Levelling to 70
* Golds: 60-67 netted +900g from just quests.
* So far, I -think- they're making it a priority to keep enough quests to avoid grinding (good thing).
* A very large proprotion of the +hp change is actually the hp/level being increased beyond what's considered (currently) reasonable, resulting me in a pure dps seeking build having almost 7k because it just keeps showing up on my gear.
* The majority of quests are soloable
* Hellfire Penn is about the size of EPL and WPL combined
* No upgrade for the 16 slot backpack has been found yet.
* There is a 20 slot bag.
* during alpha, it took 9 hours (without rested experience) to gain a level.
* you'll probably be wearing around 7 pieces (of T3) when you hit 70, and none after a month of doing instances and raids
* You can buy one extra bank slot.
* Keyring size stays the same for the first 2 levels, it remains to be seen if get u a bigger one in higher levels
Replacing Gear
* Item mudflation is so far on the extreme side of things. You'll be replacing tier .5 within an hour or two of playing.
* Blue rewards are on par or better to what you would normally get out of instances in WoW classic relative to equivalent greens
* Trash greens are roughly MC. BWL starts off with low level quest drops. AQ is hard quests/high level drops, and Naxx gear gets slightly ecliplsed with the difficult 5 man instance gear- but Naxx gear is most certainly on most come 67, short of stam bonuses.
* (How much T3 will I be wearing at lvl 70?) Honestly, 1-3 max based purely on stats. Possibly a bit more based on set bonuses. New gear is just obscene, especially stat based. In addition, most new leather/rogue gear specificly is AP + Agl.
* blue level 65 quest reward weapons are in the 60-62 dps range for 1h
* expect to only start replacing naxx items from 68-70.
* i've replaced 7 items, most of which are my oldest epics (gurubashi dwarf destroyer, quick strike ring, claw of the black drake, and so on)
* The 2 first instances are rather easy, and the loot it drops there is comparable to BWL loot more or less.
* But a healing neck that dropped from the last boss of hellfire rampart was 85% of the cthun neck.
* As for shadow gear you will start changing that from the get go.I replaced my Sash of whispering secrets with a green quest reward
Hunters
* Kill Command triggers the global cooldown.
* Rank 1 Arcane Shot still gets 20% of your AP in damage.
* Pets rock. With BM spec, my owl has 7000 hp, 9000 armor, and 160 DPS without ANY buffs.
* Pet scaling is roughly 20-21% of your ranged attack power -> their attack power, roughly 20% your resists -> their resists.
* You will NOT get 2000 attack power any time soon. With full tier 2 and a full marks spec, I had ~1450 self buffed.
* A Tauren Hunter could get 1.05*1.05*1.04*1.1 in hit point bonuses. 26%, roughly.
Warlock
* Felguard is about what you'd expect. Has a taunt ability that blows void's out of the water but has a bit less armor and his frenzy ability isn't stacking properly. He's still being tweaked, but so far seems to be a pvp pet due to the intercept ability being stupidly good.
* Felgaurd Frenzy effect is a stacking passive debuff that increases the fel's attack power. He also has cleave and, unless they've removed it recently, a 50% aoe dodge passive.
Mage
* Water elemental is exactly was has been reported so far; 600+ waterbolts and a ranged frost nova. Has 1700 health.
* CS is on global cooldown. Unsure on evocation.
Shaman
* Shaman totem summons are wussy little things that hit for 100-200 with no abilities yet implemented
* Rockbiter is a extra damage attack on swing, with a HEAVY +threat modifier- damage is lower, but threat is higher than on live (seems to be anyway)
* WF is actually 2 extra yellow attacks, treated as extra attacks. They can be dodge/parried/blocked, come from the weapon they're used on, and behave normally. Flurry procs from extra crits, UR does NOT proc from WF crits. I never saw one glance or miss
* Weapons can be individually enchanted with shaman buffs.
