Obviously, then, if you have Sunwell gear, you are not going to be replacing it with level 72 quest greens.

Looks like T6 gear will start to be replaced in Drak'tharon Keep at around level 75-76. So figure if you mostly quest to level 80, you're probably going to keep most of the same gear you have now. Gonna be a lot of disenchanted quest rewards, though that should keep the cost of enchant mats down for a bit in the beginning.

Bear in mind that T6 had a lot of stats to spread item budget and sockets, whereas the linked blue items have neither.
It's hard to judge for me since most of the linked cloth has high int/sta/spi/dmg, where raid gear has moderate int/sta/spi, high haste/crit/hit (usually 2 of these), very high damage and sockets for more dmg/haste/crit.

The linked level 75 beat BT/HS/T6 in raw budget, so they can replace that gear if they're well designed.

/shrug

Have we actually seen any sort of spirit-based talents for Pallys/Shammys?

Nope. Nor have I seen any SPI-based items for them.

E: nevermind, I'm a blind fool.

Have any of the "old" TBC gear been re-itemized yet on beta?

If you're talking about the change to a universal spell power stat, yes. All existing items have been changed to this new system. Ranging from level 6 greens of healing to tier 6.

For universal ratings it seems existing gear still provides either spell or melee based ratings. I have no idea whether these separate types of ratings will affect both spell and melee.

Edit: See the Holy Paladin tier 6 set for example: Lightbringer Raiment - Item Set - World of Warcraft

Do you know how healing is handled with respect to school spell power?
Is there a "healing school spell power" or does it use the respective school (holy/nature for pa|pr/sha|dru)?

[Nature's Embrace] [Drape of the Righteous]
Went from "holy damage" to "holy spell power".
[Ring of Unrelenting Storms]
Went from "nature damage" to "nature spell power".

I'm curious whether this applies to all holy spells, or whether healing spells pick another "healing type/school" spell power.


For comparison:
[Primal Mooncloth Robe]
Went from "healing" to "spell power".
[Spellfire Robe]
Went from "fire/arcane spell damage" to "arcane/fire spell power".

I'm afraid I have no idea there Roywyn. I can only see the information on WoWHead myself. If I happen to get in the beta my Paladin does luckily have a [Drape of the Righteous] to test this out with.

So I love healing and I'm definitely set on playing a healer for expansion, but I'm not sure which. Whenever I look and compare talent trees/spells, one question keeps coming up: "How is spell power going to work exactly in comparison to +heal?" I've seen this quote flying around often...

Please note the bold area. I'm confused, is spell power alone going to be equivalent to +Heal or will spell power AND talents result in the same amount of healing done for spells?

So I'm assuming its safe to say that the coefficients for all healing spells will increase? But by how much? Just to throw a random number out there based on gem iLvl weighting...a Teardrop Spinel gives 22 healing, a Runed Spinel gives 12 spell dmg, should we expect a 183% (22 / 12) coefficient boost of all heal spells? Or will it be lower? Maybe something like 150% and talents make up the remaining gap?

I cannot divine this answer from talent trees coefficient talents. Druid's hots remain 20%, Druid's HT gets an increase of 20% (to 40%), Priest's Gheal is decreased by 10% (to 10%), and Priest's Flash Heal is decrased by 5% (to 5%). The coefficient talent changes are going every which way, there is no way of knowing whats a buff/nerf or a spell power mechanic change. To further muck things up, multiple new +% overal healing done talents have been introduced.

Anyone have some information that sheds light on this matter?

You wouldn't. That's the point. Someone asked about feral staves so I provided a link and a comparison.

Some conversions seem imperfect. I'm guessing these will be fixed later in Beta.

For Example, you would expect Essence of the Martyr and The Icon of the Silver Crescent to now be identical, however:

[Essence of the Martyr] - 44 Spellpower, 158 on use

[Icon of the Silver Crescent] - 43 Spellpower, 155 on use

I've been browing the wotlk stuff to see whether I'll want to be using pieces from my spell damage set, or my healing set when I enter WoTLK. Seems that some healing items will turn out better than their DPS equivalents.

A few comments on paladin changes, mainly from protection spec point of view:

[2cp]
o Blessing of Sacrifice renamed Hand of Sacrifice, is now only 1 rank and transfers 20% of the damage taken to the caster, duration reduced to 12 seconds, cooldown increased to 2 minutes. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana.
This is actually a massive change for tank survivability and paladin mana regen/kickback. 20% mitigation AFTER all other mitigation is massive, plus the damage to the casting paladin is significant mana return from spiritual attunement. It also appears that each paladin can cast this on the target (tank), though it will be curious if it will be multiplicative or additive (with 5 pallys casting it, does it increase to 100% or to 68%? Either way, powerful. It will probably be nerfed, since this could easily lead to Sacrifice-rotations on the tank. It does fit the "durable healer" theme though.


