Cataclysm Stat In-Depth Guides


WOWGOLDDIG.com Guides - WoW Professions Guides - Cataclysm Stat In-Depth Guides


Starting from the top, many players are already complaining about the stamina changes and what they mean to tanks compared to everyone else's health ratios. I think everyone assumes that they mean tank gear, where they actually say plate gear. Do not forget that DPS Warriors, Paladins, and Death Knights currently have much higher health pools than say a Rogue or Mage. I believe that this is what they are referring too, not bringing everyone to tank level health. If this is in fact the case if it was applied now it would mean DPS / Healers would move closer to the 30-32k health points when raid geared, as DPS plate is. This would allow an extra hit before being killed, which is much needed as they are simply too fragile in some fights currently.

Spirit being removed from non-healer gear is a blessing to all players since it is a stat that no one other than healers really likes, but has to deal with due to its placement on items. The two exceptions seems to be Elemental Shaman and Balance Druids, but apparently they will have a mechanic in place to deal with it. Overall not bad as many players never did understand exactly how spirit converted to mana regen when compared to MP5. Now that it is just healers that need to look at it, they already know how it interacts and deal with it already.

On to Intellect where many players are once again complaining already about the statement that Intellect will provide less mana. Again I think they are missing some of the new interactions here. In several other areas (such as spellpower) it is stated that when they disappear from gear it will be replaced with Intellect. That means to me that players will have much higher Intellect values than they currently have. Therefore it only makes sense that Intellect provides less mana per point than it does now or players would easily have 50,000 mana in current gear once the change occurs. Also, having Intellect provide spell power makes it much simpler for casters and healers to ramp up their spell power and consolidates stats in an easy to comprehend manner.

Haste sounds nice, however without the math to provide hard and fast numbers on the benefits it will provide, it's best to reserve judgment on it.

The changes to block can be seen as a buff or a nerf depending on the content you normally run. In raids, changing it to a 30% damage reduction is a huge buff, since currently it mitigates less than 1/8th of a hard hitting raid bosses damage when you block. However if you normally run instances it could be seen as a nerf since you can block almost all of the incoming damage. Overall this evens it out a bit and provides utility no matter the content you are dealing with.

Parry is an interesting change and not one that was anticipated. The change makes it very different from dodge, and in my opinion may make it the number one tanking stat, especially if you ask a healer. The new parry mechanic should make tanks much easier to heal as it will flatten out the damage they take a little. If one tank stacked dodge and one stacked parry, the dodge based tank would take very spiky damage compared to the parry one. Even though they would take the same damage, the parry based tank would take it spread out more over time and be easier to heal since you could react slowly and steadily, rather than waiting for huge spikes in incoming damage when a tank failed to dodge several times in a row.

Mastery sounds interesting but with not a lot of information on how exactly it works, I won't cover it.

Armor being evened out between the armor types a bit should not make a huge deal. Sure clothies will now have more stamina and more armor, but without the defensive avoidance and mitigation abilities of a tank it probably won't make that big of a difference. If anything it is just being evened out so that designing raid encounters is slightly easier. Currently many AoE effects are either trivial to plate due to due armor values or way too hard on cloth or leather wearers.

Resilience sounds like it is being changed to no longer effect anything but incoming damage. How this plays out in arenas and PvP will be interesting as its ability to lower DoT damage and mana drain abilities is one of the only things preventing several classes from being supremely dominant in arenas.

The other listed stats are not seeing significant changes other than in the amount of them that you need to hit the caps. This happens with every expansion as the curve steepens. I don't think this is a big concern, as it should be harder to cap as you go up in levels.