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Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - 27 April
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If you're the boss...
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World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies
by
Published on 2010-08-16 09:26 AM
Cataclysm - Dungeon Maps
The latest beta build added dungeon maps for all the WoW classic dungeons! Absolutely all of them, Gnomeregan, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, they all got a shiny new world map. Maps for a couple of Cataclysm instances have also been added, including a couple of 5-man instances, the Bastion of Twilight (Grim Batol Raid), and Baradin Hold (the new Vault of Archavon for the faction in control of Tol Barad)
I also included the new map for Darnassus, a couple of others outdoor maps were updated in the latest build but they will be part of another world map/zones page update.
Cataclysm Boss - Siamat
I forgot to post the model of this boss on Saturday. Siamat is the last boss of the Lost City of the Tol'vir, one of the 5-man dungeons of Uldum and he will most likely play a huge role in all the quests of Uldum.
Blue Posts
Weird stats on crafted items
Yes. We are focusing on getting the tradeskill recipes in place so that we can adjust skill leveling rates and reagent costs and the like. We haven't made an attempt to get the proper stats in place yet.
This is why I wanted specific examples. I'd compare the dungeon gear at this point, and not worry about the crafted gear. (Source)
Why are you forcing raid healers to use more than one spell?
Because we think it's more fun. Because of the nature of raids, where the general strategy is to be powerful as a group because everyone is very specialized, it's easy for them to be become monotonous. Seeing a boss for the first time can be exciting, and maybe at that point just learning his mechanics can feel overwhelming, but it's likely you're going to wipe on that boss several or many times, and even once you succeed, you're looking at weeks of killing him over and over.
I've said this before, but it's hard for healers to evaluate their contribution based on overall meters, because those don't really tell you much about whether the healer was a good player or not. Instead, one of the best rewards for a healer is to know that they are playing smart. A big part of playing smart is using the right heal for the right situation, which is hard to do when you only have one. (Source)
Healers - Stacking mana regen
We've seen this response from all of the healers, namely that you can stack regen to offset the mana inefficiency of the fast heal. We want Spirit to be a good stat of course, but if you just take it and nothing else then you may find yourself able to cast a small heal a lot. In that situation you might see say tank health go down even though you are spamming heals, because your throughput is low without crit and without haste, you can't cast Nourish or Healing Touch quickly enough. (Source)
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Tree of Life
A good example is the "remove the tree" process. You never really wanted an opinion if this is a good or bad change, from the beginning the phrasing "is treeform fun" was already biased by your decision (or whoever pulled the strings here).
On the contrary, the message we took away from that thread was that a lot of druids loved Tree of Life, but a lot of druids hated it, and some of the ones that liked it just liked the visual and not any of the gameplay that went along with it. Based on that, and given all the problems we thought Tree of Life had (which we've stated numerous times so we shouldn't have to go into it again here), we thought it made sense to change the spell. We have a very large audience, so it's unrealistic to expect near unanimous support for any kind of change, and designing games based on popular vote among the players never works out well anyway.
TLDR: It's not fair to accuse of us not listening to you just because we listened to other players instead. (Source)
Restoration PvP Signature Ability
I don't think Resto druids need a special ability to feel fun in PvP. Traditionally it has been the power of hots in PvP (which tick when you aren't targeting them and generally can't be interrupted) coupled with some pretty outrageous mobility. Often the problems we've had with Resto druids in PvP is that they are too hard to counter. Druids heal pretty differently from priests, paladins or shaman in PvP. (Source)
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Discipline - Healing Breakdown
Some of you guys can be so extreme sometimes.
Less emphasis on shields doesn't have to mean never, ever cast shields. Your mastery doesn't have to be junk just because you cast actual heals sometimes.
A typical Icecrown Disc priest today might have a healing breakdown that looks something like this:
40% Power Word: Shield
35% Divine Aegis
8% Glyph of PW:S
7% Prayer of Mending
4% Divine Hymn
2% Flash Heal
1% Penance
3% Other
Imagine that instead of 75% shields, you do 50-60% shields and the rest is made up by Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal and Penance. So instead of doing most of your healing, shields are down to doing only a majority of your healing. (Source)
Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Shaman Q&A (Source)
Lots of questions. I don't have time to answer them all, but I will hit a few.
When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?
When you're casting Earthquake?
1) Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?
Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can't get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.
Personally, I'd like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on 'primary' targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can't think of any other dps spec that doesn't get something 'unique' that changes their rotation from the other specs.
That's just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I'd argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I'm not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It's just a different model.
Mana - I've heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s'more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement's lvl 10 skillset? It's going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I'm sorry it touches on totems again - a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement's mana very very quickly. It'd be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.
It's not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It's a model we're still adjusting. We haven't quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we're happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren't really supposed to be mana-constrained.
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that's really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.
The model we're trying to use for all the classes is that you can't just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It's an evolving process though. I'm not sure I could point to a class yet and say "There. We nailed it."
Also, Enhance has 9 "required" points in Elemental - would be 10 if it weren't for Ancestral Swiftness - on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don't like as 3 points to start with - it creates a 'floater' point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.
Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it's hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn't want.
Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.
Agreed. This is something we're discussing. A new shield doesn't have to be the answer though.
- Nature's Blessing doesn't feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?
This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it's not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn't it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn't available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?
Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It's when it isn't that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.
I agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about "we're the only class" or "are buffs aren't awesome enough" only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn't a lot of movement involved and when you weren't competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don't think we need to fix the legendary "problem" because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.
I honestly don't see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).
They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.
(4) Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I'm mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can't be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn't exactly a survivability powerhouse.
We are changing a lot of glyphs. It's too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere.
At this point tho, after getting the current tier hit/spirit cap, I'm pretty much forced to handpick items with no or little crit rating however. Mastery and haste just seem so overwhelmingly better.
That's not the intent. Hit / spirit can be capped, but if you start viewing haste, crit or mastery as junk compared to another stat, then we need to change something. It's fine if one stat is slightly better than another. Remember that crit values overall are going to be far lower than the 70%+ that some players can reach in current content. Lava Burst crits, sure, but you cast a lot of spells besides Lava Burst.
3. Whether it will continue to attack stuff we are not in combat with (especially if it's range is increased).
This is something we are trying to fix. We already have the totem choosing your target. Next we need to make sure it doesn't "helpfully" grab additional mobs.
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Inner Rage / Rage Generation
Say you're at 75 rage and the rage still seems to be coming in fast. You start using Heroic Strike on cooldown. One of two things is going to happen. Either you can bleed off the excess rage, or you can't. If you can't bleed it off with Heroic Strike, then there is nothing else you can do. Your rage is going to hit 100 and everything else will be wasted. If that happens, then things can go one of two ways: you can just waste all that rage and be sad, or you can convert some of that rage into extra damage (since it would have been wasted anyway).
You can see what that is like today by just hitting Rend, or some other cheap attack and nothing else. Your rage climbs to 100 and stays there. In fact, we had to slow down rage generation for levels 1-10 because the new basic "Strike" attack doesn't consume rage faster than you generate it, especially once you start using Charge.
The world where Inner Rage somehow steals your rage can't really exist because you already had more rage than you could possibly spend. If you got there because you forgot to hit Heroic Strike, then you were just playing badly -- that's not Inner Rage's fault. The best you can argue is that you were in a strange fluke where you suddenly went to 100 rage very quickly, but after a couple of Heroic Strikes, you were going to be fine again so Inner Rage stole that rage. But even in that case, the ability turns off after some minimal threshold, so you can get back to normal quickly.
A lot of you seem to basing your opinions around crits, but that was never the issue in our minds. Inner Rage was designed for situations where you couldn't spend rage fast enough. Examples might include being stunned (which turns on Second Wind), using Raging Calm (which pools your ragE), having to run away from the boss while taking damage (say an encounter like Gruul), or getting Heroism / Lust right when you also take a lot of damage (maybe after running a little bit).
Believe me, if we hit a situation where Inner Rage never procs for anyone, then we'll happily remove it or redesign it. We're just not going to be convinced that will be the case by vague hunches or back of the envelope theorycrafting. We want to see it in action. (Source)
So in PVP when I am being focused and hit rage cap because I am unable to bleed it off I am supposed to suffer the consequence of 50% MORE RAGE COST ON MY ABILITIES??? 45 rage for my MS and then crippling my ability to use anything else???
Again, you're just looking at the ability as "sometimes, your abilities cost more," which of course makes it sound terrible. In your hypothetical situation though, you are taking so much damage that you can't spend your rage fast enough. You hit 100 and then theoretically got to 120 or 150 or possibly 200 rage. Except all of the rage beyond 100 is just gone into vapor. Inner Rage lets your convert some of that excess rage into damage and gets you down below 100 rage again so that you aren't wasting it. If for example we let the rage bar go to 500, then we wouldn't need the ability because you'd never waste anything. So you are comparing 45 rage Mortal Strikes that hit harder to 45 rage Mortal Strikes (the normal cost, plus all the rage you wasted) that hit for the normal amount.
And as I said above, maybe 50% isn't the right number. However if for example the numbers were 10% more rage for 50% more damage, every warrior strategy guide would say "Don't hit ANY buttons until you get to 100 rage," which we don't think would be very fun.
Also, CAPS and MULTIPUNCTUATION make my arguments STRONGER!!! (Source)
Well... you might see warriors doing this with inner rage. OR, you might see them "standing in the fire" in order to proc it, or in order to max out their DPS. If a few ticks of fire damage, mean we can fill a rage bar and use all our abilities on cooldown, and use heroic strike where we want to, you can bet you'll see warriors running into the fire.
That's an issue with rage though not with Inner Rage per se. If you aren't getting enough rage and figure you can max your dps by standing in fires, then that might be attractive. I'm just pointing this out because I think the "we'll stand in fires" argument is being used as justification for removing Inner Rage, but if standing in fires gave you more Heroic Strikes, then removing Inner Rage won't fix that. (Source)
The MMO Report
Monday, MMO Report!
Comics
Dark Legacy Comic #251 and Teh Gladiators #158 + #159 are out!
The latest beta build added dungeon maps for all the WoW classic dungeons! Absolutely all of them, Gnomeregan, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, they all got a shiny new world map. Maps for a couple of Cataclysm instances have also been added, including a couple of 5-man instances, the Bastion of Twilight (Grim Batol Raid), and Baradin Hold (the new Vault of Archavon for the faction in control of Tol Barad)
I also included the new map for Darnassus, a couple of others outdoor maps were updated in the latest build but they will be part of another world map/zones page update.
