I’ve written a lot of rambling predictions and wishlists over the years. Some have turned out accurate (maybe 1 in 4 predictions), some have been rendered obsolete, and some have been explicitly shot down by Blizzard. No matter, it’s time for another round

So in no particular order, I present my latest wishful guessings for the future of Warcraft.

ideas

WoW will see TWO more expansions before being rendered obsolete.

• The current level cap is 80. If they continue tradition, two more expansions will see levels hit a nice even 100.
• Current lore tells us that there are two more major destinations we could go to: Maelstrom, Emerald Dream. I predict that the expansions will be just that. We will see the “end” of WoW in the Emerald Dream itself.
• The effective life of popular MMO’s seems to be similar to that of video game consoles at about 5-6 years before they decline or are replaced (EQ launched in 1999, EQ2 came in 2004). WoW is turning five years old this November, two more expansions will be pushing it. BC was early 2007, WoTLK was late 2008. If Maelstrom is early 2010 and Emerald Dream is late 2011 and WoW2 is 2012, that still means 8 years…

Underwater mounts.

Mounts are already learning to swim along the surface. We need another tier of mount for Maelstrom content and subaquatic only makes sense. After all, new form of transport was released in expansion 1, it’s about time for another one by expansion 3.

Spirit mounts.

Normal mounts probably don’t function well in the Emerald Dream. Without this training, players might not be able to mount at all in the dream. It would be available shortly into their time in the dream (lvl 91-92?) and would be like “cold weather” flight in that it simply unlocks the ability to drive again.

Having the skill might also allow the acquisition and use of mounts original to the dream.

Speaking of mounts, flight should really be made possible in old Azeroth.

A step toward this would be allowing people to finally drive flying mounts along the ground in no-fly zones. But the real trick would be finishing and restitching the old world together to make flight between zones viable. They could do this as an event at the end of 4.x. Messing with the Maelstrom is bound to have an impact on the rest of the planet, no?

There will be new playable races.

I’m hopeful for goblins, mildly curious for worgen, and absolutely giddy with irrational anticipation at the idea of some sort of constructed humanoid race.

If we go to Undermine in WoW 4.0 and cannot play as goblins, there will be blood in the streets. Blood, I say. Players will revolt and will generally raise a big stink. But goblins are tricksy. They’re a neutral race with presence everywhere. It wouldn’t really be fair to give them to either Alliance or Horde exclusively. That would probably just result in more blood.

They are currently setting up a precedent for transferring characters between factions (likely altering the race in the process, of course). This gives me hope that it just might be possible to have goblin PC’s in both factions. Making Undermine a divided city ala the capitals from the last two expansions is hardly a stretch.

Worgen have been talked about for a long time, and I doubt we’ll get the werebeasts of the current game. But a less-corrupted version is certainly possible for an Emerald Dream expansion – just like we got Draenei that weren’t like the Sorrows swamp monsters from original. As far as what faction gets worgen… I’d expect it to be Alliance, what with the whole Elune connection and all.

This means that WoW 5.0 needs another Horde race to balance things out. I don’t see Naga as particularly playable (lack of legs really is an issue). In fact, I don’t see any of the current races in the game as viable alternatives.

Pandaren could work, but I suspect they’d be just as likely to join the Alliance as the Horde – despite the WC3:FT cooperation of the single playable Pandaren with Horde leadership. They really are too neutral. Though, giving pandas to Horde would be a major boost to their overall factional cuteness level and would be a suitable offset for giving werewolves to the Alliance. I discount Pandaren as a playable race if for no other reason than that it is kind of unpolitic and would seriously damage Blizzard’s relationship with China.

Centaur and Cenarions have good Emerald Dream connections, but are strongly Alliance connected. And, of course, there’s that whole quadrupedal issue that really throws a monkey into the whole wrench Furbies have strong Emerald Dream attachments as well too strong of Alliance ties to make sense as a Horde race.

Ethereals are way too neutral. Tuskarr are also probably too neutral and it would be weird to have them suddenly become playable for half of the population upon entering the Emerald Dream. Kobolds, Murlocs, Quillboars, and Gnolls are too dumb. Ogres are too big. Demons and dragons are too evil (and too oddly shaped).

There is also no real reason for a subrace of any of the existing races to join the Horde. Subraces of existing Horde options are all too similar to be worthwhile (Taunka are basically just another skin for Tauren f’rinstance). Humans and Gnomes don’t seem to have subraces to speak of (and are the heart of the Alliance anyway). Dark Iron Dwarves could work… but it doesn’t make much sense to give Horde what would essentially be a cheap copy of an existing core Alliance race. They already have Elves, that’s probably as close as it’s going to come.

The only viable option I see is something completely different and unheard of. Either, the race will be something native to the Emerald Dream or (and here’s my completely unfounded wishfulness talking) it will be some sort of tinkered construct.

I really like the idea of a race of animate constructs of metal and wood. Goblins and Scourge could easily manufacture something like in 4.0 and we could see their populations grow sufficiently to become playable in 5.0. Perhaps they learn to build themselves so they begin to reproduce w/o exterior help.

Of course, this is a wild stretch and there’s about a 1 in 1000 chance that Blizzard might do playable Clockwork, but I posit that it is still more likely than any of the other currently visible options Besides, Clockwork are cool enough to offset Worgen on the Alliance side.

Player/guild housing needs to happen.

I think housing is a good major feature for 4.0. Other than extended vault options and the whole dollhousing side of things, players should probably be able to set their hearths there. Players and guilds should be able to get crafting furniture and buff-providers (higher restedness rate for example). Obviously, houses should be instanced.

Houses should be available in many areas, with multiple housing options per capital city. Other large cities (Everlook, etc…) should probably have one option and some small towns and otherwise hearthless locations might also provide housing (Talonbranch Glade, etc…).

It should be possible for individuals to purchase not only the interior of a building but a building itself with an exterior and an interior. It should be possible for guilds to own larger pieces of land with multiple buildings – perhaps partially by linking individual player-owned plots of land together.

Houses should provide additional storage and should probably not be linked directly into the normal vault system. It should be possible to install portals in houses. It might be possible to own multiple houses or plots of land.

If the guild housing system is awesome enough, it might be possible to get guild shopkeeper NPC’s. And of course, there’s also always the option of guild wars or similar as an extension to the arena system.

There will be a new crafting profession in each expansion.

The only weapons that players can’t craft are staves, bows, and crossbows. To remedy this, we need a carpentry/fletching/woodworking sort of profession. We also probably need a way to gather the wood. It needn’t be a standalone profession, but it wouldn’t hurt if it was.

The pleas for woodworking have been coming for a long time. I think we’ll probably see it in the next expansion. It really is that whole “gathering” bit that’s kind of tricky and is probably the major reason we didn’t get woodcutting in BC.

In addition to bows, staves, and arrows, woodworkers should be able to make furniture for houses – and possibly whole buildings. The profession should also unlock the ability to make lower level shields out of wood and leather. Wood could also easily be added as an ingredient in recipes for other professions as well.

A profession appropriate for the final expansion might be botany/cultivation. It would only be possible in player/guild housing. Players could grow normal herbalism and woodcutting plants as well as new botany-only plants. Cultivators might be allowed to harvest wild plants but would not be able to track them and would gather only seeds (with a very minor chance of getting a usable common plant in the process perhaps).

Many botany plants would be consumable raw or might be improved via cooking and used by alchemy/inscription. Many botany plants would yield seeds when harvested, but not all. Botany plants would take time to grow and could only be harvested by a cultivator. Over the course of their growth, Cultivators would be able to add fertilizers and waters to the plants to improve the eventual yield. Botany recipes would allow the combination of multiple seeds to create hybrid plants or the extraction of seeds from plants that don’t normally produce them.

There will be new hero classes.

We’ve long been promised more hero classes – and not explicitly as expansion content. I sincerely hope we get another hero class before 4.0, but am only moderately hopeful.

I do not expect there to be any more base classes, that doesn’t make much sense. But there is still room for several more hero classes. I think three more before the game ends is reasonable. In keeping with the size of the previous expansions, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect two hero classes before WoW 5.0 and two more after. (Bringing the total number of classes to 9 regular, 5 hero).

It would be nice if they also increased the starting level of each hero class as they went along. Thus, the next hero class could start at 65, then 75, then 85 (and probably 85 again). Requirements for gaining access to the hero classes should be having a non-hero character in excess of the starting level for the class in question.

The classes I could (would like to) easily see (in order of release) happening are:

• Mechanist – think engineeringly enhanced tanks.
• Monk – cloth melee, maybe some self-healing and agility/resist-tanking.
• Necromancer – leather ranged cold and non-elemental spell damage, melee poison, highly disposable pets.

As a fourth class… dunno. To balance out roles, it would probably have to be something with healing and cc. Perhaps some sort of Emerald Dreamwalker?

Speaking of WoW2… Yes, I think it probably will happen.

WoW will get stale and die in a few years, despite regular injections of expansion content. Unless Blizzard has a replacement product on hand, they will generate a gaping vacuum in their earnings as people bail for more modern products. I expect that they will release a non-Warcraft MMO soon (Diablo 3 doesn’t count, it’ll be more like Guild Wars) and will release WoW2 as WoW expansion 4 grinds to an end.

The ending will be awesome.

I want to see all kinds of stuff break near the end. Major content patches that change the map, not so much class tweaking (because if they can’t get it right by then…).

I think the Emerald Dream should be the largest expansion, with no planned followup other than WoW2. It should include content on a scale equal to the initial game release, covering most of the known game world and taking us back to visit places we’ve not seen in years.

They also have the opportunity to end WoW1 with some kind of universe-altering event that just isn’t realistically possible without the kind of reboot a separate game allows. Like the complete dissolution of the factions and the fracturing of Azeroth into multiple little Outland-esque shards

summary

• WoW will die, eventually becoming a whithered husk like the previous generation of big MMO’s.
• There will be two more expansions before this happens.
  • 4.0: Maelstrom
    • Level cap at 90.
    • Undermine, Maelstrom, lots of underwater action.
    • Playable goblins for both factions.
    • Underwater mounts.
    • Player housing, guild housing, guild wars.
    • Carpentry, Woodcutting professions.
    • One new hero class, revealed in 4.0; playable in 4.0.1.
  • 5.0: Emerald Dream
    • Level cap at 100.
    • Emerald Dream: An alternate view of most of Azeroth, portions on all four continents included.
    • New playable race for both factions: worgen, clockwork?
    • Botany/Cultivation profession.
    • Spirit mounts.
    • Two new hero classes, revealed in 5.0; playable in 5.1 and 5.2.
• Blizzard will launch another MMO before WoW 5.0 is released.
• Blizzard will launch WoW2 as a followup to cataclysmic universe-altering events at the end of WoW 5.x.

