Over at Blog Azeroth, Ringo Flinthammer asks:

…WoW’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, only raised the level cap by 5 levels, in addition to the other content it added. Was Blizzard right to make this call?

My answer:

Yes.

Given the nature of the expansion and Blizzard’s current philosophy regarding characters and how we spend time in-game, I believe their decision to make the level cap 85 instead of 90 was unequivocally the right one.

At Fun In Games, Naithin points out that “each level felt about right in terms of the content it consumed”, and I agree wholeheartedly. Getting from 80 to 81 felt about as long as it should have – and keep in mind, here, that I’m saying this having just leveled my Death Knight from 73 to 82. I know that the XP curve from 71 to 80 was just dramatically reduced, but even so, 80-81 didn’t feel like a brick wall the way 70-71 (or 60-61, back at the beginning of Burning Crusade) did.

80-81 felt right, and honestly, if we’d had the same amount of content but twice as many levels, we would have felt like they were just throwing levels at us – or, if they increased the XP required per level, like we were hitting that brick wall. (84-85 already requires nearly ten million XP!)

The amount of content is important, too, because when people are considering how short they feel the top-level game is, they’re forgetting that the top-level game isn’t the entirety of the expansion. In fact, truth be told, the new content for 81-85 is in the minority of the new content added for Cataclysm. We have two new races, with associated starting zones; moreover, the entire face of the old world has changed, with new layouts, new quests, and new storylines.

In other words, this is not just an expansion for characters 80-85. This is, primarily, an expansion for characters 1-85. Blizzard has made it clear – between the new races, the shallower leveling curve, the newly-redone zones and quests, Recruit-A-Friend, and certain perks like getting mounts at level 20 – that they actively want us to be leveling alts. If we focus only on the benefits to our level-capped characters, we are no longer playing the game Blizzard wants its players to play.

The bottom line: Cataclysm offers plenty of 80-85 content and provides it at the right pace, and Blizzard’s intent is that we get to 85 and then roll a new character. So yes: five levels are enough.

We know two things:

• Warriors are getting Heroic Leap, an ability that lets them jump directly to a target and automatically cause a Thunder Clap effect to all nearby targets, thereby generating snap AOE aggro.
• Priests are getting Leap of Faith, an ability that lets them pull an ally (in their party or raid group) back to them from up to 30 yards away.

This cannot be a coincidence.

I can see it now: the warrior Heroic Leaps to a group of mobs and aggros all of them, not just by body pulling but with Thunderclap. As soon as the Thunderclap lands, the priest uses Leap of Faith to bring the warrior back to the group, safely away from patrols and other mobs that might be close enough to body-pull if the warrior were to tank in place.

If Mind Vision counts as line of sight, a priest might even be able to pull a warrior safely to a hidden corner so that caster mobs would have to come running. (Even if it doesn’t, all it takes is the priest ducking out for a moment.)

Heroic Leap and Leap of Faith will be a revolution in pulling techniques, I’m telling you.

What do you think?

The notes are here if you haven’t seen them yet. WOW.com has a run-down of the highlights. The following are just my thoughts on the proposed changes.

• Heal: I’ve never really understood why Blizzard has chosen to make healing spells progress like this. We start with Lesser Heal, get Heal at 16, and get Greater Heal around 40 if I’m remembering correctly. Every time we go up a step, the previous step becomes useless (less healed for the same amount of mana). Mages don’t have Lesser Fireball, Fireball, and Greater Fireball; why are healing spells stacked this way? Regardless, it’s nice to see some more granularity in the healing spells available to level-capped priests.
• Mind Spike: You might remember a variant on this ability used by various voidwalkers and similarly-aspected creatures in Outland. (I’m thinking in particular about the voidwalkers around Oshu’gun in Nagrand.) This is useful for Shadow priests who – as they said – don’t have time to set up a rotation or who are locked out of Shadow spells (since it’s Shadowfrost, it won’t be stymied by school-lock mechanics). But as a baseline spell (it shows up at level 81 and they’ve said they’re not extending the talent trees beyond 51 points), it’ll also be useful to Disc and Holy priests in similar situations – it has a faster cast time than Mind Blast (and no cooldown) and no self-damage component like Shadow Word: Death, so we’ll be able to use it to DPS when we’ve been school-locked.
• Inner Will: This is going to be fabulous for raiding Disc priests. We’ll be much more mobile and we’ll have mana reductions on many of our key mitigation spells (PW:S and Pain Suppression, I’m looking at you). Based on this, I suspect that we’ll be seeing more talents and glyphs that remove the cast time of some our healing spells as well. (“When your Penance critically heals a friendly target, your next Heal has a chance to become instant-cast.”)
• Leap of Faith: It’s like Death Grip for friendlies. Here is where I’m going to deviate from the general healing population: if you are outright refusing to heal someone because they’re standing in a ground effect, you are a bad healer. Placing them lower on the priority list? Sure. It’s their responsibility to get out. But it’s your responsibility to heal the group. If you won’t do that, you shouldn’t be healing. We’ve come to a point in WOW where a lot of healers are saying “I’m just healing the tank, the DPS are on their own”, which is patently ridiculous. (Yes, I know I’ve been guilty of saying this myself sometimes. Shame on me.) Leap of Faith is a mitigation tool when someone’s standing in the fire; it’s like Power Word: Shield, except that it won’t run out. Added bonus: Leap of Faith + Inner Will = nobody ever has to do Frogger again.
• HOTs and DOTs will now benefit from haste and crit by default. This is cause for celebration, but I wonder: is this limited to priests, or is it a general change? And will Shadowform get a different bonus since it’s losing the haste/crit bonus?
• The changes to Spirit buffs – removing Divine Spirit, and making Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild not affect spirit – feel kludgy to me. Why not just drop Spirit entirely and go to straight MP5/HP5?
• “We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity.” Um. What does Blizzard know that I don’t about Disc priests’ ability to heal a single target well? “You’re awesome, and we want to make you totally awesome.”
• Power Word: Barrier: Finally. I’ve been waiting for this since the Wrath beta!
• Shadow Orbs (part of Shadow mastery): this looks like a cool mechanic. Wait for the minor Glyph to turn the orbs into ravens.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a note in the comments!

According to the last poll, 75% of you wouldn’t pay for a WOW guide under any conditions, 12% would if the preview were good, 6% would if the guide’s author were authoritative, and 6% would if the author were authoritative and the preview were good. That’s about the mix I expected. Thank you!

New poll, because I’ve been thinking about which characters I’m going to drop in favor of worgen once the expansion drops. Right now I’m going with my warrior and my warlock; I would have done a worgen druid, but let’s face it, you’re not going to actually see worgen form, ever, if you’re a druid, so why not just work on the night elf druid I already have?

Anyway, now I want your opinions! Which classes are you going to roll once the expansion drops?

More… &raquo

If by “lore” you mean what the developers mean, which is “the background and history on which the story of World of Warcraft is built”, then nothing is happening to the lore and the story is just progressing.

If, however, by “lore” you mean “the things about the current game that I like”, then yes, Cataclysm may well “ruin and destroy the lore”.

Guys, they’re not ruining lore any more than the second book in a series ruins the first book. Chill out.