Professor Putricide "buff"
As a point of clarification, this was not a buff so much as a bug fix. The AEs being cast by the abomination driver in P1, P2 and the tanks in P3 were being affected by the player AE cap, thus diminishing the amount of raid damage being done in 25 player Putricide. We fixed that bug in a hotfix. Of course we waited until Tuesday's server maintenance to apply the hotfix so as not to unfairly punish people that raided later in the week.
Furthermore, the encounter was designed to utilize 3 tanks. If you're just barely making the DPS check killing Putricide with 2 tanks, you might have a problem. Essentially, if you're using 2 tanks and both tanks are at a 4 stack your raid should be dead. With that said, I have a hard time believing a guild capable of meeting the DPS requirement for Festergut can't make a substitution in their raid comp to overcome the bug fix.
If all else fails, zonewide buffs will be available soon enough, allowing you to crush Professor Putricide, see his oozes driven before you, and hear the lamentation of his abominations. (
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Burst damage in PvP
We think everything is a little too intense right now, almost like playing the game on fast forward. Yes, damage can come in too quickly, but that is partially because healing is also so huge that without some amount of burst, it would seem as though nobody would ever die. It's as if players are either at 100% health or 0% health, and very infrequently effective in between. If we just drastically toned down PvP damage across the board -- say, by inflating resilience or health pools -- then healers would dominate, much as was the case in The Burning Crusade. In return, the only way to win a match would be to chain crowd control or possibly mana drain the healer. We certainly want to make sure these abilities have their place in PvP, but the game can also be frustrating when excessive healing gives players the feeling that fights are just being reset consistently until healers are completely out of mana (which in most cases can take a very long time).
On the flip side, we could tone down damage and healing, but that has huge PvE ramifications and we're not ready to re-balance the entire game -- though this is the intent for Cataclysm. What we'll likely do for the next expansion is ramp damage up a little as players advance, but have health pools increase greatly and healing increase by marginal amounts. The same change would have benefits for PvE too because mana then becomes a consideration for healers -- they must make a more determined choice between an efficient strategy and a spamming strategy -- and tanks won't constantly face dying by two unfortunate strikes. In PvP, you'll ideally see more players in a wounded state, and they can eventually be worn down rather than blown up in a couple of global cooldowns. (
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Resilience in next season
We are discussing the idea of increasing the benefits of resilience for the next Arena season. We will have to see what effect this has on healing and whether or not weapon inflation from the newest items can adequately offset any of those effects. (
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