Herbalism: Lifeblood changed

The ability that comes with Herbalism, Lifeblood, is changed. Previously, it healed the character for a decent amount of health. Now, it grants haste (240 for 450 herbalism, less if you have less skill) and a minor amount of health.

It now triggers a shared 20-sec cooldown on all on-use trinkets that grant haste, attack power, spell power and you name it.

That means herbalism is now a good pick for profession for all characters.

Haste grants

• Faster spellcasting = more dps and more hps
• Less time between auto-attacks = more dps and more procs (f. ex. Maelstrom Weapon
• More rage gained (warrior, bears)
• Faster energy regeneration (rogues, kitties)
• Faster rune regeneration (death knights)
• Faster focus regeneration (hunters)
• Shorter Crusader Strike cooldown for Retribution pallies (provided they have Sanctity of Battle)

Tanks are probably the role that benefit the least from haste. However, faster auto-attacks and more resources (rage and runes) are always handy, and translates into more threat. Unfortunately, it does nothing to improve Protection paladin resources (mana and holy power), but it still grants faster auto-attacks (and more Seal of Truth and Reckoning procs)

A simple pally macro for herbalism:

#showtooltip
/cast Avenging Wrath
/cast Lifeblood

Soon, the point of no return...

4.0 (actually 4.0.1) is on the test realm. That translates to it hitting live servers soon. I'm really looking forward to it, although there's a few things I'll miss.

I'm not a fan of whining and complaining about changes. I believe that Blizzard does what they think is best for the game, even if that includes nerfing the class I currently play. When I stop believing that, I'll probably stop playing the game. However, so far it has worked out fine. Thus, I consider all change "good" in the broad sense that they'll over time make the game better and better.

I'd just like to list what I look forward to. I think it'll be fun looking back at it in a half year's time.

I look forward to practically every overhauled talent tree. It's just exciting to see the new possibilities and combinations, and test out various new or overhauled talents. Some specific highlights.

Before we start, I just got to say I really love that Mortal Strike and the similar abilities no longer halve healing, but reduce it by 25%. It'll be balanced in the end, but I think I like the balance that I can heal a bit more consistently no matter what enemy I'm facing.

Death-tards

First and foremost, the dedicated Blood tanking tree for DKs. I'm going to test something like this for tanking. I'll also test a modified version, for example this, for PVP as blood.

The other two DK trees look... fair enough. Good thing they're overhauled, but no super-changes I'm all wired up about.

Tree-huggers

Generally, I'm looking forward to the overhauled Thorns. I hope it'll be castable on yourself while tanking.

Bothersome Bear Boredom

The first two steps towards more entertaining tanking for bears: Pulverize and Skull Bash. Thrash is obtained at 81. Going to a bear-tanking spec like this for tanking.

Coming out of the closet... or bark

Druid healing without tree form, yay! Unlike a lot of other druids, I'm super-excited about it. This is how I PVP as a resto druid already. The resto tree is so full of awesome that I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to spec. Most likely a case of repeated respecs. I'll probably try a PVP-oriented build first, and see how well it works for PVE as well.

Just let me see if I got this correctly: Fury of Stormrage reduces the mana cost of Wrath by 100% at all times? So I can chain-gun wraths like there's no tomorrow, if noone is in need of healing? Oh, I'm so excited that I just can't hide it!

Ability to remove magic, fantastic!

The new spell costs will take some time getting my head bent around. The speedy healer, Regrowth, and the big healer, Healing Touch, costs almost the exact amount of mana. Meanwhile, Nourish, which heals for about the same as Regrowth, costs only a fifth as much mana. Hm. Interesting.

However, with talents, Regrowth is an almost guaranteed crit for 150% healing (an additional 60% + 4% from talents), and then provides both a Living Seed for an additional 30% of the critted amount, meaning about 45% of the normal amount, and a bed of pretty flowers under your feet for another 30% of the critted amount, or 45% of the normal amount. So assuming it crits, which it will do often, it can potentially heal for 240% on the main target plus a heal over time, and 45% of everyone else who happen to be standing in it. Given at least three targets in the zone, its approaching the efficiency of Nourish.

Finally, I'm all excited about the new Tree of Life, now on a cooldown. All the enhanced spells... so much fun.

Sailor Moon... kin!

I'm not going to test it straight away, but I am looking forward to the balance changes as well. Ranged knockdown and spell interrupt, great! I'm just not as excited as the other trees.

Huntards

I've never had a hunter before, but I'll probably make a Worgen one. Both to test out the starting area and story, and the class itself. It's rather low priority, though.

Water-vendors

I have a low-level mage, which I'm intending to pick up just to test the various new mage specs. Pretty low priority as well, though.

Loladins

So many great changes here. I'll definitely test them out, to see if paladins may actually suit me now. It'd be great to have a single character that can both tank and heal, and so far I've found paladins lacking due to general boredom.

The new resource system, holy power, looks really neat. Now, finally paladins will have to make some choices about how to use their resources as opposed to earlier (where holy paladins spammed a single spell, tanks just used a rotation, and retribution paladins just mashed whatever button came off cooldown first). Not just what to spend it on, but whether to spend it at one, two or three charges of holy power.

