My buddies from Vigil and I talked to Kris Zierhut at the Community Discussion area earlier today and learned a lot of information. Lets get to it. Edit - He's actually a Senior Technical Game Designer. Brain is fried. Sorry. Chadd (The guy who wrote Rawr and was hired to help with sims) was there as well, and talked to us for another half our after Kris left. Cool guys. Chadd will be there tomorrow for a bit if you want to talk about theorycrafting/next expansions stuffs.
-Hit and Expertise removed. Hit and expertise soft caps are baseline for melee and ranged.
-Replaced with Amplitude (crit damage), Readiness (CD Reduction), and Multistrike. Also 'rare' secondaries such as Cleave and Movement Speed. The trinkets from this tier that have the same names were basically tests - the actual stats themselves wont necessarily be as OP.
-Vengeance changed to increase tanking abilties, rather than pure AP. He wants Tank DPS to be roughly 75% of a DPS' output.
-DoT snapshotting removed.
-Position requirement for abilities removed (sub rogues and ferals rejoice), Backstab removed entirely. However, there is still a 3% chance to be parried from the front so min/maxers will WANT to be behind. It just wont ruin your day anymore.
-Gear scaling is roughly 6% of what it currently is - the itemlevel of the gear is the same, but the stats on the gear are downsized.
-Smartheals are being dumbed down; Idea is to have target selection be a random subset of the damaged players rather than the most damaged players. This will result in a 'bell curve' of healing received where most players will receive enough heals from smart heals but a limited portion will not and will require additional triage.
-More dynamic trinkets - such as UVLS - are an idea he likes and wants to see more RNG-centered things that make the game more fun. On the other hand, he also likes trinkets with just base stats - such as +int +crit, nothing else. He likes all the current iterations and hopes to see them all through; On-Use, ICD, and RPPM.
-He agrees that warlocks are too OP (Affliction specifically ) and their skillcap is WAY too high with dot snapshotting. He wants to rip up the warlock changes (with the basic idea intact - i.e. the different secondary resources) and rebuild the class.
MORE TO COME GETTING FOOD WITH GUILD
Need to write down the ideas before i lose my brain.