Cataclysm Raid Instances
 Baradin Hold |
 Blackwing Descent #1 |
 Blackwing Descent #2 |
 Bastion of Twilight #1 |
 Bastion of Twilight #2 |
 Bastion of Twilight #3 |
Cataclysm 5-Man Instances
 Blackrock Caverns #1 |
 Blackrock Caverns #2 |
 Grim Batol |
 Skywall Dungeon |
 Throne of the Tides |
 Throne of the Tides |
Classic Raid Instances
 Blackwing Lair #1 |
 Blackwing Lair #2 |
 Blackwing Lair #3 |
 Blackwing Lair #4 |
 Molten Core |
 Onyxia's Lair |
 Ruins of Ahn'qiraj |
 Temple of Ahn'qiraj #1 |
 Temple of Ahn'qiraj #2 |
 Temple of Ahn'qiraj #3 |
Classic 5-Man Instances
 Blackfathom Deeps #1 |
 Blackfathom Deeps #2 |
 Blackfathom Deeps #3 |
 Blackrock Depths #1 |
 Blackrock Depths #2 |
 Blackrock Spire #1 |
 Blackrock Spire #2 |
 Blackrock Spire #3 |
 Blackrock Spire #4 |
 Blackrock Spire #5 |
 Blackrock Spire #6 |
 Blackrock Spire #7 |
 Deadmines #1 |
 Deadmines #2 |
 Dire Maul East #1 |
 Dire Maul East #2 |
 Gnomeregan #1 |
 Gnomeregan #2 |
 Gnomeregan #3 |
 Gnomeregan #4 |
 Ragefire Chasm |
 Razorfen Downs |
 Razorfen Kraul |
 Scarlet Monastery #1 |
 Scarlet Monastery #2 |
 Scarlet Monastery #3 |
 Scarlet Monastery #4 |
 Scholomance #1 |
 Scholomance #2 |
 Scholomance #3 |
 Scholomance #4 |
 Shadowfang Keep #1 |
 Shadowfang Keep #2 |
 Shadowfang Keep #3 |
 Shadowfang Keep #4 |
 Shadowfang Keep #5 |
 Shadowfang Keep #6 |
 Shadowfang Keep #7 |
 Stratholme #1 |
 Stratholme #2 |
 Sunken Temple |
 The Stockade |
 Uldaman #1 |
 Uldaman #2 |
 Wailing Caverns |
 Zul'farrak |
Darnassus
 |
Cataclysm Boss - Siamat
I forgot to post the model of this boss on Saturday. Siamat is the last boss of the Lost City of the Tol'vir, one of the 5-man dungeons of Uldum and he will most likely play a huge role in all the quests of Uldum.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Weird stats on crafted items
Yes. We are focusing on getting the tradeskill recipes in place so that we can adjust skill leveling rates and reagent costs and the like. We haven't made an attempt to get the proper stats in place yet.
This is why I wanted specific examples. I'd compare the dungeon gear at this point, and not worry about the crafted gear. (Source)
Why are you forcing raid healers to use more than one spell?
Because we think it's more fun. Because of the nature of raids, where the general strategy is to be powerful as a group because everyone is very specialized, it's easy for them to be become monotonous. Seeing a boss for the first time can be exciting, and maybe at that point just learning his mechanics can feel overwhelming, but it's likely you're going to wipe on that boss several or many times, and even once you succeed, you're looking at weeks of killing him over and over.
I've said this before, but it's hard for healers to evaluate their contribution based on overall meters, because those don't really tell you much about whether the healer was a good player or not. Instead, one of the best rewards for a healer is to know that they are playing smart. A big part of playing smart is using the right heal for the right situation, which is hard to do when you only have one. (Source)
Healers - Stacking mana regen
We've seen this response from all of the healers, namely that you can stack regen to offset the mana inefficiency of the fast heal. We want Spirit to be a good stat of course, but if you just take it and nothing else then you may find yourself able to cast a small heal a lot. In that situation you might see say tank health go down even though you are spamming heals, because your throughput is low without crit and without haste, you can't cast Nourish or Healing Touch quickly enough. (Source)
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Tree of Life
A good example is the "remove the tree" process. You never really wanted an opinion if this is a good or bad change, from the beginning the phrasing "is treeform fun" was already biased by your decision (or whoever pulled the strings here).
On the contrary, the message we took away from that thread was that a lot of druids loved Tree of Life, but a lot of druids hated it, and some of the ones that liked it just liked the visual and not any of the gameplay that went along with it. Based on that, and given all the problems we thought Tree of Life had (which we've stated numerous times so we shouldn't have to go into it again here), we thought it made sense to change the spell. We have a very large audience, so it's unrealistic to expect near unanimous support for any kind of change, and designing games based on popular vote among the players never works out well anyway.
TLDR: It's not fair to accuse of us not listening to you just because we listened to other players instead. (Source)
Restoration PvP Signature Ability
I don't think Resto druids need a special ability to feel fun in PvP. Traditionally it has been the power of hots in PvP (which tick when you aren't targeting them and generally can't be interrupted) coupled with some pretty outrageous mobility. Often the problems we've had with Resto druids in PvP is that they are too hard to counter. Druids heal pretty differently from priests, paladins or shaman in PvP. (Source)
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Discipline - Healing Breakdown
Some of you guys can be so extreme sometimes.
Less emphasis on shields doesn't have to mean never, ever cast shields. Your mastery doesn't have to be junk just because you cast actual heals sometimes.A typical Icecrown Disc priest today might have a healing breakdown that looks something like this:
40% Power Word: Shield
35% Divine Aegis
8% Glyph of PW:S
7% Prayer of Mending
4% Divine Hymn
2% Flash Heal
1% Penance
3% Other
Imagine that instead of 75% shields, you do 50-60% shields and the rest is made up by Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal and Penance. So instead of doing most of your healing, shields are down to doing only a majority of your healing.
(Source) Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Shaman Q&A (Source)
Lots of questions. I don't have time to answer them all, but I will hit a few.
When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?
When you're casting Earthquake?
1) Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?
Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can't get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.
Personally, I'd like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on 'primary' targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can't think of any other dps spec that doesn't get something 'unique' that changes their rotation from the other specs.
That's just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I'd argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I'm not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It's just a different model.
Mana - I've heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s'more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement's lvl 10 skillset? It's going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I'm sorry it touches on totems again - a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement's mana very very quickly. It'd be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.
It's not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It's a model we're still adjusting. We haven't quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we're happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren't really supposed to be mana-constrained.
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that's really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.
The model we're trying to use for all the classes is that you can't just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It's an evolving process though. I'm not sure I could point to a class yet and say "There. We nailed it."
Also, Enhance has 9 "required" points in Elemental - would be 10 if it weren't for Ancestral Swiftness - on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don't like as 3 points to start with - it creates a 'floater' point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.
Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it's hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn't want.
Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.
Agreed. This is something we're discussing. A new shield doesn't have to be the answer though.
- Nature's Blessing doesn't feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?
This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it's not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn't it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn't available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?
Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It's when it isn't that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.
I agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about "we're the only class" or "are buffs aren't awesome enough" only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn't a lot of movement involved and when you weren't competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don't think we need to fix the legendary "problem" because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.
I honestly don't see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).
They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.
(4) Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I'm mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can't be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn't exactly a survivability powerhouse.
We are changing a lot of glyphs. It's too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere.
At this point tho, after getting the current tier hit/spirit cap, I'm pretty much forced to handpick items with no or little crit rating however. Mastery and haste just seem so overwhelmingly better.
That's not the intent. Hit / spirit can be capped, but if you start viewing haste, crit or mastery as junk compared to another stat, then we need to change something. It's fine if one stat is slightly better than another. Remember that crit values overall are going to be far lower than the 70%+ that some players can reach in current content. Lava Burst crits, sure, but you cast a lot of spells besides Lava Burst.
3. Whether it will continue to attack stuff we are not in combat with (especially if it's range is increased).
This is something we are trying to fix. We already have the totem choosing your target. Next we need to make sure it doesn't "helpfully" grab additional mobs.
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Inner Rage / Rage Generation
Say you're at 75 rage and the rage still seems to be coming in fast. You start using Heroic Strike on cooldown. One of two things is going to happen. Either you can bleed off the excess rage, or you can't. If you can't bleed it off with Heroic Strike, then there is nothing else you can do. Your rage is going to hit 100 and everything else will be wasted. If that happens, then things can go one of two ways: you can just waste all that rage and be sad, or you can convert some of that rage into extra damage (since it would have been wasted anyway).
You can see what that is like today by just hitting Rend, or some other cheap attack and nothing else. Your rage climbs to 100 and stays there. In fact, we had to slow down rage generation for levels 1-10 because the new basic "Strike" attack doesn't consume rage faster than you generate it, especially once you start using Charge.
The world where Inner Rage somehow steals your rage can't really exist because you already had more rage than you could possibly spend. If you got there because you forgot to hit Heroic Strike, then you were just playing badly -- that's not Inner Rage's fault. The best you can argue is that you were in a strange fluke where you suddenly went to 100 rage very quickly, but after a couple of Heroic Strikes, you were going to be fine again so Inner Rage stole that rage. But even in that case, the ability turns off after some minimal threshold, so you can get back to normal quickly.
A lot of you seem to basing your opinions around crits, but that was never the issue in our minds. Inner Rage was designed for situations where you couldn't spend rage fast enough. Examples might include being stunned (which turns on Second Wind), using Raging Calm (which pools your ragE), having to run away from the boss while taking damage (say an encounter like Gruul), or getting Heroism / Lust right when you also take a lot of damage (maybe after running a little bit).
Believe me, if we hit a situation where Inner Rage never procs for anyone, then we'll happily remove it or redesign it. We're just not going to be convinced that will be the case by vague hunches or back of the envelope theorycrafting. We want to see it in action. (Source)
So in PVP when I am being focused and hit rage cap because I am unable to bleed it off I am supposed to suffer the consequence of 50% MORE RAGE COST ON MY ABILITIES??? 45 rage for my MS and then crippling my ability to use anything else???
Again, you're just looking at the ability as "sometimes, your abilities cost more," which of course makes it sound terrible. In your hypothetical situation though, you are taking so much damage that you can't spend your rage fast enough. You hit 100 and then theoretically got to 120 or 150 or possibly 200 rage. Except all of the rage beyond 100 is just gone into vapor. Inner Rage lets your convert some of that excess rage into damage and gets you down below 100 rage again so that you aren't wasting it. If for example we let the rage bar go to 500, then we wouldn't need the ability because you'd never waste anything. So you are comparing 45 rage Mortal Strikes that hit harder to 45 rage Mortal Strikes (the normal cost, plus all the rage you wasted) that hit for the normal amount.
