So this week I got the Battered Hilt and finished the quest line, but chose the wrong weapon at the end. I know, I’m so brilliant. So I submitted a GM ticket asking if the item could be exchanged for the right one. And here’s the response I got:
That made my week. And my guild is letting me tank now, so yay! I’ll have a real post later on next week – getting over a cold/sore throat right now.
The blues dropped some nice information on us about what to expect with gear changes, and one tidbit in particular really piqued my interest.
We're also updating quest rewards, trade skills, and loot drops to support better itemization for class builds that weren't widely available or used prior to The Burning Crusade (such as Balance druids).
That just makes my day. Seriously, I might level another druid or pick up on Frostleaf again to see how awesome it is to level as balance again. *incoming veteran tangent*
Back in MY day, leveling to 60 took more than an arm and a leg since I did it before they boosted exp gains after BC launched (Ice was level 56 or so when it was changed). Leveling as balance was horrible because we had very little leather casting gear, and what we did have…well, sucked. We had to wear cloth gear, and we LIKED IT. Moonkins had to waddle uphill, in the snow, both ways, for 15 yards to melee for their mana. /waves cane and grumbles
Back on topic, right now we have the typical stats that define types of gear. Melee versus caster, DPS versus heals and tanks, etc. Things are shaking up a bit in Cataclysm.
Melee DPS and druid tanks will share gear. This is nothing new, but it will have:
Will druids get the short end of the stick and wind up with very low mana pools? Or will there be no mana cost like GC hinted at in the past Druid Q&A? Only time will tell, but that’s the best guess I have.
Caster DPS gear will have its spellpower converted to intellect and stamina. It also won’t have Spirit, but you won’t need it…unless you’re a Moonkin.
Balance druid gear will still be shared with resto druids, but it will also:
The spirit change includes the removal of spirit buffs, so you don’t double your hit rating cap in a raid or something odd like that, which is nifty. Wonder if those buffs will be changed or just replaced with something that boosts intellect (woot mage’s Arcane Intellect) or agility/strength (woot DK’s Horn of Winter). This makes me question how buffs will or will not stack with each other, which makes my head spin. Guess we have to wait this one out until we get more of the Blue’s Clues. And no, I’m not talking about that fantastic toddler show :P
Okay, time to play “catch up” here since earlier this week there was a LOT of new Cata info spilling out all over the place but I didn’t have time to write much. Well now I do, and I’ve caught up on the nitty gritty parts of things that blues have given us. I’ll only be writing about what affects druids so this is more to-the-point than the blue post.
The most important changes involve stats and how some are going to be eliminated or condensed.
Stamina. We’ll see a lot more of it, just like with every expansion. Health pools will inflate to a new level like how we went from 3-5k average in Vanilla to a 7-9k average in BC, which was further inflated to a 15-20k average in WotLK. Not surprising news, but they said that plate-wearers will have a closer health pool to non-plate classes. Makes sense to me, and I would assume that tanks will have a health pool that’s head and shoulders above everyone else, with druids on top of that as usual. Yay for larger bear asses! Maybe they can notice us now.
Spirit. It’s only going to be on healing gear, and this weird, convoluted stat is going to be simplified in how it affects mana regen. We should still expect Moonkins to have it on their gear but it’ll have a special use so they won’t be stacking it for mana regen. Moonkin and trees will still share gear though, but we have to wait and see what’s definitely going to change mechanically with spirit.
Intellect. Casters rejoice! It’ll give a little less mana than usual but intellect will provide your spellpower as well since the raw stat for spellpower will be gone except for on weapons for the sake of telling a caster weapon from a melee one.
Haste. From the sounds of the blue post, this’ll do what it does now – let you do more things in a shorter amount of time (spellcasts, melee swings, etc). It does mention that haste will be more attractive to the melee critters, letting you “recover energy, runes, etc faster.” Perhaps kitties will be scampering for this come Cataclysm?
Armor. This is going the way of stamina so armor levels will be even across the board between armor classes, with maybe a slight difference between the types (plate won’t be the strongest by so much anymore). Overall armor levels won’t inflate as much as the last couple expansions, so I’m curious about this. Since plate tanks have beefy armor, but not as much as bears, how will they mitigate damage? Or will they have inflated armor levels compared to everyone else like they do now?
Resilience. It’ll be less convoluted and only reduce normal damage and critical hit damage taken by players. No more freaky mana-drain or crit chance stuff anymore. Maybe I’ll PvP in this expansion now that the main stat is easy to understand. Or maybe I’ll still suck at it regardless of gear. We’ll see :P
Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating. They will all work mostly the same as they do now and will still appear on gear but will scale up like always. You’ll need more hit rating to cap the Cataclysm bosses, more expertise to cap the bosses, etc. Same thing, nothing new to those of us who went through an expansion transition before.
Attack Power? No more AP on items. You’ll get your AP from Agility or Stamina, usually at the 2:1 ratio depending on which stat a class prefers, much like we do now. In turn Agility will provide a little less crit than it does now (to sort of mimic how intellect will provide less mana).
Spell Power? No more SP on items except for weapons, both to distinguish caster weapons from other weapons, but to let the devs make the weapons stronger for casters. How they’ll do this, I have no idea.
Armor Penetration? No more ArPen on items. You’ll get this from talents, so the stat is still in the game, just sort of in the background.
MP5, Defense, Spell Ranks, and Weapon Skill? These just plain ol’ won’t exist anymore. All tanks will be uncrittable via stance or form (took you plate-wearers long enough to get on the druid bandwagon with that!) and the 5-second rule is going to be tweaked. Classes that stack MP5 now (holy pallies, resto shamans) will get regen from spirit in the future. Yes, holy plate gear will have spirit on it. THE HORROR! At least when it dropped before we could just groan and /eyeroll. Now we get to /gawk and /whine that we can’t equip it. Grumble grumble…no more crit-immune kitteh…
Spells won’t have ranks anymore, which is a neat idea. Instead you just get one spell that scales up as you level. Weapons also won’t have skills and each class will start with the weapon skills they need from the get-go and won’t have to improve them (sort of like how Language is always 300/300 and you don’t need to improve it – it’s just there).
Stat Caps Will Be Very High. So your haste cap, hit cap, crit cap, ArPen cap, thinking cap, whatever cap will be pretty high up there and I don’t think you’ll be intended to cap everything without screwing yourself over on some other stat. We already got a taste of this when they increased the resto haste cap in 3.3.0 so get used to it.
Next post is coming about gear changes and what we should look at as druids.
Druid Main by Icedragon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at druidmain.blogspot.com.