◊ manly

For the most part, heres whats new for fire spec:
-burnout (227.5% crit multiplier instead of 210%) at the cost of -1% mana every crit
-hot streak (1 free crit after 3 consecutive crit. read: less than 1% increased crit overall for 35% base crit rate)

Now here is the core problem of this design. I have 71 talent points to place for my talents. If I pick up the new talents, that means I'm not taking a talent in the 20-35 range of another tree. And unfortunately, the talents in the 20-35 range of the other trees are far better than burnout and hot streak. Its not even comparable. For your viewing pleasure:

-arcane instability (+3% crit, +3% dmg)
-arcane power (+30%dmg/15s every 3min)
-spell power (245% crit multiplier instead of 210%)
-arcane potency (+30% crit during clearcasting (10% chance to proc on cast))

So the problem is quite obvious here. Spell Power is far better than Burnout, and I can chose interchangably between both. Which do you think I am going to go for ? Hot Streak is fairly bad as it is, besides possible use of AOE, which is not something mages are really looking for.

The problem is simple. The new talents are, at best, tier-1 level worth talents. Hence why the general discontentment (from the new talents). However at the same time having 10 more talents make a huge difference, but the problem is that this major boost has got nothing to do with the new stuff.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Anedris

One point of note re: priests is that the new improved holy concentration is completely absurd. Fully talented it gives a 16% clearcast chance, and every time you get a clearcast you get 100% mana regeneration while casting for 10 seconds. I can't see that making it to live, but if it somehow did deep holy priests are going to be looking at more or less infinite mana.

The added cooldown to CoH fundamentally changes the spell. It takes a primary healing ability and turns it into a stabilizing trick. This isn't the end of the world, and I can't see priests having trouble finding raid spots given the clearcast talent noted above, but it is the end of priests as premier raid healers (they become support raid healers instead, being good for backing up shaman and druid AoE healing with PoM, CoH, and renews but lacking the AoE throughput to manage a heavy AoE raid healing assignment alone). Priests remain the most powerful group healers (PoH) and, given the virtually limitless mana provided by the clearcast talent noted above, powerful single-target healers.

 

dlanod

I'd toss in "Counterproductiveness of intellect". No DPS boost from it, just some longevity (and not much, considering I'll be chain potting in any sustained fight anyway). If they change one thing about our class and it's that, I'd be a very happy camper.

 

Starfire

You know what frustrates me the most? Priests still have TWO raid healing trees. And yet we're not even the most desireable healers. And that's saying much.... Shamans can go unchanged, as long as they have heroism, windfury and a new rank of chain heal and they will still be more stackable than a priest.

Ok. So maybe it sounds like I am whining, but honestly I don't -just- spam CoH. No good priest will ever -just- spam CoH. We have the widest array of spells of any healing class. I don't see why this change is needed. I like the niche that CoH currently fills, why redesign the wheel?

And the other new priest spells just scream pvp. Divine Hymm? A sleep on a 10 minute cooldown? Yes. Just what we needed. At least make it a real sleep on a shorter cooldown so -maybe- just -maybe- Discipline could be a decent 5 man spec with 1-2 cc's (MC, "Sleep") and capabilities to offheal/dps. (You know, if Discipline would do decent dps, just the idea of having them as a CC and keeping pom bouncing would make them viable, imo).

Edit: Oh christ >.> I didn't refresh when I made this post and quite a couple of posts have been made since then >.>

 

Addled

I can't see Blizzard nerfing shamans. Chain heal is really the only reason for shaman healing: shamans are kings of aoe healing, paladins are king at direct healing, druids are king at HoT healing. By nerfing chain heal, you end up with a subpar healer with decent buffing abilities.

I'd like to see priests move towards the proactive healing category. Priests already have Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Mending, how about more spells along that line? Perhaps a spell that takes a portion of the incoming damage on the MT and redirects it to an offtank (ala Blessing of Sacrifice, although you could choose both targets), or a spell that turns incoming damage into a DoT (i.e. instead of one big hit for 10,000 damage, that hit would turn into a DoT that ticks off 2,000 damage every 3 seconds for 15 seconds; this would make healing less spiky).

