The main concern about an indoors roots is what happened in vanilla WoW with Scholo/Baron runs. The ability of a priest to CC one mob in every pull made them the best healers by far in those instances. TBC has managed to mostly avoid this, with most dungeons featuring humanoids (very few beasts or undead to be CCed). A notable exception would be Karazhan, especially on Moroes or the Skeletal Usher pulls.

I'm not averse to Roots indoors, especially since it's an inconsistent CC that only works on one sub-type type of mobs (melee only). But it does reflect an issue with granting a role a "core" ability that other classes of that role don't have. The flip-side, of course, is Druids not having an OOC Resurrection - which makes them a less-desired healer.

The other obvious solution is to merge gathering skills and production skills together. Alchemists and Inscribers get Find Herbs and Herbalism; Blacksmiths, Engineers and Jewelcrafters get Mining and Find Herbs; and Leatherworkers get skinning when they train those professions.

The only "problems" with this setup are:

1) The puzzle of what to do with people who currently have a gathering profession, but really, gathering is so easy to level compared to production professions that it's really not a huge deal to simply eliminate them.

2) The question of how gathering levels up if it's a component part of another profession. I think the most elegant solution here is simply to give you both tradeskills and let them level up separately, the way they currently do, and simply occupy one tradeskill slot instead of two. Alternately, gathering nodes could just require you to have one of the associated professions at a given level of expertise. For example, Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Earthroot, Mageroyal, Briarthorn, etc could require Journeyman Alchemy or Inscription to pick, while Kingsblood, Steelbloom, etc require expert-level in those professions, and so on.

3)Gathering skills are more difficult to level than before. This is less a problem as just something different than it used to be; it's always been rather odd do me that leveling gathering skills is so much faster and simpler than their associated gathering skills, anyway.

Keep in mind that Entangling Roots is an unreliable CC that often breaks early, and that unlike shacked mobs, rooted mobs still accumulate threat while CC'd. A moonkin can aggressively re-root mobs to keep them from breaking out early and running right over to the healer, but if a resto druid has that luxury you probably could have just tanked the mob in the first place.

The former does not exclude latter. I see this change as primarily affecting the "smaller" item slots, aka those which currently tend to have 4-5 stats (or in case of trinkets, quite often only two). Stamina, intellect and +damage are approximately of identical value to all casters (assuming +damage is what healeres will also use). In addition, a significant amount of specs seem to be valuing +spirit and +haste approximately identical. Not all specs for all stats perhaps, but pretty close.

And that won't necessarily mean everyone has to use same piece. Where there previous were 3 weaponds:
1 for shadow priests (+damage+haste)
1 for mage/warlock (+damage+crit+hit+haste)
1 for healers (+heal+regen)

You can instead still have 3 weapons:
1 staff
1 dagger
1 sword (if you really want to restrict it to mages/warlocks).

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Allowing multiple classes to use same item does not mean that they'd suddenly dramatically reduce the number of available items. Indeed, this would promote more variation *inside* a class. Where previous a mage would use Illidan staff or Archi sword+offhand, he could now choose also Archimonde staff while a paladin could choose archimonde sword. A warlock could use archimonde offhand. Etc.

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On a completely separate issue, I don't think 1.0 sec global cooldown on lifebloom/rejuvenation will make it to live. Making healers cast spells significantly more often than 1.5 seconds isn't very run in raids in my opinion, it's quite stressful and doesn't let one look at the actual fight enough (you just stare at the small bars).

In the intial Alpha notes there is a ability/spell to throw (paraphrasing here) "your mining pick, causing X damage, ignoring all armor".

If the skill is what it appears, something extra given to miners, it means that Blizzard is thinking about this issue already. If the damage is not insignificant and is on a decent CD, it's be interesting to say the least.

They could always force paladins to wear mail, then give holy paladins some sort of armor bonus spell/talent, similar to Righteous Fury that would amplify their "mail" armor to make it plate level.

Of course, aesthetics would be an entirely different thing...

Personally, I think the most elegant solution to this would be to allow Holy paladins to convert +AP into +Heal... Even at a 1:1 ratio.

If they can actually manage to make it so you only have to carry a single set plus a few assorted pieces to do both healing and spell damage I'll be very happy and my bag slots will be thankful.

It would be a pretty massive boost to the healing power of elemental shamans, shadow priests, and balance druids though so we'll see how they ultimately balance it.

Shamans and Paladins are the notable ones, with Moonkin Druids present as well. I think Hunters will get a slight buff out of it as well. Warlocks who use Demonform will find that change critical.

