"Lesser" heal spells after downranking nerf
If we find that any of the healers is now missing a critical tool from their toolbox (specifically an efficient heal that is good for e.g. topping of a rogue), then that is something we will definitely consider. (
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Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
We've talked about this a lot, and I'll admit that it may not be the best way to go (designing tanks for certain bosses). Currently we are talking more about HOW classes tank, not WHAT they tank. Potential examples: The warrior tanks by having a shield, a lot of mitigation and avoidance. The druid tanks by having a huge health pool. The paladin tanks by using passive reactive abilities. That is a gross simplification, but perhaps you get the idea. This would naturally lead to some tanks being better at some fights, but it should leave more flexibility to the individual. Players won't count up all the bosses and say "Only 4 hit for magic damage, so we don't need a death knight."
[...]
You shouldn't feel like you need a warrior. I wrote some of those comments trying to reassure warriors that the changes they saw weren't an attempt (on purpose or accidentally) to phase them out of being awesome tanks. But in retrospect I see my comments were a little misleading and just made non-warriors more concerned. Making all tanks viable needs to come first, and the flavor / niches (while still important) need to be second. (
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Blacksmithing - Epic Weapons not requiring any skill level / Bind on Equip ? (
Titansteel Bonecrusher,
Titansteel Destroyer,
Titansteel Guardian)
It was actually an oversight. However, I'm open to leaving them BoE if people feel it makes for better gameplay. The scenario you describe sounds like a pretty fringe case though. (
Source)
Hunter (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8781))
Suggestion - Class Bar for aspects.
Not a bad suggestion, I'll think about it. It does have issues with it though (You'd have to maintain a bunch of different hot bar setups). (
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Intimidation / Disengage / Aspect of the Cheetah
- Intimidation - We'd like to make this instant instead of relying on the pet's next attack.
- Disengage - This is being changed in a future build. What it will do is cause the Hunter to jump back instantly 10-15ish yards to gain distance. 30 second cooldown.
- Aspect of the Cheetah - The daze is there so Hunter's can't infinitely "kite" monsters or players. Sprints and movement speed bonuses is something we are very weary of giving the Hunter class.
Master's Call and Deterrence are now baseline skills
We'll be making Master's Call and Deterrence both base. (
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Chimera Shot and Shot Rotations
The disarm will work on bosses. Well, bosses/NPC's that can be disarmed, anyways.
Every spec should be using a sting and a shot in their rotations (along with Steady). Beast - Arcane, Marks - Chimera, Survival - Explosive. None of those shots should reset your swing/shot timer (aka clip). There may be some issues with the mana cost of the shot and if it's worth using, that's what we're working on now. (
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Serpent Sting
Bumped up the coefficient for Serpent Sting. With the mana cost changes, I think it's come out lower than what it was before too. The other stings I think are fine. (
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Survival Restructuration and ranged oriented talents
Sniper Training is in Survival because Hawk Eye is in Survival. To be honest, you can make an argument for a lot of talents and spells to be in Marks instead of Survival. Survival needs to be about more than just traps and melee. An upcoming build will have a big Survival restructuring.
Some other stuff from your post....
- We'll change Silencing Shot to be a proper interrupt (PvE).
- Trueshot Aura will now be raid wide.
Wild Quiver, Rapid Recuperation are both changing in an upcoming build. Though, I like the design of those two talents and think they just need some tweaks.
Paladin (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8781))
Retribution Paladin excessive DPS in beta
The point I was making to the death knights was that some of their abilities might feel "fun" because they were incredibly broken and doing insane dps. I compared them to the Ret, because I assumed everyone knew how broken Rets were at the time.
It's impossible to get a really good sense of whose dps is too high or too low until we get the egregious bugs tamped down.
Retribution Paladins in endgame raids
While the people that participate in forums like this tend to be pretty up-to-date on class abilities and balance, trying to keep track of the status of so many classes, spells and abilities can be overwhelming for a lot of players. The community at large can be slow to change. Retribution Paladins didn't have a lot to contribute back in the day, and while I think they are a good contribution to a group even today on live, some people didn't get the memo. Lolret, yanno?
We want Ret to fill a role in a group. We want *everyone* to fill a role in a group. Even the talent tree as it currently stands (meaning on Beta) could have a lot to offer if those abilities were polished up: mana or health battery for example. I can't tell you fore sure what it's going to end up being until we've finished our big buff stacking pass.
Personally, I'm feeling really good about the changes to the class as a whole. It's a big change, so it's going to take even more time than other classes for the dust to settle and all the talents to get balanced out. But I like the direction. (
Source)
Priest (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8781))
Yes, that is something we talk about. The design for the Discipline priest in PvE is using shields and similar damage prevention techniques and it sucks (and is unintuitive) that those are bad to use on warrior and bear tanks. (
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Warrior (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8781))
1) Heroic leap and Bladestorm are very awkward to use, especially in PVP, nigh unusable right now. Are there plans to make these stronger, or at least more user friendly?
