World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Here is the raid buff / debuff design as it stands today. I did not include Hunter pets or resistance auras. This is not set in stone.

Agility and Strength -- Death Knight, Shaman, Warrior
Armor -- Shaman, Paladin
10% AP -- Marksmanship Hunter, Enhancement Shaman, Blood Death Knight, Paladin
Burst Haste -- Shaman, Mage
3% Damage -- Beast Mastery Hunter, Arcane Mage, Retribution Paladin
Health -- Warlock (probably Destruction), Warrior, Priest
Mana Pool -- Mage, Warlock (probably Affliction)
Mana Regen -- Paladin, Shaman, Warlock (probably Affliction)
Replenishment -- Shadow Priest, Frost Mage, Survival Hunter, Destruction Warlock, Retribution Paladin
5% Crit -- Fury Warrior, Feral Druid, Subtlety Rogue, Elemental Shaman
20% Melee Attack Speed -- Shaman, Frost Death Knight, Retribution Paladin, Survival Hunter
5% Spell Haste -- Shaman, Balance Druid, Shadow Priest, Destro Warlock
6% Spell Power -- Mage, Shaman
10% Spell Power -- Elemental Shaman, Demonology Warlock, Fire Mage
5% Stats -- Paladin, Druid

12% Armor Debuff -- Warrior, Rogue, Druid, Hunter
10% Physical Damage Debuff -- Warrior, Druid (probably bear), Protection Paladin, Warlock, Blood Death Knight
30% Bleed Damage Debuff -- Arms Warrior, Feral Druid, Subtlety Rogue
30% Cast Speed Slow -- Warlock, Rogue, Arcane Mage
5% Spell Crit Chance Taken -- Fire Mage, Warlock (probably Demonology), Mage (possibly Frost)
25% Healing Taken -- Arms Warrior, Fury Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Frost Mage, Shadow Priest
10% Melee Attack Speed Debuff -- Warrior, Death Knight, Feral Druid, Protection Paladin
4% Physical Vulnerability -- Arms Warrior, Combat Rogue, Frost Death Knight
8% Spell Damage Taken -- Warlock, Unholy Death Knight, Balance Druid, Assassination Rogue

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Class Development Status
I'd say that at this point in time, the trees that are farthest along are mage, rogue, shaman and warrior. Paladin would be close except that things have changed so much that we still have to move talents around quite a bit. (Source)

DPS Classes Overhaul
Sure, and Fury is the kind of tree that needs a lot of adjustment because so many of the talents are "you do more damage" of various kinds (and there are still some we haven't been able to prune quite yet). But I've also seen a lot of posts where say a Shadow priest or Feral druid imagines they are getting a paladin-level overhaul with half of their spells new. Neither the Shadow or Feral trees are done yet, but the bones are there. You'll see talent slide around or maybe one or two new ones added, but they aren't getting new resources (unless you call the orbs a resource), and we aren't removing say Lacerate or Mind Flay. (Source)

Raid Buff Costs
The thing is, Rampage is a sizeable dps increase for 1 talent point. If all you ever do is raid and you know you'll always have another version, then I guess you're safer skipping it. If you ever solo or run 5-player dungeons, it's a nice benefit to have. If you have the luxury of spending your dual-spec on your solo Fury build, then again, Rampage might be a luxury. This is one of the reasons though that we are hesitant to offer more specs. At one talent point, Rampage should be a no brainer. If it cost 2 or 3 points for a buff someone else might bring, then I could see skipping it in a raid.

Likewise, if like the Frost mage, every Survival hunter, Ret paladin etc. decides that someone else will bring Replenishment, then nobody will have it.

Talent builds are supposed to be about evaluating the pros and cons of every talent. If you can quickly tailor your talent build to the other folks you are playing with, then you are just avoiding the cons. Situational talents can be skipped until you're in the situation that needs them. Dual spec was conceived so that players could tank or dps or raid and PvP, not so that you could skip over situational talents and yet still be able to use them as needed. For all the good that dual-spec has done, it has done some harm too. (Source)

Vengeance
Think of Vengeance like the way Tricks of the Trade works on live. It isn't the silver bullet that is supposed to solve all your threat problems. It's there to make sure that other classes don't outscale you as you keep piling on Stamina and they keep piling on damage.

Your normal threat rotation should be sufficient to keep aggro in most situations. Vengeance falling off periodically shouldn't be a big deal. Offtanks without Vengeance shouldn't be a big deal. We want you so still care, insofar as tanks ever care, about the damage you're doing. Vengeance is a cushion, not the solution to threat management. (Source)

Tanks and DPS Talents
It is particularly a challenge with tanks once they are ready to sub-spec into other trees. A Prot warrior for instance looks at the Arms and Fury tree and sees all these dps talents, and assumes he has to get all of those to hold threat. Yet, we can't very well make the top two tiers of Arms and Fury with no dps talents. Hopefully the way it will work out is that tanks will need "some" dps and can decide whether to get those talents in Arms, Fury and Prot, but won't feel the need to get them all.

