Hearthstone cooldown changed to 30 minutes
Alright, all -- we're going to make the cooldown on hearthstones 30 minutes when 3.1.0 releases. Enjoy your sweet victory. (
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Ghetto Hearthing nerfed in 3.1 (Note: Going in an instance and leaving the group to get teleported back to the Inn won't work anymore, it will only teleport you to the nearest graveyard)
We had a discussion with the developers about it this afternoon. Ghetto hearthing really has become a mechanic of sorts for so many players after being unchanged for so long. We don't like that mechanic though because it obviously feels like a bug exploit. They all agreed the best way to move forward on it is just to reduce the cooldown on the hearthstone.
I promise you this change did not come as a result of us continually pestering them about the community's reaction. It was something we all discussed and agreed was probably a good decision.
I won't sit here and tell you we never cave to anything. That said, most changes we make that players view as us caving on would not be made if we were absolutely against it from a development standpoint. (
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Classes changes in 3.1
One of the reasons we don't do class reviews per patches is the same reason that haunts us a little today. Players have the expectation that if they see another class get changes that they are next in line and then get disappointed when those changes don't materialize, at least at the magnitude they were anticipating.
For 3.1, we made pretty major changes to the priest, DK, warlock and paladin trees, because we think they needed it. Rogues and hunters got some talent changes too. The rest, not as many. Every class has some changes, but we try not to make changes just for the sake of change. The Resto tree in particular is something we are pretty happy with, and we made some pretty major Elemental changes for 3.08.
There are some more changes coming that you haven't seen yet, but you shouldn't go line by line through the other classes and mourn when you didn't get the same number of buffs. (
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New Kirin Tor rings in 3.1
Currently it is setup so there are 4 rings, for the sake some simplicity I will name these rings A, B, X, and Y. To get the new version of ring B, you must turn in ring B and pay 1000g to get it. So you lose the original version and get the upgraded version for it, but the current purchasing doesn't allow you to use ring X to purchase upgraded ring A. So that probably just made it more complicated than simple, but oh well, it happens. (
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Dual Specialization
Dual Specialization price (1000 Gold)
We are okay with not everybody purchasing dual specs. If your respecs are few and far between, there isn't much of a reason for you to be switching back and forth and even picking up extra gear to fulfill other roles. There are a lot of players who do switch roles regularly, whether it is going from PvE to PvP or simply from one location to another in either area of the game, they may look to change their spec and this should help make this process easier.
You may end up losing money, but you are also gaining a large convenience if you are looking to switch between specs at any kind of regular rate. With 3.1 just hitting the PTR, there is a lot of time to do a handful of daily quests and to save up to purchase this. (
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Dual Specialization at level 40 and high price
Dual specialization isn't something everyone needs. It's a perk we're adding into the game, and it's initially going to require an investment. If you can't afford dual specializations for 10 different characters, you might not actually need all 10 of your characters to be able to swap between two specializations on a whim.
With a single 5-second, out of combat cast, players level 40 or higher will instantly be able to swap between two different talent specializations, glyph sets, and action bar set-ups from virtually anywhere in the world.
That kind of convenience and versatility shouldn't be obtained with absolute triviality. (
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Switching specs
You literally just click a button, and after a 5 second cast, your specializations, glyphs, and action bars swap. You must be out of combat, and it still cannot be used in battlegrounds or arenas. There is currently no cooldown on the ability to swap specializations though. (
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1000 Gold at level 40???
Not many level 40 characters would have 1000g, to be sure. Keep in mind our original design intent was to make this available only to level 80 players. After taking in a lot of feedback from the community and further discussing the design of this feature, we decided to make it level 40.
The cost is a recognizable deterrent to players who are just starting out in World of Warcraft and reaching 40 for the first time. Those people probably shouldn't worry about swapping between two talent specializations though.
We still feel strongly that this feature isn't meant for players leveling up. It's simply not that necessary. We did consider the feedback from the community though concerning leveling alts and running dungeons, and ultimately decided to lower the level requirement so those who can afford it can still take advantage of it earlier on. It doesn't mean we're going to overcompensate for our original level requirement by making it much more easily attainable, and therefore necessary, at level 40. (
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3.1.0 Test Realms
Character transfer streamlining
In order to streamline the character copy process, we will no longer be carrying some information from live realm characters to test realm characters. In particular, characters on the PTR will no longer be copied with their achievement history. This will allow us to increase the speed and availability of character transfers to the Test realm. (
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Player vs. Player
Mana regeneration issues: buffing water?
