Oh, and despite my disappointment with the weapon skill change, I am actually very happy overall with the enhancement changes. Our talent tree is coherent, now we just need itemization to make sense to go along with the talent tree. The weapon skill thing caught me out of left field, but I'm over it.

Was this changed previously announced? It's a pretty big deal for guilds working on Kael. That extra 10% should get a few more guilds into Hyjal.

I'm awfully worried that they saw us continuing to use the 4-set as "overpowered" and will make the good set with great bonus into a good set with worthless bonus (enough of these already?).

It also could mean simply that they are making them "haste rating" to balance for future levelling/haste stacking, however.

- New macro command to target by entire name: /targetexact

This will be very nice.

Perhaps they were unhappy with the way weapon skill looked on an item? Belt of One-Hundred Deaths - Items - World of Warcraft

At least I don't feel bad about using an axe as human.

If that's true, the PTR is your chance: see what the budget cost of expertise is, do the math, leave out the exagerations and vitriol, and let them know. Even in the worst case, where they ignore you entirely, you have your research done on how to move forward.

Very interesting change to WEx. I guess I don't know if they left the rogue talent unchanged (likely not?), but if they did, then as a swords human rogue with WEx, I'm packing +15 skill/expertise, which means -3.75% dodge and -3.75% parry, in exchange for the loss of, what, 4% hit? That's a slight loss for a boss, but should be useful for trash and the like.

If I add in [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] then that grants me another, what, 6 expertise? That means I have -5.25% dodge/parry. Arguably, this change is better for melee than it was before, because though we have to stack more of the stat, it's now actually possible to fully eliminate misses/dodges from behind, and misses/dodges/parries from the front!

That doesn't factor in the loss of crit, however, so I'll let one of the other theorycrafters work that out.

Those ret changes are really underwhelming, they said they were going to resolve the threat issues and the spellpower dependence but it looks like they just forgot about it.

I hope there's more stuff coming, because that is really just not sufficient... especially when they're kicking enh and fury up to 30% threat reduction at the same time.

Forgive my ignorance, but is this in fact a spell-que ?

Base damage of Starshards is 1128 damage. As a 15 second duration DoT, it would get 100% of +dmg effects. High-end shadow priests have about 1100 +dmg from gear. This is going to tick for 450 before any debuffs are even taken into account. It costs zero mana. It can be re-cast once every thirty seconds. This makes Night Elf shadow priests DRAMATICALLY better than all other races for raiding, and probably for pvp as well. Adding this to a rotation is going to give you, bare minimum, 50 more dps.

I don't want to be melodramatic, but that's something like half a tier worth of raid gear, and it's going to be insane in any number of non-raid situations as well. How is this justifiable?

No, LOTRO has a spell queue. You literally push the button before another spell finishes casting, and when that spell is done, the spell you have queued casts. You press the button once and it casts later.

I'd prefer this method to the "spam faster" implementation here. However, this change is better than requiring /stopcasting macros for all casters though.

I really expected them to give us a little more raid utility, but instead they removed our only key talent and gave it to all paladins. They aimed for more nonburst PvE dmg and more utility. And all I can see is PvP buffing, while they specifically said "We need to be careful to not overdo Retribution for pvp". And we see PvE nerf and PvP buff.

*Confused*

Is it just me, or were the cure curse/poison/disease/etc spell ranges increased to 40 yards for every class besides druids (cure curse and cure/abolish poison) and priest (dispel magic)?

The druids I'm guessing is an oversight in the notes - priest abolish/cure disease spells were increased to 40 yards, and mage curse cures were increased 40 yards, so druid poison/curse variants probably will be too. I'm curious to see whether they'll bump dispel magic up to 40 yards (like paladin cleanse) or leave it at 30 yards (like shaman purge).

No, you still have to cast the spell after the server realizes you have. You can't just press Fireball while casting the previous one and have it Queue up. Time to affix fireball to your mousescroll buttons.

Edit: Does anyone sense that this could cause a lot of lag?

Closest thing to spell queueing we're likely to get.

We'll have to see how much damage ret paladins can put out now. Paladins already arguably bring more raid utility than any other class as it is. Easily keeping up all judgements every 6 seconds by simply using your regular attack rotation is nothing to scoff at either.

Edit: was in response to #39, I'll have to quote or move faster next time...

I may just be missing it, but I don't see any mention of what happens to the Rogue talent "Weapon Expertise" Will this become "expertise" instead of weapon skill?

So if I'm reading this right we'll all still use quartz, but we just won't need stopcasting macros for everything. Does this mean I can go back to spamming cast keys like a ritalin addicted child instead of waiting till the exact moment quartz shows it as done?

I have to say I actually liked the control quartz and stopcasting gave me instead of key spamming.

Star Shards is an Arcane spell to begin with, so it has no benefit from any +shadow items (like the FSW set, [Nethervoid Cloak], etc.), not does it benefit from Imp. Shadow Bolt or Shadow Weaving. It won't return mana from VT or health from VE. You're also assuming the damage will remain the same. Even if it does, I'd argue that it's not better than Symbol of Hope, nor significantly better than Human Spirit after the Meditation change.

Nevertheless, I'd be surprised if it went live in its current, zero-mana, state, however.

Also, this is the kind of ability that argues even harder for the removal of racials, if only to make the solo lives of healing Priests easier.

I tend to agree, except on encounters like Reliquary where I mistakenly cancel mind blast because it gets a pushback right before it finishes.

No, it's not a spell queue. It does exactly what the patch note says it does, if you think about it.

At the moment, if you have a hypothetical (or... maybe not so hypothetical, in my case <___<) 1000ms ping, and you have a 3-sec cast spell, if you're spamming the spell, your first cast will complete at 4s (1 second for command to reach server, 3 secs cast), and up till the four second mark, you'll be getting "Already casting" errors. This means your second spell will begin casting at 4+1secs, and finish at 8 secs, third spell finishes at 12 secs, etc, etc, etc.

The change basically means that instead of a client side "Already casting" error, the server still gets sent the instruction anyway. It means that if you press your button at 3s (when your castbar STILL shows 1sec left) it'll arrive at the server just as the spell finishes. Your spells then cast at 4, 7, 10, 13, etc secs instead of 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.

The problem is, unless Blizzard has thoroughly tested this in both a min/maxed raiding environment AND with sufficiently high pings, there's a shitload of things that could potentially go wrong. For example - how does this interact with client-side GCD? Say in my example above, I hit the button at 2.5 secs, get a GCD, and am unable to start the cast again at 3s (which would have been the correct time to fire off the next spell).

Can't wait for the PTR to go up to test this out.