World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Items
Cataclysm Gear much more powerful than WotLK's
Since we're only raising the level cap to 85 in Cataclysm, one of the goals is to pack as much content and gameplay as possible into the new 78-85 zones and dungeons. We don't want the leveling experience from 80-85 to feel as if it's only half of the content we've provided in the last two expansions. So, with that comes more substantial scaling of items and character power with each level gained. A level-82 character should feel significantly more powerful than a level-80 character, for example. There are some epic and legendary items from Wrath of the Lich King raid content which may take a while to replace, but chances are most of your gear will be replaced by the time you start running level-85 normal 5-player dungeons.

The first rule of thumb, as usual, is that you'll probably be focused on the stats most important to your class. If you're, say, an Unholy death knight, you probably won't be replacing items until the strength on the new gear outweighs the strength on what is currently equipped, even with gems and enchants considered. By the time this occurs you'll also likely be incorporating the benefits of Mastery rating.

[...] The concept is very much the same as the previous two expansions. We expect players leveling new characters in BoA gear, questing greens and maybe even some dungeon blues to be able to head into either of the first two Cataclysm zones at level 78 and do just fine. If you're wearing mostly quest-reward items, you can expect to replace them very quickly in Vashj'ir or Mount Hyjal. (Source)

WotLK to Cataclysm Spellpower Conversion
We're trying to keep everyone at about the same power level at 80. We want your Fireballs and Flash Heals to show about the same numbers before and after the conversion.

Now as soon as you gain a level from 80 to 81 all bets are off and numbers are going to start changing dramatically. (Source)

Beta Testing
Guild Achievements / Guild Leveling
Guild Achievements are planned for Cataclysm as well as the Guild Leveling feature (more on that to come). These systems are not yet implemented in the beta. (Source)

Deepholm / Beta Level Cap
This build of beta does not have Deepholm available for testing. It has the same zones you've been testing with a lot of bug fixes, polish and new bugs.

Deepholm + level cap + new dungeons soon... (Source)

Worgens - Customizing the Human Form
You might not be able to customize your human separately from your worgen, but you will at least be able to see both at the same time so you won't be surprised when you zone in. We don't want anyone to have to keep creating and deleting worgen to get the look they want. (Source)

Raids & Dungeons
Cataclysm Raid Buffs and Debuffs
Check the original post for more details.

Dungeon Keys
Yep, we're removing the dungeon keys and the need for them. Thanks for finding a couple places I missed. We're not in a rush to remove the keyring, quest team still occasionally uses it and the Burning Crusade Heroic unlock items are there as well for now. (Source)

Classes
Talent Trees Changes
We are making some more dramatic changes to the existing talent trees (even the ones we have released publicly already) so you'll unfortunately need to wait a little longer to get a feel for the mage and other trees. (Source)

Hit % in Character Panel
We will at least show "hit needed for a target of your level AND hit needed for a target of your level +3." If we get fancy, we'll let you pick the target level through UI and examine all of your stats in that context. (Source)

Tanking Talents
We are keeping Toughness, because tanks like to improve their survivability and very consistent damage reduction is more desirable than procs. Anticipation and Deflection aren't going to survive the Cataclysm. /sniff

Threat in Cataclysm
On threat, one of the changes we're considering trying out is to have threat decay pretty rapidly. The idea is that a tank should never be able to get so far ahead on threat that they can AFK for the rest of the fight. It might sound like a nerf, but really the intent is to make sure that the tank's job is never done -- that what you do will remain important.

The tuning wouldn't be such that if you missed a couple of swings that the warlocks would pull aggro. The feeling would be more that you have to still make decisions with regard to threat generation throughout the fight.

Furthermore, we are exploring the threat generation of Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade being temporary. That way it would still be useful for initial pulls or when adds join the fray, but wouldn't be a crutch to keep tank threat consistently high throughout a fight. Tanks are already dependent on other classes for their survival -- we want threat generation to be primarily the tank's responsibility. (Don't take that to mean that dps classes won't have to watch their threat or use threat dumps -- it just means we don't want to have tanks relying on other classes to generate threat for the tank.) (Source)

Parry
We're also not happy with the new implementation of parry, where you take 50% damage from two swings. It sounded good on paper, but after testing it out we thought the second swing just feels goofy and confusing. Our plan is to revert parry back to 100% avoidance and remove the concept of swing speed increase for any creature (players could still do it). We would change the budget on parry to be exactly the same as dodge. We'd also like to add some more talent hooks that favor say parry over dodge for some classes -- stuff like "After a successful parry...." (Source)

