raal

Ice Block is being brought in line with the Paladin immunities come 2.1.0, which a lot of non-mage players seem happy with. There is also a lot of complaints about Blessing of Protection and other immunity effects.

What people fail to realize is that these immunities are Good For The Game(tm). Without them, arena matches would be reduced to simple assist trains, a competition in having the highest DPS output on a single target.

Making a target immune to damage for a limited period however, puts serious obstacles down for this approach, making man vs man a viable strategy. If you think matches are short now then imagine what they would be like without any immunities.

While I can sympathize with 2 vs 2 troubles, immunities are the great equalizer in 5 vs 5, and if you remove them, you make the games a lot shorter, kill a lot of currently viable strategies, and ultimately reduce the skill requirement of arena matches by a large factor.

Consider a 1 vs 1 between two Mages. If you give both of them 1k HP and an instant Fire Blast that deals 2k Damage, then its all about who can press a button quicker, and the game is little to no skill dependent. On the flip side, if you give both of them 50k HP and a wide range of abilities doing 1-2k Damage, then it becomes a longer game, where it is all about who can utilize their abilities better.

Long games are good. Immunities promote longer games.

 

◊ Vain

I think there need to be more "timeout" type abilities in the game, and that these should be assigned to healing classes; here, the priest seems the ideal candidate. For example, Pain Suppression could have a much shorter recharge time and could be cast on other targets, but could cost a large amount of mana. Presumably pain suppression currently doesn't work on other targets so that it can't be cast on the main tank in PvE.

I don't know if any of you played Guild Wars, but once monks in that game put protective enchantments on the assist target (e.g. Protective Spirit: for the next X seconds, target cannot take more than 10% of his maximum health in damage from a single attack or spell), the assist train backed off and moved on to another target, because it was usually futile to try to spike someone down at that point. In WoW most of these sorts of "don't attack me" abilities, such as Ice Block, Blessing of Protection, Pain Suppression, are on very long cooldowns, but also cost little or no mana. I think if they made these abilities mana-limited rather than cooldown limited, it would give players more interesting choices to make.

 

• Amera

An interesting side note is they scrapped the BoP equivalent that was supposed to stop magic assist trains in beta.

Anyway, immunities are both good and bad. They do make the game longer, but they also tend to promote a "let's stack immunities" team since not everyone has access to one.

 

Viluliina

Now that's an awful idea. There's already enough 'timeout' abilities to begin with, adding more would make interrupting/cc'ing and then applying dps to get a kill even more useless than it is (arena matches last 3-5mins, and without string of good/bad luck, first kill is achieved when someone ooms). It would turn the game into even more of a manafight than it already is, and that is the ultimate bore.

Atleast i would like to see the game decided by who outplayed the opponent by better timed/executed cc/interrupt/dps/heals/dispels, not some manafeud where my ability to do good onspot healing/cleansing/cc/interrupt/damage, cc and interrupt avoidance/dps even when everything is going kaboom around me is worthless, since it wouldnt matter anyway, becouse people would just use their immunity cards to survive if i failed.

What's the point being good healer (anything even) if you're not really needed?Just use immunity to survive and even poor healer can heal you up.

 

Malazaar

While immunities are good to promote long games, it severely limits class variations in the teams. Since only paladins have access to the assist train stopper BoP, many teams feel they have to have a paladin in order to compete (and arguably, it IS a great advantage). This even goes so far that teams stack immunities, up to the point where it's just silly (we fought a 3 paladin team once and while we won in the end, it was very boring and annoying).

If immunities keep this hard an impact in arena play, more classes should have access to them.

 

Viluliina

"If bad guys are running with guns, everyone needs to be running with guns to give them equal chance"

Just absolutely horrible idea. When the actual problem was that there are already too many immunities in the game, so the main focus should be ridding the game of them, or if it turns out to be too much/too hard/impossible, balancing them to a tolerable level.

Which is exactly what Blizzard is doing (and i'm glad that they are). Instead of arming every citizen with mighty and ever mightier firearms they are changing the guns already in circulation to peashooters (for reference, forbearance, massdispell and now hypothermia + 0.5s cast on massdispel).

 

Zoner

From my perspective none of the PVP changes help me at all in a 5v5 team whatsoever. Basically just an arena PVP nerf (COT changes and BOP damage reduction) and a world PVP nerf (limited invuln pot).

Mortal strike is still retarded at 50% and only 31 down the arms tree. It still requires BOP to remove the debuff. On paper its about twice as effective as curse of tongues too, in practice way more than that since mortal strike causes the enemy team to spend their mana very fast, COT just slows down their mana burn really and is very nearly always decursed immidiately up until the warlock is bent over and focused down in the first 8 to 10 seconds of the match (regardless of spec in the case of 5v5).

If they were serious about balancing PVP they would give every single class a mana bar so we can all go OOM.