Sry but all Deathknight spells scale with AP and not spell dmg. so they will not wear a single piece of spell dmg plate

The Alpha Rephrain:

It's just an Alpha
Things just might change
It's just an Alpha
Blizzard's mind is hardly set
It's just an Alpha
I'm not bothering to make this rhyme
It's just an Alpha
Death Knights are a Work In Progress.

I know after I repeat it a couple of times, my posts generally come out much more interestingly than when I act like things are set in stone. DKs could handily be moved to Spell Damage for some Specs, and it would be welcome to some degree, because it would mean my Holy Pally wouldn't be the only spec using his drops (unless, somehow, Holy Pallies become AP dependant, at which point I'd be competing with BOTH my roomates for drops).

I took the removal of spell damage from Retribution viability to be a sign of the direction that they wanted to take Death Knights in, as an all-melee-stat, no-caster-stat sort of class. I suspect the consolidation of offensive and healing casters into one shared gearset came somewhat after that, and if they had made that decision earlier, then the spell damage would have remained on ret pally plate, which would have been viable for at least one DK spec. As-is, I don't know what they're going to do with holy paladins because there's no caster equivalent in the same armor class like there is with resto/ele shamans. They could make them heal via melee mechanics, or they could undo the melee-ret changes and make spell damage viable for DKs, but both of those are quite severe changes, even for an expansion.

Having Holy Paladins use melee stats for healing would be a pretty awesome mechanic.

If they did do that the stats would work fairly well.

Both would share the same haste stat
Both would share the same crit stat
Attack Power would increase the amount a pally's heals did
The only lack of cross over would be Holy Paladins wanting MP/5 and DPS plate having melee hit on them.

edit: spelling

If they have holy paladins heal via AP, why not do the same for resto shaman and druids? And have elemental shaman and boomkins DPS via AP? If the intention is to have people be able to respec and still be useful with the same gear, it seems silly to then lock people into the enhancement/feral tree with physical gear, where as the spell casters can freely swap back and forth between DPS and healing.

It actually makes sense, if you're merging spell crit/melee crit, and spell hit/melee hit, to merge spell damage and attack power for everyone too. How this works with strength/agility/int on gear though I don't know.

But maybe you could have hit = mp5?

We haven't seen the changes for Paladins or Shamans yet. Leather is still divided into two different specs because there are four different roles at the leather level (Tanking, Physical DPS, Spell DPS, healing). There's also the main goal of making things easier for healers, in terms of giving them damage gear while they gear up for healing. At the plate level, two different options makes sense due to the same four different roles. Mail is more complicated because there are three roles.


I suspect the secondary goal is to improve drop options for leveling, quests, 5-mans, and 10-man raiding. If the options on drops are reduced to seven broad categories (Cloth, Spell or Physical Leather and Mail, Plate Tanking, Plate DPS) then there's less wasted loot as people go through content. It's really noticeable in Zul'Aman, where it's really easy for a group to kill the first four bosses and shard most of the drops just because of the possible group makeup.

Shaman and Druids aren't primary melee classes though. The majority of their class is based on spell casting.

God, I really hope a lot of these suggestions aren't implemented. A bunch of stat conversions being the mainstream baseline for itemization is just about the most boring shit I can possibly think of. When I pick up a piece of gear, not only will I have to have beaten 4-24 other people out for it, but if I'm a certain class/spec, I'll have to look at a chart just to figure out what all of the stats will convert to for my relevant usage.

I don't like what I'm hearing about the current alpha client apparently removing healing gear and homogenizing it so it works for both dps/healing. I think they were on the right track with a combination of AQ/Naxx style turn-in tier gear, and the Sunwell sunmote-swap mechanism.

If they were to simply add onto the above, a system that tracks guild kills as currency or some such (it's been suggested/mentioned many times before in other threads, and possibly in this 150 page monstrosity) that would allow you to eventually buy low quantities of the elusive items you still lack from the nth farming run, we'd probably be in an itemization Nirvana.

Please for the love of god don't homogenize all of the gear. Ugh. Surely there's a happy medium somewhere.

DKs won't use spell damage plate. You only have to look at their talents and abilities. Unless everything is changed it won't happen. And everything wont chance, because the game is in Alpha already and re-writing the class completely would be stupid.

And who the hell cares if non badge gear is homogenised? People are saying silly things like "I'll be competing with x for gear" as if that means there will be less gear on offer for them, but that is not true. Homogenising tank gear and dps gear for plate users or gear for cloth users means that everyone will have more gear to choose from. Because where before you'd have 1 warrior drop, 1 paladin drop, and 1 DK drop now you'll have 3 Warrior/Paladin/DK drops. Which means that a Warrior/Paladin/DK is more likely to get equipment whenever there are fewer Warrior/Paladin/DKs around (notably in 5 mans), and just as likely to get it in other situations. Not to mention there will still be badge tier gear on top, which will have a similar distribution.

