f13.net

Spirit->Hit for moonkin and elemental is a dumb dumb dumb way to handle it. The end result is that those two specs are just going to be insanely overcapped on hit all the time, because the rings/amulets/cloaks/etc that are itemized for dps casters are going to have plenty of hit for the classes that need it.

Spirit->Hit for moonkin and elemental is a dumb dumb dumb way to handle it. The end result is that those two specs are just going to be insanely overcapped on hit all the time, because the rings/amulets/cloaks/etc that are itemized for dps casters are going to have plenty of hit for the classes that need it.

Healing in the end game as it is now is very boring and very frustrating. It's essentially if you miss a heal or cooldown, its a wipe.

I am pretty sure they're talking about stuff like the crit cap and the various soft/hard haste caps that some classes have, rather than the hit cap, but we'll see.

Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

Interesting to see that they're changing moonkin and ele shaman but not holy paladins; I thought they had mentioned some change in the works for them, so that we don't have gear dropping for only one spec of one class.

Equip the latest Tier or Season set designed for your class/spec and the six or seven buttons you push will make bigger numbers. I mean let's be serious, optimizing a Diablo 2 character required a lot more thought. We don't even let you guys allocate stat points when you level.

Time to translate.

The Haste changes go directly to making it do equivalent things for both melee and casters.

Spirit->Hit for moonkin and elemental is a dumb dumb dumb way to handle it. The end result is that those two specs are just going to be insanely overcapped on hit all the time, because the rings/amulets/cloaks/etc that are itemized for dps casters are going to have plenty of hit for the classes that need it.

Except for warriors, for whom I'm expecting haste to still be an ass stat because Blizzard seems to think that the extra rage generation is comparable to faster energy regeneration or rune cooldown.  But hey, it's not like I didn't see that one coming.

A spirit to hit conversion for the cloth casters would basically mean all caster cloth would be the same and the distinction between the two would be lost. Cloth wearers in cataclysm will have about the same gear options as Shaman and Druids will. Instead of our gear being split between Caster/Physical, we'll see DPS/Healing.

The downside of this is that in the case of druids and shaman, the caster specs are 2/6 of specs available. With 4 cloth classes, we'll be 2/12 specs available. It's not as bad as Holy Paladin, though they have absolutely no competition other than other Holy pallys for their gear. Unless the healer gear looks really unappetizing for the dps classes, healing priests will have difficulties with gear competition.

This will not be an issue.


What will be an issue, is how they intend to go about mana regen for Moonkins and Elemental shamans. Will it be spirit based, non-spirit based? Will we be able to 'double dip' regen? Will we be required to?

I run out of runes all the time on my DK, as in, if I had them up more I could easily do more DPS.

Sheepherder, your table is a suggestion right? Not an interpretation of actual changes? (If that is something official, sauce?)

Also, bears have block already: http://www.wowwiki.com/Savage_Defense

I think they said that mastery benefits stop improving at 55 points in a tree already, and that you can't get the 3rd bonus from more than one tree. So, your secondary points in Holy would give you the first 2 passives but not the third.

1) Mastery on gear gives you one bonus. That bonus is the third passive (the unique one) in the tree in which you’ve spent the most points. In the examples we gave, those are Absorption, Radiance and Runic Power generation.

...

3) Assume you only get the passive bonuses for the tree in which you’ve spent the most points, and there is a ceiling per tree (which could be something like 51-55 talent points). If you spend more points than that in a tree you still get the benefits of the talent. If you spend points in another tree, you are benefiting from those talents instead. Unless you try to make say a 40 / 36 / 0 build, you shouldn’t be losing passive bonuses.

If you turn level 10 and spend 1 point in Discipline, you are now a Disc priest. You receive the Disc talent tree passive bonuses and mastery rating on gear benefits your Disc passive bonus (Absorption). If you reach level 85 and have 70 points in Disc and 6 in Holy, you are still a Disc priest and the same rules apply. If you change your build to 51 Disc / 20 Holy / 5 Shadow, you are still a Disc priest.

You'll have to be a unique snowflake some other way Lanty!

