I understand that Blizzard said they consider classic to be a museum piece, but I honestly don’t buy it because it actually makes them money and see it more like they are testing the waters.
So, if they did come out with a Burning Crusades server and they did actually start improving on it without changing the feel of the classes or any of that, what BALANCED changes would you make? Also, for point of reference, please include what your main class(es) you played during that time was. For my, I was a druid and was primarily feral but also did do balance on occasion and rarely healer.
For basic changes.
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Change mana and energy so it regenerated gracefully like in future games instead of energy ticking in 20 energy chunks. It made energy management much more smooth and was an improvement they got right in the game.
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Change Mage Armors, Warlock Armors, Priest Armors undispellable and remove the charges from the priest armors. Again, something they got right in future games.
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Make warriors rend scale better with attack power to make it useful in PvE instead of ignored.
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When a priest bubbles someone and the bubble absorbs the damage, have it treated as a hit so that the tanks can actually not have to worry about being starved because of it. Would make disc more viable without actually changing much. The warrior hitting the bubble would still be rage starved, but the warrior actually being hit would get rage.
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Paladins, change it so they no longer get mana back from healing, instead of protection have talents that allow them mana back from having attacks dodge, blocked, parried or otherwise avoided and some back from incoming damage. That will allow them to scale with their gear. Being geared should not starve the tank for resources. They should be able to get mana enough between their judgements and avoidance to hold their own.
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Warriors have no way of shedding threat other than dying or stopping DPS. Give them a way to do so. But since there is nothing graceful about warriors and their moves, neither should this. It should be expensive but also reduce their rage by a large amount to compensate for it. Maybe name it “Fall Back”, costs 35 rage but reduces rage by a significant amount.
Now for the ones that hit close to home for me, druid specific ones.
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Turn Omen of Clarity into an undispellable passive. Not a buff. That is too important to a druid to have it removed so trivially.
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Moonkin form, the Melee for mana is poorly thought out and does not work for what it needs. Instead I would change it to be similar to Feral in that critical spell hits actually regenerate mana and apply to others in the group. Would help solve their mana issues.
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Give druid treanants a pet bar to control them. I personally would also include this for Mage elementals and any other pet that gets summoned, even through engineering.
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Mangle, remove it from the talent tree entirely and have it baked into the higher ranks of claw and have the bear form version actually hit the trainer to.
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Where Mangle was, I would move Feral Charge to as our cap stone. But I would remove its rage cost and make it usable in both cat and bear form as a cool down with no dead zone. This would allow it to be used as an interrupt for feral cat while DPSing or feral bear while tanking or a gap closer, so they have to pick which to use it as. This would also put it out of Restoration druids range which caused many to complain about.
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As an extension of #5, the Feral PvP glove bonus would be changed as well. Quite literally it was near useless, an interrupt on an incapacitate. I NEVER got PvP use out of it and only got use out of it in PvE for the interrupt when the Warrior, Rogue, Mage, or Shaman was slacking and I had combo points to spare. I would instead have it remove the positional requirement of shred as that is a HUGE portion of feral DPS. And while it was meant to be Feral backstab, that isn’t what it actually ended up being used as when it came to our damage and how much we needed it in PvP.
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Where feral charge was in the talent tree, delete Tigers Fury and instead have “Feral Fury” which would be usable in both Cat and Bear form and allows all your attacks to hit additional targets similar to a rogues “Blade Flurry” and a warriors “sweeping strikes”
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Swipe, have it increased from 3 targets to a minimum of 5 (8 preferred).
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Include an immunity to Hibernate for the druid with the “Leader of the Pack” aura as that combined with Cyclone and Roots is too much in allowing a single person to completely lock down another. And please notice I didn’t say anything about Hunters scare beast in that regards or anything, they are fine. It is just a single class having all 3 of them against another to completely lock them down is too much. If properly done, the feral druid will only get about 3 seconds of free time out of every 30 if they are lucky.
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Allow feral druids to retain their run speed and their ability to cast roots indoors. Having 2 talent points and our PvP 4-set bonus turn off along with roots because we are in doors as a bit much. Especially when that includes most instances and half of the PvP environments. That doesn’t add flavor to anything, it adds frustration at best.
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Allow feral druids to actually use potions and items in forms and benefit from “Chance on Hit” procs. We already have an insanely short list of weapons we can use and not even asking to change them because would be too much (Unless they would be willing to do it) but not even allowing them to use potions, warlock hearth stones, Nightmare Seeds, or even change on hit enchants is a bit restrictive and pointless.
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Allow Barkskin to be used in Cat and Bear form and change it where you are uncrushable while active. That would give druids a way with dealing with crushing blows and actually have a functioning “Oh Sh1t” button like every other spec that doesn’t wipe all their resources to use it. Would actually make them capable of tanking illidan without having to cheese it since they will have their own “Shield Wall” type mechanic to help with shear.
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Give standard out of combat resurrection similar to every other healing capable class.
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Have Rake scale so it is actually worth using instead of taking off your bar.
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Nurturing Instinct: Change it from just 100% to healing to also include 50% to spell damage to actually allow druid ranged attacks to scale with their gear like every other class. I don’t think a feral druid in T6 with +300 Spell damage and no talents boosting it is going to hurt anything.
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Natural Shapeshifter rolled into Survival of the Fittest and have it boosted to 20/40/60%. Feral is the spec that needs to shift and they are also the spec without any major regeneration. While Balance and Restoration, it is the opposite.
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This one is stretching it a bit but: Roll in the WotLK Furor with the current one. Where you actually are able to retain what you have when you change forms instead of completely wiping it. But not allow you to keep all of it, cap it at 50 energy and 25 rage similar to stance mastery.
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Change “Wrath of Cenarious” to also remove the cool down on Hurricane and give balance druid (And only balance druids) the ability to spam it like other casters can with theirs.
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Ferocious Bite, flat out remove the bonus energy conversion on it entirely and just have it be a set cost. Otherwise, severely boost that scaling so it isn’t a waste of energy.
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Cower is crap, you actually reduce your threat using the energy on cower instead of an actual attack move more than the threat cower actually lowers. Increase the amount it lowers threat by.
Others:
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SL/SL Warlocks are entirely too strong. At endgame levels they become unbeatable 1v1 against any other class unless they allow it, they don’t even need fear anymore which is too strong and the main thing that put Undead on the map. Do something about their mitigation because we don’t want to cut their DPS because that would adversely impact them in PvE.
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Potentially start releasing Heroic versions of the old instances with scaled up gear as well to match them. Would give players at end game much more to do, much more content to run and much more gearing options. Would also see 70s in the old places more often to run them. But please do something about the Manual Crowd Pummeler, not trying to have that thing farmed to infinity and required for druids.
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The feral druid T4 2-set bonus is INSANELY good. So it that not only is feral required to carry it all through TBC but they actually broke it in WotLK because it was so good it would end up required for T7+ instances because it was better than any stats they could put on it. Swap the T6 Mangle cost reduction with the T4 so that the endgame gear will still be the higher end. It hurts feral burst but the scaling rake, undispellable Omen and the removing of shreds position requirement would help counter that with better sustained and would have the T6 being the one you wanted most.
What changes would you make? And remember keep it balanced, nothing overpowered and no gutting of another class just because you dislike it.
Edit:
Added stuff:
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Allow Hunters ammo too stack in sets of up to 100,000 so it didn’t kill their bags. As an extension of this, the fire rate buff they provide would be a passive from the trainer and the current Quivers and Ammo bags would instead be Leather and Mining bags that increased the skinning/mining speeds effectively.
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Allow Warlock Soul Gems to stack up to at least 20. Same deal with the Soul Bags except turn them into Enchanting bags. (Herb bags would get the speed increase as well).