Fresh thread for Cataclysm change discussions

[Querk]

Cataclysm stuff has been filtering into various threads all over of course, and we had that one big changes to Cat thread, but I wanted to start a fresh one just to reduce the page counts, instead of constantly necroing the big changes thread. Everyone feel free to toss out your thinking on any changes here!

I'm looking at the new talents that popped up today. Lots of pretty interesting stuff in my mind.

For mages:
Incanter's Absorption now is a Tier 4 Talent. Down from Tier 5. Additional effect - In addition, when your Mana Shield is destroyed, all enemies within 6 yards are knocked back 12 yards.
Nether Vortex *New* - Gives your Arcane Blast spell a 50/100% chance to apply the Slow spell to any target it damages if no target is currently affected by Slow.

IA would probably not be in a raid spec anyway I don't think, depending on whether arcane gets much new in the way of mana management skills, but it's still a pretty cool utility for a solo spec, and I like it from the perspective of old instance farming. NV though is an awesome utility in absolutely every area of the game. Slow is a great group help - it was just never ever used because it's rarely worth the GCD or the huge mana cost. Now though, I can see a definite advantage to having an arcane mage in every group.

That said though, each of those three mage trees have new spells and utilities that sound really fun to me. Frost has more control than ever, and fire is now like a dot spec almost but with big big instant bombs. Thinking of the rotations there is just cool - mostly because the days of any kind of "rotation" are long gone. For all of the specs I think, but fire in particular, it will be all about reactions and instant choices - I predict much much greater variability between good mages and bad mages in Cat--and there's already some pretty heavy variability there.

For locks:

Dark Intent *New* - You link yourself with the targeted friendly target, increasing both of your haste by 3%. When you or the linked target gains a critical periodic damage or healing effect, the other gains an increased 3% increased periodic damage and healing lasting for 7 sec. Stacks up to 3 times. Dark Intent lasts for 30 min. / 6% of base mana, 30 yd range, Instant cast
Soul Swap *New* - You instantly deal 167.45 damage, and removing your damage-over-time effects from the target. For 20 sec afterword, the next target you cast Soul Swap on will be afflicted by the damage-over-time effects and suffer 167.45 damage. You cannot Soul Swap to the same target. / 6% of base mana, 30 yd range, Instant cast, 45 sec cooldown

Both just sound like cool fun abilities. DI less than Swap---it's basically the same as arcane mage's focus magic---but I just like the thematic tie that "hey, I'm a dot guy, you're a hot guy, let's get together!". That's a nifty synergy that's not around much.


For warriors:

I noticed that blood and thunder talent (thunderclap on a rend target spreads the love to others) just moved up to Tier 2, making it in reach for arms or fury. Wouldn't that be particularly good for aoe damage for arms anyway, since it works with all the rend/bleed synergy? Guarantees your single target overpowers too.

[Galenaris]

Most fury are going to dip into the arms tree for the crit bonus and bleed damage from deep wounds (not really different than current build).
Rend is a pain in the ass to keep up as fury because of the stance change. It would be interesting to see if deep wounds and rend would stack but overall i think it would be a dps loss.

I could say one way or the other for Arms as i have never played arms. I love it as a protection talent though

After tooling around with the calculators (correction. They have now been updated) it seems that as a raid spec'd Arms warrior blood and thunder would still not be the best path to take
http://www.wowtal.com/#k=lV08HUZj.9q4.warrior

Too bad really because it looks like a lot of fun. I wonder if this was a means to make leveling prot more viable

[Querk]

Hmmm... okay, I can see that. Still seems like B+T is a great aoe damage ability, with the aoe damage also supported by the 15% crit on TC and Cleave, but I can see how for a raid spec the damage from all those bonuses to MS and execute would add up. For fury it's a no-contest of course.

But for a leveling spec, and possibly a heroic dungeon spec too, I'd contend that this doesn't look shabby in any way:
http://www.wowtal.com/#k=DolbF06i.9q4.warrior

How decent are warrior self-healing abilities? I'm thinking they're pretty sucky, at least compared to Pally, Shammy, and DK.

One thing I'm really just noticing as I play with multiple classes specs is seeing choices between marginal or situational dps increases, talents that boost healing, and possibly decent utilities. I like that a lot. As a min/maxer at heart, yeah... I'm a throughput whore. And actually, mages have very little choice along those lines, because they accurately diagnose mages and totally selfish (instead, there's some interesting tradeoffs in selfish escape/movement/etc. abilities). But, as either dps shammy spec I can spend 2 points for 15% extra healing to myself... you know, I like being the easy guy to heal. Warriors get 20% selfhealing and 6% all healing. Ret pallies have all kinds of crap: they can reach protector of the innocent, could do selfless healer, the word of glory ability period, etc. etc. Lots of stuff to boost their support and utility stuff, especially with off-heal tossing.

[Galenaris]

Only thing is that by the time you get enough point to spec into B&T you shouldn't be leveling too much more. I could see it being very useful for arms as a healing mechanism (I think there is something that allows bleeds to heal you) or more overpower procs but I don't really know if the trade-off is worth it. There are other abilities that will be much more damage intensive for aoe. I wonder if a decent pvp build could spec into that. Might be useful for arenas

Yeah self healing isnt great but we do have a few and it seems those will be getting buffed in the xp. Right now we have Bloodthirst and Enraged Regeneration. ER is on a significant cooldown and can only be used after an enrage ability is used unless you waste a glyph slot on it. My fury build (if it calculator doesnt change) will max Field Dressing to get to the next tier since rend is pretty pointless.

[Galenaris]

Protection Warrior

If I did not have rage issues I think i would spec this
What do you think Baell

[Querk]

Only thing is that by the time you get enough point to spec into B&T you shouldn't be leveling too much more.

errrrr.... duh. okay, you win that point.

