Even if it is still in Arms, for DPS purposes, a Fury warrior can get Deathwish again while only giving up Heroic Leap (PvP talent), and that's with 5/5 Titan Grip.

Sword and Board and Unrelenting Assault, while not as flashy as 51-pointers, are actually pretty major changes for warriors depending on the values. Unrelenting Assault, if that is a big reduction in Overpower cooldown, will be the last that warriors ever have to hear about geared rogues Evasion tanking them, and Sword and Board gives Prot some major PvP viability (in addition to increased threat generation), as Devastate does not have a cooldown.

I disagree, I am a Rogue and I leveled to 70 as Mining/BS. I went out of my way and spent the gold on Materials for the OH sword, only to look at S1 weapons one day and realize what a waste and gold sink BS has been (I am new to the game, didn't even know abour arena seasons). Almost every BS in my guild right now beleives it has been a gold sink for them, and the only reason our GL has it is so that someone in guild has BS profession to craft the resist sets.

I picked up enchanting and dropped BS and eventually ended up dropping mining for LW. LW has some great patterns for me in T6 and the BoP Rogue set is excellent when you are starting T5 content. I do wish there was more concentrated set based craftables though.

It's under Nature's Reach, and it's 30% now. Huge, HUGE change. Now balance will only ever need 13 points maximum in resto for intensity. Plus IFF affects spell hit now as well, which means the DPS loss from GCD will be countered by being able to gear for less spell hit. All the balance druid changes make it a near 100% requirement of one per raid for maximum performance.

I hope the cooldown on starfall or hurricane is lowered so moonkin can definitely fulfill that third aoe role they seem to be giving us.


EDIT: Obviously a lot of this is going to change, but it's really enjoyable to think about what the game is going to be like in a few months.

The entire leak is fun, as long as you don't take any of it seriously.

I do like the new monster models that were also leaked. And the achievements concept is also very interesting, if it gets implemented.

Ah, thanks, I didn't think to mouseover that talent.

There's an AoE insect swarm in the spell files (complete with -hit), which seems like it could be our non-cooldown limited AoE.

Where'd you find that?

Don't forget that Blizzard stated that every profession would get something useful for their creator in WotLK, an example was brought up with blacksmiths being able to gem gear that couldn't be gemmed previously, or to some similar effect.

The change to Improved Faerie Fire is both huge and long overdue. It will no longer be passed over for not providing benefits to the Moonkin directly.

Ed. Beaten.

On a different subject, Death Knights pretty much have a base 10% increased armor in addition to Frost Presence, with 5/5 Toughness only requiring 10 points in their Frost tree. That would give them something like a 5000 armor shield as default with good 70 gear after Frost Presence. So they are certainly not going to be melee squishy.

Oh, and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Not much new, but it confirms that the pics of DK starting armor are legitimate.

Just glancing through all the new changes, I think its pretty safe to assume the debuff cap will be enlarged/removed in 3.0. If not a lot of these new abilities might not be so hot.

BTW: People have been plugging the mined talents into the mock talent calculator at unleashed gaming. Here are the good ones that I found:

Priest: War Tools :: Talent tree F&F Alpha Priest Talent Tree
Warlock: War Tools :: Talent tree Warlock WotLK leak

You can browse more at the top, but I've found that a lot of them don't match the mined data from some reputable sites. These two match the ones from both the wiki and http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/talentlist.php.

Actually there is a new talent, master shapeshifter, which for moonkin increases spell damage by 2%/4%

Even without it you can't get everything in the tree, although you could go what, 69 points balance for raids, assuming the regen is better now.

Warning: pure speculation.

I like how they are streamlining itemization a lot through talents, 20% spell damage from healing makes shadow priests/moonkins and probably elementals shamans once they get around to it receive the same spell damage as a pure damage item of the same ilvl. Ex. [Vengeful Gladiator's Spellblade] [Vengeful Gladiator's Salvation] 464*0.2+155=247.8 - This is assuming that dmg/heal items will have the heal portion removed.

They are also trying to increase the desirability of spirit for various classes that don't currently benefit from it, and spell crit for others. The result will be that moonkin/resto druids will share items, healing/shadow priests will share items, mages/warlocks will share items, I assume elemental/resto shamans will share items too.

