Douglas

As an aside, does this remind anyone else of some of the mechanisms for earning titles and such in LotRO?

I look forward to more stuff like this in the game. I know some crazy players who, instead of pushing the endgame curve, obsess over things like collecting every mount, collecting every pet, observing every in-game event, taking particularly striking screen shots, stuff like that. They'll eat this stuff up like candy.

 

Ravenmace

tbh.. the points overload is my only problem with the balance build atm.. and the resto tree.. i am of the philosophy that at 41-44 pts u should have pretty much exhausted the tree or very nearly, and have 15-20 points available to invest in another tree... each other tree should be able to provide advantages to your role whiles you are performing in it's role, or simultaneously buff your role and it's role, and last but not least, provide a suitable vehicle or mechanic when you can spend time performing that other function. This really should be for all classes. Like it kinda is for locks atm.

for e.g. if Balance/Feral was fixed, you would need only 41 pts or at most 44 pts in balance, investing 20 pts in feral should allow you to once in a while have some benefit to your casting from meleeing that can work well in raids. for e.g. if it was mana on melee u got from meleeing in cat or bear form as a balance druid, then the feral tree would have additions to its talents that made your 15secs of melee every 5 mins of casting be powerful enough to compensate for not speccing intensity and compensate for the damage loss spending 15secs meleeing would yield. an e.g. of compensating for the damage lose would be to make auras last for about 15secs when out of the main form, allow your spell damage to convert to attack power for a short time while in cat/bear form so your dps loss is not that drastic (remember your feral damage would be boosted by feral talents too) and maybe a talent that converted your combo points/lacerate stacks to extra +spell damage for a short period when you switch back to caster/moonkin form. Then you could make the mana you regen scale with the melee damage you do or your melee attack power meaning you'd be taking more damage feral talents but for gaining mana as your feral dps will still be pretty weak without the 20-51 feral talents and extra feral gear.. So you get this sort of synergy.

Likewise you could do similar things to make Feral work fine with balance. and resto work with feral as well as it does with balance, because for resto, you have no damage, so damage comes from either melee thru the feral tree or dps range casting thru balance.

There is no reason why balance can't have an occasional use to melee, atm, almost the entire feral school is useless to it, same with restoration and feral, your main task as balance is to range dps, so you do that most of the time, having a well timed 15odd secs every 5min to meleeing will put it back in line with original design philosophy, afterall at level 30 you nuked quite a lot, but meleed a bit, you shouldn't lose all of that... no class currently exist where the majority of a school becomes obsolete... it is something i don't see other classes have. If you specialize in one tree, you focus on the spell schools abilities that tree buffs. BUT, your other spell school abilities you levelled up which don't just disappear or become obsolete, they become less useful, but you still use them. Can you ever say a shadow priest never uses many holy or discipline spells? in fact once in a while be it in pvE or PvP, solo grinding or outdoor, he does, you can't say a holy priest never uses most of his shadow spells, fade, the dps ones while grinding .. yes not much use in raids but still there is a use.. when would you ever see a balance druid claw/maul/ravage/rip/rake/lacerate/maim and in total about 40% of it's total ability arsenal? that's the thing it's not even useful once in a in a while, so basically your class becomes less varied at the higher level. Spell casting is the focus for balance, but because it's a druid it should once in a while have a use for it's other spell school

WotlK is looking really good for most classes I've seen. Druid wise the major remaining issues as a spell caster are finally addressed, only small issues from now on, same with Feral and same with Restoration, it's good for their roles, they are as competitive as the other classes' builds in their roles but they are still the only ones that have redundant abilities in their opposing school. Feral at least will use balance spells like hurricane, thorns, roots, cyclone, hibernate, innervate, remove curse occasionally, but until this is addressed, balance will never maul/claw/rake/tigers fury/swipe/lacerate/maim/rip/demo roar etc neither would resto. the most you'd see is cat/stealth or bear/bash and the travel forms. This is what i hope they will now address now that it seems they have at last made each of the druid builds on par with the other class builds in their roles, tbh balance was the only one not quite there, but WotLK fixes this.

 

◊ Regen

While these are fun to complete and can be a good timesink I wonder if this will turn into purely a timesink or have some benefit as they do in Lotro or even TF2 (New class achievements). I didn't play Lotro for long but they all seemed fairly attainable compared to some of the new medic achievements in place (although in an MMO setting something extremely challenging and non-cheesable has potential to be alot of fun).