* WF hits don't count as 'hits' for shamanistic rage
* shaman weapon buffs are at a 30min duration now (confirmed by 2 people)
* Shaman weapon buffs proc from the wpn the buff is on (so WF on an offhand procs an attack from the offhand, not main hand)
* Earthen Shield -felt- like it gained around 15-20% from +healing (on each proc). I'm not entirely sure how much I had on when testing it.
* Nature's Guardian, I didnt notice that much, but it might be because we had ace tanks in the instances I played. I know it has a cooldown on how much it can happen
* Water shield is not affected by any talents or gear
* Itemisation is great for enhance/elemental mail. Got a screenie here of a quest reward that is obtainable within a few hours of entering Outland. Example:
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1684/questrewards2qv9.jpg There are a lot of items like this just from questing on Hellfire Peninsula.
Rogue
* Disarm Traps is useful (see conflicting opinion below)
* The only time I remember using disarm traps was for a type of mob in HFC: Blood Furance that dropped land mines, similar to the ones in Gnomereagon, and that was more of a, "hey I can do this" than a, "this is completely necessary to complete this instance" type of thing.
* (Is rogue dps still king?) Rest comfortably. Rogues dominate shaman in pve dps thus far, in addtion to a few abilities being, actualy, useful (stop laughing). They could probably use a buff so thier 31->41 combat talents dont' suck, but they scale fairly well. Thus far the only class I've seen displace them are hunters, and hunter need a lot more tuning anyway.
* we still outdps hybrids like druids, shaman, and, i'm guessing, paladins. however, mages saw a lot of buffs that increase their dps to really scary numbers
Druid
* Currently, if you have mangle you can remove claw and rake from your toolbar. Mine hits for a bit more than a shred does.
* Lifebloom is stupid good, but that may be due to wonky +heal bonus coefficients
* Summon treants is worthless currently.
* you can now innervate in moonkin/tree shapeshift forms
* Nature's grasp worked while shapeshifted.
* Lifebloom- keeps refreshing as long as you cast. Perma HoT for no mana for amazing heals ftw. Let it expire if you're tired of it.
* Tree Form - Currently it's detrimental in pvp, redundant with druid hybridity, and unnecessary in 5-mans
* balance is no longer the ugly stepchild. It's perfectly viable for grinding and lets you do well in instances, I leveled feral, a friend leveled moonkin and we seemed to level about the same rate.
* tree of life form will be very viable for pve, but it's definitely not there for leveling or grinding. heavy resto grants some benefits other than treeform, but in treeform, one of our druids was able to heal over 1k per tick
Warrior
* Rage normalization seems primarily future-proofing for further expansions and such. Sword and board wars get a tad bit more, fury about the same or a tad bit less. Doom and gloom predictions are unwarranted.
* Slam- I recall it got a positive change...*blush* all I remember, sorry.
* Reportedly nobody on Alpha even noticed rage normalization until the Devs posted it in the General forums.
* Overall, warrior dps seems more in flux. It will shift as gear changes of course.
* As of ALPHA, rage wasn't actually normalized--it was simply nerfed. The amount of rage per damage (2H) seemed to go down by about 30-35%
* Players were reporting that even when using poor gear and NO weapon, they were seeing a decrease in the amount of rage in alpha/retail. In order for rage to be "normalized" we would expect that players doing less damage (i.e. defensive tanks) would see an increase in rage gained through attacks. That is not the case, at the moment.
Priest
* The Priest talent Circle of Healing. This can be used outside of your own party.
* Pain Suppression (41pt Disc talent) can be dispelled
* Vampiric Touch and Vampiric Embrace can both be active on a target per priest.
* Misery and Shadow Weaving seem to stack
* Heal r2 which hits 1400 now with +900 healing on TBC it hits for about 850-90
* All healing talents in BC are multiapplicative and also include +healing effects.
