Posts with tag stats

Something I was surprised to notice when I began collecting battle pets was that the stats were not always consistent within the same pet type. While Mr. Wiggles is always Mr. Wiggles, a rare Mouse does not necessarily have the same stats as another rare Mouse. The inconsistency of stats applies to both purchased pets, like Undercity Cockroaches, as well as wild pets, such as a Cheetah Cub. (Have you killed a cheetah so that you could capture her baby? I have. We are bad people.)

At this time, many of us have more than three of quite a few battle pets. Extra quest pets, like Winter's Little Helper, can just be caged and sold (when cageable, of course), since they all have the same stats. but how do you choose which purchased pet you should keep? And what about the wild pets?

I'll show you my favorite stat, and you can show me yours.

As promised, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, has returned to the official WoW blog with an explanation of stat changes in Mists of Pandaria. Here's a quick rundown of some important changes, with the full blue post after the break.

• Spell resistance is gone, and so is spell penetration.
• The chance to block will be handled by a separate combat roll for each attack that is not avoided.
• Resilience will be renamed "Defense (PvP)" or possibly "PvP Defense." All players will have 30% base Defense, the same way all characters have some base Stamina.
• All spells and abilities will crit for double damage, baseline.

Lots more after the break.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me, especially if you've been playing subtlety lately!

I love hit and expertise. While their mechanics and nuances can be complicated, I enjoy the diversity they bring to our gear options. We have stats like critical strike chance, which give us a chance to hit harder; haste, which lets us hit more often; and of course, hit and expertise, which let us hit our targets more often. The interaction between all of these different gear stats is one of the most interesting parts of theorycrafting for me. Think about it, would you really enjoy picking gear if you were just choosing between haste, mastery, and crit?

Unfortunately for us, hit and expertise are also our only two remaining stats with tangible caps on their potency. While we were able to cap out on critical strike chance and armor penetration in the past, one of those stats has been rebalanced and the other completely removed. Because of the caps in place, hit and expertise's value drops off immediately after reaching that golden value, and so we're left always keeping those caps in mind.

So last week, we went over a series of common questions players were asking about restoration shaman changes in both the Cataclysm beta and patch 4.0.1., and the week prior, we talked about healing in heroics and normal dungeons. With everything going through massive amounts of changes and still two months to go before the release of the Cataclysm, some things are starting to feel like they are becoming settled and stable.

Luckily for us, restoration shaman seem to be pretty settled, with maybe a little minor tweaking necessary before the full release. Today I'd like to talk about some of the numbers you can expect to see when you hit level 85. I'm talking about the base mana costs, stat values you will need to know and to start talking a little bit about the coefficient of healing spells you can expect come Cataclysm.

Welcome to Wednesday's shadow priest edition of Spiritual Guidance, hosted by Fox Van Allen. We bloggers are all about search engine optimization. As such, there are going to be some changes around here: Shadowfiends will be referred to as "Lady Gaga meat dresses," and Dawn Moore will be henceforth referred to as "NY Jets reporter Inez Sainz." Fox Van Allen will, of course, remain Fox Van Allen -- he's as optimized as he's ever going to get.

I spent hours riding a seahorse in Vashj'ir last night. I love a good video game cliché, and there's no video game cliché quite like the underwater level. The environment is beautiful and immersive, but those beautiful aqua blues and sea greens couldn't distract me from a fundamental truth about the new expansion that I was constantly experiencing: Shadow priesting is a lot more fun in Cataclysm. Period. There are more options. More abilities. And yes, even more DPS.

For those of you who want to get the ball rolling on these new abilities in Cataclysm, there's good news: Patch 4.0.1 is currently available for testing on the public test realm. It's not the full release of the game, but the new patch will cover almost all the changes that are going to be made to our spec for the new expansion. And better yet, the patch's appearance on the PTR signals that all these changes to the shadow priesting way of life are just around the corner. (And not, like, how we keep saying Cataclysm is around the corner, despite its being months away. I mean legit around the corner. For reals, no take-backs.)

The way you play the game, whether it's soloing mobs or raiding Icecrown, is about to change significantly. Are you ready? Follow me after the break, where I'll explain what patch 4.0.1 is, what it is not and what to do once it hits.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press.

In the spirit of last week's column about various loot issues, I decided to feature the following email today. It comes from a guild leader who is worried about the stat changes in Wrath and Cataclysm and how they might affect his guild's loot system. Is it time to ditch the dice?

I'm GM of a guild that has had a member pose a question about the way we do loot in raids. We are not a "hardcore" raiding guild though we do have around 2-4 scheduled raids per week both 10 man and 25 man. Our loot system was set up to try to be fair to and distribute gear throughout our members to help the entire guild grow and progress. We roll on gear and each member is allowed one main spec win, one off spec, and one tier piece per run. If you have won you are still allowed to roll on a piece that fits your character, but it someone rolls on it that hasn't won you will automatically lose to the person that hasn't won in that specific category. If all people have won something already it's just a high roll wins scenario.