We might not end up buffing the PvP water since that has different balance implications, but we'll see. (
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Achievements
Achievements difficulty
If the whole idea behind these achievements is to make it very difficult to get a 310% speed mount, that would naturally imply the majority of the player base would have a tough time getting their hands on one. That is the point. (
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You have access to the dungeons and the loot. Now more than ever it's easier for more players to experience end-game raiding content. Virtually every move we've made since the release of The Burning Crusade reflects this. But the achievements are flavor and bonuses more than they are content. So while more players see the raid content, that doesn't mean more players should be getting some of the hardest-to-earn achievements. Achievements at this level of difficulty and reward, are, by definition, fairly elite. (
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Lovefool achievements and "Be Mine" requirements
The "Be Mine" achievement now only requires one to obtain six of the eight candies. This change will be retroactive for anyone who obtained at least six of the eight candies last time the event ran. (
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Instead, this was purely a numbers game. We studied the numbers and the probabilities and determined it should have been a bit more common than it was; while it wasn't as rare as A Mask For All Occasions, it was still just on the side of too rare. We didn't want to remove the dedication of going after the candies entirely for the title, and so we adjusted how many candies were necessary to complete the achievement. (
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Raids & Dungeons
Plagued & Black Proto-Drake no longer obtainable - New mounts in Ulduar
Two similar achievements, both rewarding 310% speed mounts, will be added to 10 and 25-player Ulduar. (
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Badge of Valors (Naxx 25) in Ulduar 10
If you want emblem of valor gear right now, you can either look into groups for Naxxramas 25 or hit Ulduar 10 when that is available as that is likely how it will work. (
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Kel'Thuzad nerf in 3.1
There didn't need to be a raid wide threat wipe when Chains of Kel'Thuzad is cast because we no longer charm the main tank. So I removed the threat wipe. (
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Argent Tournament
It's going to be a permanent event. You will be working to construct the coliseum, though the coliseum itself will officially be added in a future content patch. You'll see more competitions and festivities coming down the road as well.
Will the coliseum be PvP related? Like team vs team arena or vehicle vs vehicle, etc...(from rumors I've heard)
No, the coliseum will not be PvP-related, at least not as far as the current plan goes, though it will be instanced. We'll have more information on this down the road.
Where is the event held? and is it on the PTR?
It's in Icecrown and currently on the PTR, though certain aspects of the tournament are still being developed for 3.1 (coliseum not included). The Argent Crusade has shuffled off some penguins previously occupying an area by the coast to begin construction of the coliseum.
I agree, it seems incredibly odd to stop the fight against the Scourge to go jousting.
It's not just the Argent Crusade. Top representatives from all of the major city factions (Ironforge, Darnassus, Orgrimmar, Undercity, etc.) are on-hand to find the most battle-hardened candidates for taking the fight to Arthas's door step. Through the tournament, and eventually through the coliseum, you'll be able to fight for the glory of the city faction of your choosing.
Tournaments and competitions like this may seem like trivial games in times of real struggle against the Scourge, but it's also an opportunity to rally those who oppose the Lich King through blood sport.
So ... the whole Colosseum is still in dev? How long before the stuff works?
The coliseum itself will not be coming in patch 3.1. (
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"Bring the player not the class" in Ulduar
We aren't seeing anyone sidelined on raids or being stacked in raids, certainly nothing on the order of what was happening in Sunwell, so I wouldn't call it a failure by any stretch. Arms warriors and rogues are the closest to being sidelined, but we think that is largely a function of their damage being too low in PvE. Specs that were brought for buffs or not brought at all in BC are doing competitive dps, healing or tanking.
Bring the player, not the class does not mean class is irrelevant. You can put together a lot of bizarre class mixes that probably won't work. What it does mean is that you have a ton more flexibility than in Sunwell over which classes you bring and you should be able to get all of the buffs you need (and yes Replenishment is one of those) and still have enough free slots to double up on whatever classes you want or just bring the guys you like to raid with.
