soul shards

New Soul Shard System

Just the other day Gjhostcrawler made a comment that the new soul shard system they’re working on will be cool and interesting. Shards will be a core mechanic of the Warlock class and thus will be used more often. It will provide a combat boost but will not necessarily be a dps boost. That was a bit vague and confusing a few days ago but with the announcement of exactly how this works, it’s pretty clear now.

Turns out that soul shards will be a resource instead of an inventory item. This means that the soul shard bar will appear below your health and mana bar. This should also mean warlocks finally get a bag space free. A new spell called Soul Burn will be the only spell that costs a shard and will change the way many spells behave when used. For example, using Soul Burn with Fear will make it instant cast and using it with death Coil will add more healing and increased horror effects. Since soul shards will be a resource, it can regenerate out of combat and using Drain Soul will act like an “Evocate” to make it regenerate faster.

Hunter Focus and Ammunition Change

I expected the removal of consumable ammunition since this was announced a long time ago. So like the change to soul shards mentioned above, this change will free up a bag slot for hunters. As mentioned before, the haste effect that the ammo pouch/quiver gives will be made up some other way.

I never expected the change that relieved hunters from their mana dependence. Starting the next expansion, hunters will no longer be considered “casters” since they won’t use mana. The hunter npc in the Trial of the Champion sort was a clue but I never noticed. They will instead be like their pets, using focus instead of mana.

Focus works a little like the Energy resource that rogues and kitty druids use. Hunters will also have 100 focus and will generate at a rate of 6 focus per second while Energy usually regenerates at 10 energy per second. Steady Shot will be able to make this rate go faster, at about 12 focus per second. Shots will cost 30 or 60 focus (I guess depending on the shot you’re using).

Simplification of Stats

In one of the class Q&A’s, Ghostcrawler talked about eventually merging Spirit and mp5. Apparently that’s not just the only kind of stats simplification they had in mind for our gear. Below is the list of stats that are getting changed.

MP5 – It will be removed and replaced with Spirit. Healers will have an ability like meditation, allowing more mana regen while casting.

Spell power and Attack power removed – Intellect will now give spell power and mana. Does this mean that Enhancement shammies will get a spell power bonus from their spells like shocks based on their Int? Leather and mail wearers will get an attack power bonus based on their agility while plate wearers will get their AP bonus from Strength.

Haste – Will also increase the regeneration rate of energy, focus and runes. Enhancement shammies and Ret pallies will have a talent that makes use of this mechanic.

Armor penetration – It’s just too confusing and will be removed from the game. It will be replaced with Mastery, making you better at what you do.

Stamina – Since all these other stats will be removed from gear, players will see more stamina!

Defense – it will also be removed from gear. A;; tanks will be defense capped from talents.

Reforging

Reforging is a new feature that some professions will be able to use when the expansion comes out. Basically Blacksmiths, Tailors, Leatherworkers, Engineers and Jewelcrafters will be able to customize anybody’s gear (including their own). This is done by reducing a single statistic on applicable items (I’m guessing that since J/C is part of this, this applies to gems too) and converting them into stats not on the item yet. I can see how this is useful. Maybe you’re a healer and you have enough mana regen already. You can use this feature to convert some of that spirit on that new piece of gear into intellect for more mana and spell power!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

soul shards

Right now it’s still very vague as to how exactly this would work. I was thinking that since the warlock is a pure DPS class, the new use of the soul shard would also be used to boost their damage. In the Warlock class Q&A, Ghostcrawler mentioned that the new soul shard system would give warlocks a combat boost and that’s why more damage was the first thing on my mind (in the form of more spell power, crit, or haste for a short period of time). But Ghostcrawler recently came out in the forums and said that the new soul shard system would indeed be cool but not necessarily a dps buff. This statement poses a few questions right away.

If it’s a combat boost but not a dps buff then exactly what is it? The only stuff that I can think of are more of the cute maintenance things that the current shard system already has. Maybe more threat management abilities or survivability abilities? Maybe they’re things like more stuns and other crowd control effects? But these don’t scream core class mechanics to me.

If it’s not a dps buff, would making it more prevalent in class mechanics actually make it more annoying? I mean, this means you’ll have to worry about shards even more than before. It’s really got to be so cool and so fun to make the extra effort worth your trouble. Somehow i wish Ghostcrawler would give a clearer picture about what he’s really talking about but I guess even giving an example would come across to other people as “this is what it’s going to do” instead of just an idea.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.

Post from: WOW Obsessed