Honestly, the whole re-tooling of some standard game mechanics does not bother me. More so, it makes me happy that Blizzard, at least for a while, can change up how we do things. One of my favorite parts of the D2 original to LoD conversion was the fact that you just couldn't take out your current uber toon and pwn like you did before. There was, for the most part, a "reset". The people that suck will still be on the bottom and the people who don't will be on the top. However, BC will give the people who couldn't get into the uber guilds a chance to get into a top group w/o having to be there when the game first started. Is this bad nope....is it a bit of gut punch to those who built of good 40 man raid guilds..yep. A rob Peter to pay Paul type scenario.

More specifically on topic.

No matter how blizzard changes the HP the healers will adapt for PvE scenarios. It isn't like all of a sudden we can't figure out it. The encounters still need to have a solution for success. Also the new FoT isn't so much for the hp, but actually the defense. Also the change to min level for +heal effectiveness will work well increased HP....instead of heal 2...my guess is gheal 1. If you look at it side by side...still a pretty good cross comparison in terms new tank HP versus spell HP.

For PvP, I 100% expect a complete misbalance for the first patch or two until Blizzard can see how people will abuse the game mechanics to their advantage in relation to the new HP pools. Priests and rogues had a HUGE advantage when the game first opened....and now they do okay, but no where near what they were because of gear. The "changes" to fear, for priests, I guess was to help others at first, but now it feel more like a "nerf" with the current gear available.

In short...I think the new HP mechanics will alter PvP significantly more than it will alter PvE.

Every single class will have to re-gear for expansion. Your kidding yourself if you don't think this is true. Otherwise guilds would simply run everyone through naxx in 70 greens and skip 61-70 man instance. And whatever you have seen of items, don't forget only expansion items can be socketed, which will be pretty big bonus/stat boosts.

Blizzard won't come out and say this since it would cause lots of chaos in guilds right now, as many people would decide to take a break from wow until the expansion (as fun as herb farming SM 5-10 hours a week is...)

Every class will easily be able to gear up to 70 raiding status with the new instances, otherwise they would have a hard time convincing new people to buy the game. Remember MMO economics - your current playing base is pretty captive, outside of normal turnover they will continue to play unless you majorly piss them off (SWG for example). Your goal is to keep bringing in new people.

I think you'll see a sharp rise in ebay'd accounts fairly soon, especially once more items are leaked from the 68+ instances.

TBC is a game "reset", make no mistake. All your previous faction, honor, equipment, etc is not worth as much as you would like it to be. The only thing that'll be of equivalent value is gold.

Theres half a dozen ways you can imagine how high HP raids can be mitigated in PVE encounters - bosses that debuff with a stat loss, heal debuffs like fankriss, damage that scales with HP, many-many-many-whelp encounters, bosses that act intelligent and go after cloth first, etc. Given the evolution of instances Blizzard has shown, its not hard to imagine them putting in some very creative, difficult, and fun encounters in TBC that are nothing like what we have seen so far.

I'm quite aware of this, I know how these things go. I'm not bemoaning how all this works. But stamina changes make it disporportionally more important for tanks to regear, and that is something to be aware of.

Assuming the don't retroactively change stamina on all currently existing items.

As some people have already pointed out in this thread, I don't believe the stamina boost itself is going to change PvE raiding that much. Bosses damage output will scale with player stamina and healers will get bigger heals. What will change in PvE is the rolls of the various classes, but that's another discussion.

For PvP, it seems Blizzard is trying to move away from the quick 1-3 shot fights that can occur in some situations with some classes. This change will affect classes that rely on burst damage the most of course.

From the looks of some of the new talents, it looks like Blizzard wants to emphasize tactical control in PvP rather than killing. There's more stuns, snares, imobilizing effects, and general CC abilities than ever before as well as various counters to these abilities. They seem to want PvP that is more about controlling your opponent then just killing him.

They could change the old gear, but that would require either breaking old content, or rebalancing it, neither of which are desirable. In either case, its adding additional work (i.e. changing old gear, and potentially old cotent).

New content will obviously be balanced around the new HP totals. It only really matters along the path to level 70 raiding.

