Cataclysm Stats Blue Post

[Hammerfists]

From the description of Dodge, Parry, and Block, I had a few take aways.

1) Unless druids have massively more armor or health than the other tanks (which has been another issue in the past), the fact that their only form of avoidance is Dodge is going to make them VERY spikey to heal compared to the other tanks.

2) Block and Parry - is there any chance that BOSSES will apply these new mechanics as well? Tank damage isn't stellar, but you could end up with expertise-capping causing a major difference in your threat output. More major than currently. You get the idea.

1) Druids have Savage Defense which is a block to the next attack every time they crit, which makes agility really sexy as it gives armor, crit, dodge and attack power. This change gives everyone a block in a nutshell but expect druids to have more dodge than the other tanks. Dodge in Cataclysm will be the only form of avoidance fyi. Also bark skin only reduces incoming damage by 20% so dont expect druid health and armor to be changed much as they have to rely on it for big burst damage due to a low damage modifier in their "shield wall"

2) It seems to me that they want the hit and expertise cap to shift per tier so its not like today where you hit the cap and then your just collecting gravy stats like crit and armor pen from there. The thing they are shifting towards is since you have less mitigation/avoidance out of the box through reforging, gemming, and enchanting you will need to balance your stats between mitigation/avoidance and extra stam. Im sure we'll see tank damage rise but dont expect to be the deal breaker in a dps race.

I'm more curious about how mastery will work, honestly, than anything else...they mentioned that you get a mastery bonus for wearing "your" gear...so as an enhancement shaman rogue gear will probably look pretty attractive (especially since expertise will almost certainly be basically non-existent on mail gear as it's a worthless stat to hunters), but I'd lose that mastery bonus for using leather instead of mail. Is that "small bonus" in mastery really a big deal? It's less of an issue, I expect, for plate wearers...nothing else has strength so nothing else will be attractive. Definitely looking forward to more info on mastery and why it's a big deal, though.

Once again reforge armor pen or whatever stat you dont like on the piece to expertise. Blizz has solved this headache for (enhance) shaman with reforging (yours will be done by a LW). You get the cake and you get to eat it.

[Hammerfists]

But that's the things, neither of these will likely be defining characteristics, since they will both be brought closer to plate DPS (including mitigation). The difference between Tanks and plate DPS will be defensive CDs (which I hope they introduce more of) and avoidance.

No they mentioned closer stam stats on gear but with mastery and talents you will have a lot more stam modifiers pulling you just as far if not further than now in health. The whole grand scheme is to not top off the tank with each heal but to top off the dps. Only class i can see that needs to worry about your scenario is druids because agility will become more enticing while you will need to pick up parry/dodge. For example Prot Pallie beta mastery is % Block, % Stam, and % Damage tanken. You can have a dps offtank but i would imagine he would be a sack of potatoes for the healers to carry.

[Güth]

1) Druids have Savage Defense which is a block to the next attack every time they crit, which makes agility really sexy as it gives armor, crit, dodge and attack power.

They're making Agi give AP to bears in Cata?

It would explain how they're going to compensate the loss of raw AP on the gear used, but that seems like too much weighing on one stat to be true. I never really thought of how the changes would impact the AP aspect of bear druids and Savage Defense.

[Hammerfists]

Attack Power will still be in game for rings and the like to be appealing to both leather, mail and plate classes. Attack Power will be derived from Strength if you wear plate and agi if you wear leather of mail. Caveat is that if you wear mail and opt for leather gear you lose mastery bonus by a certain percent. Back to Bears, since they wear tanking gear as well as leather they will get attack power from both agi and strength.

[Chamenas]

No they mentioned closer stam stats on gear but with mastery and talents you will have a lot more stam modifiers pulling you just as far if not further than now in health. The whole grand scheme is to not top off the tank with each heal but to top off the dps. Only class i can see that needs to worry about your scenario is druids because agility will become more enticing while you will need to pick up parry/dodge. For example Prot Pallie beta mastery is % Block, % Stam, and % Damage tanken. You can have a dps offtank but i would imagine he would be a sack of potatoes for the healers to carry.

