Nerfing Talents to the ground just to make other talents look more attractive never worked.
There are two issues in situations like this. First, there is the question of whether the three talent options are relatively attractive. Second, there is the question of whether any of them are overpowered. You can't just say the second issue is always part of the first issue, and letting players choose any of three overpowered talents isn't going to be great for player balance.
We do think Shadow needs PvP nerfs, but not PvE nerfs, and we also want to be careful not to nerf any of the utility that Shadow brings in PvE. (For example nerfing
Mass Dispel for Shadow, possibly through the glyph is a common suggestion, but we like that Shadow's
Mass Dispel can be really beneficial in PvE).
Phantasm is particularly annoying to deal with because being untargetable is so powerful. The intent of the talent was to make
Fade more powerful as an escape tool, but we just overdid it with the untargeting part.
Glyph of Deep Freeze - now also lowers the stun duration of Deep Freeze by 1 sec in addition to taking Deep Freeze off the GCD.
Base
Deep Freeze has a 1 sec longer duration. So a mage with the Glyph of
Deep Freeze will see no change, but a mage without the glyph will have a slightly better
Deep Freeze.
you seem like a smart guy, explain how this helps our current problem?
We were trying to solve a very specific problem here, where a paladin wants to join an Arena team, and the team says "Can't you just go Holy, because you won't lose anything?" or the paladin looking for an RBG team who hears "We need a rogue and a DK, but don't have room for a Ret paladin." We were specifically looking for a modest buff to group utility that was Ret specific.
On survivability specifically, I feel like we're hearing that DKs are squishy and paladins are squishy and shaman are squishy, which makes me think that once
Defensive Stance for warriors isn't overpowered that all melee might feel about the same.
And now you want to take that away too, you're turning the talent into a Hand of Freedom that has a longer cooldown and a shorter duration. Despite the buffs to disc I feel this is a big and unnecessary blow to a spec that's already struggling.
While we want to see more healing priests in PvP, we don't think the right way to do that is through a really annoying defensive mechanic like this.
Single target damage is bad for shadow priests, and the only changes we're getting so far are:
We haven't made many PvE damage adjustments at all. We will. It's possible Shadow lost too much damage while moving in PvE. Nearly all of these Shadow changes were to tone them down in PvP.
The problem is the Feline Swiftness talent. It always has been. But now you're forcing feral PvP into a catch 22 situation. We're either forced to take Feline Swiftness just to stop the out of range errors when trying to use abilities, and lose our gap closer.. or we get inundated with out of range errors when trying to do anything. You know the feral hit box is still out of whack... and the feral speed bonus on the PvP set was to compensate for this.
We fixed the Feral hit box some time ago. Different races and models once had different combat reaches. It has all been normalized at least since Cataclysm.
However, to address your main concern, a different option would be to prevent
Feline Swiftness and the PvP set bonus from stacking.
Feline Swiftness would just remain a dead talent at least among knowledgeable PvP players.
As an editorial note, we're just going to delete posts that are nothing but whining and if that doesn't send a strong enough message, the moderators will ban you. Try to keep this thread informative. You have plenty of places on the internet where you don't have to be.
Was the damage buff it provided too strong? In almost the exact same gear I'm using, I was doing ~67k sustained single target dps. Seemed fine, provided that I had 0 mobility while doing that. Was the rotation being used to maximize it's effect not what you envisioned? I like how it changed our rotation without actually changing it. We were just hitting DP more frequently.
If you are talking about the version of Insanity where you just use
Devouring Plague at one orb all the time, we thought that undermined the entire rotation. It didn't just change it, it made it so you didn't need to build up orbs any longer.
Not really sure what this mean or how this really affect gameplay nor why this change now tbh... mind to explain?
PoM makes the cast instant instead of 2 sec (reduced by haste). This means the ring will appear immediately if PoM'd, but it won't freeze immediately. After 2 sec (again reduced by haste) the freeze happens.
No PoM: 2 sec cast, 2 sec arming time
5.1 PoM: 0 sec cast, 0 sec arming time
5.2 PoM: 0 sec cast, 2 sec arming time
I can see that 99% of this entire thread is related to PvP, but any chance of some feedback from GC on how he can think a 40-50% nerf to Disc AoE heals is a fair thing, given that at the absolute most we top the meters by 20%. Sure we needed a nerf, but an execution?
It seems like a lot more than 20% to us. In any case, you still have DA on PoH, just not guaranteed any more. You can force DA with
Inner Focus. You can toss out PW:Shields on some folks.* You can also still use
Spirit Shell with PoH. Using PoH without any of those absorbs will be weaker, but that will be offset by the times when you do have the absorbs. All of that ignores the argument that an absorb is probably stronger than a direct heal so maybe the ratio shouldn't even be 1:1.
