Developer Watercooler - Battle for Azeroth Class Design Overview

[arboachg]

Maybe they are just too stupid to read or lazy if you have 0 interst in news why you want know what is in ?These ................ cusauls lfr heroes........Can not even READ you should not expect from them something i think LFR is for testing iQ of animals in zoo they put monkeys behind pc log in to LFR and testing theirs brain capacity.

Brainlets, all of em.

[Zoldor]

Fingers crossed for shockwave to stay.

Same here, it is just about my favorite thing on my warrior and feels like a warrior thing. But if I had to guess almost all AE stun is going away so they can drag out Mythic + longer and longer.

[Marrilaife]

Fingers crossed for shockwave to stay.

So far the first ones to get an axe is DH stun and Hunter's binding shot - both no longer a stun.

[TheWorkingTitle]

Man, these fucking guys. Prune away abilities and destroy classes, wait a couple years, talk about giving back old abilities as a "new" addition. What a crock of shit.

They need to revert the prunes and give every class back their removed abilities.

Mages especially need to be given back baseline across all specs -- Ice Lance, Fire Blast, Deep Freeze, Arcane Explosion, Blizzard, Decurse, Shatter passive, Cone of Cold, Mirror Image, Arcane Intellect, and ALL Mage Armors.

Other abilities such as Mana Bubble, Blazing Speed, and Alter Time (/w snapshotting) need to come back as well, potentially as talent options.

For Fire Mage specifically, they need to get rid of Rune of Power (clunky, antithesis of how fights are now designed), Blazing Soul (useless, too weak), Controlled Burn (RNG is no fun, especially when Fire is already all RNG), Unstable Magic (useless, too weak), and Cinderstorm (clunky, varying effectiveness, sporadic range, aggro risk) to make room.

Also, both Flame On and Phoenix Flames both need to become baseline and baked into Fire Mage. Flame On is an auto take because of how seemlessly it fills out our rotation. The same can be said for Phoenix Flames.

As an aside, glyphs need to be expanded tenfold. We should have all sorts of cosmetic options with glyphs, as well as the option to alter abilities how we see fit. Give us back all the WoD glyphs and add way more cosmetic ones so that we can actually do as you say, "allowing players to thoughtfully customize their identity and complexity." Give us our complexity and identity back.

[nukie]

Meh.. lip service. Sounds good in theory. But even the greatest sounding philosophy would still not amount to much in actually if certain things are not met. For example, you can diversify specs and provide opportunities for different dps roles all you want, but if the single target dps of all dps specs is not within 5% of each other, then its a fail in the eyes of many players.

The only thing that would have gotten me excited about this design overview is if they would have flat out said "We realize that doing damage to the actual boss is one of the more important parts of the raid, and single target damage is one of the main ways a lot of players compete with each other. With that in mind, our goal is to have all dps specs be equal in single target damage, and then layer on the diversity by providing both unique utility and secondary roles that each spec can differentiate itself by; such as aoe, 2-3 target cleave, priority target burst, etc..."

[Locruid]

Please keep the ability Light's Wrath.......I LOVE that spell

[Eapoe]

So all I am getting from the class changes is they are going back to Wrath and previous models of "bring the class and not the player." Part of the changes they have done over the years is to eliminate that, yet now they are going to design classes/specs to excel in certain areas where others do not and design things with that in mind. For example, certain m+ dungeons or raid encounters requiring a certain setup or number of classes, etc.
Not really opposed, but it seems like Blizz went to far in one direction over the years and are now trying to reset that philosophy.

[Marrilaife]

The only thing that would have gotten me excited about this design overview is if they would have flat out said "We realize that doing damage to the actual boss is one of the more important parts of the raid, and single target damage is one of the main ways a lot of players compete with each other. With that in mind, our goal is to have all dps specs be equal in single target damage, and then layer on the diversity by providing both unique utility and secondary roles that each spec can differentiate itself by; such as aoe, 2-3 target cleave, priority target burst, etc..."

Remeber mythic+ is a big part of pve scene now. If classes are within 5% dps on a patchwerk but one has extremely weak aoe it's a recipe to never be invited to mythic+ no matter what kind of utility it's given for a compensation.

[Najja]

"We centered everything a class had this expansion around its artifact weapon and now realize what a shitstorm it's going to be fixing and balancing them once we take them away. Whoops."

Also... yeah. It took you this long to realize that having a spec/class that's resource starved at times isn't fun? Did your people play Havoc at all? Did they play it without AotHG for ANY amount of time? I've got a strong feeling that I'd be better off rerolling before BFA than trusting that you'll figure out how you want the spec to actually play AND to do it in a way that feels good to play.