We also expect Ulduar, and especially the hard modes, to shine a much harsher light on class balance. There will be great debates about which buffs and debuffs are truly optional or not and which classes are the least likely to earn a raid spot. It's going to be interesting, perhaps a bit rocky, but we're also prepared to make whatever changes we need to make. (
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Disparities between tanking classes in the original LK content
We don't sit down and say "Okay this is the paladin encounter." However, it just so happened that the two hardest encounter in Lich King were both dragons that breathed for a lot of burst damage. DKs with cooldowns and druids with huge health pools were great for that. Now don't get me wrong -- all 4 tanks have managed both encounters just fine. But it probably leaned too far away from warriors and paladins.
If Malygos didn't breathe and instead swung very fast for smaller amounts per hit, then the block-based tanks would probably have had an advantage on that fight while the others had an advantage on Sartharion. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Ebon Plague stacking
It is something we want to fix. There is just a lot we still want to do on 3.1. (
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Virulence and Morbidity swap
Yeah, this was definitely a concern. We ended up moving Virulence because every PvP DK had to have it. That isn't a problem in and of itself because there are mandatory talents in lots of trees. However, it cut out whole options for DKs -- once you were two tiers deep in Unholy doing say a Blood-Frost spec got a whole lot hader.
It's probably something we will continue to mess with, but feedback is appreciated. (
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Changes to Unholy Aura in 3.1
Unholy Aura was becoming mandatory as a raid buff. We considered giving it to other classes, but realized we would just be accepting all players moving faster all the time (which subsequently also makes some boot enchants look bad). Frost Aura was kind of lame, but I'm sure we could have come up with something better. Mostly, the mechanic was just a little awkward and hard to explain. We like the new one better.
Players often wish for a buff so awesome that it guarantees them a raid slot. But that is exactly the mentality we were trying to prevent with our big buff and debuff overhaul. In the Sunwell era, raid slots were already so precious that there is a good chance a DK might not have even earned a spot, and having more than one would be a total waste... unless we gave them two mandatory buffs, in which case the Retadin, Boomkin or dps warrior might have gotten the heave ho.
The new model is designed to let you get as many buffs as you want through several different configurations of classes and specs and still have some slots left over to bring who you want. (
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Dual wield nerf in 3.1
If we didn't want death knights to dual wield, then we would have just removed the ability for them to dual wield. However, the damage DKs could do with DW was absurdly high in some cases, and that became the standard to which all other classes were comparing themselves. Hmm, if DKs are doing 6500 dps, then clearly my spec can anticipate yummy buffs in 3.1.
DKs are a new class without four years of theorycrafting history. Some of the current builds being used were not the ones being used originally -- they developed over time as players experimented with mixes of specs and gear. As good as the community is at theorycrafting -- and it is very, very good -- not many people can look at a list of changes in a vacuum and predict what builds players will be using a couple of months from now, especially for a new class like this.
We think there will be other DW builds that develop. Some we have in mind and some no doubt the community will surprise us with. But we think the pendulum had swung too heavily away from 2H for the class. To be sure there were some 2H builds whose damage was also too high, and we have nerfed those as well.
DW always dominates in classes for in which it is an option. This is not the first time we have attempted to scale back DW DKs, but previous nerfs and ability changes were not successful. It is that hard to reign in DW damage.
If we never again see DKs pick up one-handed weapons, then we will make changes to prop up that playstyle more. But I have tried to be very clear that we do not want to see the entire DK class gravitate towards DW as the only sensible way to do dps, and that is exactly how it was trending. We needed to change the trees so that something existed besides hybrid builds trying to skim the best talents off of all three trees. That meant the deep talent trees were not competitive, which is why we made so many changes. (And no, when DKs were already doing 6000+ dps, we weren't going to inflate those talents to compete with hybrid DW builds.)
I will also offer this: While we are happy that we've had so much success not having a single tanking tree for the death knight class, I wonder if it was a mistake to also try and do the same thing with dual-wielding. Perhaps it would have made more sense to stick several DW talents in say deep Frost (though it could have been any of the trees) and left the other two as 2H dominant. It would have been a lot easier to balance. That isn't the direction we are going for 3.1, but it is an interesting idea and maybe my suggesting it will spawn some discussion.
Overall, this class is still in amazing shape. While I can understand if you just really loved the DW playstyle, I think some of the drama on this thread is a tad overblown. (
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How "finished" (for now) are the talent trees we're seeing on the current 3.1 PTR?
