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Upcoming Class Change Highlights - Part 1

This is part 1, there will obviously be more changes announced soon for the other classes.  As Ghostcrawler said yesterday, these are not all of the changes.

Quote from: Eyonix (Source)

We are planning a lot of exciting content for patch 3.1.0, and we are doing a three-part preview series on upcoming class changes. This is the first in the series: Priests, Rogues, and Shaman. Please keep in mind, that this list is not at all comprehensive, and subject to change.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

  • Hunger for Blood – instead of a self-buff, this ability can only be used when there is a bleed effect on the target. However, it has no stacks and grants a 15% damage bonus.
  • Adrenaline Rush – the cooldown on this ability has been lowered.
  • Lightning Reflexes – reduced to 3 ranks. In addition to 2/4/6% dodge, this talent now also grants 4/7/10% passive melee haste.
  • Killing Spree – while this ability is active, the rogue does 20% additional damage.
  • Savage Combat – now causes 2/4% physical damage done.
  • Mace Specialization – this talent now grants haste in addition to armor penetration.

Shaman (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

COMING SOON
Warlock
Druid
Hunter
Death Knight
Mage
Paladin
Warrior

The Role of the Priest

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

This is an experiment. :)

One of the things that has confused me a little are all of the posts from players who say they don't understand the role of the priest class. It is unclear to us why there is so much confusion about this particular class, which seems to us to be fairly straightforward.

We are often reluctant to lay out our design goals very clearly, because frankly some players tend to use those statements to attempt to lawyer us into changes ("I'm supposed to be the master of AE damage") or would rather argue about the design instead of providing feedback on how the class actually works.

Nevertheless, because players have asked for it so often and in the interest of trying to foster the discussion, here is what we think of as the role of the priest class.

The Role of the Priest

The priest is a caster class that uses Holy and Shadow magic. Priests can only wear cloth armor and have a limited selection of weapons, but do most of their damage and healing from range. They make up for their low armor with spells that offer protection and healing.

Discipline -- this is a healing tree that emphasizes survival and single-target healing. Discipline specializes in damage absorption and prevention rather than restoring health, although they are very capable in that department too.

Holy -- this is a healing tree that has a spell suited for every situation. Holy priests can heal groups, heal individuals, heal tanks, or do all three in a single encounter. They are better at group healing than Discipline priests, but don't have as many damage prevention capabilities.

Shadow -- this tree sacrifices healing for damage. Shadow priests can restore health and mana to their group while casting their spells. Like the Shadow damage of warlocks, Shadow priest damage tends towards drains and damage over time spells.

Blue Posts

The Game's Direction Q&A (Source)

What's with the need for "all specs being viable for everything"? I was perfectly fine with builds that were preferred for PvP and others for PvE, it was how a player was defined (like if they were a raider, or a PvPer). Not only that, now you have to balance every spec to each other (as if balancing wasn't hard enough).
Among other things, we thought it was shallow that every raider of a class had the same spec and every Gladiator of a class had the same spec. For dps classes, that also tended to lead to the PvE spec, the PvP spec and the pointless spec. For classes with very different roles per tree (like shamans) it doesn't make sense at all to have a PvP spec. So Resto shamans are only for PvP?

PvE gear vs. PvP gear. There's nothing that differentiates them besides 2 stats. Hit and resilience. When I switch over to my PvE gear, I lose a whopping 1k HP. 1k. That's barely anything. Why can't PvP gear and PvE gear be more specialized for those purposes so classes that aren't as reliant on resilience don't get a one-up on others like at the beginning of this season? Also, Naxx 25 raiding is so retard friendly that the best PvE 2 hander in the game is about as easy to get as one piece of savage while the Deadly weapons are almost unreachable.>
If you compare a PvE and PvP piece of the same item level, the PvP piece has more resilience and pays for it by having its other stats lower. This wasn't necessarily the case in BC when resilience was more of a free bonus stat.

The PvE gear is currently pretty easy to get, but we think that is actually a fine place to be after BC where anyone could get Arena "welfare" epics and raiding scared off a lot of people. The PvP gear in LK isn't all that hard to get either when you consider that you can spend badges or get lucky on Archavon. If we could do it over again, though, we probably would have started the Arena season earlier (or at least let some of the Honor gear be attainable) so that there wasn't so much high level PvE gear relative to PvP gear floating around.

The Ulduar gear, especially the better weapons, will be harder to get, just like the new season of gladiator gear will be harder to get.

Raids & Dungeons

Malygos Bugs Investigation (Source)

We're checking into the various issues noted here, including why his cone breath hits targets behind his centerpoint, issues with malygos deciding to attack in phase 2, and trying to make the defense bubble's protection work even if you enter the bubble in between the time a missile is launched and when it lands.

Feign Death not working on Malygos is intended (Source)

Feign death not working in actually intentional, but certainly not desired. It was causing a very nasty problem, and we've been trying to figure out a way to handle the particular boundary case without setting the creature flag that ignores feign death.

Sapphiron and Frost Resist (Source)

We've made no explicit changes to the encounter on the design side to change how the frost aura works. When Sapphiron enters combat, he casts a spell on himself that every 2 seconds casts the debuff players receive, which you see as "Frost Aura". That debuff is a 5 second duration damage over time effect that deals frost damage every second. The only difference between the 10 and 25 player versions of these spells is the amount of damage.

So if you were only getting damaged every 2 seconds previously in a 10 player raid, and still are only getting damaged every 2 seconds in a 25 player raid, there's some kind of odd bug going on that I'll have to track down.

Sapphiron Ice Block Bug (Source)

We're also trying to track down why Sapphiron decides to occasionally not cast all the Ice Blocks he should.

