Patch 3.1 -Preview-

[caladein]

As a raiding Disc Priest, I am now even more excited to see 3.1 on the PTRs.

Yeah DS has been a "Must have" buff for raiding priests for as long as I can remember.  As such, it makes sense to make it baseline like any of the 'must have' buffs for classes over the years.  Improved DS will probably stil remain a Disc Talent instead of rolling into the base, meaning the most useful part for a raid (extra spelldam) will still require at least a secondary into Disc.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with Imp DS being worth its talent points.  It doesn't stack with either FT Totem (144 SP) or Totem of Wrath (280 SP + 3% Crit Debuff) which are both a lot better.

[Ingmar]

GC has said several times over the last couple months that they know that imp. DS is lame, so I would expect a change to it somewhere in this patch too. They just might not have the final form ready to announce.

[K9]

I wonder how these regen changes will affect newbies, speaking as someone who started a Moonkin-in-Training Druid recently.

Not too bad really, most levelling folk rarely encounter fights where the time it takes to drain their mana pool is less than the time it takes a typical mob to die. The place this really starts to pinch will be in 5 and 10-mans.

[Selby]

Leveling balance druids will be no more out of mana than they were before... because it is impossible to be more out of mana.

Seriously.  I did Balance for a while... painful... so painful.  It was like I could keep casting and casting until out of mana and the mob would still have at least 30% of it's health left.  Then I had to whack it with a stick or dagger.

I'm curious to see how the mana regen works.  My priest practically relies on that 5s out of casting mode to get practically all of the mana spent during the battle back via Spirit Tap.

[Venkman]

Darniaq: That was just a small preview posted by Blizzard, more to come Soon(TM).

Makes sense.

And after reading the above about Mana Regen nerfs, I fully expect them to tap into my "utility" again with better regen summonables. Because Mages sooooo want to go back to being ATM machines for raids. They better find a better spin for this than claiming Replenishment classes/abilities are feeling unloved.

[Merusk]

As a raiding Disc Priest, I am now even more excited to see 3.1 on the PTRs.

Yeah DS has been a "Must have" buff for raiding priests for as long as I can remember.  As such, it makes sense to make it baseline like any of the 'must have' buffs for classes over the years.  Improved DS will probably stil remain a Disc Talent instead of rolling into the base, meaning the most useful part for a raid (extra spelldam) will still require at least a secondary into Disc.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with Imp DS being worth its talent points.  It doesn't stack with either FT Totem (144 SP) or Totem of Wrath (280 SP + 3% Crit Debuff) which are both a lot better.

Keep reading and you'll see I didn't know that.  My priest is not my main. Healing blows. 

[Gobbeldygook]

>Part 3< posted.  Summary:
Mage: We'll get back to you on that.

Paladin: Yo dawg, I heard you liked warriors, so I put a warrior in yo' class so you can warrior while you paladin.

Hunters: We liked deep wounds so much we felt paladins AND hunters needed it!  We also like mudkip and BM, but we don't like pvp burst.

Death Knight: Just try dual wielding or killing a priest NOW, cocksuckers!

[AngryGumball]

ROFL paladins Blessing of kings is trainable and no longer a talent. Its not like it wasn't in the first level it was just what 3 stupid talent points to get it. Clearly another example of its the best buff that everyone wants therefore everyone gets its plain and simple, no brain power needed to apply its use. Similar to making Shaman totems raid wide instead of party only. Lets make it all easy.

ROFL Hunters ammunition is no longer consumed, never run out gun or crossbow ammo. Basically, all specs are becoming similar. No longer need to worry about stocking up on ammo cuz it never runs out now. Next announcement armor never breaks or needs repair.

Soon you need to press 2 buttons to actually fully run any character. Blizzard projects to be the MMO leader in 2yos playing full time by end of 2010.

Newsflash update, Obsidian Sanc heroic was 20 manned today on Borean Tundra earning a server first title. Blizzard caters to easy mode. Seriously Blizzard your giving a server first titles out for this and expect to be respected for smart innovative gameplay? Someone roll back when they removed pvp titles claiming to make these something to really strive for. Fwiw to the idiots out there Borean Tundra is almost a month old. So perhaps half of that 10 have all their heroic gear.

