World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Will this also lower absorbs?
It affects absorbs as well, yes.

This change HEAVILY favors double DPS.
We disagree. Matches with double DPS comps rarely (if ever) last long enough for either The Crowd Chose You or the new Dampening mechanic to even become a factor. It'll take a full 10 minutes before Dampening even begins to stack.

Necrotic Strike + Dampening = GG...
Necrotic Strike's healing absorption effect will be reduced at the same rate.

How does this address the double Blood DK issue again?
This change isn't targeted specifically at Blood. As I mentioned before, one of our goals with the changes in 5.4 was to avoid heavily influencing player behavior. The Crowd Chose You has a strong affect on Arena gameplay in all brackets, across a wide spectrum of compositions, not just Blood DK in 2v2. We're going to fix Blood (and we're discussing how exactly to do that), but we don't want to balance the entire Arena system around it.

That's why it favors Double DPS.
I'm not sure I follow. Looking specifically at the 2v2 bracket, matches where either team is running double DPS typically end before the 5 minute mark. They sometimes go longer, but almost never to 10 minutes. The games that do involve Blood DK's, which as I mentioned a few moments ago, we're looking to make additional changes to.

So, under normal circumstances, the only matches that will realistically be affected by this are Healer/DPS vs Healer/DPS, in which case both healers are being affected equally. Matches between double DPS and Healer/DPS or another double DPS team are completely unaffected.

How is that fair to Unholy DKS? Necro strikes are their main source of killing in arnea. So you're going to nerf their main source of DMG cause of a healing debuff?
Only the absorption affect will be reduced, not the damage output.

How doesn't this favor classes that already have a MS like warriors?
Mortal Strike (and similar effects) are applied multiplicatively. That means they don't become any more (or less) effective as Dampening begins to stack.

Here's a quick, if mathy, example: Say you cast a heal that, unmodified, would heal for 100k. If Mortal Strike is active, that heal is reduced by 25%, for a final amount of 75k (and a loss of 25k healing).

Now, say Dampening is at 10%. Your 100k heal would then land for 90k. Mortal Strike would only affect the remaining 90k healing, putting the final amount healed at 67.5k. The heal was still 25% less effective than it would have been if Mortal Strike wasn't active, but was only reduced by 22.5K -- which, you may notice, is 10% less than the previous example, keeping it in line with the effects of Dampening.

TL;DR: Mortal Strike (and similar effects) are not made any more or less desirable by Dampening.

How will this effect Warriors and Warlocks? and other dps classes which have some sort of shield or similar damange migration ability, and how about damage reducing ability's like Hand of Sacrifice?
Self-healing, shielding as well as other abilities and spells like Necrotic Strikes absorption effectiveness will also be weakened by Dampening, it will not just affect healing.

At first, as a pure healer, this seems very bad. And very bias towards dps and hybrids.
We don't think that this change will diminish the value of healers or make them less desirable than they already are. Matches that lack healers, or even matches where only one team has a healer rarely last long enough for Dampening to kick in.

The tactic would to be, to have a triple dps combo with powerful enough offhealing, cc's/esacpe abliltys to avoid the majority of the fight for 10 mins, and the just pop all damage cd's and kill off a dps, while the healer is just watching.
That's a legitimate concern, however Dampening will hit the triple DPS team just as hard, if not harder than the opposing team, because their off-healing is already fairly weak and will just get weaker making a double DPS/healer team able to take them out as well. The main point to be made here is that this will affect both teams at an equal rate, so no individual team should be able to gain a greater advantage from it than the other.

Do remember that this feature is still under development and changes may occur to it, so please let us know what you think.

Does that mean that priests who relay on shileds will be incarnation of god itself in arena?
As was mentioned earlier in the thread, shields will also have their effectiveness reduced by Dampening. So things such as "Power Word: Shield" should not give any particular classes an advantage.

Lame, once again we're back to where we started where disc priests can decide to be a douche and take the game to a draw even when their teammate is dead.. great
Why do you feel that Disc priests are going to be so strong? If it's because you think absorbs will not be included, please see my comment above.