I’m gonna just click publish here and ramble some more about specific ideas for new class and race mechanics later.

The fact that the quest exists isn’t wrong. The fact that you don’t really have much of a choice in the matter is. You can’t tell the quest-giver “no”. You either have to torture the prisoner or you have to bypass the remainder of the quest chain (which is fairly important if you want anything to do with the Kirin Tor mages).

I did the quest once – on my warlock, the character whose job it is to be a little dynamo of concentrated evil – and I remember standing there for 5 minutes debating before I finally decided to actually zap the guy. I’m not planning on doing the quest chain again on any other characters. Normally, my criteria for adding a quest to my blacklist is that it is boring or a terrible waste of time vs the reward. This is the first quest I’ve ever had to swear off on moral grounds.

So why has this particular quest been singled out? Why wait until now? By every definition in the book, we (players of WoW and numerous other MMORPG’s) have clearly been engaged in innumerable unsavory activities – including torture – for years now.

This is hardly the first time a quest in WoW expects you to use violence to extract information. There are quite a few quests that expect you to beat on people until they talk. There are several quests that ask you to kill couriers for information they are carrying. There are quests where you poison people and quests where you perform horrible experiments on people and quests where you don’t actually have to beat on the source of the information, you just have to prove that you’re willing to do so. It is, after all, a game whose fundamental action is killing.

We play a game where we are asked to role-play as soulless mercenaries who’ll kill anyone/anything for a few bucks – or more likely a shirt that we’re just going to turn around and pawn because it breaks our set bonus. We’ll dig through pig droppings and harvest organs and collect on debts owed to thieves and steal apples if we accept every job offer that comes our way.

The circumstances behind this particular quest, however, are much more obvious. This particular quest NPC says:

You see, the Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these.

You, however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.

He then hands you a “Neural Needler”, which “Inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no permanent damage.” You then have to walk 3 feet to a man chained into a chair and use the needler on him five times. The ‘conversation’ goes something like this:

1. Pathetic fool! A servant of Malygos would sooner die than aid an emeny…
2. Aargh! Do your worst, {class}! I’ll tell you NOTHING!
3. Aahhhh! Release me! I am of no use to you. I swear it!
4. Stop! I beg you, pleae stop. Please….
5. Alright! I am beaten. {information you wanted goes here} Your mission is folly!

But you can keep zapping him a few times before turning in the quest…

6. I’ve given you the information, {race}! You’re wasting your time….
7. Noooo! This tortue is inhumane! You have what you want… why don’t you just kill me?

Even “better”… you can apparently get a fresh needler (I have not confirmed this) and continue frying the guy, just for fun…

8. What more can you possibly want, {race}?
9. Stop! Please…
10. How can you possibly bring me lower?
11. What more can you take away from me?
12. You aren’t even asking me questions…
13. Are you trying to meet the real me?
14. You’ve got a darkness in you, {race}.

So, whether this is some kind of weird statement on current events or not, several people at Blizzard apparently think that torture can be useful and want to spread that opinion to their audience of millions. I mean, c’mon, it’s not like children play this game, right? …

Regardless of why the quest was written, why it was included in the game, and why it’s standing out above all of the other heinous things players have been asked to do in the game… it was a mistake and needs to be revised to avoid railroading players into a choice between being evil sadists and quitting the game. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

Every class has the option of carrying a second set of equipment around for different circumstances in instances. A cat druid might carry healing eq for certain boss fights where the extra hot is needed, any warrior worth two beans is going to have a shield somewhere on his person, etc…

Hunters and warlocks are both already heavily penalized in the inventory department, though to be fair they really don’t have much need to switch gear between fights. Hunters permanently sacrifice a bag slot to ammunition, and warlocks need to carry lots of shards – for which they can optionally choose to employ custom bags.

After spending only 17 points in demonology, a warlock can cycle through 3 different pets in ~6 seconds. They can adapt for different fights as necessary. To them, changing pets is roughly as difficult as changing weapons. A warlock’s pet (or often their lack thereof) is simply a buff like that granted by another class’s stances and auras.

If a hunter wants to switch pets, they have to run to the nearest town. No switching gear or rebuffing between fights for them.

Aspects aren’t big enough to warrant this discrepancy. They are essentially:

1. I am shooting things
2. I am out of mana because I was shooting things
3. I am corpse running after my group just wiped
4. I am fighting a boss that does nature damage
5. I am not running out of melee range for some bizarre reason

So in normal practice, a hunter has two states – killing and in-combat downtime. Aspect of the viper is a complete joke since 3.0. Requiring players to alternate between the two is a big design flaw, IMO.

So if aspects aren’t a hunter’s “stances”, pets are the big candidate for the role.

Just like a paladin can strap on his shield to tank or put on a dress to heal, a hunter can use a gorilla to tank or a chimera to crowd control or a dinosaur to eat things… as long as he returns to town first.

Please, Blizzard. Just put hunter pets in the spellbook already.

Of course, my nefarious reasoning behind ALL of this is just so I can carry a set of 5 pets into a boss fight and resummon a new one when the old ones melt under his AoE aura – allowing me to actually have a pet out for the entire fight and waiting until after the fight to rez them

• Allaryin – 70 dwarf hunter (52/8/1)
• Chokuretsu – 71 gnome warlock (0/54/8)
• Kikichikki – 70 draenei priest (0/61/0)
• Juvu – 70 orc death knight (55/0/5)

Most of the reason I don’t have anyone in the mid-high 70′s yet is because of time spent getting Choku and Juvu up to speed.

Choku was 67 when the expansion came out, so after a very bad Utgarde Keep attempt, I took her back to Netherstorm until 68, when I moved to Borean Tundra – which is completely soloable in crummy outland greens. Choku is planned to be my main in Wrath (just as Kiki was my main for most of BC, and Al was my main in classic). I dropped tailoring for inscription and am slowly leveling that up, just buying flowers whenever I feel the urge. I won’t obsess about inscription until Choku’s approaching 80.

Juvu is my big experiment in death knights… and in high level horde content… and in playing on a different server without my normal support structure (created on Terenas and then payed-transfered to Malfurion to join coworkers). On the road from 55 to 70, he’s respecced 5 times now, and I’ve got some very strong opinions on what works for “low” level solo grinding as a DK. /played from rolling char to dinging 70 = 32 hours (spread out over 14 days RL time, so mostly unrested).

Kiki hasn’t done anything since the expansion landed. I’m waiting for dual specs to start leveling her – It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in any serious face melting

Al… has gone fishing, and exploring, and pet collecting. The only quests I’ve done with him so far have been the gem perfection quest, Dalaran cooking dailies and stuff for Kalu’ak rep. I think this is Al’s new calling in life. I’ve become so rusty at grouping with a hunter that I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that he’ll never really group again.

The remainder of the reason why I haven’t done any Dragonblight quests yet is because I’m doing the recruit-a-friend thing with a new account for my wife. At the end of our first 1-hour play session, we were level 8. After our second, we were lvl 12. If she retains sufficient interest to play a few hours a week for the duration of the bonus xp period, I fully expect that I’ll finally have lvl 60′s in every class as a result

The reason I’ve not written anything in over a month should be fairly obvious. Mind, it wasn’t all WoW. Leading up to Wrath’s release, I passed the time by playing a good bit of EVE (and have since canceled my account again).

I’m planning on writing some reviews of the viability of the new hunter pets in a pve solo environment as well as a few posts on death knight specs and spell rotations. I’ve also got a big technical (very unrelated) post in the works that might be out this weekend, we’ll see.

Today, I am going to try to confine my ramblings to the subject of the hunter talent tree upgrades. Pet changes, new spells, and upgrades to old spells will have to wait until a future post or two. And of course, I’ve also got to write about the priest changes. Hmm… And I’m trying to get my warlock to 70 before the expansion as well… Anyway. Hunters. Talents. Go.

Beastier Mastery

At present, my hunter is a pretty heavy beast mastery spec. If things remain largely unchanged, he will likely become even heavier beast spec immediately upon getting the expansion. Of course… there is so much goodness in the pending changes that I might not actually stick with beast spec much past 70, but this is my current plan for day one in Northrend.

First, let’s discuss what I’m planning on giving up (initially). In order to get 53 points in beast mastery, I will have to give up 11 points from marksmanship and survival. The talents that are going byebye:

• Humanoid Slaying (3 points, T1 survival) – No real pain here. This reduces my damage & crit damage caused to Humanoids by +3% each. Of course… this talent is gone in the expansion anyway. It’s being replaced by the 5 point Improved Tracking ability which gives you +5% base damage to whatever you’re tracking. It’s nominally an upgrade, but it’s not worth the points.
• Improved Hunter’s Mark (5 points, T2 marks) – Shrug. This talent causes my mark’s +AP bonus to apply to melee damage as well (ie, my pet’s). That means -110 AP that my pet would normally enjoy against a target I’ve marked. That’s roughly 8 dps + whatever specials might gain from AP. In the expansion… the talent gets a major buff. Cost is reduced to 3 points and it also gains +30% to resist dispel. I like the improvement, but it’s still not earthshaking.
• Go for the Throat (2 points, T3 marks) – This one makes me cry. Go for the Throat causes my pet to regenerate 50 focus every time I score a ranged critical hit. Getting this talent back will probably be my first major focus – with the planned build, I’ll be able to get this back at level 77.
• Aimed Shot (1 point, T3 marks) – This one also makes me cry. I refuse to explain aimed shot. Anyone who’s read this far knows exactly what it does. I might pick this back up, but it will take some careful juggling.

But oh… oh what am I going to get in exchange It’s gonna rock.

