Spooncraft

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I got an email today from a reader asking two pretty good questions. Both of which involve PVP to some degree. They came from a J. Rundell who is serving the US Armed forces (at least that’s what I gathered from a USMC email coming from an Iraq portal). So I start this off by saying thank you flat out. It may seem cliche it may even seem like an automatic thing to hear by now. But really in my most heartfelt way, thank you. Because of you, I don’t have to be over there and I can spend my days writing about Warcraft, getting yelled at by web people, and watching my two daughters grow. But enough of that, on to the questions!

1. Ret. Paladins in the Arena. My question was about the paladin’s spell “Seal of Justice”. The part of this spell I am concerned about is when it is judged on a target. The judgment part of the spell reads “…Unleashing this Seal’s energy will judge an enemy for 20 seconds, preventing them from fleeing and limiting their movement speed.” Why would this not apply to a warrior’s intercept ability, and a mage’s blink ability?

2. As was put out by you in a past topic, it was stated that the Death Knight’s taunt would physically pull a target to the Death Knight. Even before that was put out, I was always wondering, if Blizzard made it to where a rogue’s distract ability can effect players, by physically turning a player to the spell’s area of effect (which as far as my
research finds, was patch 1.5) why does a paladin, druid, and warrior’s taunt ability not physically change the target of a player?

Alrighty to go ahead and hit this first question let’s look specifically at the spell in question. Seal of Justice had one main purpose in the original WoW, stopping players from being able to dash away and stopping mobs that run for help. As it stands now, the spell (like you mentioned in your email) is pretty much a guarantee to take out escaping druids and the likes. However what this does is force your run speed to never exceed 100%. In other words you cannot use sprint, travel form, potions, whatever to run faster. The fact that retribution paladins specifically can refresh judged seals on a target is really helpful in this scenario because it helps to lock down a druid (usually healing) in most PVP situations.

Now as for abilities like Blink and Intercept it’s not really a movement based ability. Blink itself magically teleports the mage forward (hopefully) about 20 yards but that distance isn’t covered by running. The seal remains judged on the mage so they can’t sprint or by any means run faster. It should be noted that Blink is pretty much a mage’s only real tool to get away from an enemy when they get locked down by melee classes.

Intercept is a little more funky. I would agree that charge moves are basically the warrior running on the ground and that the seal’s definition (taken literally) should apply. But the move itself isn’t increasing the run speed of the warrior at all, in a matter of speaking he or she is just being teleported to the target but since they’re warriors they are explained (for the sake of lore and consistency) as charging an enemy to stun him by slamming into him.

To sum it up you should treat these kinds of spells & abilities as special. Intercept, Intervene, Charge are special tools given to a warrior so that he can get into melee range when he otherwise would be unable to at all thus rendering him completely useless in just about every scenario. Blink is also the mage’s gambit, without blink pretty much every melee DPS class in the game would be able to destroy mages without any effort. Rogues don’t have anything like this because they can stealth (ignore the staggeringly overpowered Shadowstep for this explanation please) and hybrids (you, me, and druids) aren’t necessarily going to be in melee roles by default.

Now your second question hits a little closer to home. I forget exactly when but a long while back this was brought up in the official forums and actually got some Blue replies but for the life of me I cannot find it in the archives. Long story short, Blizzard (at least at that time) thought it would be overpowered or at least as far as the code went, too much of a hassle. I can imagine now with the way the game engine is moving (you mentioned it too about Death Knights being able to pull and push their targets which I really like) that when we get some of the new talents and such that maybe the taunt ability will get that utility added to it. However I can still see how it would be overpowered because a protection warrior in solid gear has the staying power to really take a beating and with taunt having such a short cooldown it could render focus firing tactics in PVP useless. As well a paladin can taunt up to three targets at once at a much longer range than warriors or druids. It’s a bit of a touchy area because there has to be a lot of rebalancing and then when all is said and done you have to ask “does it make sense for the class?”

A rogue’s distract makes sense in that it’s a distraction. A taunt as well would make sense in regards to making the character focus target to something else though I don’t know the mechanics involved in making a player automatically lose his target then reselect another target. That can get a little buggy I imagine. If anything I think that warriors and paladins should be given a sort of knock-back ability associated with certain charges or slams. On a totally off-topic note as well I think holy shield should give a big glowing flaming golden shield graphic over the equipped shield of the paladin

I wish I could have been more helpful to you and I hope I have been in the slightest. The last thing I would add is that we can’t really speculate much on things we want to add to the game this close to the expansion being released (a few months by the looks of it) because Blizzard might just be giving us a totally different playing field with which to theorycraft on. New gear, new mechanics, new abilities, new everything. When the environment changes, then what we thought was important loses it’s potency. We saw this happen BIG TIME in origianl Warcraft when we shifted from using essences of XYZ to using motes and primals.