@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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

#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).

@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:

Nature’s Fury: converts (insert % here) of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Wrath and Starfire spells have a (insert % here) chance of applying the Nature’s Fury debuff on the target. The Nature’s Fury debuff increases Nature and Arcane damage done to the target by 2%. Lasts 10 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

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.