Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Season 8 Arena Gear Official Preview

With the next Arena season just around the corner, we’d like to give you a preview of the new season 8 armor sets, designed to strike fear into the hearts of your opponents in battle. I’m still a fan of the PvP gear being designed as if there was a logical progression in it’s power. You can tell looking at the first season of Wrath PvP gear that this final iteration is the same gear but fully powered up. That would actually be pretty cool for upgrading raid gear through drops and such by adding customized modding type pieces… hmm.

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Posted by Spooner | 7 Comments

Arena S7 possibly delayed & Recent in-game hotfixes

Prot paladins are surviving through PvP because they’re healing themselves like crazy? Hard to swallow but ok. It is however, going to delay Season 7 for a little bit.

We are going to fix the specific scenario where a PvP paladin with a Prot build but spell power gear can heal for more than a Holy build in the same gear. We want to do this without messing up the Prot paladin trying to tank in PvE.

We will probably not make this change before the end of the current Arena season, but you can be thinking about your teams for season 7 with this change in mind.

Now for the recent in game changes dropping this maintenance downtime.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Resilience buff and PvP mana regen for Patch 3.2

It’s a subject we’re discussing a lot with good reason since the changes to mana regen and resilience itself is pretty sweeping. Let’s face it, healing and damage is pretty damn nasty right now in PvP to the point where if you don’t kill somebody in 2 seconds then they’ll most likely be healed to full just as fast if not faster.

I think you are dividing the bucket too cleanly into “classes that can survive” and “classes that can’t.” There has been a vigorous debate for some time within the community (and not just this forum) about damage and healing being too high in PvP. While some classes are worse than others, those are also the classes that received additional nerfs. Overall we need for characters to be a little more survivable when being beat on. They need a little more room to come up with a counter of some kind so that too many fights are not “use your ability within this 1 sec window or lose.”

So there won’t be situations anymore where evenly matched players will be insta-gibbing each other; and the changes to mana regen are going to make it so healers won’t be able to just bomb out heals nonstop and get away with a full mana bar, however. Players are worried that the regen across the board will be so low that DPS mana users will have some serious problems keeping up their damage in a long fight. I like blizzard’s response to that in particular.

That assumes that caster mana is balanced around 30 second fights. It isn’t, and we aren’t talking about suddenly going to 30 minute fights. It could very well be a problem in practice, but we think it’s premature to assume that all dps casters are going to run out of mana now. There can be something between the two extremes of dying in 2 GCDs and having endless matches where the team to go OOM first loses. There can be something in between a sprint and a marathon.

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

CC in the Arena and gross ignorance…

Typically I’m an opinionated asshole but tonight, oh boy tonight, Blizzard is doing my work for me. It feels good to see the establishment acknowledging that the player base has this bad habit of saying the most incorrect and stupid shit sometimes. With the MLG tourney over players are pretty much saying the same things they said before and pretending it’s this new revelation that Blizzard will begin to notice:

The point I was making was that a common sentiment seems to be:

1) Only classes with multiple forms of CC on different DR (typically embodied by the Frost mage) are capable of playing intelligently and with finesse.
2) If you aren’t one of these classes, you are only faceroll.
3) Faceroll classes require no skill. It’s the class winning, not the player.
4) Therefore, it is offensive if faceroll classes ever win.
5) Therefore, those classes really shouldn’t be represented in Arena.
6) The only way to fix this problem is for every spec and class to have equivalents of Blink, Frost Nova, Polymorph etc.

Number 6 just isn’t our design, and it definitely homogenizes the classes more than we are comfortable with.

Even if you want to argue that warriors are too weak in PvP at the moment, which I don’t think is a foregone conclusion, they have certainly been quite capable at points in WoW’s history. If you are of the mindset that warriors should never be in that situation because they are a faceroll class, then your vision for WoW PvP is probably at odds with that of the developers.

We think classes are capable of playing with finesse even if they aren’t a class with layered CC and escape mechanisms. What I mean by that is that you need to play intelligently and respond to your surroundings. You need to use your cooldowns at the right time. You need to sometimes at least think about switching targets. Even if warriors aren’t there at the moment (again debatable) we don’t really think warriors need a couple more types of CC and escape mechanisms to get there. With the addition of Juggernaut, they probably have all the tools they need and it’s just the numbers that might need adjusting.

Some of you just need to untangle the definitions of cleave, burst, melee and faceroll and stop using them all completely interchangeably. It’s imprecise and just confuses everyone else.

Now, in those situations where a class or spec just beats someone over the head with MASSIVE DAMAGE and doesn’t have to be particularly clever or even sentient to win, then that is faceroll, that is a problem and not at all what we want in the PvP game. I don’t think warriors are in that spot now. DKs and Retadins have been there before.

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Posted by Spooner | 8 Comments

Ret nerfed overnight, all other changes… maybe later

I understand the point Blizzard makes but their (or maybe just GC’s) explanation is somewhat… bad. Ok perhaps that was just a kneejerk reaction, but the general perception that Blizz is getting across is simply that if there is a problem with any class in the game, they can remain OP and dominate in PvP or DPS pretty much for months until a patch comes out, but the split second somebody complains about ret paladins we get hotfixed that very afternoon.

This is of course an exaggeration since I’m sure people were bitching about ret paladins for a long time but that doesn’t change the fact that DKs (as an example) spent all of season 5 pretty much ripping ass all over the place before they got nerfed and even now they’re pretty damn viable.

We are in the process of completing a hotfix that could go live as early as this afternoon that will make the Paladin talent Vindication no longer reduce Intelligence or Stamina from the target it is applied to. The talent will continue to reduce Agility, Spirit, and Strength as it currently does. We felt this change will help balance the ability out, especially in the lower arena brackets where they are very prominent, while not being a negative impact on a Retribution Paladin’s PvE dps.

Once this hotfix is live, the tooltip will be incorrect until we can update it in the next content patch.

Why with Ret is it always a hotfix for any other class it’s ok to let them dominate an entire arena season?
Increasingly it felt like someone playing against a Ret-Pally really only had 60% of their health bar because Vindication took away 20% from the start and then Hammer of Wrath kicked in when they had 20% left. This change was something we could confidently hotfix and would have a minimal to no impact on the PvE side of things.

If a class is so powerful among less skilled players that it dominates but totally ineffectual against the best players in the world whose skill is high enough to counter it, we don’t think that makes it balanced. The game needs to be fun for everyone, not just the most elite players.

So by that logic it’s ok for paladins to be unhappy or to feel singled out constantly and not have fun because everybody else is happy. What if they did the same to rogues or druids? Do it to warriors and shaman next ok? Afterwards you need to nerf disc. priests and destruction warlocks, yeah kill destro locks since they’re doing ranged burst without mitigation that’s just as strong if not more than any cleave teams you can imagine.

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