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Ravenmace you really need to clean up your grammar and capitalization. Thanks.

 

flyingtoastr

Getting away from the class discussions for a minute, someone posted a nice series of screenshots of Stormwind Harbor from actually in game. It does look a little goofy because there is no water or walls, but I did notice a little something in one of the screenshots.

It appears that the harbor may not be connected to Stormwind directly but rather by a walled path (a la ancient Athens). This would preserve lore nicely as well as give us a nice and easy way to get to Northrend.

There is also a new ship model that looks quite fierce.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Shuth

Possibly an instance portal at the border of Stormwind City with an image of a leading away path. Vice versa for the other side perhaps? A kind of shortcut like the flight from Ironforge -> Isle of Quel'danas.

 

Ravenmace

it looks like those are Dwarven Destroyers, or the Dwarven ships, or Dwarf/Gnome collaboration.

 

bv728

Icebreaker prow on it, I do believe. They seem to have it 'feel' right; this is a port you'd need Van Cleef's Dreadnaught to siege.

 

Fellwraith

It's a little early to be guessing about tank group compositions, but I can pretty much guarantee almost every warrior and deathknight will want a shaman in their group. Both of us will have AP scalars on our threat generation. If you pair that with windfury totems and strength of earth, it's a significant threat boost. 15% extra hp is nice to have, more threat is usually essential once you get to late-game raiding.

I think it also makes more sense to have 2x caster groups with a balance druid in one group and an elemental shaman in the other, than to assume you'll only have one group with big modifiers and another with none. Most raids will probably still have one shadowpriest and total of at least 5 mages/locks, that points to 2 caster groups.


Separately, it's worth noting that the warrior heroic strike ability gets a damage bonus against dazed targets. It's a nice side-bonus to the improved thorns ability if it's the same type of daze effect as shieldbash.

 

Addled

Because CC is useful in raids right? You're missing the whole point of Balance druids getting CC.

Balance druids/dps shamans/dps paladins do not get 5man/heroic group invites because they have no CC. So far (at least for druids), Blizzard is fixing this by making druid CC available indoors. If this fix goes live, then I expect ret paladins and enh/ele shamans to get CC as well. If they don't, expect a ton of QQ on WoW forums.

If anything, druids are now slightly overpowered, since even Restoration and Feral druids (at the beginning of the pull) can CC now as well. Blizzard really should move the Improved Roots abilities deep into the Balance tree.

I'm guessing you're talking about this picture: WoWScrnShot_052208_183615copy.jpg - Image - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

More than likely, the dwarven destroyer and the ship adjacent to it are simply eye candy; if you look at the Theramore/Menethil/Booty Bay docks, the ships that are meant for player transport dock perpendicularly to the docks, so they can get in and get out easily. The ships that remain stationary are docked parallel to the docks. I would bet that players will use the Night Elf-themed ship on the bottom right corner of the image to get to Northrend.

EDIT: I'm stupid. After looking at the other images, particularly WoWScrnShot_052208_183556copy.jpg - Image - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting , there seems to be a second dwarf destroyer docked perpendicularly on the longest dock existing. So I'll bet that we'll use that boat for Northrend.

 

Starfire

Eh? Correct me if I am wrong but isn't that exactly what your class did in Molten Bore?

40 people, 5 minutes per a buff (sans Imp. Salvation, that was 15!) and 1.5 seconds per a buff. It would take you 1 full minute to buff everyone, leaving you only 4 minutes to actually heal before you had to buff them again.

Personally, I think there's something rather nifty about that. At the sametime, I can see how it gets tedious and boring, very fast. But I think its kind of a divergent game play... and if this -truely- is what Blizzard intended they really should amp up paladins with more specific/situational buffs. You know, more things like Blessing of Protection, and better version of Blessing of Sacrifice... re-add Blessing of Spell Warding. Give them something like Power Infusion. You know? Make them work something like Bard / Redmage from FFXI. Game play designed purely on support, with heals for emergeies, but the primary duty to be situational/specific buffs to help the group. I think this is viable, but they would need a wider array of spells.

Something that is a support class not directly becoming a healing class.

