[OFFICIAL] MoP Beta Build Changes Discussion Thread

[Deleted]

How are you going to stack MW5 so quickly after you spend it to cast HR? Also, even if you are quick enough to restack MW5, how many LBs are you going to be able to instant cast to make Conductivity worthwhile as Enhance? 1? 2 maybe?

I need to spend a GCD to cast AG. I need to cast a spell for 2 seconds (without MW5) to cast HR. Then I need to continue casting lightning bolts afterwards to make this talent worth my time. Again, we're talking about an Enhancement Shaman here, a spec that is specialized towards using melee attacks to stack instant cast spell buffs. Not hard-casting lightning bolts.

---------- Post added 2012-05-02 at 11:30 AM ----------



I'm pretty sure I said that Conductivity would be a lot better if it procced off of ALL damage, not just LB. That would allow Enhancement to throw up a HR off of MW5, and then do what they do best, which is melee damage. The same sort of applies to Elemental Shaman. They could cast HR, and be free to cast Shocks, LvB, and Chain Lightning.

All damage would be too strong, you're Healing Rain would heal for (using live numbers) 20k HPS all on its own if you were in top end DS HC gear. Thats vastly too strong to have up the entire fight (possibly). But Lightning Bolt and shocks would be okay. Atleast for Elemental their Lightning Bolt has a cast time so there is over a global breaks between the heals even if those chose to just spam LB, if it came from all damage it would be too strong, and if it didn't include melee hits to stop that from healing hugely too then that wouldn't fix the issue of it being so much better for Ele than it is for Enhance and all it would do is give it a big buff. It needs to be used by abilities Enhance uses but Ele doesn't, maybe Lava Lash and Stormstrike but not Shocks (even though I said shocks before). Though I think putting it on LL might be too powerful also.

[Teriz]

They are pure healing. Stop being disingenuous. The only purpose to any of those three talents is to boost the healing you provide, they provide zero DPS benefit, and no utility. Pure healing.

You don't consider a healing spell that allows a DPS or Tanking spec to do 100% bonus healing off of Judgements to be a utility spell? Howabout a healing spell that gives you a 30 second HoT based off of Holy Power which Paladins of any spec generate?

And I said Sacred Shield was a healing-boosting shield. Don't pretend I said otherwise, anyone else can read my post and see that. It's still purely healing oriented.

You just called it a "pure healing spell" in the exact same post.

They are pure healing. Stop being disingenuous. The only purpose to any of those three talents is to boost the healing you provide, they provide zero DPS benefit, and no utility. Pure healing.

[Deleted]

You don't consider a healing spell that allows a DPS or Tanking spec to do 100% bonus healing off of Judgements to be a utility spell? Howabout a healing spell that gives you a 30 second HoT based off of Holy Power which Paladins of any spec generate?

You just called it a "pure healing spell" in the exact same post.

[/b]

Not if you don't consider allowing a DPS to put down a totem that heals for them, or put down a HR that makes their damage do healing, or use a global that makes their damage do healing a utility spell too. And the Holy Power HoT is a direct DPS loss because Ret can't then use that for Templars Verdict and Prot can't use it for [their active defense spell I forget its name].

As for him calling it pure healing is because ALL it does is heal. There is no damage involved. Shields still fit in the healing roll else you're saying a Disc priest isn't a healer. Dont try to twist peoples words. To even make full use of it you have to CAST heals onto the person, else all it does is a small damage absorb. Its like a weak Earth Shield, heals [absorbs] on hits and increases healing [Flash of Light] on the target its on.

[Teriz]

Not if you don't consider allowing a DPS to put down a totem that heals for them, or put down a HR that makes their damage do healing, or use a global that makes their damage do healing a utility spell too. And the Holy Power HoT is a direct DPS loss because Ret can't then use that for Templars Verdict and Prot can't use it for [their active defense spell I forget its name].

Please post where I said that the Shaman talents didn't provide utility...

