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| The Stonecore |
Last night I logged into the beta server and realized that much of the information I had gathered thus far was really not much without application of it. Data alone is useless. So, I donned my healing gear and opened up my queue page. Not knowing much about any of the instances, I decided to just hit the "random Cataclysm dungeon" and see what happened. After about 15 minutes of waiting, I was on my way to The Stonecore.
Now, this being the beta, there are a few things worth noting. The first being how randoms work on the beta servers. When you queue up in live, it pulls players from your battlegroup to fill your party. On the beta realms, the battlegroup is made up of multiple regions, so you can end up with people from the EU. The language barrier isn't too terrible, but expect broken English sometimes, if any. The current beta build isn't much help either, as party chat won't broadcast to folks from other regions, so you are limited to /say.
That aside, I was a little nervous about this. I like to think I'm a fairly solid player, my progress shows that, however, this was new content and my class seemed virtually foreign to me. Not to mention being stripped of all addons. I haven't healed with mouse-overs in years. On top of that, I had not set foot in any dungeons yet, so my experiences are limited to pugs on live servers, with their "gogogo votekick" attitude. The learning curve requires some patience, and I wasn't sure I would be able to get any.
Shortly after entering, our tank left. After waiting a few minutes for a new one, the real fun began. A shaman in the group (Who, as it turns out, is one of the folks behind Deadly Boss Mods) said he was comfortable explaining the fights, and we begun our adventure.
As for the instance itself, it was a blast. The trash had some really fun mechanics that kept it interesting, and we saw the revival of something long thought dead: crowd control. During some of the bigger pulls, it really did save the day. the mobs had a plethora of stuns, knockbacks, interrupts, and aoes. It really kept me on my toes, and was a great experience from a healing point of view. The bosses were also quite a bit of fun, and other than them needing to clear up some spell animations, they look fairly finished, and were enough of a challenge to keep it engaging, but not so tough that it couldn't be done by average joe weekenders.
From a healing standpoint, I was blown away by how different things are. The default raid frames perform extraordinarily well compared to what they give us now, and I felt really comfortable using them. I'm planning on a writeup on them a little later. Watching my mana isn't something I've done in ages, but if I wasn't being careful with my spell selection, it was quickly depleted. Holy Paladins are known for being the "one spell wonder", and this is just not even close to the case anymore. Holy Light has become a cheap heal, but does half of what it used to in terms of throughput, and has a much longer cast. I found myself having to think "do I have enough time to cast this?" and "can i afford to keep casting this?" quite often, and it made things a lot more engaging. On top of that, you have to get used to the tank not being topped off. Overhealing is bad again, at least to a degree, and there's no need for the tank to be at 100% all the time. With proper CC, damage wasn't as bursty as it is in current content.
While spell selection was done more on the fly, I did pick up some little tricks I liked to fall back on, such as casting a Holy Light on the tank, immediately followed by a Holy Shock + 3 Holy Power Word of Glory to fill him up. It was a good way to get the tank topped off without using the mana to cast a Divine Light.
For the sake of length, I'm going to wrap this up with just my final thoughts. I really like the direction healing, at least from a Paladin perspective, is heading. I can tell it's not a finished product, but it's definitely headed to a good place and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the end.
If you would like to see a recording of the instance, check out my Livestream page. The Stonecore should be listed under my video library at the bottom of the page. It's an hour long though, and really is the FULL instance, so feel free to skip around. Also, I apologize for the lack of sound. The sound levels in beta are currently a little wonky, and it was hurting my ears, so I turned it off.
Next post (or I might just add it as a page) will be a list of the new spells, and my thoughts on each one and how they fit together.
/bubblehearth
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