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World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor class changes

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World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor brings many changes to classes. This article serves as a summary of them.

General

Main article: Attributes/Warlords
  • Hit, Expertise, Dodge, Parry and Reforging removed.
  • Tertiary stats added. These are bonus stats that can appear on gear that don't count towards the item level budget: Avoidance, Leech, Inspiration, Speed, and Sturdiness.
  • Primary stats on armor will now change based on your spec. Plate drops and it will have whatever stats your class needs, no more Intellect plate! No more PvP Priest Healing set and PvP Priest DPS set, just a Priest set.
  • Bonus system added that rewards players with powerful perks as they level up to the new cap. At every level from 91 to 100, characters will earn a major permanent boost to one of their their key spells and abilities (e.g. a Fire mage might earn a +50% damage boost to [Pyroblast] or +30% boost to [Scorch]). Players will also unlock a new talent tier once they’ve achieved level 100, rewarding each class with three potent new abilities to choose from.

Gear changes

Blizzard posted a large amount of information on November 26th.[1][2] Some highlights:

Armor pieces

Armor pieces are head, shoulders, chest, legs, gloves, belt, boots, and bracers

  • Primary stats
    • Armor pieces will always have some amount of Stamina and Armor value.
    • Armor pieces always have Strength, Intellect, or Agility as a primary stat. Plate has either Strength or Intellect. Mail and Leather have either Agility or Intellect. Cloth has Intellect.
    • In the cases of Plate, Mail, and Leather, the primary stat will change depending on your current spec. Specifically, casters (including healers) will get Intellect, and melee or tank specs will get Strength or Agility.
  • Secondary stats
    • Secondary stats don't change based on spec on armor pieces (or any piece).
    • Secondary stats on armor pieces can still include Haste, Crit, and/or Mastery.
    • Secondary stats on armor pieces will no longer include Hit, Expertise, Dodge, or Parry. These are being retired in Warlords, and will likely be removed even from existing gear.
    • Secondary stats on armor pieces will also no longer include Spirit, nor will they include Bonus Armor, which are reserved exclusively for non-armor pieces (which are explained below).
    • In addition, secondary stats on armor pieces may include several new stats we are exploring such as Readiness and Multistrike.
  • Additional properties
    • Additional properties are additional item level (a la Warforged), gem sockets, tertiary stats (Avoidance (less AoE damage), Inspiration, Leech, Speed, and Sturdiness)
    • "We haven't decided on exact numbers yet, but for the current discussion, assume something like a 10% chance for an item to have an additional property. It's possible for one item to have all three of these properties, but the chance of that is very small."
    • The properties are determined at the time an item is looted (and possibly even includes crafted gear). For example, if an ogre boss drops two copies of the Bracers of Crithto, one might be a normal version, while another might have a tertiary stat.
  • Set bonuses
    • Similar to primary stats, set bonuses will also change depending on your current spec.

Non-armor pieces

Non-armor pieces are weapons, rings, cloaks, necklaces, and trinkets.

  • Primary stats
    • In general, most of these pieces will not have Strength, Agility, or Intellect.
    • Instead, they may have Attack Power or Spell Power to make sure they are more universal.
    • However, our current thought it to keep primary stats on weapons so that they continue to feel iconic and special.
    • Many of the items will have Stamina as well.
  • Secondary stats
    • Same rules as armor pieces
    • Spirit and bonus armor will appear, spirit only for healers and bonus armor only for tanks
    • Stacking spirit in all non-armor slots will provide more mana than necessary
    • Bonus armor expected to fulfill the niche that dodge and parry fill today
  • Additional properties
    • Same rules as armor pieces

Classes

Pruning the Garden of War | 2014-02-27 00:00 | Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities than we've removed, and the game’s complexity has steadily increased. We’re to the point now where players are starting to get overwhelmed, sometimes feeling like they need dozens of keybinds (in a few extreme cases, over a hundred). While the game is loaded with niche abilities that could theoretically be useful in some rare scenario, in reality, many of these are barely used at all—and in some cases, the game would simply be better off without them.

For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that can be merged with other passives or base abilities.

This doesn’t mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay or dumb things down. We still want players to face interesting decisions during combat, and we still want skill to matter . . . but we can achieve that without the needless complexity in the game now, and we can remove some of the game’s more convoluted mechanics while maintaining depth and skill variety.

One type of ability that we focused on removing is temporary power buffs (aka "cooldowns"). Removing these also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class or spec has multiple cooldowns that typically end up getting used together (often in a single macro), we merged them, or removed some of them entirely.

The process of determining which spells and abilities to cut or change is a very complex one—we know that every ability feels vital to someone, and we don't take this process lightly. Even if we ended up cutting your favorite ability, we hope you’ll understand why we did so in the context of our larger goals for the expansion. Ultimately, the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce gameplay depth.

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Death knight

Druid

Hunter

Mage

Monk

Paladin

Priest

Rogue

Shaman

Warlock

Warrior

Racials

No changes are currently planned for worgen or pandaren.

Alliance

Horde

References

  1. ^ Meldheron 2013-11-26. Gear Changes in Warlords of Draenor.
  2. ^ Crithto 2013-11-26. Gear Changes in Warlords of Draenor.
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