Mar 10
1
Cataclysm stat and system changes
Eyonix (blue poster) released some new information today regarding the upcoming stat changes we will see in Cataclysm. I must admit, I was initially a bit anxious about this whole change. My fear was that, in an attempt to make stats easier to understand, it might just make it all too simple.
I would strongly advise anyone to read the full post, which you can see by clicking on this link, and in the meanwhile, we will take a closer look at what moonkins can expect.
Right off the bat, Eyonix mentions that all spirit based gear will be for healers. All caster classes will have gear with different stats. All caster classes, except for elemental shamans and moonkins though. Hey, I’m all for only battling resto druids for my gear, as I am sure that mages and warlocks just love being the only ones needing on cloth DPS gear. I worry, however, that we will return to the itemization that caused a lot of issues back in The Burning Crusade, as with:
- Mages and warlocks will share cloth caster gear. Priests get all items with spirit for themselves.
- Resto druids and moonkins will share leather spirit gear. Rogues and feral druids will share their agility based gear.
- Hunters and enhancement shamans will share gear, while restoration and elemental shamans will share theirs.
- DPS warriors, death knights and paladins will share one pile of gear, and the respective tank specs will share another pile of gear.
- Holy paladins gets a pile of stuff for themselves.
This means that there will be items that are only attractive to holy priests and paladins. While this may not be a huge deal, we might still see item drops that are only useful to those classes, and it will pain anyone to see them go disenchanted.
To the rescue comes reforging. It will allow a mage to receive a cloth item with spirit, reforge it to remove some of the spirit, and recieve a, if not perfect, then acceptable upgrade none the less. For moonkins, spirit will be our way to gain hit – although I fail to see the connection – and once we are comfortably hit capped we can begin reforging some of our spirit, when we accumulate more, into intellect, crit or haste.
With the change to caster gear, I would assume that Blizzard plans to do something about mana regen for all classes. While mana is certainly not a problem for moonkins at the moment, chances are that we will probably be looking out for it again when Cataclysm comes out. Spirit will be converted into hit rating, so our regen will be covered by a moonkin-form-like aura that lets us regen, and innervate.
The most interesting change is the mastery stat. It can be found on gear and will increase “whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique”. I assume that it is some straight buff to our talents, so that with 100 mastery, eclipse will be 44% rather than 40% or something along those lines. It is interesting, I admit, because it offers some interesting choices: Do I increase my crit by 5%, or do I increase the value of my talents by 1%?
Finally, all spell ranks will be removed. I guess that removes down ranking for sure, eh? Spells will scale as we level up, and we will only have to visit trainers for new spells – they are adding more of those also, but if they will add an equal amount (or any) to all classes is currently unknown. I like this change.
One of the changes to spells that I really liked was when all spells were changed to be a percentage of base mana. I saw this change on my (still) level 40 mage alt, where I would just be comfortable with the mana cost of fireball when I would get a new rank that would drain my mana much faster. With mana cost being a percentage of our base mana pool, the mana goes up accordingly, and there was no more suprise mana costs and only more damage with each new rank.
Come this system, mana cost and damage will scale accordingly. We level up, get more mana and do more damage with spells that cost more mana. It makes sense, and as we gear up we will get more intellect compared to mana cost to be able to cast more spells with more damage, for the same mana cost.
In any case, it seems like we have a lot of very interesting changes incoming. How all of this works in practice, noone knows yet. Don’t get too comfortable with how your playing and gearing style is now. The changes incoming may be almost.. cataclystic!
