A new patch was added to the beta realms the other day, making some minor changes to our talents and giving us a sneak peak of what is to come on our tier 11 pieces. The talent changes aren’t really that interesting to be honest.
Talents
A lot of people think that it is a really big deal to lose Nature’s Grace, while I’m sort of nonchalant about it. The whole point of this is that we don’t really know things are going to work out at level 85, but we must expect that anything taken away from us is balanced out at max level. And to be fair, Nature’s Grace was a double edged sword: In Wrath, we needed a high uptime of Nature’s Grace, as well as the capabilities to keep it active. If it wasn’t, it was a huge damage loss. In Cataclysm, we lose a lot of crit (from Lunar Eclipse) and that would make Nature’s Grace a rarer buff, and a very unstable one at that. As long as it’s balanced, though, I don’t really have a problem giving it up.
Other talent changes include a change to Balance of Power. The extra hit is removed, but the talent still converts spirit to hit at a 1:1 ratio – that’s fine, we’re probably going to be swimming in spirit and hit gear anyways, until we start reforging our items. Lunar Shower was changed so that it is only the direct damage component that is increased.
Tier 11
What’s much more interesting is the sneak peak of our tier 11 bonuses. 2pt11 is rather standard, 5% more crit on moonfire and insect swarm. If you remember our tier 7 pieces, they upped the damage of our insect swarm as well. Looking across the board, these bonuses seem to be pretty close in terms of damage increase and what kind of spell they affect. Please remember that MF and IS will play a lot bigger part of our damage in Cataclysm, with them being affected by haste and crit as well.
The 4pt11 bonus is really interesting though. Each time we proc eclipse, we get 99% more chance to crit with our spells. One crit and the bonus is reduced to 66%. Two crits, and we’re down to only an additional 33% chance to crit. This basicly means that we can almost expect crits with our first couple of spells after an eclipse, but not always. If we have a lot of crit, say, like we have now, 99% extra crit is going to be wasted. You can consider if that crit would have gone though without the extra crit buff. But we won’t be having so much crit in the beginning of the expansion and with a promise that our 2nd and 3rd casts will probably crit, we can start playing around with that.
Obviously, with this in mind, you would want to be sure to cast some really powerful spells. You could use it to proc eclipse and then fire off a massive starsurge crit, or start racking up those starfires. How this all affects our DOTs, I can’t begin to say, but it would be pretty awesome if it meant that casting a DOT right after proccing eclipse would cause the DOT to have the 99% chance to crit for the full duration.
We’re all going to die!
Last but not least, it is time to pack up your fur lined plate armor – it looks like we’ll be going home soon! 4.0.1 has been deployed on the PTR servers, and allows you to play around with the class changes (but not much else). If you remember from previous expansions, the 2.0 and 3.0 patch was usually deployed a few months before the expansions came out, so that we could get used to our new spells. This is the case with Cataclysm as well, and in a few weeks we might see 4.0 being deployed on the live servers.
Ofcourse, everything will be a complete mess at that point. Some classes are going to be insanely powerful at level 80 – maybe it’s us, maybe it’s someone else. You won’t really be able to call out for balance until we get to level 85. Ultimately, you should be better off than you are now, so you can continue doing your raids and the like, while playing with your new talents.
What this all means is that we are getting dangerously close to the end of the world as we know it. Blizzard are probably gunning for a pre-christmas release for Cataclysm, and with 4.0 on the PTR, we can’t be far off. I think that we will have 4.0 on the live servers in about 2-4 weeks, and then 1-2 months after that, we’ll be invaded by dragons and lava.
- QQ
