Hunter
Aspects off the GCD
No, it’s not over. We took them back off the GCD. (Source)
Hunters in 3.0.8 and 3.1
We talked about it, and Aspects on the GCD is not that big an issue for us. We don’t think it’s a huge balance problem either way. We can understand though why it feels like a nerf to not have the GCD now and to get it back in 3.0.8. So we can keep Aspects off the GCD. No harm done. (They will still have the 1 sec shared cooldown.)
The argument of why you can’t just do too much damage until Ulduar is a silly one. Hunters are doing too much damage. Yes, some other specs are also doing too much damage, but we are reigning those in too.
Remember, our tests are not done with the PTR data. Our builds are more recent than that and have numbers, bug-fixes and data you haven’t seen. We try and give you a heads up to major changes when we can, but we can’t give you an accurate picture of the data with just words.
We understand the concern that Survival’s damage is too high relative to other hunters. That may be the case on the PTR but it isn’t the case for us. We have some different numbers for Explosive Shot than the PTR has. We understand the concerns about T.N.T.
[...] On the Aspects issue, we don’t like taking things off of the GCD. There is a reason we have a GCD and it has everything to do with being a server-client based game. We tried to fix the problem with Aspects being difficult to manage by reducing the need to switch from a defensive aspect (Monkey) and an offensive aspect (Hawk). Enough people (and not just on this thread) said Viper would still be a problem, so we agreed in this case to take the Aspects off the GCD. This is a good example of feedback working. (Source)
Patch 3.0.8 pet changes
We are iterating on the pet abilities I mentioned earlier and we have new numbers for anyone out there who is still trying to theorycraft this. One of the reasons I don’t always provide numbers is because we change them a lot.
Rank 6 Scorpid Poison – 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake – 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike – 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.
We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we’d like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community. (Source)
Rogue’s Dismantle
I just wanted to comment on this for any hunters who are new to being disarmed. Weapon chains affect your global disarm duration. They aren’t tied to the weapon per se. An offhand weapon chain works on both weapons and your bow.
When disarmed, you lose abilities tied to that item and armor, but not other stats.
Priest
Circle of Healing nerf and other talent trees
We do care and we do listen. But I think sometimes players don’t listen to each other. There are plenty of players who say they understand CoH was overpowered (even if they disagree with our solution) and there are plenty of players who say they like healing on their priests and that their priests are the backbone of their raid. If you don’t feel that way, that’s cool, but you can’t realistically expect us to only listen to you while ignoring them.
You can tell us what you don’t like about the class and what your concerns are, and many of you have. We appreciate that feedback. But that doesn’t mean we are going to make a whole lot of changes if we don’t feel they are warranted. We’re not asking you to design a class for us to go implement.
Saying a class is broken doesn’t make it broken. You can say it’s underpowered in specific areas if you feel that way, or even that you think the mechanics are clunky and don’t play well together. That can be useful feedback. But you’re not going to be able to convince us that any of the classes in the game are horribly broken. They just aren’t. With the exception of the DK (which doesn’t seem to be hurting at all) these classes have been around a long time and through a lot of encounters. They are pretty battle-tested by now.
We think Holy is a very strong healing tree, and we know there are cutting-edge guilds who agree with us. If you aren’t in a very min-maxed guild like that, then the differences between classes should matter even less because you have so much power to improve your class’ contribution just by learning all the nuances of the spells, the best gear to maximize them and how to coordinate with other healers.
Now there are some things we would like to do to all 3 priest trees. But I increasingly feel like it is necessary for me to add every time I say this that just because we have future plans for your class does not mean we think your class is currently broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. (Source)
Rogue
Mutilate rogues vs. other specs
As someone mentioned, Mutilate rogues seem great in PvP and pretty competitive in PvE (and will probably be spot on when some other outliers are brought down). We realize the other two rogue trees aren’t keeping up and we definitely want to see them get there. We also want to make sure the rogue group buffs feel competitive. This is a touchy subject because so many classes will claim there is no reason to take them to a raid, or that their buffs are inferior to someone else’s counterpart. There is a grain of truth to some of the latter claims, but there is also an awful lot of of hyperbole. (Source)
Shaman
Shaman DPS
We are buffing Elemental shaman damage. There have been many posts about it. I strongly advise you not to play the game to see which class or spec gets the most posts. The closest correlation has to do with what we have been working on recently at work. It has nothing to do with who we think is the most broken or who we love the most or who writes the most eloquent posts. If anything I would just assume my posting is random and leave it at that.
EDIT: The thread mentioned Elemental, but I see the OP is Enhancement. My bad. We’re not buffing Enhancement damage. It’s pretty good. Once the wolf bugs are fixed (which they are next build) it should help Enhancement in PvP too. (Source)
Warlock
Are the Warlock changes in patch 3.0.8 or 3.1 ?
There are changes in both. We will try and announce the 3.0.8 changes soon ™. Those changes are mostly PvP survival considerations.
The PvP changes are not big sweeping changes but they should help. Depending on when the patch is you might be able to try them on the PTR.
Larger changes will wait for the Ulduar patch. Most of those are what we call quality-of-life issues. Cleaning up some talents that don’t quite cut it and some of the spells that don’t seem to have a clear role. Destro and Affliction dps look like they are pretty good right now. Demonology needs a little boost. (Source)
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