I have to confess I didn’t get around to much healing on the PTR in the last couple of days, spending most of my time soaking up the scenery and making mouseover macros. I did take myself off to Vashj’ir to do some levelling though.
I will try and keep the Cata posts generally more structured than this, but I’ll admit I’m excited enough to throw up a first impressions post early, so here it is.
This is based on build 12604, and may already be out of date, although I didn’t see anything in the spell diffs that contradicts what I’ve written here.
Graphics
From the moment I zoned in, standing in the middle of Orgrimmar, I was genuinely impressed with the graphics upgrade the game has been given. The art and design folks have done a great job of updating the models and textures for the buildings and scenery to make them look a bit less 2005 and more 2010. It’s certainly no Aion, but the game world does feel a lot more real than it used to.
The most striking difference is the water texture, which is a lot more realistic-looking and less regular, and such a massive difference I feel compelled to add a screenshot. I’m sure everyone’s been poring over the screenshots on MMO-Champion for months, but I haven’t so this is new and exciting to me. Allow me my moment!
Screenshot taken while flying over the Great Sea
Absorbs in the combat log
Here’s a nice change: the combat log finally handles absorbs properly.
First, an edited screenshot from the in-game combat log:
Combat log extract showing how PW:S is reported
And here’s an excerpt from the WoWCombatLog.txt file. They’re not of the same fight section but you get the idea. For those not adept at reading this form of combatlog, I’ve bolded the event type (e.g. SPELL_AURA_APPLIED) and the amount (e.g 8615)
7/28 20:26:57.008 SPELL_AURA_APPLIED, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 8615, 0, 0
7/28 20:27:07.839 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 320
7/28 20:27:08.171 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 6678, 0, 07/28 20:27:09.920 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 377
7/28 20:27:10.096 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 6301, 0, 07/28 20:27:11.934 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 424
7/28 20:27:12.081 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 5877, 0, 07/28 20:27:24.145 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 8615, 0, 0
[…]
7/28 20:27:54.141 SPELL_AURA_REMOVED, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 3789, 0, 0
What you can see in the second log extract is the way the information is handled and reported.
First the log shows me casting PW:S on myself (“SPELL_AURA_APPLIED”), and the size of the shield as the third from last number in the list (8615).
Then you can see the log reporting that the mob failed to do damage (“SWING_MISSED”) and the reason why (“ABSORB”), and the last number on the line is the amount absorbed (320, 377 and 424).
On the next line the Power Word: Shield is refreshed (“SPELL_AURA_REFRESH”) and the third figure from the end tells you how much absorption is left in the shield (6678, 6301 and 5877).
If you re-cast PW:S before it has been fully used up, as I did in the last line in the quote above, you get another SPELL_AURA_REFRESH line with the new value of the shield. As expected, shields don’t roll over their unused portion, hence this says 8615 again. (I miss the ICC buff!)
And if PW:S fades early, you also get a report in the in-game and text-based combatlogs telling you how much remained unused. (“SPELL_AURA_REMOVED” or “Malevica Power Word: Shield fades from Malevica. (3789 Remaining)”).
For a Disc Priest in particular this is fantastic news. Not only because now we can get correct credit for our contribution (for every situation where a pugger with Recount has shown us doing less healing than the Feral Druid, there’s a situation where WoL has given us credit for every Sacred Shield going, not to mention the fun we had on the Twin Val’kyr for a week or two…) but also because it opens the door for proper estimates of how much absorption is left on a given player.
I dream of adding another power bar to each player’s frame with a PW:S indicator analogous to their health bar. It’s a nice thought, anyway.
Power Word: Barrier
Malevica standing inside her Power Word: Barrier
Is just awesome. The absorb amount seems a little low at the moment, especially given the long-ish cooldown (3 minutes), but there’s plenty of time to change this before release if necessary. It’s essentially a holy version of the DK’s Anti-Magic Zone, and it looks like someone froze Holy Nova at it’s fullest extent and made it extra golden and sparkly. I hope this animation stays, because it looks spot on. And it’s very visible too.
It’s also nicely sized at around 15 yards from side to side: you do need to group up quite close to stay inside it, but you don’t need to be stacked too tightly to be comfortable, and the edge is pretty well-defined as you can see in the screenshot above. You also get a buff Power Word: Barrierapplied while inside which you could add to Power Auras or similar so it’s easy to see when you’re inside the area of effect.
One downside of PW:B is that unlike it’s single-target counterpart it doesn’t appear to report it’s absorb amount remaining in the combatlog. You get a SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS for the spell, and a SPELL_SUMMON when the PW:B is created, and you do get an ABSORB report with a value, but there’s no indication of how much is left, in contrast to how PW:S works.
Here’s another combatlog extract for your delectation. This log shows me putting a PW:B down, standing inside it, and letting a Zin’jatar Guardian and Zin’jatar Overseer hit me for a while. Again, I’ve bolded the events and amounts.
7/29 18:12:48.351 SPELL_SUMMON, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0xa28, 62618, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2
7/29 18:12:48.701 SPELL_AURA_APPLIED, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 81781, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2, BUFF
7/29 18:12:48.701 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 384
7/29 18:12:49.679 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 639
7/29 18:12:50.865 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 456
7/29 18:12:51.523 SPELL_PERIODIC_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 13445, “Rend”, 0x1, ABSORB, 238
7/29 18:12:51.687 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 632
7/29 18:12:52.708 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 424
7/29 18:12:53.707 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 456
7/29 18:12:54.038 SPELL_AURA_REMOVED, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 81781, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2, BUFF
Now the tooltip for PW:B is slightly confusing. Here’s a screenshot of the tooltip taken in-game:
In-game tooltip for Power Word: Barrier
The tooltip says “Absorbs 4784 damage done to friendly targets within it each time they take damage”. This suggests that every hit has 4784 damage taken off it, but in my testing the PW:B lasted 5.3s, and absorbed a total of 3229 damage spread over multiple hits before disappearing, not quite what the tooltip suggests. Perhaps there’s a bug with the numbers, but that top figure seems to be a per-person cap, rather than per hit.
