Preface: My Rogue is a jewelcrafter/miner, my Resto Shaman is an herbalist/potion alchemist.

I'm pretty happy with the alchemy changes so far. I've never really had to chain pots, being my alt the toughest content I do on him is T5 and I don't find it to be necessary. That said I definitely can't relate to Sunwell healers, but I see this as a similar "nerf" to the 2.1 battle/guardian elixir change. It will really help people who don't want to have to spend hours farming pots every day so they can match the level at which a given encounter is tuned.

Alchemical Blood looks pretty good, and should allow Blizzard to make some new alchemist stones if they choose to go that path again, with new special effects. I could see them doing something that when used, gives a partial benefit of the flask/elixirs you have equipped to your whole party (i.e. Rogue is using a 35 agility/20 crit elixir. He uses his trinket and gives 50% of the benefit, 17 agility 10 crit, to the party for 20 seconds). Obviously this is pure speculation, but seeing as they gave all alchemists AB, hopefully they won't get rid of alchemy trinkets altogether. It would be terrible to have a profession that is 100% consumables/transmutes.

I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the mining/jewelcrafting changes on the other hand. The stamina buff is nice, but overall useless for most players. I have friends of every class who mine because of, well, the cash. So this helps the tanks who mine, but what about the other classes who would rather have a more useful buff without dropping their professions (skinners get 1.25% crit at 70, I don't know how much that equates to at 80). Jewelcrafting will still be a huge money maker and I plan to dump cash on getting every pattern early, but I'm disappointed that Blizzard hasn't gone in a new direction with it. It appears to be the same green/blue/epic/BoP gems and probably the same types of trinkets (mp5 with a mana-over-time buff, AP and stealth with a used +AP buff, etc.). Can we have some more actually useful crafted accessories?

EDIT: While I'm here I might as well throw in my thoughts on inscription. In my circle of friends people are already talking about jumping ship of their professions to grab inscription and go with that. The thought of having a knockback on their attack or an extremely shortened cast time seems too great to resist. I really hope Blizzard doesn't go overboard with inscriptions. Will all of them be self-only, or just some? Either way, they need to balance the self-only inscriptions in a way that isn't overpowering. I think they did that well with ring enchants in TBC. 40 healing/24 damage/8 stats/4 weapon damage was nice, but was it required? Some may argue that it was, but for the most part it was fairly balanced.

On the subject of permanent vs. swappable inscriptions: I kind of like the idea of permanent inscriptions that are reasonably expensive. While we've seen that major inscriptions are going to be quite powerful, I get the feeling that they may provide an interesting and useful counter to the flexibility of easily swappable talent specs. Let's look at the "powerful" example we've seen so far:

My question here is: Does that say what I think it does? Clearly, it makes HT faster to cast. However, the mana cost and amount healed are less clear to me. Presumably, they're both "in the same direction". So either it makes it faster to cast and cost 25% more but heal 50% more, or it makes it faster to case and cost 25% less but heal 50% less. My presumption is that it costs more and heals more.

In either case, however, there's a trade-off here—either more speed for more mana spent or more speed for less healing done. You're changing a core spell in a pretty fundamental way, and you get to do this kind of major change to two of your spells. It seems to me that while there might end up being "standard" inscription builds for different roles, this isn't going to be as big a hang-up as having entirely different talent builds for different roles.

So, what I expect to see happen is for people to have two specs (swappable out of combat on a cooldown?), and a set of expensive inscriptions. The inscriptions define their specialty spells, the things they're the very best at. But, a druid who has one spec set for healing isn't going to be hamstrung by not having inscriptions for healing--they'll still be a very solid healer. They just won't, for example, be specialized in healing touch for very fast heals.

So, instead of "I'm a feral druid" or "I'm a resto druid", you might have somebody who's "I'm a feral and resto druid, specialized for fast healing." They can bring it hard in both roles, as long as they're geared up for both roles. It's just that they can bring it slightly harder on the healing end, particularly when there's a need for speed. And, with luck, the spec choice can be made between fights. Finally, perhaps, the holy grail of flexibility in raid composition without swapping people in and out or respeccing regularly?


On the other side, if Blizzard does things right, people will change inscriptions over the course of their character's life. The easy reason is "Oh look, better inscriptions are dropping off of bosses in T8 instance A." The more complex reason is that as the stat mix of gear changes, and as experience changes, I think we may find that the same inscriptions that were optimal at one point aren't optimal at another. And more importantly, it's my hope that it's actually worthwhile to have different inscriptions represented in raid, rather than same inscriptions.

