Mastery

Template:Cataclysm

The Mastery system is a new game mechanic added to the talent system in Cataclysm. As you spend points in a talent tree, you will recieve passive talent tree bonuses (previously known as mastery bonuses) for the tree with the most points in it you will receive additional gains passively from the mastery system. Each character only gains passive talent tree bonuses from one talent tree. This system will replace some of the current stats on gear as well as some of the "passive" talents found in the game during the expansion. Additionally, there is a mastery stat, which improves the talent tree's third bonus.

Passive talent tree bonuses

Blizzcon 2009 examples

Blizzard has used Armor Penetration as an example at the 2009 BlizzCon to explain this system. In a slide presentation, they showed two specific examples to demonstrate. For a Combat rogue specced 15/51/5 with an unknown Mastery stat, he received the following bonuses from the Mastery System:

• Assassination (15 talent point): +10% Melee Damage, +2% Melee Crit, +5% Poison Damage
• Combat (51 talent points): +72% Melee Damage, +5% Melee Hit, +10% Armor Penetration
• Subtlety (5 talent points): +4% Melee Damage, +1% Melee Haste, +0.5% Energy Regeneration

Armor penetration is green, which may indicate that it is modified by the mastery stat.

The second example was a Retribution paladin specced 0/13/58 with 20 Mastery, with the following bonuses:

• Holy (0 talent points): +0% Healing, +0% Spell Crit, +0% Crit Heal
• Protection (13 talent points): +3% Damage Taken (probably a typo), +3% Health, +2% Block Amount
• Retribution (58 talent points): +75% Melee Damage, +10% Melee Crit, -12% ability cooldown

Ability cooldown is green. The tooltip for the Mastery stat in the stats panel says "Ability Cooldown: -12%".

Eyonix, a Blizzard employee, gave a more detailed breakdown of the Mastery stat on the WoW forums:

Last week, we gave you an early look at the changes we’re making to the stat system in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and explained how these changes will ultimately provide players with more interesting gear choices and make stats easier to understand. Today we’d like to go into more detail about a brand-new feature that’s an integral part of this overhaul: the Mastery system, a set of new game mechanics designed to allow players to become better at what makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. With this system, we want to accomplish three things: give players more freedom in how they allocate talent points, simplify some of the “kitchen sinky” talents that try to do too much at once, and add a new stat to high-level gear that makes you better at your chosen role.

Here’s how the system works: As you spend points in a given talent tree, you’ll receive three different passive bonuses specific to that tree. The first bonus will increase your damage, healing, or survivability, depending on the intended role of the tree. The second bonus will be related to a stat commonly found on gear desirable to you, such as Haste or Crit. The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear.

One of our primary goals with Mastery is to give players more flexibility to choose fun or utility-oriented talents rather than make them feel obligated to pick up “mandatory” but uninteresting talents, such as passive damage or healing. (For examples of the kinds of powerful but boring talents we’re talking about, take a look at the talent tier just above the 51-point talent in many of the existing trees.) In a sense, Mastery makes it so every talent in (just for example) a rogue tree essentially has an invisible additional bullet point that says “…and increases your damage by X%.” This way, if you choose a talent like Elusiveness (which reduces your chance to be detected while stealthed) or Fleet Footed (which affects movement), you won’t feel like you’re giving up damage in exchange for utility.

There will still be talents that boost damage, of course, but those talents will also affect the way you play. For example, you can still expect to see talents like Improved Frostbolt, which reduces the cast time of the Frostbolt spell; it increases DPS, but it also affects the mage’s rotation. Piercing Ice, however, is just “6% more damage” and is the kind of talent we’re trying to eliminate by implementing the Mastery system.

As we get closer to Cataclysm’s release, we’ll go into more detail about the changes coming for each class, including individual talent-tree adjustments and how Mastery will affect them. In the meantime, here are a few examples to demonstrate the three kinds of passive bonuses we described above. Please keep in mind that we're still working on this system, and the handful of examples we're providing here are, of course, subject to change.

Holy Priest

For each talent point spent in the Holy tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.
• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent from the Discipline tree, which many Holy priests consider to be a “must-have.” Regeneration will also probably be determined by whether you are in or out of combat, and not the “five-second rule.”
• Radiance – Adds a heal-over-time effect to direct heals, such as Flash Heal. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

Discipline Priest

For each talent point spent in the Discipline tree, the priest also gets:

• Healing – Improves your healing by X%.
• Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent.
• Absorption – Improves the amount of damage absorbed by spells such as Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

Frost Death Knight

For each talent point spent in the Frost tree, the death knight also gets:

• Damage – Improves your melee and spell damage by X%.
• Haste – Improves your melee Haste by Y%. This might allow us to remove some of the Haste in the Icy Talons line of talents.
• Runic Power – Improves the rate of runic power generated by abilities. While all death knights want runic power, Frost death knights would generally have more runic power than Blood or Unholy death knights (who would receive a different benefit from their respective trees). An Unholy death knight who sub-specs into Frost would still be able to benefit from this bonus, though because they’re investing fewer talent points, they’d benefit to a smaller degree. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

April 2010 class preview examples

This preview introduced the Vengeance mechanic.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection trees for warriors and paladins, Blood tree for death knights and Feral tree for druids, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors, Frost or Unholy death knights, Balance, Restoration or Feral druids in cat form or Holy or Retribution Paladins running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

Death Knight

Blood

• Damage reduction
• Vengeance
• Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you'll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.

