Beta blog 3: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Liz Skuthorpe | Aug 28, 2008 2:46 PM

This month our friendly neighbourhood Warcracker looks at some important changes for spellcasters.

It can be a funny old world playing a hybrid class in WoW. It’s certainly better now than it was early on, when hybrids were only ‘allowed’ to heal because, well, they had healing spells in their arsenal. Feral tanks were laughing stocks and Balance was… well, no one really knew. Paladins weren’t the powerful AoE tanking they are now and shaman were just things that appeared out of nowhere and killed you (at least if you generally play Alliance, like me). After a while Blizz sorted out hybrids and made them quite viable and in many cases required raid members; yes, even the giant crit-chickens.

I’ve transferred my druid and shaman to the test server and noticed something – two thirds of their gear is now pretty much identical. As you may have heard, when Wrath goes live we’ll be losing +heal and +damage modifiers. In their place will be the single modifier +spell power, this change will be retrospective and apply to all gear currently in-game. So for hybrid classes carrying around a caster-dps set, healing-set as well as a melee set, this means you’ll now have a lot of gear with nearly identical stats – +crit and mp5 are the only notable differences.

The new gear in the expansion has a very different set of stats.

One benefit of this is that I was able to go through the various +heal and +damage gear and develop a useful set of gear with overall better stats than I had before. However we also lose some of the big numbers previously seen on those healing items. So say goodbye to the impressive looking +348 healing on the [Nightstaff of the Everliving] for example and say hello to a far more modest +185 spellpower.

It remains to be seen whether these spellpower changes affect how instance drops are distributed in game. Casters of all stripes could, in theory, roll against each other for items which could cause problems. However, there should also be more drops that classes can use over all plus it reduces the problem of having gear drop that no one in your group can use.

Blizz Wants YOU! (to stop downranking)
This is a big change that affects healers directly – with the exception of druids who mainly use a rolling Lifebloom as their primary healing spell. Priests, paladins and shaman were often affected my mana conservation issues in long fights, particularly in the context of raids. So, down-ranking spells (using lower ranked spells for less mana) was used to spam heals in those encounters.

Recently Blizz has declared an end to down-ranking by significantly changing the mechanic of spell-casting. Instead of a set cost, spells will now cost a percentage of base mana – thus wiping out the benefits of down-ranking without constantly adding new penalisations to down-ranking in order to coax healers out of the habit. Understandably this has got some healers worried, but in theory this will lead to differently contrived encounters. Much in the way that, say, decurse-heavy fights were avoided after Blizzard decided to break the early decursive add-ons. Down-ranking, as a work-around method to conserve mana, was never an intended fix and so the developers are essentially removing it from the game.

We built this city…
…on terrifying amounts of magic (and rock ‘n roll). Having hidden away in Dalaran behind their uber magic shield for a while, the mages of Dalaran have decided to take the fight to Northrend. It’s situated in the Crystalsong Forest zone, and the (now massive) city floats above the Northrend.

Players are only able to visit it once they’ve reached level 74 and obtain a quest to be teleported up. Mages however, can obtain the Teleport Dalaran spell at level 72, thus sidestepping that level requirement. If you’re a fan of WoW’s environments go check out the massive gaping wound left in Hillsbrad where Dalaran used to be – it’s impressive.

We can at last see what those Dalaran mages have been up to!

In game it functions much like Shattrath, as a sanctuary for Horde and Alliance alike and houses the Kirin Tor (including Rhonin, for lore geeks out there) and the Silver Covenent (represented initially by Vareesa Windrunner). New factions and therefore new reputation grinds are on the horizon, I’ll bet.

Dalaran sure is pretty at least.

All Death Knight, all the time
I mentioned in an earlier blog the joy of typing /who in Hellfire Peninsula and seeing nothing but Death Knights in the zone. As the weeks have passed this state of play has continued for the most part, sometimes you might see a lonely druid or warrior hanging out or levelling a new profession.

Generally speaking though, all the healers are in Northrend in instances using their max rank spells. So what does this mean for up and coming Death Knights in Outland? Well, it means you have all Death Knight Dungeons – and they are FUN. You still need a tank, obviously, and Frost specced DKs do an excellent job with Frost Presence on (+45 per cent threat, +magic resistance and 45 per cent increase armour contribution from items) and in the current build spells such as Howling Blast and Icy Touch do insane amounts of damage and threat.

Still without a healer you will more than likely wipe a couple of times during the instance but it all balances out in the end. The two DPS specs; Blood and Unholy work really well. Unholy puts out a significant amount of damage and Blood is practically unkillable – particularly if you spec heavily into the regenerative abilities like Vendetta and Bloodworms.

Two other big thumbs up go to running five Ghouls in a party along with player characters and the horrifying miasma that is five Death Knights casting Death and Decay in one area. You can’t see anything, but that’s okay. When the mist clears everything will be dead.

Things I miss about earlier Death Knight builds: Raise Ghoul acting like an area effect spell and raising everything in the vicinity. There ain’t no party like a ghoul party, ‘cause a ghoul party’s got rot!