Lots of PVP talk going on lately in the blue posts and it’s seeping into the class news as well it seems. That’s understandable as there is a rather large population just hitting 80 and having fun in the arenas and battlegrounds. I’d venture to say that the amount raiders in this game are about equal with the amount of PVP fanatics. About the only major difference is that the PVP breed is much louder on the forums.
Priest
Divine Aegis clarifications
You guys have poked holes in some of the extreme examples that have been mentioned, and understandably so, but this essentially is the gist of it. Players are really good at finding clever ways to exploit mechanics to trivialize encounters. Healing damage is a pretty well understood mechanic at this point. Shielding players from taking damage is a little scarier — preventing 2x damage is a much bigger deal than healing 2x damage.
While we probably could come up with a system that bullet proofed every possible potential Diving Aegis exploit, I just don’t know that the bang for the buck is there. Even if you have 3-4 Disc priests healing a raid, it seems like they could all be pretty effective even with a limitation of one shield per target.
If we get to the point where it feels like the third or fourth Disc priest is being excluded from a raid or an Arena team, we’ll probably look into it some more. For now, we just want to see Disc be more common in general. (Source)
PvP survavibility
First, I think the warlocks would disagree pretty vehemently about their survivability. This message comes up pretty regularly on the damage forums.
Second, we know it’s posible to make very tough priests, because Disc priests were exactly like that in later seasons. It took a high amount of resilience gear and some specific talent choices, but they could take a lot of damage and heal themselves through a certain amount of it.
I agree we have some work to do on Holy priests in PvP.
I think the concept of a cloth class without a lot of mobility that is supposed to just heal itself through damage would be a pretty hard sell. But we try to address it on the mitigation side for priests (and the occasional fear bomb doesn’t hurt). (Source)
Shadow PvP
With regard to Shadow PvP, as a few players have suggested, the question is always whether to buff or to nerf to bring everyone up to the same level. Players would always prefer buffs, and frankly so would we, but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude more work to do so (when you start talking about inflating mob health across the board for example). If incoming damage were lower, through whatever solution, would Shadow priests be able to do their job?
Dispersion is a new ability, and like many of the new abilities, it’s going to take some test driving before we’re entirely happy with it. The spell still comes up a lot in our design discussions. I’m not going to risk saying anything beyond that until we have something more concrete to offer. I am sorry to sound so guarded at times, but honeslty, players can get really upset if they feel they were promised something that for whatever reason we end up not delivering. (Source)
Warrior
Clarifications on the “DR” from the latest Q&A post
My bad. You said “DR” and I even responded “DR” but what I meant wasn’t diminishing returns, but breaking on damage (as fear does now). That is a topic that comes up a lot. My point was that it wouldn’t make a big difference on very short stuns like Charge, but it would change being stunlocked quite a bit.
To answer several other questions, yes I realize the questions were directed at PvP. The poster even said that up front. I mentioned Fury pulling aggro because it suggests their damage may also be pretty RNG if they can’t control it better.
RNG in PvP is a pretty big topic. In general you will probably find us more tolerant of random elements than players typically are. Misses, crits and resists are all very random and sometimes those numbers can determine success or failure of a match. (Source)
Sudden Death and Taste for Blood randomness
No, I think I understood the issue in this case (which isn’t easy, since so many of these questions are typically written in “gotcha” format). We did want them to be random abilities. It would have been very easy to make them on-demand, but we have also had to nerf a lot of on-demand burst (just ask the Ret pallies). In your mind you are probably envisioning a Sudden Death that does what it does now when you want it to. But in our minds, if we made the ability less random we would also make it hit less hard. That might be a fine trade-off for some warriors. We have discussed making Sudden Death more like mini-Executes. The reason we haven’t done that yet is it just waters down the ability. Players might start to think, eh, it’s not a ton more damage than MS, so I’ll just stick with MS. It is really easy for players to match out abilities when randomness is downplayed.
Stance penalties
I think in the minds of most warriors they say “Would I like to have a 10% percent damage penalty or not? I think not.”