Such changes won't mean everyone has the same gear, it'll just mean that lots less gear will be 'wasted' because it will be usable by more people. And that's a good thing.

For point 1 see above, for point two: You already have to do this. You already have to know how 1stam/int/spirit/etc will affect your class and spec, and look at charts if you want to min/max this calculation.

They will likely have both. Badges for class specific stuff, drops for more generic stuff. It's just that now the drops will be as useful as the badges, insofar as they will be usuable by as many people. The variation of loot won't change, it may even rise (they said they want to increase drops in PVE, not sure if this is just amount or variety also).

This change is only a good thing if it happens, loot will be more accessible, yet not be restricted to badges, individuals will get, in some cases, up to three or four times the gear options they had before, substantialy increasing the variety you will see within individual classes, and the itemizers will have an easier job and be more inclined to get things right. If thigns are slightly out then balance can be much more easily achieved by tweaking class conversion rates instead of changing all the class loot.

Much better overall.

I think having everyone only needing a single set of gear is a worthy goal in and of itself. I know as a healer unless your guild has a very stable raid composition it can be virtually impossible to gear up your offspecs, as just when one lot of DPS has geared up and the drops might start going to you, a new lot of under-geared DPS comes through and starts needing them.

Additionally, it'd fix a lot of the issues with certain specs being good at arena (often changing depending on bracket and season). The classes that need 2 or 3 sets of gear are at a real disadvantage there.

You don't, leave it at that.. Merging spell power with attack power would be great, long time ago it would have been problematic for hybrids, or rather overpowering, but even with that, ELemental shaman having more powerful windfuries because of attack power and spell damage being the same are over, no enhancement would prefer to nuke anyway even with that given all the strengths are in melee it just makes that aspect of his class more useable which is great for it's diversity. Why can't you have attack power merged with healing.

if spell damage can be merged with healing like it is now, why not also with attack power? Seriously? So basically you just have one stat power: merging spell damage, spell healing and attack power. Give healing trees a talent that converts 25% of their power into healing power. Then you have power, hit and crit uniform. Making gear creation a lot simpler all you have to concern yourself with is stats and armor class. There will still be spell damage, attack power and plus healing, but you simply hover over the power stat in your character sheet and it will list each, just like when you hover over spell damage currently you see the different school, it is not complex to create menu like structure accessed by simply hovering over. Hover over power you get spell damage, attack power, healing, hover over spell it will list the different schools.

Tbh.. you really can't have balance druids wearing cloth, nor resto druids, and same for shsman/hunter in mail wearing leather.. the reason is because class abilities were given precisely because a class had very low armor, why do you think clothies have more control than leather users who in turn have more control than mail users who in turn have more control than plate users? It is because they have less protection and rely less and less on getting hit. Caster classes have about 4-5 control mechanisms (fear, slows, freezes, polys, fades, shields, blinks, exhausion, seduce, MC each clothie has about 4 or 5) leather users got fewer (roots, cyclone, gouge, cheapshot/kidney shot - why do you think barkskin has a cooldown and PwS doesn't), go to mail and you get 1/2, Shaman have slows/stoneclaw and can equip a shield, hunters got slow/freeze in traps but can have a pet distract and taunt mob) i.e. 1 to 2. Get to plate wearers, and you have hardly anything, another reason why bubble has such a long coolodwn, that's why palas have easy anti-interrupt from push back features like concentration aura, because they're suppose to be taking damage.

I just wish with the paladins case, that digging into the fight sort of aspect will return even with the healers who'd be meleeing but doing more powerful close range heals by touch then building up mana and utilizing seals. rather than spam from a distant more akin to leather and cloth users.

I've digressed a bit. Conclusion is that it's good to merge the powers, i.e. spell damage, attack power and healing on gear and give it just as power. Also good to merge melee & spell hits as one, and the melee & spell crits as just crit. It is not good to make any class that has a higher armor proficiency have to wear a lower one. So ways must be found in at least reducing the amount of sepearte itemization.

Even with power merged, you would still have to create more than one set for melee and spell casters. With power merged into one, hit merged to just hit, and crit, your gear creation is already simpler, however you must give ones with int/spi/stamina and others with agi/str/sta, what maybe you can avoid is giving one for healing and one for spell damage at leather and mail level, so that resto druids and balance druids don't really need as much separate itemisation, and resto shaman / elemental shaman don't either. Plate is just as interesting. I'm not sure how it can be done. Just that you don't want to homogenize everything which makes it just boring, but neither do you want to ruin the immense pleasure players are having using different roles by going to pre-tbc and making all palas/druids/shammies/priests as healers and thus one gear in each category with only the armor value changed.

