Thing is, and this is what is puzzling GC with the whole hitbox situation.. is that we're getting out of range errors, yet our white swings are still merrily hitting the target. It's that disparity that confuses the kitties. I've never seen that kind of issue on any other melee class.
White attacks and yellow attacks are calculated differently by the engine and it make different calculations about your position. You have to remember WoW was originally designed to be mostly white attacks with very few yellow attacks. The 2013 game is a very different beast, and if we could do it all over again, we'd have the two handled really similarly. Again, this isn't anything related to druids or cats. Despite your personal experience, all melee should be encountering this.
Spirit Shell formula is slightly off - right now the metagem critical effect (1.03) is only being multiplied in on the expected aegis size on crits not on the entire crit heal. This is causing a slight decrease in the size of SS.
You are correct. Fixed.
I doubt this is even close to enough to make an rbg team want to bring a ret.
We have a problem right now where melee of all kinds are not very attractive for super-competitive RBG teams, except possibly as a flag carrier, in which case you probably want a druid or warrior. This isn’t the kind of thing we’re going to easily solve by just throwing all sorts of amazing utility at every melee spec, but we agree it’s a problem and we’re looking at longer term solutions.
It was stated abilities are meant to be counterable, but things like Cloak of Shadows and smokebomb are just fine. There is a double standard here.....
Quoting Ghostcrawler because he said it better than I could: "Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered."
Eye for an eye baseline would be kinda cool, but it'll have to be designed really well because I don't want it breaking CCs lol. I would probably rather have something else if I had to choose though.
Something we hear a lot from Retribution is they want a little more “retribution” back in their kit. We don’t think passive and/or random reflection like Eye for an Eye or Retribution Aura were super interesting mechanics but we understand the attraction of the idea in general and we’ll consider something longer term.
Reduce PW:S mana cost (this is gonna have to happen one way or another to make it viable), and make it so that a priest can't have more than 3 - 4 active PW:S to avoid PWS spam.
This suggestion (limit 3 or whatever) has come up a few times, and possibly for other traditionally-hard-to-balance spells like
Eternal Flame and perhaps
Rejuvenation. We are unlikely to make any of these changes for 5.2 so it’s probably beyond the scope of discussion in this thread, but we wouldn’t mind hearing more feedback on the idea over the long term. I personally worry that it might feel like a lot to have to track, which makes mods more mandatory, etc.
Looks like they need to just go ahead and buff Arms rage generation.
We’re hearing really mixed feedback on Arms’ rage at the moment and I suspect there is still a lot of experimentation and/or theorycrafting required to figure out when to use
Overpower vs.
Slam vs.
Heroic Strike. (To be clear, we have a design, but we're not sure it's working yet.) Warriors nearly always ask for more, more, more rage, so just seeing posts requesting the same won’t be sufficient to convince us. Overall though, more analysis of how Arms rotation feels (in PvE and PvP) would be helpful.
This post is from the perspective of an Elemental Shaman that mainly focuses on PvP.
You commented on a lot of different things, which makes it hard for me to offer responses. (In general players tend to try to cover too many different topics in a single post instead of focusing on the 2-3 that really, really matter). I will try to cover a few though.
While it’s fun to have lots of minor glyphs, they really are targeted at fun, and this thread is supposed to be about the nuts and bolts of rotations and set bonuses, so it’s beyond the scope of this discussion.
We agree Elemental have too many mandatory glyphs, and we did give you the most mandatory one (
Flame Shock) as a base mechanic in 5.2.
I disagree with you some on
Frozen Power. We see a lot of Elemental shaman using it. It’s not the dominant talent (Earthgrab is) but it definitely isn’t niche.
I also disagree with you on the prevalence of dispels. Dispels are precious in MoP. I know it might seem like anything awesome you do gets instantly removed, but your opponent has to make the choice to blow their CD on your
Flame Shock (which has a lower CD than the dispel). We are really trying to move away from undispellable mechanics on enemies. In Cataclysm and before, dispels weren't a choice and we agree that anything got removed too quickly. We're not really in that world anymore, and we think that's a huge improvement.
I keep getting a lot of lols on Twitter about
Shamanistic Rage, but we think this is a pretty serious buff for Elemental in PvP (esp. considering the glyph). It’s an exciting change. We’ll see if we’re right.
Does that not seem odd to you? Where are your design principles? Where is the consistency?
Hardly any PvP paladin takes Light’s Hammer, while it’s reasonably popular in PvE. A PvP-only buff there makes a lot of sense. Nearly every priest takes
Phantasm in PvP while it’s not popular in PvE. A PvP-only nerf makes sense there.
I'm glad for warriors that you decided to revert the additional nerfs to Second Wind, but there is still a potential problem with it and that tier. The problem is that it's mandatory for warriors to take because it is so necessary for their viability.
We actually agree with this, but allow me to explain our logic. As a designer, one of the things you often have to struggle with is idealistic design vs. realistic design. In a pure design space, we believe Enraged Regen and
Impending Victory are balanced and
Second Wind is overpowered. However, we’re not talking about a theoretical game. It’s a real, living game played by millions of players. Our changes have impact. Arms warriors (and Frost mages and a couple of other specs) have been hammered with PvP nerfs since launch, and not at all because the players did anything wrong. The new patch brings a few more hefty Arms nerfs with
Shockwave,
Defensive Stance,
Overpower,
Taste for Blood and
Warbringer. We’re not trying to kill Arms in PvP and we’re not trying to make anyone who plays Arms hopelessly depressed. In this case we think it’s acceptable to have
Second Wind be a little overpowered so long as Arms as a whole is not dramatically overpowered or underpowered. Long term, it’s the kind of thing we’d like to eventually fix, but in the short term, we think nerfing it does more harm than good.
just curious, what are you looking at that makes you think shadow priests are OP in pvp? It seems that we get more nerfs based on a projection of what you might think is the case, then classes that were/are OP. What about shadow makes you think it's over powered? I still feel like I get focused every game I play, and you nerfing my escape tool kit, when I don't ever see how priests had superior escapes.