I also wouldn't be surprised if with the new +armor contribution talents in the feral tree, feral druids and rogues will share items as well and the +armor budget for ferals will no longer be needed, and with a 6% reduced crit on survival of the fittest, they will no longer need defense/resilience as well.

The net result is that armor types will be vastly reduced, resulting in a much higher chance that loot won't be wasted.

Healing cloth -> Priests of all specs
Damage cloth -> Warlock/Mage
Healing leather -> Balance/Resto Druids
Physical DPS leather -> Rogues/Ferals
Physical DPS mail -> Enhance/Hunters
Healing mail -> Elemental/Resto Shamans
Physical DPS plate -> Retribution/Arms/Fury/DPS DK's

This leaves healing/defense/spelldmg plate left to address. An ability that lets death knights get something out of shield block value/rating wouldn't be surprising. Some tweaks to prot paladins so that they no longer require spell damage would also be in line with all of the above changes.

Another result will be that hybrid healers will be able to off heal much more effectively since they will be wearing full healing gear.

Whoa, I missed that one in the notes. Soul Link now a Tier 3 talent (11 points in Demo). Replacement talent would be Demonic Empowerment, which looks extremely powerful if used intelligently.

Warlocks also have their T5 two-piece bonus and some pet scaling at the 35-point talent range.

There are only 2 spells associated with Shock Charges:
49838 Stop Time Halts the passage of time, freezing all enemy dragons in place for $d. This attack applies 5 Shock Charges to each affected target.
49840 Time Shock Deals $s1 Arcane damage and detonates all Shock Charges on an enemy dragon. Damage is increased by $49836s1 for each charge detonated.

From the second on we can assume that they are related to the Onyxia style, ride on dragons encounter, with the 5 dragon flights which was brought up in one of the recent Kaplan interviews, I can't remember exactly which one.

Though there is this:
48837 Elemental Strength Your Shock spells have a chance to grant $43749s1 attack power to your party for $43749d.

The only issue I have with this is that prot paladins' holy damage is what uniquely defines their role. Unless they're planning on turning us into warriors that can bubbleheal, I think they'll have to work around this somehow.

The most logical route would just be to scrap the paladin class as it is now and start fresh, making everything we do based on strength (healing, tanking, and DPSing) so all plate wearing basically require only two sets of real gear (Plate with Strength and Crit for DPS and healing (think Illumination from melee crit instead of spell crit for holy) and stuff with strength and avoidance for tanking). I doubt the devs would take the time/energy to do such a thing for an expansion, so at the moment the system would have to be a Stamina > Spell Damage conversion for the prot tree and something somewhat alike in the ret tree.

Resto druids are becoming more crit based now with the leaked talents. They'll want to balance haste, crit and healing just like a balance druid does. The addition of the improved moonkin aura will make crit much more inline with haste value wise for moonkin as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see some crit/haste/healing pieces.


The real question: Will they go so far as to make only two tier sets for druids, one for priests?

That Warlock Metamorphasis talent looks very interesting. Would prove quite useful for Warlock tanking in some cases I guess.

I so want to see a Rogue parse now.

If the leaked information is anything to go by they're dealing with that issue by making spellcrit desirable for Resto Druids. Holy Priests were getting more crit-based talents as well that I saw; that fits well with making caster items more generic, though not so much with shadow priest desirability with current known abilities.

Crit's actually the least important stat right now for a T60level druid. I don't think it's like they're going to stop making Spelldamage gear available to us.

In unrelated news, Entangling Roots appears to have had its outdoor-only restriction lifted. That could be fun.

Funny thing: If they make mind flay able to crit, combined with it refreshing SW:Pain, crit would become significantly more valuable for shadow priests as well.


So much speculation though, I'm sure I'll end up wanting all the cloth DPS drops because they'll be better itemized halfway through wotlk anyway :/

That's the real key: Is the itemization team really on the same page as the class balance/talent design team.

On the crit issue: depending on the internal cooldown of improved moonkin aura, crit will drastically increase in value with the new talents as well.


On entangling roots: Now lets hope it stops breaking from its' own dot quite so often.