Oneiros

I think it would be a better idea to make PvE sets a little better for PvP rather than making the PvP ones useless. I think everyone can agree that the PvP gear is a little overpowered for some classes compared to how easy they are to get versus their PvE counterparts, but the problem is that the PvE gear is almost useless in PvP whereas PvP gear is semi-useful in mid-level PvE (the weapons, OTOH, are some of the best in the game). I hope that they make the PvP gear a lot worse compared to the corresponding tier set in the future, since the effort required is much greater for most people, but I won't hold my breath on that one. As most classes, if you go into BGs in full tier 6 (with 0 resilience), you're a free kill (or at least a much much easier kill) for a full season 2 player because of the lack of resilience, and I think that it shouldn't be like that. Obviously, it shouldn't be like pre-BC where raid sets owned everything else, but at least a little bit of a concession to those of us who do not enjoy arenas but love raiding would be nice. Personally, I find arena to be very boring but I really like BGs and raiding, so it doesn't really motivate me to get the top arena ratings. I have even been in the top 5 in our battlegroup in 5's for season 2, so its not like I don't know how to do it, its just there's about 99 things I'd rather do in the World of Warcraft than fight the same 7-8 groups of 5 people over and over again.

But to re-emphasize, rather than nerfing something, I'd rather they buff its converse.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

Stopokingme

Actually, he's saying the exact opposite, there'll be healing gear which can be converted into spell damage using talents.

 

Smurrf

If they make it so that there are multiple methods to CC various mobs within the dungeons, that only makes it better, imo. Consider: How many forms of CC currently exist? Sheep, Banish, Fear (living and undead), Sleep, MC, Ice Trap, Shackle (and that's not counting the highly unreliable Roots, Cyclone, Seduce, and the various ways and means of temporarily CC'ing by offtanking or using one of several different items, totems, or pets.) How many typically get used in a normal run? Sheep almost always, the others...eh, depends on the run. Having many different mob types in a run will ensure that provided that you're running with a varied group composition, you'll have some form of reliable CC for at least part of the pack, breaking out of the 'must have 3 mages' mold. The key to this will be balancing the mobs so that if you don't happen to have one form of CC on that run, you don't get screwed. Remember, this is all about breaking away from set group pieces. If the most pain-in-the-arse mob that HAS to be cc'd throughout a whole run is only susceptible to Banish, it means that unless you have a warlock, it's going to ramp up the difficulty a hell of a lot.

 

bellator

I would guess he means that gear will be along the lines of "X spell damage and healing" and that healers will have a talent converting Y% spell damage into healing and dps'ers will have a talent which converts Z% healing into spell damage

 

Rannasha

I'd rather that Blizzard ramped up the difficulty in another way than adding more hard-hitting mobs. Giving mobs unique abilities to be dealt with for example. Entry-level dungeons would consist of mainly tank and spank mobs and as you level up to 80, the mobs will be able to use more special tricks. Just think about it: 5-man trash with Doomfire! (Okay, bad example, but you get the idea). They could make the main mobs in each pull immune to CC while putting in some adds that are consiberably weaker, but not trivial, that can be CCed. This way you can reduce the importance of CC without making it useless.

 

Cube

I'm really not sure if this should be talented. It seems easier to balance if they just change spell coefficients rather than forcing talent point dumps like this, especially for druids(the leaked balance tree is especially top-heavy). For example, items will keep their current spell damage amounts, offensive spells will keep their 1:1 coefficient(before all other ones), and heals will take a 3:1 coefficient.

Also, considering how +spell damage is the best thing to stack for most classes after they're hitcapped, talents like this would force every DPS class to drop X points into a potentially non-optimal tree for that bonus. I would assume that X% +healing = damage would be in the Arcane tree for Mages, the Disc tree for priests, and the affliction(maybe destro) tree for Warlocks. For the true hybrids, this works in their favor, but, again, the trees are getting bloated overall.

 

flyingtoastr

It sounds like he's describing the old talents where "X healing > Spell Damage" was in and removed in the last build. Could someone check when the actual interview was conducted by any chance (I can't seem to find it anywhere on the internet so I'm assuming its in the actual magazine)?

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Charsi

I wonder if we're not looking at a hint to a generic +power attribute. The cited quote is somewhat confusing.

 

Arindelest

The problem is that PvE gear is a lot more powerful than PvP gear in PvP for some classes. Although not a huge PvP'er, I know that rogues can make great use of PvE gear (a lot of the top rogues use a combination of T6 from SW and the S3); shamans and paladins I believe likewise perform far better using some PvE gear. On the other hand a lot of other classes (such as warlock) can't use PvE gear at all in PvP.

 

Vasala

I suspect it means that there won't be any items with pure spell damage ala frozen shadoweave with just +shadow / frost.

 

Melthu

It sounds to me like they are trying to open up 5 man dungeons to non-CC classes by making all CC unreliable. Imagine if in every instance 1/3 of the trash is dragonkin, 1/3 is elemental, and 1/3 is giant. You can't cheese the place anymore with 3 mages since everything in there is immune. Hibernate and banish would each be useful in 1/3 of the instance, but that's it. With such little CC available you may as well bring dps shamans or druids along, since you won't be losing any effective CC anyway. Groups will just have to learn to get by with no or limited CC.

Of course, the problem would just evolve from excluding non-CC dps classes to excluding non-Paladin tanks. Unless Blizzard decides to move away from pulls of 6 elites at a time to smaller, but tougher, pulls. I think making more instances like Arcatraz would be a very good thing.

 

Prinsesa

The first batch of leaked talents gave Balance Druids and Shadow Priests a talent that would convert 20% of healing into spell damage. Along with the standardized 33% healing to spell damage conversion on all healing items, this would make a [Gladiator's Salvation] worth exactly as much spell damage as a [Gladiator's Gavel].

