Blizzard Blue poster Zarhym has posted a preview of some major changes to dispel mechanics set to come with the arrival of Cataclysm later this year on the official World of Warcraft forums.
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Blizzard's goal with the following dispel changes is to make dispelling "less trivial" in PvP, as well as create more equity amongst healers' dispelling capabilities in both PvE and PvP.
World of Warcraft currently makes use of five types of dispellable (or curable) buffs/debuffs consisting of: curse, disease, poison, defensive magic, and offensive magic. Come Cataclysm, each healing class will have access to spells that dispel (or cure) three of the five aforementioned types of buffs or debuffs, one of which will be a spell to dispel defensive magic. This will result in allowing players to put together less restrictive Arena or Battleground teams, and will also allow designers to assume that every group will have the ability to dispel magic.
The "opportunity cost" for dispelling will be altered as well. As Zarhym mentioned in the opening of his post, dispelling magic is a bit too trivial, and so some key changes are being made in this regard:
- Dispel spell mana costs will be raised
- Making it so players can waste mana by dispelling something that isn't there
- And the removal of Cleansing Totem, Abolish Poison, and Abolish Disease from the game
Below is a breakdown of the upcoming changes in a bit more detail:
As previously mentioned, we are providing three dispel capabilities to all healing classes as follows:
There is some trade-off that is being made in making these changes and we wanted to expand on this further.
- Druids will be able to dispel defensive magic, curses, and poison.
- Paladins will be able to dispel defensive magic, diseases, and poison.
- Priests will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and disease. /li>
- Shaman will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and curses.
- Protection and Retribution paladins will lose their current ability to dispel magic.
- All shaman will lose dispel disease and dispel poison in exchange for Restoration gaining dispel magic.
- Restoration shaman, Restoration druids, and Holy paladins will need to talent into their defensive magic dispels.
- Shadow priests won’t be able to remove disease in Shadowform.
- Mage, hunter, and warlock will retain their current dispel mechanics.
- Body and Soul remains the same, and basically any dispel mechanic not mentioned above is currently planned to remain as it is.
- When possible, we’d like to combine dispels into a single action. For example, the druid ability to dispel curses and poisons might be a single spell with a Restoration talent that also allows it to dispel magic. This part of the design isn’t finalized, however.
The original announcement can be viewed here.
[Thanks Kost for the tip!]