They aren’t finished at all. However, I would not turn that into many threads saying “Oh, the next PTR build will fix all these problems. Let's just wait to discuss then.” We want feedback now or we would not have put the PTR up. (
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Howling Blast
We are still messing with Howling Blast. It’s a fun ability -- especially when it’s OP
-- but it’s also hard to get it in the right niche. It either makes you want to replace Obliterate or Icy Touch depending on the numbers. Maybe that’s okay for a 51-point talent, but then not many DKs will actually be using Obliterate. (
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Druid (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Nerf to Moonkin Frenzy
The nerf to moonkin frenzy was because moonkin kept standing in the fire in order to enhance their dps, which seems like not the kind of gameplay we should be encouraging and makes healers write us nastygrams in all capital letters.
We realize it's a PvP nerf and we're trying to come up with other ways to solve the problem. It may be that the current implementation on Live is the best one after all. (
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Druids in PvP
We were worried about Resto survivability in PvP. Without all the stuns, we are worried about Balance in PvP too, but our solution is liable to be different. (
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Druid Form Graphics
Creating new druid skins is a task on which our artists have been working on very recently actually. I don't have a time frame for you, but we did speak specifically with our developers about this in late January. Druid forms are a work in progress. I haven't seen them, but have heard some cool things about them. (
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Balance changes
We are also looking at (sigh) Eclipse yet again to make sure the Wrath part of the equation holds up. We discussed looking at Insect Swarm. It's been a long day, and I can't recall what we decided. (
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Maim in 3.1
The change to Maim is probably a buff to the solo or BG druid. You won't be able to use it as well for chaining CC, so in that respect it's a nerf to Arenas.
CC definitely has a huge role in PvP, but being chained for too long with no reasonable ways to get out is not a fun way to play the game. You aren't making decisions. You are just dying and hoping you die slow enough for the rest of your team to somehow pull off something truly amazing. CC needs to be about checks and balances. It needs to be about using it at the right time and deciding when and how to break it.
Immediately burning someone down at the start of the fight while they are chain CC'd isn't a clever strategy that makes you a really good player. It is something we are trying to improve. (
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Developer Q&A (
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Typhoon isn't the "get outa mah face" ability that it should be. Possible solutions are to add just about anything to it (ie. stun, slow, daze, silence, counter-spell, root, larger knockback, et cetra).
We are looking at Typhoon.
We are still waiting on the damage coeficient increase for starfall, last time I checked.
I believe we fixed the Starfall coefficient already.
Owlkin Frenzy is not so frenzied. Having it just work with melee/ranged damage ends up with it being weak for either PvP or PvE, and will just end up being looked-over in favor of other talents.
We will probably just leave the Owlkin Frenzy talent as is on live rather than risk the PvP nerf. If druids want to stand in the fire with the paladins in PvE, we'll live. Take it up with your healers.
Hunter (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Hunter changes in 3.1
1) Trap Launcher is a very cool idea and something we would love to do. However, it requires a lot of tech and may end up beyond the scope of what we can do for patch 3.1. We don't want to give hunters a buggy, half-baked ability. If you are going on the PTR to test Ulduar or just mess around with numbers, I wouldn't worry about this ability, at least for now.
2) Black Arrow is on the trap cooldown timer, and we assume largely for PvE. Black Arrow is your ability to proc things normally caused by traps (like LnL) in PvE situations when using a trap is a pain or the target is immune.
3) Think of Lock and Load triggering from traps (esp. Frost Trap) as a PvP mechanic. Think of Lock and Load triggering from periodic ticks (esp. Black Arrow) as a PvE mechanic. In PvE, you may want to use traps on trash or group pulls however. In PvP, nothing is stopping you from using Black Arrow if it works for you. (
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Thunderstomp
Thunderstomp is now a pet talent available to any Tenacity pet. Now your bears, crocs or ESPECIALLY CRABS can join in the AE tanking fun. Assume the gorilla pet will be about as useful in PvP as the pets with stuns, of which there are several. Most of those have cooldowns in the 60 sec range. Pummel could probably be less than that. (
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Thunderstomp scaling as a talent
Because of the way pet talents work, we had to covert it to a single scaling rank instead of the multiple ranks it had before. The spell will look different, but we did not attempt to rebuild it or purposely nerf it. Let us know how it feels. The pet abilities are notoriously hard to balance because their stats are so dependent on the exact gear of the hunter, which of course varies wildly. (
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Furious Howl changes
The original LK idea was to make it a substitute for Battle Shout / Blessing of Might. We took a similar tact with several of the pets being able to bring great buffs if you were missing them. Unfortuntely, those buffs tend to be exceedingly common and wolves are such an iconic WoW creature that it felt unfortunate for them to be sidelined.