However, the most recent Alpha patch scrapped all those talents and instead eliminated pure healing altogether. That is, [Golden Spellthread] was changed from 66 healing and 22 spell damage into 35 spell damage, along with all other healing items.

Ostensibly, pure healing was done away with and instead healing spells would receive greater base values (WOTLK ranks of healing spells are about 40% more than TBC ranks) and higher coefficients to make up for the lost healing.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Douglas

Whereas, from my perspective, this exact same thing is horrible for exactly the reasons you like it.

If you do not need anything from Kara, please don't go to Kara. I would rather the run be canceled than the run proceed with a T6-level tank, two T6-level healers, and four T5-level DPS. That's not experiencing the content -- that's getting dragged through it, like being dragged through Deadmines by a 70.

Alas, I know I'm in the minority here. Many (certainly not all!) of the people who are not on the bleeding edge just want to press some kind of loot feedbar. But I do hope that Blizzard does more to encourage the playing of the content at the level at which it was intended, rather than farming it while overgeared/outleveled.

Know what'd be good? Put in some handicapping system (I've talked about this before), and badges only drop in an instance if all the people who outgear it use the handicapping mechanism to lower their power levels until they're all in-range.

 

Deedre

Prinsesa, out of curiosity, how does Runic Spellthread come out looking in this new ruleset? Also 35 spell damage?

 

Rebellion

Which were often the best items for their slot because they used the itemvalue in a way a +dmg/healing item could have never done it.

 

Bismar

No, most people here agree with you. Kara farming is boring, and few think that's the way the game was meant to be played.

I think a handicapping system is far from what Blizzard wants to balance around (at most they're making some stabs at getting to work with your low lvl friends). Don't really think we need the comments about "press some kind of loot feedbar" though.

 

Bismar

Doubtful. It changes as a dungeon gets on farm status (for the server at large) and people know it. Before then, people want maximum CC. People wanted CC when heroics were new. Heck, people wanted maximum CC when they were first stepping inside normal ramparts.

If nothing changes, the first couple months of lvl 80 heroics will also be very mage-friendly. But it won't last forever.

 

Bismar

That's actually a very good question. If the 2nd best trinket is common to obtain, but the best trinket beats it by like 5 dps, and is really annoying to obtain... is that a problem? I can see it both ways. On one hand it's your choice, you can still be a top-level DPS without it, and Blizzard isn't responsible for your OCD. On the other hand, well you made the argument.

DST is more than a little better than any other trinket, and more speaks to bad trinket itemization (particularly the trouble they have had with haste and procs) than anything else. But for say Hex Lord, it's not a huge upgrade for caster DPS, and it's not quite so absurd that not everyone has it.

 

Linnet

That's fine, but make sure there is some kind of raid in place where we can have higher geared people play alongside lesser geared/skilled/experienced friends for a social evening of raiding where the difficulty is pretty simple. There are other reasons to raid than for pure challenge.

Druid: Peace

 

Prinsesa

Yup, that's right. It's going to be weird to have two spellthreads doing the exact same thing, but that's a relic of changing horse midstream so drastically.

While Paladin tanks can still corner the market on Shattered Halls-esque 5+ mob pulls, I think that the other tanks won't have as many problems doing multi-mob pulls, especially with Shockwave and AP-scaling Thunder Clap being given to Warriors.

The inability to tank large pulls is as much fueled by exagerration and WOW-General QQing as it is undisciplined DPS.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

rayijin

The change to thunderclap early in TBC made tanking 4-5 mobs - for a prot warrior with proper talents anyways - fairly easy. Obviously for a non prot warrior tanking anything is still moderately difficult.

Assuming they up the baseline threat of warriors and let tanking abilities scale as they do in the current alpha, I see warriors continuing to be able to solo tank medium to large sized pulls very well, maybe even when not protection.

So what about the other 3 tanking classes? Well, paladins already excel at multi mob tanking, so they're taken care of.

Druids? Well, the swipe nerf coincided with the thunderclap buff. Druids used to be the second best "AOE" tank after paladins when swipe scaled ridiculously well. A few tweaks to this ability (add an extra target?) combined with a shorter cooldown on aoe taunt will make druids just as viable at tanking large pulls as before.

That just leaves death knights.

 

Floria

A little bit of selective un-randomization on Swipe to make sure that it has a tendency to hit additional targets that it didn't last hit would help druids out. They only struggle with AoE tanking when one mob manages to get missed most of the time while tab-swiping.

Death Knights, it remains to be seen, but it looks like they're going to get at least a few AoE abilities, and since they're not being sold as AoE DPS, it seems reasonable to assume these AoE abilities might be considered "high threat" or at least spammable enough to keep mobs off healers. Alternately, with 5 mobs swinging at a Death Knight, and the super-high parry rate they'll have, they'll end up with enough parry haste to swing a 2-hander every 1-1.5 seconds! Tab to get a swing on each mob with a rotation, and that'll hold up pretty decently. Or, just watch single-target threat skyrocket, and make sure your DPS know to assist-train mobs off you.

 

Henin

I'd really like to know the date of that quote as well, before this thread goes off on a huge tangent again with possibly outdated information.

 

Lithose

Not to get into a class argument with you, but swipe is still a better multi mob talent than TC. It is cone directional with no cool down and generates extremely good agro, taking into account usage, crit rating. rage cost and different dynamics of the class it will easily out-perform TC. That being said, this isn't a complaint, both classes are capable, however, both should be brought up a little more to be "closer" to paladins on 5-6 pull packs, especially if the goal is to make paladins "almost" as good on single targets.

 

Axanor

You missed where every class with +10 spell hit got it nerfed to 3%.