In light of the paradigm shift where neither Tailoring or Leatherworking creates Bind on Pickup epics, here’s help deciding between the additional benefits of these two production tradeskills.
+Spell Damage or +Healing to be Removed in Wrath?
Published on June 9, 2008 by Phaelia 
Items and Equipment 
25 Comments
A very interesting change to core game dynamics is rumored for Wrath of the Lich King. In one way or another, the difference between Spell Damage and +Healing is going away. Always reputable news source MMO Champion quotes Kalgan as having said:
We’re also going to be doing away with spell-damage only type gear. We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.”
There is a rumor, however, that the +Healing on gear has been removed and replaced with the equivalent +Spell Damage on the Alpha servers. In either case, players are guessing that talents will be added that either convert +Healing to +Spell Damage or +Spell Damage to +Healing. It’s also possible that talents will be used to augment healing or damaging spells, setting healers apart from DPSers. If this is true, I can see several potential effects, some positive and some negative.
- Increased Gear Competition
As it stands now, Mages, Shadow Priests, and Warlocks generally pursue the same gear sets (with the exception of the Arcane Mage who might turn an eye toward the rare Spirit and +spell damage item) while Holy Priests and Restoration Druids look at +Healing cloth. After this change, Holy Priests, Shadow Priests, Mages, and Warlocks would all vie for the same gear. (The Improved Tree of Life talent that augments armor by 360% while in ToL form will probably discourage us from picking up cloth.) This would make the more-or-less ideal gear breakdown look something like this:- Cloth +Spell Damage with Spirit: Holy Priest, Shadow Priest (with rumored talent changes), Arcane Mage, some Restoration Druids (perhaps those who don’t spec deeply enough into Restoration to pick up Improved ToL)
- Cloth +Spell Damage with Crit: Mages, Destruction and Demonology Warlocks
- Cloth +Spell Damage, no Crit, no Spirit: Affliction Warlocks
- Leather +Spell Damage (with or without Crit, Spirit): Restoration and Balance Druids
- +Spell Hit: Non-healers only
- Less Unique Appearance
Damage casters and healers will look very similar, making it harder to distinguish between the two in battlegrounds and Arenas. (Of course, the giant feathered butt of Moonkin might continue to give Balance Druids away.) I personally enjoy the often effeminate aesthetics of healing gear, so this is a negative in my book. Although looking forward, if Druids really do end up focusing solely on leather items, these items aren’t typically as attractive as their cloth counterparts anyway. - Ease of Role Switching
This is a wonderful change for healers who will need only respec to drop the talents which either convert a portion of +spell damage into +healing or augment the amount of +Healing applied to their healing spells and should then be competitive with other spellcasters (some spec changes might still emphasize different stats however, and healers won’t have geared for +spell hit). Assuming that the cost of respeccing remains 50 gold and that income increases similar to the increase we saw in TBC, I think you’ll see a lot of players frequently role switching, improving the flexibility of your raids. This will be a very positive change for guilds who plan to pursue 10-man raid progression since flexibility will be invaluable in these smaller guilds. - Increased Viability for Hybrid Builds
Along the same lines as easier role switching, builds that incorporate a mixture of talents from a Healing tree and a Spell Damage tree may become much more viable. Dreamstate particularly may make a more impressive showing in the expansion with strong Wrath, Moonfire, and AOE (albeit not as strong as that of a true Laser Chicken) along with a Lifebloom rotation on the main tank. Imagine if instead of a 2 tank, 3 healer, 5 DPS ZA run you could viably make a 2 tank, 2.5 healer, 5.5 DPS run. This sort of flexibility will again be especially helpful to guilds who focus on 10-man raids. This will also make hybrid PvP builds all the more deadly, especially considering the recent popularity and success of Restokin builds in Arena. - More Quest Rewards … for Everyone!
