1961

The only way to get rid of cookie cutter specs is to instead have talents be fun and interesting, instead of contributing to min/maxing for dps/healing/survivability as much as it currently does. It’s been told to them on numerous occasions, however they refuse to go that route.

1962

Hunter friend of mine had same feelings. It’s not the same class which he originally played and is probably going to reroll.

1963

I think there may be another upswing coming when 4.0.3 hits and a lot of people roll new characters. At that point everyone should have used up whatever supply of glyphs and ink they had before 4.0.1, and the increase in material cost per glyph should help keep supply a bit lower than it was.

The glyphs learned from the glyph mastery books may not come down for a while either. The books have jumped to ridiculous price levels again on the auction house.

1964

Of course a ret paladin is going to whine, he got nerfed. They’ve partially unnerfed them, but still.

Honestly, I would argue that ret paladins got buffed, not nerfed. I can mow through multiple mobs by chaining all the powerful procs I have constantly going off (mastery is key). It takes a little time to learn the class and you have to pay attention to what’s going on and time everything right otherwise your DPS will take a big hit. Another big factor is that some of these classes like the mage are killing mobs so quickly that classes like the ret pally have no time to do anything and I think that’s a major culprit in all the whining as well.

1965

After taking my hunter through several instances last night I’m finally getting the feel of Survival with Focus down. I have to admit it still feel strange not drinking or popping back and forth between dragonhawk and viper, but that will come back once we have fox I guess.

All in all I’m fairly neutral to the changes now that I’m adjusting. My hunter is still coming out top DPS or second in instances which is what I mainly do.

My little ret pally is just insane now though. Pre patch I was hitting max crits for about 400ish with BoA gear and now with the new holy power and other buffs I’ve seen crits for over 1800, in my mind 30’s. I can walk up to orange/red mobs and cut them down like critters, even three at a time as I saw last night.

I didnt play my mage last night after the adjustments, but just spamming Arcane Blast he was wrecking house. Will be interesting to see how that was toned down.

1966

I am seeing definite DPS improvements on my unholy DK. I haven’t gotten a rotation down or all my glyphs and in halfway T9 stuff with no party buffs I still managed 5.7k last night. Not entirely surprising, really. My diseases are receiving a mastery damage buff, plus the changes mean they stay up for a minimum of over 30 seconds, meaning I need to spend runes and GCDs on keeping them up less than half as often (I had generally reupped them at about 10 seconds previously). The sudden viability of unholy presence also speeds things up. And then automatically giving me tons of death runes and runic empowerment and free death coil procs means I was doing things like chaining four Scourge Strikes in a row. And every death coil is extra DPS from the ghoul as well, and…

Yeah. I hate what they did to the talent tree system, but I think I love the class/talent changes. Mostly. (I’d still prefer Army of the Dead go back to a 6 minute cooldown, Raise Dead go back to, what, 30 seconds? and Death and Decay go back to 20 seconds.)

1967

Supposedly when the mastery talent kicks in, there should be some differentiation between people playing the same class and roles. We will have to wait and see.

Again. The talent trees are missing masteries.

1968

The talent trees are not missing mastery. Just by picking a tree you get some mastery bonus, as long you have trained the mastery skill from your class trainer. There is no way to accumulate mastery rating at this time other than through reforging, though.

1969

My understanding is that without the rating, the masteries can’t be added to, which would then permit differentiation. Are the masteries implemented in the beta client? I ask because I’ve only heard about them from Blizzard.

1970

Rant #18475 - So they “got rid” of spell power. All my gear now has INT, my gems are all INT. Except my staff which used to have INT, but now has a ton of spell power and no INT. And my enchants are still spell power. wtf?

What are they trying to accomplish here? I have no idea how to gear my character.

1971

Mastery is live right now for every class. By default everyone gets 8 mastery points, which are accounted for in the mastery tooltips. For example, here’s the tooltip for the Elemental Shaman mastery, Elemental Overload:

Grants a 16% chance for Elemental Overload to occur. Elemental Overload causes a Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, or Lava Burst spell you cast to trigger a second, similar spell on the same target at no additional cost that causes 75% of normal damage and no threat. Each point of Mastery increases the chance of Elemental Overload by an additional 2%.

