Apparently on the current PTR, Hand of Reckoning cannot be used on players. Or totems.
Um, cool? Guess exorcism can maybe fill the niche, though it’s fairly pricey.
Some testing over on AJ has unearthed an interesting rogue bug. On live, the Glyph of Backstab currently reads:
Increases the damage dealt by Backstab to stunned and incapacitated targets by 20%.
What it actually seems to do on live is increase all your damage versus stunned and incapacitated targets. I tested it myself on training dummies (with 2x [Main Gauche] and a [Lovely Black Dress] and it definitely increases mutilate damage; people in the AJ thread report everything from evis to white damage benefiting from the multiplier.
That makes it a pretty amazing burst damage glyph!
Of course, it’s getting changed to a worthless attempt at a PvE glyph in 3.1 (which seems weird to me, surely they don’t think Shadowdance is overpowered right now?) but unless they ninja-hotfix it you can still take advantage of it until then!
(Sadly, it probably won’t make our hardest matchup much easier)
EDIT: Here’s the official solution – fixed in 3.1, but they’re upping the Sinister Calling damage bonus on hemo and backstab from 5% to 10% so subtlety isn’t hit too hard. Interesting change, since it’s shifting some sub damage from burst to sustained.
I’ve been playing around with the Paladin talent calculator on MMO-Champion in light of the ongoing changes. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, 49/22/0 Holy for 2s (would switch to a beacon build for 3s).
I glyphed HS/FoL/Salv, but that last one is a bit contentious – Turn Evil would be one alternative, but that probably depends a lot on the metagame. I’m also pretty attached to the HoJ glyph. For minors I went wisdom/wise/kings, you could conceivably swap kings for sense undead for gibbing lock/dk pets, but that’s pretty damn marginal either way. I wish the might glyph was a mana cost one instead of duration, since I find myself recasting that a lot versus some teams (basically any team with offensive dispell on a cooldown, especially hunter teams where protecting HoFreedom is important).
I’ll probably get into arguments about Light’s Grace again; I know a lot of people hate it for 2s. I’ll see how I feel once I get a chance to play with it on live, I might end up swapping those points to Blessed Life if I feel like I really don’t need LG at all.
Unrelated: updated cutoff graphs for Reckoning 2v2 and Reckoning 3v3.
Dinaer tagged me for the “how did your characters get their names?” meme.
Masako – my original level 60 character, a female orc warlock. I named her after a Magic: The Gathering card from the Kamigawa block called Masako the Humorless. How terribly Megan of me, right? I stacked crit and raided MC as destruction, boy was I terrible.
Synth – female human warrior. At some point I decided I’d name all my characters using dictionary words, usually by browsing the dictionary.com word of the day archive until I found something cool-sounding and appropriate. I may or may not have been going through an eighties music phase at the time.
Theory – female human paladin. This one I picked for amusement – at the time, Paladins (ret in particular) were not a particularly strong class. I was tempted to change my warrior’s name to “Practice”, but I was too attached to her by then.
Fresh – female night-elf rogue. This was actually my first character on live (the Ner’zhul server IIRC) and she was originally named Araya which was an elven name from a pen and paper campaign during my teenage years. I abandoned her around 40-something in that river full of amicable turtles in Hillsbrad foothills, and eventually transferred her to my main server for a fresh (!) start. She is currently my main, insofar as I will ever commit to one.
Cavalier – male dwarf priest. Another dictionary-browsing one; I thought the listed definition of “Given to haughty disregard of others” sounded appropriately dwarfish and it abbreviates nicely. Plus, I do have a somewhat cavalier attitude towards healing. Priests have too many other fun spells to cast!
Overall I’m pretty happy with the names, though I suppose you tend to grow into whatever you end up choosing.