We also have guidelines concerning which type of gear is most suited to a particular niche of character; i.e. tanks, healers, dps, etc. The system has worked for pretty well so far, but this one member brought up a valid point concerning leather and cloth healer gear in the future.

We've known for a while that Cataclysm was going to feature some extensive changes to the stat and gear systems, and while we'd gotten bits and pieces of the whole picture before, the blues recently posted a massive breakdown of many of the changes. Death knight tanks will see a few things affect them as well, such as the complete removal of defense and a change to the workings of parry. Without further ado, let's break down the major changes that affect death knight tanking.

Breaking news: enhancement shamans get the dumb in Cataclysm. Intellect is gone! Are we becoming rogues with mana?

No doubt you've read the big changes coming in Cataclysm. At this point there are a few confirmed points with the rest falling into the "confirmed they'll be changing" category. What do these changes mean for enhancement shamans? Read on.

Cataclysm is right around the corner, and with it comes sweeping change for every class whether it is talents or itemization. Restoration shaman are no exception to the rule and several of the changes will affect us and how we choose gear. Take some time to read through all the stat and system changes happening, but for right now lets talk about how this affects restoration shaman.

Here's the list of things we need to be aware of:

• MP/5: Gone
• Spirit: Now the regen stat of choice for all healers, gear with spirit is specifically healer gear.
• Spell Power: Gone from all items except for weapons, marking specific weapons as caster items.
• Intellect : Spell power is now derived from intellect, making this stat very important
• Haste: Still around.
• Critical Strike Rating: Still around.
• Spell Ranks: Gone, Spells will now grow with you as you level. Levels at which you can learn spells will be changing.
• Mastery: This is a specialization stat found on gear. Mastery allows for you to be better at your defined role
• Existing gear: Your existing gear will be updated to fall in line with these changes before Cataclysm is released

What does this mean for us exactly? More about that after the break.

One of the challenges for many novice level healing druids and priests is figuring out what provided more mana: X MP5 (which stands for mana per 5 seconds) or Y spirit. However, in Eyonix's post about Cataclysm stat changes, MP5 will be completely removed from the game. Healing paladins and shamans normally relied on slight amounts of MP5 on their gear. Instead, their gear will now pack spirit which will affect their mana gains.

Say again?

Yes, you heard right. MP5 is being removed. It will be gone. Fist pumps and high fives all around!

In any case, when the next expansion comes around, everyone will need to relearn the entire mana regeneration mechanic. Thankfully, it should be much easier this time around. Spirit is the main stat which will contribute to mana regeneration since intellect provides spell \power. It is too early to provide any advice or guides since we can't actually see the changes in action just yet, but the basic idea is that healers will be stacking a combination of intellect and spirit to increase healing throughput as well as mana regeneration.

Lastly, for the druids and shamans:

Eyonix

If you are a Balance druid or Elemental shaman:

• You will still share gear with Restoration druids and shaman.
• Your gear will have Spirit on it. It won't have Hit on it.
• You will have a talent that converts Spirit to Hit. We will adjust talents accordingly so that you want about as much Spirit as, say, a warlock wants Hit.
• Hit on rings and other such gear will still benefit you.
• Raid buffs will no longer boost Spirit, so you shouldn't find yourself unexpectedly over the Hit cap because of buffs.

source

I wonder if this means Prayer of Spirit will be removed. All in all, I'm very excited about the regeneration changes. It'll make things much easier for players to understand (like me)!

Anyway, the line of thinking here regarding the removal of raid spirit buffs is this: Since spirit will be providing elemental shamans and Balance druids with hit due to a talent conversion, any raid buffs which boost spirit will presumable bump their hit and put them over the hit cap which isn't a good thing since any surplus points will be considered wasted.

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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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Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

There is this priest trial in my guild right now. He applied as a discipline priest but what we were looking for at the time was a holy priest. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to play holy, so I'm exploiting my veteran status and making him learn it. Coincidentally, the big bosses also want all of us here at WoW.com to work on these 101 columns, so this kills two anything-but-birds with one stone. I really like birds, by the way.

The following is meant to be an introductory guide to the priest holy tree. It is not going to tell you what to do step by step (at least not until you get to the enchants section) instead it intends to show you some options from which you can get started. If you're already a veteran holy priest, feel free to add anything I left out in the comments so readers who use this column as a resource can get as much help as possible.

When I was growing up, I was a total Final Fantasy geek. I can still remember the thrill I got when I first started playing Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV to you purists).

I never paid much attention to stats aside from the basics back then -- there was no reason to. When I did take a look under the hood, though, what I found was easy to understand. Cecil beat stuff down with a sword, so he had a high amount of strength. Rosa was better at healing things than Cecil, because she had more will than he did. Rydia blew things away with black magic and summons, so she was loaded up with wisdom.

When I eventually got around to playing World of Warcraft, I went into it with a lot of preconceptions from my Final Fantasy days. This healing priest? Spirit. Makes total sense, that's a healer stat. When it was time to use the darker side of the priestly art, it was time to look for gear with intellect. It made logical sense from a Final Fantasy standpoint. And just like in Final Fantasy, the most important thing to pay attention to was how well a piece of armor protects you from attack. Right? RIGHT?!