As for him calling it pure healing is because ALL it does is heal. There is no damage involved. Shields still fit in the healing roll else you're saying a Disc priest isn't a healer. Dont try to twist peoples words. To even make full use of it you have to CAST heals onto the person, else all it does is a small damage absorb. Its like a weak Earth Shield, heals [absorbs] on hits and increases healing [Flash of Light] on the target its on.

So is Stone Bulwark Totem a "pure healing spell" as well? Sacred Shield doesn't heal you at all, it blocks damage primarily, and ENHANCES a heal secondarily. That is NOT a healing spell. Healing spells return HP, Shield spells SHIELD you.

[Deleted]

Please post where I said that the Shaman talents didn't provide utility...



So is Stone Bulwark Totem a "pure healing spell" as well?

You're saying that the Healing tier for paladins is somehow better for DPS than the Healing tier for Shaman, yet in no way do they benefit the DPS of a Ret paladin.

And yes, if you want to put a label on it like that SBT is a defensive talent that shields you, and shields are essentially heals (someone hits you for 50k and you have 100k health and 30k shield you still take 50k damage, they are like heals that increase you're health pool). I count Shields as healing, as do things like Recount, World of Logs and Raidbots ect ect, they do the same thing so yes SBT is a 'healing' talent.

[Teriz]

You're saying that the Healing tier for paladins is somehow better for DPS than the Healing tier for Shaman, yet in no way do they benefit the DPS of a Ret paladin.

The Paladin talents not only work alongside what all Paladins do during a standard rotation, but the standard effects are enhanced through the talents. Selfless Healer for example gets a 100% boost to Flash Heal's effectiveness and makes it instant cast via Judgements for example.

BTW, every Paladin spec gets a passive ability that enhances their judgements in some way. Protection Paladins for example get an ability that allows them to generate HP from their judgements. So if I'm a protection Paladin, I have some great choices in this tier. I could take selfless healer since I'm already doing Judgements anyway for HP and other talents. SH could possibly give me a strong Flash Heal if I need to heal while tanking a boss, soloing, or dumb enough to try PvP as a Prot spec. I could go Eternal Flame since my Judgements and other spells are granting HP, and you never know when I or an ally might need a 30 second HoT. Or I could go Sacred Shield, just for extra damage mitigation. Also if I have a Paladin healer, the Flash Heals from Selfless Healer could be insane.

That's what I'm talking about. A tier where I have plenty of choices that are determined by situation or what spec I am. It all comes down to my personal play style. You just can't say the same about HTT and Conductivity.

And yes, if you want to put a label on it like that SBT is a defensive talent that shields you, and shields are essentially heals (someone hits you for 50k and you have 100k health and 30k shield you still take 50k damage, they are like heals that increase you're health pool). I count Shields as healing, as do things like Recount, World of Logs and Raidbots ect ect, they do the same thing so yes SBT is a 'healing' talent.

Shields don't increase your health pool. They protect you. You can consider shields healing spells if you wish, but we both know that there's a big difference between Great Healing Wave and PW: Shield.

[Deleted]

[/COLOR]I also believe that some of the criticisms of Shaman talents as less "hybridy" than other classes hold some weight - look at Elemental Blast for example - it's only damage, whereas ALL of the T6 Priest talents do damage and healing, Chi Torpedo for Monks does both damage and healing, ALL of the T6 Paladin talents are capable of damage or healing. All of those make for interesting talents for healers of those classes. For Shaman however, our bonuses are limited to: 50% extra bonus healing on Unleashed Life (pretty boring), the ability to channel +20% healing while FE is active and +20% healing and +10% damage reduction while EE is active or some bonus haste/mastery/crit if we cast Elemental Blast. All of those are pretty boring for Resto, even if they do provide some nice bonuses.

Why can Elemental Blast not do damage AND healing, when Priest T6/Paladin T6 talents can?

Here's hoping there's going to be another pass on Shaman talents.

