Anti-Patch Notes
I didn’t think it was possible to get excited for an expansion of a game I haven’t played in over a year, but damn. I got to about here:
Druid
- Innervate has been removed. Mana costs for Druids have been adjusted accordingly.
…before I realized the devs were serious about the pruning of cooldowns thing. I mean, Jesus, they even removed Mana Gem.
Blink and you’d miss it. Wait… Blink is still around, right?
Paladins were about the one class that seemed to come out ahead after the ability decimation; losing Wings on non-Ret specs makes me shed a nostalgic tear, but in return no more Divine Plea or Inquisition? That’s practically a bonus! Plus, Lay on Hands and Divine Shield survived. Blinding Light didn’t, but we only had that for what, one expansion? It looks like Seal Twisting is making a come-back, but hopefully it won’t be powerful enough to be mandatory.
Man, look at this:
Priest
- Binding Heal is no longer available to Shadow Priests.
- Hymn of Hope has been removed.
- Heal has been removed.
- Greater Heal has been renamed Heal.
- Inner Focus no longer provides any mana cost reduction.
- Rapture has been removed.
- Renew is now available only to Holy Priests.
- Shadow Word: Death is now available only to Shadow Priests.
- Void Shift has been removed.
- Inner Fire has been removed.
- Inner Will has been removed.
That’s all of the Priest notes. Well, more or less, there’s some additional explanation at the bottom. Still, there is 109 instances of the word “removed” across 34 pages of notes. The end result will likely be a tighter game experience, but damn, all these simultaneous band-aid removals took some hair with them.
As for the new level 100 Talents, some of them are jokes that won’t pass the AV test. What’s that? It’s simple: just imagine someone (or 40 someones) using the ability in an AV match. Seriously, they’re giving Death Knights Defile. Defile. I hope your CPU is water-cooled next time you’re slumming it up in Drek/Vann’s room because otherwise your machine might well burst into flame. Necrotic Plague alone will pad all the meters, and combined with Chilblains? You can single-handedly stop an entire mounted charge.
That’s basically what I’ll be doing in BGs all expansion long: being annoying. Did it when Death Knights first came out with Death Grip and/or Chains of Ice; did it when Paladins could Seal of Justice mounted players from 40 yards away; did it with portal shenanigans via the Warlock; did it old-school just Sapping people and watching their reactions from stealth as the Rogue. If your goal is to be annoying, it’s damn hard to lose in WoW. And now it’ll be 100% easier in the next expansion!
Posted on April 7, 2014, in Commentary, WoW and tagged Aaaand It's Gone, Expansion, Patch Notes, Removed, Warlords of Draenor, WoW. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
In An Age 
I made the joke on twitter a couple of days ago, but I’ll just repeat it here because I liked it enough to do that. And because Alamo, obviously.
BLIZZARD TELLS U DURID IS LOOSE NINERVATE K? DRINK A POT LOL
It was weird to me to read those patch notes, because I haven’t more than 2.5 years now, but still followed some developments from the outside (reading Cynwise and Sacred Duty, among others). But Innervate was the one that really made me realize they were serious, just like for you. Almost like way back when they removed Divine Spirit as the “take-one-for-the-team” 31 point Disc ability when Disc sucked.
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Honestly, with the way WoW has changed over the years, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m not so close-minded to think that it is necessarily the wrong direction – I do agree that fat needs to be trimmed and too many options is just as bad as too few.
However, I do miss the days when there was a little built in ambiguity and inefficiency. It may have not produced the best DPS/heals/survivability/etc, but I liked having a few rarely used abilities on hand for extreme cases.
It made the game a lot more exciting when things went wrong!
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