World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

I enjoy playing World of Warcraft. I used to play it VERY often, and I'm talking hours and hours and hours. Nowadays, I've found a bit of balance and don't play as much as I once did. I used to be in a solid 25 man raiding guild, but that doesn't interest me anymore, so I was really glad to hear that Blizzard is making 10 man raiding equal in difficulty (and loot) with 25 man raiding.

So apparently the expansion is out at the start of November, and I'm still not settled on what I'm going to play yet. I'm mostly playing my Shaman at the moment, and will probably continue playing that. Healing can be pretty boring if you've got nothing to heal, you are mostly just stood there waiting to click grid like a frantic game of whack-a-mole, but healing is getting better in Cataclysm. When I'm not healing, I will throw a few Lightning Bolts and keep Flame Shock up, and this is exactly how healing will be like in the expansion.

It looks like Priests and Shamans will be expected to Smite and Lightning Bolt when not healing, I don't really care much about Priests, but the talents that Shamans get are pretty hot. Throwing Lightning Bolts will restore mana by 40% of the damage done, and casting a Shock spell will increase the healing power and decrease the mana cost of your next healing spell. Pretty cool right? So it seems like Resto Shamans are going to be offensive healers, sign me up! Elemental is getting a nice reboot also. Elemental has always been a boring facerolling spec, but a couple of spells are adding some much needed complexity to the spell casting priority. Rolling Thunder is a talent that gives you 30% chance to return some mana back every time you do damage with Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning, but it also generates an extra charge on your Lightning Shield up to 9 stacks. Fulmination is the next talent that works hand in hand with Rolling Thunder. Fulmination allows your Earth Shock to burn any extra (past 3) stacks of Lightning Shield you've generated. So you wait until you've got 9 stacks of Lightning Shield, and then you Earth Shock to do Earth Shock + 6 stacks of Lightning Shield damage, pretty awesome. Another cool talent that adds a bit of unpredictability to the rotation is Lava Surge, this talent gives your Flame Shock ticks a chance to reset the cooldown of Lava Burst.

So that's what I like about Shaman, but I've always been a Protection Warrior, and I'm not really impressed with the gimmicky talents in Protection, it looks more like a DPS tree than a tanking tree. The talents look fun for tanking heroics and such, but there aren't many talents in there that improve your survivability. Oh well.

So when the expansion comes it looks like I know what I'm doing for the next few months, hah! I just have to discipline myself to keep up with my good eating habits and exercise. I'd hate to turn back into a fat, lazy slob.

I saw a cool quest preview from Cataclysm today, it's a Plants VS Zombies clone called Peacebloom VS Ghouls, heh. Credit goes to TotalBiscuit of http://www.cynicalbrit.com/ for this: