ULTIMATE WotLK Classic Class Picking Guide

[Music] we started this journey in 2019 and with wrath of the lich king classic confirmed for 2022 it is time for another class retrospective series during vanilla we asked was it any good though in tbc we moved on to ask is it any better now and for wrath well it's no longer a question of asking if your class is good or not because every spec in the game is great at something so we're going to be looking at what is new to your class baseline the pve talent changes as well as raiding how well your class is expected to perform in raiding throughout the expansion pvp performance in the arena as well as taking a look at your tss and then through this hopefully we can give a proper answer to your class in wrath of the lich king classic just how broken is it now [Music] i always end up starting these series covering druids why is that i wonder well it's the only class in the game with four effective specs they always have so many talking points and they continue to go from strength to strength as world of warcraft progresses during the burning crusade i said that they were overall the most improved class coming from classic moving into wrath of the lich king they once again have had a lot of work into focusing each of their specs to be viable in their niche rather than having this jack of all trades master of non-class fantasy in fact i think the idea of that was well out of the picture even by late vanilla as the druids struggled to find their space anywhere apart from healing tbc sure did improve on vanilla at least feral tank became incredibly strong moonkin a utility powerhouse restoration a welcome addition and feral cat was um yeah well i guess it exists if you want it to outside of tanks though druids weren't really a clash you ever stacked whilst viable for their buffs their individual performance could often leave much to be desired so in wrath of the lich king will droids continue to be the unsung hero supporting from the back line or is it their time to shine at the top let's find out obligatory youtuber intermission start of the new series and all that if you've been looking forward to this can't wait to see your class or just want to help out the channel in general drop a like and the sub if you think that i deserve it it's free and takes a few seconds gets the videos out there and hopefully the extra effort on the series will be worth it okay then what is a new baseline none of the talent stuff just the existing ability changes and new spells notepads out because there's gonna be a lot of it the balance tree first you know when you're standing on some kind of platform or ledge outside and you try and cast entangling roots and the game says what are you crazy you can't cast this spell indoors at least it creates some memes but in raph you can cast entangling roots indoors giving the druid a fairly reliable source of cc speaking of roots nature's grasp is now baseline and has three charges instead of one barks can get some nice buffs moving from a 20 damage reduction in tbc to 30 and is now castable in all forms great change for actively tanking ferals gaining another cooldown to use armor reduction effects such as that from fairy fire on our percentage and not a flat amount this is an across-the-board change for all armor reduction effects in fact a big one now balance gains access to a spammable aoe as hurricane has had its cooldown removed this is a change that when we talk about balance in more detail with talents you'll see how they go from kind of meh aoe to you can really start to begin to top meters and delete entire packs as a boomi finally for balance innovate is reworked it goes from a six minute cooldown and basing its mana restored off the target spirit to a flat amount of mana equal to 225 of the druid's base mana pool and a three-minute cooldown so this means raffle the lich king innovate will restore about 7 800 mana it will have a shorter cooldown but now any target that needs mana is a good target for an innovate which will of course not stop your arcane mages informing you that they need it on cooldown every single fight feral combat tree next so you know how in cataclysm feral druids got skull bash as a proper interrupt while in wrath of the lich king they just kind of had a scuffed version of it added on to existing abilities so now bash and mame will cause an interrupt effect on non-player spell casting for three seconds though if you really have to interrupt as a druid you can it's a pain but it is possible oh and there's this visual update too for both cat and bird forms as well say hello to your brand new improved shape-shifts and now in case you're wondering there are no glyphs to not have to look at boomkin form that was golip of stars and it was also in mr pandaria and they didn't even update the moonkin form properly until legion either so yeah if you're playing a boomi you better like looking at it they don't change true form either energy is no longer gained in increments of 20 this will be true for rogue as well and will instead continuously regenerate at the same rate it was gained previously meaning that scenario that happens where you're like one or two energy off a finishing move doesn't mean you're gonna have to wait for a full tick anymore nice mame is now also a stun and is basically the cat form equivalent of kidney shot but it has a shorter duration and does some damage cats also now have an aoe similar to what bears have been doing since vanilla cats now learn to swipe which does a large percentage of your weapon damage great aoe burst on low health adds not so good sustained but better than nothing yes totally first new spell for druids is savage raw this is the backbone of feral dps and is a mandatory you must have this up as close to 100 of the time as you possibly can all your damage is just gonna instantly disappear it grants a massive 30 damage buff to physical attacks that can be 33 percent when clift or up to 34 seconds needless to say maintenance buff playstyle isn't for everybody i know it's not for me but we can look more at all the plates you have to spin as a feral dps soon and why people always rate it as one of the higher skill cap dps specs tiger's fury now has a cooldown which is 30 seconds but has had its energy cost removed and will actually be useful for the first time ever as we'll see when we get onto feral talents as for the feral tanks savage defense is a new passive when you crit you take less damage on next attack simple enough finally growl and all taunts in fact have a little rework they are now a 30 yard range because much like real life you do not have to be in melee distance to start talking also you can glyph taunts so they well you know work last four baseline changes are the tree enthusiasts over in restoration so we don't have a bunch to say here there'll be two new spells nourish which is like the druid small and efficient heel that they were missing from their toolkit heals more depending on how many hots or heal over times a target already has active basically replaces healing touch in all scenarios so it's a very nice spell to pick up and oh my god how has it taken so long dungeon healers rejoiced and that one guy who survives a wipe in a raid and then just has to stand there in afk because he can't do anything finally is useful because blizzard are actually giving druids a proper resurrecting revive and they still have combat rest too this is one of the best quality of life improvements they could have done no really look combat res is cool and all just not at the expense of having a normal one that's all i'm gonna say so that's our general changes overview not a huge amount of new stuff in the baseline kit for the druids but the talent trees are where we will really see the difference let's start with balance again both druid dps specs get way more interesting than they have been during tbc first things first your rotation now is well it's a rotation not just press starfire till the enemy red bar has disappeared off your screen in fact this is an across-the-board change for spellcasters which i think is super welcome because boomi like many other casters have been pressing literally one button since molten core so let's get the talent tree up and have a dig about and see what the new shiny and interesting bits are first off let's just cover the support parts in the restoration tree because each talent has had something added on to it so it's interesting for a variety of play styles yora for example gives 10 more intellect while in laser chicken form omen of clarity is now passive and can proc off well anything that the druid does a master shape-shifter is new and gives a bit of extra bang for your form of choice over in the balance tree i actually want to start towards the bottom of it because this single talent defines your playstyle and understanding it will be key eclipse simply put if you do not like how this talent works you will not like boomkin essentially when you crit with either wrath or starfire the opposite spell is empowered for 15 seconds and only one of these buffs can be up at once meaning broadly speaking you aren't just spamming starfire 100 to the fight anymore and are tracking your eclipse timers whether it be a good time to proc them your trinket procs when do you startle and more why you may not like this is because procking your eclipse states which contribute a huge portion of your damage both have rng attached if heroism is up and your trinkets are rolling and you're fishing for a proc that doesn't feel good it's a small thing but it's worth a mention let's move back up the tree then nature's grace gets a huge buff increasing all casting speed for 3 seconds instead of just the next spell cast nature's splendor is new increase in the effect of both damaging and healing periodic effects nature's reach gets some much needed threat reduction tacked onto the side of it and celestial focus gets totally changed it doesn't have that chance to stun any more on starfire and now prevents spell pushback on a few abilities as well as giving a bit of spell haste you'll notice improved insect swarm isn't taken here and when considering increases damage taken from wrath by three percent or create chants from starfire by three percent with dots up that is surprising it's recommended in later game gearing but boomis are just short on gcds to apply their start when they want to be blasting their active eclipse more often than not improved fairy fire gets reworked and also now applies a spell hit debuff on the target and even more crit chance for the boomkin for real though boomkins do really make things go boom dream state isn't taken anymore we don't use the word umkin anymore in wrath the lich king partly thanks to another small rework to moonkin form itself offering more defenses and getting rid of the highly questionable restore mana on melee attacks what was that all about tbc moonkin form now spell chris wow that makes more sense can restore mana amazing improved moonkin form adds to your impressive utility toolkit giving three percent spell haste and spirit scaling force spell damage alkyn frenzy is a bit of a questionable one you need to be getting hit to get value from it and in raiding content well as a dps you tend not to want to be getting here some fights however you don't have a choice like saffiron for example where it's going to be up all of the time it's a substantial buff but not a consistent one by any means gayle wins buffs up the power of your aoe spells mainly very cool and typhoon is a brand new spell which i'm pretty sure the main use of it is to prowl up to lumber mill in arathi basin knock people off the edge and then laugh at them not taken here but if i were me i'd try and figure out where i can borrow a point to get this earth and moon is just some extra stats and essentially makes it so your main spells apply a curse of elements type effect and finally the big one the reason boomkins kinda pop off in wrath one of the most iconic spells of all time starfall now this is the o g starfall in more recent wow expansions blizzard have made it well more how can i put it controllable you press this bad boy in wrath if it's in 36 yards of you whether it's in combat or not whether it's an enemy or a passive it's getting starfled it does a lot of damage it scales super hard with trinket procs and man it's satisfying to have this ability up pretty much every second pull when you're raiding boomis bolster their playstyle of burst and sustain dps with glyphs such as starfire starfall and moonfire let's head on over to the feral tree then first thing to consider is there are now more tailored talents between you being a cat or a bear than there was in tbc more so the case for cat but we'll get on to that in a moment because i want to start with bears similar to moonkin there's some support tants in the restoration tree which i don't really have much to add on apart from they make you do a bit more damage in the feral tree a new cooldown has been added called last stand uh sorry survival instincts but no it's it is just last stand still it's a nice extra cooldown for both cats and bears primal precision is a huge 10 expertise for free as well as energy cost reductions you'll still want their expertise as a bear is a super valuable stat predatory strikes also gain scaling off your equipped weapon natural reaction is new and adds some more dodge chance for bears and survival of the fittest also has a mini rework to give you the baseline stats you really need to be able to tank bosses infected wounds is only really taken if no other classes such as a death knight for example are in the party to provide the 20 attack speed reduction and predator of the pact is another huge pile of stats for bears including a 12 damage reduction just passively king of the jungle adds more damage on top of enrage for bears and improved mango is another new talent that reduces its cooldown which is very important for tanking as this will be a large chunk of your threat brendan tur and primal gore give even more damage and make certain abilities be able to crit though honestly they are nice it's a bigger deal for cats than it is for bears at the bottom of the tree is the new active ability berserk for your bear tanks this will be a three minute cooldown 15 second duration and it will make mangle hit three targets and have no cooldown i don't know how you even think about pulling off a bear when they have this running obviously this is highly fight dependent you kind of need to cleave or this end of talentry ability is just doing well pretty much nothing if i'm honest i mean t to fears though but that's more of a pvp thing burst beast themselves up further with glyphs such as growl frenzied rejuvenation survival instincts and maul again it's content dependent if i'm doing a dungeon as a bear tank you bet i want a mullet cleaves parades though maybe not so much kitty cat next we've covered a bunch of the talents so let's go over the points we missed from a few important ones barrel charge can now be used in cat form and allows you to leap behind your target and daze them briefly predatory strikes has a new effect added onto it that gives you 20 chance per combo point spent to make your next spell which isn't revive essentially instant cast this is more of a pvp thing but when combat res is called for at least you can do it instantly and the buff will always be active when you're playing in pve improve the leader of the pack fixes feral mana issues and king of the jungle finally makes tiger's fury actually useful as it transforms it into a mini cooldown that restores energy kind of like this or t used to be primal gore means some of your bleeds crit which is great because they ignore armor and berserk reduces energy costs by 50 for 15 seconds which is great burst at the start of the fight and for setting up your rotation that shoes glyphs like savage raw rip and shred and i suppose i should also mention it's not expected that you will power shift or we'll have to wear wolf said helm anymore fiora doesn't give you energy when you shift into cap as it does in tbc it just kind of passively tracks your energy when not in cat form as if your energy bar is always going up whether you are in cat or not last set of pve talents for now and thankfully the restoration talenting is a bit more interesting than tbc which is just take every single one of your points and throw them into the restoration tree so resto druids are one of those classes that care about haste break point values exciting this is a bit of a new thing for wrath of the lich king mainly so you can get your gcd or global cooldown as low as possible to allow for maximum heal over time spamming again i want this to be a bit of an overview so i've gone with what i believe to be a more early game build so we can just take a look at some of the newer talents over in balance we get some nice additions like genesis for five percent more periodic healing moon glow for better mana efficiency nature's splendor for more hot duration and celestial focus which again is a consideration depending on your haste resto druids have overall incredible mana efficiency throughout the entirety of the expansion back in the restoration tree master shapeshifter has been taken for more heals apart from that a lot of this is the same as tbc to be honest however down in the tree living seed is new and makes it so critical heels do a bit more once the target next takes damage you can take this if you don't need the extra points over and bounce for spell haste tree of life has had a bit of a rework it doesn't slow you passively anymore it used to by 20 and you can cast a whole bunch more spells in tree form now like healing touch yes in tbc you cannot cast healing touch in tree form there will be no point where i believe this isn't just a huge oversight that was never fixed not that you really do cast healing touch outside of nature's swiftness anymore but it's just a principle on top of that improved tree of life gives some more bonuses from spirits revitalize gives some hearts a chance to restore resources such as runic power rage or energy this is actually quite nice and a unique selling point for resto droids kind of like the tier 3 2 set if you remember that back from original max gift of the earth mother is just a pile of stats goodness and wild growth is your final new talent healing five nearby party members over seven seconds another solid addition to your ability to just cover the raid and heal over time effects resto druids will use glyphs such as swiftmend which is such a nice quality of life improvement wild growth and the last one varies a little bit on your role you could pick ones such as nourish rejuvenation or innovate for example so how do we think druids are going too far in wrath of the lich king then overall this is a news section for these videos i would usually cover leveling here but uh back in tbc i barely made two sentences out of leveling and in wrath just do what you want for it have some fun it'll be fine it's not challenging or super time consuming every class has better manner efficiency personal cooldown self-sustain and so on it wouldn't be much of a talking point especially when compared to how well we think the class is going to do on average so it's always hard to say and i do encourage a very large grain of salt here if you remember back at the start of tbc we all expected warriors to be pretty average until they started picking up armor pen during tier vi in reality even at the start of tier 5 they were proving one of the top dps it's all well and good saying everyone was wrong with hindsight but that's what hindsight does and we don't have it right now there are servers who have tried rafter the lich king time and time again but at the end of the day we don't know until blizzard puts it on their servers with that said i'd full on expect the majority of raids to consider taking one feral dps one moon kin and one restoration druid feral tanks will at no point be as good as they currently have been in tbc at any point in wrath of the lich king yes people will clear all the content with bears yes they will work but the other tanks notably prop pal and blood dk just get kind of really really overpowered feral single target threat isn't as good as their counterparts and the aoe doesn't compare either they are still some tanky boys and scale well but they lack external cooldowns if you're dead set on continuing playing feral it's gonna be possible but i just think there'll be a bit less demand for them overall moonkin should absolutely pop off on clearing trash and fights with consistent adds coming in especially when it lines up with their star fall cooldown but they do really need the stars to align quite literally to be seeing themselves anywhere near the top end of the dps even then i wouldn't expect to remain there for a prolonged period of time i would say they'll be higher up in the dps on average compared to where they've been in tbc but they're not i want to be the best dps material they're still highly desirable to have one as the boss they provide are incredibly powerful also they are way way more fun to play and that certainly counts for something i think feral cats are one of the specs which could be a surprise and come out on average much higher than expected and we already think that they will be good they are in a strange place of doing well early game as their bleeds ignore armor whilst also scaling super well with armor penetration in later game raids they're an absolute single target machine with strong burst aoe and the aoe is mega bursty and just not sustained whatsoever the difference for cats will be on experience with the playstyle and knowledge of the fights you need to know where the target swaps will be when best to pop cooldowns will this mob live long enough for me to reapply dots each fight will have its own trial and error learning curve of how to optimize a feral druid's rotations which will make it super interesting for some and frustrating for others if you want a chill raid with a nice simple playstyle feral cat might not be for you finally restoration druids you'll want one more or less it's the same deal as tbc they fill a niche they bring great utility you know what druids do by now the combat res the innovate and so on no real bad words to say against resto druid if you like it now you'll like it in wrath even more however much like tbc it's not going to be that topping heels when compared to others if that's what you want out of the game you need to be thinking about holy power again these are speaking from experience talking with others and personal research on each specialization we've had surprises in the past we will be having them again i'm sure but those are my current impressions of druid performance in pve so that's about enough on pve let's talk pvp and head over to the arena if you're an avid tbc pvp i'm sure your impression of the druid class at the moment looks something like about 95 of them are restoration five percent of them are ferals and boomkins don't exist this changes in wrath quite a bit restoration goes from arguably the best healer in tbc to the least represented in wrath though it still fits in a number of extremely powerful comps it's just not in every second game anymore barrelcat becomes considerably more threatening and gains a wide variety of tools to become more effective and boomkin um yeah not in the best spot still so restoration do they fall after they just get terrible what's the deal with that i'll put it on two main reasons why the other healers have caught up everyone else just gets absolutely an insane volume of buffs while in some ways restoration gets some of their utility and cc taken away from them and number two only having a poison and curse as defensive dispels and no offensive dispels is not a very good toolkit when it comes to wrath of the lich king everyone has just kind of caught up to their level now here's a talent tree that a restoration druid may consider for the arena there isn't a huge amount of changes compared to our pve healing spec notable inclusions are natural perfection over in the resto tree giving you both more offensive and defensive capability and of course improve the bark skin which makes the druid just have more baseline armor additional damage reduction on bark skin and it makes it harder to dispel you can also glyph bark skin on top of this to make it even better changes in the feral tree have made it much less attractive to dip into that for the likes of brutal impact or feral charge both of which have now moved deeper into the tree leading to part of the druid's pvp utility taking a hit and as you will soon find out early raph the lich king is arguably more burst heavy than tbc was which isn't great news when the majority of your heels really need time to take effect droids often pair up well with classes that cover their weaknesses or they can cc chain effectively with with comps such as resto druid shadow priest mage aka god comp or resto druid destro warlock elemental shaman aka lsd in fact they fit into many more caster comps than melee overall and caster comps in wrath are real scary speaking of casters boomkin surely it's in a better place than wrath than classical tbc right well uh it kind of just does the same thing that it's always done if you let a boonkins sit at the back and cast their spells they're gonna delete your team but it's just too easy to stop them from doing that except after the lich king boomies will turbo delete your team between the bonus stats from eclipse and starfall boomi's out of combat burst from stealth is really high practice teams however have too many options to shut it down through stuns and silences and if you are under any effect that causes loss of your character starfall just gets turned off like a light switch and then you're left jumping about applying not too scary dots and waiting for peels so you can play the game again talent-wise there's barely any deviation from the pve spec apart from of course picking up alkyn frenzy and obviously in this case you always get typhoon because believe me you are going to need the ability to kite as much as you can get also boomies don't do very well defensively they get a nice chunk of physical mitigation from their form but improved bark skin is all the way down at the bottom of the restoration tree meaning for every other spec it's just going to get dispelled more often than not leaving you with travel form and running for your life is it a fun battleground spec yes can you boot people off the middle of eye of the storm you bet you can arena though yeah it's still going to be a rough pick to get good value out of a quick mention for feral or bear it's not a thing in arena it just doesn't do enough damage and doesn't have the utility cat does cat however is the most improved druid arena spec by a lot they are pretty rare in tbc at the moment and have a very narrow number of comps where they work a whole host of changes in wrath makes them considerably better first up feral does very high damage and has practically infinite mobility which they can really take full advantage of now that they've had mana issues solved through improved a leader of the pack they can choose a target and stick to it like nothing else here is an example talentry additions such as nurturing instinct give a lot of bonus heals you do and you receive primal tenacity is a solid two-part talent to reduce the duration of fears and a huge 30 damage reduction when stunned in cat cat also now has a slow which they practically spam just by playing the game in infected wounds king of the jungle reduces the cost of shapeshifts by 60 in addition to the other effects it gives and every five combo points spent by the druids means they're going to be popping out of form and instantly cycloning somebody on the enemy team thanks to predatory strikes this makes feral druid a high pressure high damage choice that usually fits alongside another physical class that can provide a much needed mortal strike effect for their pressure to be effective such as rogue or hunter oh and berserk can both clear active fear effects and then makes you immune to them for 15 seconds that is a lot of uptime on some classes that rely on those forms of cc overall feral gets a good look into a number of comps and should be seen a bunch more than it is in tbc which brings us on to tss something you'll notice about tier sets in general for wrath of the lich king is that they start off kind of being a little bit dull just adding a bit of damage to your regular rotation and then in tier 8 they start getting a little bit interesting and then tier 9 somebody at blizzard went crazy with them and then in tier 10 they went mega crazy with tier set power levels nevertheless so let's take a look at the looks and the effects of the tsx that the druid will be getting ts7 the dream walker garb hey if we're gonna reuse the entirety of naxxramas again might as well reuse the tier sets again as well right you damn right we're gonna do that and they still look awesome all of them the druid's no exception set bonus wise feral first it of course has to work for both specializations here i'd say cat gets the better end of the bargain an extension on finishing moves helps smooth out that rotation and more tiger's fiori is only ever good for restoration a reduction on the cost of lifebloom is okay but druids aren't a class that are overly hurting for mana efficiency in the first place bonus nourish healing can add up and make them quite the spot healer but this is often a role that other healers are doing in the first place but balance five percent damage on insect swarm is just pretty meh to be honest it's far from your best spell in the first place five percent crit on wrath and starfire though is really really good boomies already have a huge baseline crit chance through talents and benefit hugely from dealing critical strikes making this seem like quite an attractive four set here eight from ulduar the night sun guard best tier looks wise of the expansion hands down always been a big fan of this suits the druid theme really well both bonuses for feral cats seem kind of insane player casting procking from your dots is like a dream scenario it means more shreds easier rotation and just the chance to pop off and the full set is eight second more on savage raw which is again fantastic or bears it feels once again it's just okay with the nature of tanking and rage generation you aren't as in need of clear casting procs and an extra eight seconds on survival instincts is probably just not seeing any value most of the time the restoration tier 8 2 set is 10 more heals on swift mend which isn't too exciting it's a nice spot heal but not usually something you're popping on cooldown the four piece makes it so rejuvenation also does an instant heal when you apply it i had a look into this and it appears to just be an additional tick of redo when you apply the spell so in other words not terribly exciting balance looks pretty good so the seven percent