Sapphiron fixes aren't to "nerf" the encounter (Source)

Once we find out what he bug is and correct the problem, we'll adjust the numbers if needed to closely match the damage that players have been experiencing when WotLK shipped. We're not trying to adjust the difficulty of this fight, but we need to determine what's happening so this bug doesn't cause problems with future encounters.

Current State of Melee DPS (Source)

There is no such thing as a typical raid or even a typical encounter, so it is tricky to make blanket statements like "X always tops the meters."

Overall, we suspect that warriors are too high (largely on double-dipping effects of Deep Wounds), DKs may be too high, and rogues and possibly cats are too low. This should not be news to anyone who follows these forums.

Again, that depends enormously on your actual group. Players are often very quick to ignore differences in gear or skill when claiming their dps is too low.

We tend to balance around individual encounters though. There might be certain fights where we think say mages, hunters or shamans are too high depending on how that encounter plays out. I would not try and read too much into my statements above.

The meaning of "Pure DPS should top meters" (Source)

When we say "pure dps classes should generally top the meters" we mean "warlocks, hunters, mages and rogues."

However, when we say "generally top the meters" we are refering to players of flawless skill and perfect gear. For almost all raids composed of mortals, a very good player of any dps spec should be able to do the highest damage on an encounter. This was not the case in BC where we kept say Enhancement shamans or Retribution paladins much lower than the pure classes.

Dual Spec Info Coming Soon (Source)

This is still in the works and we will have more information on it for everyone before too much longer.

Death Knight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Make Unholy Blight the third disease instead of Ebon Plague? (Source)

Not all Unholy DKs pick up Unholy Blight though. One of the benefits of Ebon Plague is it just happens without having to spend that extra GCD. We'll get it fixed.

Plague Strike (Source)

We also agree that Plague Strike feels underwhelming. Part of the reason is that, unlike Icy Touch, it also has a pretty significant PvP effect in its ability to remove hots. We have some ideas to improve it though. We definitely don't want DKs to ever feel like the right way to play is to ignore one of their two main diseases. As some players have pointed out, there are a few reasons why that is the case.

Overall Class Changes (Source)

As a new class, I would expect to see a higher rate of change over time in the DK until they have caught up a little more with the 4+ year history of the other classes.

Hunter (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Explosive Shot Coefficient Hotfix (Source)

We made a hotfix recently to lower the coefficient of Explosive Shot. Sorry we didn't get a chance to announce the change ahead of time. We don't typically do patch notes for hotfixes so we don't have a system in place to always broadcast these before they happen.

We are in the process of making some changes to get damage done more in parity (in PvP and PvE). If there are other classes far ahead of you on the damage meters, chances are good they will see some nerfs to their damage soon too.

Overall, we are trying to make changes in a more timely manner so that players won't feel like they are stuck with a bug or other issue forever. We won't be able to get every issue fixed overnight, but it's a start.

Beast Mastery Fixes ETA (Source)

Soon. I can't tell you a date, but it won't be long.

Marksmanship versus Survival DPS Numbers (Source)

What I said before was that players tend to look at relative numbers while we look at absolute numbers. All the players saying "SV is not too high" justify that by saying "because I am not topping the meters." And in some cases, SV is topping the meters. :)

Pets and their uses (Source)

There is a trade-off between damage and utility. We specifically gave some hunter pets raid buff / debuff options in case your group, esp. a 5 or 10-player group, has trouble having access to that bonus. I have seen a lot of wasps out there lately.

But as I also said, more parity among pets is something we want to pursue. Currently most of the hunter discussions on the forums are about SV-MM-BM differences or PvP however.

Hunter 3.1 Changes (Source)

We hope to be able to announce some 3.1 changes soon.

Hunter Glyph Selection (Source)

We will be adding more glyphs over time, especially for newer abilities. We didn't want to add them all right away for fear that players would just assume the glyphed version of the spell was the way the spell worked rather than realizing what a benefit the glyph itself brought. If that makes sense.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Shadow Priest Damage (Source)

We think Shadow priest damage is good in PvE and PvP, minus a few annoying bugs. We think the problem is that Shadow priests just can't survive long enough to do damage. That is a combination of some classes doing too much damage, but also Shadow defenses being too weak.

Priests (or any class) will not be the "best" healer (Source)

I'm pretty sure "jack of all trades, master of none" is something the community came up with, not us. All I have ever said is you can't be "jack of all trades, master of all." You can't be "the best healer in the game." We have no problem if Disc priests can equal Holy paladins or if Holy priests can AE heal as well as Resto shamans. Priests just can't AE heal so well that Resto shamans become pointless. A group that takes all Holy priests for its healers should feel like it is missing out (though it should still be possible). I would say the same thing about every class in the game. :)

Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Hunger for Blood Change (Source)

The idea with Hunger for Blood is you will probably have bleeds available from other classes in a raid setting (and even if you didn't you can add them yourself). But in PvP it will require an extra step to really benefit from HfB and thus tone down Assassination burst damage a little.

There are more related changes, some sooner and some in 3.1. We didn't want to list every single change, just a sampling.

Killing Spree Change Clarification (Source)

Just imagine it is exactly like the current Killing Spree except that your dps goes up while Killing Spree is active.

Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Deep Wounds Hotfixed (Source)

We have been working on fixing the bugs with Deep Wounds so that we wouldn't have to just nerf it across the board. Some of those hotfixes may have gone in.

Fury in particular was doing too much damage on many encounters solely because of these bugs. We think Arms pve damage is probably too low, but we don't want to adjust that by having a buggy Deep Wounds. We also want to make sure prot warriors do not lose too much damage or threat.

Deep Wounds now only scales off pure weapon damage (Enrage, etc. no longer affect it) (Source)

This is the change we made: Number 2 will no longer happen. Instead Deep Wounds will just be a percentage of the damage calculated in number 1.

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