And as I said above, maybe 50% isn't the right number. However if for example the numbers were 10% more rage for 50% more damage, every warrior strategy guide would say "Don't hit ANY buttons until you get to 100 rage," which we don't think would be very fun.
Also, CAPS and MULTIPUNCTUATION make my arguments STRONGER!!!
(Source)Well... you might see warriors doing this with inner rage. OR, you might see them "standing in the fire" in order to proc it, or in order to max out their DPS. If a few ticks of fire damage, mean we can fill a rage bar and use all our abilities on cooldown, and use heroic strike where we want to, you can bet you'll see warriors running into the fire.
That's an issue with rage though not with Inner Rage per se. If you aren't getting enough rage and figure you can max your dps by standing in fires, then that might be attractive. I'm just pointing this out because I think the "we'll stand in fires" argument is being used as justification for removing Inner Rage, but if standing in fires gave you more Heroic Strikes, then removing Inner Rage won't fix that. (Source)
The MMO Report
Monday, MMO Report!
Comics
Dark Legacy Comic #251 and Teh Gladiators #158 + #159 are out!
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Published on 2010-08-14 10:35 PM
Cataclysm Build 12759 - Class Changes
Important: These changes are gathered by comparing spell data from the previous beta build with the new one. They might not reflect real or intentional changes from the developers. Don't panic if something looks strange, I probably screwed up. (Or Blizzard did, but most of the time we'll assume it's my fault)
Class changes should be coming faster with the next build, it looks like we're starting to figure out the new client, spell tooltips and the talent calculator will be updated a bit later. I also included Ghostcrawler's blue posts after the list, read them before you comment (or post on forums), or I will steal all your left shoes.
Blue Posts
Important: These changes are gathered by comparing spell data from the previous beta build with the new one. They might not reflect real or intentional changes from the developers. Don't panic if something looks strange, I probably screwed up. (Or Blizzard did, but most of the time we'll assume it's my fault)
Class changes should be coming faster with the next build, it looks like we're starting to figure out the new client, spell tooltips and the talent calculator will be updated a bit later. I also included Ghostcrawler's blue posts after the list, read them before you comment (or post on forums), or I will steal all your left shoes.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Companion Pets
Glyphs
Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Unholy
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Balance
Feral
Restoration
Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Beast Mastery
Marksmanship
Survival
Mage (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Arcane
Fire
Frost
Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy
Protection
Retribution
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Discipline
Holy
Shadow
Rogue (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Assassination
Combat
Subtlety
Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Elemental
Restoration
Enhancement
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Demonology
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Arms
Fury
Protection
- Lil' Deathwing - Right Click to summon and dismiss Lil' Deathwing. (Yep.)
Glyphs
- All glyphs are now found in the spellbook of each class on beta servers. Ultimately, classes will learn glyphs as "spells" and will only have to buy the glyph once to definitely learn it and swap it at any time.
Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Unholy
- Dirge now procs from Plague Strike, Blood Strike, and Icy Touch. (Old - Festering Strike, Plague Strike and Scourge Strike)
- Morbidity no longer reduces the cooldown of Death and Decay and increases its damage by 10/20/30% instead.
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Balance
- Soothe Animal is now named Soothe - Soothes the target, dispelling all enrage effects.
Feral
- Frenzied Regeneration now Increases maximum health by 30%, increases health to 30% (if below that value), and converts up to 10 rage per second into health for 20 sec. Each point of rage is converted into 3% of max health.
- Savage Roar now increases autoattack damage done by 50% instead of physical damage done by 30%.
- Bash no longer interrupts spellcasting for 3 sec.
- Enrage now increases physical damage taken by 10% instead of reducing base armor.
- Survival Instincts now Reduces all damage taken by 60% for 12 sec. Only useable while in Bear Form or Cat Form. Instant, 5 min cooldown
- Heart of the Wild now increases your maximum mana by 5/10/15% instead of increasing your Intellect by 2/4/6%.
Restoration
- Master Shapeshifter bonus increased from 2% to 4% for all forms.
- Furor now gives you a 33/66/100% (up from 20/40/60%) chance to gain 10 rage when you shapeshift into Bear form and you keep up to 33/66/100 (up from 20/40/60) of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form. Now increases your total Intellect by 2/4/6%. (Old - Only increased in Moonkin form)
- Naturalist is back as a Tier 2 Talent. Reduces the cast time of your Healing Touch and Nourish spells by 0.15/0.35/0.5 sec.
Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Beast Mastery
- Aspect of the Fox now allows you to shoot Steady Shot and Cobra Shot while moving and causes you to gain 2 Focus whenever you take damage. (Old - allows Auto-Shot while moving and increases focus regeneration by 20%)
- Kill Command now has a 100 yards range, your pet must be within 5 yards of the target to Kill Command.
Marksmanship
- Multi-Shot now costs 40 Focus, down from 60 Focus.
Survival
- Misdirection's transferred threat is no longer permanent and will fade after 30 sec.
- Thrill of the Hunt is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 6.
- Noxious Stings is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Increases your damage done on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 5%. Increases your damage done on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 5%. If Wyvern Sting is dispelled, the dispeller is also afflicted by Wyvern Sting lasting 25/50% of the duration remaining.
- Hunting Party now also triggers a 20% ranged and melee attack speed buff.
- Point of No Escape is now a Rank 2 talent, down from Rank 4.
- Serpent Spread *New* (Tier 6) - Targets hit by your Multi-Shot are also afflicted by your Serpent Sting equal to 50% of its total duration.
Mage (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Arcane
- Mana Shield now has a 12 sec cooldown, up from 10 sec.
- Portal: Tol Barad - Creates a portal, teleporting level 85+ group members that use it to Tol Barad. / 18% of base mana, 10 yd range, 10 sec cast, 1 min cooldown, Reagents: Rune of Portals
- Teleport: Tol Barad - Teleports the caster to Tol Barad. / 8% of base mana, 10 sec cast, Reagents: Rune of Teleportation
- Improved Polymorph's effect cannot occur more often than once every 10 sec.
Fire
- Frostfire Bolt now slows the target by 40% (up from 20%) for 9 sec but no longer deals additional Frostfire damage over that duration. Cast time changed to 2.5 sec, down from 3 sec.
- Pyroblast damage has been increased by 5%.
- Fireball damage has been increased by 15%. No longer deals additional damage over 4 sec.
- Improved Flamestrike revamped - Reduces the casting time of your Flamestrike spell by 50/100% and gives you a 50/100% chance that your Blast Wave spell will also automatically Flamestrike the same location if two or more targets are affected by the Blast Wave.
- Hot Streak no longer affects Pyroblast.
- Cauterize now burns you for 12% of your maximum health every 1.5 sec (up from 1 sec) over 6 sec (up from 4 sec).
- Blast Wave now slows the targets by 70%. (Down from 75%)
- Molten Shields now reduces the global cooldown of Mage Ward by 1 sec. (Down from 1.5 sec)
- Impact now has a 5/10% chance (up from 4/7%) to cause the next Fire Blast you cast to stun the target for 2 sec and spread any Fire damage over time effects to nearby enemy targets within 12 yards.
- Improved Fire Blast now increases the critical strike chance of your Fire Blast spell by 4/8% instead of reducing its cooldown.
Frost
- Fingers of Frost has a 10/20/30% chance to proc (up from 5/10/15%) and now also affects Frostfire Bolt. Can now accumulate up to 2 charges of Finger of Frost instead of giving you 2 from the beginning.
- Improved Freeze now has a chance to grant 2 charges of Fingers of Frost.
Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Holy
- Divine Light now has a 3 sec cast time. Up from 2.5 sec.
- Seal of Insight now has a chance to restore 4% of the paladin's maximum mana. (Old - Unknown value)
- Consecration now costs 55% of base mana, up from 22% of base mana.
- Sense Undead is gone.
- Seal of Righteousness additional Holy Damage reduced by 50%.
- Light of Dawn now consumes all Holy Power to increase healing by 10% per application.
- Blessed Life revamped - All attacks against you have a 50/100% chance to cause you to generate Holy Power. This effect cannot occur more than once every 2 seconds.
- Improved Concentration Aura is now a 2 ranks talents, down from 3 ranks. Increases effect of Concentration Aura by 8/15% and reduces Silence and Interrupt effects by 15/30%.
- Divine Favor revamped - Increases your spell casting haste by 20% and spell critical chance by 20% for 20 sec. / Instant, 3 min cooldown
- Enlightened Judgements revamped - Your Judgement instantly heals you for [970 to 1081] / [1940 to 2162].
- Clarity of Purpose now reduces casting time by 0.15/0.35/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)
Protection
- Avenger's Shield is now Protection's primary skill. Cooldown lowered from 30 to 24 sec.
- Divine Shield can now be used with Avenging Wrath.
- Hand of Reckoning no longer deals damage if the target isn't attacking you.
- Hammer of Justice no longer interrupts spellcasting for 3 sec.
- Shield of the Templar now reduces the cooldown of Avenger's Shield by 3/6/9 sec. (Down from 3/7/10 sec)
- Sacred Duty revamped - Your Judgements have a 25/50% chance of making your next Shield of the Righteous a critical strike. Lasts 15 sec.
- Vindication revamped - Your Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous have a 50/100% chance to reduce physical damage done by targets by 5/10% for 10 sec.
- Shield of the Righteous revamped - Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to determine damage dealt:
1 Holy Power: 20% Attack Power
2 Holy Power: 60% Attack Power
3 Holy Power: 120% Attack Power / 6% of base mana, 5 yd range, Instant cast - Guarded by the Light now increases your Word of Glory by 30/60% when used on yourself. (Up from 20/40%)
- Holy Shield is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4. Revamped - Using Shield of the Righteous or Inquisition increases your block chance by 15% for 20 sec.
- Grand Crusader now also procs from Hammer of the Righteous.
- Hallowed Ground now decreases Consecration's mana cost by 40/80%.
- Hammer of the Righteous revamped - Hammer the current target for 40% weapon damage, causing a wave of light that hits all targets within 0 yards for 1061 to 1407 Holy damage. Grants a charge of Holy Power.
- Wrath of the Lightbringer now also affect your Judgement and Hammer of Wrath spells.
Retribution
- Judgement of Vengeance is now named Judgement of Truth.