o Blessing of Salvation renamed Hand of Salvation, now reduces total threat on the target by 2% per second for 10 seconds while also reducing all damage and healing done by 10%. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana.
A targeted Soul Shatter / Invis. Very nice. We can start knocking the people off the top of the threat meter that get too close or pass. The damage / healing reduction is minor, and probably a net increase for the one it is cast on, when compared to their aggro drop abilities. This is a pure benefit for classes without aggro drops, like dps warriors.

o Improved Righteous Fury (Protection) threat bonus folded into base spell, talent still reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
This is odd. Improved Righteous Fury implies anger, retribution, offense. Having the only benefit to the talent be mitigation is in contradiction to this. Still no complaints about the effect, though less than a warrior still, but the naming retention is odd.

o Seal of Vengeance damage over time effect duration increased to 18 seconds.
This is awesome for threat, it makes it much less likely to drop a 5-stack, with 50% more swings (assuming 1.8 speed, up to 10 swings from 6.66) Coupled with the Imp SoR talent moving to Tier 1, this helps propel SoV even further as the best threat seal for duration fights.

Divine Guardian - Spell - World of Warcraft
Divine Guardian: Divine Shield now re-directs 30% of all damage to all raid members within 30 yards to the paladin while active... who is immune to it
Bubble rotation?

Touched by the Light - Spell - World of Warcraft
Touched by the Light: Spell power and critical healing bonus increased by 30% of stamina ... WOW. Stack stamina for threat. That is awesome. Right now, that would give me another ~400+ spell damage, or ~ +60-65%. Passive, I would be 1000-1100, the range I currently get when I stack spell damage.
Heal crits would be up to x1.8, a boost for wearing holy pally crit gear when you don't have the illumination talent. For off healing.
(wowhead lists Spirit in the actual effect, stamina in the tooltip, probably an error)

_______________________

The loss of passive salvation isnt the problem that people are making it out to be. Tank threat overall is way up, i think more than the 30% gap. Prot pallys specifically are probably up WAY more than 30%, due to several threat boosts, though that Touched by Light talent is by far the biggest. Coupled with paladins being able to directly knock people off the top of the threat meter, I don't see a single problem with the loss of passive salvation.

For when we are in, but not actually tanking, the Touched by Light is still massive for us, as well as we are possibly the only ones with imp devo (maybe not, 16 points in, but possibly), for tank mitigation and a raid-wide boost to healing.

Raid wide Concentration aura is another big boost to DPS and healing.

Between the new Sacrifice and the added Bubble, i could easily see a sacrifice / bubble rotation used to mitigate a TON of damage from tanks / raid for an extended period of time.

Theory:
If 4 pallys, all specced, -20% for 12 sec x4, -30% for 12sec x4, 96 seconds of -20% or -30% additional mitigation, applied AFTER all other mitigation. I am assuming blizzard won't let them stack together for 100% mitigation. I expect a nerf to these somehow. The sacrifice most specifically. At least bubble, a prot ability, boosted in the prot tree, is finally usable by a prot pally, even if just while offtanking.

[/2cp]

Sheshonk,

I think it's a big case of wait and see what beta testing shows in terms of coefficients, as Blizz's changes dont seem to make sense in this regard. As

a) for talents which increase spells by x%, then there is really no need to re-balance these so long as they keep the new spell power * new coefficient equal to old healing * old coefficient, then the % increase will end up the same. Perhaps they could have made the coefficnet of things like GHeal larger than a 185% increase and countered it with the reduction from empowered healing but this makes no sense

b) for talents which give +spellpower based on a % spirit like a priest's spiritual guidance, since coefficients for spells are larger one would effect thig % to decrease, but infact it has increased in the priests case.

Need some beta players casting lots of heals methinks

My guess is that there will be a 2 min 'Forebearance' type debuff applied to the target to prevent rotations of some kind.

Has anyone seen a complete list of the achievements knocking about? Would love to see one

[ignore] I have seen they have popped up on worldofraids

Oddly enough, while they converted the healing to spellpower, they did not convert the spellcrit rating to the new unified critical strike rating, nor spellhaste to haste.

I have to say that Ebon Hold looks absolutely awesome. Instructor Raz as a questgiver? Fuck yeah. I remember people talking a long time ago about how Death Knights should start in Naxxaramas and be able to do quests there, and this is really pretty much as good. I hope Blizzard does a better job of tying raid bosses into the lore this time around.

[Edit]

Overall, the achievements actually contain a fair amount of information about Northrend. Apparently the boss of the CoA 1-shot black dragon raid has the title of "the Onyx guardian".

This might be somewhat interesting to hunters, after finishing downloading the beta client I extracted the background for the pet talent trees. The files names, quite helpfully, also included the names which I've added below the picture.



No idea about how the talent trees themselves will be laid out beyond this though, you'll have to wait for someone else to post that info.

Nice pictures.

Tenacity would obviously be the "tanking"/survival tree and I would assume Ferocity and Cunning are the DPS and support trees respectively.