Skirmishes
Can you guys turn skirmishes on?
We'll be rotating between battlegrounds, skirmishes and Ashran throughout the beta. We want to focus people on one particular activity during Beta. (
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Death Knight (
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Death Knights and Rune Forging
These are good questions and we will discuss. Currently, no enchants offer any benefit but Rune Forge Enchants are a part of the Death Knight class. Whether we allow them in PvP or not, we will tune the class's PvP stats based on whether those enchants work or not. (
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Death Knight Feedback
Festering Wounds just simply do not work in PvP, useless mechanic and so is Death Strike, give us back Siphon, thanks.
Festering Wounds shouldn't be dispellable as it is too central to the spec's functionality. We've already made this change for the next release. (
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Protection Paladin Heal Light of the Protector
Light of the Protector currently heals almost like a Lay on hands. Might want to take a look into that.
It will be reduced in PvP. It will be changed to 15% in an upcoming hotfix. (
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Retribution Paladin Feedback -- Build 21232 -- 3-Mar
Equality -- This ability needs to go. Degenerate gameplay will only ensue from this. Purposefully forcing a player to take damage & causing heart-attacks for Healers is not cool or interesting. It's infuriating. I can't imagine what Equality encourages and causes to be objectively better than what its setting out to achieve. Neat idea, VERY bad gameplay. I think we have enough of that take-damage-deal-damage paradigm as is via Shield of Vengeance – at least this encourages us to stay alive and simultaneously reward that effort.
I think this talent touches on a handful of topics about class design philosophy. It's a great example of talent design that doesn't fit today's norm, but in a good way - and in a way that we need more of, not less. The topics I see in play here are philosophies about what role talents play, the mechanics of a talent that require a player to take damage, and possibly the location of the talent in the tree.
In a forum discussion, we tend to get lost in the mechanics of an ability. This is true not only because the most well-spoken players on our forums are organized raiders with personalities that lean toward the analytical, but also because the nature of a forum lends itself to considering theoretical use cases more than the actual moment-to-moment experience of playing the game.
In my actual experience of playing a ret paladin in Legion content, I'd say that equality might just be the most fun and gratifying talent in the tree. It's gleefully fun when you end up in a situation that would have resulted in your death to hit the button and watch your enemies go from nearly full to dead. As much as an expert player might imagine that such a situation never applies to them, the reality is that it does (and more so in Legion world content than in the recent past). Beyond that, it's fun to occasionally manufacture exactly that situation.
It's important to recognize that so much of World of Warcraft resides outside the confines of reliably topping a damage meter in a 10 player raid. This is particularly true once again in Legion, where we anticipate that players will spend far more time in non-raid content than they have in recent years due to the role of 5-player dungeons and world quests (fueled by the general possibility of getting an item upgrade from any content in the game), and of course pvp. As such, it's important that we view talent design through the lens of "not everything will or should be the most efficient path to victory in a raid".
As to the mechanics of this talent, many players balk at the group play implications of a talent that assumes you've taken a bunch of damage, comparing that with a variety of other mechanics we've had in the game at one point or another that encouraged a player to take damage. For content that isn't particularly challenging, it tends to be a non-issue (if you want to potentially get yourself killed, have at it). As it relates to challenging content, our experience suggests that frequency is a meaningful part of this equation, and if in challenging content healers are stressed it also implies that the stress is as a result of players taking damage that is out of their control, which also implies that over the course of an encounter a reasonable opportunity to use the ability without deliberately manufacturing the conditions will arise due to its long cooldown.
In addition, from a purely mathematical perspective the ability does (or at least should) hold up if you use it around every 7 minutes or so, enough to provide some slush to account for the situational nature of the spell. In addition, the talent nets meaningful damage over time and should/does hold up against the other talents in the tier.
Equality is not a fun ability to use in any practical sense outside of PvP or solo content.
Many players will likely not agree with this statement. Fortunately, there doesn't need to be universal or widespread agreement.
I can't imagine any practical sense where I'm going to request my healers let me drop horrendously low to optimize my damage with this ability, and I know I'm not going to be the only one in high end raiding guilds feeling the same way.
Great, that's why it's a talent. Choose a different talent.
The alternatives on the tier simply aren't that great either from a gameplay stance, as Gomak elaborated on, as none of them change up how you play and simply add passive benefits..
Totally fair, and while it isn't possible to get every talent in a tier to be interesting to every individual, we certainly do want there to be a choice on any given tier that you find cool. (
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[Feedback: Warriors]
Philosophically we're okay if some of the core talents aren't super nail biting choices all the time for PvP. I think in an ideal world every core talent and honor talent is an interesting choice in all aspects of the game, but if talents such as War Paint become the de facto talent in PvP (not saying it is or isn't right now) it's not that big of deal to us. It's challenging to create core talents that are competitive, interesting choices in PvE let alone both PvE and PvP.
Our design direction with Arms vs Fury is that Arms should have more burst or "frontload" damage, while Fury is stronger at sustained and has better mobility. While Fury does take more damage while enraged, that's being factored into the balance of the spec overall. You'll have higher health and self-healing. (Note: Tuning is still in progress)
Regarding mobility, it's very much a hot topic with us currently. Arcane Mages and Sub Rogues are engineered by us to have some of the highest escape tools out of the specs, but they're intended to be glass cannons and countered by specs that can dampen their burst damage (Tank specs, Paladins) or where their escape tools aren't as strong (Warlocks, Hunters). That said, their mobility/escape may be too out of line right now and may need changes. If we're going to do mobility changes it's likely going to be us toning down the stronger specs rather than buffing the weaker ones. (
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