Leveling up will be twice as fun as practically every quest is guaranteed to have a cloth (or leather +spell damage reward that will be useful to Restoration and Balance Druids). If TBC’s trend continues, however, we’re likely to see more cloth rewards than leather. Hopefully raiding itemization will present us with more leather options.
Improved Tree of Life to Affect Enchants and Buffs
On a related note, it is also rumored that the Improved Tree of Life talent affects not only the armor contribution from items but also the armor contribution from buffs, enchants (including armor kits), and gems. You might think this a bug, but the description for the talent actually reads differently from the description for Moonkin Form:
Moonkin Form: While in this form the armor contribution from items is increased by 400%.
Improved Tree of Life: Increases your armor while in Tree of Life form by 360%.
This would make armor-based enchants like that available to cloaks and armor kits more attractive to Tree of Life Druids. I’m personally looking forward to laughing in the face of Heroic mobs who hit me for only a little more than what they’d hit the tank for (although more often since my dodge is likely to be abysmal). It’s a nice, non-green-blob alternative to the Priest’s temporary aggro reduction, Fade.
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And the +spelldamage plate will be all mine! Bwahahaha! Though all those new talent points will probably be shoveled into whatever conversion talents I’ll be given in Wrath. This may spell the ACTUAL death of the Shockadin.
And yet another potential reason for me to switch to resto. I really enjoy healing, especially druid healing, despite being feral. If I have to go deep into the resto tree, however, to get the talents that let me have decent levels of +healing on my gear, my days of being able to heal reasonably well as a feral spec are likely numbered.
To pick a nit with just one sentence (sorry!):
As a priest, I wish you wouldn’t call “fade” an aggro dump. That just makes it seem more useful than it is. True, there is occasionally a time when fade helps out, but since it takes 130% threat to pull, the small amount that fade reduces threat by normally has no effect at all (or if you’re lucky, the mob will jump to the squishy next to you, making you heal him/her quickly too).
And since the fade effect is temporary (all the aggro you got rid of with fade comes back at once), you can look forward to the mob running at you again in a few seconds when your threat jumps up again. yaay.
But as a druid (also), I do have to say that fade is more useful than the druid counterpart – yelling “help” over vent.
I’m going to have to disagree with a few of your bullets Phae.
Increased Gear Competition
Yes, you’re going to have more people competing for the same gear. However, at the same time you’re going to have more gear to compete over.
Less Unique Appearance
While it’s true that healers and casters will be less distinguishable from one another, there will still be as many models (in fact, more considering the PvE/PvP model split) to choose from. I think that overall this will increase variety.
Overall, I’m not entirely sure what to think. There are three distinct roles in raiding, and it seems natural that the roles would have their own gear. It’ll be tough to tell whether this is a masterstroke or a death knell until we get our hands on the beta.
@Ninjasuperspy: Depending on its implementation, this change could actually help Holy Shock Paladins, couldn’t it? I can’t imagine Blizzard would intentionally take a step backward from making Healers at least somewhat viable in a DPS role.
@SuraBear: Give in to the temptation … shed those pounds and be at one with the Tree…
@Coren: You make a good point about Fade. I was overgeneralizing its strength and have clarified it as a temporary aggro reduction.
Thanks!
@Meanderingmind: Both good points, however as a Druid we may be just as limited as before. We’ll probably want to stick with leather whenever possible because of the Armor increase and likely will compete primarily with Moonkin (though, of course, there will be some differences; Moonkin need spell hit and prefer Intellect over Spirit). I do hope you’re right about an increase in model variety. And I’m very hopeful (once again) that Blizzard will realize that there are more colors in nature than Green and Brown (the violets in T5 were a nice touch).
You bring up an interesting point. . . its not just spelldamage/healing that differentiate healer gear and DPS gear. Non-paladin healers don’t generally care too much about spellcrit, and sure as hell don’t need any spell hit, for example. I wonder if there are going to be conversions for non-damage stats on gear, or if, ultimately, there will still be obvious “thats meant for healers” and “thats a DPS piece” distinctions based on the presence (or lack thereof) of such stats.
