Beru’s MoP Wish List

I had a friend in the military who was talking to me about a list of locations that you get when you move from one kind of duty to another (I can’t remember the details). Apparently you are given a list of different military bases and you get to pick a handful of locations where you’d like to be stationed and number them from your highest desirability to your lowest. He told me some funny joke, that I no longer fully remember, about how you filled out all of these places you’d love to be stationed – only to learn that the military is going to station you wherever the hell the feel like it, and your “wish” list basically becomes a list of places you are pretty much guaranteed to never see. The joke itself was funnier. But you will just have to trust me on that one.

I guess the point that I’m trying to make with the anecdote above is that while I have a lot of wishes that I’d like to see implemented – I also am fairly realistic about any of them coming to fruition. Much like my friend dreaming of being stationed in Hawaii or perhaps internationally, I know that just because I want to see certain changes made, doesn’t mean that those changes are going to go any further than this post. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to wish for them, or suggest them! Because, I mean, much like the Field of Dreams, if I don’t build my thoughts, no one will ever hear them! Hrm…that analogy worked better in my head.

Regardless! Let’s get on to some of the things I’d like to see changed with Mists!

Bring Back Pure Healing
To put it another way: make healing about healing again. This is probably my number one wish for Mists. I miss the days when being a healer was about making smart decisions in your healing and not about what cooldown you offered your raid. Honestly, I’d be 100% okay if they got rid of raid cooldowns altogether and designed encounters around just being able to heal though them based on the skill and ability of your healing team. No gimmicks. No Shenanigans. No “omg we have to have cooldown x or we are at a disadvantage”. Just let me heal.

Additionally, I can’t help but think that a lot of balancing issues could be solved, or at least heavily mitigated, by removing all of the if/then factors that things like Barrier brought into the healing game this expansion. More than anything else I want to be able to go into a raid and  just worry about healing. I honestly don’t feel that things like PW:B, AM, (3 min) DH, SLT or (3 min) Tranq make encounters more dynamic or “fun”, and often I think that they are detrimental when looking at the way in encounters are designed as a whole. Let’s just scrap them all and heal again – after all, isn’t that why we signed up to be a healer in the first place?

Quality of Life(bloom)!

My next wish is druid centric and a quality of life request. I’d like to have a way to swap a 3 stack lifebloom between two targets without having it take 3 GCDs. Let’s face it, outside of a handful of unique situations, in PvE lifebloom is kept on the tanks. However, a lot of encounters are designed to have tanks swap. Sometimes with alarming regularity (think about fights like Ultraxion or Ragnaros). To be perfectly honest, if you tried to keep a 3 stack of LB up on the active tank during Ultraxion, you’d almost never have time to cast anything but LB as you constantly re-applied your 3 stack between tanks as they swapped back and forth.

I understand that Blizzard wanted to move away from the “rolling LB” healing style that we saw in TBC. I even understand why they moved LB to only being able to be stacked on one target at the end of Wrath. But please, for the love of god, give us a way to swap it between targets while retaining our 3 stack. The swap could cost as much mana as re-applying a fresh stack, just please don’t make us spend 3 GCDs to get it back up on a new target.

Mince those Mushrooms

Another druid centric wish! If we can expect to see the damage patterns that have been consistent during this expansion, Druids absolutely need a way to more effectively and efficiently deal with burst AE damage. But Mushrooms are not the way to fix the problem. A spell with (very) limited range, that requires the raid to remain stationary (standing in the mushrooms), that takes 3 GCDs, must be set up in advance  (while praying your raid doesn’t move and you have enough familiarity with the encounter to know the damage patterns to use them) to detonate and requires the very clunky mushroom placement mechanic is just not a good solution. Especially when you have to consider that we are already maintaining harmony every 10 seconds and having to use 3 GCDs to swap lifeblooms between tanks; oh, and let’s not forget the wrath spam we are supposed to be integrating into our healing to boost its potency. Mushrooms are, frankly, the worst solution that I’ve heard regarding our need to have more burst healing abilities in our aresenal and is going to cause nothing but problems. Or give us another mediocre and lackluster raid heal.

