Wednesday, September 24, 2008

You won't like these changes

Says Mr. Jeffrey Kaplan on the beta boards. I guess they pulled down the servers without the fifteen-minute warning. Whoops! From part of his post on what's in this build (and what will be in future builds):

"You won't like the ones [class changes] made to your own class but you'll think the changes made to the 9 other classes are all overpowered."

Luckily I don't see much in the way of wild sweeping changes. Here's what I found.

Druids

Typhoon range has been extended from 20 to 30 yards.
Insect Swarm hit chance reduction lowered from 5% to 3%. Damage increased. (1050 to 1290 for Rank 7, 792 to 1032 for Rank 6, etc ...)
Wrath damage has been increased. (489-551 to 553-623 for Rank 12, 414-466 to 504-568 for Rank 11, etc ...)
Stafire damage has been increased. (670-790 to 1028-1212 for Rank 10, 562-662 to 854-1006 for Rank 9, etc ...)

Great, great, great, and great. I'm fine with the tradeoff on Insect Swarm, especially when we get what looks like roughly a 20% damage increase.

Eclipse now increase your critical strike chance with Starfire by 15%. (up from 10%)

Oh, wait, Eclipse still sucks!

You can now cast Innervate while in Tree of Life Form

Good for Drooood healers. I didn't know it wasn't castable in Tree form, but it's something Tree Druids use, so that's great.

Mages

Arcane Blast cost is now increased by 200% for each cast. (Down from 300%)

As it turns out this ain't no typo. They don't want people spamming Arcane Blast. Here's the thing though: if they're going to make the principle mechanic of the spell useless, why don't they just remove it? Give the spell a 3 second cooldown.

Paladins

Hammer of Justice now also interrupts the spellcasting for 3 seconds on all ranks.

Hmmm.... this seems.... useless? The only scenario where I can think of this being useful is if you were to HoJ a Mage out of his Arcane tree, preventing him from Blinking out of the stun. But because the stun is longer than the lockout, unless you're going to trinket/EMFH/etc out of the stun, what good is it going to do? Even if you were to escape the stun early, it's a super-short lockout.

Rogues

Opportunity now works all the time. (Old - Only increased the damage of attacks from behind)

That's a pretty wicked boost for Assassination builds now that Mutilate doesn't require you to be behind your target.

Shaman

Stoneclaw totem also protects your other totems, causing them to absorb damage.

The highest-rank Stoneclaw Totem has over 1600 health on it, and coupled with the stun chance that makes for a longer-lasting totem. Only problem: using it in PvP locks out the use of SoE+GoA and the new talent-able Earthbind. But hey, at least it prevents stuff from being one-shot, and the more time someone's pet spends hitting your Stoneclaw Totem and getting stunned, the less time they spend on you. And you can drop it every 30 seconds!

I wonder if all this goes up on the PTRs. Last I checked it did, sans the Northrend content obviously. Still haven't renewed my subscription. I'll get to it eventually...

No comments: