Alright, go ahead and do a happy dance. I'll wait. Matter of fact, I'll join you in spirit via this wonderful video:
Ok, that's out of my system.
This means something a bit different for each class, so let's break it down and take a look at how each one will be affected, and why you don't need to build a dps set for leveling, giving you more shiny emblems for things of more financial importance.
Paladin
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As the only healing class without a casting spec, unfortunately the healadins must still build an offset to avoid grinding up slowly and painfully to 85. But, this still affects us in some really positive ways, and I'm still super enthusiastic that they decided to include this for holy paladins in spite of us not sharing gear with a dps caster counterpart, and part of it is why I'm showing melee hit in this screenshot, and not spell.
As a Holy Pally, a large amount of healing done comes from Judgement of Light. Now, consider this example: You're on Twin Valks. There's two mobs, and just one of you. You know the aoe is heavy here, and you want to do as much group healing as possible. You look at your judgement spell, and notice that it has a 10 second cooldown, and lasts 20. Being an enterprising young paladin, you judge one, wait the 10 seconds, then judge the other. Now, with debuffs out on both mobs, you just reapply it on cooldown, and you're good. Until you miss. With judgement becoming only one spell baseline to all pallies again, this loses some luster with more than one pally in the group, but when we're seeing more 10 mans I think this will still hold some use.
The other big deal here is mana regen. Much of a pallies regen comes through Seal of Wisdom. Now, a good strategy with this is to weave in SoW between heals. Less misses decreases time between ticks. Because this and judgement are both based off melee hit rating, we don't even need a large amount. One point in the talent might be sufficient, assuming you dont mind less range on your judgement.
The third use is pvp. Nothing is more frustrating than a missed stun or kill shot, and getting hit capped as a healer is rough. This will help immensely.
Priest
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EDIT: August 14th, 2010 - Priest talent changed to 50/100% like the others.
Now, this one is a bit tough to speculate on for a few reasons. The first, the talent doesn't seem to be working. I'm not wearing a single piece of hit gear in this screenshot, only my healing gear. This is the only toon where I'm getting a flat 0. The other reasons this one is a bit odd is that out of all the classes, it's the only one deep enough into the dps tree that a healer can't grab it. So, priest healers are a bit out of luck here for pvp and raid dps purposes, they'll still need hit gear. I'm assuming the priest conversion is lower because cloth gear will still have hit, whereas with mail and leather they wanted to have more people using the same gear. However, even with this only affecting shadow, it's not all bad. This talent (when it starts working) will assist with leveling priests, you won't have to have a second gearset. It will also help part time shadow priests. Your 10 man have 3 healers, but this fight only takes two? This will help the gear race, as more of your healing gear will be alright to dps with.
Shaman
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Being able to just throw together an ele spec, not change any gear, and speed up the leveling process was wonderful. I can still take healing upgrades when I quest, and not worry about having trouble with mobs. And when I start raiding, I won't have to grumble when I'm asked to dps for a fight, because I can swap out minimal gear and still help my group.
This one is actually low enough in the elemental tree that a healing shaman can reach it if they wanted to put a point or two there. With the new talents encouraging healing shaman to shock and lightning bolt for mana returns, just like paladin, this might not be a bad use of points if mana is a frequent issue.
Druid
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I'm curious to see if healers will be easily hit capped at 85, or if they'll need a hit ring or something to fill the gaps. For various reasons, weekend dps, pvp, leveling, and group utility, this is a wonderful change. And to top it all off, it helps less loot rot, which means more purples for all.
/bubblehearth
I'm also highly in favor of this new development. And that's not just because I play a Holy paladin.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit worried about something though. A while back (and this might have changed in the meantime) there was a blue post stating that in Cataclysm, players wouldn't be able to reach any kind of cap easily anymore. Now, of course, as it is now in beta, it seems otherwise. But I'm really worried how things will look at the new level cap.
Yea, without being able to get to 85 in the beta, it's hard to tell where things will end up, and we can only speculate. But, as a healer we generally want a decent amount of regen, and with the high conversion rate, I think people with healing gear will actually have an easier time being capped than folks focusing on gear with just damage stats.
ReplyDeleteThis mainly applies to pallies, shaman, and druids, as priests are in a bit of an odd spot with the lower conversion rate, and there being hit on cloth dps gear. Let me use ele shaman as an example.
As an ele shaman, mana isn't really much of a problem. You have tools to help with it if it becomes one, such as thunderstorm. Now, you're getting hit capped through spirit, so as an ele you want just enough to get to that cap, then letting you focus on more haste/crit/int. A resto shaman, however, is more likely to continue taking spirit gear to aid with regen, and is probably either oblivious to the cap, or at least not worried about it. So, when they swap to their dps spec, they have more of a chance of having to lose hit than having to gain it.
Again, without being able to get to 85 and see the gear, it's impossible to tell for sure, but this is the way I've been looking at it. Even if the cap is harder to reach, I don't think healers with an offspec dps will have any trouble.
And thanks for the comment! My first one.
And here's your second >8u
ReplyDeleteThey haven't quite implemented +Hit for all classes at the moment, only caster DPS (and healers, it seems) like they said they would. I assume there's going to be some normalization when the time comes, feeling out what stats should give x amount of +hit.
Since they don't have control over numbers being concrete they might end up giving the skill to each class/spec and giving it a cap hard cap (Like Excute's 30 Rage cap).
I doubt there will be a cap on the talents, at least not for boomkin and ele shaman. The point of them being there was so that they would share gear with shaman healers. For priests, maybe, but the conversion rate is so much lower that again, I doubt they'd cap it.
ReplyDeleteWhat would probably be more likely is if they feel the hit is too easy to obtain, bump the conversion down from 100%.