Aspect Mastery is a new T3 beast talent. For one point, it buffs your 3 basic aspects. Viper gets +10% to its mana regen rate. Monkey gets 10% damage reduction – that’s right, flat out absorption when the dodge fails. This also means monkey now helps when you’re getting hit by spells. Hawk gets +50% to its AP bonus. At level 70, hawk is worth +155 AP, so this talent is worth +77 AP. At level 80, hawk will be worth +300 AP…

While I’m going this deep in the tree (and since I don’t need the point for Aimed Shot any more), I’ll also be picking up a 3rd point in Catlike Reflexes for an additional +1% to my dodge and +3% to my pet’s dodge.

Invigoration is a new T8 beast talent that for two points causes you to instantly regenerate 2% of your mana every time your pet scores a crit with a special. My pre-existing talents already give my pet +10% crit chance and double focus regen. I’m losing the focus regen from Go for the Throat but am also picking up both of the new T9 talents…

Longevity costs 3 points at T9 beast and reduces cooldowns on Bestial Wrath, Intimidation, and all pet special abilities by 30%. Intimidate’s cooldown goes down from 60 seconds to 40; Bestial Wrath is down from 120 seconds to 84. These cooldowns were already short enough that I have macros that ensure I am able to burn them almost every time they’re up. The buff makes me giddy.

Reducing the cooldown on pet specials by 30% means I don’t have to rely on my pet’s focus dump ability any more. 30% more frequent crits from specials means 30% more frequent procs of Invigoration and happy joyful mana regeneration.

Cobra Strikes costs 3 points at T9 beast and gives me a 60% chance when I crit with Arcane, Steady, or Kill shot to cause my pet’s next 3 specials to crit… In conjunction with Invigoration, this effectively reduces the mana cost for my Steady shots into the realm of the microscopic.

And of course, then there’s Beast Mastery, the new T11 talent. This will allow me to tame exotic pets (devilsaur, chimera, silithid, etc…) and effectively gives all of my pets +20 levels worth of talent points.

The only new beast talents that I’m not actually picking up with this build are:

• Animal Handler (T6, 2 points), which gives my pet +4% to hit (that’s never been a problem) and reduces the cooldown on the new Master’s Call ability by 10 seconds (from 60 to 50). I don’t think I’ll be using Master’s Call much. I’ve already got 84 second Bestial Wrath.
• Separation Anxiety (T10, 5 points), which is quite probably very cool, really. Fully trained, it gives your pet +10% movement speed when <=20 yards from you and then turns the speed bonus into +10% dps once it gets 20 yards away. This makes interception time even faster and generally translates into an almost permanent +10% pet damage (since 20+ yards is a quite normal range for hunters to shoot from).

I’m vaguely torn by Separation Anxiety. Insert pun here. To pick it up immediately upon WotLK launch would mean foregoing +5% crit chance, and my crits already give my pet huge bonuses that I wouldn’t want to go without.

Of course… the other two talent trees have gotten an even bigger upgrade. Beast was already terribly overpowered, so it is only fair. If it weren’t for the lure of exotic pets, I’d be all over the other trees. As it is, I’m having a hard time deciding what I want out of their first 3 tiers.

Marksmanship

The changes to the marks tree mean major improvements to hunter shots, reliable improvements to baseline DPS, and absolute gobs of bonus mana efficiency.

One of my longstanding gripes has been Improved Concussive Shot. In BC, it was a 5 point talent that gave the dubious benefit of a 20% chance of proccing a 3 second stun in addition to the daze effect. There are numerous problems with this that I really don’t want to get into since the bad talent is finally going away. In return, we get a sleek new 2 point talent that increases the duration of the daze by 2 seconds. This is pure awesome. If I were leveling a newbie hunter, this would be my first talent, hands down.

T1 marks also gets the 3 point Focused Aim talent, which gives hunters the same sort of 70% interruption resistance (while charging Aimed & Steady) that other mana-using classes have traditionally been able to buy for low tier talents. I find this to be of questionable usefulness, however – especially since it’s a T1 talent that buffs abilities that aren’t available at level 10. Aimed shot is a T3 talent, so it is first available at level 20. Steady shot rank 1 is level 62…

T2 marks gets some amazing changes, I’ve already mentioned the buff to Improved Mark.

Careful Aim makes an appearance at T2. All the way down from T7. Yup. They moved a tier seven talent down to tier two. And then they buffed it 3x. In stead of a puny +45% of your int converted into RAP, it now gives a full +100%. Epic win.

They have also switched the locations of Mortal Shots (+crit damage) and Efficiency (-mana cost). Mortal Shots is now T2 and becomes Aimed Shot’s pre-req (in stead of the other way around). Efficiency wasn’t very important at low levels, so moving it up to T4 makes more sense (when it’s saving you more than 1 or 2 mana per spell).

In stead of Careful Aim at T7, marks hunters now get Piercing Shots for 3 points. This gives Steady and Aimed shots the ability to ignore 6% of target armour. Very unshabby.

Rapid Recuperation is a new 3 point T8 ability that helps mana efficiency. While using Rapid Fire, both the hunter’s and pet’s abilities are 60% cheaper. This makes for a lot of focus dump happiness for your pet. Additionally, Rapid Killing (which already reduces Rapid Fire’s cooldown) is improved by giving you a mana regen tick that heals you for 150% of the damage dealt by the +20% damage shot you fire to use the Rapid Killing charge. This is quite probably enough to keep high level hunters at full mana forever, so long as things keep dying.

Wild Quiver is a new T9 (3 point) talent that gives you a 10% chance to fire an additional auto shot at 60% damage. Combine this with the fact that heavy marks hunters will likely be using Improved Hawk in stead of Viper (since the marks tree is really taking care of the hunter’s mana needs without it now)… and you have a LOT of extra arrows flying.

T9 also gets Improved Steady Shot (3 points). This gives your steady shots 15% chance to increase the damage of your next aimed/arcane/kill shot by 15% while reducing its mana cost by 40%. See? I told you. Mana efficiency.

The new T10 marks talent is Marked for Death (5 points). It gives your already improved hunter’s mark an additional +10% damage dealt by the hunter & pet and increases your critical strike damage bonus of all shot spells by a further 10%. This really encourages the hunter to mark their targets but I wonder how it plays out with multiple hunters firing on the same target. Do they all get the bonus, or does only the hunter who placed the mark?

And Chimera Shot is the new T11 talent. It’s a 10 second cooldown shot for 125% damage that refreshes your current sting and procs an additional bonus depending on which sting was active. Serpent deals 40% of the sting’s normal damage instantly. Viper heals you for 60% of the amount it drains (mana efficiency). Scorpid procs a 10 second disarm attempt that can only occur once a minute. All told, way cool.

Survival

The big change at T1 for the survival tree is that the former pair of 3 point talents Monster Slaying and Humanoid Slaying have been replaced with the 5 point Improved Tracking. I’ve already discussed this above, but just to reiterate:

• Only costs 5 talent points in stead of 6.
• +5% damage in stead of +3% damage and +3% crit damage.
• Works on whatever you’re tracking in stead of just 4 different creature types.

T2 gets a new talent called T.N.T.. Hehe. This gives your fire traps 15% chance to deal a 2 second stun when they do damage (I assume this means 15% each time the dot procs…). It also increases the crit chance of your explosive trap by 15%. And… the talent also extends these bonuses to your Explosive Shot (which is the new T11 talent that effectively acts as a ranged explosive trap). I could live with this.

Tier 2 also gets Survival Instincts. Yup, another high tier talent moving down into cherry picking range. They didn’t even nerf it in the process (but they didn’t buff it like they did Careful Aim). This formerly 5th tier talent gives you a whopping 4% damage reduction and 4% AP for 2 points.

T3 sees an upgraded version of Deflection. This talent previously cost 5 T2 points for +5% parry bonus. Now it costs 3 T4 points for +6% bonus. Deflection also becomes Counterattack’s new pre-req (since the old pre-req, Deterrence is becoming a baseline ability now). Win.

T3 also gets Trap Mastery, which is currently unimplemented. But I believe it is supposed to be a combination of the previous T3 Clever Traps talent and the previous T4 Trap Mastery talent.

And… T3 also gets an improved version of the formerly T4 Improved Feign Death. Survival Tactics (2 points) is Improved Feign Death (+4% to difficulty to resist feign) plus a 4 second reduction to Disengage’s cooldown.

At T4, Surefooted is slightly changed to cut the duration of snares in half. Previously it supposedly gave you a +15% chance to resist them, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a lot of CC/snare/etc… type effects are, well, simply irresistible. So this is a nice improvement. They’re actually doing this sort of thing all across the board (changing chance to resist effects that weren’t ever actually resistible to a reduction in that effect’s duration).

Lock and Load is a new 3 point T4 survival talent that gives you a crazy weird clearcasting type effect that procs whenever you trap a target or 15% of the time you sting something. The proc is that your next 3 arcane and explosive shots are free to cast and have no cooldown (they normally both have a 6 second cooldown). I really wonder if successive explosive shot dots stack… because explosive trap + 3x explosive shot = actual big boy aoe dps. This would actually make hunters vaguely useful in situations where previously only mages & warlocks would do.

Hunter vs Wild is a new T5 talent for 3 points that increases you and your pet’s AP by 30% of your total stamina. 5 points in Survivalist are the nominal pre-req, but when considering taking a talent like this, who’d pass up a +10% stamina bonus anyway?

Noxious Stings is new at T8 and has Wyvern as a pre-req and gives your wyvern sting a backlash effect that hits the dispeller for 50% of the remaining sting duration. In addition, it also increases all damage dealt to victims of your serpent sting by 3%. This really improves the usefulness of wyvern in pvp and makes serpent a nice addition to an improved mark in group situations. I don’t think this should be a T8 talent with a pre-req… but there really isn’t room to put it anywhere else

Point of No Escape is a new T9 survival talent that costs 3 points and increases the crit chance of all attacks on victims of your ice traps (and possibly bear trap, but I think they’re doing away with that one). This is very nice for frost trap and potentially very very fun with the rumored changes to freeze trap (it won’t break on any old damage now). This means you might get to cycle off two big crit shots into something when breaking its freeze now.

Sniper Training is another new T9 talent (3 points). This increases the damage dealt by steady, aimed, and explosive shots by 6% when you are >30 yards away from the target. It also (possibly more importantly) improves your chance to crit by 15% when executing with Kill Shot. It’s kind of a shame this is so mutually exclusive with Separation Anxiety (+pet dps at long range).

