This will no doubt be a rather controversial change. Zarhym hit the forums last night to let everyone know about what looks to be a last minute decision to WoW-blue-tracker/us-forums/27607450688-updated-combat-resurrection-design.html#0″ rel=”nofollow”>nerf combat resurrections in raid instances.

While they will still work in a raid, you’ll be limited in the number you can use on any given boss attempt. One res per 10-player boss attempt, and three per 25-player boss attempt. They can be any combination of combat resurrections — either Soulstone or Rebirth — but once you’ve used your allowed number players will receive error messages when attempting to accept the resurrection.

This change has been long overdue with the abuse of soulstones in the past, and is likely an attempt to reduce the focus on those spells being a major reason why you bring extra druids or warlocks to a raid. While I’m sure there will be some negative reaction to this, overall it’s good for the health of the raid game.

The design for combat resurrection effects has changed a good deal for Cataclysm, and we want to make sure players are clear on how spells like Rebirth and Create Soulstone now function. Rebirth has a 10-minute cooldown and Create Soulstone has a 15-minute cooldown. On raid boss encounters, you can only use one of these combat resurrection spells (so one Rebirth or one Soulstone) per attempt for 10-player raids. For 25-player raids you can use three forms of combat resurrection per raid boss attempt (so three of any combination of Rebirth and Soulstone). The count is incremented as soon as a player accepts a resurrection, so one can always choose not to accept if he or she wants someone else to get the resurrection instead. There is no equivalent of the Sated debuff (which tracks Bloodlust/Heroism usage), but you will get an error message if you try to resurrect too many players, and we might add tracking to our raid interface if there is demand for it. Outside of raid content, you can use as many battle resurrections as you have available.

For those of you currently participating in the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test, please note that this functionality may not be fully implemented as of yet. If you notice combat resurrections are not currently functioning as explained here, this is just a heads-up about the updated design intent behind them.