 

talzar

Or they could just have the gnomes build another track for the tram that takes you to the harbor.

 

flyingtoastr

I'll forgive you since you've clearly never played a paladin and you think its "nifty" to do nothing but be a buffbitch for a minute than sit in the corner for the next 4.

Yes, that is all we did, buff and spam decurse. It was not fun. The only redeeming part of it was that we didn't heal enough to make speccing holy worthwhile so everyone was Ret.

Being a support class does sound like fun. But Paladins are not a support class. Hell, Dis Priests have more support spells than we do. At the moment holy Paladins have jack shit going for them other than powerful long term buffs which don't require you to actually be in the instance. I'm honestly surprised guilds aren't just parking pallys outside instances to buff people in between wipes and replacing their raid slot with a healer who can actually bring something to the table.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Rasputin

Regardless of how neat this might be, that's not at all what the class has been. What flyingtoastr says is absolutely true. When forming a raid, a lack of paladins is a concern only because you won't have 3 blessings. A lack of shaman or priests or druids is a concern because of healing. There is no niche for holy paladins. They no longer have the efficiency they had pre-BC due to the Illumination nerf and the need to use Holy Light a great deal. They have NO group healing, no instant heal to speak of(please do not say Holy Shock). The only reasonable position a Holy Paladin can fill is that of a tank healer, and there is a limited requirement for that in every given encounter, as well as the fact that every other healing class can do it on a similar level.

I truly hope that the delay in releasing Paladin talents is due to a massive revamp of mechanics. But that's just a hope; they could as easily just be saving it for a later push to cut down on the testing they want their actual testers to do.

 

Amera

Another nice example would be Paragons from Guild Wars, who basically support the team via shouts that have various beneficial effects from regaining energy to healing to buffing damage. However, in order to support those shouts, they generally have to be dealing damage (in this case, throwing a spear) to build up adrenaline to shout with. It's actually really nice synergistic system because the shouts restore energy based on the number of people they affect.

But this is really divergent from what the class currently is, and more importantly, how specs work. This type of paladin would basically be a Ret paladin who DPSd the mob and intermixed buffs with attacks - you wouldn't even need caster gear in this model. But classes like this do have some really problematic weaknesses like:
1) Terrible alone, or in small groups, since buffs scale better with more people (already a problem with paladins)
2) Unless the buff management is its own interesting rotation/cycle, it is a really boring class for most people to play. Casting a buff and being mostly afk for minutes in between recasts isn't interesting; maintaining buffs on as many people as possible through mana/GCD management would be.
3) Support/buffing classes in general are incredibly unpopular. Paragons are one of the least popular classes in Guild Wars in most areas despite being effective; enchanters were underplayed in EQ. It's difficult to sell this playstyle to a large number of people.
4) It's really hard to make effective in PvP. The buffs need to be so good they are threatening, or the class will be really weak due to poor damage and generally no CC. As a comparison, consider that vampiric touch is one of the most powerful PvE abilities yet its amazing component, the mana restoration, isn't really threatening in PvP. The same thing applies to most paladin blessings - they are nice, but rarely impact a battle at all, especially a small scale one.

 

Ravenmace

yeah.. i was talking about that pic... the ships look quite funky.. i remember seeing the Thalassian Destroyers in TBC and the Darnassian Voyagers..and thinking wow! how beautiful and very Elven like, this i like even more. I just hope they really decide to do over the 8 original race graphics and animation with such finesse as they're capable, man do most of the alliance races need serious makeover.. human male graphics and NELf male animations are one of the worse in the game imo, and to be honest, a seroius makeover to character appearance and animation will get me even more excited than class abilities.

Dunno how much whining there will be over the CC issue if shaman/Palas don't get one, i mean feral druids and resto druids can use roots in all the outdoor instances currently from Zul'Farrak upwards, but the don't, i doubt it will change much for them at all, and druids have always had roots and long before arguments regarding having CC on Shaman/Palas arose, and have been moaning for roots indoors since the beginning. The use of roots in outdoor instances has shown it's not game breaking at all, it's always been there anyway, so druids having it indoors now i doubt will have much bearing on whether they give CC to Shaman/Ret Palas. Saying that, I will be VERY surprised if Shaman don't get a CC, and very surprised if it is as good as polymorph, it will likely have some restriction. Ret paladins ..hmm.. would probably get a CC 51pt talent like Repentance lasting about 20secs or rather an improved repentance extending it's duration for 5/10 secs.