here appears to be added on top as a flat amount i think who knows the tooltip doesn't exactly give it away old wow head comments don't say either if it's seven percent extra as a percentage though this is a pretty tiny bonus the four piece just says it has a chance great blizz i prefer to not know what my gear does another session of looking into it later i believe it's an eight percent proc chance with no internal cooldown which is pretty good actually i would say tier 9 from trial of the crusader these are the rune totem or malfurions garb though looks wise i don't know if it's because they wanted to do two different sets between hoarder alliance or what's going on here but all of tier 9 without exception look so bad it doesn't even look remotely good what a downgrade from the ulduar set the same however cannot be said for most of the tier set bonuses well i say most of because the feral set looks like a downgrade from ulduar the two-piece reduces the cooldown on growl five percent more damage on lacerate and three extra seconds on rake nothing too exciting here all set hey cat can benefit from both here that's quite nice shorter cooldown on park skin and five percent extra crit on rip and ferocious bike which is a decent damage increase as your rip will be critting baseline anyway thanks to a talent restoration five percent more crit on nourish which is okay more spot heals more living seeds going out and the fall set makes it so rejuvenation can crit which could be quite interesting there's also a glyph called rapid rejuvenation that allows rejuvenation to benefit from haste too balance as per every set so far has great tier set bonuses by the looks of it the two set means moonfire's periodic damage can crit the vengeance talent in the balance tree also says it affects moonfire so this should be a nice bit of synergy the full set though a bit dull is four percent flat damage on your big spells which should be decent the final stop is ice crown citadel for tier 10 the elisha weave garb i don't know about the looks too much i get it it's meant to be a thorny looking undead plant thing going on i just prefer the urdu one bonuses then feral first 20 more damage on swipe bar and lesser eight okay now these are some tier set bonuses no more of that five percent nonsense cats on the other hand only get 10 less energy cost on rip which is pretty minor the four piece makes enrage into a damage reduction for bear and removes the armor penalty which is again very strong and for cats it lets rake though both bleeds you're constantly keeping up are now critting which sounds like a lot of fun restoration 2 set has a rather strangely worded wild grow feels more and the full set gives rejuvenation a chance to jump and reset its duration which despite it only being a two percent chance sounds really cool it could proc more when clift it can proc off itself i bet this adds up over the duration of a long fight where people are consistently taking damage to round it out as per usual the balance set looks amazing the two set is 15 more damage for six seconds after gaining clear casting this should have great uptime particularly during your burst when it should be just chain procking off of starfall the force that makes it so when some of your spells quit they add seven percent of the damage as a damage over time effect by icc you're going to be hitting some big boy crits as a boomi so this should add up if it's worth taking so with all that said having talked pvp expected performance pve the tier sets and many points in between can we give an answer to druid in wrath of the lich king classic how broken is it now it's better overall without a single doubt but certainly on the lower end compared to what other classes bring to the table now if you put raffle the lich king druid in tbc it will look absolutely unreal insane but that's testament to how much each class gets really powered up in the expansion barrel tank takes a bit of a downgrade when compared to tbc cat gets a massive boost in all areas of content and boomkin and restoration feel that good utility niche whilst both gaining a much more engaging and fun play style druids continue to be that all around can do it all and can do it all well type of class now so if you're somebody that enjoys a variety of playstyles and being able to fill the gap in your group druid might be a consideration for wrath the rogue so far has had quite the journey throughout classic's lifetime starting in the original game they were a pve powerhouse that was just as good in pvp content in tbc they grew even more powerful in pvp somehow and arguably were the most consistent class found at high ratings across arena brackets yet in pve they often struggled to find their spots in raids people saw them as a low utility class that was easily replaced by others who could outperform them well that is until we started hitting late game tbc gearing and a certain set of legendary weapons which also helped out quite a bit so in wrath of the lich king how will world of warcraft's premiere stealth and thievery class evolve let's check out the rogue so then what is new to the class baseline we need to start off with poisons in classic and tbc they were quite honestly pretty lackluster yeah they are great in pvp content but more for their utility in applying a slow or immortal strike type effect at no point have they ever actually done damage this is going to change by a lot first up you are not making your own poisons anymore this is a shame really i'm not quite sure why this was taken away they had already buffed poison durations to be an hour in tbc so you didn't have to make all that many of them and it was a fun little class fantasy thing nevertheless in wrath the vendor that used to sell you your poison materials will now just instead sell them to you directly also vanish does not need every agent anymore either so more bank space for the rogue i guess on top of that you're going to be using a poison on your main hand and offhand all of the time windfury totem now gives melee haste instead of that temporary buff that allowed extra attacks yes rip win fury totem and finally poisons will now begin to scale in damage with the rogue's attack power so in short poisons are really good make sure you have plenty on you all of the time more or less every single poison has had minor two major changes as well for mind numbing and crippling poison the proc chance is now 50 and the cast speed reduction effect on mind numbing is 30 down from 60. instant poisons move to a proc per minute instead of a percentage chance depending on your weapon speed deadly poison now works the same but once it's at five stacks prox will instead apply your other weapon's poisons these two poisons will contribute a significant portion of your dps especially as assassination which we will look at soon an aesthetic poison which you probably didn't even know exists because it's completely useless in tbc now dispels an enrage effect if you desperately need that and some fights do hunters usually deal with this though wound poison doesn't stack anymore there's one application 50 healing reduction it's both better that you don't need to stack it and worse in that it doesn't protect your other poisons energy is no longer gained in increments of 20 and will continuously regenerate haste also benefits energy regeneration which it already didn't tbc but i think now it regenerates constantly it's a little bit more noticeable aside from this rogues have also learned the delicate and stealthy art of equipping axes for assassination exposed armor now reduces armor by 20 percent instead of a flat value and improved exposed armor now reduces the energy cost of this ability instead of making it more powerful which puts expose on equal footing with other abilities like thunder armor or a new hunter petability acid spit you'll of course want one of these up when you're raiding but it's not always going to be the rogue's job anymore so that's some good news in venom gets buffed significantly throughout wrath and i'm glad it did because the whole mutilate rogue just never saw the light of day and was never viable at all at any point in tbc now on top of doing high nature damage of course which is by passing armor it will also dramatically increase the chance for you to apply poisons for a short duration afterwards and most importantly there is a talent there's also a glyph but you'll take the talent when you're assassination which stops in venom from consuming your deadly poison stacks and absolutely ruining your dps which is vital dismantle is another new ability that removes all carried equipment from the target for 10 seconds it's like disarm but better a short cooldown and a low energy cost it will remove shields and pvp against high armor targets and the disarm effect was one of the few bits of utility which a rogue did not already have and well now they do over in the combat tree rogues get something which historically in raiding has made them extremely overpowered banked on top of the threat reduction effect will now also make you take 50 percent less damage from aoe fx for six seconds so essentially a rogue is going to survive practically any big aoe ability banked might not even be on your bar at the moment but for ralph the lich king i would find somewhere where you can have it to hand combat also gets a new ability fan of knives costs 50 energy hits enemies nearby around you and does bonus damage if you have a dagger equipped fan of knives will also apply your poisons this finally gives all rogues access to a decent aoe effect in wrath however it doesn't build combo points which is a shame but hey it's aoe and that is certainly better than nothing but the stealthy boys in the subtlety tree not too many changes actually zap now works on many more targets other than humanoids in fact it works on practically anything other than mechanicals there's another new ability tricks of the trade think misdirection but for a melee class and straight up better it's a short 30 second cooldown and lasts 6 seconds during which time it will redirect all of your threat to the chosen target and increase their damage by 15 for the duration uses of this vary quite a bit sometimes raids choose to have two rogues who would tricks each other on cooldown to bounce their threat out and give themselves a nice damage buff sometimes it's just common sense to put it on a tank so they can build threat quickly on a new target you can also glyph this ability to last four more seconds and the tier 10 2 set makes it give you 15 energy instead of costing that much you could in theory have three rogues with tricks of the trade glyph giving one member of your raid team a permanent 15 damage buff it sounds like something past enthusiasts would end up at least experimenting with hey at least the raid would be guaranteed three rogues if this was the case but i don't expect many people to really do this in practice and your tanks threat would have to be absolutely insane to be keeping up but it's just something to think about let's talk raiding and the pve talent changes for this i'll be covering both assassination and combat as the rogue has two fully viable play styles which will vary depending on your preference as well as which tier and gear is currently available i'll start with the assassination or mutilate spec whichever you want to call it because this specialization is more or less brand new as it was entirely unused throughout the duration of tbc in fact rogues and pve have been combat spamming sinister strikes since day one of classic finally things change and the talent tree is very much gonna reflect that as there's been an enormous amount of stuff which has had to change to make it work here is an example talent tree let's talk about the new stuff blood spatter gives your bleed some extra damage vigor has been moved all the way up in the tree from where it used to be during tbc and improved poisons gets mega buffed it used to just increase the chance to apply poisons by 10 now it's 20 percent more chance to apply deadly poison and 50 for instant poison murder has also moved a little down the tree and is now a flat 4 damage increase deadly brew is a new talent to the tree and is more of a pvp thing basically makes it so you get to apply crippling poison without actually having to have it active overkill is yet another new talent which makes you generate a lot more energy in stealth and for 20 seconds afterwards we'll have to see how this interacts with the likes of vanish or the updated version of night elf shadow meld which works in the same way as vanish there's a chance you'll be able to proc this talent multiple times per fight or maybe not the beta will tell us for sure when it's out find weakness has also just changed from damage after you use a finishing move to just do more damage in general focused attacks gives assassination a lot more energy generation over the course of a fight and master poisoner is yet another new talent yes assassination really needed this much help this supplies a three percent crit debuff on the target which otherwise can only be done by retribution pally or an elemental shaman as well as decreasing the duration of poisons on you by half which i'm sure has some niche uses here and there and most importantly it makes it so in venom doesn't consume your deadly poison and absolutely delete your dps anymore which is amazing then the table looks fairly decent but we haven't taken it here and we're going to see why when we look at the towns in the other trees in a moment what cut to the chase does is remove slice and dies from your regular rotation and just make it into a one-time button press at the start of a fight and then you forget about it the bottom of the tree is the winner for the most boring bottom of talentry ability in the entire game hunger for five percent more damage look it's nice and all but i'm looking over there at classes like warriors with bladestorm and titan's grip and it's good obviously and you can glyph it to be eight percent more damage which is a lot of flat damage and you should be able to proc it off any bleeds such as marksman hunters who will be spamming bleeds or warriors it's really effective but it's just not terribly exciting over in the combat tree we're really only after lightning reflexes for that 10 extra melee haste which means more poisons being applied more focused attack procs and just more consistent damage which is what assassination is all about finally in the subtree two points are spent for a little bit more damage on some of your abilities assassination rogues use glyphs such as mutilate hunger for blood and the third is a bit of a flex in this case i've went for fan of knives for a bit more aoe if however you prefer to stay with combat rogue which you may end up playing later on in the expansion four reasons we'll get onto in a moment and we should also take a look at that improved slice and dice now increases its duration by fifty percent but only two talent points and their past will also now generate a combo point which is a nice little leveling change you should think about sword specialization has been renamed to hack and slash and still gives a chance to gain a bonus swing with either a sword or an axe now may specialization now makes them ignore armor instead of having a chance to stun and fixed weapons have been added into the dagger's talent and gives more crit blade twisting has had 10 damage added on to certain abilities so that literally anybody takes this talent for the first time ever and vitality increases energy regeneration by a huge 25 which is really gonna smooth out your rotation throwing specialization is a new addition and increases the range of your well ranged abilities and adds an interrupt to deadly throw similar to what the pvp gloves did in tbc unfair advantage is another more leveling oriented talent and savage combat is a valuable debuff that adds four percent physical damage taken to the target only either a combat rogue or an arms warrior can apply this right near the bottom of the tree prey on the weak which should essentially just be a flat 20 bonus quick damage on the majority of enemies you're facing and finally combat gets a very exciting and historically very buggy ability killing spree teleport between enemies attacking in rapid succession and then hopefully don't land somewhere where you fall through the floor or disconnect which is how it's worked on retail for years when it works though it adds to combat rogue's super cleave heavy kit and it's really satisfying to fire off combat rogues consider glyphs such as killing spree to lower that cooldown massively sinister strike to give it a chance to add an extra combo point and the third one again is a bit up in the air here i've gone for tricks of the trade for a bit more duration on it so that's a little bit of a pve talent overview but how do we think rogues are going to perform overall in wrath classic as per usual i have to mention this take this with a grain of salt this is based off my experiences conversations with others and my own personal research i think rogues will be overall in a much better spot than tbc if i'm honest i can't see a raid ever running without at least one and i don't think there's anything wrong with having more than one of them either now that assassination is not absolutely useless you want somebody in your raid to be picking up those daggers when they end up dropping speaking of assassination they are expected to be one of the most consistently high dps throughout the entire expansion the gearing requirements they have to be able to start pumping great damage is also very low and they scale well however the damage is super single target focused and the nature of applying deadly poison stacks and having to build combo points means they're even weaker than rogues usually are at target switching also they are um how can i put this one of the most straightforward specializations in the game they don't have a big cooldown to pop they just kind of choose a target and hit it very hard with a very simple rotation i'd say assassination could be a good spec if you like to perform well in raid but also like to pop some real life consumables during your raid if you know what i mean as the expansion progresses and more armor penetration gear begins to become available in ulduar and beyond it's expected many rogues will look to make the swap over to combat as it should eventually begin to outscale the pure single target of assassination and by icecrown citadel combat should be pulling comfortably ahead though assassination is still very consistent and i can see them beating combat out on single target fights for a large portion of the expansion either way both specialization should be viable in a rate com and it'll be down to you to pick one that fits better in any event rogues get more utility through tricks of the trade valuable debuff from master poisoner and savage combat and more consistent damage throughout the expansion i think rogue should be a pretty good steady choice for a melee that's about enough on pve though i reckon time to talk arena though in tbc rogues and arena are simply part massively overpowered the sheer amount of cc burst mobility utility and just damage they put out is questionable how they ever made it to live service like that in wrath as many other things do this changes quite a lot their damage distribution is different as is their survivability and just their general playstyle gone are the days of chasing people around spamming hemorrhage in wrath instead you're going to be using daggers also rogues aren't about applying that constant pressure and building up wound poison stacks and now they are way more burst focused and on top of that a lot squishier than they currently are average rogues will find themselves getting deleted in a few seconds when out of position whilst experienced rogues still have an amazing toolkit to outplay and outmaneuver their enemies finally before we take a look at towns there kind of is an assassination pvp spec and it kind of plays like how the tbc version of rogue does we just pick a target and hit them and do a lot of damage but it's just missing so many tools that salty has and we've looked to the majority of the assassination towns so i think for this we're just gonna look at sub relentless strikes is now at the top of the subtlety tree and is a five point talent elusiveness also gets changed it used to reduce the cooldown on blind and vanish by 90 seconds now both of those are reduced by 60 seconds but it also makes clocker shadows come up 30 faster as well though this means there is no more auto win on the second blind anymore against a wide range of comps as blind will now share a cooldown with the pvp trinket serrated blade reduces a percentage of target's armor instead of a flat amount emo gets bonus damage scaling when using a dagger and initiative has changed to be a 100 chance to add a combo point for some more consistent openness and damage premeditation has been removed from preparation but its cooldown has been lowered from two minutes all the way down to 20 seconds waylay is a brand new talent and adds an attack speed and moves speed slow to your backstab and ambush abilities i've put one point here in honor among thieves it should proc fairly often when in group pvp and when considering that some damage over time and heal over time effects can crit now that should also add into it filthy tricks is another new talent and largely removes the energy cost from a bunch of utility spells the rogue has as well as reducing the cooldown on preparation to five minutes total water from the shadows makes it so your backstab and ambush are much more spammable during a burst window as well as increasing all damage by five percent and at the bottom of the tree we have shadow dance a short one minute cooldown that allows you to use stealth abilities for six seconds regardless of actually being in stealth or not this adds a huge amount of utility and just brand new combos for the road to try out between applying a garage silence to somebody not expecting it catching a healer who's trying to drink with a sap and just so much more at the top of the combat tree i've also taken improved gouge for even more cc subtlety rose can use a bunch of different glyphs depending on what kind of comps you're facing i've decided here to go with ones like preparation for even more cc and disruption shadow dance for an extra global or two out of stealth as well as gouge to make this utility ability even better between an insane toolkit of cc such as kick gouge garage cheap shot kidney shot utility and mobility like blind and shadow step and strong burst damage from ambush and backstab rogues just don't ever stop being a great pvp class and they continue to be viable across a wide range of comps such as roguelok shaman or the inevitably forever viable rogue mage priest ending off on the tier sets for the rogue then tier 7 from the revamped next rammus either turntee and sartharian's lair is the bonescyfe battlegear and as per all the copy paste tier 3 gear it's awesome in the lux department two set is 10 more damage on rupture at this point the expansion i would imagine all the rogues will be assassination so that's a little bit of bonus damage for you the force that reduces the cost of your combo building moves by five percent which in real terms means mutilate costs three less energy so yeah not great tier eight the terror blade battle gear from ulduar i like this set it's a good mix of spooky and rogie i also like the whippy shoulder things it just kind of stands out on it two set means you get one energy each time deadly poison deals damage which is okay it scales in aoe situations where you can proc it via fan of knives and on single target it's a marginal energy gain also it means 20 more rupture damage which means somebody at blizzard really likes this ability as we will continue to see with tier ix these are either garona or van cleef's battle gear let's not talk about how t9 looks and move straight onto the bonuses two-piece a chance on ruptured take to reduce the cost of your next ability by 40 energy which sounds pretty good until i went to check on the proc chance and found its two percent so it's not good the full set is five percent crit chance on various combo builders particularly nice with mutilate since it scales up with seal fate's ability to generate extra combo points ending off in tier 10 the shadow blades battle gear it looks kind of um like a halloween costume went wrong i don't know that geist hood always look goofy to me the two set makes tricks of the trade grant 15 energy instead of costing 15 which is really nice you were already pressing this button so somebody else can get 15 damage out of it or for the threat generation now you get a benefit personally as well from doing so the full set makes it so melee finishing moves have a 13 chance to add three combo points to your target what a weird random selection of numbers sometimes you can pop off if it's procking back to back other times it just doesn't really do anything i'd prefer something a bit more consistent than that so now we've had a look at the pve various specializations new abilities pvp and tss can we give an answer to rogue in wrath of the lich king classic how broken is it now it's in a pretty damn good state i would actually say assassination seems pretty broken when you can push incredibly high dps with super low gearing requirements combat though should take over later as more armor penetration gear becomes available yet both should be competitive rogues are now much more wanted across pve content and are an asset to bring to raid with tricks of the trade and a number of valuable debuffs and people won't spend half the expansion meaning them anymore like they did in tbc that is for sure in pvp they remain an absolute powerhouse of a class yet i think they get more difficult to play due to being squishier and having to focus more around burst windows rather than following somebody around spamming himo despite all this guilds won't be jumping at the chance to stack rogues by any means and i don't think a version of world of warcraft exists where loads of people don't want to play this class for obvious reasons so do expect a bit of competition when looking for those raid spots and that is the rogue in wrath let me know your thoughts on whether you'll be giving this class a go as a main origin alt i reckon it'll be a pretty solid choice so if you've played tbc or even if you gave it a miss the shaman was by far nova class even came remotely close the most in demand for raiding content between totems three specializations that brought a wide variety of utility on top of good performance and this little known spell called heroism or bloodlust this class was always on everyone's recruitment list i said in the tbc shaman video if you just want to guarantee a raid spot play resto shaman and i think i got that right but for wrath of the lich king as it does for every class a lot of stuff changes and some of those changes don't work out too favorably for our totem dropping friends at least in pve that is because pvp is quite the opposite with three specializations tons of changes and additions there is so much to cover here so let's talk about the shaman in wrath of the lich king starting from the top what's new to the class baseline then first up is a huge quality of life change to totems shamans now get what are essentially totem presets these are call of the ancestors elements and spirits using the drop down toolbar you can customize a set of totems that you can then drop all four with with the press of a single button or three or perhaps even two it depends how many you add into it meaning if you more or less always have the same totems that you want to drop it's not for gcds anymore it's one which is such a nice change makes repositioning in pve so much easier and setting up in pvp considerably faster you'll still want the good utility totems keybinded like your earthbind grounding tremor and so on also the totem you equip we are one would usually go will now count as every type of totem so you don't have to carry the quest ones around in your bag anymore what's new in the elemental tree then so earth shock does not interrupt anymore it now applies a small attack speed slow shamans do however gain an entirely new spell for interrupts called wind shear this is a two second interrupt on a six second cooldown and yes it is about as obnoxious as it sounds to try and cast a spell versus a shaman and this is also off gcd all interrupts are off gcd and wrath actually but this is very nice to have in pve and exceptionally powerful in pvp iron over totem has been removed from the game and turned into a spell that the shaman casts it will now make your active fire totem erupt instead doing damage to nearby enemies overall this is a big buff as its cooldown is lower it does more damage and there's no longer that annoying thing that happens when you drop your fire nova totem it generates about one million threat and then enemies just turn around and one-shot it flameshot periodic damage can now crit and scales with your haste stone claw totem will shield all other totems this is actually a huge deal in pvp as we will get onto a little later new to elemental is hex some consistent cc for the shaman at last it's kind of like a polymorph but a bit better as the target needs to take a little bit of damage before it will break this spell does have a 45 second cooldown though and it is considered a curse effect in wrath and of course you can't have an elemental shaman without a lava burst the big spell elemental has been waiting for the time of weaving those spaghetti and meatballs is finally upon us this is a huge nuke which will always create against the target with flame shock active and contributes a lot of the shaman's damage particularly in pvp content changes to enhancements toolkit are mainly for the totems in fact there's quite a lot to go over here flametongue totem now gives spell power instead of wrath of air and flame tongue weapon buffs your active weapon with spell damage too rather now instead gives your group five percent spell haste race of air that's the agility totem and tranquil er totem that's the threat reduction one have both been removed from the game and strength of earth will now give strength and agility instead stone skim totem gives armor instead of just reducing damage taken and win fiori totem has been reworked and no longer grants bonus attacks to party members it instead increases melee haste win fury weapon will still give bonus attacks though don't worry about that and the biggest change perhaps overall for the shaman in the expansion is that heroism and bloodlust now applies to your entire party or raid its cooldown has been lowered to five minutes but it applies a ten minute debuff called exhaustion or stated that prevents you from benefiting from another similar effect you may see people actively trying to die to reset this debuff but we'll see how it works in