WotLK Disc Priest Talents
Posted by Jay | Filed under PvP, World of Warcraft
WotLK offers disc priest some great new talents to look forward to. I won’t go over the entire tree. What I will do is break down a couple builds I think disc priests will find useful come the expansion. Discipline priests are one of the more survivable cloth classes out there next to warlocks.
Reflective Shield boost spec. I really like this spec. As a discipline our main trumps are rogues, warrior, and ranged caster specs. Reflective shield is a potent weapon against each of these classes. While it is difficult for us to prevent damage before it is done. We can make a low life attacker think twice about dropping that 5 pointer, or shatter crit with our shield on, shiny and for all to see.
We keep spell warding from the holy tree against our caster trumps and to mitigate dot damage. We gain an increased bonus to PW:S thanks to the new talent Borrowed Time. This reduces the cooldown on PW:S and increases its absorption by 20% of your “healing”. I am assuming the wording means spell power and that hopefully its an increased bonus in addition to scaling normally with spell power.
The new 51 talent also gives a nice holy damage attack for those clutch moments when a burn down is called for. Remember that holy is largely un resistable. That means this channeled attack right after a mana drain/mind blast + PW:Death can be quite a potent burst damage combo.
Largely you’re still pursuing you’re traditional disc priest play style with this build. Which is nice.
44/27/0 - You use smite in the arena?
This is an experiemental build for Disc Priests. Instead of using mana drains, dispels, PW:S and Renew as your primary attack, you enter the arena as an offensive damage dealer and secondary healer. You’ll maintain all the survivability toys of the current disc builds. You’ll also gain free smites. Since you’ll be relying on critical spells to fuel instant smites, this build is less predictable but more fun. Important note: with WotLK spell power is the governing stat for spells. No more separation of +healing and +spell damage. As such both you’re heals and damaging spells will become more potent with gear.
61/5/0 - Where’s that extra point go?
The final spec I’ll propose today is the full discipline tree. A quick over notes that all deep disc talents are taken advantage of. Mana efficiency, mana return and increased damage reduction are the key to this build. You’re greater heal takes longer and you’ll be using it less in favor of a quicker flash heal. The extra point can go where you like. I opted for enlightenment due to the additional 1% to spell power. You’ll be ultra survivable and have great mana return.
Ultimately, I have no idea how these spec will play out. I imagine that due to itemization discipline priests will gain many more options. Depending on play style and team make up, stacking either of the big 3 (MP5, Spell Pen, Spell Haste) will be useful. Take care! Our role is still one of strong support and cloth tanking. I foresee we’ll still be resilient, standing up to the powerful new spells and abilities of the expansion with ease.
Week 2 - S4 - PR
Posted by Jay | Filed under Arena, PvP, World of Warcraft
Huzzah!
As my rogue friend and I were waiting for our mage to log in commence with the evening of 3v3 prep, we decided to warm up with 2v2. Holy COWTHULU and a bucket of bolts we owned! We ended the evening 11-2 with a rating of 1611! Items galore! Ugly purple chest here I come… maybe!
We made one major change in our tactic and it proved fruitful. We flocked.
Flocking: The ability for an arena team to stay close enough together that help/support/burn down can occur within 2 seconds. Basically for all you disc priests out there, remain mindful of LoS to control ranged DPS, and stay close to your team mates.
ESA, E3 and you!
Posted by Jay | Filed under Game Industry
I haven’t blogged about the games industry in awhile, and I’m glad that I’ve finally stumbled upon some inspiration!
Relmstein posted a great overview of the ESA and E3 on his site. I would suggest going over to read it. I love the global conscience of the blog-o-sphere.
I want to add one point to his post. With the successes of PAX, Blizzard’s WWI and self hosted trade shows(There aren’t any more that are on my radar…) the need to have one large expo is being replaced by dedicated followers to one community(PAX) or one developer(Blizzard’s WWI). Gaming press and blogs are much more prevalent, covering the same content and building hype as before. I should also mention that many new pc games(thanks EA for investing in some new IPs!) have developer blogs. Time will tell whether this directly contributes to sales. I certainly hope so!
He does mention something that troubles me. The second paragraph from the end mentions developers that don’t enjoy talking with the player and their audience. Poo poo on them! As a develop myself, I would love the opportunity to chat with players of my products! I’m split on the importance of that one conference. Does GDC add enough?
As our industry matures, the need for a serious developer conference, ones like this one are becoming more needed to keep the veterans engaged and interested! Almost as important, the veterans should pass along their learnings over the years. Its very rare for any company to truly share its secrets, let alone any individual employee. I would venture to guess that any serious entry level developer read up on theory or, as many from the MMO community have done, become a serious expert in a game you play. Tigole and Furor did it, so can you!
Another Great Game on Kongregate
Posted by Jay | Filed under Game Industry
This is another great game! Just as a matter of perspective, this game has been played 335610 times. That’s almost half a million. Half of the projected Age of Conan release sales. It has also received 18304 ratings. Almost 20k people that cared enough to rate it. That’s an impressive number.
If you haven’t already, Kongregate is a great flash games portal with free to play games and an excellent card collection macro game. The more often you play (they ask once a week) the more cards you gather!
My screen name is Rerollmuch, come on over and check it out!
S4 Titles and me!
Posted by Jay | Filed under Arena, PvP, World of Warcraft
all that hard work during the last two weeks of season 3 really paid off. My 3v3 team ended with challenger titles. We were ecstatic!
On another note: Holy crap! Lock, Druid, SPriest is one tough cookie to crack.
