Patch 5.2 PTR - Build 16562, PTR Class Balance, Comic

We are going to temporarily close LFR testing until we can get a new build up, hopefully this afternoon (in NA).

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far.

GC currently (on live) Vampiric Touch don't return mana when hit shielded targets, is this intent? Also, dispelling VT causes it to diminish return itself and Psychic Horror intended as well? I think it devaluate the dispel protection.
The first part (vs. shields) is a bug and now fixed. The second part (the dispel DR) is intended.

the Rogue Assassination ability Venomous Wounds does not currently proc off of absorptions effects;
Also a bug. Most things that proc on an attempt to deal damage should proc if the damage was absorbed.

Paladin
We finished looking at Seal of Righteousness and Justice. Righteousness we ended up buffing by 50% so it should be a good choice against 4 targets instead of 6.

Justice is much more complicated. It was intended as a PvP seal, but the damage loss is so significant and the snare just not that valuable (which is ironic when you consider Ret's history of not being able to catch things), and Burden of Guilt is there if you really do want to snare. Furthermore, just buffing Justice's damage risks Seal twisting in PvE becoming a thing, where you stack up Censure and then swap to Justice. It could be cool if designed right, but would probably just be annoying. We just don't have much room to buff Justice, and players might still forsake it in PvP.

So, we're going to redesign it and attempt to solve another problem, which is Ret's damage outside of cooldowns (which are quite potent). Justice will now proc (and Judgment will count for the proc) a stacking debuff on the target that increases the damage of your next Templar's Verdict. With 5 stacks, this will be a big hit (but not an insta-gib) and opens up some interesting decisions about how to use Holy Power, such as Inquisition or WoG, if you're trying to hold TV. While Truth + Censure will still do more sustained damage overall, there is a chance Justice will see some situational use in PvE, and we're okay with that. Justice is a Ret-only thing, so it should be a Seal they actually use. It won't snare at all, which I expect some will call a devastating nerf, but again, there's Burden of Guilt if you really need a snare.

Combined with removing the snare, it's a really stupid change that solves none of the issues it was meant to and creates others. It's worse than no change, it's active destruction.
We went through several pages (on this and other forums) of Ret paladins saying they'd never use Justice because Truth is a lot more damage, they have Burden of Guilt if they really need a snare (and our numbers suggest plenty of high-end PvP players take it), and there are enough snares from allies that having an easy-to-apply snare isn't even that important.

Likewise, we had a lot of feedback, principally from Ret paladins, that changing Seals (occasionally - not rotationally) was something they wanted to do. Given that Ret has some problems with burst damage outside of cooldowns, we thought this was a good solution. Truth still does more sustained damage, if sustained is important to you, and has some perks such as being able to do damage to two targets at once or apply an anti-stealth dot.

Now given the size and diversity of our player base, it doesn't surprise me that other players will feel differently and expect that Justice is very important in PvP. We have to make these kinds of decisions all the time where we get competing, often contradictory, feedback.

Check it out when it's available on PTR or when we're able to provide actual numbers and let us know how it feels.

(Having a passive snare for Ret that's available all the time with no damage trade-off is just not something we're going to do. Why not just apply a snare when you enter PvP at that point?)

No more embers on SB killing blows (and it only refunds 1 ember period for the very last SB you used if killed in 5 sec).
We didn't make any intentional change here. It could be a bug.

- if you get blanket silenced and a melee attacks you (rogue's garrote comes to mind), they don't get feared, and you still lose the blood horror buff. So I spend health and a cd for no effect at all. - if a warrior spell reflects, he can successfully reflect blood horror back at the warlock.
Silence shouldn't prevent the horror proc. We'll get that fixed. Warriors can Spell Reflect Nature's Grasp proc, so it seems consistent that they can reflect the Blood Horror proc.

If there are no enhancement buffs after this then they are truly biased.
We asked you not to whine. This is whining. Please don't do it. I don't have a lot of time, so I want to actually get something out of reading this thread, and posts like this just waste my time and that of anyone else trying to read this thread.

My apologies if I sound like a jerk. I'm not going to mention this again.

