Ghostcrawler Muses on Upcoming Class Changes

Mr. Crabby dropped a few bombs on the greater World of Warcraft community this morning. The man with pincers disclosed the current musings on the massive whiteboard the class developers use. Take a deep breath, there’s a lot to absorb.

Most of the PvE revelations are opinions that many players have already confirmed. Yes, numerous classes are considered to have “too low” DPS. Mages, shadow priests, masksman and beastmaster hunters and retribution paladins are all on the short list for single-target damage. On the flip side, Demonology locks, frost DKs and survival hunters have too much AE damage.

The grass is actually greener for me!

PvP generally seems to be working as intended. The developers are happy that healing prevention is no longer job number one and that the effectiveness of burst damage has been reduced thanks to the larger health pools. In effect, both changes allow the battles to last longer, offering a more strategic form of combat. A timely gank won’t always guarantee a handful of Honor Points anymore.

The lead decapod admitted that the team is unhappy with certain specs and classes ignoring statistics that should help them. For example, crit for is assassination rogues. The scuttle is going to “make a pass” at changing our opinions on those “secondary” stats. Perhaps the most maligned stat across the board is Mastery. For many specializations – combat rogues, retribution paladins – the new Mastery stat isn’t as powerful as it should be. Some Mastery abilities can easily be buffed to fix the problem, yet others are going to have to be reworked.

Click the Read More button to gander at the shortlist of hot points. Obviously, none of this is final. It’s just what’s highlighted on the board right now.

Some additional class-specific tweaks (keeping in mind this is not the full list):

• Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.
• Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don’t have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.
• We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it’s a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.
• For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.
• We’re making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.
• We’re buffing Wild Mushroom. It’s a cool spell that isn’t getting enough play.
• Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We’re also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.
• We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don’t account for too much mana savings.
• We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.
• Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.
• Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.
• We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.
• Censure will no longer break Repentance.
• As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.
• To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.
• We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.
• We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.
• We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.
• Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.
• For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.
• We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.
• We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we’ve seen more PvP.