The new ability *stacks* with those buffs. It only affects the hunter and her wolf. We changed the cooldown and duration because we thought it was more interesting to try and time your cooldowns (like burn Rapid Shot during Howl) rather than just have the bonus up 100% of the time. (
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Roar of Sacrifice / Cunning and Tenacity pets
It will take BM to reach the bottom tier, but those are mostly gratutious dps talents. Utility abilities like Intervene are higher, though you may have to pick and choose since your points are limited.
I believe we changed Roar of Sac to only affect the hunter (we feared chains of hunters keeping tanks alive) but we are strongly considering letting Cunning pets have access to the same talent as Tenacity pets. (
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Mage (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Paladin (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Priest (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Viper Sting
Viper Sting vs. priests is something we plan to address. (
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Reflective Shield and Hymn of Hope removal
There is a good chance we will just keep this spell. The jury is still out. As I am sure most of you know, the original intent was to let you gain the functionality on any target. When we had to limit it to the priest for technical reasons (that is to say the tech didn't exist to cast it on others) then we became less enamored with the spell, as did many of you.
However it turns out there are plenty of players who still like Reflective Shield exactly as it is, so it may get a stay of execution. Both these spells will probably be rescued from the cutting room floor. (
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Shadow Priests
I think Shadow priests will be in a good place. For PvP they got a much-needed tweak to Psychic Horror, but I won't spoil it here.
For PvE, I think the changes will help their scaling in the long run. I suggested in another thread that we might need to make their Shadow spells crit at 200% in order for the Shadowform change to actually be a buff. But we are fully committed to having the dots crit. The game just works better that way.
The Shadow Ulduar 4 piece set bonus is pretty sweet too. (
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Healing as a Discipline priest
I believe there are 1 or 2 more Disc talent changes you don't have yet that boost healing a little more. We're not worried about Disc mana generation, because it was really good before, but let us know if you get on the PTR how it feels. (
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Rogue (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Shiv
Ideally, Shiv would not be an uber PvE button to push, which is why we have nerfed it before. We don't have any changes to announce for it yet, but we may end up changing it before 3.1 ships. The purpose of such a change would not be to nerf rogue damage, but just so you didn't feel like you needed to use Shiv for Combat or Assassination PvE builds. Please remember that we have not announced all of the 3.1 changes yet. Even when 3.1 goes up on the PTR, it will not initially have all of the class changes in it. We want to get this patch up early so we have lots of time for feedback. One thing we are messing a lot with is poison procs. Changing poison to a proc per minute would make super fast weapons less attractive. I am suggesting that such a change might happen just so you don't recklessly shard all of those slow weapons. (The Enhancement shamans may want them too.)
Shiv is an ability primarily designed to get poisons on a target quickly. It is primarily a PvP ability. We don't want to just nerf it for PvE or it kills what it is doing for PvP. But it is not ideal that it makes a main ability like Sinister Strike look like poo. And we can't just buff Sinister Strike et al. (more on that below).
I understand that rogues, and particularly optimized players, will gravitate towards whatever spec and rotation maximizes their dps. That's cool, but it doesn't mean that we should just celebrate any bizarre way to play that comes up just because that happens to maximize dps. I also understand how from a player point of view it always makes sense that when you see a big number and a bunch of little numbers that we should buff all the little numbers. It may be fun, but it rarely makes sense from our point of view. For starters, it causes game inflation at a much faster rate (and it is already pretty fast). It makes us have to buff other classes that are supposed to be on par with the target class. It might even make us buff encounters. That is a lot of work with a lot of risk compared to lowering perhaps a single number.
We are committed to improving rogues in PvE, and we have had trouble doing that without a major patch because small tweaks tend to have ripples throughout the class, making whole trees too good or too bad in PvE or PvP. But 3.1 is a major patch and we can touch as many things as we need to touch to get to the target we want.
