Tuesday, August 24, 2010

It's a good day to fix Lightwell

Anyone who's followed my blog for a while should've gotten the idea about my thoughts on Lightwell. Ok maybe that's not fair, the only time I've had a longer say on what I think about it was 8 months ago ^^ Long story short, I think it's a great spell with great potential and they really should make something good about it.

Back then I wrote;
"Ok I can think of one thing; they should change the mechanics of Lightwell. It's a great spell and a great idea of a spell, but no one likes it because of how it works. You have to target it to use it and honestly, how many dps like to retarget? Even for a split second? Even if it saves their lives? Not many. My dream come true would be if they made so it works like the lightwell in Trial of the Champion does. A beacon of sprouting heals. Yeah that would be completely awesome and sooo good from a healer perspective. And not likely to happen. But they could at least make it so that you don't have to re-target it to get heals. The mechanic is there, because you don't have to target the Mage-table or Healthstone-thingy to activate what it does (just click it, which is miles away from targeting it). Maybe it could have an aura of healing? So when you get close to it it heals you automatically? Yeah I wish..."

People just don't use it today (and with "people" I mean dps) which means I have to find semi-usages for it all the time. It still works fairly good, but its grandness doesn't come out. I can always place it over at some lonely offtank or by myself, and I even sometimes use it as a marker for where people should run in different boss mechanics (oh the shame, have we fallen this low...). Considering many dpser, even in serious heroic progress endgame guilds like the one I am currently in, barely take the time to run off to bandage themselves or otherwise hide/avoid/remove damage from themselves, Lightwell just wasn't easy enough to use. Everytime I see someone using it I have to pull my chin off the floor.

My Lightwell currently heals for over 4k every 2 seconds, that's no shitty heal. And yet people seem so reluctant to use it, like it was poisonous or something.

But I still love that damn thing! I've been trying to keep track of it to see what Blizzard will do to it in Cataclysm, if anything. First wow.com hinted that it might be put aside in the talent tree to become that obscure, lonely talent that only weird priests spec (not far from what it is today actually). And then mmo-champion (that lovely old chap) comes around and gives me new hope again with this very small quote from Ghostcrawler;

"Lightwell
How to make lightwell work: Change clicking range to 15y, Make clicking it not change target
As I have said previously, this is the plan. We just haven't been able to test it yet, and the talent has enough baggage that it's hard to get players to even try it."

These suggestions - increasing range and especially making it so that it works more like the warlock healthstone-stone - is exactly what I was hoping they'd do to Lightwell, and it would certainly make Lightwell alot more easy to use for those simple-minded dps out there. Mind you that Ghostcrawler hasn't promised us any pony here, he's barely promised us the photo of a shadow of a pony, but I'm willing to grasp onto anything! This means I can at least hope that Blizzard have this on their drawing board somewhere (probably in the basement though). Then again, considering they haven't done anything about it thus far, or even said much about it, I must conclude that Lightwell is pretty far down in their priority list and might turn into one of those things that will be fixed in a patch instead.

He also says that the talent has baggage, and that is very true. But that is where we hard-working and nagging priests come into the picture. We will have to take a crash course in advertising and make sure that Lightwell sounds like the best idea in the world for a dps to use. I already nag on my dps to use it, and it works so-so of course, but I am sure that is because of the flaws of Lightwell today. If the above mentioned changes were to go through I could say that there would be no more excuse not to use it, and be damn right. Maybe make a deal with the RL about minus-dkp ;)

At least there is hope for Lightwell, a very small but bright hope that this awesome spell finally will be awesome. It has actually made me rethink my decision about not going holy in Cataclysm. If they make Lightwell into a proper spell there is no way I will be able to keep my hands off it.

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