slant

Linking mana regen to mana pool size would certainly simplify mana regen outside of the 5SR, but I maintain that's a good thing. If you want to optimize for regen, you gear specifically for MP5. I would also change all talents that grant some percentage of spirit based mana regen inside the 5SR and set them to increase MP5 by a percentage instead.

Decreased duration with haste would be a downside in a raid situation if nothing else were changed, but when you have the freedom to change base mechanics, those kinds of issues are trivial. Increase lifebloom's duration and decrease its HPS so that a human can maintain 3 stacks on whatever number of people the devs want us to. Same deal with vampiric touch, increase duration and remove DPS. Remove the DoT from roots. Say curse of doom isn't a DoT (which it isn't, really, it's just implemented that way) and leave it alone. I would argue that the transparency gained by being able to say "haste scales every spell the same" is worth the trouble.

And now we start to get into silly arguments with obvious answers. Feral parry allows druids to benefit from parry rating, a largely unused stat right now because only rogues benefit and they don't want to be hit anyway. Ferals should benefit from weapon procs because every other class does-- it makes itemization easier, the whole point of this exercise.

And finally yes there is something wrong with the current mechanics-- they're confusing, non-intuitive, and as transparent as mud. Properly gearing your character requires extensive knowledge of game mechanics and reading FAQs on boards like this one. Heavy theorycrafting shouldn't be a requirement for casual play or even mid-level raiding. Theorycrafting should allow players to eke out that last bit of potential for their characters, that hidden edge, it shouldn't make such an tremendous difference.

Try to explain how the windfury cooldown affects weapon speed itemization to a new player and just watch their eyes glaze over. Or try to explain why AGI is better than STR for a feral druid, and that STR gives 2AP per point and AGI only gives 1. Or why haste is great for horde paladins but not for alliance ones. These aren't crazy esoteric "hidden edge" issues, they're basic gearing. Is this item better than that one? Most people don't know!

 

flyingtoastr

As it is right now every spec uses their own style of DPS gear to begin with (Ret uses melee gear, holy uses spell damage gear, prot uses from my small experience large block values with some spell damage) so I wouldn't say its too much of a difference.

For all intents and purposes I'm expecting a STR > SP or STM > SP in the prot tree anyway, if prot can somehow wear the same stats as the other two tanking classes I'm pretty sure it will happen.

And generally those people don't care. The information is not difficult to learn or find but you can do fine in the game without it. The only instances that do (and should) require absolute min/maxxing is the final tiers of content, which is exactly as it is today.

Not everything needs to be handed to you on a golden plate. A little work never hurt.

And to nip this in the bud before someone else makes a stupid comment: Haste is still a good stat for Alliance pallys. It's not as good as it is for horde pallys, but it is still a large chunk of extra DPS.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

slant

Well designed mechanics are clearly defined and intuitive because they lead to better gameplay and more satisfied players. The fact that players are still able to achieve some degree of success without that clarity doesn't make it less desirable.

 

Anaram

I'd say haste is currently more intuitive than if it affected dots/hots also. I really don't see what the functional benefit of changing dot/hot speed with casting speed is. The system is perfectly easy to understand as it is.

I'm not really sure what you are after in here. Rogues benefit from parry (if they pick the talent) as do several other classes. It has significant raid-environment benefit to some classes (mainly tanks), but it's generally too expensive a stat for anyone to particularly gear up for. Even if you give druids parry, it won't change the fact that parry rating is worse than other options. In fact, given that the other 3 tanking classes can parry, what you efficiently achieve is just taking away one itemization option. If you want to itemize a piece of gear such that it works nicely for plate tanks, toss in parry rating. If you want to itemize for all tanks, toss in dodge rating. Block rating/value can exclude both druid/DK. You could give same item armor (very valuable for ferals) and parry if you wanted to and overbudget it to compensate without ending with an overpowered item. How does the game benefit if you give ferals parry?