Why do any consolidation at all? Well, it is the loot tables it comes down to. We'd be happy with different gear if we didn't have to shard so much for less played specs...I hear sharding boomkin loot come up a lot, if the spec wasn't so undesirable and dull compared to it's other caster dps specs, more would play it and perhaps there'd be less of a problem anyway Kudos to blizzard Boomkin looks a lot more exciting now so maybe more will play it, but it still is annoying to go into a 10 man and hunter loot drops when there is no hunter in the raid.

I think the state of end-game raiding requires people to have several pieces of gear for one roll/spec. Imo they could utilise gems/inscriptions better to create variation. If i could re-gem some of my gear without having to buy new gems all the time my gear just became a lot more flexible, and i'm talking about going with more +hit today instead of more crit because the boomkin and ele shaman weren't online today. If my inscriptions and gems were soulbound to the item i used them in, then i could get several gems for each piece and merely swap them in and out. Gem pouches could become standard like Key rings as like this you'd be carrying a lot of gems around. What this means in instances is that they don't need to be scared that having more loot will stop us playing sooner because we've got all the gear we need, not if we have to get more stuff for alternative gear. What we hate is going to an instance progression for an entire week and not even come out with one piece. Maybe they can ensure that loot drops something that someone in the raid can use. all the time...so what drops depends on who's there.


the game is calibrated

How did you come to this conclusion and what the hell do you mean by "based on"?

I've sort of been hoping that they combine Leather and Mail. Resto Shamans, Elemental Shamans, Resto Druids & Balance Druids could all use the same gear but they still want different stats. While Hunters, Rogues, Feral Druids & Enhancement Shamans could all use the same gear but again they would prefer certain stats over the other.

2 of 3 talent trees for both classes revolve around using and improving the classes respective spells?

The point of shrinking the loot table is not so one cklass has one set of gear no matter the spec. Enhancement Shamans andn Hunter can easily be changed to both desire the same gear.

Paladins however wont with the current setup in alpha without significant changes to how their class works.

I really don't see what the need to have Holy Paladins use homogenized DPS plate in the place of healing plate.

One could make the case for Prot Paladins using homogenized tanking plate, but come on, a 100% AP to healing conversion? That's silly.

Give Paladins (and Shaman) a reason to value SPI and you've solved 4 slots already: They can share healing necks, cloaks and rings with the rest of the healers.

That just leaves the real "armor" slots right?
For a 5-man, it doesn't matter that you have specific healing plate drops, because there's no reset.
Badge gear? No problem, you're not stepping on anyone else's toes.
Raid drops? Five out of eight slots will be filled in by tokens, and you can still fall back on a Sunwell mote system for the remaining bracers/boots/belt.

Imagine how streamlined the loot tables will be:
[Cuffs of Devastation] to be used by all clothies of all specs

[Deadly Cuffs] to be used by Rogues and Feral Druids, which can be Sunmoted into [Rejuvenating Bracers] to be used by both Balance and Resto Druids

[Bracers of the Pathfinder] to be used by both Hunters and Enh Shaman, which can be Sunmoted into [Howling Wind Bracers] to be used by both Elemental and Resto Shaman

[Furious Shackles] to be used by both DPS Warriors, DKs and Paladins, which can be Sunmoted into either [Blessed Adamantite Bracers] to be used by Holy Paladins or into [Eternium Shell Bracers] to be used by Tanking Warriors, DKs and Paladins.

Instead of:
1. Cloth DPS (which could still be further subdivided)
2. Cloth healing
3. Leather melee DPS
4. Leather caster DPS
5. Leather healing
6. Mail melee DPS
7. Mail caster DPS
8. Mail healing
9. Plate DPS
10. Plate healing
11. Plate tanking (which could still be further subdivided)

You only have:
1. Cloth caster
2. Leather melee DPS
3. Leather caster
4. Mail melee DPS
5. Mail caster
6. Plate DPS
7. Plate healing
8. Plate tanking

That's three less drops even if they don't pursue the Sunmote model for everthing, and seven less drops if they do.

Because Holy paladins are one spec out of 27 class/specs, and are no more deserving of a unique itemization needs than Ret paladins or Fire mages or <insert class/spec>?


The token trading system is more of a temporary measure. It can work for one particular raid instance, but scales horribly in general, since you're still stuck specifically itemizing all the other dungeons - again, only for one spec of one particular class. If they're going to all that trouble to unify cloth itemization needs (giving all cloth wearing classes some use for spirit, merge heal and SD, etc), then they might as well fix plate itemization needs.


