The Daily Blues
Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.
A couple notes. First, we're going to start running The Daily Blues around 7/7:30 a.m. EDT weekday mornings now. And second, while we normally wouldn't put a YouTube video with this post, we do try to include the latest Blizzard happenings, and that includes their other games. This trailer was just released and it's bad ass. It was so awesome that Mat McCurley just bought the collector's edition of StarCraft II.
Table of Contents
Ghostcrawler
Incoming wall of text. Read if you're interested, if not, spare me the request for TLDR. Thanks.
Toughness - Mandatory, but all tanks pretty much have it, so no big deal.
Seals of the Pure - I'm OK with the mild threat talent at the top here, but it is disappointing that it only effects seal damage. It's considered a lackluster talent on live when it increases Judgment damage as well, and we lost that portion of it? It's being taken at this point only because 20 seconds off HoJ is really useless.
Imp HoJ - PvP talent for Holy and Ret. We get it, you needed to give them something to sub spec into. Could you try to make it interesting for us somehow? Maybe by creating a bottom of the tree talent that reduces the cooldown further, removes the stun component, and MAKES IT OUR INTERRUPT? Just asking...
Judgements of the Just - I'm glad this is in range for other spec'd paladins to take, even though I highly doubt they will. However, it does still frustrate me that it only effects one target at a time as opposed to Thunderclap, but that's a minor inconvenience.
Protector of the Innocent - Can you just remove this talent please? First of all, it's probably going to feel mandatory for Holy Pallies to bring 6% extra healing (yay, they've replaced Druids!), which gives them no ability to go into Ret instead if they want PoJ, Crusade, or Rule of Law. Secondly, if you aren't giving us 3% extra DR, you might give paladins and warriors the same stamina scaling. The fact is, the average pug leader in this game is stupid. They don't understand the basics of "DR" and "EH", they look at the health bars, and whoever is winning the "health bar epeen contest" is who MT's. Period. I've had someone make the druid MT the boss over me because he had 700 more health. No matter how many times everyone tried to point out that if he only had 700 more health than me, I grossly outgeared him. Please don't expect a PuG raid leader to know that 3% DR will result in less healing, they won't. They'll just make me OT adds.
Guardian's Favor - Meh, Ret/Holy PvP talent again. We get it, again. But did we REALLY need two ret/holy PvP talents in our tree that are borderline useful as tanks? I guess it at least gives us places that we know we'll never put our talents... but that doesn't feel like "choice" there at all.
Divine Guardian - This is grossly OP, and pretty much guarantees that every raid will need a minimum of one prot pally, even if we don't get our other issues fixed. Is this OP cooldown why you're not giving us a workable AD? Are you planning to do anything to make sure that DG's can't be chained by just making all your tanks prot pallies? 20% DR for the entire raid is just too much.
Sanctuary - Thank you for making this not a blessing anymore. Really, that was getting annoying! Better place for crit immunity too. Can we talk about the mana return percentage, now that we don't have SA anymore? 3% is nothing. I mean, it's awesome when we go pull insane amounts of trash to never run out of mana, but I'm worried about where we used to have SA, we're hosed now. Is Divine Plea still lvl 71? What are little lowbie pallies supposed to do for mana? I know everyone likes to say the game starts at max level, but it doesn't. It starts at 1, and that's especially important for this expansion. PLEASE make sure little lowbie pallies have mana to tank their SM runs. And make sure I don't run out when tanking Ragnaros v. 2.0.
Hallowed Ground - I find myself iffy on this talent... I can see it being useful if we needed the 20% extra damage on it, but I have a hard time believing I won't be able to push the button every 15 seconds or so. I just can't see the 20% extra damage on it being more important than other options I could put the points towards in Ret or Holy.
Wrath of the Faithful - Again, feeling iffy. I mean, thanks for the damage buff and crit strike buff, and thanks for giving us some sort of snap AoE threat. Really! But if we're not really having a world of "AoE the ever loving hell out of every instance from start to finish" like Wrath, and CC and single target nuking down the dangerous bad guys is important... then I only need to keep Bad Guy off my healer. Snap aggro is great. YAY! But do I really need to use 2 talent points to increase its damage/threat? Or will I keep aggro off my healer as is? And why do I really feel like I may need to use my dual spec for an AoE build and a Boss build?
Ardent Defender - Activate to reduce damage taken by 20% for 10 sec. While active, attacks which would otherwise kill you cause you to be healed for 15% of your maximum health. 3 minute cooldown. Off the GCD.