I'd claim that you don't need to know very much to do okay in the raiding game. Just recognize what stats benefit your class: hit, crit, +damage etc. and get those. You might not end up with the optimal combination, but it's hardly required to progress. Getting your stats close enough to optimal is quite enough. On the edge there will always be need to optimize, and indeed optimizing gear is a metagame in itself.

As long as there are multiple DPS stats and multiple factors involved, people will always be able to choose wrong. I'd say things should work in an intuitive fashion, but that math needn't be obvious. A feral druid need not be able to "just know" if agility or strength is better, but he should be able to see how each stat affects his performance. I think the important thing is that if you get more crit rating you end up getting more crits, if you get more strength (for your druid) you end up hitting higher.

In this respec SoC and windfury are problematic because the effect gets hidden behind murky mechanics. I don't think strength and agility are problems though.

EDIT: Doing radical changes to combat system which most of the ~10 million customers have already grown used shouldn't be undertaken slightly. Just because something is more intuitive and cleaner doesn't mean that changing it is actually beneficial. A major revamp of the combat system would throw current balance out the window, force more effort to be put into balancing things and probably still end up with a less balanced system than the current one.

I'd say one major reason to have a stat such as intellect instead of just splitting it into +mana and +crit is that the same stat can have different effect for different classes. Thus the classes can play differently and still use the same gear.

 

Starfire

I agree with the poster saying making HoTs faster is flawed.

But you know what would work? Making HoT duration last longer with haste gear. That would be amazing.


To the person about spelldamage. We cede that Melee stats was superior. The problem is because of the spell coefficients. You needed 13.5k spelldamage with whatever the coefficient was (20%, I believe). Now imagine if the coefficient was 200%. You'd only need what, 1.35k ? Get the point now?

 

Copernicus

The goal is for healers to be able to get gear for healing (while leveling etc) that allows them to still do damage.

There's possibly a secondary goal of making the plate tank gear close to the same for all three classes, but that won't be revealed until Paladins get updated and Death Knights are in a more finished state.

 

Prinsesa

The entire idea behind spell haste is time compression. That is, if I have 10% haste, I can cast 10% more Shadowbolts, Frostbolts or Fireballs within the same frame of time.

If I have a Fireball, Fireblast, Fireball rotation, I should be able to execute that rotation 10% faster.

HOTs and DOTs currently do not follow this rule because their duration stays the same regardless of how much haste you have. A Druid that rolls Lifeblooms does not gain any benefit from spell haste until he has enough to allow him to squeeze one more LB for a 4th person within the LB's 7 second duration.

If enabling true time compression to work with HOTs and DOTs makes it "flawed", then I say the base functionality of the spell was flawed in the first place, and not haste.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

flyingtoastr

SoR coefficients are 9.2% for a 1 handed weapon and 10.8% for a 2-handed weapon.

And that would be allowing Holy Paladins (along with their leetsause heals) to do unmitigatable raid level DPS in PvP alone. Yes, you could make SoR scale as high as our melee swings, but you're going to seriously unbalance PvP. Think of it this way: I'm walking around in AV with my awesome level 80 raid gear with 2000 spell damage. At 200% coefficient my SoR will be doing about 4100 damage every 1.8 seconds. That is PURE HOLY damage: it ignores armor, procs on every swing, isn't affected at all by Resil, has no resistance school to buff partials for, etc. I'm also getting all the awesome healing talents from the Holy tree, meaning I can then sit back and full heal myself to full after soloing everyone at Relief Hut for a minimal mana investment.

That also means I can solo someone with 20k health by autoswinging for 9 seconds. It will cost me about 400 mana to kill an army of horde. Broken much?

Not just that, but SoR is the main damage/tanking seal of Prot as well. Think, prot pallys with only 1k spell damage will be able to put out almost 3000 TPS without touching Holy Shield or Consecration. Our single target threat will blow the other classes out of the water!

