Wintergrasp Changes, Blue posts

[emodac]

They upped the limit to 120 people per side to account for that.

Oh nice.

[rages]

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on "slightly." This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with "Patchwerk" to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

OK, couple of things here. They admit druids are getting hurt more and then they hint that they may be nerfing us more! I admit I haven’t been keeping up on PTR info mostly because as a Feral druid I don’t want to think about 3.2. So after reading the above I clicked on the patch notes and read the following:

•Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
•Block Value: The amount of bonus block value on all items has been doubled. This does not affect the base block value on shields or block value derived from strength.
•On-Use Block Value Items: All items and set bonuses that trigger temporary increases to block value have been modified. Instead of increasing their block value amount by 100% like other items, they have all had their effect durations doubled. This applies to Glyph of Deflection, Gnomeregan Autoblocker, Coren's Lucky Coin, Lavanthor's Talisman, Libram of Obstruction, Tome of the Lightbringer, Libram of the Sacred Shield, the tier-8 paladin Shield of Righteousness bonus, the tier-5 paladin Holy Shield bonus, and the tier-5 warrior Shield Block bonus.
•Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.

So I then decided to take a look at Warrior and Pally tanks on my server and as I suspected 0 agility on their gear. WTF, if you want to nerf dodge then nerf dodge don’t mess with agility. You buffed shield carrying tanks and Nerfed Druids without any way of making up for it. Well at least we still have great dps in cat form, ohh yeah forgot that gets nerfed in 3.2 too. O’well I still have my epic frost gear socketed with all 24 stam gems! I can’t wait for all the fun nerfs us ferals get in 3.2 best of all I get to stare at my metrosexual Hello kitty and Fat ass bear with retarded arm bands and Elvis sideburns.

[Damates]

Only thing I have to say bout this, is who the F cares about prot warriors!!. I dont. I am more intresting to know is about Prot Paladins. Blues should have mentioned things about Pally tanks not warrior tanks.

[hx9]

BGs? What are those? It's all about Arena lately. BGs have mostly become grinds since Arena (and ranking-required gear) hit the scene.

Hahahahaha. Hope you're ready for some big changes.

[sardokar]

On that note, I keep getting 1 shot by Pallies in BG's. When I look at the combat log it says I was hit for like 468 (16452 overkill). That was the numbers from just one time, but I go from full health to dead from one hit and it seems as tho it's been happening a lot this week. Not saying that Pallies are OP or anything (more annoying IMO) but I just wanted to see if it was just me. Not QQing just wondered if there was a bug or something.

Not to disagree as I feel paladins and dks are overpowered in pvp and while Blizzard knows it they're really not trying to change it...

But that crit you list above was probably their ranged execute move. I know on my hunter my kill shot will crit for 12k or so but that's not representative of one of my regular/special shots. Execute style moves always do a tremendous amount of damage for some reason (I guess to guarantee the kill).

[Falcio]

"I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn't care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to."

Well, no, you really don't, you could just fucking ignore it (or better yet, remove it).

Unfortunately, people still PVP.=P

They want to figure out a way to nerf PVP while keeping PVE the same, but they seem to refuse to change it so abilities act differently in a BG or Arena or Duel setting. That, in my mind, is just making a small problem worse. Even a shmuck can figure out how to make Viper Sting suck up mana in a slower pace against a player while keeping it the same it is now against an NPC.

It would require a bit of retooling, I know, but it would keep my damn SS crits. I want them to do it. It would probably harm world PVP in the end, as that would probably be too hard to retool, but I don't care. I'd rather they start treating PVP and PVE as two separate creatures and change one while keeping the other out of their minds. It would be much better than seeing the problem with Prot Warrior DPS, and nerfing one of their basic moves to do LESS DPS.

It's mind-boggling how they're going about this. At this rate, the Warrior DPS problem can only be solved by nerfing the other 3 classes, and I doubt anyone would want that.

Only thing I have to say bout this, is who the F cares about prot warriors!!. I dont. I am more intresting to know is about Prot Paladins. Blues should have mentioned things about Pally tanks not warrior tanks.

Oh, you'll get nerfed out of this, too. Lore from Tankspot put it out nicely that the DR part of Shield of Righteousness might be more of a problem than the DR part for Shield Block for Warriors.

Problem was, you weren't the tank that does the least DPS, so the only thing you'll lose out of this is a bit of threat and maybe some DPS. The problem is that Warrior tank DPS is bad compared to the other classes, and if our mitigation and survival skills are all the same, then which classes would you think a guild would take?

[Baaadum]

I'm of the opinion that Arena has sufficiently ruined (EDIT: Okay, ruined is a strong word, but it's caused a lot of problems for PvE and non-arena PvP. Every time they "fix" something so it's "more balanced" in arena, it throws everything else for that class and/or spec and/or stat out of alignment.

I couldn't be happier if they just removed arena outright. Let the leet pvpers measure their epeens through dueling or calling each other out on realm forums (cross-faction) for duels elsewhere, shift the focus of pvp back to BGs and world PvP.

But I'm probably in the minority there, and I'm sure somebody will reply to this with, "You just dislike Arena because you suck at it."

I think the real problem with Arena is that the game designers keep clinging to the philosophy that "Arena, PvP, and PvE are all the same game in WoW." So, they strongly resist having skills that have different functions in pvp and pve. They're trying to 'balance' classes for two different games, and to boot they're resisting homogenization (rather poorly at the moment, probably due to the community's mass amounts of QQ about 'OP' classes/skills/whatever). Accept what the gamers already know: Arena is different from PvP (because in PvP numbers give the advantage), and Arena is different from PvE. Treat them as such, design for them as such. Would save a lot of work in the long run.

