Blizzard is planning for gears and stats in Catalysm. Many players are starting to panic since this change will dramatically affect how many classes will work. As healing priests, these are the stats we currently use:

• Stamina
• Intellect
• Spirit
• Spellpower
• Haste
• Crit
• MP5

The launch of Cataclysm will entirely remove MP5 from the game. That’s one less stat for us to worry about. Spellpower will be gone from gear too, except for on caster weapons. In this way, we can avoid seeing everything as a hunter weapon. A new mechanic, mastery, is added to the game to encourage players to wear gear in their own armor class. It might be irrelevant to us since we are already limited to one armor.

So now the list of stats we’re going to use looks like this:
• Stamina
• Intellect
• Spirit
• Haste
• Crit

You will notice that there’s not too much difference. But, the changes will definitely change how stats work, or more specifically the way we prioritize them. It is still too early to tell what priority system we will applying. Here are more changes:

Intellect: With spellpower no longer being available on gear, intellect is where spellpower will be coming from. Currently, intellect increases the size of a priest’s mana pool, and her critical strike rating. While I’m not sure if the crit relationship will remain, Blizzard said that intellect will not provide as much mana to players as it currently does, implying that intellect will still affect the size of mana pools. However, the change means mana pools will not be scaling upward as dramatically as they did from 70 to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King, and mana regeneration will be more important as a result.

Spirit: Blizzard said they are probably going to be reworking the entire mana regeneration system and that spirit will only be found on healing gear from now on. This means it will soon be very easy to pick out healing gear since all cloth with spirit will be specifically made for healing priests. However, it could also mean that it is more difficult to share pieces of gear with your shadow set. Though, it’s a little too early to know.

Stamina: We will be seeing more stamina on gear so that our health pools are more similar to plate wearers. This will make us less vulnerable to random damage, but make healing non-tanks a little more taxing.

They are really dummy-proofing gearing. At least for healers, anyway; dps will still need to account for stats like hit in order to deal damage to bosses. There will be new ways to customize gear or reforging but the new stat system will make it harder for players to end up with the wrong base pieces in Cataclysm. Picking the right gear won’t be as important as knowing how to properly tune it for your needs.

The changes that Blizaard plans to put into effect can lead players into thinking if we will all look alike in Catalclysm. Also, if the difficulty of gearing is going to go down then the difficulty of raiding in general, apart from mana regen and healing, go up. Time will only tell if more tough content will be added in Cataclysm.

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