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

Update: This little picture on the left is Titan’s Grip from WoW: Trading Card Game. Hint hint?

I was wondering for a while if I should write this post since it’s not official info, but considering that this information flows all around the internet, I think I’m cool with it. I’m not going to post source of that information, but it’s not hard to find :P. I used to be quite skeptic about so-called leaks, until some time ago when we had some leaked information about patch 2.4 (I think it was) that turned out to be, partially, real. So yeah, all of that is pretty early stage of development and will probably change few times, but overall the ideas are here.

Before I start talking about 51 pointers and other new talents, I’d like to cover what is apparently changed, and there is quite a lot of changes. First of all - holy jeebus protection! I remember posting after patch 2.0 and before TBC about protection being offspec unfriendly and how everyone and his dog will be arms/fury as it used to be on 60. Well, it looks like it finally got to the devs, protection 0-21 looks really really sexy. I’m not going to copy-paste the notes from the leak (again, if you want the source, it’s not hard to find at all *cough* wikidot *cough* ok… where were I…), but I’ll instead try to list them in a more compiled way to fit them all here. So the changes to prot as far as I embrace them are:

• Bloodrage changed: now gives 25/50% more rage on bloodrage.
• Defiance changed to Incite, now gives 5/10/15% increased critical chance on heroic strike, cleave and thunderclap, swapped places to tier 2 instead of toughness, the extra 15% threat is now built into def stance without any talents.
• Anticipation changed to 1/2/3/4/5% extra dodge, swapped to tier 2 instead of shield specialization.
• Last Stand cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (!!!)
• Improved Shield Block now two-pointer reducing cooldown of shield block by 5/10 seconds, there are more Shield Block changes, but that’s not something I want to talk about (PvE lawl!)
• Improved Disarm - reduce the cooldown of disarm by 5/10/15 seconds and increase damage done on disarmed target by 4/7/10%!
• Concussion Blow - cooldown reduced to 30 seconds, now also deals 25% attack power as damage and generates ‘high threat’.

What’s also worth to highlight is that Shield Bash is supposed to deal 20% attack power as damage and Shield Slam is now a trainable ability (replaced with some boring PvE ability - ding! - we just got a trainable offensive dispell)! Overall those changes makes me feel happy in the pants, even if I won’t get as high as 21 in prot, I might pump 18 points into it, having on-demand 10% damage boost against nuked target for your whole team on arena can redefine the way warriors work in 5v5, add last stand on 2 minutes cooldown as a counter to flash nukes and we are home. Trainable Shield Slam and Shield Bash dealing damage can be a good counter for disarms while not having weapon mastery, got disarmed when finishing someone? Shield Slam fucker while screaming THIS IS SPAR… well, you get the idea.

Next on the list - Fury changes… Read the rest of this entry »

Terhix