Wrecking Ball

Into week 3 and still no Level 90 characters on my roster, this is very bad form and I deserve to be stripped of my ability to write about World of Warcraft. The upshot of taking it easy and smelling the flowers is that I have witnessed the playability and levelling skills of several different classes. I have not swapped specs to compare or anything daft like that is purely my observations of the class specs as named below:

Beast Master Hunter

Welcome home Beast Master the king of levelling. I wish this was the case, because for a long time BM Hunter, the class has become very different than in previous expansions. Suddenly we have gone from the pet being a faithful companion to being the full thrust of the spec, and it feels slightly odd.

If I want to kill something fast I have been using Lynx Rush not Bestial Wrath, this saddens me greatly that Big Red Kitty is not the signature spell of this spec anymore.

I have not played around Stampede but you can read plenty about it over at Grumpy's place. It would appear that BM Hunter is the new Ret Paladin, simply hit the flashing lights when they appear and activate the emergency buttons if you have attracted too many mobs with your bouncing pet. This is the new Whack-A-Mole spec.

Hunters are still one of the best gathering classes with their ability to leave the pet to the job of killing whilst you mine, herb and skin to a vast fortune. Everything seems too easy but the pets are definitely not as tough as they used to be, so if you are a bit lax it may make sense to use your pet in Tenacity mode and spend less time healing your pet, but more effort killing the mobs.

Elemental Shaman

I normally play Resto so the idea of chucking out offensive spells is like playing a different character. I have not noticed too much different about the class, but there is definitely a reduced complexity from some of the other classes. The Totem system is a bit of a mess these days, and I must say I preferred the old system. I have never made much use of Totems in the levelling process, but now Searing Totem is almost part of the rotation. Mobs seem to spend far too long in your face unless you have one of the 2 Elementals raining death and destruction on all your enemies.

In general unless I am missing something this seems like business as usual.

Frost Mage

Like BM Hunter, the Frost Mage is being given a chance to shine. When I first read the changes to Mages I thought it was going to be 3 specs with identical spells just in different colours. In fact I haven't noticed any major changes. I have just checked with the MMO Melting Pot guides and appears that I need to throwing in some spells that are non standard Frost spells like Arcane Explosion and Flamestrike for AoE.

Single target still seems to be building up the big hitting freeze - Fingers of Frost - Ice Lance, with Brain Freeze - Frostfire Bolt, so no change there. It is still based on not standing toe to toe with your foe and freeze and hose down. The design of building up the big hits seems quite contived, but I guess they don't want the old style Aimed Shot (Head Shot instant death mechanic).

Retribution Paladin

The Cockroach of Warcraft, I cannot advise how best to play, but I usually just use Judgment and then whatever Icon lights up, most of the icons are either lit up like a Christmas Tree or unavailable or on cooldown. Easy to level and difficult to maximise, most enemies don't last long enough to experiment with.

Unholy Death Knight

This is the class that has inspired this post. Death Knights seem to be able to soak up the pain, regenerate and dish out the damage at the same time, this unique combination makes them the new Cockroach of choice. I was able to round up most of Jade Forest and survive. If this is the new face of DPS DK's, then I do not want to face a Blood Death Knight in PvP.

Summary

All my characters are below max level and I have not incorporated any of the new abilities and talents that they gain at 87 or 90, but so far the number one levelling class is Death Knight, and I normally hate melee classes. Shaman, Mage and Paladin seem to have changed too much, but BM Hunter is oddly not what I was looking for. Death Knights on the other hand appear very unbalanced in their damage output, single and AoE, and their survivability is second to none. It would appear that they have returned to the OP days of WotLK.

I recommend dusting off your DK and smashing your way around the Jade Forest. You are in for a real treat, and don't forget to use the best spell Blizzard ever invented Corpse Explosion.

Min Max

A recent Dev post by Ghostcrawler highlighted the issues faced by MMO's when designing their games. Most have settled for the tried and trusted Holy Trinity - Tank, Healer, and Damage Dealer. The article was well written and very honest. However I must dispute the following claim

"We can get all of the DPS specs pretty close together on target dummies, and indeed they actually are very close on target dummies today"

Does Ghostcrawler play BM Hunter or Frost Mage? I know I do. I feel that these 2 are way behind the other specs available. Perhaps Ghostcrawler has inside information for a secret rotation that Elitist Jerks have not discovered. I know he has hinted at this in the past. Please GC let us know.