Totally. We like the basic talents, so the rest is just getting the tuning right and fixing all the bugs. Heroic Leap will probably be trickier just because it has to handle physics and obstructions. (
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2) Titan's Grip is mathematically pretty terrible right now and severely devalues attack power for a fury warrior using it. It does almost universally less DPS than a one handed weapon fury build.
The design is for Titan's Grip to be a dps increase. It's easy to make it too much of an increase, and we may be being too cautious with the numbers at the moment. But when we talk about Lich King, we are assuming most Fury warriors are using two-handers. It's not supposed to be hard decision. (
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3) Most talents beyond Tier 3 in arms are staggeringly bad for PVE right now, with the exception of blood frenzy. Is this intended to balance blood frenzy? Will we see any improvements here? Do you intend to go the route of feral with arms and build multiple effects onto talents to give them PVP/PVE usefulness the way feral gets DPS/tanking talents?
Given plenty of time, we would love to sprinkle PvP, PvE and tanking talents all throughout the trees. There are definitely some lame talents at the moment (some old, some new), and we are going to try to get to them all. Blood Frenzy itself is going to be on the back-burner until we resolve how we're going to handle raid stacking. It isn't the intention that Arms gets to raid and Fury goes home.
4) The changes to windfury and sword specialization have destroyed the slam rotation for arms in terms of DPS viability. Arms warriors simply don't have the rage for a full rotation without them, even specing to endless rage and anger management. We're in a very similar state now to ret paladins live, enough or close to enough skills to provide powerful damage output but hamstrung by resource limitations, are there any plans to fix that? Judgments of the wise was a brilliant fix, any chance we could see something similar in arms to improve PVE DPS?
Slam is intended to be an attractive button. I think it just needs a little attention now that the extra attacks are under control now. (
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5) Fury's top end talents ignore PVE DPS almost entirely in their current form, TG while cool is a spec for burst over sustained damage and has the same rage issues that arms does only more severe with reduced attack speed and increased miss chance. Heroic leap does very little damage and the stun effect is not useful in dungeon or raid settings so its almost exclusively a PVP talent (its targeting issues not withstanding). Bloodsurge and Furious Resolve are workable but the other new talents don't add a lot to fury and quite honestly you'll likely see fury raiders as 16/47/8 or something similar, keeping their exact old build plus bloodsurge or furious resolve, taking advantage of the better impale/deep wounds placements and grabbing improved bloodrage, tactical mastery, and Incite out of prot. Is that intended? Do the devs thing fury was in a good spot in TBC? Do they think we need a step up? or a step down?
There were certainly Fury warriors doing fine dps in BC, but that might have been in spite of and not because of the tree. I don't think anyone here would disagree with your analysis. We're working on the talents. The feedback from the warrior community, while occasionally (and sometimes understandably) bitter, has been helpful. (
Source)
I think a 20% down to 0% haste penalty for TG will make it a stellar talent at high end gear with better returns coming from one handers until a fair bit of hit rating and haste are acquired to smooth out the rage, 21/50/0 seems like a good raid build with that change, maxing out TG and picking up impale/deep wounds and 2 hander spec out of arms.
It's still a little odd that 1 talent point gets you the dual-wielding and the others just improve it, but maybe that's workable. We'll know soon enough. We love the idea of the talent though. It is one of those that gets noticed a lot by someone just coming to LK. (
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6) you've mentioned balancing blood frenzy in arms against the personal DPS of fury. Have you considered adding a buff of similar magnitude to deep fury? Something like 3% crit or haste added to battle shout, or similar? Such that you could equalize the personal DPS potential of the two trees without making arms warriors clearly superior in raids.
Yes. We wanted to make Arms as attractive as Fury for raids, but we probably tipped the scales too far. We're currently discussing whether it's okay for any class or spec to bring no real synergy to a group other than mad dps. But granting buffs to traditional high dps classes might also mean their dps needs to come down a little in proportion to everyone else. (
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7) Can we add prot's passive expertise talent back on incite to help out DPS warriors even more by letting them pick up some expertise for a minor prot splash? (sorry, I have to bring up the expertise in every thread, it being gone really bothers me)
We weren't trying to screw anyone out of Expertise by removing Defiance. It was intended to just be a buff. We'll see if we can work Expertise back in somewhere. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8781))
Chains of Ice Diminishing Returns in PvP
It's a bug. It should not diminish. (
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Death Coil and Frost Strike Runic Power cost changes
Death Coil and Frost Strike are 40 runic power again. I hoped that would make it into this build.
We're still not sure if runic power generation is too high or not, but ultimately 40 is just a better number. Since you often do 5 abilities before using all your runes, that leaves you with 50 RP. If every Death Coil drained that, you are kind of static. With a 40 cost, you build up a little more RP over time so the Death Coils come at different moments. (
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