I'm almost a proper Blood spec for both tanking and dps.

Specifically from a shadow priest perspective, this is kind of dumb.

if the trees are

holy:
healing
regen
hots

disc:
healing
regen
shields

then no matter what the shadow tree is it will never make sense to put a single point in holy or disc as you'll be foregoing a point of something to gain healing

I tank in blood, I just don't like frost... and unholy.. well it sucks.  lol

Don't do Unholy or Frost tanking, that's a sign of "special" that you really don't want to be.  I ran with an Unholy tank and it was... very interesting.  I tanked frost for a few weeks before deciding I *really* didn't like it.

Exactly.  I tanked in Frost and while I did all right, I needed things like D&D and Howling Blast ALOT more than they were ever up.  In blood I've got a 15-s D&D and heart strike\runestrike to maintain aggro much better than I ever did in Frost.  Unholy is just... blah for tanking.

Frost tanking is fine, don't be silly.

It would be nice if splitting talent trees didn't end up gimping you even more than it currently does...

I will be getting passive bonuses to healing and regen if i do that. 

3) Assume you only get the passive bonuses for the tree in which you’ve spent the most points, and there is a ceiling per tree (which could be something like 51-55 talent points). If you spend more points than that in a tree you still get the benefits of the talent. If you spend points in another tree, you are benefiting from those talents instead. Unless you try to make say a 40 / 36 / 0 build, you shouldn’t be losing passive bonuses.

... I'm not that unique.

Getting less so all the time.  I already dumped Blood-Caked Blade and Necrosis to get Will of the Necropolis and Blood Gorged.  I'm almost a proper Blood spec for both tanking and dps.  My Druid has been a 'proper' Moonkin for months now.  I feel so dirty. :cry2:

I've been blood tanking for months.. but lately I've gotten tells from healers saying "wtf, u know ur blood spec not frost, rite?"

 :awesome_for_real:

I just picked WoW back up and I'm not getting the point of this system, what am I missing?

- It'll be based on the total number of points in your primary tree, so it doesn't seem to be ungimping anything; a gimped spec will remained gimped in relation to a better spec.
- Trees give passive bonuses that are relevant to that tree, so there'll be an additional advantage to speccing deeper into a single tree. This appears to remove customization and deincentivize off-specs, neither of which I can embrace as progress.
- Items will have a stat (+Mastery) that will be very attractive to all classes, which seems crappy because it can and probably will create competition for loot across specs and armour classes (think Clothadins in ye olde days.) If on generic slots, like rings, the problem will be exaggerated. This issue can rather easily be dodged, though, even if that makes it a bit pointless (quest rewards only, enchants, gems and other generally accessible means.)

Seriously, help me here, what is Mastery supposed to be fixing/improving?

I see, thanks. I don't know if I can bear 50 active talents though, I have enough bars as it is.

Seriously, help me here, what is Mastery supposed to be fixing/improving?

- It'll be based on the total number of points in your primary tree, so it doesn't seem to be ungimping anything; a gimped spec will remained gimped in relation to a better spec.

- Trees give passive bonuses that are relevant to that tree, so there'll be an additional advantage to speccing deeper into a single tree. This appears to remove customization and deincentivize off-specs, neither of which I can embrace as progress.

- Items will have a stat (+Mastery) that will be very attractive to all classes, which seems crappy because it can and probably will create competition for loot across specs and armour classes (think Clothadins in ye olde days.) If on generic slots, like rings, the problem will be exaggerated. This issue can rather easily be dodged, though, even if that makes it a bit pointless (quest rewards only, enchants, gems and other generally accessible means.)

The move fast talents usually theorycraft as higher DPS than most of the filler DPS talents.

Healing in the end game as it is now is very boring and very frustrating. It's essentially if you miss a heal or cooldown, its a wipe.

I'd also toss in some resentment on my part.  I really do not like being told that mana management will be "fun" for healers, but not required for anyone else.  Healing is a suckass job most of the time, and making it worse in Cataclysm isn't going to improve the number of healers available.