When I first started with a mage, as with every other class you get to level 20 without dying, then on a sortee into Stranglethorn Vale, I first noticed how easy the clothies died. Up against one foe the mage could execute anyone with a string of Frostbolt, Arcane Missile, and Fireball, but if they managed to hit you face to face that was very bad. From a leveling point of view it made absolute sense to me to make the most use of the slowing spells, which in vanila meant Frostbolt and Frost Nova. The leveling specs seemed to choose themselves.

The same was also true when I created my first character, a Warrior. I didn't really get on with the playstyle and quickly created another character. This time I studied the guide books and decided that I really liked the idea of having a pet fighting alongside me. At level 10, I picked up my first pet and my first talent. That very first talent point I placed in Beast Mastery, I had no reason to pick BM other than that seemed liked the best place to start.

I never took any particular notice until TBC when I wanted to know more about Hunters and in particular BM. I discovered first the Hunters Mark (a blog that is no longer with us) and from there I followed a link to Big Red Kitty. BRK was brazen in his love for his pet cat and the magical spells Bestial Wrath and the Beast Within. BRK believed that BM was capable of topping the meters, at a time when 50% of the hunter community was specced Marksman. This period is now considered to be time of the Beast Master but most commentators believed at the time that Marksman was producing vastly superior numbers. Is this a case of rose tinted glasses? What was not mistaken was how Overpowered BM was in the early stages of WotLK. The nerf bat was swung and the classic age of BM was consigned to history, never to return to it's once lofty heights.

The arguments at the time centred on BM being easymode and the more complexed rotations of Marksman and Survival deserved to be rewarded with higher DPS output. In Cataclysm none of the specs appears to be any harder than the others and in some respects BM requires the most management of both Pet and cooldowns. So does one spec deserve to be so undervalued for so long? If Blizzard is considering changing Hunters, Rogues, Warlocks and Mages from 3 to 2 alternative specs, which ones deserve to survive. In the case of Hunters, Survival lacks the flavour of the other 2 specs, yet this is the current top raiding spec.

For the Altaholics amongst us, swapping specs is a monumental undertaking. At present I play 10 characters with a total of 12 different specs to get my head around. If you just concentrate on one character it is not such a big thing to swap from Marksman to Survival, research the glyphs, rotations best stats etc. Then go and bash a dummy for 20 minutes. Multiply that by 7 and then it starts to become a problem

In the case of Mage I would argue that Frost and Fire are so similiar in terms of spells, that the only difference is the colour of the spells. In reality one of these specs is the top raiding spec and the other is flourishing in PvP as the first for the enemy to target to stop that never ending trap/ensnaring machine that Frost as become. It probably makes more sense to have a hybrid of the two with special damage being awarded for the cross use of hot and cold.

Warlocks and Rogues also suffer from the same inbalances, although I can safely say I don't enough about either class to make the same sweeping statements. So I would guess for the Pures, the choice is going to reduce to two. At the same time, the all singing all dancing Druids actually branch out to get a fourth tree. With this kind of versatility what hope have the Pures got of surviving future expansions.

A quick look on WoW Census shows that the four classes under the median of 10% are Rogues, Warlocks, Shaman, and Warrior. Rogues are probably on a little bit of a comeback with the current raiding tier offering a chance at a pair of Legendaries. Even without the Lengendaries on offer, Dragon Soul seems to shower the stealthy pointy daggered breatheren with weapons. Shaman like Druids used to suffer with a lack of race options and will probably always been a minority class. Warlocks have always suffered with a close approximation to Mages and have the distinction of being the Mages evil twin. This is probably a turnoff for the Teenage Human Paladin brigade. Warrior is an unglamourous class, with a stigma attached to those daring not to be Tanks. They suffer this problem more than any other class even though Death Knights have exactly the same makeup of one tanking Spec and two Dps specs.

So what is going to happen when there is a new Race and Class to choose from? I personally see a very black and white future.