had a certain sentimental item languishing in my bank. I had repeatedly tried and failed to find items that coordinated with it when I happened to stumble upon a post by FlashYou: Looking for Transmog? (Leather Edition) which renewed my interest in turning the robe into an outfit.

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Masquerading Mana-Kitty

Phaelia in Druid 5 Comments

Kudos to Blizzard for the — at least so far as I am aware — unannounced change whereby shapeshifting into Cat Form while in Suramar City no longer results in you losing the Masquerade buff. You now instead shapeshift into a Manakitty!

masquerading-manakitty

If Cat Form looked like this all the time, I might actually be tempted to play Feral. (No, I wouldn’t.)

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Cruelty-Free Animal Questing

Phaelia in Druid 6 Comments

card-dehta-membershipLegion is probably the most well-written expansion I have played. It makes me wonder if Blizzard might have found themselves with a surplus of excellent writers when Project Titan was shelved and decided to put them to good use developing class-specific content and innumerable world quests. With the introduction of Order Halls and spec-specific Artifact questlines, tremendous effort was obviously devoted to inspiring a sense of class immersion. And so, as a Druid, it causes me great distress when a world quest such as Munitions Testing calls for the mindless and exceedingly unsportsmanlike slaughter of otherwise inoffensive wildlife.

If you haven’t yet done this quest, it requires the player to kill five hawks and five packs of wolves. To aid you in this endeavor, you are provided a mechanical rabbit with two abilities: the first, to lure the unsuspecting creature; the second, to detonate and kill them. Once I understood how the dynamite rabbit mechanic worked, I was so horrified I tried completing the quest without using them. Unfortunately, at the point where you have to kill the larger wolves and her two smaller packmates, it was just so much easier to use the rabbit. This quest made me extremely unhappy as a Druid and as a player (honestly, I expected Archdruid Lathorius to jump out of at tree and demand I hand over my D.E.H.T.A. card). If it weren’t the only quest remaining to fulfill an Emissary requirement, I would have abandoned it altogether.

An actual robotic rabbit, used for composting and companionship
An actual robotic rabbit, used for composting and companionship … not carnage
It is probably too late to ask Blizzard to re-write this quest and those like them, but I would implore their quest design team to consider offering alternative methods of completing similar quests in the future. Some examples could include:

  • Convince the questgiver there are better uses for her munitions.
  • Sabotage the collection of munitions.
  • Catch and relocate the animals further away from the murderous NPC.
  • Side with the animals, putting players in PvP state with players that choose to side with the questgiver.

I realize that many quests require the seemingly pointless slaughter of wildlife. But the exploding rabbits made this one seem particularly egregious. What do you think? Are you similarly bothered by being asked to kill wildlife as a Druid or are exploding bunnies just another objective in your quest toward the destruction of the demonic hordes of Legion?

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7.1 PTR Changes to Cultivation and Prosperity

Phaelia in Druid 4 Comments

MMO Champion is reporting that two changes affecting the Restoration talents Cultivation and Prosperity were applied to the PTR this week:

Druid Talents
  • Cultivation: When Rejuvenation heals a target below 60% health, it applies Cultivation to the target, healing them for [*60% 72% of Spell Power*] over 6 sec. Restoration Druid – Level 75 Talent.*(please see note below)
  • Prosperity: Swiftmend now has 2 charges, and its cooldown is reduced by 5 3 sec. Restoration Druid – Level 15 Talent.
Source: MMO Champion

This is actually a sizable nerf to Prosperity, one of my favorite talents to use in conjunction with Soul of the Forest. We still benefit from being able to have two charges queued up, but it’s a Swiftmend cooldown reduction decrease of only 10% rather than the current 17%. Interestingly, both the buff to Cultivation and nerf to Prosperity will steer more Restoration Druids away from Soul of the Forest.

PTR Talent Calculator
PTR Talent Calculator

As of today, WoWPopular is listing builds with Prosperity/Soul of the Forest as the most popular of the Restoration Druid specs, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. No doubt this is seen as a problem by developers who want players to have interesting choices and tradeoffs.

Part of the problem is undoubtedly that Cenarion Ward is more useful in 5-man content than raids. Likewise, Cultivation is much more useful in 5-man content where it can actually do some good since your heals aren’t as likely to be sniped by another healer. Unless something is done to make these two options more attractive outside of Heroics/Mythics, I’m afraid this is just a nerf to Restoration Druids, at least for raiding content.

*Note that the percentages for Cultivation listed in the summary on MMO Champion are different than the ones listed in their PTR-datamined tooltip and would actually represent a huge nerf. I think the correct value is probably the 144% in the tooltip (which is an increase over the current value of 120% listed on WoWHead). Someone please correct me if I’m misunderstanding this, however.

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Off-Spec World Quest Rewards

Phaelia in Blue 4 Comments

I’m sure I’m not the only Restoration or Balance Druid who was — at least temporarily — frustrated by the plethora of Agility trinkets being offered as rewards for World Quests. It seemed for a week or so that I would never see an Intellect trinket, making me envious of the “pure” classes (like Mr. Phae’s Arcane Mage) who only have one primary stat to pursue. I originally viewed this as an oversight on Blizzard’s part and assumed that they would correct it in one of the tuning patches. However, the development team actually makes some good points:

World Quest Rewards
  • World Quests don’t adjust rewards based on your loot specialization.
  • If the map changed every time you changed spec that would be an annoying experience.
  • Having to cycle between your different specs to see different rewards is not great.
  • It also allows you to get items for off-specs without having to change your loot spec.
Source: Live Developer Q&A: Patch 7.1 (as summarized by MMO Champion)

In other words, don’t expect this to be changed, although if you’re like me, you now have the Intellect- or Agility-based World Quest trinket drops you were looking for anyway.

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