...if they do give that...nothing is confirmed. This really is tit for tat, balance druids, resto druids have different issues than shaman or paladin do, you can't say give us something because you gave that other class something, it's silly. When the game started not everyone had the same abilities, some had more than others, could do more things than others, or better in one way than another. There are many things that shaman have that druid's don't, far more of the resto shaman's abilities are accessible to it and useful in one way or at one point in time or another than is the case for a resto druid for e.g, do you wish to count? It could be finally blizzard making up for a lack resto druids had compared to others.

But as I continue to repeat, wait till you see what shaman and paladin get, and whether druid's get a combat rez before kicking up a fuss.


Exactly, this is the position most players find themselves in. This is why priests are getting at least 1 AoE, this is why resto druids will get a flash heal and an AoE heal, and why you will see that shaman will get an HoT and Paladins an AoE heal and HoT. It is the reason why some amount of homogenizing appears to be taking place.

they want all classes to be relevant but in different ways, yet at the same times, raids and groups require 3 main things, tank, healer and dps. For groups you want as much accessibility as possible. If you are making content more dynamic and interesting, you will have elements that may force groups to take the only class that can provide it. This is bad for 5-man content so you make that one thing more available in others. Like AoE for e.g., there maybe heavier use of it in all instances, but if 5-mans you could only take a mage and warlock for aoe, then kiss goodbye dps priests, caster druids who are notoriously bad at it, so you give them all some AoE, but keep mages and locks having the most so they don't lose their distinctiveness, you can choose later on to add the balance druid to that list, but at least 5-mans can go with say a warrior, a rogue, a pala healer, a hunter and a priest to the likes of Magister Terrace and not have groups crying for mage or warlock only. This way now they can go through that content with a shadow priest.

When it comes to 25-man raids, well everyone has a function, the fact that the shadow priest has an AoE to it, does not displace a Mage at all, the shadow priest has a different dps function although it can aoe. Same with the balance druid, it can aoe a lot better than before, but it's strength is in AoE utility not quite in AoE damage, that's where the Mages and Locks shine, so really you have to make room for them. Everyone has a place, a Shadow Priest getting AoE does not displace a mage, it makes the shadow priest more accessible in 5-mans and allows groups to go on.

Tanks: Frost Death Knight, Feral Druid, Protection Paladin, Protection Warrior

Ideal design would be for you to be able to go with anyone of these to any 5-man and they be up for all of the instance not be incapable because one lacked a certain feature. However they all have different strengths, In 10-mans still largely 2 would hav e to be able to cover all, so you are still not fussed. In 25-man's there is room for 3 or even 4m now 25-mans would require the strongest available for that niche be present. Warriors all round the best...but you know Death Knights will be the best at AoE tanking, Protection Paladins the best against fast hitting mobs, Feral druid against..(well you fill that one in)

Healers: Restoration Druids, Holy Paladins, Holy Priests, Restoration Shaman.

Same as for tanks, any must be able to do 5-man content, and if you are making 5-man content more interesting you would be throwing in features that require specialist types of healing that only 1 class had access to before. for e.g. you would throw in some bosses or mobs that HoT was vital and made a huge difference, you wouldn't want groups to only go for druid healers now would you, and you won't want to halt the evolution of your design. So you give Paladins and SHaman HoTs also, you only need give them one, that would suffice for 5-mans & 10-mans, in 25-mans Shaman would be focusing on the AoE healing even though druids can now throw in a Flourish, so too would Druids be focusing on their HoT rolling mitigating spike, but shaman would be able to help with a HoT.


So far I'm glad for all the classes I've seen, Priests, Druids, Warriors, and I'm not sad that the old Taboos of "only one class must have this" or "only one must be good at this" are been broken, because the reason they're being changed will actually improve the game. The thing I would have feared would be if I lost my uniqueness, but then my uniqueness in PvE setting is still preserved. Mind Sear AoE though an AoE is very different from Arcane Explosion, Shadow Priest has one, my Fire Mage has 7, a good part of my class is AoEing and i hav emany different things I can do with them. Highest damage and some utility, my uniqueness is maintained in my diversity of aoe and the preservation of my high damage output, not in being the only one able to do it.

To be perfectly honest, there isn't really much of a reason that +heal should be a separate stat from +dmg, or at least one whose itemization value is so much less than other single-element bonuses. The higher value on heal spells can be done via spell coefficients, and that's only necessary if they intend to keep heals scaling faster than DPS (which I'll take as a given until proven otherwise). It helps even out inequities like healers needing DPS gear for non-raid functions, which not only exist but are relevant. My suspicion is that +heal will still remain existent as a stat, but as localized as element-specific damage is now.

