Hello everyone! I am sorry for my slight disappearance; I have been swamped in IRL stuff, while longing to go back to alpha news and other secret projects that I’m working on. Now that I have some breathing room, it is time for some misty tea talk. What has been happening on the alpha since we last talked and what the heck have I been doing?
To kick off, alpha is progressing nicely, and while there haven’t been any new builds so far (though, one is right around the corner), we’ve had the opportunity to see some lucky people play and stream the alpha. In the last post, I linked some very interesting videos regarding the Mistweaver gameplay, the Class Hall and Artifact acquisition quests, etc. My second hand impression of looking at these videos is that Mistweavers seem to be really versatile, and hopefully, “niched” healers will be a thing of the past; all healers have the tools to do all kinds of encounters. In other words, some healer classes will not be benched because they cannot handle a specific situation. This is great, because then you can really focus on one class to master and it will really simplify raid setups.
The interesting part yet to come is an explanation of how the new healing philosophy will be in Legion. We haven’t heard anything official, but one can get a very vague impression just by looking at spells and talents. My prediction is that they want us to use more of our toolkits – a.k.a. not spam our only AoE heal. If we look at the gear – so far no spirit in sight. Spirit is on our character panel, but it seems like we will not be able to increase it with gear. Mana will be an important issue through all the expansion then, since mana regen won’t scale, only the strength of our spells. And our AoE heal, Essence Font, is not exactly spammable; it has no cooldown, but 1) it costs a lot of mana and 2) it gives up to a potential of 18 people a HoT you do not want to override by spamming. So, I am guessing we will have to work into a rotation with Vivify and hopefully some efficient single-target gameplay. This sounds great to my ears, because the more viable spells we have in a raid setting, the more strategic choices we have to make. BUT (!) this is just my predictions and it is early alpha – we will see how it pans out!
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