The new T10 survival talent is Hunting Party (5 points) and serves as an awesome hunter version of Vampiric Touch (shadow priest spell that dots an enemy and turns the damage into mana for the party). Hunting Party has Thrill of the Hunt as a pre-req (regen 40% of shot costs when you crit) and heals your whole party’s mana/energy/rage/runic power slightly whenever you crit with an arcane/explosive/steady shot. Hehehe. Oh, and remember, TNT gives explosive shots +15% to crit while Lock and Load makes them subject to chain clearcasting

And of course then there’s Explosive Shot at T11. We’ve already seen numerous other talents that improve it, but what is it? It’s a ranged explosive trap on a 6 second cooldown. It hits the primary target for a good chunk of fire damage and then splashes everything within 5 yards with a dot for half of the base damage again over 2 seconds.

And so… with so many wonderful options, I am really starting to wish for the first time that they will let us dual spec somehow. It would mean I can keep my insanely heavy beast spec for soloing and take something from marks and/or survival for groups/pvp. Mmm. Happy ideas.

Anyhow, I’ve spent entirely too long on this, and now I’m less sure than ever of what I’ll be doing with my 10 shiny new lvl 71-80 talent points. Oh well. Respecs aren’t really that expensive after all.

However, since I hate to waste a good rant, I’m going to dust this thing off before it goes entirely stale. Let’s see what I can salvage.

Well, that wasn’t terribly outdated after all. Most of the changes (beta changes, so not entirely guaranteed to go live, of course) that obsolete some of my opinions are:

1. Mini-pets are going into your spellbook.
2. The stable might have been increased in size by 2 slots.
3. All pet races have a unique ability.
4. Bite has been nerfed to act as simply another name for claw (a focus dump). Every race gets one or the other.
5. Pets now magically learn new abilities as they level, thus eliminating the need to go out and tame a lvl 63 ravager to teach your level 64 boar rank 9 gore…
6. Pets automatically level up to a minimum of 5 below their owner when tamed.
7. Loyalty is quite probably going away, so that’s no longer a concern for the ‘enslaved’ pets I was pondering.
8. Along with loyalty, the often confusing training point system is gone and has been replaced with a much nicer and more familiar talent system. Each pet family falls into one of 3 trees.

So what does this all mean? It means that Blizzard is normalizing pets in the best possible way. It means that there will finally be a real reason (other than aesthetics) to choose weird pet races. It means that I’m absolutely going to maintain a minimum of 3 pets now, and will have an easier time of doing it.

It also means that we have a slim chance that they will actually burn the stables down (by making pets into spells, just like mini-pets and mounts). I’m guessing that they’ll try to live with the broken stable system for a bit longer (as evidenced by their expanding it to 5 slots from 3), but I’m hoping that this is just a temporary mechanism that will be done away with when the expansion goes final (or in the patch immediately following).

I mean… they’re already getting rid of the pet trainers… and they’ve already written most of the systems we’d need for it… so why not get rid of the stables as well? Here’s to hoping.

…

Because encouraging us to keep more pets around without similarly increasing our access to said pets is just plain mean

I did it right this time. Kiki spent the vast majority of her post-newbie levels as a holy/discipline hybrid build and eventually ended up at 28/33/0. Smite and mana efficiency FTW.

I also planned ahead. Not only did I have 5 pieces of lvl 70 eq waiting for me (including the Primal Mooncloth set). Not only did I have enough money saved up to buy my flying mount, but I actually “camped the chicken spawn”. I hit level 70 less than 30 yards from the riding trainer in Wildhammer, bought my chicken, and flew away.

Kiki currently has 6741 hp, 9266 mana, just shy of 1250 bonus healing and 154 mp5 while casting (354 while not casting). She has over 400 int and spirit. Her /played is just over 10 days.

boring history

(Seriously, I’m about to ramble for a few hours… Hey, I said this took 12 years…)

I’ve always enjoyed healing in RPG’s, and I like to think that I’ve gotten fairly good at it over the years. I play clerics and druids in pen and paper RPG’s. I cried like a baby when Aeris died – and not just because I was emotionally involved in the story (which I was), but also because she was my healer. My first MUD character became a priest on September 10th, 1996.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about healing in games that I enjoy so much, but I like it more than summoning (a close second – playing healers who can summon makes me giddy). I’m pretty sure my original obsession with clerics was strictly the result of numberchasing munchkinitis. In AD&D, clerics felt like the most flexible class to me. They could heal, they could smite, they could summon at very low levels, they had good hp and could wear heavy armour and hit things with big hammers. My online handle “Allaryin” comes from my first successful D&D character, a chaotic good dwarven cleric of Tempus – the Forgotten Realms god of war.

However, in subsequent games, I recanted this position. Somewhere along the line, the idea of being able to do anything and everything at any time started losing its appeal. I became less interested in whacking things with hammers and calling down fire to consume my enemies whole… and more interested in passively altering events. Why wield the hammer yourself when the fighter can do a better job at it – especially with my help keeping him alive?

Future incarnations of Allaryin stopped following warrior gods like Tempus and started following Lathander the god of light and creation… and eventually evolved into followers of Ilmater the martyr’s god. I became obsessed with keeping my party members standing, even if it meant they had to find another priest to raise me when I fell.

When ’96 rolled around and I was introduced to muds, it was a happy coincidence that the guys who kickstarted the addiction were a knight and a priest. I quickly gravitated toward the priest’s guild and when the time came, chose to play as a priest of Morike, the game world’s goddess of healing. Though I eventually played almost every other class in the game, I always came back to Morike. If I logged into the mud right now, Allaryin would still be there, a very dusty and unplayed but still very fervent follower of the light.

Fast forward to March of 2004, FFXI hit my PS2 and I was all ready to reinvent Allaryin again as a Tarutaru white mage, but the game’s user interface had other plans. I was unable to figure out how to choose a name of my own, and after several attempts finally gave up and decided to use the random generator. Kikichikki was born.

Kiki was also doomed to failure by a game that made solo play absolutely impossible, especially for the entirely defensive white mage class. I don’t think I ever hit level 21, but I hit level 20 about 50 times… having not quite mastered the fine art of controlling aggro in order to avoid getting killed in groups.

Kiki saw a brief reincarnation as an Agatean Pishite on the Discworld mud that lasted a few months before real life conspired to prevent me from playing. When I returned, the character had been wiped for inactivity

In early 2006, Kiki’s next stop was City of Heroes. I rolled the character four or five times but never really got into it – however, when City of Villains came out, I rolled Columns, a Necromancy/Poison mastermind who spent most of his time keeping people alive (or reanimating them as the case may be).

When World of Warcraft launched, I was unimpressed with my options for healers. During the open beta, I determined that paladins, druids, and shamans were too confusing and priests were too squishy. Summoning was where it was at, and a few months later when I was finally bullied into opening an account, I rolled Allaryin as a dwarven hunter.

In the intervening years, I have tried leveling healers several times, but the closest I ever got was a 40 paladin (who isn’t even healer spec any more). Priests were always squishy, I hit level 15-20 with several attempts but always gave up at my inability to solo with the class – but I had always tried to level as a shadow priest since that’s what common convention states is the best build for soloing.

shadow is overrated

I repeat. Shadow is overrated.

I originally (like 2 months ago when the topic was fresher on my mind) meant for this to be a separate rant, but as I never wrote it I may as well go into the subject briefly here.

Again, this time with feeling. Shadow is overrated.

Maybe I’m just complete noobsauce, but I just couldn’t make a shadow priest work. I’ve got a level 50 warlock, which you’d think would be comparable. But it isn’t. In World of Warcraft, playing a low level shadow priest is more like playing a melee hunter. Just because the game lets you spec for stupid doesn’t mean it actually works.

I’m not saying that the shadow talent tree is worthless. I’m not saying that high level shadow priests aren’t amazing and viable in groups. Nor am I saying that shadow priests can’t be obnoxiously effective in PvP, and I am certainly not suggesting anyone try to solo to 70 w/o picking up any offensive talents.

I am saying that shadow priests are pointless in low level (<50 or so) PvE solo content. I am saying that the holy and discipline talent trees have much better options for solo players at lower levels.

When Kiki was in her early 40′s, I figured I’d give shadow another chance. I had been a holy smite build until this point and had intentionally waited to respec shadow until I could buy enough talents to make it worthwhile. I advanced two levels as a shadow priest before giving up in disgust.

What is wrong with shadow priests? Let me count the ways.

At level 10, a priest is highly squishy. They’re going to be healing themselves a lot – their fights take longer since they do less damage and they’ve got less defense (not getting the first rank of their personal armour spell until level 12).

Going immediately into either of the available shadow talents means delaying or neglecting Healing Focus (2 points for 70% resistance to interruption while healing). Time wasted trying to heal through interruptions means a corpse run.

Waiting until level 12 to take your first shadow talent point means you can’t get Mind Flay (the first really useful shadow talent) until 22.

Everyone talks up Spirit Tap (increased mana regen for 15s after a kill) but water really is very cheap and low level priests really shouldn’t be using mana to kill things anyway. Wand DPS is much more reliable and even outperforms smite at low levels. Lowbie priests should never run out of mana since they’ve offloaded their spells to before the mob closed into melee and are spending the rest of their time in combat wanding and regenning for the next fight.

Blackout is even more useless at low level. 10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds with your shadow spells? There is only one direct damage shadow spell before Mind Flay, and it’s on an 8 second cooldown.

For the same five talent points that would have been wasted in regen you don’t need or stuns that you can’t depend on… you could have 70% resistance to interruption while healing AND one of:

• +15% wand dps (up to 25% after 2 more points).
• +15% healing over time from your renew spell (which should be your most commonly cast spell at this level).
• +3% crit from your holy spells (up to +5% after 2 more points, this includes heals and nukes).

Shadow damage can be mitigated. There is no such thing as holy resistance. Smite always works. And it’s not on a cooldown, so you can actually spam it.

Shadow priests’ damage output is highly equipment-dependent. To truly be worth the pain of playing a shadow priest, you need gobs of +shadow damage equipment. The soonest a character can be effectively loaded up with +shadow gear is level 40.

