Beastcleave during MLG Orlando
I don't think this is a clothie issue at all. In fact, appropriate use of Ice Block and Demonic Circle defensively made a big difference.
I also don't want to discount the skill of those players at all. Make no mistake - these are very good players. While some of the matches were over very quickly, I think you're dramatically underestimating things if you think anyone would have performed the same with same setup.
That said, coordinated damage (from the BM + the shaman's wolves for example) is just really high, and in some sense it has to be or everyone will just be healed again. We need to see more matches where everyone in the game is playing in a wounded state. You need to be able to wear someone down (without just wearing the mana of the healers down). Health just needs to be higher for everyone across the board, even in PvE, and healing power has to be lower. The buckets need time to fill and drain instead of being full or empty 90% of the time.
I also think it's cool to see warlocks, hunters, shaman, paladins, druids and whatever classes I forgot that saw a lot of use at MLG Orlando, besides just RMP. Ideally those other comps would use a bit more CC (even if it's not quite at the RMP level) and there would be some matches that would last longer. The announcers did a good job of the play by play, but sometimes there just weren't enough plays to really have a sense of the kind of back and forth that make competitive sports interesting. (
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[...] This thread quickly deteriorated from talking about the MLG matches to the same old tired arguments:
1) RMP is skill. Anything that isn't RMP is faceroll.
vs.
2) CC is boring. Let's kill something.
It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. There is room in competitive Arena for a lot of different comps. I for one am glad to see really talented players gravitating to something besides RMP vs. RMP for every match. It was nice to see other classes in there. I do wish the hunter + shaman combos fell back on other strategies more often than instantly blowing wolves + Bloodlust. In an ideal world it would be very effective (you are gambling a lot of cooldowns on that opening move after all), just less so than it is now.
I don't fault the players at all -- they do it because it's effective. They focus because they have to focus -- because getting someone to 50% and switching targets would be ineffective. But if other teams could survive that initial burst a little more often, then it would be more risky, and in turn it wouldn't be so popular as the the first thing to do when the gates went up. I really don't think we're that far away from that, by which I mean we don't have to redesign every class to have Frost Nova + Ice Block to make Arena matches last a little longer.
But as I said above (and most smart players realize) just buffing health / lowering damage alone won't do anything but put even *more* emphasis on burst, because getting someone to 2% will be as irrelevant as getting them to 99% (because the healers will just reset the match). Lower damage *and* lower healing and the matches will almost certainly last longer, hopefully without richocheting to the other extreme of layered CC or mana drains being the only way to play. (
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Warrior (
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The problem with Warbringer
The problem with the PvP side of Warbringer is that when you consider prot warrior versus mage (just as an example), there was nothing a mage could do to a well versed warrior. The warrior carries a lot of stuns, silences, and then any attempt to root him is broken by multiple abilities. So then the warrior's teammate (like a hunter) is just doing tons of damage while the target has no defenses.
For the other side of this change, we certainly don't design 5-player or raid content with the assumption that the tank has Warbringer (or a way out of snares and roots in general). We understand that it can be a big help in specific situations but we don't feel it's the only option in any PvE circumstances. (
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Patch 3.3.x nerfs for prot warriors
Let's look first at the Warbringer change.
Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. Aside from stuns and Dismantle, rooting or snaring the Prot warrior is the major way to keep him off of you. Considering all of the stuns and silences that Prot has, when they can also jump out of every Frost Nova with Warbringer, then there's not much in the way of skill a mage can employ to stay alive. They just get countered in every way.
Will it nerf them for PvE? Yes, but really slightly. I'm not sure I can ever remember a case in my WoW-playing history where my warrior or some other tank caused a wipe because of a root, so even if it did happen, it can't happen that much or be that memorable. Warriors certainly won't get sat because of some new Achilles' heel and we don't design encounters around the assumption that tanks can't be rooted. The important part of Warbringer from a PvE perspective, removing the stance restrictions, is still intact.
Now the damage change. As Bornakk posted recently, what we essentially did was look at some of the successful Prot PvP characters and compare them to some of the Prot tanks out there. We nerfed the block conversion to Shield Slam damage so that it would hit the PvP guy without really hitting the PvE guy. (The PvP warriors aren't stacking a ton of Shield Block Value, but they do have a lot of Strength which also converts to block for purposes of making Shield Slam hit harder -- many of these guys are wearing PvE dps plate.)
Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. We want Prot to be able to hit reasonably hard, but they also need to pay some price for their massive survivability. We thought the Warbringer change alone would nerf the warriors vs. e.g. mages but wouldn't control their damage. Those big Shield Slam crits should go down a lot.
Will it nerf them for PvE? Probably not, or at least not much. If you tank with a lot of Strength or SBV, you might see your Shield Slams go down, but that's why we buffed the threat of Shield Slam to compensate.
Again, keep the changes in perspective. We want Prot to be PvP viable. We don't want Prot warriors to dominate PvP or have everyone feel like they need one for their team. Likewise, we want Prot to do higher damage than the almost trivial damage that they did in BC. But that doesn't mean they need to be competitive with the dps while they're tanking. (
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