There’s always an element of that in PvP. For PvE, we have a really good idea of how much damage everyone can do in every situation. That’s harder to generate for PvP and not even super relevant. We do look at who is winning a lot in PvP. We do it a lot ourselves to try and understand why. We also try to pay a lot of attention to player feedback, especially those skilled PvP players whose opinions we respect, but also the guy just doing pickup BGs who still deserves to have fun. In all of those cases, the names that keep coming up are Frost, Arms, Shadow and maybe BM.
Frost and Arms are taking some big nerfs. BM has a couple of little ones. With Shadow, I’ve tried to be honest that we’re not exactly sure of the right thing to hit. There isn’t anything there like
Shockwave or PoM+
Ring of Frost that feels totally broken. It’s a lot of little things that add up: damage, healing, utility, survivability. Utility we really don't want to hit and damage isn't too high in PvE. At the moment, we've nerfed burst a little, healing a little, and made some of the survivability mechanics less potent. We'll see how that feels.
Are you telling me that not only is this issue understood, but is considered acceptable? Being spammed with out of range while you're clipping someone elses model is incredibly frustrating and a major turn off to playing the game at all. It swings both ways too, being stunned by a melee ability from someone 20yds away is just awesome. I had hoped something would eventually be done to fix this crap.
Which would be acceptable? That the nose of the cat is considered the center of the model, so that anyone chasing you has to hit your nose? Or that cats just have a huge combat reach (which also means everyone else can hit you much easier than they could a smaller model)? Should tauren for that matter be easier to hit and gnomes harder? Trust me that this is a very old and involved debate in game design – the code does not always agree with the art about where your character is located, and that is particularly true on a client-server game that still tries to offer some semblance of snappy combat.
1. Are you happy with how many different categories there are?
2. Are you happy that some abilities affect more than one DR category?
3. Are you happy CC is so complicated, that not even sites like Arena Junkies can track how they all interact?
4. If you are not happy, would you please please please consider reworking CC and DR and make it transparent in the tool tips?
Our sense is that there probably 2-3 too many different categories. I also totally agree that the system is way too opaque, especially for new players. Mentioning DR and perhaps PvP CC durations in the tooltips (perhaps only in PvP, perhaps only as an advanced option) is something we’ve wanted to do for some time (so is Path of the Titans, so is Dance Studio… you know how it goes).
We also talk often about whether the game would be better off with only a single DR category. It makes it easier to learn for sure. But it’s also a really risky change. Much of the depth of PvP skill involves knowing what ability DRs with what. A lot of Arena comps are built on that mechanic. It gives us a lot of room to provide surgical buffs or nerfs by changing which DRs with what. Overall, I think there is a chance we would scale down the number of different DRs, but it’s a small chance. We’re much more likely to just spell them out more explicitly (which to be fair also chips away at the knowledge base that differentiates an expert PvP player from a merely tolerable one).
That's what I'm trying to say in more attention grabbing ways. I can try running the numbers in simcraft or wrathcalcs if that will help, but I'm not the math expert that some of the silent laser chickens are.
Nope, you did a fine job. It will take us some time to analyze all this, but I wanted to drop a quick note to say we appreciate the work.
Now moving into patch 5.2 We'll have a similar feel except we'll have a lot of GCDs where we can't do anything because we've blown our rage on AOE. We'll proably go... Mortal Strike > Thunderclap > Whirwlind > Twiddle our thumbs for 3 seconds while we wait for MS to come off CD. We don't have that filler of Overpower to do something else whilel we wait.
This could be a problem. We’ll look into it more. Off the cuff, we could make
Whirlwind 20 rage (just for Arms!) to keep parity with the cheaper
Slam.
MAKE SEPARATE TALENTS FOR PVE AND PVP!!!!
I’ll refrain from the caps, but we do that all the time. Check out
Colossus Smash. Check out (live)
Taste for Blood. Check out the duration on
Polymorph. We do it as a last resort, because it does cause more risk for bugs and is more for players to have to remember, but when it’s the right solution, we definitely go there. We nerfed
Devouring Plague’s up front damage because that reduces PvP burst without having a huge impact on PvE (because the difference in burst in this case is over such a short time frame it’s unlikely to really be felt). If that solution hadn’t worked, then we could have considered DP to do less damage in PvP.
I'll also posit that even if PvE and PvP had totally different rule sets, it wouldn't reduce the volume of players campaigning for buffs or nerfs. "Everyone" would still think it was their class holding them back and would want us to twiddle with the numbers even more. Once in awhile we'll say something like "We'd love to help you guys, but we just can't buff you any more because of PvE / PvP." The more typical situation is that someone thinks they need a buff while we disagree. Splitting out the rules doesn't change that.
Perhaps there is a much simpler solution (a numbers tweak rather than a mechanics tweak)?
I feel like we’d have to nerf
Divine Aegis dramatically to have the same effect. The
Spirit Shell change was mostly so priests could go back to using it at the right moment and not just on cooldown because it was a throughput increase. Those are the two major changes that weren’t numbers tweaks.
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