Clearly I am not their target audience anymore. I am that 5 or 10% they have stopped caring about.

I just wish MMOs came with game difficulty levels you can adjust. I do not want to play WoW on stupidly easy mode. Its like a single player game where you can adjust difficulty that is what I want. I want a Server that will kick me in the balls and mock me. Not be so boringly easy to play that I feel stupid for still playing even if your still the best polished MMO out.

[Azaroth]

Obsidian Sanc heroic was 20 manned today on Borean Tundra

Is that a major achievement?

The entire fight is walking away from the slow moving flame waves.

I don't see being five people down as any kind of a detriment.

Unless you mean with three drakes up?

[Fordel]

AngryGumball, sense you make? Zero.


Just sayin! 

[Rasix]

ROFL paladins Blessing of kings is trainable and no longer a talent. Its not like it wasn't in the first level it was just what 3 stupid talent points to get it. Clearly another example of its the best buff that everyone wants therefore everyone gets its plain and simple, no brain power needed to apply its use. Similar to making Shaman totems raid wide instead of party only. Lets make it all easy.

ROFL Hunters ammunition is no longer consumed, never run out gun or crossbow ammo. Basically, all specs are becoming similar. No longer need to worry about stocking up on ammo cuz it never runs out now. Next announcement armor never breaks or needs repair.

Soon you need to press 2 buttons to actually fully run any character. Blizzard projects to be the MMO leader in 2yos playing full time by end of 2010.

Newsflash update, Obsidian Sanc heroic was 20 manned today on Borean Tundra earning a server first title. Blizzard caters to easy mode. Seriously Blizzard your giving a server first titles out for this and expect to be respected for smart innovative gameplay? Someone roll back when they removed pvp titles claiming to make these something to really strive for. Fwiw to the idiots out there Borean Tundra is almost a month old. So perhaps half of that 10 have all their heroic gear.

Clearly I am not their target audience anymore. I am that 5 or 10% they have stopped caring about.

I just wish MMOs came with game difficulty levels you can adjust. I do not want to play WoW on stupidly easy mode. Its like a single player game where you can adjust difficulty that is what I want. I want a Server that will kick me in the balls and mock me. Not be so boringly easy to play that I feel stupid for still playing even if your still the best polished MMO out.

What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

[K9]

Part III brought out the stupid in several people.

One thing that's noticeable across the board is how Blizz is caving in on stuff they had previously stated as being off the table; trainable DS and kings, no ammo for hunters, better means for generating shards for locks. Just little changes like this make a lot of people happy. Overall I can't see many buffs I can fault. The only one which raises some doubt are the amount of silences they are throwing at paladins. I'm guessing the glyph of exorcism is looking at a possible change, since with that paladins will be able to keep another caster silenced very effectively.

From Kalgan:

- it won't be quite as easy to get deadly items via emblems of conquest as hateful items currently are via emblems of valor

- the new Archavon boss (a new boss located in another wing of the Vault of Archavon), will have slightly different drops than the current Archavon (he can drop Furious Gloves/Legs, or any possible random honor item in addition to tier 8 pve set items similar to Archavon's t7 pve set drops, but cannot drop the Furious Chest piece)

So new emblems it is for T8 content. I guess they'll probably add new items to the Heroism vendor to help people fill itemisation gaps (from the point of view of a clothie, wands and shoulders are in short supply in 10-man content). T8.10 Ulduar will drop emblems of Valour I'm assuming.

[apocrypha]

Clearly I am not their target audience anymore. I am that 5 or 10% they have stopped caring about.

The fact that Blizzard at least try and cater to the 90-95% of the playerbase that isn't you is probably why they have 11+ million subs now.

[Hindenburg]

Next announcement armor never breaks or needs repair.

I'd love that. 

[Merusk]

Death Knight: Just try dual wielding or killing a priest NOW, cocksuckers!

