SanSul

As a Paladin, I am certainly not looking forward to this new form of damage called "Chaos". It penetrates all immunities, which leads me to believe Paladin's bubble is now once again being chipped away. Hopefully there is some compensation to Paladins.

As for priests, they really are giving them a lot of Paladin like abilities. Poison cleanse, holy shock, etc. Can't wait to see Paladins get all the priest goodies like Hots, Aoe spells, and what not.

I guess the game is really going back to Healer, Tank, DPS where everyone can do everything and so long as you have those 3 classes in your group, you are pretty much set.

 

Corronach

For what it's worth, chaos damage is from Warcraft 3. It ignored all the typical armor sorts, but it would not go through Divine Shield. I don't think you have to worry about that.

 

Anedris

And that is a good model, because it makes it easier to form an instance or raid group with whatever people you have on hand.

The two instances of chaos damage do specifically say they ignore immunities. One of them is deep destro however (hint: not known for its PvP prowess) and the other is part of a talent that appears, in its present form, horribly broken and will almost certainly be reworked. Regardless, the loss of the impunity of the bubble will hardly be worth crying over if paladins get a new array of tricks and tools to make use of (as I fully expect they will).

 

Fiola

Erm, wasn't VanCleef building a ship to attack and destroy SW by sea?


The sea-route hasn't been shown in-game, but it's been implied... There's also the undersea-part of the gnomish Tram that links SW-IF.

 

Draele

Affliction is just a giant mess. Especially the 51-pointer. Between Seed, Hellfire, and the new cone based AoE we really don't need any more AoE. Not to mention it wouldn't stack well with SoC anyway since only one Corruption ability is usable per target. Sure, there's some synergy with Haunt, but Haunt looks like it would be usable enough on it's own. Not to plunge into suggestioncraft, but 51-Affliction would be well served getting either a stacking low coefficient DoT(As a Shadowbolt replacement) with a nice debuff tacked on, or a passive "two curses allowable per target" talent. Both would be much more usable and less situational than the current 51-pointer.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Liebestod

Yea, but given that WoW chaos damage explicitly pierces immunities, it's hard to imagine what other purpose this clause could have (piercing Nether Protection)?

 

Kinv

Back when you could easily glitch yourself underneath Stormwind and walk around, if you walked toward the coast it's a small hill between Stormwind and the Ocean..... I can see that easily becoming a harbor.

 

RpgWizard

Both the Frost and Fire talents that have been leaked, if they are real of course, really disappoint me. It looks like they're pushing fire to be the AoE king, Frost to be PVP king, and Arcane for single target king. Unless there is a dramatic change in the way boss fights are designed, Fire will be a dead raiding spec as AoE has never been such a huge portion of a fight that you had to explicitly spec for it. In fact, Arcane's AoE is almost solely used now and could easily be sufficient for almost anything other than extremely gimmicky fights.

 

Leviathon

In the lore Stormwind does have a harbor.

Stormwind - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

 

Anedris

The mages in this thread - [Mage] WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion seem to have a rather different view of matters...

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

Pretty much every time Stormwind is shown on a map with its surrounding areas, the coast is to the West / South West.

Even if it didn't exist before, it's not hard to imagine one being built. The lack of a nearby harbour town (assuming it was landlocked) was always a bit silly anyway.

 

RpgWizard

If you bothered to read that thread there are very few actually excited about the TALENTS, sure base abilities like Frostfire are nice, but don't just read the OP and 1 other person in the thread to prove that all mages are excited about it.

Edit: I'm more excited for the boomkin changes, almost making them a required fixture in any caster dps group.

 

Anedris

I did read the thread. I am curious as to whether you found anyone in that thread heralding the coming of the new arcane kings in single-target DPS?

The consensus in that thread is that deep fire and deep frost have been given boosts (for fire, more or less more of the same powerful scaling that gave it its dominance in most of TBC; for frost, the ability to inflict shatter combos on raid bosses combined with more elemental uptime) while arcane has been left behind (no empowered talent for arcane blast, nothing to make up for its weaker crits).