Healing Model in Cataclysm
We've had many threads on this topic already, some with blue posts, so I feel like I'm starting to sound like the proverbial broken record here, but I'll give it a go one more time:

-- We want to add talents that are more than just +healing. You've got plenty of those.
-- There are opportunities for *every* healer to dps.
-- Opportunity 1. Leveling or soloing. Not every healer wants to use their dual spec on say Elemental or Shadow.
-- Opportunity 2. PvP. Good healers, especially priests in today's game, can contribute a lot of damage.
-- Opportunity 3. Dungeons. This is particularly true when the content is easy and you want to get through it quickly. Healing more doesn't make things go any faster. Dealing damage does.
-- Opportunity 4. Raids. No matter how challenging the content, there are moments when nobody is taking damage and you can spare the mana. Your choices are do nothing, tab out to YouTube, or maybe do a little damage.
-- If you are the kind of healer that never, ever, ever wants to do damage under any circumstances, then don't. You'll have choices to avoid anything dps-related.
-- I also don't think you'll be expected to dps. Your 2-3 dps talents aren't going to let you compete with a mage. There are very few fights balanced along such a razor's edge that your dps will contribute more than say what the rogue and lock could add if they just stepped it up a bit. Besides, in those really challenging fights, you probably are going to have to devote all of your GCDs and mana towards actual healing.

Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
DK Rotations with the new Rune System
Rotation-wise, imagine that say a Frost DK has a rotation similar to what you have today: Plague Strike, Icy Touch, Blood Strike, Blood Strike, Obliterate with Frost Strike using runic power. The difference will be the procs and other things to fill in the rune uses. For example, Frost will be generating a lot more runic power, so you might be able to work several Frost Strikes or Death Coils in among those Blood Strikes. You might also get runes to recharge for free, allowing you to get another Blood Strike, Icy Touch or perhaps even Howling Blast in there. At high level, abilities like Outbreak will let you skip the disease application abilities and go right to the big guns. (Source)

AE Tanking and Howling Blast
As far as tanking goes, with DnD, Blood Boil and Pestilence, we think DKs will be fine, particularly given that we expect to see less AE tanking in general. Remember, part of the reason we're going to a single DK tanking tree is so we can give tanks everything they need without having to make multiple versions of spells for every mechanic or niche.

We think Howling Blast has been a little marginalized for Frost of late and we're taking a look at giving in a larger presence. (Source)

Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Eclipse and Balance
Here are a few clarifications on Eclipse and Balance intent is general. As you probably guessed, part of what you're seeing is a work in progress.

On Eclipse -- Currently Eclipse has a 30 sec cooldown on its proc, so it may be beneficial sometimes to say proc Lunar, go almost halfway to Solar but then just go back and proc Lunar again depending on the situation. In an upcoming build you cannot proc Lunar unless you proc Solar, and visa versa.

Eclipse’s “predictability” -- A new talent is being added that if taken will make lunar/solar energy gain a little more random, so as to make Eclipse less predictable.

Haste caps and Nature’s Grace -- We’re addressing the haste situation in a few ways. We’re going to up the cast time of Wrath to 2.5, up from 2 sec base (so 2 sec after you get Starlight Wrath). This should help the clipping issues. In general, your haste and crit stats won’t be as inflated as they were in Wrath of the Lich King so it will be more unlikely for you to reach caps for those stats. However, we are also considering short term haste power gains to scale off of your existing haste values. What that means is that instead of just increasing your haste by 20%, it instead will increase the haste value on your paper doll (or rather, the sum of how much haste you have itemized) by a percentage. So the more haste you have, the stronger the effect of Nature’s Grace is.

Movement -- DPS issues with movement are addressed in Wrath of Cenarius. The gameplay is you spam Moonfire while moving, similar to how a Frost Mage may spam Ice Lance or a new Warlock may spam Fel Flame. If you proc Lunar eclipse while moving, this does amplify your damage done by WoC/Moonfire but of course isn’t easy or practical. Moonkins can also maintain their DoTs while moving.

Talent choices -- The new talent design philosophy is to reduce a lot of passive, “no brainer” talents in the tree. Most of these are “PvE” talents which are mostly passive damage modifiers. “Gameplay” talents (aka talents that have a visceral change of how you play your class) are always dubbed “PvP talents” at first, but often have emerging gameplay once players learn to use them. We think there will be plenty of situations where a persistent AE silence or a line of mushrooms creating a 75% snare have PvE usage. In LK beta, some Moonkins were upset that Typhoon had no PvE usage. Not all of these abilities increase dps against a solo, Patchwerk-style stationary boss, but we try not to have too many of those encounters.

