3.2 Resilience Changes
Resilience affecting heals
We considered the idea that resilience acts like a debuff for heals, but we're not happy with what that might do to the game. You'd be in a situaiton where sometimes you might not want extra resilience since it lowers your healing. Resilience is already something of a trade-off since it often comes at the expense of other stats (though hopfully less after these changes).
There is a possibility that if fights go on for too long that dps casters may run OOM more than they should. That is something we may have to adjust, but we don't think it's simple to math out what kind of buff casters should be given at the moment. Note that the intent is not to turn every Arena match into a 20 minute slog. The intent is to have fewer 30 second matches.
I do see some people saying that healers were already in god mode and this will only buff them. Just realize that player perceptions or intentions are different. For one person, a healer in a 2 vs. 2 shouldn't be able to keep their partner up alone. For another, having a 1 healer, 4 dps team in a 5 should be perfectly viable. (
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DoT Damage reduction
Dots were (and currently are) lowered when they do normal damage and lowered when they crit. I don't think anyone is arguing that fact. What dot-classes often contended was that this design wasn't fair, while our position was that they were balanced around that design. It didn't make sense to us that dots that couldn't crit (say the player didn't take those talents) should be able to do more relative damage. If anything it made those talents a mixed blessing.
What is changing is that we decided not to continue this design going forward since warlocks and shadow priests could stand to be buffed. If anything, you could say everyone got the warlock design, and perhaps that is a more sensible design in the first place. (
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Classes
Bring the player, not the class
The design intent is very simple, though it gets lawyered a lot by players asking for buffs.
We want to promote diversity and flexibility in the raid group.
Here are examples of what we DON'T want:
- You have to have a shaman in every 5-player group within a raid.
- You have to have 1 Holy paladin, 1 Disc priest, 2 Holy priests, 2 Resto shamans, 2 Resto druids.
- You have 2 have 2 Holy paladins to heal the tanks.
- You have to have an Unholy DK for Ebon Plague.
- You have to have a warrior MT and a druid OT.
- Etc.
We push niches for healers, to a small extent, so that players don't just say "Well, druids are the best healers. Let's take 6 of them." We want you to get a couple of druid healers and then think that you are probably better off getting a few different kinds of healers to balance out your raid. We want you to be able to raid if your best Holy priest is sick that night by getting a paladin, shaman or druid instead.
Some players like to claim the sky is falling after every set of patch notes, and to be fair, it's a pretty understandable reaction. But the fact is that the Ulduar raid groups have been more diverse than at any point in the history of WoW. Even the most competitive, cutting-edge guilds in the world don't all raid with the same mix of classes. From that perspective, the "bring the player" philosophy has been pretty succesful. This doesn't mean there are no balance problems (or even quality of life or fun issues) left to address. Let's just keep it in perspective. Not many guilds are running with 8 [fill in the blank of the preceived overpowered healer of the month, probably Resto druids currently], and nobody is going to start doing that in 3.2.
I'm still having a hard time seeing why you can't substitute DPS classes into this statement and have it be any different... except you don't push niches for DPS, you do the opposite. Because you realized that "niches" were holding people back.
First, there are more dps slots in the typical raid so even if you bring say 5 mages, you have plenty of room for everyone else. Second, if you stack too many of one particular class then you risk not having enough of the buffs and debuffs you need. Third, there are niches for dps classes too, but they are also not overly rigid niches. If you bring too much melee, you suffer on some fights. If you lack strong crowd control, your pulls may be a little messy.
All I am saying is that the design is, more and less, working. Players are still concerned about being curbed, sometimes only when they are trying to look into the future or having bad memories of the past. But for most guilds out there, it isn't a problem. In most cases, bringing a more skilled player of any class will have a bigger net effect on your raiding success than bringing someone for their buff or narrow healing or damage niche, provided you have your bases covered.
On the other hand, man did that soundbite stick.