* - This seems to be the most misunderstood portion of the philosophy. We want Disc to use PW:S. It's one of their signature spells. We don't want Disc to blanket the entire raid and use nothing but PW:S. But we are so far from that now -- we see almost no PW:S, except for
Rapture cheesiness with Mana Tide or to proc
Body and Soul. You won't be able to put PW:S on 10 or 25 people before the dragon breathes, but you shouldn't have to. You have other healers backing you up and all of you have several cooldowns (and yes PW:B counts) when you're really in trouble.
Oh, and there's no point in making Fade an escape tool. If the priest is running at 100%, gets slowed, but uses his "escape tool" to go back to 100%; IT STILL DOES NOTHING SINCE THE PERSON COMING AFTER HIM IS RUNNING AT 100%.
"Escape tool" does not mean "nobody can ever catch you." Abilities have counters and pre-counters.
Phantasm was a movement ability with a damage avoidance mechanic (that allowed you to go offensive with less of a chance for retribution) on a tier with two movement abilities. The other talents are never going to compete with that.
I'm just offering a general statement here, and I'm not calling any of you out personally, but we see a lot of feedback of the form "X doesn't work because it can be countered." That is the entire point.
PvP works better, in our opinions, when you have to be smart and react to what other players are doing. That means trying to guess what they're going to do next or deciding the right time for a crutch dispel or CC. If you find yourself asking for something to be undispellable, or to punish someone for dispelling it, or you're asking for something to work while crowd controlled, or something that makes you immune to something, or something that overall leaves your opponent no options, we're very unlikely to make those changes. Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered.
Hey, The Balance 2 piece looks interesting, but the 4 piece looks weaker than lots of trinkets I've disenchanted this expansion.
Can you give us some kind of estimate for how much DPS percent you think it provides? I've disenchanted a lot of trinkets too, but that's not much of a yardstick.
what the (insert explicit here) are you thinking nerfing shadow priests this hard? you do realize it all but benches them in pve right? they needed a buff in pve as it stands now, and your nerfing them??? seriously?
How does nerfing
Phantasm or
Dispersion bench Shadow in PvE? We avoided utility nerfs that would risk hurting them in PvE, as I mentioned, such as targeting
Hymn of Hope or
Mass Dispel.
GC, it is obvious that the nerf to Mindspike glyph is a loss on dps even if you are just standing and doing damage.
This is a legit PvE nerf, but a very, very small one and as I said, we haven't made any PvE numbers adjustments to anyone yet. This one is easy to fix without PvP risk and it makes a glyph less mandatory for its DPS benefits.
If they catch your cast time spells, which only melee really seem to bother doing these days, then you'll be unable to cast Dispersion until your shadow school is available again. But yes, if a mage decided to wait for you to cast a VT and Counterspell that, instead of using a blanket Silence on you, then they could prevent Dispersion for 6s.
Yes. I predict the
Dispersion nerf won't really be felt that much, especially among lower ratings.
you may think you have fixed it - but you have not. Only 3 days ago on life I was pursuing a hunter - I don't have any speed bonus except the +25% from cat - my nose was almost touching his back and I still got "out of range" errors.
The hitbox of a cat has the same hitbox as a gnome or a tauren. The nose of the model doesn't matter - it comes from the center of the model. What you're probably seeing is what all melee deal with, particularly when moving very quickly (+25% counts) and no snares. The two clients just often disagree about the position of you and your target.
That said, we are likely to make the change I mentioned yesterday about reverting the PvP set bonus and having it not stack with
Feline Swiftness.
Yep. Frost is a lot better than Ret. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I just think that those saying the Sac change isn't potent are wrong. It's a huge buff to Ret utility.
Yeah, we agree. It's not "Ret mandatory on every 3s team" good, but I think you can understand why we wouldn't want that.
We are considering some other buffs to Ret still. We don't know yet if we will do any or all of these (they are emphatically not promises) but the kind of thing we are considering:
- Glyph of Blessed Life - no longer requires Seal of Insight. You can have any Seal or none active, which puts the glyph in Ret's hands.
- Glyph of Templar's Verdict - damage reduction triggered by Exorcism (or both) instead. That way you aren't choosing TV over a heal.
- Light's Hammer - also snares targets it damages while in range. This one potentially buffs Holy too, but we're not sure that many Holy paladins would give up Prism to take it.