Hitting Hyjal or, Boomkin au go go! Liz Skuthorpe continues her exploration of the Cataclysm beta, this time hitting the new 80+ content zones.
Having had a look at the new zones for Worgen, Atomic has decided to take a look at the other end of the spectrum for this instalment of the Cataclysm blog and see what Blizzard has to offer more seasoned players and characters.
There are a handful of new zones added to the game in the expansion and one of those is Hyjal - mysterious and tempting Hyjal - a zone which has called to explorers ever since the game launched and before the developers broke wall-walking for nosey players' sneaky exploits. Hyjal was previously seen in Bronze Flight time-travel mode flashbacks through raids in Wrath of the Lich King, but it is now available to players as a properly fleshed out levelling zone for characters approximately 80-83.
I had dragged my mage through the early parts of this zone a couple of weeks ago, but it's had significant additions to quests and phasing in the last big patch - what we get now is a reasonably complete feeling zone.
Admittedly there are still a few areas where I've flown around looking for those elusive yellow exclamation marks - I get the feeling that not quite everything is implemented yet. For example the Twilight Hammer quest string in Hyjal seems to suddenly drop off without a conclusion; but release is obviously months away and there's still work to do.
Running a balance druid through the now more completed zone was immense fun and hey, RP-wise I'd do anything to get my druid in with those Guardians of Hyjal. This was also a good opportunity to have a closer look at Mastery, which was also implemented in the patch. Mastery is a new stat included in the expansion which, along with the changed talent trees, and has generated a lot of interest. Originally Blizzard had said that the Mastery stat might apply the more you invest talent points in a particular tree, however, it's now appearing as a stat on gear, much like Haste or Critical Strike. It's also a skill that needs to be learned from class trainers somewhere in the mid-70s levels before the bonus on said gear is used.
However, the original concept that Mastery would somehow benefit your primary spec has remained. Many of the quest rewards in the high level zones include Mastery as a bonus in much the same way as we've seen Spellpower or Hit, and should be implemented in the same way; according to the item level of any particular piece of gear.
How does this play out in-game though? For a balance druid the Mastery bonus is called Total Eclipse and affects the new improved Eclipse proc. Wearing gear that's itemised with a Mastery rating of 392 (or +4.95 percent) at the time of writing, the Total Eclipse mastery bonus grants 19 percent bonus damage when Eclipse procs. Given that Eclipse itself is now much more stable, if less spectacular in its current beta form, Boomkin should be able to rely on Eclipse as source of higher dps-output. In the current retail release Eclipse is often unreliable, as it depends on critical strike chance and many a boomkin has bemoaned the RNG, which seems to wait until the end of a fight (especially in short encounters) to proc the bonus.
But considering that the latest patch also broke in-game combat text it's a little difficult to tell exactly how much extra damage my character is doing with this new mastery-based bonus. Hopefully the combat text will be fixed in a patch not too far from now, in the mean time we're reduced to guessing.
In the meantime, we've got a little gallery of a few other neat spots from our Beta explorations. Enjoy!
Issue: 133 | February, 2012