[ManiaCCC]

Something special? Like what? Designed for 0.01% of the playerbase? Why waste dev time on that? And raids aren't the only thing for end game. Mythic+ is another. And it's already a place where some classes/specs do massively better than others. Let's see who's gonna be the ginger stepchild in m+ in BFA like shadow priests were for majority of Legion.

I meant something like crafting would scale to the endgame too. PvP gearing, or some solo/small group content (These islands may be it). Basically any sort of content, which can reward you end-game gear without actually forcing everyone to raiding/mythic dungeons. Something, where different specialization could be more useful in some other aspects of the game.

Because if they really want make classes more unique (which is fantastic), it means that these hardcore groups will just bench some classes even more, just because their utility is not perfectly suited for certain raids. And if Mythic and Raiding is only source of end-game top rewards, discussion about balance is always only about, and ONLY about, how they perform in raids.

Maybe it is okay, if not everyone can be top dog in raids, as long as they can be top dogs somewhere else and be rewarded for it.

[Voidwielder]

Reads like my thesis - nice formatting, lots of words.


0 substance.

[hyphnos]

Yay! Now we know what navel-gazing horse shit will be used to justify every bad decision they make with this expansion.

[Sanguinerd]

It's almost like they do it on purpose at this stage.. first they remove all class identity by making them all pretty much the same and now they talk about making classes feel unique again.

Genius >_<

[Tabrotar]

Terrible approach. Sad negative people will tell you not to say anything but don’t listen. Just be loud.

I understand a few betas in the past (like legions) had a lot of Developer vs Player interactions (ret Paladins and holy wrath is a good example) but they’ll never do anything at all if they don’t have feedback. Don’t listen to idiots, keep providing feedback and lobby for abilities to come back if you feel they should.

Do all of that and hope we don’t get another scenario like Tom chilton yelling at players saying Holy Wrath is fun and good and we have to like it because he’s not going to remove it.

Soo even after you pointed out that the Devs won´t take a "We don´t like it because..." from us players you still belive that they will hear us THIS TIME?

[Deleted]

This blue post has just said: "We care only the opinion of our close friends, family. LOL Blizzard dev team... what a joke!

One of the managers, get up and hit the lead dev as hard as you can!
You need money and we pay your salary! We dictate not you!

[agentsi]

I still think they shoulda went with my suggestion I submitted:

Why? Because it's "your" suggestion? You offered them nothing that they weren't already aware of or haven't talked about. You really think they didn't think about just baking the artifact weapon into the classes? Are you that glib? jfc... kids these days

[Taeldorian]

Soo even after you pointed out that the Devs won´t take a "We don´t like it because..." from us players you still belive that they will hear us THIS TIME?

No but they obviously have eyes. They can read. Regardless of what you think or what I think feedback is still important and changes have occurred due to player feedback in the past and very recently. Many amazing changes have been brought to the game due to feedback.

So, while the legion beta was very rough in terms of the developers listening to feedback that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t provide it. If you care, you provide it. If not, then continue burying useful posts with useless shitposts (not you specifically).

[Marrilaife]

I meant something like crafting would scale to the endgame too. PvP gearing, or some solo/small group content (These islands may be it). Basically any sort of content, which can reward you end-game gear without actually forcing everyone to raiding/mythic dungeons. Something, where different specialization could be more useful in some other aspects of the game.

PVP gearing existed since TBC, and got kinda screwed with Legion. I do hope they look back into fixing it, true. But all I know is from what people say, as I don't pvp.

Now solo / crafting your way to top gear is a problem. Because we already know from the experience if Blizzard offers people the anti-social way they will majorly take it, leaving small minority still interested in group content, but these people will have it extremely hard to find groups as most people will switch over to solo avenues. So generally unless they decide "WOW is no longer an MMO, we don't care to encourage grouping" this won't happen. And this is just a philosophy decision. Many people prefer to play solo, many people insist MMO needs to revolve around grouped experience. Hard to satisfy both. More like impossible. The only thing remaining is tradition - if WOW was already a group-oriented game in it's end game core, keeping it is less problematic than switching it 180 degrees.

There's also another issue, namely how long people will stay subbed - the social bonds was one way of having some people subbed even after they completed majority of the content they cared about. Look at SWTOR - they changed the experience from multiplayer-oriented to solo-player oriented (more solo story questing etc.) and the player count went down to the point they had to merge servers again. It was their deliberate decision to launch expansion with just questing and no new dungeons / raids just upscaled old ones. I don't think it went so hot.

[draynay]

I've played a Priest for a long time. Holy in Classic/Vanilla, and Spriest in BC, and currently.

One of the things that I loved about Shadow Priests in BC, as both the player playing a Priest, but also as a healer/mana user, was their combined heal/mana "HoT" from Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch. I hope they add those back as the classes "unique" abilities.

We can dream.

[bearlolzx]

spriest is borked, either top dps or barely 6-7th