Frost

• Melee damage
• Melee Haste
• Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.

Unholy

• Melee damage
• Melee and spell critical damage
• Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree's play style.

Druid

Balance

• Spell Damage
• Spell Haste
• Eclipse: We are moving Eclipse from a talent into a core mechanic of the class and making it less random. Balance druids will have a new UI element that shows a sun and a moon. Whenever they cast an Arcane spell, it will move the UI closer to the sun, and buff their Nature damage. Whenever they cast a Nature spell, it will move the UI closer to the moon, and buff their Arcane damage. The gameplay intention is to alternate Arcane and Nature spells (largely Starfire and Wrath) to maintain the balance.

Feral (Cat)

• Melee Damage
• Melee Critical Damage
• Bleed Damage: Feral druids will receive two sets of passive bonuses depending on whether the druid is in cat or bear form. Bleed Damage will be improved for cats. Savage Defense is the current bear mechanic for converting crits into damage absorption and will be improved for bears.

Feral (Bear)

• Damage Reduction
• Vengeance
• Savage Defense: Feral druids will receive two sets of passive bonuses depending on whether the druid is in cat or bear form. Bleed Damage will be improved for cats. Savage Defense is the current bear mechanic for converting crits into damage absorption and will be improved for bears.

Restoration

• Healing
• Meditation
• HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

Hunter

Beast Mastery

• Ranged Damage
• Haste
• Pet Damage: Many of the passive benefits to pet damage will no longer be available in the Beast Mastery talent tree. However, these will be provided through the new Mastery mechanic.

Marksmanship

• Ranged Damage
• Armor Penetration
• Double Shot: The hunter will have a chance to launch a free attack off of the global cooldown for 50% damage.

Survival

• Ranged Damage
• Ranged Critical Damage
• Elemental Damage: Hunter abilities such as traps, Black Arrow, and Explosive Shot will do elemental damage of the following types: Improves the Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature or Shadow damage of abilities like traps, Black Arrow and Explosive Shot.

Mage

Arcane

• Spell damage
• Spell Haste
• Mana Adept: Arcane will deal damage based how much mana the mage has. For example, Arcane mages will do much more damage at 100% mana than at 50% mana. If they begin to get low on mana, they will likely want to use an ability or mechanic to bring their mana up to increase their damage.

Fire

• Spell damage
• Spell Crit
• Ignite: All direct-damage fire spells will add a damage-over-time (DoT) component when cast. The flavor will be similar to how Fireball works; however, the DoT component will be much stronger.

Frost

• Spell damage
• Spell Crit damage
• Deathfrost: Casting Frostbolt places a buff on the mage that increases the damage for all frost, fire, and arcane spells. The only damage spell that won't be affected by this buff is Frostbolt.

Paladin

Holy

• Healing
• Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.
• Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Protection

• Damage Reduction
• Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.
• Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

Retribution

• Melee Damage
• Melee Critical Damage
• Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

Priest

Discipline

• Healing
• Meditation
• Absorption: Improves the strength of shields such as Power Word: Shield, Divine Aegis, and Power Word: Barrier.

Holy

• Healing
• Meditation
• Radiance: Your direct heals add a small heal-over-time component to the target.

Shadow

• Spell damage
• Spell Crit
• Shadow Orbs: Casting spells grants a chance for Shadow Orbs to be created that fly around you and increase your shadow damage. This will help lower-level characters feel more like "Shadow priests" before they obtain Shadowform.

Rogue

Assassination

• Melee damage
• Melee critical damage
• Poison damage

Combat

• Melee damage
• Melee Haste
• Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety

• Melee damage
• Armor Penetration
• 3.Harder-hitting finishers

Shaman

Elemental

• Spell damage
• Spell Crit
• Elemental Overload: Your direct-damage spells have a chance to proc a less powerful 'bonus" version of the spell. This will work much like the current Lightning Overload talent, but would also apply to Lava Burst.

Enhancement

• Melee damage
• Melee Haste
• Nature Damage: This will provide a passive bonus to the Nature damage dealt by the Enhancement shaman.

Restoration

• Healing
• Meditation
• Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target's health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points.

Warrior

Arms

• Melee Damage
• Armor Penetration
• Bonus Swing: This is similar to the Sword Specialization talent that is currently in the game, but Bonus Swing will work on all attacks and with all weapons. You have a chance to proc a free, instant weapon swing that hits for 50% damage.

Fury

• Melee Damage
• Melee Haste
• Enrage Intensity: Every benefit of being enraged is increased. This includes doing more damage/healing/ etc. from abilities like Bloodrage, Death Wish, Enrage, Berserker Rage, and Enraged Regeneration.

Protection

• Damage Reduction
• Vengeance
• Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.

External links

MMO Champion Blizzcon Day 1 - Class Discussion Panel

MMO Champion Blizzcon Day 2 - Game Systems Panel

MMO Champion Blizzcon Day 2 - Open Q&A Panel

World of Warcraft forum discussion of Mastery Stat World of Warcraft forum discussion - Cataclysm Class Information is here!