General 4.2 Impressions from PTR

So I’m starting to get really excited about patch 4.2 now that it seems to be shaping so very nicely. I may just be sick of the T11 raids. Not the fights themselves, I think they are well done an offer up a variety of different fight types and challenges. The zones however I find distinctly uninspiring. Firelands on the other had…wow. This raid zone delivers. I definitely get a feel for the fact that we are entering Rag’s how turf to bring the fight to him. I’ve PTR’d the 1st 2  bosses, and the fights defiantly seem like they are going to surpass T11 encounters in general complexity and boss design.

In addition, there are some changes coming down the pipe for healers that have me interested.  Some classes have what they consider to be significant nerfs (I’m lookin @ you Pally’s and Shamans), and Druids are getting a major mastery buff. Priests on the other hand seem to be staying fairly even with where we were, with the exception of the global healer change.

All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).

Originally I was going to talk about the T12 Priest set bonuses, but they seem in a state of flux, swinging from a laughably bad lightwell clone one week, to potentially OP (on stacking phases) ability the next week.  

Talking To Mr. Robot

I stumbled into a very interesting website about a month ago called askmrrobot.com. The premise is simple, import your character and have Mr. Robot audit your toon’s enchants, reforges, and gemming to optimize performance. I find the interface very slick and easy to use, and it saves me tons of time with my old spreadsheets.

The only real gripe I have with the site, shouldn’t really be one because it seems unavoidable; there are no options to easily specify what your roll in the raid is. I’ve noticed that spell selection varies greatly for healers with role, and masteries complicate this further.  For example, Mastery is currently a much better stat for a Disc priest that is assigned to raid heal a 25 man because you’ll probably be throwing a lot of PW:S around big damage spikes. Conversely, if you run 10m raids as a Disc tank healer then you probably are looking more to haste and crit to support your assignment.

There are ways to account for these differences however; all stat weights are totally customizable, there is however no preset way to account for your play without fiddling with these. The problem is that, in general, if a healer is knowledgeable enough to properly evaluate secondary stats based on their role in a raid, then they most likely don’t need a site like Mr. Robot to help them work out issues with their gear.

All things considered, I do in fact use the site to help me finesse gear a bit. I haven’t noticed any drastic swings in performance one way or another, but it’s nice for quickly figuring out things like how much equivalent spirit a trinket is worth. Forum mods and site developers are very active and quick to answer questions, even when they are ones that have been posted 50 times before.  The development of their mobile app seems to be progressing nicely and will find its way onto my phone as soon as they put it up on the market. I urge all of the arm-chair-theorycrafters out there to give Mr. Robot a look.

~Swagg

Reference:

www.askmrrobot.com