Minischoles wrote:Considering how fast Blizzard is going through these at least some credence has to be leant to them, and the druid talents have actually got me really excited.
Looks like resto and balance are getting some huge buffs in terms of utility.
The "leaks" are valid. The reason why is very simple: For a limited amount of time the Friends and Family Alpha was downloadable from the Blizzard site. Lots of people immediately downloaded it and all this information is from those downloaded game files.
However, seeing as this is still an Alpha, everything is still subject to change (as an example, Titan's Grip was also a talent in the BC alpha).
You CAN however see the rough direction they seem to be going. This includes apparently giving all casters good AoE spells, working CC, and making all casters dependent on a larger number of stats (spirit, spelldmg, crit, haste, hit are all needed/useful). They also seem to be trying to make dpsing more interesting for casters by making them do more than just spamming one key. Druids for example have the following talent:
http://wotlk.wikidot.com/ wrote:# Eclipse - "When you critically hit with Starfire, you have a 20/40/60% chance of increasing damage done by Wrath by 10%. When you critically hit with Wrath, you have a 20/40/60% chance of increasing your critical strike chance with Starfire by 10%. Effect lasts 12 sec." (Balance)
Warlocks get the following talents:
http://wotlk.wikidot.com/ wrote:# Decimate - Your next Shadow or Fire spell is instant cast, and does damage in the form of Chaos damage, ignoring all resistances, absorption, and immunity mechanics. After the end of the Decimated cast, you become exhausted, disabling you from casting a spell of the same school for 3 sec.
# Molten Core - Your Shadow spells and damage over time effects have a 4/7/10% chance to increase the damage of your Fire spells by 10% for 6 sec.
# Torture - After you critically strike with a Shadow spell, your next Searing Pain or Immolate spells have a [broken]% chance to become instant cast. This ability has a 20 second cooldown.
This would (finally?) force casters to react to what is happening in the game and not have a fixed spell rotation or a single spell to spam the entire time.
In addition, it is possible they are removing all pure DPS items and replacing them with the following talent (this one is from the Shadow Tree for Priests, the druids have a similar talent):
http://wotlk.wikidot.com/ wrote:# Growing Pains - "Converts 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Mind Flay has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to refresh the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain on the target." (Shadow)
If you look at the current itemisation, then adding 20% of the +heal as +spelldmg makes it equivalent to a pure spelldmg item. However, the druid version only adds 10%, and the other talent trees don't have an equivalent talent, so it remains to be seen if they really will remove pure caster dps items.
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