Cooldowns and Ability Pruning

The first of the long-awaited "Dev Watercooler" articles is up, and they're discussing the mechanics of the item squish as well as the philosophy behind the pruning our spell books will be getting, as well as a little word on bringing racial abilities into balance.

We also got several tweets about various specific class abilities.

First off, it appears that Amplify and Cleave are both getting nixed after the experiments in SoO (I always thought Cleave would be shunted off to the tertiary level, but either way, it's nice not to have one more way you can accidentally hit more than you wanted to (though these days CC in PvE is pretty rare.)

Amplify I always thought was a little uninteresting as a stat, as it only affected your other stats (though boosting crit and multi strike damage was maybe more interesting?) I'm not shedding a tear.

On the subject of abilities, it looks like one of their goals is to reduce the number of redundant cool downs, either by eliminating some or merging some (I believe the crit damage bonus of Skull Banner might get rolled into Recklessness, for example.) Likewise, Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria is going to stand alone as the one major raid damage cool down, with Skull Banner and Stormlash Totem going away.

There's little on cutting down rotational abilities, but I'm hoping that we get a little of that (the hunter level 90 tier is a little frustrating. It might not be so bad if those replaced other abilities, but as it is, it's easy to be playing and say "crap! I forgot Glaive Toss again!)

Perhaps of more interest to the PvPers, the various diminishing-return categories of crowd control are getting slimmed down a lot to allow the DR effect to truly help. Likewise, they're significantly cutting back on pet-based CC and cutting back on instant-cast CC.

In terms of racial abilities, one of the biggest blanket effects is that weapon racials are all going out the window, and getting compensated with new abilities. So long, my Paladin's preference for Swords and Maces. One of the nice effects that this, and other racial redesigns will have is that they should make the racial abilities more generally applicable. Right now, the Human Spirit does jack for me as a tank, but the idea they're having is that you'll be able to select two secondary stats to boost by a small amount. Racial damage cool downs, like Berserking, are going to get nerfed to be more in line with the other abilities. One ability that seems pretty interesting is for Night Elves, which gives them 1% haste at night and 1% crit during the day.

Pretty exciting revelations, and I'm pretty happy with all of them (though it'll still look weird for my Paladin to wield an axe, which I've actually managed to avoid for the vast majority of my time playing him.)

However, I don't think we'll be able to get the real picture until the Beta is out, which Blizzard claims is "Soon (TM.)"