Classes Resources
Resources for all classes are supposed to matter. If they weren't supposed to matter then we could certainly simplify the game by removing them all. For some classes or specs, the actual resource is GCDs not a bar that fills up.

Rage, energy, runes and soon focus are essentially infinite. You only risk running out for short periods of time, but they'll be back eventually.

For mana-using dps specs, the gameplay is similar but the time slice is broader. A mage isn't going to run out of mana in the first few seconds of a fight. She might run out later, particularly in a longer fight, but she also has ways to get that mana back, and then using those at the right time becomes some of the skill of playing that class.

Healers all use mana, and they are supposed to run out of mana if they make bad decisions. That isn't currently happening, but it will in Cataclysm. Healers feel singled-out by that design, but we believe that when healers have infinite mana that we lose controls in designing an encounter. We have to rely on killing characters faster than healers can respond, punishing players dramatically for doing or failing to do some key event in the fight, or relying on dps checks with berserk timers and the like. Healer mana is a tool we had in BC and lost in LK. When the raid takes too much avoidable damage, then the healers eventually gas out (after using their own tools for mana restoration, like Divine Plea and Innervate) and the group then dies. Put another way, the game is just too easy when healers can just rely on their most powerful spell all of the time (many of us also think the healer gameplay is a little boring when you arne't using all your spells).

I'm not trying to derail the topic from rage, but I did want to explain why we think it's okay for some characters to have infinite resources and some to risk running out. But the resource itself still needs to matter even if it is effectively infinite. (Source)

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

    * Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
    * Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
    * Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
    * The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
    * Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
    * In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.


To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

    * If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
    * Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.


2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.


We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

Healers all use mana, and they are supposed to run out of mana if they make bad decisions. That isn't currently happening, but it will in Cataclysm. Healers feel singled-out by that design, but we believe that when healers have infinite mana that we lose controls in designing an encounter. We have to rely on killing characters faster than healers can respond, punishing players dramatically for doing or failing to do some key event in the fight, or relying on dps checks with berserk timers and the like. Healer mana is a tool we had in BC and lost in LK. When the raid takes too much avoidable damage, then the healers eventually gas out (after using their own tools for mana restoration, like Divine Plea and Innervate) and the group then dies. Put another way, the game is just too easy when healers can just rely on their most powerful spell all of the time (many of us also think the healer gameplay is a little boring when you arne't using all your spells).

They seem to have missed the point that for most of TBC mana was genuinely finite for most healers, and that's why we used downranking and various other tricks. They nerfed that, and now wonder why they have to break content to make it challenging.

Noooo, WoW-style downranking is awful from a design perspective. It creates a barrier to entry into higher level play for new players, because it isn't transparent enough in-game to explain what it does for you, that's why it had to go.

And yes, they have a long way to go in terms of knocking down all those walls but ideally you should never have to rely on outside documentation (forums, EJ, wahtever) to understand the core mechanics of your class.

Is it really that unintuitive to use a spell that costs less but heals less in order to conserve mana and reduce overheal?  Hell I figured out I couldn't spam my max rank heal my very first raid ever.

Once you factor in all the math and testing that goes into determining which rank is the optimal one to use, factoring in all the hidden stuff like spellpower coefficients, the original downranking penalty, and the fact that the spell tooltips at the time only told you the base value of the heals? Yes, far too fiddly for the average user.

EDIT: DAMN YOU FORDEL

They used my idea! It's Runic power that's generated off auto-attacks instead of Rune abilities.

I'm a gamer, and Cataclysm was my idea.

Conversely, all PvE Debuffs will end up being 'Magic' Debuffs, or at least the ones that are "dispell this or die".

making it possible to waste mana by casting a dispel when there is nothing to dispel

Maybe I'm just burnt-out but I haven't liked a single mechanics change I've heard for Cata.  They're trying way too hard and, imo, silly shit like this shows why they're the "B" team.

They're homogenizing the game while trying to make it "Hardcore" enough for their raiding base and it seems like its losing a lot of its fun in favor of 'easier' optimizations. 

First, more bosses will have "dispel or die" type stuff as Magic which I'm not really sure about. 

