“I can live for two months on a good compliment.”
Mark Twain
Failing N’Zoth
I want to be clear that I am not complaining.
We had a grand time last night. It was a three hour wipe-fest on the final boss of the expansion on Normal. It should be hard. And it was and is hard. This is a fight where everyone has to learn all the little bits in each different phase, so you try over and over. It is also a fight with random things, so on the fifth try it might be your turn to get the thing to do the thing. Everyone has to be patient with you when you finally get your turn.
Historically in WoW, I’d be optimistic and think that next week that we’ll be stronger. Over the years we’ve had titan-forging or tokens to upgrade our optimal pieces, things like that. But now we are all in 445 gear or higher thanks to Darkshore or the weekly with a few of the pieces.
The new Corruption Game is kind of cool. The variations are endless. I have one piece with Void Ritual which is a nice piece (a 445 mace). My other piece gives me a Crit percentage which is only okay (a pair of 420 boots). My ideal would be three pieces of Void Ritual or three with the Haste percentage.
As Cinder says in Cinder Says, we have four layers of RNG to get the piece that we want. It is RNG whether a piece will drop at all. It is RNG if it will have corruption on it. It is RNG if the corruption will be the spell you want. It is RNG if that spell will have the ranking that you want.
So, I am not close to the set that I’d like. My anti-corruption cloak is gated. I have a bunch of pieces that are either corrupted or non-corrupted so I can change things around if I get anything. And I am hoping for a 4 x RNG drop from anything, anywhere, please.
But, here is the deal. From this healer’s point of view, the real change from titan-forging to corruption-based design is that we are not getting any more stamina. Our survivability is not improving beyond slight upgrades via the neck piece. Sure, I have a ring with Avoidance on it; but no one would swap for that and drop a buff in their role.
Stamina is the difference maker. Period. You can load us up with secondary stat buffs all that you want and we can feel like gods. But when that big blast comes down, it has to be survived. Meaning the ability to survive a mistake is smaller than ever before.
I have seen it time and again. Raid bosses that are a nightmare can become trivial when you gear up to survive the blasts. But, we really are not gearing up. We showed up to this raid in mostly 445 gear. Our stamina is not going up much. Sure some, but not much.
It is possible, and we’ve done this before, that we’ll drop to the first bosses on Heroic and then our second night of raiding we save a lock-out for the final boss on Normal. It sucks to play this way because it isn’t linear and you feel like you are “gaming” it some. But it is a time-honored strategy in raiding.
Wish me luck!
Coffee Cakes and Crits 