Get the point now?

There is no simple solution here, stop pretending there will be one.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Axanor

All signs point to "Hex" at this point. It's in-flavor for the Shaman and has been datamined on the PTR.

 

Endoscient

I am little confused with why everyone is trying to have ret pallies scale with spell damage. I thought the overall goal here was to reduce the amount of gear that was only useful for one spec of one class. Not to make it so each class has one set of gear they always use.

How ret pallies work now is fine, and with Death Knights there will be 3 classes that will want to use physical dps plate, presuming they don't decided to itemize leather better then plate again.

What I think is far more needed is to find a way with talents or something to have protection paladins use the same gear as protection warriors more or less, so they don't need their own version of tanking plate but with spell damage. Make some talent that makes Holy Shield scale with Shield Block value, or have consecrate do more damage with strength and actually make strength be good for Warrior tps.

I don't see anything wrong with having a totally separate gear for Holy, Protection, and Ret. In fact I prefer then having one jack of all trades set. It is just having three sets that are only good for that one spec that is the issue. The only set that will really be by itself is Holy, but I don't think there is any perfect way to consolidate everything. Having holy scale with melee stats (as someone suggested) would just be plain weird, and will really have the butcher the meaning of stats to make it work.

While the makes just one damage/healing stat will help consolidate gear, I would be quite suprised if we don't see separate pieces aimed at magic nukers and healers. Sure you can use either one if it is a big item level upgrade, but it shouldn't be optimal for that tier. What magic caster wants mp5? What healer wants hit? Their is already enough competition over dps cloth, why make more.

 

Anedris

Can we please stop talking about paladins? There are a thousand and one directions that Blizzard can take the class in, and we won't know which one they've chosen until they tell us (or it gets leaked). We've been over the arguments, we know that holydins have a gear niche that will probably be widened somehow and ret paladins have a quarrelsome relationship with spell damage that will probably be fixed in one direction or another. Unless someone has something new to say, can we stop bickering about which path is better?

Regards redoing all the stats... I don't see why. Certain stats do certain things because that is what they were arbitrarily chosen to do a long time ago, and rearranging everything to try to make it more "intuitive" doesn't get us anywhere. To some people, haste reducing DoT durations is intuitive. To others, it's nonsense. (Spell haste making diseases run their course faster? Does that really make sense? At the moment spell haste does exactly what it advertises: it makes you cast faster.)

I can agree with removing some of the more archaic mechanics (crushing blows being the premier example) but most of this game makes enough sense that people can muddle through. Spirit is mana regen and intellect is mana pool. It's easy enough to understand. You can make intellect mana pool and mana regen and then make spirit spellpower - it works fine, I just don't see the benefit that makes it worth re-itemizing the entire game.

 

Fiola

Speaking of haste, does the combined spell/physical haste stat mean that physical classes will see their abilities "cast" faster?

(Sorry if it's been brought up before)

 

Incoherence

It makes sense to priests because they've spent the last 3 years dealing with it. That doesn't make it any less transparent to anyone else (particularly because the FSR mechanic is not really explained anywhere, and even the "while casting" explanation on the character sheet is somewhat misleading because you don't drop into FSR while casting a non-channeled spell, only once you finish casting). The 2.4 changes actually simplified things for priests, who could just tell newbies "get spirit rather than mp5", but it still takes several pages to explain priest regen mechanics, an Algebra 2 level formula to calculate it, and an addon to measure FSR. And throughput is a whole different ballgame.

I can sort of see both sides of it. On the one hand, the FSR mechanic rewards priests and (to an extent) druids that can figure out how to use it, and it means that priests have a different regen mechanism from shamans, who have a different regen mechanism from paladins. On the other hand, it's overly complicated and not well explained in the game, and if the aim is to simplify and streamline, spirit mechanics certainly qualify.

