All my buttons are yellow.

It never really occurred to me until recently how Goddamned monochromatic Paladin and Priest spells are for the most part. I've been playing those two classes the most over the past week or two, and really all my hotbars look like someone's obnoxiously bright chandelier. I am hammering away at people or healing them with various iterations of yellow light, like a painter who has entered their manic joy period. If an artist ever had one of those, anyway.

But beyond the aesthetics, I want to go over what I think the changes for Paladin and Priest mean to me. It's been months and months since I've raided, and longer still since I've even cared about raiding, so this is less of a perspective bent on endgame raiding and more focused on what Blizzard is supposedly catering to these days - the player who is not spending a whole bunch of time raiding. Note the careful avoidance of the now-loaded word "casual". You can't even say "casual" anymore without someone grousing about how it's a secret cipher for "bad player who blames a lack of time on their horrible ability" or "noble and secretly genius player who struggles against real world concerns to play". So in this instance, we're just talking about a relatively competent person (myself) who is somewhat burned out from WotLK and might be considering playing on a few-hours-a-week schedule given what we're looking at from Cataclysm.

For Paladins, I have to say the decision to give the class Holy Power is one I'm still not sold on. The horribly mismatched complaint that says Paladins are now like Rogues because Holy Power is points just like Combo Points is points so it's "the same thing" makes my inner ears bleed. But beyond that particular stupidity, the "ramp-up" that Blizzard wanted for Paladin confuses me. Really, there's not been an acceptable answer to the question of "why?" Why do you need this, Blizzard? Blizz has been pretty standard in their responses that both cover a broad range of answers (from "to tone down burst" to "to make them interesting!!!") and are vague enough that the answers themselves cover a wide range of logic that is cheerfully open to interpretation, allowing you to pick an answer that makes sense to you.

But really, Ret is still bursty, and had to have its damage increased since the Holy Power money shot wasn't cutting it. No Holy Power at the start of the fight for Prot is something that Blizz is now having to fix. And Holy only has one, arguably needless, use for it. In the end, I believe that Holy Power is going to be something of a metaphor for many of the class/skill/talent changes that went in with patch 4.0.1 - an attempt to make things a little more interesting and balance, which will have to be modified and tweaked until it's nothing but a new paint job for the exact same machine. With Paladins, building Holy Power is already becoming "do what you would have done anyway."

Looking at Retribution, the changes nagged on me for some reason I couldn't quite put my finger on. Blizzard had mentioned that they disliked how many specs felt GCD-locked: which is to say that they're frantically pushing something every global cooldown or they feel like they're falling behind. The problem with this is something I agree with. After all, it makes the game a repetitive bore that relies more on muscle memory than actual play, and it also means that class skills that might interrupt this rotation become seen as detriments rather than bonuses and extra abilities. So when I was told Ret would be on a system where you might count a beat or two between attacks, I thought that was pretty neat.

But in practice, it felt really somewhat boring, but again not in a way I could describe at first. Hit an attack, hit another attack... wait... hit another attack... wait... hit an attack, then Templar's Verdict. What occurred to me eventually was two things - Firstly, that Blizzard had said they disliked Ret's priority system of just mashing whatever short cooldown had just come available, but now Ret was such a proc-based build that you were still staring at your hotbars and wondering what just went off so you know how to react like a crazy game of Simon Says. Secondly, I realized that now that Ret had this breathing room to use abilities, they had really lost the two main things that were worth using - Cleanse and instant heals. Sure, cleanse is still there, but it's not very useful, and there is no instant heal now. So what are we doing with the extra breathing room? Waiting for short cooldowns and procs instead of seeing how you can help your raid/group/self in some fashion other than "hit palette swapped cultist #452 with large weapon".


I had a similar issue with Prot at first, but it went somewhat in reverse of how I explored it on Ret. With a tank, it felt annoying but somewhat necessary to have an attack to fill every. Single. GCD. Tanks are the only role that really is effectively fighting against both the enemy and his own group - by having to race the damage dealers on threat. So not having something to constantly push that threat lead made it feel very much like I was being... well, a bad tank. However, with a higher threat push put into each individual attack (and hopefully DPS who understand that threat is now supposed to be something that can be stolen from the tank), "saving" attacks to catch adds or waiting a beat or two to hit it at a more opportune moment puts a little more decision making into playing the role. Also, mana is almost a nil consideration for the build, as everything is put at a much lower cost unless you want to heal yourself outside of Word of Glory (hint: don't, just take the talent that refreshes Holy Shield when you use it). Prot just has a much better "feel" to it, without having to slot 5,000 buttons and having more umph behind each hit, it's actually a pretty decent solo pve build even when you're not AoE grinding.

