Armaggedon's coming!

OK, So I foolishly threw down my fur lined silk gauntlets yesterday and suggested Zupa, Larisa and I should form a mystical triangle (no pentagrams for us) and cast talents at each other.

I must point out that this isn’t intended as an extreme theorycrafting shootout, rather a reflection of why we love our specs and hopefully a light hearted analysis, piece by piece of our talent trees. So, no need to worry Larisa.

Diversion into each other’s trees in attempt to fill out our specs is of course essential – Zupa has cast the 1st salvo by picking one of those essentials, Elemental Precision.

Often this is caused by a near worthless talent in our trees (Wand Specialization anyone?), or a much better/complimentary one elsewhere. So hopefully we can touch on what leaves that undead taste in our mouths.. mmm Zupa, that’s you!

Anyway, to start with, what I love about fire:

• The sound and the sight. I love looking down the barrel of a fireball, or pyroblast – my end of course.
• Riding the threat wave. Yep you have to keep yourself in check, but that just adds to the thrill, the feeling that you are brimming over with molten fire – any moment risking pushing it just a little too far.
• Being Squishy, yet deadly. My form of survivablility or defense is all out pure offense. I can’t afford to be hit, so I better blast them before they get to me. I forgot the risks recently while helping a new 70 Tankadin friend. PUlled aggro in under 10 seconds – but the mob went down with me. My mate was stunned at the aggro I generated, and the damage dealt.

Anyway, enough gasbagging…

Today’s Tier 1 talent.

So you can get this first when you are using your Rank 2 Fireball, which is a 2 second cast. Now 1.9 seconds doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, but at level 70, people are scrambling to get haste gear to reduce their casts by 0.1 of a second.

• At level 12 when you get your 2.5 second cast Rank 3 fireball, you are reducing the cast time to 2.2 seconds – more damage, not much more cast time.
• By the time you have your Rank 4 Fireball at level 18, you will be maxed out in this talent, turning your 3 second fireball into a 2.5 second fireball.
• And of course later on, your 3.5 second fireballs are only taking 3 seconds to cast.

So why is this important?

At early levels, without the survivability of Frost (which really doesn’t come into it’s own until later anyway), you want to make sure that the mob either doesn’t reach you, or if it does, it is going down real soon.

At higher levels, in particularly while raiding, the time reduction is vital to allow you to keep up your 1xScorch/8xFireball spam (actually I think you can squeeze in 9, but with Oz latency, I wont risk that)

Back to Zupa’s Elemental Precision..

Is there a raiding spec without Elemental Precision? Absolutely essential, and thankfully a tier 1 talent.. otherwise I would have to invest more points in Frost

OK, that’s it for me on talents… but on a side note…

I kinda wish my spells backfired occasionally (I guess aggro could be considered something similar).. being Gnome, there is bound to be the occasional failure.

And further along these lines, I wish we had to manufacture our Mechanostriders. Yep, pull out a box of bolts each time we want to ride and construct it on the spot (no glowy hands, just a box of bolts and a wrench). While I am at it, I think they should malfunction occasionally – necessitating repairs… and why can’t we build our own Gyrocopters, Engineering or not?

Gnomer and Out!

Ducking and Weaving – Fire #2 >>