YAY! I'm lovin' the Garg-UB swap, myself.  I hate dual-wielding DKs and hope they tweak for 2h a little more. 

No ammo for Hunters should have been done a long time ago.  It was easy enough to blow-through a full 24-slot quiver of ammo just running BC dungeons, and that cost a minimum of 24g to refill. I don't know the cost of LK ammo, but fuck it's got to suck even more with the upped price of L80 repairs plus the ammo. Grats to them for the change.   Plus, it's not like the majority of their attacks were affected by ammo anymore.   Next they'll hopefully remove Bow auto attack and just make them physical dps ranged casters like they treat them anyway.  (In this they'd up the damage of their actual attacks to make up for the auto attack loss.)

[Numtini]

I'll be interested how the mana thing affects me. I'm a would be resto shaman based around crits and since my main mana regen is from water shield procs off of critical heals, none of the changes seems to significantly affect me. It seems like I might come out way ahead. But honestly, I'm pretty sure I could chain heal for months without running out at the moment as long as I keep water shield up. And I don't think that's their aim.

Otherwise I like the shaman changes. Combining mana and healing totems is just a sop to the reality that nobody ever casts healing and gives us a bit more healing power. I could care less whether I have one or two decurse totems on my bar, it's pretty rare to need to drop both disease and poison anyway.

Circle of healing for priests is an odd choice. I didn't like the notion of gimping priests to give shaman a niche, but that's clearly what they wanted in nerfing COH with the timer. And this seems to put us back where we started. And even with the COH nerf, I found it didn't work, priests were still preferred to shaman because COH was still good enough and priests are better overall healers.

Frankly, what I really want most out of the next patch is dual spec.

[Dren]

Wow, that's fucked up.  However, my group's holy pally never has mana problems so I don't get why others are.

I currently do not have mana issues either, but that is with heavy usage of Divine Plea.  If I do not keep that going within the confines of cooldown I will easily run out of mana quick.  Yeah, if I just did Flash of Light only I'd have no issues, but that just isn't possible.  I used to use Flash a lot more before they nerfed the glyph for it making it a HoT in the last patch.

I've been using Plea because I have my spell power nearly to 2000 and a 20% redux doesn't seem to affect me too much in the long run.  It is certainly a fair trade for not running out of mana and doing ZERO healing.  50% is nothing to sneeze at.  It will hurt, but I'll have to continue to use Plea to keep from hitting bottom in the middle of a fight that is a gear test.

[Nevermore]

Death Knight: Just try dual wielding or killing a priest NOW, cocksuckers!

I hate dual-wielding DKs and hope they tweak for 2h a little more. 

Fuck you! 

I'm heavy Frost spec so the rearrange probably won't affect me much, as long as they don't to something crappy like putting Howling Blast at 51.  The change to BotN will give me a couple of extra points to play around with, which is nice (and will help if they do something crappy like putting Howling Blast at 51).  Unholy Blight being more accessible looks interesting.  The change to Pestilence has some DK tanks in a panic.  Is the change to Unbreakable Armor supposed to be a buff or a nerf?

[kildorn]

The UB/Garg change is a split spec nerf. Mostly because Garg was far FAR too good for a 21 point talent, and UB was a great DPS tool, but not something stunningly good.

The Pest change is the largest hit in the DK list. Pest did a rather useful amount of damage, and it's cooldown being removed turned it into the default "spam me for AE with a blood rune" skill.

This change however drops my basic AE opening (DnD, IT, PS, Pest) about 800-1200 damage per target. Fordel will shortly be here to tell me to suck it up and how I deserved it for the absurdity of that AE rotation <3

[Hindenburg]

If  you do pick up UB, the damage will still be there, though. Tanking as deep undeath is easy mainly due to UB and that other disease.

[kildorn]

It's an overall boost to deep unholy, just putting Garg closer to what it was (pre nerf) and moving it. Not that unholy needs DPS increases   

It's a hit to split spec DW builds, just because garg was so out of line, overall dps per talent point wise.