Tanking without a rotation, oh, how I look forward to that. Dps with a more depth than just cooldown-mashing, great. AoE healing and more choices while healing. Without even testing it, I am 100% sure that this is a great step in the right direction for paladins.

Interestingly enough, paladins can now (finally?) chain-cast a dps spell, Exorcism.

Preists

(That was intentionally misspelled, by the way)

Lots of neat stuff here. However, priests where already a pretty well-rounded class, so I look at the changes are more of rounding off an already great class, with a few exceptions.

The ability to heal by damaging enemies looks interesting, particularly when combined with a stacking buff and an mana restoring and healing increasing effect. I really wonder how it'll work out. At least healing in 5-mans needn't be boring when you're overgearing the place.

The priestly version of Anti-magic Zone looks neat, not least because it reduces all damage and not just spells. Pretty much superior to AMZ, in fact.

Blizzard is trying to make Holy priests viable for PVP now. Or, more viable, this is probably their third attempt or something. Chastise is back. I never got a chance to test it while it was a racial spell.

Chakra looks like it could be real fun, particularly with Chastise morphing to other spells while chackra'ed. By the way, I can't stop thinking of Naruto each time I hear the word Chakra.

The shadow tree looks polished and neat, but apart from the Shadow Orbs doesn't strike me as anything really new. However, it worked well before, it'll probably work slightly better now.

Rouge

(This, too, was intentionally misspelled)

I've got three RL friends who play rogues, so I keep an eye on the changes here so I can discuss it with them. However, I don't have a rogue, I've never had a rogue, and I'm not even remotely planning on getting one myself.

It does, however, look to me that rogues will be completely and utterly overpowered until the health pools increase. Bypass 50% armor for 10 sec after an opener? Probably a bit broken in combination with the health pools and dps of level 80 characters.

Ehm... lightning-huggers?

Sadly, I don't know any pun on shammies.

I think the changes here will be great. However, I'm not sure how I feel about the class. I do have a 80 which I've had a lot of fun with, and I will probably level her at some point, not least since Jewelcrafting is a great profession for all my characters.

However... I'm not sure I want to spend too much time as a shammy anymore. With that said, if the changes are good enough, I might. In particular, Elemental and Enhancement never agreed too well with me. Resto was good. I'm certainly going to test out the new talents and stuff.

Interestingly enough, I look forward to buffs getting lowered. Shamans had, in my opinion, too many buffs, and they're balanced around having all those buffs. Now that the buffs aren't quite so powerful, they'll need to be balanced around that, which means that they'll be more powerful when buffs are present... translate that to most PVP action.

For Resto, I'm in particular excited about the ability to remove magic, restore mana by casting lightning bolt, improving healing by shocking and 15% improved speed at all times.

I'm wondering if they have or will change Mana Tide Totem. I did read that they intended to change it, but can't see it anywhere. In PVP it's way less effective than every other mana-restoration ability for healers.

I'm still not sure I'll be a great fan of Elemental. I'm not sure how well Earthquake will work. Time will tell how well it'll work.

healthstone-vendors

I've got my level 34 alliance lock which I stopped levelling about two weeks ago. Will test out stuff with her. Honestly, the changes look really great, particularly after annoying myself to death with the old soul shard mechanic... lack of bag space, anyone?

As a low level lock, I'm also excited about getting the specialization spells now instead of having to wait until level 60.

Meat shields

I do have a warrior, retired a loooong time ago at level 34. ... how come I abondon several classes at that level?

However, come Cata, and I intend to make a goblin warrior. Since I don't have too much experience, I can't really tell what changes are good and what's not. But it looks quite interesting.

... and that's not all, folks

I'm also looking forward to the non-class specific changes. Too many to list here, but the spell alerts look particularly good.

Until 4.0, I've decided to get Crusader on my DK, to get the "bank access anywhere on a cooldown" thing. Lacking 5 days of dailies. You may also call me sir-fish-a-lot. So far, some 1200 fish and no turtle.

There's one thing I'll miss, though... the ability to tank as an Unholy DK... but oh well, can't have it all.

Talent tree design philosophy

Now, for some of you, this might be obvious. Sorry to you.

I'll share some thoughts about Blizz' design philosophy regarding the different talent trees. At least, what I think they are.

When WoW was made, Blizz tried to separate each class into three parts, corresponding to the three tabs in the spellbook and three different talent trees. I'm not going to debate whether that was a good idea or not. The basic point was that by separating the talents into different trees, no member of any class could have everything the class offered at the same time. Thus, they could choose to focus on one aspect of the game at the expense of the others, or several aspects without being top-notch in any.

Splitting each class' abilities into exactly three made for some very hard decisions and choices, as there weren't always logical reasons for splitting the way they did. But they tried.

The easiest way to split was on role, for those class that could perform several roles. The roles they split on was:

• Tanks


• Healing


• Ranged dps (spellcasting)


• Melee dps

Some of the classes was easily split using those ideas. I'm going to look at what they intended and worked towards, not the status at WoW launch. At that point, some of the talent trees were really messed up, like both Feral and Balance for druids.

