Posts with tag class-changes

One of the sharpest double-edged swords in Blizzard's arsenal is the constant iteration to class and play design that comes with each World of Warcraft expansion. On the one hand, players like innovation and new mechanics and spells to keep their favorite class fresh. On the other hand, players could reject the changes as too severe or too different from the class they originally set out to play, as was the case with Alex Ziebart and myself with paladins in Cataclysm. It's a risky move to change up the core mechanics of a class, and the introduction of the "What's New" window helps streamline this occasionally daunting issue.

New and old players alike will benefit greatly from the "What has changed?" tab. Simply open up your spellbook and click on the last tab at the bottom. You'll be greeted with a new screen giving you the run down on some of the biggest changes to your class coming in Mists of Pandaria.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Last week, we covered some of the more notable monk abilities along with the expected playstyle. Recently, the level cap on beta has been raised to level 87, allowing every class access to their new level 87 spell. Much of the talk this week on the major sites and blogs is about Symbiosis. We touched on it several times, but now we get to take a closer look at it in further detail.

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

With patch 4.3 imminent and Arena season 10 due to end Nov. 29, it seems reasonable to assume the patch will appear in early December. While you're racing to get your team into title range, get that last piece of gear, or just running laps of your capital city, you might be thinking forward to the arrival of the patch and wondering what your fate will be in PvP as the nerf bat winds up for another swing. Firstly, let's deal with some housekeeping.

Conquest points, the PvP equivalent of valor points, will now be far, far easier to earn from ordinary Battlegrounds. The first daily Battleground win will now award 100 conquest points, up from 25, and wins after that will award 50 conquest point, up from, well, none! The conquest cap will remain, so while it will still be far quicker to reach it through Arena, it will also be attainable via Battlegrounds of the non-rated variety. This makes it far easier for solo players to build up the resilience numbers people often demand (fairly or otherwise) for access to Arena and Rated Battleground teams or just to gear for Battlegrounds.

There are changes on the upcoming 4.0.6 PTR for death knights. Actually sorting through them may prove a little difficult, as the official patch notes and the datamined information sometimes say two different things. In short, though, we can say that blood has received a bit of a survivability hit, but a nice threat boost; unholy has both become a more solid 2H damage tree and received a sizeable (but expected) DPS nerf; and 2H frost has gotten a nice boost that may actually make it viable in endgame raiding, depending on how the numbers hold out.

Remember, though, that this is the PTR, and things may (and probably will) change before this thing goes live. With that in mind, let's take a look at what the changes say.

Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted the blog post I think most of us have been waiting for ever since Cataclysm went live. It features a summary of where the dev team sees the PvE and PvP games at this point, including some analysis of various classes and specs, and some planned changes for those specs that are underperforming and overperforming.

In PvE, Ghostcrawler mentions that Blizzard is mostly happy with the tank classes and notes that while healers do have it a bit hard, this is intentional. Heroics are meant to be a challenge. As for DPS, he offered that some classes, such as arcane mages and marksman and beast mastery hunters, are too low in their damage, while others, such as shadow priests and fire and frost mages, are being watched closely before final judgment is made on their numbers.

In PvP, Ghostcrawler says Blizzard is satisfied with the decreased emphasis on healing prevention and burst damage. Crowd control and dispel mechanics, especially offensive dispels, may see some PvP nerfs, and priests will specifically be getting some PvP buffs.

Stats also got some mention. A lot of stats are being neglected by some classes, and the dev team wants to fix this. Mastery will be either buffed or completely revamped for many specs, such as unholy death knights and retribution paladins. Haste may be made to scale with more attacks, such as Lacerate, Slam, and Steady Shot, in order to make the stat more desirable to certain specs.

Check after the break for the complete text of Ghostcrawler's post, including a list of specifically planned (but not finalized) class changes for future patches.

The stars and planets have aligned. Some celestial body out there is in some sort of retrograde. Ancient civilizations have predicted something akin to the events tomorrow. Patch 4.0.1 is coming, and you need to be ready for it. Here's the official announcement:

Bashiok -- Extended Maintenance 4.0.1 Release - 10/12

Extended maintenance will begin tonight at midnight, Tuesday, October 12 for the release of patch 4.0.1. Maintenance will begin at 12:01 AM PDT and conclude at approximately 12:01 PM PDT. During this time all realms and many web services will be unavailable.

Due to the size of the patch we highly recommend you enable your background downloader. If you need assistance doing so please visit http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=35274

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There are some pretty major changes coming to World of Warcraft tomorrow, so it's time to learn to play all over again.

Read about your new class features here.

Read about the new glyph system here.

Read about the new reforging system here.

Don't forget to turn on your background downloader if you want to be able to log in sooner tomorrow.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Wryxian

We are thankful for all the paladins and their patience in having to wait just a bit longer than others to get their Cataclysm class preview. While we had initially announced that we were planning to post the Paladin preview on Friday, April 16, we can now reveal that it will instead be posted on Wednesday, April 14!

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Will Paladins see Radiance Aura as a full-fledged ability, or does Blizzard have something else up their sleeves for the Light-swingers? We'll be posting the Paladin class information once it's live -- a little sooner than expected. In the meantime, check out the other class previews, changes, and analysis in WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm.

