Ensidia

This week we saw the release of Plagueworks and thusly the first boss that had limited tries, Professor Putricide.

We started out the lockout with our 10 mans. We have 8x10 man groups so this takes quite a long time to get through. I've had a few messages from people asking why we didn't do 25 man first and realistically I don't see why it matters at all since at this point your focus really has to be on farming gear and preparing for hardmodes. With our first 10 man we worked out a really good strategy for Putricide. We were really looking forward to this fight from the PTR and after reading about all the problems USA guilds were having, we were expecting it to be pretty hard. Unfortunately it does seem that the fight was significantly over hyped, but it offers a bit more of a challenge than some of the 10 man Heroic content in past instances. One of the strange things was that it didn't seem like 25 man was any harder than 10 man, probably easier infact. I think that was actually the case with quite a few of the ICC bosses but that might just be that the relative strength of our 25 mans is a little stronger than our very spread 10 mans. Let me be clear I'm not saying it supposed to be hard, I'm just saying it's easier than it was hyped to be on forums etc!

The design of Putricide is solid, I just feel that more could have been done with p3 and it's going to be very interesting to see the difficulty level and what extra aspects there are to the fight in Heroic. Festergut is a bit of a boring fight but honestly I find myself quite liking having the occasional fight where you can just slack a bit and look at the meter! Rotface was a really nice hardmode on the PTR and that's going to be a solid challenge for all guilds.

All this being said I don't want to sound negative, this instance is looking really good and a massive improvement over ToC in terms of boss design and feel. We always want the emphasis to be on good movement and actually put your players to the test rather than just standing still and crunching numbers or having to use some obscure strategy. It's that intense feeling where your eyes are darting around and you are watching for multiple different abilities to dodge and still move and stand and do perfect dps/heal/tank.

I really doubt we are going to bother releasing movies of normal modes. Perhaps there will be something of Arthas but when you have a hardmode for every single boss that's already a LOT of movies to make and we want the quality of them to be high. Spamming out poor quality movies just for the sake of it really isn't something we want to do.

I also wanted to talk a bit about Elemental Shamans in raids because I've been reading a huge quantity of whine about it on forums and I'm really struggling to understand it all. Don't get me wrong I really want us to be buffed and if you want us to compare to mages and rogues etc. we will need buffs. However if you play it right Elemental Shaman can be a good spec. I'm sitting at around 10.6k or slightly more (while I was still using 4 part t9) if I don't make any mistakes on Saurfang. I certainly havn't seen any Moonkins producing these kind of numbers on World of Logs and that's really the class where you have to draw your comparison. Also remember that as an Elemental Shaman you can provide your Crit buff at a huge range but only 45 yards as a Moonkin. This makes a Moonkin pretty poor on some fights like for example it was on Mimiron hardmode. I know that some people are probably thinking, you have insane gear, but our main alt Elemental Shaman is also doing extremely competitive damage. I'd infact say that his damage is higher than Moonkins with considerably better gear. It all comes down to if Blizzard thinks that providing buffs means your dps should be lower, if they don't then we need a DPS boost of around 5%.I think this could partly be to do with Elemental Shaman being one of the harder caster specs to play. I know a lot of people are instantly thinking "it's soo easy" but infact it requires a lot more thought and timing than a lot of specs especially as you get more and more haste. You have to constantly monitor your haste levels and use a lot of DPS cooldowns at the right times and adjust your rotation according to using them. I'll be getting into this in more detail in my Elemental Shaman Guide which will be coming out at the start of next week.

One of the major issues with Elemental Shaman right now lies in the itemisation. Firstly our 4 part t10 set bonus is a complete joke when you compare it to say the Mage bonus. Give us 18% damage on Elemental Mastery and then we can start talking. Fortunately it seems that Blizzard will fix this and that's something I'm eagerly anticipating. The problem however extends on from that with seemingly very little thought going into how we can select our gear. There is not enough hit at all. If you want to use only Mail gear and you want to be hitcapped as Horde you need to have hit on Weapon, both Rings, Neck etc. since there is not a single Mail item that has Hit on it. This can make it very difficult to pickup the right items and often you are going to have to resort to looking for cloth items you won't have any kind of loot priority on.

So on with the music. Most of the radio shows that I listen to have been playing mainly "Best of 2009" type mixes so here's a random mix of stuff I've been listening to recently.

Ronny K - Orchidea (Ilya Soloviev Remix). This one is a recommendation from Sbe the man behind all our movies (and the music choices in them).



Sweatsky - Triumphant. This one was recommended to me by Thaya. While it's something different from what I normally post I often find myself listening to this kind of thing. Very relaxing track



Ashley Wallbridge - Chimera (Dark Edit). This man is surely one to watch in the trance scene for 2010



Lange pres. Firewall - Wanderlust. I've had a major thing going for this stuff since Sincere.



DJ Eco - And We Flew Away. Always kick ass tunes from DJ Eco and a unique style