Chardonnay

Same stuff with holy priests. Spell pushback is a 100% dumb, annoying and unneeded mechanic, I wonder if they are going to remove it finally. It just makes no sense at all.

 

Prinsesa

Again, a form of this was already implemented in the first Alpha build.

That is, Shadow Priests and Balance Druids getting a talent to convert 20% of healing to spell damage. Assuming they continued this trend towards Shaman, the Skyshatter Bracers would get (73 * 0.2 + 25), or 39.6 spell damage, matching that of the Skyshatter Bands.

The talent conversion has since been scrapped and the conversion was transferred directly onto the items, such that the Bracers would no longer exist/be necessary under this system and we'd only have the Bands to provide for both Ele and Resto.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Tainter

As a Priest, no matter which spec, you can choose not to suffer pushback by simply using Power Word: Shield. With my disc PvP spec it even increases my dps. If you'd rather save the mana you can still fear, which gives ample time to kill stuff without pushback.

Shamans could try it with Earthbind and Frostshock. Besides that Shamans kill most non-elites in three spell hits anyway, don't they?

 

Anedris

The posters above you were stating precisely that shaman grinding becomes much easier when you kill things before they get to you - i.e., in three lightning bolts.

The point isn't that healers can't kill things. They can, and once you get good gear (so that using PW:S doesn't result in having to drink every 5 pulls) it's not too bad. However, an affliction warlock kills a mob in 3 GCDs. My frost mage in blues and greens could dispatch a blood elf at the Black Temple in 9 seconds without crits. Whatever a healer can kill, a DPSer can kill two or three times faster (and often with the same or less down time).

I don't really know if that's an issue - the "respec to farm" paradigm is fairly well established, and healing specs can kill things even without respeccing. They're obviously not as good at it (or as fast at it) as actual DPS specs however.

 

Linnet

The big gain from this would not be anything to do with farming, it would be that if a raid happens to be short of dps one night, one of the healers could respec and have raid level dps gear.

We quite often have dps hybrids respec healing for a night, but rarely the other way around. That's because currently, it's much easier for a dpser to get healing gear for offspec in a raid than vice versa (purely due to the number of dps rolling on gear). Right now, if we need a spare dps it's more common for a 'spare' healer to log a dps alt instead who has been geared up in badges/kara.

As a hybrid player, I like the idea of that. You have to be quite hardcore to gather healing AND caster dps AND melee dps AND tank gear for your druid just so you can have the option of playing any role of which your class is capable in a raid. If they can cut down the amount of additional gear sets you have to gather, as well as saving bag space (may not be an issue if they're doing a wardrobe type addon), it'll make it easier for hybrids to swap playstyles.

Maybe there will be raids where it's useful to do that mid-instance -- heck, maybe there will be some kind of easy-talent-swap too. And even if there aren't, this'll be a boon to more casual raids who are more likely to need a hybrid to switch roles if they don't have class quotas in place.

Druid: Peace

 

Shakes

The problem is that if scaling continues at the current rate, healers will be virtually useless for killing anything. Especially in the greens and blues people will be starting with at 80, is just going to be an exercise in pain.

I don't think that's a good place for the game to be in, especially when you take one look at any recruitment post and almost universally guilds need healers of some description. Telling people "you either need an alt or to respec multiple times a week to play a healer" really doesn't help that issue.

 

TSplodey

Totems are in the physical school now.

Nothing huge, but a new tidbit to munch on. Its a buff I guess, just nothing to write home about.

 

Prinsesa

What does that change mean? You can't dispel Earthbind? Can Mass Dispel destroy totems?

Apologies for my ignorance of Shaman mechanics, but I can't for the life of me figure out the implications.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Stopokingme

It means totems can be cast while silenced, since they're not considered spells.

 

Foofer

I don't play a shaman so I could be wrong on this, but I assume it means you can drop them while silenced/etc.

edit: Sorry, looks like it was said while I was typing it out.

 

malthrin

That theory about 128 inventory slots is completely wrong - [Foror's Crate of Endless Resist Gear Storage] x4 plus backpack is 160 slots.

 

Oneiros

Fairly certain this item only existed on the Test Realm and will not return. I personally think they should just allow people to purchase their own tab of the guild bank, open only to the person who purchased it (so that you could put soulbound stuff in there). I'm not sure how many slots are in one of those tabs, but it sure looks like a whole hell of a lot and that would certainly help relieve the "I send every single thing that isn't soulbound to my alt" trend.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

flyingtoastr

They could always use the old idea of "specialty bags" that only let you throw in soulbound items. Something about them was mined in the 2.4 patch if I remember correctly but we never saw them. It would make storing things like resist sets, off-spec gear, old stuff, etc. much easier.

Some people's minds are like cement: all mixed up and permanently set.

 

Torq

This, and your bank can already hold well over 128 items as well. If your bank works anything at all like your stash did in D2, it's just an extension of your inventory anyway (anyone remember being able to swap items from your stash from anywhere? :P ) Plus, I'm pretty sure your "keyring" is actually a part of your inventory, and that expands ad infinatum, as far as I can tell. Mine's up to 8 or 9 rows, and it doesn't show any signs of slowing. I can test when I get home, but I don't think it's really necessary.

 

Pleochism

They've mentioned at one time or another that the primary limit on giving people extra bag space is the physical storage required. I think the reason they can allow keyrings to expand ad infinitum is because keys can be stored as a set of flags (for the unique ones) or a single int (for the rest). Both of which are much more space efficient than bag items.

 

Lhivera

They also stated, however, that attempting to limit storage requirements by limiting bag space failed, because people just created additional characters to hold the extra items -- so they were still storing the items, and they were storing extra characters to boot.