 

• frmorrison

Holy Light is still a very powerful heal (HL 11 can crit for 40% of a tank's HP), I don't think any other class can match the HPS of HL spam, and imp Devo Armor (~1200 armor) is pretty nice. Plus JoL/JoW 100% uptime if you have a Ret Pally around is useful.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

lairpie

I think paladins could be a vastly better class with a few things. First, you're right, they need a niche, and they don't have one at all. At a lower level of raiding that's fine. They make ok tank healers, but a resto druid's hots and a holy priest's gh spam is almost inarguably better than 2 paladins spamming, and it only takes up 1/2 the druid's time. Further, they have to stop moving to heal where druids and priests can do quite a bit while moving. Their mana regen is based around crit, but a non overhealing crit heals critting on tanks probably means the tank was going to die had that heal not crit. With watershield and massive spirit buffs, paladins probably actually have the most trouble with mana.

So what can they get that would not stomp on druid/priest/shaman territory, but give paladins a defined and useful healing role?

1. Consecrate heals. I completely stole that from whoever, not claiming any credit, but that's a pretty good idea. Out go the days of CoH / brain heal chain casting, in comes a coordinated effort of consecrates, flourishes, coh, chain heal as the counter to raid damage.
2. Make blessings require you to be in the instance. That's a no brainer and they need to put that in regardless of anything else.
3. Agreed that bosac, bop shouldn't overwrite your existing blessing. That would allow holy palys to sac the tank, toss in a new rank of bosac at 200 a hit, and poof, palys have a source of better mana regen from SA and a unique contribution to the raid. We already have our ret paly doing this on fights where the tank has enough threat to not need bom and its a lot of extra mana on some fights, and at least something in all fights. Then every once in a while a druid throws the paly a single lifebloom to top him back off. Its not the hot they've been crying for for 3 years, but it does serve some of the same purpose.
4. Change divine favor to: Instantly completes the current cast and guarantees it to be a crit. In addition, the paladin will gain 200 spell haste rating for 6 seconds. (numbers TBD). This gives paladins an actual role in tank healing that isn't just the left over job. Whether they use it in response to a big hit on the tank, as an effective NS-Holy Light on whoever, and the haste to catch up on healing the tank, or plan to pop it during an enrage or such, it gives paladins a measure of control over their healing output. As holy as they are, the fact that paladins currently just have to pray to god for a crit at the right time is stupid.

Brewmaster of WBC

 

Zzbzq

Frost DKs seem to have a weapon buff at 11 points in frost. If we believe Bliz' suspicious assertion that frost talents are for tanking, most DKs might not be using windfury. Hopefully windfury will only work off autoattack in the expansion as well.

It makes more sense to load up all your group buffs into one group so that the coefficients multiply each other.

I suspect that paladins will be getting a major healing move at a 51 point level and at least 1 good heal standard. I have a suspicion that pallies will be getting an instant or very brief casting, insanely mana efficient group heal on a 20-30-ish cooldown. Reason being that, if they're smart, they'll want to add base abilities that all specs can use. Pallies need group heals this expansion, that's a given, but if you make it fast and nearly free, all specs can use it, so just add a cooldown and if necessary let talents reduce it.

On another topic, regarding the guy who said shaman should get a weak, conditional CC. I would be disappointed if they don't get a full fledged poly clone like the hex rank 1 in the spell lists. With 10 classes and a new resolve to have a lot of 10-man instances, you can't force people to have 1 mage in every group. Because indeed, people would always want to run with like 2 mages and a hunter, because you know that Bliz would have CC oriented pulls, which are always such a harsh difference between easy/impossible depending on if you have CC.

I'm counting on their being more true-CC classes in the game, and shaman is a glaring choice. Ultimately, every spec should be able to fill some sort of role in a 5-man or 10-man. In TBC group damage buffs just don't cut it below the 25-man raid level, as evinced by all the people who LFM dps/cc and only "settle" for dps like shaman when the group is strong/the instance weak enough. I think in Wrath, they want DPS warriors tanking in groups. Moonkins have root indoors and better AEs. That leaves just DPS shaman and ret pallies. I don't know what to do about ret, but you could make them more apt to tank or heal, or give them like a ranged sap for humanoid and undead.

