Illundai

Back to Warlocks, isn't a shorter gcd on Lifetap pretty awesome? I mean, given enough haste it'll end up with quite a few extra bolts? Or am I totally off here again?

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Shadout

Probably, but will it really be worth it to sacrifice other (better?) stats for it? I somewhat doubt it.
We need the theorycraft army to step in and save the day.

 

Gumibear

It pretty much eliminates the one downside to choosing haste gear, and haste is already the best return per point for a tier 6 hit-capped destruction warlock after raid buffs according to the theorycraft threads we have here.

 

heel

Restoration Shamans continuously apply the effects of Totem of the Third Wind, Healing Way, and Ancestral Healing.
Elemental Shamans often have Elemental Focus and Eye of the Storm active.
Enhancement Shamans often have Shamanistic Focus and Shamanistic Rage active.
Every Shaman should always have Water Shield active.

Those are just the ones that are up a significant amount of the time - there are more - Elemental Mastery, Nature's Swiftness, Ghost Wolf, and so on.

Yes.

 

Arrian

Extra tokens might not be so bad for a couple reasons. First, tier tokens are an almost guranteed upgrade for a slot. They're also some of the heftiest slots as far as stats go. So increasing the rate of tier drops will certainly speed up the rate newer guilds gear out. The only time you DE a tier piece is when everyone already has all the pieces for their class. It's the best way to gurantee upgrades get into the hands of prospective sunwell raiders considering random loot is random.

Also, sunwell is supposedly doing some off-tier sets which are likely going to be for slots other than where tier pieces go. So, rather increase the droprate of stuff that will get sharded because itemization sucks or will get replaced because Sunwell is introducing better, Blizz can increase the droprate of tiered gear which won't turn around and get replaced a couple weeks later.

Finally, we could give Blizzard encounter designers the benefit of the doubt and assume they know that even relatively long term T6 farming guilds won't have all the top level non set pieces on every raider but can be expected to have 4 piece T6. So they could be designing encounters based around "4pc T6 + 50% T6 quality non set pieces" and this change will make it possible for guilds new to T6 content to get into Sunwell asap. Sort of a combination between vanilla wow's farming an instance till the raid's fully geared and BC's moving to the next tier as soon as attunements are finished.

It's certainly easier than going through all BT/Hyjal loot and re-itemizing it so that every drop is an upgrade for a standard raiding class and build.

 

Northerner

Increased tier drops will also have the nice side effect of increasing the number of "OMG SPINELS!!1!" threads!

 

Essarhaddon

Blizzard can't realistically reduce the duration of DoTs as it will make Affliction warlocks very powerful in PvE at least (and probably PvP as well).

Against a raid target an affliction warlocks Corruption is effectively an instant cast nuke with about 10 damage per mana that does 3.5k damage and can't crit, Unstable is slightly less effecicent. These are far and away the most powerful mana-efficient damage sources in the game. If the duration of the DoT were lessened it would let warlocks spend more of their casting time casting these spells. So not only would affliction warlock DPS go up, as the DoTs have huge damage per casting time, but their damage per mana would also go up. This is in essence a double bonus for haste for an affliction warlock. For a nuking mage DPS goes up, but DPM stays the same as they don't havea mix of spells to cast (or the mix isn't changed by haste really).

I would love this (as an affliction warlock myself) but it would probably be too powerful. The current solution is not one I expected but is one that works reasonably well. An affliction warlock still gets about 40% of their DPS from shadowbolts so haste is directly beneficial for that and now their is some bonus on everythign else as well. Haste still won't be as good as +spell power but it won't be quite so far off.

 

Renew

A few guilds with insider infoz have been selling off their gem supplies. Rumor has it that you can buy epic gems with badges.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

• Playered

That would be... interesting... *twitch*

 

Jitka

If you mean heroic badges, that would all but cripple the jewel crafting profession. I find this 'infoz' extremely hard to believe.

What I would NOT find hard to believe is a token system for gem redemption inside Sunwell and/or BT/Hyjal.

 

Emeraude

Considering there is 0 access to Epic gems outside of raiding at the moment I don't see how it would cripple jewelcrafting if you offered them via heroic badges. If you say charged 10 badges per gem.

You'd still have to find people to cut said gem.
You'd still have to find people with that particular pattern to cut said gem.
You could always cut out the middle man as a Jewelcrafter and put them on the AH cut already for hundreds of gold that people who don't feel like running heroics would in fact buy.

If anything it's rather ridiculous that the best gems for a profession have only been offered in an end-game raiding environment. Had they been offered via badges before-hand and then dropped in BT/Hyjal, raiders would see it as a bonus to raiding, as opposed to the headache it is now trying to sort and organize them between your raiders and fighting against the RNG gods.

 

Brakar

If they make it so the vendor is inside MH with the other two vendors already there it might not be too bad. It would still hurt rare gems but not completely destroy it like having it on the Shat vendor would. This assumes they don't lift attunements for MH/BT though. Having Badges of Epic Gems drop from all T6 and higher bosses much like BoJ currently in ZA would be nice to help with the issues already present for gems like Spinels.

