The change the Devastate talent got me thinking. Making it into a weapon-speed attack with both weapons (akin to Stormstrike) is a cool change, in that (intuitively) it allows Protection Warriors to do significantly more damage on their own (when they are not tanking). Combined with One-handed Specialization, Protection Warriors could with the right gear put out some decent damage while soloing. I don't know how well this works out in practice on the PTR, but that's not really important.

What IS important is this: why don't all non-DPS specs/classes get something like this? As a Resto Shaman since the launch of WoW, being unable to kill things on my own in any decent time (regardless of the DPS gear I'm able to put together) has long been a personal beef of mine. The same goes for Resto Druids, Holy Paladins, Holy Priests, Prot Warriors...tons of players in tons of classes. The Devastate change is cool because it provides a significant chunk of DPS while not compromising the Warrior's tanking talents, and not making that Warrior overpowered in a PvE situation. It's just a nice solo-play side benefit on top of the group benefits the talents carry. So, why not extend this benefit to the other non-damage-dealing players to make their soloing lives easier?

To use my own class as an example, what if Earth Shield conferred 400 AP to the casting Shaman while it was on him? I would be able to kill non-elite world mobs a lot more quickly, and I would be considerably more effective in duels. But my PvE role would stay exactly the same. I don't bust out a 2-hander and melee in groups....it's as ridiculous an idea as an MT dual-wielding to hold aggro on a mob. What if the Treeform talent also conferred a substantial AP bonus to the Druid's catform?

I think talent changes like this, applied to the non-damage-dealing classes, would make them a lot more enjoyable to play, remove a lot of the necessity to have a DPS alt for farming, and wouldn't upset the balance of either the raiding or arena games.

Well, the change to Devastate was rescinded, for one.

Well, Holy Paladins gain Holy Shock, plus a talent garnering well over 100 spell damage, in addition to 5% crit on Holy spells. Shamans gain 3% spell/melee hit, 5% Lightning Bolt crit, Nature's Swiftness for burst, and a similar talent garnering spell damage. The shallow-to-middle parts of the Holy Priest tree are chock full of Smite-boosting talents and other Holy damage stuff, and middle Discipline has some more damage talents, leading to PI if you were so inclined.

The better question would be, "Why don't Druids gain any offensive capability from a Resto spec?", but Druids can construct a Dreamstate Healing Touch spec that includes Moonkin form at a marginal sacrifice.

Honestly, the simple answer is that if optimal healing specs also provided equal DPS, then DPS-only classes would be obsolete.

The particular Devastate changes don't really matter, even if it was rescinded. This is a normative statement. And talents like Nature's Blessing are a step in the right direction, though I don't think they go far enough. I've yet to see a full Resto Shaman spec Nature's Guidance, it's more of a hybrid option.

I don't think anyone is asking for equal dps or even anything close to it, just "endurable solo grinding dps" and there's a pretty big difference.

Devastate is a pain in the ass for soloing, because it requires such a large build-up time for the Sunders. If it applied Sunder, then it would be a much better soloing tool *and* get more use outside of tanking raid bosses.

I was under the impression that sunder was only required for the bonus threat of devastate. Is this not the case?

Honestly, when I need to solo grind I just put on some of my Ret-oriented blues and whip out my Hammer of the Naaru - I found it to be more effecient, both in terms of DPS and in terms of downtime, than stacking holy damage and going to holy shock route.

It's still agonizingly slow, however, and really makes me not want to solo grind any factions or items. I think that Blizzard needs to implement each faction in a way such that the non-DPS classes are able to have a solo ability to grind the factions out (either a repeatable solo quest that favors healing/tanking classes, or something similar). Otherwise the more important reputation continues to be, the more behind I feel in terms of being able to fully develop my character.

Protection warriors were in pretty much the worst situation all around - low DPS output + no ability to heal except from bandages was very bad combination for solo grinding.

Compared to them, healers are still slow in killing mobs, but they are able to recover faster without downtime (eating/drinking). That's assuming "DPS gear", of course - with druids being in the best situation (DPS not mana based) and probably priests in the worst (DPS heavy mana based, relatively high damage taken compared to mail/plate+shield of shammy/pally).

Which brings separate topic of multiple gear sets needed to be effective in various roles in game...

The tooltip is fairly misleading that way. It does no extra inherent threat per sunder application, but it does extra threat via damage for each sunder. (specifically, 35 damage per sunder)

I tried that, but I seem to get better results from Seal/Judgement of Righteousness, Holy Shock, and continuous Consecration (Rank 1). I wear mainly Elemental Shaman gear, running around 600 +dmg with about 25% crit to my holy spells (including talents), and most of my "grinding" gear is not enchanted, because I put all my gold into my tanking and healing sets.

I've completed well over 95% of the quests in Outland, having specced Holy at 61 when I realized that I might need a bit of an edge to heal instances. Arriving in Outland with "healing gear" consisting of 40s blues with int on them will do that. I will openly acknowledge that Floria, my Warlock ex-main will grind circles around Kaiserin, but by no means is grinding or farming difficult or tedious on my paladin. It does help to pick your targets; I wouldn't grind fear-immune or shadow/magic resistant mobs on a warlock, and similarly I pick undead/demon mobs on my paladin, as well as low HP mobs that can be burst down.

What's really needed is some way to specifically boost solo damage that doesn't boost raid damage. This may sound like an oxymoron, but it's not.

Think about a frost mage shatter - great boost to DPS if you can get the shatter off, but in a raid situation most mobs aren't freezable, and any that are will have the freeze broken before you can take advantage of it.

If there were similar effects (say Devastate applied a Daze, allowing your HS to do more damage), that would give a boost to prot warrior solo farming without changing their raid role.

