Day: May 2, 2010

Old World Dungeons in Cataclysm (Stratholme, Scholomance, etc …)
Those dungeons (and more) will get some love. (Source)

PvP Flag in Tol Barad
I have a slight correction on this. The current plan is to only forcibly flag players for PvP in the zone when a Tol Barad battle is in progress on a PvE realm. We still plan for Tol Barad to be a major daily quest hub when battles are not in progress and do not want this to force PvE players into PvP in order to quest there. I apologize for the confusion. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Heals Efficiency

The big heal doesn't have to be super inefficient. It just has to take more mana than the efficient heal, but that's okay because it also heals for more. You use the big heal when it's faster than using two of the efficient heals. That only really makes it inefficient when you're overhealing a ton.

Your fast heals will be the inefficient ones, because you pay more for speed. Don't spam those, but use them when you don't have time for a long cast before damage will happen next.

If you're a druid healing a tank, you'll probably use Lifebloom, then Nourish, swapping to Healing Touch at times when the tank's health starts to dip dangerously low. You probably won't cast Healing Touch often on non-tanks, unless they're just super low for some reason (and in those situations, you may need a fast heal like Regrowth or Swiftmend to get them stable anyway). (Source)

Healing in Cataclysm
We don't want druids in Cataclysm to be tabbing through the raid throwing out random Rejuvs like many druids do now. Frankly, we don't think it's that fun and we know plenty of druids agree with us.

That also doesn't mean that hots are going away. We like hots to be a big part of the druid arsenal. We just don't want them to eclipse all your other heals. It's easy to point out specific things like glyphs and set bonuses that have given Rejuv in particular so much leverage. That's fine for now, but not where we want to be in Cataclysm.

I also agree that hots risk being overpowered in an environment where they aren't overhealing constantly. In a world where players spend more time being wounded, hot ticks will be enormously important. That's okay to a point. We want you to push them. But we don't want such a large percentage of your healing to come from one spell. We don't want Rejuv to win the decision every time you're thinking about whether to cast say Nourish or Regrowth instead.

To think about it another way, druids already have a pretty different rotation when tank healing than when raid healing. What we want to do is further split out raid healing into situations where players are occasionally taking damage and situations where everyone is constantly taking damage from raid-wide auras. You should use different types of spells in those situations — maybe WG and many Rejuvs in the latter, but more Nourishes and Regrowths thrown in there with Rejuv on the former. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tanking Glyphs
We're still working on the Inscription design for Cataclysm and it may end up changing a lot.

If it doesn't change, then I am going to predict we do something like remove the Glyph of Last Stand (and lower the cooldown base or through a talent) and keep the Glyph of Shield Wall. The Shield Wall glyph is mildly interesting in that sometimes you want it and sometimes you might not. We don't think it's unreasonable to have to spend some glyphs on survivability, since presumably that's what is most important to you. But maybe you're spending too many glyphs on cooldowns today. (Source)