- Seal of Truth now deals 16% weapon damage when it's stacked to 5 times. (Down from 33%)
- Crusader Strike now has a 4.5 sec cooldown. (Up from 4 sec)
- Inquiry of Faith now increases the damage done by Seal of Truth by 10/20/30% (Down from 20/40/60%) and now also increases the duration of Inquisition by 50/100/150%.
- Seals of Command now deals 7% weapon damage, down from 15%.
- Divine Purpose revamped - The following attacks have a 20% chance to generate Holy Power: Judgement, Exorcism, Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, Inquisition, Holy Wrath
- The Art of War now has a 10/20/30% chance to proc (up from 5/10/15%) but the effect cannot be triggered while Exorcism is on cooldown.
- Divine Storm now deals 22/74/150% weapon damage depending on your Holy Power. (Up from 22/50/90%)
- Improved Crusader Strike is gone, replaced with Sanctity of Battle (NYI) - Haste effects lower the cooldown of your Crusader Strike.
- Improved Judgement is now a Tier 1 talent, down from Tier 2. Now increases the range of your Judgement by 10/20 yards instead of increasing its damage.
- Conviction is gone.
- Eye for an Eye now has a 20/40% chance to proc from magic attacks. (Old - 5/10% chance from all attacks)
- Rule of Law is now a Tier 2 talent, up from Tier 1.
- Long Arm of the Law *new* (Tier 3) - Your Judgement has a 50/100% chance to increase your movement speed by 30% for 4 sec when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.
- Eternal Glory *new* (Tier 2) - Your Word of Glory has a 20/40% chance not to consume Holy Power.
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Discipline
- Focused Will now reduces all damage taken by 3/4% (up from 2/3%) and increases healing on you by 4/5% (up from 3/4%) after taking a critical hit. Can now stack with Blessed Resilience.
- Grace now also affects Heal.
- Archangel now also increases your frost damage when used as Dark Archangel (Shadowform).
- Twin Disciplines now increases damage and healing done by instant spells and the damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield by 2/4/6%. (Up from 1/2/3%)
Holy
- Chakra is now a Tier 5 (Down from Tier 6) and 2 Ranks (Down from 3 Ranks) talent. Revamped - When activated, your next Heal, Renew, Prayer of Healing or Smite spell will put you into a corresponding Chakra state. Lasts for 30 sec. Heal - Increases the critical effect chance of your Heal spell by 10%, and your Heal refreshes the duration of your Renew on the target. Renew - Increases the healing done by your Renew spell by 10%, and reduces the global cooldown of your Renew spell by .5 sec. Prayer of Healing - Increases the healing done by your area of effect spells by 10% and reduces the cooldown of your Circle of Healing by 2 sec. Smite - Increases your total damage done by Shadow and Holy spells by 15%. 6% of base mana, Instant cast, 1 min cooldown
- Test of Faith is now a Tier 6 talent, up from Tier 5.
- Lightwell is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5.
- Spirit of Redemption is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 4. No longer increases total Spirit by 5%.
- Holy Concentration is now a 2 Ranks talent (down from 3 Ranks) and now increases mana regeneration from spirit by 10/20%. (Up from 5/10/15%)
- Divine Touch is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks.
- Deliverance (Tier 3) is now named Serendipity (Tier 4). When you heal with Binding Heal or Flash Heal, the cast time of your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing spell is reduced by 6/12% (Up from 3/6/9%). Stacks up to 3 times. Lasts 20 sec.
- Improved Holy Nova is gone.
- Improved Healing is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks.
- Inspiration is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Now reduces your target's physical damage taken by 5/10%. (Up from 3/7/10%)
- Divine Fury now reduces cast time by 0.15/0.35/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)
- State of Mind *New* (Tier 6) - Your successful Heal, Renew, Prayer of Healing or Smite spell casts increase the duration of your corresponding Chakra state by 4 sec. Passive.
- Heavenly Voice added as a Tier 5 Talent. Your Divine Hymn also heals you for 12/20% of your total health during its duration, and the channel time of your Hymn of Hope is reduced by 10/20%.
- Blessed Resilience added as a Tier 5 Talent. Critical hits made against you have a 30/60% chance to prevent you from being critically hit again for 6 sec.
- Desperate Prayer is no longer a skill and is back as a Tier 2 talent.
Shadow
- Mind Spike revamped - Blasts the target for 1082.81 to 1144.05 Shadowfrost damage, and increases the critical strike chance of your next Mind Blast on the target by 30%. Stacks up to 3 times.
- Shadow Word: Death cooldown changed to 10 sec, down from 12 sec. Damage increased by 10%.
- Mind Flay now deals damage over 3 sec, down from 5 sec.
- Vampiric Touch no longer deals damage if dispelled.
- Twisted Faith is now a Tier 2 (Down from Tier 5) 2-Ranks (Down from 3 Ranks) Talent. Revamped - Increases your chance to hit with shadow spells by 1/2%, and grants you spell hit rating equal to 50/100% of any Spirit gained from items or effects.
- Mind Melt now stacks up to 2 Times. (Down from 3)
- Empowered Shadow Orbs is now named Harnessed Shadows.
- Improved Mind Blast now gives your Mind Blast a 33/66/100% (up from 20/40/60%) chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 25% for 10 sec.
- Improved Devouring Plague is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Revamped - Your Devouring Plague instantly deals damage equal to 15/30% of its total periodic effect.
- Paralysis *New* (Tier 5) - When you critically hit with your Mind Blast, you cause the target to be unable to move for 2/4 sec.
Rogue (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Assassination
- Cold Blood no increases the critical strike chance of your next non-periodic offensive ability by 100%.
Combat
- Sprint now lasts 8 sec and has a 1 min cooldown. (Old - 15 sec, 3 min cooldown)
- Lightning Reflexes now increases your attack speed by 2/4/6%.
Subtlety
- Tricks of the Trade's transferred threat is no longer permanent and will fade after 30 sec.
- Blind now costs 15 Energy, down from 30 Energy. 15 yards range, up from 10 yards.
- Sap now costs 35 Energy, down from 65 Energy. 10 yards range, up from 5 yards.
- Enveloping Shadows is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 4.
- Dirty Tricks is gone.
- Energetic Recovery *New* - Empowers your Recuperate ability, causing its periodic effect to also restore 4/8/12 Energy.
Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Elemental
- Magma Totem now costs 18% of base mana, down from 27%.
- Lava Burst damage has been increased by 25%.
Restoration
- Totem of Tranquil Mind *New* - Summons a Totem of Tranquil Mind with 5 health at the feet of the caster for 5 min, causing party or raid members within 30 yards to lose 0% less casting or channeling time when damaged. (Value NYI, Concentration Aura)
Enhancement
- Maelstrom Weapon now also reduces the mana cost of the spell.
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Demonology
- Seed of Corruption Soulburn effect - Your Seed of Corruption detonation effect will afflict Corruption on all enemy targets. The Soul Shard will be refunded if the detonation is successful.
- Create Soulstone now resurrects with 30% health (down from 60%) and 30% mana.
- Soulburn now has a 45 sec cooldown, up from 30 sec.
- Nemesis no longer reduces the cooldown of Fel Domination, now reduces the cooldown of Soulburn.
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Arms
- Colossus Smash now allows all your attacks to entirely bypass the enemy armor for 6 sec. (Old - Just Mortal Srike, Heroic Strike, Bloodthirst, and Overpower)
- Endless Rage is now passive.
- Battle Stance revamped - A balanced combat stance. Increases damage done by 5%. Decreases damage taken by 5%.
- Strike *New* - A simple strike that deals 50% weapon damage. Use once you have sufficient rage. / 20 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant, 3 sec cooldown
- Drums of War no longer reduces the rage cost of Hamstring. Changed to 1-Rank (down from 2-Ranks) and now reduces rage cost of your Shield Bash, Pummel, and any shouts which cost rage by 50%.
- War Academy now also affects Cleave.
Fury
- Berserker Stance revamped - An aggressive combat stance. Increases damage done by 10%. / Instant, 1 sec cooldown
- Cleave no longer has the ability to consume up to 20 additional rage to deal more damage. Now costs 30 rage (up from 10) and deals the maximum amount of damage. Cooldown changed to 3 sec, apparently shared with Heroic Strike.
- Single-Minded Fury no longer affects Cleave.
- Bloodsurge now has a 7/14/20% chance to proc, 6 sec internal cooldown removed.
- Enrage now lasts 9 sec, up from 4 sec.
- Impending Victory now procs from Devastate instead of Shield Slam. Proc chance reduced to 25/50%. (From 50/100%)
Protection
- Defensive Stance revamped - A defensive combat stance. Decreases damage taken by 10%. Increases threat generated by 45%.
- Gag Order is now a Rank 2 talent, down from Rank 4.
- Improved Revenge is now a Rank 4 talent, up from Rank 2.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Increased NPC Damage in latest build
There seems to be a problem where some (?) caster mobs do way too much damage. Your experience may have everything to do with the specific mobs you fight. Listing particular mobs that seem more deadly than you'd expect would be helpful. (Source)
[...] The idea isn't for you to be in Godmode, mowing through everything in your path. The idea is - in fact - for you to have to stop to rest, bandage, heal, every once in awhile. If you are reckless you will absolutely die. This is intended. (Source)
There are likely still a lot of areas that are going to be lethal. List the issues that you run into in this thread. We still have plenty of tuning left to do and we realize that. Thanks for testing. (Source)
We're currently investigating issues with creature spell damage scaling. The intent is definitely not for players to have to rest after every single solo pull. Melee damage, on the other hand, seems about right, but may undergo some fine tuning. Keep the feedback for specific lethal creatures and deadly points of interest coming. We're looking at everything submitted. (Source)
Relics class requirements gone in Cataclysm
You are looking at existing, Wrath of the Lich King, items. Those are currently only used by those classes, so there isn't a great motivation or need to change them.
Cataclysm-level relics can be used by any paladin, shaman, druid or DK, though there may still be some class-specific ones from time to time. (Source)
Relics changes in Cataclysm
The "on paper" design of the Lich King relics sounds pretty cool: you have your choice of which of your spells or abilities you care about the most. Maybe a Resto druid takes the Rejuv idol over the Regrowth idol. In reality, what happens is that we make 3 druid idols per tier so the Resto druid is stuck with whatever idol we make. If we make the Rejuv idol, awesome. If we make the Lifebloom idol, probably less awesome (or at least much more situational). Of course we could just make the Rejuv idol every tier, but really that's not much different than the stats. The procs are designed to mostly be always up, so it's just clutter in the buff section of your UI.
