Essarhaddon

Or they are perfectly happy to have people analyzing and speculating over changes they can disavow at anytime. Changes that happen to have hit the internet the same week Age of Conan was released.

 

Feorthas

I'd like to think of it as more of a mixed blessing. Yes, sure, we know what's coming and it's going to be picked to death; however, it's going to be picked apart by some rather smart people in places like EJ so any major shortcomings/issues with abilities/talents that might be overlooked will almost certainly be found.

So, we lose out on the surprise from the talent leaks later on but blizzard gains useful feedback, hopefully resulting in a better game (which is vastly more important).

 

flyingtoastr

Actually I think Blizzard might have intentionally let this happen. It makes sense from a business perspective; by keeping everyone waiting with bated breath for the next big change they are keeping focus on their product and away from the competitors. Coincidence that this happened right as AoC came out? I doubt it.

I still find it interesting that they are banning people for just talking about the changes though. The CM's are too busy to bother with the flaming and trolling crap, but they have more than enough time to pick through the class forums and ban everyone.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Ravenmace

I wouldn't be upset at all, the usefulness of all these mage abilitties depends on the values given to them in their final version at release, but judging by the spell descriptions, with the right values, they have the potential to be all the mage has wanted in each build. But could be crappy with poor values given, so i remain excited for a mage, and if the values aren't nice then we'll be moaning on the official forums till they are nice.

 

Tacitus

Actually, the alpha got "published" the same day AOC had it's official US retail launch

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Fellwraith

I think you may have missed some of the other changes people were talking about, I walked away with a very different impression.

Taking a few points in prot instead of fury isn't completely crazy now.
• Improved disarm increases the amount of damage the disarmed person takes by 15% - for your entire party. It only costs 1 talent point to add that debuff, subsequent points in the talent only reduce your disarm cooldown. Paired with an MS, that's a pretty brutal focus-fire technique. It's on a shorter cooldown than deathwish and it's more overall damage if you have 2+ dps in your team. It's also not so far into the tree that an arms build couldn't take it and remain viable.
• Last stand is on a 2 minute cooldown, similar to the "survival" trinkets many people use in arenas and it gives you more health. It also looks like it stacks with the new strength of arms talent (which is worded as 5% of your health, not stamina).
• 6 expertise from defiance is pretty similar to 2% dodge reduction (and in some ways superior since you want people dodging with imp overpower and unrelenting assault). Cutting your disarm time is nice, but not so nice that I'd waste a lot of talent points to get there.
• Deathwish no longer removes fear. I think warriors are going to be much more susceptible to fear between this change, the unrelenting assault talent (we're more likely to be in battlestance full-time against enemy rogues), and shadowpriests getting a horror effect.
• You'll want at least one point in tactical mastery as they've reduced the cost of spell reflect
• Depending on how they scale strength and battleshout, strength of arms may be comparable to the AP boost from commanding presence

A prot/arms warrior adds a lot more utility and survivability to an arena team than an arms/fury warrior at the expense of their personal damage output. It wouldn't work with a 3's team of warrior/healer/healer, but it would work in a 5v5 team. It's a much more tactical team build. Depending on the bracket and your team make-up, it might make sense to think about different specs.


Safeguard reduces all damage taken by your target by 60% for 6 seconds. It doesn't say you take that damage, it says they take 60% less damage, making it like a mini shieldwall or pain suppression. You can use it every 30 seconds at the cost of 10 rage and a chance to get hit (hit twice if the mob is dual-wield). I can think of a number of fights where the ability to use that would be invaluable on an offtank (specifically fel-rage targets, tanks who screw up and get sheared, stomped tanks, mortal struck tanks, etc.)

I agree critical block doesn't look too exciting to me right now, I probably wouldn't take it because it's not a consistent source of damage reduction and I don't think it's likely they will scale block value up on tank gear as they have in TBC.

 

Baern

With regards to Frost spells and DKs requiring spell damange, it has been mentioned before and I could just be completely misunderstanding the spell data, but most spells certainly seem to scale with AP.

 

LiquidHAL

Is there anything on the WOTLK entry-zone quest rewards? I'd like to see how the gear gap actually compares.

 

Malleus

Imagine that instead of Blizzard having to pay 30 people to theorycraft out your new expansion, they can have 30,000 people doing it for free. They save money and probably end up with a better product if they follow the right hints. If they're /facepalming, it's only because they didn't think of it sooner.

 

Mideci

Yeah, I fully understand that and agree. So leave the existing Circle of Healing cooldown free as far as I'm concerned rather than breaking it. And created "Really Really Big Circle of Healing" and put that on cooldown.

