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!).

[Delc]

In addition, reportedly +crit, +hit, and +haste has been changed so that there are not different versions for casters vs. melee. In other words, a paladin armor with +hit on it would both help his Righteous Defense hit (currently based on melee +hit) and his Judgement of Righteousness hit (currently based on spell hit).

That would be huge for shaman as well. It could finally make hybrid builds possible.

[Taelas]

It would also seem they're finally doing away with Crushing Blows.

[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.

[RTM]

I like the idea of loot streamlining, but I wonder about the removal of +heal. In order to keep people from hoarding TBC gear with copious amounts of +heal on it, Blizzard will have to go back through and remove it from all pre-WotLK gear (not unprecedented), thus forcing them to balance all pre-WotLK encounters for less +heal (fairly unprecedented). Or they will have to bump up the amount of healing pre-WotLK spells do. I suppose they could get away with bumping up just the lvl 60-70 TBC ranks of spells. Datamined info for lvl 70-80 spells shows a HUGE jump in the amount healed, so it looks like they have already taken into account the lack of dedicated +heal on gear.

Looking forward to seeing how it all works out.:)

[Taelas]

As I understand it, they are changing the coefficients healing spells have so they end up getting more out of less (though only on top ranks; seems they might be trying to affect downranking again).

[Ruvanal]

I like the idea of loot streamlining, but I wonder about the removal of +heal. In order to keep people from hoarding TBC gear with copious amounts of +heal on it, Blizzard will have to go back through and remove it from all pre-WotLK gear (not unprecedented), thus forcing them to balance all pre-WotLK encounters for less +heal (fairly unprecedented). Or they will have to bump up the amount of healing pre-WotLK spells do. I suppose they could get away with bumping up just the lvl 60-70 TBC ranks of spells. Datamined info for lvl 70-80 spells shows a HUGE jump in the amount healed, so it looks like they have already taken into account the lack of dedicated +heal on gear.

Looking forward to seeing how it all works out.:)

The easy way to stop the hoarding of the +heal gear is to drop the code that looks at that parameter and then only look at the +spell damage parameter of the gear.

[Lissa]

The easy way to stop the hoarding of the +heal gear is to drop the code that looks at that parameter and then only look at the +spell damage parameter of the gear.

That wouldn't work though. If you look at the damage numbers on some items, they are below those of equivalent level blue items for epic items (Shard of the Virtuous for example). Easier solution is just to take the amount of item budget spent on +heal and convert it directly to +damage, simple find and replace operation in the databases.

[oldmandennis]

In order to keep people from hoarding TBC gear with copious amounts of +heal on it, Blizzard will have to go back through and remove it from all pre-WotLK gear (not unprecedented), thus forcing them to balance all pre-WotLK encounters for less +heal (fairly unprecedented).

They will just leave the encounters unbalanced. It's not like normal 5 mans are tuned that tight anyways... so you can't do SV at 68? I don't think bliz will spend 1 min on that. After all they didn't bump Menexxa when they added stacking hots.

[Mordekhuul]

Latest alpha build contains Shaman and Rogue changes, it seems.

Some shaman info and a link to the wiki forum thread where more are being discussedsted.

Ancestral Awakening - Requires 40 Points - 3 points - When you critically heal with your healing wave or lesser healing wave, you summon an ancestral spirit to aid you, instantly healing the lowest target within 40yds for 20%/40%/60% of the amount healed.

51 pt resto talent:
Spirit Link:
372 Mana - 40 yd range
Instance Cast
You link the friendly target with two nearby targets, causing 50% of the damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. After 2200 damage, the link will sever.

51 pt enhancement talent
Feral Spirit:
372 Mana - 30 yd range
Instant Cast - 2 Minute cooldown
Summons 2 spirit wolves under the command of the shaman, lasting 30 seconds.

51 pt elemental talent
Thunder:
Instant - 45 second cooldown
You call down a bolt of lighting, energizing you and damaging nearby enemies within 10 yards. Restores 5% mana to you and deals 595 to 679 nature damage to all nearby enemies, knocking them back 200 yards.

51475 Summon Air Elemental Summons an Air Elemental to accompany the caster until dismissed.

51730 Earthliving Weapon Rank 1 Imbue the Shaman's weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by $51940$s2 and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additional $51940s1 over $51940d. Lasts 30 minutes.

http://wotlk.wikidot.com/forum/t-66798/51-...and-other-stuff

Supposedly there is a weapon imbue for elemental shaman as well.

To quote flyingtoastr form the EJ boards:

Yeah, now that Shamans have the two "big deals" for pallys (Illumination and Cleanse) I'm curious as to what Blizzard is going to do about pallys. And apparently my hope for a new version of Blessing of Sacrifice is being given to Shamans as well.

I am looking forward to the pally changes even more now.

He is referring to these changes when he says that:

Reading through more of the changes, apparently Elemental Focus is going to include Healing Wave and its Lesser version, which is HUGE, as it pretty much makes it Illumination for Shaman.

Cleanse Spirit - Requires Purification - 186 mana - 40 yd range - cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease, and 1 curse effect.

Fun stuff for shammies, and does make me wonder what they will do for paladins.

[Mordekhuul]

51724: Sap (Rank 4)
65 Energy
Melee Range
Requires Melee Weapon
Requires Stealth
Incapacitates the target for up to 45 sec. Must be stealthed. Only works on Humanoids, Beasts, Demons and Dragonkin that are not in combat. Any damage caused will revive the target. Only 1 target may be sapped at a time.

[Shamago]

51 pt elemental talent
Thunder:
Instant - 45 second cooldown
You call down a bolt of lighting, energizing you and damaging nearby enemies within 10 yards. Restores 5% mana to you and deals 595 to 679 nature damage to all nearby enemies, knocking them back 200 yards.

Shazam!

[Mordekhuul]

Shazam!

I do assume that the range is supposed to be 20 yards, not 200 =) Typo, I expect.

[Treesh]

Latest alpha build contains Shaman and Rogue changes, it seems.

Some shaman info and a link to the wiki forum thread where more are being discussedsted.

Ancestral Awakening - Requires 40 Points - 3 points - When you critically heal with your healing wave or lesser healing wave, you summon an ancestral spirit to aid you, instantly healing the lowest target within 40yds for 20%/40%/60% of the amount healed.

It seems very fitting for Mogo to be able to get other healers considering all the heal leading she's done. :)

[Taelas]

There's also a clarification of what will happen to +damage and +healing:

"Spellpower: 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."

Very interesting, IMO. Much better than what Kalgan said a few days ago.

[Mordekhuul]

There's also a clarification of what will happen to +damage and +healing:

"Spellpower: 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."

Very interesting, IMO. Much better than what Kalgan said a few days ago.

Yeah, I appreciated that clarification as well. It all seemed clear from the alpha leaks regarding no more +heal on gear, just +dmg, and changed coefficients, and then kalgan opened his mouth and made it all sound confusing again =)