I did not mention Kaz'rogal on purpose actually. I am not sure if a prot paladin can currently tank that, but even if the risk of him blowing up would be kinda big?
Imo a bad example of a fight in general as that mechanic is also very punishing to enha shammies and ret pallies?
They should look for better methods to make fights difficult than mechanics that punish a single tank class or spec imo. And mana burn is one of those things i'd like to see gone in general.

Holy shield being physical would be a huge buff and i don't see what speaks against it.

Every single of the 4 tanking classes has to be able to Maintank every boss in every raid or be able to switch role with an offtank else they'll be replaced, that's just how it is.

If one of the tank classes makes a fight trivial, that class will be picked by raids?

Maybe we are interpreting it differently then. I read it as "if you have two different tanking classes, you are good to go". Only one tanking class has a mana bar anyway, so the second tank always ends up being able to tank through silence/mana burn.

While I agree with you on the likelihood of gimmick fights that strongly favour one class reoccurring in the next expansion despite the current best intentions, they seem much more likely to be in the 25 man than the 10 man raids, or, to put it another way, it seems likely that any gimmick fight in the 25 man raid version will have its gimmick portion tuned down or removed entirely in the 10 man version.

While a 25 man raid guild is likely to have a tank of any tanking class available and decently geared up for switching in (with potentially the attendant issues of benching and social group interactions that are not fun for anybody involved), I do not think the same assumption can be made about 10 man raiding guilds or smaller non-dedicated raiding guilds that occasionally do raid 10 man instances.

10 classes, 10 spots - it is entirely likely that many smaller guilds will completely exclude one or two classes from their regular raiding roster (if they have such a roster rather than just taking whomever is online and present), not because of perceived shortcomings with the classes (though that could be another issue) but because of which classes the guild happens to play.

For the 10 man to work as a concept satisfying what the developers have stated as intentions in the beta forums while also appealing to players, it should be possible to completely and for all time during the next expansion to remove one or two classes from your raiding roster and never, ever, run into an "you need class X on the roster to succeed" issue. If you have two good players playing tanks, you should be good to go using those tanks throughout the 10 mans without ever having to replace them for any individual encounter.

Perhaps I am reading too much into the blue statements, but they do seem to indicate it rather strongly.

This also stops all the issues associated with trying to correctly interrupt your mind flay at the appropriate time (2 seconds). If a broken mind flay just dealt the appropriate fraction of remaining damage, your DPS would be the same no matter when you broke channeling. Arcane missiles works a bit differently, but presumably it could send an additional bolt that deals less damage.

This is how I saw it as well. You grab two tanking classes, two or three healers, and fill in the rest with dps and you're good to go, granted as long as you didn't grab three Ret paladins or something silly. Although that might end up working as well.

Paladins don't need any protection against mana burn/silence because there is going to always be at least one other tank in your group. It seems to me Blizzard is moving away from the idea of a MT, guild wise at least. There will still probably be one tank in your group MTing the majority of the fights in an instance, but the amount that majority encompasses should be smaller than it has been. Ideally in any given 10 man instance, each tank should be the MT on half of the fights in the place, with the 25 man being similarly spread out.

Could you have just a single tank throughout a zone? Probably, but if the other tank with you can do it better, why not let him? My paladin does fine on Maiden, granted that is far from current progression. And a mana burn could easily be tweaked to let a paladin tank the fight. Maybe have it burn a percentage instead, which would help mana using melee classes as well and instead of blowing up if you have no mana, it will burn health instead. Or even not have the boss target the tank with the burn, akin to Leo's demon phase not targeting the tank with whispers.

Main point is it seems Blizzard wants a tank to look at a fight and say "Yeah, I could tank this fight and deal with Ability A, but the other tank here can completely avoid Ability A so he should tank it instead." And this would be with every combination possible of tanks. Or it wouldn't matter and they simply play rock, paper, scissors to decide.

Actually, this fight isn't that difficult to tank by the way. I did it the other day, and it was actually harder doing it when I overgeared the instance (we're now 3/6 SW), than it would have been back when it was progression. He hits plenty hard enough to keep my mana up.

