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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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No More Class Facelifts, but Healing Changes Coming Soon™

What are these assclowns thinking? I don’t know how else to title this post, there’s just so much shit going around on my screen right now. Every topic Blizzard is posting on seems to be like a cousin of the previous one, everything is either about healing or Ulduar. May the record show I am fucking sick of discussing healing. With that said, GC has pretty much promised that we will not be seeing any major class overhauls and at most there will be some tweaks to the current existing mechanics classes use. About the only “major” change we’ll see is how retribution is going to be changed in its functionality when 3.2 comes around.

If you are looking for a major overhaul for any class in the game, you’re going to be disappointed. Whenever we see that term, it’s a near certainty that the players making it have an entirely different vision for the class than the developers do. The changes to the paladin class seals and judgements are about the largest “overhaul” you’re ever going to see, and that one was an extreme. We like the way the classes work. Nearly all can be improved, some more than others. None of them need an overhaul.

As for healing, they want to change it but they’re skiddish about bringing regen issues and OOC mana regen back to the forefront of the argument. I don’t like that they want to nerf tanks in order to address the healing issue. I really don’t fucking like that at all. Do something about the boss damage, do something about mana costs and cast times on heals, but please if you’re going to change tanks at all, fix the bullshit RNG with avoidance and useless block.

We nerfed regen a little, knowing it probably wasn’t quite sufficient, and there was quite a bit of name-calling in this very forum. We’ll get there, but it’s important not to freak out too many players in our efforts to eventually make things better.

Yes tank avoidance would need to come down along with many other long-term changes, but from a healer point-of-view what we’d like to achieve is a clear distinction between your bread-and-butter heals and your emergency heals. The latter are typically made expensive to discourage their casual use, but when you have the mana for it and the tank always requires those big heals, there is no reason not to use them. It may be that mana costs are not the best way to balance spells. Maybe it’s cast time. Maybe it’s cooldown. Likewise, maybe we should have more fights where say 5 players take damage at once rather than the whole raid. Then the smart, instant heals wouldn’t be quite as attractive in every situation.

There were some good aspects of the healing in vanilla, but we’re not eager to go back to the days of /stopcast macros and healer rotations (meaning someone sits out for OFSR regen while a fresh healer steps in). That’s not what we mean when we say that the risk of running OOM has to exist.

And of course all of this is coming Soon™ and Blizzard will not give out any specifics.

We have to be very careful announcing changes. Last patch, we listed out some specific things we were working on. Some of them came to pass and some did not. For the ones that did not, some players took it very hard. They became upset. They posted that we didn’t care about them or weren’t doing our jobs. Now it’s easy to ignore a few bad apples, but when a large enough portion of your community responds negatively, it can affect the entire community. It can cast a dark cloud over these forums. That isn’t fun for anyone.

Check out this link. It’s a press release about Blizzcon. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a painfully long explanation about forward-looking statements. Most of that is more geared towards business issues than class changes, but ultimately it’s all part of the same philosophy. It is unfortunate that that is the world we live in. Announcing stuff too early when we aren’t 100% sure we can do it just gets us in trouble.

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Paladin PvP nerf and the future of Holy mp5.

Ok seriously, what’s the big fucking deal? How is it that every other class can be overpowered for weeks at a time and pretty much roll face over anybody and everybody, but the split second that a few people piss and moan about how the big bad paladin is beating on them Blizzard has a bitch fit about it and starts nerfing things left and right. EXPLAIN THIS BULLSHIT. I don’t even PvP often enough anymore and this shit gets to me, every day it a new post from some butthurt little mage or priest or god-for-fucking-bid warlock crying about how the ret paladin killed him or how the holy paladin won’t die.

“I mean he killed me! ME! He made me bleed my own blood! This is unacceptable, nerf nerf nerf!”

Holy and Ret paladins have in some form been on top of the current and previous Arena season. Furthermore, we think part of the reason some players, especially casters, feel like they are dying so quickly in PvP is because they can’t use their crowd control abilities without them getting quickly removed. Freedom was a big part of that. It’s supposed to be “Get out of jail free” card, not “you can’t ever cc me” card. If that makes sense.

It is still a very potent ability, especially talented, which almost all PvP paladins do. To be honest, we’re concerned the duration is still too long.

See? They’re concerned the duration is still too long… it’s blessing of freedom you fucktards not blessing of almost got away. This makes me laugh because casters are the ones doing all the bitching, but nobody dare say shit about death grip or deadly throw or escape artist or blink, or cloak of shadows, or chains of ice, or charge, or intercept, or demonic circle, do I continue? Assholes.

Also here’s some more crap that doesn’t interest me about holy paladin gear in Ulduar and how it sucks because all holy paladins want is intellect and haste.

The problem we have is paladins are now telling us “This MP5 on our gear is useless. Give us a better stat instead.” We don’t think that will result in a balanced outcome for the reasons I have mentioned. We’re not talking about nerfing paladins for no good reason. We’re talking about shifting the sources of your regen so that the Ulduar gear is perceived as an upgrade. I don’t accept the logic that it’s impossible to make paladins care about MP5 or that denying paladins more crit and Int will get them gkicked.

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Holy Paladins and mana regen in Ulduar

I’ve never really researched Holy Paladin stats and basics and I haven’t really played the paladin healer role since Classic WoW so all these discussions are a little alien to me. Still, I’ve always thought that mp5 is a good stat for healers in general since spirit is pretty much a waste stat unless you’re outside of the FSR. Blizzard says you do need mp5, regardless what most theory crafters are going to proove.

The issue that started all this was paladins saying “We don’t want MP5 on our gear.” The designers designed you assuming you’d have MP5 on your gear — I know; I was there. If you are effective without having MP5 then it probably means you are going to be too powerful at some point because you are able to replace a less-powerful stat with a more powerful one without missing the loss of the less-powerful one.

Imagine you could prune every less-useful stat off your gear. Imagine you could trade in armor, Stamina and everything else for just spell power and crit. Do you think you’d blow away the other healers? I do. That’s more extreme than giving up MP5 for more crit, but carries similar risks from a game-balance perspective.

Healers should care about Spirit (druids and priests) and MP5 (paladins and shamans). It’s fine to care about Int and crit too, but if you’re ignoring Spirit and MP5 and aren’t missing them, then something isn’t working right.

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