[Nevermore]

If they don't move Howling Blast to 51, I'm going to switch to a DW Frost/Unholy AoE dps spec.  Shorter cooldown on DnD + Howling Blast + Unholy Blight looks like fun.  I'm positive they aren't going to want DKs with both HB and UB, though.

[kildorn]

It's no more absurd than the shit I already put out, AE wise. My main issue with HB in an AE trash rotation is that it's sudden absurd threat, but I don't pull much threat normally (inc thorgrim bitching me out about spiders  )

HB/UB as a solo leveling build is amusing, it would make for a pretty rapid AE questing grind setup.

[Nevermore]

It's no more absurd than the shit I already put out, AE wise. My main issue with HB in an AE trash rotation is that it's sudden absurd threat, but I don't pull much threat normally (inc thorgrim bitching me out about spiders  )

That's what the plate armor is for. 

Besides, how can Ingmar have fun if he doesn't have to work for his threat! 

[Merusk]

If  you do pick up UB, the damage will still be there, though. Tanking as deep undeath is easy mainly due to UB and that other disease.

Yeah, any time I have had to off-tank or MT a Heroic I've never had to respec purely because of UB.  That, plus D&D plust frost presence has always generated more than enough threat.  It's a much better RP dump than spamming deathcoils right now, anyway, unless they reduce the damage with its new spot in the tree.

I always liked spamming BB over Pest, just because of death runes. The extra damage will be missed from the AOE rotation, though. /sob.  

The UB/Garg change is a split spec nerf. Mostly because Garg was far FAR too good for a 21 point talent, and UB was a great DPS tool, but not something stunningly good.

Yeah, it's really aimed at nerfing the 34/39 dual wield specs.  The original garg damage & timer nerf was intended to do the same thing, but the ability is still way too powerful as a dps tool. This is a much better idea than nerfing the gargoyle to oblivion.

Death Knight: Just try dual wielding or killing a priest NOW, cocksuckers!

I hate dual-wielding DKs and hope they tweak for 2h a little more. 

Fuck you! 

Roll a warrior!  

[Xanthippe]

Don't get me wrong, I have loved Wrath of the Lich King in terms of leveling up.  The quests are terrific, the storylines are interesting, the artwork and music all stellar.

Being an 80 hunter who is also an engineer has been frustrating me though.  I don't have any sort of a grasp on what a hunter is supposed to be anymore.  The nerfs and more nerfs and this nerf and that nerf without any sort of vision dismays me.  BM was OP but then nerfed into the ground.  Switched to Survival, which was as brokenly OP as BM; apparently it's being "adjusted" as well.  (I haven't played Surv enough yet to really have an opinion - I'm not a min/maxer).  I just wish I knew what a hunter is supposed to be - it seems like the devs have NO idea.  Why hunters are getting so much nerfing and buffing and changing when other classes are as broken or more stupidly so, I don't understand.

On one hand, the loss of ammo is great - getting an extra bag and no more spending 3g/stack making my bullets is great.  On the other hand, another bit of flavor has disappeared.

As an engineer, well.  Here's another thing that I have no idea what it is anymore. 

Maybe I'm just too old and set in my ways to think these things are all terrific, but I'm finding myself lacking in the desire to log in as much anymore. 

I guess I could go play a DK like everybody else. 

(Boy does this sound like sour grapes or what?!)

[Merusk]

a min/maxer).  I just wish I knew what a hunter is supposed to be - it seems like the devs have NO idea.  ... (Boy does this sound like sour grapes or what?!)

Hi, welcome to my side of the fence 4 1/2 months ago.  No, it doesn't sound like sour grapes to me at all.  I played a hunter from day one until I got wind of what was going down in LK and gave-up on the hunters entirely.  Loved the class to death, but like you I came to the conclusion the devs have no idea what to do with them.

The death of 1000 papercuts is great PvE dps, but sucks for PvP.  It sucks even more when you've played a class with real burst damage.  "We can't give hunters more burst because of Autoshot" has been the stock response to that complaint. 