To me, though, Holy has come away the real winner. While the build is having some serious issues at 80 doing raids, I could not care less if I was compelled to do so on pain of my own death. Exorcism with no cooldown has been a pretty big deal, because to me Paladin has been the only healer that was still stuck contributing absolutely nothing when not spamming heals. Other healers had (albeit shitty) casts to toss around, possibly even AoE to use. For Paladin, you had to run in, turn on Righteousness, and blow holy shots, consecrates, and shield of the righteous in turn to pull off maybe 1k dps. Now, you can just spam Exo, Holy Shock hits for a decent range more, and you just generally feel like what I imagine Blizzard has always tried to make the Holy Paladin - a traditional D&D Cleric. For the healing, the build does feel a little... lacking right now. With Holy Power really only dumped with Word of Glory, and Paladin's heals built around having spells that aren't available till 81+, you can definitely feel the shortfall. But I think Blizz has done a fine job of pulling Paladins back from "stack Int, spam Holy Light", though, and that's saying something.

Four Point Oh Point... Whu?

I am going to amuse myself now. You're welcom to come along with me, but you are warned - it is amusing to me to complain about things that probably don't matter to people who don't live in my head. Blizzard finally patched in the anticipated Pre-Cataclysm patch last week. The patch that promised to re-vamp the talent system, making leveling more engaging, create less fuss and muss between talents and buffs, rebalance characters around a level that is currently unobtainable, destroy PvP, further trivialize content, make Inscribers filthy rich, break all your mods, and probably introduce several game-crashing bugs. Thankfully, they managed all of this and more.

I've been playing off and on in the past week and a half (the patch went in last Tuesday and the servers were even playable that same day!), which is unusual for me of late. My WoW playtime went from "arguably an addiction on paper" to "about as often as I wash my car". However, Cataclysm and it's pre-patch promised a few things that were of interest to me. The new spec system, where you get several abilities/modifiers at level 10 that make you more "fully" your chosen spec seemed brilliant to me. As I have said several times, only Warrior really felt like they were suddenly given the tools to do their "role" at a low level all at once... if you wanted to tank. Being handed shield block, taunt, and sunder in rapid succession made you feel like a fundamental shift had taken place. No other spec had that, but now they possibly all would.

Second was the concept that "hey perhaps healers should be effective at damage, too, but not overly so." Now, this was promise in the TBC -> Wrath switch, and it was met to a degree. Healers were given some tools to more properly DPS, but really it was all in the "healing and spell damage are no longer separate stats, it's all spellpower now" change. With the exception of a few wonky outliers due to bugs and patch hilarity, leveling as a healer remained Godawful, but just slightly less so. The changes proposed this time around actually meant to give synergy between dps and healing talents, to actually encourage healers to shoot things and given them the tools to do so even in groups. My God, I thought - the power of the Sun. In the palm of my hand.

Above: Tuesday night ICC run.

So, after downloading everything and spending about three days figuring out what Glyphs to use, what new talents did what, and wondering why I got a sick, unnamed sense of dread after I put my Druid's offspec back to Feral, I decided a few things:

- Shadow spec for Priest was completely over the top, and would get severely nerfed. In order to save my heart the inevitable pain, I went from Holy/Shadow to Holy/Disc. I didn't notice (and more about this later), but apparently my body was at that time suffused with a bright glow and my hair went yellow and spiked straight up.

- Retribution on my Paladin felt kinda... dumb. I had piddled on the PTR with it some, and while I don't miss the BOP-EM!!! style of play chasing random cooldowns, going from that to hitting a button every 2-3 seconds felt... weird. Also the loss of magic removal from Cleanse pissed me off exactly as much as I thought it might. However, my Paladin has been Ret or Prot (or both) since December of 2005, which meant I only chose my spec by figuring out which was the most damn annoying. Thusly, I spec'd Ret. Also, I heard the damage overall was horrible, only fueling my desire.

