Antmanton

As a theoretical note on the Windfury change from weapon imbue to generic buff, could this mean that dual-wielders will be able to proc Windfury attacks on off-handed attacks as well as main-hand ones? If so, and if the internal cooldown on Windfury remains, might this change actually result in a net DPS loss as Windfury procs are "wasted" on weaker off-handed attacks? Or would the ability to use poisons/weightstones/sharpening stones on both weapons outweigh the loss?

 

orcsgotbooty

Windfury totem does not have an internal cd unlike windfury weapon (the ones shaman can put on themselves). So this would not make a difference.

 

Ja7us

Another question would be, will shamans themselves be able to get windfury totem? If not, will windfury weapon itself be a buff, rather than a weapon imbue (which would mean shamans can sharpen their weapons, too)?

 

Antmanton

Ah, you seem to be correct. So pure buff all the way through. Let me substitute the following questions instead, then: Assuming Windfury does in fact proc from both weapons, what implications does this hold for melee DPS as a whole? Rogues obviously benefit completely, but what about 2H MS warriors, Death Knights, and Retribution paladins (leaving aside whether or not those are otherwise actually viable PvE raid specs)? Can they meaningfully compete with dual-wield DPS classes that effectively gain a double benefit through increased procs from the buff?

 

Ja7us

Leaving aside current balance (which will all be thrown out anyway), those classes are currently getting far more from WF totem than their dual wield peers; if the totem works on offhand attacks, it will be much more even.

 

Prinsesa

@flyingtoastr: Yes, that does seem to be the direction this is headed, based on what we know. I don't see this as something particularly bad though. Note that Ret Paladins are already "one per raid" because a 2nd Ret Paladins does nothing that the 1st already does.

Another rez, another blessing, another aura, yes, but those are all abilities that are not specific to Ret - a differently specced Paladin would add another rez/blessing/aura just the same.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....63815BffMm.png

 

bv728

I would presume that bringing another Enhancement Shammy would be mostly justified by second set of totems; if you don't have resto/elemental shammies, a second shammy may look like a good deal still, depending on which totems get combined. I'm not that worried about offspecs in general; the hardcore will stack whatever synergizes best, and the non-hardcore will continue building non-optimal raids. I don't expect that for the average raid, the difference will be a big deal, while the cutting edge will continue to be dominated by people who are more interested in success than playing a specfic spec.

 

Paprikka

Plus I don't see it being easy to design around. If a hybrid dps class such as a Moonkin is buffed to be on par with a pure dps class such as a Mage, then they would be interchangeable. While that doesn't sound bad, a Druid also has two other talent trees that fulfill an entirely different role in a raid. Meaning you could have four, five, or even more on rare occasions of just a single class in your raid.

If Blizzard is trying to make a raid balanced around only two or three of a class, then some classes will be limited to just a single person for some specs out of simple necessity. Priests had something similar to this going. At least in my guild when we started foraging into 25 mans it wasn't unusual to see 2-3 Holy Priests and 1-2 Shadow Priests.

On a more personal note I was hoping there was going to be more done with soul shards, although the emergency soul shard thing is still something nice. I was hoping for something like our new demonic circle spell would make all spells soul shard free while standing in it, and it could be shared between warlocks, so only a single shard would be spent during the buff period, assuming the circle takes a shard to make.

 

Azurai

50g isn't meaningless. It's not a big expenditure when raiding, but that's not what this new mechanic would be for. Quite obviously they're concerned with the general inability for people to find groups for 5 mans once easily obtained gear surpasses their ilvl. They said as much with the DK and heroic loot revamps as well as the attunement/key changes in tbc and wotlk. If I were to simply sign up for 5 LF1M heroics in a row in shat, I could easily have to respec 5 times between healing and dps. Obviously, its not worth 250g for me to do this so I simply won't go. If it was 5g or free, I would be much more motivated.

 

Mideci

We had a very lengthy discussion of this in another thread and I think it's clear they are listening to the customer.

Since we can presume you'll be limited to two specs you can move between easily and then incur cost to modify those I see no real concerns for abuse, but instead reasonable opportunity to have even more flexibility in using 25 >>people<< in your raid who can play 25 characters with more than just 25 specs. This is hardly tragic and long overdue.

 

Addled

Even if respecs were free, it wouldn't solve the problem you're describing. If you were a T5/S2 player (or above) for instance, there's really no reason for you to go back and run normal/heroic SL/SH/SV/etc.

To fix it, Blizzard should make the WotLK equivalent of badges be account-bound, so one could run heroics with a highly geared, highly desirable tank/healer toon, then use leftover badges to gear up a less group-desirable DPS alt.

More than likely, this problem will be slightly mitigated by Inscription; imagine a range of minor inscriptions that removes the soul shard requirement for <insert ability here>, then you can pick and choose which 2 spells you use the most, then select the minor inscriptions for those spells.

 

doogless

Uh, I actually really hope that they do successfully do this. "I'm a Fury Warrior," or "I'm an Affliction Warlock," or anything like that is just so silly - you play a class, not a spec. Being closed-minded about which portions of your class you're willing to play is terrible for a multiplayer game - where defined roles need to be filled by people in a group - and I see it as a good thing if game mechanics are such that people are either forced to actually learn their entire class, or at least exploring other aspects of their class becomes easier.