You're confusing the two types of magic dispels.  Since every healer now has dispel(enemy)  you can expect a lot of bosses to put up self buffs, things like dmg multipliers or high healing renews.  Think more along the lines of faction champions, where as a chromaggus fight would be dispel(friendly)  which only shamans and priests are getting.

An example of defensive magic dispelling would be using a dispel to free a polymorphed ally, while offensive magic dispelling would be utilizing a dispel ability to strip away an enemy’s buff or heal-over-time (HoT) spell.

    * We want to stress yet again that one of our goals behind these changes was to help us design 5-player dungeons and 10-player raids. Currently having the ability to remove, say, a poison or disease can make an encounter go from challenging to easy, yet not every group has those abilities. With this new matrix, the encounter designers can make anything that must be dispelled a magical effect, while curses, poisons or diseases would be in the category of helping you win, but not an instant wipe if you lose. In 25-player raids, we have more flexibility to ask you to dispel more types of effects.

Raid-wide stuff is rarely also cleanse or death though.

    * Shaman will get Cleanse Spirit as a base spell that removes curses. Restoration will have a talent to add magic dispelling (on friends or enemies) to Cleanse Spirit.

They could go a long way and just standardize condition states like Guildwars. We really don't need 14 variations of the 'snare' state.

Awesome, so baseline Purge is going away too?  The Shaman preview tomorrow better have some amazing new stuff in it because Elemental Shaman are really taking it up the ass, losing Poison, Disease *and* Magic dispelling.

This is something we’re still working on. We will still have abilities that remove 2 effects. One design is that all shaman have Cleanse Spirit (curse) and Purge (magic on enemies), and then Restoration can talent to allow Cleanse Spirit to also remove magic. Another is that shaman have one button that does all the dispelling to free up key-binds. The point we were trying to clarify above is that the ability to remove curses is a base shaman ability.

Why ?

Because it requires you to have read up on all encounters beforehand. Yes, most of us do it. No, it shouldn't be mandatory to play the game. My problem is that I don't have time to read what the fuck a debuff DOES by finding it and mousing over the tiny fucking icon during the middle of a fight to see if it's a CLEANSE ME NOW JESUS CHRIST (Iron Council), or a OH GOD DO NOT CLEANSE THIS (Naxx poison dude.. grobb?)

That's why it's a terrible system. Same reason having random buffs on the boss with specific required reactions is annoying and now has calls usually. Because I don't want DPS stopping every time the boss does something so the entire group/raid can read the fucking tooltip to see if it says "boss gains 1000 armor" or "boss will instantly kill anyone who attacks him for 15 seconds"

The game moves too quickly to read tooltips in real time. And I don't want to force everyone to go read tankspot for 5 man non heroics.

I expected Frost to be tanking and Unholy to get the DW talents, to match the fucking presences.  This just pisses me off.

I expected Frost to be tanking and Unholy to get the DW talents, to match the fucking presences.  This just pisses me off.

I expected Frost to be tanking and Unholy to get the DW talents, to match the fucking presences.  This just pisses me off.

I don't see how they're trying to hard when this is just an extension of the Fear Ward homogenization and Shamans getting Curse removal put in their Resto tree (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=51886).

Ditto.  Anyone want to join me on the "fuck is Ghostcrawler goddamn stupid" train yet?

I would be surprised if the playstyle is going to change dramatically from how blood tanks now - lots of self heals, etc. They'll just have a full suite of tanking tools which until now DKs have lacked.

. This change is totally left-field.

I would be surprised if the playstyle is going to change dramatically from how blood tanks now - lots of self heals, etc. They'll just have a full suite of tanking tools which until now DKs have lacked.

Which is exactly the problem I have with it.  I *hated* blood tanking when I tried it.  It's completely different from frost tanking.

Maybe Holy will get some fucking depth or variety.

Blood will be the only tanking tree in Cataclysm. (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/24038461060-death-knights-will-tank-as-blood-in-cataclysm.html)

I have never had a problem reading tooltips.  I make it a point to read every single tooltip for every debuff or buff I see.  The game does not move so quickly that you can't take a few seconds to mouse over a debuff and see what it does, especially in 5 man content.  Worst case scenario, you wipe, you explain what the debuff does, and then you kill him.  Also, there's nothing wrong with a boss that requires you wipe once to understand it or have something explained.  One shotting everything is not a right granted for fifteen bucks.

