As Wrath of the Lich King is completing it’s fourth month, Blizzard is working on the next major patch, 3.1.0. While adding new abilities, this patch will also contain many class changes that have been solid pieces of World of Warcraft for years. I am going to share with you some of these major changes.

Let’s start with Priests. The Priest will mostly get additions to their repertoire of abilities for PvP utility and group utility. One of these changes is a new talent in the discipline tree called Power Word: Barrier. This spell acts like Power Word: Shield but for an entire group, instead of one player.

The Shadow Priest’s survivability is also being improved in the fact that Shadowform will reduce magical and melee damage taken, and dispersion will remove snares. This will make Shadow Priests a harder opponent to vanquish in PvP.

The Holy Tree is getting some very nice additions as well. First, Prayer of Healing will become group-specific, you will be able to choose whichever group you want to cast it on (like in raids). Also, holy Nova’s Mana cost will be reduced, and Circle of Healing will heal for more, to further increase the utility of these spells. Blizzard has also noted that, “Other spells will be improved as well.”

Next, we have our Rogue friends. The Rogue will be receiving some nice bonuses, but nothing too fancy. Some of the nice changes will be the lowering of the cooldown on Adrenaline Rush, and the talent Lightning Reflexes will add passive melee haste.

A very nice bonus to Rogues, is to Mace Specialization. This talent will also grant haste and armor penetration, hopefully to make One-Handed Maces viable, for Rogues, once again.

Blizzard loves Shamans, and their new buffs are pure testament to that fact. Unleashed Rage will be reduced to two talent points, down from five, but will also add an increase to critical strike by 1% to 2%. Also, Storm, Earth, and Fire, will now increase the damage of all parts of Flame Shock, both initial and periodic.

These bonuses pale in comparison to what Blizzard will be doing to Water Totems. Healing and Mana Stream totems have been combined into one. This merge has also occurred for the Poison Cleansing and Disease Cleansing totems.

As you can see, these changes are nothing to sneeze at. Next time I we’ll look at the changes coming to the Warlock, Druid, and Warrior classes.

Editor’s note: As with anything “future” you have to take it with a grain of salt.  Until we have had an opportunity to see some more of the PTR in action, most of this is conjecture and we are hard at work delving through the available patch info and the PTR to update the following articles to more accurately reflect exactly what you can expect from 3.1.0.