Wrath of the Lich King: NOW We Can Talk
Unless you have been removed from the news cycle, you already know these two important tidbits of information:
In other words, any proposed changes are now public, in the open, and up for legit discussion.
To kick this off, a few highlights from the beta patch notes (first edition):
Maths get Nerfed
Less stats to cope with:
- All items and effects which grant bonuses to spell damage and spell healing are being consolidated into a single stat, Spellpower. This stat will appear with the same values found on items which grant “increased spell damage and healing” such as on typical Mage and Warlock itemization.
- For classes which do not heal, they should see no change in the character sheet other than new tooltip wording.
- Healing characters will see their bonus healing numbers on the character sheet decrease, however, all healing spells have been modified to receive more benefit from spellpower than they received from bonus healing, with a net effect of no change to the amount healed by their spells. Some talents have had to be rebalanced to accommodate this change, but the amount healed will remain roughly the same. In addition, some talents will provide only healing spell power.
While theorycrafting is fun, there’s a point when the amount of maths you need to evaluate your gear upgrade paths gets in the way of things, and simplifying these by removing some stats is a good move in my book. The first change will benefit all classes who today combine melee and magic to a certain point, like hunters, paladins, druids and shamans for instance. The Spellpower change is a no-brainer too: healers won’t have to build a separate gear set for damage anymore.
Hunter Love
Several hunter changes which should rejoice all pet maniacs everywhere, among others:
While I haven’t taken a hunter up high enough to be able to fully measure the amplitude of all the other changes, the above are no-brainers. Finally completing unique abilities for all pet families is something which hunters were waiting for since patch 1.7… and that was 3 years ago. Loyalty won’t be missed. Auto-levelling new tamed pets within 5 levels of the hunter? This has to go live. It just has. Bite and Claw made equal? Again, no-brainer. Min-maxing had killed Bite-only pets in TBC. Welcome back, I say.
Paladin Sanctification… and Cursing
Again, way too many changes to list them all. Here are a couple of chosen few:
Lovely start here… except that a longer daze effect on Avenger’s shield gives indisciplined DPS more time to rip aggro off a pull before it even reaches the paladin.
Blessings renamed into Hands… Mmkay.
I don’t like the sound of this change one bit. Salvation was pretty much a cast & forget blessing. Now part of the responsibility of personal aggro management gets shifted from the DPS to the paladins. I can already hear the arguments after a wipe. Instead of fostering personal discipline, the bad DPS will just blame it on a paladin too busy to cast a hand to shed the extra aggro they shouldn’t have gotten if they had been better players.
Several changes which appear to attempt to foster more hybrid gameplay or talent builds. It remains to be seen how this plays out in practice. I’m skeptical at this point. However, the big Hammer Tossing contests starting when a boss goes below 35% of health are sure to amuse for at least a week or two.
Combat Log changes
- The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.
- Overhealing is now reported in the combat log.
- When a source of damage is entirely prevented (by a shield block, a full resist, or a damage shield like Power Word:Shield, the prevented amount will now be displayed
Lookie, that starts making sense.
As you will have guessed, there are way too many changes to comment them all in a hit & run post like this. There will be more later, but in the meantime, you will of course get class-specific commentary from your favourite class-specific blogs.
Don’t be grim Gwaendar! Now are fun times for debating and pondering
You and Rohan seem to setting up separate camps on the Salv change.
I see the future you forsee but I also see the “only the tank gets the fear ward” sort of situation happening for “Hand Salv”. It could just become situational with priority to healer squishies. Let the DPS die. Half the rogues and hunters I know considered it a crutch anyway?
I for one already love tossing my Hammers already so more Hammer time is always fun for this nutter.
Hunter pet trees were a necessary change that should have been implemented quite some time ago. Hopefully this will help us have a little more variety in the optimal pets — for both PvP and PvE. Though that never kept me from taking a Strigid Owl with me instead of one of the oft-desired but so damned common kitties.
Not sure if I like the changes that change the benefit derived from Bonus Healing. As a theorycrafter, the current applied percentage of Bonus Healing is pretty easy to figure out using the appropriate equation that I’ve more than understood for quite some time now. Now I’ll have to learn a whole new set of numbers! Bleh.
Now I’ll have to learn a whole new set of numbers! Bleh.
Shrug. Not bothered by that. It’s only a matter of adjusting your spreadsheets so that Flash of Light now benefits from your Spellpower x 1.29 instead of +healing x 0.43 – just new base numbers to look up somewhere
With no more Salvation and no more TA, combined with WF adding 20% haste and dual-wielding 160 dps 2H’s at a flurried 2 seconds each, the future of the raiding Fury Warrior looks grim.
You mean in terms of DPS throttling for aggro? I wonder, because considering what DPS DKs and Ret Pallies ought to bring to the table in Wrath (at least in the current talent trees), a fury warrior’s core selling point should probably be high sustained melee DPS. This is taking the comment that DPS abilities across the board will generate less base threat at face value, of course.
Well they gave Warriors another threat reduction talent deep into the Fury tree, but of course none of us are going to take it.
It’s also a matter of Heroic Strike doing additional threat. If you can get flurried 2h’s down to the 2-2.2 second mark, then slam becomes a waste and Heroic Strike takes over as the premier damage dealing ability like it is now, except you’re doing it with a 2h.
Blizzard realized 95% of Ret Paladins can’t dps worth a damn, so said “Here’s Righteous Vengeance and Divine Storm. Stop sucking.”
You can get a Paladin to go something like 47/0/24 and get most of the good stuff a Ret Paladin would bring, without all the hassle of an actual Ret Paladin. Plus Sheath of Light will get pretty crazy with all the raid wide AP buffs.
I’m still undecided about DK’s as high end DPS.