Illundai

Was any guild able to get testing in on the Twins? I mean, they did shut it down obnoxiously fast.

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Thiris

I could see swipe being useful in places like the trash after Hydross in SSC where you're sheeping 4(?) of the mobs and often times if they're at the far edge of the platform, they can get a little close to the middle of the battle. Aside from that, it seems that maybe 5 man instances are where they are aiming this change at.

 

Mordekhuul

I'm thinking more of TK trash where having trash mobs up that dish out AOE is pretty bad, even for geared groups.

In SSC we recently stopped using any CC on the trash pulls right after Hydross. Pally tank, interrupts on the healers, and its a lot more fun (as fun as doing those pulls for the 800th time can be, I suppose).

 

Douglas

IMO, the point is to nerf Heroics, now that less experienced folks are able to do them due to the lowered rep requirements for the keys.

I can also say, this makes me a lot more likely to have my tankadin tanking PUGs (which I have historically refused to do). Won't have to keep yelling "no, don't sheep until after Captain America throws his mighty shield", and sap will actually be more useful.

 

berg

My only problem with normalizing to population like they did is that the population is not even remotely flat. warriors being near 100% for their entirely inflated population still means they are over represented compared to a system that was balanced.

Obviously they cannot get the class population perfectly flat, but I doubt they want classes almost doubling the population of other classes.

 

Chirality

Wow that class balance data looks very different than what you would expect--in fact, it seems to indicate they believe, by arena rankings, that warriors are *slightly underrepresented* in nearly all brackets, and that the most overrepresented classes in 5v5 are Shaman and Priests. Druids have a staggering 276% in 2v2.

That said, I actually can't say I disagree with the results significantly.

 

◊ Penguin

It's not balanced for any sort of population, it's balanced against blizzard's expectations for that class.
We have no data on what exact metric is used for "represented as we'd expect". I would assume that their expectations included how many of each class actually existed (ie, they wouldn't expect to see 500 shamans in 2200 teams if only 600 were even at 70 on a server), but those expectations are not laid out for us.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Kasi

That chart is pretty silly. I find it humorous that on both 1850 and 2200 they show druids above warriors in 5s.

 

tedv

No, the numbers work like this. Assume 10% of the level 70 players are warlocks. If 20% of the 1850 rated players in 2v2s are warlocks, then their chart would read 200%. If only 5% of 1850 players are warlocks, then their chart reads 50%.

It measures the whether attendance in a team for a class is relatively higher or lower than the class's overall popularity on the server. You can think of the formula as:

 

Kasi

Yeah it is difficult to analyze. If a class has 3 times the numbers of another class but only twice as much representation above 2200, what exactly does that mean? You could say in this case that warriors are underpowered compared to druids at the top end (which seems wrong), you could say that there are a lot of warriors that aren't very good, you could say that the power of druids in 2s brought a lot of min/max top players into the class and that has affected their standings in 5s, and so on. Its really hard to analyze without knowing the current trends in arenas. And even knowing that, it still isn't easy.

 

berg

Exactly. My point is that Hunters look terrible by those numbers but Hunters have always been a very populous class. If a class is overpopulated I do not think there should be an expectation for their overpopulation to carry over to successful arena teams.

If overrepresented classes can all find roles their class will continue to grow. When underrepresented classes still cannot get their fair share then their populations will just shrink further.

 

Moogul

Whilst that is how I would *expect* them to do it, it is not the only possibility - do you have any proof that that is how they are measuring it?

It is entirely possible that having taken the population values, they might then apply another formula to those to get their 'expected values', which whilst influenced by population are not just population percentages. They might not expect a class that is 2 times as populous to be 2 times as popular in pvp, they might expect them to be, say, 2^(1/2) times as popular.

Personally I think such measurements would be rather strange, but there's no guarantee they are doing straight linear percentages.

 

Daenerys

There are a TON more Warriors than Druids at 70. As the most populous class in the game, Warriors are going to show as "under-represented".

These numbers are valuable, even if a lot of nerf-mongerers want to try to discount them. If the classes are *perfectly* balanced, then it would stand to reason that each of those numbers would be at or near 100%. If Warriors make up 50% of the 70s in WoW (exagerating to make a point), then they should be on about 50% of the arena teams in existence. Of course, that kind of balance is nearly impossible when you take into account the synergies certain classes share with others. Point is, those numbers can't be thrown out because Warriors enjoy a relative advantage in arenas and yet they show as "under-represented".

Hopefully Blizzard realizes the flaws in that data and takes a serious look at some of the classes with obvious issues. I am certainly pleased that the data caused them to reverse the Warlock nerf (let's be honest, Warlocks are not the force they used to be, and they feel pretty balanced from where I'm sitting), so to me it seems the data is being used properly so far.

In any event, this is probably not the thread for this discussion in any event.

Edit:

If the classes are truly balanced, then that's exactly what should happen. Again, it's a pipe-dream to think that sort of balance will ever exist, bur the point stands.

 

Alerian

Can we please avoid turning this into multiple pages of class representation in Arenas?

While I typically am Resto or Balance, the Swipe (etc.) change will be nice for a few tighter space pulls in Heroics. I don't really see a huge change for raid tanking since we're typically careful about where the targets for sheeping get sheeped.