But a lot of things aren't explained well in the game, threat mechanics being the most glaring example, and I'm not sure that this is a battle worth picking, particularly because it doesn't help you consolidate gear: whatever the regen stat is, healers will want more of it than casters.

 

PSGarak

There's nothing flawed about spell cast-time and debuff duration being completely different. I would say, it's rather the point.

Here's the problem: For cast-time spells, shorter is better, for obvious reasons. For non-DoT/HoT buffs and debuffs, longer is better for equally obvious reasons. You certainly wouldn't want your melee haste lowering the duration of your Hammer of Justice or Battleshout, nor your spell haste lowering the duration of your Curse of Tongues. In fact, I would spend talent points to increase the duration. So time-compression is not always a desirable effect.

For HoT/DoT effects, the two combine. There are a few DoTs nowadays that have secondary non-damage effects as a consequence (shadow embrace, VT, blood frenzy, UA), and for these shortening the duration is a bad thing as well as a good thing. At the very least, all DoT also have the "periodically breaks stealth" effect associated with them, so reducing the duration is always a nerf in some (admitedly trivial) capacity.

Haste is not evenly-distributed time compression. This is not particularly different than hit not being an evenly-distributed DPS increase, nor +dmg or AP for that matter. There is absolutely nothing special about haste that means it must necessarily benefit everything identically (it would also need to lower cooldowns, which I wouldn't object to). The problem isn't even that it doesn't affect DoTs that much. The problem is that it's one more thing on a long list of things that don't benefit DoTs very much, if at all.

Increasing the tick speed is an interesting option. It suffers from the break-point problem that you don't benefit until you actually fit one more tick into the normal duration, but it also gives a DoT-class more than 1% DPS per 1% haste*. Which isn't really that bad, once you look at it as just comparing a DPS-equivalence of ratings. Scaling superiorly with one stat may be what's necessary to make DoT-classes scale viable in end-game gear.
*DoT damage is increase by 1%. Filler damage is increased by 1%, and again by less than 1% but more than 0% by having more time to cast it that was previously spent on DoTs. Net gain is more than 1%, although not by much.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

flyingtoastr

In regards to GCD:

If its a spell yes. If it is a melee ability no. Taking pallys as an example, during Heroism my GCD for Crusader Strike will remain a static 1.5 seconds. My GCD for Seal of Command will be decreased however, as it is considered a spell. Pallys and Shamans at the least will get a little use from the overlap, but it won't help the Rogues, Warriors or Ferals (other than when they pop out to bres).

If you mean casted weapon attacks (like Slam) I honestly have no idea, but I would doubt it.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Rivkah

It's an interesting change for hunters especially since they live in that weird nether world between casters and physical dps. Right now steady shot is hasted by melee haste, but since the base cast speed is 1.5s and the GCD isn't affected by melee haste, GCD is still an issue, although I believe that heroism and drums will reduce the GCD for hunters since they also provide spell haste. So if both forms of haste are given, it makes for some interesting changes with regards to rotations.

 

Anedris

The FSR is a completely separate mechanic from intellect increasing mana pool and spirit increasing regen. You could make intellect affect both mana pool and regen and spirit be spellpower and still have the FSR. Or you could remove the FSR and leave intellect and spirit doing the same things they do right now (although spirit would obviously change to something more akin to mp5, but it would still provide regen). I certainly did not mean to defend the FSR when I said intellect and spirit are fine as is.

 

Linnet

That's a very strange conclusion. HoTs can't benefit from crits either, does that mean the base functionality is flawed also?

What I would like to see haste do for HoTs is allow you to overlap them. Right now, a single druid can stack 3 lifeblooms. But what if extra haste let them overlap a 4th one for a small amount of time also?

Druid: Peace

 

Copernicus

Arguably, the goal is to make healing gear useful for non-healing roles. Specifically, leveling a character and respeccing.

Gear consolidation won't happen at the raid level - each class or spec will choose their best option or stats. Stuff like hit rating or mana regeneration will split up gear. But for levelling purposes, a druid or priest can pick up generic spell damage gear and use that for healing purposes when in group and damage dealing while soloing.

