Monday, April 12, 2010

Cataclysm Previews

All classes have now had their Cataclysm previews with the exception of paladins and already many bloggers have put forward their ideas on what may be coming in the expansion. I thought that it was time that I to put out my predictions and wish list.

Mastery
We already know that the first two levels will be a damage reduction and Vengeance. My guess for our third tier is that Redout will be removed as a talent and added as our Mastery in the form of increased block amount as we saw at Blizzcon. I imagine it will increase blocked amount from 30% up to maybe 40% depending on whether or not there is a cap on mastery numbers, if not then I would assume some kind of diminishing returns up to and over that mark.
This would allow Paladins to block similar amounts of damage over time to warriors but in a steadier stream as apposed to the very slightly more spiky Critical Block.


New Spells and Talents
Most of these will be rather obvious and have generally been covered by every other writer out there but I'll go through my list anyway.
First off I see us getting not one but 2 new heals to keep up with the common changes one base line heal somewhere between Flash of Light and Holy Light and an AoE heal of some kind possibly trained between 81 and 85 maybe as a Holy Talent. What I would like to see is a player targeted AoE HoT something that you cast on your rogue and that player and everyone in 5-10 yards gets healed for 50% of each HoT tick on the rogue. Its the AoE heal we need and something not yet in game that fills our missing HoT position as well as keeping similar to the Holy Light Glyph.

For Ret I think its fully assumed that we will get a new attack for leveling, maybe something new or maybe Crusader Strike will be baseline and Ret get a new cooler ability that will replace CS in their end game rotation. On top of the new attack I hope to see a non damaging off the GCD interrupt but I'm not sure if they will give us that and i doubt they would give us both this and my next point together unless they finally feel Ret is fixed enough in PvP to not be over powered with them. Charge, nice and simple with warriors getting two now and priests getting their "Life Grip" I hope its about time to get this ability. As I said I don't see us getting both a charge and an interrupt unless they are truly happy with where Ret is in PvP but if I had to pick one it would be charge.
The other thing I see coming for Ret is a talent with a cool proc something to spice up the rotation and step it away from the FCFS, I'm not quite sure what but possibly something to re-set the CD of the new spell they will be getting.

I can't see alot of changes coming to prot that wouldn't fall under Ret, the two big things though would be a Sword and Board like talent to help break the rotation. Secondly I hope for a overhaul of forbearance which while not a prot change would hopefully seen Divine Protection removed from the effect if it still remains.

General Changes
The biggest change I would like to see is the addition of the "stance" based system through auras such as Rhidach had talked about several weeks ago. Its a great idea that would help to solve a lot of class problems and coupled with a heavy reduction in base heals I think we could really come along way and start to see some really interesting new idea for the future of Paladins.
The other class change I hope to see which would work really well with the stances is the removal of spell power as a co-efficient in Ret and Prot ability's. With how Death Knights work their damage there is no reason that Paladins can't do the same further reducing things like Prot heals in Arena that Blizz hates so much.

Over all i think what we have seen from the previews so far has been amazing and hopefully we won't be disappointed come the 16th. I am half expecting to see something completely out of the blue for us like what Bliz have done for Balance druids but for now all we can do is wait.

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