Subject to further balance tweaking of course.
Divine Protection - major cooldown, 2 minutes.
Divine Guardian - minor cooldown, 2 minutes.
Ardent Defender - minor cooldown, 3 minutes.
Divine Guardian doesn't affect the paladin. Otherwise we feared it would just get used as another tank cooldown instead of for the raid utility for which it was intended.
We're strongly considering changing Divine Protection into a short cooldown. It is currently a clone of Shield Wall. Considering the paladin 85 also offers strong emergency damage reduction, we thought they could use a short cooldown ability (say 30-60 sec). Shield Block for warriors is being repositioned more as a short cooldown ability.
With Crusader Strike's cooldown being 4 seconds. Having 2 attacks reset its cooldown seems almost meaningless. It'll always be up on its own after using it and an additional attack.
Grand Crusader no longer affects Crusader Strike. That was an older model we were trying.
No silence on Avenger's Shield has to be a bug,
Avenger's Shield silences as a baseline effect. It no longer dazes, since all that seemed to accomplish was making pulling take longer.
CS doesn't benefit from RF's threat multiplier
Righteous Fury now affects all threat.
Your forgetting holy shield and the glyph of salvation. Personally i like the idea of being a CD tank =D
I'm not optimistic that we'll keep the Salv glyph, but we'll see. As to Holy Shield, it is going through rapid iteration. Our current implementation has it providing 5% block per stack of Holy Power, up to a max of 15%. So you can use Holy Power for threat, healing or mitigation depending on current circumstances. You should be able to keep the 15% block up all the time with a very small amount of effort.
Warriors get 15% block baseline, so this means the paladin has to work harder for it. Seeing as how the paladin doesn't have to maintain Demo Shout or Thunderclap's debuff, this doesn't seem too great a burden.
Since I am sure it will be asked based on that info, paladins and warriors have the same Stamina curves now. A naked warrior and paladin of the same race will have the same health at 85. Both Protection trees get the same amount of Stamina as a passive. That number will likely be something like 10 or 15% Stamina depending on tuning. (In our current build it is 15%.) In similar gear, their health should be very similar. We'll provide the differences in their cooldowns and how they tank. DKs and druids are likely to have different amounts of health as well.
Again, this could change. :)
The only fun mechanic I've messed around with on any healing class so far in this game. A 'your mileage may vary' form of mana regen that scaled based on how well you knew the encounters.
With Shaman getting Lightning Bolts = mana, I'd assumed all healers were going to be brought up to the on-demand mana regen capabilities that are such a joy to play with on a Holy Paladin. Guess not sadly.
Seal of Insight is the new healer-oriented Seal. It combines the effects of Light and Wisdom.
Judgement of Wisdom's effect (casters using wands on a target to regen mana) is what we cut. The communication error is probably mine. The new spell, just called Judgement, combines the Justice (limits movement speed) and Light (chance of a melee heal) effects.
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Seal of Insight: Fills the Paladin with divine power, giving each single-target melee attack a chance to heal the Paladin and restore 4% of the paladin's maximum mana. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time. Unleashing this Seal's energy will deal Holy damage to an enemy.
Judgement: Unleashes the energy of a Seal to judge an enemy for Holy damage. Judged targets move slower and cannot flee. Attacking a judged target has a chance of healing the attacker.
"Move slower" is a cap on run speed, as it is today.
Judgement is considered a melee attack for purposes of restoring mana via Seal of Insight.
We're iterating on all of this quickly though, so things might have changed by the next beta build. :)
Is the "Sleep" ability on MMO-Champ a real druid ability or is it just a datamined mistake?
Someone who knows for sure and isn't just expressing their preferred opinion please answer.
Sleep is not a new class ability. I assume it refers to a creature ability.
-- Improved Drain Soul and Dark Pact have been cut / redesigned.
-- Aftermath is a 100% chance to proc with 2 points. That is just a tooltip error.
-- Soul Fire's base cast time is reduced to 4 sec, and Emberstorm takes it down to 3 sec.
-- Demonic Aegis back to 15/30%.
-- Drain Life will do more competitive damage.
Other
If history serves, though, I'll probably end up staying awake all night on release day, getting my main up as high as I can, and then spending the following days progressing her quickly until I hit level cap (when I'm not hard at work here, of course). After that, I'll re-roll and conquer, albeit at a much more leisurely pace. :)
Buckle yourselves into your computer chairs or face being blown away!