Currently to maximize DPS Enhance is casting Lightning Bolt before reaching 5 stacks of Maelstorm quite often. This is cause Lightning Bolt does the same amount of damage regardless of how many stacks of Maelstrom you have. As a melee spec I find having to 'stutter step' in order to get casts off is really akward. I was thinking that if Maelstrom Weapon increased the potency of your spells with each stack kind of like how the Healing Storm glyph operates for healing then it would be more favorable to cast an instant spell at 5 stacks as opposed to hard casting prior to the 5th stack.
This is intended behavior. We like that there is some decision about when to use Maelstrom Weapon, and the mechanic has worked this way for some time, possibly always. That said, you don't have to game it. It will be a DPS loss, but not a massive one, if you only use MW at 5 stacks. Do what works for you. Trying to use MW at various stacks to improve your DPS and failing to do so might be lower DPS than always using it at 5 stacks.

That said, HTT swings wildly in the other direction for Restoration due to both Purification and Mastery scaling.
We think this is a legit concern and we're looking at it, but we also want to make really sure any change didn't feel like a massive nerf to Resto, who relies on Healing Tide a lot for group healing. Opening up talent options is important to us, but so is enjoying your class, and big nerfs to talents to make the other choices seem better is a last resort. (Yes, we do it. You don't need to bring up examples of when we've done it. But we don't like to.) It could be that it's not worth the risk of changing, but we are considering how we'd do it.

Any thought on removing preparation all together and lowering the remaining rogue cooldowns. The recent cloak change makes gameplay feel smoother and I'm really digging it.
I don't think we'd remove Prep. Would the design be stronger without Prep and lowered cooldowns? Possibly. But we're convinced what would happen is that all the rogues that love Prep for whatever reason would come out of the woodwork. It's been a core ability forever and all that. Years from now when we did threads asking players what to fix about their class, I'm convinced we'd see "Bring back Prep!" I really don't mean to sound cynical; I'm trying to sound practical.

I know many of you are smart players and you expect all players to be just as logical and objective and see that there is no massive difference between a cooldown that finishes the cooldown or other spells and those spells all having shorter cooldowns. I don't think the reaction would be universal praise though.

If both just do damage, whichever does more wins, which apparently will be Truth.
Sustained damage doesn't count for as much in PvP as being able to land a kill within a narrow window. If you want to have good damage meters at the end of a BG, then Truth may be fine for you (it has other benefits because of the dot as well). If you need to kill someone while their healer is CC'd, then you may not have time to let Censure finish ticking for its full amount.

(The same is true in PvE by the way. Sometimes something needs to die right now.)

I'm fine with switching a seal to snare if I have to, but being forced to spend a talent point for the same mechanic handed to EVERY SINGLE MELEE with zero tradeoff besides maybe a GCD is really irritating.
A GCD is a DPS tradeoff.... Other abilities, like Hamstring, have costs. In any case, we balance classes around their entire package of abilities not single ones. Specs with very good snares often have weaknesses elsewhere.

I made that comment for a very specific reason, which was to try to get players to not lobby for a Seal of Truth-level ability that also snared everyone. And yet, I guess that was a mistake because my making that comment still brought out a lot of lobbying for the very thing I said we weren't going to do.

Can you tell us when you'll start doing PvE adjustments?
Soon? We're actually working on it now. I will try to give you our quick summary of who is likely to go up or down so you can prepare for it before you see the notes or datamining.

Eye of Kilrogg glyph no longer allows you to place your Demonic Circle if the location is out of line-of-sight. Then to make matters worse, it places it at your current player location instead of giving a LoS error, thereby making it even more difficult to replace a soon to expire Demonic Circle that may appear to be in LoS, but actually isn't. Eye of Kilrogg can't even be used in RBGs, yet this was somehow necessary.
We had to implement the nerf to stop some exploits where it was possible to get Demonic Circle in areas that you aren't supposed to path. We didn't want to nerf the mechanic overall and in fact we think we found a compromise where you have to either LoS OR be able to path to the location. That should cut out the exploits while still letting you use Eye to get behind a pillar or something legit.

Believe me, nothing frustrates us more than having to nerf something because of 'sploiters.

A very simple bug to fix that only requires the Meteor to check for the Glider buff or similar things before activating
Things that may seem simple to players are often anything but. That was the case here. (Typically, statements like this are followed with various players trying to tell our programmers how to code, and typically I answer that if you're that awesome at coding, please send us your resume.)