practice once the bait is up this single change to this one single ability is why you will see raids going from wanting five shamans in tbc too well a lot less in wrath oh and yes you can still use heroism in arena in wrath as well restoration tree has a few less changes cure disease and poison have been combined into one ability the same goes for poison and disease cleansing totems though this totem is one of the few in the game that is only party wide because automatically dispelling two different effects is kind of op also resto shamans gain the ability to decurse but only resto shamans can do it as they have to talent it restoration also gets a weapon enhancement now called earth a living weapon this gives you a bit of extra bonus healing and a chance to apply a heart effect on your heels let's check out some talent trees for shamans in pve then we have three specs to cover overall so we better make a start and i would like to begin with elemental as with every caster going from tbc to wrath mana problems are solved and the rotation gets more interesting it's still fairly straightforward though shoot lightning sometimes shoot meatballs see big crits be happy hall of fayeno also gained some extra benefits for lava burst and the fire nova totem is reworked a little bit to increase the effect of the new spell instead i have the storm gets changed to actually be consistent this is such a huge quality of life buff in tbc elemental is one of the very few casters that has no decent spell knockback prevention but old either storm to proc you had to be cripped by specifically a physical attack which is useless in pve and too random in pvp another great quality of life changes elemental reach now increases the range of flame shots so you don't have to be really close to apply this spell elemental mastery gets a small change now making the next spell instant and then giving a 15 haste buff for 15 seconds thor murph and fire is just a good all-round talent for every area of content reducing the cooldown on chain lightning adding a root to earthbind and increasing the damage of flameshock's periodic effect booming echoes brush your shock spells a little bit more and elemental oath is new to the tree giving you some bonus spell damage after you crit and increasing your group's spell crit chance by five percent totem of wrath has been reworked to give bonus spell damage and add a three percent crit debuff to enemies lava flows is a huge new talent that makes lava bursts scale really well with your spell damage and adds a little heroism effect to you after flame shock is dispelled which it will be in pvp a lot shamanism just makes your main damage spells scale a little bit better with your gear and the final tone in the tree is thunderstorm which is such a versatile ability a self-peel mana regen damaging aoe invisibility potting and running to the center of either the storm will never not be fun with this spell in fact on retail they added extra walls to eye of the storm because knocking people off was so powerful in pve it can be like a reverse death grip if there's one mob that isn't on the tank's deathball overall it's just a really good ability to add to elementals diverse toolkit elementor uses glyphs such as lava for even more damage on that ability lightning bolt for some flat increase and wrath for more spell damage on to enhancement then much like tbc it's still all about dual wielding yet we have a bunch of changes to spice up the rotation first up the whole totem twisting thing to maintain wind fury and agility totems at the same time it's not only dead it's mega dead as neither of those things even exist anymore enhancement gains more exciting cooldowns and access to some solid aoe there is also an alternative play style for enhancement that we can talk about in a moment but for the time being this is a standard pve type spec that i've decided to go with so we can look at the new talents improved shields now affects all various shields across your specializations from lightning to water to earth you still have to cast ghost wolf baseline in wrath i thought they would have removed this but nope and we don't really have enough talent points to pick this up in the tree either which is a shame shamanistic focus now reduces the mana cost of shocks by 45 at all times instead of 60 after a melee making it a more attractive talent for a variety of specs elemental weapons is new and just adds a bit of extra damage to whichever style you're using mental dexterity is also new and increases your scaling for enhanced damage improved wind fury totem increases the melee haste it provides from 16 to 20 only either a shaman or a death knight can provide this buff however normally death knights are a lot more flexible in the either a tank or a dps can provide this buff and i want to say a braf the lich king raid without a death knight is just unthinkable but if there for some reason isn't then it's probably worth taking unleashed rage has also been changed now giving some expertise and being a passive rather than a proc after you crit towards the bottom of the tree is where we start getting to the newer and largely more interesting stuff static shock makes lightning shield useful in pve content you won't need watershield anymore as mana isn't a problem thanks to shamanistic rage only being a one minute cooldown and improved storm strike also helping lava lash is another brand new talent that gives enhancement shaman something else to track a short cooldown attack that deals bonus damage when using flame tongue on your offhand maelstrom weapon is also introduced in wrath this gives your attacks a chance to proc a stacking buff when it reaches five stacks you can fire off an instant cast spell a lightning bolt or chain lightning in pve a hex or perhaps an off-heel in pvp this talent provides so much diversity and has always been a favorite of mine in enhance's toolkit finally at the bottom of the tree is feral spirit a 3-minute cooldown second duration these doggies give the shaman a ton of utility and a little bit of extra damage they can remove roots and increase your movement speed and their own they provide a small amount of healing they can stun they even have an aoe taunt as well if you really wanted them to over in the elemental tree for enhancement here we've talked about most of the bits we want the only one to mention is elemental devastation which hasn't really changed since vanilla there is also expected to be another way to play enhancement which i should give a mention to it's called spell hands the idea here is that instead of focusing the majority of your damage into physical attacks is that you actively tried to use certain spell damage focused weapons jewelry and trinkets to rely on shaman's capability to do magic damage instead just from a melee distance not a huge amount changes build-wise but it should give you access to much better aoe through the likes of fire nova and more consistent single target damage the idea of this being an actual thing was never fully explored during wrath of the lich king when it was alive and it's more of a fan server creation though i'd say at the moment it's very up in the air whether things are going to work on blizzard's wrath compared to what people have been experimenting with elsewhere shall we say it's one to keep an eye on for the beta people will test it thoroughly i can guarantee you that it could pop off or it could just flop a bit if i'm honest we don't fully know until it happens nevertheless if you're playing enhancement do keep it in mind enhancement shamans power up further with glitch such as fire nova storm strike and flame tongue weapon which brings us to restoration is there finally more to life than just pressing chain heel well yes yes there is but chain heel is still very good let's get straight into the talents then tidal force is new and adds a huge extra crit chance modifier to your next few spells this plus nature's swiftness is practically guaranteed to top somebody off improve water shield add some mana regen by having it proc when you crit with certain spells and healing weight doesn't stack up a buff anymore it just gives a flat increase to healing wave blend spirit is a brand new spell and adds a de-curse effect to shaman's dispel nature's blessing adds a bit more stats and improved earth shield just improves the amount of healing and the number of charges this ability has blessing of the eternal and some more spell crit and guarantees earth-loving weapon procs on low health targets ancestral awakening makes it so your single target healing crits also provide a little bonus to the lowest health target in the raid tidal waves makes it so you want to do more with your life than press chain heal all day every day giving both healing wave and a lesser healing wave bonuses after you either cast chain heal or riptide speaking of riptide this is the brand new end of talentry ability a small instant here with a hot on top of it on a very low cooldown and then if you chain heal the target with this active it'll consume the effect and increase its potency this fills a gap for the resto shaman something you can press on the move a little bit of help to top people who are dipping and just an overall good spell which they needed your glyphs depend a little bit what your role is in the raid as a resto shaman i've come with a more aoe focused setup here with chain heal healing stream totem and earth living weapon so how is shaman going to fair throughout rafa the lich king then well here's the shocker a lot of raids will drop from bringing at least five of them in tbc two two of them in wrath in fact i'm quite confident in saying that guild's pushing high performance will bring one and only one which will be resto or maybe enhancement so what gives do shamans just underperform this expansion well not exactly no it's just that some other classes do what they do whilst performing better this is the not so pretty side of bring the player not the class i expect elemental shamans to fare quite similarly to how they have done in tbc they'll start off looking pretty good and then each new tier that comes out they just gradually fall off as they don't scale as well as other spell casters do as for enhancement i think it's one of the specs that could really be a surprise in terms of how well they would do as mentioned earlier the whole idea of spell hands just isn't fully known at this point in time whether it's going to work as expected on blizzard servers but the normal enhancement spec is also a known high performer in early game content and also scales very well on top of that also you don't have to bother with totem twisty anymore and i think it's got overall a more interesting rotation restoration shaman should still be very popular not a contender for top healer anymore as they have consistently been through tbc but they still have that good utility and a mix of tank and raid healing and of course let's not forget whatever happens to a shaman they have literally the best spell that's ever been put in the game ever to this day in world of warcraft heroism or bloodlust whether it's elemental enhancement or resto there will always be a raid spot for a shaman just not as many as they used to be that's about enough on pve though so what about pvp let's get straight into it again with elemental so whilst elemental does not get the best reputation in pve for wrath content if you care more about pvp it should definitely be something to consider playing if you enjoy casters because this spec is an easy s tier all day i should have mentioned this somewhere by now really but it's one of those less well remembered changes in wrath and that is to spell knockback you see in classic and tbc it's a big problem sure there are talents to counter it but sometimes rng doesn't go your way that one second spellcast turns into over two seconds and you lose half your health at the same time not a very fun scenario in wrath spell knockback happens twice and after that it's like you're an npc with zero knockback at all and for a specialization like elemental which needs to cast a lot whilst often face tanking this is such a massive buff it cannot be understated if we take a look at talent tree now elemental warding's just a flat six percent damage reduction and quite far down his astral shift which is another 30 damage reduction when stunned beard or silence so basically elemental shamans just take a huge amount of reduced damage baseline and of course they're wearing a shield and have male armor thumb earth and fire gives elemental a root on earth bind totem lava flows as mentioned earlier gives you a big haste buff when flame shot gets dispelled thunderstorm and pvp particularly on the likes of bladesurge arena or dalaran is incredibly impactful one knockback can absolutely change an entire arena match shamans have that consistently great utility an interrupting wind shear on a six second cooldown grounding totem tremor totem heroism on top of that elemental paxim of the scariest burst in the game a lava burst into elemental mastery with a few overload procs in there is fifty percent of any one self any day of the week combine that with another caster and you will see people getting a hundred to zeroed by good coordinated comps with elemental shamans in stonecall total now provides all your other totems with a little shield when it's dropped meaning there has to be a bit more effort put into totem stomping and you can glyph stone core on top of that to put a shield on yourself as well oh and i nearly forgot on top of all of this shamans get hex a hard cc to help set up all that burst you have access to best of all though it has to be the change to totems you can instantly drop four at once now or three if you want instead or even two it's all up to how you customize it and you will want to customize it for mana efficiency's sake even if you just prefer casual battlegrounds this spec is still absolute god tier and you're pretty self-sufficient with off-heels and some peels as well through thunderstorm and roots i did play an elemental casually back in the day and it was super fun i can absolutely recommend the spec for pvp it is going to be great elemental is found in some of the lich king's most scary comps such as thunderclave which is arms elemental holy paladin or lsd which is destro lock resto druid elemental sharman does enhancement do just as well then uh i mean it's good but not on the same level as elemental very few classes in the game are on that level let's start by touching on a few talents i left out when talking pve anticipation now reduces the effect of disarms against you in addition to dodge chance you either take this talent or carry a weapon chain swap with you most of the time toughness is 10 extra stamina and 30 less duration on movement speed slowing effects i mean it's decent it's just not i want to spend five talent points on it decent though frozen power is new and gives you a root effect on frost shock when a target is 15 yards or more away from you which is nice and i imagine there's going to be weak horrors made to show when somebody's too close or far for that to proc earthen power makes earthband remove all snares from yourself and nearby allies and makes the attack speed slow on earth shock a little bit stronger over in elemental i put some points into reverberation because more shocks always sounds like a good thing it should be seen a bunch early on in the expansion before resilience starts getting too high though most famously being part of beast cleave which is enhancement bm hunter and holy pally usually in pvp glyphs for enhancement such as stonecore feral spirit for a bit more damage and especially shocking to reduce the gcd can be good to keep the pressure up and damage rolling finally restoration another shaman spec another considerable set of improvements in pvp mainly for reasons we've already talked about for elemental which are just the same across the shaman class as a whole the totem changes interrupt spell knockback changes but now perestos specifically they've had some of their key weaknesses filled in riptide gives them a button to press on the move blending totem affects both disease and poisons and they just have so much utility it's insane talent-wise not a lot has changed that we have not already talked about focus mind makes silences and interrupts a bit less annoying and nature's guardian helps keeps you up when you drop in health a bit i've also taken guardian totems here in the enhancement tree for a bit shorter of a cooldown on grounding totem healing grace adds a thirty percent dispel protection on your beneficial spells and a big change that really helps restoration is that dispels no longer entirely remove earthshield they only remove stacks so basically after you've earth shielded somebody they cannot be dispelled effectively anymore which is really powerful and of course i have to mention it somewhere for shaman purge is an incredibly powerful ability which allows you to stay on the offensive even when being a healer for glyphs stone claw is opie as per usual and then the likes of perhaps earth shield and lesser healing wave are good for some spot heals resto shamans will be seen widely across way more comps than they currently are in tbc particularly with casters who scale up with heroism very well so then let's check out what shamans get in terms of tier set bonuses tier 7 the earth shatterer battle gear as per usual with tier 7 looks great elemental first two set five percent less mana cost on lightning bolt well that just may be the worst two set i've seen so far in the expansion the four sets ten percent more create damage on lava bursts which is okay it would have been better if it was base damage enhancement 10 more damage on lightning shield which will do damage now thanks to the static shock talent though just not a lot of damage overall force that means your flurry talent gives five percent more haste now this is a nice bonus for once that's more or less just five percent more melee haste all of the time restoration gets some solid bonuses too the two set makes water shield ten percent stronger that'll be for the passive regen and the proc i'd imagine the force that makes healing from chain heal and healing wave five percent more effective which is a fairly good chunk of your heels tier 8 the world breaker battle gear from ulduar looks pretty damn good but i'm not sure i'm too sold on skirts for mail and plate gear in general though elemental gets 20 more periodic damage on flame shock which as far as damage increases go isn't very big the force that means your lightning bolt crits apply a dot on the target this is a little more interesting since elemental showns get good crit modifiers through their talents enhancement gets some more interesting bonuses 20 extra damage on storm strike and lava lash that sounds good and the four set twenty percent more frequency of procking maelstrom weapon firing off those extra lightning bolts or chain lightnings is just always fun the restoration two set reduces the cooldown on riptide by one second it doesn't sound like much but the cooldown is only six seconds normally anyway and the full set reduces the casting time on chain heel by point two seconds train heel is still very good in wrath of course tier nine from trial of the crusader is either nabundo or the battle gear the elemental 2 set makes flameshock last nine seconds longer that's more time doing other stuff than having to recast flame shock which is only ever a good thing the four set kind of reminds me of the ulduar one for elemental but better now scaling off a lava burst crit damage instead enhancement makes it so you have an additional three percent chance to trigger static shock that's a 33 buff to the talent which is good but it just really doesn't do that much damage to begin with force that makes shocks do 25 additional damage again it's gonna be quite minor maybe spell hands cares more about this stuff than the regular spec though restoration gets twenty percent more healing on riptide from the two set twenty percent is where things start to matter it feels as though and rape time between the instant heal and the hot does do a decent amount so this should add up the force that increases quit on chain here which is more chance for improved water shield to proc and is just one of your best spells in general nothing not to like here tier 10 from ice crown citadel the frost which witch's battle gear looks amazing i prefer the blue version though because you know ross witch blue makes more sense the set bonuses though on these for all three specs wow elemental gets some really cool stuff the two set makes it so lightning bolt and chain lightning reduce the cooldown on elemental mastery by two seconds each this is what i want to see from a tier set bonus not random ability does a relevant amount of extra damage remember elementor mastery also gives you a 15 percent haste buff for a short duration as well the full set again looks super good lava burst extends flame shocked by at least two additional ticks so it's worded like this as flame shock scales with haste in wrath baseline or at least it does on 3.35 enhancement now you're two sets shamanistic rage gives 12 additional damage on top of the other effects well that's another cooldown for your kit and this ability is on such a short cooldown to begin with we'll stack up with heroism and other cooldowns and just allow for so much burst early on full set when maelstrom weapon reaches 5 charges a 15 chance to get 20 attack power for 10 seconds a bit low on the proc chance but this is a huge proc i think i prefer a bit of a smaller attack power proc with a better chance for it to happen nevertheless if this procs back to back your dps games will be pretty substantial restoration riptide gives 20 spell haste on next cast within 10 seconds scales with your tidal waves talent are super well and that's just a lot of haste riptides on the super short cooldown everything about this tier set is great the fall set is also huge chain heel crits also caused the target to be healed for 25 of the amount over 9 seconds that's amazing why not just make resto shamans into a heel of a time class instead with this singular set bonus so now we've covered all of the main points can we give an answer to the shaman in wrath of the lich king classic just how broken is it now well it's a two-part answer in pve content they just are not as in demand as they used to be anymore whilst by no means performing poorly you just don't need to stack shamans anymore to get the key benefits that they bring whilst in pvp this class goes from zero to hero especially elemental in fact elemental shaman from tbc to wrath in pvp may just be the singular class and spec that receives the most buffs in the entire game for tbc many many many players have decided to roll shaman because the demand is so consistently incredibly high and they're practically guaranteed raid spots if everybody currently playing a shaman continues on to northrend the competition for those raid spots is going to become much higher than it is at the moment and whilst you will see guilds aiming to min match their comp only bringing one shaman for heroism all guilds will have several shamans on the roster because sometimes people can't turn up sometimes people leave a guild or quit 10-man content exists and you will always want a shaman in every single wrath of the lich king raid the utility particularly heroism and bloodlust are just too good to ignore but overall if you're dead set sticking with a shaman it will be one of those classes i'll look to try out for a guild with sooner rather than later and hey at least if you're the token shaman you can never get benched right hunters are a class that's had an interesting journey so far throughout classic from being a strong starter back in vanilla as marksman then to one of the most consistently powerful single target classes in the game throughout tbc as beast's mastery for wrath of the lich king you already know things are about to change massively i feel as though it's another expansion trying to smooth out the hunter and just well make them a little less clunky they've always been a class that's had these extra bits to consider from ammo to having enough pet food attack range swing timers the list goes on though we have so much to cover so we better make a start on the hunter in wrath of the lich king i want to start with the overarching changes which will affect your general gameplay first things first you can get rid of your swing timer your auto attack swings and any casted abilities such as steady shot are now tracked separately meaning you cannot clip your autos anymore in fact if you actively try to clip your autos they will still fire off during a steady shot cast meaning less time looking at your swing bar more time focusing on your rotation and there is a rotation too other than just pressing steady shot you still do need to carry around ammo as a hunter however now they stack up to 1000 instead of 200. also the attack speed from your quiver or ammo pouch has just now been added baseline onto your auto attacks so they're more just flavor items where you can store loads of ammo oh and yes there's still a minimum range where you'll swap between melee and ranged attacks and you still do use banner next up pets pretty much everything gets changed here the pet loyalty stat has gone in the past this affected various things such as how fast pet happiness was gained and whether or not your pet would run away among other things this means pets can't run away anymore in wrath the pet training point system is also completely gone these points were gained from leveling up pets and were then spent to give your pet abilities that you as the hunter learned from your beast training spell book in wrath instead your pet will now have a talent tree similar to the hunter pets now have three families these are broadly speaking ferocity these are the dps pets for pve tenacity these are tanky pets mainly for leveling and cunning which are utility pets mainly for pvp these pet families can't be rerolled so make sure you're picking the right one for the content that you're doing and as your pets level up they gain talent points just like the hunter does and then you can spend them on their respective trees here's an example of how the new pet talent tree to look for tenacity because i couldn't really figure out where else to fit it in the video talents include a charge effect that has a short route the previously guerrilla exclusive thunderstorm for some aoe threat last stand which well you probably know what that does a bunch more health a powerful new cooldown and roar of sacrifice making you immune to crits and intervene which works the same way as the warrior one other talents here either basically do more damage or take less damage in one way or another the nasty pets include gorillas turtles crocolis crabs and so on each different type of pet will also have a signature ability so they aren't just the same apart from their visuals examples of this are wolves having a powerful attack power buff in furious hell and crabs having pin which is a physical type root which is really good in pvp on top of this pets will level considerably faster in general be able to hold threats a lot better than previously and if you mine a glyph bend pet you don't even need to carry food for them anymore there's also some pet talents that do this as well though overall vast quality of life changes more depth to pets through the new talent trees it makes more sense the way they're trained and just big improvements on the previous system let's delve into each spec and see what's new baseline then beast mastery first kill command has been reworked from a proc after a crit into a one minute cooldown that makes your pet's next few abilities do a bit more damage aspect to the viper now reduces damage caused by 50 but restores mana way faster now aspect of the beast for some reason gives you 10 melee attack power to you and your pet if you ever fancy being a melee hunter that is new to beast mastery is masters call hey it's hander freedom but undispellable that's pretty good a solid bit of utility added for the hunter in all areas of content here get a tank out of a route to be able to kite in pvp just a really versatile new spell full stable pet does what it says on the tin call a pet from the stable on a five minute cooldown good for pet swapping when it's needed last major change for beast mastery is a new aspect aspect of the dragon hawk it's just aspect of the hawk and aspect of the monkey combined into one still it's a lot of stats for free marksman next then first up arcane shot doesn't dispel a magic effect anymore this has been moved to tranq shot hunter's mark now starts at maximum power instead of having to be built up by arranged attacks viper sting now does a percentage mana drain instead of a flat amount and it's more or less just being nerfed and this is an across the board change for mana drain effects volley's undergone huge changes it scales better it crits and it's had its cooldown removed it's genuinely really worth having on your bars now for aoe situations so you don't just press multi-shot and then be sad as a hunter due to the marksmanship tree is an execute to the creatively named kill shot usable when targets are 20 health or lower fire an instant powerful attack that deals a large amount of damage something new to press when targets are low health and gives the hunter an extra level of threat in pvp the survival tree though is the one which i would say has the most changes deterrence has been totally reworked from being a talented tbc to now being baseline and way stronger it gives a 100 parry chance 100 chance for ranged attacks to miss and all spells will be deflected it can be played around by smart opponents a rogue for example can shadow step and they'll always be behind you and then land a kidney shot and it won't remove any existing damage over time effects nevertheless it is a vital personal cooldown for the hunter perhaps no longer share a global call down between all types of them instead they're in three categories nature which is just snake trap fire which is immolation explosion and also black arrow which we'll look at later in the survival tree and frost which is frost strap surprisingly freezing trap and freezing arrow hey that's another new spell freezing arrow it's freezing trap but ranged so no need to run into melee after scattering in pvp and you can reliably cc in pve content nice change misdirections had its cooldown load to 30 seconds and now redirects all threat for four seconds honestly a big buff to one of the best spells in your entire kit as a hunter mongoose spike no longer requires you to dodge in order to proc it a minor one but i thought i'd mention it and finally probably my favorite world of warcraft ability of all time comes to life in wrath of the lich king disengage well i say this because this spell has been part of the hunter's toolkit since classic where it used to be a melee