The D3 hype has settled. I have to say, it’s alright but I’m not as crazy into it as some people are. So with that, I’ve managed to get a bit more time onto the beta. I’ve got a few quick notes about both specs. For Restoration, I managed to do a few dungeon runs. As Elemental it was mostly just questing.
Here are my Restoration notes:
1. The Riptide glyph makes things a lot more cohesive. You can basically have a 100% up time on Tidal Waves with it. What I did was use Riptide on a target then throw out 2 heals to consume the buff and then use it on another person. Very nice.
2. Not laying totems constantly takes some getting used to. So instead of laying your totems on the pull you just hold off and wait until one of your totems is needed as a buff like Spiritlink, or Mana Tide.
3. Ascendance form as Resto – I didn’t really get to play around with it as much as I did with the Elemental one. It’s a pretty good cooldown and will definitely be used on most any boss encounter.
4. The new talent setup allows you to pick up Elemental Mastery which was re-worked. You basically get a Bloodlust for 20 seconds every 2 minutes. This makes for a very nice cooldown, though I will say not having an instant cast as a healer took some getting used to. An instant cast to me is invaluable for those “oh shit!” situations. If I did decide to go the Ancestral Swiftness (formerly known as Nature’s Swiftness) route instead I’d get the instant cast and a flat 5% haste increase.
5. The Deluge glyph is pretty cool. So instead of yellow jesus beams, they’re now blue and watery like the rest of our spell animations!
6. Mana pools cap out at 100k, which I honestly didn’t notice at all. I’m sure as I get closer to 90 and start doing heroics and such I’ll be able to notice it.
7. Call of Elements is a nice cooldown to add-on if you pick up that talent. If you use Mana Tide early in a fight and you need it again (or any other cooldown totem of less than 5 minutes) you can use Call of Elements and the cooldown on those is reset.
Overall, I didn’t feel that much had changed with healing. You get some new utility spells like Healing Tide Totem and defensive cooldowns like Astral Shift. The cool thing about those is that you can get them as Elemental as well!
Onto the Elemental notes! I don’t have as many notes on Elemental because I was questing as Elemental which doesn’t lead to being able to see the class in a ‘longer’ encounter.
1. Ascendance is absolutely amazing. The huge draw to this is that Lava Burst doesn’t have a cooldown. You’d really be using this on a burn phase combined with Elemental Mastery and/or Heroism/Bloodlust. This actually gives us a great amount of burst as well for PvP.
2. I actually picked up Echo of Elements instead of Ancestral Swiftness or Elemental Mastery. Without having a damage dealt add-on to look into the numbers this felt underwhelming from a “numbers popping up on my screen” point of view. I’ll take another look at it later when add-ons are enabled on the beta. I imagine this might be coming up soon as Level 90 was recently unlocked so they should start opening things up a bit like add -ons.
Unfortunately that’s all I have for Elemental. I’m going to start leveling up on it so I can get the actual Ascendance ability rather than relying on the bug, plus I’d like to see the Level 90 talents.
So far, things are looking good. My enthusiasm for WoW (atleast, raiding) lately has been fairly low, mostly due to it being summer time, but I’m still looking forward to Mists.
