◊ Kyth

If ignite is getting knocked off you've got other problems in your raid that are affecting your non-destro locks more than your mages, since the spell priority system still isn't updated for level 70 and appears abandoned at this point.

(that, and the bug of not being able to go over 110% reliably on fights with secondary abilities are the two most annoying tbc bugs for me. particularly because neither appears to be on any bug lists. the latter is because it means I don't get as much out of soulshatter as I ought to be, and I can sometimes still reach threat cap after using it at an optimal time.)


My point was unclear, but was that mages (moonkin, eleshm) aren't tied to being forced to a certain percentage of +hit (soulshatter), nor do they need to make sure their +dmg doesn't lag too far behind because of lifetap efficiency, so there is a lot more freedom in gearing. Not that crit is totally useless to a lock.

 

Northerner

Yep.

It does depend on the fight of course but unless there is a very tight enrage condition, I'd rather have a single affliction warlock present for SE when learning new content if at all possible. At a raid level, one affliction warlock is not a huge rdps drop anyhow. Their personal dps hit is huge but +3% malediction for two more warlocks and 1-2 spriests recovers a bit of that. (It's a shame arcane isn't viable still as that made maledictioned CoS very viable.) The remaining question really is dps over SE and on farm content I'll take the dps any day. On new (hard) content I'll take the SE at first though.

 

Vulkaire

I have never had a problem with ignite getting knocked off. It would seem that if ignite was getting knocked off, imp. shadow bolt would have the same issue. Thats like saying imp shadow bolt is bad because it can be eaten by wands. Neither is really an issue in raids.

 

Gumibear

We're still scaling better with damage and spell haste than crit, even if our crit benefit is better than a mage. But that's on the destruction side of things. Affliction really needs some love, especially if anything in Sunwell is tuned around Shadow Embrace. Some proper haste scaling on Affliction would help to close the gap from poor crit scaling.

 

seminarca

Fully agree with that point, and although you mentioned Druids from a Resto POV, Ferals have similar issues. Our #1 DPS stat is Agility, followed by Strength and AP. Crit Rating (almost the same % ratio as agility assuming Kings, and no bonus AP) / Haste Rating (our white damage comprises relatively much less of our total dps, no dual wield) / APen (Rip, a bleed effect, is a decent portion of our dps and ignores armor) / Hit Rating (it's trivial to cap the 9% for single wield) aren't "optimum" stats for us. But due to the way itemization formulas work, stacking singular stats has severe diminishing returns from a budget perspective. It was only in S3 that Blizzard starting breaking "traditional" itemization rules, which resulted in stuff like [Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers] (Agility and Crit Rating on the same item) which are actually very good for us. Even though Crit Rating itself isn't as good as Agility, stacking more Agility on that item would yield a lower amount of added stats over the current two different ones.

In contrast, dual wield classes benefit from Hit Rating well beyond the 9% specials cap, they also benefit greatly from Haste Rating because of dual wield and lots of proc stuff. APen is equally far more valuable (less for Enh Shamans I guess, due to shocks).

Anyway, this isn't meant to sound like a whine, just that due to how itemization in this game works, benefitting from multiple stats is to one's benefit. The S3+ breaking of itemization taboos is a Good Thing. But I'm not sure how this could be adapted for Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests without further boosting Destruction (the one thing that came to mind was generic Spell Damage and Shadow Damage on the same item). Or else we're dealing with major-ish mechanic changes.

 

◊ Kyth

Naw. You can fix spriests and destruction warlocks easily by giving them deep talents to convert crit to +dmg (sort of like how locks already have a talent to remove spirit and gain stamina.)

Adding shadow onto gear with +dmg on it already would overpower destruction warlocks, which is very much not something that needs to happen, that spec is more than fine.


I'm not sure if the "right" solution is what an earlier poster suggested, changing the budget, or if it's better by continuing to massage specific classes. Even though the budgeting change seems a more correct general change, my gut says they're better off continuing to do things like feral AP, bonus AC, talents to switch crit to dmg, adding +dmg to heal gear, etc., and just expand that to other problem areas.

