Preparations

Patch 3.0.8 will be the first major balancing pass post WotLK launch. I and the people in my guild try to keep as up to date as possible on upcoming changes so that we can plan around them and know what the expect come patch day. Most World of Warcraft patches have tons of changes and only a few are significant and relevent to raiding. This post will cover those important changes in patch 3.0.8 and their ramifications for raiding. Keep in mind that 3.0.8 is still in testing and there will most likely be further changes before it is live.

Summary

• Overall Raid DPS nerfed
• Hunter Nerf
• Rogue Bugfix
• Elemental Shaman Buff
• Multi-target Healing Nerfed

Deathknight

• Bone Shield damage reduction reduced from 40% to 20%.
• Icebound Fortitude damage reduction reduced from 50% to about 35% in tank gear.
• Frost Presence bonus armor increased from 60 to 80% and magic damage reduction increased from 5 to 15%.

Druid

• Wild Growth has a 6 second cooldown.

Hunter

• Steady Shot bonus from AP reduced from 20% to 10%.
• Beast Mastery pet damaged significantly nerfed.
• Explosive Shot buffed to bring Survival closer to the other trees in DPS.

Paladin

• Judgement of Wisdom now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.

Priest

• Circle of Healing has a 6 second cooldown.

Rogue

• A bug with Honor Among Thieves was causing multiple rogues in one group to gain too many combo points. This has been fixed.

Shaman

• Elemental total DPS output increased by about 10%-15% in Naxxramas 25 gear and full raid buffs. UPDATE: Latest numbers and word from Blizzard indicate it may be more like a 20% buff. This makes sense given how abysmal Elemental DPS is on live.

Raid Zones

• Players will be immune to Fire and Shadow damage for a few seconds after leaving the Twilight realm.

Itemization

• Ferals and hunters will now share weapons due to changes to how Feral Attack Power works.

You Are Not Prepared

Illidan was right, you’re a slacker! No, not really. You’re reading this post so you’ll be more prepared than almost anyone else out there. We will have impact evaluations whenever there are patches with significant changes in them, so check back often. We do our best to stay as one of the top guilds in the world, and we’ll do our best to share what we know with you.

The Ramifications

Some nerfs, some buffs, some in between, that’s how it always is. Making sense of how it will effect your raids is the hard part. Some of it is just experience seeing this dance played out many times over it. Some of it is in-depth knowledge of game mechanics. Never fear though, because I’m here to be your interpretor!

First we’ll start with damage dealers. Overall, raid DPS will most likely be noticeably lower for min/maxed raids. Hunters, most of which are currently Beast Mastery, will be seeing 10-15% reductions in top end DPS. Even Marksmanship and Survival will be seeing some reduction, though they will become more powerful in relation to Beast Mastery and thus we will see them more commonly used in raids. Right now Hunters along with Mages significantly out-DPS any other class in a raid full of people at similar skill levels. The only exception to that is Rogues built around abusing a bug with the talent Honor Among Thieves which causes Rogues in specially built groups to do very high DPS (6000+ in some cases). This bug is being fixed and Rogue DPS will probably go down 10-15% without it.

The Judgement of Wisdom nerf will hit all casters, though it will hit Mages the hardest. Mages lose about 130 mp5, Hunters lose about 30 mp5, and the other casters are somewhere in between those numbers. It’s tough to put a number on how much of a DPS hit this will result in. It will vary greatly based on class, gearing, fight, etc. It will definitely how some impact, however.

Now for the good part, the buffs. Elemental Shaman damage currently is horrifically bad. They are absolutely last in DPS, and by quite a large margin. Its Blizzard’s goal that they should be competitive with Moonkins. Right now they’re at least 10% behind, if not closer to 15% behind. Elemental Shamans still get brought to raids because they bring some unique buffs, but it’ll be nice to be able to bring them and not worry about them doing substandard DPS.

The nerfs to Circle of Healing and Wild Growth will have a significant impact on healing strategies. We’ve all come to rely on both of those spells doing a huge amount of healing and we will need to adapt to them not being spammable. I suspect that Restoration Shamans will come back in style now that their Chain Heal will have more demand. Overall you should expect healing to become noticeably more difficult. The amount of healing currently done by Circle of Healing and to a lesser extent Wild Growth is staggering

The change to Sartharion with multiple drakes up is a small nerf. It removes a gotcha from the fight without really nerfing it too much. It took some additional coordination and awareness to dodge lava waves when leaving portals but it wasn’t a huge deal. It’s a definitely needed change in regards to shadow damage, though, because there was no way to dodge a Shadow Fissure if you happened to land on it right as you came out of the twilight realm. Overall a small but good change.

The change to Feral Attack Power itemization should be noted for your loot decisions going forward. The biggest impact if this is that a lot of previously feral only weapons are now attractive to hunters. For example, Journey’s End from Heroic Kel’Thuzad will be best-in-slot for Hunters as it currently is for Druids.