David Greig's Blog

Just thought I’d update on how things are going with the house purchase.

I have now received a formal acceptance of my offer, which is excellent news. On the other hand I’m having some trouble arranging my mortgage application with the bank due to an outdated Home Report. Which means I have had to instruct my own updated survey. Another £150 down the drain, sigh!

Already looking at stuff for the house. Need to buy a sofa and bed very soon. We’ve bought pots, kettle, toaster, kitchen bin etc already. It’s all very exciting at the moment.

The official move in date is October 30th.

I’ll keep updating my blog with new happenings about the house. I’m going to be so poor but I think it will be more than worth it!

The new house:

In the space of 3 days I’ve went from living at home with my parents to owning a 3 bedroom house! Now there’s a turn-up for the books.

Timeline:

Monday: Viewing with my girlfriend @ 7:45pm
Tuesday: Mortgage Agreement in Principle from my Lender
Wednesday: 9:05am instructed my solicitor to put in an offer on the property
Wednesday: 10:15am received notification from my solicitor that the offer has been verbally accepted.

Now that is fast!!!!

Looking forward to getting all organised to move in at the end of October by the time the Missives are concluded etc!

For the moment (and maybe forever) my interest in continuing to play World of Warcraft has died. I haven’t been in-game for the last 3 months. I had a good time playing this game for the last 4 years but the time has come for other more important priorities.

The main focus in my life at the moment is my girlfriend. We started going out 6 weeks ago (officially).

I asked her out quite a while ago but that’s another story completely! Maybe I’ll share it sometime! We’ve known each other for a long time though and things are going really really well.

Girlfriend > World of Warcraft

So goodbye Ezri hello David.

Hopefully 3.1 will be hitting the PTR’s quite soon and will give me the chance to look at the talent changes affecting Holy priests along with the changes to OOFSR mana regen to see how big a nerf this is. It may not be an issue in current content but I worry this could cause serious problems for healers (except Paly healers) in the new content.

Blizzard are rolling out testing of the new Ulduar instance in stages so it will be interesting to take the opportunity to test out some of these bosses in advance of the live rollout of 3.1. Ulduar looks to be pretty epic instance with lots of replayability. 11 of the 14 encounters have “hard” modes which make the encounters more challenging for those guilds that can cope with them providing better loot. Sounds like a lot of fun!!!

NeverEnders continues to progress well, were now at the point where we are clearing all 25 man content (Naxx, Malygos, VOA, with Sarth currently @ 2 drakes alive) in a day or 2 after the reset leaving us pretty bored for the rest of the raiding week. As a result of this NeverEnders are really looking forward to the release of Ulduar into the game.

We don’t feel we need to be in competition with any other guild on Bladefist but who knows we may even get a realm first on the realm which would be sweet.

My own personal loot progress is a bit disappointin I’ve not been raiding a lot recently due to personal issues and when I am on nothing drops that I can use! Still sitting at only 1 piece of T7.5 while others in NeverEnders are at 5/5 T7.5. Very frustrating. Hopefully I can rectify this and get full T7.5 along with other BiS items in the other slots before Ulduar hits.

This is a provisional list of changes coming to priests in 3.1

• Divine Spirit – this spell is now a core ability available to all priests.
• Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).
• Several area of effect (AOE) heal spells have been improved: Prayer of Healing can be cast on any groups in your raid party. Holy Nova’s mana cost has been reduced. Circle of Healing now heals for more.
• Shadow priest PvP survivability has been improved: Shadow Form now reduces magic as well as physical damage. Dispersion now removes snares.
• Penance – this spell can now be targeted on the priest.
• Serendipity – this talent now reduces the cast time of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when Binding Heal or Flash Heal are cast.
• We are also working to give Holy additional PvP utility.

Interestingly there is a big change coming to the way mana regen works in WOTLK Blizzard currently feels this is trivial in some cases. I can’t say I’ve really noticed this as some fights I still have trouble with and need an inervate thrown my way. This change looks to effect mana regen accross the board but will especially impact healers.

GM Bornakk wrote:

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

• Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
• To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
• The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
• Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
• In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
• We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
• We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
• These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

Well there you have it….lots of big changes incoming!

So my internet troubles continue…

Now into week 3! Download speeds are absolutely fine but there is a regular occurance of packet loss on very early hops in the path to my Warcraft gaming server which causes major lag spikes of up to 10 seconds and regular disconnections.

Not good to disconnect just before a Sapphiron air-phase!!

/vexed

Well since I’m a priest in WoW this is hopefully good news for me as atm I am a bit jaded playing what I feel is a fundamentally broken class in comparison to the other healing classes (Druid/Shaman/Paladin)

From Ghostcrawler:

We have some exciting changes planned for priests. Many of them will make it in 3.1 (Ulduar). We hope to have them finalized enough to be able to announce some in the next couple of weeks, but that date might not work out for a number of reasons. The community has a way of overlooking all those caveats such as “at this time” or “assuming nothing changes” and suddenly we are “breaking promises.”

Well lets see what happens down the line maybe they will introduce something to make healing as a holy priest interesting and fun once again.

Well since I find that I spend a high percentage of my free time playing World of Warcraft.

I thought that I would start to use my under utilised blog to give my thoughts on the game my progression in it and any other general ramblings that I may have.

Well since the expansion came out at the end of last year I’ve managed to level my main up to lvl 80 and begin end-game progression with my guild.

Up till now we’ve cleared the majority of 10 and 25 man content that is available so far in this expansion. The only instances missing are 25-man Eye of Eternity (Malygos) 10-man Sartharian (+ 2/3 drakes) and 25-man Sartharian (+ 1/2/3 drakes). I’m looking forward to completing the available content and getting ready for patch 3.1 where the new 10/25 man raid zone will be introduced, Ulduar.

Outside game but still Warcraft related I’m looking at combat log statistics as well as updating the website. Next on the website will be a link into our DKP system to show the most recent loots gained by our members during our raids.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated and I hope anyone who reads it finds it interesting. I’ll try keep topics as lively as I can!

Just thought I’d write a bit about what I get up to when I’m not at work or playing World of Warcraft. I currently have an XBOX 360 and a medium sized collection of games for it, most of which I find very enjoyable.

My favourites at the moment are:

1. Assassins Creed
2. Need for Speed: Pro Street
3. Mass Effect

I have been playing Assassins Creed more than WOW recently its a very fun game. It appeals to my sneaky side. Nothing better than sneaking up next to my intended target and stealth assassinating him/her and walking on my merry way without being spotted.

For a long time now I’ve also considered getting a PS3 but really unsure. Hmm maybe a Christmas present for myself

But I am also saving up for my new toy in the new year so maybe I will give it a miss!!

Well…Well….