I personally loved escort quests while leveling for that reason. While escort NPCs don't do that much damage compared to a normal player, it did increase the speed at which stuff died quite a bit, and they were quite enjoyable to do simply because I could 'tank' the groups of mobs you tend to encounter during them.

Of course, the issue with most current escort quests is that you can't heal the Escort NPCs (Or they're vulnerable opposite faction ganking, especially that Mag'har Prisoner is amazing, on a PvE server he attacks non-PvP enabled Alliance as well if they pass by him. Very annoying.)

In my opinion the real issue here is not that healer/tank/support classes & talent specs lack damage, but that damage dealing specs and classes lack down time when soloing.

The way the game is balanced at the moment, dps classes can solo farm & quest quickly and effectively, if they take on mobs that challenge them they just need to bandage/eat/drink afterwards.

Eating or bandaging provides dps classes with solo healing capacity, when you consider "down time" between mobs. There are no consumables that give healing/support classes an similar boost to reducing the time it takes to kill a mob, thus dps don't need healers to farm or quest. Teaming up helps the support more than it helps the dps, so dps don't bother teaming up much. When I get help with quests/farming from dps, they are helping me. They don't need my help, but I need theirs.

Unfortunately I don't have the answers, but I do know that more dps to healers would be overpowered. My gut feeling is that eating/bandaging is overpowered (!), but there may be no way it could be reasonably fixed.

Certainly the devs don't want to put certain specs out of business (deep Prot out dpsing deep Fury with devastate), but I agree that adding more dps talents to the healing trees would be a boon.

Sadly, the devs are scared of making hybrids too powerful, so I don't see many changes in the works.

I cringe whenever I read a suggestion to make devastate less weapon-speed independent.

Its stong enough with a fast weapon for tanking as-is... sure, on a 5-stack of sunders its only marginally better than a sunder for threat, but it brings our arsenal of threat generating abilities that actually scale with gear up to a whopping 2... and thats including shield slam, which doesnt actually scale much when block value is at the bottom of your list for valuable stats.

Any change normalizing devastate would likely end up being a minor buff to fast-weapon devastate, but a huge nerf to slow-weapon devastate damage, and I dont think anyone would be happy with that. Plus, such a change would likely force devastate to become a non-weapon-damage ability, eg, based on a flat number, possibly modified by attack power. It would take away our main potential source of threat scaling... getting beefier weapons. Even if the change was a buff now, it would come back and bite us down the road.

I do agree that making devastate apply a sunder would be a very reasonable and welcome change... for tanking, more threat will still be gained by using sunder the first few times, so it isnt a wholesale replacement for sunder. For doing dps in a raid, it really isnt much of a change at all... it would probably make a prot warrior do less than 1000 more damage over the course of a fight, since it only makes a difference on the first 4 swings. It would shine for grinding though, and remove the question of how many times to sunder before devastate.

I do prefer to throw on a block value set and slam away for solo grinding. The reduction in kill speed is definitely balanced out by the fact that I'm more or less immune to a level ~68 melee mob. However, it doesnt always work... farming elementals is a major exception, and an important one... everyone needs primals.

I would love to be able to get a response out a Blizzard telling us a good reason not to have devastate apply sunders.

At this stage in the game, large changes to improve the soloing capability of tanks and healers are pretty unlikely. Druids really need no revisions in this regard (because of feral forms and the terrific resto -> feral synergy), and palis do have reaonably strong AoE soloing capability (although it is certainly a niche), but prot warriors, holy priests and palis, and resto druids and shaman do suffer.

Dual-wield changes to Devastate were a very elegant solution for prot warriors, particularly because there is no need for Devastate to be another tanking ability. I am aghast that they did not attempt to tweak the proposed DW benefits and simply removed the change. I can think of several tweaks (basing it on weapon DPS and not damage, for example) that could have prevented it from out-dpsing fury in the extreme case while still providing a noticable DW benefit. The fact that they did not anticipate the effects of the changes is somewhat indicative of failings in their design process. Even without testing, it is readily apparant that the mechanic favored very slow weapons (which is contrary to DW strategy), which should have been a clue-in that it was probably not balanced for one case or another.

Changing healer soloing capability is trickier depending on the class. For priests it should certainly be doable, given that the 21, 31, and 41 point talents in the holy tree are generally regarded as lackluster. If the 41-point holy tree significantly improved soloing (a guardian spirit, for example), it would not have to compete with Divine Spirit and would provide a clear, tangible benefit if chosen.

For paladins, a talent in deep holy for boosting Consecration damage could definitely help with holy leveling and would be an asset for a more hybrid healing/tanking role in select AoE situations like Morogrim. I'd also really love for Holy Shock to be more focused for damage or healing; as it is, its a terrible heal and pretty poor for damage outside, although it does offer snap aggro.

For resto shaman, high spell damage, searing totem, and flametongue weapon make soloing bearable as long as the target is not fire-immune. Alternately, an resto/enhancement build can use windfury and a 2-hander to solo. There is room for improvement, but the best target would probably be the weapon buffs.

The trick is to make sure that any talent added to improve soloing capacity also has raid-oriented benefits. If 41 pt holy adds nothing but solo capacity, raiders won't be able to take it, because that's a point that's better off spent helping the raid.

You can get a 10% smite dmg boost for 2 pts in the holy tree. Who takes it? Not many.

The Holy Guardian is a wonderful idea, but it has to have a raid benefit too. If the guardian added a 2% mana regen while casting buff to everyone in the party (non stackable) or some sort of passive mana regen, and also could be used for DPS, that would be awesome.

Added DPS for soloing, less downtime due to the aura, raid benefits (that aren't huge). That's a plan right there.