ranged threat reduction which was you know completely useless now in addition to that it launches the hunter backwards allowing you to reposition close gaps and just do all kinds of things it does require you to be in combat and raph though which is the only downside so that's all a baseline change is done time to check out the talent trees let's start off with what you should expect to be playing as a hunter early on into the expansion survival the biggest change here is survival goes from being a bring one of them utilities back in tbc to now they are great in their own rights in wrath the biggest reason for this is the exposed weakness talent goes from applying a debuff on your target increasing the entire raid's damage against it to a buff on you instead at the top of the talent tree the tracking talents have been combined into one but make sure you're tracking the correct type of enemy in both pvp and pve if you're a bit of an insane gamer you could swap tracking when tabbing between different targets if they are different types this would work as all tracking abilities are on their own separate cooldown from everything else so there's a bit of min max to be done there i don't know how much content that's really relevant to but i thought i'd mention it trap mastery has received some updates to make it even better and now also affects black arrows duration as well survival instincts no not the druid one is also a new talent and makes you just take a bit less damage and do some more damage tnt is pretty similar just adds damage to your rotation lock and load is brand new and is a powerful proc from traps or black arrow removing the cooldown on your next two explosive shots you want to try and force proc this off of cooldown through traps where possible hunter vs wild apart from sounding like some kind of reality tv show gives you and your pet some scaling off stamina and resourcefulness now reduces the cooldown on black arrow in addition to the previous effects i've taken one point and exposed weakness here perhaps you do want to earlier on into the expansion but survival hunters do crit a lot noxious stings is new for pve just think of it as do 3 more damage against the target who has serpents sting on them master tactician now puts even more crit in your rotation simple enough sniper training is a huge boost to a bunch of your abilities after having stood still for six seconds it's pretty easy to keep up on most encounters though as it's got a 15 second duration but you do want to make sure that you're keeping this buff active black arrow something i've already talked about a lot is a brand new ability applies a damage over time effect and a damage taken debuff on your target for just you it says shares a cooldown with traps but it only really shows a cooldown with fire traps keep that in mind hunting party gives three percent agility and is one of many many classes that can apply the replenishment effect which is just a mana restore for up to 10 players in your raid finally your end of tree talent is an ability that's defined as survival hunter for many years the spell that puts the boom in your rotation explosive shot it's a short cooldown ability hits multiple times can crit and does fire damage and it's just really satisfying to fire off survival hunters might consider glyphs such as kill shot explosive shot and serpent sting however hunters have a second pve spec that you will see people playing the biggest difference is that marksman is expected to need a good chunk of armor penetration before it really starts taking over but let's have a look at this tree now focusing gives some crit and prevents knockback on steady shotcasts careful aim has been moved way up the tree and now converts 100 of intellect into ranged attack power and now a huge change to hunter affecting both pve and especially pvp here is that aim shot has had its cast time completely removed and still applies a mortal strike type effect of course it does less damage but it's well worth the trade-off readiness has also been moved over from the survival tree to marksman and still has the same effect resetting all your cooldowns apart from best your wrath improved barrage has changed a little bit now stopping spell knockback on volleycast piercing shots is new making crits from aimshot steady shot and chimera shot apply a bleed for 30 percent of the damage done crucial aura has also changed and is now just 10 attack power for your raid and it won't start with similar effects such as the one from say a blood death knight or an enhancement shaman master marksman is a load more mana efficiency on some spells and a bunch more crits rapid recuperation gives you some more mana efficiency overall not really needed in raids probably a decent talent for when you're leveling though wild quiver is now giving you a chance to fire an extra shot for bonus damage mark for death gives loads of stats five percent more damage from shots and pet abilities against the marked target and more crit bonus finally your last talent for marksmanship is chimera shot which in wrath has a bunch of different effects depending on what your active sting is if you have serpent sting up it deals a bunch of extra damage viper sting it will restore mana to you and scorpid sting will disarm the target the vast majority of the time it's serpent sting that's being used here but a disarm can have nice uses in pve and is certainly very useful in pvp being only on a one minute cooldown marksman hunters consider glyphs such as serpent sting the duration scales with chimera shot daddy's shot to increase its damage a little bit and hawk for some additional gains i'll also give a mention to the pet here so in pve content more or less the go to is the wolf the ferocity which is the pet family we want and its unique ability is furious hell which provides a large amount of attack power with a pretty good up time talent wise the ones that stand out are calling the herd which is essentially just a flat three percent damage increase for you and your pet rabbit has a dps cooldown which is only for your pet and gives them a stacking buff it's pretty minor but you may as well macro into something and finally call of the wild a 5 minute cooldown which should definitely be macroed into your big cooldown rotation which is 10 percent attack power for 20 seconds pretty substantial this is one of the large reasons why you do want a ferocity pair so how do we think hunters are going to perform throughout the duration of the expansion in pve content then well if you've noticed for the pve part of the video i didn't even cover beast mastery as a talent tree as it has one of the most dramatic fall from graces from being considered a top-tier single target spec in tbc to quite literally unviable in wrath i was going to say a fight some incredibly short in naxxramas it might have seen some play but as of this video blizzard have actually confirmed they plan to buff knack's content so that's not happening i'll still talk about it in pvp it's great for leveling as it's always been but in raiding it gets easily outperformed by either survival or marksmen early on to wrath of the lich king you should expect hunters to be playing survival as a strong single target specialization putting out competitive damage without tons of gear once we start hitting later raids trial of the crusader and onwards and armor penetration starts to become much more plentiful expect hunters to make a shift over to playing marksmanship there isn't really a super big selling point to playing one spec or the other beyond preference and which one is putting out bigger numbers at any given time playstyle wise we've already talked about how clipping autos is gone both specs are now more of a cooldown based priority system marksman is more similar to how beast mastery is at the moment having a lot more filler steady shot time or survival there's a very good argument to playing super close range and trap and melee weaving to either increase damage or just get your traps on cooldown as they have procs tied to them and they don't all share a global cooldown themselves anymore dps-wise hunters are typically middle of the pack from beginning to end of the expansion certainly not last but you're gonna struggle to stay really high up in dps in equally geared and skilled environments if you picked a hunter because you like being at the top of the dps for tbc and that's all you care about it may not be the class for you anymore overall though it's a more in-depth playstyle there's that responsibility of misdirection and on top of that you get a class that's also very much involved in pvp so let's talk about that next there is legitimately an argument for playing any of the three hunter specializations in arena and not many of the pure dps classes can do that we're going to start with beast mastery and the changes it's had because we haven't really looked at it yet at all really early wrath the lich king pvp is probably the place we are most likely to encounter beast mastery hunters when resilience is low enough their burst damage can be seriously scary most often alongside enhancement shamans and holy paladins as part of the notorious beast clave comp talent wise for beast mastery aspect mastery is new which just amps up the power of all your aspects by a moderate amount moving down the tree ferocious inspiration now increases the damage of all your raid members by 3 as well as a few of your spells by a little bit best your wrap has had its duration lowered to 10 seconds but this is offset by some later talents and can also be glyph to reduce its cooldown even more cat light reflexes despite not being taken here also reduces the cooldown on kill command by half when taken cobra strikes is a new talent gives some synergy between you and your pet when you crit longevity is also new lowering the cooldown of all your big abilities such as best giraffe and intimidation kindred spirits gives you a massive 20 damage buff to your pet and adds some movement speed as well for you and your active pair and finally at the bottom of the tree is the namesake of this entire tree beast mastery this gives you four extra talent points for your pet and gives you the skill to tame exotic beasts these are certain pets across azeroth that have special and more powerful abilities such as their devil saw core hounds chimeras rhinos all the new and unique to northrend spirit beasts pvp wise it's all about applying that mortal strike effect with game shot and trying to burst people out with best giraffe up whilst you're immune to everything after that it rapidly becomes a weaker version of either survival or marksman but most of the time you won't be seeing beast mastery in arena in fact you'd probably be happy to see beast mastery compared to the much more common spec marksman a quick look at the talents then again it's pretty similar to pve main differences are over in survival entrapment changes to be a guaranteed route for four seconds we always want scattershot as a hunter and survival tactics reduces the cooldown on disengage by a little where the hunter comes together in pvp for raph is having an unreal huge toolkit of utility and damage that's a shot freezing trap silencing shot a disarm through primary shot mortal strike or name shot masters call for a freedom effect and readiness to reset the cooldown on literally all of those pet-wise there is a few choices actually which is up to you however you always want a pet with raw of sacrifice meaning essentially it has to be cunning or tenacity this ability is a one-minute cooldown that protects a friendly target making them immune to crits however 20 of all damage taken is also applied to your pair but being immune to crits is massive imagine that versus an elemental shaman or a frost mage it's a big deal raw of recovery is another cunning pet talent that restores thirty percent of your manner over nine seconds the most common pvp pets are either a crab which are tenacity that can root a target for four seconds a spider which can also root for 4 seconds from range but it's magic dispellable or a ravager that does a 2 second knock down clip wise for pvp hunters can opt into serpent sting for damage aim shot to lower its cooldown for a better up time and disengage to get out of bad positions overall hunters are a flexible pick that offer a ton to a wide variety of comps it certainly still has a pretty high skill cap just as it did in tbc but i think it can be really rewarding to get good at and you don't have to spend every game pressing viper sting on cooldown as your wing condition that's pretty cool too i think with that said let's check out a few tier sets then for the hunter tier seven the crypt stalker battle gear looks pretty damn good as per usual with the tier three recolors set bonus wise though five percent more pet damage on the two set which is okay your pet's not doing a huge amount of damage anyway the faucet is 20 more attack speed when aspect to the viper is active tip don't go out of mana and you won't have to use aspect to the viper the force that here might as well just not exist tier 8 the scourge stalker battle gear from ulduar also looks great this time i'm a big fan of it the 2 set is 10 more damage on serpent sting which is actually okay since it's ignoring armor and it scales up with camera a shot the 4 set is a 10 proc chance for 600 attack power for 15 seconds which is nothing to scoff at that's a pretty sizable proc tier 9 is windrunner's battle gear the 2 set gives serpent sting a chance to quit which should be a minor dps gain overall when it comes to damage the 4 set is like the previous tier but it doesn't seem quite as good your pet really isn't a huge dps contributor in rafter lich king as a non-bm hunter tier 10 the uncaja blood hunters battle gear from ice crown citadel i like the appearance of this set it looks as though you've gone and chopped up a lord and then equipped it somehow the two set is pretty insane five percent is a low proc chance yes but 15 damage for you and your pet for 10 seconds that is a lot if it happens during your cooldowns the four set is so when serpent sting or wyvern sting do damage 5 chance for 20 attack power for 10 seconds it's another pretty low proc chance but with a huge effect overall i would prefer something more consistent than i got lucky and got 20 attack power and 15 percent damage but hey if it all lines up that's going to be pretty cool so now we've had a look at the hunter in pve pvp the glyphs the tears and everything else in between can we give an answer to hunter and wrath of the lich king just how broken is it now honestly i think they've had enormous improvements from tbc the one caveat is they are not going to be as consistently high on dps as they have currently been but you get a variety of specializations that are viable in pvp and pve loads of new utility in pvp i think they're just straight up buff now with way more cc and a reliable mortal strike effect they've got interesting pve rotations and somebody who's good at misdirecting is legit just a reason by itself to bring along a hunter i rate it that much and you get disengaged how can you not like disengage doing these class videos has had me checking out so much raph the lich king information and the hunter is the first time i've done a class other than what i already planned to main a warlock that's had me thinking i might go ahead and play this one as an old mages were a surprise in tbc if i had to describe them in one way expected to be on the weaker side until midway through tier 5 content and then needing a lot of support to really do well as arcane well the needing support part has been true but mage has been one of the most consistently high performing classes throughout the duration of all of tbc moving on and upwards to northrend then an expansion of casters in general do very well it should come as no surprise that mages have a lot to look forwards to so let's talk about the mage in wrath of the lich king classic let's begin as we do with our base line changes so for mage it probably has the least changes from tbc to wrath out of any class i've looked at so far arcane blast gets a little rework it still increases its costs as it stacks but it no longer decreases the casting time of subsequent arcane blasts and instead now applies a 15 stacking arcane damage buff which will stack up to four times and this buff will drop off when you cast any other arcane spell than arcane blast invisibility no longer gets removed when you're phasing out from taking damage evocation goes from a 8 minute cooldown all the way down to a 4 minute cooldown and we can make it even better through talents the amount of mana lost when absorbing damage through mana shield has been reduced mage armor now reduces the cooldown of all magical debuffs on you by 50 in addition to previous effects slowfall is castable on group or raid members and you can glyph it so it doesn't require a reagent as well and new ranks of conjure food also conjure items which restore health and mana at the same time new to the arcane tree is mirror image this summons three copies of yourself which casts frostbolt on a target which is just a decent damage cooldown on a three-minute cooldown dalaran intellect brilliance and polymorph cats are all buyable from a shop just on the left of the violet citadel inside dalaran if you ever find yourself having a bit too much gold each of these just adds a different spell effect to what they already do over in the fire spell book molten armor gains bonus crit scaling from spirit and a new spell is frostfirebolt which benefits from both frost and fire talents opening up some mage hybrid possibilities it never really took off in original wrath despite it being tried a lot maybe we'll see some new experimentation these days over in the frost spell book uh nothing changes yeah i said mage didn't have all that much different but fun fact here because i don't know where else i can put it in the video did you know you could glyph water elementals so that it lasts forever but can't cast freeze anymore i had no idea you could do that because nobody ever seems to but it might be fun when you're questing though always having a pet out so let's move on to checking out some talent trees when it comes to raiding as a mage now like a bunch of other classes you should expect there to be two main talent trees that you end up exploring those are arcane and fire arcane should be the one that you play early game into wrath so we'll start on that arcane stability now finally gives you some consistent spell knockback avoidance across the entire tree focus magic is a new ability that places a three percent crit buff on an ally and when they quit you also gain three percent spell crit too student of the mind is new and gives you some more spirit scaling though missed out here due to earlier levels of gear improved arcane explosion has been changed and renamed to spell impact which now just increases the damage of a whole bunch of your different spells magic achievement in addition to its previous effects now also increases the range of arcane spells by six yards your arcane shielding spell has been updated to provide better baseline defenses and reduces the amount of mana it takes to maintain mana shield by a lot torment the weak is another brand new and super important talent for all areas of content in fact you're kind of forced to pick this up for pve whichever spec you are playing it's 12 bonus damage for your big filler spells against snared or slowed targets and that slow includes attack speed ones such as thunderclap arcane power goes from a three minute cooldown and 30 bonus damage and mana cost to two-minute cooldown and 20 bonus damage in mana costs arcane empowerment adds a huge chunk of extra damage to arcane blast and missiles and also provides a three percent braid wide damage buff not half bad arcane flows reduces the cooldown on your big spells by a significant amount and puts the vacation down to only a two minute cooldown which is insanely good for arcane missile barrage finally makes arcane missiles useful in pve for the first time ever now your spells have a chance to make your next arcane missiles free and fire two times as fast this is super fun to fire off and it procs all the time as well netherland presence is just a whole bunch of spell haste and at the bottom of the tree is arcane barrage our brand new main ability in wrath is a super short cooldown three second single target nuke it's good on the move whenever you need to reset stacks of arcane barrage and miss albarage hasn't procked or just as a general filler over in the fire tree incineration is taken for more crit damage on arcane blast and the frost tree is just there so we can get icy veins really to pump up that arcane burst phase and even though we know blizzard is going to be buffing next rammer spikes in near to biss tbc gear are still going to be so short we can justify going deep enough into the frost tree to pick up cold snap as well for that double icy veins arcane will use glyphs such as molten armor for some extra spell crit as well as arcane blast and arcane missiles just for some extra damage however once we start to get a bit later into the expansion crit gear becomes more readily available and you really begin to power up it's at this point it's expected that mages make the swap over to fire this time it'll happen for sure right fire also has a bunch of changes to cover in the talent tree that makes it a much better pve pick just to mention the arcane talents quickly again here it's really the same as what we've already gone over you just want to pick up torment the weak because hey as it turns out 12 damage is quite a lot the rest though we're going to be looking into the fire tree welding flames increases the crit chance and a whole host of different spells across all three specs improved scorch has been reworked now adding some spell scaling and more importantly no longer stacking anymore now one scorch will apply a five percent spell crit vulnerability debuff to the target instead combustion gets a small change going from a three minute cooldown down to two minutes as well as now instantly giving 50 bonus spell crit which continues to stack up until you've landed three non-periodic crits molten fury gets changed to be 12 bonus damage against targets under 35 health instead of 20 bonus for targets under 20 empowered fire adds scaling to your big spells and makes it so basically you can't go um anymore well between this talent and master of the elements that is mages like many other casters don't have that mana problem that they used to apart from arcane that is that's the whole idea of the spec hot streak is perhaps the biggest new talent in the entire tree that's been added for the mage any back-to-back non-periodic crits will make your next pyroblast become instant cast this is why mages need that extra crit before they can really start to do damage towards the bottom of the tree burnout is a massive 50 bonus to spell crit damage but spells cost five percent more when they do which is a completely negligible downside this talent is super good finally your end of tree talent is a living bomb place a debuff on the target that ticks down for 12 seconds exploding at the end of its duration causing high damage to all nearby targets the explosion portion of the spell also counts towards hot streak overall a super fun talent gives fire mage access to even better aoe than they already have and it just looks cool when a bunch of them chained together glyph wise for fire and pve they again use molten armor viable reducing its cast time as a little trade-off for losing the dot is an easy decision and a living bomb so the periodic portion can now crit though how do we reckon mages are going to do in wrath then overall pretty damn good is the answer this class should be consistently near the top of the dps meters the only thing i'm curious to see how it plays out is when fire will overtake arcane the tbc by the sunwell it was fully expected that mages are going to make the swap to spamming fireball but in reality fire just doesn't compete with the damage arcane can put out sure arcane needs more help with innervates and mana tides and so on but that's how many guilds are built they're raid to be by this point in time if wrath is anything like tbc you may be stuck pressing the arcane blast button for a long time speaking of the two playstyles and their individual performance arcane is expected to be better early and this has been true across many raf servers arcane simply has a huge burst phase at the start of a fight and then can do it again every two minutes thanks to their talent reworks but you know what they say about arcane it's probably the one caster that doesn't change much from tbc to wrath you really do just hold down the arcane blast button your missile barrage is a nice proc but when you press that button it's gonna remove the 60 bonus damage your arcane blast is doing however when you make the swap to fire which i think will happen in wrath by the way it'll feel considerably better as it now has hot streak again it's pretty simple on gameplay get two crits in a row press pyro repeat but it's super effective at putting out damage and by later on in icc has historically been one of the highest performing classes in the game made should have a specialization that can find itself performing well whatever phase we are in whilst the gameplay is pretty simple it backs it up with huge numbers and very competitive single target and aoe which brings us on to pvp once again in tbc mages found themselves as a very popular pvp choice notably the frost specialization was as per usual an absolute top tier performer but before we talk frost i want to give a quick look at fire as a pvp spec because i think it's come a long way since tbc grabbing some talents here i want to check over the new ones we didn't talk about yet burning determination allows you to immune the next silence or interrupt after being hit by one impact has been reworked it's no longer a complete rng on fire spells and now makes it so any damaging spell has a 10 chance to allow your next fire blast to stun for two seconds that's much more controllable and a lot more powerful molten shields now affects both frost and firewards and the reflect chance has been increased to 30 percent you can glyph either frost or firewall to increase that by a further five percent two blast wave in addition to its old effects also has a knockback added great for arena where you can knock people off the edge or just to help with your kiting in general fiery payback is a new talent which does a ton of different things it gives a 10 chance to disarm the target when the mage is hit on ranged or melee attack it doesn't say in the tool tip but i would assume this has a one minute cooldown because all disarms have a one minute cooldown when below 35 health all damage taken is reduced by 20 and pyroblast cast time is reduced by three and a half seconds but it now has a cooldown this makes fire mage super dangerous once they do hit that low health there's a reason pyroblast doesn't have a super short cast time normally dragon's breath gets mega buffed now disorienting for five seconds which is enough time to wind up a big cast or land a cc and finally firestarter makes flamestrike instant and free after blast wave or dragon's breath fire has had so many of the tbc issues addressed better survivability tons more cc more utility and even more damage it should be a fun spec to mess about with even if it is rather squishy which is its main weakness because the majority of the time much like it's been since day one of vanilla whenever you see a mage in pvp they're gonna be frost and man they just keep getting better the more expansions go on is the talents the standard in the arcane tree really in frost a bunch of the old mandatory five-point talents like shatter have been moved to three points instead freeing up loads of talent points to explore the new tree ice floes reduces the cooldown on your big abilities such as icy veins by a whole bunch permafrost has been updated adding a 20 healing reduction effect to your chills because hey why not may just sounded like they could use a mini mortal strike effect on their entire rotation winter's chill is changed to affect all spell crits against the target not just frost but it does still stack up to five times hold as ice is new and just removes even more cooldowns from your big spells chatter barrier is another addition off of the ice barrier talent a great new bit of utility adding a guaranteed frost nova when your barrier breaks fingers of frost is a new vital talent and is a complete game changer for the mage your chill effects have a 15 chance to grant a proc treating your next two spells as if the target were frozen improved water elemental increases its duration and gives you some extra mana gains when casting frostbolt brain freeze is another big proc effect for the mage your chill effects have a chance to make your next frost fire bolt or fireball instant cast more bursts that's just what the mage needed kill to the bone is pretty simple just a bunch more damage on your big spells and even more chill effects and finally we have a talent at the end of the tree that's become iconic for frost mages deep freeze a point-and-click 30-yard five-second stun but it does require the target to be frozen unless you have fingers of frost proct of course during this five seconds the target is both stunned and they are also frozen too making it a guaranteed burst window of ice lance's super powerful and versatile ability and just another layer of burst and cc for the frost mage's formidable toolkit frost and pvp uses gloves such as evocation to add a big heal on top of this ability ice barrier for more absorbs and polymorph to remove damage over time effects when it's cast and allow you to make swaps way easier than ever before as per usual with frost mages you should expect to see them across a wide variety of comps and brackets most notably being part of gog comp which is resto druid shadow priest frost mage or the inevitable rmp let's finish up on some tss tier 7 the frost fire gob from a revamped knack cyber 20 and south america as per usual love the tier 3 recolors the 2 set makes it so you gain 25 more mana when using a mana gem and granting 225 spell power for 15 seconds hey look it's serpent coil braid on a tier set as in they literally copy pasted the trinket and put it on a tier set i mean this trinket is still used by mages playing arcane in the sunwell a few months in so i'm gonna go ahead and say yes this is still very good the force set is five percent crit damage bonus on all offensive spells again that's a lot of bonus damage for free mage might be the first tier seven where it looks genuinely really interesting and strong for both the sets tier eight is the kirin tor guard from ulduar i'm just going gonna say it i know i'm gonna get a backlash for it but the looks on this are just a miss i don't know what's going on with the helm and i prefer ropes on mages the set bonuses though those are something else the two set is your main spells have a chance to give you 350 spell power for 15 seconds i went to check on the proc chance and what we have available says it's 25 chance to proc which seems incredibly high for how good this is as in that's going to be up the majority of the fight if this is correct wow that's an amazing two set all set is a chance to not consume the proc effects unique to each talent tree this one said it had a 10 chance to proc which is not nearly as good as the two set there tier 9 is khadgar or sunstrider's regalia from trial of the crusader the two sides various scaling to your armors the one which you care about for pve is molten armor when it's glyphed on top of this tier set bonus and its baseline effect it should convert 60 of spirit to crit which is actually a pretty huge amount so this seems like a very good set bonus the four set is five percent extra spell crit for all your big filler spells again that's a lot of spell crit and it seems to be a pretty good argument for really starting to think about fire here year 10 is the blood mages regalia from icecrown citadel it looks okay it just doesn't beat out tier 7 recolors for me though the set bonuses however are again amazing the two set makes your hot streak and other procs you don't really care about by this point in time give 12 haste for five seconds after consumed you're gonna be procking hot streak a lot in icc this is a great case modifier the force that makes it so mirror image also causes you to do 18 additional damage for 30 seconds this is probably one of the best tier sets i've seen so far 18 damage during heroism when you can choose where it happens on top of all the other cooldowns you can have running is an incredible bonus no wonder mages get so good by icc with a tier set like this but now that we've covered pve pvp tear and had a pretty good talk about how the mage is going to be can we give an answer to mage in wrath of the lich king classic how broken is it now pretty damn broken i'll tell you what two viable high performing specs in pve content hopefully fire does overtake arcane blast sooner rather than later because it hasn't yet in tbc in pvp they also get a range of viable specs fire gets mega buff you could play arcane but it's not going to be as effective as the other two frost gets even more cc and deep freeze a healing reduction through permafrost and even better burst you can also expect an amazing leveling class and dungeoneer out of mages as per usual i think mages did get a little bit undersold in tbc and perhaps that was a bit for the best as you couldn't really stack them super hard in raids due to them being needy for external buffs as arcane in wrath they need less group specific help now that nearly all buffs are raid wide they're still gonna want your druids innovate don't worry about that but overall are much more self-sufficient it's a high performer in pve and pvp content and there just doesn't seem to be an expansion where mage isn't a great choice for a main the priest has really come into its own moving from classic to tbc remaining a powerful and versatile healer whilst the shadow specialization went from mean to mandatory propping up four of her players mana bars with ease on top of providing so many useful buffs and debuffs no group from 5 to 10 to 25 ever quite feels complete without a priest so moving onwards and upwards to northrend how does the priest class fair in wrath of the lich king classic let's find out you know the drill by now if you've been watching the series let's start off with the basics all the major changes to your spells and abilities i guess the biggest thing that i have to say is gone are the pre-specific racial bonuses these have been a feature of priests all the way back from day one of classic instead now all priests have the same abilities regardless of their race in fact the majority of the racial bonuses are just straight up gone now including chastise symbol of hope feedback looms grace shadow guard the list goes on it's easier to say which one still exists to be honest so i'll be doing that where it makes sense for each spec over for discipline divine spirit has now become a baseline spell instead of being talented new ranks of inner fire will also give some spell damage in addition to previous effects making it feel even more important to keep him active mana burn same as all the other abilities that affect mana now destroys a percentage of mana instead of a flat value levitate can now be cast on allies and you can glyph it so it no longer requires a reagent and finally one feature i totally forgot about you can cast power word shield on any ally without them needing to be in a group with you i don't know where this is relevant but hey i noticed it on the beta at least a holy holy nova is now baseline two a nice a little bit of aoe good pvp utility to get them rogues out solid addition to your kit holy fire has been reduced from a cast time of three and a half seconds down to two first new spell is divine him a powerful channeled heel that also applies a small buff to targets affected increasing the power of heals they receive for a short duration think of it like tranquility but holy instead of nature the second new spell is hymn of hope this is the remnants of the once drain our unique spell symbol of hope it's a bit different though also being a channeled spell that gives manna to allies and temporarily boost their max mana too but shadow there's two new spells well i say two it's one if you were undead but devouring plague is now a baseline pre-stability though it has been changed from what it used to be it's still a damage over time effect it heals a less overall and it's had its cooldown removed this is now a core part of shadow's rotation rather than just a little bonus for undead priests the second is an aoe button mindseer channel shadow magic into your enemy causing all other nearby enemies to take damage over time unfortunately in wrath you can't mind sia allies i remember it working that way but i went and checked and that was a change made in cataclysm so no mind searing in arenas to catch stealthers or searing the tank in pve still it's an aoe which is better than what you had before those are your baseline changes not a huge amount to be honest in fact with the racials taken into account priests across the board definitely lost more than they gained but that's not going to mean they're weak far from it so let's delve into the pve talent trees and see what changes were made i want to start things off with perhaps the most consistent healing specialization in world of warcraft classics so far the cornerstone of your healing core they have been there and they've been amazing since day one the holy priest so holy is in a bit of a strange spot in wrath it certainly is a highly capable speck but your fan guild seeking to optimize their raid actually not bringing them at all instead favoring discipline now for pve and we'll talk about why later nevertheless holy remains a solid choice and perhaps has a larger and more versatile kit than any other healer in the expansion and well let me tell you we're not going to be talking about holy in pvp so let's do it here and now desperate prayer has been added to this tree is a two minute cooldown a good instant cast heel on the priest think of it like a defensive this used to be exclusive to dwarves and humans as a racial surge of light gives spell crits a 50 chance to make your next smite or flash he'll be free and instant cast but unable to create there was a point in time where the proc could crit and you could go infinite with these procs it was like a holy wind fury it was hilarious but a little hard to balance so that's why they ended up changing it holy concentration adds a load of extra mana efficiency for the priests after spell crit lightwell continues to be as useful as it's been since vanilla that's to say not at all body and soul is new after shielding a target they gain a big movement speed buff for a few seconds and your abolished disease also cures a poison on yourself this is more of a pvp thing in wrath despite this talent having become part of the priest kit in retail over the years we don't quite have the talent points to justify it here serendipity makes it so when you heal with one of your faster casting spells your cast time of your next big spell such as greater heel is reduced up to a cap circle of healing now heals targets in your raid instead of just the target's party empowered renew does what it says on the tin adds a bunch more heals on top of this ability we don't take tests of faith here but it's extra heals on low health targets divine providence is just a ton more healing for basically your entire kit a good all-rounder talent and finally is guardian spirit a holy spirit watches over the target increasing healing taken by 40 if they die while the stuff is active the target will instead heal for 50 of their maximum health a solid cooldown to place on targets expected to take a spike of damage or just to sacrifice somebody if you know a mechanic can't realistically be healed holy uses glyphs such as guardian spirit to make this into a frequent usability instead of a long cooldown as long as it doesn't proc that is prayer of healing to add a heal over time on top of this ability and finally circle of healing so that it affects another target however these are more aoe focus glyphs and you definitely could go more single target instead however for the first time it won't be every single priest in pve being holy anymore discipline gets considerably buffed in rat to become a way better healer and not just an improved divine spirit and power infusion dispenser when disciplines is new giving some bonuses to your instant cast abilities improved fortitude also gives you a little bonus stamina on top of the previous effect of the talent improved in the fire gets moved up the tree a lot and now gives it extra charges which is really nice in helping you keep it active all of the time meditation also gets buffed from a 30 passive mana regen in combat to a huge 50 percent soul warding is honestly the most important talent change for discipline by an enormous margin and it's just not even close this talent removes the cooldown of power word shield entirely which means discipline priest's playstyle is going to involve a lot of pressing shield improved flash heal reduces its mana cost by a small amount and buffs its crit chance on targets below 50 percent health renewed hope does i mean look at this absolute wall of text it does a lot of things at the same time basically the gist of it is you do more heals to targets you've just shielded and your raid takes three percent less damage pretty damn good rapture gives mana back when power word shield is completely absorbed or dispels on top of giving your target some resources as well aspiration is just a reduction on the cooldown of several of your spells divine aegis means that spell crits place a shield on the target for 30 of the amount healed race allows it so one target gets bone the seals from the priests towards the bottom of the tree borrowed tongue gives you 25 spell haste after shielding somebody and makes power chills scale super hard with your own spell power and finally the last talent for discipline has become one that's iconic for the priest over the years penance launched several volleys of holy light at the target either healing or doing damage to an enemy a short cooldown very mana efficient spell looks amazing super fun to fire off big fan of this spell overall only downside if you can call it that is that it's not castable whilst moving in wrath at all this pre-shoots glyphs such as powered shield because believe me you're gonna be casting a lot of power shield this will add up penance to reduce its cooldown and flash shield to reduce the mana cost which means we have one priest deck left the other half of what light creates shadow spirit tap gets changed up a little bit now procking for a smaller effect from spell crates on top of what it previously did improved mind blast now also causes a mini mortal strike type effect on top of reducing its cooldown if used whilst in shadow form the best change for shadow priests maybe i'm not even joking here but mineflay is finally 30 yards baseline but you wish that happened about three years ago huh shadow weaving is now buff on yourself increasing damage you deal instead of on the target good change here improves target swapping and aoe considerably vampiric embraces basically just a permanent buff now they might as well have just made it into a passive nevertheless remember to keep it active oh and it just passively heals for way more now as well mine melt is your good old do a bit more damage on your rotation type talent and the same can be said for improved devouring plague shadow power gets reworked now increasing crit damage by a hundred percent instead of crit chance by 15 for these various spells shadow form turns into a literal wall of text which i can roughly translate to it makes your damage over time effects scale with your gear overall it's 15 bonus shadow damage 15 percent less damage taken you can cast some utility spells like cure disease your damage over time effects those being shadow where pain vampiric touch and devouring plague can now all crit and vampiric touch and devouring plague also scale with haste amazing changes that felt long overdue for this damage over time reliant caster misery has also changed making some spells scale better and applying a three percent spell hit debuff on the target the only other class that can do this is boomkins so it's a nice addition vampiric touch has also undergone changes it's no longer the ability that turns priests into a mana battery instead when you mind blast the target with this debuff up to 10 members of your raid will gain replenishment giving them some mana bank over time loads of different classes can do this buff as well so it's no longer a unique selling point to the priest pain and suffering makes shadowhere pain into a one-time cast though don't forget it will snapshot certain effects like flat percentage damage increases so keep that in mind when considering if you should refresh it twisted faith makes spirit into spell damage and some bonus damage for various abilities and your final spell is well for a change once not a dps spell at the bottom of a tree for a dps spec it's an incredibly strong defensive and utility focused spell instead dispersion only on a two-minute cooldown unusable whilst under the effect of any cc more or less take 90 reduced damage and gain 30 of your mana over 6 seconds and you're unable to attack for the duration it also clears all routes and snares when cast if you are dying as a shadow priest between the shadow form damage reduction vampiric embrace passive heals and dispersion you're doing it wrong very good bit of utility here especially on encounters with sunk mechanics most famously being used on algalon to soak black holes shadow uses glyphs such as the creatively named shadow that makes non-periodic fritz give a ton more spell power mind flay for some extra damage and the third one depends a bit on what you want i've gone for mindsear here for the extra range so with all that said how do we reckon priests are going to do in pve content for wrath of the lich king kind of similar to where they're at in tbc really i think that is a fair thing to say about them the biggest difference is that many guilds won't be running holy priests anymore instead opting for one disciplined priest instead why though well holy priest is a throughput healer they have decent cooldowns and can do solid single target heals or push insane aoe numbers if the raid is consistently taking damage the issue is there's a lot of other throughput beast heal us this expansion looking at you holy paladin and for aoe there's plenty of competition from other healers too the way that discipline heals is totally unique for healers you saw in the talents how many different ways power word shield gets buffed your job on some fights will be just press shield on the entire raid and you rotate as weak and soul drops off people other healers have damage happen and then heal it discipline is the only specialization that can stop damage from ever happening very consistently as such they're an absolute staple of wrath of the lich king raiding oh and they bring power infusion and pain suppression too those are some very powerful buffs don't expect to be topping heels as disciplined by any means but it's hard to put an exact value on having somebody just not taking damage to begin with it might save them from getting bursted out by several mechanics it stops really nasty buffs such as infest on lich king from getting out of control and just so many more uses discipline will be in high demand for the raiding scene for sure as for shadow priests on the dps side once again they are mainly there for the utility despite all the help and extra way your dots scale they still find themselves lower down on the dps meters overall when compared to others in many ways again it's quite similar to the play style in tbc maintain your dots mind blast and mind flay if you like everything a shadow priest does now you're gonna continue to like it in wrath let's move on and talk pvp then so discipline was the pvp healer spec for priest back in tbc and in wrath that continues to be the case however shadow also gets quite a bit more interesting but we're gonna start with discipline and the talent which i missed out for pve unbreakable will right at the top of the talent tree gives a very good 30 reduction on the duration of all of stuns fears and silences improved mana burn a bit lower down is still taken and is a valuable wing condition and also applies good pressure to enemy casters i've taken less than four points and a few talents here partially because what i went for in the holy tree but also there are so many good talents here you're kind of just short on points on where to spend them but generally speaking having loads of magical buffs active is a good thing because it stops you from getting offensively dispelled or your important buff spell stolen reflective shields adds a decent bit of damage to your kit over in the holy tree inspiration i should have mentioned this for pve really but it's relevant here as well doesn't increase armor anymore instead reduces physical damage taken divine fury and searing light are taken so the priest can stay on the offensive not always taken if you don't want to it depends on your bracket on your comp and so on but the discipline priest can put out even better damage than tbc now also don't forget penance can be cast on enemies as well playstyle wise is quite similar to tbc in the scope of what discipline does it's a versatile healer with offensive and defensive dispels they can get rid of ice block or a paladin bubble with mass dispel on a half a second cast they've strong cc through psychic scream and mind control good cooldowns where power infusion and pain suppression surprisingly high damage with two dots in shadower pain and devouring plague they have holy fire smite penance shadow word death priest carries on being that good mix of offense and defense lift wise they use penance to reduce its cooldown pain suppression so it's castable while stunned and maybe even smite for even more damage over in shadow we have a few changes too that are different from the pve spec of course picking up silence a point-and-click five-second science effect is super powerful it is also worth a mention you can trinket sciences and wrath of the lich king and they will dr with each other so just don't overdo it veiled shadow reduces the cooldown on fade which doesn't sound like much but this is a very good addition as we will see later improved shadow form makes fade remove all movement and pairing effects and give you a 70 spell knockback prevention whilst in shadow form huge bit of utility for the spec here the final talent to mention is psychic horror a point-and-click two-minute cooldown that causes the target to be cc'ed for 3 seconds and also be disarmed for 10 another layer of cc for the shadow priest also worth mentioning mana problems are addressed in a whole host of different ways such as the shadow affinity talent near the top of the tree giving base mana back when shutter wear pain or vampiric touch are dispelled also if vampiric touch gets dispelled the target takes instant damage now as well many mana base tanks have improved vague gets out of roots and dispersion is more or less a guaranteed way to live any level of burst on top of that your offensive capability is much better with psychic horror a silence and an aoe fear damage wise you also hit like a truck now and more or less can't be given up time or you just start deleting people on the other team shadow gets hugely improved in wrath pvp and will be represented a lot more across a wide variety of comps shadow uses glyphs such as dispersion to reduce the cooldown on this spell fade to lure its cooldown even more and the third one is a bit of a flex but i've gone for powered shield here so let's finish up with a check up on the priests tier sets tier 7 is the regalia of faith the healer 2 set makes prayer of mending jump one extra time i've always liked this spell so it seems like a fun extra bonus to have and the fourth set reduces the cost of greater heel by five percent which is just okay i reckon dps wise for shadow the two set reduces the cost of mind blast by ten percent and the four set adds ten percent extra crit to shadow word death not exactly the best starting tier set i've seen that tier 8 sanctification regalia from ulduar the two set increases the crit chance of prayer of healing by 10 percent not bad for holy not quite as good on the disciplined side of things the force that makes casting power where she'll give 250 spell power for five seconds now this is the kind of tier you want to see i'd read that as just gain passively 250 spell power but shadow the two set increases the damage on devouring plague by 15 which is the debuff you're going to have rolling so a solid increase the force that makes it so mind blast also grants 240 haste for 4 seconds considering its low cooldown that should be a decent uptime on this haste modifier tier 9 is zabra or velen's regalia from trial of the crusader for healers the two set gives a bonus 20 heals on prayer of mending there's a few fights in trial where this is going to be chain bouncing and getting value so not half bad the force that affects the talents divine aegis that's the one that applies a shield when you crit and improves the effect of empowered renew but shadow the two set of six extra seconds on vampiric touch any time not having to reapply dots is a good time and the fourth set is five percent more crit chance on mind play again not half bad tier 10 the crimson acolytes regalia from ice crown citadel for healers the two set gives a 33 chance for a flash shield to apply a heel over time effect on the target for 33 of the amount healed over 9 seconds and the 4 set increases the effective circle of healing and more importantly power word shield super strong anything that buffs shield is really nice but shadow the critical strike chance of shadow where pain devouring plague and vampiric touches increased by five percent that's your entire damage overtime toolkit so that sounds very good and the force that reduces the channel duration by 0.5 seconds and period by 0.17 seconds on your mindflay spell this is kind of strange and wordy but after you've unlocked the four piece here you'll be casting mind flay all the time instead of using mind blast in your rotation so now that we've had a look at the priest in pve pvp tier sets and all the changes in between hopefully we can give a good answer as to what to expect from the priest in wrath of the lich king overall it's a great set of changes and the class stays as a solid pick for all areas of content discipline is the specialization that really comes into its own providing a unique healing role in the game if somewhat of a one button type spec on certain fights holy priest is certainly playable though with other healer changes it tends to get overshadowed don't think it's bad or underperformed by any stretch of the imagination it's just healer roles are a bit more limited and you're already going to be bringing a disciplined priest for sure shadow keeps doing shadow things as better access to target swaps than ever before and its aoe whilst it exists now isn't that great compared to other classes but is better than nothing in pvp i'd say both specs improve notably shadow becoming much more threatening than it's been in tbc priest has always been a raiding and pvp staple and in rafter lich king that really doesn't change it's a super fun class and one that i personally played for a large chunk of the expansion back in the day and i really enjoyed it back then warlocks were one of the most highly anticipated to perform well classes throughout the duration of tbc gaining access to highly potent aoe from seed of corruption to round out their dps toolkit as well as the notorious slsl pvp spec allowing them to control the battlefield and gradually wear their opponents down and i would say overall that they met those expectations though whilst performing impressively the way they did it often left much to be desired moving on and upwards into northrend then they certainly have a lot to live up to in order to really improve on what they're already capable of but with a whole host of changes damage over time effects starting to scale a plethora of viable specs in all areas of content and rotational changes so you don't start to fall asleep mid-poll anymore let's just say they are in a pretty damn good spot oh and yes before you ask i am indeed going to main a warlock in wrath so no bias towards the class of course because they don't need bias to be amazing right so what's changed in your spellbook and what new abilities have we got then we should begin with your demons because nearly all of them have changed to a certain degree first up and this goes for all pets now actually but warlock's demon specifically didn't have it in tbc and that is avoidance this means 90 less damage from aoe at all times meaning your demon doesn't just die to some random spam void walker's suffering ability now applies a 10 hit chance debuff and sacrifice only costs a small bit of your void walker's health instead of just outright killing it also for some reason consume shadows now greatly increases stealth detection for its duration the imps fireball has a new animation not that you're ever going to see it because it's never used but hey that's there for the suck soothing kiss now applies a 10 attack speed debuff and if you haven't played well in a while there is also a manly version of it as well yes really but fell hunters paranoia and tainted blood have been removed from the game and instead they gain shadow bite which does shadow damage scaling with how many damage over time effects are on the target and fell intelligence which is just a raid wide intellect and spirit buff in the affliction tree it's mainly reworks to the whole curse system curse of elements now includes nature damage which it didn't previously at all it took them three years to implement that i guess nature just wasn't an element before wrath of the lich king or something eruption is now instant cast baseline curse of tongues is now only a 30 cast speed increase down from 60. draymana now does a percentage instead of a flat amount so you go from never casting it to really really never casting it curse of recklessness has been removed from the game the armor reduction effect it had before has been rolled into curse of weakness and finally drain soul has an execute modifier to do 4 times damage when a target is under 25 percent health and can also generate shards during the normal ticks this spell is the reason affliction locks get a reputation as a super strong execute class in wrath but demonology fire and spell stones change for the third time in a row in an attempt to get them to be useful outside of providing a magic dispel back in classic they were offhands and they were kind of never used in tbc there were ones and they were kind of never used and in wrath of the lich king they are now weapon enchants and yes they are used giving extra periodic damage and a nice chunk of spell haste these will replace your weapon oils so free stuff i guess nice demon armor now gives bonus healing in addition to armor and the shadow resistance has gone bell armor now gives cell damage scaling with spirit and a small percentage health heal every few seconds ritual of summoning now creates a portal which functions exactly like a meeting stone meaning you can summon faster and with less shards you can now recast spanish to remove the effect i wish that happened a few years ago and you can train dreadsteed at your trainer for a bit of gold instead of having to go and do the entire questline a new ability for demonology is demonic circle it's actually two abilities i suppose you have demonic circles summon and teleport the first cast places a circle on the floor that lasts six minutes and then you can teleport and it will instantly take you back to that location as long as it's within 30 yards this is well as close to a warlock is to getting any mobility this is your reposition in pve to deal with a mechanic where you can set it up in advance this is your big escape tool in pvp superverse style ability and a very welcome addition to the warlocks toolkit finally in the destruction tree practically nothing has changed there's one new ability shadow flame this is a frontal cone aoe that applies a small damage over time effect it can be upgraded through glyphing to apply a slow which is useful in pvp and can also be consumed via conflagrate as we'll get onto later giving destruction some stuff they can do without having to hard cast those are the baseline changes time to take a look at some pve so for warlocks they have two specializations which should both see a lot of use and this time around things are going to be very different gone are the days of pressing shadowbolt as your entire rotation i mean you still will be pressing shadowbolt don't you worry about that just not nearly as much with both specializations gaining a number of effects to track and snapshotting to consider now snapshotting is one of those things that it's worth talking a little bit more about for warlocks in particular anyone can do it with any spell in the game but warlock's damage over time effects do a lot more damage than most peoples do and you have certain ways to extend them beyond their normal duration the moment when you place the debuff or buff the game will take a snapshot of some of your buffs and some of the target's debuffs certain stats will continue to be applied when the spell is refreshed whilst others are reset to what your character has at the time of the refresh we expect with the game being