With the new model, there is less risk of having the "bad luck" of having a bad relic for an entire tier for your spec. In fact, it should even offer a little more choice because you could choose the crit relic over the haste relic. Currently you don't get a choice because we have to offer such specialized relics. The gem socket is to make them at least feel slightly different from the ranged items that can shoot.
To be brutally honest, I wouldn't call our ranged weapon slot a success for any class. Warriors, rogues and all wand users don't care much about their ranged weapon slot except as a stat stick. Warriors and rogues use their ranged weapons once in awhile, but we really don't like the model where a caster wands everything while leveling instead of using their actual spells. The only class that really cares about the ranged slot is the hunter, and they in turn don't care much about their melee weapon. Furthermore, the hunter doesn't get the same kind of stat budget out of their primary weapon that the melee guys do. Believe me, we have had many meetings just to discuss the ranged slot. We don't have a solution yet that we think is better than the current Cataclysm implementation, but it's the kind of thing we're going to keep working on for a long time. (Source)
Class "roles"
We try not to divide classes / specs into such discrete buckets. Our overriding design is to try and have classes feel diverse, such that rerolling or adding a new class to your group feels interesting, but still give you the tools to fill your role. If any healer is too good at one thing, they tend to get stacked, and if a healer is too weak at anything, they risk being unwanted.
Put another way, we used to have this design that say DKs were the magic tank and paladins were the AE tank. The thought was that if you had a paladin in your group you were happy when you had an AE fight but that you'd be fine with anyone else. In reality, this didn't play out so well. Players felt compelled to swap players in and out of their groups, or be reluctant to run a 5-player dungeon with the "wrong" tank. We decided that tanks need to be tanks.
Likewise, our model for healers for a long time has been that everyone has their little niche. We now think healers should just be healers. We just have to make sure that they still feel different enough that you'd prefer to have as many different healers as you can. The big difference is that raids have more healers than tanks, so we have a little bit of room to make the healers more differentiated from each other than the tanks are. But only a little bit, and that space is going to be even smaller in Cataclysm than it was in LK. (Source)
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Moonkin Form
We've had a lot of discussions about Moonkin form, as you might guess. We know opinions range among the player base from "cut it" to "make me stay in my adorable form all the time." At first we were trying to make it more of an option, so that cuddly-hating Balance druids could choose the spec without the shapeshift. After much discussion though, we're going to go back to a Balance druid = Moonkin Form design. We'll put some more damage into the Moonkin Form. (Source)
Restoration
As far as the history goes here, we thought at the time (and still think!) that the Resto druid wasn't going to be well served as a "I only care about hots and nothing else" healer. It's just too extreme a design. Any time when hots are good (by which I mean both individual encounters and periods in the game as a whole) the druid is going to dominate. Any time when hots are terrible, so will be druids. We probably, in retrospect, didn't push Nourish enough, because we still ended up in a raid healing situation where druids used Rejuv and Wild Growth and were loathe to use any other button.
We are going to push even harder in Cataclysm. Druids will still have exceptional hots, but will need to cast direct heals as well. I usually get a lot of responses after such a post from druids saying "But I only want to cast hots!" I'm not sure how to respond to that, because we just don't think it works.
As far as the AE healing goes, it's definitely something to keep an eye on, but we're not worried about it yet. We are trying to cut back (yet again) on the dominance of the smart AE heals. The cooldowns of CoH and WG need to stay high. We do have some room to lower the mana cost on WG, and probably will.
It's also worth mentioning that Efflorescence does some great AE healing, and is probably overpowered at the moment.
One change we are going to make is reintroducing the talent that lowers Rejuv to a 1 sec GCD. Since haste affects Rejuv ticks and since druids will be casting cast-time spells that benefit from haste, we're not as worried about druids turning up their noses at haste. This will let you get Rejuvs up on more people when you want to, though it still should be mana-inefficient to just do so at random. We think hots are going to be enormous in the Cataclysm healing model just because they won't be overhealing nearly as much as they are now.
We like the way Nourish interacts with hots. Yes, it's different from the way priests, paladins and shaman use their heals, but we do want the classes to play differently, as long as those differences aren't so extreme that you can't use a druid on some dungeon or raid fights.
I suspect we won't end up keeping the snare on Tree of Life. We knew that we could try snare and then remove it. We would have a hard time trying no snare and then adding one. Our intent was to make you think about when was the best time to push ToL rather that just hitting it the second it's off cooldown. In practice though we just think it feels crappy so even if it accomplishes our goal, it's probably not worth it.
We're still working on the Resto tree (and druids in general). You were missing the talent to lower the cast time of Nourish and Healing Touch, which is a pretty painful thing to live without. We're also considering changing Furor to provide intellect to caster form too so it is attractive to both caster trees. We agree that too much of the early Resto tree felt like it was there for Feral.
I'm talking PvE in almost all of this, since that was the original thrust of the thread. (Source)
This seems really at odds with the increase in Rejuv's mana cost. We're not supposed to pre-HoT the raid, but you're adding in a talent designed to let us do exactly that? I'm very confused by this.
We don't like prehotting (or pre-shielding) as a general strategy. On certain fights where you know that the damage is going to come fast and furious then maybe it's appropriate, but we don't want the current LK style to continue. I've healed a lot as both Resto and Disc, so I know the power of prehealing, though it's not as if you need first-hand experience to understand how useful and powerful it is.
On the other hand, if a lot of people take damage at once, we have no problem with getting a Rejuv out on several of them at once, and a lower GCD will help there. It's still possible to screw that up (by which I mean we want healing to have some player decision-making as part of the gameplay) by using too much mana on Rejuvs or casting too many Rejuvs when the situation called for something else. (Source)
I am still concerned about the proc-rate of Efflorescence, however, and hope it isn't underpowered at lower gear levels and then overpowered in higher gear levels.
It's okay -- to a point -- if some talents are more useful at different gear levels than others. It's interesting if you consider changing talent specs rather than having one that serves you well in almost all stages of the game. But we don't want the extremes either, where it never procs as you're leveling and is up 100% of the time so that you fish for it in the endgame. Definitely something to keep an eye on. We also might take the wounded restriction off of Nature's Bounty, so that Regrowth just crits a lot. (Source)
I'm going to assume that the lowered GCD is to allow for situations where Players A, B, and C got him by a small AOE and were taken down to 70% health. Nourish is too slow to heal all three, Regrowth is too expensive for that little damage, and Wild Growth costs too much for just three targets. So instead you just toss a Rejuv on each of them and move on. This is much different than the current model where you would just keep as many players Rejuv'd as possible with WG on cooldown.
Yes! (Source)
Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Silencing Shot damage gone
We're going to take the damage off of Silencing Shot. It's supposed to be a situational utility ability, not something you macro into every shot. (Source)
New Call Pet
Here is the way the new Call Pet works.
At some higher level (25?) you get "Call Pet 2." If you have a second pet (e.g. Festus), it will change the spell name to "Call Festus" instead. You can then call either pet 1 or 2, so long as you dismiss the other one first. Dismissing no longer affects happiness because we want you to be able to do it often.
Eventually you will get Call Pet 3-5 as well. If you ever want more pets than you are able to call, you need to visit the stable and swap some into "deep storage."
We are discussing just giving you Call Pet 2-5 at the same level, to make this a little less confusing. Getting the ability to swap from a fourth to a fifth pet isn't nearly as exciting as getting the ability to call a second one.
The Call Pet button is a flyout. You can put this button on your bar and expand it to pick a particular pet. In this way, you only sacrifice one button to calling all your pets. If you like having all your pets separately, then you can either drag the individual pets to your bar. You can even drag them from the Call Pet flyout.
Warlocks work almost exactly the same way with regard to the flyout. Warlocks have no dismiss button, but instead summoning takes a cast instead of being instant like with the hunter. (Source)
Hunters in Cataclysm
We're still following this discussion. Some players are making some good points and we have addressed some of these in our most recent builds. Here is a quick update on some of the issues being discussed:
Focus -- We think we're in a much better spot for focus regen now. Our goal has been for focus to be a resource you spend on your higher damage shots, which is regenerated passively at a rate lower than energy regen, but faster than energy if you are using Steady / Cobra (which can only be done while stationary). At the lower regen rates, we found it felt bad if you couldn't Steady / Cobra rather than Steady / Cobra feeling like a bonus. We think we're closer to the sweet spot now, but please let us know (preferably after you've actually tried it rather than prophesizing doom).
Aspects -- We're not happy with the way the Hawk vs. Fox choice is playing out. We think that ultimately either damage or focus regen is going to win out and the other aspect won't get much use. For now, we are going back to Hawk being used for damage and regen. We'll discuss other potential uses for Fox. Changing Aspects will not affect focus regen.
Mobile damage -- This is always a touchy subject. In our testing, we found that it wasn't fun with the current implementation when hunters had to move around a lot, especially in PvP. This is why we are giving up on the current Aspect of the Fox design. We also significantly reduced the focus cost per damage of Arcane Shot, so that it is usable under almost all circumstances. We've also removed the focus costs on several utility abilities (e.g. Concussive Shot, Intimidation, Bestial Wrath, Scatter Shot, etc.) One potential use for Aspect of the Fox is to generate additional focus when you take damage, but we don't want to get back into a world where you are "aspect twisting" when someone comes into melee with you in PvP.
Survival -- We're still iterating a lot on this tree in particular. We agree it's probably the least polished of the hunter trees so far. The reason is that we just have it in for Survival hunters.
Pets -- As I posted in another thread recently, a pet scaling pass is underway. We still plan to do passes on the hunter pet talents and abilities as well. With the design that allows you to swap pets often in the field, we want to make sure that there are some interesting choices in which pet you use for a given situation. Provided they are all crabs.
In case I need to say it, the last two sentences of the last two paragraphs are not meant to be taken seriously. (Source)
Pet Scaling
Pet scaling is getting a massive overhaul at the moment. For starters, we still intend for pets to scale with all of the master's stats for things like hit, haste and crit. For the big stats, our current plan is something like this:
Ferocity (damage) -- 50% of master's AP, 40% health, 50% armor
Tenacity (tanking) -- 35% of master's AP, 50% health, 70% armor
Cunning (utility) -- 40% of master's AP, 40% health, 60% armor
Warlock pets will be getting a similar pass. In general, we want pet dps to be 20-30% of player dps. Note that this is a lot lower than current BM and Demo lock numbers. Pet damage as BM will still be higher than Marks or Survival though, and we want BM to be competitive overall with Marks and Survival. (Ditto for locks.) (Source)
Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Enlightened Judgement
Enlightened Judgements does not affect hit rating, but the Holy passives do that. (Source)
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Desperate Prayer
Desperate Prayer isn't gone. It's just back in the talent tree. We don't have a new level 10 Holy ability in this build (it's not Sanctuary). (Source)
Shadow
Phantasm -- Having a 2 sec immunity is something we may consider, but we also don't want snares in PvP to be quiet as prevalent as they are today.