This.

I couldn't agree anymore with you.

[VirtuousX]

I like those bg and arena changes, but I think they need to make a new build and fast cause I can't stand these feral PvE and PvP nerfs

[rages]

The real message is that they want us to all play pally’s. I did a wow hero’s search on my server and there are more pallys than any other class by a large margin. So people are listening. I have a feeling that after 3.2 goes live I will find myself doing what I should have a long time ago leveling a pally. At least they made leveling easier!

[pomr]

World PVP? What's that? ^_^

The only world PVP I've ever experienced is:

1) Getting jumped by (and usually ganked by) a stealthed Rogue or Druid while I tried to quest or do dailies
2) Getting jumped by several people working in concert while I tried to do dailies or quest
3) Getting jumped by some douchebag while I was fighting 1 or more mobs and was down to half my health and mana...the mob being something I was killing as I tried to quest or do dailies.
4) Getting jumped by someone as I was leveling who was 20+ levels over me...while I was trying to quest to level.
5) Having to fight our way into a raid or instance because the other faction was feeling surly.

World PVP is nothing but an annoyance in its present state. All it does is slow down the game with pointless drivel that adds nothing but frustration and ePeen bloat for idiots that are a waste of life. =) There's no 'spice' added, unless the spice in question is dried bat guano.

Nothing says 'asshat' like slaughtering lowbies...except slaughtering quest givers, flight masters, bankers and auctioneers. Fortunately there are dedicated douchebags determined to revel in their asshattery.

I would be delighted if there wasn't any PVP at all. As numerous posters have pointed out Blizzard has no damn clue how to balance PVP with PVE, buffing one invariably breaks the other and vice versa. It is really irritating.

[Nixia]

So with the 100 person limit in WG on each side, if players are put into raid groups automatically, doesn't that mean there will be a raid group (possibly) made up of only 20 people, since 2 groups should have the full 40?

They changed it the limit to 120 so there will be 3 full raid groups on eatch side =)

[ztkraptor]

"our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec"
and such is the downfall of this game.

[Genotsknots]

Blizzard sure made a big progress on listening to their community and using the feedback. Thumbs up for that.

*cough*nerf*cough*healers*cough* WHAT?!? who said that

[Skiball]

"The future of Block
I feel like we've been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). "

I don't see why that has to be the case. In BC it ws very easy for paladins to be block capped so that every hit was a block, miss, dodge, or parry. No one claimed this was OP back in the day, it was just a different style of tanking that was unique to the paladin. I am not sure where the problem arises. Even if they doubled total block value(instead of just value from the block value stat itself), very few tanks would get above 4-4.5K block value, so stopping 4000 instead of 2000 out of 20K isn't that huge of an issue.

I have no been on the ptr but that is how it seems to me without playing the ptr.

[Biernot]

I don't see why that has to be the case. In BC it ws very easy for paladins to be block capped so that every hit was a block, miss, dodge, or parry. No one claimed this was OP back in the day, it was just a different style of tanking that was unique to the paladin. I am not sure where the problem arises. Even if they doubled total block value(instead of just value from the block value stat itself), very few tanks would get above 4-4.5K block value, so stopping 4000 instead of 2000 out of 20K isn't that huge of an issue.

The Problem is not the block value when you are tanking ulduar hardmodes. If you balance block value around these bosses, then block becomes totally op in lower tiers of raiding. Or in other words:
Not a problem: Blocking 4k out of a 20k hit.
A problem: Blocking 4k out of a 3.5k hit.

The real problem with block is it's basic nature: it does not work relative, but in absolute terms. Absolute numbers do not scale, relative ones do. This is why talents are always relative ("Increases the damage of XXX by 2%") and items are always absolute ("Increases the AP by 132"). And this is also why they introduced the combat ratings when TBC came. There is still one level 60 item around (Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon), which works in relative terms. And to no surprise, it is still viable, because it scales with the rest of your gear.

Long story short: They need to make block work relative, or at least partly relative. e.g.:
- Block now mitigates a percentage of the hit, rather than a fixes value. It could have a fixed small base amount (like the natural block amount on your shield, which would be a bit over 200 for current shields)***
- Convert "block value" to "block value rating". BVR is subject to diminishing returns (caps at 25% or something like that).***

-> Result: Block now works against hard hitting raid bosses, without beeing op in easier content (heroics, naxx 10, ...)



*** The numbers are just random examples. What the actual numbers have to be, remains to determine.

[bigsampson]

MEH I DONT CARE tanking as a prot warrior is easy...so we dont have the aoe tanking abilities as others...really this isnt the end of the world.

[lilbandit]

"They have some unusual utility spells, including Revive and Innervate"

Just further proof that GC is a retard and doesn't actually play the game he develops.

Revive - Returns the spirit to the body, restoring a dead target to life with 1800 health and 1365 mana. Cannot be cast when in combat.

Such awesome utility!

yes it's obvious he meant Rebirth, but come on, he can't even get the spells right, how the hell can he develop a game!

Druid Q&A was a joke, as above poster said, didn't even address the main problems with Druids. Bear AoE threat is lackluster (it's passable, but a real job to keep agro from even weak AoE classes. Feral PvP still has major problems - only real viable comp in 2s is priest/feral because of the never ending mana, possibly feral/rogue due to enormous burst. Not being able to use shred is crap as mangle is just really poor. I personally play resto in pvp, and i /lol even harder when I see I feral than when I see a ret pally trying to kill me.

And that nonsense about ToL form? what is GC smoking? What resto druids want to be constantly shifting in and out of ToL??