 

Maahk

Anyone saying that the new CoH is worthless in-game, just have a look at Naj'Entus and Illidan. On Naj'Entus, have two priests on opposite sides of the room cast CoH immediately after bubble. Bubble pops, heals go off, and poof, everyone's at 100%.

The same applies to Illidan's raid-wide fire bombs.

The applications to which an ability that has the potential to heal 25 people at once could be applied are many. If you have two priests in the raid, that's a raid-wide heal every 4 seconds.


[E]

Overall it has almost the same healing potential (5 people every GCD vs. 25 people every 5.33 GCDs.) That also discounts the ability to cast other spells during 8 second cool-downs so potential healing over the same period of time for new CoH + other casts vs. current CoH is higher, though of course actual healing done will depend on what the encounter requires and allows.

 

Tyrian

Absolutely. Does anyone really think the expansion alpha was so easily obtainable (by those with the knowhow) precisely when a major competitor to WoW is released? Wow - What an amazing co-incidence!!? No, the reality has to be what the person in the quote said. Blizzard designers are most certainly reading this forum thoroughly and getting extremely valuable feedback from the smart posters here.... all for free.

There will most certainly be something else equally co-incidental happen when WAR is released, too. Theres some pretty smart suits at work here.

 

kalbear

It's not worthless. But it is far more narrow in application, and for a 41-point talent that's a shame. Right now, CoH defines the spec and is the reason to bring multiple priests to Hyjal/BT/Sunwell - because of their raid healing ability. That is being completely removed now.

And no, two priests doing new CoH will not heal 8500 raid damage. Not unless you have something on the order of +15k HSE.

The old CoH had applicability in virtually any setting you can imagine. It was instant which allowed for greater throughput. It was a fast if inefficient way of healing one target while on the go. It could heal parties after raid damage. It was great in 5-mans (especially things like MrT). It could heal small groups and raid groups well. It was a defining talent and a core part of the deep holy retinue of spells. And now? Now it will simply not be used at all in a large chunk of fights, but more importantly you can't assign the priest to raid healing. At least not compared to something like a druid or a shaman. They were already below shamen in terms of raid healing, but now they're outclassed considerably.

One could say that the applications that lightwell has are many as well. That doesn't make it a good talent; it makes it a marginal talent with occasional niche uses. CoH as it stands has been reduced from a good talent to a marginal talent with occasional niche uses.

 

Kumar

Just been looking at the maps, Storm Peaks looks like a very huge area. in Outlands, I thought all the different areas were pretty similar in size, thats not the case with this.

 

lairpie

Looking at how well one WOTLK talent out of 71 functions, ignoring the rest of the spec, ignoring changes to other healers, and assuming that fights will need comparable amounts of raid healing to what is needed now is pointless. First, when you have 51 point talents, 41 point talents no longer are the pinnacle of the spec. Right now CoH is the defining talent of a spec because any healing priest has most of the same talents and just has to choose between iDS and CoH. That's not the primary choice anymore, and people need to move past that.

Priests being turned into CoH bots and shaman turned into chain heal bots because of a fairly stupid amount of raid damage was a poor fight design by almost anyone's standards and isn't like to be a mistake they'll repeat in WOTLK. Early wow was "can you kill the boss before your healers screw up or run out of mana." Later on it got a bit more interesting and was "can you do that while moving?" BC was basically 1.5 years of "can you do all the same sorts of things you did before, while not dying as you get pelted with random fire?" From what little we've seen, I'm guessing WOTLK will continue to draw on those elements while introducing even more "special jobs like cubes, ghosts, inner demons and the like." The whole controlling dragons thing is a good example of that. As new fight dynamics emerge, the need to do the old ones fades a bit just like how running oom became far less of an issue in BC where it was a huge component of healing pre-BC.

Instead of looking at how this is a huge priest nerf and how priests are going to be completely removed from raiding guilds like has been continually predicted for years, look at healing over all. They probably just nerfed CoH to make sure my flourish gets a chance to tick a few times instead of the priest just spamming CoH and me just spamming hots. This doesn't make druids better than priests, it forces us to work together to get that group rather than both being marginally afk spamming the same things the whole time.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

• Playered

CoH became as stupid as Lifebloom was though, no one healing spell should be so predominant in your healing cycles when you have options to several very useful others - especially Priests who have the most amount of healing spells in-game. There was already complaints about PoH being worthless because CoH was just better? and people would use CoH instead of Flash when really it was more suited to it?

They seem to be aiming to force people to play in a versatile way encorporating as many of their healing functions as possible - and thats a good thing, look at Paladins for when classes have no options and do one or two things endlessly.


I've never really been a Lifebloom-baby and im happy that Blizz are helping make the other spells (Nourish requires Rejuv, Rejuv & Flourish proc Replenish) have much more purpose to be used instead of the 'min/maxed most efficient spell' because it helps to keep the class interesting (note: interesting does not mean big on meters).

