Seriously Getting Fed Up With Interrupt Effects.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20677670814&sid=1


Affliction, Balance, & Shadow. What do they have in common? One spell school worth a damn. They all three need interrupt reduction talents.


Healers have them. Because heals are all in one spell school. Healers gets locked out and they can't do their job. Martyrdom, Focused Mind, Aura Mastery/Improved Concentration Aura. Admittedly, Restoration Druids don't, though they can get by reasonably well with instants, thus not often exposing themselves to lockouts. Why don't similar talents for Affliction, Balance, and Shadow exist? All of the spells of any consequence for these specs are similarly all in the same spell schools. Shadow, Nature, and Shadow, respectively. Starfire? Searing Pain? The only one of the three with any practical use at all is PW:S, but even that doesn't justify being interrupted anywhere from 3 to 8 seconds (an effective silence).


Don't get me wrong, it's not a whole lot of better for Elemental either, but at least the Flame Shock + Lava Burst combo is still available and Astral Shift can help wait it out if it's a Silence + Interrupt like Counterspell or Wind Shear. Mages have multiple useful spell schools. Arcane Locked? Frost Nova or Iceblock. Fire Locked? Poly, Blink, Nova, or Iceblock. Frost locked? Sheep or Blink. Etc. Destro/Demo aren't quite so reliant on any one spell school. Fire get locked while nuking? Fear, Howl of Terror, pet summons, Shadowfury, demonic teleport. Shadow get locked? Keep on nuking and remaining a threat.


Juking? Yes, it CAN, work. But it doesn't always, and often enough you simply don't have time to juke less you or your arena partners take a dirt nap. These specs massively require some protection in this area, less interrupts continue to function as silences.

Belated Blizzcon Thoughts

I haven't posted in quite a while. Between looking for a job and playing the auction house game I haven't had much time/interest in updating anything on here. But I felt like dropping a line here on Blizzcon after having a few weeks to think on it. I'll present it as a brief pro/con of Cataclysm.

Pro
-Interesting story idea. I love the idea of going back to old school Azeroth/Kalimdor.
-Path of the Titans sounds like a lot of fun. It's like picking an auxiliary talent tree from a shared pool. I'm very curious to see the bonuses/abilities that are gained from the specific paths.
-The Mastery system seems like a slick way to re-package the talent trees and add more fun talents. If most of the damage/healing/mitigation throughput talents are consolidated into passive bonuses for simply putting points into each tree it will open up room for more fun/playstyle altering talents, which would seem to create more "true" choice for players when picking out talents. That being said I think the best feature of this system is the fact that the developers can easily tweak the mastery bonuses to fine tune balance much more easily than they could otherwise.
-Stat consolidation. I really like it. Int has never been a very desirable stat for most casters, attack power is redundant with Agi/Str, etc. Streamlined is good.


Con
-Due to so much focus being spent on the 1-60 leveling up experience I'm worried that there won't be as much 80-85 content as there might be otherwise.
-No new tiers to the talent trees is somewhat disappointing. These have got to be one of my favorite aspects of new expansion is playing with the new talent derived abilities, adapting my playstyle to accomodate changes, etc.

I'll post more as I think of them.