So for Paladins, either Ret Paladins have to be converted to using generic spell damage gear or Holy Paladins have to be converted to using generic Ret Paladin gear. Both are logical, and Blizzard doesn't mind having one set of gear only being useful to one class (see spell power Leather or Mail).

 

Prinsesa

Melee haste currently does not let your Improved Slam cast faster than 0.5 seconds, and I assume the same would hold into a merged haste stat. In which case, you are correct that Warriors and Rogues (and Ferals to most extent) would not gain any GCD gains from the haste merger.

One of the arguments against haste affecting LB that was mentioned here is that you wouldn't be able to roll it on 4 (or even 5) people anymore, since the GCD and duration proportions would always only work for 3 people.

This is what I mean by base functionality: The ability to roll LB on 3 or 4 or 5 people is completely arbitrary, as set by whatever rules the game and the spell are playing by. Just because it suddenly wouldn't work the way you prefer it to work is certainly no reason to make haste work more intuitively.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Aéquitas

Only thing I hope is that they keep hastegems in the game so Rogues can finally specialize in haste too instead of just hit or agi.

At the moment haste is worth more then hit or agi in my current gear. And tbh what I always loved about assasin/rogue classes is the fact that they attack extremely fast. also we are gettinghaste enchants for evenmore haste

 

RangerSix

A question about those who suggest that we, Ret Paladins, should go back to spelldamage mechanics.
How will you keep us scaling with groupbuffs in check? (E.g. Battleshout, windfury, ect...)

Just feels like too much of a fuss to make us not scale with "warrior" styled dps gear anymore all of a sudden.
I mean, warrior DPS gear is going to be there regardless, so why not let Retribution use it?

 

Exewut

You can keep the melee scaling via SOB, what I'm suggesting is adding a viable alternative via a change to SOC so that someone in spellpower gear (holy and who knows prot too) will have an effective means of doing dps even without having to collect a second gear set. (same gear, respec, viable raid lvl dps. The same deal as druids resto/balance and shaman resto/elemental). There's also nobody that says that you have to be in the melee group. You can be in the caster group.


Anyway the discussion has gone beyond ridiculous now thanks to some heavy trolling by some, I think it's best to just leave this subject and wait for the revised talent trees to see what blizzards plans are.

 

rhea

And how balanced it is to have a holy paladin heal for 8k crits and hit for the same as retri? I don't really care for what purposes the scaling should be. Making holy scale with melee because of leveling is quite stupid don't you think? You spend 2 weeks leveling and 2 years raiding. Now if you make holy paladins scale with prot paladins...
Prot paladins would have a SD -> Block/Chance conversion so they would mostly wear the same gear as holy paladins, only excluding the necessary block/defence/dodge... It would also make holy paladins the real combat healers in the sense "you have 10 mobs hitting you but you still pull out heals".

And how it solves the gearing problems?
2 specs use SD gear, holy and prot paladins.
2 specs use block gear, prot paladins and warriors.
2 specs use dodge gear, prot DKs and warriors.
3 specs use melee dmg gear, DKs, retris and fury.

Trying to clear up a bit more
prot paladins use SD for threat, holy paladins well duh, healing. (no, you don't give prot paladins 3000000tps)
prot warriors and paladins use block for mitigation.
prot DK and warriors use dodge for avoidance and strenght for threat.

I'm not saying anything about defence or parry because those are stats that no tank stacks. It's true that DKs work alot on parry but unless they give them new gear for that, it's a new problem.

 

• Playered

Except you cant Block, Parry, or Dodge while casting which makes the point moot, and quite often with Imp Concentration Aura this is somewhat do-able as it is.

Remember that Block is changing rather significantly in WoTLK aswell, and no one knows how this will effect Paladins which makes further speculation about it even more silly.