The talent trees that were obvious from the role choices were:

• Shaman: Restoration (Healing), Ranged dps (Elemental), Melee dps (Enhancement).


• Paladin: Holy (Healing), Protection (Tanking), Retribution (Melee dps).


• Priest: Holy (Healing), Shadow (Ranged dps).


• Druid: Restoration (Healing), Tanking (Feral), Melee dps (Feral), Ranged dps (Feral).


• Warrior: Protection (Tanking).

A special note for Feral druids here. Because druids could perform all four roles but still only had three talent threes, it made sense to stack tanking and melee dps together, as they shared many similarities, among them gear choices.

Now, the next wave of splittings was on a spesific aspect of the class. Both classes with pets had a tree devoted to that. Those with choices about weapon types got a single tree focused to that.

• Hunter: Beast Mastery (Focusing on the pet), Markmanship (Focusing on the ranged dps), Survival (Focusing on melee dps and traps).


• Warrior: Arms (Two-handers), Fury (Dual-wielding).


• Mage: Arcane (high dps at the cost of mana efficiency), Fire (good, straightforward dps with fire damage) and Frost (slowing and bursting with frost damage)


• Warlock: Affliction (DoTs and curses), Demonlogy (the pet), Destruction (Direct damage).

Rogues initially got Assassination (finishing moves), Combat (white dps), Subtletey (Openers). This, however, made less sense. Every rogue benefitted from all of those. Over time, Subtletey came to focus more on the "Ninja" aspect of being a rogue, Combat focused on being a light armored, quick fighter, and Assassination came to focus on poisons. Today, they also focus on the three different combo-point builders Mutilate (Assassination), Sinister Strike (Combat) and Hemorrhage. Backstab is the joker, trying to fit in in all of the trees. Blizz tries to make it an alternative to all talent trees, expect if you sink 41 points into Assassination. But I digress. Someone else can probably tell you a lot more about rogue talent trees. I recommend Parry! Dodge! Spin!.

The different playstyles offered by the different trees encouraged different aspects of the game. The warrior Arms tree with it's burst potential was a much better PVP tree than Fury, despite fury packing better PVE dps. Similary, mage Frost tree with it's burst and control was much better suited for PVP than Fire.

There were also some trees they failed with a bit with.

The mage Arcane tree seemed to focus more on meta-spells than standing on it's own. Presence of Mind and Arcane Power were much more useful used with fire spells (and to a lesser extent frost spells) than with arcane spells. Blizz has added new spells and abilities, until today, when it seems to be able to stand on it's own. But it's a bit questionable what it's focus is.

The hunter survival tree was focusing on an aspect of hunter which was generally counter-productive to the hunter playstyle. Melee attacks for a hunter? Granted, some abilities are useful for attaining the range nescessary to use ranged attacks, but a hunter in melee was generally a gimped dps, in addition to the fact that he was much more likely to take damage. Blizz has changed it back and forth. Currently, it's a mix between traps, utility and dps talents. At least from my perspective.

At an alpha or beta stage in Wrath of the Lich King, Blizz decided to change their philosophy. They had done so slightly already, but took a much greater leap now. Rather than letting each talent tree have talents which supported a spesific aspect of the game (such as tanking, PVP dps, PVP healing, PVE dps, PVP healing and so on), they tried to make every tree contain talents which aided in any of the roles the class could perform. The most obvious sign of this was when the description of the three Death Knight changed description. Frost was no longer a tanking tree, but a control tree, similar to frost mages. Every Death Knight tree was given talents that aid in tanking and dps.

At the same time, the warrior Protection tree changed from being bloated with mitigation talents to containing a lot more dps and offensive abilities, while Shield Slam was made baseline for all warriors.

Now, this brings me to my final point. Priests. There are two different observations I'd like to share.

From the start, discipline was a utility tree. Useful abilities for both holy and shadow, but unable to start on it's own. With Burning Crusade, it turned into a PVP-healing tree. Now, they've turned it into a tree that can support others (the lower 20 points), or stand on it's own (further down) as dps or healing, PVP or PVE.

The second observation is about non-shadow dps. Blizz wanted non-shadow priests to be able to dps. But since each class had three trees, this was at first a part of holy through talents on it's own. Then, through different patches and expansions, both discipline and holy have gotten new damage talents. It's interesting to notice, though, that the damage talents are clustered relatively low in both trees. The latest damage talent in Holy is at 27 point (but you need 28 to get all of Spirit of Rdemption, Spiritual Guidance and Surge of Light). Granted, Penance is 51-pointer, but I'm very uncertain that it's better than the talents you're giving up in Holy. Otherwise the latest damage talent is at 31 points (Power Infusion) unless you count Reflective Shields. Many would argue that the latter is not a dps talent, because it only works when you shield yourself. In an instance, that's usually a bad thing. Not to shield itself, but having to shield in the first place.

Now, priests' healing talent trees are built on a slightly different philosophy than the healing trees of Shaman, Druid and Paladin.