It seems to me that Blizzard is moving priests towards more utility and less healing: the 51 point holy talent is an emergency "Oh shit the tank is about to die from huge incoming spike damage" and deep disc is focused around buffing, not healing.

I also want to point out that the news about CoH is... just weird, IMO. Depending on what the final values are for CoH healing/radius, CoH could be the greatest thing since sliced bread or worse than the scum behind your local refrigerator. But that only applies to 25mans. Yet Blizzard has to know, there are still tons of players that only do 5mans and 10mans, and for them, this is a nerf, because Blizzard will have to balance this spell around it hitting 25 players, not 10 or 5.

 

flyingtoastr

Its so interesting that you phrased it this way, as it really screams "paladins in TBC". They nerfed our healing and created encounters that didn't play to any of our strengths (in other words, the game has become one giant AoE damage fuckfest) and we're left as a subpar healer that is still brought to raids because we have some leetsause buffs.

One idea that I also got from reading this was a redesign of Blessing of Sacrifice. Assume it didn't remove the other blessings (just as BoF and BoP shouldn't, but I digress) and that it somehow scaled with bonus healing. Then give paladins Binding Heal. Now we become the preventative damage healer. It plays to the class strength of high survivability and rapid small heals on a single target and does give us a unique class role. There are all sorts of other fun things that could be done with it as well, decreased damage taken while BoSac is up for example. I really think BoSac has been completely underused when it should be a major class ability (sacrificing yourself for your comrades, it just SCREAMS paladin). And of course to make sure we don't abuse SA with it again they could always make Holy Shield baseline (which should be done regardless- for a tanking/healing hybrid we're remarkably terrible tanks without speccing into prot) and put SA as the 31-pointer prot talent or something.

But we all know Pallys will just be getting an AoE res and blizzard will call the class fixed.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

orcsgotbooty

Paladins have trully gotten to the point where you only take as many holys as you need to add up to 3 buffs (depending on your ret and prot pally situation). Taking one prot one ret one holy pally actually is pretty balanced, but not when you would gladly sit the holy for another healer of any class if it wasn't for the blessing.

 

◊ arison

I think you're being melodramatic. In a 25 man raid, 5 CoHs (one for each group) today take 7.5 seconds. In this tentative new version, one CoH takes 8 seconds and does the same amount of healing to the same number of players (assuming it can hit all 25, and assuming coefficients remain the same). The throughput per second of the heal is the same. What is gone is the ability to concentrate that healing on a single group five times in a row. But, if your 25 man raid brings 2-3 CoH priests, you're more or less back to where you were before just about. Now, it does change CoH in ten mans, since likely you wouldn't have more than one CoH priest, but they are pretty different already anyway.

I like the idea if it means CoH healing now means "drop CoH, then perform 4 more GCDs worth of instants or other spells til CoH is up" instead of "mash CoH over and over." It adds variety to the play style and requires a bit more skill than CoH spam alone does. I hope other healing classes get some changes that likewise give them more variety and tactical depth than they currently have.

Now, what I was really wanting is a hopping HoT (like PoM, except when it tops someone off, it moves to someone else), a group HoT, a channeled heal (so you get immediate healing but still longer cast times), and other new mechanics for healing. But since this is early alpha, I imagine we are still in store for some interesting mechanic changes that just haven't been implemented yet.

Panicking about any of the current changes is just silly, though. There is so much refinement and improvement to go through before the final release that, at best, this gives us very crude insight into the direction Blizzard is taking the classes, not specifics of what life will be like once WotLK is released. Relax, enjoy the ride.

 

Cryic

Holy shit, enough with the WOOOEEEE is me shit post. Almost every class except a few can go on and on about how some other class does their job better.

