Friday, November 5, 2010

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.

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