Blue posts and other WoW news: MoP talent clarifications, shaman buff auras, no flying in BC starting zones

G'day all!

I have some clarifications for this on some of the class specific information just as an FYI :)


Gorefiend's Grasp is not going to be similar to the priest spell, it is actually a spell that will pull all enemies in within a set radius to the location of the targeted mob or player. The base spell itself can be targeted on a player, but the pull effect will not affect friendlies.

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The talent trees now require that you must trade the survivability talents you got in the frost tree, for some of the higher damage output of the other trees for PvE which is why Frost damage output was lower. The new talent tree in Mists of Pandaria will let you take the utility and survival talents from there. The major difference that you will have as a Mage between all 3 specs is the spells you cast as well as the procs and other mechanics that activate.

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If you like, we may consider changing it to Discipline Nova to keep it linked in with the talent tree that uses it? :p

Dibs to Jito for beating me to the Glyphs and ranged weapons point. ^^

Hey all,

Just wanting to make sure that you know that the core shaman buffs from totems, such as Strength of Earth and Windfury, will most likely become auras. These will probably work in a similar way that Unleashed rage does currently.

We feel that this change will be a positive influence because there is not a lot of interesting gameplay in simply dropping Strength of Earth on each encounter, comparatively to the reactive activation of a totem such as Earthbind or Tremor Totem.

I hope this explains the change for all of you and feel free to discuss it further! :)

Taking these zones out of their own separate instances, placing them properly in the world -- so they're in the same instances as Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, respectively -- and revamping all of the terrain and architecture to make the areas suitable for flying, aren't trivial feats.

I know the last part of that answer sounds very familiar to what we used to say when we heard requests to allow flying in Azeroth, long before Cataclysm was in development, but it's still true. And maybe we'll do it some day too. It's not something we're against. It'd just be rather low on the list of priorities, especially in terms of the resource investment required for something that would have very little payoff for the average player.