Downranking Nerfed - What Does it Mean
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You probably heard already downranking spells has been significantly changed in Wrath beta. If not, once you finish reading more about it here, you’re welcome to come back here and read my rant how this will affect warlocks, as well as other classes.
I’ll let others who are much better at math figure out how this will affect raid healers, but as far as PvP goes, downranking is serious business and this change will be a major blow to all classes (except, you guess, warriors and rogues, and deathknights).
I did mention a few spells warlocks can downrank to save mana in one of my older (but still useful) post about warlocks tricks, but there’s a lot more:
- Drain Soul - an extremely cheap way of making Soul Shards. Max rank costs 305 more mana, and still does terribad damage.
- Corruption - rank 1 was useful for two things: making dispellers waste mana, and cheap Nightfall procs
- Curse of Recklessness - PvE here, used for the infamous fear bouncing. Rank 1 is (was) a cheap way to break Fear without increasing mob’s AP too much. Other curses are also great if that druid or mage keeps removing them and wasting mana.
- Rain of Fire - terrible for DPS, but useful for breaking rogue’s stealth
- Hellfire - probably one of the worst spells in lock’s arsenal, besides Firestones (for now). But only one tick is enough to trigger Prayer of Mending.
- Life Tap - using lower ranks like 4-5 when you’re low on health but desperate for mana.
Although I don’t use as many downranked spells on my druid, there’s still a few:
- Moonfire - destroying shaman totems, or forcing dispels (Insect Swarm for the latter as well). Even used for a simple task such as keeping opponents in combat during arena matches.
- Faerie Fire - 90 mana cheaper than max rank, and still prevents rogues (or night elves in general) from stealthing.
- Rejuvenation - again, forcing dispels, but more important if you’re trying to kill Anzu.
- Entangling Roots & Hibernate - since it lasts no longer than ten seconds in PvP, there’s no reason to use max ranks.
I won’t get into other classes, but I’m pretty sure each caster has their own uses for downranked spells. Mages use R1 Frostbolt to snare or Arcane Explosion for rogues, shaman use R1 shocks… they will feel the pain also, especially enhancement ones. The point is, as you can see, raid healers are not the only ones who will suffer from this change. Yeah, casters got buffed with the spell pushback change, but downranking nerf outweights it by a longshot.
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O.o I never thought of any of those uses for Warlocks before, and a few of those for Druids are new to me, too! Thanks for the — however shortlived — tips!
There goes my rank 1 drain soul; and I thought I was being mana efficient
At least now I’ll have some excuse to use the full rank version which will hopefully be buffed a little to compensate for its current near uselessness.
I am seriously going to miss Rank 1 Drain Soul. Goddammit.
I second that, I always had it as Shift-3 to quickly get a SS for 55 mana (bargain?) so I really think if they are doing that it needs a buff beyond that crappy talent.
Yeah, this is absolutely ridiculous, and completely unnecessary. It wasn’t broken, why fix it? It’s not as if casters are running rampant destroying everything else, and they won’t be even when the pushback fix is put into place.
A small update in this thread.
well i guess to the classs it feels like a nerf but pvp wise it is technically a buff to everyone else, but it is unfair that non mana users will feel no pain from this
Downranking affects us locks a lot. It is so a pvp as it is a pve nerf. (nomore small life taps, nomore cheap soulshards, hellfire..)
And CoR bouncing for a feared target doesn’t work anymore because cor was changed that it only affects mobs that they don’t run away in fear if they are low on HP and not feared.
So kinda CoR was also nerfed.