ZulazeeluIcecrown

Yes, these numbers don't make much sense unless they are going to flatly prohibit downranking. Maybe that's in the pipe? I can tell you for Hunters it's almost like they're trying to force Hunters to take Intellect on gear through the mana costs, but unless they change the spell mechanics to match Warrior/Rogue ability mechanics (making downranking literally impossible), I can't see it working out.

 

flyingtoastr

What the hell? Right now our max rank Flash of Light (VII) costs 180 mana and heals for a base of 458 to 515 (average 486.5). That gives it a heal:mana ratio of of about 2.703. This new max rank costs 420 mana with an average base of 620 for a ratio of 1.476, half of the current ratio.

Either Blizzard is throwing out the idea of pallys being efficient healers or they want us to downrank everything (rank VII will still be getting about a 40% +heal coefficient at level 80 so there isn't much lost by ignoring the new ranks).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Arentios

Everyone seems to be getting this sort of treatment.

The cynic deep (and shallowly) inside of me wonders if the concept is like this:

+Healing naturally increases the efficiency of spells. Everyone (casuals, raiders, pvpers) has far better gear than they did a year or two ago, and currently spells are getting more and more efficient as a result. It's not unspeakably hard for a druid to get a around a 20:1 mana:healing ratio for a single stack of lifebloom. If Blizzard feels they'd like to return things to how they used to be, one viable way of doing it is to increase the base mana cost of spells, thus sliding efficiency back down the curve.

Alternatively, they might be doing this to try and encourage down ranking more, by putting a hefty premium on the highest end spells, but given the penalty on downranking, that still would be an attempt to push efficiency back.

 

Ravenfire

A hunter based Inscription?
Venomous Mana(Glyph Passive): Grants your Viper Sting ability an additional 15% chance to resist dispel effects.

Potential new hunter talents
Silent Hunter(Rank 1):Reduces threat from all attacks by -5%.
Silent Hunter(Rank 2):Reduces threat from all attacks by -10%.
Silent Hunter(Rank 3):Reduces threat from all attacks by -15%.

Superior Aspects(Rank 1): Allows Aspect of the Beast and 1% of the effect of Aspect of the Monkey to be shared with the Hunter's party.

 

Corronach

They need to walk a fine line, because on my paladin mana is very tight without a shadow priest. Sunwell fights are an exception because of the enormous amount of raid damage. But it is far to early to speculate until we see our new abilities and talents.

 

Exemplar

If people are correct about Stamina not vastly increasing, then it sounds like healing Oh Shit buttons have increased, but otherwise we'll continue playing BC and use our BC spells in WotLK.

If they expect us to mainly use our new heals, then both Stam and Int (and regen) are going to need another huge jump like vanilla->BC. Average around 50% more base heal and who knows how ungodly +heal on gear. If Health Pools aren't larger, then we overheal ridiculously, or downrank and can go from 20% to max on a tank easily. If Health Pools are indeed bigger and we have to spam these new max ranks... we need a lot more mana and a lot more regen to keep up.

I'm worried for paladins. They're going to focus on increasing spirit mechanics for everyone, right? Paladins don't have spirit on plate. And we'll start to be annoyed if they add it.

 

Ja7us

Huh? If they add spirit on plate, it will be added at the same time as the talents and abilities designed to take advantage of it. How is that annoying?

 

nfw

Of course, I suppose to get most of those they give up MS. But hey, 31/0/40 would be viable right? (You'd basically get everything I listed except for the AoE stun on a 20 second cooldown).

Edit:
Ha, I forgot one more important thing about Protection warriors. Their charge/intercept/intervene will dispel any snare/binds from them![/quote]

Unless shockwave is on its own DR (it should for a 51 point talent), it's a lackluster PvP talent. On the other hand, the buffs and the extra 10 talent points might make one hand MS build, 33/11/23+4, at least for 1v1, BG and world PVP.
Also, will we be seeing warrior AOE grind with Bloodbath?

 

Gokey

Woot!, 5% dodge aura for the tanks! Good for underprivileged hunters everywhere. Bad for hunters that finally have their own group.

 

flyingtoastr

It would be annoying because we already have our item budgets stretched with spell crit (an incredibly expensive stat). Now if they remove the crit for spirit and replace Illumination with a Meditation-style talent then it would work, but right now we just don't have to budget to split for another stat.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Douglas

I'd almost bet on it.