Some casters get more out of +dmg because they have more multipliers in their trees, but some get a free 10% +sphit which means they can be a lot freer with their gear choices. Variety is good, even if it doesn't produce the 100% exact same power in every class as players sometimes think they want.

For 99% of the guilds out there, the variance in meters is skill, not class choice/power. Look at some of the top WWS parses of the top guilds and you see classes doing pretty similar dps (with the exception of the dotters) when you take a variety of fights into your sample.


I don't think any of the classes are designed for balance, more, say, "massaged" into balance via itemization and talent manipulations.

This has the advantage of making the classes more differentiated (which is good), and also allows different classes more prominence in different tiers of content (not necessarily good or bad, but it does happen since they scale differently.) What they need to avoid is extremely unidimensional classes like affllock/spriest.


I'm curious if 2.4 will bring even more melee prominence (as I believe rogues are gaining dps faster than any other class) via gear upgrades.

 

Jebraltar

Removing diminishing returns from items would make for fascinating tanking itemization. Exactly enough defense to hit uncrittable with nothing besides Stamina stacked on items? Think about what Solid Stars of Elune do for itemization, except on a bigger scale.

The problem isn't that the system punishes you for stacking one stat exclusively, the problem is how gems interact with that and the fact that some specs just don't scale properly with more than one or two stats.

 

alkis

Really I don't see why adding haste to dot ticks will unbalance pvp that much any more so than haste does for direct damage spells. Imo they should make haste work as follows (to make it a worthy stat for everyone) for both melee and spell casters:

• Make it a bit more expensive than hit rating and less expensive than crit rating to get 1% (from 10@60/15.8@70 go to 12@60/18.9@70)
• Reduces GCD
• Reduces cast time
• Reduces cooldowns of all abilities
• Reduces over time damage/healing abilities tick time

This way 1% haste means 1% damage/healing increase for every damage class and every healing class. Effectively it transforms this stat from a spell crit rating style, waste of itemization points stat for half the spell casters in game, into a perfectly viable stat for everyone. Furthermore, as implemented above, it doesn't break cycles for any class other than rogues I believe.

As for crit rating, they really need to fix it somehow as a lot of you suggested, into something that dot classes can benefit at least a bit from. For shadow priests my proposed fix would be to change Vampiric Touch to add shadow damage to your spells as much as your crit rating. This way point for point spell damage is better but not as worthless as it is now, plus it requires that you actually have to keep VT up to get the crit to spell dmg conversion.

A similar solution can be implemented for warlocks as well, by adding the same mechanic to Unstable Affliction.

 

Gogusrl

I don`t know about cooldown, with enough stacked it would imbalance arena by droping skills under 15 mins and making them usable.

 

panny

This doesn't result in a 1% bonus for everyone. For example, dots gain double the benefit by having the cast time reduced, as well as the duration. In PvP, there's already an issue of HoT/DoT classes overshadowing others due to the greater actions per minute they can perform. Haste would just make this situation worse.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Alerian

I know it gets mentioned a lot, but Haste really isn't used that often in PvP due to it not being on a lot of PvP items in the first place. Even if you swapped out some PvP gear for PvE items with Haste, you still need so much Resilience to be competitive that I don't think that Haste on HoTs or DoTs would really be overpowered. Rather, it would be another balancing situation where you have to decide how much Resilience you need vs. how much Haste you can wear without being too defenseless.

Another thing I'm slightly wondering about is if we're perhaps getting too far off-topic since this is primarily conjecture based off "what if" scenarios, and not the "2.4 Details" intended thread topic.

 

Draele

All stats aren't created equally, as even with the new GCD effect Haste *still* favors nukes. Crit favors nukes. I say "so what" if DoTs gain a little more out of haste. The primary objective is to provide another stat for Resto, Affliction and Shadow to be able to use since A) items that solely stack +healing/+damage are sometimes tough to find and B) even when you can find them you're made to suffer the diminishing return on stat stacking as Blizzard has set the itemization formulas up to favor classes who gain benefit from multiple stats.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Pyros

Exactly, and this is why there's so much "whine" about druids and warlocks in pvp, on top of their "expected" strength. People don't cry because warlocks have high mitigation, or because druids can escape easily, but because they can do it WHILE maintaining dps/healing. At least that's how I see it. Now one thing to note however is that haste is currently unattainable on pvp gear, so it'd be a resilience for haste tradeoff, at least unless they make S4 gear with haste. It'd make haste the pve stat, while resilience is the pvp stat. You'd probably see a lot of crying when PvPers who don't raid can't get access to all the gear tho, so don't know about it.

Another thing is, maybe I fail to undertsand the whole faster tick things, but that would reduce the duration of the dot right? While probably not bad for dots, it'd be disastrous at best for druid pve, and blizzard would have to itemize gear for druids specifically without haste. Why? Because we wouldn't be able to roll lifeblooms if haste affected their duration. Sure the GCD would go down too, but at a lower rate in absolute(unless they change it so tick reduction is proportional?). Then you'd end up with weird situations where druids use "old" gear on some encounters where 3lifeblooms are needed on tanks, or use new gear but aren't able to cast anything but these 3lifeblooms.

Well still a lot of speculation, hopefully they publish patch notes tomorrow or tuesday, since the PTR seems pretty ready for next phase currently.

 

Draele

Grey area I suppose as it is related to the Haste changes coming in 2.4- ultimately discussing how it's lacking.

EDIT: Creating a new thread for deeper discussion on the subject.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Alerian

I'm not sure about that because you'd have to have the Lifebloom duration reduced to less than 2 seconds (29% of its current duration) in order to not be able to keep up the full stack of 3 (on one target at least). But I do agree that on multiple-target Lifebloom fights, it would be extremely awkward.

Since Haste is indeed a primarily PvE stat, one thing I've thought about is that Haste could increase the coefficents on HoTs and DoTs. Obviously, you'd have to be careful to not increase it to such an extent that it would become drastically OP, but that could be another solution and it wouldn't require massive retooling of cast sequences.

 

panny

I suspect this line of discussion will get shit heaped, but... the problem is not that stats aren't created equally. It's that haste affecting dot duration would be too much. A stat that costs the same as hit, yet is worth double to DoT classes? Expecting the stat to not make it to PvP is also not a good design practise. Perhaps having a seperate stat to reduct DoT durations would be acceptable, depending on the itemization cost.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Elerion

Regarding spell haste and Shadow Priests:
Preliminary theorycrafting suggests that the spell haste change even for a relatively DoT-heavy class turns spell haste gear into best-in-slot in comparison to every similar ilevel item, and even makes items of significantly lower ilevel comparable to their high end counterparts. The new badge gear is clocking in at just under T6 level, and ZA gear is best in slot where T6 failed to provide a meaningful upgrade (Primarily neck slot).

If said calculations are correct, spell haste is definitely not underperforming for shadow priests after the change.

Affliction locks are obviously more DoT-dependant than shadow priests, but the GCD change is huge none the less.

(Details regarding the theorycrafting can be found at shadowpriest.com)

 

Zifna

Hm... maybe a crit dot could tick out faster? If a class got 200% damage, the dot would tick its full damage in half its normal time, if they got 50% damage on crits it'd tick at 75% speed? Would make crit a little bit more uniformly valuable to casters.

 

Starfire

Compromise and change all dots/hots to work like immolate/regrowth? That is small front end direct damage/heal portion with a damage/heal over-time component?

Then, to balance it a bit better, add in talents to make these effects get a larger crit modifier?

So like, taking numbers from my ass. Lets say DoT does 15k damage over 15 seconds, ticking every 3 seconds (so basically 5 ticks at 3k each). Spell could be reworked to do 15k damage over 12 seconds, with a 3k hit on the start and then a 12k dot. Now we add a talent point somewhere that would allow the "direct damage" part of this to say get a 4x crit multiplier. So when this spell "crits" the first hit would be 12k and then we'll see the remaining 12k over 12 seconds.

I hope that made sense. >.>

 

seminarca

Making carbon copies of all DoT spells hardly seems like a good idea. Not to mention, if you change a backloaded spell like CoA (ramps up over time) into a frontloaded DD+DoT spell (with no cooldown), you open up a huge can of PvP balance issues. Same with an Affliction Warlock's instant Corruption. Can you imagine being CoA spammed to death (as in, Moonfire spammed)? And what happens with Siphon Life? Do Warlocks really need a spammable instant heal with no cooldown?

 

Divismal

It was mentioned several times, that the upcoming change of spellhaste, wouldnt have a major impact on DoT-Classes. Thats actually wrong - at least from a shadowpriest point of view.

A whole bunch of current BoS-Items(Best on slot) for shadowpriests will be replaced by spellhaste gear.

A few examples:

[Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer] will overcome [S3 Mainhand] + [Orb of the Souleater].

[Bracers of Nimble Thought] will overcome [Cuffs of Devastation].

[Brooch of Nature's Mercy] overcoming [Ritssyn's Lost Pendant] will be funny as hell, if the 1 Spellhaste ~ 1 Spelldamage Calculation isnt totally off.

So finally Spellhaste is going to turn the tables for shadowpriests. The point of reaching the Gcd as a nuke class isnt possible with passive gear - so not much will change for destrolocks and mages.

 

Prinsesa

I'll try to make this my only post in regards to the spell haste/GCD changes, to prevent further derailing (I just don't think it fits in with the newly opened theorycraft thread):

Why are people concerned with PvP balance with regards to spell haste being tuned to affect DOTs?

You would need a significant amount of spell haste to start making a dent in the ticking department, so much so that you're giving up significant amounts of resilience and STA.

Granted, you might be able to get away with it if you're in near-full Vindicator/Vengeful Gladiator with access to T6 drops, but you'd be such a classy player that I really wouldn't mind.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

◊ Kyth

Except destruction locks hit lifetap an awful lot :p.

If Leulier's new spreadsheet is accurate, I see a 56 dps increase with just lifetap for my mana regen (lifetapping once every 13 seconds), and a 48 dps increase if I'm in a standard spriest group and use mana pots on every cooldown (lifetapping once every 27 seconds.)


(edit) and fire mages scorch once every 8 (or 7?) fireballs, meaning a 1.5 second cast every 24 (21?) seconds as well, so they will probably see a similar dps increase.

 

Divismal

The lifetapping fact was a point, that i totally missed - jesus christ. Thank you.

 

◊ manly

Nah, not really. The more we stack haste (to get in the case of gained DPS from lowered GCD), the less we need to cast scorch. As long as we refresh fire vulnerability every 30 seconds we're fine, so it's not really a static 8fireball/1scorch rotation per-se to start with. The gain from lowered GCD, as far as fire mages are concerned, is in the realms of less than 20 dps. However, what that change will most impact is 4 things:

-deep fire ramp-up time lowered on new targets (ie: time to stack scorch)
-AOE (arcane explosion is still our best AOE regardless of spec, and we had no way to dodge the AOE-cap other than stacking crit. With this, haste allows us to work around the AOE-cap)
-deep frost can now stack icy veins with bloodlust (50+ dps increase in some cases)
-give a new way for arcane spec to scale, as AB was a 1.5s spell. I doubt it will do much to make the spec compete. Ironically Arcane Power is roughly +30% damage for 15s every 3 min, and Water Elemental is still +40% dps for 45s every ~3 min. I believe the spec is still hopeless, as its main point of interest was burst DPS, which really it isn't the master of. And AOE. But again, that is about it.

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