Which is exactly the problem I have with it.  I *hated* blood tanking when I tried it.  It's completely different from frost tanking.

Which is exactly the problem I have with it.  I *hated* blood tanking when I tried it.  It's completely different from frost tanking.

They are very different.  I'm sorry they're taking it from you since you'd make the better tank any day. :sad:

I do like my Blood tank (and my Blood dps), but that's because I'm odd.

Wrath has also largely avoided it as well.  Very few "raid wide" (or even "hits lots of people") dispellable debuffs going out.  Only fight where dispelling someone really matters that I can recall is Iron Council, but that is single target only.  Everything else is, once again, either an in fight mechanic to deal with debuff (LOS the boss to drop stacks, etc) or just "heal that person harder" kind of thing, like with penetrating cold on Anub in ToC.

My biggest hope for the DK change is that they remove the mandatory 5/5/5 talent points for tanking and consolidate them into one tree, so we can go as deep into a second as every other class. As a pretty geared out raider, my spec (56/5/10) is a mess because they have low-tier talents that are mandatory for tanking scattered throughout all three trees.

I don't really mind blood being the tank tree. I'll lose my unique snowflake unholy tank-ness, but that's ok.  :awesome_for_real:

Curious though, if they made this move due to the mastery system ("we can't have a tree add mastery bonuses for a tank spec + damage spec at the same time omg"), what is going to happen to the feral tree?

well shadowpriests are in the same boat. With two healing trees, what would a dps want to do with a +healing bonus. I guess one could be mana regen. Yay.

However IIRC again, only the first 51 points (or whatever the new number to get to the end of the tree) will give the passive bonuses. That way classes with more than one DPS tree will actually be able to spec points outside of their chosen main tree without losing possible passive bonuses.

In short any given class will be "forced" to spec 51 points into their main tree, but will be free to stick the rest wherever they like.

Yeah, just looked through the linked thread (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23710210871&sid=1&pageNo=1#8):


Problem solved.

Personally, if I may neckbeard for a bit, I would probably have killed the DW thing entirely and left DKs as 2h users across the board, there's already too much DW in this game and it makes itemization easier since DKs don't want the same stat balance that other DW dps do.

I wish they'd just change Maelstrom Weapon to auto-fire a lightning bolt like the DK's Sudden Doom now does. Although that might be kind of a PVP nerf, as you can currently use MW for heals too.

I'd prefer to keep the mechanic as-is, having the choice of what spell to use is pretty valuable to me.

Neckbearding:

Or make the (unique) autoattack / cast non-interaction that hunters have universal for all spell casts, so warriors and shamans aren't penalized in auto-attack damage for initiating a casted ability.  Would give fury a cool rage dump (Slam) to replace Heroic Strike, buff Arms single target damage, and make Maelstrom into a mobility talent.

Slam works completely differently from a normal spell in WOTLK.  It doesn't reset your swing timer, it merely delays it until the cast completes.  Fury never hard-casts Slam because giving up the white damage and hs or cleave for 1.5 seconds is never worth it.  and no, it would not be 'cool', it would suck satan's asshole to have to stand still and hard-cast while in melee range.

Slam sucks for arms as it is. The only reason--the way I understand it anyway--that you can get away with it is the slow 2h weapons speeds.

I'd prefer an incite/HS rage dump for arms and that does work IF you're really geared up. I've tried it on my ghetto warrior and though it has nasty burst damage, she simply doesn't generate the rage necessary to really keep it going--yet.

Re: slam, the fix is not turning slam into steady shot, the fix is taking off the casting time entirely and just letting it be fury's proc attack (arms won't need it at all with new HS): it's mechanically inconsistent with everything else about the class and awkward to use besides. There's no value in preserving it as a cast ability.

Because what Blizzard is aiming for is having every melee class be highly mobile instagibbing machines constantly in a GCD locked state.