His point is that it's been known for months that all non-BC gear will get outscaled by mudflation very early into the expansion. It would be like saying "by the way you can have a 31-pt and a 21-pt talent at the same time!".

I don't understand the attachment people have to their current gear lasting to 70. Either way, devaluing stamina is not the only way in which existing gear will beshow its age at 70. Assuming all hit, spell hit, crit, and apell crit are convert to the new rating styles then everyone elses gear will gradually degenerate in effectiveness as they level (and are thus hitting higher level mods).

So while a warrior in Tier 3 will have less stamina at 70 relative to the mobs than they did at 60, rogues will have less crit, and casters will have less spell crit.

Well if you spent an inordinate amount of time aquiring such gear it's understandable that you might not want it reach obsolescence so quickly :) . Be that as it may, Naxx gear will most certainly become obsolete, the argument is when exactly and will there be a difference from class to class as Avair contends.

If Blizzard doesn't retroactively adjust the stamina on at least some of the items, there's a high probability that people will be replacing their Naxx gear much sooner than many people think. In fact it's likely they'd be replacing at least a couple slots even before level 70. Given all the extra stamina and jewel slots it'll be hard to pass up on some of those pieces, I've seen some pretty impressive blue pieces.

It's really up to Blizzard of course, how fast do they want to close the gear gap? It's relatively easy for them to rebudget a stat, they did it before with defense. They'd probably only have to do it on higher level gear (say level 55+) so they wouldn't have to rebalancing things in the low level dungeons. What are the pros/cons of it from Blizzards perspective?

I can't recall a single time in this game that any gear lasted me 10 levels.

Green whelp armor and situational/gimmicky crap excluded.

Frankly, IMO it would be pretty dumb if your level 60 epics lasted you to 70 and were even remotely worth wearing. We'd all sound like hunters: "Wah wah, I haven't gotten a weapon upgrade since chromaggus", but worse.

It's a safe bet that none of your leveling up gear required you two months to obtain, either. The idea that Naxxramas gear might be out of date immediately seems silly to me; equalled by instanced gear in the mid 60s and obsolete at 70, sure, but obsolete at 60, at 63?

Well, I never did get Bracers of the Eclipse after 50+ runs. GGRNG, right? ;)

I do think it's worth keeping in mind how long it will take one to get from 60-65 (while we dont know actual numbers, will it suffice to say "it will be longer than 30-35"?). The naxx gear will make leveling/instancing *that* much easier to obtain the upgrades to said gear, which is what MMO's are all about - the time sink, right?

Sure, its easy for me to say b/c I don't have the gear, but this whole line of questioning re: "My gear won't last till 70, wtf?" sounds a lot like "I want my cake and eat it too". My caster chars get hit for 2K white crits from DEOI warriors. Enhancement shaman can 1 shot me if they get a lucky windfury triple crit. Maybe this is getting into the stam debate, but if that gear lasts you till 63/4/5 that's a pretty good investment IMO, for no other reason than you don't have to re-invest in enchants every few levels.

Burst as a killer is already failing as a rogue tactic in PvP, and it's going to be totally gone if peoples' HP doubles in TBC. Sure, if both of my backstabs (Perdition's, mix of T1 and T2 gear) crit, I've done ~3200 damage to cloth... if they forgot to keep up a shield of some kind, which smart players don't. And that won't kill a clothie in PvP gear, anyway. At which point my massive damage is reduced to autoattacking. If I'm trying to burn down some clothie with 7000 HP, my burst doesn't mean a thing, unless they double my damage output to go with it, at which point we're back to that two-shotting thing, aren't we?

Whenever talking with others about the "golden age" of WoW, I go back to the good old days when Scholomance was endgame (and the forums awash with "nerf scholo!" threads). Warriors were running around with Blackhand Doomsaws, and the truly ownage warriors wowed everyone with their arcanite reapers. Mages were running around with magisters and couldn't kill someone in 2 seconds. PvP was engaging and fun for just about every class. Even the low dps classes, like paladins and druids could compete with a strategy built around outlasting their opponents.

So the rumors of increased stamina are music to my ears, because I believe it will bring back that nostalgia I had for the pre-MC pvp game.

