Season of Discovery - Class Changes Feedback

[Lumy]

Season of Discovery - Class Changes Feedback
Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield shared on Twitter potential upcoming class changes in Season of Discovery, and asked the community for feedback on them.

The team focused on SoD has spent a good chunk of the last few days chewing on a rather large list of class adjustments coming soon (likely actually soon, not "soon tm" soon). As always we want to prime everyone that it's not going to fix every single thing everyone wanted, but we are continuing to iterate.

We've been watching discords and forums for ideas and suggestions as we go, and while that's fine and good, I figured it might be a fun exercise to probe for a few suggestions here to a few targeted questions.

Disclaimer; there may be an excellent idea in here that you love that we can't execute on for whatever reason.
Game dev isn't easy and sometimes you have to pass on a good idea for a myriad of reasons. It's nothing sinister and its not us being tone deaf. Many things are also too big to hotfix so we have to think about what we do now vs. next phase.

So, feel free to post suggestions or links to media with good suggestions in reply. Please do keep it civil though both towards me/the team and each other. I've been increasingly having to mute/block folks with abusive or unhelpful commentary so let's all be chill humans together.

Lastly, please try and frame your suggestion with both a) the issue to be addressed, and b) your suggestion--phrased as concisely as possible. We likely won't have time to read super long posts/threads to find the meat of your point, so this will help (he says, while typing a super long post himself).

Anyway, here goes:

1. Shadow DPS - We'd like to increase damage while allowing them to still shine in terms of group utility, particularly because their utility/value is likely to increase even further at 60 with some new stuff coming. One thing we also keep coming back to as well is wanting to restore mind flay to having a place in the toolkit. With that in mind, how would you suggest improving Shadow DPS with those goals in mind?

2. Survival Tree for Hunters - We know a lot of melee hunters really want Survival to be a thing and we agree that it really fits that "RPG ranger" class fantasy. Currently, BM tends to outstrip it in terms of raw output. What do you think could be interesting to zhuzh this up and make a deepish survival investment interesting?

3. Holy Paladins - We did you guys a bit dirty by not giving you interesting buttons to push like every other healing class. Viewed through a level 60 vanilla lens holy is great, but in SoD it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing we've been discussing is a group heal or some sort of proactive heal mechanic for Holy, but interested to hear some concise ideas here.

4. Sword Rogues - We have some adjustments coming in the upcoming update but we are open to ideas for how to make Saber Slash and other sword gameplay compelling. Might simply be a "do moar damage" adjustment that fixes this in the end, but we are interested in "feelsy" adjustment ideas too.

5. Warriors - Rage is a problematic mechanic because more damage = more rage = more damage = more rage ad infinitum. This is going to become more problematic at 60 as well. If we had it to do over again, we'd likely have normalized rage (i.e. you don't get extra rage when you do more damage/crit) at the start of the season and focused on major changes to their gameplay to compensate. The way it works now really hamstrings the design options for Warriors as we have to worry about the historically best dps in the game becoming even better later and forcing us to do an absolutely massive nerf which everyone would hate. To you, what would be a good trade for some form of normalized rage at 60 if we had to do such a thing?

To close us out--at this point, we are always open to novel ideas for any class, including things that don't just strictly borrow from future expansions. Our philosophy on this has shifted from when we started developing this season and now we'd love to experiment with totally NEW mechanics (that ideally fit somewhat plausibly into the classic ecosystem). Not to say we won't use future expansion spells, but there's a willingness to expand our horizons a bit.

Anyway sorry for the length. We've had a lot of fun just trawling discords and forums recently but figured I'd just throw this into the maelstrom and see what we get here as well. Thanks!

EDIT: I am not answering questions here, so sorry if you want to ask something. My thoughts are irrelevant to this discussion and we want YOUR ideas.

[Biomega]

I don't give two fucks about SoD, but it's very nice to see that they communicate a lot and invite constant feedback. That's great from any developer, so kudos.

[Malrune]

The retailification continues.

[Segus1992]

2. Survival Tree for Hunters - We know a lot of melee hunters really want Survival to be a thing and we agree that it really fits that "RPG ranger" class fantasy. Currently, BM tends to outstrip it in terms of raw output. What do you think could be interesting to zhuzh this up and make a deepish survival investment interesting?

ahem... well... You know what, nevermind

I'm scared of melee so everyone should be. What he's saying is people think the go-to spec for melee Hunter should be Survival, but it isn't. Beast Mastery is.

[RobertMugabe]

I don't give two fucks about SoD, but it's very nice to see that they communicate a lot and invite constant feedback. That's great from any developer, so kudos.

Probably won't stay for long, considering just how wild that original thread was.

There was like 5% proper feedback and and the rest was people just moaning and a lot of it were insults and death threats against the devs and Aggrend in particular.

[Kralljin]

Surprised that Elemental isn't mentioned.

Currently, the best rune "combination" for Elemental involves Mental Dexterity, a rune that gives a spelldamage whenever you melee an opponent based on your attackpower.
So Elemental currently has to melee the boss every 10 seconds to keep the buff up and the buff is so strong that this very clunky playstyle is the best even on bosses where meleeing the boss is a huge pain.

[Shinchi Migi]

Why do I feel that the team for SoD is more, lots more, communicative then retail team. Or it could just be me

[Grinning Serpent]

If they think they need to normalize Rage, then they really are making "retail". Normalizing Rage made Warriors a lot easier to balance, but it also removed an enormous amount of the feel and flavor of the class. I don't think you can normalize Rage and still have a vanilla warrior.

They probably should have given Warrior more utility runes (since utility is something Warriors always lacked), or maybe even an entire support/healer "spec" (focusing on banners, attaching bonuses to shouts, adding new shouts, etc.) Giving Warrior more damage, when Warrior was already traditionally one of the very best at damage, was probably a mistake.

I think they were designing around Warrior being weak early in tiers and thinking that it would be okay, but forgetting that every phase adds a lot of very high quality loot that, due to the way phases are staggered, mostly ensures Warriors will always get.

Either way, normalizing Rage is not the solution here. I don't have a horse in the race, though. They didn't put in actually interesting and exciting runes (like Sword and Board, Gladiator Stance, etc) early enough to keep me interested. I bounced when I saw phase 2 runes were boring as fuck.

[SinR]

Aggrend's engagement with the community is great.

Retail could learn a thing or twenty.

[GMZohar1]

"Survival to be a thing and we agree that it really fits that "RPG ranger" class fantasy"

Combat Rogues are the "RPG Ranger" fantasy. Rangers don't have pets. Stop trying to turn Classic Combat Rogues into your retail Pirate spec nonsense