Leviathon

I'd assume it could be given to bear pets.

 

Prinsesa

That's what I thought as well, and it certainly fits the new healing spell ranks:

Holy Light rank 11: 2321 average
Holy Light rank 12 (WOTLK): 3450 average, 48% increase

Golden Spellthread: 66 +healing, 22 +damage
Golden Spellthread: 35 +healing and damage, 46% decrease

Shoot me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, but jacking up base healing values by 40%* would seem to make up for the 40% loss in +healing after everything gets converted.

Scaling would definitely take a hit, as base values are no match for gear inflation past a certain point, although it remains to be seen whether we'll actually see that point of inflection within WOTLK's lifetime.

*I've only looked at Paladin and Priest spells, but one other thing I did notice is that Flash of Light, Renew and Prayer of Mending all only got an 11-13% increase, whereas everything else got much larger: Greater Heal's 41% at the low-end and Prayer of Healing's 67% at the high end.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Ellyh

Well if they do away with +healing as a separate stat they would have to go back and rebalance one hell of a lot of instances. Everything from outlands on was balanced around healers having large +heal values. None of the raid content from Kara onwards could be realistically attempted under such a system, they would have to depower all the dungeon mobs to compensate for the loss of power from healers.

Now, top class healers can heal most of the 5 mans in outlands in their levelling gear, but it is much much harder than in dedicated healing gear.

Even if they do homogenise the gear like this you still need to make "Healer" and "DPS" versions of all cloth as the dps want's Hit, crit etc and healers want regen. otherwise you end up with mishmash gear with a lot of wasted stats for everyone.

The other downside of this is that you make it even harder for offspecs to help out as much more of your throughput comes from talents not gear. This would particularly hurt when levelling. I've healed my way from 60-70 as a shadow priest and it can be done with healing gear, but I would have really struggled if I only had my spellpower set rather than my healing set.

 

LiquidHAL

If they are planning this, I just hope they adjust the drop rates accordingly. In our raids we already have 7 people rolling on caster gear (2 mages, 2 warlocks, 2 shadowpriests, oomkin). Meanwhile we have one DPS warrior, and DPS plate seems to drop as often as caster gear. Now if caster gear and healing gear were the same, we'd have 14 people rolling on the same drop. Not exactly ideal.

 

Asimo

Oh hell yes. I'd be leveling a dwarf hunter then, if so. C'mon, you have to admit the WoW opening cinematic was awesome there...

 

Malleus

I think someone may have made a datamining error there. It makes zero sense to turn the Aldor-specific Golden Spellthread into a precise duplicate of the Scryer-specific Runic Spellthread.

 

Prinsesa

This wouldn't be the first time old instances would have their balance drastically affected by ability changes. Maexxna after the HOT stacking change comes to mind.

The initial batch of WOTLK talents had a "convert 20% of your healing into spell damage" for Balance Druids and Shadow Priests, making a Gladiator's Salvation worth exactly as much as a Gladiator's Gavel in spell damage.

It was another shot at homogenization: Have the healing-caster hybrids wear healing gear and give them talents to adjust their itemization to make it equal to DPS gear, except that wouldn't work, because there's no spell hit on healing gear.

Now it seems like they're going the other way around: Remove +healing as a separate stat, increase base healing to compensate, then have the casters wear DPS gear. Priests get talents making crits more useful while healing beyond just Inspiration, all casters start to value SPI somehow, etc. etc. to reduce wastage.

Again, this is only my theory behind those changes, but that's the impression I got from all these design decisions.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Roywyn

They could just change the modifiers accordingly. GHeal currently gets 86% scaling of +heal.
If +healing is scrapped and replaced by 53% of it as damage, and GHeal would change to scaling with 162% of +damage, then nothing would change.

Someone said that Empowered (Healing) Touch was changed from +20% to +40% scaling.
Might be an indication of adapting (~doubling) the scaling with +damage.
The Empowered Healing talents could follow this it were a change like this.


*Wowwiki: +damage costs 0.855, +heal costs 0.455. Ratios are 0.455/0.855 = 53%, 0.855/.0455 = 188%.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Ellyh

This does seem more plausible than a complete rework of healing mechanics.

The other thing is that if the values of healing don't remain the same by massively boosting the spell coefficient as Roywyn suggests the system you are affecting the most isn't raiding but PvP. Raiding you can tune the incoming damage any way you like, but changing the balance between damage and healing in PvP is a major major change in how your game plays and I could hear the whining and bitching from here in New Zealand.

 

Benita

Same deal for warriors on level 66 only receiving new ranks for MS/BT/SS.

 

• Caniki

It seems to me that the change to healing spells indicates that Blizzard will be doing away with dedicated healing gear.

 

rayijin

I wouldn't be surprised to see changes to coefficients and even new ratings that change depending on spec/stance/some new method.

Imagine stats like this:

Alpha rating: Increases defense rating by 1 if specced protection; Increases critical strike rating by 1 if specced arms
Beta rating: Increases your spell hit rating by 4 if specced shadow; increases your mana/5 by 1 if specced holy/disc

The druid talent changes seen thus far point to rogues and druids using the exactly the same gear, but that's only the start. The changes that can be assumed to occur to crushing blow mechanics are a precursor to how itemization will change, I think.

 

Pleochism

What about hybrids that want to pop on some DPS gear for farming? They'd be "locked" into their main spec.