I don't think anything I could say at Blizzcon this year could have that kind of staying power. (
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Hunter (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Roar of Sacrifice changes in 3.2
The Roar of Sacrifice change we are trying in 3.2 is to give hunters back a little of the utility they lost when we changed it to be hunter only. Relating the ability to crits is to make sure hunters don't use it to keep the MT alive. Before we made the change to its current, live version, this was happening, and we didn't want to have to start balancing around the assumption that hunters were RoS'ing the tank. This would have led to making sure other classes had a mandatory buff, and so on.
The 3.2 change is intended to restor RoS to the PvP functionality it had before, which is something a lot of hunters said they liked since they could use it on team-members and not just themselves. The cooldown is something we could iterate on, though we needed to start fairly conservatively with it to avoid having to nerf it right away. We can't change the ability back to damage reduction for anyone or we'd be back with the same tanking problem as before. But this is intended to be a buff to utility not a nerf to the ability itself. Feel free to offer your feedback on the change in this thread.
This thread has gotten into some other hunter topics as well. While, I have no problem with you discussing them, I am going to confine my comments to RoS for now. (
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Paladin (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Illumination nerf
If it matters, we changed Illumination first to correspond with the Beacon of Light changes. Then when we agreed on changing resilience (and it was a very long discussion) we knew we would have to look at healing, or at least the healing by prominent Arena specs. Resto and Disc almost certainly needed attention. We thought paladins might be okay since their mana regen had already been nerfed and Beacon isn't a huge factor in PvP.
I understand some paladins who don't like the change are trying to somehow trap us into admitting the Illumination nerf was for PvP. This strategy of questioning our motives always perplexes me, because we try to be up front about when we think something is too powerful -- we don't try to hide it. We would rather face player ire directly by stating something is getting nerfed because it was too good rather than try and sneak the nerfs in under questionable justification that smart players would see through anyway.
Illumination was nerfed for PvE reasons. Having made that nerf convinced us we didn't need additional PvP changes (for now anyway). We always consider what effect changes will have on PvP and PvE (and 5-player dungeons, soloing and the level-up experience as well). (
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[...] The nerf to Illumination was almost entirely because of the buff to Beacon of Light. Beacon can now provide massively more healing in some situations. If paladins still had the mana return they do currently, they would be the best healer in the game by a pretty wide margin. It is difficult to argue that point. Now you can argue that you prefer the current model (HL on the tank and nearly unlimited mana) better. But it's hard to argue the new Beacon would be balanced without other changes.
I'm going to throw out some made-up numbers. These are not from actual stats, but are hopefully typical of say a 25-player, 10-min hard fight (something like XT). Feel free to disagree but they shouldn't be off by orders of magnitude.
A Holy paladin's mana regen might look like this:
Illumination 70,000
Divine Plea 50,000
Replenishment 36,000
Other sources of mana 30,000
Mana from gear 10,000
Overhealing 60%
A Holy priest's mana regen might look like this:
Replenishment 30,000 (remember, the paladin has more mana)
Other sources of mana 40,000
Mana from gear 25,000
Overhealng 30%
See the problem? We're not talking about mana regen that is slightly off from other classes.
This situation is acceptable (somewhat) in current content because you can only do so much with such high levels of regen since you generally have to target one heal at a time. We could pretty much just make paladin spells free and the outcome wouldn't change that much. That's an exaggeration, but you get the point: paladins are generally GCD limited much more than they are mana limited. I'm not sure anyone is that mana limited in current content (though slightly more so on the hard modes), but whatever it is, paladins feel it the least.
Now we change Beacon so that the overhealing counts. Paladin healing is going to go up, probably by a lot. We can argue how much it's going to go up or how of that will be effective healing. But it will go up a lot, especially considering the glyph of HL will get more use. Considering how much higher paladin regen is than other healers, it has a long way to fall before it would even be at parity.
Remember, we are also nerfing Penance, Prayer of Healing and Lifebloom. The latter won't be felt as much in PvE, but also realize we are talking about 3.2 changes here and the current druid set bonuses (which might be slightly overpowered) won't be around. (
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Originally Posted by Ufalah
German player, sorry for bad grammar.
My wow blog: wowstage.blogspot.com
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