^^ Exactly my point, thats what makes our talents hybrid - damage AND healing, ours are one or the other.. Priests / Monks will be far in front, with Paladins continuing their niche as tank healers - Shaman and Druid will be far behind.

I've yet to see 1 talent for shaman that is unique and really out of the box thinking, they are all dull and things we needed as base line years ago.

[Deleted]

I've yet to see 1 talent for shaman that is unique and really out of the box thinking, they are all dull and things we needed as base line years ago.

Conductivity it entirely unique, totemic restoration is unique also, they're both innovative and gameplay altering, what more are you actually looking for in an ability?

You seem to misunderstand the whole concept of the new talent trees. Each tier has a theme, tier one is movement speed, whether reducging someone else or stopping our own from being reduced. Tier 4 is throughput, Tier 5 is bonus healing etc etc.

We do not need talents 'Baseline' as we are given a choice between three with similar effects, allowing for the smarter players to customise character abilities to suit a fight. I understand you want to have all abilities at once but that's foolish, can you think of a single encounter where you would benefit from having both windwalk totem and frozen power?

Things like the survivability tier I'm sure we'd all like to have access to all of them at the same time, but that's just not balanced or interesting. I cannot stress this point enough: The idea is that you pick the talent best suited to the scenario, not that you're given an 'I win' button.

[Deleted]

As long as I have the tools to do my part in my team's raiding then I'm happy, I heal alongside a Paladin and a Druid. I don't want carbon copy spells of the other classes, otherwise I'd play that class. I dropped my Paladin healer at the end of Wrath because I felt that Shaman were more fun, and still think that.

I'm very much looking forward to resto shaman in MoP.

[Mithgroth]

I have an innocent question about MoP Enhancement:

How many buttons we have?
It looks like we use almost all Elemental spells except Lava Burst, plus Enhancement spesific melee attacks. Two more buttons (Fire Nova and Chain Lightning) for AoE, plus totems. Finally, we can have 6 active abilities from talents and we have other utility spells like Bloodlust.

Also we'll need to spend more keys for totems individually since Call of Elements are going away.

This looks overwhelming and scary.

[Teriz]

Conductivity it entirely unique, totemic restoration is unique also, they're both innovative and gameplay altering, what more are you actually looking for in an ability?

You seem to misunderstand the whole concept of the new talent trees. Each tier has a theme, tier one is movement speed, whether reducging someone else or stopping our own from being reduced. Tier 4 is throughput, Tier 5 is bonus healing etc etc.

We do not need talents 'Baseline' as we are given a choice between three with similar effects, allowing for the smarter players to customise character abilities to suit a fight. I understand you want to have all abilities at once but that's foolish, can you think of a single encounter where you would benefit from having both windwalk totem and frozen power?

Things like the survivability tier I'm sure we'd all like to have access to all of them at the same time, but that's just not balanced or interesting. I cannot stress this point enough: The idea is that you pick the talent best suited to the scenario, not that you're given an 'I win' button.

I think you're missing his point. Why can't elemental blast also heal? Why isn't conductivity broken down based on spec? Why doesn't HTT have a damage component so that it is more enticing for dps to pick up? Why would an elemental or enhancement shaman ever pick up echo of elements? These are issues that blizzard really should address moving forward.

[Endus]

Priests and Monks - the rest by the wayside.. Endus I'd love you to quantify how priests have zero pure healing tiers and all their tiers offer a proper hybrid mesh of talents?

It's difficult to quantify, but it boils down to loose characterizations of the various classes. Shaman are, loosely-speaking, about enhancing and buffing their own abilities. That's where the weapon imbues, buffs (still more buffs than any other class, in MoP), elemental shields, and all that comes from. Priests are pure spellcasters. So, Priest talents tend to be "here's another spell with a new delivery" or "here's an improvement on a spell", and to make those useful to both healer specs and Shadow, they need to provide healing and DPS, especially because Shadow's long-term "thing" has been providing healing via DPS.

