Since in the same paragraph, they mentioned that the conversion factor from rating to skill, is the same as the old rating to skill from weapon skill. So 4 points of skill rating at 70 will translate into 1 Expertise point. Each Expertise point will reduce 0.25% of Parry and Dodge (Miss was avoided by this change, probably due to sweet spot of +5), so basically each Skill point rating will give 0.0625% of Dodge and Parry mitigation, assuming my understanding of the paragraph is correct.

Hahah, wow, I just noticed the Magtheridon change. It'd be pretty funny if it backfired by just causing people to be much less careful on the clicks. Everyone spams early because of no Exhaustion debuff, and it just so happens Magtheridon gets banished early, comes out and proceeds to Fire Nova.

(P.S. This post is inspired by nightmares of Faerlina wipe nights and confusion between two completely contradictory strategies)

Said Mage is probably counterspelling the Shaman's teammate...or has Improved Counterspell.

I sure hope the spirit is removed from mage dungeon/raid sets now ... having to use mage armor instead of molten armor just to get any use at all from a significant portion of your gear's stats is really not acceptable itemization. I don't include arcane meditation in the argument because having to spec 18 pts deep into a talent tree to get any use from your t5/t6 stats is even more ludicrous.

The evocation & arcane meditation changes are entirely counter-productive. Both arcane mediation and mage armor should be changed to increase a % of mana returned from all sources, none of this desperate attempt to justify spirit. Give me 30% more mana from vampiric touch, mana gems, mana pots, etc ... then we're talking.

This isn't how I understand it to work, and the patch notes seems to infer that the castbar timings aren't changing at all. We'll see when PTR comes up, I guess.

- Cooldown removed from Noggenfogger Elixirs.

It would appear there is a god after all.

Probably a mage with Imp CS pre-emptively silencing the shaman to finish either him or a teammate off.

We still don't know:
1. If the base damage was changed
2. What the coefficient will be
3. What the cast time will be

We'll see tonight when the PTR comes up just how effective it is.

I'm pretty sure the 0 mana starshards DoT is a mistake of some sort. Compare it to the nearest priest analog: Devouring Plague.

Devouring plague costs 1145 mana, does 1216 shadow damage over 24 seconds, and leeches life back to the caster and has a 3 minute cooldown.

The projected Starshards would cost no mana, do an unknown amount of arcane damage over 15 seconds (it's probably not 1148... that would be retardedly large for a 15 second DoT) and would have a 30 second cooldown.

Unless the damage done by Starshards is very small, even when you consider that Plague benefits from Darkness, Weaving and + shadow damage, the imbalance here is very, very large and it gets even bigger when you consider Touch of Weakness vs. Elune's Grace (basically, Touch of Weakness is a lot like the old Curse of Weakness except you have to be hit in order for it to actually do anything).

Also consider that because Plague is a leech, it has a smaller damage coefficient than Starshards. I don't see this going through at all.

They just mentioned that there was a conversion factor. Nowhere can I see that they actually provided it. I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Check THIS doozy out:

- Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the
talent trees.

Yeeowza.

Moogle, I believe the following is what Wodin was referring to:

The bolded part could be referencing a change to say, the Rogue Mace Skill (gives 10 mace weapon skill currently) and/or the weapon expertise skill (gives 10 sword/dagger/fist weapon skill currently).

They didn't qualify which talents were being changed, or by how much, but how many talents give weapon skill? We just need to confirm on the PTR when its up.

This will not affect steady shot macros unless hey flag the hidden cast of Auto Shot such that you cannot cast over top of it. Like a mage casting frostbolt.

- Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the
talent trees.

Another fun one!

Edit: Bah I should have known I would be too slow on such a fast thread :p

I definately inner focus Plague on fights, there is definately an imbalance here and will be easy to document. Best to file it, get on the test server, analyze, and report out. At the beginning of the test server is the best time to fix something like this so it doesnt go live.

While updating the post, the section for Paladins got cut off. So there are more notes for them that aren't showing.

How's that for taunting ret pallies?

If you guys wouldnt mind could you post changes in addition to adding them to the first post? Its really hard to reread the patch notes and try to find changes.
Thanks.

Expertise: We have added a new stat and associated rating called expertise and expertise rating. Expertise rating converts to expertise at the same rate that weapon skill rating formerly converted at. Each point of expertise reduces the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried by 0.25%.

Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise.

First paragraph mentions that Expertise rating to expertise will have same rating converstion (4>1) as Weapon Skills.

Second Paragraph mentions that Weapon skills will be converted to Expertise rating. While it does not mention a direct conversion factor between weapon skill rating, and expertise rating. I find it highly plausible that they are just converting the names of weapon skill to expertise (thereby 1:1) so people don't have to force a sweet spot of +5 weapon skills, for better or worse.

As in make their own section at the end of the first post instread of hiding them inside the actual post itself.

For rogues, I think it's safe to assume that the Combat tree's WEx won't be granting 10 Expertise points. That'd be ridiculously good for 2 points (deep combat builds need fillers, anyway). Even more so when combined with the human racial, assuming it remains at +5.

Corpses that belong to someone in your party, but that you cannot loot will say in the corpse mouseover who has loot rights on that corpse. This will help skinners who want to know who to talk to in order to skin their corpse, as well as master looters when special loot drops on a normal monster. Everyone will then see that there is a monster that the master looter has loot rights on.

A brief (well, maybe not) explanation with ASCII graphics for the people still confused with the casting bar change:

Both now and after the patch, the ability to cast a new spell is determined client side, but currently the knowledge about what you are actually casting is determined server side. The latter is what is changing in 2.3.

Live, no stop casting
The graph above represents current chain casting without the use of the /stopcasting command. At point A, we have the initial button press, which after some latency travels to the server and initiates the actual cast.

The server then sends a message back to your client telling the client you have begun casting; accordingly your client starts the cast bar at point B. You actually started casting the spell on the server one half of your ping ago by the time your cast bar starts.

Once the cast finishes on the server, it sends another message to your client which after some latency reaches your client at point D and terminates the casting bar. Now your client will let you begin casting another spell and the process repeats. Generally, this means without using stopcasting your spells gain one roundtrip time; in other words your ping is added to the cast time.


Live, stop casting
In order to get around that added time, people use the notion of the /stopcasting command; from point C in the above diagrams, any command issued will reach the server after the server finishes the current cast - points C through D are the parts of the cast bar colored red by Quartz and other latency-measuring addons.

Accordingly, a /stopcasting command is issued partway through this time at point D; instead of waiting to complete normally, the client-side cast is canceled while the server-side cast completes. The client therefore allows the next cast to begin immediately without waiting an additional one-way trip from the server.

Properly applied, the stopcasting method allows you to shave one-half your ping off of your cast time without using stop casting, in the best case.


2.3, no stop casting
In 2.3, the proposed 'fix' to using stop-casting is to desynchronize the client and server cast bars. In other words, once you cast a spell, the client will be in charge of determining when it ends, rather than the server (for purposes of letting you cast another spell). Effectively, this results in the ability to chain cast in the same manner as using stopcasting, without the added risk of canceling your current spell by attempting to cast again too soon.

This would return the /stopcasting command to its original purpose, for when you actually wanted to stop casting something to use a different ability.

And no, this shouldn't increase network traffic, as the client shouldn't be actually sending the cast command when you spam it before you're able to cast the next spell; it doesn't do that right now either, or the whole stopcasting thing wouldn't be necessary on live.