Rogues have always had a problem where weapon speed can trump all, and we are seeing it now where blue weapons like Librarian's Paper Cutter can out-perfom much better weapon just because of the weapon speed. Usually when chance per hit is pushing players into doing unusual things like this it is because hits are being over-emphasized, and fast weapons hit more often. Our usual solution to that is to go to a proc per minute where slow weapons proc more often per swing than fast weapons so weapon speed itself becomes a lot less relevant compared to other other stats on the item and players actually have the option of benefiting from a higher level item that drops, rather than having to pass on it because it isn't 1.4 speed or whatever. (
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Shaman (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Unleashed Rage in 3.1
in 3.1 this is getting changed is a 3pt talent, along with the 4%/7%/10% AP bonus on crit it will grant 1%/2%/3% more AGI. What I would suggest is changing the agi bonus to expertise, the lack of mail gear with expertise is very hard to overcome.
I believe this change (Agility -> Expertise) was actually made today. No promises until you actually see it on the PTR. (
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Warlock (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Syphon of Life removal
It was solely the first reason. We didn't like the spec having so many dots to manage. Nobody mortal was playing Affliction at all without third-party mods for dot timers, which should not be mandatory to play WoW.
It isn't just a CATERIN 2 THE CASAULS issue. Because so much of Affliction's damage was tied up in dots, their on-demand burst damage was low. This has ramifications in PvP for obvious reasons, but also in PvE. Locks were getting frustrated on trash for instance because they never had time to do damage. Yeah, I know NOBODY CAREZ ABOUT TRASH BLIZARD. Except that trash is a part of the game. You can wipe on it. You can spend time killing it. Several bosses have adds that you need to contend with. It isn't fun being the class that just kind of hangs out until it's boss time.
I have suggested a few times since LK shipped that we wanted to remove 1-2 dots from Affliction's normal rotation and 3.1 was a good chance to do that. If it ends up being a small nerf on raid bosses, well Affliction can probably handle that, because there was a good chance they were going to get a slight nerf anyway. For PvP, it may end up being a larger nerf, but that wasn't really the intent and we are looking at options for adding damage back in that doesn't also inflate sustained PvE damage. (
Source)
Siphon Life Q&A
1) Affliction required Siphon Life for PvP. Without it, Affliction is doomed.
First, we are making many changes to warlocks for 3.1. We can't be too scared to make a change we think is needed because of the status quo. We thought Affliction had to maintain too many dots, which did bad things to the class, such as making them feel underpowered in short PvE or PvP fights. Along with these changes come many other changes that are going to make players rethink the builds they are even using for PvP. Second, we don't believe dot (or buff or debuff) protection is a fun mechanic. If your dots are too easy to dispel and that hurts locks, we would rather solve it in other ways than to give you more protection dots. Third, Arena matches can't just be about instant cast spells or a whole lot of spells in the game are going to have to be re-designed.
2) Warlocks are still terribad in PvP so why nerf them?
I don't want to derail the entire thread here, but we don't believe the entire success or failure of Affliction in Areas was dependent on Siphon Life. Abilities, especially on-demand ones, tend to have a much bigger effect in PvP than just raw damage, unless it is very bursty damage, which Siphon Life wasn't. I'm a little skeptical that SL was 30% of dps for too many Affliction locks in Arenas, but even if that were true, it doesn't mean the only solution is that SL is somehow sacred. If warlocks aren't competitive in PvP, we will buff them. Perhaps we will even juice Corruption through the Siphon Life talent if that's what it takes. But we have to be able to change spells and rotations in order to move the game design forward. "You can't cut Siphon Life -- we need it," is not a very strong argument. "We want to be competitive in PvP, and Siphon Life helped to do that," is totally valid, but we care a lot more about the first part of that sentence than the second.
3) We don't want to spam Shadowbolt.
I think this is just trying to be argumentative. In BC, warlocks spammed Shadowbolt the way Frost mages spam Frost Bolt. It was dull and we tried to fix it for LK. Our intent is not that you take Shadowbolt off your bar. Our intent was that it doesn't become the centerpiece of your entire rotation, and I don't think it is any longer. My point was actually that you can't just subtract the Siphon Life damage and call it a nerf because you are going to end up using the time and mana on another spell.
4) But I liked Siphon Life!
WoW has a huge and vocal community. Almost no matter what change we make to the game, somebody is going to disagree. Even the most annoying and weak spell in the game probably has a few fans who would be sad to see it go. We just didn't want to keep Siphon Life as an active spell any longer. We wanted to reduce the number of dots Affliction had. I'm sorry if it was a spell that you really liked for whatever reason.