Shaman's new spells, on the other hand, focus more on boosting the Shaman's further performance. UF enhances how we can capitalize on UE. Primal Elementalist becomes more about buffing the Shaman than the elemental itself, practically. And Elemental Blast's big "thing" isn't the damage, it's the 8s buff. Even if it did healing as well as damage, the heals you tossed over the next 8s would do more additional healing from that buff than from the initial burst. I really think people focusing on the damage portion aren't seeing the most important factor to the ability. I don't think it providing a healing burst would be "bad", but it's not that big a deal, IMO. The spell is more like a supercharged variation of Unleash Elements; you don't use UE for the instant heal, you use it for the big enhancement to your next heal.

You don't consider a healing spell that allows a DPS or Tanking spec to do 100% bonus healing off of Judgements to be a utility spell? Howabout a healing spell that gives you a 30 second HoT based off of Holy Power which Paladins of any spec generate?

There you go, changing the terms of the discussion again.

There is "Healing", "DPS", and "Utility". These are clearly "Healing". By the definition of "utility" that you're trying to use, Lava Burst is "utility" to Elemental, because it's useful. It renders the term meaningless, because it covers everything, which is why nobody uses it that way.

[Deleted]

I think you're missing his point. Why can't elemental blast also heal? Why isn't conductivity broken down based on spec? Why doesn't HTT have a damage component so that it is more enticing for dps to pick up? Why would an elemental or enhancement shaman ever pick up echo of elements? These are issues that blizzard really should address moving forward.

1 - Because why does it need too? It gives you improved throughput afterwards so you can use it to 'preload' your healing for big heal phases instead

2 - Conductivity works for all 3 specs, its in a pure healing tier so it doesn't help DPS, that tier is designed to improve healing

3 - HTT doesn't have a damage component because its not a damage tier, its a healing tier. We don't need to be like priests, our counterparts have always been paladins and they have the same thing, a pure healing tier

4 - Are you seriously asking why a DPS would pick up Echo? Its amazing, doesn't devalue any stat by giving you excess haste (EM) and it supplies much better burst potential than Ancestral Swiftness does

5 - I see no issues, your just making them up because it doesn't fit how you want it to do be.

[Endus]

I think you're missing his point. Why can't elemental blast also heal? Why isn't conductivity broken down based on spec? Why doesn't HTT have a damage component so that it is more enticing for dps to pick up? Why would an elemental or enhancement shaman ever pick up echo of elements? These are issues that blizzard really should address moving forward.

Elemental Blast does boost healing.

Conductivity would be fine if it were tweaked a bit for Enhancement, but it's absolutely fine for Resto/Elemental.

HTT doesn't need a damage component because none of those spells in that tier have damage components, nor do they need them.

Echo of the Elements is a solid DPS boost and is automatic; it absolutely will get picked up by DPS Shaman. There is NO issue with this talent, and I know quite a few DPS Shaman who are eager to pick it up, I have no idea why you're suddenly dismissive of it.

[Blitond]

Another quick question about beta. Do weapon imbues still cost a GCD?

I gave up on the fantasy that elemental will get a defensive CD (outside t1 talent) in MoP, but if weapon imbues were off the GCD we could greatly benefit from the Unleashed Fury talent.

This talent would provide some great utility: 50% movement speed buff, 40% damage reduction, +50% heal, or the traditional damage (+25%). I can definitely see times where I would take the damage reduction or movement speed over the +25% damage.

I could see using macros to switch to (insert weapon imbue) then cast Unleash Weapon.

[Xanda]

Another quick question about beta. Do weapon imbues still cost a GCD?

I gave up on the fantasy that elemental will get a defensive CD (outside t1 talent) in MoP, but if weapon imbues were off the GCD we could greatly benefit from the Unleashed Fury talent.

This talent would provide some great utility: 50% movement speed buff, 40% damage reduction, +50% heal, or the traditional damage (+25%). I can definitely see times where I would take the damage reduction or movement speed over the +25% damage.

