The Deluge Commences

Finally, the first true jökulhaup of information has arrived, and much as the biblical flood that is the subject of Darren Aronofsky's latest film, the flood of 6.0 patch notes is washing away much of the known world.

That's right, folks, the Warlords Alpha has arrived. Alpha, you ask? Not Beta? Well, I don't know how Blizzard is playing things these days. The big Heroes of the Storm thing that people are checking out now is technically an Alpha, even though it looks more like a closed Beta, so who even knows?

Anyway, there is a metric crap ton (tonne?) of information Blizzard has released, and while I would love to go into specifics, it is very late at night and even if it weren't, it would be better to just link you to the patch notes.

But let's do highlights!

Primary Stats:

Agility and Intellect will no longer provide crit, bringing them in line with Strength. However, because they like agile guys to crit more, all physical classes that use agility will get a base 10% bonus to their crit chance (all rogues, all hunters, feral/guardian druids, brewmaster/windwalker monks, and enhancement shamans.)

Strength and Agility will also now only provide one point of attack power per point of the stat, BUT: one's damage will scale up significantly more from attack power (at the very least compensating for this.)

Vengeance Dies Hard, Resolve Avenges It:

With tanks now benefitting from "DPS stats," Vengeance is going to be replaced with Resolve, which will only affect the defensive aspects of a tank's abilities. To compensate for the lost attack power, tanks will both have their abilities scaled up and also gain attack power from their masteries, in addition to the masteries' standard defensive effects.

As an example: Death Strike will now heal based on attack power, rather than damage taken in the last five seconds, but because Resolve will buff its healing based on damage taken in the last ten seconds, it winds up looking pretty similar.

Buffs and Debuffs Going Away or Getting Consolidated:

Haste buffs will now be consolidated, so your Rogue and your Moonkin will both just give everyone haste.

Sunder Armor effects were always basically a different flavor of Physical Vulnerability, so they're removing them (and in some cases giving PV to abilities that used to affect armor.)

The Grand Cull:

There are so many abilities getting streamlined or removed entirely. I really can't go through all of them here, but those notes are a veritable abattoir of holy cows. Check the link above.

And So Much More!

There's a lot here that I've left out, like more details on the stat squish and some of the implementations of the removal of hit and expertise, and the phasing out of dodge and parry (I could have misread, but I get the impression that current items with dodge/parry will still have them.)

Blizzard also unveiled the 91-99 perks that affect various abilities. While many of them are flat buffs that will likely come out as a wash in the long run, a few have significant effects. For example, Assassination Rogues will get Slice and Dice as a passive, and Frost DKs will get buffs to Razorice and Ciderglacier (hopefully enough to let my 2H Frost guy use a rune other than FC.)

There's also some interesting things about professions, particularly glyphs.

It's heartening to see some new information, even if it's just the beginning of the "Alpha." Expect a lot of change, but probably not reversions of the big changes.