I read a comment the other day that the reason for the Lifebloom nerf was because it's coefficient was "inflated" from what it should have been (I am assuming that that is referring to the 3 second cast normalization). Even with that in mind, the change still seems odd to me since Lifebloom ticks aren't honestly that much total healing (particularly compared to Chain Heal and Circle of Healing).

In some ways, it feels like Blizzard's goal for the Druid class is to have Balance and Feral be PvE-centric, and Resto be PvP-centric. HoTs are inarguably great for PvP situations, and good for PvE to help minimize the effects of spike damage. But with the way so many of the fights in BT, MH, and SW25 are designed, group healing is just quite simply that much more valuable. I guess it's an issue that won't be clear until the patch after 2.4 (whether that's LK or something else), but it often feels like that's the general direction of the class (although that's something that can change overnight).

 

Kasi

Well that is why I followed up my post with the other one. (plus really it didn't have enough content) Numbers like that are hard to analyze without knowing the current arena trends. Looking further at the realm history site, you can look at breakdowns of teams and the like. Although I wish it would be more than 5 team setups. But currently the Euro Comp is the most represented setup +2200. (and third most in 2k+) so that is where most of the druid representation is coming from. There is probably only 3 teams in 5s that work really well atm for them. Euro comp, 4 dps (which is hurting) and triple healer. You can in some 2345 setups replace a healer with a druid, it isn't exactly optimal. While Warriors according to that are in the other 4 most popular setups. This is why I want to see the breakdown of all teams at 2200+, not just the top 5 setups.

That's why I think to have meaningful analysis you can't rely on just normalized data, or unnormalized data, or even the number of different viable comps (because that would disregard extremely overrepresented setups like the mage in PMR in 3s). You really have to factor all three in. But personally I would dismiss normalized data first. What the masses love has little relevence on what the top pvp'ers say are the best setups. There is a more limited pool of those players and they will choose the classes they think are best. And they are good enough that if a switch will improve their situation, they will reroll and get geared fast.

So when I look at war/druid in 5s, I look at three things. Warriors are on twice as many 2200 teams. Warriors have at least double the pop of druids, so their normalized numbers are lower. Warriors have at least 50% more viable setups. This leads me to think that warriors are better off than druids in 5s because of points 1 and 3. Druids are doing okay mainly on the viability of a cc heavy team, which with changes to warlocks or mages could be very fragile.

 

PSGarak

Blade Flurry and Sweeping Strikes use different mechanics than normal chaining attacks. Everything else has separate combat resolutions per target, whereas BF and SS take the damage roll from one target and apply it to another. I don't know how different that makes them from a programming perspective, but it's possible that the current change is completely unapplicable. Not to say it couldn't be done, but it would have to be addressed separately.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Nezralix

If they increased the Lifebloom mana cost substantially to make its efficiency more in life with other healing spells, would that be a preferable solution?

 

Chirality

Sweeping Strikes has always had odd behavior, relative to cleave. I feel like I almost always know where my Cleave will go, and can pull off cleaves over huge distances (between Channellers in Shade of Akama, for example). Sweeping Strikes, on the other hand, behaves extremely different--not to mention the second target's damage seems to get reported with a fair bit of latency.

That might be part of the issue, in fact--Cleave can have such a huge Range (Sweeping Strikes is way smaller) and Sweeping Strikes is reported so different that I feel there has to be a huge difference in implementation.

 

Edghar

I was always under the impression that sweeping strikes was a cone-based attack, while cleave was a "chain" attack. This would explain the range differences. Does anyone know of any testing that confirms or denies this?

 

draghkar

Like this game needs to be easier and easier to play at each patch. Riiiight.

 

Edghar

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they are going for.

 

Pixen

Make something idiot proof and somebody will just make a better idiot.

Exhibit A: The prot pally in my ramparts run last night who insisted on consecrating/tanking single melee mobs while the casters in the distance drilled our healer.

You have to wonder if there's a point of no return when it comes to dumbing things down.

 

Dralmoo

The swipe change seems like it pretty much equalizes druids and pallies as the best 5 man tanks with warriors a distant seconds. Which maybe is fine, seeing how warriors still have more or less a monopoly on the serious raiding MT position.

 

Mideci

We generally do heroics with very little crowd control because it quite frankly slows things down an awful lot. Representatively, with a good druid friend, we cleared Botanica in 37 mins, SH in 35, Unberbog in 27 recently. Well, running with another druid the other day, they absolutely refused to swipe because "it breaks sheep." After myself and my guildmate did about 30 /rolleyes in the channel to make the point, we told the mage -- now both mage and druid were random pugs -- that if he sheeped again, we'd kick him from the group, in the hopes the druid would get the point.

Fact is, the swipe, etc. change is not unreasonable when you consider that this magical ability can "anger" multiple targets in the first place such that they only pay attention to you rather than simply go turn and 1-shot the guy in back healing you. It's not entirely unreasonable given that you wouldn't be able to apply it selectively. Heck, even OHF Thrall respects sheeping these days. Hyjal Thrall, not so much.

 

• sordee

In the end, yes this will make tanking a little easier in 5-mans. But the good tanks will still be repositioning the pack away from the CC'd mob(s) to let all the other full AOE (non-chained) attacks to be used on the pack.

BTW, one of the most annoying mobs in the game is the damn shooters in Shattered Halls, that you can't CounterSpell.

edit: I wonder when they add Chain Lightening to the mix.