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Warlords of Draenor

Druid Changes in Warlords of Draenor

Worgen Druid Bear formWow. Lots of Druid changes, especially Balance, arrived with Warlords of Draenor. Then a couple more came with patch 6.1.

Various changes are across the board. All classes are losing various abilities and others are being restricted to one or another spec. Occasionally new abilities will be replacing old ones, but no one is going to gain abilities.

The “new” level 91+ abilities are “perks.” These are actually enhancements to existing abilities, not new ones..

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment form at the bottom of the page or share this page and add them there.

Now, read on:

Skip to: All Druids — Balance — Guardian — Feral — Restoration — Talents — Glyphs — Perks — 6.1 Changes

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Death Knight Changes Coming in Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor, AKA Patch 6.0, is scheduled to be released on Nov 13, 2014. In addition to the ten new levels you will get new talents, at level 100, new glyphs, and, instead of new abilities, you will get perks. In fact, some of your abilities will be removed.

Draenei Death Knight with the starting gear setThis post was last updated on 9/21/14 and is based on the WoD patch notes here.

Unlike the last couple of expansion the changes coming to Death Knights in Warlords of Dreanor aren’t major, but there is a fair amount of poking, prodding, and tweaking going on. The basic talent system is the same and most of your abilities are unchanged, but some abilities will be removed. Generally speaking, the changes are intended to streamline things a bit. Leave a comment if you don’t think that’s the case, or even if you do.

Note that most of the changes shown here are very early and are likely to change as we get closer to that release date of Warlords of Draenor.

Fortunately, the abilities are the only things being tweaked. According to a tweet by a Bliz Dev there are no changes planned to the resource system for Death Knights. So love it or hate it you’ll be keeping it. Probably.

So scroll down or use the menu to jump to various sections:

General DK Changes — Blood — Frost — Unholy — Talents & Glyphs — Perks
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Race Changes in the Warlords of Draenor

female gnome approvesAs with everything else in the Warlords of Draenor there are race changes coming. Warlords is removing Hit and Expertise so any racials dealing with those stats are being removed or replaced. Similar things will be happening to various class abilities.

These are the changes as of  4/24/14 and it’s at least 6 months until WoD is released, so changes are quite possible, even likely. All of these changes will have to be poked and prodded in the alpha and beta testing. One might guess that racial changes might be more set in stone than ability and class changes, but we’ll see.

So here they are, as they stand now. The actual changes are marked in bold. The rest of the racials are added just to be able to see the whole picture. Abilities not linked are not (yet) in WoWhead‘s database.
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Will an Instant Level 90 Devalue Leveling?

Some days back it was discovered that Blizzard would, in fact, be offering an insta-90 boost for $60. This is in addition to the boost that will come with the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Whether it will be available before the expansion is anyone’s guess. Naturally there has been some discussion as to what the value of the boost is, whether it’s “pay to win” and so on.

Goblin with a pile of gold wants to get leveled, now. My view is that it’s cool. People constantly complain about leveling and how long it takes to get to 90 (and soon, 100.) Especially if what they really want to do it get into the end-game stuff. I recently rolled new characters on a new server because that’s where a friend was hanging out. An insta-boost to 90 there would be great, considering that I don’t have a ton of time these days.

$60 will be a barrier for many and it’s likely a bit less than buying a whole new account and all of the expansions. Besides, you save a trip to the store and you get your extra 90s on one account and one server, esp. if you’re nicely set up on that server.

I expect they will get a fair number of takers. Heck, there are people buying multiple accounts already for use with Recruit a Friend or Multi-boxing. I’ve heard of several who multi-boxed ten accounts, and rumors of some who did many more.

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Blood Tanking the Proving Grounds, Going for the Gold

Human Death Knight, ready to be provenOne of the better ways for your Death Knight, or any other tank, to learn tanking skills is through the Proving Grounds, introduced in patch 5.4. It’s a safe place to experiment with rotations, dealing with multiple targets, reforging to get the most out of your gear, and so on. No one will know whether you took one try or 100 (or more) to get your gold achievement.

If you can get at least a silver achievement on your Death Knight (or any other character,) then you’ve probably got a clue.

In fact, Blizzard agrees that the Proving Ground is a good test and it looks like they are at least considering making the Proving Grounds a requirement for random groups in Warlords of Draenor. There were some recent interviews with Blizzard Devs on this topic.
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Warlords of Draenor Dev Q&A Roundup

Ok, it’s been a few day since Blizcon ended and all the announcements were made. People asked a lot of questions and got some answers and have been chewing on them ever since. What I’m going to do here is sum up some of those discussions and link to the originals. Also see our other posts: The level 100 talents and a Warlords overview.

There’s the Ausgamer’s interview (just below,) another by RockPaperShotgun, and a video interview by Blizzpro. Enjoy.

AusGamers sat down with Blizzard’s Helen Cheng and Marco Koegler

On the new Character models: Bliz saw that the Pandaren models looks so much better than the rest that, well, they needed to update things. This requires a non-trivial amount of work to not only update face, hands, and whatot, but also to make sure those changes fit with existing facial features, hair styles, items, and so on. The upgrades include animations, so Orcs might do a visible grunt as they jump. The upgrades probably won’t cover Blood Elves and Draenei (or Worgen & Goblins?) because those are much newer models. Humans, Orcs, and the others are all pretty ancient. Read More »Warlords of Draenor Dev Q&A Roundup

Warlords of Draenor Talents

The Level 100 Talents for Warlords of Draenor

Updated 10/7/14 for talent changes.

In addition to the level 100 talents there are also some changes to some of the earlier talents for various specs, such as the Death Knight losing Roiling Blood (and replaced by Plaguebearer.) The bigger changes will be covered on this page, minor changes will be dealt with elsewhere.

Keep in mind that these are proposed changes. This is all still very early, so take all of these descriptions with a grain of salt. Release is supposed to be “on or before” Dec 20, 2014 officially 11/13/14, so there’s plenty of time for adjustments.  There will be a number of other talent changes, but those are not covered here, just the level 100 talents and major changes (such as new lower level talents.) Changes to abilities, the new Perks, Glyphs, and so on will be covered in other posts. (By the way, getting to level 90 or 100 will be easy, just use Zygor and get there fast.)

Numbers aren’t posted here, for most talents, as they’re likely to be different when they go live. As of now it looks like the squish is definite, which will take a bit of getting used to when it goes live.

Note that a number of the available talents will be different depending on your spec. For example, each spec of Mage has access to a different mage bomb. No more Frost Mages casting Living bomb, now they only get Frost Bomb.

Scroll down to find your class. Again, these will all change, maybe by a lot, before they go live. Also see our other post on the subject: WoW 6: Warlords of Draenor. Note that all the tooltips (hover over the links) are for Warlords info, so will very likely vary from the Mists counterparts.

Skip to: Death Knight — Druid — Hunter — Mage — Monk — Paladin — Priest — Rogue — Shaman — Warlock — Warrior
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Warlords of Draenor

WoW 6: Warlords of Draenor

WoW 6 has been announced at Blizcon and Warlords of Draenor is the new title. WoW has the official page up where you can get the official details. Some of the bits that we will see, assuming any of this makes it through all the testing: Also see our post on the new level 100 talents.