Angry Dome: Now With 1000% More Fury!

The Angry Dome... is awesome. Thanks, Professor.

So, there’s something that’s been making me very angry recently (big surprise, eh?).  And it’s not the lack of raiding.  It’s not the fact that I’m only excited when there’s a new patch.  And certainly it’s not that I have a medal for basically teaching (it’s awesome, totally wearing it to classes tomorrow so I can win the “Biggest Douche” award).

But it’s… oh, how can I put it.

Recently, PUGs have been springing up that ask for a #### GS.  The only way you can go to these raids is if you have a GS high enough in order to go to a specific raid.

This is what I like to call, “The Biggest Douchebag Limitor That Gives You A Number That Really Just Gives You The Middle Finger”.

There is an add-on that I’m sure most people know of by now called Gearscore.  This add-on will calculate your iLvl and put it into a number that magically means you can only go to so many raid instances because of this number.  Nevermind experience: we’re all too worried that poor Karumph won’t have enough DPS to kill a boss because he has a Crusader’s Locket.

This is a piece of bullshit, if I ever did see one.

I say this because you can basically hide behind a number.  Just a number.  This number automatically speaks of your experiences.  And especially if you’re an alt.  If for some reason “your number isn’t high enough”, you can’t go to these raids but it’s okay: the moron who gets tail-whipped into Ony eggs every pull is allowed to go and will do so with expense.

When people use these numbers to hide, I get angry.  As a generally decent human being, I would worry more about a person’s intelligence than their gear.  Though— there are limitations, obviously you can’t take a person in all greens.  But seriously, you have to start somewhere.

There was a point on Exodar on my mage that I wanted to do 10-man Naxxramas.  The leader was like “your gearscore isn’t high enough”.  I asked him politely “where the fuck should I start because I’m wearing all iLvl 200s, and I hear Naxx 10 is basically the first place to go”.  Logic bonked him on the head and I won.  You have to start somewhere. This somewhere has been changing because of the ability to get a nice amount of gear without having to run a bunch of raid instances for a very long time (though the nicest of the pieces do lie in those raids).

Also, where the heck do the Gearscore people get their numbers?  I fear that there are people who are setting limitations to where maybe they don’t know what a limitation may be.  Furthermore, there should be a disclaimer saying that no fucking moron should take an add-on as the end all be all.  If you’re not doing a PUG raid because you can’t find another person with a 4500+ GS?  Go kill yourself.  Seriously.  You’re hurting a LFG channel and the other people in it by being an ignorant jerkwad.

Now— I’m sure people can make arguments for this mod.  “Gee Kitts, I don’t know these people… I need something to look at to see if they’re any legit”!  Well, that’s a great argument if you’re a moron. You should know the people on your server.  You should know what guilds are scary and which aren’t.  You should know what people are “baddies” and which aren’t through your prior PUGing experiences.  You should know general things about classes and whatnot, even if you’re casual, because the truth is you have friends (hopefully) that also know other things about this game and you can use them as reference points for good or bad!

Maybe people are just afraid of getting bitten by the “worst player ever” in a PUG.  Or they’re so overly cautious that they have to put themselves into a world where the only thing that matters is a number.  But here’s something to think about.  How many people in your guild get carried through, die on most fights, and get gear at the end? These are the people who sit in your LFG and tell you that you can’t do a raid because you’re not good enough.  Does that anger you?

I hope it does.

(Disclaimer: By no means are people who use Gearscore are “limited” intellectually.  But you may want to start considering using your brain when playing WoW.)

Tier 10 Healing Bonuses Updated…

• Priest Tier 10 Healing: 2 piece bonus – Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
• Priest Tier 10 Healing: 4 piece bonus – Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

… okay, nevermind, this is much better.

In all seriousness.  The old Tier 10 healing 2 piece was to place an “increases healing received” buff on your target after Guardian Spirit/Pain Suppression on your target.  But this is much better.  I’ll take it.

25% of a critical Flash Heal with Grace up (9% increased healing) can be pretty impactful— I’ve gotten 6-7k Flash Heal crits before, so that’s a nice little HoT to sprinkle on.  Consider being a tank healer, this could be very nice (though not a showstopper).  This would be somewhat subjectfully useful on raid healing, but it’s not a bad thing at all.

They changed the wording of the 4 piece to mean that in order to proc a cooldown wipe on your Penance/Circle of healing that you must use that spell first PRIOR to using a Flash Heal (and you must proc it with Penance/CoH) that will make your cooldown go to 0 on those two spells.  I think this is a better approach— you can probably forsee some issues with just spamming Flash Heal and CoH.  Penance, maybe not so much, but you can get a buttload of Divine Aegis stacks if you wanted to.

But yeah, not too bad.  Wish we were as cool as Shaman Restoration bonuses though.  Chain Heal crit strikes putting on a 25% of the amount healed as a HoT?  Riptide increasing Spell Haste by 20% for your next cast?  Whatever.  Screw you guys.

The Tier 10 Set Bonuses

… as of now, this can change, because I hear it’s a new PTR build and things do change when they need to, but…

• Priest T10 Healer 2P Bonus – After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
• Priest T10 Healer 4P Bonus – Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.
• Priest T10 Shadow 2P Bonus – The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.
• Priest T10 Shadow 4P Bonus – Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 51%.

So let’s analyze this for a moment.

The 2 piece bonus for the healing set is pretty nice though I don’t see the function of the Pain Suppression changing at all— if anything it’ll assist healers that easily get used to reduced damage buffs like this, and will keep a tank up for a little longer.  The Guardian Spirit one, however, I feel will make it get used more often for just the overall healing buff while it’s up.  Though, in reality, both are nothing too much to write about…

But those 4 piece beauties, I mean, wow.  You want something overpowered?  You got it.  The recent trend of most priest healers now tend to fall in line with the Flash Heal method over Greater Heal.  If anything, it seems like Greater Heal needs to be looked at again to see whether it can be a spell that can be back on the bar and used with more frequency and less fear of overheal (I personally miss the Tier 5 bonus of getting mana back on overheal).  Resetting the cooldown of CoH or Penance will make the priest a powerhouse in theory.  However this does depend on what sort of internal cooldown we might see from it.  A 15% implies a 1 in 10 chance (rounding down as a cynic) to get something instantly cooldowned and this isn’t looking at how fast your Flash Heal is to make a cooldown appear.

Unfortunately, I cannot determine on how powerful this will be for Discipline.  I kind of think that after using PW:S, Prayer of Mending, and Penance prior to using Flash Heal.  This means we have to prioritize using Flash Heal directly after Penance in order to take advantage.  Furthermore, the 8 second cooldown requires us to get lucky in the 15% area— at most, I know I can cast maybe 3-4 FHs in that cooldown and that’s if I’m not already looking to PW:S another tank, or put it on myself, or do something else.

We’ll see though.

The shadow set bonuses, though I know nothing about shadow, seems to follow the same trend: a solid 2-piece bonus and a very, VERY nice 4 piece that will benefit those with very, VERY fast Mind Flayers.  I think it’ll help out those who are pushing the 4-Mind-Flays-In-A-Mind-Blast-Cooldown method.

But that’s all I got!  What do you all think about the bonuses?  Am I just crazy?  (Possibility is always there.)