Cataclysm Class Changes

Cataclysm hasn’t just changed the world of Azeroth forever, it has also brought significant changes to many classes. In this article about cataclysm class changes I will cover the outline of changes in every archetype (healing/tanking/damage dealers) while linking to articles for all out information per class. Whether you’re a veteran player considering his reroll options or a new player looking for information on the classes you should find what you’re looking for.

I will start out covering the changes to healers, followed by tanking and damage dealing. This will allow you to quickly spring to the part that interests you and see what significant changes were made to change the class balance.

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Let’s get into it.

Healers

The healers arguably underwent the most change. In Wrath of the Lich King mana was rarely an issue allowing healers to go all out instead of seeing it as a scarce resource. With Blizzard attempting to bring this back in Cataclysm they also adjusted the classes significantly. Before the roles were pretty written out: paladins are tank healers, shamans could tank and raid heal, priests could raid heal (either spec) and tank heal (discipline) while druids would raidheal with rejuvenation covering. Well, not anymore. In cataclysm every healer will be able to take on any role of healing well enough. Of course druids, shamans and priests are still stronger raid healers than paladins when it comes to healing many people at once, you actually have the option now to have a paladin raid healing. Before a lot of the tougher raid encounters wouldn't really allow you to have a paladin raid healing because they couldn't spread their healing powers enough.

Paladin healing also received a massive overhaul. Instead of just using holy light they now have to use their whole arsenal of heals. On top of hat they also gained a new resource called Holy Power which works similar to the rogue combo system. They can use this to either use a strong raid heal or an instant heal, both free of cost while becoming more powerful with more holy power (up to 3 holy power). What makes paladin healing more interesting now is that there’s a lot of synergy between spells, be it generating more holy power or one spell giving you extra haste on  another it’s a lot more diverse than it was before.

Shamans and druids didn’t get significant changes when it comes to healing. Arguably shamans haven’t changed at all, beyond getting 2 new spells. Druids did see an interesting change in the form of their tree of life form now being a healing cooldown instead of being permanent, allowing them to temporarily heal a lot more. Beyond that the old “keep rejuvenation on the whole raid” has been toned down by Blizzard as it’s not rather mana costly.

Lastly we have the priest class. Similar to druids, discipline priests were discouraged from shield covering the whole raid in regards to mana issues. Instead of just nerfing this aspect, the other heals for discipline were also boosted to make healing more attractive than just shielding. Holy on the other hand got a whole new mechanic to play with. This new mechanic, called chakra, allows priests to “change” their primary healing role by being able to boost certain spells on 30 second intervals. For example, you could boost renew to be more similar to the old resto druid raid healing style, or you can boost your raid healing improving the healing done by all the relevant spells. It adds a dynamic aspect to the holy healing spec as you’re now able to adjust your power to whatever you need, be it consistent  raid healing, single target healing or direct raid healing.

Tanking

The biggest change to tanking is arguably the change to threat and agro. Before with misdirection (hunters) and tricks of the trade (rogues) it was impossible to take monsters away from the tank. Now with that threat being removed after 30 seconds everything’s changed. Instead all tanks obtained a new mechanic called vengeance, which allows them to stack more AP whenever they take damage up to a maximum percentage of their health. This allows them to deal more damage as the encounter progresses, meaning the damage dealers still have to be careful early on in the fight, or when adds spawn for example.

Another big change came for death knights. Beyond their rune system being changed, their tanking tree is now limited to blood where frost and unholy are now damage oriented. This caused a lot of the cool tanking talents from frost and unholy to be cramped into the blood tree, giving them a lot of cooldowns to play with.

Paladins also saw a significant change with the introduction of their new mechanic, namely holy power. With this they have to decide between which abilities to use instead of following their rotation as they used to. Furthermore ardent defender was also changed to be an on use cooldown instead of a passive lifesaver.

Druids saw some changes to their abilities, mostly adding new ones while adding a cooldown to swipe. This added a lot more depth to feral tanking. It also reflects the Blizzard thought of wanting to reduce the “AoE tank&spank”mentality of quickly clearing trash. It’s a lot harder to keep agro on multiple targets now with the cooldown on swipe.

Warriors didn’t change to much in general. The biggest change, which also affected paladins is that block now reduces damage by a percentage instead of it being good against a lot of weak mobs, but useful against hard hitting boss mobs.

Damage Dealing

In a short summary there isn’t much to say about the changes to this archetype. The biggest change Is arguably the stat consolidation and the removal of armor penetration. This put a lot of classes back (warriors, marksman hunters, feral druids and combat rogues). These classes saw some significant boosts in other regards to make up for this change.

Feral druids are now a lot more focused on bleed damage than auto attack and shred.
Hunters now work with the new focus mechanic instead of mana. This means one has to put more thought into what you use your resource on, while not being stuck with running out of mana which was a big issue and damage loss all throughout wrath.
Retribution also saw a big overhaul with the introduction of holy power. Instead of mashing what comes up first you now have almost a fixed rotation between crusader strike into a filler, until you have 3 holy power and can use templar’s verdict. The part that makes retribution fun to play is that what filler you use has priority, and there are many things that can adjust what filler you need to use keeping you on the ball.

There isn’t much else to say about damage dealing in general. If you’re really tied up between what to play you’ll have to check the individual classes or go by how they played in Wrath of the lich king. Not that much has changed unless you’ve actually been playing the class already and now how significant something actually was.

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