Really, though, it was reading Ghostcrawler's responses to hunters complaints in beta that made me give-up entirely.  The devs truly DO NOT understand, or even play the class.  This is not just your usual forum warrioring complaint, here.  I wish I'd kept them in my head, because there were comments about abilities that just don't make any sense at all if you've played the class.  The usual complaints you hear from bad players after they've gotten killed by a hunter, coming from a dev made me  .  SOmething like how frost trap does damage and hunters  have more abilities than any other class, and aspect switching was fine on a GCD, etc.

I'd reccommend finding another class, since I know you love Pvping too much to just go PvE and farm all day. Which seems to be all hunters are good at anymore.

[Montague]

"Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content"

What this also means is that PVP Ret paladins just got a ranged spell interrupt, unless they remove the glyph. Caster tears incoming.

BoK - that change wasn't unexpected. Every spreadsheet/theorycraft for every class was taking BoK as a given for every raid. Blizzard has a tendency to just baseline spells when they become thought of as raid required (see Innervate).

[Rasix]

YAY! I'm lovin' the Garg-UB swap, myself.  I hate dual-wielding DKs and hope they tweak for 2h a little more. 

   Just remove the damn option all together. I just don't see how they'll ever be able to balance it adequately without nerfing it into oblivion. I suppose moving Improved Icy Talons farther down the tree could completely destroy their utility and make them the selfish bastard dps spec.

Will this be that huge of a DPS hit given the recent changes didn't seem to slow down 32/39 that much (I have no idea what the current DPS gargoyle brings to the table)?  Of course, I'm the only non 32/39 DK dps in my guild.     One guy in my guild is actually running 32/39 using a two hander. 

Would be nice to not have to listen to that dumb kid in my guild letting us all know that he does 3K DPS everytime he completes a heroic.  It's like a desperate cry for help since it's his alt and people would rather him play his tree.  Seeing a big drop in his faceroll dps may finally shut him the fuck up.

[Lantyssa]

Overall I'm fine with the changes.  On my DK I rarely use the gargoyle anyways, and I don't have the 1-h or 2-h damage talent so I can still dual wield.

More pet stuff and no ammo makes me happy for my hunter.  I don't care about the rest of the changes because I play it for my pets.  How I throw arrows out doesn't concern me besides the hassle of restocking, which meant I tended to wade into melee to conserve ammo anyways.

[Xanthippe]

I'd reccommend finding another class, since I know you love Pvping too much to just go PvE and farm all day. Which seems to be all hunters are good at anymore.

You're right about that - I've done very little pvp since WOTLK because it seems just completely broken for hunters - although from complaints I've heard, many people say it's broken.  Maybe I should take a WoW break instead of rerolling yet another alt (I'm not crazy about playing either my shadow priest or warlock in pvp either either, after seeing the bursty damage the plate wearers are doing).   

I really don't get the Ghostcrawler love - that guy should not be posting publicly, given some of the dumb things he's said.  Why can't Blizz hire a real community manager to handle his shit?

[WindupAtheist]

Blessing of Kings will be baseline? Neat, I need to figure out where I'm putting those 5 talent points.

Spiritual Focus maybe? Being able to squeeze off a heal while taking hits seems handy, especially since I'm usually running solo or with one other person who can't heal at all.

[Venkman]

Jeezus guys, I was freakin' kidding when I said "I fully expect them to tap into my "utility" again with better regen summonables". And then I read Part III (thanks Gobbeldygook). First damned line:

• This talent has been removed and replaced with a new talent that grants Replenishment (similar to Shadow priests).

To hell with utility. I kill stuff before they get me. One dimensionality with big numbers. I don't need more. Except numbers of course. 

[bhodi]

Don't forget the mana regen:

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

    * Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
    * To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
    * The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
    * Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
    * In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
    * We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
    * We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
    * These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

All I can tell is that it'll make it even MORE advantageous to stack int on priests than it already is.

[Venkman]

Right. That's why I made the quip earlier. It really seems like they want to make mana regen a minigame when all I want is to burn the forest down  Even if it means sitting between rounds and managing consumables.