A side effect of the new talent philosophy is that there will be less math decisions over “PvE bloat,” which will be disappointing for some high-end players who like crunching math. We’re sorry. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Aimed Shot Cast Time / Dead Zone in Cataclysm
It's not a "dead zone." It's a minimum range. I say that because many hunters use "dead zone" to refer to an old design quirk where there was a range at which neither range nor melee attacks would work. We haven't had a dead zone for some time.

If a melee is up in your stuff, you have a couple of choices. Choice one is to use your melee abilities. Choice two, which will probably work out better, is to get away from them and resume using ranged attacks. You have several defensive cooldowns you can use to gain distance or survive long enough to gain distance. Your third choice is to keep shooting even with someone attacking you in melee. By design that is supposed to be quite ineffectual.

In Cataclysm, hunters have some capacity to do damage while moving, but again that's not going to be a super effective way of dealing damage. It's a last resort.

[...] I meant trying to shoot while someone is in melee with you isn't going to work out well. We don't want a model where the hunter goes about his merry way while melee dudes are trying to melee him. (Source)

Looking for Dungeon "Unlock"
The vast majority of our dungeons must now be visited and their entrances explored before you can LFG for that dungeon. A few classic dungeons will always be available that are extremely hard to visit or are low level. Ragefire Chasm, Stormwind Stockade, Deadmines, and Wailing Caverns are automatically unlocked. (Source)

Hunter Changes
We wanted to share some our intent with some of the hunter changes, which will in turn help you give feedback.

Focus -- We'll be messing with ability costs for some time. Depending on your weapon, autoshot costs can be higher than "focus dump" abilities, which clearly won't work. We're working on a DPCT priority list that makes more sense. As far as regen goes though, we think the current rate is about right. We don't want the rotation to become erratic and we like the gameplay of building focus through shots. In situations where you just can't stand still, such as kiting, you can use the new Aspect of the Fox. We've tied the focus regen for using cast-time shots during Aspect of the Hawk, otherwise there would be no reason to be in anything but Fox. Focus is more of a combo between rage and energy, since you build it and use it up. The skill of playing a hunter involves keeping your focus high enough -- as it is somewhat random due to procs -- but use it before you overflow.

Shots -- Each hunter talent tree has a "signature" focus dump: Survival has Explosive Shot, Marks has Chimera Shot, and Beastmaster has Raccoon Shot... I mean Kill Command. These all have cooldowns, so if you are at 100 focus, use Kill Command and still have focus left over, you can use Arcane Shot next. This is why Explosive and Arcane no longer share cooldowns. Once you figure out which abilities to use for each spec, the number of abilities you need to manage should feel less daunting. For example, Marks would use Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Arimed Shot, Chimera Shot and Arcane Shot on a boss fight, and Serpent Sting gets refreshed automatically. Think less in terms of shot rotations and more in terms of prioritizations.

Pets -- We haven't done our design pass on them yet. The design is for them to no longer receive raid buff since they get complete scaling from the master (and we don't want them to double dip). Their abilities will be divided into 3 categories: basic focus dumps (e.g. Claw), specials (e.g. web), and exotic abilities for the BM exotic pets. Specials never cost focus and basics have short cooldowns but meaningful damage. All pets will do the same dps. We don't want "wolf or die" in Cataclysm (and before that it was cat). Each pet family will bring a unique raid buff, allowing hunters to be wildcards for when you are lacking something. The ease of swapping pets will facilitate this further.

Cobra Shot -- We're not happy with the damage yet. We want BM to basically not use Steady ever again. Marks may use Cobra in PvP situations where spell damage trumps physical damage.

Kill Command -- We like the Frenzy / Focus Fire mechanic, but are likely to make it it's own clicky and not tied to Kill Command. Kill Command itself will be the signature focus dump for BM. For other specs, it will be more situational, such as dealing damage to a target out of your (but not your pet) LoS. Marks also has the Resistance is Futile talent to give it some more use.

Aimed Shot -- We are returning this ability to be an opener once again, like Ravage or Ambush. In longer fights, Master Marskman can proc instant Aimed Shots, to keep the ability relevant.

AE damage -- The design is that you use Multi-Shot on 2+ targets, and Explosive Trap and Volley on 4+ targets.

Venoms -- The focus cost may be too high. However, don't expect to have to use these on every target. Part of separating Serpent Sting from the Venoms so that they could be more situational. Even Serpent Sting isn't necessary on every target, especially those that will die quickly. Instead 2-3 Steadies with an Arcane or Kill Shot should do the job. Hunters are used to using every ability on every target because there is no real resource cost with mana. Now priority and efficiency become important.