Shadowform requires level 40 at the absolute minimum. That’s if you completely ignore the other two talent trees…

Can’t cast holy spells while in shadowform. Since you still have access to discipline spells, this isn’t a huge nerf (unlike a druid’s specialized caster forms which pretty much limit you to nuking or healing)… but it is still inconvenient. If for whatever reason you do need to cast a holy spell while soloing in shadowform, switching back costs a huge amount of mana.

DoT’s don’t crit.

Shadow priests blow through mana like nothing I’ve ever seen before. With one’s primary sources of damage being a DoT and a channeled DoT, you waste a lot of mana. Shadow Word: Pain suffers from the same problem that all DoT’s have – it rarely has a chance to tick to conclusion. Likewise, with Mind Flay, any hit you take while channeling will reduce the damage/mana ratio of the spell dramatically.

When hunting trolls as a shadow priest in Arathi, Kiki had to stop and drink after every other kill, even with Spirit Tap. As a smite priest, both her dps and her mana efficiency were higher. She could take 3 or 4 mobs before resting.

After the failed adventures in shadowform, Kiki gave a heavy discipline build a whirl. It too was disappointingly less effective than the heavy holy build had been – but, while she did less damage and her heals were weaker… at least she was sturdier and had more mana to cast the weaker spells with.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that from a purely munchkin standpoint, shadow spec is not a good idea for solo PvE before level 50, and is just… well, unplayable before 40.

If you want to play a shadow priest, do yourself a favor and either always party or level a hybrid build of some sort or another and respec to shadow when you get to Outland.

Let the flames commence.

Oh wait, that’s right. You can’t do that in shadowform

(Yes, I know the pun was horrendous. I’m sorry. Kind of.)

world of warcraft

I primarily play Allaryin, a dwarven hunter, my only lvl 70 char. I don’t raid and I burnt out on PvP a while ago. In fact, I hardly play any more. My account is currently pending cancellation (like the 4th or 5th time) as soon as my paid time runs out again.

Despite all of that, my total /played for all of my extant characters is about 53 days. 37 of those were spent on Al.

everquest 2

I’ve had 3 main characters over the years. That said, however, my total playtime on all remaining characters is barely 7.5 days. Half of that has been spent on my current ‘main’, Juvu, a lvl 35/31 sarnak shadowknight/armoursmith – my first serious attempt at playing a tank in any MMO in over 10 years.

city of heroes/villains

I don’t know what my CoH/CoV played time is. My subscription is not active. But I have two characters that I’ve spent the bulk of my time on, Tetris and Columns. I suspect Tetris’s /played time is 2x that of Columns’, despite their vast level differences.

ffxi

I have no idea how much time I spent on FFXI. I don’t even remember if that sort of data was easy to acquire or not. My main character, Kikichikki the Taru WHM hovered at the lvl 20 boundary off and on for months before we finally pulled the plug on our accounts for the last time.

three kingdoms

3K is the mud I played the most during college, and despite my lack of desire to continue playing there, I have hosted several sites for different guilds over the years. My character has hopped between just about every class available in the game, and is finally back in Priests where he started. He is 65 days old.

discworld

The Discworld mud is probably still my favorite text-based game of all time. I’ve put in a lot of time into every class in the game, but all of my alts appear to have been deleted over the years. The only character I have remaining is my main, the current incarnation of Allaryin of the Venerable Council of Seers – 14 days old.

walraven

I guess it’s not much surprise that I’ve spent more time on my own game than anything else. Since I first added character age tracking, Allaryin has logged in excess of 260 days of play/idle time.

Of course, in all of these games, I’ve had other characters that took time but were eventually deleted for one reason or another. And then there are all of the games I only demo’d or beta’d… and the numerous derivative faceless Diku clone MUD’s and cookie cutter Korean MMO’s…

It will take a LONG time for these newfangled graphical games to even come close to the time I’ve spent on MUD’s.

Prediction: The next expansion will focus on expanding Azeroth

I don’t think the next expansion will be the Emerald Dream – that’s expansion the 3rd. This time around, we’re going to come back to Azeroth and fill in the holes in the map. And there are numerous holes in the map of Azeroth right now.

There are at least 3 more continents we’ve not yet gotten access to: Northrend, Undermine, and Pandaria. There is also lore surrounding the Maelstrom and the associated bits of sunken Kalimdor.

Even on our existing continents, we’re missing several areas. A few of my favorites:

• Grim Batol is a potential overland zone with at least one high level instance east of Loch Modan and the Wetlands.
• Mount Hyjal is where the final battle of WC3 took place. It’s been a big closed off zone since the beginning of the game. In the last patch, they released two new flight paths essentially adjacent to the mountain border with Hyjal.
• Uldum is a big instance gate in southern Tanaris that taunted me every time i drove past it. Everyone’s expecting this one, just don’t know when it’ll happen.
• Dalaran is another obvious place for expansion. It’s the big purple bubble that all Undead players bump into on their way to Taren Mill for the first time.
• Gilneas is another big gate next to Silverpine. There were some pretty funny rumors going around before the Draenei and Blood Elves were announced that the zone was entirely peopled by werewolves…

Most of the smart money is on Northrend as the primary focus of the next expansion, and I tend to agree. There have been hints in the past that Arthas might be a level 80 raid boss. People have been begging for it for a while now – we’ve wanted this more than we wanted Outland

It also does nice things for bringing people back to Azeroth to do more than just shop or powerlevel alts.

How do we get to Northrend? I suspect that there will need to be boats installed. Viable locations for these ships might be eastern Azshara, Undermine, and northern Tristfal.

I actually really like the idea of establishing a settlement on one of the tips of Azshara, but it would be weird for a new city to magically appear out there overnight. Tristfal has the same problem, but to a much lesser degree – it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to imagine the Forsaken setting up a naval base out there to lead the charge in taking the war back to Scourge territory.

Undermine, and the island it lives in (Kezan), are the most logical choice… unless they open up Gilneas.

Gilneas is fun. Since there’s no communication with the place, it’s entirely possible that everyone inside’s been killed and turned into zombies or what-have-you… or that it’ll finally be willing to join with humanity in the fight against the Scourge. Maybe the Scourge broke through the wall and they came crawling to Southshore for help? This would give the Alliance a potential starting point to get out there. But I doubt it’ll happen. If I had to bet on the fate of Gilneas, though, I say they’re the new Southern Plaguelands by now – especially since the Alliance already have a much more probable city up that way in Dalaran.

Undermine really is the most logical choice. Probably. It’s a sizable island dedicated to commerce. The goblins certainly would see a profit in allowing both Horde and Alliance navies to set up shipyards on their northern shores – so long as they behave themselves and don’t kill each other in goblin territory (just like any other goblin controlled city).

I’d like to see Undermine become the new Shattrath. It makes the most sense to connect it to Steamwheedle Port (esp since no other boats use the dock atm), but that’s a pretty inconvenient location for such an important travel route. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to also connect it to Ratchet or Booty Bay somehow. Possibly tie it into the zeppelin network and give the Alliance a boat out of Southsore?

By connecting Undermine to lvl 20-40 zones, it would be quite appropriate to make the Isle of Kezan actually contain a good bit of content suitable to that level range. Make it into several (4-5) areas that provide a viable alternative to Stranglethorn and Desolace. The game is currently weakest in the lvl 30-50 content range right now, this is a good solution. With no new races, there’s no need to introduce new pairs of newbie zones – that effort should be bumped up to mid-level content

So, if we allow Undermine to become a large travel hub and allow it to connect players to Northrend, what do they have to do up there? High level content. Mid level content. Max level content. Several new instances. Northrend is big – really big. The map shows 11 zones plus plenty of spots for instances. Perhaps it could be made suitable for levels 50 and above – or even levels 45 and above. The continent is big enough that they could easily add another 45-55 zone in addition to zones all the way up to level 80.

But… we need a lot more lvl 70+ content in the next expansion, right? Well… TBC introduced a total of 11 new overworld zones in addition to instances. If they considered 7 zones sufficient new high level content for this expansion, I don’t see why the next expansion should be any different. Add an extra chunk or two of lvl 70+ content to Outland, leave the rest in Northrend, and we’ve still got room to resolve the dearth of mid-level content.

Suggested overworld zone level breakdown:

• Kezan – 30-40, 35-45 x2, 40-50
• Northrend – 45-55, 55-60, 60-65, 65-70, 70-75 x3, 73-78 x2, 75-80 x2
• Outland – 70-75, 75-80

This is a total of 17 zones – 6 more than TBC introduced. As a reasonable trade-off, I’d like to think that not every zone needs unique world PvP objectives and multiple instances in the initial launch. They can do with these what they did with Ghostlands and Zul’Aman – that is, the instance needn’t be launched at the same time as the zone containing it. There is plenty of other precedence for this.

I think it is entirely reasonable to focus new instanced content on lvl 70+, so perhaps none of the lvl <70 zones get new instances?

Either way… I predict that the world will be getting a lot larger and that most of the growth will be on Azeroth this time. And I hope I hope I hope they do something about the lack of good mid-level overland zones in the game. They needn’t be huge zones, just interesting changes of pace for people hoping to get their 6th alt over lvl 50 w/o repeating the same blasted quests over and over again.

Prediction: Access to Outland will be improved

Since low level players can already get to Shattrath with a little help from a friendly mage, the level 58 restriction on going through the Dark Portal feels really arbitrary. Especially since it’s possible to enter the Ramparts at level 55, and the level requirement for Master crafting professions is only 50 but they must be trained in Outland. I’d like to see the gate opened to all players capable of driving across the Blasted Lands in the first place. That’s good enough of a restriction already.

Perhaps they’ll eventually add some easier transport methods direct to the Dark Portal? Maybe a portal from Dalaran? Maybe one each from Stormwind and Orgrimmar? Perhaps a faction-neutral zeppelin path from Booty Bay?

Prediction: Woodworking will finally be made available to players

They released Jewelcrafting in TBC with … interesting results. It was an expansion-only profession that was still able to benefit players who were too cheap/uninterested to grab the expansion. It is terribly useful to lvl 65+ characters, just like Enchantments and Alchemy have always been important to high end players.

However, launching a new profession also made for an awful glut of cheap goods on the market. I am a lvl 367/375 jewelcrafter now, and I have yet to break even. I doubt I ever will. I spent hundreds and hundreds of gold to get from 250 to 300. The economy is terribly wrecked as a result of the new demand for jewels, but shrug. It’s not like the incredible inflation from Outland didn’t have a huge effect on prices either

One of the most requested features from players has always been that they let us make our own bows and arrows. I think a profession that makes bows, arrows, staves, and shields would be great. This would fill the gap left by other crafting professions and make it possible to finally craft every type of equipment in the game.