Mind Melt -- The timing of the Mind Melt buff interaction with Mind Spike sounds like a bug and will be fixed.
Shadowy Apparition -- It sounds like there are a lot of bugs still with the implementation. The way we intend for it to work is that the Apparitions are shades of your character and will attack the correct target (the one with SW:Pain on it). We have already fixed several bugs relating to Shadowy Apparition interacting with Shadow Orbs and Mind Blast. (Source)
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Pet Scaling (See Hunters)
Warlock pets will be getting a similar pass. In general, we want pet dps to be 20-30% of player dps. Note that this is a lot lower than current BM and Demo lock numbers. Pet damage as BM will still be higher than Marks or Survival though, and we want BM to be competitive overall with Marks and Survival. (Ditto for locks.) (Source)
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Inner Rage
The numbers on Inner Rage are very easy to adjust. I wouldn't obsess over the current ones too much.
We don't want warriors to sit around autoattacking until they proc Inner Rage all of the time. We also don't want them to be bummed when they slip into it. It's there so that if you get 100 rage and can't spend it fast enough that you aren't overly penalized. I realize some of you think that can't ever, ever happen with the new numbers, but we haven't seen enough high-end PvP or raiding to be convinced yet.
The numbers just need to be such that you play normally until you get Inner Rage and continue to play normally if it happens. Changing your behavior to try and hit it ASAP or avoid it isn't what we're going for. (Source)
Protection Warrior
I'm not sure why you feel that the new Shield Spec is required. If you struggle with rage it might be nice, but there are other solutions to that too. We left it as 3 points because it's a nice talent for backfill potential. If you have 1 spare point, you get a little bit of benefit out of it (compared to say talents that have a 33/66/100% chance to work with 1/2/3 talent points).
I would get Toughness and Shield Mastery, no question. You either need 2/3 Incite or 2/2 Hold the Line and then 2 more talent points to get deeper.
In the deeper tiers, I would consider Last Stand, Bastion of Defense, Devastate, Sword and Board and Shockwave to be non-negotiable. Heavy Repercussions, Improved Revenge and Warbringer are very close to being non-negotiable. The others are up to debate or your individual style. (Source)
There seems to be a problem where some (?) caster mobs do way too much damage. Your experience may have everything to do with the specific mobs you fight. Listing particular mobs that seem more deadly than you'd expect would be helpful. (Source)
[...] The idea isn't for you to be in Godmode, mowing through everything in your path. The idea is - in fact - for you to have to stop to rest, bandage, heal, every once in awhile. If you are reckless you will absolutely die. This is intended. (Source)
There are likely still a lot of areas that are going to be lethal. List the issues that you run into in this thread. We still have plenty of tuning left to do and we realize that. Thanks for testing. (Source)
We're currently investigating issues with creature spell damage scaling. The intent is definitely not for players to have to rest after every single solo pull. Melee damage, on the other hand, seems about right, but may undergo some fine tuning. Keep the feedback for specific lethal creatures and deadly points of interest coming. We're looking at everything submitted. (Source)
Relics class requirements gone in Cataclysm
You are looking at existing, Wrath of the Lich King, items. Those are currently only used by those classes, so there isn't a great motivation or need to change them.
Cataclysm-level relics can be used by any paladin, shaman, druid or DK, though there may still be some class-specific ones from time to time. (Source)
Relics changes in Cataclysm
The "on paper" design of the Lich King relics sounds pretty cool: you have your choice of which of your spells or abilities you care about the most. Maybe a Resto druid takes the Rejuv idol over the Regrowth idol. In reality, what happens is that we make 3 druid idols per tier so the Resto druid is stuck with whatever idol we make. If we make the Rejuv idol, awesome. If we make the Lifebloom idol, probably less awesome (or at least much more situational). Of course we could just make the Rejuv idol every tier, but really that's not much different than the stats. The procs are designed to mostly be always up, so it's just clutter in the buff section of your UI.
With the new model, there is less risk of having the "bad luck" of having a bad relic for an entire tier for your spec. In fact, it should even offer a little more choice because you could choose the crit relic over the haste relic. Currently you don't get a choice because we have to offer such specialized relics. The gem socket is to make them at least feel slightly different from the ranged items that can shoot.
To be brutally honest, I wouldn't call our ranged weapon slot a success for any class. Warriors, rogues and all wand users don't care much about their ranged weapon slot except as a stat stick. Warriors and rogues use their ranged weapons once in awhile, but we really don't like the model where a caster wands everything while leveling instead of using their actual spells. The only class that really cares about the ranged slot is the hunter, and they in turn don't care much about their melee weapon. Furthermore, the hunter doesn't get the same kind of stat budget out of their primary weapon that the melee guys do. Believe me, we have had many meetings just to discuss the ranged slot. We don't have a solution yet that we think is better than the current Cataclysm implementation, but it's the kind of thing we're going to keep working on for a long time. (Source)
Class "roles"
We try not to divide classes / specs into such discrete buckets. Our overriding design is to try and have classes feel diverse, such that rerolling or adding a new class to your group feels interesting, but still give you the tools to fill your role. If any healer is too good at one thing, they tend to get stacked, and if a healer is too weak at anything, they risk being unwanted.
Put another way, we used to have this design that say DKs were the magic tank and paladins were the AE tank. The thought was that if you had a paladin in your group you were happy when you had an AE fight but that you'd be fine with anyone else. In reality, this didn't play out so well. Players felt compelled to swap players in and out of their groups, or be reluctant to run a 5-player dungeon with the "wrong" tank. We decided that tanks need to be tanks.
Likewise, our model for healers for a long time has been that everyone has their little niche. We now think healers should just be healers. We just have to make sure that they still feel different enough that you'd prefer to have as many different healers as you can. The big difference is that raids have more healers than tanks, so we have a little bit of room to make the healers more differentiated from each other than the tanks are. But only a little bit, and that space is going to be even smaller in Cataclysm than it was in LK. (Source)
Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Moonkin Form
We've had a lot of discussions about Moonkin form, as you might guess. We know opinions range among the player base from "cut it" to "make me stay in my adorable form all the time." At first we were trying to make it more of an option, so that cuddly-hating Balance druids could choose the spec without the shapeshift. After much discussion though, we're going to go back to a Balance druid = Moonkin Form design. We'll put some more damage into the Moonkin Form. (Source)
Restoration
As far as the history goes here, we thought at the time (and still think!) that the Resto druid wasn't going to be well served as a "I only care about hots and nothing else" healer. It's just too extreme a design. Any time when hots are good (by which I mean both individual encounters and periods in the game as a whole) the druid is going to dominate. Any time when hots are terrible, so will be druids. We probably, in retrospect, didn't push Nourish enough, because we still ended up in a raid healing situation where druids used Rejuv and Wild Growth and were loathe to use any other button.
We are going to push even harder in Cataclysm. Druids will still have exceptional hots, but will need to cast direct heals as well. I usually get a lot of responses after such a post from druids saying "But I only want to cast hots!" I'm not sure how to respond to that, because we just don't think it works.
As far as the AE healing goes, it's definitely something to keep an eye on, but we're not worried about it yet. We are trying to cut back (yet again) on the dominance of the smart AE heals. The cooldowns of CoH and WG need to stay high. We do have some room to lower the mana cost on WG, and probably will.
It's also worth mentioning that Efflorescence does some great AE healing, and is probably overpowered at the moment.
One change we are going to make is reintroducing the talent that lowers Rejuv to a 1 sec GCD. Since haste affects Rejuv ticks and since druids will be casting cast-time spells that benefit from haste, we're not as worried about druids turning up their noses at haste. This will let you get Rejuvs up on more people when you want to, though it still should be mana-inefficient to just do so at random. We think hots are going to be enormous in the Cataclysm healing model just because they won't be overhealing nearly as much as they are now.
We like the way Nourish interacts with hots. Yes, it's different from the way priests, paladins and shaman use their heals, but we do want the classes to play differently, as long as those differences aren't so extreme that you can't use a druid on some dungeon or raid fights.
I suspect we won't end up keeping the snare on Tree of Life. We knew that we could try snare and then remove it. We would have a hard time trying no snare and then adding one. Our intent was to make you think about when was the best time to push ToL rather that just hitting it the second it's off cooldown. In practice though we just think it feels crappy so even if it accomplishes our goal, it's probably not worth it.
We're still working on the Resto tree (and druids in general). You were missing the talent to lower the cast time of Nourish and Healing Touch, which is a pretty painful thing to live without. We're also considering changing Furor to provide intellect to caster form too so it is attractive to both caster trees. We agree that too much of the early Resto tree felt like it was there for Feral.
I'm talking PvE in almost all of this, since that was the original thrust of the thread. (Source)
This seems really at odds with the increase in Rejuv's mana cost. We're not supposed to pre-HoT the raid, but you're adding in a talent designed to let us do exactly that? I'm very confused by this.
We don't like prehotting (or pre-shielding) as a general strategy. On certain fights where you know that the damage is going to come fast and furious then maybe it's appropriate, but we don't want the current LK style to continue. I've healed a lot as both Resto and Disc, so I know the power of prehealing, though it's not as if you need first-hand experience to understand how useful and powerful it is.
On the other hand, if a lot of people take damage at once, we have no problem with getting a Rejuv out on several of them at once, and a lower GCD will help there. It's still possible to screw that up (by which I mean we want healing to have some player decision-making as part of the gameplay) by using too much mana on Rejuvs or casting too many Rejuvs when the situation called for something else. (Source)
I am still concerned about the proc-rate of Efflorescence, however, and hope it isn't underpowered at lower gear levels and then overpowered in higher gear levels.