Ultimately, we think these changes will solve some of the problems the hunter class has had as well as making them more fun to play, or we wouldn't be going through so much re-design. (Source)

Mage (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Shatter
Shatter has been a lot of things. At the moment it is double crit chance vs. frozen targets for 1 point and triple crit chance vs. frozen for 2 points. I'll try to update some of the other concerns and make corrections when I get some time. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Critical Immunity on Holy Shield
The crit immunity is a permanent passive for spec'ing that deep into the tree. (Source)

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Rockbiter taunt effect
Shaman won't be a tanking class. The Rockbiter effect is for very situational uses, such as say an Enhancement shaman who wants to try and rescue a healer in a 5-player dungeon who has aggro. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Trolls and Dwarves Warlock
Trolls and dwarves can be warlocks. It's official. (Source)

Soul Burn
• PvE applications
Many of Soulburn’s effects are gameplay oriented, so they’re less desirable in situations where all you care about is your passive damage (like say a solo boss encounter). For those situations you will use Demon Soul (which may not be in your current build), which is more or less a short term damage percent power gain, depending on what pet you have. So often in boss encounter you may use your three shards on Demon Soul, and during dungeons, soloing, or PvP skirmishes you might use the different soul shard effects depending upon the situation (since you can replenish them easily through adds on trash etc via Drain Soul).

• UA Soulburn effect
This most likely won’t be implemented, because it conflicts too much with Fel Flame’s mechanic. Why burn a shard for amplifying the damage done from re-casting UA when you could just refresh it with the upfront damage from Fel Flame?

• Tooltips and education
Ideally, we'd like to educate players on Soulburn effects through quests. Listing the spells it effects in the main tooltip is also an option, our only concern is it just becoming a short novel. When you cast Soulburn, it should change the tooltip of spells it effects. In a future build it will also “highlight” the icon of your spells which it affects. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)
Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury
Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury are mutually exclusive. There is no need to have both talents in one build (I guess unless you just want to be prepared for any potential weapon drop).

Single-Minded Fury only applies when you are dual-wielding one-handed weapons. We will clean up the tooltip.

Fury and Enrage mechanics
We want enrage mechanics to be a bigger deal for Fury in general, so we think that covers Enrage. Blood Craze we changed to be triggered on taking damage rather than taking a crit to make it a more useful leveling talent. Not all of the talents are going to be of the variety "You hit harder" -- that's really the kind of thing we are trying to back off of. (Source)

Crit Immunity
The warrior crit immunity is on Imp Defensive Stance in the newest versions of the talent trees. (Source)

Intimidating Shout
We're also changing (probably) Intimidating Shout into a single-target, longish duration CC (basically taking off the fear from the secondary targets and increasing the duration to the Repentance level). (Source)

Thunder Clap
Thunder Clap is something we are experimenting with. It might be that it works with no cooldown if Shockwave hits hard enough for the emergency or burst threat. We also might end up changing it back. (Source)

Heroic Strike
Heroic Strike is something we're still not entirely happy with. The new design works technically, but it is still a little confusing (one of the things we wanted to avoid) and we are worried that warriors of all three trees will lose some of the visceral feel that warrior players liked about the class. Don't get me wrong -- replacing every white attack with a Heroic Strike was terrible gameplay, but being able to sneak more than one attack into a GCD could be fun too.

The new mechanic that we are trying now is Heroic Strike is still instant, but is off the GCD and with a short cooldown. The rage cost doesn't scale, but we can make it more expensive if it needs to be in order to adequately burn off rage. We are hoping the rage normalization and Inner Rare mechanics do a sufficient job on their own of keeping rage from ever getting infinite. We're still not fans of the next swing mechanic, so that isn't likely to return. It delays gratification, and ends up being really confusing because you lose the rage and damage that white swing would have caused etc. (It also causes a bug allowing dual-wield warriors to cheat their hit chance, but that's fixable in other ways.)

All of this makes us think that Heroic Strike isn't a good starting ability for warriors since teaching them to spam it is a bad thing. (Source)

Cleave
Cleave wouldn't necessarily need to match the Heroic Strike design. You could just replace say Devastate with Cleave when needed. Maul also doesn't need to use the exact same implementation. (Source)

Vigilance
One idea we like for Vigilance is for it to keep the protective aspect it has now, but instead of transferring threat to the tank, it gives them a chunk of Vengeance if the target takes damage. The nice thing about that is it turns into a great tool for an OT to use on the MT. (Source)