5) You lied to us GC! You lied! Why? Oh why?
Be reasonable. We change our minds. Stuff can change very fast when it is in iteration mode sometimes. We sometimes mistate things or have mistaken assumptions about how things work. I know the spells and abilities very well, and still I do it all the time. We try to always be very, very careful in our correspondence with players to caveat the heck out of anything we say. "Assuming nothing changes. At this time. For now." Those get tacked on to everything we say just to avoid players freaking out if we are working on A ,and A ends up getting cut or we do B instead. WoW is a living game. It's going to change over time. You have to give us room to manuver and not try to nail us to the wall anytime something changes. The only thing I am ever going to promise with a capital P is that we will do the best we can to make WoW a great game, and that we will listen to your feedback and take it seriously. (
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Removing Syphon of Life ... and Immolate?
Players tend to evaluate almost everything in terms of dps. If you could come up with a rotation with just one spell that maximized dps, many players would do it even if it was soul-destroyingly boring. If we were dumb and gave you 35 spells you needed to cast in the average fight, many players would still do it even if it made their eyes bleed. Clearly there is some intermediary point between 1 and 35. Part of our job is to think about what that number should be and not just focus on what the damage meters show at this moment.
We thought Affliction had too many spells to cast as part of their rotation (by which I mean spells they generally think about all the time, vs. cooldowns or more situational spells). What we want to do is get rid of Siphon Life and adjust everything else so that Affliction remains similar (it won't be identical) to how it was before.
That is a different intent than if the design team had sat down and said "We need to nerf Affliction. What is the best way to do it? Hey, we could remove Siphon Life." That happens sometimes, but that was not our design goal with this change.
Now, we do also want to remove Immolate, but it's a lot harder to do. The base Immolate spell does decent damage even without talents. If we nerf Immolate, then we have to add deep talents to both Destro and Demo to prop it back up. We might just leave it as is, because you could at least de-prioritize Immolate. Using it would be a modest dps increase, but nothing like your other spells. Or we might find ways to still steer it more towards the other two trees. One of the reasons we wanted to get some of the changes out early was to start getting feedback. Unfortunately, much of the feedback has been "I don't like the change because it's a dps loss and that's all that's important to me." (That's a bit of an exaggeration; I realize some of you care about it being instant cast, providing an extra debuff, like having a ton of spells to manage, or just liked the look and feel of the spell.)
Again, I understand the value of instant cast spells in PvP, but we aren't going to just design classes so that every spell they want to cast is instant for PvP reasons. We can't just write off all of those spells with an actual cast time as PvE only.
I know it's fun to say Blizzard doesn't understand this class (that they designed), or that no thought went into the decision, or drag out that tired old adjective: kneejerk. However, we put a great deal of thought into this. Just because you might disagree with the direction does not make that untrue. Sometimes we are going to make changes that may seem unpopular in the short term because we think it improves the game in the long term. (
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Soul Siphon loss of DPS
We will definitely address this issue. We don’t want Soul Siphon (I assume that’s what you were referring to) to be nerfed from this change. It also goes against our raid stacking philosophy in its current form anyway so it was due for a change, (
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Removing the requirements of SL -> Shadow Mastery
That is something we are considering. There is less of a chance of us messing with that than with Soul Siphon. (
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Pandemic in 3.1 and DoT crits effects in PvP
Under the new system, dots don't get hit more from resilience than direct damage spells. If the dot doesn't crit, then its damage is reduced as it is on live today. If it does crit, then it is treated like a normal (non-dot) spell and the damage is reduced from the crit, but not the dot. That may sound confusing, so I will try and explain it another way. Resilience does the following (among other things):
A) Reduce the chance to crit
B) Reduce the damage of crits
C) Reduce the damage of dots
If a dot has a chance to crit, then A applies. If the dot does not crit, then C applies. If it does crit then B applies (the same way it does to Shadowbolt) but C does not. (
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[...] I am confused. You can keep posting "dots get affected twice by resilience" if that's supposed to be a rallying cry or something but it really has no balance implications. Ultimately I think you are trying to use an AND when an OR is called for.
Current: Dots have their damage reduced by resilience.
Future: Dots have their damage reduced by resilience. The exception is if the dot crits, then it is treated as a direct damage spell, in which case its damage is... guess what... reduced by resilience.
