Except…Â*if there are no other big mechanics changes, as you speculate, then there are two specs that would happily use that gear, at least for soloing. Prot Paladins, lacking the melee scaling talents and abilities from Ret, solo much better with spelldamage gear than with Warrior DPS gear. This is especially true for Alliance Prot Paladins who don't have Seal of Blood to fall back on (though my Prot Pally is Horde, Seal of Blood in my best "ret" gear still hits for less than Seal of Righteousness… but my ret gear is terrible).

As Blizzard stated at WWI, Ret is the odd-man out for Paladins, not Holy. Holy and Prot would both be happy with those items, at least for soloing, and probably for a threat set too.

Spellpower is the healing stat, as well as damage. There is no +dmg and no +healing.

IE, it's healing plate (which could also be used as pewpew shockadin).

Ret is the "odd-man out" for paladins, but in a scope of general Plate wearers Holy is the outlier. Ret does wonderfully with "Warrior" DPS gear, Prot does passibly well with "Warrior" Tanking gear (a difference that could be solved with a single Strength/Shield Block Value > Spell Damage conversion). Holy does crap with other plate.

Remember, their goal is 3 classes wearing the same style gear, not 3 specs.

Well I think it's pretty clear that isn't going to happen with plate. Anything you can think of to allow Holy Pallies to use Warrior gear is going to feel extremely contrived and unsatisfying. There is a solution to allow Ret and Holy to wear the same gear, though. Just make a deep Ret talent that gives 2AP per spellpower and says "you gain no spelldamage or healing from spellpower on your gear." Blizzard seems to have decided against that, though.

Edit: or 3AP or whatever would be required to make it work.
Edit2: or Strength for synergy reasons

That is a hard goal to achieve indeed with 2 mail and 2 leather classes, unless taking lower armor gear becomes official. I'd rather think the idea is 3 speccs than 3 classes, otherwise you would end up with 4 kinds of gear overall, which is overdoing it alot. If it's 3 speccs of 3 different classes with always different combinations it's overly complicated for no reason and would solve nothing in the lower amount of gear that hybrids need to collect.

Which is why I am confused that they are still sticking with mp5 for Paladin and Shaman mana regen.

I've just seen a leaked screenshot from the alpha which shows a "spell" cloak with Stam, Int, Spirit and Spell Power.
This would fit nicely on Mages, Locks, Priests and Resto/Balance Druids, but the spirit on it is completely useless for shammies and pallies.

I can't really figure out the reasoning behind this as all the classes I mentioned above will also be able to use the same cloak if it had mp5 instead of spirit on it (although they might grumble a bit as it won't have the talent synergy that spirit does).

EDIT: When I say it would fit well on Warlocks I'm referring to some WotLK talents that seem to hint that locks will be using spirit for mana regen.

This is kind of what I meant, but I was more thinking along the lines of dropping mp5 in favour of spirit, since it has much more going for it than mp5 does (scales with BoK, many talents that are enhanced by spirit, comparable while-casting regen while massively better outside of 5sr).

Why exclude pallies and shammies from spirit-based items while other classes can use those items AND mp5 ones?
As an example, look at the Violet Eye healing ring - great for 2 healing specs, pretty rubbish for 2 others.

Same goes for strength/AP for physical damage classes, I suppose.

Also there isn't many strength cloaks/rings, they are usually attack power which the plate/mail seems just as happy with as the leather ones. However, there is plenty of int/mp5/heal necks/cloaks/rings which can't compete with the spirit versions for druid/priest anymore.
Lore-wise I can't see why spirit should be weaker for shamans or paladins, and maybe they should just change it similar to how agility means different things for different classes. Shamans and Paladins getting somewhere near 100% regen in 5sr and spirit giving them 30% of what it gives for druids/priests. This wouldn't change the way they play, giving them the same regen in 5sr and out, and making spirit worth somewhere equal to what mp5 is for them now.

The way I interpreted making the game "easier" was more along the lines of making boss ability/spell mechanics more intuitive or obvious, rather than making then do less damage or have less HP. For example on the Ahune fight that was just recently added, there are big, center print raid announcements when he's changing phases, that hint at what you need to do for that phase, and the tooltips for his buffs/debuffs are clear and concise.

Or, going by Ockham's razor, the reason they have the plate itemized the way it is now is because they haven't changed pallys yet. There still have been no appreciable changes to pallys so removing any sort of spellpower plate would cripple any paladin trying to play at the moment. It is much easier to change some random loot drops after the new trees go in than to force people to heal with 0 bonus healing for a few months.

The exact quote was "we'd like each type of armor to be shared by at least 3 classes", going on to note the homogenization in cloth between all the caster classes. Make of it what you will.

On the subject of making tooltips more intuitive and whatnot, does anyone else feel it's time spellpower coefficients became a bit more visible ingame?

I know most people who read these boards can probably tell you from memory what the % benefit from damage or healing to X spell is for their class; but with damage+healing being merged to spellpower, and the indication that healing spells will just receive some arbitrary higher value than before, it seems alot less straightforward. I say arbitary because I still kind of have the old rule of 3.5s gets 100%, instants get 42% or so, and everything else scales in between those two points. Admittedly I'd have to go look at a spreadsheet to tell you how much things like arcane missiles or pyro gets nowadays.

