Spellcasters will continue to struggle with spell ranks being its primary limitation in level banded endgame in each phase. Waiting to get a new rank a few levels higher than the level cap will allow casters to have underperforming spells for each level cap. Spell ranks as they are have always been a flaw in design which is why they changed it in Cata. Below is Ghostcrawler talking about that change in spell ranks.
The gain is every level. You don’t have to reach certain milestones for your Shadow Bolt damage to increase. One of the scaling problems we have currently is that any spell without a level 80 rank starts to fall behind. Imagine Shadow Bolt just has 85 (free and automatic) ranks.
We changed the level at which you get abilities, in some cases dramatically. Currently, you get showered with abilities at low level, many of which aren’t even useful when soloing. By sliding these around we have every class to where you get an ability about every odd level. There are still some dry spells for some classes, but then you have talents and other things that fill in some blanks.
Related, the spell book tells you at what level you will get future abilities so you can plan accordingly. In addition, when you ding, the UI tells you not only about newly available spells, but also systems and mechanics not tied to your class trainer, such as the ability to train riding, dual spec or use Dungeon Finder. It’s pretty sweet. Our UI team is kicking some major booty for Cataclysm.
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer
I think learning new ranks is part of the flavor of classic so I don’t want that to change completely and copy cata/retail, just go about a solution in a different way. We are also limited by the client era being tied to HC/era and should seek solutions that can be self contained in SoD and the runes. I think the main problem is spell ranks and scaling.
I’ve considered 3 solutions and would like to hear any better solutions others may have or what possible problems there are with these solutions
1 - Create new spell ranks at each level cap. These spells being SoD exclusive however that needs to be done. Add a new trainer next to your normal trainer only on SoD that gives you level capped spells each phase for all damage/healing abilities (preferably free to train). I don’t know how elegantly this can work in a spellbook, to have something like rank 4b or lvl 25 Frostbolt, as an example. So mage’s rank 4 frostbolt at lvl 20 is 78 to 87 Frost damage. Rank 5 is 132 to 144 Frost Damage at lvl 26. A lvl 25 Frostbolt rank 4b doing X amount of damage, let’s say 113-122. The other option is gradual spell scaling, which may be impossible based on SoD restrictions, to give minimal bumps each level and then a bigger bump in dmg at a new rank level.
2 - Another solution, mostly for scaling, is a mainhand weapon rune where this rune is the only option in that slot. In this case, all casters get this rune to then adjust and scale all spell dmg (maybe healing too) based on weapon damage, converting weapon dmg into +spell damage. These numbers are random and irrelevant, mostly focusing on ratios like 2h staff is .5x or .4x of the average weapon damage into SP, 1h weapons giving more become of the obvious lower damage so 1x, and 2 hand polearms/axe/mace/sword for the pallies, druids, shamans being .25x or less because they have much higher weapon damage than staves usually or completely disregarding them. This also makes weapons feel a bit more meaningful like how weapons feel to a melee or physical class.
3 - Another weapon rune, instead of scaling weapon damage into sp dmg, we just convert all of your intellect and/or spirit to give some spell damage. Some classes (holy priest) will end up double dipping on this with later talents and possibly new runes, who knows. Both 2 and 3 would definitely change the amount of spell damage casters do, especially at 60, but most casters fell off once melee (rogues and warriors) get gear anyways in later phases.
This won’t truly fix frost mage now for example or even change the meta maybe. The point is to remedy the spell rank/scaling problem and not penalize casters for having spell ranks in lvl 25, 40, or 50 endgame. Even at 60 honestly. Melee abilities mostly scale off their weapon damage and/or AP, giving + X or + X% weapon damage unlike casters. Adding tons of +spell damage gear might be too much as we get to the 40/50 raid and completely make future gear in other original classic raids irrelevant or need to be buffed. In any form of classic+ I believe we would ideally address this issue among other things. There are still other issues of scaling such as haste and dots critting, actual spell coefficients, and more, but this is to address one specific issue regarding spell ranks and its effects for casters.