 

Lhivera

A lot of the changes being made to many classes seem to be designed to dramatically reduce the drive to respec. It seems plausible as well that Inscription will also serve as a disincentive; it's likely that you'll be able to use a limited number of inscriptions in your spellbook (say maybe 4-6?), and thus a respec would likely involve replacing your inscriptions to enhance abilities more appropriate for the new spec.

 

Lamaros

Not that major, really.

We are getting 10 new levels and new abilities, etc. In the face of all the considerable and serious change, another healing change on top? Not really as big a deal as you are making out. Unless it's not tested properly and causes gear issues, etc. But you can say that about anything.

 

Addled

The issue is that respeccing is more important for farming than is a new set of gear. For instance, my alt priest is holy now, with roughly T4ish and above gear. If I need to farm, I do more DPS by respeccing to shadow, and wearing my healing gear, than if I stayed holy, wore DPS gear, and Smite spammed mobs to death. This doesn't solve the issue of healers needing to farm, if anything, it exacerbates the situation.

If Blizzard just made respecs cheaper (and yes, I know: there will be gold inflation in WotLK), that would solve a ton of problems.

More than likely, I'll have to level up a DPS toon to farm for my healer, if Inscription works as you said (and it's a pretty darn good guess).

 

Bismar

2 things:

Warrior Shield Block Change: If this actually goes live, I'm curious what order we will see. The rules for BC, patch 2.0, actually came out about a month before BC did, and this included all the new talents.

If this change went live against current bosses... well that'd be really rough for warriors. So either
a)there won't be a lot of time when 3.0 is active pre-WOTLK,
b) this change won't go live
c) all current bosses will automatically get the presumed "no more crushing blows" change
d) warriors are screwed

As for Druids finally getting an OOC rez, well frankly, I don't see why every class shouldn't have an OOC rez. It's by definition something that rarely effects game balance*, and it's always annoying when most of a party has to run back despite people being alive. Lastly, one of the (many things) that sucks about being a raid healer is that when a raid wipes, 2/3 of the raid goes to read the web or grab a snack, but you have to resurrect everyone.

*Yes it's possible mechanics like stealth+resurrect could be broken in some situations. It really doesn't seem that Blizzard tries to systematically avoid this combination given: soulstone, invisibility potions, Nelf stealthing, summoning, Ankhing, levitate, jumper cables, and rebirth as is. All of these allow some combinations of "getting somewhere without clearing trash, and resurrecting someone". (For instance, how is it worse for a druid to stealth to a boss past trash and rez everyone versus... a druid stealthing to the boss, rezzing the priest, who then rezzes everyone?)

 

Copernicus

The latest patch included a new version of Amplify Magic (spellID 51054). "Amplifies magic used against the targeted party member, increasing damage taken from spells by up to 1000 and healing spells by up to 2000."

I think I've given up trying to parse the spell database for meaning. Because there are only two options - either the game is changing so much that buffs and healing can't be figured out OR Blizzard is deliberately messing with anyone who is trying to look through the Alpha client information.

 

uber

Blizzard has gone on record saying that you will be allowed 6 inscriptions; 4 Major and 2 Minor.

Major Inscriptions will be the ones that everyone is excited about, the added damage to Shadowbolt, the Fireball knockback etc. Minor Inscriptions will be mostly trivial, removing reagent costs and the like.

 

Lhivera

So presumably, unless there actually aren't enough inscriptions for Frost Spells specifically to let a Frost mage stack up four Majors for his primary school (which seems unlikely), respeccing to Fire is going to mean replacing your Frost-specific inscriptions with Fire-specific inscriptions.

 

Cranberry

Given that they are adding a new spellbook page, it's entirely possible that "used" inscriptions will be toggleable from that page. I.e., you can have four inscriptions for both specs, but only four of the total can be active at a time.

 

Deathwing

Remove reagents you say? I would love to remove a the reagent cost from a few my spells, that would be huge.

Well, ok, not huge, but definitely not minor.

 

PsyBomb

Blizzard has said that the 2 minor Inscriptions are going to be purely cosmetic. I believe someone dug up a spell ID somewhere that colored Blessing of Protection blue. Others are assuming the much-begged-for green fire for warlocks will be among them, as well. They also said that there is going to be an individual page (Spellbook? Character tabs?) for your Inscriptions. Thing is, nothing has yet been said other than vague hints at what the greater ones will DO. Even more so, nobody knows if it'll work like gems or like gear slots, and (even more importantly) nobody knows if the Inscriptions will be Unique-Equip.

That last is what I'm getting at, here. If the inscriptions are NOT unique or unique-equip, then it doesn't really matter if there is only 2 for each spec of each class. A mage would stack 4 identical inscriptions for his most-used spell and spam the heck out of it at every opportunity.

By the way, my personal assumption is that Inscriptions are going to work like gem sockets, and will be unique-equip. This will let people customize themselves for their spec without allowing TOO much overpower (4 stacked Shadowbolt power ups, anyone?), and would also fit the flavor of it. That, and it would help promote the new profession.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Grizlor

I can't be the only one groaning at the thought of druids, with their extreme CC and escapability, getting a res usable in the arena.

 

Prinsesa

Only if you look at it from a level 70, TBC standpoint.

Warlocks are getting Cripple, Warriors are getting Leap, etc.

Part of that CC and escape is Feral Charge, which is being denied to Restos and being given to Feral Cats.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler