Next X-Pack (Cataclysm) Stat Changes in a Nutshell

[Bahnek]

From a lengthy Official Blue post... changes to how stats work when Cataclysm hits late in the year.

What You’ll See on Gear

Stamina - Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Spirit - Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana... Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect.

Intellect - Intellect will now grant Spell Power. Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.

Haste - Haste will basically remain the same for casters. Our intention is for Haste to let you "do stuff" more often.

Mastery - This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It's directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future. There is a small Mastery bonus for wearing "your" gear. So a Balance druid who takes cloth will be essentially giving up free stats. Sometimes that may be worth it to them (just as sometimes it's worth it for a Resto druid to take that piece of +hit gear), but often times it won't be worth it especially if it's an upgrade for you.

Resilience - This will only affect damage done by players and critical damage done by players. It will not impact crit chance, mana drains, or other such effects.

Hit Rating and Critical Strike Rating - These will all still appear on gear as well. Aside from situations mentioned elsewhere in this list, in general these will function similarly to how they do now, though the details -- such as how much Hit Rating you might need to effectively combat high-level creatures (more on this below) -- are likely to change.

Spell Penetration - Spell Penetration will still exist on PvP gear.

Being Removed from Items

Spell Power - Spell Power is another stat that you'll no longer see present on most items. Instead, as mentioned above, Intellect will grant Spell Power. One exception is that caster weapons will still have Spell Power. This allows us to make weapons proportionately more powerful for casters in the same way they are for melee classes.

Going Away Completely

Spell Ranks - Spell ranks will cease to exist. All spells will have one rank and will scale appropriately with level. The levels at which you can learn certain spells are being changed in order to fill in some of the gaps, and we will be introducing some new spells to learn along the way as well.

What Else You Should Know

Combat ratings - All ratings will be much harder to "cap out" at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

Reforging - In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat.

Gems - We are changing the gem colors of a few stats as a result of these adjustments. For example, Hit is likely to be blue instead of yellow. We'll have more details on this in the future.

What about Fel Armor (which benefits from Spirit), will it change?

It seems so. I would remind players who are focusing on individual talents and abilities to remember that we're going to be doing a major redesign on all talent trees. So fear not, these changes are meant to work in conjunction with the design of each class come Cataclysm.

If you are a DPS caster, expect to see:
• A lot more Stamina.
• All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• No Spirit. You won’t miss Spirit, though, because you won’t need it for DPS or mana regen
• DPS cloth: Int, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery

[Zodan]

And more important than all that crap,


NO MORE WEAPON SKILLS, WOOT

[djinux]

Weapon skill is fine i have no problem failing through a couple dungeon runs to skill up a weapon. The best thing that comes ffrom this is that mp5 is gone forever!!!!!

Put spirit on mail caster gear and have it govern resto regen and elemental hit rating... sweet.. gear that works for both specs not marginal for both sounds like maybe they got the clue I put in the mail about how to work out the shaman class.. Although i am curious to see how they scale mana for Enhancement since mail physical dps gear won't have any int on it once hunters don't use mana any more.

[Zodan]

Weapon skill is the worst blight inflicted upon WoW ever.

Mp5 is pretty annoying too though, less stats to worry about is a nice thing.

They'll give talents to convert so much of X stat into Int or something.