WotLK talent/ability speculation

[vor_lord]

There are some really interesting changes leaking out of the F&F alpha at this point. I'll try to summarize a few of the more game changing experiments that seem to be underway, to save folks caching up on the 120+ page WotLK elitist jerks thread.

First, as referenced here and in various other points in that thread, it looks like gear in WotLK may no longer have a separate +heal stat, at all.

Instead, gear would have straight up +dmg, at different values and item budget costs than it does today, and spell coefficients on damage and healing spells would be adjusted as needed.

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

Anyway, the gear changes will be interesting to watch as Blizz experiments. They are clearly looking for ways to make gear more widely useful, reduce sharding, etc. Certainly wouldn't hurt the holy priests to be able to turn around and smite the crap out of folks in PVP or when farming without changing their gear much.

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!).