Another point for making the change is for soloing/leveling. The coefficients aren't there to make the current +healing/SD itemization work well for solo DPS. Some form of overall Str/AP-based scaling is natural for this melee tank/heal hybrid, and would have the added benefit of fixing the "healing hybrid" part of Ret/Prot.


edit: typo

At this stage we really don't know what the point is unless someone from Blizzard tells it to us.

I mean everyone complains about lack of healers, but one of the problems a lot of people have with healing is that unlike DPS they're not gaining gear that serves them outside of their raid healing role. If healers could just respec while not raiding and automatically have good gear for their chosen spec, I think that would help in attracting more people who would be willing to do it. You could probably more easily rotate people through roles too, so if someone is feeling a bit burnt out of tanking/healing, they could go DPS for a week with no loss of effectiveness for them or their replacement.

So while having people carry only one set of gear may or may not be the point of the change, I'd argue it should be a goal.

If you're addressing loot tables, that is a different matter. But you were suggesting it's okay for Paladins to heal with AP but not Druids/Shamans because "they're the spellcaster hybrids". Which is a dumb classification as it is, but whatever. So, okay, how does your conclusion of AP being suitable for Paladin healing and not for Druid/Shaman healing follow from this beyond "well it doesn't FEEL right"?

Here are the breakdowns of the different armour classes:
Cloth: caster, healing
Leather: tanking, melee, caster, healing
Mail: caster, melee, healing
Plate: tanking, melee, healing, caster(Paladin tank)

It seems like with the spellpower/healing changes, this will get reduced to:
Cloth: caster/healing
Leather: tanking/melee, caster/healing

From the Prot Warrior skills scaling with AP, I'm not going to be surprised to see them combine the Plate tanking/melee sets together and combine the Plate caster/healing. Splitting the different Plate users between these two groups surely is a better idea that making healing Paladins use AP.

Where does the overlap from Elemental/Resto, Balance/Resto and Holy/Shadow come from? Healing to spell damage? Doesn't that imply an overlap from Holy to Prot then?

I don't really see the need for a giant revamp. Throw in a healing to stam/armour talent in the Paladin Prot tree, and make the tank/pvp DK tree scale off spellpower. Bam, you have Arms/Fury/Blood/Ret/WarProt using the 'melee' plate and PallyProt/Holy/Frost/Unholy using the 'caster' plate.

I acknowledge that Holy Paladins would be the only class that would suffering from gear exclusivity under the new system without some sweeping changes, my point was that perhaps this isn't such a bad thing considering everywhere else we've saved drop rates on.

One thing I was thinking about was homogenizing gear between Holy and Prot Paladins:

Druids are getting a 6% crit chance reduction, which ostensibly allows them to skip Defense Rating completely
They're also getting additional armor contribution from items, which allows them to skip green armor on items as well

This leads me to believe that Tanking Feral Druids, DPS Feral Druids and Rogues will wear pretty much the same kind of armor, with a little more emphasis on high STA and high AGI pieces for the Bears.

How does this relate to Holy/Prot Paladins?

Currently, Paladins have a spell damage Lamellar PvP set. Not a lot of people use this, but back when I was stuck with horrible shoulders (doing T5 content in [Spaulders of the Righteous] for lack of any better drops), I leveraged on the [Gladiator's Lamellar Shoulders] since they offered more STA, more spell damage and more armor at the cost of avoidance, which I could spare.

We wouldn't actually have any +healing in WOTLK if the current changes are to be believed. Rather, we'd get spell damage with higher base values and coefficients for healing.

Homogenizing Prot Paladin gear with Warrior/DK Tanking gear would also require jumping through several hoops to make the spell damage compatible.

So, how about making concessions to Prot Paladin abilities to unify the itemization of the two? I'm already quite confident we won't need to stack avoidance to uncrushability in WOTLK, and that change alone would make Lamellar-esque gear viable for both specs.

Except it does nothing to address the issue of our combat system being split between half spell-scaling and half melee scaling. That is one of the biggest problems with our class and it needs to be addressed before any gearing questions can be answered.

Prot pallys get nothing out of spell crit or Mp5, both incredibly important stats for holy pallys (and if the rumors are true spirit as well). So you'd have to be getting some conversion talents in there (Intellect > dodge... lol) making things just as complicated as if you had a straight AP scaling system for the entire class. Prot pallys also don't get the massive armor values bears have to make up for the lack of avoidance on their gear.

I don't get it.
Holy - scales with caster gear
Prot - scales with caster gear
Ret - scales with melee gear

What spec scales with both?

If you say Prot needs more defensive stats, that's easy, add a talent to Prot that scales with +healing/mp5/spirit/whatever (dodge/armour/block).