I could see using macros to switch to (insert weapon imbue) then cast Unleash Weapon.

They still cost a GCD.

[Cai]

Teriz, I have a completely serious question. Do you not like being a hybrid? Cause from your arguments I have been reading it sounds like you don't feel Dps Shaman should have to heal. The Healing Tier in our talents helps Ele/Enh heal a little more. I "Off-Heal" as Enh during progression runs or during Oh Shit moments and I am perfectly fine with it. If I didn't want to off heal I would reroll to a Pure(Mage/Hunter/Rogue/Lock) class. Having a Talent to help me with that really helps not only me but my raid.

On the other side of the coin the same principle applies. What if we had a tier in our talents that did nothing but increase dps? Would you be complaining that Resto is getting the short end of the stick because healer's shouldn't have to dps. When I do the Resto Shuffle I dps all the time, it maybe only 2-4k but that is still more dps going out.

[Teriz]

1 - Because why does it need too? It gives you improved throughput afterwards so you can use it to 'preload' your healing for big heal phases instead

Because as dps, you get the double benefit of a damage spell AND the 8 sec bonus. Resto gets no such benefit.

2 - Conductivity works for all 3 specs, its in a pure healing tier so it doesn't help DPS, that tier is designed to improve healing

Certainly all 3 specs can use the talent, but you're being dishonest in implying that an enhancement shaman can use the talent as well as a resto or even elemental could.

3 - HTT doesn't have a damage component because its not a damage tier, its a healing tier. We don't need to be like priests, our counterparts have always been paladins and they have the same thing, a pure healing tier

AG and Conductivity both have damage components. As does the healing abilities in paladin tier 3.

4 - Are you seriously asking why a DPS would pick up Echo? Its amazing, doesn't devalue any stat by giving you excess haste (EM) and it supplies much better burst potential than Ancestral Swiftness does.

Enhance doesn't cast spells often enough to make this talent worthwhile. Elemental's mastery makes this talent pointless.

5 - I see no issues, your just making them up because it doesn't fit how you want it to do be.

This coming from the same guy who thinks pw: shield and healing wave operate the same way?

[Noruk]

What i would like to see is a change in the tier 2 talents, make windwalk totem baseline and put instead of windwalk totem capacitor totem in this tier.
This would also kinda help with GW glyph issue. Since we got more utility for mobility.

And concerning elemental blast, I also think it would be nice to have choice wheter you want to use it as a heal with mastery/haste/crit increase or a burst dmg spell with mastery/crit/haste increase. Since I am almost certainly going to pic that one as elemental for pvp (it will do huge dmg), but certainly not in any situation as resto except maybe in 2v2 fo decent dmg on CD.

Also does anyone know if we will be able to use elementals in arena because that would make primal elementals quite good for 2v2 or 3v3.

[Radux]

AG and Conductivity both have damage components. As does the healing abilities in paladin tier 3.

AG: Hit the button and do dps. People receive healing.
Conductivity: Cast HR and do dps. People receive healing.
HTT: Hit the button and people receive healing. You can sit there and do nothing (since you're implying that using HTT = 0 dps) or you can continue to dps. The only difference between the talents is that HTT's healing isn't determined by your dps. I don't see a problem with that. It heals people no matter what you're doing.

Enhance doesn't cast spells often enough to make this talent worthwhile. Elemental's mastery makes this talent pointless.

If you follow the beta changes at all, you'd know a couple of things:
- Enhancement gets a ~30% proc chance. That means every 3 spells you cast (LB, FS, ES, Each Fire Nova that radiates, CL, any healing spell... whatever), you'll get a duplicate. That's powerful.
- How does Elemental's Mastery make this useless? You still have a ~7% chance to get a duplicate spell cast from either the main spell or the Mastery spell. It works exactly like DTR.

It's pure throughput.

If anything, it's a less desirable talent for Restoration since it could very well lead to a lot of overhealing (since the duplicate heal isn't a 'smart' heal like AA).