Gateway nerf again...

[Natixsphere]

So I wonder if this means they are also nerfing warriors heroic leap distance and mage blink? Seeing how both of those classes can pretty much stay on the warlock or their healer the entre time even when they use gateway. Honestly if they dont like gate they should just take it out.

[nonamekiller]

I don't think an entire raid/arena team can hop on the warrior or mage's back when they heroic leap or blink.

[Irian]

Can they please just get rid of this ability? Please? For the love of god, it's so terribly designed yet they cling to it for some reason.

Most warlock players I know hate it. Pathing issues, the long cooldown and the unexplainable occasional failures in working that make you have to frantically spam click it for it to work are just some of the problems. The only people that actually seem to like it are PvPers and almost all of them would prefer a better, more reliable escape than Gateway. The ability from a PvE standpoint is always either largely useless or grossly overpowered, because it's either used as a cheap way to disregard a boss mechanic or largely ignored.

Seriously. Enough of this gimmicky teleporting crap. Give us a real, reliable ability to peel off melee in PvP and scrap the idea entirely. It didn't work.

[Fennixx]

Gateway nerf is aimed towards PvE utility, as it was really good (almost mandatory) to cheese/skip/make life way easier on some bosses. IMO Blizzard likes Gateway, find it awesome, but they just can't balance it (and lets be honest, its hard to balance it on any movement heavy fight).

Healthstone are good utility, especially if they heal more than potions. Yes HS and HP pots are going to share CDs but class abilities are generally stronger than it's profession counterparts. Lets hope/ask for it.

Also, maybe warlock ranged tanking is back in some form on mythic bosses?

[Deleted]

I'll take any nerf if they make it stop despawning if you stop staring intently at it while muttering threats.

Can they please just get rid of this ability? Please? For the love of god, it's so terribly designed yet they cling to it for some reason.

Or they could do this.
Gateway seems like a really game breaking / useless ability that's going to be really polar depending on what the fight entails.
I'd rather have more consistently useful and balanced utility than that, and my own mobility needs addressed by giving us some more options with our personal portal, be it placing it at range, reduced CD, the SB speed increase delivered in a way that doesn't steal a haunt / is available on other specs.

They could make an entire talent row out of the personal portal, we'd get a talent tier that actually had a theme and could be balanced to compete with each other as legitimate choices, you know, unlike the horrible lvl 90 one we currently have - there's heaps you can do with that personal portal.

[Irian]

I can think of several ideas off the top of my head from a talent tree for demonic circle.

New talent row for warlock mobility:

Nether Attunement: Demonic Circle now has two charges.
Fel Trickery: Allows the option for a brief time (~3 seconds?) to teleport back to your previous location after using Demonic Circle.
Demonic Circle Mastery: Remove the Global Cooldown for Demonic Circle and allow it to be used while casting or while stunned. Reduce cooldown by 6 seconds.

This is just what I came up with after about 10 minutes. I'm sure they could come up with all sorts of interesting ideas if they really tried, but instead they leave us with this awkward ability that they have to balance around an entire raid.

[Terahertz]

I can think of several ideas off the top of my head from a talent tree for demonic circle.

New talent row for warlock mobility:

Nether Attunement: Demonic Circle now has two charges.
Fel Trickery: Allows the option for a brief time (~3 seconds?) to teleport back to your previous location after using Demonic Circle.
Demonic Circle Mastery: Remove the Global Cooldown for Demonic Circle and allow it to be used while casting or while stunned. Reduce cooldown by 6 seconds.

This is just what I came up with after about 10 minutes. I'm sure they could come up with all sorts of interesting ideas if they really tried, but instead they leave us with this awkward ability that they have to balance around an entire raid.

I don't exactly know what the nerf is, but I do know this thread is pointed towards arena PvP gameplay. And we don't need more mobility in arena. If anything, we need less. Those changes would make warlocks even more disgustingly OP than they already are.

[Gumboy]

Gateway makes arena completely lame for me at the moment. Every team I see at high rating is either A. warlock/restoshaman/x or a melee cleave. And by high I mean 2k I guess. Some people might not consider that high, but yea.

