"Overpowered" AE Spells in WotLK
Maybe I'm misremembering something, but the goal going into LK was that warriors should be able to AE tank rather than every group using paladins for trash, and that casters should be able to use their AE spells, otherwise what are they there for? We succeeded in both of those, but a little too well on the latter to the extent that anything with more than 1 mob became a job for Blizzard / Hurricane / Mind Sear, etc.
In Cataclysm, there will be more threat to the tank of dying if you try to just AE tank every pull. Likewise, AE damage won't be quite as awesome so that single targeting things will probably be a better strategy when there are say 3-5 adds. If it's a dozen twilight whelps, then sure, AE away. (
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Haste on channeled spells in Cataclysm
It's probably more accurate to say that the haste will lower the duration until you earn a whole additional tick, at which point the duration will go back up again (but with more damage / healing because of that extra tick). Getting more haste will never be a bad thing, but there will be break points where haste is more valuable than others. You should also never want to cancel the spell early.
This is definitely one of those cases where we'll have to see how it feels, but it is more intuitive when you're actually casting spells in the game than it might sound on paper. (
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[...] The answer we were trying to give was that "channels won't just get shorter and shorter the more haste you get." But a more complete answer is that hasted channels will get shorter until you get a whole additional tick, at which point the duration will go back up again. We don't want to do partial ticks or things like that because they encourage you to just recast the spell. (
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Overused stats in WotLK
Yeah, I agree with that. For a number of reasons (that I've gone into before), we allowed some stats to become much more valuable than competing stats that also occur on your gear. We're really trying to prevent this in Cataclysm. We're making changes including, but not limited to, letting hots and dots crit, asking healers to care about mana regen, getting rid of group buffs that improve hit, keeping combat rating from getting inflated, etc. (
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Healing and mana regeneration / stats effect
Yes, I agree that having high mana regeneration will allow you to use inefficient spells more often. I was reacting against some of the player saying they would just stack Spirit and nothing else because Spirit also allows you to cast big heals or fast heals more often. A hasted Flash of Light is still going to be pretty good in many situations, as is a Flash of Light that crits for a big amount. The numbers should be such that all stats are valuable, not that the guides say "Stack Spirit and all other stats are garbage." (
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[...] We don't want that either, and in the absence of a five second rule, it won't help you that much anyway. Instead, we want you to choose whether you use your GCD on a moderate heal, a huge heal or a fast heal. Today almost every GCD is spent on the fast heal because someone will die if you don't do that and your mana regeneration supports that play style.
Now, we might slow combat down a little to the point at which you have enough time to make a decision about which heal to cast, but that can probably be on the order of 0.5 to 1.0 sec and not 2-5 sec. (
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Heroic Leap and "old" abilities in Cataclysm
We change our minds sometimes, like about letting Charge work in combat for example.
In fact, one of the reasons we changed our minds about Heroic Leap (and Camo, and Trap Launcher) were so many players that were sad about seeing those abilities not make it in LK. (
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AE Tanking in Cataclysm
Some of you seem to be confusing intensity with diversity. It's easy to imagine a world where a class has one AE tool that works phenomenally well and a different class that has several AE tools, none of which actually allow them to tank worth a hoot. There seems to be some kind of logic train (wreck?) here that because some classes got abilities that might be useful when AE tanking that we are wrong / changed our minds / lying about how often you will be AE tanking in Cataclysm.
Our goals are that you won't be spending as much of your tanking time AE tanking in Cataclysm as you did in Lich King. A second goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use different abilities than when you are single-target tanking. A third goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use more than one (or maybe two) abilities. None of those seem contradictory.
If you want to challenge our goals as being unrealistic or dumb, then feel free. But we're seeing a lot of this inductive (specific to general) logic where a player tries to poke a hole in one ability and use that to mean our goals can't possibly be met.
Try one of these arguments instead:
1) I disagree with Blizzard putting more emphasis on crowd control and single-target damage.
2) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how we'll get there because of X reason.
3) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how Y ability will help realize that goal. (
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Druid (
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Tranquility / Healing in Cataclysm
He meant this. Tranquility will always be raid wide, just because the concept of a "group" within the raid is kind of a strange one. What does that group refer to in the game? It's not distance for example. We'd like to do this with every spell.
As far as druids being too powerful because hots are too powerful in a world where they don't overheal as much, that is definitely on our radar. Hots can be good and the "druid thing" without druids spamming nothing but Rejuv ("Because if I cast anything but Rejuv, then I'm not a druid!"). (
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Paladin (
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Healing Hands
Healing Hands is one of the ways we want to let paladins raid heal and it might even be the dominant way. We want to give them a group heal that isn't Circle of Healing or Chain Heal, because we've already done those spells and we want to do something new here.
