But... we'll be seeing NE holy priests on the damage meters soon

Seriously though, no heal to cast? Use your instant, free dot on a 30s CD. Sounds great to me especially with the healing = 1/3 damage change.

It also gains no +hit or -threat from shadow talents.

Interesting change to warlocks. They won't be draining mana nearly as well as before in arenas, and the change to soul siphon basically eliminates the popular SL/SL spec.

I still don't like these changes to elemental shamans. All this is giving me is mana efficiency and threat reduction which aren't normally an issue on any boss once I let the tank get 3-4 seconds agro. Add in there plenty of fights have movement requirements for non tanks that make threat a non issue anyway since shamans do very low dps when moving. Efficiency should allow more use of CL, but that's not a long term solution cause of the introduction of spell haste gear.

The current weapon skill was claimed by blue posters to reduce parry as well.

I wonder if they realize that it doesn't currently work as intended.

My guess is that expertise will be broken as well unless they catch this - since they're simply going to change numbers and names. Don't expect expertise to lower your parries.

Quartz timing was fun for awhile, but I certainly can't be the only one who thought it was really tedious after the 3rd month. Also, knowing that no matter how good you were at stopcasting, you could never get around the lag entirely, was really frustrating for me. Being unable to hit your theoretical DPS due to a flaw in the spellcasting system was really annoying for such a long time.

I am also pretty pro at cancelling spells left and right due to pushback mechanics. Will be glad to see that go too.

I'm happy to see the change, despite the fact we'll all goto button mashing/scroll wheel spin nuking. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of DPS increases across the game from this - I'm sure a large chunk of raiders don't even know what stopcast is.

Interesting change to Magtheridon, it's certainly much more idiot-proof now.

I am also dying to find out the details on the [Mystical Skyfire Diamond] change. If the cooldown is longish, that seems like a death knell for the short-lived glory days of Arcane Missile spam.

Overall I am really, really excited about this patch. But as a mage, maybe there is more than a little bias there

Edit: I also wonder what impact the /stopcasting thing will have, from a bandwidth and processing perspective. Seems like there could be potentially dozens more packets per second being sent by each caster on the server?

So they did not give Ret a threat reduction?

That is almost heartless. Take a huge buff to Crusader strike, but god help you if you use it...

I was really expecting for one of the Warlock curses to affect nature damage. It seems like a pretty big oversight with the much larger number of elemental shamans and boomkins.

Such a pessimist Quigon. Hilariously, the only warrior tree (Arms) with Expertise is also the same tree that Improved Overpower sits in. Now 1% less than before! This is the same silliness that we saw with Resilience.

I know it's arcane. High-end shadow priests have +1100 in generic damage, right now. That number goes to 1350 or so with buffs, since flask/oil/food are all generic, as well. I would argue that this is infinitely better than any other priest racial. Shadow priests are a dps class, and this spell directly increases your dps - by a noticable amount - relative to all other racials.

Racials, priest racials in general, have always been complained about. It's absolutely unbelievable that they respond to this by introducing (essentially) new racials which widen the power gap even further. If this goes in, I will never be able to perform as well in raids as a Night Elf shadow priest. It's no fault of mine and there's nothing I can do about it. This makes me want to throw in the towel.

Pardon my ignorance but... is starshards castable in shadowform?

Shadowform only blocks holy school spells. Starshards is arcane.

The old one is worded "amount drained" so depending on the implementation, it may no longer increase the amount of life returned by Drain Life. It's another one of those "test it and find out" bullets on the docket.

It's not going to come close to killing the spec.

Wait... is Starshards even castable in shadow form?

edit: dammit, beaten

Yeah I don't see it as killing that spec at all. It's if anything a start towards reigning in a greatly overrepresented spec in arena, and the drain mana aspect of that ability felt unbalanced in comparison to non-scalar Mana Burn and Viper Sting in the first place.

God, I'm shutting up.

Weapon Expertise and PvP
All I can say is yum......

From a rogue perspective, this stat becomes pure PvP goodness (thought it also makes Surprise attacks less useful). As a mace wielding human rogue, (or swords with 2/2 Weapon Expertise talent), I will now have at 15 * 0.25 = 3.75% less chance for my sinister strikes, gouges and kidney shots to not be dodged or parried. And I now have an incentive to find another 5-15 skill points to avoid getting dodged or parried at all for most classes.

Your top geared PvP warrior has around 6%-7% of dodge/parry (i.e. see The World of Warcraft Armory ). With a 7% parry rate, I need 28 expertise to avoid missing any attacks at all.

Nitpick - it blocks holy tree spells - Mass Dispel is a holy school spell, for example, and you can still cast it in Shadowform. Starshards is discipline, though, not holy, so the answer is the same. You can use it in Shadowform.

Actually, since drain life returns what it takes, that's probably not a problem. I believe the problem referanced is that Soul Siphon no longer affects drain mana, which it previously did.

Expertise seems pretty reasonable to me. Eyeballing it says that it will take 15.6 expertise rating to reduce the dodge chance by 1%. That's comparable to 15.8 hit rating to reduce the miss chance by 1%.

Add in the parry change, and expertise becomes twice as valuable as hit rating for tanks, not even counting mitigating the whole next attack speeding up problem.

There are tons of things they promised missing from the notes, it's pointless to speculate until we get on the PTR. And even then, they've already said Guild Banks will not be in the first build. I expect an enormous "Unannounced Changes" thread for this patch!

Uh, this is not true. You'll see a ~20% nerf on drain mana and a much smaller one (~4%) on drain life (assuming no MS). Damage dealt translates into healing done; their wording doesn't really imply a more significant change to the talent. Soul link, siphon life and CoEx all remain unchanged which means the spec is still on top for 2v2 warlock specs. Also, drain mana only scaled in the same sense that mana burn scaled with imp. mana burn.