bygamer:Unofficial World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Guide part 11

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removed in WotLK, so you can now cap spell hit at 17% and never miss a spell against a raid boss. Note that Spell Misses are not related to spell Resists, which is a different mechanic altogether. This may seem like a tiny change, but it can be significant in fights where a missed spell steal or silence can ruin the day.In addition, spell misses are actually reported as a miss in the combat log now, no longer leaving you wondering whether your spells' failure was due to lack of spell hit or actual enemy resistance.

Resistance

Mobs above your level will resist partial spell damage. To complicate matters, this level based damage reduction is entirely unrelated to actual resistance. Spell Penetration does nothing to alleviate this.

Wands

In Burning Crusade, you would get a global cooldown both when you started and when you stopped wanding. The latter is removed now, so you can interrupt your wanding and instantly begin casting a spell.

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bygamer:Unofficial World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Guide part 10

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Channeled spellsWhile channeling a spell, the first and second hit you take will reduce the duration of your channeled spell by 25% of the total duration. At most, someone can cut your channeled spell by 50%.Note that this mechanic is separate from actual silence, stun and other effects which are designed to interrupt your spell casts. Nonetheless, this is a welcome change. You can actually get a non instant spell off when being attacked, and that is very nice in both PvE and PvP.

AE Damage Caps Increased

Back in Burning Crusade, Area of effect damage caps were added to the game. When the damage dealt with an AE spell goes past a certain point, any further damage is not applied to the targets. This mechanic stays in WotLK, but the caps have been increased. You can deal up to 37,500 damage with an instant spell, where a channeled spell may deal 25,000 per second. Reaching this cap is typically only a concern if you pull large amounts of mobs.

Downranking

The use of lower ranked spells has been especially popular among healers, but damage casters did it from time to time as well. This practice has become pointless in WotLK, as spells costs were all reworked to use percentage of your base mana pool. Your base mana pool is the mana you have when you strip away all mana granted by buffs, talents or gear.

CC breaking

Many crowd control spells like Fear, Frost Nova and Entangling Roots used to have a chance of breaking whenever the afflicted target took damage. This is no longer the case in WotLK. Instead, all such spells will break after a set amount of damage has been taken. This amount depends on several factors:–The target's health pool–Elite or non elite.–PvP or PvE.

Spell Hit

In BC, the Spell Hit cap for raid bosses (which are considered to be 3 levels above your own, so 73 at the time) was 16%. You always had at minimum a 1% chance to miss your spells. This 1% minimum has been

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byGamer:Unofficial World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Guide part 9

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An example: Balance Druids, Unholy Death Knights and Warlocks all have a debuff which increases magic damage taken by the target by 13-15%. These debuffs do not stack. You definitely need this debuff in a raid, but you are no longer forced to look specifically for a warlock to get it. Warlocks won't like that, but there are many other examples. This change should make it easier to put a raid together without desperately looking for any one specific class

Tanking

Traditionally, warrior tanks have been the main tanks for the majority of 25 man raids. This changes ever so slightly with BC, which brought paladin and druid tanks a little more to the forefront. Blizzard decided it wasn't enough, and felt that the tanks should be much more equal. The goal was to make Death Knights, Feral Druids, Prot Paladins and Prot Warriors all equally viable in tanking raid content. All four received good AE aggro capabilities, easier threat management and good single target tanking tools.

Further tanking things of interest:–Crushing blows can only be dealt by mobs 4 levels above you. Raid bosses are at most 3 levels above you, which means that CB's are no longer a factor for tanks.–Defensive Avoidance stats have diminishing returns. Defense Rating, Parry, Dodge etc all provide a smaller increase the more of it you have.

Spell Interruption

Spell casting times have always been increased dramatically when taking direct damage. If you hit someone fast enough, it can take ages to get a spell with a cast time off. This has been changed for both regular and channeled spells. It now works like this:

Regular spellsWhile casting a spell, the first and second hit you take will increase casting time by 0.5 seconds each. Any damage taken beyond that does not effect the cast time. At most, someone can increase you cast time for any one spell by 1 second.

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bygamer: Unofficial World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Guide part 8

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Auction houses and Trainers

Just as with Outland, Northrend has no auction house or skill trainers available. You will still have to visit the old capital cities for this.

Game Mechanic Changes

A number of important changes to statistics and mechanics occurred in WotLK.

Damage and Healing

combinedOne of the most notable changes is the merging of +healing and + spell damage on gear into a singular stat named Spell Power. All passive item effects that strictly affect healing were converted to grant Spell Power. Healing spells were adjusted to compensate for the lower total amount of Spell Power. Healers will now be able to deal meaningful damage when healing doesn't require their undivided attention.

Ratings for both melee and spells

Hit Rating, Haste Rating and Crit rating found on items all apply to both physical abilities and spells

Fewer items

The aforementioned changes allowed Blizzard to reduce the amount of items you can find on instance bosses. This may not seem like a positive thing, but its meant to reduce the amount of overspecialized gear that no one wants.It will also result in healers now rolling on the stuff dps casters are gunning for and vice versa, which is expected to lead to more drama, sadly.

Raidwide Buffs

Previously group based buffs such as Power Word: Fortitude, Totems, Blessings, Blood Lust, etcetera now affect the entire raid. This is a pretty big shift from how things used to be, and it makes group composition much less important.

Buff and Debuff

stackingBuff and Debuff stacking has been changed. Blizzard decided to move away from having any one class bring a critical buff or debuff to the raid, so they spread these abilities around to multiple classes, whilst preventing them from stacking.

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Two Specs

This functionality will not be live at launch, but is scheduled to be patched in later. The idea is to let players save two talent specs they can easily switch between. Currently known is that you will be allowed to switch in most PvE situations, but not in Arena's. You will not be able to swap specs during combat.Lastly, you will also be able to save two different sets of Glyphs, which will switch along with your spec.

BoE Epics

Every raid boss Northrend has a chance to drop a Bind on Equip item.This gives non-raiders a chance to acquire raiding gear. Expect to pay serious gold to buy raid gear though.

Heroic Badges

Outland's Badges of Justice are replaced by two new types of badges; Emblem of Heroism and Emblem of Valor. Each offers access to different rewards.Emblem of HeroismThese can be gained in heroic instances and the 10 man versions of raid instances. They are essentially the new Badges of Justice.Emblem of ValorThese are gained in 25-man raids only. They can be used to purchase higher quality gear than the Emblems of Heroism

Account-bound Items

This new type of item tag allows it to be mailed to characters on your own account only.Heirloom ItemsThese items have a gold color. They're special in that they will scale in power relative to your level. They can be purchased with Emblems of Heroism. They are account-bound, so you will be able to mail them to an alt to make leveling easier.

Heroic Loot

Heroic instances have an entirely separate loot table from normal difficulty. You won't be finding a rare meant for level 73 when killing a heroic instance boss

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Inscription

Inscription is the new profession introduced with Wrath of the Lich King. It is remarkably similar to enchanting, with the distinction that it lets you enchant your spells and skills instead of your items. In addition, Inscribers produce Vellum, which can be used by Enchanters to make their Enchants tradable. Vellum itself can be traded, so that Enchanters aren't obliged to pick up Inscription. More info can be found in the Inscription chapter.

Target Dummies

Engineers could always make target dummies, but those could only be used as a distraction. However, you can now find special Target Dummies as a permanent addition to all capitals. They can be attacked to test out your skill, or to see what kind of damage you can put out. There are level 80 and 83 ones in Dalaran, but you'll find lower level versions in Outland and Azeroth.
More Daily QuestsDaily quests were added to Outland after Burning Crusade's release, they were available once you reached level 70. Things are different in Northrend. Nearly every zone has one or multiple daily quests available. The lowest level one requires 68.

Pets and Mounts

Non combat pets and mounts no longer take up inventory space. You can learn them, and they will appear in the pets and mount window, from which you can summon or hotkey them. This window can be accessed by hitting SHIFT-P (default binding). From there, you can click tabs to go to the Companions, Mounts and Pets tabs.

Currency

The various currency tokens no longer take up inventory space, they also have their own currency window. Tokens include heroic and PvP marks. The Currency window is not tied to a hotkey per default, but can be accessed through a tab underneath the Character Window. (Hotkey is C per default)

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Quests&Professions---Unofficial World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Guide:part 5

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seen, but at the least it could be a nice gimmick. Naturally, there are various new mounts to be obtained in Northrend, including Mammoths, Proto-Dragons, Flying Carpets and Motorcycles.

Quests

The precious Expansion introduced some new types of quests to make leveling up a bit more interesting, most notably the bombing runs. Those are a bit more prominent in WotLK, culminating in rather advanced mini-game type bombing runs in Icecrown, a top level zone. Wrath of the Lich King does its best to spice up your questing in its own way as well. New quest types include:A) Control quests: In these quests, you can control mobs (even bosses), siege weapons or guns to utterly destroy stuff. They all have their own special abilities, which makes these quests pretty sweet in general.B) Chase quests. Mount up and gun down or slow down mobs chasing you.C) Lore quests: Get teleported to a different location to relive an event from the past.

Professions

Giving players with a crafting profession access to so called 'best in slot' items was a concept introduced in in Burning Crusade, and heavily expanded on with its last major content patch, 2.4. Whether this trend continues as strongly Wrath of the Lich King is uncertain right now. The epic craftables by the various professions look solid, but only up to Naxxramas level gear, which is the first tier of raiding. Blizzard has commented that they thought some of the craftable gear felt like a requirement to raiders, and they were not entirely happy with this situation. This expansion with ship with decidedly less superior craftable gear, although each profession does get a different kind of self-only boost. For instance, Blacksmiths can add a socket to several items and Alchemists can craft self-only potions with unlimited charges. If the high level raids are to drop superior quality items, then the crafting professions may still have access to really good gear, but that all remains to be seen

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