What we want to avoid: "Well, we don't have our paladin tonight to heal the tank, so let's call the raid."
What we also want to avoid: "Well, we have too many paladins and they can't raid heal, so let's replace one with an undergeared alt."
There are extremes of course. All things being equal, we'd rather you not stack too many of any one spec. We just don't want to make it impossible to heal a raid if your group of friends just happens to have a lot of Holy paladins. (
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Critical Healing (Mastery)
I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Having larger crits makes crit chance attractive on gear, but I don't think the reverse is true. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have high crit and low mastery because you will just crit more often. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have low crit and high mastery because when you do crit, your heals will be larger. Crit and mastery do complement each other well and I can understand why it might be a problem if haste and Spirit weren't attractive stats so you were pigeon-holed into just crit + mastery gear, but those should both be very good stats.
(I'm ignoring the effects of Illumination, overhealing and the (specious) argument that "crit is inherently bad because it's RNG" to keep things simple, so let me know if any of those is key to understanding this.)
If at any point in the expansion crit is a poor stat for paladins, they have no third stat to retreat to.
I agree with this, but that's like saying that if at any point in the expansion Holy damage is a poor damage source for Retribution, they would have no other spell damage source to focus on. If paladins don't care about crit, then we have a problem. It doesn't matter at that point that they care more about crit than other healers. Disc priests care less about crit than they might because of Power Word: Shield, but that doesn't mean crit won't improve their healing.
So if you're arguing the flaw is that there is a risk to the paladin if crit isn't valuable, then I guess I see that. If you're arguing there is just an inherent flaw no matter what, then I'm not following you. (
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Group Healing
I think there is a problem now because more throughput (in terms of bigger heals because of crits) is wasted on overhealing. Paladins rarely have trouble healing a single target to full. Their problem is not having enough GCDs to bring up everyone before the next round of damage happens again. That won't be the case in Cataclysm hopefully. (
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Priest (
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Prayer of Healing
We'd like to change PoH too. The challenge there is making it not feel like CoH.
[...] Right. I mentioned this in another thread today, but you have a few broad options: either PoH heals the 5 most injured folks (in which case it's a lot like Circle) or it heals the whole raid (in which case it's likely overpowered or not useful enough) or it has a longer cooldown to compensate for the previous (in which case it's a lot like Divine Hymn) or it heals the target and the 4 closest targets (in which case it's like old CoH).
It's a goal to get it to not be group only. It's just a tricky goal. At the very least it's not as bad as Tranquility since you don't have to decide what group the priest is in ahead of time. There are spells that still suffer that restriction, and we'd like to change them too if possible. (
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Warrior (
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Improving Warrior AE Tanking
We could increase the damage of Thunder Clap and Shockwave if we needed to. I'm not convinced we'll need to, particularly in a world with the Vengeance concept. Warrior AE threat was generally fine in Naxxramas. It only started to slip in later tiers, and in comparison to (some) other tanks.
[...] Not every new spell is there to help realize those goals. If we wanted to give warriors a new AE ability, we'd give them something either spammable or persistent. We're just not sure they need a new tool in that space. Any balance issue can be solved with number tweaking of existing tools.
[...] I don't think warriors have any AE issues now, except for two: some classes have to do less work to AE tank, and the threat generation doesn't scale with gear as well as it needs to. Again, we don't want to make tanking just hitting one button or a macro. It's not a matter of giving you an ability for any conceivable situation you might find yourself in. It's only a problem if you're horribly broken in those situations and I don't really think warriors are there. As I've said before, we like how warriors AE tank. It generally works. It didn't work when Tclap had a 4 target limit.
Do you really struggle for example in 5-player heroics? Did you struggle in Naxx? Did you wipe a lot on Ony whelps when a warrior tanked them? (
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AE Tanking in Cataclysm
There will almost certainly be staggered adds sometimes. It won't be every encounter. In those situations you'll need to use your full tool box to handle them. Maybe you need to save Thunder Clap for a few seconds. Maybe the rogue and hunter help pull the adds to you. Maybe you Devastate and tab. Maybe you blow Challenging Shout. Maybe you blow Intimidating Shout until Thunder Clap has finished its cooldown. If we wanted you to always have an answer for every single add situation, then Thunder Clap would have no cooldown. That would make tanking easier for sure. Is making tanking easier really more fun? At what point is it so easy that you're just standing there getting beat on? (
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