There's two ways this can play out from a loot-dropping perspective (or rather, a spectrum with two poles). On the one hand, the heal->dmg conversion could be thinning out loot to help with RNG fuckery, which I'm totally fine with. Getting your loot is easier when there's three possible drops instead of eight.
The other option, is actually an increase in the diversity of caster drops. Yeah, homogenize gear for more diversity, right? Think about it: rather than having one offset damage piece and one offset healing piece in a slot, you could have one high-DMG piece and one high-SPT piece. It's the same amount of gear that's dropping, but now each class has two possible options that match spec and playstyle preferences.
I assume that class sets will be much more specifically optimized with, say, 2% less hit on warlock sets (assuming current cataclysm/supression) and significantly less crit on shadow priest sets.

Maybe it's a dumb concern, but it kind of bothers me that with all the stat consolidation going on, they'll either end up seriously cutting down on the loot table size of raid bosses, or a huge percentage of loot (probably a majority) will be considered automatic shardbait. I don't think it's a problem that different classes use different stats, it's more a problem that classes which use more stats tend to scale better.

Blizzard will think they're useful for everyone, but what will probably end up happening is they'll create 3 caster robes to make sure casters have enough drops, but one of the robes will be better than the other two (it will spread its item budget out better or it won't have excessive spirit or whatever) and thus loot competition won't really change - everyone will want the one good item, and people will pick up the subpar items only grudgingly to wear until they can get their hands on the "best" item. The subpar ones will quickly become shards and we will be back to complaining about the randomness of loot.

(I admit there are ways it could turn out that are much rosier than this, I just don't quite trust them to happen.)

Lootwise I really wish they would just cut down on it alot..... alot of people think its "fun" to see what randomly drops but it's never fun sharding half the shit you get in a run. Get rid of the random token shit and make something like AQ40 minus the scarabs/Idols. Either make 1 token every class uses or 2 tokens that are split 5/5 between the classes and each is a guaranteed drop for the run. Also add in a weapon "token" that drops off the end boss/bosses that has a Main Hand/2 hander available for every class/spec when you turn it in. If you want make the Offset loot still random but make all of it available through a new Badge of Justice system as well. Also keep the T6 setup for armor sets of 2/4 Piece bonuses(maybe 3/5 to prevent stacking) and 8 pieces of armor available in the set(hopefully add this to Pvp as well)


For Example for Naxxramas using the Pre-BC list of bosses.

Patchwerk-1 Wrist Tokens
Grobbulus-2 Wrist Tokens
Gluth-1 Belt Token
Thaddius-2 Belt Tokens

Noth-1 Boot token
Heigan-2 Boot Tokens
Loatheb-3 Helm Tokens

Anub-1 shoulder Tokens
Grand Widow-2 Shoulder Tokens
Maexxna-3 Leg Tokens

Razuvius-1 Glove Token
Gothik-2 Glove Tokens
4 Horsemen-3 BP Tokens

Saphiron-2/3 tokens for Offhand/Ranged/Hunter Statstick Tokens
Kel'thuzad.2/3 Tokens for Main Weapons.

Add in some various Rings/Trinkets/Capes/necks/offset pieces randomly throughout the bosses that are also available through "Badges of fuckrandomloot"

I think the former will happen: Less loot from a boss (7 different bracers from Rage? come on) but the possibility of drops as adjusted for relative use. That is, assuming the [Cuffs of Devastation] can replace the [Bracers of Martyrdom], you might see Rage able to drop two Cuffs to account for how many players will be wanting to wear that (all cloth DPS, plus healers).

I do remember someone mentioning in an interview that they plan to increase the number of drops from 25-man bosses to account for additional players/difficulty in the raid, so perhaps it would be possible that, along with condensed loot tables from casters and healers sharing gear, this would make RNG a lot less painful (5-6 drops not including tier tokens would be stellar, but I doubt we'd see that much of a change).

It could also be possible that there will be multiple items for each slot itemized differently; for example, Bracers A has spell damage and lots of spirit while Bracers B has spell damage, a bit of spirit and crit. Even though one is better for healing and one is clearly better for DPS in the event that all the healers already have their Bracers A a DPS player can at least use them until his chance for a Bracers B, reducing the number of "worthless" sharded drops from getting the same boomkin boots 10 weeks in a row.

This still leaves us with the problem of Holy Paladins though. Holydins want healing but no spec of pally uses spell damage as a primary stat. Perhaps this is another nod to a redesign of the class to be based solely on melee stats and our healing gear will simply share with plate DPS gear (I can dream, right?).

Sounds pretty good but I didn't find collecting multiple gearsets to be something that is dramatically hard. (I have a prot warrior main with multiple tank sets and DPS set & a priest alt who is sometimes holy, sometimes shadow) Regemming the gear would definetly be way harder and more taxing. I hope gear pieces won't be unique if this happens, people like me will need multiple pieces of the same loot for different gemming purposes.
Altough I like the idea of the same or similar gear for multiple specs. This also means that switching role during an encounter might be easier and it also might become a standard tactic on some boss fights which I would very much enjoy personally.

