Saturnalia took on the 3.0 PTR today, in our usual 3-man grouping style. We are all 65, so we decided to do Underbog which was a little low for us, hopefully counteracting the fact that we all had UI brokenness due to the loss of settings and mods. It was really enlightening, and we can see that some things are likely to change. Here's how it went.
Mana
Traditionally fights are harder on us than they are on 5-man groups because we have to push so much harder to put out appropriate dps, and that means sitting down to drink after most fights. On a good day, we're drinking after every other fight.
On the 3.0 PTR we were drinking a handful of time throughout the entire run! I think it was well past the first boss before I (Paladin tank) took my first drink. Mana issues have just vaporized for me, and frankly I expect to see this change. Our Shaman healer was reporting similar results due to the synergy of Shaman healing spells in 3.0, which meant far less healing was needed.
However, it wasn't all good. Mobs that used to be slightly annoying because of mana drains are deadly on a Paladin tank now. In fact, I believe this is a fatal flaw in Paladin tank design, now. The problem is that Paladins aren't supposed to need much mana anymore, and the stated intent is that they'll be using mostly warrior gear. When a mob drains a caster who has nearly no mana, and that mob is tuned for casters who stack int, you pretty much go OOM instantly. This needs to be addressed, since Paladin tanks simply won't be able to run certain dungeons without a substantial amount of healer gear for certain pulls.
DPS
Our damage was simply off the charts. Between live and the PTR I think we had something approaching a 60% increase in dps output, and I was putting out just about exactly twice my live dps while tanking. How? Well, since mana isn't an issue unless something is draining, I'm free to just keep casting whatever isn't on cooldown. My typical rotation was:
- Pull with Avenger's Shield (3-target instant nuke with snare)
- Holy Shield (AoE reflective damage)
- Judge Wisdom (single target damage with mana return)
- Hammer of the Righteous (3-target instant nuke)
- Consecrate (AoE DoT)
- Keep Consecrate and Holy Shield up while continuing to cast AS, JoW, HotR whenever they are up
This is two spells I didn't have on live (HotR and Avenger's Shield which used to have a cast time, and thus wasn't useful during combat), one spell I could only cast sparingly (Consecrate). Overall, it's like I'm a whole other dpser and was around 600 dps overall, which isn't all that great for a 70 in decent gear, but for a 65 prot-specced tank who has a substantial number of greens, that's just scary.
Bosses
As usual, The Black Stalker
was a royal pain, and its constant resets wiped us a couple of times
before we gave up. However, the other three bosses went down easily. In
fact we had an early agro problem kill our druid cat dpser early on the
Hungarfen fight, so we just downed him with two! It took a little bit
longer, but we trounced him.
Swamplord Musel'ek was a particular pushover, and I'm kind of surprised that he didn't use a mana-draining shot like the trash before Ghaz'an does. I'd say that the hardest fight outside of the painfully ill tuned Black Stalker is actually the first naga trash pull. It's just so easy to pull three groups at once there that I've wiped in 5-man groups more there than anywhere else in Outland (well... Vorpil has been known to stump some ill-geared groups...)
Overall
I'm loving 3.0, and I do think they have some tuning to go, but it's a really, really nice patch with lots of goodies for everyone.
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