Infraction for kaib: General Idiocy

• Zoid · 02/26/08, 11:08 AM

Post: 2.4 PTR and Patch Notes
User: kaib
Infraction: General Idiocy
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Hey, maybe I'm special!

Message to User:

Usually we have to give an infraction for people who can't bother to read. You even read the thread and acknowledged you were doing something that was asked not to. You are not special.

Original Post:

I realize praetorian said no more lifetap stuff, but I didn't get to post earlier and I am still in high hopes blizzard reads these boards, so I'd like to say some stuff that I don't think has been said like this here yet.

I realize Warlocks are due to a dps reduction. It was in the coming for a long time. Pretty much every dps meter in our raids has our 3 destro warlocks in the top 5. Taking the top 3 spots is not exactly uncommon either. And this is with warlocks NOT being in spriest groups, that hardly ever happens as we only raid with 2 and on farm content I'd rather save some pots for the healers/hunters/mages and lifetap more.

Now all this talk about using more int gear is pretty obviously total crap. We won't use really crappy gear to gimp our dps. If this change goes live like this, it leads to only one thing:
Warlocks lifetap becomes a lot less efficient, thus it needs to avoid being used. If the dps output of warlocks with mana is not getting nurfed, the result of this is pretty easy:
You have X spots in spriest groups and the spots for ranged dps in those groups will be taken by warlocks. Which then leads to replacing mages in raids. That's the only and quite obvious result of the lifetap change. A warlock in a spriest/shaman group will outdps a mage very easily while adding more utility AND survivability to the raid.

Reducing lifetaps effectivity means either a 3rd spriest or reducing the number of spriest dependable casters. If you have to reduce those and warlocks remain unchanged otherwise, this nurf will NOT hit warlocks. It will hit mages. Cause right now in pve, mages are a clearly inferior class.

And yeah, mages are NOT the class you want to nurf in pve right now.

There are tons of different ways to nurf warlocks in PvE. Dem Sac, ISB and Shadow&Flame are all fairly overpowered talents. One or even two of those getting hit with the nurf bat would not have surprised me in any way.

Now I understand that this lifetap change was largely motivated by mana drain teams in arenas while blizzard generally tries to fix mana regen in pve for at least all healing classes. One rather simple solution to this wouild be to just make lifetap a flat 20-25% of hp -> mana, without looking at int/max mana at all cause doing that is stupid given our current itemization. Yes, this would still mean warlocks do not go oom in pvp. And yes, I do not think they should as long as they have the hp to lifetap. Warlocks do not have burst dmg, the role of locks is to outlive others in arena. There's no shatter combo or aimed shot or something like that. Having lifetap cost sucha substanial amount of life will make it quite difficult to use under fire.
Also this would mean that you actually have to pay attention in pve when to lifetap and possibly use HS/pots after in some encounters while making sure that warlocks do not run into mana problems and won't take up spots in spriests groups.
Obviously you need to nurf warlock dps output along with that as it means even less GCDs spend on lifetap. But nurfing some of the fairly overpowered pve dps talents cannot be that difficult, can it?