Really, we'll just have to see. Given the rabid min-maxing nature of people, it'll probably turn out less rosy than I would like. But still, I hope.

While I (and most people, I'm sure) don't really enjoy having to farm for mats for stacks of pots and the like, I can't help but feel that it's going to lead to problems. The difference between this and the elixir/flask change is that those provide a constant, static buff. Pots are more dynamic, in that you mold them to the current situation. The other problem? The benefit vs the cooldown. On my pally tank, for instance, I don't use very many health pots, but I use mana pots fairly regularly. On my warlock, I use destruction pots in ZA runs, as well as anywhere else I can get a shaman in my group.

I guess what concerns me is the possibility that while I may gain some use out of Mana/Health pots even with the change, things like Haste/Destruction pots will no longer be used. After all, what's the point of blowing your one pot for the fight, if something randomly comes up and negates you being able to use it? Some sort of 'Move out of the Fire(tm)' effect springs to mind as one example.

I'm going to have to wait and see about this...while I like the reduced Drums, this seems like too much on the surface.

Currently, the datamined spell to socket weapons is not restricted to items the blacksmith already owns. It also uses the "permanent enchantment" slot on an item... which is probably why it's not yet implemented. It is reasonable to assume that socketing weapons (and maybe shields and off-hands) will be the perk that blacksmiths get, but until the ability gets implemented or the datamined spell makes the item soulbound, I'm not going to include it on the list.

Socket One-Handed Weapon - Spell - World of Warcraft

Which is exactly the point. Crafting should having nothing to do with tips. It's a service. The ability to do that service is something you either had to farm for, pay for, or otherwise obtain. Every single enchant, craft, or whatever is done for you should come with a fee. The idea that is so pervasive that it's an optional tip is exactly why it will never be profitable to be a crafter in this game. A tip is something you give to your guildie who is assuming to do it for free. I guarantee that no enchanter who sits around in trade chat all day doing enchants for tips makes even a fraction of what a gatherer would do in the same amount of time, except very infrequent occasions like the release of a new arena season.

The Healing Touch glyph isn't great. Keep in mind that druids are getting Nourish at level 80, which is basically flash heal that gets a bonus if you heal a target with a hot. If you use the glyph for healing touch, you basically get the same thing as nourish but more expensive in mana and without the synergy with hots.

Blizzard is never going to balance this game around the tiny percent of the players that are willing to level and unlearn 4 or 5 professions in order to gain a tenth of a percent to their stats. If you're willing to go that extra mile to get that gain, that's great, you deserve it, but it doesn't effect game balance at all. Now, if every single caster feels obligated to dump one of their professions and pick up tailoring because the gear is so powerful, that's a balance issue that should be addressed. There should definitely be a benefit to each crafting profession, and while they don't have to be exactly balanced, you shouldn't feel forced to take one particular profession in order to be competitive.

Question regarding LW: Are there Northrend-level leg armors that can be used non-LWs? The only ones I've seen are LW-specific, and if we don't get non-LW armor, I'm pretty sure everyone else is going to keep using Nethercleft/Nethercobra in the interest of min-maxing. It's going to be a huge PITA to farm Outland mats and find a Cenarion exalted LW if that ever happens.

There are in fact. Just going to link MMO-Champion's page for it: Profession - Leatherworking

Of those only the Wyrmscale Leg Armor is leatherworking only. It's fairly big upgrade over the normal ones though.

That would be pretty overpowered. In TBC values, that would mean a 1.5 sec cast that heals for near 10k and crits for 15k. Granted at a high price, but it would still make HT extremely good, especially if you combine it with downranking. I'm pretty confident it's meant as -1.5 sec off the cast, 75% of the original mana costs and 50% of the original amount healed. It seems like a pretty useless glyph as we already have 2 "fast heals" (Nourish and Regrowth). I see this even as a downgrade as I wouldn't have any big heals with it anymore and my "instant heal" will put out 50% less.

Also, after seeing devilsaurs becoming hunter pets and feral druids getting a polar bear glyph, I can only pray for a minor glyph that would make treeform look like the Ancient Protectors in Darnassus. ^^

That's right, you can't talk for other classes. So far there has been no consideration in WotLK toward mp5-based classes who already have extremely poor regen options outside of consumables. I don't see what value OOM Shamans are going to provide at 80. Nice they gave the class that already has Spiritual Attunement an Evocation as well.