IMO, a lot of the less serious players don't downrank at all, ever, and you can actually get pretty far that way. It's not an obvious thing to do, and nothing in the game teaches you to do it, and this matters particularly for people who reroll healers. They might be thinking about prohibiting downranking and then tuning encounters based on that as a mechanism for making more content more accessible to... less thorough players.

 

Fiola

The devil's in the details.

If they did
-Paladin base ability: "50% Mana regen in 5 second rule"
-Make spirit cheaper on items, just like Sta became cheaper in TBC
-Etc

There's a lot of stuff they could do to make spirit work. That said, we don't even know if they want to do spirit for paladins or not. Do they still want to do healing plate, when there's 1 out of 3 classes that even wants it?



I think the higher mana costs of spells indicate that they may want to shift to a higher mana regen model, instead of the current "infinite mana for the duration of the fight, pot every cooldown" model.

 

impossible!

It's obvious at this point that SPI is getting an overhaul come the expansion. The change that came with Sunwell was the first step. Some of the new talents and spells for mages and warlocks that work off the stat is further proof. Re-itemizing come WotLK is the final step.

But, like you said, why bother with SPI on healing plate if it's isolated to a single class? The same could be said for shamans and mail. It's almost certainly why paladins and shamans haven't been implemented yet; they've either designed themselves into a corner, or, are in the process of re-working the class altogether.

 

Prinsesa

Am I reading this right? Holy Shield's higher ranks are offering more damage for the same mana?

Also, the presence of two rank 2 Seals of Blood are ... intriguing at best.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

rhea

If they wanted to prevent downranking, they would just delete the lower ranks from your spellbook

 

talzar

What happens when people decide not to train the new ranks of spells and continue using their current ones?

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

Hmm, if that talent is real then it's extremely likely that Feign Death will be changed, probably a five minute cooldown instead of thirty seconds.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I think Silent Hunter and Superior Aspects were both TBC talents that were scrapped before release

 

swills

Does anyone know the cast time of Nourish yet? I'm hoping/assuming/praying it's either instant or 1.5s.

 

Starfire

I disagree.

Just playing on my druid 3 years ago I realized that my new rank of spells healed for too much and that it was better for me to use 1-2 ranks lower so I wouldn't overheall.

On that note, even on my mage... the idea of a 1 second rank 1 frostbolt vs. a 2.5 second frostbolt seemed good to get off a quick snare.

 

Addled

I'm guessing these are new pet talents. If so, we could be seeing hunters use a more varied stable of pets. For instance, a hunter in 5mans with a scorpid pet (guessing here) has another CC with Pin. Dust Cloud-capable pets (guessing maybe flamingos/raptors/etc?) would be pretty good for raids, if the effect works on raid trash (probably not on bosses though). Nether Shock capable pets would be terrific for PvP, hunters get the equivalent of a felhunter without the dispel ability.

 

• Playered

Im hoping something is done about spell pushback then, Hunter pets are bad enough now without an actual interupt on a 6sec CD aswell.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

If I recall correctly, most of these "pet abilities" were datamined from the BC alpha client too. That is, they've been around for a long time. That's not to say they won't be used, of course, but I'm positive that "Pin" isn't new, for example.

 

bellator

The thing i don't get with the new ranks of heals and their mana costs.

In it's current state, if new encounters in wotlk require spam healing (which had become the trend in tbc) of these new heals then there is no way with current mechanics that healers can keep going for any sustainable duration. If however spam healing of these heals is not needed, healers will just downrank and increase rate of healing due to the greatly increased efficiency.

It seems a lose lose situation at the moment for these new ranks of healing. There has to be some extra mechanical changes that is not known at present.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

It's not just the healing spells. As I pointed out earlier, at least for Hunters even the damage spells don't make sense. Steady Shot rank 3 was tremendously more expensive for less than double the effect, and this was true of every ability. So for this to make sense we're definitely missing some information. Here's some speculation:

1.) Intellect will receive the same treatment Stamina got in BC, and our mana pools will all get tremendously larger. Though for Hunters the problem will still be "Why not downrank and wear all leather DPS gear?" So I'm not 100% sure this is a real possibility.

2.) There will be a total change to the mechanics when leveling up. Instead of visiting a trainer and buying new ranks, you'll be given new ranks automatically on level up. The old ranks will be deleted from the spellbook, even for mana-using classes.

Speculation number 2 does adequately explain everything. However, it would certainly be a dramatic change!