Something that has become quite apparent is that the rune abilities are very powerful. While passives can be easily adjusted if they are too strong, as they are typically a flat rate across all levels or some other effect, damage and healing abilities that use specific numbers are different story.
While originally with ranked abilities, you would go through check points of upgrading your next rank, that new power coming in chunks, typically at the cost of a heavy new mana sink for casters, or only marginal improvements for melee. However with the rune spells and abilities, they are better in everyway, so much so they invalidate their other spells counterparts due to them increasing in power with every level. Plenty of have noticed the power of Penance, Starsurge and Incinerate. While I can’t speak to Penance and Starsurge in much detail, I can tell you that Incinerate makes Shadowbolt completely worthless in any situation outside of a fire-immune target. It costs almost half as much mana, does 10% more damage(37% more on the second cast), casts 25% faster, and buffs all other fire damage to boot. That means it ends up being over 70% more powerful than Shadowbolt with less mana cost and buffs. Even if you invest 10 talent points into 5/5 for Bane and Improved shadowbolt, and you reliably crit to keep the debuff up always, Incinerate still beats it by 30% dps, a lot of mana, and a buffing your other spells.
This is only going to get worse as later one with spell costs getting higher, and many spells not having a final rank at 60, meaning the scaling Rune spells will always be better, even with a mana cost reduction on ranked spells, this means the rune ones will remain better until probably AQ. I hope it’s not too late into development to fix this, but currently, this will make many spells pointless, runes seemingly require for later raiding, as the difference is difficult to ignore.
(Oh and one last thing, I assume it’s a bug, but rune abilities automatically have the benefit of crit damage improvements and ignore the 50% damage penalty of attacking targets 5+ levels above you.)
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This is probably intentional and an attempt to break up the unbelievably boring homogeneous rotations and ability use in Classic raiding… Did you really want to play another round of Shadow Bolt Only?
Scaling is going to be changed a lot in future phases because it’s such a non-factor adjustment to make.
Yeah I made a post about this issue with some different solutions and also going further into caster scaling issues, especially at this lower level. I’m not sure if they would add ranks to runes. There’s just inherent flaws with spell ranks unless you update all spells to level caps. Some alternative options:
- Adding additional ranks for each lvl cap for all abilities or at least the core abilities. So lvl 25, 40, and 50 having an additional trainer, new ranks, spell books that drop from the raids, or whatever to have spells scaled for each level band cap. Level 60 partially did this with AQ books but not enough.
- Implement spell scaling. This already occurs with abilities like battle shout where there is a gradual increase each level without learning a new rank. Basically, your spells would automatically improve each level by a minimal amount, but would not surpass the next rank until you learn that spell rank.
The question also seems if it is worth their effort. Even at 60 this will be a problem when elemental shamans for example never receive a lightning bolt spell after lvl 54 or 56 iirc.
I love alternatives, and it’s great to have some sort of fill cast ability instead of spamming Immolate for fire spec, but the difference is huge, especially later one when we get Emberstorm. If the current trend continues at 60, it’s almost twice the DPS of Shadowbolt.
Casters are generally strictly worse than physical this tier. The value casters bring to PvP is mostly in the control they offer.
It would be a better idea to remove ranks from all abilities and scale normal abilities like runes do.
Eh… this is a flavor that is pretty nice, imo. Like Rank 1 Frostbolt is a faster cast, and costs less mana, makes sense to use it to slow something over max-rank. Likewise with Blizzard.
I wouldn’t see this as a positive change, personally.
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