2 things.

Regarding gemming, I do hope they make it a little more flexible. For e.g, how about once you use a gem, it is soulbound to that item, so, you can re-gem the item without destroying the gem. That will allow much needed flexibility in socketed items without hurting the Gem Crafter profession. This way, you will still need new gems for every new item you get, as you cannot re-use a gem you used on one item, on another. It may actually end up being more profitable for gem crafters as now everyone would be getting several gems for each slot of new year gear they get, given that currently, very few ever re-gem because it's quite expensive, and most don't have that piece for too long.

The idea is simple, for certain encounters or instances, depending on my role, i change my gems on my piece. This might mean carrying around a lot more gems, but I love this idea for flexibility, aftera.. why not have a gem pouch like a key ring with unlimited spaces, gems are afterall rather small.

Second thing about itemization was that I hoped they don't get holy paladins wearing cloth or resto/balance druids wearing cloth, same with ele/resto shaman. I hope that advantages for having extra armor would be more apparent in the classes that have them. I had once hoped that paladin healing would invlove a more melee like approach for they had the armor for it, your meleeing healed (seal of light concept) and your healing was more touch related but then I had hoped once that resto druids would heal 80% of the time and do something else like range dps or melee dps/off tank the remaining 20%, but those were back in the days when "what a hybrid is" was still being determined as in-game they had almost 0 end-game realization. Blizzard eventually chose not to mature what I felt was their very unique realization of hybrids and fix it properly, but instead allowed more specialisation, which in it's own way works.

I just hope that they find a useful applications for holy paladins having plate and don't force em to wear cloth, just like WotLK finally has some use for Moonkin's 400%AC when AoEing, which would be undermined if then Moonkins had to wear cloth.

Well, I seem to remember that at one point of time a larger bag for 'soulbound' equipment was datamined, but hasn't made it to live as of yet. Given my current bag usage, I'd be looking forward to that going in for sure, and so would other hybrids most probably.

As an example, right now in my bank/bags I have:
- 1 set resto PvE gear
- Half a set of resto haste gear
- 1 set resto PvP gear
- 1 set elem PvE gear
- 1 set elem PvP gear
- 1 set enh PvE gear
- 1 set enh PvP gear
- 1 set FR gear (before someone asks: tanked Leo, was saved by a new wl recruit from attempting to tank KT)
- 1 set SR gear
- few pieces of miscellaneous resist gear and swoppable trinkets for various purposes
- 1 bag of consumables

Which leaves me maybe about 1 bag's worth of space to go farming with even if I dump everything in the bank, and this is after deleting various tier sets I had been keeping for vanity reasons. Granted, I could delete the elemental sets which are now kind of defunct, but in my guild at least there's always the possibility that I might get asked to play that spec again rather than flip-flopping between enh and resto. I can imagine ferals in particular have it a lot worse, or Swiss Army Knights, so item bloat for hybrids is definitely a concern.

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere yet, but regarding the spell damage/healing change, what happened to the S.Priest and Oomkin talent that gave you extra spell damage based on your healing? Did it just get removed? Do S.Priests and Oomkin just get 20% more spell power (whether healing or not) now?

I wouldn't really like the idea of holy paladins wearing the same gear as DKs, Retris and DPS warriors already do. That's sharing 1 piece with 4 specs where as every other type gets shared with 2-3 specs. It also makes ALL the plate almost the same, only protection would differ. Compared to cloth, leather and mail, they all have a bit more variety even if they made dmg/healing 1:1.
Instead they could make more use of dmg/healing for retris and holy paladins, sharing the gear with 2-3 specs like the rest of the armor types. Holy still gets major advantages from crit, so does retri, it would be pretty easy to combine that gear, make "shockadin" part of retridan (or what ever, unholy dks) and that way viable for example . Also make protection paladins wear the exact same gear as protection warriors. Give protection paladins an AP->spelldmg conversion talent and volá, we have 3 usable plate gear sets for all 3 plate classes.

Yes, that's correct:

1. The "healing to spell damage" conversion talents on the Balance Druid and Shadow Priest trees were removed.

2. The standardization of healing and spell damage increased the spell damage on healing items by ~40%, such as 22 spell damage on the Golden Spellthread being increased to 35, which makes up for the loss of #1's talents.

3. The standardization of healing and spell damage decreased the healing on healing items by ~40%, such as 66 spell damage on the Golden Spellthread being decreased to 35, which will be made up for higher base healing amounts and (allegedly) higher coefficients on healing spells.

It wouldn't really work with ap, warrior threat barely scales with ap at all, and any prot warrior with his weight in salt would easily trade ALL the str on their gear for any stat besides spell stats.