Back to new stuff: Has anybody heard anything beyound the few new talents about the expected Spirit makeover for dps casters? I pray its more then just a few buffs to some talents.

 

Lamaros

I started a new thread for DK pedantic discussions in the class forum. Hopefully this is not out of line. I asume it would be ok because the Mage and Warlock threads there are.. still there.

Much info about now about the spells and talents for the DK, so the discussions should be specific.

 

• Tsook

Well.. aside from the change to Bite to turn it into a focus dump (which means that every pet other than the spore bat now at least has at least one focus dump) -- documented here Wrath of Lich King Stuff (was 'Blizzcon' thread) -- I found a few ranked spells that could be new pet spells in the datamined stuff. It could also be NPC/quest mob skills that accidentially got flagged with a Rank, so take it with a grain of salt.

49966 Smack(Rank 1)
49967 Smack(Rank 2)
49968 Smack(Rank 3)
49969 Smack(Rank 4)
49970 Smack(Rank 5)
49971 Smack(Rank 6)
49972 Smack(Rank 7)
49973 Smack(Rank 8)
49974 Smack(Rank 9)
50245 Pin(Rank 1)
50256 Swipe(Rank 1)
50262 Rushed Assault(Rank 1)
50271 Tendon Rip(Rank 1)
50274 Spore Cloud(Rank 1)
50285 Dust Cloud(Rank 1)
50318 Serenity Dust(Rank 1)
50433 Bad Attitude(Rank 1)

Name: Smack (Rank 9)
Description: Smack the enemy, causing 54 damage.

(The damage range is on the order of what we have in Claw, though a bit lower. This is the only one I think is especially likely to be a new pet skill since it has 9 full ranks. Perhaps Gorillas? Not sure who else could Smack things.)

Name: Pin (Rank 1)
Description: Pins the target in place, and squeezes for $o2 damage over $d.
Description2: Pinned in place.

(Crab? Scorpid? Snake, even?)

Name: Swipe (Rank 1)
Description: Swipe $x1 nearby enemies, inflicting 10 damage.

(Maybe Bear?)

Name: Rushed Assault (Rank 1)
Description: Increases the caster's movement speed by 60% for $d. and causes it to inflict an additional 250 damage on its first three attacks.
Description2: Movement speed increased by $s1%. Inflicts an additional $s2 damage on first three attacks.

(250 is very high for a pet skill, but maybe?)

Name: Tendon Rip (Rank 1)
Description: Damages an enemy for 3 and reduces movement speed by -25% for $d.
Description2: Movement speed reduced by $s1%.

(25% is not a very good snare, but it's better than nothing. Crocolisk, maybe?)

Name: Spore Cloud (Rank 1)
Description: Inflicts 2 Nature damage to nearby enemies every $t1 sec for $d and reduces armor by -15%.
Description2: Nature damage inflicted every $t1 sec. Armor reduced by $s2%.

(Spore Bats? Nether Rays? Obviously the -armor is kinda hax, maybe it doesn't stack with sunder?)

Name: Dust Cloud (Rank 1)
Description: Kick up an obscuring cloud of dust, lowering the chance for enemies to hit by 30%. Effects last $d.
Description2: Dust cloud, chace to hit reduced by 30%.

Name: Serenity Dust (Rank 1)
Description: Heals the pet for $o1 over $d.
Description2: Healing $s1 damage every $t1 seconds.

Name: Bad Attitude (Rank 1)
Description: Snap back for 5 damage at any target that strikes you for the next $d.
Description2: Snap back when struck.

(This one would be super-cool for soloing but it's right next to the spells for the Blood Worms that Death Knights can summon, so it's probably a Death Knight ability rather than Hunter)

 

Ngita

Shadow priests still look strong, 1 or more, the new disc abilities look strong, 1 Disc priest, in raid of 25 people, 10 classes, I can see blizzard not wanting to give to good reason to stack multiple holy priests.

 

Tuftears

I'd missed that. Thanks! The wiki doesn't give any information on the spell cost/casting time, so difficult to say whether it's an emergency heal or a direct heal that doesn't require shifting out of tree form.

Hope they make it work for crushing blows too, since people who take Survival of the Fittest will be uncrittable out of the box, unless crit percentages rise drastically. (shifty sideways look)

upstart feline miscreant (47 feral/14 resto)

 

Prinsesa

That seems to imply that it is a PvP-oriented talent.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

lairpie

Also it would take some pretty drastic changes for getting crit in pve giving you a 40% armor buff to be a valid druid tanking skill. It would however put a feral druid in bear form to a ton of dodge and close to armor capped in pvp gear.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

SanSul

With this talent, and I believe warriors losing their +defense talent, could we be looking at a change in boss mechanics? Maybe increasing the crit chance of bosses compensates for the removal of crushing blows. Could they have done away with the defense cap, and thus having defense talents no longer essential for stacking dodge and what not?

 

Prinsesa

An interesting hypothesis: If crushing blows were removed and mob crit chance increased to "compensate", it would make tanking possible for a Death Knight - I can certainly hit the defense cap without resilience (since it won't work in instances anymore) and without a shield, but it's quite impossible to become uncrushable without block.

It would also solve homogenized tanking plate quite nicely: Avoid block rating/value on generic items and give Paladins a tanking stat to spell damage conversion to allow all three classes to share gear.

However, it would still make Defense Curl useless in PvE - regardless of how high they make the defense cap, tanks are always going to strive to hit it.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Ravenmace

erm, i believe the intention is to not need more than 1 holy pala, 1 ret pala and 1 prot pala, simplistically looking at 25 man raids TBC, with 9 classes, that is room for every class in 1 of their three specs except 2...and which ever class will turn up wtih 2 instead of 3 is more down to availability of the type of encounter the raid will tackle that evening. [this changes with the DK ofc in WotlK]

I think the design concept was to make it necessary or essential to have at least 1 in each build but no more, so you really shouldn't need more than 1 holy paladin. Priests have 2 healing trees, you should need 2 of your healers as priests, 1 holy, 1 disc, 1 resto druid, 1 resto shaman, 1 holy paladin. Very few raids can get along with 5 healers, so normally 1 or 2 more tend to be taken in place of dps. this often goes to priests if you had choice in most guilds, but could really depend on the encounters you are tackling if you had the player pool to choose and in most situations just comes down to availability and skill of the individual player.

I notice a lot of priests feel they ought to be the undisputed kings of healing. I disagree. Every healing class should be quite capable or just as capable as each other of the task but in different ways such that you won't hand pick 1 specific healinc class over any or all the others for 5-10 mans but can get away with just having a skilled player regardless of class to do the job, whiles for 25-mans, each bring something unique such that you need all to cope with the different situations.

I'm liking some of the stuff the palas are suggesting, more use of blessing of sacrifice and similar fits the theme of the pala immensely, high lastability through it's mana efficiency is already one such, and i hope that blizz has some of these healing ideas coming in for the pala that ppl have suggested on this page.

It is hard to see the overall impact of the new changes in their current form without testing, but Holy Concecentraion and changes to CoH have immense potential, my first glance at the holy tree was that, blizzard had put the Holy Priest right back at number 1 for healing, i don't see why healing priests should be vastly superior to healing shaman/druids/pala like the old days which imo were terribly broken for druids/shaman & palas that healed, but, without the new encounters to weight the spells by it's so hard to guage.

I think blizzard have a good dungeon design going, i don't believe we will see as dramatic an improvement in encounters in Wotlk over TBC as we saw TBC had over classic wow, simply because classic wow was so flawed in terms of making use of the majority of class builds and they learned from many of the raid design issues for which in the end i am grateful they found a use for most class builds.