The big problem with releasing woodworking is with the gathering aspect of things… do you add trees to herbalism? Do you make lumber drop off of certain common NPC varieties like cloth does? Do you make trees harvestable by anyone? Do you add a woodcutter/lumberjack gathering profession? Do you make woodworking a combination gathering/crafting profession? None of these options by itself is very ideal.

Enchanting and Jewelcrafting are already combination gathering/crafting professions, with the exception that improvement in the gathering aspect of the profession is only possible by improving the crafting aspect. I think this is a good starting point for Woodworkers.

Allow Woodworkers to break apart bows and staves in order to get special materials – but not their own work (you can’t DE something you just enchanted and expect to get the shards back). Allow them to harvest wood from certain npc corpse types just like miners and herbalists can now. Make plant type mobs likely to drop wood in addition to flowers. Make the numerous lumber mills around the game actually spawn piles of lumber that any player can loot – similar to treasure chests.

I think adding some basic types of lumber (reusing the enchanting wand and campfire materials) to common vendors would not hurt at all – every other crafting profession has to buy some of their reagents already, why not these too?

And if Blizzard does all of that… I think it might work. I don’t like the idea of generically choppable tree nodes like mines and flowers. There’s something about the size of things that just doesn’t quite work for me. Perhaps there could be a class of largish flowers that herbalists can gather if they carry a tool with them. Or, perhaps they could just go ahead and add small trees to the world map that can be cut down. Shrug.

Prediction: The crafting skill cap will be raised to 450, others skills will only increase to 400

This isn’t much of a logical jump here. They need a new tier to make equipment for lvl 80′s. They’ve actually caught themselves in a pretty vicious cycle by bumping character levels out of sync with the crafting levels. When the game launched, both combat and crafting skill caps were 300. When TBC launched, though, they only added 50 levels to combat skills while crafting caps went up by another 75.

If they make the next tier of crafting skill also have a cap of 450, they’ll have gotten 50 ranks out of sync unless they surprise everyone and bump the level cap in the game to 90 My money’s on increasing the imbalance between the skill numbers.

As far as other skills go… I don’t know. Adding another tier or two of riding skill works well, but what would they add at that point? Aquatic mounts? Mounts that work in certain underground Nerubian zones? I guess the current disparity between crafting and normal skills AND riding skills shows that they don’t much care about the actual balance between the numbers. But I wish they would – it would make things pretty again

Prediction: Secondary skills will get some love

First aid can do precisely two things right now. It can make bandaids and it can make antivenom potions. Mostly, it just makes bandaids since the antivenom is quite inconvenient. I’d like to see first aid have an easier time of curing poisons and have options for treating disease based debuffs – make healing poison easier and make healing disease about as difficult as healing poison is now. They also need to add some additional tiers to the poisons. Right now, the only way to make lvl 60 antivenom is through an Argent Dawn recipe. There is no lvl 70 antivenom – and besides, the ingredients they’d probably use for them are currently being monopolized by people who want to defect over to Scryers

I’d also really like it if they could give inoculations that act as long-term disease/poison prevention buffs. It would give priests a reason to train first aid. But a 30 minute buff with say 5 charges of poison curing? Good stuff. Rogues would probably throw a fit, but shrug, I play a hunter. I dislike rogues

At present, cooks can only manufacture food. The skill can’t make drinks – even if a handful of cooking recipes do give +mp5 from their well fed buffs. I think allowing players to manufacture their own drinks would be fun and would entice more people to drop time into the skill. Right now, if people rely on secondary skills for out-of-combat healing, they’re 99% likely to be using bandages anyway…

Besides, it’s not like adding drinks to the skill will in any way unbalance things. Mage water’s still free, ne?

Currently, the worst secondary skill is fishing. It requires an insane time commitment to level and is actually quite dangerous at times. This makes it terribly unattractive to anyone but hunters and cooks. And since there are very few people who train cooking in any meaningful way… fishing gets even less attention. I like fishing, but… I’ve not really engaged in any fishing since hitting 300 a while back.

I want to see net fishing. I want to see more fish that come out of the water and attack you. I want to see fishing with dynamite and shotguns and traps. Fishing could easily be made into an interesting mini-game. All crafting could. EQ2 did a great job with that, and WoW could really use a new type of gameplay right about now.

Well, it’s time for my second blind prophetic mumbling. Last time, I talked about the direction I think that Horde/Alliance relationships should (and are starting to) move in.

Prediction: The next expansion will not introduce new races, but will introduce new classes.

I’d hit on this topic over a year ago.

Specifically, I would like to see two new character classes available – monk (defensive cloth-wearing melee type) and necromancer (zombie herder).

Pardo claims that one of the design goals of the game is ‘concentrated coolness‘ and thus they have 8 very unique classes in stead of something like EQ2 where you have numerous pairs of very similar classes.

So… before you start whining that necros would basically just be another brand of warlock, no, they aren’t. I actually have a harder time justifying monks than necros – though high end BC fist weapons have finally made an “unarmed” type class much more viable. My general justification for these ideas is that there is prior precedence for both classes and that they would be viable player classes in WoW. They make use of mechanics

I’m not interested in runemasters as a class, largely because I feel that they’d take more work to become viable and because Blizzard would get a lot of flack and accusations of copying Warhammer Online’s runepriest class.

It is my stated opinion that necromancers would make a fine addition to both gameplay and to world theme. They’re very traditional fare for the franchise, with skeleton armies being my arch-nemesis back in WC1… So, how can we make necros both thematically acceptable and give them sufficient uniqueness that they’re not just warlocks with zombies? Easily

And as far as monks vs concentrated coolness? How much cooler can you get than a clothie who can main tank instances?

necromancers

Weapons: dagger, sword (at 10), fist (at 20), wand
Armour: cloth, leather (at 60)
Talent Trees: Decay, Preservation, Animation
Role: nature/shadow/ice spell dps, highly expendable pets, wipe recovery
Races: undead(?), troll, blood elf, gnome, human(?)
Primary Stats: intelligence, spirit

class highlights

Necromancers are primarily a direct damage spell dps class. Their primary attacks are nature (poison/disease) based but they do get access to some shadow and ice direct damage spells. Their poison nukes do proc dots and debuffs, but they have no specific dot spells (ie, dots are all side-effects of nukes, more like a mage than a warlock in this sense).

They have the ability to reanimate corpses (or summon ghosts from a graveyard), but these summons are very different than those of a warlock or a hunter, and the necromancer has much less control over their summons than a hunter or warlock would. Necromancer pets steadily decay over time and cannot be healed through traditional means.

Necros have a number of ‘control’ points at their disposal. These points limit the frequency at which corpses may be reanimated and the number of zombies that may be had at once. Yes, multiple pets. Control points do not regenerate instantly upon the death of the summon.

Because a necro’s summons require that the caster either be in a graveyard or that they have a suitable corpse present, and because they require control points… necromancers will frequently find themselves forced to operate without a legion of zombies.

While they are not healers, necromancers should be very adept at wipe recovery. They can’t prevent party members from dying, but they can certainly bring them back after they do

hordes of zombies

When somebody says necromancer, they’re not talking guys who raise the occasional zombie to do their bidding. They’re talking legions of undead minions. In WC3 terms, we’re talking Arthas the Death Knight, etc…

So, I think a fundamental feature of the necromancer class should be the ability to have multiple combat pets at once. No other class boasts this feature – at least, no other class boasts the ability to actually control multiple combat pets at once. Anyone can get trinkets or temporary uncontrollable pets.

And I think that should be the biggest feature of the class, the ability to raise and control multiple pets at a time. Of course, this comes with two major problems:

• The game interface currently can’t deal with multiple controllable pets at once.
• Everyone else is gonna whine and complain like spoiled little baby childrens.

To the former problem I can only say that since there weren’t any new classes in Burning Crusade, they’ve over a year to iron out the UI/driver issues That, and by limiting the control options given to necro pets, things should be made easier.

To the whining and complaining, it’s a valid concern. However, you must consider who’s gonna be complaining. Hunters and warlocks. Blizzard hates them, so it doesn’t much matter, eh? In all seriousness though, if we allow necromancers to have multiple summons at once, we need to: either make individual necro pets somehow weaker than individual hunter and warlock pets, or make it way more difficult for necros to break the 1 pet at a time limit, or come up with some sort of combination of the two.

Part of the whining and complaining would be Blizzard themselves, of course. But they’ve lost the right to complain about concentration of summoning powers now that they’ve given limited summoning abilities to correctly specced mages (who deserve it), shamans (who don’t), priests (who huh?), and druids (… huh?!?!).

other summoners

Hunters have to catch and train and feed their pets. They can only take one pet with them at a time – and have to buy stable space in order to store other pets. They can call their pet instantly, unless it is dead – at which point they must spend time and mana to rez the critter. Hunter pets must earn xp in order to level up, but the player also gets a very large degree of room in which to customize their pets. Hunters can name their pets.

Warlocks have to quest for each of their new summons, of which they get a total of 8 or so. These quests get increasingly more difficult (it’s possible for a lock to have their imp at level 3 or 4, but the succubus quest is long enough that it took me all the way through level 20 and into 21 to complete, etc…). Warlocks get free mounts. Warlocks always have to spend mana to summon their pets (and shards, and sometimes party members ). Warlock pets have no feelings, so it doesn’t hurt to let them die any more than it does to leave them behind in a dangerous situation. Each warlock pet is a unique critter with vast differences in usefulness, and the player may switch them out at any time. The pets level along with the player but are also completely identical to any other warlock’s pet of the same level. Warlock pets come pre-named.

Other classes with summons must purchase them with high tier talent points. They’re generally short term big attack spells. I’d like to see a necro’s summons fit somewhere in between these and a warlock’s.

I think the first difference between necromancers and warlocks should be that the difference in loyalty and cuddly feelings towards a necro’s pets and a lock’s pets should be roughly the same as the difference between locks and hunters. Ie, it should be cheap to raise zombies.

