yay.

It’s not that big of a change in PvP though, especially once gear scaling gets reigned in. The main reason that it’s changing is to make it more clear what it does, because raid-level PvE mobs calculate their damage by multiplying their base AP by a lot. Vindication and other -AP abilities affected the base AP. But if you were new, you’d think a boss had like 20,000 AP, which might be confusing.

All abilities that reduce AP, like demoralizing shout, are being changed to physical damage reduction and all tanking specs will have access to the physical damage reduction ability.

The Vindication change is a bit more than just a clarification but rather (to me) a nice little buff. It is going from a flat reduction amount: 287/574

to being percentage-based: 5/10%

574 attack power would be 10% of 5740 attack power which is already obtainable and breakable quite easily by any physical DPS class today. At level 85, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 7000 attack power as obtainable (I throw that number out there simply as an idea as I don’t yet have solid values for what level 85 stats will look like – all we know is that they will go up a bit).

Yes, a mild buff but a cool one nonetheless.

As overweight said, it was no longer for wipe prevention. Just saving money and more importantly, exploiting some game mechanics. Soulstones can be used in-combat and you still have to die to use it, so it’s most like a combat res and not wipe prevention anymore.

Vindication change just makes the ability more clear, its just a simple change.
Blessings – meh, cool, but nothing huge, further consolidating buffs.
Swift Ret – will be another source of the WF buff. nice for solo and small group content.
Resistance Aura- Awesome, assuming the shaman totems will do the same.

Most of the updated changes I see being worthwhile (Paladins, now with Heroism!) but really I am still finding the proposed Divine Storm changes to be rather lackluster.

By the way, does anyone know that when the Pre-Cataclysm Patch comes out, will current items with AP, SP be converted to Agi, Str, Int etc? or will they remain the same and the new stat mechanic only applied to new items.

it’s actually from a question answered on her fromspring site, and as far as where the information comes from, I have no idea. Last i heard she was a Blizz employee and was on alpha, but again, pure speculation on my end.

like i said, an interesting rumor at the moment until we get more concrete information.