There is no double dipping here. If you like, think about it as a coin toss. If it's heads, the dot is affected by dot resilience. If it's tails, it is affected by direct damage spell resilience. Dot resilience OR direct damage resilience. Just because something can be affected by two things does not mean the impact is double. I can pay with cash or a credit card but that does not mean things are twice as expensive for me.
The only thing you could really be logically arguing is that dots that do not crit should not be affected by resilience at all. But that is basically arguing that the way the spells work today on live is unfair and dots should be immune to resilience. Obviously we don't feel that way because dots have been affected by resilience for a long time. They are balanced around the fact that (read: their damage is higher) they do not crit. A talent that allows them to crit without lowering their base damage (which we aren't doing) would just be a big, free buff that is not warranted. Allowing dots to crit does not change the need for them to be affected by resilience. It only means dots should not be affected by resilience twice *at the same time* which they are not. Cool?
Now, of more relevance is whether or not the crit change represents an overall damage nerf to shadow priests and warlocks. We can see how that is possible because you used to be able to do an extra 100% damage (or 200% total) and now you just get a normal crit, which for spells is 150%. Like most other spells, your dots probably need to get boosted to 200% crit damage (possibly through talents). (A lot more theorycrafting on that in the
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Warrior (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Warrior Changes
Well, we want them to do more damage, feel like a viable alternative to Fury (or hunters) in PvP, and be able to use say Overpower without being so dependent on RNG. We're not ready to discuss details yet. (
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Arms Tree in 3.1
Right now, we are working a lot on the Arms tree for 3.1, so suggestions and feedback on that play style are timely and useful. While Arms dps is too low at the moment, we are more interested in adjustments to signature abilities (say Mortal Strike, Overpower, Sudden Death, Taste for Blood and things like that) than we are just inflating passive damage, especially passive white damage. (
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Adding a 10% penalty to Titan's Grip once again
Anyone who has been following Fury since beta can probably recite this history of Titan's Grip.
1) We implement the talent. The warrior community doesn't think the talent will work with a penalty and predicts nobody will take it.
2) Fury damage is a little low at the time, so we finally drop the penalty to an almost trivial amount.
3) We later just pull the penalty off altogether because it wasn't really offsetting the huge bonus of the talent any longer.
4) Fury does too much damage as a result, and Titan's Grip becomes the new talent by which all others are measured. ("Man, my 51 talent doesn't increase my dps by over 10% a point.")
Fury warriors who think their dps will be too low after this change in PvE are probably comparing themselves to classes or specs with inflated dps who are also being brought down (even after the Deep Wounds fix). If you are worried about the PvP ramifications, I think we can probably agree that a 10% swing in dps is not what is going to determine whether warriors are viable in Arenas or not. (
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Warrior tanking and Ulduar
We are very happy with the mechanics we put into place for Prot warriors for LK. Long-term tanks still tell us that tanking as a warrior is night and day more fun than it was in BC. The talent tree is worlds better than it used to be.
We do understand there are some concerns about tanking parity, and some of these are more stat related than mechanic related. We have plans to improve warrior tanks where they are deficient.
Our stance is that in BC, the warrior was the MT. There are some guilds that fielded paladin or druid MTs and managed to do fine. However, we made the assumption that most fights were being tanked by a warrior.
That is not true in LK, where we assume you have one of four classes tanking. We want every fight to be viable with every tank. Now that word "viable" is a tricky one. I can't say "identical" because realistically it's not going to be identical. The four classes have different stats and abilities so inevitably some fights are going to be a little easier for one class than another. We are going to attempt to minimize the effects of that as much as we can. We don't want to see a guild with a druid MT suddenly hit a brick wall.
This gets even trickier when you are talking about the Ulduar hard modes. Some are going to be quite challenging and we won't be at all surprised to see guilds optimize as much as they can to beat those encounters. Some guilds might be able to swap in a DK for some fights because they think that gives them an advantage compared to a warrior tank. We're not really going to do anything to prevent that, but we are going to make sure that is not your only option.
If you go for the hard modes, you are going to be in for a challenge. Everyone will be able to see Ulduar, but not everyone is going to be able to beat those situations that offer the best loot. You all as tanks are going to have to be very careful and honest about admitting when you can't beat an encounter because you're group just isn't up to it and when you can't because class balance gets in the way. (
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Originally Posted by Wymorence
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