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

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

warlock 666 damage

He was around level 64 when I decided to play him more seriously again and he just hit 70 this morning, which I’m quite happy about. When I was level 68, I looked at my bonus damage at my character screen after getting a few gear upgrades and I was quite surprised at what I saw. Being a warlock, a magic user of the dark arts who also has a demon minion, it was quite amazing to find that my bonus damage was 666 thanks to my gear and the right abilities like fel armor and the demonology talents. For that short amount of time he was a warlock that was really true to his calling for the dark arts! Right now I have a lot more bonus damage than that because of the gear, fel armor rank upgrade, and level but that was really amazing that I caught that moment. Of course, in no way do I advocate what my warlock stands for but it’s cool for a little role playing.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

We have many interesting classes that we could implement, but like all things, we needed to decide which classes would be the most interesting and capable of being robust additions to the game from the start. The Necromancer is one class that has been in consideration before. Who knows. Perhaps someday the Necromancer will come into play within the World of Warcraft, but that is something for the future to decide. Source

If I were to interpret that response right, I’d have to say that it’s a “most probably not” at best. If it were, there’s really good reason not to have one. First of all a necromancer would be too close to a warlock to make a real distinction between skills to make a class that’s unique from the rest of the classes in the game. Like the warlock, a necromancer would be an advocate of the dark arts and would also be a minion based class. The only thing that would separate a necromancer from a warlock would be the ability to raise the dead and turn them into minions. This brings me to my second point.

If raising the dead would be the necromancer’s unique ability, it would be extremely difficult to work that out in the game. The reason why the necromancer was a viable class in Diablo 2 was the fact that the hero fights multiple enemies at once and they die a lot faster and with much more ease that in WoW. For this reason, it wasn’t hard at all to find a corpse to raise or blow up using corpse explosion while playing. Finding a corpse to raise in WoW reliably would be a pain in the rear. Even if you were to say that you could store this raising power in portable reagents for future use, then that would look very very much like a warlock’s soul shard wouldn’t it?

Besides, with the Death Knight hero class coming in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion I think it’s about time we steer clear of more of the “evil” classes.

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Post from: WOW Obsessed