Replacing Howl with Breath of Gul'Dan is a buff, and I'm glad they finally heard us. Now all they have to do is make it be in line with the other talents, although I doubt that will happen unless some drastic changes are made. Who would take Breath over Shadowfury, which only has 10 more seconds on CD?
I'm very happy with what they're doing though, design wise at least.
Destruction PvP movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXXkGgkpcis
In all fairness he'd probably be banned from the forums for "Spamming / Trolling" or "Other". He makes excellent suggestions however.
His vision is bad when it's the players that have to deal with the fall out of his dislike for other classes that are not the Mage. People play to have fun, not play as Greg Street tells them to. THIS is why he's such a poor Lead Designer. Instead of embracing what players discover, he actively works to shut it down. There is a degree of enjoyment in finding tactics and new ways to do things. At any rate, as long as he's allowed to continue it without any form of oversight; and as long as situations like CRZ moderation, the recent Services Price cut then announcing of that new Virtual Server thing continue on, we will continue to see subs drop.
It started with Wrath, and it will continue until many of the problems he contrived are shut down. He's done a lot right, but he's done a lot more wrong. I frankly find it somewhat ironic that we fight a Sha of Pride at the conclusion of this expansion and Ghostcrawler's pride is the chiefest stumbling block of this game.
Last edited by The Penguin; 2013-06-14 at 12:07 AM.
Worth mentioning here, an official blue post about the situation that kind of blankets the stuff people have said on twitter and various places. A kind of general here's what we think and feel and what we are planning to do, and what we need you, the players, to do.
source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...881?page=7#135Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
What I take away from it is unfortunately a "We don't like this" therefore even though you all might, too bad. We're going through with it. :\
Thanks for the update though Xskarma, not what we wanted to hear. But it'll be what it'll be.
Last edited by The Penguin; 2013-06-14 at 12:11 AM.
I predict (and hope) there will be a mass exodus away from the warlock class if this goes through. Hopefully then they'll see how ridiculous this change is to our class. We have no spells to use on movement that actually help us, considering that when we overwrite superpowered dots we actually lose dps. The haunt change is even more ridiculous. I'm not wasting shards on it if I can't be channeling MG afterwards. It's just useless. And it seems liek this time they won't back down.
At this point, i wouldn't be surprised to see the old good GoSac with older values coming back.
Didn't get a chance to read everyone here, but the nerf to KJC is about as crappy as the affliction 4 pc bonus. Dots are weak without MG and without a huge buff to dots Aff is going to drop off the face of Azeroth. Not that I like this idea, but the only way I can see this working without redesigning the class is to make MG castable while moving. Personally one of my favorite things about locks right now is KJC. Without that they will probably just be Meh...
2 things, talent being changed because of 1 spec. 1 spec, not all 3 specs. 2nd, casting haunt on the move is retarded. Make Malefic grasp castable while moving and it wont grind affliction into the ground.
I agree, Haunt while moving is stupid. I mean let's entertain the thought. It works to an extent, but it's heavily reliant on gear to have the shards to do this while moving. People leveling up and fresh 90's without gear will be screwed over still, cause they simply do not have the shard regen to use Haunt on the move.
So it wastes valuable resources while only giving us 1 button to push every 8 seconds. That's not nearly enough of a solution for heavy movement fights.
The iteration remark is good, cause they'll need to try new things to solve this. The fact they don't make MG the spell we can cast on the move from the get go insinuates to me that moving MG was part of the problem they saw and they will do everything to make sure that resorting to that is not necessary. So I'm not holding my breath for MG on the move, tbh, even if that would be the simplest solution to our mobility problems.
Yeah this KJC nerf is terrible, but as many others have said here, if they at least could make our fillers (MG, shadow bolt, incinerate) castable while moving, we could at least do something useful while on the move.
I can't figure out what their problem with MG would be. It seems to me that pvp is one of the main factors bringing this whole debacle about, namely Fear+pillars. MG in pvp is a big purple "please shadow lock me" sign. That they even thought for a brief instant that making Haunt mobile would make any difference at all, let alone be the solution is bewildering.
Make MG/DS castable on the move baseline with a flat 50% snare, wipe hands on pants. It's that easy. Then you can get to the actual work of making lv 90 talents that don't suck.
They do this for every class, though. It's not just him and not just us.
WoW suffers from creative constipation. It's grown so bad that I'm thinking of leaving WoW forever. They just can't get past the "jump when I SAY jump!" mentality [I've often said it feels like developers started out as 1st Edition Dungeon Masters]
The fundamental problem is, they go berserk unless YOU play THEIR game THEIR way. It's why subscriber numbers are finally plummeting: at long last, they've pigeonholed everyone into play styles with no flexibility and no meaningful variation, playing a game with no alternative advancement and every ounce of fun sucked out. There's no alternative here, and so people play other games.
WoW became popular as a broad, flexible MMO. Nothing like that existed before. But, every time they took a step toward flexibility, they took two steps backward -- from MoP talents to pushing overtuned raids near-exclusively to knee-jerk class nerfs to "bring in line" any class that had a fun or unique gameplay element.
This is why Shamans are still putting sticks in the ground, Paladins are still balanced around Divine Shield, and Windwalker Monk mechanics get called "unique and different" when their "uniqueness" means "gaining nothing from offensive raid cooldowns" (note: they're balanced around them as if they gain full benefits). It's also why the Monk rollout was a complete disaster: the class had to fit their narrow mold, so it got the same thoroughput for much harder mechanics, and -- suprise! -- nobody fucking plays it.
If anything, the 5.4 KJC nerf proves that they learned nothing from the Monk disaster. If you make Warlock into a ghetto Mage, ghetto Moonkin, ghetto Elemental Shaman...with the same playstyle but a more complex rotation...people won't play it. It's that simple.
The plural of anecdote is not "data". It's "Bayesian inference".
I'm not happy with the KJC change, but it's better that they go ahead with their vision rather than just caving every time people cry about something - it's just a balancing act between knowing when something people are crying about is worth catering to and when it's better for the game to not give everyone what they want.
It also just feels bad, you're not supposed to haunt on CD - being "forced" to "waste" a shard by movement feels about as shit as using Fel Flame and downscaling your dots.
There's a difference between
a) Movement has forced me to break my standard rotation and use suboptimal movement-allowable filler
and
b) Movement has forced me to use an ability that is actively having negative repercussions after said movement ends, which is exactly what downscaling dots or draining shards does
Allowing haunt to be cast on the move fixes if we're forced to make movement for the 1 second or so cast haunt has, letting us avoid interupting it. It doesn't fix the core problem that we have nothing to do WHILE moving, like, lengthy or regular movement.
Wouldn't be so bad if our dots were actually potent without relying on our filler spell, but I doubt we'll get decent dots with shadowbolt back any time soon.