Edit: I like this plan in concept, though. In my opinion, they should just put both spelldamage and healing on all pieces (much like they did with healing gear a while ago, but comparable damage to the damage pieces, instead of the reduced amount currently used). A DPSer using healing gear (or vice versa) would not be IDEAL due to the gear lacking other necessary stats, but it would at least be a passable solution should someone find themselves badly in need of a slot upgrade.
I HATE this change if it goes through.
1) I know this is “alpha” talk so it might not make it.
2) The only thing this is doing for people, is lessining the amount of gear they have to carry.
3) Alot of the fun in instances, is the random you dont know what will drop! Its fun going ah DAM my piece didn’t drop.
4) Having to spec extra talent points to become spl dmg or healing. Is a waste of talent points. I’d rather have something else in that spot :/
5) If your gonna try to change this effect. Then instead in raids you should do the sunwell thing. Be able to trade your item in for something else.
6) I know that if given the chance at new stats. Things like spell crit might be fun to try on a druid. (as we dont have alot right now)
7) as you said.. fights will occur over gear. If there are 3 drops that droods/priests could share. That means all casters droods priests included, will be rolling on the gear if its any sort of an upgrade!
Theres alot more but I gotta raid. Bad move again by blizz. Getting less and less excited here :/
Armor enchants counts as “bonus armor”, armor multiplying bonuses(bear, warrior talent, paladin talent) works only with “basic armor from items”.
I get the feeling that gear is going to be even more generic than your breakdown. If you look at some of the alpha talents and spells, you see locks making use of spirit, shadow priests making use of crit, and spell hit talents facing the nerf bat. I wonder if the future is one-cloth-fits-all…
I’m not exactly happy to hear this either (if I’m reading it right), with our guild’s raiding schedule it makes it pretty much impossible for me to respec for spell damamge as we only have off on tuesday and weekends (I’m helping with kara on those days) Right now, I can go out and nuke through dailies with no issue, and if I do get stuck, the current +healing I have means I toss a lb and keep going. If I have to choose between heal/dmg it’s going to again mean that I’m back to not being as effective soloing quests and getting things done on my own unless I want to blow 100g a day ;/
On a side, I hate going bear/cat to farm, I think I shifted into feral form once after I hit 40. Balance I love, and have always preferred caster classes.
Quick note – Shadow Priests, typically, would not be looking at gear with +Spell Crit on it. As is the case with warlocks, most SPriest damage comes from their DoTs (SW:Pain, Vamp Embrace, Vamp Touch, etc) which cannot crit, and so +Spell Crit is useless for the most part.
Just nitpicking, though.
One complaint I would have about Blizzard shifting from the current itemization system to this proposed itemization system is that they’re going to end up making players look even more identical than they already do. They’re giving more players an incentive to all be looking at the same gear. For example, at the moment a lot of priests are awfully interested in the new 2.4 badge healing robe. Institute the proposed itemization changes, and now all of a sudden, you not only have 30000 priests running around in that robe, but also 30000 mages and warlocks… Same could be said, for example, of the healing mace from Lower City rep or (old) badges.
While its an interesting idea, I think ultimately it will end up causing more problems than it solves.
I think this change is to help healers grind solo. It would probably not require respec, as this is what is so annoying in the current system.
It would be nice to see a talent that for every ten points you were allowed to put one point into a talent that increased spell dmg and healing as a % of “spell effct” gear stats. It would be a 1/1 talent every 10 points such that while leveling you would get 7/14/21/28/35% increase to spell damage from “+spell effect” gear and 40/80/120/160/200% increase to +heal from “+spell effect” gear. Thus, +50 Spell effect would net +67.5 damage and +150 heal (maybe numbers are off-scale, but you get the idea.)
In this way, the more you spec into healing, the more access you have to spell damage to help grind, as opposed to X/5 points spent at the higher end of the tree, this would encourage those leveling for the first time to take on and remain in healing roles, while still maintaining DPS for soloing.
