mists-of-pandaria-changes
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Lichborne: Death knight group utility in Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Death knights are not always the first class you think of when you think group utility. They don't have a long-term crowd control method, they can't summon food or Healthstones, and they don't have one of those long term castable stat buffs like Mark of the Wild or Power Word: Fortitude. That said, you shouldn't sell them short. We have a lot of little things we contribute to a group in a ways people may not think of. This week, we're going to look at some of the buffs, debuffs, and group utility moves death knights contribute, with an emphasis on things that or new or significantly changed in Mists of Pandaria. Bringing the Buffs Horn of Winter has long been a valuable buff that you should never neglect, and it's changed in some interesting ways in Mists. Instead of a flat buff to strength and agility, it now adds 10% attack power to you and your group. This ends up being pretty handy since it should scale as gear levels increase.
Patch 5.0.4: Changes to the spellbook
With patch 5.0.4 dropping today, there are quite a few UI changes you'll need to get used to. Many of those changes are coming to your trusty spellbook. The way you find and use spells has changed slightly, and the spellbook now includes some handy hints to help you grasp your class and spec's role and abilities. Here's the basic rundown: All core class and spec skills are now on one tab under the main Spellbook tab. The Core Abilities tab gives you a rundown of the key abilities you'll use for your class and spec. The What's Changed tab lets you know what's new for your class and spec. The Mounts and Companions tabs are no longer in your main spellbook. Let's take a deeper look at each of these points now.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Once more into the Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. And back once more, my friends, into the breach in the Great Wall of Pandaria. The Mists of Pandaria beta has seen another patch, this one with gear and everything. So what do we think of it so far? Well, they buffed Bladestorm up to being a worthwhile DPS ability again, and that's nice, but otherwise DPS warriors didn't get a lot of change. Prot saw some changes, with a small but incremental increase in rage generation in Defensive Stance and some other adjustments aimed at keeping us in Defensive Stance. Some of these seem more like tooltip changes (and confusing ones, like the change to Charge that removes the cooldown entirely), but I do think it's worth chatting about them, especially the change to defensive stance. I've scraped together a set of 483 PvP gear for use in BGs and running scenarios and dungeons. One of the things I'm noticing is that since your special attacks only need to be capped to 7.5% hit and since you generate your rage from Bloodthirst primarily, once you get to that 7.5% hit, you might as well stop entirely. With the hit cap so far out of your reach at level 90, while you certainly would like to cap all of your white hits, I think stacking haste is going to end up being a much more sustainable approach for rage generation, especially for fury. Arms can easily cap hit. It's strange to actually want some haste, but that does seem to be where we're going.
3 things I'm going to miss about retribution in Mists
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of the beta and what's coming our way in Mists of Pandaria -- so easy, in fact, that we lose sight of what we stand to lose in this transition. Retribution isn't undergoing as extensive of an overhaul as warlocks are, but amid the improvements and buffs are abilities, talents, and mechanics that are going by the wayside. Unfortunately for many of you, Inquisition isn't one of those mechanics, but below are a few things that I will look back on and yearn for in the coming expansion. Holy Wrath and Consecration The loss of these two abilities isn't so much about how our AoE toolbox is going to suffer in their absence. No, Hammer of the Righteous and Divine Storm should more than make up for these relatively weak filler abilities, and I'm sure our mana pools won't miss Consecration in the slightest. When I first started playing the spec, I had visions of my character being not only a powerful warrior but also an adept wielder of the Light. There's just something about a paladin using generous amounts of holy magic to battle demons and the undead that just seems so right and makes the departure of these abilities hurt the overall feel of the spec. Yes, we still have Exorcism, Judgment, and Hammer of Wrath, but aside from Exo, these spells just seem like they have holy damage added on to them after the fact.
Lichborne: The effect of the new stat changes on death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. We're still a couple of weeks away from the dam burst that is the Mists of Pandaria press event, but in the meantime, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler. He listed some stat changes coming in Mists that, while ostensibly not as complicated as those in Wrath, still hold some interesting and possibly major implications for class balance in the coming expansion. Let's dive right in and see what they mean for death knights. Blocking takes a week While it doesn't directly affect us, the blocking changes will certainly shake up the tanking hierarchy that we're a part of, so it's worth pointing out that the usual single roll combat table for dodging, parrying, or blocking a hit is gone. Instead, the chance to block will be calculated only after the dodge and parry chance is calculated. This essentially means that being unhittable is gone. You can't just stack to 102.4%. Of course, death knights and druids have never been able to do this, but they will now be joined by the shield tanks.
