Cataclysm

Hey guys. This will be more informal than my other posts cause I'm workin quick watching the 3v3 finale.

Cataclysm got announced, and I'm excited for it, and I know I am foaming at the mouth because we get to revisit Azeroth and put in better quests and phased zones and Ragnaros is available again. I like the new races, the new professions, and the new guild leveling system, and the Path of the Titans thing, from what I've read on WoW.com and Tankspot.com (check both of those out--tankspot's got an awesome system that lets them blog live from the floor without you having to refresh like you do for wow.com)

I am going to theorize on stuff.

DEFENSE IS GONE. All tanks will have talents like druids do that reduce crit chance. This is good news, because it makes it easier for new tanks to get in on the game. It also means that the increases to avoidance that defense gives (+.04% block/dodge/parry) are gone, so I'm thinking that overall, avoidance will be improved for tanks (like how druids have incredibly high dodge to compensate for no parries or blocks and dk's have a lot of parry to compensate for no blocks)

ALL CLASSES WILL HAVE SIMILAR HP.
Basically the definition of a tank is "one who is good at taking hits (and keeping others from taking hits)". These hits are normal or magical damage. The arcane breath on Maly is about 20-25k magic damage, which will kill your average mage. In cataclysm, this won't kill your average mage, because the mage will have the same hp as the tank (probably like, 40k at level 85).
The other type of damage is normal damage. Patchwerk hits for around 15-20k on a tank, after armor reduction. Otherwise, he'd hit for like 60k. A mage would get hit for 50k, can't block/dodge/parry

Because of the hp homogenization, the major difference in the survivability is avoidance and armor now--so I'm thinking that we'll go back to normal damage being the damage-of-choice for bosses. Either a lot of fast attacks so avoidance shines, or hard hitting slow attacks so the armor reduction shines. I think maybe they'll increase the armor cap/make it easier to attain. I know I've got about 66% or so mitigation; 2/3rds normal damage knocked off from a hit.
If blue changed the armor cap to capping at 90% instead of 75%, and made someone in my gear be able to knock off 3/4s of a hit instead of 2/3rds, that would mean they could have bosses hit harder (before mitigation. taking that into account, it'd be the same) and be more damaging to those with less % armor reduction, creating that big difference between tanks and mages.

The other thing I can think of is armor now can somewhat reduce magic damage, so an arcane breath from Maly would hit a mage for 25k of his 30k and hit me for 20k of my 30k. It might be like, 75% armor mitigation = 20% magic reduce, but I think that'd be fair.


Edit: I've heard that it's less drastic than I think. instead of a fresh 80 mage having 9k, he'll have 15k, and a good mage will have 20k instead of 15k.

BLOCK VALUE IS GONE, BLOCK BLOCKS A % FROM A HIT
This makes block worse on trash but better on bosses. maybe you can make block work on magic too, so warriors and pallies have a chance to block a % off magic attacks and then give druids and dks the armor=magic reduction thing. that'd get rid of some class homogenization.


That's all right now. Hype out.