Spooncraft

Alrighty it seems Blizzard’s giving out some more in depth information on the official Wrath of the Lich King Druid forums.

Maim has been changed

Maim will break from the same amount of damage that Fear, Entangling Roots etc. breaks with now. It’s a flat amount of damage based on the HP pool of the target (its’ different for players and creatures), we haven’t settled on the right number yet though. (src)

Updates

In the next data push, you will find Omen of Clarity has been changed a bit. The 10 second cooldown has been removed, the procs per minute has been raised from 2 to 3.5, and melee abilities no longer trigger it. Spell interaction with Omen of Clarity remains relatively unchanged, with its hidden chance to trigger off spells reduced by half (and rolling the dice about 2x as often).

What this means is that more auto-attacks landing on the target will increase the benefit from Omen of Clarity. Haste, increased hit chance, and expertise will all make Omen of Clarity better.

We are aware of the concerns with reaching the hit rating cap, and will make sure Druids can pick up Rogue items to wear without exceeding that cap. This means Rogues will likely socket for hit, while Druids socket for Strength or Agility.

Before LK goes live, we will do extensive testing on how much damage classes do, and will increase or decrease their power as appropriate to meet our targets. Cat raid DPS suffered relative to other melee in BC for lack of an Combat Potency equivalent talent (OOC should now be roughly equal), for lack of a scaling finishing move (Savage Roar answers that), for lack of benefiting from Windfury Totem, and for lack of weapon procs (+35 agility != Mongoose). All of those lacks have been addressed. In addition, a change has been made to make the agility rebalance less severe (as I posted in another thread).

In PvP, we are adding many tools to the Feral Druid arsenal, including the redesigned Maim, Infected Wounds, King of the Jungle, and Berserk. We have also made some improvements to the “range bug”. Attacks that require you to be behind a target will no longer be able to be parried, nor able to be dodged by a player. Our movement engine will now smoothly interpolate positions of moving units, preventing the “Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target…” sequence from occuring any more. In addition, being able to apply a snare makes the Feral Druid able to slow down their target and lessen the severity of the “range bug”. Yes, there are still issues with the model, especially when switching into and out of cat form, but many of the issues are being dealt with. (src)

To help deal with this issue, in the next data push, Druids should find their melee critical strike chance is about 5% higher.

The conversion of agility to critical strike chance remains the same 40:1 at level 70, but the base amount for 0 agility has been increased by 5%. (src)