For those who aren’t familiar with it, Be Imba is a website that will fetch your character’s stats from the Armory, and give you advice on how to improve it, as well as tell you about where your gear level is at in terms of PvE progression. It’s missing information on a few specs, and while I like the idea, more often than not I find myself going “duh” when using it. I tried showing it to a friend of mine who recently hit 70, and it told him he had some low level items (greens), and he was at the pre-Kara level. Do you really need a site to tell you that? It’s also rather annoyed at me for having the Feral Charge talent (which it considers to be a PvP talent), although I find it irreplaceable in PvE. Nevertheless, it can be quite useful in helping you realize you forgot to enchant a piece of gear, or that you forgot to replace a “placeholder” item or gem.
The reason I’m making this post though, is I’ve finally managed to achieve the Be Imba ranking of “this character is in top shape,” which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Its recommendation for where I should get gear is slightly off, but still relatively accurate. The only thing that still bothers me is that it’s convinced that my spec and gear is designed for PvP, despite the fact I have a measly 18 resilience in my tanking set.
In similar news, I have teamed up with a classmate from my college to design a website oriented to assist those who want to get a bit more out of services such as Warcrafter, Be Imba, and MaxDPS. Each brings something new and unique to the table, but each is lacking in a few aspects. For example, have you ever wanted to use Be Imba, but want to see the results for gear you don’t have yet (for planning ahead and such)? How about wanting to use MaxDPS, but rather than have you manually input your statistics, have it remember your character, with options for both armory fetching and manual building? And hey, how about something more useful than Be Imba’s “You’re not suitable for Kara yet,” but something along the lines of “Your dodge is a bit low for Kara, most recommend it be at around 30%”?
Enough ranting about that, hopefully there will be a public beta available soon that will let you guys play around and have some fun, and hopefully get me and my friend some useful feedback. Our biggest challenge at the moment is the DPS calculations, which while websites such as MaxDPS provide that, many of them assume impossible things, such as an infinite-rage situation for Warrior DPS, or ignoring the internal 3 second cooldown of Windfury for Elemental Shamans. I’ve even had one website try and convince me that I can achieve a 0.0% chance to miss my target.
For those who are interested, keep your eyes open, there’ll be a public announcement soon. And if everything goes well with that, we have a few other ideas floating around, including creating an in-game addon that will allow you to essentially achieve the same results you get with the website, but have all the calculations done completely in game!
In WoW news, my guild finally decided to take a serious attempt on Al’ar last night, and we managed to down him on our second attempt. My guild saves all the adds that spawn until the second phase, and DPS them all down then, to maximize our damage in Phase II. Unfortunately during our first attempt, our add tank during Phase I tanked them up against the bottom of the ramp, and was killed almost instantly (along with all our melee dps) during Flame Quill. The downing of Al’ar puts my guild at 6/6 SSC and 3/4 TK. Kael, you’re next! This also places us as the 5th most progressed Horde guild on our server, which is quite an achievement! Good job to all.
I’ve also picked up quite a few new add-ons, but would like to throw a special shout out to Align. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it does exactly what it says it does. For the OCD in all of us, Align will draw a grid on your screen, including highlighted vertical/horizontal center lines, to easily allow you to position your frames. That’s all it does. It doesn’t make frames draggable, or move them by itself. It simply draws a grid when you type /align, and removes it when you type it again. If it seems like something you may like, give it a whirl! I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
For those who aren’t following the PTR,
* Lifebloom: The bonus coefficient on the final bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. This spell will no longer cause error messages when interacting with Spellsteal or while the Druid is under the effects of Mind Control.
* Regrowth: The mana cost of this spell has been reduced by approximately 20%.
Source: MMO-Champion
WoW Insider states: “It looks like we can say that Blizzard is slowly put [sic] surely learning to seperate [sic] the PvP and PvE game.”
To be completely honest, I’m very surprised by this move. It seems that Blizzard is really trying to make a good impression with this patch. They’re taking into account player input, and actually modifying the patch accordingly. Can we get them a /clap? They deserve it, this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Based on the PTR patch notes as retrieved at the time of posting.
Blizzard: Hey druids, what do you think of you class?
Druids: Well, depends on which spec we’re at. Resto druids are having a fun time in 2v2 and 3v3 in PvP, and are great raid healers as well with their HoTs healing. Being the only class able to battle rez is amazing, but having no out of combat rez kind of sucks. Feral druids love tanking and have figured out the whole crit immunity thing, and are overall pretty happy with themselves in PvE, but are absolutely horrible in PvP situations. Feral druids suffer from many things in a PvP environment, including the fact that they have nothing to counter healers (no motral strike-like ability). Balance druids are annoyed at the fact that they go OOM in no time, have tremendous issues in PvP situations, and have a very hard time getting geared in PvE situations.
Blizzard: Okay, we’re listening to you, our player base, and the next patch should help you out a lot. Let us know what you think about the changes.
* Lifebloom: the healing coefficient has been reduced. *
Blizzard: Hello? Druids? Anyone there?
Alyviel: This is going to hurt the PVE game much more than making druids less “uber” in PVP.
Blizzard: We’re looking for feedback, what do you guys think?
Elune: For us, and especially our tree cousins, this is devastating.
… *many more comments made* …
Blizzard: Okay, we have reassessed the druid class, and have updated the PTR with a new version that incorporates several changes to the Druid class that we felt were neccessary.
* Swipe: This ability will no longer strike any secondary targets which are under the effect of crowd-control spells that break on taking damage. i.e. Polymorph, Sap, etc.*
Druids: wtf?
/sigh. Where does Blizzard get its ideas? Honestly, I have yet to hear a single complaint about Swipe (or other AoE effects) breaking CC. It was quite an obvious “duh, should have been more careful” sort of thing. Meanwhile, they’re completely ignoring how unfounded the Lifebloom nerf is, and how much it hurts Druids in PvE. Totally ridiculous.
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