Reaction to the new World of Warcraft patch, Before the Storm, has been generally positive. Most players seem to be having fun trying out their new talents. Major cities are filled with warlocks running around ostentatiously with their new Felguard minions, frost mages summoning water elementals, and druids shuffling round in tree form.

Complaints, such as there are, seem to be coming mainly from priests, who feel that their new talents offer them little advantage, especially in PvP, and ex-hardcore PvPers who see that the rewards they worked so hard to get are now available easily to everyone through the token system.

I have three level 60 characters, a mage, a warlock and a priest, and played around with the new talents on all of them yesterday.

Impressions :

Priest – can’t say I was bowled over by any of the new talents. I decided to go for Circle of Healing to try it out though I wasn’t able to use it in a raid yet since, owing to the legendary incompetence of Blizzard Europe, the server was unavailable for much of yesterday evening and our scheduled raid had to be called off.

Mage – I tried a full arcane build with the rest frost. It seems to give nice DPS. With the higher crit chance from the Spell Power talent, you can rack up some big damage numbers in both the frost and arcane magic schools. Arcane Missiles still seems too mana-inefficient to be seriously viable as a main raid DPS spell to me but I haven’t been able to try it out in a raid yet.

Warlock – Well I had to do it - get a Felguard. It certainly provokes a lot of comment wherever you are. If you get one, you can expect to be bombarded with questions from lowbies in Darnassus. I tried it out in a few Alterac Valley games. It’s powerful, no doubt, but it seems to attract a lot of attention to you. I found myself constantly being assaulted by vast numbers of the opposite faction, and if it’s feared or banished, you don’t have many options left.

In the end, I decided to respec towards a full Affliction build which is better suited to Alterac Valley, where I mostly play. I don’t raid much with my warlock any more but if I do start raiding again, I may go back to full Demonology because I think that, with Demonic Sacrifice on the Felguard giving +10% shadow damage and 2% of mana restored every 5 seconds, it could be a great build for raiding.

Overall, I have the impression that Blizzard want to make things much easier for the player base. They are trying to give a boost to the small guilds who have struggled with Zul Gurub or Molten Core, and help them breeze through those instances more easily and gear up for the 25-person raid instances in The Burning Crusade.Why do I say this? Well, one of the least talked about but ultimately most significant elements of the new patch is the fact that HOTs (Heal Over Time spells) are now stackable. This makes tank-healing much easier. It becomes much less of a last-second, twitch affair with healers trying to cast Flash Heals when the tank’s health takes a sudden dip. From now on, HOTs should be the standard way of healing a tank. They are more mana efficient than other healing spells and gain the most from +healing gear (this was also buffed in the patch.) For a conventional raid encounter consisting of (tank maintains aggro, healers heal tank, dps takes boss down ) this makes everything much easier. The stacked HOTs will maintain a constant flow of healing on the tank, making reaction time less of an issue. With extremely tactical fights like say Jindo in Zul Gurub, this isn’t true, but most raid encounter lack this degree of nuance.

Other patch changes which should make everything easier include :– the Improved Divine Spirit buff which, assuming that at least one priest in the raid has it, gives approximately +20 — +30 damage/healing (10% of total spirit) to every spell caster in the raid. Not bad.

- the epic pvp gear now seems to be very easily attainable. Looking at the honour prices in the Champions’ Hall, the Grand Marshal weapons, the greatest of the PVP rewards, now seem to be purchasable for about 25,000 or so honour points. I played two brief Alterac Valley games yesterday evening, both of which my team lost, and still came away with almost 1000 honour. It seems you could get the Grand Marshal weapons with just a few days of intensive playing or a few weeks of more casual playing. The epic armour is available even more cheaply than the weapons. I predict that, within a few weeks, a big chunk of each server’s population will have some of the epic PvP gear. Since, taken as a whole, it’s probably equivalent to the Tier 2 sets from the raid instances, this implies a massive gearing-up of the general population, helping those (the majority, let’s face it) who aren’t in big, successful raid guilds acquire some of the best gear in the game. When that new epic gear is used by those small guild players in their ventures into the raid instances, it should make everything go a bit more smoothly for them.