There should be no names given to the summons. There is no training of zombies. Each minion is a new creature, who will be used up and thrown away. Other players cannot heal zombies. They do not regenerate on their own, in fact, they decay gradually over time. Many of a necromancer’s bigger spells should cost a minion as a reagent.

summoning methods

Ok, so it stands to reason that necros need bodies to re-animate or something like that, ne? Sounds good to me. I’d like corpses to act the role of a warlock’s shards with two major differences. First, shards are portable. Corpses are not. Second, any kill worth xp/honor is worth a shard. Not all corpses will be suitable, and some mobs don’t even leave corpses at all.

Like the warlock can always summon an imp in the absence of shards, a necromancer should be able to animate corpses from a graveyard. These critters will be weaker than those from fresh kills, but oh well.

What corpses are suitable? Well, I think it should be a function of level. Just like a hunter gains different tracking abilities as they advance, a necro should be able to raise different varieties of corpse as they advance.

Level 10 – humanoid
Level 20 – beast (most beasts)
Level 30 – demon (some demons)
Level 50 – giant
Level 70 – dragonkin (some dragonkin)

Note that undead, elementals, and critters w/o a creature type will never be suitable fodder for necromancers. This includes a necro’s pets who have been destroyed (they’ll not actually leave corpses). Also note that the individual creature itself doesn’t much matter (only level). So a lvl 30 bear will be just as useful to a necromancer as a lvl 30 kobold.

Starting at level 10, and continuing every 6 levels afterward, the necromancer should get a new way in which to animate corpses (ie, a new spell). Each spell is only usable with certain corpse types.

Level 10 – skeleton (any)
Level 16 – zombie (humanoid, beast, giant)
Level 22 – ghoul (humanoid, beast, giant)
Level 28 – ghost (any, graveyard)
Level 34 – abomination (humanoid, giant)
Level 40 – death knight (humanoid)
Level 46 – crypt fiend (beast)
Level 52 – felwalker (demon)
Level 58 – deathguard (any)
Level 64 – wraith (humanoid, demon, graveyard)
Level 70 – lich (humanoid, demon, dragonkin)

Animating zombies should be quick compared to warlocks, but not entirely instant. I’m thinking a 3 second casting time to start with on skeletons and +0.5 sec to casting time of each additional level of spell (so ghouls are 4 seconds and liches are 8 seconds). Possibly allow 5 talent points to be spent on reducing casting times of all animation spells by 0.5 seconds (reducing skeletons to 0.5 sec casting time and liches to 5.5).

Each pet will generally fall into one of three categories: offensive, defensive, or utility (pets that aren’t terribly impressive in general combat but have some decent abilities in specific situations).

Skeleton

Animated sack of bones. Offensive, no special abilities.

Zombie

Skeleton with some meat on. Defensive. Cannibalize, can eat zombie-suitable corpses for healing.

Ghoul

Utility zombie. Melee damage inflicted is divided evenly between mana and hp. Against rogues and warriors, that half damage is discarded.

Ghost

White incorporeal spirit. Offensive. Frost bolt.

Abomination

Like the big scourge guys. Defensive. Heavy melee with poison cloud taunt.

Death Knight

Ghoul with armour. Utility. Can heal undead minions.

Crypt Fiend

Undead nerubian. Utility. Root. Ranged insect summon type nature damage attacks.

Felwalker

Skeletal felhound. Defensive. Highly resistant to magic – any spell resisted has a chance of backfiring on the caster for a heavy taunting effect.

Deathguard

Skeletal doomguard. Defensive. Highly resistant to physical damage. Sunder, revenge.

Wraith

Red incorporeal spirit. Offensive. Shadow bolt. Can drain life to heal self.

Lich

Ghoul in mage robes. Offensive. Ice and shadow single target nukes, aoe shadow debuff, single target ice-based snare.

In addition to these guaranteed summon types, necromancers should also be able to purchase a few different types of minions through talent points at tiers 3, 5, and 9 in the Animation tree.

Tier 3 (level 20+) – shambler (any)
Tier 5 (level 30+) – shadow nexus (graveyard)
Tier 9 (level 50+) – mirror image (humanoid)

Shambler

Small slime-shaped mass of flesh. Utility. The necromancer gets 2 shamblers from a corpse, which cost only one CP between the two of them. No combat abilities whatsoever. Shamblers exist only as cheap minions to sacrifice to other spells.

Shadow Nexus

Incorporeal black and purple cloud. Defensive. The nexus has no direct attacks but does possess a powerful AoE taunt ability, an aura that debuffs enemies within range, and an ability that reflects 75% of all damage taken back to the attacker as shadow damage.

Mirror Image

Looks like the necro character with a green tint effect similar to shadowform/berzerk. Offensive. The mirror image echoes any offensive spell cast by the necromancer that does not cost reagents or minions.

control points

Necromancers are allowed multiple pets at a time. However, the more minions they raise, the weaker they become themselves. The hard limit on the number of summons a necro may have at once is measured by ‘control points’. Necros earn 2 CP at level 10 when they complete their quest arc and are given further quests to improve their control by one more point at levels 30, 50, and 70 for a grand total of 5 CP. It might be possible to purchase a single additional CP through the use of a max tier animation talent point.

Skeletons, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, and pairs of shamblers cost 1 CP to animate. Abominations, death knights, shadow nexuses, crypt fiends, and felwalkers cost 2 CP. Deathguards, wraiths, and liches cost 3 CP. Mirror images cost 4 CP. The necro may distribute these points however they want.

The level of the corpse does not affect the CP cost. In fact, it is entirely possible for a necromancer to spend 3 CP on animating a lvl 50 corpse as a lich and then guard it with a pair of level 65 zombies.

For every CP spent in maintaining an undead minion, the necromancer suffers a fairly stiff penalty: -5% max HP, -5% max mana, and -5% to spell damage. Without any pets, the necro should inflict damage on par with a shadow priest. With a full compliment, he should hit about as hard as a paladin with a fishing pole. These penalties may be reduced with animation talent points.

When conjuring minions, a necromancer may only use corpses that were slain by his party. There is no implicit level limit, thus a baby necro could theoretically make himself a level 50 zombie… if he were in a twinking party. But the newbie who wanders into a high level zone can’t animate corpses left behind by high levels too inconsiderate to loot them.

However, when a necromancer DOES wind up with a pet bigger than themselves, the CP cost for that pet is increased by 1.

If a necromancer ever finds themselves overexerted on CP, their smallest minion dies. If they are still over their CP limit, another one dies, etc… though I don’t really see how that one’d be possible.

CP do not regenerate immediately upon the death of the minion – even though the associated stat penalty does. The necromancer must either wait 2 full minutes for the CP to regenerate, or they must cast a lvl 40 spell that regenerates the CP For them (in exchange for a percentage of their base mana).

care and feeding

Necromancer minions do not earn xp. They do not level to scale with their master. They are whatever level of corpse the player re-animated from. Graveyard minions are leveled based on the entry level difficulty of the zone, minus 5 (minimum level of 5 in newbie zones).

So, if a player were to summon a few pets in the kodo graveyard, they’d wind up with some lvl 25 minions since Desolace is lvl 30-40.

Necromancer minions can’t be healed by traditional means. Players can’t use healing spells or bandages on them. The only ways they can be healed are either by eating corpses or by healing themselves. The necromancer has no normal heal spell for his pets – but he CAN sacrifice one pet to heal another.

In fact, much of what a necromancer does involves killing pets to make himself and his remaining pets stronger.

The three most basic necromancer minion sac abilities are:

1. Sac a minion to provide friendly target with a shell that reduces melee/ranged damage taken by X for 30 minutes.
2. Sac a minion to feed another minion. 50% of the sacrificed pet’s health and mana are transferred. If the sacced minion is of equal or higher level than the healed minion, the healed minion’s level is increased by 1.
3. Sac a minion to inflict tremendous damage to a single enemy.

The necromancer may not specify which pet is used to fuel an ability that costs a minion. In stead, the game selects the necro’s weakest, lowest CP value minion automatically.

When a minion dies or is sacrificed, a portion of any aggro they have generated is returned to the necromancer. The rest dissipates.

wipe recovery

Necromancers have two resurrect abilities that they may use on party members. They also have a feign death / ice block type ability that flushes their aggro and takes them out of combat.

Revive Ally

Level 20. Usable only out of combat. 2 second cast. No cooldown. Brings the party member back with 5% of their max hp and mana and a -50% spirit debuff that lasts for 1 minute. Otherwise is very inexpensive to use and quick to cast

Reanimate Ally

Level 40. Usable only during combat. 3 second cast. 30 minute cooldown. Sacrifice one of the necromancer’s minions to bring an ally back to life with 100% health and 100% mana. The party member also comes back in a berzerk and uncontrollable state, with +50% to damage done and immunity to CC that lasts for 30 seconds before the player is given control of their character.

Suspended Animation

Level 20. Instant cast. 10 minute cooldown. The necromancer sacrifices a minion in order to flush all aggro and enter a state of suspended animation that lasts for 1 minute. During this state, the necromancer cannot act or be acted upon. They do not regenerate mana or health. Any of their minions still active will continue to act with their previous orders. The state may not be terminated early. When the spell ends, the necromancer will wake with a 30 second -50% spirit debuff.

spells and abilities

Necromancers get 3 basic nuke spells.

Initially, they start play with Toxic Strike which does a burst of nature damage up front and applies a short debuff that reduces the target’s nature resistance. This debuff may be improved with decay talents such that it stacks up to 5 times and increases the victim’s susceptibility to crits.

At level 6, they pick up Icebolt, a frost damage nuke that does half of its damage up front and the rest as a brief dot that stacks up to 5 times.

At higher levels, necromancers also get a Darkbolt spell that does shadow damage and (with talents) has a chance to proc an accuracy debuff on the victim.

Another general thematic element that I would like to see with necromancers is that they are essentially combat alchemists. Sort of how druids are connected to herbalism and warlocks are connected to tailoring, there should be numerous quests that expect a necromancer to have ready access to a friendly alchemist. Many of a necromancer’s spells will cost rogue poison components as reagents.

The necromancer’s initial 30-minute self buff spell will give them some armour points and will reduce their generated threat.