[Irian]

I don't exactly know what the nerf is, but I do know this thread is pointed towards arena PvP gameplay. And we don't need more mobility in arena. If anything, we need less. Those changes would make warlocks even more disgustingly OP than they already are.

You say that as if anything currently applying to game balance will matter in WoD. There's the simple fact that other classes are almost all being buffed and granted new toys while warlocks are losing a drastic amount of their power that will self-nerf the class, and without gateway warlocks would lose a lot of their value in arenas. They'd need something to keep people off of them more effectively if other melee classes are going to remain as they are.

[Jessicka]

You know, with the more global nerfs to Ranged/Healer mobility; Gateway is just going to be even more desirable even in its nerfed state. It's not like we can actually exploit the full range in it current incarnation anyway given the despawning issues, so the only real issue is the increased cooldown.

[Nivrax]

If we get decreased Gateway range what makes you think Gateway despawn range isn't decreased as well? The fact it does that in PvE and not PvP means it's intentional for us to be stuck in one place around it and portals.

[Jessicka]

If we get decreased Gateway range what makes you think Gateway despawn range isn't decreased as well? The fact it does that in PvE and not PvP means it's intentional for us to be stuck in one place around it and portals.

The despawn issue is a global hard coded thing, all stuff like that despawns at 100 yards. Obviously it can be fixed to go beyond that as happened in 5.2, but that means it's open to exploits which need fixing seperately (and claim to be working on).

[Deleted]

100 yrds is enough. Gateway will be even more powerful or simply all casters will be replaced by hunters as they retain max mobility

We we shall see what will happen. Perma meta would be solid.

[6kle]

Perma meta would be solid.

No, it would be weak. Anything permanent is weak. It would be like normal caster form, except with your batman costume on. I would much rather have a strong, non-permanent Meta when burst is needed.

[Jessicka]

100 yrds is enough. Gateway will be even more powerful or simply all casters will be replaced by hunters as they retain max mobility

We we shall see what will happen. Perma meta would be solid.

Questionable. Where it's useful, it'll be more useful, but it'll be less useful overall. Making such a binary ability even more binary doesn't seem overall, like a very good fix.

I'm also not sure about your obsession with Permanent Meta, but it's fair to say that it would not be as powerful or as mobile, or even play anything like currently, because right now it's balanced against time spent, throughput and mobility in caster form.

[Deleted]

I don't exactly know what the nerf is, but I do know this thread is pointed towards arena PvP gameplay. And we don't need more mobility in arena. If anything, we need less. Those changes would make warlocks even more disgustingly OP than they already are.

Considering that post stemmed from mine, which was supporting a post saying to remove gateways - I find is baffling that, for pvp balance, you find a talent row dedicated to buffing a warlocks personal mobility (when WOD is axing their primary on demand mobile cast) more OP than gateway, which impacts an entire team.

Surely that's a huge drop in net mobility?

[Deleted]

I honestly don't see the point in nerfing gateways in PvE for WoD. Every raid is going to have at least 1-2 warlocks present on Mythic and that is honestly the only difficulty that really matters. Blizzard said at BlizzCon 2013 that the main reason for one raidsize for top-end raiding in WoD was so they could design bosses in ways that expected you to have at least 1 of every class present. I agree that gateways are currently quite OP for 10 man since not having it on some fights make it somewhat harder (more so in ToT than SoO i want to add). But nerfing gateways down the point of being a waste of a keybind just makes no sense to me.

[sugarfree]

In all honesty, never a fan but I used it in BG's esp. with guarding gates in SOTA. It is a potent spell, however, I still don't know if the 90- sec adjustment is enough or too much. It was targeted to be a nerf for PvE and PvP is collateral damage, unfortunately.

But we'll see. With a lot of mechanics changing, the nerf might be in line. I am just worried about warriors and other melee who might be benefiting from a lot of these caster nerfs.

[Octa]

I'll take any nerf if they make it stop despawning if you stop staring intently at it while muttering threats.

This, 100,000,000 times. That or remove it and figure out something else cool that is easier to balance.

[Jessicka]

This, 100,000,000 times. That or remove it and figure out something else cool that is easier to balance.

Blzzard's patience when it comes to flogging a dead horse vs coming up with something new is legendary.