Sniff out the new talents

Scout out those talents carefully! All your talent points will be resetting, anyway. Take your time and read through everything carefully before investing them. My respec costs on the beta rose higher than the cap that's currently live in the game right now. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not. Either way, the new talent trees should be fun to mess with!

Readjust your gems

The first thing I noticed when I logged on the test realms is that my Runed Cardinal Rubies instantly converted to 20 intellect gems. You may wish to convert any gems that are out of place into something useful. Remember the stat changes! Spellpower gems aren't something you can get anymore. Intellect automatically converts into spellpower for you. If you find yourself needing more mana regeneration, invest in a few spirit gems. That is now the main go-to stat for regeneration.

Pay attention to the basics

So I mentioned a little earlier in the piece about the increase to health and mana. Don't rely on that to be a crutch. No matter how much health or mana you have, standing in Defile is still going to destroy you. You still need to run out of fires, stay out of void zones and avoid getting cleaved by stuff. Pay attention. It isn't the weapon swings of the boss that are going to crush your group. It will be the shadow priest who got pulled into the middle and couldn't avoid the explosion or run out fast enough.

Yeah that's right! A shadow priest (although really, it could be any class).

Manage your mana

I have no way to know what to expect. I hustled my way from 80 to 85 and jumped into instances when I had the chance. You can't simulate the environment of a raid from a normal 5-man instance. All I can provide is the "no, duh!" answer of guessing and checking. Keep healing however you see fit, but make adjustments on the fly. Obviously, if you're draining your mana, ease off the gas for a while. You still have potions and cooldowns to use, right? I know you may not have had to use them in a while.
Should you use Heal?

Last I checked, no. That particular healing model is supposed to kick in once we all hit 85. Stick to your normal spell usages for now. Unless they throw us a curve ball, I don't expect that to start using our new and efficient heal.

If you wanted to summarize everything, I can easily do it in three words: I don't know. The numbers are being changed so often that by the time I can write something conclusively, it would be outdated anyway (or incorrect). But I do think that things won't be as terrible as some players are calling it.

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