A large set of spells available to necromancers will be referred to as ‘infusions’. Infusions are not necessarily one type of spell, there are offensive and defensive infusions. Regardless of the type, necros will only be allowed to maintain one infusion at once (as a hunter’s stings, a warlock’s curses, a paladin’s judgements, etc…). Necros should be given a large variety of infusions to choose from. All infusions count as poison debuffs, even the beneficial ones, and no infusions may be cast on the necromancer himself or party members (but they may be used on a necromancer’s minions).

At level 20, necromancers gain a Metabolize Poison buff spell that cures 1 poison effect on the target, replacing it with an hp regeneration effect in stead. The size of the effect depends on the rank of the metabolize spell cast, not on the size of the poison cured. This spell can be used to heal minions.

Nuke-wise, the necromancer should be weak in the AoE damage arena. They should have area attacks, but these should be primarily debuffing in nature – like disease clouds, etc…

At level 60, necromancers should gain Sever Spirit, an expensive high powered shadow nuke that will instantly reanimate the victim as the biggest appropriate minion type available to the necromancer if the target dies within 3 seconds of being hit by the spell.

Necros should also receive some sort of ability to CC undead. Whether it’s more like shackle, turn undead, or enslave, I don’t really care. Perhaps they could have all three.

talent trees

The three talent trees available to necromancers are Preservation, Decay, and Animation.

The preservation tree improves a necromancer’s minions (makes them last longer). It also improves their ice-based nuke spells.

The decay tree improves a necromancer’s debuffs as well as their nature and shadow damage attacks.

The animation tree improves the actual process of creating minions (speeding it up, making it cost less, etc…). The tree also gives the necromancer an additional CP and three additional summon types.

Animation necros will probably be the least viable PvP build, simply because of their limited options for corpses in BG’s and the arena. Decay necros should be similar to shadow priests in party usefulness. Preservation will likely be the soloing spec.

monks

Weapons: fist, staff (at 10), polearm (at 20), thrown
Armour: cloth, leather
Talent Trees: Mind, Body, Weapon
Role: downtime reduction, dodge/resist tank, melee dps
Races: orc, troll, human, night elf, draenei(?)
Primary Stats: agility, spirit

class highlights

Monks have a mana bar, not energy or rage. They are primarily a defensive melee class that relies upon dodging attacks to compensate for their low damage mitigation. Their special abilities do physical and arcane spell damage.

They are capable of wearing both cloth and leather armour but receive major bonuses to dodge and spell resistance when wearing only cloth equipment. The strength of this buff is sufficient to make monks viable tanks.

Monks start off with a pair of fist weapons and the ability to dual wield them. As they progress, they gain the ability to use staves and polearms, and have special abilities that are only usable with either fists or staff/polearm (treated identically for purposes of abilities).

Monks learn a number of ‘forms’ that they may adopt, similar to a hunter’s aspects or a paladin’s auras. Every form enables a single special ability that may only be used while in that form, otherwise, the forms all have passive effects that only directly impact the monk himself.

A monk retains a portion of their mana regen even when casting and is also capable of channeling mana to party members in order to keep them going. Other than channeling mana, they have no ability to heal people other than themselves.

dodging and resisting

Monks should receive a phenomenal amount of base dodge. Like… more than a hunter with permanent aspect of the monkey. On average, they should dodge better than a rogue with similar stats and eq. They should also get good chances to parry when wielding a staff/polearm.

In addition to this, monks should have an ability that gives them an additional chance to dodge every attack. If an attack is avoided as a result of this ability, a large amount of threat is generated. This is the monk’s primary threat generation mechanism – annoying mobs by dodging their attacks. It should therefore also make them very effective at tanking multiple targets at once.

Monks should have high natural spell resist. They receive +1 resist to all 5 spell damage types for every 10 points of spirit they have.

Monks receive a mobility buff whenever they are wearing only cloth armour. This buff is what makes the phenomenal dodge possible, and should also give the monk increased spell resistance chances.

But, you ask… if the mobility buff is so good, why should a monk even consider wearing leather at all? Well, there will still likely be fights where their dodge is insufficient to make up for the lost damage mitigation from wearing cloth. Or there are fights where the increased number of hits taken doesn’t really matter if the mobs are going down fast enough…

forms and specials

Monks have a number of forms that they may adopt. These forms are similar to warrior stances and hunter aspects. Monks begin play with one form and receive a new combat form every 12 or so levels. Every form applies one or two passive affects to the monk and also activates a unique special ability that is only usable within that form.

Specials are powered by ‘momentum points’. These points are earned when the monk dodges or parries an attack or completely resists a spell. A maximum of one momentum point may be earned per second. Once charged up, specials are unleashed in a manner similar to a paladin’s judgement spell (ie, a single ability with a short cooldown that is used to activate all specials).

If the monk does not use their special to flush momentum points, they act as a buff that enhances the effectiveness of the monk’s current form. Momentum charges up to 10 times and has a short duration unless refreshed by avoiding another attack, so it quickly disappears once the fight is over.

Changing forms is instant and does not cost mana. It does, however, flush any momentum points saved up.

Owl (Level 1)

Owl form grants the monk the ability to retain 10% of their natural mana regeneration while casting.
Momentum: Every point of momentum increases the mana regeneration by 8%, thus at 10 points of momentum, the monk retains 90% of their mana regen while casting.
Special: For each point of momentum burnt, the monk regenerates 1% of their maximum mana.

Mongoose (Level 12)

Mongoose form grants the monk increased dodging abilities (+10%). Mongoose form may be improved with talents to give a total of +20% dodge.
Momentum: Every point of momentum increases the monk’s threat generation by 10%.
Special: For each point of momentum burnt, the monk taunts one enemy within range. These points are spent round-robin, starting with whatever mob the monk has targetted. Thus, if burning 7 points in a battle with 3 enemies, every enemy will be taunted twice, with the monk’s target receiving a 3rd taunting effect.

Turtle (Level 24)

Turtle form grants the monk increased spell resistance. This resistance starts at +20, but increases with additional ranks of the ability to a maximum of +60 spell resist.
Momentum: Every point of momentum gives resisted spells a 5% chance of being reflected back at the caster.
Special: The monk gains a buff with 1 charge per momentum point burnt. Every second for 30 seconds (or until out of charges), the buff will attempt to dispel a single negative magic or curse effect from the monk, costing 1 charge per success.

Crane (Level 36)

Crane form grants the monk increased mobility (+8% run speed) and +10% weapon attack speed.
Momentum: Every point of momentum increases the monk’s attack speed by 2% (to a maximum of +30%).
Special: The monk blinks backwards away from their enemy. More momentum translates into a longer distance blinked.

Scorpion (Level 48)

Scorpion form grants the monk arcane spell damage equal to 50% of all physical damage dealt.
Momentum: Every point of momentum increases the damage dealt by 10% (to a maximum of 150%).
Special: Unleashing scorpion form momentum reduces the target’s arcane resist by 5 per point burnt. Additional specials will not stack – the larger effect will stick. The debuff has a short duration but is refreshed any time the target takes arcane damage.

Tiger (Level 60)

Tiger form converts mirrors of the monk’s natural mana regeneration with an equivalent amount of health regeneration.
Momentum: Every point of tiger form momentum allows the monk to retain 3% of their natural mana regeneration while casting.
Special: For each point of momentum burnt, the monk regenerates 2% of their maximum health.

Dragon (Level 72)

Dragon form reduces the casting cost of all Mind and Body abilities by 50%.
Momentum: Each point of momentum reduces the casting cost by a further 3% (to a maximum of 80% cost reduction).
Special: The monk receives a buff with a 30 second duration and one charge per momentum point burnt. Every time the monk gets a critical effect with a spell while the buff lasts, the cost of the spell is refunded.

mana regeneration

Several of a monk’s forms improve their mana availability. A monk in either owl or dragon form should be able to maintain a healthy surplus of mana energy, despite their low intelligence score. This mana should then easily be shared with party members. Starting at about level 20, the monk should receive a Channel Mana spell that very efficiently gives mana to the target ally (over time).

At higher levels, monks should also get the ability to (less efficiently) burst channel mana to a party member or perhaps (even less efficiently) burst channel mana to the entire party.

spells and abilities

Monks start out with an Arcane Palm spell that has a 1 second casting time and inflicts a short magic dot (arcane damage) on the target.

At level 10, they get Arcane Fist, an instant cast spell that empowers their next melee attack with additional arcane damage.

At level 10, they also get Stunning Palm, a short-term (12 seconds without talents) CC ability that works only on humanoids and will disengage the monk from the target and purge any potentially interruptive arcane damage DoT effects on the target (talent). Any damage taken will interrupt the effect (talents may allow dots a chance not to interrupt the CC). When the spell ends, the target will be afflicted as with Arcane Palm.

At level 20, they get an ability to throw their enemy 10-30 yards away. Giants and other large enemies may not be throwable.

At level 30, monks get Far Strike, an inexpensive instant attack that delivers a normal weapon strike as arcane damage up to 20 yards away (up to 30 yards with talents). Far strike has a 6 second cooldown (reduced to 1 second with talents).

At level 40, monks gain a 30 minute buff that allows them to automatically counter up to one melee or ranged attack per second with either arcane fist or far strike as appropriate and as remaining mana allows.

At level 50, monks should be able to perform an AoE attack that inflicts minimal damage but also generates a large amount of threat and knocks back multiple targets (number of potential knockback targets increases with additional ranks).

Monks should also have the ability to heal themselves, but not others. They should be able to flush poison, bleeder and disease effects from themselves via a spell in addition to the turtle form’s ability to purge magic and curses. They should have an instant cast self-heal over time spell as well as a channeled self heal (which can be rendered 70% uninterruptible through talents).

talent trees

The monk talent trees are Mind, Body, and Weapon.

Mind primarily affects the monk’s ability to generate and channel mana. It improves their spellcasting efficiency and their resistance to fear and similar effects. It also improves their arcane damage dealt.

Body affects the monk’s ability to avoid taking damage, increases their unarmed attack damage, and increases their self-healing and threat generating effects.

Weapon affects the monk’s abilities with staves, polearms, and thrown weapons. It should be able to give them a large amount of +parry% as well as several special attacks, including one that depends on thrown weapons. Weapon spec should include threat reduction techniques that allow the monk to act as DPS in a party without stealing aggro.

Each talent tree should also introduce a new combat form at tier 9 and could also improve the efficiency of associated other forms (Owl is a Mind form, Crane is a Weapon form, etc…).