There are some tanks who get some things "for free" while others need to talent into it. As long as the end result is similar it should feel okay. Part of what we are dealing with is all these brand new talents or old favorites that have changed a lot. You don't have the years fo experience and theorycrafting to fall back on so you don't know (yet) if say Thunderstruck is mandatory (it shouldn't be).

There will be some amount of dps talents in all trees. Some players will call any dps talent that doesn't require them to click something "passive and boring" but we also think there is a limit to the number of procs, stacking buffs, and using base spells in unusual ways that a player can manage. We'll have some of those talents for sure, but not 20 of them per tree. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Death Knight Rotations
One thing I'll throw out there is we're definitely trying to keep the feel of Unholy with a more predictable rotation and Frost with more of a priority system, since what ability to use next can't always be guessed in advance. DKs seem to like those play styles for the two trees respectively. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Hunter Redesign?
No, hunters are not undergoing any kind of massive redesign. We have spent our efforts lately on trying to make sure focus works as intended in both aspects and at low and high level. We're not there yet. We'll work on the talent trees a little more when we feel like focus is where we want it to be, since that will affect the talent design. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Power as Protection
It's entirely possible there isn't enough Holy Power to go around for Prot yet. We want you to be able to consider things like Inquisition and Word of Glory. Remember too that it's only 15% block. If it falls down from time to time, you're unlikely to drop dead. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Raging Blow / Fury in the Blood
Raging Blow -- We want this to be an ability that can't be used 100% of the time. We don't want Fury to have very static (and boring) rotations. We're going to try to keep Fury enraged a lot without it being 100% up time (somehwere in the 75% range sounds better). As such, we're not crazy about a design that lets you hit Raging Blow whenever you want. It just waters down the ability. (In fact, we feel the same way about Execute and are considering redesigning Sudden Death for Arms). We think we can make Fury's use of enrage predictable enough without being totally under player control that your dps won't fluctuate wildly from fight to fight.

Fury in the Blood -- I think a little bit of the "we won't be able to use our utility abilities correctly" is a little overblown. For starters, you don't need to use Bloodrage and Berseker Rage all that much. Fury has a lot of other ways to generate rage, and fears just aren't super common in PvE and you have other ways to break them in PvP. In those situations where they do come up, we think it's an interesting choice. Is the boss going to fear? Maybe you want to save your Berserker Rage for a few seconds and use it then. There are going to be very, very few fights where it's a true dps loss to delay or save your Berserker Rage for the right time. Frankly, we'd rather have encounters feel more different like this, where abilities are more valuable or have to be used differently sometimes. I compare it to Arcane's mana gem talent. Sometimes you want to use the gems for mana and sometimes spellpower and sometimes both. That makes the decision on when to use the gem deeper than just "on cooldown." (Source)

Now all of that is really just an endorsement of Raging Blow, not Fury in the Blood. In fact, with Raging Blow being the primary reason to stay enraged, we're just not sure we also need the bonus damage from the Fury in the Blood abilities. With say Enrage and Death Wish providing the enrage sometimes, you should have to fall back on Bloodrage and Berserker Rage less often, which should let you save them for emergencies more often (but not always, as I said above).

In short, we like Raging Blow, but not Fury in the Blood and will likely redesign the latter. (Source)

Intended use of Bloodrage
If you have to pop Bloodrage on cooldown for rage, then we've failed. It's there for emergencies, not as the primary way you gain rage. Hitting things is the primary way you gain rage.

Just because rage won't always be unlimited doesn't mean that it will go to always being limited either. If that was the case then we wouldn't need abilities like Heroic Strike or Inner Rage. (Source)

Rather than derail threads on individual classes or specializations, I thought I would address some common questions or misperceptions in this one thread.

We don't consider "bloat" a bad word. Players typically say that when there are more talents than they can possibly get. That's the whole idea. When you run out of interesting talents, then that's when we think we have a problem.

Related, if we do our jobs right, you are going to run out of dps talents (or healing talents if you're a healer, or mitigation talents if you're a tank). We don't want every talent to feel mandatory since you are prohibited from getting them all. We want you to have choices.

We don't consider every talent that doesn't directly lead to higher dps to be a "PvP talent." Survivability is a big deal in Cataclysm. In that vein, talents that keep you alive (or help healers conserve mana) are indirectly dps talents.

Related, many trees lost a lot of true PvP talents, such as dispel resistance or mechanic duration reductions. These are the kind of talents I describe as "arms races," where you need a counter to the ability someone else is using to try to counter you. We'd rather reel the whole thing in a little and make things like crowd control or dispels as powerful or as weak as they need to be baseline rather than assuming you have talents that make them less powerful.

We are providing some damage talents for healers. For the most part, those are optional talents for leveling, soloing, PvP or times in dungeons or raids when you don't need to heal.

Likewise, we don't assume tanks need to pick up every single dps talent in order to generate sufficient threat. You'll likely need some threat talents, but since you're probably dipping into a dps tree to get some of those, you're going to find way more than you can afford.

