WotLK talent/ability speculation

[Concillian]

You mean as a healing priest I would have to compete for healing gear with mages and warlocks? Interesting.

The current 1/3 of +heal contributing to spell dmg has already given this ability to healers. I think a good chunk of the motivation behind the experiments is to simplify things for Blizzard. Reducing sharding and simplifying gearing (think how much of your inventory is gear!).

I expect the largest motivation is to streamline the loot tables. If you look now you have things like elemental shaman and shadow priests weighting crit very, very differently. As a result you need different items to satisfy different classes, even if they could potentially use the same gear. So at some point the RNG gets you and you end up with multiple good items for one class and the other classes get shafted. This is with bosses generally having a 15-20% chance per item.

If you make goals more common, then you have fewer items on the drop table, maybe down to 25-33% per item, you end up with overall more opportunity even if the items are shared amongst more classes.

Overall the right direction to head, howeever I am dubious about their ability to get it all sorted out correctly. They actually did a fairly good job of giving Ret, Warriors and Enhancement similar golas and similar priorities, but they share some loot (esp. trinkets and jewelry) with hunters and rogues where there is some compromise between stats. Ferals I'm not sure, they're a little different than either.

But, you look on the caster side and you see values of crit that vary from close to 0.9 crit = 1 spell damage (destro warlocks / ele. shaman) all the way to like 0.4 crit = 1 spell damage (affliction / shadow) and everywhere in-between.

Then they just recently created the MP5 / Spirit divide amongst healers.

So it will be interesting to see how it all works out. It seems like they would have to break current content to make things work right that you could legitimately share loot well. I was thinking more along the lines of maybe making a couple tweaks along those lines, then having all dungeons do things similar to Sunwell with the sunmote turn-in to get a different version of the item to reduce loot table bloat.