Will it affect the health return component of mage food (and bandages)?
That's actually a really good question that I will endeavor to find an answer for.

Well, the new design is certainly better than what we have now at least. Thoguh personally I think it should start affecting damage instead rather than healing.
So you feel it would be better for damage to increase by X% per Y seconds instead of reducing healing? Can you give a little more information as to why you think this would work better than the current Dampening effect?

I'm still extremely worried about Blood DK's. They can easily survive for the first 15 minutes or so and then, with a 25% healing debuff, spam NS with all their cooldowns up and try to finish the healer. This strategy may turn out to be so efficient that Blood DK's are still going to be a huge problem here.
This change isn't intended to address Blood DK's in 2's and we also don't want to be designing the way the Arena system works around an individual spec. We agree that double Blood DK's in Arena are too strong at the moment and we're looking into some other changes in that regard.

Also, while you're here, I'd like to ask why it was decided that Necrotic Strike should be affected by the healing debuff? It means a DK will effectively lose his prime damage component over time.
Because the absorption effect of Necrotic strike effectively becomes more and more powerful as healing gets reduced. This would mean that teams which have this mechanic at their disposal would be at a great advantage once Dampening starts to kick in. The damage component of Necrotic Strike remains the same, however.

How would Polymorph work in conjunction with Dampening?
Another great question that I will look into.

What about teams that will save their major damage cooldowns for after the 10 minute mark?
At that point of the match, you're in just as much danger as the other team. Not only that, it's a gradual increase and not a sudden one; this means that the 10 minute mark is still the same as the 5 minute mark.

How will this effect Anti-Magic Shell? Does it go away once 1 damage is taken?
Absorption effects are affected in the same manner as healing in regards to Dampening. So it should absorb 1% less every 10 seconds after the 10 minute mark.

How would this change effect a DoT cleave, especially in combination with a Gateway. I can see teams kiting for a long amount with almost no risks/downsides.
Can you elaborate further on how you see this style of comp changing its play style to adapt to the new system?

If anyone else sees an issue with this system where particular classes or compositions will change their gameplay to take advantage of this system, please let us know.

And if necrotic is affected, how about mortal strike effects?
Mortal Strike effects are percentage based, while Necrotic Strike is based off of the Death Knights Attack Power. While Mortal Strike effects scale along with the heals because they are based on percentage, the healing shield effect from Necrotic Strike would get exponentially stronger the more Dampening kicks in. This is the reason that Necrotic Strikes healing shield is getting reduced at the same rate as healing, but Mortal Strike effects are not.

Stormwind (City) Denizens – a Query
Hello denizens of Stormwind – jewel of Human civilization. I have a query for you. When you look over the city and think of it ever so fondly, what feature do you think of most? What is your favorite aspect of the city and do you have any favorite NPCs there? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Region-Wide Arena Queue Times
We're aware players are reporting that they're experiencing longer queues than normal for Arena. We're currently looking into this and when we have more information on the matter, we'll get back to you. For the time being, please discuss this matter in the active thread here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8380918087 (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Arena Participation
Warrior participation has definitely increased, but the ratings seem to be looking normal right now. We'll be keeping an eye on things though, sometimes it’s hard to tell if there’s really a need for a quick hotfix from the very beginning of a new season and/or patch.

Players are also starting to get new weapons right now, and that can result in players experiencing sudden changes, especially on the apparent damage output of classes that scale particularly well with weapons.

I know that everyone expects devs to always react immediately to everything but sometimes things should be allowed to go on for a while in order to be able to increase the level of confidence before making any changes, if we don’t, we risk having to keep reverting changes all the time or keep making adjustments if the changes are too conservative. In my opinion that’s worse than waiting a bit before a well thought out hotfix is applied, too many changes tend to detach players from the game. It’s true that sometimes this has backfired, but more often than not, time reveals that the changes aren’t actually necessary or that they didn’t need to be as strong as initially thought out. Sometimes there’s just an initial entropy that stabilizes over-time (because WoW is not an isolated system). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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