It's okay -- to a point -- if some talents are more useful at different gear levels than others. It's interesting if you consider changing talent specs rather than having one that serves you well in almost all stages of the game. But we don't want the extremes either, where it never procs as you're leveling and is up 100% of the time so that you fish for it in the endgame. Definitely something to keep an eye on. We also might take the wounded restriction off of Nature's Bounty, so that Regrowth just crits a lot. (Source)
I'm going to assume that the lowered GCD is to allow for situations where Players A, B, and C got him by a small AOE and were taken down to 70% health. Nourish is too slow to heal all three, Regrowth is too expensive for that little damage, and Wild Growth costs too much for just three targets. So instead you just toss a Rejuv on each of them and move on. This is much different than the current model where you would just keep as many players Rejuv'd as possible with WG on cooldown.
Yes! (Source)
Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Silencing Shot damage gone
We're going to take the damage off of Silencing Shot. It's supposed to be a situational utility ability, not something you macro into every shot. (Source)
New Call Pet
Here is the way the new Call Pet works.
At some higher level (25?) you get "Call Pet 2." If you have a second pet (e.g. Festus), it will change the spell name to "Call Festus" instead. You can then call either pet 1 or 2, so long as you dismiss the other one first. Dismissing no longer affects happiness because we want you to be able to do it often.
Eventually you will get Call Pet 3-5 as well. If you ever want more pets than you are able to call, you need to visit the stable and swap some into "deep storage."
We are discussing just giving you Call Pet 2-5 at the same level, to make this a little less confusing. Getting the ability to swap from a fourth to a fifth pet isn't nearly as exciting as getting the ability to call a second one.
The Call Pet button is a flyout. You can put this button on your bar and expand it to pick a particular pet. In this way, you only sacrifice one button to calling all your pets. If you like having all your pets separately, then you can either drag the individual pets to your bar. You can even drag them from the Call Pet flyout.
Warlocks work almost exactly the same way with regard to the flyout. Warlocks have no dismiss button, but instead summoning takes a cast instead of being instant like with the hunter. (Source)
Hunters in Cataclysm
We're still following this discussion. Some players are making some good points and we have addressed some of these in our most recent builds. Here is a quick update on some of the issues being discussed:
Focus -- We think we're in a much better spot for focus regen now. Our goal has been for focus to be a resource you spend on your higher damage shots, which is regenerated passively at a rate lower than energy regen, but faster than energy if you are using Steady / Cobra (which can only be done while stationary). At the lower regen rates, we found it felt bad if you couldn't Steady / Cobra rather than Steady / Cobra feeling like a bonus. We think we're closer to the sweet spot now, but please let us know (preferably after you've actually tried it rather than prophesizing doom).
Aspects -- We're not happy with the way the Hawk vs. Fox choice is playing out. We think that ultimately either damage or focus regen is going to win out and the other aspect won't get much use. For now, we are going back to Hawk being used for damage and regen. We'll discuss other potential uses for Fox. Changing Aspects will not affect focus regen.
Mobile damage -- This is always a touchy subject. In our testing, we found that it wasn't fun with the current implementation when hunters had to move around a lot, especially in PvP. This is why we are giving up on the current Aspect of the Fox design. We also significantly reduced the focus cost per damage of Arcane Shot, so that it is usable under almost all circumstances. We've also removed the focus costs on several utility abilities (e.g. Concussive Shot, Intimidation, Bestial Wrath, Scatter Shot, etc.) One potential use for Aspect of the Fox is to generate additional focus when you take damage, but we don't want to get back into a world where you are "aspect twisting" when someone comes into melee with you in PvP.
Survival -- We're still iterating a lot on this tree in particular. We agree it's probably the least polished of the hunter trees so far. The reason is that we just have it in for Survival hunters.
Pets -- As I posted in another thread recently, a pet scaling pass is underway. We still plan to do passes on the hunter pet talents and abilities as well. With the design that allows you to swap pets often in the field, we want to make sure that there are some interesting choices in which pet you use for a given situation. Provided they are all crabs.
In case I need to say it, the last two sentences of the last two paragraphs are not meant to be taken seriously.
(Source)Pet Scaling
Pet scaling is getting a massive overhaul at the moment. For starters, we still intend for pets to scale with all of the master's stats for things like hit, haste and crit. For the big stats, our current plan is something like this:
Ferocity (damage) -- 50% of master's AP, 40% health, 50% armor
Tenacity (tanking) -- 35% of master's AP, 50% health, 70% armor
Cunning (utility) -- 40% of master's AP, 40% health, 60% armor
Warlock pets will be getting a similar pass. In general, we want pet dps to be 20-30% of player dps. Note that this is a lot lower than current BM and Demo lock numbers. Pet damage as BM will still be higher than Marks or Survival though, and we want BM to be competitive overall with Marks and Survival. (Ditto for locks.) (Source)
Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Enlightened Judgement
Enlightened Judgements does not affect hit rating, but the Holy passives do that. (Source)
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Desperate Prayer
Desperate Prayer isn't gone. It's just back in the talent tree. We don't have a new level 10 Holy ability in this build (it's not Sanctuary). (Source)
Shadow
Phantasm -- Having a 2 sec immunity is something we may consider, but we also don't want snares in PvP to be quiet as prevalent as they are today.
Mind Melt -- The timing of the Mind Melt buff interaction with Mind Spike sounds like a bug and will be fixed.
Shadowy Apparition -- It sounds like there are a lot of bugs still with the implementation. The way we intend for it to work is that the Apparitions are shades of your character and will attack the correct target (the one with SW:Pain on it). We have already fixed several bugs relating to Shadowy Apparition interacting with Shadow Orbs and Mind Blast. (Source)
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Pet Scaling (See Hunters)
Warlock pets will be getting a similar pass. In general, we want pet dps to be 20-30% of player dps. Note that this is a lot lower than current BM and Demo lock numbers. Pet damage as BM will still be higher than Marks or Survival though, and we want BM to be competitive overall with Marks and Survival. (Ditto for locks.) (Source)
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Inner Rage
The numbers on Inner Rage are very easy to adjust. I wouldn't obsess over the current ones too much.
We don't want warriors to sit around autoattacking until they proc Inner Rage all of the time. We also don't want them to be bummed when they slip into it. It's there so that if you get 100 rage and can't spend it fast enough that you aren't overly penalized. I realize some of you think that can't ever, ever happen with the new numbers, but we haven't seen enough high-end PvP or raiding to be convinced yet.
The numbers just need to be such that you play normally until you get Inner Rage and continue to play normally if it happens. Changing your behavior to try and hit it ASAP or avoid it isn't what we're going for. (Source)
Protection Warrior
I'm not sure why you feel that the new Shield Spec is required. If you struggle with rage it might be nice, but there are other solutions to that too. We left it as 3 points because it's a nice talent for backfill potential. If you have 1 spare point, you get a little bit of benefit out of it (compared to say talents that have a 33/66/100% chance to work with 1/2/3 talent points).
I would get Toughness and Shield Mastery, no question. You either need 2/3 Incite or 2/2 Hold the Line and then 2 more talent points to get deeper.
In the deeper tiers, I would consider Last Stand, Bastion of Defense, Devastate, Sword and Board and Shockwave to be non-negotiable. Heavy Repercussions, Improved Revenge and Warbringer are very close to being non-negotiable. The others are up to debate or your individual style. (Source)
by
Published on 2010-08-14 01:01 AM
Update 09:40PM PST - Added Nemesis.
Update 09:15PM PST - The new 310% Speed Flying Mount skill costs 5000 gold to train. People who already own a 310% flying mount get it for free.
Update 08:15PM PST - Masteries and Armor Specializations are available for testing. (Cataclysm Masteries List, Armor Specialization List)
Update 08:05PM PST - The Mounts & Companion Pets are now in the spellbook with a brand new interface.
Update 08:05PM PST - The UI for Paladin's Holy Power is here.
Update 07:40PM PST - Added Guild vendor rewards.
Update 07:25PM PST - Added Tol Barad Reputation Rewards.
Update 07:10PM PST - Relics slots have stats now and are just named Relic now it seems. (Totems, Sigils, Librams, etc)
Update 07:00PM PST - Tol Barad, the new PvP/Daily Quest zone is open for testing, and people keep trying to hurt me. More on that later.
Cataclysm Beta - Build 12759
A new build is being deployed on beta realms, just like any beta build, it will be painful, a lot of stuff will break, and I have no idea if I'll be able to give you all the content on the first day.
On the upside, Thrall is getting a new model. Stay tuned for changes!
Nemesis in Hyjal looks really nice too.
Guild Vendor Rewards
The Guild Vendor is here, a lot of items are placeholders but it should give you a pretty good idea of what it will offer.
And if you're wondering.
Loading Screens
Loading screens for each continent have been updated.
Spellbook - Mounts and Companion Pets
The Mounts & Companion Pets are now in the spellbook with a brand new interface.
Tol Barad
Tol Barad is open for testing, this is a new outdoor/PvP zone with a daily quest area for the faction controlling it. More on that later.
310% Speed Flying Mount
The new 310% Speed Flying Mount skill costs 5000 gold to train. People who already own a 310% flying mount get it for free.
Relic Slots Items
All classes items in the relic slot now have stats.
Masteries and Armor Specialization
Masteries and Armor Specializations are now available for testing.
Holy Power
The interface for the new Holy Power resource is here.
Video Settings
The Video Settings menu has been expanded, looks like we'll be able to tweak more things in Cataclysm.
Creature Damage Output Changes
New Guild Advancement Forum
Update 09:15PM PST - The new 310% Speed Flying Mount skill costs 5000 gold to train. People who already own a 310% flying mount get it for free.
Update 08:15PM PST - Masteries and Armor Specializations are available for testing. (Cataclysm Masteries List, Armor Specialization List)
Update 08:05PM PST - The Mounts & Companion Pets are now in the spellbook with a brand new interface.
Update 08:05PM PST - The UI for Paladin's Holy Power is here.
Update 07:40PM PST - Added Guild vendor rewards.
Update 07:25PM PST - Added Tol Barad Reputation Rewards.
Update 07:10PM PST - Relics slots have stats now and are just named Relic now it seems. (Totems, Sigils, Librams, etc)
Update 07:00PM PST - Tol Barad, the new PvP/Daily Quest zone is open for testing, and people keep trying to hurt me. More on that later.
Cataclysm Beta - Build 12759
A new build is being deployed on beta realms, just like any beta build, it will be painful, a lot of stuff will break, and I have no idea if I'll be able to give you all the content on the first day.
On the upside, Thrall is getting a new model. Stay tuned for changes!
Nemesis in Hyjal looks really nice too.
Guild Vendor Rewards
The Guild Vendor is here, a lot of items are placeholders but it should give you a pretty good idea of what it will offer.
And if you're wondering.