on patch 3.3.5 to extend buffs such as percentage damage for example from tricks of the trade as well as crit modifiers such as mages focus magic but to not extend things like spell damage effects as in trinket procs or haste effects from the likes of heroism this kind of stuff can get really min maxi but i thought i'd just give it a quick mention here because i want to take a look at the talent trees let's make a start with affliction this spec gets mega buffed from tbc to where it's a niche utility spec to arguably being one of the most consistently high dps specs from day one of wrath of the lich king all the way to the very end improved corruption is changed to buff various spells instead of reducing the cast time soul siphon also now works for drain soul which is going to be a big deal when we tally up the total execute on this ability you could miss putting points into foul concentration and have them an improved agony and amplify curse instead but spell knockback is just super nice to have for general use syphon life has been removed from the game now corruption will instead heal a small amount as well as certain spells just get a flat buff shadow's embrace has now been reworked increasing shadow periodic damage taken and reducing periodic healing improved fel hunter buffs your pet of choice a little bit so it doesn't go oom all the time and is a little bit better though on some fights they may be so short you don't even bother using a fel hunter at all shadow mastery is buffed from 10 to 15 bonus damage and now also applies to your fell hunter's shadow bite eradication is brand new to the tree giving you a six percent chance to get a 20 casting speed after a corruption tick which is a pretty huge buff albeit quite rmg heavy male addiction is reworked to just buff the power of some of your spells deaths embraces another new talent to give you more execute damage because hey why not pandemic is a massive buff allowing both corruption and unstable affliction the ability to crit everlasting affliction increases your flat damage by a little bit more and makes it so filler spells refresh corruption this talent is why you care about snapshotting corruption with a high crit and flat damage modifiers active because you can keep it running forever and finally the bottom of the tree is horned a single target nuke that increases damage over time by a further 20 you just have this up all the time on your main target over in the destruction tree improved shadow bolt has been reworked to apply a 5 spell crit debuff on the target and the other talents here are just above shadow bolts damage as it's your main filler outside of execute overall affliction has been buffed super hard damage over time effects that crit the ability to snapshot very strong single target damage bell hunter's your go-to pets you have an interrupt and one of the best execute phases in the entire game with an insane modifier on drain soul damage flexion locks use glyphs such as haunts to add a little bit more flat damage quick to cave to fish for more nightfall and eradication procs and life tap for some flat spell damage games but wait to there's more your guild will also want to bring a demonology warlock as well aside from solid single target damage with good cooldowns and powerful aoe their unique selling point is a buff called demonic pact right at the bottom of the town tree which we may as well start with talking about this makes it so after your demon crits your entire raid gets 10 of the warlocks spell damage for 45 seconds needless to say this changes how demonology is played and geared you want the largest amount of spell damage you can possibly obtain before you send in your demon to score a crit and then you don't really want to refresh that buff as it will overwrite the old spell power effect until you really have to meaning you're going to have to play a pretty macro heavy playstyle if you're really trying to min max the buff as much as you can or you just leave your pet on the target all of the time either way you want to demo lock in your raid every single raid back at the top of the tree fel synergy means your demon doesn't diet some random aoe anymore as it's constantly being healed demonic brutality boss your voidwalker but now it also increases your felguard's attack speed buff soul link has been moved way up the demonology tree and is now only a 20 damage reduction between you and your demon more on that in pvp though master kundra makes your summoning of spell or firestone's quite a bit stronger mana feed makes it so your demon never goes um but generally speaking mana problems have fixed themselves now there's a whole host of raid wide buffs that solve it molten core is another new talent that makes it so immolate ticks have a chance to buff either your next three incinerates or sulfires which gives you a bit of a mix up in your rotation additionally demoloks also get a different execute rotation as well and whilst not as powerful as affliction locks it makes this spell useful for the first time in pve since well forever and that spell is soul fire specifically the decimation talent changes soulfire to be spammable on targets on 35 or below demonic sacrifice is finally removed from the game you know that talently you had to spend like 20 points in the demonology tree buffing your demons only to then end up sacrificing it for a 15 shadow damage buff yeah that one in fact if you're a main pve ear wrap for the lich king will be the first time you're actually going to have to use a demon in raids and i'm borderline not even counting imp because it would just auto die if you ever tried to actually use it for combat anyways instead there is now demonic empowerment which well just empowers your current demon in a variety of ways you'll be using on your felguard for the attack speed buff though improved demonic tactics now gives your demon a bit of extra crit and nemesis reduces the cooldown on all of your big spells by a huge 30 percent and finally at the bottom of the tree has to be one of the most iconic warlock spells ever that blizzard totally stole from warlocks and gave to demon hunters anyways at least in wrath you get to have metamorphosis transform into a powerful demon for 30 seconds gaining a substantial amount of offensive and defensive stats as well as gaining several new abilities such as a charge a cleave and aoe taunt and most importantly an immolation aura this is your big cooldown your burst window and the reason demology lock aoe is so powerful cloth wise demonology locks are quite similar to affliction also wanting quick decay and life tap but opting for felguard for more damage on that demon with the talent trees and baseline changes out of the way then how do we reckon the warlock is going to perform throughout the duration of the expansion well no surprise to say pretty damn well affliction is full on expected to be one of the most consistently high dps classes from day one to the end of the expansion there will be fights where people beat them out with cleave damage they will be outscaled eventually in icc by the likes of warriors mages and rogues but they are just always up there in terms of performance if you enjoy a damage over time playstyle and seeing a big execute phase it's hard not to recommend picking up an afloc also they are one of the few dps we expect to be stacked in raids where you're aiming to push performance a little bit more so they should be in pretty high demand despite being a dps class however let's just say the fan server side of things have a habit of buffing content and as things stand at the moment we are not getting buffed content in wrath classic or even pre-nerf content for that matter this means bosses ads and so on are just gonna have way less health less health means less execute and less execute up times means less damage for the affliction lock who really benefits from a prolonged period of time here demonology warlocks fill that utility role and are largely seen as a you need one but only ever one type of spec yet early on in the expansion they do kind of pop off dps wise demo locks love a short fight and early in tier seven fights are gonna be short this is so they can maximize their uptime on meta and heroism many raids will seek to prioritize caster gear to the demo lock as an upgrade for them directly translates to a buff for every single other class that cares about spell damage it's kind of like how the survival hunter was in tbc but even better we expect demologs to fall off in dps when compared to affliction over the course of the expansion as they don't scale quite as well but they're still very much wanted both specializations have tracking damage over time they care about procs they care about snapshotting and have a different execute phase i think it comes down to how much you care about your own dps as opposed to playing what is more of a supportive role so in pve things are looking good for warlocks how is pvp then yeah it's also very very good once again there are two fully viable specs both of which play completely differently and fit into different comps which is the kind of flexibility not many pure dps classes have but warlocks they can either play affliction in pvp or destruction now off the back of talking about affliction in pve let's cover that again there's not a huge amount of other changes which we haven't already mentioned of course you pick up improved howl of terror to make that an instant cast and over in the demonology tree now that soul link is way further up in the tree you're always going to be getting that you'll also pick up fell domination and master summoner so you can get your second pen out near instantly after your first one dies which you will certainly want to do because warlocks are way more squishy in wrath improved fear is another new talent that applies a brief slow after the effect ends and curse of exhaustion is of course taken in pvp to give you that little bit of extra utility lift wise quick decay is taken once again on top of corruption which doubles the effect of nightfall and shadowflame which applies a pretty big 70 slow on top of its damage over time effect affliction locks in raph arena play that classic multi-dot high pressure playstyle unstable affliction applies a huge risk of trying to dispel your other periodic effects and between that you're trying to play around pillars kiting throwing out utility curses and if drain solar ever takes on something under 25 percent health it's gonna hurt them real bad affliction locks often pair up with other dark focused classes such as shadow priests or unholy dks what we haven't talked about at all so far is destruction so i guess this is really the big change for the warlock in rafter lich king this spec has always been the shadowbolt throwing pve spec since vanilla now it's entirely different focusing much more around fire damage and dealing devastating burst damage that can remove entire health bars in a single global the demonology tree is quite standard and pretty much the same as when we looked at the affliction tree a moment ago though destruction in battlegrounds or maybe more skirmish smaller scale fights could consider using a succubus and specking into improving it in the demonology tree which makes the juice about a 0.5 second cast for the most part though you'll just use fel hunter it's too good the destruction tree has a ton of changes to amp up the power of this speck molten skin is just a flat six percent damage reduction now aftermath increases the damage of your emulate and adds a guaranteed slow to conflagration now the protection has been reworked and now be a 30 chance to gain a 30 damage reduction against any spell school that hits you conflag now deals some of its damage instantly and then a doctor thanked afterwards it can also be consumed by shadowflame if you need to the pyroclasm talent has been reworked but it's not taken here it's a decent damage increase but not from spells you'll be casting too much backdraft is new and is such an important talent for your entire burst toolkit following a con flag your gcd and casting time of your next three destruction spells is reduced by 30 the uptime on this is also really good due to conflict having a super short cooldown add a heroism on top of this and destroy locks can send a good three spells in the air towards someone before they even know what's hit them shadow fury has said it's cast removed nothing really to add on that great quality of life change empowered imp is actually such a good talent and i think it was intended for pve destruction because unfortunately your imp is just way too fragile to use in pvp fire and brimstone just adds a bunch more damage against targets with immolate and some extra crit chance and the final talent another iconic i know i say this word a lot but it totally is wrath is full of talents that have become the centerpiece of class identity anyways another iconic talent chaos bolt though in wrath it probably works differently from how you remember in recent expansions it's just been a 100 crit chance nuke that is not the case here instead it cannot be resisted and pierces through all absorption effects local shadows on the rogue no problem power shield active doesn't matter chaos bolt is one of the ultimate big satisfying single target nuke spells did i even mention it looks awesome as well destruction uses glyphs like shadow flame immolate to boost their damage and conflagrates you down to constantly be reapplying immolate destro locks are most often found in comps where they want to land some cross cc and then remove somebody from existence often alongside elemental shamans or frost mages let's finish up on some tier sets that the warlock gets access to tier vii the plague heart garb it's solid on appearance as per the usual with a tier three copy paste the two set makes corruption and emulate have a chance to increase the crit chance of your next shadow bolt or incinerate by 10 for 10 seconds though i had to go and have a look at the proc chance and apparently it's 15 so yeah not exactly great the four set makes casting life type give you 300 spirit for 10 seconds this looks like a meme but it's actually really good bluff of life tap already means spirit is bonus spell power and fel armor also turns spirit into spell power so it's just a lot of free bonus spell power tier 8 is the death bringer garb from ulduar this set will always stand out as the one that's used in the wrathgate cinematic and looks really cool the two sets percent extra damage from unstable affliction and ten percent more from immolate which is not half bad the four sets five percent more crit on shadow bolt and incinerate again it's functional but just not very exciting tier nine from trail of the crusader is either gul'dan or kel'thuzad regalia the 2 sets 10 more crits from your pet and the 4 set is 10 more damage on a bunch of your dots again it will scale well with more gear becoming available but it's not much of a game changer nothing to really say here tier 10 from icc is the dark covens regalia i have to say it looks good but not quite as good as the old war set did two set is five percent more crit on a bunch more spells and the forcer is probably the only interesting tear locks get this expansion from a gameplay perspective where dark takes have a chance to give you 10 more damage for 10 seconds which can impact things such as snap shotting or just general cooldown usage so with all that said now we've checked out the changes to the talents pve pvp and everything in between can we give an answer to warlock in wrath of the lich king classic how broken is it now somehow this class goes from being pretty top tier everything in tbc to even more top tier everything in wrath of the lich king warlock is a clash you will see represented across all raiding content and arenas it's got multiple viable specs in pvp and pve content a wide range of utility more interesting rotations pretty much all a jank from tbc has been worked out and left us with a class in a really strong state look i know i'm saying this as a warlock player but i would have rolled them anyway i just like the class it certainly helps though when they're in a super good spot for the expansion wrath of the lich king may have been the first time that blizzard ever added a hero class to the game in the death knight yet below the surface another class one that existed since day one of vanilla was to prove the real hero of this expansion you know how in the burning crusade it's an expansion about fighting an endless army of demons and guess what the class that can control demons warlock ends up being really good so what if we had an expansion where we're fighting an endlessly growing army of undead if only we had someone whose main class fantasy was turning them into piles of ash well we do as it turns out and they're good at it really good at it in fact they are either amazing or literally the best at the majority of the roles they can do though things are going to be different since we're playing on the final patch you should still expect a huge surge in popularity for the paladin class with three specs to cover and a huge volume of changes let's make a start on checking out how the paladin evolves in wrath of the lich king let's start off with the general gameplay changes so the whole seal and judgment system gets a revamp your seal used to be a short duration buff that modified your auto attacks in some way and your judgment was just a single spell that would unleash that seal consuming the buff for a variety of different effects now instead seals and judgments work as two separate entities deals have had their duration moved up to 30 minutes and judging will no longer consume the active seal deals for the most part still do the exact same thing wisdom restores mana on hit justice has a chance to stun and so on however the judgement spell has been split up into three separate new spells you have judgment of light which places a debuff when you or others hit a target you heal wisdom the same but for restoring mana and justice so the target can't exceed the normal movement speed so say for example you have seal of light active meaning your attacks will restore healthy you and you use judgment of wisdom on a target meaning all attackers against that target have a chance to restore mana or you have seal of vengeance active so you're applying a damage over time effect and you judge justice meaning the target cannot exceed normal movement speed you can refer to each seal's tool tip for any bonuses their respective judgments will do but the vast majority are just do a bit more holy damage so all in all no more spamming to reapply seals all the time and make sure you're using the correct judgment for the correct occasion next and possibly the best quality of life feature this expansion for paladins certain spells have changed from being blessings to hands this includes spells such as salvation protection and sacrifice more on their new effects later this makes it so for example your mage and your raid decides they're gonna try really hard to rip threat on an aoe pull and you go to use blessing of protection on them you no longer have to reapply whatever blessing you had on them afterwards as hands on blessings are different spells in fact we shouldn't really call it bop anymore it should be hop as it's now hand of protection also very good in pvp obviously we are spamming blessings a lot more final general changes that your charger is now learned at your class trainer for a few gold instead of having to go and do that massive quest line over in the holy tree there are a couple of noteworthy changes exorcism and holy wrath have had a bit of a switch up now exorcism has a cast time can be used against any target and will always crit versus undead or demons and holy wrath is now instant cast it still only affects the dead or demons but will additionally stun them for three seconds lay on hands now causes forbearance however it has the same effects as previously forbearance itself is now two minute duration up from one an avenging wrath cannot be used within 30 seconds of benefiting from something else that caused forbearance divine players a new spell for holy gain 25 percent of your mana over 15 seconds and it reduces your outgoing heals by 50 this in addition to a bunch of other effects is why paladins really never go um as any of the three specializations anymore a lot more to say about this spell later on though sacred shield is another new spell for holy applying a buff that lasts 30 seconds when that target takes damage every 6 seconds they gain a shield which absorbs some damage and makes it so flash of light has a 50 increased crit chance sounds like a pretty small ability but this is actually insanely good for all areas of content again much more to say about this later or protection blessing of kings has been removed from talents and is now a baseline spell instead hammer of justice also acts like an interrupt if a target is immune to stuns and the sacrifice gets mega buffed and it's now turned into a two-minute cooldown spell redirecting 30 of damage taken to the paladin up to a maximum of 100 of the casters health and if salvation gets totally reworked it's no longer this regular 30 threat reduction blessing you just have active at all times now instead it reduces 20 percent of the target's total threat over 10 seconds divine protection is also reworked it used to be like a weaker version of divine shield that you got at low levels now instead it's a 50 damage reduction that lasts 12 seconds on a three minute cooldown new to protection is hand of reckoning this is your single target taunt and if you're already being attacked it does some holy damage important threat generation tool and a controllable taunt for protection power is super useful finally shield of righteousness hey it's shield slam but it does holy damage instead big threat generator new button to press scales with block value another important addition for prop alleys for retribution the main changes were to judgements which we've already gone over a little bit ago apart from that hammer of wrath is now an instant cast spell so it's finally useful in pve the cast time in the past hurt it so badly resetting your melee swing for a low damage high mana constability was just barely ever worth doing now this becomes a strong part of the paladin's execute rotation apart from that seal of vengeance becomes the go-to dps seal for single target encounters it now applies a stacking dot on the target and when at maximum stacks your attacks deal bonus holy damage also your judgment scales in damage with the number of stacks the target has the seal twisting gameplay from tbc is no longer possible in wrath so if you weren't a fan of that then good news here that is our baseline changes done then so how about we get onto paladins in raiding there is just so much to be said about them here let's make a start with holi as it goes from being probably the least represented healer in tbc to pretty much the best in wrath balance wise illumination actually gets nerfed again from tbc to wrath going from a 60 mana refund on spell crit to 30 percent this used to be a hundred percent back in vanilla by the way it was insane despite this well mana isn't exactly much of a concern for the holy paladin don't worry about this nerf aura mastery gets reworked into a cooldown either doubling the effect of any aura or making allies immune to interrupts or silences for its duration blessed hands is also new increasing the utility on sacrifice and salvation though not really needed so much in pve content holy shot goes down to only a six second cooldown another huge cooldown reduction for this spell since tbc and makes it so much better and a more consistent part of the paladin's healing toolkit judgments of the pure gives you more damage on seals and judgments and also a huge 15 on both melee and casting speed for one minute after you land one make sure this is active at all times of course enlightened judgment makes it so you don't have to be sitting in melee distance to refresh your judgment which is a nice quality of life change and gives a bit of spell hit too so those annoying resists are less likely infusion of light is a new talent that really powers up holy's healing after a holy shock crits your next flash of light will be instant and apply a powerful heal over time to targets with sacred shield and holy light gains extra crit chance your final talent is why holy just cannot be matched for incredible single target heals its beacon of light makes it so you copy all of your heals to a friendly target for a one minute duration and it has no cooldown whether you're focusing on the raid topping players off or just whatever it may be you are always providing a ton of heals for this target holy paladins use glyphs such as beacon for more uptime and just having to recast it less wisdom for more mana efficiency and holy light to give them a bit of aoe healing this glyph will add up surprisingly on heels so that's a round of pop holy changes what is new for props also a ton of stuff divine sacrifice is a brand new 2 minute cooldown which basically functions as hand of sacrifice but aoe more importantly though is the talent it unlocks divine guardian a 20 damage reduction on your entire raid for six seconds this is one of the reasons that protection is just above other tanks it's got an external raid wide damage reduction cooldown not only can nova tank do this no other class in the game can do this improved devotion aura is now also very powerful the bonus armor is nice but six percent bonus heals on well your entire raid essentially hey that's pretty good blessing of sanctuary also gets buffed considerably used to just block a flat amount of damage and reflect some damage when you block and a tank now it reduces all damage taken by 3 gives 10 stamina and strength and when you mitigate an attack you gain mana yep this spec seems about fine so far you know what else this tanking spec needs cheat and death because that's what ardent defender is on top of passively taking less damage at low health any attack that would kill you instead sets you to 30 percent of your health based upon your defense on a two-minute cooldown you can literally die every two minutes and just not die on a tank i've no idea how this made it to live servers on top of that avengers shield has its cast time removed super happy about that not being able to use it when actively tanking kinda sucked touched by the light gives you spell damage scaling off your strength this is why prop pallas don't have spell power on their gear anymore this talent just does it for you guarded by the light reduces spell damage taken and makes divine plea a permanent buff so you never go um ever also the spiritual achievement just above it in the tree too this used to be a passive for mana gains now you can just put a point in it here instead field of the templar reduces damage taken even more and adds a three second silence to avengers shield so you can easily pull in those pesky casters judgments of the justice not taken here depends if you need the melee attack speed reduction dathonites usually have this debuff covered and they can also spread it via aoe whereas paladins can't finally in the bottom of the tree is hammer of the righteous a short cooldown cleaving attack which to me always sounded sort of like a cow and now you can never hear it either either way it's just another button to press helps on aoe threat does good damage all positives here protection uses glyphs such as righteous defense so that their taunts actually work divine play for some passive damage reduction and vengeance for expertise games which translates to threat gains the final paladin spec and the one which i have a feeling is going to be the most anticipated is retribution and just like the other two specs a huge amount of positives to talk about here deal of command is now a passive cleave for all of your abilities instead of an rng proc for extra damage you want this up and running whenever facing multiple mobs sanctity of battle is new and just adds some more damage to your core rotation sancta tiara has gone instead now allies affected by any of your auras gained three percent bonus damage art of war is new as well increasing damage from your abilities and making it so melee crits make your next flash of light or exorcism instant cast huge bit of utility here for both pve and pvp judgments of the wise make it so that you basically don't go um anymore when playing the game which is great sanctified raph is another massive talent making hammer of wrath crit very reliably shaving avenging wrath down to a 2 minute cooldown and bypassing 50 percent of damage reduction effects whilst it's active swift retribution adds 3 physical haste to your raid simple enough chief of light powers up your utility a bit adding more power to your heels that you'll be procking constantly off out of war righteous vengeance is a simple damage over time effect when your abilities crit and finally at the bottom of the tree is some good aoe for retribution paladin no longer is it just pressing consecration going um and then being sad divine storm hits up to four nearby enemies hard and also heals for a bit too because hey why not it's also a really satisfying ability to fire off into a pack of mobs and see the numbers just fly up on your screen retribution power up further with glyphs such as vengeance for the bonus expertise judgment for some more damage and exorcism for the same reason also small side note glyph of sense undead as a minor glyph gives you one percent more damage against undead when it's active so be sure to have that on when you're in naxx or icc but that's the talent and baseline changes rounded out for the paladin how well do we expect them to perform throughout wrath the lich king in raiding content then um yeah so when i said they're the real hero class i kind of mean it protection is the best tank and there's not much of an argument to be had with it their single target threat is great their aoe is good they have no mana problems they have amazing utility they have an external raid wide damage reduction they have cheat death for some reason they scale well your main tank is probably going to be a protection paladin you could have an off-tan protection paladin as well if you really wanted to they are honestly that good expect a huge amount of people to consider rolling prop pala for wrath there is also a very strong case for holy paladin being the best healer as well in the expansion the throughput is insane on every single fight they just don't go um they have that standard great paladin utility and best of all in tbc holy paladin is not at all a highly contested healer spot though i feel if you've played holy parlor in tbc it's kind of like you've done your time and now you get your raid spot in wrath and in wrath many raids will consider bringing up to two holy paladins in fact they are the healer which is most likely to be stacked in the expansion for retribution things are a bit different