Rapture now reduces the cost of Power Word: Shield by 25% and provides mana equal to 150% (was 200%) of the Priest's Spirit, but no longer benefits from Spirit provided by short-duration bonuses. Really..... a Mana Nerf?????
It wont't feel like a nerf when you consider that PW:S is cheaper and Meditation is now the same as other healers in cases except timing Rapture for use with things like Mana Tide (which is what we call cheesy). We also changed the Disc set bonus in PvP to make Flash Heal cheaper.

Overall, Disc in PvE on live just does not worry about mana the way other healers have to and all are supposed to. PvP is a different story, but the changes above are intended to help fix.

Paladin
Here is the current PTR Seal of Justice: Fills you with Holy Light, causing melee attacks (and Judgment) to apply Justice to your target. Justice: The attacking Paladin's next Templar's Verdict striking this target will also deal 25% weapon damage as Holy per application of Justice. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 sec. Undispellable. Using the TV consumes the stack. The Justice proc itself is not affected by mastery, nor is the mastery proc from TV counted for purposes of how hard Justice hits.

We understand the concern that this superficially looks a little like the old Taste for Blood. Taste for Blood was designed to be very random in order to limit the planning the warrior could do and limit its frequency. (It was also off the GCD, a buff rather than a debuff which made it feel even less predictable to the victim, and stackable with other big hits like Heroic Leap.) Justice is designed to be a very predictable mechanic in order to unload some decent damage even when GoaK and wings are on CD. Yes, it will be even bigger when stacked with CDs. Big hits that take a lot of planning and give their target plenty of notification and opportunities to counter are more acceptable than those that come out of the blue.

We also understand the concern that this forces paladins into taking Burden of Guilt if they want a snare. However, that is offset by the data that suggests some (but not all) paladins take Burden today (meaning the cost for taking it isn't too great), but hardly anyone uses the current Seal of Justice today; i.e. most Rets are running around with no snare at all.

On the other hand, if Ret still isn't going to use this new Justice, then there is no reason to change it, and we could just leave it as a dead spell for 5.2.

Is there a reason why Subtlety's Slice and Dice can be refreshed with a weaker (aka shorter) version when Combat's can't (you get the 'more powerful spell active' error)?
That is odd. Neither should be refreshed with a weaker aura. We'll look at it.

Could you guys PLEASE look at Death Knights final tier talents as they are now they are absolutely USELESS in a raid situation Remorseless Winter is an AoE cc that obviously dosent work on a raid boss there immune then there's gorefiends grasp an AoE deathgrip obviously useless in a raid encounter as they are immune to its affects as well then there's Desecrated Ground? i forget the last ones name but boss loss of control mechanics can not be broken by any ability. PLEASE look them over and give one of them something useful to raid boss encounter i feel left out of all the cool level 90 talents.
Originally, they all did damage in addition to their other utility so players would use them in raiding environments. Unfortunately, the damage just overshadowed everything else. Players tried to figure out how to work them into their normal rotations to maximize DPS, and then the utility almost became a liability, because you had to delay the ability (i.e. nerf your DPS) in order to use their utility. We think DK rotations have enough going on that the level 90 talents don’t need to provide say Unholy Prism etc. and the DK level 90 talents as is are still useful. We don’t have many raid bosses these days that don’t come with some kind of add that often does need to be CC’d, and raids still have trash, as do challenge modes.

I don't get the justice change either because at first GC didn't want to buff sustain because it meant buffing burst so now he plans to buff burst which will buff burst even more!?
I think we’re all using terms like “burst” too generically. The more specific problem is that Rets have a couple of really strong cooldowns that they can’t use very often. This leads to the perception that their damage is great with GoaK + Wings and weak outside of it. A few weeks ago (largely through Twitter), I explained that we could drop Wings CD, but then you’re looking at a 10% DPS increase every minute (or something). That means there are more frequent periods of high damage, but it’s a big nerf to having on-demand burst. On the other hand, we don’t want to just buff say Judgment, CS, TV and Exorcism across the board, because then inside of GoaK + Wings, Ret just blows people up. We’re trying to use the new Justice as a shorter cooldown to improve damage outside of GoaK + Wings + trinket. (It also improves damage with GoaK + Wings even more, but only for one hit. You can’t unload with Holy Avenger and the new Justice for example.)