 

• Tecton

Yeah, I think they're just going to have to bite the bullet and expand our storage eventually. If the wardrobe function gets expanded to hold loot as well, as they said they were aiming for, that'll go a long way to helping, though.

 

Starfire

That's moot to the question. Shadow priests and smite priests don't have pushback resistance either. At best for any priest would be martyrdom -- which requires you being crit to proc.

All 3 priests specs however can use fears/power word: shield and dots to kill targets.

Holy Fire, Smite, Smite.... should be enough to kill most Outlands mobs, and an extra Mindblast finishes off pretty much everything left standing. At least for me with 1200-1300 +damage as a holy spec.

 

Malleus

I have no idea what makes you think WOW is programmed in exactly the same way as D2, or why you think bank and personal inventory are the same thing. I don't see a great deal of point in arguing about it, as neither of us can prove we are right. For that matter, I could be right now and wrong when WOTLK recodes everything.

One point to consider, though. Say there are 32-slot bags in WOTLK. It will be possible to equip four of them to your person and seven to your bank. Along with the backpack, that's 368 inventory slots plus the bank window - which doesn't scale and takes up half the screen. Some of my toons have an average of 18 slots per bag between bank and person and it's already scaling down small. That many slots would be almost unusable.

 

orcsgotbooty

I know personally I keep certain things in certain bank bags, first bag is raid consumables 2-4 are offspec and resist gear, last bag is pre bc/RP gear etc. Maybe they could let you add a note to each bag like your friends list.

 

flyingtoastr

Funny, I have full 20-slotters in my bank and I still have <10 free slots (keeping 3 tiers worth of old gear along with a full set of Ret and Prot gear might be part of it, but I digress).

Regardless, if they increase bag size it won't be to 32's, at least not for non-specialty bags. If they follow the Vanilia>TBC model of the expensive bag size becoming the mid-price size ([Bottomless Bag] into [Imbued Netherweave Bag]) then we should expect to see mid-price 20-slotters (replacing [Primal Mooncloth Bag]) and expensive 22 slotters. 104 bag slots and 156 bank slots is not unreasonable.

Some people's minds are like cement: all mixed up and permanently set.

 

◊ zirky

Its definitely possible that they can and will increase bag size and more importantly backpack size.

Some quick googling turned up the following

Source

Blue Post in question

I wouldn't be surprised to see standard bags receiving a small boost and the backpack, which is sorely in need of a bump getting a boost, then again, that is purely speculative. Bumping size on a single character, as noted, is infinitely cheaper than incurring the overhead of multiple bank alts and the masses of mailings that are associated with them.

 

PsyBomb

Totems moving to Physical school means more than being able to cast them while silenced. It means that getting your nature school interrupted will no longer shut out everything but two of your shocks. Not a huge buff, as things go, but if it's any indication of what is to come then it's a very good sign.

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.

 

Xelopheris

Regardless of whether or not it existed on test realms or live, the code is still in the game.

BagNo (Minimum 5 bits, 32 Max) | Bag Position (Minimum 8 bits, 32 Max)

Bag 0 would be backpack.
Bag 1-4 would be your other bags
Bag 5 would be your bank main page.
Bag 6-12 would be your bank bags
Bag 13 would be your keyring.

Bag Position is simple. Just bags alone, 28 positions, next power of 2 is your 32 bits. It's safe to assume that 32 is the biggest size that is currently available, as the keyring only expands that far.

They almost 100% use this method for doing bags. This is would makes handling bags very easy to do. It's also why you can easily swap in a bigger bag over another, or change bags in and out of banks with different sizes.

 

gnoop

Quite hardcore? Quite the contrary. When I started raiding back in March, I had one caster item; a ring out of heroic SV because we had no one to de the items. As a pre-raiding Feral, I concentrated on my tanking gear, got cat gear on the side, and took any healing gear as it dropped (I love running with Pally's and Priests in mostly epics since they didn't want things like blue healing leather legs). Without really putting much effort into it, I had +1100 healing when I started running Kara as Resto and geared up from there. Caster gear? That's just fallen into my lap. Running Kara and ZA with a decently geared group, there have been plenty of times where a Holy Priest and I were rolling in caster off-spec gear. While not fully decked out, I sit at almost 700 +dmg without any enchants. If I put some effort into it and was concentrating on the gear, I'd push that even higher pretty quickly by simply grabbing some more gear out of Kara and badges.

This is on top of a few pieces of shadow and fire resist gear I've grabbed for tanking certain bosses. Quite honestly, I've really only ever put focus on tank gear and healing gear yet I've got 4 pretty decent sets of gear.

Back to the point, this change can make it convenient for a few dps'ers that have to switch roles, but it seems like hammering a nail in with a jack hammer. For pleasing a few casters, you're upsetting even more casters because they now have a slew of healers after the same gear. Worse, depending on guild, casters may not even get a chance at a lot of their gear until the healers are geared up if guilds push gear priorities. As I've stated before, even if various items are itemized for casters more than healers, it's not really going to matter much as healers will still see a piece of gear with stats better than what they've got and go for it. It'll be the new pvp gear (ie. sure, resilience is mostly useless in pve, but the stats are good enough that people don't care and use it anyway as it's better than what they've got). Plus, if you're really going to be bouncing specs, perhaps your guild needs to take this into consideration and make some efforts to get you some gear? That seems an easier solution since, as you say, your hybrids have an easy time getting healing gear in the first place.

Keep caster gear to casters. Keep healing gear to healers. People will end up with off-spec gear without all that much difficulty.