Seems to me, and I'm catching a LOT of flack for this from some friends, that a rogues pvp game (with increased HP pools) is moving more towards the raw CC/interrupts of sap/gouge/blind/KS/CS and silence of garrote.

I'm obviously extrapolating from "reduced value of stam in the ilvl budgets" here, but even now it's at a point where if a mage/priest is at 60-70% with no shield (used to be 100%), you can pretty quickly remove them from the equation. If, with tBC we have to wait till 50/40/30% sans a massive assist train, that's just kind of silly. It might even be lower than that for priests if they take their 41st disc talent >_______<

The flip side to this argument is the new multipliers for backstab, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that stam comes at a reduced cost. Whereas, as far as we know now, agility/AP/crit/hit will not be budgeted any cheaper. That's a bad thing for a class who gets pretty marginalized when knocked out of stealth and can be kited from range with relative ease.

Unless of course they make the HP pools large enough to last the 5-6 minutes till your next cooldown cycles up. :P

Update: What would make me extremely happy in the pants would be a talented throwing weapon ranged knockdown. They could even make it deep in the sub tree and I'd still probably go for it. Again, supposition based on a concept of "everyone gets more HP".

Yeah if PvP is simply about killing your oppenent before he kills you. To me it seems like Blizzard is trying to introduce a more tactical element to it though. So you can't kill your opponent fast, but what else can you do to him? There's lots of snares, stuns, dazes, and CCs the characters will have access to with the new talents. In a team enviroment you'll have to comunicate and coordinate a lot more with your teammates in order to take out an opposing group.

When you think about it, it wouldn't be very good to have classes with very high burst potential in the Arena PvP system. Being able to 2 shot your opponent would mean some very quick and boring matches with certain class combinations and I think Blizzard wanted to get away from that.

With the change to Stamina, Rogues can still be a strong force, just in may work out better to be in more of an assist role than burst damage role. Also, stamina will not be doubled, more like 1.5.

So I can see a Mage with 6000 health in the best lvl 70 gear, but then that same Rogue will have 7000 health (Even more with the Combat talent). Anyway, it is hard to see the PvP changes without the final talents in mind.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't the BC instance system have a difficulty setting and loot tied to the difficulty rating? What if you're basically required to have Nax or equivalent BC gear in order to upgrade to the top of the line difficulty?

If the time you've invested in Nax allows you to skip to the hardest setting sooner, that's a pretty big advantage, and markedly better than farming the lower difficulty tiers of the same instance to get geared up. Your time in these harder raid instances today wasn't totally wasted if you get a 2-3 week headstart on the general population of wow.

As far as rogues in PVP go, I was wondering how they were going to balance out 5 seconds of silence from a combat rogue on a caster (garrotte + improved kick). High HP pools keeps that from being basically a one-shot engagement. I'm not ecstatic about it, but it makes sense. Personally, I prefer a PVP fight that requires some tactics rather than a 3 second burn-down.

I knew about that, and, no.

A snare is not a spell interrupt. A knock down is. Subtle, but big difference. Plus, I'd have to go check the snare speed reduction of Crip2/50% vs. Ice Armor/R1 frostbolt

I thought you were worried about just kiting.

Basically, you want a ranged snap kick then? That seems pretty overpowered for a rogue. One move that solves kiting, allows for closing distance, interupts spells and is unresistable? Who has anything that good?

I agree with the general statements that the consequences of a significant health buff would mostly be positive - for PvP in particular.

One issue that I feel has been overlooked so far is casters in PvP. Their mana would have to be balanced to last that much longer as well but item budgets show no indication that much of a change is going to happen. It'd also be an issue to buff player mana heavily since that'd affect mana endurance in PvE and mages wouldn't have to care about their mana unless a fight would last like 20+ minutes or force them to spam AoE/CC all the time.

Profile please, Trashe.

Shaman mages paladins?

I wouldn't mind it deep in sub and require talent points, as it seems sub is going to be the way to go for any serious pvp going forward the more I think about it. In terms of effective use, if you make it like your bow 8-30, casters can still out range you and you can't use it in a "hand to hand" situation - with those limitations I'd place it on par with imp kick in terms of marginal utility - I also wouldn't mind throwing 2 points into it to ensure a knockdown or disorient or something. Anything to interrupt a cast actually.