Monday, July 21, 2008

Death of Spell Crit?

If you've been hiding under a rock since last Friday, you may want to come out and see all the information that's coming out regarding the release of Beta for Wrath of the Lich King. Unfortunately, I have not gotten a beta invite yet, but I'm still hopeful. My brother and his wife both got invites, so I'll have to head over to their house (about an hour's drive) to... umm.. observe them play. Because of course, it would be against the EULA (or whatever) for me to play on one of their accounts. :)

At any rate, I was looking at some of the pictures that have been mined over at MMO-Champion. Rhie-ay's Clutching Gauntlets (pictured (am I alowed to steal graphics like that?)) for example, presented some interesting data. I've already read that plus healing and plus spell damage will be joined into one stat called simply spell power. Okay, that makes sense. But now, there's no longer a Spell Critical Strike. It's just Critical Strike. Go ahead... click on the picture again. And it's not like some Mage is gonna start busting out his dagger, so I'm pretty sure that it's working on spell damage.

Not a big deal to most classes. And I doubt I'll have Rogues needing on my cloth because of the crit, but that seems pretty huge to the Pally community. Your Critical Stike stat now goes towards spell damage and your melee damage. You don't have to get stats in both. I can't think of another current class that that will benefit as well, but it will also help the Death Knights. Seems like a good change... and hopefully people won't have issues of misreading bonuses since they'll all be the same. :)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that it would also be at least somewhat nice for enhancement shaman shocks and whatnot on top of their melee critty goodness.

Anonymous said...

I see you haven't read the beta patch notes very carefully :-)

I think this was about the 7th bullet in the patch notes:

"Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste Rating now modify both melee attacks and spells. "

Leiandra said...

@malfean - I have a Shammy. I spent 1-58 being enhancement. You'd think I'd stop leaving the Shammies out. Yes... they'd benefit from this change as well.

@elinor - Now that I think of it... I'm not sure I read the whole thing. I was too excited to see if they'd done anything cool with the mages (unimpressed so far), and I may have skipped over a couple things. And this is the second or third thing that you've mentioned that I don't remember. I better go re-read now so I don't look like such an idiot on my next post.

Anonymous said...

/whinge (sorry) You know that I love the idea that our healer/dmg dealer combos (whether that be as simple as cast heal followed by damage, or form change, or respec) are getting a bit of this love.

I just wonder whether pure damage specs (ok this is coming from a potentially disgruntled mage) will get a bonus from it as well.. I mean I love to heal, but my fireballs don't tend to give a lot of healing love.

Anyway, not crying over the milk still in the cow's udder... it has just been playing on my mind.

Gwaendar said...

I think hunters will also benefit from the consolidation, and druids of course.

Anonymous said...

Does crit affect bandages? Dranaei/Blood elf racials? Fishing?!?!? Anyways I think blizzard is reworking this for two reasons.

1. They know people like getting loot more often and wasted loot sucks. So make more people fight for the same loot. (Armor proficiency differences will still apply)

2. I think blizzard is having a hard time scaling things and keeping them balanced. By consolidating, it simplifies. You can make each class use the bonus differently though talent spec's. (Holy priest get +X% healing from spell power and things of that nature)

Just my 2cp.