WoW Forever: casting low ranks stops paying off

The character sheet in the WoW Forever beta now says something it never said in the original game. Hover over spell damage or spell healing and the tooltip explains that spells cast at ranks far below your current level get much less benefit from both, and have a reduced chance to set off your class abilities and talents. The 2 examples it names are Frostbite and Omen of Clarity.

A developers' note in the same build puts a number on it: "Using a Rank 1 Frostbolt at level 60 will result in a 0% chance to get a Frostbite activation." The note frames it as a choice rather than a loss — "you now are making a decision between getting a slow off quickly, or using a spell that can potentially get a Frostbite activation, instead of getting both".

What is being taken apart here is one of the oldest habits in the game. Downranking means casting a weaker version of a spell you already know: a healer picks a smaller heal so the target is not overhealed and the mana bar lasts longer, and a caster throws the cheapest rank of something to fish for an effect that triggers on a cast rather than on damage. Both work because spell power carries over to every rank. Cutting how much of it reaches the low ranks makes the small heal smaller than the arithmetic says, and cutting the trigger chance removes the second half of the trick outright.

Mages have taken it worst, coming after a run of other reductions to the class, and the argument on the forums has been running all day. This is read from the beta build rather than from an announcement: Blizzard has not published a separate post about it, and the developers' note above is the whole of what it has said. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever opens at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.