I think he just wants to assume the entrance to Azjol-Nerub is that tunnel since Jormungar were used to make the tunnels for the Nerubians. I am still going with Blizzard just has not added the entrance to Azol-Nerub yet since I would assume the entrance would use the gate in the MPQ.

Indeed. A much more logical solution would be to allow professions to craft items up and down. BS would craft Mail to Plate and Plate to Mail. LW could do Mail to LW and LW to Mail. etc. Wishful thinking, but it would really help out the glut that is currently cloth dps.

I think we're more likely to see Divine Strength changed to grant Strength as Spell Effect, and Judgement of Light changed to cause hits to heal the Mob's target, rather than the person doing the hit to make them melee healers who wear plate DPS gear. (I have half a dozen of these ideas lying around, each stranger than the last, but I hold dearly to my first Mad Prediction: No Tank Plate in Lich King!).

There are so many issues with reducing itemization right now, and I just can't figure out what they're going to do with Plate; every other type of gear is down to effectively 2-1/2 drops per tier now (The half is for the random badly itemized gear nobody uses but is there anyway).

There are spider webs all around that look identical to the ones inside the as-yet-unfinished Azjol-nerub, and it's in the right general location, which was enough for suspicion. Given that the portal in the Pit is a circular, burrow-like structure, I'd say that's some pretty strong supporting evidence.

EDIT: I really, really hope it's not. I wanted a lot more from Azjol-nerub, don't get me wrong. I just think it's really likely at this point.

How would that solve anything though? The intent in that would be, I assume, to reduce the amount of items that have to be placed on a loot table. So lets take that theory further and say, BS is given the ability to take a Mail item and upgrade it to plate. Blizzard use this as a reason to stop adding non set Plate healing gear to loot tables. Now any non-BS Paladin is screwed, because it's very unlikely that the transformation of Mail to Plate will be allowed to happen within a trade window. Yes they could just use the item as Mail, but that's a messy solution that I doubt Blizzard, or the players, would be happy with.

So far Blizzard seem really keen on reducing the amount of glut on the loot tables. Paladins, and in particular, Holy Paladins are the obvious target here. Prot and Ret can to some extent make do with Warrior gear, but Holy Paladins are the only class that will ever use Plate healing gear. We can see Blizzard clearing up some of the issues with classes who are much less of a problem with regards to loot table glut. Now we also see the recent Resto Shaman talents incorporating the traditional Holy Paladin stat, +crit, into something that's very good for them also. I doubt these things are a coincidence. If Blizzard don't make Mail baseline and turn Plate into a Prot talent, then perhaps they will make Mail items a restriction on a powerful talent. Much like Warlocks take a Spirit penalty from Demonic Embrace, perhaps there will be a particularly powerful Holy talent that restricts the Paladin to Mail gear if he wishes to make use of it.

As for Plate DPS gear, it's still used by DPS Warriors and possibly Deathknights, so the issue isn't so bad there. Blizzard have also gone quite out of their way in increasing the viability of Arms/Fury Warriors for tanking. I really doubt that they'll send them back to Mail with these changes in mind.

Dammit, I thought a knew alpha update would be enough to stop this retarded paladin gear-sharing nonsense.

Also, new shaman stuff is weaksauce. I guess as long as that class has bloodlust they're doomed to be otherwise bad.

As noted above, it would smooth the glut that is currently cloth dps. Almost every raid has 2 spriest, 3 warlocks and 2 mages. Toss in the fact that priest healers will be competing with the the change, thats 9 classes fighting over cloth. Take a look at every other armor level, and its usually 3 or 4 tops.

I dont expect the change, but if they wanted to add it to professions, I would so no reason why profs couldnt make the change via trade window.

If the benefit of Spellpower gear for Ret was improved it could share a lot of itemisation with Holy. This wouldn't necessarily exclude scaling with DPS Warrior items, players could mix and match.

Spell power doesn't (at the moment) increase our white swing damage, which is the majority of our damage.

We used to "max-and-match" on our gear and it worked terribly. Pallys either need to scale with one stat set or the other (or give a talent that makes one of the sets scale with the other a la AP > SP conversion), this split system is what is killing the class.

With the right numbers it could work.

If gear that was worth 100 DPS to a Melee or to a Caster is worth the same 100 DPS for Ret that gear would be fine for you no matter how much you get from the other stat that isn't on the specific piece. The problem with the old split system is that you didn't scale fast enough with either physical or caster stats.

The problem with this is that for a caster piece to be worth the same dps for a ret paladin, we'd need some sort of retardedly powerful spellpower -> AP conversion to make it scale our abilities. It makes no sense to shoehorn that in since we already share a scaling system(mostly) with standard plate dps gear. I mean, anything can be done with appropriate conversion talents. You could make rogues scale with spell haste if you cared to, but why?

Yes, but that doesn't change that we're still a melee class that has to be smacking things six ways from sunday to do damage.