they're not on that same power level that pro and holy is i think a lot of people are remembering launcheret which was close to launch dk which means they were insanely overpowered on final patch they're a lot more toned down i expect them to be mid to high on dps meters and you shouldn't really expect to be topping anything until icc as you really really need your tier 10 2 set which gives your divine storm a 40 chance to reset its cooldown on melee swing until then it's gonna be a little bit tougher to do also play style wise you should be able to macro your entire rotation into a single button because rhett is just sort of pressed the thing that lights up playstyle still having somebody who's on the ball with the utility blessings is much better than a one button presser any day of the week but i just thought i'd give it a mention overall though paladins are an excellent choice if you want to get into any of wrath of the lich king's pve content as any spec so that is the pve side of things out of the way and it's looking pretty amazing for the paladin can we expect just as many great things out of pvp yes yes we can so if you played tbc as a pvp your experience of facing paladins in the arena is going to be pretty limited retribution has a couple of viable comps where they aim to global people and holy is rarely played due to its general lack of utility and just being too easy to lock down this is all going to change massively in wrath in addition to arguably being the best pve healer holy paladins are pretty much the best pvp healers as well their toolkit simply gets insanely good here's an example specialization not a huge amount of new things compared to say to the pve spec notable talents taken are unyielding faith reducing the duration of fears and disorients by 30 percent improved concentration already reduces the effects of silences or interrupts a bunch more less life is somewhat of an optional choice it's rng heavy but it can certainly save you at times if you're being focused constantly as a holy paladin and finally not to forget sacred cleansing ah sacred cleansing so in wrath pvp they took so much of the frustrating rng out of arena such as making stone resist effects becoming stunned duration reduction effects instead and then they go and introduce this highly questionable talent trust me if you are a caster you are not going to like holy paladins solely because of this talent it gives your cleanse a 30 chance to increase the target's resistance to all of poison magic and disease effects by 30 for 10 seconds though say a paladin dispels a random debuff off of their warrior your frosten over or death coil or untangling roots or just anything to be honest has a considerably higher chance to be resisted over in the protection tree it's mainly things we've already talked about for pve but improved hammer of justice is also taken for some more cc overall holy paladin's toolkit is just wildly out of control for arena they're super hard to see see having hand of sacrifice and divine sacrifice a much stronger on-the-move instant cast toolkit with a shorter cooldown on holy shark infusion of light for instant casts and sacred shield they can immune all sciences and interrupts with aura mastery they suffer zero spell knockback on heels thanks to their talents they're crazy man are efficient as per usual with illumination and sacred beacon sacral cleansing is a big middle finger to casters and holy paladins even help burst a lot harder with judgments of the pure and an instant cast hammer of wrath only paladin should be the healer you see the most overall in wrath arena glyph wise they consider salvation for another personal cooldown holy shock to reduce its cooldown a little bit more and light for some extra heals holy pallies will be seen across a huge range of comps most notably with thundercleave which is arms alley holy or the infamous tsg which is arms and holy holy pala retribution also has quite a few changes and should be seen a bunch more than it currently is in tbc talentwise additions are vindication that now reduces the target's attack power it does scales and the talents are just showing the value at a low level but it's a decent amount of 80. pursuit of justice has a disarm reduction effect added onto it a nice pickup for a talent which you're already taking for the movement speed increase divine purpose gets changed too now reducing the chance for spells and ranged attacks to hit you by four percent as well as making your hand of freedom remove stuns from the target making it into an even more powerful bit of utility don't forget sanctified wrath also makes you bypass 50 percent of damage reduction effects whilst avenging wrath is up for retribution in pvp the big change is really in the play style you don't have to play around mana as much anymore and your whole kit isn't building up two reckoning and win fury stacking somebody out retribution's pressure is a lot more consistent whilst also fitting that great utility niche that paladins just always have just don't expect it to be like rafa launched brett was where you sort of dragged your face along the keyboard and just gained rating but wait there is another pvp spec that isn't holy or rhett and no it's not prot i don't think we're gonna see deep prop in arena all that much even though it does have quite a bit going for it such as silencing on avengers shield but the spec i want to talk about is prague pala named after the player who popularized it the prague palette is a mix between prot and rhett and you deal damage with a one-hander and a shield not a two-hander your main sources of damage coming from shield of the righteous as well as seals and judgments here are our talents going down to sheaf of light and getting art of war in the retribution tree is absolutely vital this makes it so your off heels are incredibly consistent as every single melee crit will proc an instant flash of light or an exorcism as well you have a good amount of cc with hammer of justice and repentance in the protection tree mostly standard pvp talents taken here but we also want to go down and get reckoning this spec is all about the extra seal damage as well as more chances to proc out of war again making this flash of lights instant finally one-handed weapon specialization is just a flat 10 damage and despite this spec wearing a one-hander and a shield you'll be surprised by both the damage and healing that it is capable of doing and it shuts down other melee classes hard by just being able to do more everything than they are able to this spec does need a bit more gear to get going particularly a fast one-handed spell power weapon is absolutely essential to making it work so you may not see it all that much until later seasons either way expect to face this monster of a hybrid in wrath arena preg pala uses gloves such as judgement for more damage flash of light where needed for more heals and perhaps even turn evil versus locks or dks you'll often find this alongside classes that can provide a mortal strike effect to capitalize on the pressure they generate let's round this out on some tier sets then tier 7 the redemption regalia the 25 man recolor here is my go-to for paladin transmog to this day on retail and it looks amazing that wise for retribution the two set is 10 more damage on divine storm and the full set one second less cooldown on judgments both of these are solid damage increases nothing really more to say protection has 10 more damage on hammer of the righteous which is more threat more aoe very cool and three seconds more on divine shield and protection not sure how necessary defensive increases will be in tier vii but hey blizzard have said they're going to buff naxoramas so time will tell holies 2 sets 10 more crit on holy shock which is very good more heals in general more chance to proc the likes of illumination or divine infusion and the 4 set reduces the cost of holy light by 5 which if it's cost matters at any point it's more so early games so not half bad year eight the aegis regalia from ulduar let's just say looks wise nothing is going to beat the original next 25 recolor for me the bonuses though are again very good rex 2 sets 10 more damage on exorcism and hammer of wrath and the 4 set 10 percent more quick chance on divine storm and crusader strike all just good damage additions that certainly add up even if they're not terribly exciting for protection you get more damage on various seals from the two set and a big block chance increase after shield of the righteous and for six second afterwards on the four set this is gonna have a pretty good up time overall definitely helping you in that main tank roll for the holy the two set gets a small hill over time when holy shot crits would have been nicer if it contributed a bit more than 15 but hey it all adds up for beacon and the force that makes sacred shield proc a little bit more often which will add up over the course of a fight i guess tier 9 turalyon or liadrin's regalia from trial of the crusader retribution two set righteous vengeance can now crit so this is the town that places a dot on a target after you with one of your other abilities which is a pretty nice increase actually force that gives you five percent more crits from judgments which hey that's something that procs righteous vengeance that's pretty good but protection the two set reduces the cooldown on taunt a little bit and some extra damage on hammer of the righteous and the force that reduces the duration of forbearance a bit and the cooldown of divine protection but holy the two sets 10 increased duration on judgments less refreshing than generally a good thing and the force that increases the effect of flash of light on targets which they could shield by quite a bit here 10 the light swarm regalia from ice crown citadel for retribution this is what you have been waiting for the entire expansion the tier 10 2 set gives your melees a 40 chance to reset the cooldown on divine storm this is probably the strongest tier set bonus in the entire game that has been made up until this point in time and will single-handedly catapult you up the dps meters you really need to get this as soon as you can the full sound top of this increases damage on seals and judgments by a massive amount tier 10 is just a huge deal for rhett i would be looking forwards to this the protection 2 set gets 20 more damage on hammer of the righteous and the 4 set 12 dodge for 10 seconds after activating divine play and considering divine play itself is only on a one minute cooldown that's pretty good the holy two set turns divine illumination from a really strong healing cooldown into an incredibly strong cooldown adding a massive 35 bonus seals for its duration and the force that makes your holy shock reduce the cast time of your next holy light by 0.3 seconds overall tier 10 for paladins is really strong so now that we've covered pvp pve tier sets and everything in between can we give an answer to paladin in wrath of the lich king classic how broken is it now um yes i think that's the correct answer here yes they're really really good as tank check best pvp and pve healer check good dps becoming very good in tier 10 check stacked in raids yeah part of nearly all of rafa lich king's strongest arena comps yep this class without a single doubt is just overpowered this expansion and you should be expecting a lot of people to roll it the paladin is just a great choice for wrath of the lich king whatever you are into out of every single class in the game moving from tbc to wrath i would say paladin is the biggest winner and gets the most improvements by quite a long way in 2006 blizzard announced the first new class to grace the world of azeroth this was to be no ordinary class however it was a hero class starting at level 55 as a soldier of the lich king you're shown the scourge's power first hand throughout the starter zone before breaking away and forging your own path following the battle for light's hope and for blizzard's first attempt at a new class well it couldn't have gone any better to this day death knight remains a popular main character for many players for so many reasons but how did their life begin all the way back at the start of their first expansion because whilst having some similarities to how they are in retail these days it's quite a different experience i think the first thing that has to be said here is that death knights on launch during wrath were how can i put it just a little bit over tuned in fact they were the most powerful any class has ever been throughout the history of wow ever and it's just not even close people got gladiator ranks in blue gear during season 5 and others used cass random macros to turn their entire rotation into rng and would still top everyone else on dps in pve content you could dps or tank as blood and holy or frost and they were just the best at everything you could not go wrong any way that you played the death knight it was just a choice of how much better you wanted to be compared to all these other non-hero classes but in wrath classic we are not playing on progressive patches our game is set to the final patch 3.3.5 as such death knights have been toned down considerably from their crazy launch states in all areas of content nevertheless you still better believe dks are going to be incredibly popular and for good reason so let's get into it and take a look at how the dk began their life in wrath of the lich king so usually here we would start off the video with what's new to the class baseline but uh yeah it's all new there's a whole new class so instead i'm going to go over how death knights play on the current patch they have what i call a builder and spender type gameplay with a bit more depth to it than most as they have two resources to track at the same time runic power first this is your blue bar and it's generated through certain abilities which cost runes such as icy touch or plague strike as with any class with a resource bar there are times when you want to pull it to burst but most of the time just make sure you aren't capping it by spending it on other abilities which cost runic power such as death coil or frost strike your second resource are runes shown just under the runic power bar by default there are two blood two frost and two unholy each of these will regenerate over a few seconds after having been spent and some of your more powerful abilities can cost multiple rooms such as death and decay which costs one of each through certain talents when runes regenerate they will also become death runes these are shown as purple and count for any rune overall it's a bit of a juggling act between not capping out on your runic power making sure that your rooms are in a state of regeneration and not having huge portions of down time in your rotation by over using certain types of runes practice through leveling will go a long way to understanding and getting a good grip of this system death knights also have presences which are kind of like stances though in wrath dks didn't quite have their talent trees fully tied down to one identity as such each presence is well very different from how it is now in retail blood is the go-to dps presence which makes you do fifteen percent more damage and heals you for four percent of damage done this is mainly for pve dpsing ross gives 8 stamina 60 more rama contribution from items and 8 percent less damage taken obviously this is the tanking one and unholy gives you 15 attack speed and move speed and reduces your global cooldown by half a second this is mainly for pvp that's also great for dungeons or leveling on top of this death knights also had their own profession rune forging which allows them to apply special benefits to their weapons the main powerful ones that you will see often are rune of the fallen crusader which gives you a proc that heals you for three percent health and a massive 15 bonus to strength for 15 seconds this is dps focused of course razor ice that applies a stacking debuff causing the target to take extra weapon damages frost and increasing the power of your frost based attacks and stone skin gargoyle giving some bonus defense and stamina there's also quite a few niche use rune forges too like sword shattering giving extra parry chance and reducing the duration of disarms or spell breaking that reduces the duration of silences on you so hopefully that gives you an idea of what the baseline toolkit looks like for the dk in wrath on to raiding then let's start with tanking so by the final patribreth the lich king the one we're playing blood had really began to fit into the tank niche whilst unholy and frost were seen more as the dps oriented specs for the new class though it wasn't till cataclysm that blood was formally made into the go-to tanking spec so there is still some fun and experimentation to be had here whilst i'd say if you're tanking raids just go blood it makes too much sense not to i want to have a quick look at a frost centered tanking build just as an example of how flexible the dk talents really are in the blood tree the main talents that i want to highlight are bladed armor this is just going to give you a bunch more attack power and will scale up as your gear improves death room mastery allows you to gain two death runes after casting a death strike and that's a lot of death which can then be used as any rune type moon tap is just a nice short cooldown for some bonus health spell deflection is an interesting one gives you a chance equal to parry to reduce the damage from a direct spell by 45 one of the reasons that dk tanks are so good in raph is they have so many tools to deal with heavy magic damage this one is rng but if it's procking they're taking next to no damage finally abominations might is some bonus strength and 10 percent attack power for your raid more of our flex pick this one depends if your raid actually needs it or not other classes such as enhancement shaman or marksman hunters can also do this in the frost tree i'm mainly going to talk about the points for tanking as we're going to go over frost's dps later but toughness is a bunch of armor and 30 reduction on slowing effects black ice is important for threat generation for the dk lichbaum isn't quite as useful in pve as it is in pvp but having the ability to immune certain effects whenever you want is nice you can also death call yourself or heals during this spell which maybe would make a difference now and again rigid dreadplay reduces the chance melee attacks hit you by a small amount and death chill is a guaranteed crit on frost spells which is good on a pole for snap threat icy talons and improved icy tones is just a no-brainer for both raid wide utility as well as the personal bonus reducing the target's attack speed by 20 and giving your entire raid 20 melee haste and you a further five percent improved frost presence will be taking for the damage reductions blood on the north converts a further two abilities into death rune generators usually dk specs don't have two separate talents that do this so you're going to be swimming in runes as this speck unbreakable armor is a short 1 minute cooldown increasing armor by 25 and strength by 20 for 20 seconds a huge bonus big up time helps on those scary pulls what's not to like here finally acclimation gives a stacking spell resist buff that can help out even more unspell damage heavy encounters overall this is a twist on the traditional dk tank a two-handed frost rune generating machine that has tons of counters for casters however most of the time when dk tanks are considered they are going to be some a variation of blood this spec of course also uses a two-hander dks don't need no shield and they have the best single target threat generation too as late in rafter the lich king blizzard gave icy touch a massive threat modifier and unlike many other tanks blood feels much more in control and has a massive toolkit of self heals i suppose i have to mention here but what about blood as a dps spec that worked in original wrath right well yes it did in original wrath at the start when dk's were busted i think the best way i can put it is it would be like turning up to a raid in tbc as a warlock playing a fel guard you can still play the raid you're still going to do decent damage but destruction will beat it every single time with the same group and gear you can put points into blood as a dps and try it out but don't really expect great things i did a video not so long ago where i talk about all the weird and wonderful specks of wrath if you want to check it out though also if i'm trying to cover every variation of dk that could potentially work the video would be way too long so anyways blood tank let's talk about that here's an example of a spec blade barrier decreases damage taken by five percent when blood runes are on cooldown this one should have a very good uptime when tanking veteran of the third war is just a big old pile of stats to improve your combat performance mark of blood is a bit of a weird one i think a lot of people wouldn't take it but it has niche uses particularly on bosses that are constantly aoe in the raid or when they attack very fast either way i think one of the things that makes blood as a tank so fun is how many cooldowns they have access to so i'd be taking it either way hysteria is a big selling point too it's power infusion but better but for melee classes 20 bonus damage for 30 seconds is such a massive buff so good luck trying to convince your tank to give it to you improved death strike does what it says on the tin makes the ability much better though unlike retail death strike doesn't heal depending on how much damage you've taken recently it just does a flat amount plus a bonus for each disease on the target vampiric blood is another short 1 minute cooldown that boosts the death knight's max health and increases healing taken by 35 a great ability to combo with damage spikes in conjunction with your many ways to heal will of the necropolis is just a bunch of flat damage reduction when you hit low health and the final talent taken here is in heart strike which is like an upgraded blood strike which also does a bit of cleave the final three talents are really more focused towards dps increases which does translate to threat increases but going into the frost street instead for the likes of improved icy towns and just generally amping up the power of your icy touch is just better nevertheless for the sake of completion and going over everything in the tree these talents are might of migraine and blood gorged both of these give you plenty of extra damage into your rotation and the final ability in the tree is dancing rune weapon which on the final patch just isn't terribly exciting anymore it's only on a one minute cooldown and it copies the death knight spells but for fifty percent reduced damage this ability used to scale with how much runic power was spent on it and would copy everything you do like literally everything for the same damage as the death knight was doing and it was one of the main reasons that blood worked as a dps class early on for tanks blood decays will use glyphs such as disease vampiric blood for better uptime on this ability and dark command so your taunt actually works moving across in the dps trees then let's start with frost in wrath frost is a dual-wielding fast-paced dps spec that counts on procs for huge crits through its talents as per usual with the dk there's a good deal of flexibility for the talents starting early game expect to be using a blood subspec picking up bladed armor as well as dark conviction for bonus crits though later on you should be moving over to an unholy one instead in the frost tree nerves of cold steel are vital if you're duel wielding for the extra damage and hit chance annihilation is mandatory making it so obliterate no longer consumes diseases on the target killing machine is part of the proc based gameplay giving melees a chance to guarantee a crit on your next frost ability glacier rot is just a nice bit of boneless damage not too much to say about that merciless combat is your execute modifier in your rotation 12 bonus damage from your main abilities against targets under 35 health rime is the second part of your proc based gameplay a 15 chance after obliterate to make howling blast reset its cooldown and be free threat of asarian is the other reason you care about dual wielding when you're frost causing your offhand to deal damage at the same time the isle of gorfin does there to add a bunch more damage to your big spells and frost strike is your runic power spender for this tree instantly attacking with both weapons for frost damage of course bypassing all armor under stalker is just more damage against targets with frost fever and a bunch of expertise and your final talent point will be put into howling blast a short cool down powerful aoe hitting all enemies nearby hard add some procs on top of this and you can really start to delete enemies frost dks can put out some of the best short term aoe bursts with a bit of luck frost uses glyphs such as disease frost strike to reduce the cost of this ability and of course obliterate for some big damage gains the second dps spec for dks to consider is unholy this is the spec that can quite literally do everything well apart from tank that is in fact it probably could on easier content anyways it's great at leveling you get a ghoul pet it's amazing in pvp and pve unholy just overall is a beast of a speck but we're going to start with the pve side of things again as per it was with frost there is an earlier game build and a later one though it's quite a similar tale the blood subspec is expected to perform a little better earlier and the frost one later also normally unholy would use a two-hander however whilst i was checking over dk information to see if anything crazy had happened in however many years fan servers have existed for wrath there was also some talk about a dual-wield spec as well for unholy though there wasn't a huge amount of changes from the talent trees were about to look at and one of the main benefits was being able to use cinder glacier as a rune forge to empower some abilities but it could be something new which we see grow in popularity during the expansion but for the time being i'm just gonna cover the traditional unholy pbe spec as not too much is known about this yet virulence is a great spell for hit chance it gives mobility a bit lower down is also great since it increases the power of mainly death coil but also reduces the cooldown on death and decay ravenous dead amps up the power of your ghoul and allows it to be a little more tanky further down the tree necrosis adds a bunch of shadow damage on top of your auto attacks blood cake blade gives an on-hit chance to add a bunch of extra damage scaling with diseases next to that knight of the dead a master of ghouls turn your temporary pet into a permanent one with its own set of abilities it's more worth talking about for pvp as in pve you kind of just have it hit whatever you're doing and that'll be fine back in the talents impurity gives your spells better scaling desolation adds a flat 5 damage buff at all times more or less bone shield is an active ability in wrath which works a bit differently too on a one minute cooldown it causes you to take twenty percent less damage and deal two percent more damage as well crit favor and ebb and plaguebringer by themselves are already good reasons to bring an unholy dk this essentially makes your diseases passively apply cursive elements to the target and you can spread this to all other nearby targets easily via pestilence very good talent here wandering plague is why unholy starts to really scale with aoe a chance equal to your crit for your disease ticks to be an aoe hit is absolutely huge scourge strike is the big new spender ability dealing a whole bunch of physical damage as well as some shadow damage rage of riven dare towards the bottom of the tree is just a bunch of extra damage once again and finally your last talent point will be spent in summon gargoyle a powerful three minute cooldown that will deal very high damage to your main target and of course it will scale with your active buffs and holy uses glyphs such as dark death for more damage icy touch for the same reason and ghoul to make your pet scale even better so now we've had a talk through the specs in pve how do we think death knights are going to perform overall throughout wrath the answer is very very well usually when a class has multiple dps specs they start with one at the beginning of the expansion and then swap to the other later as it begins to outscale it death knights don't do this you will happily have both a frost and an unholy dk in your raid from day one to the end of the expansion it's not even bad to have more than one of either spec 2. both dps specializations perform very well with unholy caring more about stacking raw strength for scaling while frost is expected to go the route of arma pen eventually the only potential problem is if this dual wield and holy speck becomes meta then there suddenly is way more competition on one handers still your rhett and fury warriors are going to be happy about it aren't they as for tanking as blood you are also super happy to have one of them in the raid at all times they're very self-sufficient they offer a ton of utility through being able to spec into 20 melee haste and 10 attack power they give a physical dps hysteria they have the best bar non single target threat expect to see many 25 man lineups take a blood decay and a prop pala as the standard tanking duo also it kind of goes without mentioning really but this is the new class as of making this video there are currently zero death knights in the game and raids will want at least three the demand will be there you can bet there's gonna be competition for sure the class is popular for a reason it's awesome this expansion but i can't see picking a dk as a main or renault ever being a bad choice at anything in pve or pvp for that matter so let's move on and talk about that shall we so first really i just want to start by touching on frost as a potential pvp spec but very briefly it's got great burst and a nasty setup with hunger and coal providing an aoe hard cc on only a one minute cooldown but after people drinking that hungering cold or it wears off you find yourself playing a dk with much less survivability and consistent damage than your unholy counterpart which is why i've decided to focus on unholy for this because unholy just has so much to be said about it for pvp let's check out the talents then i'll go over the bits we missed out when we were talking pve unholy command low is the cooldown on death grip a little bit it's an incredibly powerful ability to either interrupt or just disrupt your enemies positioning corpse explosion is a bit optional but you can consider it for a little bit of extra burst when you're going for that all in unholy blight is super good causing deathcore to apply a dot and making all diseases undispellable on the target for 10 seconds