Arcane has been given some spirit-based crit rating which, unless itemization changes dramatically, will just like the already-existing mind mastery scale poorly with high end gear, and it was given a proc for an instant cast spell, which is awesome and fun, but isn't going to make up for the huge scaling bonuses in deep fire. Deep fire is better than arcane for single target DPS at present and nothing in these talents will change that. Deep fire gains 25% additional crit damage and the weird and probably-broken hot streak, and it retains everything it already had.

The 41-point fire talent in BC was dragon's breath, an AoE spell, but that didn't make fire the AoE tree, and living bomb won't make it the AoE tree of Wrath (although it will, I dare say, be a lot of fun).

 

Prinsesa

After reading the thread myself, I believe the consensus was that Arcane's viability was banking on whether or not Netherwind Presence could proc off Arcane Missiles on a per-missile basis.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Malleus

Hear that? That's the sound of every Shadow Priest in the game re-rolling if these changes make it to live. Crippling the capacity of S-Priests to function as a mana battery, forcing them to take 90 extra spell hit in place of damage and making use of Shadow Word: Death suicidal is going to make them no longer raid viable. It'll require something like a 35% increase in DPS capacity to counterbalance it.

(I don't know where you got the reduction in VE from, BTW. It's already 15%.)

 

RpgWizard

Dominance for most of BC? Have we been playing different expansions? It wasn't until they finally removed the coefficient reduction on the first tier cast time reduction talents that mages were at all close to the current dps of hunters, warlocks, and rogues. There is still the fact that many guilds take only 1 mage due to the babying any good mage has to have in order to push their dps to the levels that are competitive.

Sure the talents maybe increase single target dps beyond arcane, but how do you expect to not pull aggro with the obvious emphasis on stacking crit rating over anything else? Not just threat, but 5% total mana every crit? Unless there is a massive change to caster dps mana regen on the order of what priests/druids saw, or it is 5% base mana (which does not seem to be the case), there is no way that a fire mage could sustain that. So I'll take 5 points in burnout so that I use 5% of my mana on top of the cost of the spell to do 25% extra crit damage bonus. I'll also take Hot Streak so that when I get 3 crits in a row, which is 15% of my mana plus the cost of the 3 spells, my next spell will cost a guaranteed 5% of my mana plus the cost of that spell. So in 4 spells I go through probably 25-30% of my mana. Coupled with the rumored nerf to VT and the fact mages have to be babied to even make that viable, it sounds great to me.

 

rhea

It also says "[sitation needed]" right after the harbour sentence. If you look at the maps, Elwynn Forest etc. are more or less located to the east of Stormwind - so nothing's really in place. Stormwind isn't that far from the coast anyway. Who knows, maybe the coastline makes a small turn towards northern Stormwind, the area ingame is "grey/inaccessible" anyway so you shouldn't count on it being the way lore meant it to be.
If they are going with the harbour in WOTLK, that would be the last thing to worry about lore wise in my opinion.

 

Prinsesa

I think you're jumping the gun a little there. Think of what you're getting in return:

1. Dispersion - mini-Iceblock and Evocation wrapped up into a neat little package.
2. Improved Spirit Tap - more personal mana regen, which will synergize with Shadow Power to increase the value of spell crit substantially
3. Nightmare and Mind Sear - two AOE spells on a DPS class that previously did not have any
4. Growing Pains - even more mana savings from not having to recast SW : P as often
5. Dark Spirit - even more spell damage
6. Shadow Power - increasing the value of spell crit is going to help a lot of scaling/itemization issues.

Instead of looking for spell damage near exclusively as you do now, Shadow Priests will potentially have four stats to look for: spell hit, spell damage, spell crit and SPI, quite possibly in that order. Also, the reduction of VT to 2% specifically allows you get that kind of 35% personal DPS increase you're looking for.

