I'm flabbergasted by this. I can find no formula on the web that relates actual crit % to level of the mob.

At any rate, it's beside the point - even if Holy Priests have a semi-but-rather-small advantage vs. lvl 62-68 mobs, I wouldn't call that sufficient when most farming and higher level quests (for money, of course, which is the point) are on 69 and higher mobs.

It only happens against lower level targets and it may not apply to spells. I know that testing on the Blasted Lands goons at 70 will give you double your normal melee crit rate.

I have found (and known for some time) that it was true for melee. I can find no such official confirmation or empirical evidence about spells.

Why not? (as Linnet asked).

Even with free respecs no Fury Warrior or Shadow Priest will grind quite like a Hunter or Warlock can.

What I expect is that they'll adjust the game as things go wrong. I also expect tank shortage and perhaps healer shortage is going to become more and more acute.

I expect them to confidently declare they'll never do something (not necessarily this thing) then U-turn a month or two later.

And I expect Kalgan's stated plan of padding the non-dps trees with mediocre dps talents will fail.

What I don't expect and don't understand at all is dpsers opposing tanks and healers grinding better. I can only assume that most of you who feel this way are in guilds where people are more committed than the guilds I'm used to and availability of people to do instances with is less of a problem.

Edit: it does sound like the new daily quests may be a viable alternative in which case hats off to Blizzard for an elegant fix and wrist-slap to Kalgan for forgetting they'd put this in.
New Daily Quests - Profitable?

Err, what? Shadow Priests are just as good of farmers as warlocks, and in some situations better than hunters.

Despite calculations, theory, and my personal experience, I should take your word that shadow DPS is much higher than holy DPS and much more efficient? Shadow DPS is spread over time because of DoT's, and both damage per cast time and damage per mana drop significantly if you stick a 24-second SW:P on a mob that's going to die in 12 seconds. That's why my math and experience show that holy grinding with a few non-healing talents and proper gear measures closely to shadow grinding.

And I'll point out that any priest with 10 points in holy will have a 2.0 second Smite. Have you actually used the spell before? Yes, the mana cost is high, but that is mostly offset by a holy/disc priest's high spirit and use of spirit tap.

I just tested this on my warlock. I get three full 2.5 second shadowbolts on a target less than 30 yards away, as long as the mob doesn't have a sprint or charge. If a mob gets in your face, you can time your casts so that the melee hit lands right after you begin casting, and you get negligible pushback. It's easy to chain near-pushback-free spells with a 2.0 second cast time, since that's the swing speed of most mobs. Not that you should have to--with decent damage gear, the mob will hit you once at most. There is absolutely no need for Fear or Shield, and you won't need to Renew more than once per half dozen mobs, as long as you are coordinated enough to stand just under 30 yards away and chain cast. The whole thing becomes trivial if you pick up the Holy Reach talent. I stand by my original estimations.

I'm sorry for nitpicking and continuing off-topic conversation, but it's clear to me that there is widespread misinformation here about the solo ability of a holy priest (not counting Roana: I've seen Cat's posts on the official forums and have a lot of respect for her). The ideas formed here on the EJ forums carry a lot of weight and they trickle down to the official forums and into common knowledge. Holy grinding definitely sucks if you min-max your character for raid healing and take zero grinding talents. But the vast majority of the WoW gaming population is not doing progression raid content and can afford to make a few talent concessions.

Between PvP queues of around 3-5 minutes, I kill the lvl 62-63 outside of Shatt for shards. Myself and pet have had more that expected crit with both melee and spells.

However, the melee crit rate was about 15% (normal 10%) and my spell crit rate of about 15% (13% normal). I have killed those mobs quite a bit over time.

As a holy pally, I've never understood why Blizzard doesn't just give all healing classes an ability to change 50% (or whatever percentage would be balanced to equivalent ilevel damage) of your healing spells to damage. These could even be class specific abilities to fit into lore, just do something like:

Pally/Priest:
Vengence of the Light
500 Mana
10 minute duration
Your healing spells disrupt the spirit of hostile forces, dealing damage equal to 60% of the normal spell.

Druids/Shammy:
Nature's Wrath
500 Mana
10 Minute duration
The forces of Nature respond to your call, disrupting the life energy of hostile targets equal to 60% of the normal spell.

So, to compare this to a paladin, the class I'm most familiar with, and 1500 healing to make the math simple:

R7 Flash of Light: 448-502, 1.5 sec cast:
Average cast: 475 + (1500 * .43) = 1120
1120 * 50% = 560, or 373.3 DPS.

