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[Lucifer]

Quest Mobs

We have adjusted mob health and damage quite a bit in the beta and we're going to continue to do so. In LK, quest mobs got to be a bit of a joke, such that everyone was used to killing clouds of them with ease. We're trying to return to a world where you can generally handle one, but might want to think about using some of your crowd control or emergency buttons when you get an extra one or two. (Again, that's the intent. We're still adjusting things to get there.)

Stats vs. Ratings while leveling

Your primary stats go up, but your combat ratings go down. The reason for this is that those ratings convert to percentages. If you started with say 50% crit chance, and then gained a level and your new gear had say +4% crit chance instead of +2% crit chance, then you'd quickly get to 100% crit and stay there. This was the reason we implemented combat ratings in the first place. (You can blame Blackhand's Breadth.)

This particularly gets to be a problem when you reach max level. The reason is because you are going to go through several tiers of gear without increasing your character level, so we need to have enough space in the numbers for them to increase. We figure out what the highest say crit and haste chance the game can handle and then work backwards giving each tier a meaningful upgrade (or getting new gear won't be fun) and that determines the combat ratings on the starting gear.

We definitely understand the confusion / weird perception issues this causes and we've talked about some ways to completely revamp the game's combat equations so that we didn't need to use percentage-based stats influenced by ratings with diminishing returns. That is too large a change for Cataclysm, but something we might do in the future (when we aren't also tackling talent and glyph revamps).

Also remember that if you are leveling to 85, you are skipping over a lot of potential quest rewards that you can't get yet. The item leaps among levels are pretty large at level 80-85, which we had to do to make the upgrades feel meaningful. (Imagine the alternatives where you could go to Twilight Highlands directly from Icecrown and do okay.) Once those quest items are in, you'll be more powerful as you level.

Warlock Builds and their Pets

While we generally still want to adhere to the goal of Felhunter = Affliction, Felguard = Demo, Imp = Destro, we want everyone to use their other demons sometimes too. That involved making a lot of changes.

For starters, their damage and survivability will move closer together. We want the decision to be more about utility of their abilities than dps or squishiness. Under the new scaling model, the Imp and Succubus have health, mana and armor not too far off from the Felhunter.

We tried out the Imp doing friendly damage when he dispelled because we thought it was interesting for the demonic feel, but we have already removed it. We also tried an ability to knock allies out of CC that break on damage, but we now think that would be too powerful. Currently the Imp still does a dispel on allies.

We wanted to split Devour Magic into offensive and defensive components or else we felt like the Felhunter would always be the obvious choice for PvP. Now you can choose between having an off-the-GCD silence / interrupt and an offensive dispel / purge -or- having a defensive dispel, increases health and an escape tool.

Like everything else in beta, these are subject to change. We're close to being able to get more max-level PvP feedback and will buff or nerf abilities accordingly.

DK's Dark Simulacrum

There' still some polish needed on Dark Simulacrum. We are going to try and let it affect everything we possibly can, but there have to be some limitations. Copying pets and the like is just something we can't handle really well. We also need to make sure that some effects have a duration. It's probably okay to copy Shadowform, but Shadowform itself has no duration and the DK version needs to.

Paladins in Cataclysm

Paladin Tanks (src)
Generally, you should use Inquisition when AE tanking, since it will boost the Holy portion of Hammer of the Righteous as well as Consecrate. You should use Shield of the Righteous when fighting single (or perhaps 2-3) targets, because it's going to hit a lot harder.

Beyond that, you have a few options. You can glyph Avenger's Shield to focus on one target if you'd like. You can switch to Shield of the Righteous even on group targets when you get Sacred Duty procs. You can use Grand Crusader procs to focus on the targets you are already in melee with, or use Avenger's Shield on additional targets to help hold threat. Consecrate isn't the "threat glue" is used to be, nor does it have 100% up time, so you're going to have some choices about when and where you use it.

Exorcism (src)
Damage numbers aren't our focus right now. It's not an efficient use of developer time to tweak everything to get everything where we're perfectly happy with the tuning when we're still implementing basic rotations. If your damage feels severely undertuned, then chances are it is.
As far as where things are supposed to be, we don't want Exorcism to be the largest source of your damage. There were a couple of bugs with the spell implementation (double dipping on AP for instance) and we also recently decided to change Ret's mastery to no longer affect Holy damage, since it was just propping up Exorcism too much.
We think situationally you will want to use TV or Divine Storm with less than 3 stacks. However, if it's very efficient to do so, then players will never wait for 3 stacks because having 3 smaller hits is more valuable than having 1 large hit of the same total damage.

Healing (src)
The main strength of Word of Glory is its cost. No matter how strained mana might get, you're always going to have ample usage of an instant, free heal.

It's difficult to offer talents that mod the other heals. If you have a talent that makes Flash of Light more cost effective or Divine Light faster, then those aren't really filling those niches anymore. We had a lot of problems like this in the past where a combination of talents, glyphs or set bonuses made Flash of Light or Holy Light the obvious heal for paladins, and the other one just died. We want to use all 3 of the cast-time healing spells in Cataclysm, but we're offering the most gameplay around Holy Shock and Word of Glory, because those are what make Holy paladins feel the most different from other healers.

As others have pointed out, Beacon just can't stay as "I heal at 200% effectiveness" in the Cataclysm healing model. It will still give you extra healing, particularly with the Tower of Radiance component.

We're not worried about the AE healing situation. In Lich King there were situations, especially in raids, where healers were called upon to instantly heal multiple targets at once or someone was going to die. With the larger health pools in Cataclysm, those situations are just going to be very rare. AE damage, and sometimes raid-wide AE auras, will still exist, but your tools are more than adequate to handle them. No, Light of Dawn may not take 5+ targets from 50% damage to 0% damage, but it also doesn't need to. You'll have time to top them off with single target heals, or just wait until the next AE heal is available. We just don't think spammable AE heals are that fun. If we wanted them to be a big part of the game, we'd need to make actual AE healing rotations that did more. The LK scenarios of hitting Wild Growth and Circle of Healing on cooldown are not something we want to go back to (plus, we've increased those cooldowns).