MMO-C Downtime, War Games, Blue posts

2H/1H Weapons
Keep in mind that we generally don't itemize two-handed Agi weapons except for staves and polearms that can be used by hunters and druids. Shaman can't even use polearms. We make one and two-handed versions of Str swords, axes and maces though, so it's easy to convert a warrior or DK back and forth.

Again these are not unsolvable problems, but neither are they trivial problems. I hate to close the door on anything, but it's not in the cards for the near future. (Source)

Classes strengths and weaknesses
What you're calling a "discrepancy in logic between classes" we call "different classes work differently." It's very common for players examining weaknesses (perceived or engineered) of their class to look to other classes and say "Hmm. They don't have the same weakness. That's not fair." But it's more than likely they have other weaknesses to compensate just as you have other strengths. Almost any time you bring up an example of other classes working differently, we're going to respond "perfect." I realize that can be frustrating since looking at other classes provides easy examples of abilities or mechanics you don't have, but that's honestly the whole point. (Source)

DPS and PvP talents in healing trees
As to the actual topic, as we've posted several times, those talents are designed to be optional. Any healer spends some amount of time in almost any instance standing around when nobody needs healing. Some healers want to be able to perform solo or in small groups without having to switch to a dps spec. We are trying to get away from trees where every talent essentially says "increases your damage or healing by 5%." A talent that is non-mandatory should be by definition optional. If you don't think you'd like or use that particular chunk of utility offered by a talent, then skip over it. Or go ahead and get it knowing that you'll still get a passive benefit that improves your healing. (Source)

MLG Tournament Results
We all watched MLG. I have refrained from commenting because all of the discussions in this forum seem to devolve into "my class didn't win, so clearly other guys are overpowered" or "GC loves whichever comp wins." Frankly, I thought it was one of the best tournaments I've seen in awhile. It's hard to argue that the guys who won did so because they chose the overpowered comp -- those guys are insanely skilled and played very well. We had pretty good class representation over all, but I still think it's a small sample size from which to draw a lot of conclusions about class balance. If Orange or someone had gone for a three healer comp would we really be here arguing that three healers are OP?

Yes warriors can be crowd controlled. They also have a lot of ways to get out of it or prevent it and they have enough mobility that when they aren't being CC'd they are probably on top of a target. If anything I'd argue the lack of warriors dominating the upper echelons of PvP has more to do with their lack of control, not their susceptibility to it. (Source)

Casters and haste
Casters cast too quickly. Haste has just gotten a bit out of control, which is partially the fault of overly generous talents and partially other stats on gear not being as attractive. Fear of being interrupted or needing to move has just led to too much reliance on very fast or instant spells, which are very difficult to counter. We need to back off of that. (Source)

Vol'jin in Cataclysm
Yes, Vol'jin will no longer be in Orgrimmar come Cataclysm. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Cataclysm Tree of Life design goal
It's a burst healing cooldown for emergencies or stressful periods of a fight. The survivability is there partially so that your cooldown is not trivially countered. (Source)


Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Counterattack removed?
I may have spoken too soon on Counterattack. Just today we discussed keeping it and getting rid of Mongoose instead. There are some legit PvP uses of hunter melee attacks, so long as the class doesn't feel like it's supposed to be a melee-ranged hybrid. You're ranged. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Anesthetic Poison
Anesthetic Poison might very well go away and Shiv just become the anesthetic equivalent. Little too early to tell on that one. (Source)

Malice
Malice is the kind of thing we'd like to replace, but we'd rather the trees work than just rip out every passive stat talent just because, so we'll only replace it if we come with something we're really excited about. Precision is fine -- being able to remove some hit dependency is useful to every dps spec and the kind of thing you could consider talenting out of if your gear put you over the cap. (Source)

Subtlety Tree
The idea of a rogue who sticks to the shadows, suddenly lunging out to stunlock and execute an unsuspecting target works well for single-player RPGs but not for MMO PvP. PvP needs to be about counters -- knowing when and how to use a certain ability depending on what the other player does. "Unsuspecting" by definition doesn't leave much room for back and forth. It may be fun for the rogue, but it's really frustrating for the victim, and pushes us in a direction where if the rogue doesn't line up his perfect kill moment, that he's going to get destroyed. That is "balanced" in the strictest sense where you kill or are killed, but it's too binary to be fun -- again a lack of back and forth.

Subtlety still has Cheat Death and Shadowstep and many great tools that feel "rogue-like" for PvP. You can skip over talents like Blood Spatter, which are mostly there to keep PvE dps competitive, in order to focus more on PvP tools and less on bleeds. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Stances
We like stances. You seem to be arguing that stances are fine, but we should make it a little easier to be in whatever stance you want. For me this crosses over into one of those areas where players see a limitation to their class and know they have to overcome that limitation to perform well, but cross over from trying to master that tactic to lobbying us to remove it or chill it out. (Source)

Mortal Strike
As far as balancing your damage with MS, what I meant was that MS is arguably the most iconic ability in the Arms tree. It should be a button that you look forward to hitting. It needs to do good damage regardless of the debuff, which is usually wasted in PvE anyway. (Source)

Weapon Switching / Spell Reflect
I'm not trying to say that clunkiness is a good cost for an ability. What I am trying to say is that if we just wanted Spell Reflect or whatever to be super easy to use that we would take away the shield requirement or just have it auto-switch to a shield. Being able to pull it off at the right time is the hallmark of a great warrior. If you watch some of these really skilled players play, yeah I'd argue their intuition does seem to border on ESP. (Source)

DPS comparison with melee classes
You should get beaten by a rogue if that player is as good or better than you and has gear as good or better than you. On the other hand, you are destroying Enhancement shaman and other melee classes. Warriors are at the top or near the top of nearly every Icecrown fight. You may not be, but many warriors are. If I was a frustrated player, the message I would get is that I should roll a warrior for Cataclysm because they tend to dominate damage done in final raid tiers. That's not cool. (Source)

Whirlwind component of Bladestorm
The Whirlwind caused by Bladestorm is a different spell effect. We can adjust it independently. At the moment we have not lowered its damage because we want warriors to be able to use it on single targets as a dps cooldown. (Source)

Warrior damage at higher levels
It's a trend, not a data point. Go back and look at ToC if you'd like. Nevertheless, I don't want to turn this into a thread analyzing meters. That's an exercise we are generally in favor of, but it will take over this conversation. Suffice to say we have sufficient evidence that warrior dps is higher than we would like once warriors are at high item levels. This happened previously at high ilevels per tier, so if you want to disavow it, know that you're going against a pretty solid set of data. (Source)

Warriors changes
What are you going to do differently? I mean, if you designed the gear / warrior abilities with the intention that they were balanced...and they ended up tending to be overpowered on the damage charts, what evidence is there that you can produce balanced gear / warrior abilities?
Normalizing rage for one. Getting rid of armor pen for two. Defining swings as AE or single target for three. (Source)