 

thedopefishlives

Imp Devo does not scale. ~1200 armor is nice for a starting-out paladin tank who only has 12k armor in the first place. ~1200 armor on a bear druid, erm, not so much. And while HL11 is a powerful heal, the lack of versatility still pigeonholes us into a specific role in the raid and limits the advantage of bringing more than one holy paladin. Not to complain at all, as I find healing on my pally a very refreshing and challenging exercise, but when I am specced holy, there are a lot of 5-man instances I simply _cannot_ do because of a combination of gear level and excessive group damage.

 

flyingtoastr

Holy Light XI also costs more mana than every heal in the game except max rank Healing Touch (which is used pretty much never) and heals for less (or equal to Healing Wave) than all the other max rank "big" heals. Thanks to our complete lack of regen from our talents (fun fact: paladins are the only mana-based class in the game that has exactly 0 regen talents- and no, Illumination is not regen as you're always spending more mana than it refunds to proc it) almost no paladin can keep up a max rank holy light spam for longer than about a minute (just going from myself with 13k mana, 160 Mp5 and 41% Holy Light Crit I can chain cast HL XI for about 50 seconds before OOM).

If they want to make pallys the main tank healer they need to give raids a reason to want one in. Take Illumination and the Damage Reduction talent from priests and give it to pallys. Make BoSac scale with healing. Make our heals crit at 200% instead of 150%. Revert the Illumination nerf. Make Divine Intervention and Lay on Hands useful for something other than saving repair bills. There are lots of options, but something needs to be done.

EDIT: I went and looked it up and apparently if you spec into it even max rank Healing Touch costs less mana than Holy Light XI. So yeah, you trade HPS for efficiency.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Arentios

Er, ~1200 armor increases time to live by the same amount from 0 armor to the armor cap.

On my paladin (in blues/heroic purples), I've never had a problem with any 5 man, except heroic Kael'thas. A lot of raid damage can be mitigated by intelligent play by the party (not running into orbs on Kael'thas, spreading out on Murmur, etc).

I do feel that Holy Paladins need something in a raiding environment. The 2.4 changes shrunk their niche considerably by boosting druid and priest regen immensly. That is simply from anecdotal observation from fights such as Brutallus and Felmyst where it seems our Holy Paladins have a harder time tank healing than the Holy Priests, and I confess, not from any personal experience.

 

thedopefishlives

Not to venture too far off-topic, but this is exactly my point. A bear druid with 20k health and 30k armor is going to have a bit more of a time to live than a paladin with 10.5k health and 12k armor, yet they both get the exact same benefit from Devo Aura. It gives a bigger relative benefit to the paladin, which is good for him, but gives little incentive for the druid to want the devo aura - especially if there is a good amount of raid damage flying around, which calls for concentration aura instead.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Oddly enough when there's lots of raid damage, paladin efficiency is fine due to spiritual attunement.

I'm pretty sure the devs are aware of the limitations of holy paladins so I'm really interested in seeing in what they'll try out

 

Lujaar

If you'll forgive the wild speculation, Stasis Ward from WC3 would be a strong candidate for a shaman CC, and if Blizzard decides to use an ability from pre-existing lore I think this is the direction they'll go. I sort of envision a totem that sleeps/incapacitates a single nearby target until either the totem dies or someone hits the target, and fires a threat-generating pulse every few seconds (meaning uncontrolled mobs will run over and break the totem).

As for ret paladins, removing or significantly reducing the cooldown on Turn Evil would let a ret pally chain fear undead or demons, without giving the same functionality to a prot paladin (who doesn't want to be hard-casting spells while tanking) or a holy paladin (who doesn't want to be chasing a mob around fearing it while he's the group's sole healer). Without knowing what WotLK dungeons are going to look like though, there's no way to say if a CC that works on undead/demons only would be enough to make ret a decent 5-man spec.

Or, who knows, maybe I'm being overly optimistic. After seeing Magister's Terrace I don't expect much in terms of heroic class balancing. "Hey guys, we made an encounter with 5 untankable mobs that can two-shot your healer and can be completely removed from the fight by polymorph! Our tank/healer/magex3 playtest group said it was awesome!" /facepalm