Ladies and gentlemen, raid testing has finally started on the MoP beta servers! Granted it is just 10 man normal mode for the first boss, but this is just the beginning. FINALLY. Finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel that is Dragon-Soul-end-of-expansion farming. Raid testing always starts with 10 normal difficulties and eventually progresses through to 25 man and finally into heroic. Anyways back to recent events, the start of 10 man normal testing was finally a signal for everyone in vodka to get back into gear. Now is the time for us to hit the beta hard. Figure out how to play our classes. Figure out what classes look stellar for all the roles and their separate categories. Which tank classes are generating the most single target threat or AoE threat? Which healing classes are better for raid healing versus tank/single target healing? As a healer, I’m particularly interested in finding out where the different classes stand in terms of burst raid healing and longevity. There are numerous questions from there.
For starters, here are my impressions on the shaman healing class so far. We still seem to be kings of raid healing especially when it comes to trying to top the raid off quickly after taking a huge amount of burst. The additional raid healing tools we got such has our Healing Tide totem and the new Healing Stream totem make topping the raid off after a huge amount of burst really quite easy. If you know that you need to have a burst amount of healing to do at a certain point of time, you can use your elemental totem where you get 10% more healing done with either your fire or earth elemental. All of this is nice and good, but the huge problem is mana. Healing rain takes about 10% of my mana pool to cast. With the current mana regen, there is no way a shaman can sustain 100% healing rain uptime. To be honest, I actually enjoy the changes made to the mana costs of healing spells and mana regen in general. It makes it so that healer actually needs to think before he casts. One can’t just drop healing rain and mindlessly spam chain heal anymore. It’ll be interesting to see how healers and guilds will learn to adjust to this change.
With all of that said, it’s time I started talking about some of the recent going-ons in vodka. To begin, we had our first beta testing last friday on the Stone Guards. To explain the boss in one sentence, it’s three mobs that have energy bars that reach 100% which result in an explosion, and is super easy. To be fair, I can see this encounter actually being pretty difficult on heroic difficulties. The 10 man normal version was really quite undertuned. Since it was our first official day of hardcore testing on beta, we got our feet wet and got to see how respective classes did in a MoP raid setting. One of the biggest things that stood out is the ridiculous amount of dmg rogues, elemental shaman, and boomkins did. Rogues did exceptionally well because stormlash procs on all blade flurry targets and attacks. Elemental shaman were exceptional because of how well ascendance synergized with the warrior crit banners. I’ll go into more details about boomkins at a later time, but they are pretty ridiculous in their current rendition because they have so many cooldowns that are % damage modifiers.
I’m sorry I can’t go into anymore details about the Stone Guards; it was a bit like what raids are like now in Dragon soul, pretty dull. Speaking of our current raids, It’s time I briefly filled you guys in on what happened in the vodka raids during the 6/12 and 6/19 raid weeks! Our goal for these recent raids was to get our members back into the right attitude and mindset for business. Instead of dps cheesing and speeding through content as quickly as possible, we turned off the buff and made sure we were going through the mechanics properly. Outside of people forgetting their nightlights on Zon’ozz and forgetting what side they should’ve been running on, both weeks we performed well. I was pleasantly surprised how quickly we still cleared everything. Of course a vodka raid wouldn’t be the same without some type of clowning around and delaying us.
Something else that stunned me while working on my Midsummer Fire Festival achievements was a conversation I had with a random guy.
Finally we come to what Natalie Tran would call porno music/comment time. If you’re interested in a gear/title/mount run in Firelands or Dragon Soul, please feel free to contact Entio or Killars. If you’re looking for a new guild and are especially adept at the Death Knight or Druid classes, just throw up an app at vodka-guild.net! And finally the great music that I’ve come across recently, compliments of Oveh and Stormbornz respectively:
