Mind Blast , Mind Soothe , Power Infusion , Shadow Word: Death , and Shadow Word: Pain will be available for all Priests to use regardless of their active specialization.
These changes are pretty neat. I’m cautiously optimistic that this is an enumeration of Shadow Spells and that Holy Priests will now also be able to use Power Word:Shield, being the only Priest spec currently that cannot.
See, I hated holy power as holy.
As a result, I will not be playing my paladin in Shadowlands.
I don’t understand the Demo lock changes. Dark Pact is a defensive cooldown…
I didn’t need a lot of changes for Demo, but some QoL improvements would be nice.
You raised some good points. If they’re going to take away utility from bear and kitty, they need to give them something in return. There’s no reason all specs shouldn’t have innervate. I don’t particularly care for the affinity system myself. Just give us back those abilities on all specs just weaker versions like they used to be.
Druids are nature lovers so where are the spells like Wrath, Thorns, Hurricane for Balance and Faerie Fire (not just a PvP talent) for all? They don’t have to bring back those specific ones or all of them, they can create new nature spell(s) if they like since they are making new spells for other classes/specs.
Where’s my devouring plague blizzard?
It’s fine that you don’t feel to have all specs of a class in the same raid. There’s not enough room for all of the specs in the same raid. I’d gladly take mass grip for dps dks.
Hazzikostas in 12 months: “We have people who just keep asking ‘Why don’t you just remove the third spec from Shamans if you only want people to play Enhance or Resto’ so we’ve decided to do just that. Back when we announced Shadowlands class changes we decided to give the entire Elemental tool kit to Enhancement so now in patch 9.2 we’re phasing out Elemental entirely”
This is a great gesture and all -
But until gameplay comes out in alpha/beta testing, I’m not convinced that all of this will be cohesive and “feel good” to play.
The next step is to fix classes to do damage outside of cooldowns!
The affliction change looks promising.
Seed baseline hitting 2 more targets and the malady pushing a faster tick rate on corruption is great news. It’ll depend on how malady adjusts the tick rate.
That kinda follows the thinking I added awhile back to make affliction dots work differently depending on the order they were applied. So that AoE burst is actually possible.
HM nothing on GCD in here…
Yep. This is heartbreaking, hpal was so good this expansion
Can we get some comments on the lackluster Survival notes? I see that everything is subject to change, but so far what’s presented seems a bit demoralizing. Under-performing talents getting buffed is fine, but two of the talents (Flanking Strike and Tip of the Spear) directly compete with Mongoose Bite which many in the community (from Legion to BfA) feel is THE signature Survival Ability.
Furthermore, it seems a bit odd to leave in Bloodseeker when it involves no interaction at all and its taken in nearly 99% of all situations. Buffing Steel Trap seems a bit confusing as DPS traps are a bit degenerate as it relies on the tank not moving the mob/bosses having acceptable hit bosses for traps/etc.
Next, Chakrams being buffed is necessary but…when would anyone take Chakrams in AoE over Wildfire Infusions? Shrapnel, Volatile, and Pheromone infusions all give interactive game play in AoE and ST situations. Birds of Prey is going to feel very lackluster without Blur of Talons as it stands in live is a very unimpressive CD without the ridiculous Agility stacking from Blur.
Moving on: many specs are receiving talents/traits baked in to their kits from BfA that were deemed integral/thematic/always picked. Hydra’s Bite being buffed is fine and dandy but without Latent Poison that seems a bit odd. Half of the spec’s identity seems to be Wildfire Bomb (Wildfire Cluster [trait] Wildfire Infusion [talent], Guerrilla Tactics [talent], Wilderness Survival [trait]) but there was no mention of any part of this ability in the preview.
Mostly I would just like some clarification that there is going to be some actual changes to Survival to flesh out the (very exciting and engaging) themes from Legion and BfA. It feels a little disheartening to see Beast Mastery and Marksmanship get exciting new changes while Survival only gets buffs to under-performing talents I doubt people will choose regardless.
mmm never said you did. That wasn’t what we were talking about. The fear for those that main feral especially is that they won’t be taken at all if the utility they bring is now shared by both dps specs since balance can bring even more utility.
Not to be ungrateful and all, BUT imma need blizz to give Frost mages Deep freeze back please.
The problem is when a spec like Guardian or Feral underperforms other classes in the same role (Guardian vastly underperforms other tanks, and Feral greatly underperforms other melee DPS), and then you go and remove the ONLY reason to actually bring them to a raid.
And we can’t brush it off as “Blizzard will fix the numbers” because Feral has traditionally spent more of the game’s lifetime than not in a pretty pathetic state as far as performance goes. Ditto for Guardian, although to a lesser extent.
Give rogues expose armor or give us a perk for assassination that increases physical dmg by 5% on envenom (acidic venom, passive) for parity with Outlaws incoming leader of the pack crit debuff.
Also, hemorrhage. Bring it back. Why did you make it an azerite trait but no gib it back!?!?!?!!
Definitely an encouraging start. I like seeing a lot of talents and azerite powers being baked into classes at the baseline. This is absolutely something we needed. It’s also good to see so many specifics mentioned instead of just broad statements that no one knows what they mean. Please keep up this level of communication with testers and engage around class design discussions.
WHERE IS THE GCD CHANGE REVERSION?
I keep thinking that Blizzard is missing an opportunity with Balance.
In Mists, there was an Alliance quest with Lorewalker Cho, in which, to satisfy the quest, you needed to hit the left or right button in order to achieve the center, while Cho rang gongs that forced you further along one side or another.
I always felt that this gameplay was more representative of a spec called “Balance” than the wild tick-tock approach of Eclipse. Where you weave Arcane and Nature in equal measure to unlock the burst damage once you are “balanced” (centered).
I also really miss “ye olde days” where Nature was, well, nature. I hearken back to the Arcan’dor, a perfect balance of Nature and Arcane as the template here - with maybe solar and lunar being part of the Arcane end of the rotation, and we see old-school Wrath, Insect Swarm and Hurricane returning for the Nature side.
As a final note, I would really love to see, if nothing else, a glyph that turns your trees into fey dragons, but really I’d like to see the HFC druid 4 piece set bonus as a talent for - where a crit may proc a faerie dragon, up to 3, which:
Balance/Feral - does damage to the target
Guardian - heals the bear for x amount
Restoration - heals nearby characters for x amount
This would be an amazingly whimsical talent if it was competitive with others on it’s tier.
Or a glyph that changes your trees into faerie dragons. I just really like that set bonus from WoD.
Not really. Originally you always died at the end of STM now this could be used out on any mob(s) in the world and once you kill it before the STM ends you don’t die.
I don’t think warriors can unlock wands.