Sweeping Strikes, Cleave, Thunderclap, Whirlwind, and Talented attacks. All vying for a place in AoE.
We treat cleaves (2-3 targets) and AEs (4, 6, 10+) targets a little differently. Because we try to have mostly 2 tank fights these days, cleave situations are a lot more common. Sweeping Strikes and Cleave are for cleaving (and I agree you could argue that Heroic Strike and Cleave aren’t as important for Arms as they used to be). Whirlwind is for actual AE situations. Thunderclap can be used for anything, though you can’t really and wouldn’t want to just spam Thunderclap.

Also, think about how often in PvE you are doing AE vs. doing single-target damage in PvE. I think sometimes all of us (developers included) get too focused on these mythical Patchwerk fights that just don’t happen very often anymore. Increasingly, every spec is going to need an interesting AE rotation because increasingly you’re asked to do a lot of AE. (Channeling Blizzard is not an interesting rotation in our book.)

Look at it this way, you say that 90% or Locks are using sac and that's why it needs to be nerfed, but really the vast majority of those people are playing with Sac becasue they DON"T WANT TO USE A PET.
If you hate pets, take Sac (though I also have to challenge a little bit why you picked a pet class to play in the first place). What we don’t want is for warlocks to take Sac just because it’s a dps increase. The average warlock should have a demon out. If a subset of them do not because they take Sac, we’re okay with that. If very few of them have demons out because a spreadsheet said Sac is a 1% dps increase, then we’re not okay with it.

Do you consider this change to make progression PVE ret's reinstitute seal twisting as mandatory? Or is the debuff going to be mutually exclusive to Censure? Also, "melee attacks" in this case mean CS/HotR, Judgement, and white attacks only, correct? I guess I'm just concerned with how this plays into min/max PVE, esp considering the fact that seals are still on the GCD.
We don’t want to encourage more Seal twisting. We could consider a 20 sec shared cooldown on Seals if we needed to. We’d rather a PvE paladin consider which Seal made more sense for the fight at hand and a PvP paladin use Justice unless they really wanted Censure for some reason (to damage two targets at once or prevent stealth for example). As I said above, we are trying to fix a PvP problem here. If the new idea doesn’t solve that problem and paladins just prefer Truth still and we create a lot of pressure to Seal twist, then we’re doing more harm than good.

Also, is there still a passive damage component associated with SOJ, like the current 16% weapon damage as holy on Live? Or is this new Justice Debuff the only form of damage associate with the seal?
No, there is no passive component. We did that because it let us make the debuff that much larger.

Can you share the proc rate for us? is judgment 100% chance to generate a proc?
The proc rate is 100%, just like Censure. There is no random chance involved.

Will I be able to prevent the application of Judgment stacks with AMS?
It will behave like Censure (Seal of Trurth’s proc), and I don’t believe you can prevent Censure with AMS. I may not be correct with that assumption.

And do i need to state how rediculous this is for combat? its got to the point where the rogues in my guild thought about not popping ar and sb together for combat because of the rediculous nature of our energy situation and that inherently hurts our long term dps because sb wont benefit from the 2-3 cycles/finishers we use during the AR. I Hope all of what i have said makes some sense to you, im not whining here, im simply pointing out a fundemental issue with the 4 piece.
What is the inherent problem with not using Adrenaline Rush and Shadowblades together? Doesn’t that sort of give you two Adrenaline Rushes? If it’s a big DPS loss then that would be a problem, but all it really seems to be doing is changing up your rotation a bit.

What exactly is the intention? Justice for pvp. Truth for pve? Truth for cds or something?
We’d be pretty happy with Justice for PvP, Truth for single target PvE and Righteousness for AE PvE. That was the original MoP design intent, but Justice’s damage is too low, and the dot from Censure does have some PvP benefit. That said, we try not to be too heavy handed with our designs. We give players tools and let them use them creatively, so long as the specs stay relatively balanced and nobody’s rotation becomes stupidly convoluted or numbingly simple. So if players find ways to use Righteousness in PvP or Justice in PvE, we’re okay with that.