[Toryn]

Protection Warrior

If I did not have rage issues I think i would spec this
What do you think Baell

Keeping in mind that my perspective is necessarily influenced by my life as a protection warrior as it exists today...

I would dump Blitz, the point in War Academy, Field dressing, Impending Victory, and Vigilance. Like this

I like Blood Craze more for group/raid tanking than Field Dressing. Anything that fires on you getting hit is going to proc a LOT. The talents you picked up will result in a very nice bit of self healing it looks like, and I would love to have them as well (stupid pallies and bears soloing Threat From Above comes to mind). However, my highest priority is to spec for survivability and better grouping tools and leave the saving of me arse to my healer. Plus I don't care much for Blitz or the other early Arms talents in a protection build. Therefore I axe those and pick up the extra AP from Armored to the Teeth on the way to Blood Craze. Further, I don't care about Impending Victory and while the revamped Vigilance sounds nifty I have a bigger fish to fry in the protection tree. That is to pick up Gag Order. A 1 minute cooldown on Heroic Throw makes it an "every other pull" ability at best, and I have been irritated for a long time that I don't have a fast re-charging on the move pulling ability. So I prioritize picking that up. Not to mention those guaranteed silences make pulling casters nice.

I am also interested in Shield Specialization, but hate to give up anything else in the Prot tree. Besides, the jury is still out on rage generation so until I know more I'll leave points out of it. Definitely keeping it in my back pocket though.

[Galenaris]

Keeping in mind that my perspective is necessarily influenced by my life as a protection warrior as it exists today...

I would dump Blitz, the point in War Academy, Field dressing, Impending Victory, and Vigilance. Like this

I like Blood Craze more for group/raid tanking than Field Dressing. Anything that fires on you getting hit is going to proc a LOT. The talents you picked up will result in a very nice bit of self healing it looks like, and I would love to have them as well (stupid pallies and bears soloing Threat From Above comes to mind). However, my highest priority is to spec for survivability and better grouping tools and leave the saving of me arse to my healer. Plus I don't care much for Blitz or the other early Arms talents in a protection build. Therefore I axe those and pick up the extra AP from Armored to the Teeth on the way to Blood Craze. Further, I don't care about Impending Victory and while the revamped Vigilance sounds nifty I have a bigger fish to fry in the protection tree. That is to pick up Gag Order. A 1 minute cooldown on Heroic Throw makes it an "every other pull" ability at best, and I have been irritated for a long time that I don't have a fast re-charging on the move pulling ability. So I prioritize picking that up. Not to mention those guaranteed silences make pulling casters nice.

I am also interested in Shield Specialization, but hate to give up anything else in the Prot tree. Besides, the jury is still out on rage generation so until I know more I'll leave points out of it. Definitely keeping it in my back pocket though.

Am I wrong that Field Dressing will make healers spells 3% more potent on you. Tooltip says healing effects which is a little vague.

No vigilance?

[Toryn]

Am I wrong that Field Dressing will make healers spells 3% more potent on you. Tooltip says healing effects which is a little vague.

No vigilance?

Field Dressing increases heals on you from all sources by 6% it looks like. I'm not attempting to argue that it's not a good talent. Rather, I just prefer something that procs on getting hit and heals me for 7.5% of my total health. At a health pool of 50k that's 3750 healed over 5 seconds, and it should proc a ton, even if it has an internal cooldown.

As for Vigilance...

and while the revamped Vigilance sounds nifty I have a bigger fish to fry in the protection tree. That is to pick up Gag Order

[Querk]

Field Dressing increases heals on you from all sources by 6% it looks like. I'm not attempting to argue that it's not a good talent. Rather, I just prefer something that procs on getting hit and heals me for 7.5% of my total health. At a health pool of 50k that's 3750 healed over 5 seconds, and it should proc a ton, even if it has an internal cooldown..

Hey, I'm obviously a totally ignorant warrior noob, but as usual even though it's not about me, any spec conversation has me intrigued here. So you mind if I toss in a few comments, not to criticize as if I'd know any better, but just to help me understand what your thinking is, so that I can figure out why some of your choices aren't what I would have guessed they would be?

First, at first both of your not taking Shield spec seemed odd to me - but I see Tim's point about keeping it in the pocket till we see what rage generation is like. Okay, I get that, that's just a personality difference between us I think - I just have a tendency to default to being conservative. I'm in a similar boat with mana issues as a healer--I have no mana issues now in most situations, but given all the comments about making mana a more relevant resource all my play specs pick up every mana saver I can, then I hope to spec out of some when I discover I don't need them. Given the fact that HS is a real rage dump now and they keep saying they want to try to make sure rage is not an unlimited resource anymore, seems like it'd be a big rage-engine for prot... but maybe it's not nearly as big as I'd imagine?

Second, I see the benefit of blood craze, even though in absolute terms it's probably not going to add to as much healing as field dressings would--but it works for solo too and could save you in the seconds before healers get to you. But still, 6% more healing is like 6% less damage (okay not quite, but still, close) and that's a pretty fricking strong survivability talent for 2 points--and gets you 20% more blood craze too. So why not get both? Seems like it'd be easy to switch the talents from improved rend into field dressings. I get how the synergy with B+T is cool, but still... doesn't seem as major as the survivability.

The thing that looks coolest to me about Vigilance is as a tank-swap tool, or really any off-tanking situation. I can't see it having much use in a 5 man - but in a raid on a boss with 2 tanks, having your taunt always up, 3% damage reduction (for the other tank granted), and keeping your Vengeance up seems pretty sweet. Situational, granted, but maintaining that 5000 (using that 50k health number) attack power bonus sounds pretty major.