Cataclysm Class Changes: A Comprehensive Look

We go in and tell you what the blues have said about the new classes all in one easy to browse location..

New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

PaladinNext you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

  • Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
  • Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
  • Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
  • Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

New Talents and Talent Changes

  • We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
  • We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
  • We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
  • We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.
  • Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
  • Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
  • Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Holy

  • Healing
  • Meditation
  • Critical Healing Effect

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Protection

  • Damage Reduction
  • Vengeance
  • Block Amount

Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.

Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

Retribution

  • Melee Damage
  • Melee Critical Damage
  • Holy Damage

Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

Clarifications:

Here's a bit more clarification on some of these changes. Also, please keep in mind that this is merely a preview and we'll still have more to go in testing up to and including any other changes that aren't listed here in the preview.

We've updated the Flash of Light reference to make it a bit more clear in the original post as follows.

Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.

In addition we’re changing the paladin heal design to match that of the other healers. Holy Light is the middle heal. It’s very efficient, but not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of throughput. Flash of Light will be the faster heal that costs more mana. (Currently paladins sort of flip the model around by having a fast, efficient heal.) Holy paladins can talent into an additional heal that is like a giant Holy Light. It might take three of these big heals (or two crits) to get a tank from death’s door back to 100% health.

Currently on live, Beacon of Light is a tool that allows paladins to target more than just the main tank. In Cataclysm if it just doubles their healing, it is going to be overpowered. We have two ways we might handle this and we’ll experiment to see which feels better. The first is that Beacon only works on some heals, such as Flash of Light or Holy Light (but not the big one). An alternative idea is that Beacon increases the mana cost of a heal cast on a beaconed target, since you’re essentially getting a double heal. Under this model, Beacon itself would cost no mana.

Also on the live realms currently, paladins have huge mana pools and massive throughput. The trade-off is that they are excellent single target healers and much weaker in other roles. We want paladins to be slightly more interchangeable with other healers. In Cataclysm, you should be able to have a Holy priest on the tank and a Holy paladin on the raid. We’re not sure we’ll back off of the current healing roles completely, but we definitely want to add more breadth to those whose roles are currently too narrow.

As for the Guardian of Ancient Kings. First, it's important to understand that this is not a pet nor does it have a pet bar associated with it. Second, it's also not meant to last for very long. So, it's not a pet in the traditional sense. It's a friend in need when you need it, but not a permanent companion.

Next: Priest

Comments

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Priest pay
# May 07 2010 at 9:14 AM Rating: Decent
27 posts
All these changes to priest are exactly identical to the way I have been playing my healing priest. All my gear already focuses on intelligence first for power pool, Spirit and spell power second for bigger heals and better mana regen. I did notice that they are going to make a second heal availiable with less mana. I find this funny because I used to make use of the top three ranks of greater heal to minimize the power loss on heals, then they made them all the same power cost, ultimantly getting rid of that second heal with less power consumption. So they are bringing back what they got rid of over two years ago.
I used to always use bubble shield on tank when its hp got low and I knew the heal wouldnt land before tank died, so I'm really glad they are bringing in a even bigger shield to make saving tank at critical moments less stressful. I do not like the idea of getting rid of spirit buffs however, as it was challenging enough with great spirit and mana and trying to heal second rate tanks with power pool. But I'm sure its not too big of a differance, losing 80 or so spirit, atleast I hope. Well rounded and thought out change for holy healing priest, and I like it.

Edited, May 7th 2010 11:16am by pizzamike

Edited, May 7th 2010 11:17am by pizzamike
Class changes
# Apr 28 2010 at 11:53 AM Rating: Decent
I agree with EphyuSikay, nothing looks like a nerf. But I did see some interesting changes to some classes. First off is the Pally, my class. Due to the fact that I was retri before retri was uber nerfed, I feel that them fixing it will be a great accomplishment. But what they said in the pally article is strange to me. Quote 'We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either ' 1) all they could do is PVP so why do they want to improve 'PvP utility'. 2) Risk to hit the wrong button? They also said that what was holding the retri pally back was the shields and defense. Unless they replace the endurance with more power, I see this more as another nerf than an improvement.