It will be interesting to see how they try and move Shamans away from Brainheal though.

 

Tyrian

Well said - I dont see how anyone can really disagree with this sort of logic. I love the current COH, but honestly, its time to really let it go and move towards and embrace this type of synergy (flourish + new COH). Encouraging classes to actively work together more is a great thing. Perhaps another reason to bring more than one resto druid to a raid... *gasp*

 

timski

Probably best to avoid the conspiracy theories and keep this thread factual. Given Blizzard's current enthusiasm for getting leaked content removed from fansites, I seriously doubt the leak was planned. I'm actually surprised this site hasn't been asked to remove these discussions: It is the last of the big non-hack/exploit-type sites hosting detailed information.

Sadly there is no meaningful way to digest the analysis of 30,000 people, although sites like these do at least allow consensus to form. Unfortunately we only have half the expansion, and likely less than half the information about it. So any analysis here has to be subsequently re-analysed.

It would be good to know what Blizzard's view is on the use of expert communities for testing content. From memory, their last public statement was that beta invites would be more-or-less random. They have a real problem doing anything else: If they invite the top raiding guilds to test content, the first dozen bosses fall on live before most players have been got the box open. If they run speed-leveling contests to pick testers, they accidentally create a commercial empire for the winner to sell leveling guides. Yet if people like the Noggaholics are going to gate-crash their way onto the test server anyway (which they've reportedly done), surely it's worth trying to gather feedback? There are parts of the game some of these people will know better than the designers/programmers. I digress.

 

Talgog

Blizzard seems to have purged War-Tools of talent trees composed using the leaked talent information. Not that that really does anything other than try to make their NDA enforceable on the people who signed it and might leak other stuff to someone. If they don't seem to care about leaked information, that weakens their NDA. Expect the bans from official forums and deletions from 3rd party sites to continue. Again, not that it really does anything with the loss of the alpha client.

Put me in the camp of Blizzard talking out of both sides of their mouths in order to deal with competition and get free talent and ability evaluation.

 

kalbear

The fact remains that the role of a priest in a raid is being reduced. Before, priests could single-target heal well (not as well as some, but well enough) and raid heal well (not as well as some, but well enough). One of those roles has been essentially removed. That makes priests less versatile in capabilities.

What is the spell that best defines priests in WotLK for raid healing now?

I'm not saying that WotLK will have comparable encounters to BC. I'm not saying that this is the end of the world, or that holy priests won't be taken to raids. What I am saying is that the roles they can play in a raid healing position are being changed because of this change to their abilities, and not recognizing that is being deliberately obtuse. All sorts of things could change, we still don't know the extent of a priest's spells and heals, etc (though no talents mention anything new that we don't know about, so they're unlikely). The disc bonuses are exciting, and the holy bonuses seem to show a very good single-target heal capability. It may be that priests are going back to being the best single-target healers in the game, and that would be great.

But for some of us who enjoyed the versatility of multiple roles within one spec, it's a shame.

It's also very amusing to me to see people laud druids getting basically a HoT version of CoH while saying that it's not a big deal that priests lose it. Somehow it's reasonable to say that the encounters won't emphasize raid damage but then applaud a raid healing system for druids? Odd, that.

 

lairpie

The answer is CoH, PoH, Flash heal, Binding heal, PoM, renew and maybe even a greater heal once in a while.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

Xunwael

Gah, all the talent trees were just removed 'by request of Blizzard'.

Now I'm sad

"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
- Clark's Law

 

Flamingcloud

Surprised all these websites are caving to blizzard's requests, especially the big ones that have the resources to fight, and could cause publicity problems for blizzard.

Also surprised the ej threads are still up still they go against publicly stated policy.

 

Copernicus

EJ is discussing information, but not hosting anything.

---

As far as the alpha leaks go, big companies like to stagger the information as it comes out, to get people excited about things over a longer period of time. It also means that they can mess around with stuff a lot more during the alpha, such as making insanely bloated talent trees to have people try out a variety of choices and see what is fun and what isn't. Or make talents that seem overpowered and then walk them back.

There's already posts whining about X spell getting changed or Y talent being under/overpowered. The amount of complaining that will come up when the next alpha client is released is going to be ugly. Despite it being alpha and everything being changed constantly.

 

Malan

What would be the point? Lets assume that some of these sites get their info from a blizzard 'insider' - making waves and trouble for the company is not a good way to ensure that you get information again in the future.

Gurg's public policy was that the information is out there and it would be stupid to try and ignore it like it never happened, but that actual leaks of the NDA on this site are not appropriate. Its all detailed in a sticky thread.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06