|
Looks as if ToL was changed in a later build but the changes weren't pushed to the front page:
Tree of Life: "Shapeshift into the Tree of Life. While in this form your movement speed is reduced by 20% and you can only cast Swiftmend, Innervate, Nature's Swiftness, Rebirth, Barkskin, Nourish, poison removing and healing over time spells, but the mana cost of these spells is reduced by 20%. Your heals also grant friendly targets your Bark's Blessing, increasing healing done to them by 25% of your total Spirit. Bark's Blessing lasts 8 sec." (Restoration) [Changed in 3.0.1.8303]
This confirms that Nourish is usable in ToL form, which means druids now have a fairly strong flash heal for their tank target and an equivalent flash for everyone else. Win situation from my point of view.
The Bark's Blessing is a change to the ToL aura mechanic. Instead of an aura, it's a selective temporary buff which unlinks the tree from the tank group and could mean say for Council, a tree providing its 'buff' to all four tanks while those tanks are in their own optimised groups.
IMHO, Nourish has the capability to eliminate the need for a dedicated 'flash' healer on tanks, and just have the tree + direct chunk healer. It also eliminates a weakness in druid healing and that's quick, direct targeted heals. It's stepping on the toes of paladins and priests methinks especially seeing how CoH has a cool down attached to it now and Flourish has the capability to do something really disgusting. My napkin maths are indicating to me that a single tree with rank 1 Flourish (level 60) could possibly solo heal all three boil groups on Bloodboil O_o
Yes, I don't have numbers to back up my thoughts yet, but I'll write them up once I get the chance to.
As for the itemisation homogenisation (try saying that when you're drunk), I don't think that's in just yet. These talent details are in the same patch as distinct +heal/damage enchants and items. I suspect Blizzard may be working out the ability details before they fudge the numbers for homogenisation using talents and coefficient changes.
Item homogenisation has other problems though. Let's take a look at caster stats:
'Spell Power'
Int
Haste
Hit
Crit
Penetration
Spirit
MP5
Of those, the first 3 stats are universally welcome. The next three (hit, crit, pen) are useful only for DPS casters and penetration is further holed in as being generally more useful for pvp than pve. Holy Paladins are teh exception for crit since they can stack crit to ludicrous (for healer) amounts. The last two are regen stats, with Spirit being useful only to three classes and one of those classes (mage) only for a sub-build. mp5 is a generic stat but for pve holy priests and resto druids, they'd rather have spirit.
This will have some major impacts in how well Blizzard can homogenise items. A common line of thought would be to have the cross-class items focus mainly on the first three stats, and shove a bunch of sockets to tweak it out. This is an idea, but sockets only really nudge in one direction rather than provide a bulk amount of a stat and unless Blizzard wants DPS casters to have minuscule crit and hit rates, perfection is not all that possible with this system IMHO.
Then we have weapons.
Daggers
Swords
(1H) Maces
Staves
Daggers are used by all potential healer/caster except Paladins.
Swords are not usable by Shamans, Priests and Druids
Maces aren't usable by Mages or Warlocks
and Staves can't be used by Paladins.
Blizzard has typically used this to their advantage by loading the daggers with DPS caster stats, maces with mp5 based regen and healing stats, and staves are generally stat/stam rich to partially cover survivability needs for the squishies without a shield. With itemisation homogenisation, what happens here?
While I admire the desire to homogenise the spell damage and healing stats, it does leave quite a fair few tricky questions with how to deal with some stats and how far they want to go with this plan.
|