The “Great Warlock Life Tap Nerf of 2008”, another one of those “We’re Totally Not Balancing World of Warcraft Around PVP And Especially Not Arenas, But We Are” adjustments, has finally made it to the Test Realm Patch Notes which puts it one step closer to reality on the live servers.

Life Tap: This spell now has only 3 ranks. Each now costs a fixed percentage of maximum health to cast, and grants the same fixed percentage of maximum mana: Rank 1 is 5%, Rank 2 is 12%, and Rank 3 is 20%.

If you don’t pay attention to warlocks other than to curse at or about them, this is huge. Currently, Life Tap converts a fixed quantity of health into mana (e.g. 580 health lifetaps into 580 mana), ergo, warlocks have geared heavily for high hitpoints (+ stamina gear and enchants, donchaknow) and mana pools be damned, they just swap their health into mana and eat babies’ souls. Indeed, even their class armor reflects this fascination with stamina over intellect and mana regeneration — cuz what care they for regen, lifetap isn’t at the mercy of out-of-combat mana rules or potion cooldowns.

It WAS what made warlocks so very deadly, and, so very valuable to raid DPS.

Of course. If that nerf goes live. Not so much. At least for a while until the ‘locks can regear for intellect over stamina. ENJOY!!

It’s like a minigame within the game, just like bag space. Regear for this, regear for that, resist sets are nice too, plus carry all that around in your tiny backpacks of suck.

So I’ve been watching the warlock venom on the Test Realm forums as Blizzard has cycled through multiple adjustments to the nerf because the ‘locks, they be LIVID, and the other classes are enjoying the show, and really … you should not relish another class’ nerf. The Wheel of Nerfs: round and round she goes, where she’ll stop, nobody knows.

Witness: Forum thread – LOCKS DESERVE EVERY SINGLE NERF THEY GET by Naitsirhc, level 64 shadow priest, suspected mage alt, of the Eldre’Thalas realm.

Any class that can drain life and mana is insanely OP, and you guys know it. It was not your fault that this game mechanic continues to exist, but I think every single nerf is warranted and should be applied to BALANCE this crap. And yes I am talking about PvP, I can care less about PvE. I’m sorry to be blunt, but this has gone on for far too freakin long.

The accusation: Reply #2 by Thromgal, level 70 warlock of Kil’jaeden.

You can go ahead and post on your mage.

Which sums up that thread very nicely.

And speaking of a mass exodus, where have all the healers gone?? Long time passing. Long time ago.

That’s rhetorical, I know very well where the healers have gone — away.

I did some faux research on the Healer Exodus of my own WoW realm by reading through all the recruitment threads on the first page — these would be all the recruitment threads that have been /bumped in the last few days, i.e. active recruitment threads.

The Results of my ten-minute research project:

Alliance
10 total recruitment threads
8 seeking healers only, 1 seeking healers + DPS
1 seeking DPS only (lucky dogs)

Horde
5 total recruitment threads
1 seeking healers + DPS
4 seeking DPS only (also lucky)

Some interesting faux facts from my own guild:

Of our raid healing core, only 2 are pre-Burning Crusade healing mains — 1 paladin, 1 priest. A week ago, the count would have been 3 — 2 paladins + that one very dedicated priest, but the one paladin … you might remember him as our paladin man-whore … he left our guild last week.

Quick drama debriefing: Our paladin man-whore left because his latest imaginary game girlfriend abandoned him and started hanging with our other pre-BC paladin (also a man-whore as we discovered), which drove the first man-whore into another emo phase for a few weeks, then he decided “fuck this” and left. Probably to seek other imaginary game girlfriends, who knows. Anyways, this relationship with ManWhore02 and the aforementioned imaginary game girlfriend is really distracting because they are usually fighting, and she’s usually threatening to LEAVE THE SERVER and what do we care if she leaves, she’s not a healer, then ManWhore02 gets upset with the guildmates cuz goddamit we should care but I just want to /gkick the both of them and be done with it. And further, it’s this kind of shit which tempts me to call for a moratorium on guilding female players, my apologies to all the drama-averse female players out there, but can’t people keep their personal lives out of the game and just kill stuff? Crimony!

Anyhow. Except for those two pre-BC healers, the rest of the raid healing core are post-BC healers. I’m hoping they have at least a few months in them before they burn out too.

Ya, I have a lot of hope. I don’t have any resto shaman, but I have a whole lot of hope.