Infusion of Light

I think I am not alone in thinking that it is about time Blizzard pushed out this patch. We’ve all been waiting since more or less the release of WotLK, and now finally we have it. From what I have seen and read so far most of the changes are for the better. Amongst the general changes I am especially pleased about the change to the mining skill, this will make farming that much easier, I have lost count of the number of time I’ve started mining a node only to have to fight off some annoying creature only to find that some one has dropped out of the sky and consumed the remaining ore whilst my back was turned.

I could go on at great length about the good and bad changes but it’s all been covered by other people so I will limit myself to giving my thoughts on the Paladin changes especially those that concern Holy Paladins.

Firstly Holy got a DPS increase, It’s only a small one but still I don’t think I could have asked for more. The 46 poitn holy talent Judgements of the Pure now grants 5% additional seal and judgement damage per talent point as well as giving the haste boost it gave before. I’ve tested this out and whilst it’s not much it is noticeable. I hope to try out some different seal/judgement combinations on the weekend to see if I can get more damage with a different approach.

The other big change from a Healing point of view is the changes to the Glyph of Flash of Light and Glyph of Holy Light. The old Flash of Light glyph was basically useless, who would give up 50% of there healing output for a heal over time that doesn’t stack? So I am very pleased with the additional 5% Crit rating the glyph now grants. The Holy Light glyph is now even better than it was before although from what I have just read it’s going to be hot fixed to reduce the area of effect from 20 to 8 yards. This is a shame but in it’s current state 20 yards is a bit over powered really.

The only real bad change, and it’s not really bad for Holy, is the reduction in the mana generated from Judgement of Wisdom. I’ve tested this out and it doesn’t seem to have reduced the mana generated when using both the seal and judgement. I was at first a little worried that it might have had a drastic effect on mana efficiency when soloing, but thankfully this is not the case. There are many other changes but these are I think the most salient for holy paladins, If I find any more I’ll add them in a later post.

Edit: It would seem that I missed all the articles and posts talking about the major problems caused by this patch. Hopefully with the minor patch released today these issues will have been resolved.

It has been three weeks since I finally went forth into Northrend and started working on the new content. So far I am very impressed with both the zones and the quests. For the most part the plan myself and some of my guild mates came up with to avoid the crowds has paid off. Waiting those few weeks has meant that all of us got chance to gear up a bit more, save up some much needed gold and above all avoid the need to do quests at the same time as everyone else on the realm.

At some unpleasant hour of Sunday morning Tallinus hit level 74, which is pretty good as I only hit 73 on Thursday night. So far I have only really seen two zones, there are so many good quests and I find it hard to move on when there might be some interesting quest or story line that I might have missed. I know I can come back and finish each zone once I hit 80 but it’s not the same. I am going to try and make the effort to move on more quickly but I still have some pretty important things to do in Dragonblight so I don’t think it will be much before 75 that I move on.

We have so far done two of the new instances, as usually we fell into the “Oh, we don’t need PUG DPS we can three man it” trap which seems to be something of a bad (but ion occasion very impressive) habit we picked up somewhere along the line. So imagine our surprise when we actually beet Utgard Keep with only three. Unfortunately we didn’t do quite as well in the Nexus. The penultimate boss was just too much for us, really needed more DPS. Hopefully we’ll go back and avenge our deaths on that damn arcane elemental or what ever he is.

I will try and post a bit more regularly now that the site is pretty much finished, plus I have a number of post that are just waiting to be checked over, that I wrote a few months ago before I got the site set up. I just have to figure out how to slot them in on the correct dates.