The 16% default proc chance is just the chance per point of mastery (2%) times the number of default mastery points (8). This holds true across every mastery for every spec of every class.

1972

There are also some items like my Runecaster’s Mantle which still has “Socket bonus: +5 spell power”. Some items just fell through the cracks when they were fixing up the stats on them, I guess.

1973

Caster weapons are supposed to mirror melee weapons in that they have a disproportionate effect on your damage output, but they didn’t want them to also have a disproportionate effect on your mana pool, so the SP stat still exists on them. As for enchants, I’m not sure what their specific reasoning was for not switching them to int, but I believe that there will be no more SP enchants in Cataclysm. Same is true for socket bonuses.

1974

That’s a cool idea, but about 5 years too late. As a mage, I used to nerd rage in the MC days when a rogue would pick up a purple dagger and immediately increase their DPS by over 25%, whereas a new staff did crap for me. I haven’t really noticed it being a problem since BC, though.

1975

Slight correction to myself: it turns out that there are one and a half that are slightly off of this pattern: Shadow Priest (Shadow Orbs), and the cat portion of Feral Druid (Razor Claws). Both of the default values are very slightly off from their expected values (expected value for Shadow Orbs would be 34.4, actual value is 34, and expected value for Razor Claws would be 24.8, actual value is 25.04). I’m not sure if this is deliberate, a tooltip error, or a rounding error, but my guess would be error, since literally all 29 other masteries follow the pattern exactly.

1976

It’s not a new phenomenon at all. Basically what happens is that the item budget that would go towards higher physical DPS instead gets folded into spellpower. I’m pretty sure it was true even for Molten Core loot, though those items have changed a number of times since MC was relevant content, so there’s no easy way to go back and check.

1977

I have to apologize. I was thinking of the original way they had portrayed masteries which was to get extra points at the end of the tree. They dumped that early in beta.

Here is a description by ghostcrawler of what masteries ended up being. From the article (which is sourced at the bottom)

In Cataclysm we have an opportunity to get a lot of those passive talents out of the talent trees. At the same time, we do need to allow for a distinction between say the higher damage and lower survivability of a Fury warrior compared to a Protection warrior. If individual talents shoulder too much of that burden, then the talents aren’t much of a choice. Instead, we give you passive bonuses just for spending points in the tree. Protection warriors care most about reducing damage and maintaining threat, so those are the first two passive talent bonuses. The third one we wanted to feel specific to the Prot warrior tree, so that one is going to relate to blocking with a shield.

So to restate this properly I hope this time, a third of the differentiation will come from the mastery bonuses on the gear that you get. I took out Spirit on my gear and changed it to hit because I wasn’t at the cap, but I could have changed it to mastery, which would have made the passive fire mage mastery bonus more potent.

There are also more articles at the bottom of the page that get deeper into it.

EDIT: This article in particular is good.

1978

I’m not quite following what you’re trying to say Lorini, but the information in that quote is woefully out of date (I can’t access that web site so I don’t know if further context is provided). They completely dumped the whole passive bonuses for spending points in the tree thing.

Edit: and yeah, that first article you linked finally came up and it’s dated June 3rd. In July they announced that they had completely reworked mastery, changed the talent trees to 31 points, and so on. Here’s a relevant quote from that announcement:

The original passive Mastery bonuses players were to receive according to how they spent points in each tree are being replaced by the automatic passive bonuses earned when a tree specialization is chosen. These passives are flat percentages and we no longer intend for them to scale with the number of talent points spent. The Mastery bonus that was unique to each tree will now be derived from the Mastery stat, found on high-level items, and Mastery will be a passive skill learned from class trainers around level 75. In most cases, the Mastery stats will be the same as the tree-unique bonuses we announced earlier this year. These stats can be improved by stacking Mastery Rating found on high-level items.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626290449&pageNo=1

1979

big deal. its just wow. I want Diablo III. hurry up Blizzard!

:-)

1980

Tanking at low levels is very different now, as a Warrior or Paladin. Fare well, ye olden days of tanking an entire room full of mobs and taking zero damage while Shield Block was up…