Blizzard considering removal of downgraded spells, later mage boosters

[robbotats]

But healers no longer being able to downrank spells will show up very obviously when it comes to balancing content, and that won't be a problem. Sure, you'll think, "if I could downrank I would have had mana through this fight." But the reality is that if you could downrank, then the fight could have been made correspondingly tougher.

This is not why priests downrank. A top geared priest's highest rank Gheal simply heals for too much. If you were to heal efficiently on your highest rank, you would need to let the tank drop a lot of HP, and then you risk spike dmg killing your tank.

[Malekyth]

It sounds like a lot of people are saying, "this is a stupid change because now I won't be able to do ____!", when Blizzard is saying, "we never actually wanted you to do ____, and we're fixing that now." It's by design, considered at length by the people who designed World of Warcraft and know better than anyone what the game "should" be. As that blue post reminds us, if there are legitimate balance problems that arise because of this, they'll fix them. I'm going to miss the rank 1 Arcane Explosion mob roundup, but am confident that whatever is changed will make the game better in the long run.

Most of us have devoted days and weeks of /played to Blizzard's game design. They're good enough at what they do that they're not going to ruin it for you!

[Tasty]

Mages use rank 1 scorch?

[heyaz]

Doesn't seem game breaking enough. And the thing about mass nerfs like this - they affect everyone at the same time, so it's not like you lose an advantage that everyone else will still have...

[Stabface]

Doesn't seem game breaking enough. And the thing about mass nerfs like this - they affect everyone at the same time, so it's not like you lose an advantage that everyone else will still have...

It's a nerf to casters, who had to use some of these rank 1 spells in PvP versus melee classes (Rogue). Melee didn't get nerfed...

[Kel]

For my mage it will be a bit of a pain (for a start I'll have to train the higher ranks of frost nova), but i'm sure I'll get used to it.

It will probably make the most difference to play style on my healers. I often have a mid-rank top healing spell for use to top off people when I know they won't take much more damage. On my priest I could use renew (and possibly have that person die to unforseen damage), flahs heal (spending a lot of mana for a hps benefit that I didn't need) or a max rank GH and end up overhealing that person for 2-3k. I liked the choice to be able to cast a lower rank normal heal, so I can top up the right amount of health, in a reasonable time period and for a decent mana cost. I don't raid much on my priest, but end-game raiding isn't the be all and end all of WoW.

With the changes to 5 normal mans (any spec of tank-able class will be able to tank them) I guess they will just dumb them down so the amount of healing needed is minimal, otherwise I don't see how it would be possible for a healer (using max mana spells) to heal a non-prot spec tank without going oom.

[shaeman]

Sounds like an exploit to me Unintended use of game mechanics. Ban the lot of them

[JonnyB]

Maybe now Blizzard can remove stamina from the game and normalize health for every level. Everyone at 80 has 15k hp, then make armor mitigation actually mean something. I was playing around with my Shaman on the test realm. I only have Kara level gear, but essentially now I just have my small fast heal(2k), larger slow heal (5k) and of course the group heal. Normally I would be figuring out what ranks to use based on the tank on most runs (wouldn't use the same for a tank with 17k HP vs one with 10-12k HP.

I just think Blizzard is opening up a whole can of worms with this. They already reduced the effectiveness of downranking with respect to heals when BC was released. They claim they didn't expect people to be stacking + heal and downranking in this fashion. I suppose its not like they've only had 9 years since development began, almost 4 years since launch, and a year and a half since BC to figure out this wasn't what they intended.

Anyway I've got my mage/priest/warrior/shaman at 70 now, hopefully with 1 of each class by the time Wotlk hits (thank you RAF + the free levels )

[Drizzit]

Mages use rank 1 scorch?

yup, i don't know where else they use it but locks and mages use rank 1 scorch for the strawman in the oz event of kara.

[Frosty]

The only time I ever downranked was when I solo'd my Enhancment Shaman.
And the only reason I downranked was to keep from drawing too much aggro.

That being said, I wonder how this will affect friendly people doing run-by-buffing on low level players?