What i am really concerned with though is, Discipline, the new abilities look nice, but i can't really see how a discipline priest can fit into a raid... the new holy talents to me make holy a much better healer than discipline healing power wise. So where is disciplines place? a hybrid like holy dps/healing ? (remember ret pala issues?)

imo, it is discipline that should work by buffs to shield and redirecting damage received.. so what it lacks for healing power it makes up by effective damage mitigation to raids, and i think holy paladins should have a little of that, but discipline priests be the main players there. Ideas like de-spiking damage received from a lump hit to a dot is a great idea.. also applying DR through shields etc and a more raid friendly use of spells like Pain surpression and PI might make Disc priests just as useful and a unique type of healer who's overall contribution to raid survival is just as valuable as the stronger direct healing holy priest/pala & resto druids/shaman

 

Ravenmace

You forget that CoH is no longer limited to the target's group, but will heal EVERYONE near your target, I see a lot forgetting this change.

The Druid's new spell flourish, heals a third of the amount of CoH at it's level 80 rank, altho it seems to have a wider range and no limit on who it affects, but still CoH is direct healing Flourish HoT that heals for a lot less

 

Ravenmace

well said, it's no point panicking yet, and if you look closely at the wording of the new spells for each class, there is alot more to be excited about than not, unless if u were a fire mage. It seems that blizzard is indeed trying to stop you from spamming just one spell, they've done this with CoH priests now, and this is not to mention the fact CoH is no longer limited to your target's group but will heal everyone near your target. but gone are your spam days so you have to be that more skillful or at least have more rotation.

Do you not notice the extra importance returned to Rejuvenation? So now druids have a strong reason to include that spell more often than before, ensuring that indeed you have more variation.

THe same has been done with the dps classess, balance druids will benefit more with alternating some wraths with starfire rather than just starfire spam, they've made destruction locks use of fire spells a lot more viable do you're not just spamming shadow spells or really shadow bolt, making some of the dead playstyles obsolete and more involved than previously. It's looking bright imo.

 

Finkum

No one is forgetting this. Many of us are, however, disputing how useful the tradeoff is.

As I suggested previously, it would make more sense to put an additional deep holy talent "Empowered Prayers: Your next PoH or CoH spell has its mana cost increased by Y, healing done increased by X, and affects all friendly targets within it's perimeter. 8 sec cooldown." You could even engineer it such that using the entire raid version puts your normal Coh/PoH on the 8 sec cooldown giving you an interesting tradeoff for using it.

 

Flipside1300

One thing that might be very interesting is if they were to give paladins a spell like an anti-consecrate, basically a patch of ground that aoe heals whoever is on it. This would help round out the aoe healing styles with something different, but definitely a paladin feel. Keep it on the melee or ranged and it would certainly change dynamics, and stacking it with CoH, chain heal, flourish and lightwell (you heard me, lightwell, not lolwell) and all 4 healing classes could take part in healing up a raid.

I really do think that adding more aoe healing and damage abilities for classes that lack them is the way Blizzard seems to be going and I think this is a good thing. By making these aoe's situation and/or unique, there will be a time and a place for all of them to shine and synergy to be had.

On another note, why no disc priest love? Unless I'm totally off my rocker, Grace, will reduce tank damage by up to 9% and increase healing by up to 9% when fully stacked. If a buff that big goes live, why would any raid not want to have 1 disc priest for grace, pain suppression, power infusion, rapture (healing mana battery anyone?) and DI. Especially with the changes to spirit, DI is a no brainer, but why not convert one of your holy priests to disc and have the best of both world?

 

Finkum

Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you Ravenmace but I take issue with this argument too.

The only reason that a holy priest will spam CoH and nothing else is if the encounter mechanics put out mass AoE damage to everyone or repeatedly damage a specific group of people. Even then I would say that a priest that didn't also use ProM, Binding Heal, the occasional Shield/Flash Heal/Renew is playing poorly.