But doesn't that a seem a little farfetched? Currently you can look at a piece of gear and tell how much bonus AP or spell damage you'd get on X ability, do we really need to have a spreadsheet calculated by testing dozens of casts to have a rough idea of how much of each we really get?

It seems if they're overhauling the UI, they might as well just put your spellpower calculations rght on the tooltip, or just give the % bonus. To take fireball for example, on a tooltip I'd rather see either 'Does 800 damage + 115% of your spellpower (tooltip updated to reflect Empowered Fireball), or even better would be if they just did the math on it and said 'Does 2000 damage', having already taken into account your amount of +spellpower, leaving no guesswork on your part on how hard you should be hitting, aside from target debuffs.

Well I wasn't even referring to any particular deduction when I said Blizzard had decided against adding a Spellpower -> AP conversion for Ret so that all three specs of Paladins could use the same gear (at least for soloing, in Prot's case).

I was basing that statement on the explicit statement at WWI that Ret Pallies would get more changes so that they would use identical gear to DPS Warriors and Death Knights. A statement that implies, by the way, that Holy and Prot Paladins will not be using that gear, since Ret was singled out specifically.

I suspect the "each type of armor shared by at least 3 classes" thing is more of a goal than an iron-clad statement of what will be. Especially since there's only two classes that are Mail-wearing classes total!

Yet, like your signature shows, maybe people shouldn't take a quote mentioned in a Q&A so literally or take it as etched in stone.

There's still a crapload of tweaking and development to go for both Paladins and Death Knights. People seem completely convinced that there is no Death Knight spec that will require SD gear even though they've never played one, this could easily change.

Blizzard is hardly perfect, but don't worry, everyone's going to get their gear.

Oh come on, Chilton was clearly joking when he said that.

Don't know if it's a fake or not, but this is today's screenshot of the day on wotlk.info:

My educated guess is that Blizzard has two goals in creating create two styles of spellpower itemization:

1.) Bring them in line with the two styles of physical DPS: There are str/crit items that are better for warriors, paladins, and shaman, and agi/AP items for rogues, hunters, and druids. By having SP/mp5 items and SP/spi items, Blizzard creates the same caster dichotomy that currenty exists for physical DPS. Thus we will probably see certain shared item slots such as rings, cloaks, and necklaces continue to have this distinction.

2.) By not converting Shaman and Paladins to a spirit based system, Blizzard is able to prevent mail/plate classes from taking that gear is intended for the cloth/leather classes -- spirit continuing to be a bad stat for the mail/plate casters helps protect the cloth/leather classes from having their gear canniballzed.

3.) Giving people incentive to stay mainly within their armor class is definitely a good thing, as we currently have a situation where elemental shaman will often wear cloth, particularly at pre-sunwell levels where the +dmg mail is rare, and in many cases physical dps classes of all stripes prefer taking rogue leather over the mail/plate drops, only taking items in "their" armor class as a stop-gap measure. This really hurts cloth casters and rogues the most, as they are unable to take higher armor class items to fill their item holes while having other classes roll/bid on the only items they can use.

As a Fury warrior, wearing leather doesn't bother me too much. Barbarians in D&D could only use leather, so it sorta works from an RP perpective. I think the logical solution would be to not so poorly itemize particular armor classes. Loading warrior gear with +hit and agility is not the way to go for example. As a result, swiping rogue loot is the next logical choice because mail items sink item budget into intellect.

Yes, I know. Perhaps I just didn't word my post well enough. He made a joke about Warriors and it's now become some sort of rallying cry for angry Paladins. This is why I was telling FlyingToaster to stop posting "Well, he said that they wanted three classes to use each set of gear" like it was etched in stone, because it's not.

There are also those rare agi/ap items for Rogues/Hunters/Druids that are amazing for Warrior/Shaman/Paladins.

Well, not so much rare, as that they really really stand out at high level play with the way itemization is.

And really, pallies aren't upset about the actual joke as much as what was presented with it. They already stated last year that Ret was to be moved to Warrior itemization, and that doesn't address certain issues that brings up (regarding longevity with low mana pools). The blessings comment while neat for PVE (don't have to recast a blessing after a BoP or BoS) really means very little in PVP where pallies are hurting now. Neither of the two spells will last long at all. And another single target heal is not what paladins were hoping for. The irony for me is he's laughing at a spec being terrible, when he was the one who designed it. I guess if you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

The mana issues for ret is not an unprecedented problem. They came up with a more than workable solution for Enh shaman, I see no reason an Unleashed Rage-like talent couldn't fix ret's issues just as well.

I definitely agree with you that they can fix it if they want to fix it. I was just saying that people being upset over a joke isn't irrational. They see it as a very serious situation, with very little developer concern. Joking wasn't a big deal, but showing nothing new (ret or prot), very weak PVP upgrade for blessings, and another single target heal doesn't address much that people were really anxious to hear.