Recently the non disclosure agreement surrounding the next expansion to World of Warcraft was lifted and beta testing has begun. Over the past few days a flood of new information has come forth regarding all aspects of the game and many things have slipped through relatively unnoticed in the excitement.

While it would be entirely possible to run through each class reviewing the upcoming changes in depth, let us instead look at a few of the key changes to game play mechanics that will have a widespread effect throughout the game for a vast majority of classes.

Spell power

Rather than there being separate stats for improving a spells’ damage or healing capability, Blizzard has combined both statistics together into the new spell power stat. In turn the coefficients for all spells have been adjusted, particularly for healing spells since there is no longer a pure healing stat.

The net change of this is that a healer will be receiving a vast increase to their damage capabilities, while offensive hybrid casters will be able to heal far more effectively than before.

Hit/Crit/Haste

All three of the above stats have been consolidated; no longer will there be separate hit, crit or haste stats for melee and spell casters, instead both your melee attacks and spells will benefit at the same time.

This mechanics changes is massive for any hybrid capable of both melee and spell attacks such as paladins and shaman. As an example of how big an impact this may have, enhancement shaman will be able to obtain a decent crit rate to their shocks; this in turn can be combined with the talent elemental devastation for brutal synergy.

Note that this only applies to the raw stats of those individual statistics, critical strike chance increases due to stats such as intelligence or agility will still only apply to either spells or melee.

Threat

Blessing of salvation has been radically changed and so many classes which relied on it for threat reduction may be in a bit of a panic about how threat management could be an issue in WotLK.

Fear not however, tanks in the expansion have had their threat multipliers boosted in compensation; for instance a warrior’s basic defensive stance now boosts threat generated by 45% rather than the current 30%. Equally, threat reduction talents for all dps classes are now present and much easier to access.

Raid Wide Abilities

Many effects which only had an impact on your own group have now been changed to be beneficial to your entire raid. Auras and totems will now be beneficial to all those nearby but the change does not only apply to buffs.

Several healing spells will affect raid members nearby regardless of grouping and many of the new abilities such as a paladin’s Judgement of the Wise talent, will affect raid members too.

The net impact will be a much wider variety of group compositions along with more fluid PvP combat within battlegrounds where groups naturally get split apart and group composition is generally random.

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