- Holy, on the other hand, was hi-lar-i-ous. No cooldown on Exo? Shocks hitting much harder and more frequently? 

- Balance was pretty much the exact same thing it was, with a couple of tweaks to the rotation. I was a bit underwhelmed since I do enjoy my Moonkin a great deal. She was the only character I had that went through extensive ICC25 experience, and the spec has all the right mix of aoe, dots, and direct damage that make it interesting to me. But given how wildly Paladin and Priest shifted, finding out that Balance's changes were "now just keep ALL your DoTs up, Starsurge when it's up, also your Nieblung is now even less good" on top of the same ol same ol.

- My Warrior will likely gather dust now since Ret/Prot Paladin and Arms/Prot Warrior feel way, way too similar. 

- My Resto Shaman pretty much just got a straight upgrade of awesome. 

- My 77 Demo Warlock is now extremely complicated, which... I dunno. On one hand I enjoyed that Warlock had a bigger toolbox to play from than Mage, but on the other I just son of a bitch fucking seriously how many buttons do you want from me, Blizzard. HOW MANY.

After taking some time to read various information sources - blogs, official forums, crying men on the corner near Best Buy - I decided that I was probably gonna try and focus on just a few of my characters - the Paladin, Priest, and somewhat on the Shaman. My Shaman was really there because I wanted to test out his current power level, but mostly he seemed unchanged like Balance. So after this past week and then this weekend, I'm gonna see how it all plays out.

Getting into TF2 a bit...

... yes, I know: Welcome to 2007, Seth.

I played TF Classic many, many moons ago when it was new and exciting and everyone thought the ol' spray-and-pray in your spawn room with pipe bombs was the single most offensive act a man could execute. When TF2 was announced, I was such a busy person I thought to myself, "There is no way I can buy this game and still have a healthy social/work life." Eventually, my friend Jon bought it for me on Steam, I downloaded it, and I proceeded to have a moment of bright, terrible clarity regarding what I had just done. I put the siren's game back in its box, tucked it under the bed, and tried my best not to think of it as I endured the shakes and hallucinations brought on from the forced separation.

So anyway a few weeks back, I decided to reinstall and try it. Things have slowed down at work, other games are rapidly losing my attention, and I wanted something visceral and violent to enjoy in chunks like I had with Borderlands. I think this time, with less of a frantic need to escape my 60-hour-work-week reality, I was able to approach the game at a measured, reasonable.... oh fuck it's 3am on a Wednesday morning.

The game is comfortable and familiar, like an old denim jacket that has somehow undergone an amazing alchemy to make it no longer musty, dated, and unfashionable. Valve has done a pretty solid job of edging that line between gore and cartoon humor, as well as encouraging serious antipathy to anyone not wearing your colors while not taking itself too seriously. So far, what I've learned -

- A pyro's flamethrower actually has a range of X - 1, where X is the amount of feet away that fucking guy is who would die if you could just get one more hit on.

- Spies have a button where they are able to simultaneously sap all of your buildings, even if they're 400 yards apart, and backstab you from the front in one smooth motion. I don't know where this button is, sadly. All I can find is the "when attempting to kill things, fumble nervously like a boy undoing his first girlfriend's bra."

- I am still pretty good at arcing pipe bombs just perfectly so that I completely miss unmoving targets.

- Speaking of: Soldiers and Demomen, when played by other players, have a 100% accuracy rate on the rockets/bombs they are wildly spamming at random directions. That is to say, the less thought you seem to put into these weapons and merely trust in the Force, the more likely you will catch someone (read: me) as they round a corner at 50 HP.

- There is nothing more amusing to me than the amount of unassisted kills I have racked up on my Medic. When I switch to an actual weapon and attack, there is a 50/50 chance the other guy will simply stop moving, as the player has fallen over his desk in confusion.

While it's been pretty frustrating at points (it's often way too easy to simply die in one second without having any reasonable chance to react or defend yourself), it's been a good time waster overall. Also, there's something to be said for getting messages like "You have been killed by: the assmachine."