The only way pallys should be fully scaling off spell damage is if we're given offensive spell nuke to replace our autoswing. That is the way every single other caster in the game works.

As it is right now a Ret Pally already scales about 90% with physical damage stats (it varries depending on Consecration/Exorcism rotations). What you're suggesting is actually more of a change than making everything AP based.

You would need such a talent merely to make autoattack scale. Or else you would need a multiplier to make seal and judgement damage worth approximately 4 times as much as it is currently to make up the difference. In either case, it begs the question of WHY.

Well when I heard they were trying to cut down on the amount of loot they had to make I had an idea, but wasn't too sure about it. Now I'm seeing some people suggesting turning a mail item into plate or plate into mail etc so I'll just post the idea I had. I was thinking they could just eliminate the types of armor altogether (no more cloth, leather, etc). Just one type with a base armor value on it (same as cloth) and then give druids and rogues x3 that value, shaman and hunter x6 and warrior, deathknight, and paladin x12 or whatever multiplier would make it the same difference that it is now. They could even take it a step further and consolidate attack power and spell power into one stat.

Along the lines of gear homogenization, Feral Druids still need two unique weapon drops per tier for Feral AP weapons. Allowing a Druid's attack damage to scale with weapon DPS would allow them to use the same two-handed weapons as MS warriors (or the maces, anyway).

Alternately, druid weapons could be adjusted to be shared with another class. Possibilities for this include kitty DPS staves that could also appeal to hunters (kind of a stretch but no worse than enhancement shamans using hunter loot), or going back to pre-TBC-style free feral AP on weapons with otherwise normal tooltip DPS (sharing DPS weapons with pretty much everyone and tanking weapons with Deathknights).

Warriors are still in the same boat for weapon itemization inasmuch as their weapons are good for basically nothing else. There's no reason that Blizz couldn't just dump warriors into the same boat as paladins, by having warriors fight the rogues for fast offhand-style weapons with general-purpose survivability stats (stam, agi) instead of tank-specific survivability stats (def, dodge, armor). This would leave orcs in the cold, since no class wants fast offhand axes, but such is life.

Or a talent in the BM tree that converts FAP to AP, rate determined by depth in the tree. That wouldn't seem unfitting.

And you're back pre-2.3 patch, where good ret paladins were already going for "warrior" gear, because all that can't compete with the increase brought by attack power for white attacks basically.

As it has already been stated the problem is not DPS plate gear, shared by DPS warriors, Ret paladins and some or all Death Knights with possibly some AP --> mp/5 or AP --> Sp via talents for Ret.

The problem is about only one spec (holy paladins) wanting a type of gear : it seems much more likely and logical that this spec will use Dps plate or tanking plate with some stat conversions, if someone has to use something designed for others, which we don't know yet.

That's simply a matter of finetuning the coifficients. It's neither impossible nor hard.
As an added benefit this might make it possible for ret to use similar gear as holy. If they give the ret tree some +hit that is.

It wouldn't be a stretch to have this gear at 80:
- tanking plate: dk/pally/warrior
- spelldamage plate: (some pieces) prot/ret & holy
- dps plate: (some pieces) ret & dk/warrior

Then you only need a few changes to the trees:
- Increase the dependency of holy on crit and les on mp5
- Give ret a way to stack hit without needing a lot of it on it's gear and use a spelldamage scaling seal
- Let prot's mitigation scale via spelldamage, increasing your block via holy shield for example

This would mean that a good equiped paladin can respec and tank decently enough, dps okay and do some healing in the same gear set. To excell at his role he would then need to gem for his prefered spec and get appropriate rings/cloak/neck.

As for Dks/dps warriors/retadins going "back" to mail being a big issue, you do realize in the 100% ideal setup half of the gear is LEATHER because of itemization already. Holy paladins using mail would be a non issue as well, hell at one point one of our holy paladins had a full mail healing set from SSC-TK because of itemization/time of drops and there wasn't much downside to it besides maybe he couldn't use it as well in pvp. I know personally I would even wear cloth if it was the best dps for myself, if armor/survivability is ever an issue to offtank murlocs/hyjal trash etc I just wear pvp gear anyways for the crit reduction and swap to my dps/half leather set if possible at the boss.

Exewut, the problem with your idea is that this spell damage plate is still only feeding towards Paladins. Two specs of Paladins as opposed to one, yes, but still only Paladins.

It makes much more sense to convert a tanking stat, such as any of the ratings or even block value into spell power for Protection, then AP or STR into spell power for Holy, both being deep enough that you can't get both.

The critical strike rating change even supports this, as then the melee crit on DPS plate is going to feed a Holy Paladin's Illumination.

Perhaps an almost rage-ish system for Holy, where their melee attacks cause healing to the mob target based on damage done, or something like "Your melee attacks cause you to gain HealingBuffThingy1, increasing healing done by X% of your attack power for Y".