 

Knasen

Regarding DoTs and haste... My wet dream is that they just add an deep affliction talent that "converts" haste and maybe even crit to extra +dmg, 1% haste =0.5% extra DoT-dmg or whatever could be balanced. Guess Spriest wouldnt be sad either and they could do something similar to druids HoTs. Could probably help out the omgcrazy dotscaling which I really have had problem seeing myself.

 

Malakitoo

Are any of those buffs things that you look to purge? No, they're all trash buffs. I would be glad if someone took the time to purge totem of the third wave whenever it went up.

I guess your point is that shamans have buffer spells that would take time to dispel and can protect the things that actually matter. The totem buff is the only one that you can expect to be up at any given time anyway, since ancestral fort is a crit-based proc and healing way requires that you use a full healing wave. Also, both of these talents are probably going to be the first ones dropped to pick up dispel protection. So you're looking at 3 points for improved conditional buff-protecting ability, which also requires you to drop 6 more points to get ancestral fort and healing way. In terms of making earth shield a worthwhile investment in the face of offensive dispelling, I don't think it changes anything.

Not really sure what your point is with water shield, since having that active means you don't have ES, and it costs no mana so I'm not really sure why you'd want to dispel it. It also dispels itself when you get hit.

I'm really impressed that some people take the time (what, 4.5x5=25 seconds or so?) at the beginning of a match to purge every single buff off the other team. For some reason I don't think you're going to win a mana war that way, nor do well with one person doing nothing for 20 seconds to start the game. But I play 4dps so it's a different perspective.

As to why many shamans are disappointed, the general feeling is that restoration shamans are weak in arena at the moment, and that a buff is needed. Some may disagree, but that's why I was saying that this doesn't really seem to be a buff.

 

Sayessa

Well, the only targets we purge are the focus target and if we plan to flashnuke someone, the flashnuke target. It doesn't matter anyways if the paladin has fort or spirit, it's just a waste of mana (3 dispels per person, 5 persons, ~250 mana per dispel, so you are wasting 3750 mana) although it could be very nice to mass dispel bloodlust right when it is casted, but too many class have "on hit" procs or anything else like light's grace on them.

 

Draele

Unless 1% Haste = 2-3% off the GCD it won't make much difference to Affliction Locks and Shadowpriests as far as giving us a new stat worth stacking. Sure, it will be a nice boost to the optimal items we already have that have haste on them, but it does nothing to fix the itemization problem by giving us a second stat beyond +dmg.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

mek

I think it's a little early to condemn these changes; we should at least wait for some substantial theorycraft. This will allow instant-cast spells to benefit as much from haste as any other spell; reducing 1.5sec gcd to 1.35sec (~12% haste) might seem minor, but in reality it allows you to fit an extra spell into your rotation every 15 seconds. That can't help but translate into a significant dps boost: warlocks get a free lifetap, and it will certainly unlock a number of new possibilities for shadow priests.

 

Xrhino

Tokens for flasks (marks of Illidari) drop in T5 and T6 and yet I make quite a bit of money off selling flasks, mainly flasks of mighty restoration. I believe most people would be to lazy to farm heroic badges. Any serious raider probably has a stack of badges sitting around from ZA/Heroics but these raiders also have access to the T6 epic gems. The average player who is still needing badges for their badge gear wont have spares to spend on gems for a very small increase in stats.

 

Maynard

Didn't Blizzard explicitly say quite recently that they weren't going to add any additional badge items?

Still, as a PvPer I wouldn't mind some incentives to go back and do a bit more 5/10-man content.

 

Malahi

That's not accurate, you'll maintain the same DPM if you cast the same spell cycle in 1/2 the time. The only way Haste would raise the DPM of an afflock would be if it affected Dots more drastically than the Shadowbolts. I don't see why it would make sense to have 10% spell haste make dots tick 50% faster rather than the expected 10%.

 

• Playered

Flasks are somewhat restricted (no Kara, Heroics, ZA, general use) coming from Marks of the Illdari.
It would be like having gems that are disabled while in BGs or Arenas.

 

mek

If you could convert a Primal Nether + an uncut rare gem -> an uncut epic gem, it'd be pretty balanced, and still allow jewelcrafters significant income from the cutting process and prospecting, of course. In fact, I can't see how they'd lose at all; it would massively expand the market, and only take profits out of the hands of ranged classes who farm BT all day.

 

• Playered

Because that wont make Living Rubys rocket in price compared to others will it?=o

 

Machinator

I wish they would put a bit of explanation into why they make some of these changes.

-Why are they giving more set drops? If a lack of gear is an issue why not just add another drop slot to all bosses? Non-set drops suffer from all the issues of the tokens and then some.

-Haste Rating. Why only casters? Haste already does less per point than most other primary stats, and would work well as a pvp stat and tanking stat too. Even with this change its hard to see spell haste worth much more than it is now for anyone who didnt get much out of it before.

"Information is ammunition."

 

Metrosexuelf

I wouldn't go that far -- it certainly turns a stat that was basically worthless and a waste of itemization points to something that at least provides a decent benefit. But at the very least it shows they aren't totally indifferent to certain classes not scaling as well as others.