I haven't posted in a while, but right now I feel like getting out my magic crystal sphere and gaze into the future. And I see priest changes!
1) Raid-wide Prayer of Healing
Prayer of Healing will become a smart heal that is now longer restricted to your group. Instead it will work like Circle of Healing, healing the 5 players with the highest health-deficit in your raid. Indicators that this change is in the pipeline are the general trend to make spells and buffs raid-wide. Basically it will become Circle of Healing with a casting time but no cooldown.
2) Divine Spirit and Fortitude will become auras
With the coming dual-spec feature the talents for group-wide buffs are tricky. With dual-specs you could have one spec to buff other players (the buff spec) and then switch to your raid spec without these talent points "wasted".
When you switch specs the buff on yourself could be removed. But it is basically impossible to remove the buffs on all players that you previously cast it on. Just believe me on this - the WoW-engine can't do that right now and Blizzard will not go to the endless pain to implement buff-erasing and have it work for people not in your raid or outside the instance. So the buffs would stay on everyone, even after you switch specs. And that would be bad since this would basically force the raiders to have a spec with all the buffs and one spec with all the non-buff raiding talents. You end up with being forced into what is basically one big spec split into one raid-spec and a buff-spec where you have to spend a certain amount of points to get all the buffs that can be cast before the fight starts.
Instead the spells will change into an aura that you cast on yourself. The basic single-person version of the buff will become "self only", while the group-wise one will affect your whole group/raid and has a huge range. If you switch specs then the aura is cancelled and you have to recast it (if you still have the required talent). The single-person version will be self only since otherwise you could still one-by-one buff every single player in your raid with the buff-spec. And that would be an even bigger torment than just being forced to have a "buff spec".
This might also affect Shadow Protection, even though there is no talent to improve that one (yet). And if my prediction comes true then this will also affect other talented buffs for other classes such as Druid's Improved Mark of the Wild.
3) ?
More visions of the future will hopefully come to me real soon. :)
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2 comments:
Interesting ideas :). I can see at the leas the first one happening.
Are you sure that the WoW engine can't handle removing buffs? I seem to remember that some of the hardcore guilds in TBC had some sort of trick where they kept tons of low level warlocks outside their raid instance, invited them to the raid before an attempt on a new boss and had them soulstone the entire raid. Blizzard patched this out that you would lose the soulstone buff if the warlock left the raid or party.
Obviously this is not exactly the same but it is kind of similar.
Wasn't that nerf a failure back then? I faintly remember that guilds just used low-level warlock alts instead that stayed in the raid, but outside the instance.
But you are right - they can remove buffs if they restrict buffing effect to group/raid only. And the auras in my "vision" work basically in the same way. You only get the buff when grouped with the buffer and in the same instance.
Good bye to drive-by buffing - I will miss you. :(
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