Okay, NOW I'm getting a bit frustrated. I have never once mentioned DPS being able to off-tank. I shouldn't need to clarify myself three times.

[Eravian]

Hmm... now that I think about it, I know that Reforging will be great, especially when that thing drops that isn't ideal for any class with because it has Hit, Spirit, etc...

But I wonder if that's going to make problems early on too... clearly this isn't anything Blizzard can control, since it boils down to the raider or individual loot rules, but if that Healer gear would be a major upgrade for me if I swap out that Spirit for Hit, does that mean I can roll on it? Or will there be "Main spec roll - main spec with reforging - off spec - off spec with reforging - vendor/greed" etc. Clearly not an issue for many, just got me curious if we'll see these sort of rolling norms pop up.


As for Mastery, it'll be fun to see the different Mastery abilities and how they balance it out so that it's not always, for example, in a Prot warriors best interest to take all the Prot talent points for the increase to Mastery stats and likely survivability. I hope there are enough cool/worthwhile/just plain fun talents in the lower tiers of Arms and Fury to make up for it.

Unless of course they are trying to promote more the idea that "I'm a tank, so just max out the Prot tree," but I highly doubt that sort of uninformed spec decisions are what they'd want to see. It will be interesting to look at when they're released!

[Chamenas]

Reforging will always be inferior to the item at that item level that you're supposed to have. At least, mathematically speaking it should be as one stat will be 50% below budget. But the way that Blizzard chooses to itemize gear sometimes... it could very well become an issue.

[Eravian]

I'm aware it will be inferior still... I just mean that if I need new boots, and I haven't seen any tank boots drop FOREVER... hmm... those dps boots have lots of stam... and I can trade off that crit...

That kind of loot protocol. Will be interesting to see how standard "loot protocol" as it were adapts to this change.

[Arikak]

With regards to Mastery:

They are pruning out the "Static" talents from most of the talent trees. Expect to see things like Anticipation disappearing into the Mastery system.

The idea here is to free up some talent points to grab more situational abilities. So as a protection warrior I will probably be able to take most of the protection tree talents and then muck around in Arms and Fury much to my delight. I can be "full prot" yet still dive deep into fury for Improved Cleave and Piercing Howl and maybe have points left over to get Sweeping Strikes in Arms. Which is cool.

[Eravian]

I wonder if they'll put a cap on it, though. Like "Beyond 60 points in a tree, the mastery no longer increases," so that the survivability gains of going 0/0/76 don't outweigh the utility of dropping some stuff in Arms or Fury (again using Prot Warriors as an example). Of course, diversity is going to have more utility and be more fun, I'm not worried if they don't cap it, etc. I'm just curious what kind of cool talents, etc. we might see to balance out the potential DR, Stam, Block bonus of mastery (if it's similar to Prot Paladins), especially for those tanks (not me) that are looking to min/max their survivability for progression raiding.

[Ion]

Once again reforge armor pen or whatever stat you dont like on the piece to expertise. Blizz has solved this headache for (enhance) shaman with reforging (yours will be done by a LW). You get the cake and you get to eat it.

No.

1) No because reforging isn't at a 1-1 conversion. So if there was some stat on my gear that I didn't like (which won't happen, see point 2), I'd take X amount of it and end up with Y amount of expertise, where Y < X. Basically meaning that I'd end up with less stats on my gear simply because enhancement shaman aren't as important as hunters. That, I think, won't be what happens.

2) No because there won't BE stats that I don't like anymore. That's the point of the whole revamp to begin with. Haste? Yes please. Crit? Of course. Hit? Yep, need that too. Agility? Obviously. You can't reforge stam...and mastery is, apparently, not really a stat you'll see until later.

So, there will need to be some fairly significant reason to wear mail, as an enhancement shaman since we basically share more stats in common with rogues than we do with hunters in pve.

So, one wonders how they're going to handle that conundrum, amongst others. The most glaring, I'd think, is DK tanks not using block, but I'd guess that very much as it is now, there will be plenty of pieces that simply don't have the stat. Which, of course, is sort of the opposite of the "we need expertise" problem...warriors and paladins don't NEED block, it's just got some value to them. DK's can't use it at all, so leaving it off gear isn't really a HUGE deal...since it's not really stopping people from doing their job effectively. Leaving expertise off of mail is fine and dandy for hunters, but a serious problem for shaman, since it is the best stat prior to capping it (which is a whole other conversation...capping stats), and necessary for melee of all sorts to have.

