Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Patch 3.2 Arena healing and damage over time changes

So resilience is being changed and apparently so is the way that burst is being handled. With the patch 3.2 changes coming in pretty much the crazy out of control burst is going to be toned down so players won’t be pushing so much damage, however. The burst healing issue has not really been addressed since within one or two global cooldowns, anybody can be healed to full (assuming there’s no mortal strike debuff).

What if resilience affected heals?
We considered the idea that resilience acts like a debuff for heals, but we’re not happy with what that might do to the game. You’d be in a situaiton where sometimes you might not want extra resilience since it lowers your healing. Resilience is already something of a trade-off since it often comes at the expense of other stats (though hopfully less after these changes).

There is a possibility that if fights go on for too long that dps casters may run OOM more than they should. That is something we may have to adjust, but we don’t think it’s simple to math out what kind of buff casters should be given at the moment. Note that the intent is not to turn every Arena match into a 20 minute slog. The intent is to have fewer 30 second matches.

I do see some people saying that healers were already in god mode and this will only buff them. Just realize that player perceptions or intentions are different. For one person, a healer in a 2 vs. 2 shouldn’t be able to keep their partner up alone. For another, having a 1 healer, 4 dps team in a 5 should be perfectly viable.

So with these changes, what’s up with Dots? They’ve always been double taxed and now they won’t be?
Dots were (and currently are) lowered when they do normal damage and lowered when they crit. I don’t think anyone is arguing that fact. What dot-classes often contended was that this design wasn’t fair, while our position was that they were balanced around that design. It didn’t make sense to us that dots that couldn’t crit (say the player didn’t take those talents) should be able to do more relative damage. If anything it made those talents a mixed blessing.

What is changing is that we decided not to continue this design going forward since warlocks and shadow priests could stand to be buffed. If anything, you could say everyone got the warlock design, and perhaps that is a more sensible design in the first place.

Read More

Posted by Spooner | 1 Comment

Butt load of Arena news for you today…

Here I’ll give you the short version and save you some time in checking all the specifics though I still suggest you read the direct quotes below because I’m a hardass like that.

• Blizzard wants to nerf RMP in 3’s but doesn’t want a double melee team to take its place, so they’re fucked.
• Blizzard wants people to stop fapping over 2v2 matches and play 5v5 more and BGs.
• Blizzard knows burst is not too high, PvP is just fast where you can burst somebody just as quick as they can get fully healed.
• Burst needs to be chilled through resilience and healing needs to be chilled out as well.

RMP in 3’s
We’d prefer to see other comps as dominant as RMPs in 3s. The problem is if we nerf RMP without making other changes, then double melee teams would likely just take their place. The public perception is that at least RMP requires more coordination and finesse than double melee (though we also think there is validity to the claim that just because you have the option of crowd control doesn’t mean that bursting someone down makes you somehow more legit.)

Current problems in PvP
We’re not removing Arena from the game. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but many players do. We don’t ignore many comments on these boards, but “They should just remove Arena / PvP from the game” is not a helpful suggestion. Things that would make PvP more fun for you or things that would keep PvP balance from intruding into your PvE are more useful.

I’ll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.

1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they’re not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.

Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can’t burst someone down when wounded, they just aren’t going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.

But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and “reset” the match. If you fail, you’re dead and the match may be over. We’d like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.

Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we’re concerned people just wouldn’t ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable.

Burst is too high
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that burst is too high. Imagine we made changes such that getting an 8K crit was almost impossible and 3K or 4K hits were more common. Now consider what would happen. You hit someone. The healer heals them. You keep hitting. The healer heals them. Two strategies then rise to the top as the only way to win a match: keep the healer crowd-controlled forever or drain her mana. Yet not every class has the same amount of crowd control and very few have mana drains. We don’t want every class to have those abilities because then every class feels alike. Furthermore, playing a healer that never gets to, you know, actually play because you’re always sheeped / cyclone or OOM isn’t much fun either.

In the current game, imagine a mage getting beat on to the point where he is near Execute range. He decides to Blink. If he gets the Blink off, he might have just won the match because he can get healed to full before the melee close again. If he fails to get the Blink off, he’ll probably die in the very next GCD. He might have a window of 2 seconds max to win or lose the game. If you have those situations every now and then you end up with a nail-biter match. That’s cool. However, if every single encounter with the other team is like that, it’s just exhausting. Many fights will end in just a few GCDs. Others will go on and on, at least until the healer runs OOM, which is unlikely to happen with abilities like Innervate and Divine Plea. It’s just too extreme in both damage done and healing done.

Resilience
I probably should have added an additional bullet, which is that in the previous season, starter resilience gear was either too hard to get or sacrificed too many stats. We want resilience to be attractive because of the survivability it brings (and I think that part is working), but we started players too low. You need like 500 before you start to notice its effect and 800 to 1000 before you actually live long enough to respond to attacks (though as I suggested above, perhaps not long enough).

Read More