I agree that with ImpToL, druids will be looking to leather. I really like this change a lot. We will probably never get a damage bubble, but this comes very close. If we could get either some spell reflect or an increased range for our healing spells that would help with survival vs casters (inscription?). I see this mainly as a nice PvP and PvE solo change and less useful in raids (hopefully your tank is alive and functional).
I’m not very fond of the idea to get rid of +healing as a specific stat, at least not if Blizzard does a whole lot of changes to the game!
All the points mentioned so far are valid, however I do see a problem for Hybrids that are not specced for healing.
As it stands now, any hybrid can collect healing gear and heal instances while leveling or easier instances at 70. I did that a lot when I was still feral, back in the early days of level 70. All one needed was gear with lots of int and +heal, and you were fine.
Should that change make it, those hybrids who are not currently specced for healing, will see a decline in their ability to switch roles with gear. Right now one can specialize a character with talent points and gear. Gear is more flexible, because you don’t need to go to a NPC and pay 50g.
Removing +healing will remove one aspect of customization, and we all know there are way to few of these already
Prot Pallies who’re not needed in a 1-tank fight can switch to healing gear and help out, with this change they might as well /afk. (I realize they aren’t amazing healers right now, but they’d be even worse)
Shadow Priests, Boomkins and Elemental Shamans will have trouble switching to a healing role.
The only end game raiding problem would be that of prot paladins not beeing able to heal, yet I object to it because it takes away so much from the fun of the game. And Blizzard _will_ screw up itemization even more. I already see one cloth set for mages and warlocks and healing/dps priests. x_x
//kuhbi
Just to note – this info is about as good as the leaked talent trees. But combining them brings all kinds of questions into the mix. Where is this proposed talent they speak of?
http://wrath.druzya.org/yarr/?c=druid&v=8391
Because I’m not seeing it. My little durid is new in this world (62 and counting…stupid server downtime) but has high hopes to be a big bad tree one day.
Hey guys,
As a staunch follower of alpha I think you are badly misreading the news. What they are removing is the UNIQUE sources of damage. That is to say there will no longer be belts that give you +shadow damage, or +fire damage, or +frost. Right now they are giving shadow priests and mages the ability to convert +healing from +damage/healing into more +damage. I believe Oomkin got the same style of ability. That way itemization amongst the caster core is going to be more stabilized.
I believe that the reverse: damage->healing might be a talent available to pallies and resto shamen (not yet shown) because there is no equivalent cross-armor-type sharing.
Allow me to explain.
If they made two sets of caster gear. One stresses spell hit, one stresses spell crit. There are classes that will use both. Example might be warlock who would go with the former for affliction and the latter for demonology/destruction hybrids. However this same gear would apply to mages (arcane/frost vs fire) and shadow priests. Melee leather can be shared by druids and rogues. This is where things get interesting. Melee mail can be split between hunters and enhancement shammies, but elemental and resto shamen would need 2 sets that are not applicable to any class. So that is 2 separate and unique gear sets for just one class. Hence I think that they might make one set (stressing mp5 and spell crit) and simply allow elemental to convert the +heal element of the set to +damage, and vica versa for resto.
The problem for a double-druid set is that doomkin stress crit which trees don’t, and the things we need aren’t compatible. If they will make a unified set like that for us, our talents trees would have to change up considerably. We’ll see how things go.
–Z
@Sephran: You’re correct that it would hinder a DPS- or tanking-specced player from fulfilling the role of a healer as well as someone specced for it (assuming that talents from the Healing tree are needed to convert a portion of spell damage into healing). But it doesn’t sound like DPSers will need to take talents to convert +Healing into spell damage. And I don’t think Druids are going to be rolling on cloth as much as they might have prior to Wrath, so we won’t be as likely to have to contend with cloth-only casters. Leather just affords us too much additional benefit. I think that the desired stats will provide enough automatic differentiation between classes and specs that it will be less of a problem than you fear.