But Beru, I hear your complaints, do you have a better solution? I don’t know if I do or not – I just know that what is proposed right now is not something I’m looking forward to trying to navigate in a raid. Why not explore an entirely new spell for us? It seems reasonable since we didn’t receive one in Catalcysm. Maybe something that can cause all of your active rejuvs to “flourish” healing nearby raid members for a certain amount in one burst, or maybe base it on how many active rejuvs you have on the raid, with a maximum limit it could heal. It could perform the same task as mushrooms – but would be much more dynamic and not as constricting. It also has the potential to allow the player to make intelligent and smart choices about who they are healing while thinking forward towards how those heals will impact the raid as a whole.

The long and short of it is that I think we do need additional tools in our kit to solve the problems we’ve seen this expansion, I just do not think that healing mushrooms is a practical, or particularly appealing, way to get there.

Serverwide Achievements

I’ve talked about this before, but I’d love to see things like “Realm First Boss X” have separate 10 and 25 man achievements. While the two raid sizes coexist, trying to balance them to be equal is an exercise in futility. If Blizzard is going to continue to keep competitive achievements like the server first achievements in the game, I think that there should be a separate achievement for each raid size. I also think that if a guild obtains the server first achievement for one raid size they should be prohibited from obtaining it for the other raid size. As an example, if Guild G obtains a server first achievement for Boss N in a 10 man raid setting, they will be ineligible to later obtain the achievement in a 25 man raid setting. This would mean that each server would have the opportunity for both 10 and 25 mans guilds that are focused on progression raiding to obtain the server first recognition without the concern about an encounter is “easier” or “harder” on one difficulty or the other.

Cross Realm Guilds

Why not?! Everything else in the game is already cross realm, why not allow guilds to be cross realm as well? Guilds are all about community, why should that necessarily be limited to server communities? This would also help recruitment tremendously – as guilds that are on smaller populated realms could attract players who would rather play on a more populated realm, but want to raid with a certain guild that made its home on a smaller realm, or the realm the guild is located on has started to stagnate. As someone who has recruited for a mid-population server, with a smaller horde population, I can absolutely tell you that this is a factor that can be a detriment to some players and that this addition could be extremely valuable to the survival of many guilds moving forward.  I think that cross realm guilds will be even more valuable and prevalent if MoP sees cross realm raiding permitted for current content – and could factor into the difference between life and death for many guilds.

Server Mergers

I would like to see the merger of some small and medium population servers. MMOs are all about community and being able to participate in community activities. I know that as we seen things like LFG and LFR introduced this has become less and less true, but I still think that a lot of the value of playing an MMO is in having a community of people that you enjoy. As guilds have continued to struggle this expansion, I think that smaller realms have taken a harder beating than larger realms. Let me see if I can explain this…

A realm has a finite talent pool that they can draw from, once that pool has been tapped the only way to secure talent is to look outside of your realm. The larger and more populated your realm is, theoretically the larger and more diverse your talent pool will be available, which also means that the converse is true for smaller realms. Often times on smaller realms when a guild falls apart, many people either transfer to a new (often more populated) server or quit the game entirely. This, in turn, causes a very nasty catch 22 as smaller realms steadily lose talent and playerbase.

I think that if Blizzard looked at some of their smaller and medium populated realms and cross matched them so that small realms with high alliance population were merged with small realms with high horde population you could invigorate these realms and in the process save a good number of players and guilds in the process.

Get Rid of Legendaries, Bring Back Class Specific Epics

Let’s face it, legendaries are nothing but trouble. They cause problems with balancing. They cause drama. I can’t think of a single guild leader who heard about a legendary and went “yay!”. Personally, I’d rather see class specific epics similar to Rok and Benediction. Along with long, complex quest chains that require players to be a master of their class to obtain the weapon. I completed both a Rok and a Benediction during vanilla, and the quests were amazing. Not only from a lore perspective (it’s a real shame people can’t see the Benediction quest anymore) – but from a “you must learn to be an exceptional player” perspective. Both quests required you to become a master of all aspects of your class and it’s a shame that Blizzard stopped making rewards in this fashion. I would love if we never saw another orange in the game, but had more class-centric epics that really encouraged and rewarded players for learning to think outside of the box and be exceptional.

I have so many more things I’d like to see changed, but I think those listed above are the biggest ones for me. What about you? What would be on your MoP wish list?