Yes, it sounds bad coming for NOW, but keep in mind you have 1-2 new ranks of spells to look forward to, and Blizzard could just as well jack up the base values much higher to account for the loss in utility.

EDIT: Perhaps you just exaggerating, but let it be said again that these are early ALPHA previews. It's WAY too early to go rerolling anything. The discussion has been fairly serious thus far, but remember to keep your tongue firmly in cheek - the only reason we're talking about this so earnestly is because mostly everything else has already been theorycrafted down to the third decimal point.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Munorion

I'm not even sure about the spell hit part; if the talents were to stay the way they are now, there would be enough boosting of spell hit from other classes: Improved Faerie Fire from druids, Winter's Grasp(?) from frost mages and of course Totem of Wrath from shamans. Assuming these stack, they would give 10% hit.

 

Unity

Some of the reduction in VT will be made up by superior gear - the damage output of a raiding level 80 shadow priest will be substantially more than that of a similar level 70 so if the percentage returned was left alone groups with a SP would be that much closer to infinite mana. Cutting by 60% is a big drop though, especially for pre-80 characters.

 

Ballista

Making it a fixed percentage is always going to bring this problem, as damage increases mana increases until you reach the point that the mana return is equal to mana usage. Blizzard's current plan seems to be reducing the percentage each time we're close to this happening, which heavily nerfs the ability at low gear levels.

To fix it you need to change the mechanic. Perhaps a falloff to a softcap of mana. Or changing it so something other than damage so it doesn't scale with gear, for instance returning 25% of the mana spent dealing damage to a target with it on. It's not like spells cost more as your gear increases, so making it not scale with gear doesn't negate a shadow priest's abilities.

 

Liebestod

I don't understand why they simply can't make the % vary based on level. If 5% is good at 70, just remove .3% at each level from 70 to 80. They do it with passive talents, I don't see why they couldn't make spells the same way.

But yea, I think this indicated less that Blizzard wants to nerf SPriests and more that they simply expect the damage:mana output to rise from level 70 to level 80. Of course, tbh, it'd have to rise a lot in order to keep things balanced.

 

Zzbzq

Or you could just, y'know, increase the mana cost of the new spells for all classes.

The lower VT % probably means they are going to be bringing SP's up to ~2x their current damage relative to other DPS classes, with slightly less mana regen capability. Otherwise, yes, their current plans are bad. Need fewer non-CC, raw dps classes, not more. The mana regen should remain a defining element to the class, otherwise the class is just another ret paladin in the 5-10 man games.

 

Malleus

Deleted by user.

 

Pintofbrew

If any SP is looking for any sympathy with respects to his raid viability, it certainly won't come from me. Having a group-based regen that is much more than double the next best regen (Manaspring, BoW, or Div Spi), and at the same time being doomed to low dps for fear of having too-much raid synergy, combined with 5% global magic buff and 10% shadow buff.

And you whine for the change? The group-wide regen was brought down to be more in-line with the rest of the game's buffers, your own personal autonomy corrected to be sufficient (from a bloody tier-one talent, no less, which used to be useless in raids, remember), your 100% dependency on 1 stat now changed into possibly Four stats, a new AoE or two, An Iceblock-wanabe (which also fixes the imp. fade talent), MORE agro mitigation, pushback protection...

Honestly, forgive me if I harbor no sorrow for the state of WotLK SPs. From where I'm standing it's looking like all the serious concerns you had were/are being looking into, and to excellent effect. And don't whine about the 10% to hit, all three schools which had a 10% hit talent got changed into 3-pointers for 3%. Affli, Arcane, and Shadow all dropped it. It was about time this archaic talent got noted as "perhaps too good" when 3 of your first talent points could be invested into making mobs at Plvl+2 Hit-caped. A talent with 25 item-points worth of the best stat for your class per point at Tier-1? Good evening, Mr. Needs-To-Be-Brought-In-Line.