@ArdRaeiss: Typically, that is the case. However, reports are saying that the talent is applying its multiplier to armor enchants and the like. The description is also written in a different way than we’ve seen in the past, leading many to believe that it’s an intentional difference.
@Merlot: Well, I think spell hit items specifically will be desired by DPSers only. By reducing the effectiveness of talents which reduced the need for spell hit, it ensures that DPSers are “forced” to make up the difference through gear, thus reducing the likelihood of them nabbing an item that doesn’t have spell hit. Still, every item you equip doesn’t need to have spell hit on it to bring you to the cap, so they will have some flexibility in determining what to roll on. Spirit and +spell crit are two other great stats that can help “draw the lines” between different classes and specs.
@Stepford Mom: I don’t have an issue with completing very many daily quests with my mostly Restoration spec, but I’m really just too cheap to spend the money on respeccing for that purpose. I’m sure it would be more efficient were I to spec Balance for Dailies, but the change to spell damage in 2.3 was very, very helpful to healers in that regard. Also, keep in mind that your guild’s raid schedule might change based upon the raids available to you guys (10-man vs. 25-man). I don’t think my guild will end up raiding on the same nights as we do right now.
@Lassirra: Thanks – I’ve removed Shadow Priest from the +crit listing.
I am also worried about everyone looking the same. I hope that the items with spell crit, Spirit, etc. look distinct enough that we don’t all look like casters from EverQuest 1 (EQ1 had TWO robe textures that came in a variety of colors).
@Idahoe: I think you might be right … the % armor increase for Improved Tree of Life might be intended — at least partially — for PvP.
@Kuhbi: Assuming respec costs stay the same as they are now (a maximum of 50 gold), maybe respeccing for the purposes of healing won’t be as painful, given how much money we’re likely to see. Blizzard has also said they hope to include interesting, non-repetitive Daily Quests at the onset of the expansion, so I am guessing that money will be pretty plentiful. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t suck not to be able to heal a non-Heroic as a Feral or that it won’t cause trouble for DPS-specced healers in raids, but just that changing specs for that purpose won’t be as difficult as it was before. At least for Druids, we can Teleport: Moonglade and Ritual of Summoning back.
@Nick: There was a talent like that mentioned before, though it was in the Balance tree to start. I describe it below.
@Zaira: If this is true, what does this mean: “We’ll be moving to a system that, as part of your talents, will let players convert healing into spell-damage and vice-versa as part of their talents. That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.” That would seem to imply that either +spell damage or +healing are going away or are being combined into one “pure” stat that can then be redistributed via talents. I’m not sure if you saw the original inception of the Balance Talent, Nature’s Fury, but it read something like this:
The conversion has since been replaced but +Healing gear is supposedly still absent from the Alpha servers. Maybe they intend to add the conversion to the Restoration tree instead.
firefox has choked 3 times so far writing this so I’ll cut to the chase
3 things in the latest alpha worth noting
#1 – no +healing on items
#2 – empowered touch up from 10/20 to 20/40
#3 – empowered rejuv didn’t change
This all fits well with making +healing items into +dmg items (at roughly half the value) and increasing the multiplier on all healing spells to accommodate.
The empowered touch change relies on direct channeling of +healing (or the new spell dmg) regardless of the current multiplier, so it needs to change if the system and multiplier change to give the same total healing. If the multiplier on healing touch was made 200% instead of 100% and healing values halved, then the empowered touch talent needs to increase from 20% to 40% to keep place and contribute the same amount.
Empowered rejuv is multiplicative on the considered +healing effects of a spell, and scales the same regardless of what the actual multiplier is. It increases the amount of +healing you are considered to have when casting hot spells, effectively a % multiplier to the coefficients directly. So if the rejuv multiplier was changed from 80% to 160%, empowered rejuv would still make it effectively 20% more, or 192% (as it makes rejuv 96% now).