But of course that’s not the way it would work. If we redesigned the stances it wouldn’t be in order to give warriors 3% more crit and 10% more health. That’s just a straight buff. What we would likely do is something similar to the death knight presences — lower your health by 10% and then increase the damage reduction of Defensive Stance and give Battle Stance a tiny bit of damage reduction. (Or maybe Battle Stance would take the same damage as Berserk, but have a more meaningful bonus like movement speed or attack speed). Now your tooltips don’t use the word “penalty” so you maybe feel better about them, but the balance hasn’t really changed much — Berserk would be an offensive stance and Defensive would be a defensive stance. Being in Berserk would still be risky.
If instead you’re just arguing that warriors are weak and need to be buffed, that’s a different issue. But there is no reason we would have to solve that by removing stance penalties. (Source)
Fury aggro issues and PvE/PvP threads
My comment about Fury pulling aggro was to suggest that they also can be very RNG and burst-heavy and therefore maybe it is a warrior issue and not an Arms issue.
Aside: You may have noticed I do tend to bring up PvP issues in PvE threads and vice versa. My purpose is to gently remind players that despite your individual interests, that we must take both ways to play into consideration whenever we make changes. In my effort to post as much as I am able I sometimes type too quickly, but I’ll try to be more clear. (Source)
Death Knight
Death Knight changes
It’s hard to take that 1% dps rule of thumb too far. For example, Howling Blast can do a lot of damage, but you have to consider how the DK would spend those runes if he or she had skipped that talent. Just because Howling Blast is 20% of your dps or whatever, does not mean the talent is a 20% dps increase.
Wandering Plague is probably okay and Gargoyle is probably too good. Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade are probably better candidates to buff for Unholy (though there are some DW builds that get a lot more out of them).
The DK talent tree is new and hasn’t been subjected to anywhere near the scrutiny of the existing class talent trees. I’m a little surprised we haven’t had to tweak it more than we have already, but I suspect more of that will be coming. (Source)
Druid
Feral tanking
We don’t really apply a penalty to Feral tanks to make up for the fact that they have Rebirth. (We don’t really apply a penalty to Prot warriors to make up for their shouts.)
I recently said in another thread that druids can do a lot of different things well and when doing those things they have a lot less overlap in abilities used than warriors, paladins and death knights. For that reason, we don’t want to keep giving bears more and more abilities. We don’t want druids to be the class with 120 abilities while every other class has 30. Rebirth is in your spellbook and probably on your bar (and you have probably even clicked it) even though it isn’t a tanking tool like Demo Roar or Barkskin. Different classes do have different abilities, and we want to keep as much of that flavor as we can.
We want to have four classes that can main tank (given appropriate skill and gear). We’re pretty close to that right now, but we’ll have to see what things look like in the next tier of content. It’s possible the gear available then or the types of encounters you experience change the playing field a little, in which case we’ll have to make adjustments. (Source)
Hunter
Hunter pets and paladin buffs
Okay, the issue is that paladin buffs are class based, which is funky with regard to pets. Got it. I’ll put it on the list. (Source)
Warlock
Demonic Circle and Warlock changes
Teleport breaking snares is something we’re discussing.
As I’ve said, we want to make some changes to the warlock class for a future patch. Since those changes will take some time and testing, we are also going to try for some more band-aid level fixes that can go live much more quickly. You will doubtless see lots of (less-informed) players say “That’s it?” to which you can reply (if you so choose) that no, that’s not it, but a handful of quick changes (such as perhaps teleport breaking snare) that we thought we could safely make while we are looking at the larger issues.
When we have the “sooner” changes finalized, we’ll announce them. When we have the “later” changes finalized, we’ll announce them too. Ideally those “later” changes can come out at the same time as Ulduar, but we’ll see.
I also don’t want anyone to think this was the only post on warlock (largely PvP) issues that we’ve read lately. There have been some insightful comments and good ideas on several threads, mixed in of course with the traditional QQ. For those of you who made the good posts, we thank you. (Source)
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