Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
Don’t freak out. It’s still beta; it’s all a work in progress. Bears in Mists of Pandaria are still like bears in Cataclysm but with the cat half of their toolkit cut out and nothing filled in to replace all that flavor. It’s up to us to keep things from staying the way they are. With the power of <announcer voice> CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM!
To start out, look at the difference between my beta monk’s action bars and my beta druid’s.
I have a posse of stuffed animals in my living room because I have not completely given up on that aspect of my childhood. I’ve gathered them together just because I like them and they’re cuddly. I try not to keep to many out there or else I might seem like a crazy person.
I was planning on getting more testing in before posting this, but the beta was pretty much MIA yesterday. I did do a dungeon run the day before, but I’m still far from good at this class. Brewmasters play much more chaotically then before, but with a few changes they will be playable.
Monks went through a lot of changes since my last post. Guard is on a much longer cooldown (30 sec), Shuffle has no cooldown, and Purifying Brew has a much shorter cooldown (6 sec). Brewmasters got a couple of cool new abilities: Keg Smash, Clashing Ox Charge, and the talent Dampen Harm. Dizzying Haze generates a large amount of threat and monks finally have increased health while in their tanking stance (still no increased armor).
It’s finally here! The new website I’ve been working on for weeks.
I wanted to move to my own hosting service so that I can learn more about how that stuff works, and so I can have much tighter control over how everything looks. I also wanted to change the domain name so that I wouldn’t feel wrong talking about non-bear stuff on a bear blog.
The name of my new blog is a pun off of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which is an ancient Chinese treatise on military strategy. The whole thing is super applicable to many things, not just warfare. You can pretty easily apply it to video games, especially in PvP. Also, since many of my posts are guides on how to defeat big bad guys, you could say I’m writing my own Art of War about boss encounters (though much less timeless). Finally, if I end up rerolling monk then it fits with their Asian-inspired theme.
You may be able to tell it’s not your conventional WoW blog done with WordPress. It’s a blogging framework called Octopress. Very fast, generated HTML 5. No databases, no easily hackable WordPress. They say it’s for hackers, but you don’t need to know that much about programming (you just need Ruby installed and some basic CSS skills). If you want to see something cool you should go to the site and resize your browser — stuff moves around and readjusts! (Okay that’s just exciting to programmers I think, but I love it.)
I’ve transfered all of my old posts over, and I won’t be posting at sunnierbear.blogspot.com any more. I can’t transfer comments, which bums me out, but I still use the same commenting system.
If you follow me through an RSS feed, you shouldn’t need to update anything. If you have me bookmarked, you should probably update that.
I got into the beta a few days ago and quickly transferred a monk premade. I still can’t find a way to get a premade to Stormwind to test on a dummy, but I was able to find the first five man dungeon, Temple of the Jade Serpent, where I spent about two hours learning the brewmaster spec and soloing the first boss.
1. We’ve got some really good looking utility talents coming our way that will be awesome for tanks and actually provide a unique flavor that warriors don’t have. MoP is looking like the first expansion where bears are more than warrior clones and are turning into true guardians of nature.
(That aren’t related to balance or mechanics.)
1. I get to see my transmog. Transmog is the coolest thing to happen to WoW in years, and it’s a bit disappointing to spend all this time making a set for my druid only to hide it under a furry coat.
World of Warcraft was released on November 29, 2004. It doesn’t really seem like it was that long ago, but it turns out a lot of things can change in eight years. I scoured the Internet and my own memories to put WoW’s age into context.
Continue reading “Things that Happened the Year WoW Was Released”
(With very little information to go on.)
In an attempt to better understand Brewmaster monks, I’ve compared them to Guardian druids. I tried comparing similar abilities side-by-side, but many skills do not have a direct correlation between classes. A couple skills fit into more than one category, so they’re on this list more than once. I probably also missed some skills, so if you find any mistakes, please let me know.
Bears will still be the only offensive tank. That is, Guardians benefit from haste and crit, and will probably have more reasons to cap hit and expertise than other tanks. These stats will increase our rage generation, which leads to more frequent Savage Defenses and Frenzied Regenerations. Brewmaster monks, on the other hand, don’t appear to benefit from these offensive stats. I think they will love dodge, since each dodge gives them a huge amount of Chi (their primary resource). Parry will make their rotation a bit more dynamic and probably increase their damage.
And expertise too. It’s no secret that I’m way beyond the expertise soft cap (as are many leather wearers this tier). But beyond this relatively new development, I just don’t like stats with definitive caps. I’d probably feel the same way about mastery if I was a shield tank. Stats that just stop working after a while are no fun.