• Discipline and holy priest analysis by Dawn Moore
• Shadow priest analysis by Fox Van Allen

If you haven't seen them yet, make sure to check out the list of upcoming changes. We'll continue to analyze these class changes as they're released, and don't forget that we're also looking for guest posts on these subjects.

Now that you have the basic upcoming shaman changes for Cataclysm, we're happy to bring you detailed analysis of what the changes mean to your class and spec.

Our class columnists have been hard at work and have put together a series of posts detailing exactly what the changes mean for you, what's good and bad about them, and how they're going to shape the future of the game. Check out the analyses below:

• Elemental shaman analysis by Mike Sacco
• Enhancement shaman analysis by Rich Maloy
• Restoration shaman analysis by Joe Perez

Don't forget to read over the entire list of upcoming shaman changes as well!

Other classes will have their analyses come out in a similar fashion soon. And don't forget, in addition to commenting, we're also looking for guest posts on the shaman changes.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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As we've been expecting, we now have the first glimpse of what the shaman class will be like in Cataclysm. These changes are straight from Blizzard, and they provide great insight into where the designers want to take things. Please remember that these changes are for the beta and will very likely be modified as the expansion nears release.

Some of the major highlights:

• Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects
• We plan to add Earthquake as a deep Elemental talent for targeted and persistent AoE.
• Spirit Link will likely be worked back into deep Restoration in some form. The idea is that you will be able to link targets together so they share damage.
• Elemental will have a deep talent that allows Spirit (which will appear on the gear they share with Restoration shaman) to boost their Hit rating.
• Healing Rain (level 83): An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it.

The full Blizzard announcement after the break.

Unless you've been living under a rock you know that Blizzard is getting set for a major Cataclysm info dump over the next week. This kind of information sparks a lot of comments and intelligent discussion, and WoW.com wants to feature it prominently. To that end, we're looking for short guest posts on what you think about the changes to your class.

We're going to operate this guest posting opportunity much like we did our BlizzCon 2010 opinions. Write a paragraph or two, sign up for Seed, and then go and submit it on the Seed project page. If it's something we like we'll post it and you'll get paid $10! Easy and awesome.

You can find out more about the guest writer program in our announcement post and at our Contributing to WoW.com page.

A couple things to note:

• If you write a really great comment here, feel free to submit it through our Seed page too! No penalty for leaving a comment and submitting it through Seed.
• We're expecting to get a ton of submissions for this, so we're not going to be able to publish all the great thoughts and opinions we get, even though we want to.
• If you'd like you can include a short bio about yourself, things like your character name, guild, server, blog, etc... Totally optional, though.
• The sooner you get these in the better! We'll be publishing our first batch of guest posts in the next day or so, and will continue to do so every couple days for the next week or so. This project closes on April 19th at 11:59 p.m. EST.

We hope that you all keep this in the back of your mind in the next few days as all this info gets released. So many of you know this game so well, we're excited to be able to feature your knowledge and opinions to the masses!

If you have any questions, just leave a comment here or email seed@wow.com and we'll get back to you.

Edit: Please note, this submission should be based off the upcoming Cataclysm class changes, released April 7th through April 16th.

In a surprising middle-of-the-night blue post, Bashiok has announced the schedule for an upcoming series of Cataclysm class change previews. The series will start this upcoming Wednesday, April 7th, and continue through to the 16th. The schedule is as follows:

• Shaman - April 7
• Priest - April 7
• Warlock - April 7
• Warrior - April 8
• Death Knight - April 8
• Rogue - April 8
• Hunter - April 9
• Druid - April 9
• Mage - April 9
• Paladin - April 16 (More details on this in the blue post)

This is just one more step in the deluge of Cataclysm info being passed on to us before the beginning of the encroaching beta phase of testing. Expect more and more of this in the next few weeks, because we're certain to see it. Check behind the cut below for the full blue post from Bashiok. It's a long one.

There's a new notice up on Warcraft's Facebook site with some intriguing new information:

Official Warcraft Facebook

Death knights, druids, hunters, mages, rogues, warlocks, warriors, oh my! For those participating in our public testing of the upcoming minor content patch 3.3.3, look out this week for a host of fascinating new adjustments to these classes. Chains of Ice innately does what? Nature's Grasp has how many charges? Vitality boosts stamina by how much? Stay tuned to find out the answer to these and more questions!

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What does this mean? No idea, but it appears as though the various class changes and tweaks that were announced for patch 3.3.3 aren't set in stone just yet, which is what Ghostcrawler said late last week. This fluidity should be expected, after all, as it is a public test realm. Players on the PTR may want to keep an eye out for the changes, and possibly expect some sort of minor patch this week. When an announcement is made about the changes, we'll let you know!

There was really just one topic on the show last Saturday, and it was patch 3.2. We finally went down all of the new features and class changes we're expecting in the patch, and laid out (with the help of some of our chat channel folks) who was buffed, who was nerfed, and which classes are, in Turpster's estimation, "rubbish anyway." Alex Ziebart and Lesley Smith helped us decode some of the more complicated changes, and of course we answered your emails, including how the fishing daily can make you 4k gold, whether our characters are really getting stronger or not, and Blizzard's problems with cosmetic items and armor dyes.

The show is available at any of the links below (or for listening right here on this page). If you haven't yet subscribed to the show in iTunes (where you can listen to it for free on your iPod or iPhone), please do. And while you're there, feel free to leave us a rating or a review -- the more we can get, the better. Thanks for listening as always, and we'll see you next week.

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