Example:
Renew rank10: base healing 970
With +1000 healing: 1970
Imp renew (15%) : 2265
Spiritual Healing (10%) : 2492
PvP
* PVP town- Called halaa, so much fun it should be illegal. Just absurdly amusing, AMAZING strategicly, absolute blast in every sense in every situation. So good there was a thread that had about 5-10 posts called 'Praise halaa' (if you don't get the pun shame on you). Can't say enough good about this
* PVP- Thus far (NOT A PVPER), stamina has outpaced damage to an unreal level. 1vs1 is no longer burst but 1 minute battles between equal gear
Professions
* The super health and mana potion injectors are basically just a way to stack potions to 20 instead of 5. They require 20 of the appropriate potion to make and they share the potion cooldown
* Goblin Rocket Launcher. 5 minute cooldown, 5 second cast, 50 yard range. It does 960-1440 fire damage and stuns for 3 seconds while also knocking you down.
* You will need about 100 runecloth to take first aid to 330, then bandages with the new cloth, which drops quite liberally (i cant remember the name now) up to 375.
* Disenchanting now requires 225 skill.So no more lvl 1 shard mules.
* Also some enchants are now lvl capped.Eg Crusader,+15 agi,+100hp etc.No more uber twinks either.
* They added a new mechanic to alchemy where you can spontaneously 'discover' new recipes while creating potions.
* fel lotus, used to create the new flasks, is a random drop off regular herb nodes (like swiftthistle) rather than a separate plant
* other nifty additions to herbalism, you can gather herbs off certain types of mobs, certain herb spawns give you a buff when picked, random chance for some BoP consumables from herb spawns
* Herbalism - Fel Blossom is a random drop from Felweed, it's a 750-1250 (IIRC) damage shield type consumable, and BoP
* a type of node called flame something-or-another, that you can pick with herbalism. You don't actually get an herb from it but a consumable that increases your fire spell damage (by 80 I think?) or adds a fire proc to your weapon for a limited amount of time.
* Jewelcrafting - start stocking non-green ores/bars and some gems. save up a lot of ore and any spare gems you can acquire. A lot of copper bars are used early on.
* Have seen no use whatsoever for elementium, bloodvine, MC cores....
* Jewelcrafting - When prospecting ore, you always get "dust" (i.e. Thorium dust, Fel iron dust, etc.) that is vendor trash. Additionally, there is roughly a 60% chance to get a gem. I've seen double gems (one of each type) but never two of the same gem.
* The higher level of JC (260-300) required some annoying world mats like Mojo and essence of water/earth/undeath. It made it pretty hard to skill up.
* As far as I saw, for all professions all new 300+ skills use purely BC materials.
Flying Mounts
* Expert Riding-Requires lvl 70, Riding (150) allows the player to ride flying mounts that require riding skill of 225 800 gold
* Artisan Riding- Requires lvl 70, Riding (225) allows the player to ride fast flying mounts that require riding skill of 300 5000gold
Faction Reputations
To go from Unfriendly to Neutral with Sporeggar (think mushroom smurfs), you have a choice of three things:
1) Kill Bog Lords and Fungal Giants for 10 rep each.
2) Pick up Mature Spore Sacs in the Spawning Glen and return 10 for 400 rep (repeatable, the sacs are common and respawn fairly fast)
3) Turn in 10 Bog Lord Tendrils, which are about a 10% drop off Bog Lords and Fungal Giants (400 rep, repeatable)
For Cenarion Expedition faction, you can either grind nagas at 5 rep each til friendly, OR you can turn in 10 Unidentified Plant Parts (dropped by any non-humanoid mob in the zone) and get 400 rep (repeatable) and a bag containing: 2 stacks of vendor trash, 1 stack of edible plants, and a ~50% chance at at "Unregistered Plant Species", which starts a (repeatable) quest to talk to the NPC you're standing right next to for 500 more expedition rep. EDIT: Unlike the Sporeggar quests, this one lasts from Neutral til at least Revered. Sporeggar gets a new batch of quests at every rep level.
There's still a grind but its much shorter. I went from Unfriendly to Honored with three factions in one day, just from doing the repeatable turn ins. This was turning in the drops I had gotten from running around doing other stuff and does not include rep you get from quests (which was frequently 4 digits).