The tooltip definitely needs some clarification.
I mean, clearly a 32k shield would be massively overpowered while solo, so there ought to be a cap, but 3-4k still seems a bit low to me, compared to 8.6k PW:S casts with effectively no cooldown.
The other downside, albeit a situational one since I was mostly levelling in Vashj’ir, was that it was a bit frustrating that PW:B, as a ground-targeted spell, was not especially useful while fighting in three dimensions. Sometimes it’s not convenient to drag mobs down to ground level to cast the spell.
Again, I don’t know how I’d solve this problem while still retaining the ease of use. Maybe it’s just one of those things that we’ll have to live with. If you replace it with a more free targeting mechanic like the anti-air guns on some vehicles (Demolishers in Ulduar, I think) then it could be quite clunky to use in raids when you really just want a quick action and you’re (probably) limited to two dimensions anyway.
Tooltips
Speaking of tooltips, I was very pleased to see that spell damage/healing amounts on tooltips now update in real time, as well as cast times and mana costs (we only have the latter two in WotLK, as far as I can remember). It won’t replace DrDamage, but it’s a really nice thing to see which should have been there for a while anyway.
General UI
Getting beyond the superficial, as expected there are no addons in use at the moment on the beta realms. I’d forgotten how much fun it was working with the default action bars again after all this time.
I did nearly die on more than one occasion because I’m so used to having a HUD and having my player and target frames near the bottom of my screen rather than the top that I wasn’t paying attention to the screen.
There’s a big thread up on the beta forums with feedback and requests for the default UI. I doubt I can add anything to that list, although I do think that some of the people commenting in that thread might be missing the point a little. If you want total customisation, I think that probably ought to remain the province of addons, since customisation, especially in GUI form, costs resources.
My wishlist at this stage would be:
- The ability to move the player and target frames around. You can do this with the focus frame, so it would be nice to be able to do this with the other frames. The reasoning is that your eyes tend to be focused on the bars at the bottom of the screen (not all of us are fluent in 20 keybinds) and it’s easy to neglect something hidden away in the top corner.
- Also thinking of the player and target frames, if you turn on the health bar numerical display it pretty much entirely obscures the green bar behind it, making it tricky to see at a glance roughly how healthy you are. Perhaps this is a bigger problem because it’s compounded with the location of the frames themselves, which means you might only be taking a quick glance rather than having time to look in detail.
- Some sort of Clique-like interface alongside the key bindings interface. The trouble with this is that Clique steals the right-click which is used to access the menu for things like raid marking, inviting, inspecting, leaving groups and vehicles, etc. I don’t have a good solution to this. Thinking about it, I tend to use VuhDo to target a player and then right-click on the standard target frame to use the menu, although I’m aware that you can set VuhDo up to show the menu directly.
I’m not going to go so far as to demand fully-customisable player and party frames Pitbull-style, because I think that’s too confusing for the average beginner (and for me, quite often) and I think it’s probably best handled by addons since the choice between unitframe addons, at least for me, tends to come down to the customisation UI rather than the appearance of the frames themselves. (I didn’t get along with the older versions of Pitbull, although Pitbull4 seems to make sense to me somehow.)
I noticed that there’s an option for compact party frames, which I presume are similar to the default raidframes but for a party, but since I didn’t join a party last night I’ll have to wait and see about that one. Likewise, I’ve not seen how buffs and debuffs are handled in party or raid situations, so I have no comments to make on that.
The other big change is the vehicle UI, which completely replaces your action bars and makes it very clear you’re in a different type of situation. It’s nice to see this being revamped, rather than just replacing your main bar, although I think the new UI looks a little bit to cartoony at the moment. The health bar being represented by a jar filled with green liquid just doesn’t match any other element of the UI (the party frames just have bars) and looks a bit too cheesy for my money.
Class balance
OK, a slightly frivolous point to finish, but seriously, it felt like more than half the players I was with were Druids, most of them Moonkins. I don’t think I saw another Priest all night.
Maybe this is a sign of things to come?
Here’s how I set up clique to allow me to bind right-click to something useful in combat but still get at the menus out of combat:
– In “Helpful”, Right-click does something useful (Riptide, Renew, etc.)
– In the “Default” profile, Alt-Control-Right (which is AltGr on European keyboards – I’m not sure if the right alt does the same if you’re in the US) brings up the menu
– In “Out of Combat”, Right-click brings up the menu
That way I can get at the menu out of combat easily without losing a simple binding in combat. If I absolutely have to get at the menu during combat I can, albeit with a slightly more convoluted binding.
Since I first set things up this way I’ve moved the “out of combat” menu bind to Alt-right, as I find that the thing I tend to bind to right-click is also the thing I tend to use to top people off when out of combat.
Hey, look who it is! Good to see you’re still around, even in the background.
Thanks for sharing that information. I don’t use Clique myself, so I had trouble imagining how you’d do it, but I’d not taken into account the multiple profiles thing. Might still prove a bit over-complicated for the average player, but at least it can be done.
Ohhhh! Love the pictures – the sea looks amazing and the PW:Bubble – YUMMY! I can’t wait to use that one 🙂