Battle Resurrection Changes for Cataclysm

Cataclysm raiding is supposed to be a change. It is going to be different. Players all have “Oh Crap!” buttons now to preserve their life, and somewhere I know Ghost Crawler or another predominate World of Warcraft figure made the comment that each person would be responsible, to a degree, for staying alive.

This is the beginning of the end of healing the DPS that stands in ooze puddles or fire, the DPS that forgets what first aid is, how to pop a health stone, or a health potion. In conjunction with this same mentality, Blizzard has taken it to another step. They are setting limits on the number of battle resurrections that can occur during one boss attempt. This reminds me of how they change Hand of Protection from working on Deathbringer Saurfang, or the change where you could only use one potion during a boss fight. I remember when you could consume potions every 2 minutes, and they didn’t share cool downs.

This change will impact the druids’ battle resurrections, as well as soul stones that a warlock can use. It hasn’t been determined yet at this time of posting if ankhs on shamans will be impacted the same way. In addition to this, they may make the change that soulstones can be cast on a dead player to revive them. The latest posts on this topic show one battle resurrection for 10 man raids, and 3 battle resurrections for 25 man raids. With the cooldown changes of druids’ resurrections back to the 10 minute mark, and the warlocks’ soulstones on a 15 minute cooldown, it brings some interesting possibilities.

It removes the one thought of letting people die by stacking druids, and bringing them up afterwords to avoid dealing with game mechanics. It also makes one wonder if this is the functionality that may be bugging out the druid battle resurrections on the live servers. In some ways, I am very anxious to see how Cataclysm unfolds and if it brings back the feel Vanilla World of Warcraft had to the raiding scene.

4.01 Changes and Impacts

With 4.01 hitting the servers live, here at No Quarter Given, we went ahead and implemented all of our Cataclysm main changes, solidifying our raiding core. We’ve been recruiting to fill the empty slots with talents folks that both offer the skill and the commitment we expect from our raiders.

This patch brought some changes into guild, with the character switches, as well as a hard look and re-evaluation of our guild goals and ambitions. We did some tweaking on our Raid Conduct, trying to cover the loop holes we have noticed over the last couple of years, and taking a different approach with our tiered raider rank system. This change was implemented because we currently have a few members that are valuable assets to the raiding core but their attendance could not be met for our 85%. We’ve really restricted this rank to existing members whose work schedules change weekly. While there is no difference on “loot”, “effort”, or “raid slot”, there is a difference of attendance requirements.

As far as game mechanics go, World of Warcraft has been buggy in itself since the landing of patch 4.01. About half the guild had their 310% drakes, so the riding mastery was free. We’ve been struggling with the adhoc changes in ICC, as well as the lock sharing between 10 and 25 man content. Our guild is extremely focused, and the new raid core has tons of synergy, welcoming our new members. While we were recruiting hard for Cataclysm, we’ve slowed to a crawl in an effort to evaluate what we have and how these people are meshing with our community and atmosphere- and above all else, our strange way of doing things.

Cataclysm launch is roughly a month away, with a major holiday in right before. We are still maintaining our raid schedule, and making great progress for the remaining heroic mode bosses. It’ll be interesting to see how far we get.