I think having "flavor" as a tank is never going to work. We've seen throughout T6 content, the tank that makes the fight the easiest will be the required tank. That leaves the other tanks cheerleadin'. RoS is actually a cool gimmick fight in that it requires a warrior for phase 2, and is made far easier with a paladin for phase 3. But it still leaves druids waiting it out (or dpsing).

Also, I guess as a protection paladin that's only been in one raid as non-protection since Kara, I don't really care if I keep flavor from other tanking classes. Being the king of trash is a small consolation when you're riding the pine for progression Brutallus. Being required for the first 4 bosses in Hyjal but then utterly useless on the last boss wasn't much fun either.

They're talking about having multiple classes besides shadow priests in the "mana battery" role, right?

Is there any chance that having one of the "mana battery" classes available to the tankadin could provide enough mana to make doing their job less painful on this kind of fight?

Do the new seal/judgment mechanics mean you can use the seal and judgement of wisdom without gimping your TPS too terribly? As I understand it, all judgments do holy damage, and do so regardless of what seal you have up, and the differences between judgments now all relate to debuffs, and none of the judged debuffs increases your TPS, so you're free to use them more situationally without gimping your TPS.

As I further understand it, the mana returns from both seal and judgment of wisdom scale now, with both attack power and spell power.

Judgement of Wisdom - Spell - World of Warcraft

Seal of Wisdom - Spell - World of Warcraft

Might that plus a shadow priest be enough?

Looks like they fixed the texturing on the dragon on the new WotLK title screen in tonights beta build.

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/2...8012648jp4.png

I guess they will just make spriests mana regen raid wide? At least they said they didnt see it as a problem to do so.
The improved Water Elemental Mana regen is supposedly raid wide too.

My initial reaction is "probably not". In a 25-man, you usually won't need the paladin to tank the mana-burner (Sunwell tanks step in now and yell at me...), so it's probably moot. In a 10-man or 5-man, you can't count on having the mana battery character, so an alternative will likely need to be around for paladins to be able to effectively tank mana burn fights in those instances.

The problem with Seal of Wisdom as a solution is that you're trying to solve the problem of having your threat generation reduced by reducing your threat generation, which seems counterproductive. It might help (mostly on AoE fights, I'd guess), but it'd probably be extremely encounter-dependent.

But how much threat do you actually lose using SoW, versus the threat you gain by having more mana regen? Seal damage looks like it's going to be a smaller part of overall threat generation (new holy damage abilities that scales off BV and AP), so the net gain from using SoW is probably better than it'd seem.

Where's that screenshot from?

I'm in Beta and I can't even download the new build yet, and no U.S. Beta server is named Coldarra.

Perhaps Euros got the build before we did? Not sure...

Edit: Apparently the Euros got it first.

Yeah I'm in the EU beta and took the screenshot.

Wow. That looks a ton cooler than the current frost wyrm models. Maybe it'll replace all of them?

Servers are up and they have reduced the mana cost of a lot of spells, though my Arcane shot rank 10 only costs 7 mana, that seems like a bug :p

They also added a filters tab to the calendar, you can show things like raid resets and battleground holidays on the calendar

They're back. ;P

Tailoring and Jewelcrafting seem to be fully available, tons of new stuff on the trainers and vendors, a 20 slot frostweave bag recipe.

Lastest Beta Build (forgot number)

VERY VERY IMPORTANT CHANGE
- The mana cost of ALL spells have been changed to scale with level. EVERY lower rank than the maximum one will also cost more to cast.

To give you an idea, my Holy Light (Rank 1) currently cost 1347 Mana, whereas my Holy Light (Rank 12) cost 1148 Mana.
It's the same thing for Flash of Light. And every other spells in the game. Even buffs are affected.

However, it is important to notice that the overall mana cost of every new rank spells has been drastically reduced. My Flash of Light (Rank 8) previously costed 350 mana, it now only cost 277 mana at level 77.

Downranking is no longer possible as well.

Indeed they are:

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appear to be living in Dalaran sewer :p

And WotLK just keeps getting better and better. Guess mindless spam isn't a viable form of healing anymore, huh? Unless talented for it of course.

When low on mana first reaction shouldn't be switching to a lower rank spell and continuing spam. Hopefully this will bring some need of intelligence for healing. On some level at least.

*Edit* Blue post about subject

WoW Forums -> Goodbye Downrankers!

Changes in the client patch notes, mainly covering some of the class changes already announced: