No, it's not. Now I can't BoP against hunters anymore.
Dispells are getting a little out of hand imho.

Well hopefully these changes for elemental shamans won't last to live. I just recently specced elemental so I might have missed something but I don't feel close to overpowered atm, nerfing us feels a bit out of the blue.
Anyhow I guess it is Blizzard's way to tell me to stay resto for eternity.

It's worse than your forecast because less damage in = less rage = less threat output (a prot pally might be able to avoid that part).

I await the first guild to get their MT to tank without a shield or without defence gear and rely on chain Pain Suppression to compensate as a gimmick. Doing something like that may produce enough threat to actually end up above the threat of a normal tank without pain suppression use. It would also make for an awesome video.

It's not a nerf if you have 0 +damage .

Combined with the LO buff, it is a net damage increase at very low gear levels, though. The cast time change reduces the damage benefit from +damage by 16.5%. The LO change is 4.76% more dps. Some quick math says that the break even point is at +201 damage. At +1500 damage, it's about 7% less damage. It's also about 10% less threat, but I'm not sure if that really matters when your damage is dropping that much. It seems like a pretty strange change to make considering that Elemental shaman aren't overpowered at any gear level at the moment.

Not to trivialize the rest of the argument but I think this is indeed the core.

We shall see of course but my money is on the arena system changing drastically with these relatively small changes. That may or may not be intended of course but I do think it will happen on a large scale.

I am not. I said "For sufficiently geared raids". That covers the entirety of the point. I responded to the point that one could get hyjal/BT weapons on a small amount of time raided per week. How would this be a different case if, say, a new recruit was rushed through attunement and raided only 5-10 hours a week?

It's been done. I've already posted several times in that thread about arena weapons, and I have also proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do get rewarded for losing in PvE.

It's really quite simple.

Any sort of trash epic drop or rep reward from a raid instance are your consolation prizes. They are your reward for trying and not succeeding. They even added them to Hyjal and BT recently. They've existed since the very beginning in Molten Core. They are your consolation prize, so that 'at least you got some rep, you got some trash drops, etc.' even if you did not succeed at downing any bosses.

It's completely false to say that PvE does not reward failure at all. It most certainly does.

You cannot compare the tiny loot pool that is trash drops to the sheer amount of selection you get when buying gear for honor/arena points. And uh, molten core rep? No thank you.

You are getting ahead of yourself here, save your speculation about how fair the system is when you know what the other items actually cost and the details behind the system.

Oh, come on. That's a bit of a "crying wolf" statement. Mages are not going to magically become overpowered because of a dmg coefficient restoration. The days of rolling ignites are long gone, and mages will not magically start rocking rogues on the damage meters because of one change.

What it will do is make mages competitive with warlocks for the top caster dps spot, which is all the intelligent ones were asking for. And it was a reasonable request.

Rogues will still be the top dps in the raid. They just aren't insanely over the top as they were beginning to be with massive stacking haste and dual legendary weapons. The changes to WF and Heroism are nerfs, no argument, but our rogues are still putting out 1200-1400 dps on T5-level fights post-nerf. Fire mages are hitting *maybe* 850, tops. There's a lot of head room there.

Mages deserved some love. Rogues needed some small nerfs. The triple whammy of WF+Haste Effects+Sword Spec nerfs all at once was *likely* too much, although the total results will require a bit of time to really feel. So far, it seems somewhat reasonable, if annoying. Rogues are still dpsing, and competitively at that, but they're not 30% ahead of any other class. At least, that's our meters. Are yours dramatically different?

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Do you have any idea of what the ratio of rogue damage to mage damage is in raiding situations? We are almost at the point where only in fights where there is a very very heavy amount of AoE can mages hope to reach rogues, the nerfs were absolutely needed.

Shadowpriest damage right now at the very high end is lower than it was at the start of the expansion pre-weaving nerf and SW nerf - this is however very fair, because were grossly overpowered at the start. You really need a global sense of class balance, you cannot just think about your class.

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That's the point. They want to think ahead, with the loot of Sunwell coming close.
If they'd leave the rogues like they are now, they'd just do an even more insane amount DPS, in "Tier 7 gear", compared to other classes, then they allready do now.

Blizzard often tries to balance things around the end-game gear each class can get. These rogue nerfs and mage buffs are a necessity with the Sunwell being around the corner, imo.

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Did you even look at the fight? That's Morogrim, a 100% AoE fight, and even in a 100% AoE fight the top rogue is beating mages who are spamming arcane explosion, that's a fight where Mages should be dominating rogues.

Do you really feel that rogues should be competitive and beating mages on AoE fights? I don't dare to ask what you think should happen on fights that emphasize single target DPS then.

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I'm really happy. This patch has so many changes that were long overdue that I went speechless for a moment. Evocation not based on spirit, muffin factories, cleanse poison in treeform, fear ward changes... Honestly, I was making fun of hunter traps not scaling just 12 hours ago.

There are also a couple interesting ideas in there:

- Increasing the threat from bloodthirst and MS in defensive stance may make dps warriors better offtanks in raid situations and viable tanks in at least some instances - It could've been placed on a more common talent though.

- Out-of-combat shadowstep might be a, pardon the pun, step in the right direction for returning some character to Subtlety tree, which seemed to be going the way of survival with a mix of gimmick and bland +% talents; As for pve, though the threat reduction seems a little strange, I have an image in my mind of the Twin Emperors and Blackheart the Inciter.

- The dispel mechanic on arcane shot seems powerful against BoF and BoP, but please remember it's a 6 sec cooldown skill (untalented) that dispels only 1 magic effect and can't be used when you're close to your target.

2000 rating needed to buy s3 shoulders is a hilarious joke, but a bad idea. Not because I can't buy them in my current team (we're working on it ;), but because of set bonuses. They idea of having final bonus for 4 pieces and not the full set was to allow the players a degree of flexibility. Now, unless they change the bonus to apply for having 3 pieces, that flexibility is removed for a lot of players.

Well. In their words they said this was being done because people were complaining that players were able to receive T6 quality gear without having to "progress" through T4 and T5 quality gear. I guess that's true in a way. But the people that had absolutely no Arena gear heading into season 2, fighting against teams that started with full season 1, probably didn't find that all to entertaining. It's a different set of circumstances.

I think they could have done some kind of trade in policy, where you could sell your lower season gear back to the vendor for some redeemed Arena points, or that you could "upgrade" your previous season gear slot items by trading them in and paying some additional point fee. This may have been more in line with forcing people to "progress" in some manner of speaking. But I'm not sure if the grand scope of the playing community would be very excited about that.

Well, that may be the case but I can't comment on the difference in damage charts between T6 and T5 instances as there's only one guild on my server that's even attuned to BT. And they achieved their first 25 attunements about 4 days ago.

Go look at WWS of BT guilds, and in those charts the margin of difference is even greater when there is no AoE. Are the nerfs that rogues got harsh? Yes, but they were undoubtedly needed, and if you had a sense of perspective you would realize this.

Regardless, this is a stupid derail to justify nerfs in a discussion of the changes in 2.3.

PvE Tier 6 Shoulders/Helm: top ??%
PvE Tier 6 Weapon/Chest/Legs: top ??%
PvE Tier 6 Hands: Top ??%

You don't have to spend 16 hours / day farming them to excel in arena. All that counts is that you win games. 10 games / week with 80% wins will get you a nice rating sooner or later. All that takes is 0,5-1h / week. If S3 is going to be tier 6 level equipment (only designed for pvp, not pve use), then I think there should at least be SOME skill requirement. Saying you don't have time is no excuse

During 3 nights (4 hours each night) wiping on a new boss you can easily spend over 120 mana pots, 6 flasks (or 60-90 elixirs, depends on what you use), 30-45 of food and 4-5 stacks of weapon oils. Not to mention reparairing equipment that takes few hundred golds.

And as result you may get nothing. Realistically speaking, if you want T6 level PvE gear you have to spend at least 4 to 5 nights there wiping on stuff each week. Only thing you may get from months of wiping is a guild that disbands and leaves you with no new PvE epics.

Please don't tell me PvE rewards for failure! Farming trash can be compared to farming battlegrounds for honor.

In other news, I really like the class changes. Making meditation (and talents alike) higher % gives spirit extra value it needed. Pain suppression change is nice, but I don't think it will affect PvE much because of disc-trees general lack of good talents. PvP, can't say yet. Other classes changes did sound ok too.

Your percentages are probably true for the WoW gaming community as a whole, but more people PvP than raid. Out of something like five thousand active users on our server, there are 6 or 7 "raiding" guilds that you could actually call serious raiders. That probably only accumulates to a few hundred people at best. So the % of the raiding community that will end up with full T6 in comparison to the % of the PvPing community that will end up with full S3 Arena gear is probably a bit closer.

I thik he means that feral druids don't scale in, and past SSC/TK, and/or are virtually non-existant in 5v5 arena and/or are virtually non-existant in top 100 arena teams of any bracket.

The general consensus is that the PVE problem is one of (non-)itemisation; the PVP issue is more fundamental. The arcane shot purge thing is clearly aimed at trying to make hunters more appealling for arenas; why not feral druids? ferals are right down there with hunters as the most under-represented class/spec.