desecration is another vital talent causing plague strike and scourge strike to put a 50 slow area on the floor imagine if frost trap was spammable off melee abilities that's kind of what this talent is pretty soon after an unholy dk connects on a target the whole area around a pillar is just a permanent slow field magic suppression makes anti-magic shield even better than it already is on top of just reducing magic damage by a small amount but what if you could extend this bonus to your team as well well you can with anti-magic zone reducing 75 percent of incoming magic damage up to a certain cap for you and your party members only on a two-minute cooldown improved and holy presence is really just for making your rooms come off cool down a little bit faster over in the frost tree lichbaum is taken to immune fears or self-heal a little and endless winter removes the runic power cost of mind freeze which is another fantastic quality of life unholy dks one of the highest pressure classes in the game with amazing offensive and defensive toolkits with the likes of anti-magic shield anti-magic zone icebound fortitude death pack strangulate pet stun death grip and more liftwise and holy dks use dark death for more damage all for extra scaling and disease for the utility expect to see unholy dk across a wide variety of comps maybe as part of a dot focused team of affliction locks or most notably part of holy pala arms warrior and holy dk or more commonly known as tsg so let's finish up on some tier such then starting off in tier seven the scourge born battle gear hey look it's tier seven where blizzard had no tier three to copy from and you know what they still absolutely smashed it with this tsa this is my favorite death knight set they've ever made the tier 7 25 recoiler is just biss add an armageddon on top of it and that is the dk look for me that is how they should be set bonus wise this one made for dpsing and one made for tanking but throughout wrath of the lich king dk's didn't really have a define to this spec is supposed to do this role so all the sets kind of benefit all the specs in one way or another the dps2 set increases crit chance of obliterate scourge strike and death strike by 5 and the 4 set makes those abilities generate 5 extra runic power not half bad as far as tier 7 sets go it's going to add a little bit to your overall for tanks the 2 set increases the crit chance of plague strike by 10 and the 4 set increases the duration on icebound fortitude by three seconds this is pretty underwhelming as far as tier set bonuses go and changes the class very little tier 8 the dark ruined battle gear from ulduar the dps the two set increases the crit chance of death call and frost strike by 8 and the 4 set adds a further 20 bonus damage per disease for abilities that scale with them overall a notably larger dps increase than tier 7 would have been though not really doing anything to change the way you play the game the tanks the two set is an increase the damage on rune strike and the four set is anti-magic shield also grants you 10 reduced physical damage taken again like tier 7 for the tanks doesn't seem very good bonus wise rune strike works out over power does for warriors but it's on next melee and it generates boneless threat as for anti-magic shield it's something you want to use on magic damage if there's no magic damage on a fight will a 10 dr make that much difference maybe it will maybe it won't tier 9 from trial of the crusader is called terror author sarian's battle gear for the two set you can proc 180 strength for 15 seconds this is apparently a 50 proc chance with a 45 second internal cooldown which is okay the icd is kind of long though the full set means blood play can hey that's pretty good especially four and holy when you're on cleave heavy fights that will start to add up or tanks the cooldown on dark command that's your taunt is reduced by two seconds and blood strike and heart strike deal five percent bonus damage the force that reduces the cooldown on unbreakable armor vampiric blood and boneshield by 10 seconds finally tier 10 from ice crown citadel the scourge lords battle gear this is actually a close rival to tier 7 in the lux department for me especially the 25 heroic set with the helm that looks like the spire of ice dc super cool design really like that the dps the two set is just a bunch more damage on your entire rotation pretty much it certainly adds up even if it's not terribly exciting and the four set makes it so when all your runes are on cooldown you gain three percent more damage for 15 seconds this will alter how you play a little bit and you'll want to make sure that you're maintaining that buff as much as possible for tanks the two sets twenty percent more damage on death and decay death knight aoe threat is okay but it could certainly be improved so it's not bad in that regard the 4 set is a 12 damage reduction for 10 seconds when you use blood tap this ability is only on a one minute cooldown to begin with so a nice extra little damage reduction for the dk to fit in their cooldown heavy kit so now that we've had a look through the death knight in their launch expansion at blood frost unholy pve pvp tier sets are more can we really give an answer to what to expect from choosing a death knight in wrath i think you should expect nothing short of an amazing experience it's true that they have been massively nerfed from their launch date but they had to be but calling dk's nerf makes it sound as though they're bad or something this cannot be further from the truth each of the dk's specs excels in at least one area of content i'd say unholy does the most things well between pvp pve and leveling its main advantages are in pvp though so if you don't care too much about that side of the game literally any dk spec is a good choice for wrath look they're even called a hero class they start at a higher level than everyone else and they remain to this day for very good reason one of the most well remembered parts of world of warcraft's most successful expansion ever so in short dks and raph they're pretty damn good the final class in the wrath of the lich king series is here have i saved the best for last perhaps hmm well i'm sure in the eyes of some people it will be the warrior since the days of vanilla has proven to be a powerhouse of a class having well surpassed expectations for dps in tbc whilst remaining a strong tanking class throughout its life so far moving over to northrend the warrior is about to unlock some of its most defining talents ever as well as being a strong contender for a certain legendary weapon late into the expansion with three specializations to cover and a bunch of talking points for all areas of content let's get into it and take a look at the warrior in wrath starting as we do with the basics so let's look at the baseline changes in the warrior's spell book battle stance has now had a passive 10 armor pen for all attacks added onto it which is gonna add up quite nicely all of the big warrior 30 minute cooldowns have been moved down to five minutes instead those being retaliation recklessness and shield wall instead they now each last 12 seconds no longer share a cooldown between each other and you can only have one of them active at once as for the changes in the arms tree retaliation now counter attacks a maximum of 20 times instead of 30. thunderclap has had its target cap removed making warriors way better at aoe tanking than they've ever been before a number of other talents we can go over later also help this out a lot rend is no longer completely useless for pve it now scales its damage with your weapon and new ranks will also hit harder against high health targets more of a change that arms warriors care about as we'll see in the talents later new to the arms tree is heroic throw instantly throwing your weapon at the target and causing high threat this exists that warriors don't have to range pull with a bow anymore warriors also get shattering throw that applies a 20 armor reduction debuff on their target for 10 seconds also in pvp shattering throw will remove immunity such as ice block or paladin's divine shield in the fiori tree berserker stance now increases critical strike chance by three percent but increases all damage taken by five percent recklessness gets well completely gutted seriously rip this ability it now makes your next three abilities quit instead of everything pretty for its duration you also take 20 more damage whilst it's active bonus rage damage from execute now gets capped at 30 so you won't be hitting quite as hard as it does at the moment new to fury is in rage regeneration a new defensive on a three minute cooldown consuming a rage effect healing 30 percent of your max health over 10 seconds and in rap it's not hard to always have an enrage active either so it's a decent help to personal survivability over in protection defensive stance now reduces damage taken by ten percent reduces damage caused by five percent and generates extra threats under armour is changed to reduce a percentage instead of a flat amount of the target's armor capping out at 20 and taunt now has a 30 yard range so you don't have to be literally on top of something for it to work field slam has also become a baseline ability for the warrior and shield block has been updated going from a 5 second cooldown that gives a 75 chance to block one attack to now being a one minute cooldown that increases chance to block and block value by a hundred percent for 10 seconds and finally shield wall has changed to be a 60 damage reduction on a 5 minute cooldown i'd say not a huge volume of things have changed for the baseline kit of the warrior but the talents are where we're going to see how things really evolve for them so then similar to tbc there will be two dps specializations that raiding warriors will be looking at those being arms and fury as per tradition arms is the big two-handed wielding warrior that focuses on less attacks but ones that do more damage there's also quite a few talent changes throughout the tree but a number of them are just small numerical adjustments and otherwise do the same thing as tbc so i want to focus on the new stuff ace for blood is a reason to always keep rend up overpowered procs are gonna add a nice bit of extra damage into your rotation weeping strikes has moved back over from fiori into arms again where it makes a bit more sense i think the time of the sword spec is finally over two things have happened to end its reign as the go-to weapon specialization since day one of vanilla first of all when fury totem is rip and it gives melee haste now instead of bonus attack so just a less chance to proc it in general and when it does proc as you can see on the tool tip it's been given an internal cooldown so it's nowhere near as strong as it used to be pole like specialization is preferred instead to give you extra crit trauma is another new talent increasing the potency of bleeds on the target for a minute this will either be you as the arms warrior applying this or a feral druid either way there's several classes that care about bleed damage now so this is a nice bonus strength of arms is just a bunch of stats for you juggernaut is another new talent that makes charge usable in combat although increasing its cooldown by five seconds i think that's a pretty good trade-off though unrelenting assault is a huge talent for all areas of content for arms in a pve context it's a shorter cooldown and more damage on overpower blood frenzy increases your attack speed a little bit and adds a 4 physical debuff to your targets a second great bit of utility for the arms warrior here a bit further down the tree sudden death gives arms another proc a nine percent chance on melee to be able to use execute whatever the target's health is at towards the bottom of the tree wrecking crew enrages you giving 10 more damage and your final talent has to be one of the most fun abilities blizzard have ever come up with what if we took whirlwind and just made it so you spammed it for like six seconds and became immune to everything well ladies and gentlemen they made it and they call it a bladestorm on a super short one minute cooldown become a whirlwind of steel dealing huge aoe damage to nearby targets it procs your bleeds and all your debuffs it enrages you and it leaves you with basically a full rage bar when you come out of it big fan of this ability always been really fun arms uses glyphs such as mortal strike for some more damage rend for the extra duration and of course blade storm because we want to be using more blade storms but warriors tend to not stay arms forever because as the inevitability of gear progression happens more crit and armor penetration becomes available and they will turn into late game scaling machines and eventually fury will take over as the go-to warrior spec again in this talent tree there's quite a few bits to go over armoured to the teeth is a nice extra bit of attack power that scales up as your gear does enrage in the fury tree changes a little bit it's now a thirty percent proc off any damaging attack instead of you having to be crit this means fury warriors have two reasons to stand in fire now a rage generation and b trying to proc this new enrage death wish has been moved back over to the fiori tree from arms again intensify rage is new reducing the cooldown of several of york or abilities gurious attacks has been added it's not really taken anywhere it's the fury version of mortal strike but uh it kinda sucks more of a pvp edition but fiori just doesn't match up to arms at all in that regard rampage has changed to be five percent crit for your entire raid now take it if you need it a feral druid will probably be taking this buff though bloodsurge gives fury a proc to track as well giving several of your attacks a chance to make your next slam instinct cast heroic fiori is also new instantly removing immobilizing effects and refreshing the cooldown on intercept and no warriors don't get heroic leap in wrath i thought this talent was heroic leap too when i saw the icon that doesn't happen until kata towards the end of the tree unending fury is just your good old do a bit more damage on these abilities kind of talent and then finally we have another absolute classic of a talent the reason fury stands out when you're sitting there on your mount in the capital city titan's grip it gives a 10 damage penalty however you could now equip two two-handed weapons which well surpasses this limitation absolutely iconic end of talentry ability it just feels good to swing around two huge weapons and it also is another little bonus you may not think of gives fury warriors really high health poles from wielding two two-handers which offsets taking a little more damage whilst in berserker stance yora uses glyphs such as heroic strength for more rage gains whirlwind to reduce the cooldown and where it's relevant cleaving is also a huge bonus the final treat to breakdown in pve content is the beefy tank boys on the front line none other than the protection warrior improved thunderclap has been moved over from the arms tree and been given a nice bit of extra damage this is going to be your bread and butter aoe threat generator insight is a new talent and is a bit optional for extra threat gains yori may also consider going into protection later in the game to pick this up as well shield mastery increases your block value and decreases the cooldown on shield block down to 40 seconds improved revenge is a great dungeon the leveling or just generally i need to cleave talent improved spell reflect now gives two allies a similar buff for the same period of time improved disciplines reduces the cooldown on all your big five-minute abilities like shield wall and so on by 60 seconds concursive blow now deals damage scaling with your attack power and has its cooldown lowered to 30 seconds gag order is another new talent giving shield bastion heroic throw a three second silence vigilance is your first new active ability watch over an ally reducing damage they take by a flat three percent and transferring 10 of all threat they cause to you on top of this if they're hit directly your taunt cooldown resets mainly good for the extra threat but the other bonuses are okay as well improved defensive stance now makes it so when you block you enrage dealing 10 bonus damage safeguard is an interesting niche talent making the target take 30 reduce damage for 6 seconds critical block is yet another new addition giving you a 60 chance to block double and adding some more damage on shield slam warbringer is an amazing bit of utility making all of your warrior gap closers usable in combat as well as in any stance this is what makes prot warriors a super mobile tank that always has a way to close the gap damage shield just does damage when you block sword and board adds more damage to your main abilities and has a chance to reset the cooldown on shield slam whilst also making it free really good proc here for the damage your final talent is a great mix of cc and damage shockwave on a really short 20 second cooldown deal some damage that scales with your attack power and stun all enemies in front of you for 4 seconds really powerful on small frequent chain pulls or getting that snap aoe threat better than any other tank can do without external help protection warriors use glyphs such as taunt so you know taunt works as well as a last stand and shield wall for a few more consistent cool down options so with all that said how do we reckon warriors are going to perform in pve this expansion well this is gonna have to be a bold prediction because i can absolutely say warriors totally outperformed expectations in tbc it was very much expected they wouldn't be coming online damage wise until tier 6 where they begin to gain access to loads of armor penetration gear in reality as soon as you had your dragon strike and some tier 5 gear fury was already very capable of topping dps well as long as you gave it a proper group but that's how tbc raiding is in general and wouldn't you know for after the lich king it's supposed to be the exact same script play arms early be middling on the dps providing more of a utility role tier 7 fury is expected to be way low down on the damage meters exceptions perhaps on a few fights where you can cleave a lot but generally speaking and not till trial of the crusader will fury really start to consistently rise up the ranks and by icc at the end of the expansion with your armor pen cap yori will be capable of putting out some of the best dps in the entire game will the predictions be right this time uh maybe what i will say is if the main thing that matters to you in raids is how high you are on the meters i don't see why for tier seven at least you wouldn't pick something like a death knight a rogue or a warlock and then swap main later once it's more of a sure thing still dps warrior has surprised us before and only time will truly tell and hey maybe you get to play the underdog two expansions in a row and be strong early and incredible late because even though the game's old even though many people have played it on their own servers time and time again it's never been re-released by blizzard things can change things can be discovered give it a good old grain of salt as for protection it also gets a bad reputation in wrath for the lich king it's sort of similar to feral tanks however because i can tell you people will clear all of the content with prop warriors it's just the other tanks have that little bit more than it the pve content protection excels in dungeons with their aoe threat thunderclap gets its target cap removed shockwave revenge and so much more they can do everything in raiding content now that crushing blows are no longer relevant their ability to always mitigate these attacks hasn't really been replaced by something which is equally as valuable they have strong cooldowns but other tanks have strong cooldowns and whilst they mitigate physical attacks well rap for the lich king has loads of magic damage in raids too leaving protection in a rather strange position nevertheless they have a tank with a ton of mobility aoe damage and good cooldowns though they may not be on top they're certainly going to be a fun pick so let's move on to pvp then the warrior has always been a top tier pick here and raf the lich king will be no exception notably arms warrior will find itself as being part of a lot of the strongest comps in the game a quick mention that late game in wrath when you get tons of armor penetration you can play protection in pvp it's way more memey and actually surprisingly squishy for a tank but those shield slam procs from sword and board can near one shot people it's fun and worth a go eventually but for this i want to focus on the specialization that you should expect to see from warriors in wrath arms talent wise i'm going to go over the ones that i miss for pve iron will reduces the duration of stuns and charms on you by a decent amount weapon mastery which used to be in the fiori tree has moved over to arms reducing the chance you're dodged as well as the duration of disarms by 50 improved hamstring is of course taken giving a chance to root targets for five seconds second wind is another powerful returning talent from tbc restoring loads of health and rage when stunned or rooted unrelenting assault perhaps shows its true power in pvp content this is one of those talents which i'm not really sure how it went live like this but if you use overpower on a target that's casting they deal fifty percent reduced damage and healing for six seconds and yes it stacks with mortal strike as a percentage at least in that if a target has both effects active at once it will render healing 75 percent less effective which is uh yeah that's a big number this is why arms warrior damage is kind of unhealable of course bladestorm at the bottom of the tree is your counter to seat cfx across the board and it can even be used as an escape if you really need it to it's a super versatile ability you can get disarmed out of it though and a lot of classes have disarmed snow and wrath even marksman hunters and shadow priests have disarms over in the fiori tree are two returning talents from tbc in blood craze restoring six percent of total health over six seconds after being crit and piercing hell as a good utility aoe slow on top of the insane pressure warriors can put out with mortal strike and unrelenting assault they can charge in combat they can cleave your entire team with sweeping strikes they have a disarm and aoe fear and you will see just how tanky they get for real between blood craze second wind and rage regeneration they heal way more than you would expect by just kind of existing warriors as per usual expected to need a little bit more gear to get going in fact i think casters are kind of going to be bullying them early game when they have low resilience but a bit later on in this expansion arms is an absolute monster pvp specialization arms in pvp uses glyphs pretty similar to pve actually in bladestorm for the reduced cooldown mortal strike for more damage and hamstring which is also great when it works together with the talent giving you a 25 chance to root let's wrap it up on some of the tsx then tier 7 the dreadnought battle gear dps wise the two set gives salam 10 damage which is pretty minor in that it's a filler ability for arms and a proc for fury the force that gives your bleeds a 10 chance to make your next ability cost 5 less rage for tanks the 2 set adds 10 more damage on shield slam and the four set increases the duration of shield wall by three seconds the two sets nice extra damage extra threat not much to add on top of that as for the four sets i mean blizzard said they're going to be buffing next premise but i'm not sure this is really going to be relevant next up tier viii of the siege breaker battle gear from ulduar the two set slam and heroic strike crits have a 40 chance to give you 150 haste for 5 seconds again depends on how much rage you have to spend on these filler abilities really even then it's less than five percent haste for five seconds it just seems about okay the four set is ten percent more quick chance for mortal strike and blood thirst not very exciting more damage very cool but tanks the two set increases the crit chance of devastate by 10 percent blizzard really enjoy giving prop warriors more damage this expansion the force that makes a bit more sense shield block also makes you take 20 less magic damage for the duration not half bad but you want a cooldown like this to be used on melee attacks really tier 9 is rin or hell screams battle gear from trail of the crusader dps 2 set circus stance gives two percent more crit that's five percent passive total and battle stance gives six percent more armor pen so 16 total better than it looks because it's a passive bonus which is going to affect absolutely everything you do the force that increases the crit chance of slam and heroic strike by this point in time we should really start to see warriors scale up and these will go a long way to help that the tanks the cooldown on taunt is reduced by two seconds on the two set as well as a bit more damage on devastate the full set reduces the cooldown on shield block by 10 seconds that'll mean it's up every 30 seconds when talented which is actually pretty good and now for the big boy tier the i don't know how you say it lord's battle gear from icc dps2 set when deep wounds does damage you have a 3 chance to gain a massive 16 attack power for 10 seconds amazing scaling potential on aoe fights or where you can choose a bit of cleave backs up well with cooldowns even if it's a bit rng heavy dps force that means your proc effects from your rotation will instead have two stacks fire off a bit faster and you have more time to weave them into your rotation super cool set bonuses here for the dps warriors no wonder they get so good by icc finally protection two sets shield slam and shockwave get 20 more damage okay blizzard you want to give tanks damage don't you at least you can give them a good amount like this the full set blood rage no longer costs health instead makes you absorb damage equal to 20 percent of your max health another powerful defensive cooldown to add into your kit here not half bad either so now we've had a little look over the warrior in pve pvp tier sets and more can we really give a good answer as to what to expect from this class in wrath of the lich king classic it'll be one to watch for sure i'm interested to see whether fan servers got it right this time it's full unexpected for warriors to be way down the dps meters for a good while early game but again they are well known to scale like absolute machines and should be a safe bet to be high on the dps meters by late game protection also gets a bit of a bad reputation as mentioned earlier i think a good bit of it is just protection paladins are unreasonably good this expansion so it's kind of hard to justify bringing another main tank unless you have somebody who's dead set on playing prop warrior in pvp again expected to be a slow starter and gear dependent but another late game force to be reckoned with alongside an even better toolkit for pvp than they already have in tbc you know wrath of the lich king was really the era of a class being flavor of the month we don't really have that in classic anymore now we only have one balance patch maybe warriors in wrath will be the tipping point where people do start choosing to play them as we get later on into the expansion either way worries are just a fun class to play even if you're not topping the dps or the best tank early you're playing that long game it's only a matter of time before you start hitting the big numbers oh when there's this two-handed weapon too called shadow mourn i don't know i heard it's pretty good for pve and pvp that might be something you want to think about long term as well those are my impressions on the warrior though let me know what you thought whether you tried one back in the day or whether this will be your first spin with wrath warriors hello ladies and gentlemen willie here that is it every single class specialization covered for wrath of the lich king classic all of the tier sets the pvp and the pve i know the videos had a bit of a change of direction midway through as i wasn't too sure i like the whole how broken is it now title for the series but i don't really think it affected the content of the actual videos as the goal was always to provide a breakdown on how each class changes and the format was just so people can see it and recognize and this is part of that series so i hope that makes sense i've never really thrown a big series together like this but i thought it would be a good idea if somebody wanted to binge the whole series or look at a specific set of classes also i'm kind of interested to see how one mega video like this actually does the types of videos in the series like this always take way more time and effort than the usual content that i'm putting out so i do try and go the extra mile to make them special because at the end of the day i can only do each class for each expansion once i did have an editor to help out with these videos in fact i only did one of them myself and there were loads of comments saying the editing had been much better so i was really happy about that that was kind of also the reason there was a few more sponsors on these videos compared to my usual content as well i do have my three year youtube full-time anniversary whatever you want to call it coming up relatively soon and i was planning about talking a bit more about what things look like from my perspective of making videos how it is and so on and so forth so i will do that around the end of august i believe if that's interesting at all that will be it for the wrath classic class guide then back to the normal content for me if you made it from the start of the video to now then congratulations or if you're just watching this part for any specific reason thanks for sticking with the channel i've got plenty of content planned for wrath and around classic in general and i hope i helped you choose your class or just learn a little bit more about them that is it though as always guys thank you all so much for watching and listening in and i'll see you on the next one very soon [Music] you

Channel: WillE

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Keywords: wotlk release date, wotlk boosting, classic wow, wotlk, wotlk classic, wotlk release, wotlk tier list, wotlk dps tier list, wille, wotlk pvp tier list, was it any good wotlk, wotlk pve, wotlk pvp, dk, death knight, wotlk dps, paladin, mage, warlock, priest, druid, rogue, hunter, shaman, warrior, naxx25, ulduar, icc, dragonflight, best mmo, free mmo 2022, best mmorpg, best free mmorpg, best mmo 2022, mmo 2022, eso, gw2, ff14, osrs, riot mmo, ashes of creation, dungeons and dragons, gaming, pc

Id: HthzQ-QsJe8

Length: 231min 1sec (13861 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022