R11 Holy Light: 2196 - 2446, 2.5 sec cast (2.0 sec talented)
Average cast: 2321 + (1500 *.71) = 3386
3386 * 50% = 1693 or 677.2 DPS (846.5 talented)

It's a decent amount of DPS, but nowhere near what a pure DPS class, or most DPS specced hybrids can put out, so there wouldn't be any issue with bringing three tanks and 22 healers to a raid. It also doesn't require the healers to collect two different sets of gear to be able to perform in raiding and farming. If there's a potential problem with this, make it a casted ability on your target and make all instance mobs immune to the effect. You could do the same thing with PVP targets, or make it less effective since being able to do decent damage and large healing wouldn't be balanced.

Disclaimer: This is just a rough up, I realize that druids would have a bias towards this due to switftmend, etc - It's just a proof of concept, please treat it as such. The percentage is merely something I picked at random, it would obviously need tweaking.

I think it really just comes down to: Single-tree-specced hybrid classes are never going to match the mob farming ability of a dedicated dps class, and hybrid-specced hybrid classes are going to be even worse off. Based on the statements that Blizzard has made, I don't see that as changing. Ever.

The only real solution is to not make dps the most significant factor in being able to farm whatever it is that needs farming. Fewer "kill X" quests and "get drops off of mob type Y" farming, and more tradeskill-based or quested-but-not-via-dps farming opportunities.

Sorry I think I got carried away by my own hyperbole.

Let me re-phrase it as:

Even with free respecs no Fury Warrior who spends his dps on tanking gear or Shadow Priest who spends his dkp on healing gear will grind quite like a Hunter or Warlock with good pve upgrades from raids.

I think you're on the right track, and Blizzard should try to make gold or reward farming "separate but equal" for DPS and hybrid/healing/tank classes. They can only go so far by manipulating damage vs. downtime, where DPS classes kill fast but need to rest a lot, and healing/tanking classes kill slowly but get energized after each kill. The percentage of farming time spent recuperating is low because no one likes having to eat for 30 seconds after each kill. But while there are self-evident reasons for giving DPS classes more damage than other classes, there's no good reason for any type of class to have an advantage in earning gold or reputation, especially while soloing. I can see a new 41-point prot talent:

well, the point of having a dps class is to win pvp by dealing damage, and to deal damage in parties/raids, not to be outstandingly better than support classes when it comes to soloing.

From a holy priest point of view, well, even with superior smiting gear I'm still not able to compete with, say, a rogue or a mage when it comes to party/raid damage. Sure I can play as a pure damage dealer in non-heroics, I can even handle AOE parts there, but I just lack the sustainability, survivability, crowd controlling tools, evading tools, silencing/interrupting tools and stuff that make me a viable and efficient choice against anything that deals more than 1k damage on cloth per hit and lasts more than 10 seconds to kill.

The only problem I see with this, I repeat myself, is the reliability on a fair number of non-party talents to achieve solo efficiency, and the fact that those talents don't even help in solo PVP either, making them poor choices for achievement-driven playing. It's cool to grind money, it's cool to grind rep, it's cool to clear around mines or whatever, but apart from that, it's just a relative waste of talents that could somewhat improve the contribution of a player to his team's success.

It's quite fun for a change - but I just wouldn't accept anymore to be shut away of most of the solo content simply because I made a given choice on character creation or class build.

One of the dedicated healer/tank's perks is having to find a dps friend with the patience and dedication to kill a hundred ogres for his friend's talbuk mount, for instance. And the worst part is, the tank won't even benefit from teaming up with another tank or another healer, it will just be slow-and-steady killing, and endless whispering of mages for water.

Among the world-wide statistics I'd like to see is, the percentage of healers and tanks with the epic riding skill vs the ratio of dps builds that have one. That should be an eye-opener to some.

That said, some of the things that irk me is the inability to heal an NPC in an outdoor escort quest, the inability of said NPC to hold aggro over healing threat (when it can actually be healed), the inability to buff said NPCs in most cases. Some quests require a healer and/or a tank in party to complete, and those are labelled "group". But the huge majority of quests require a damage dealer to complete.

I personally wouldn't have a problem with some classes having access to more zone-based "followers", or a "solo perk" that you can choose from your trainer, that only works when you're not in a party or in a raid, and that basically lets all classes play with their PVE or PVP gear/build when questing. Only thing is, I have troubles specifying those

I definetly like the idea of this, however as a holy pally it is not as necessary as we got very strong aoe farming ability already.

I just wish something like in Ragnarok Online would be implemented, where you could kill undeads by healing them to death.

Or of course if blizzard finally decided to turn wow into a proper mmorpg and make group leveling farming alot more viable and effecient than solo farming.

Easy way to implement this could be just make an instanced zone where people can fight tough mobs, for which a 5 man group is ideal, that do not drop items but alot of gold and everyone would make more gold this way then grinding by themselves.

While it is arguably a bug, I found out while levelling my alt warlock that Dark Pact is quite ridiculous with the change made to pets 'dismissed' as you mount.

1- Dark Pact all of your pet mana
2- mount up
3- un-mount
4- pet is back at full mana !

this made my grinding downtime to an almost 0 as of late.