 

Vagabond

If they didn't want folks becoming invested in only a portion of their abilities, they wouldn't design 150pts of talents and then give us 61 to spend.

 

Draele

So nothing is sacred? What's next? Forcing people to reroll? And there's absolutely nothing wrong identifying yourself with a talent tree. It's no different a concept than identifying yourself with a class. Each class has an overall playstyle unique among other classes. Each talent tree has a unique playstyle unique within the class. How can you say it's okay to identify with one but not another?

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

 

Anedris

Changing your talent tree costs an amount of gold that can be gained in 20 minutes without trouble. Changing your class takes 5-15 days /played simply to reach 70 and then further weeks to acquire the gear to regain whatever level you were at. I would say that makes the two slightly distinct.

In other words, Blizzard has said that changing one should be easier than the other. I conclude from that that it is logical to have a greater attachment to one's class than to one's spec.

Personally, I don't have a huge amount of attachment to either, as I have three characters, several of which I have played quite a bit as multiple specs. I am quite happy to sacrifice meaningful talent spec identity if it makes participating in group content easier and PvP/farming less painful.

 

• Playered

There are some combinations which are just too powerful to allow, which is a significant reason for keeping you limited to a small amount of points each time.
While overall you could spec between Resto & Balance every other boss, you couldn't have both at the same time which would really blur the definition of your class during encounters.

 

Vihermaali

I dread the day when my guild decides to think like that and try to make me shadow.

It might be the same class, but differences between playstyles of specs are like night and day. Being a DPS is not something I enjoy. Big numbers, yay. After 5 minutes of gameplay you have seen what the spec has to offer and only thing left to you is optimizing dps. It might be fun when farming stuff, but if I have to sit in a raid dungeon for several hours / week, it has to be something I enjoy. Healing is something I enjoy, and it's something that has kept me playing all this time. Why? Every run is unique, even after several months of farming the same instance.

I may be selfish and close-minded, but I'd rather gquit and find a new guild than be shadow for next few months of Sunwell raiding. Luckily I don't have to

*edit* Sorry for offtopic(?)

 

Tacitus

Megaton: you'll be able to earn rep in dungeons not associated to that faction by wearing their tabard.

This is an awesome, awesome change.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

◊ Cadfael

And they will remove faction requirements for heroics, too. Which is basically an even more important change.

 

Shakes

Basically yes, you've made every off spec vital, yet made it so bringing more than one is detrimental. That is going to be very hard for a lot of guilds, since you either need someone who never misses raids in all those roles, or else people who are happy to respec from raid to raid.

I think a better direction to go in is to make it so you basically determine the number of tanks/healers/dps you need, and adding or subtraction any particular class in those roles works out roughly equal. Sure, for fights with tank healing vs raid healing you may prefer paladins or shaman for healers, but that's different from saying "we have our one paladin healer, no more can come".

Some people say "oh but druids can fit any role, wont you have too many in the raid?" but if you look at how the numbers add up, if you need one of each hybrid spec, and you still need 7+ healers, you're going to find the hybrids push out the pure classes as it is. If you make classes more interchangable, then the pure classes can compete for the DPS spots that otherwise would have gone to the required hybrids, so I think it's a win for pure classes.

So instead of trying to limit class stacking, I think the better way is to make all classes utility infinitely stackable, but then balance output vs utility. More utility = less output. The problem with shaman stacking is that they have good utility and (particularly as resto) good output. I'd say make totems raid wide, and allow totems (even of the same kind) to stack, but balance the strength of totems and the shaman accordingly. This probably implies a nerf of the power of totems, which is probably a good thing anyway, because it'd make it easier to balance shaman for PvP (where totems are quickly destroyed) and PvE (where totems are effectively permanent buffs applied every 2 minutes).

 

Cranberry

Looks like they're aware of the issues with random legendaries - "[their] preferred method" is like that of Atiesh. With any luck this should alleviate problems like Brutallus with Warglaives, where sheer luck allows certain guilds a major edge.

 

Bullshot

So they're gonna introduce a system called Championing in WotLK. Basically, it means that you can get rep of a faction by wearing that faction's tabard in any dungeon. So you can wear a Keepers of Time tabard and go to Coilfang Reservoir and you'll get KoT rep in addition to the Cenarion rep. And if you do a KoT dungeon with the KoT tabard on, you get a small bonus to the KoT rep as well.

I think it's a good thing that they're making tabards a bit more useful than just eye-candy. Now I just wish they do something with guild tabards by making them give some small bonus to a raid group if everyone in the raid is wearing it.

 

• Chicken

I'm personally curious whether this "Championing" will extend to raid instances as well. There's currently a bit of a disconnect between the two, with the raid instances being less good for your reputation than the non-raid instances are, unless the raid instance has it's own reputation affiliated with it.

It always felt a bit wrong to me that you could have been one of the people that killed Lady Vashj, but the Cenarion Expedition would give more recognition to someone that handed in 10 [Unidentified Plant Parts]. Or that you achieve the final goal of the Shattered Sun Offensive (Preventing Kil'jaeden from entering the world), but the NPCs would much rather think of the guy that just did his dailies every day as being awesome.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of