Druids seem to be fine but the tree of life argument is interesting. The reason they think that the tree of life should be a duration not a passive is because Druids shouldn't have to sacrifice damage for healing. That is a weird thing to say because i have played a resto druid and i think i was fine with not being able to attack. This is because i was in a dungeon as a healer. I am not meant to attack.

Hunter having no ammunition is weird. I liked having special bullets or arrows that helped my damage. But it will make things easier.

DK seem to finally have a tanking talent tree. I have a DK tank and his talents are in all three trees to get the best tanking buffs. It is strange that Blood is now the tank where before Frost was.

As for the other classes, I feel that they are just making it easier for them. New abilities look nice for all classes and talent trees defined is a great thing. Cross your fingers that Cataclysm will be great (Or at least good enough to still place)

For any spelling mistakes I'm sorry. I fail at typing :D


Tree of Never Being Used
# Apr 23 2010 at 9:40 PM Rating: Decent
While I'm mostly excited about a lot of the class changes, I'm a bit annoyed at the Tree of Life changes for druids.

Raid healing, especially for a druid, is about consistency. Making tree of life a cooldown that increases healing.. isn't really going to do much. We'll all be gearing ourselves to be able to sustain healing without it, because we'll need to keep heals up without it. So when it's popped, it'll either be overhealing, or a limited time of barely keeping up, especially considering the majority of druid healing is HoTs, which aren't going to benefit much from a cooldown. If a fight goes by where it isn't used, I'll feel like it was wasted. If I need to use it every single cooldown to keep up, why isn't it passive? Currently, I've got a trinket I'm mostly wearing for the Int that also has a SP bonus on click... I never need it, and it never really seems like a good idea to pop. I don't notice much difference from popping it every cooldown, or leaving it alone for an entire fight. Mostly, I use it when buffing tanks with thorns. Is that what Tree of Life will be?

Healing isn't like DPS. I've got to keep people alive the whole time. With DPS, you can spike and relax, spike and relax, and it averages out. If my healing spikes, and relaxes, I'm overhealing for part of it, and people are dying for another.

I guess they'll probably balance us around popping that and then spamming nourish or something. Or saving it for enrages. Or maybe they'll add that much more stress to encounters by creating more moments like the air phase on Blood Queen (which happens again fast enough that all my cooldowns are still.. on cooldown). But hey, now my raid can see my ugly *** armor (assuming they don't improve much over my current Jay Leno helmet). I currently use Tree of Life to HIDE my armor and take up less space on my screen.
garbage
# Apr 20 2010 at 2:31 PM Rating: Default
they are gonna ***** us shaman over, this is b.s.!
garbage
# Apr 23 2010 at 9:46 PM Rating: Decent
Dude, I am all the hell over the shaman changes, along with most of the others for classes I play (and a few I'd now be interested in). I didn't really see anything that looked like a nerf, how're you being screwed over? And what spec are you talking about?
#REDACTED, Posted: Apr 16 2010 at 7:45 PM, Rating: Sub-Default, (Expand Post) Ok after all the work geting my hunter to lvl 80 I now need to delete my hunter win thay do this hunters are bad enuf oredy now thay will be the worst toon in the game fater rouges that is
Y?
# Apr 20 2010 at 10:13 AM Rating: Decent
I agree with Dark. Hunters are hardly the worst toons in the game and if you are that bad on yours I would suggest a lot more research on builds and rotations. A good place to start is ElitistJerks, there is lots of useful information in there that can help. The new content for hunters coming out is only going to benefit them in multiple ways, I did not read a negative thing at all for the upcoming changes. I have 3 80's and my hunter dominates them all.
Y?
# Apr 20 2010 at 4:34 PM Rating: Excellent
I have a 80 hunter, rogue, spriest, shaman and pally (those are my toons in the pics). I'm combing through the changes to see if there is anything I DON'T like about the changes. If I find something, I'll write about it.

Oh and my mage just hit 73 ...
Y?
# Apr 20 2010 at 9:20 AM Rating: Excellent
Why, because they will be using focus instead of mana? It seems like a logical jump since pets use focus as well. I play a hunter as well, among my five 80s, and I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I never liked the concept of mana for hunters anyway. Our activity is action-based, not magical based.
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