In most cases, raid buff talents are cheap and often have selfish bonuses. If they lack a selfish bonus, it's because we consider the talent so compelling that you'd probably want it when solo anyway. We see a lot of "I'll skip that talent, because someone else will bring that buff," but obviously that logic starts to fail when everyone comes to that conclusion. Also make sure you're familiar with how some of the buffs and debuffs have changed for Cataclysm. We are trying to make it even easier to get the big ones, especially for 10-player raids.

We aren't designing PvP vs. PvE trees. Ultimately, we consider a talent specialization to be a stylistic choice. However, given the challenges of nailing both PvP and PvE balance, as a consolation prize it's nice when at least there are no dead trees. If Frost and Arms weren't raiding juggernauts, at least they did have a place in the game in Lich King. But Cataclysm represents an opportunity to try again, so we hope to see Arms and Frost raiding, and Fury and Fire in PvP.

We aren't overhauling every single class. We are changing paladins quite a bit, and the resource systems for hunters and warlocks and Balance druids have changed. I get the sense some of you are waiting for that magical build in which half of your talents have been scrapped in favor of new ones, and in many cases, those changes just aren't coming. That's not to say we're done with any tree.

We haven't been super concerned about numbers yet, and we aren't at all concerned about glyphs yet. It's helpful if you note abilities that seem to have lost a lot of damage compared to live, just so we can make sure it's intentional (as it is for many AE abilities). If you think you won't use some core spell just because it doesn't hit or heal for enough yet, then it's fine to bring that up, but you can also assume that the numbers just aren't quite right on it yet. Of course this also means that you may feel underpowered (or rarely overpowered, though players almost always feel underpowered) compared to someone else. This does not mean you're doomed in Cataclysm or that you need to SCREAM REAL LOUD to make sure the developers don't overlook it. Numbers are much easier to adjust once we're happy with the basic mechanics.

We've gotten a ton of great feedback already, and I want to personally thank you for that. We make changes every day that are the direct result of the feedback we receive, and that certainly includes this forum, the live forums, and many of the great websites out there were players discuss World of Warcraft design.

I hate to go all forum moderator on you guys, but we've seen a recent downward spiral in the quality of some of these threads and posts here on the beta forum.

Story time: I started posting heavily in the Lich King beta forums. It was a great experience and lot of players enjoyed the opportunity to be able to have intelligent conversations directly with the developers. I've heard over and over ever since then what a positive experience that was for a lot of players. It's for that reason that I am going to be fiercely protective of the quality of posts here in the Class Discussion forum.

If you see a locked thread, chances are we thought it crossed the line. If you keep making the kinds of threads that get locked, then you'll be removed from the beta and we will replace you with someone who can provide intelligent feedback. Sorry to sound like a jerk -- I hate making these kinds of posts. But we want participating in the beta to be a positive experience.

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Shield of Righteousness removed from Beta
We have temporarily disabled Shield of Righteousness.

We're working on the basic Prot rotations right now, and with Shield of Righteousness in addition to Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecrate, Avenger's Shield and Holy Wrath, there was just a lot going on. Shield seemed like the least interesting of those abilities -- really Shield and Hammer just seem to be single-target and multitarget versions of the same ability, especially without block scaling. Shield also felt like a duplicate of Shield Slam, which doesn't help in trying to differentiate the two Prot trees. Frankly, we'd rather make Avenger's Shield and Hammer of the Righteous cooler than they are today.

It's too early to call this a permanent change. We still have a lot to consider, such as the damage of Hammer vs. Shield, how different we want the AE vs. single-target Prot attacks to be, and how much Holy Power considerations occupy a Prot paladin.

If we keep Shield of Righteousness, we need to figure out its role relative to Hammer. We don't want it to be just swap one button for another for AE fights, and we don't want you to have to use both on cooldown since we are giving Prot paladins more things to manage in Cataclysm. (Source)

Paladin Gameplay
As far as the paladin changes go, we have made no secret that we haven't happy with the paladin gameplay on live, of all three trees, and the class was headed for a pretty radical redesign. There can be very few sacred cows as part of that process or we're not going to have the design space we need to fix the problems.

The current Cataclysm rotation is far from static and was in fact so frenetic that we had to scale back on some of the random procs and Holy Power generation or paladins were never going to have the bandwidth to do things like position the boss. It was far away the most complex tank rotation, and that's not what we were going for.

We're trying a lot of new ideas and it's going to take some iteration before we're happy with them. The current snapshot you are getting in beta is just a snapshot -- it's whatever the data happened to look like at the time when we made a build. (Source)

Righteous Fury / Threat
We recently made a change, that I suspect you don't have yet, to make Righteous Fury improve all threat and not just Holy threat. It's also possible attacks like Judgement, Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous just don't hit hard enough yet. You lost a lot of passive Strength and damage in the talent trees and we haven't baked all of that back in yet. (Source)