The way to make priests be more than a one-button class (incidentally I do not concede that this is currently the case at all) is NOT to put a cooldown on spammable ability X but to design the encounter(s) such that proper use of other skills is necessary/effective.

Anyway I do not think the change made to CoH is the result of the developers saying "All holy priests do is spam CoH and we need to fix this" (if this were true God knows what's in store for resto shaman). Rather for as-yet unknown reasons the developers decided to change CoH to affect the entire raid and to balance this change they are forced to either make the spell very very expensive, heal for a great deal less, or put a cooldown on it.

 

Ravenmace

Certain things to note about the druid btw.

Imp MotW is down to 2 points, but, the final rank has drastically imp in value to actually scale with the TBC and WotLK leaps.. final level 80 rank gives you 745 AC, 37 to all stats 54 to all resistance, the previous rank was something ridiculous like 14 all stats, 25 all res, and 450 ac, don't remember the exact values.

another previously buff made useful is Thorns, Thorns final rank now dishes out 140 damage wen being hit, which now scales with big stamina hike TBC introduced, making it useful, Thorns never scaled to level 60 when it should have, what was even more ridiculous was when TBC had the big Stamina jump, it still stayed at a value only meanignful on a level 30 player, so at last Thorns becomes decent buff to have on a tank. Balance druids speccing brambles will see thorns get a 75% samage increase and the ability to daze a target affected by it's damage which gives it a nice pvp benefit.

Looks also like Tiger's Fury and Rake are back on the Feral druid dps cycle, no longer is cat dps a mangle/shred bore. Rake has a big damage increase to justify spending it's energy cost and increase or centralising the feral druid as the physical dot master. Tiger's fury no longer costs any energy, is a straight buff, but with a 30 sec cooldown, and a significant damage boost, it goes from the quite useless 40 extra damage to 131 extra damage for it's duration which i'm not sure if that has changed or not.

Balance druids will be pleased to see Hurricane lose that ridiculous cooldown so it's like Rain of Fire and Blizzard even tho mages/locks seldom use that cos they got far fancier AoEs, it should please balance druids who'd be able to at last do continuous aoE. But then so can priests now without speccing Holy Nova with Mind sear

Roots indoors should be fun now, no idea why it took so longer. I expect shaman are getting a CC, and 1 non-totem aoe, i exepct this to be EARTHQUAKE... the CC is unlikely to be Hex and probably a very situational spell. If it is Hex, it will have a cooldown.

I do not believe blizzard want to make shaman strong CCers as I think they believe shaman have a rather overwhelming amount to contribute to groups & raids they shouldn't starve for viability. However i think 1 CC and 1 AOE aside, Shaman will get more pvp based additions in Elemental and Enhancement... what excites me the most is what Restoration shaman will get. that remains to be seen.

 

Ravenmace

you'll want Owlkin frenzy if you were ever AoE tanking. With Starfall instant cast, and Typhoon damaging all it comes in contact with, and at last Hurricane off cooldown, in those 5-mans or 10 mans that don't have Prot palas or Frost Death Knights, you will be doing the AoE tanking.. you will be hit, and tho barkskin won't cover you for much of the second hurricane, going into an owl frenzy you can at least help out out some.

But then, Prot warriors do get Shockwave which combined with thunderclap i think makes them the second most effective AoE tanks behind Prot Paladins.

actually scrap that.. you seen the Frost Death Knight... lolz.. i think feral druids will be the least good at multiple target tanking.. HOWEVER... a fact most Feral druids forget, is they have Barkskin +hurricane.

no1 rule for feral druid in aoe situaitons when you're group tank, tell your group that you'll start the aoe, and only start after your hurricane is nearly over.. you can probably fit in 2 hurricanes with Priest shield timed to come after barkskin expires altho you won't complete it, then shift back into bear form, you'll have the mobs glued to you.


So i've just talked myself out of thinking feral druids are the worse aoe tanks, it looks like all tanks have aoe potential tanking, Palas still the most effective until we see what the Frost Death Knight can do.