Regarding shadowpriests, they might want to get some spellcrit. Improved spirit tap procs with crits and gives us nice bonuses. Of course this will happen in WotLK, at the moment spellcrit is one of the most useless things we could have
@Phaelia: Agreed. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this will be a good thing. It all really comes down to how “Universal Spell Power” works and where the talents are. If the talents are added in the top three ranks, then we’re golden. If they add the new talents next to the 41 then we’ll have to talk. If I read this right, 100 USP should act as damage and healing no matter what. Then we get a talent that adds 200% more USP giving us 300 healing and 100 damage from that same USP. Honestly that sounds like the way to go development wise. It streamlines the generation of loot tables and makes stat balancing a bit easier. I don’t know how they’ll prune the talent trees to make the talents early and accessible, but they might lower the number of ranks that go into early talents, who knows?
If they really want to make me pass out, then they can add 200% to healing and Holy Spell Damage. That’s a bit pie in the sky though. Maybe the +Healing can talent in the top of the tree and the +Holy in the bottom. That would make every 1 point worth 3, and would boost me WAY over the top. So probably not.
And yeah, you guys need more forms. Green Blob all the way.
It looks like they are already turning conventional +dmg/healing into the ‘universal spell power’ mod, all they need to do is rescale the benefits that the current healing spells get and drop +healing as a mod altogether. The latest patch changes look like they are going this route considering the way they are scaling empowered touch (getting twice as much as before, balancing out the roughly 50% lower value dmg/healing has compared to +healing).
This system wouldn’t require any new talents to compensate, the shift would occur in healing coefficients on each spell.
This would also mean that resto and balance have the same amouts of +dmg on gear, but that seems to be the way they are pushing anyway. The first alpha version actually allowed balance to use +healing items without losing any spell dmg, they probably realize that moving both to +dmg is going to keep the playing field more level (more fair, allowing both the same advantage, rather than just giving balance an advantage). The major difference will be from talents, not gear.
as blizz said “That way they can use the exact same gear, but their talents just adapt what it does.” So clearly this is their goal, they are just playing around with how to get there.
Yeah, as far as the new Alpha patch goes it does look like they adjusted coefficients rather than adding talents. So even better than my best case scenario. The hits keep on coming as well because they condensed Hit, Crit and Haste across the board for Melee and spell. I can’t even begin to fathom how much of a boost that is going to give to shamans, to say nothing of the other two hybrids. Also the fighting over +hit and +crit swords between mages, paladins and rogues will be EPIC.
The key word is “convert”, does convert mean a +100 damage item is changed to +50 damage +150 healing due to talents?
If that’s true, I can kiss soloing goodbye on my holy priest, it will suck even more, since even stacking +damage gear won’t help. It will be like forcing me to run around in my healing gear. So even though it’s still 1/3 in my example, it’s still half of the +damage.
It all depends on how they implement it.
“Less Unique Appearance”
This is because developers think druids are happy with all their advantages of being the same. Everyone looks the same, everyone fits in, no one is left out! So they want to expand that model to the other classes.
@Yunk
There is no conversion, everyone will use +spell power gear and the coefficients on healing spells will increase to make it just as effective as the same item budget in +healing would have been under the old (current) system.
So shadow priests and holy priests would have the same spellpower, healing just benefits more from it (for healing and nuking spells of the same cast time, healing would get about twice, actually ~180%, as much benefit).
Did you just call my butt big?!!
@Sayari: A great and thorough analysis. Thanks very much. And sorry you had difficulty getting your comment to post. Thanks for sticking with it!
@Hoho: I’ve heard mixed reviews on Spell Crit for Shadow Priests, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they DID try to make it more attractive to you in WotLK to help keep somewhat of a delineation of “this is damage caster gear.”
@Yunk: Spell damage will be unaffected (as of now). It’s healing that’s taking the “hit” by being converted into the equivalent amount of spell damage and then healing spells adjusted to compensate.
@Teranin: Who, me? Never! (Srsly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.)