Loading Screens
Loading screens for each continent have been updated.
Spellbook - Mounts and Companion Pets
The Mounts & Companion Pets are now in the spellbook with a brand new interface.
Tol Barad
Tol Barad is open for testing, this is a new outdoor/PvP zone with a daily quest area for the faction controlling it. More on that later.
310% Speed Flying Mount
The new 310% Speed Flying Mount skill costs 5000 gold to train. People who already own a 310% flying mount get it for free.
Relic Slots Items
All classes items in the relic slot now have stats.
Masteries and Armor Specialization
Masteries and Armor Specializations are now available for testing.
Holy PowerThe interface for the new Holy Power resource is here.
Video Settings
The Video Settings menu has been expanded, looks like we'll be able to tweak more things in Cataclysm.
Creature Damage Output Changes
New Guild Advancement Forum
by
Published on 2010-08-13 08:16 AM
It looks like the official news are calming down, it can only mean one thing: We're back to datamining!
Epic crafted items in Cataclysm - Updated
The first batch of crafted epic items was released when the NDA was lifted, due to some technical issues it was ... difficult to get the new ones. This is now fixed and I should have a couple of interesting previews for you in the next few days. (or you can spoil my fun and lurk on the latest additions but not everything is listed there)
Alchemy
Apparently, Alchemists will finally get another epic stone in Cataclysm. That's also where you realize how useful Mastery Bonus is, the item is just great for everyone.
Blacksmithing
Blacksmith get all the happy-fun-stuff again and will create the weapons that a lot of people will use when they start raiding. Don't expect them to be easy to craft.
Engineering
All 3 types of ranged weapons are craftable and your epic helms ... are actually even more epic than we thought in the first place, they are socketable with Cogwheels and Hydraulic Pumps, engineer-only gems.
Engineers are definitely getting some love in Cataclysm ... an updated preview of the profession will be up soon, with all your new toys. (Assuming they reach the live servers ...)
Jewelcrafting
Your epic gems are back.
Leatherworking
The Mail/Leather gear is back, you also get the Tanking and Physical DPS cloak just like in Wrath of the Lich King.
Tailoring
Your epic items aren't in-game yet, don't hate me!
BlizzCon 2010 Online Contests Begin
Blue Posts
Concept Art
The Concept Art Gallery has been updated but if you're addicted to artworks, you probably saw a lot of them before.
Epic crafted items in Cataclysm - Updated
The first batch of crafted epic items was released when the NDA was lifted, due to some technical issues it was ... difficult to get the new ones. This is now fixed and I should have a couple of interesting previews for you in the next few days. (or you can spoil my fun and lurk on the latest additions but not everything is listed there)
Alchemy
Apparently, Alchemists will finally get another epic stone in Cataclysm. That's also where you realize how useful Mastery Bonus is, the item is just great for everyone.
| ilvl | Type | Spec | Slot | Item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 359 | Trinket | All | Trinket | Lifebound Alchemist Stone |
Blacksmithing
Blacksmith get all the happy-fun-stuff again and will create the weapons that a lot of people will use when they start raiding. Don't expect them to be easy to craft.
| ilvl | Type | Spec | Slot | Item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 359 | Plate | Tank | Chest | Hardened Elementium Hauberk |
| 359 | Plate | Tank | Waist | Hardened Elementium Girdle |
| 359 | Plate | Melee | Chest | Elementium Deathplate |
| 359 | Plate | Melee | Waist | Elementium Girdle of Pain |
| 359 | Plate | Spell | Chest | Light Elementium Chestguard |
| 359 | Plate | Spell | Waist | Light Elementium Belt |
| 359 | Dagger | Spell | Main Hand | Elementium Spellblade |
| 359 | Mace | Heal | Main Hand | Elementium Hammer |
| 359 | Polearm | Physical | Two-Hand | Elementium Poleaxe |
| 359 | Axe | Melee | One-Hand | Elementium Bonesplitter |
| 359 | Dagger | Physical | One-Hand | Elementium Shank |
| 359 | Shield | Tank | Off Hand | Elementium Earthguard |
| 359 | Shield | Spell | Off Hand | Elementium Stormshield |
Engineering
All 3 types of ranged weapons are craftable and your epic helms ... are actually even more epic than we thought in the first place, they are socketable with Cogwheels and Hydraulic Pumps, engineer-only gems.
- Fractured Cogwheel - +132 Mastery Rating
- Quick Cogwheel - +132 Haste Rating
- Smooth Cogwheel - +132 Critical Strike Rating
- Subtle Cogwheel - +132 Dodge Rating
- Flashing Hydraulic Pump - +132 Parry Rating
- Precise Hydraulic Pump - +132 Expertise Rating
- Rigid Hydraulic Pump - +132 Hit Rating
- Sparkling Hydraulic Pump - +132 Spirit
Engineers are definitely getting some love in Cataclysm ... an updated preview of the profession will be up soon, with all your new toys. (Assuming they reach the live servers ...)
| ilvl | Type | Spec | Slot | Item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 359 | Bow | Physical | Ranged | Overpowered Chicken Splitter |
| 359 | Crossbow | Physical | Ranged | Finely-Tuned Throat Needler |
| 359 | Gun | Physical | Ranged | Kickback 5000 |
| 359 | Plate | Melee,Tank | Head | Reinforced Bio-Optic Killshades |
| 359 | Plate | Spell | Head | Specialized Bio-Optic Killshades |
| 359 | Cloth | Spell | Head | Lightweight Bio-Optic Killshades |
| 359 | Leather | Spell | Head | Camoflauge Bio-Optic Killshades |
| 359 | Leather | Physical | Head | Agile Bio-Optic Killshades |
| 359 | Physical | Head | Deadly Bio-Optic Killshades | |
| 359 | Spell | Head | Energized Bio-Optic Killshades |
Jewelcrafting
Your epic gems are back.
| ilvl | Type | Spec | Slot | Item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 85 | Red | N/A | Gem | Brilliant Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Red | N/A | Gem | Delicate Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Red | N/A | Gem | Flashing Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Red | N/A | Gem | Precise Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Blue | N/A | Gem | Solid Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Blue | N/A | Gem | Sparkling Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Blue | N/A | Gem | Stormy Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Blue | N/A | Gem | Rigid Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Yellow | N/A | Gem | Subtle Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Yellow | N/A | Gem | Smooth Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Yellow | N/A | Gem | Mystic Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Yellow | N/A | Gem | Quick Chimera's Eye |
| 85 | Yellow | N/A | Gem | Fractured Chimera's Eye |
Leatherworking
The Mail/Leather gear is back, you also get the Tanking and Physical DPS cloak just like in Wrath of the Lich King.
| ilvl | Type | Spec | Slot | Item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 359 | Spell | Waist | Stormleather Sash | |
| 359 | Physical | Waist | Corded Viper Belt | |
| 359 | Spell | Chest | Twilight Scale Chestguard | |
| 359 | Physical | Chest | Dragonkiller Tunic | |
| 359 | Leather | Spell | Waist | Lightning Lash |
| 359 | Leather | Physical | Waist | Belt of Nefarious Whispers |
| 359 | Leather | Spell | Chest | Chestguard of Nature's Fury |
| 359 | Leather | Physical | Chest | Assassin's Chestplate |
| 359 | Cloak | Physical | Back | Razor-Edged Cloak |
| 359 | Cloak | Tank | Back | Twilight Dragonscale Cloak |
Tailoring
Your epic items aren't in-game yet, don't hate me!
BlizzCon 2010 Online Contests Begin
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Additional raids before Cataclysm
There are no plans for any additional raids before Cataclysm ships. With that said, there will be at least one major patch leading up to Cataclysm with a lot of core features and framework being added for the new expansion for players to explore. There will also be various limited-time events to set the tone for the release of Cataclysm. (Source)
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Making Soul Shards "exciting"
That is still the goal, but we don't think just hooking up a big +damage buff or spell is going to feel that way. It will just be done on cooldown without some kind of situational requirement for doing so. We haven't given up on the idea at all, but it's not a trivial one to resolve. (Source)
There are no plans for any additional raids before Cataclysm ships. With that said, there will be at least one major patch leading up to Cataclysm with a lot of core features and framework being added for the new expansion for players to explore. There will also be various limited-time events to set the tone for the release of Cataclysm. (Source)
Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Making Soul Shards "exciting"
That is still the goal, but we don't think just hooking up a big +damage buff or spell is going to feel that way. It will just be done on cooldown without some kind of situational requirement for doing so. We haven't given up on the idea at all, but it's not a trivial one to resolve. (Source)
Concept Art
The Concept Art Gallery has been updated but if you're addicted to artworks, you probably saw a lot of them before.
by
Published on 2010-08-12 07:28 AM
Cataclysm Screenshot of the Day - Blackwing Descent
The Screenshot of the Day Gallery has been updated with a shot from Blackwing Descent. The dragon featured in this screenshot seems to be Atramedes, one of the boss of the instance.
Cataclysm Work In Progress - Twilight Highlands
Twilight Highlands is one of the new zones of Cataclysm, it is located near the Wetlands and Grim Batol and looks like one of the most interesting zone of the expansion (with Uldum).
Important! - Screenshots were taken from an Alliance point of view.
Important! - The zone is still in development, the screenshots and video below aren't representative of the final content.
Important! - Spoilers.
TotalBiscuit released a nice video of the zone a few days ago.
And I went through the zone to screenshot most of the interesting things I could find. You will most likely meet a couple of major lore characters here. (More on that later ...)
Beta - Stuck in Phase Issues
Fan Arts
The official site has been updated with 5 awesome new Fan Arts. I will sell my soul for a high resolution version of the pandaren.
The Screenshot of the Day Gallery has been updated with a shot from Blackwing Descent. The dragon featured in this screenshot seems to be Atramedes, one of the boss of the instance.
Cataclysm Work In Progress - Twilight Highlands
Twilight Highlands is one of the new zones of Cataclysm, it is located near the Wetlands and Grim Batol and looks like one of the most interesting zone of the expansion (with Uldum).
Important! - Screenshots were taken from an Alliance point of view.
Important! - The zone is still in development, the screenshots and video below aren't representative of the final content.
Important! - Spoilers.
TotalBiscuit released a nice video of the zone a few days ago.
And I went through the zone to screenshot most of the interesting things I could find. You will most likely meet a couple of major lore characters here. (More on that later ...)
Beta - Stuck in Phase Issues
Fan Arts
The official site has been updated with 5 awesome new Fan Arts. I will sell my soul for a high resolution version of the pandaren.
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