Teh Alpha forums and upcoming changes

[iapetes]

Blue posts on the shaman alpha forums and elsewhere have some very
interesting things to say:

1) they're considering lowering the cost of lightning shield. this one
is boring.

2) They're toying with making a lot of abilities that were party wide
raid-wide like circle of healing (This was on the priest forum). This
includes warrior's shouts and totems etc.

3) procs and pots for druids, including WF totem

4) Enh's wep spec was changed for fists: now when you crit with a fist
wep, it reduces the cast time of your next spell by 20%, stacks up to
5 times.

[iapetes]

One reason they changed the fist spec, btw, was that 20% less armor
was a lot better than the other 2 wep things.

For other classes:

holy priests are intended to be among the strongest AoE healers, while
disc priests are meant to be among the best single target healers
along with paladins.

cripple was intended to be a sort of fear-replacement, sharing DRs
with fear and you weren't supposed to be able to fear one guy and
cripple another. But they've decided to scrap cripple. Might be
replaced with something similar to what haunt was before that got
scrapped.

DKs are meant to mitigate damage while tanking more through active
abilities to make up for not having a shield and so on, we may see
some changes to reflect that. Carving runes might be on their way out,
currently you're stuck with 2 of each, and they want to see how DKs
play before letting you choose runes. But there is concern with
balancing abilities around 1-2 rune costs and some DKs having 6 of one
type and spamming an ability.

They want to make holy paladins more mobile, and ret a lot stronger
for raiding, and uh i guess prot should be good at tanking (duh).

I think that covers most of it.

[iapetes]

oh right, the advantage of cripple was supposed to be using it on fear
immune targets.

[Solwolf]

I wonder why, assuming the fist weapon change goes in (I understand
the loss of -20% armor... that would make enhancement shaman fist-only
for raids basically), it seems Blizz is commited to making enhancement
an actual hybrid and not just a meleer (e.g., melee + spell damage
augmenting the melee) while making resto a pure, stand-back-and-heal
healer, and elemental a mostly pure stand-back-and-cast caster with
some offhealing tossed in.

[JC McCormick]

I don't think that melee'ing to gain an occasional instant cast spell necessarily hybridizes enhancement.  Elemental will still have the same base heals as Resto now, just fewer talents to improve it.  And Resto I imagine will function a lot like it does now - with slower DPS, that still hits like a truck.

I think the hybridization is going to be buffed for all 3 specs.  The Intelligence talents in Enhancement seem to just be there to reduce the amount of lame itemization problems for physical DPS mail.

[Drats]

You guys are forgetting lava blast. With the changes to int, hit, and
crit rating, we're going to be capable of doing a lot more spell
damage than we are right now. I the fist weapon buff will be nice for
using lava burst -> ED and or LB -> ED. Since twisting will be nerfed
(holding my breath on this one, it took them 3 years to lower the
totem gcd) we should have a lot more time to do things other than
cast. However, if the instant casts reset the swing timer it might not
be worth it :-/

Only time will tell....

On Jun 17, 8:48 pm, "JC McCormick" <esmev...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think that melee'ing to gain an occasional instant cast spell
> necessarily hybridizes enhancement. Elemental will still have the same base
> heals as Resto now, just fewer talents to improve it. And Resto I imagine
> will function a lot like it does now - with slower DPS, that still hits like
> a truck.
>
> I think the hybridization is going to be buffed for all 3 specs. The
> Intelligence talents in Enhancement seem to just be there to reduce the
> amount of lame itemization problems for physical DPS mail.
>