[Hammerfists]

However, in Cata, if uncrittable is simply tied into a stance, a lot more people might be looking for their "off off Tank" (in say, 25 mans) to simply be a DPS that switches stance, since they often do little tanking anyways. Ideally this would be a Tank that can go full Tank if the raid requires 3 actual tanks, or DPS when it doesn't. That puts more pressure on me to get a DPS spec, since it's already hard to find a spot in a raid for a Tank, it will be even more difficult when they have even more reasons to want me to have a DPS spec.

Sorry lulia i got from this point that IDEALLY the third tank is prot/dps specced but ideally means not necessarily. What i felt you were hinting at was that it might be possible that the third tank would run dps spec but be uncritable. This is my last post here since this topic appears to be crumbling into too much speculation when all this is a taste pre-beta and the world might turn again.

PS Good things on the horizon enjoy what we got now and dont stress it.

[Grifieth]

ok, im actually loving the fact things are going back to vanilla wow standards. call me insane but i actually had more fun in vanilla than i did in the xpacs. dotn get me wrong, ive loved what theyve done in the xpacs, but vanilla, idk just sooo much to do and soo many peps that didnt knwo how to play their classes, and u didnt have to have a cookie cutter spec, u could spec into almost anything, leanr how to play it and bam u could be awesome lol. but anyway back to what i was posting..

ive looked over the notes and im liking everything, BUT one thing has caught my eye and idk im confused..

You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat--Gc

from that right there, are they telling us, hey dps gear gonna have more sta on it, and if they are, are they doign it cuz they knwo we'll gem sta so its a way to curb down our health into balance with dps?

[Maèl]

Truth being told, heals should be halved, hp should be doubled, boss damage should be halved. I can top off a tank with 2 GHs and a FH. The figure should be more like 4-6 GHs and me having the time to actually cast it. There is nothing wrong with a hateful strike kind of damage. But that shouldn't be a lovely white boss hit. That should be part of the fight mechanic.

The last time I had the problem that my healingTHROUGHPUT couldn't keep a tank alive was my very first heroic in BC. Over the course of a minute I watched in horror how the tanks hp slowly got less and less while I was going full out. I was literally unable to top him off. In WotLK that has been replaced with the mindless healing spam to prevent tank insta gib. There was a time when severe overheal was a sign of lack of skills. That happened to somebody who couldn't manage his mana or a poorly organized healing team. But that was vanilla.

So in my opinion Blizz has taken a step in the right direction. They should be a bit bolder about it.

The downside of my plan is that healer get a true "rotation" which is just another word for "I don't care about my surroundings. I have to press the right keys at the right time or I'll lose the game". Anybody here remember Summer Games for C64? There were a lot of godawful "games" that had you pressing a key at the right rythm and that was all that was to it.
Everytime I hear the word "rotation" I want to rotate my head while spewing pea soup.

For the record: I don't give a beans worth for PvP balance. That's Blizzard's mess to clean up.

[kingcomrade]

I'm very glad that they want to simplify the stat system. Right now it's too complex for its own good. When you have to look at spreadsheets just to tell if you want a purple gem or a blue gem (and gems are expensive so mistakes are costly to fix, e.g. my disc priest has a 10 mp5 gem in his shoulder and I'm not going to change it until I get a new shoulder piece) the stat systems have been taken too far. The problem is that there isn't customizability here, there is either optimal or sub-optimal. One option is always going to give you the best DPS, survivability, or healing, the rest are just mistakes you made because of the complexity of the stat interaction. I know it makes many people feel 1337 to have optimal gems and enchants compared to others because they used a spreadsheet program, but removing that need for programs to tell you how to make your character not fail at a video game is not "dumbing down." People need to know the mechanics of the game to play it without confusion about what is good and what is not good. When you have to resort to what I've been QQing about here for that it takes the fun out of gearing your character. These changes aren't about stopping people from needing to know the mechanics of the game, it's to make those mechanics more clear.