Day: March 2, 2010

Cataclysm Stats – General
Cataclysm stats recap
DPS cloth: Int, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (mage, warlock, Shadow priest)
Healing cloth: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Holy and Disc priest)

Melee leather: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (rogue, Feral druid)
Spellpower leather: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Balance druid)

Physical mail: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (hunter, Enhancement shaman)
Spellpower mail: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Elemental shaman)

DPS Plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (Fury, Arms, Retribution, dps DKs)
Tanking plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Armor, Dodge, Block, Parry, Mastery, Expertise (Prot, Prot and tanking DKs)
Healing plate: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Holy paladins)

There will be exceptions. There might be some spellpower cloth with no hit or Spirit that healers and nukers may want. There will likely be Elemental tier sets with no Spirit. Jewelry and cloaks will be more class agnostic than actual armor pieces.

I wrote that quickly, so hopefully I didn't mangle anything. EDIT: You get a small mastery bonus for wearing the highest-armor gear capable for your class. Hunters in mail get a bonus. Hunters in leather do not.

Mastery bonus and armor type
There is a small Mastery bonus for wearing "your" gear. So a Balance druid who takes cloth will be essentially giving up free stats. Sometimes that may be worth it to them (just as sometimes it's worth it for a Resto druid to take that piece of +hit gear), but often times it won't be worth it especially if it's an upgrade for you. (Source)

Reforging
Think of reforging like enchants. It's not that you take a piece of gear and turn it into whatever you want. You pick up specific scrolls with specific conversions. We haven't decided on them all yet, but I imagine crit -> parry is not something you're likely to see. Maybe we'd do hit -> dodge for the tank who is full on or doesn't want hit. Maybe we'd do block -> parry to help DKs benefit from more plate.

Rest assured that we're not going to promote a system where Prot paladins want dps plate for tanking more than tanking plate. Part of all of these changes are to discourage behavior like that. We don't want to recreate it immediately in a different form. (Source)

Haste in Cataclysm
Haste will basically remain the same for casters. It is changing for melee classes, however. Haste will also allow melee classes to recover their resources more quickly, effectively letting them hit their buttons more often. (Source)

Gem sockets and item budget
We take gem budgets out of the most attractive stat on a piece of gear, in order to avoid anything with sockets always trumping similar gear without sockets. As such, socketed tanking plate has less base stamina but with gems, you’ll almost certainly end up with more health than dps classes. (Source)

Mastery Bonus
You get a mastery bonus (i.e. free stats) for wearing your gear. If shaman or druids wear cloth, they will do so at a slight stat loss. Sometimes that may still be worth it. (Source)

Spirit
Spirit is currently on a lot of cloth gear because it is considered a healing AND dps stat. We are changing it to just be a healing stat. There will still be a lot of it on leather though, just not every piece. Both Spirit and hit are the kind of thing you want enough of and no more than that. Since there won't be any buffs that boost hit or Spirit, you shouldn't often find yourself in excess. (Source)

[…] If we solve the Spirit -> hit conversion through a talent, it will be tacked on to an existing talent so that you aren't really paying for it. We like the talent approach more than a passive ability because the talents let you tell the game "I'm trying to be a caster, not a healer now."

I've read several players say that they like to reach their hit cap and then be done with it. But that doesn't really happen because every tier there is more and more hit on gear, forcing you to either swap out some of your excess hit or avoid the new stuff completely. The new model is more that all that extra hit on higher ilevel gear will have a use.

Plate / Cloth Armor differences
Plate will still possess much more armor than cloth, the difference just wont be as significant as it is now. (Source)

[…]  posted something similar in the Cataclysm forum, but let's look at actual numbers. A level 80 Prot warrior in Icecrown gear unbuffed has like 45,000 health and 30,000 armor. A level 80 mage in Icecrown gear unbuffed might have 20,000 health and 2000 armor. Yes, 2000 armor. We have a lot of room to narrow the gap a little. It's a big gap. (Source)

[…] Someone (Angua?) had a post awhile back that explained this using numbers. Cloth won't have as much armor as plate. But maybe it will have half as much armor as plate instead of one fifth as much armor as plate (or whatever the ratios end up being at higher levels).

Really, cloth isn't the issue, since cloth wearers have spells to buff their mitigation. Leather wearers are the ones who end up the most fragile. Mail would be bad too except that shaman can use shields when needed and hunters typically don't get hit by melee much. We just want to bring things a little closer to each other. It's easier to establish a baseline for how hard a particular attack should hit for when one dps spec isn't literally four times as survivable as another. (Source)

Tanking
Is threat fun?
When threat doesn't matter as a tank, then maximizing your rotation doesn't matter much either. To use the warrior example, you could skip Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam and just autoattack and use defensive cooldowns. Is that fun? On the other hand, many of the requests we see are for harder hitting attacks, especially on the AE front, so that in essence it's less work to tank multiple mobs at once. Is this really what you want?

I would assert in the current game that threat is almost never an issue. It might be an issue in the first few seconds of a fight (including when new adds join the party) or when the dps severely outgear the tank (such as in a Dungeon Finder situation). Especially in a world with Misdirect, Tricks of the Trade, and Tauntable bosses, tanks on single-target raid fights get so far ahead of the dps and healers, that catching them would be almost impossible. We could definitely tone this down a little such that tanks needed to fight for threat a little more than they do now. Some players would welcome that change and some would say that Blizzard hates tanks and makes them work too hard. (Source)

Tank specs in Cataclysm
Tanks will still be required to tank raids and I expect most heroics. You're not in any danger of being …