Reading the not-so-official forums about WotLK alpha, I’ve jumped into two interesting topics - first dealing about Shield Block changes and second about the lack of +healing.

First things first - as I’ve wrote in my previous post, Shield Block (the ability) is getting changed, now increase the chance to block to 100% and damage blocked by 100%, works only on one block. It has 30 second cooldown, 20 talented. This is a huge change for tanking as shield block with two charges is today’s way of dealing with crushing blows, without it warriors are going to eat crushing blows just as everybody else.

Or are they? It seems that in current alpha build crushing blows are removed from the game. Death Knight, which is supposed to be a new class capable of tanking, can’t use shields, which means no shield blocks, which means DK would have to eat crushing blows just as feral druids, making it hard for DK to become anything more than an offtank. With crushing blows removed not only DKs and feral druids can sleep well, but it will be also possible to tank without any def gear at all, just get 200+ resilience (or how much will be required at 80 for 5%) to become crit immune. This will also make it much easier for non-prot specced warriors to tank.

Another thing that looks interesting is lack of pure healing gear. It seems that Blizzard is taking a turn after Warhammer and AoC, and tries to make healers a bit more universal - as Paul Barnett of Mythic says, nobody stays behind, everybody fights. This will make itemization much much simpler, there are still things that have to be solved, like the need of mp5, spirit and spell hit for different casters. Also, it doesn’t take an Einstein to realize such a change would have huge impact on arena PvP. Currently healers can be near to immortal as long as they have mana, maybe not that much in 5v5 where a right amount of CC is enough to nuke someone down, but having half hour fights against warrior/druid teams in 2v2 is not really my definition of having fun. If this goes live, DPS/healer vs DPS/healer in WotLK should be much shorter thanks to both healers having less healing and being better at assisting with dps. Survivability in arena should be more than just healing. Also, this will help with the headache of healers having to farm complete different sets when respeccing, not to mention solo farming / doing dailies and what not.

Whether those changes are just speculations, and if they make it into live we will have to see, but it’s more than interesting to see so heavy changes being discussed.

Terhix