I like the solution that was proposed on the other terrain thread. LoS is fine, pillar running in circles forever is kinda stupid. So make obstacles that are more like walls. Have an arena that is is basically a big circle like most of them. But inside that big circle have a smaller one that is a wall. Have the wall have 3 breaks in it at different locations. BE with its ridiculous number of pillars is annoying, and Nagrand one can infinitely pillar hop. So make obstacles, but have it so that you can't always maintain seperation from whom you're kiting.

I really disagree with this. Hunter damage might be the most susceptible to straight-up pushback when being focus fired, that doesn't mean they have more problems with pushback in general. First, anyone being FF'd has to deal with their cast times being severely gimped as well. Mages don't stand around trying to get off frostbolts when there's a warrior straddling him, t4 or not (and I strongly prefer the -50% sheep to those pve gloves, so I'm entirely dependent upon my dispellable shield to not suffer pushback). They also have to deal with silence/counterspell which hunters [really] don't have to. No one puts their pets on a hunter when there's a clothie to annoy with it instead. Plus, spells like CoT don't rape you if you're not able to dispel them, which compounds pushback problems. Add to the fact that hunters generally aren't a priority target, and they have time to get off plenty of aimed and steady shots. Oh, and HoT's/DoT's are all subject to dispel, something I think we can all agree is a powerful ability.

I can only think you're talking more about 2v2, where all sorts of class imbalances start to show. This is probably due more to warrior+healer being so prevalent, which is the only case where I can really imagine that pushback is a bigger problem for a hunter than pushback the hunter can cause to the opposing team. But then, the ability of a hunter+pet to completely shut down a ranged caster can be equally devastating against other matchups like mage/druid.

Oh yeah, autoshot. I'd be more than happy to give every hunter 100% pushback protection on aimed/steady if my mage could wand w/o triggering the GCD. It would be ridiculous.

Ask Gwilar or Beauruin to let you play their mage/warlock for a few weeks; the other side isn't greener.

Except that the incoming damage is *much* reduced because you now have people with 800 resilience.

Having had BR before, I'd like to say that being crit immune doesn't necessarily save you from a 5v5 train.

The way resilience works, having values go up to 800 would completely break a lot of classes and certain specs in particular. It's hard capped for a good reason; it's a percentage based reduction.

A middle ground where you can line of sight for a respectable amount of time, but not indefinitely, would be good. I dislike how ruins of lordaeron does not allow you to stay out of LOS for more than a couple seconds unless you outrange your entire team by going into a starting gate, making even a well timed trinket out of hamstring during CC on a warrior next to worthless with the inevitable intercept 2 seconds later. Running around a pillar forever is also pretty dumb.

Count me in on the Arcane Shot bandwagon - I have nothing against trying to help Hunters, but adding a dispel effect just boggles the mind. It adds no value to the class. A Hunter would still be shooting it as fast as his rotation dictates and all it would be doing is stripping off buffs that much faster.

A Shadow Priest can choose between Dispel and SW: D, considering how badly he needs to deal damage as opposed to how badly buff x needs to be removed. A Hunter is still going to shoot AS whenever he wants/can because there's no opportunity cost for doing biding your time.

I recall a remark made on these boards during 2.2 that Hunters fit so well on 5v5 teams because all the necessary bases were covered, letting them go into the last slot comfortably. You couldn't do that on 3v3 and 2v2 teams because between DPS, healing, dispels, snares, etc., Hunters don't offer enough, and this new AS still isn't helping. No one brings a Hunter specifically for his dispel.

I have a huge issue with reasoning like that. If the loss of Cyclone blows your entire arena game out of the water, then something is wrong with your class as a whole.

While I agree that the crit damage reduction should be hard-capped as a function of scaling, I disagree that the chance to be crit reduction should. It's already effectively soft-capped by the limits of itemization: How high is the maximum theoretical crit rate of class x wearing optimal gearset y?

Nobody was saying to remove cyclone; just to tone it down a bit from how it is now. As it stands, cyclone is the only ability in the game that can entirely negate players' abilities to do anything. No other ability prevents the target from being healed while in its effect, and no ability should.

I think comparing Arcane Shot to Purge/Dispel is really an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Really, Arcane Shot and Devour Magic are remarkably similar skills. Their main advantage is that they are hugely efficient in terms of time - Arcane because it's a damage skill that sees use regardless, and Devour because it's tied to the pet, so the warlock's not blowing his own GCD on it.

The significant weakness of both Arcane and devour is that they are *NOT* primary dispels that can remove large quantities of buffs quickly. They're good in 2's and 3's matches where you have no other dispel and people don't have loads of buffs on them. In 5's(and even perhaps in 3's if the other team's running something like PMR, where you could easily see 5 combined targettable buffs between the priest and mage), when people routinely have lots of buffs, and there are lots of different potential dispel targets, it's not a substitute for dispel/purge by any stretch of the imagination. If you're trying to blow someone up and want to rip a BoP off them, these skills are not going to cut it, unless the fight's already dragged on for quite a while and you've had time to whittle things down.

Thus, I believe comparing Arcane Shot and Devour Magic to each other is a fair comparison; comparing either of them to purge/dispel magic is not.

what gem buff are you referring to?

New PTR Build, season 2 issues, blue posts, Internode fix Mana restored for rank 5 gem was almost doubled, I assume thats what he's talking about at least I haven't seen any meta gem changes in 2.3.2.

Also you now have 3 charges of the top gem, so that should help you in longer fights.

Can we, say, nerf cyclone a bit by putting a polymorph like effect on it?

Players who were cycloned can restore X health per second.

Though I agree without cyclone, druids are pretty much useless. Their root can be dispelled. In human form, they are quite squishy. In animal form, they are either squishy (cat) or useless (They can not heal and do abysmal DPS) (bear)

But Prinsesa is right. That means the class is pretty broken in an important way, and it becomes more obvious in 5s. They need to make druids more potent in caster form so they can function during assist trains and be a more viable healer in 5s while weakening their shapeshifting to make them less dominant in 2s and 3s. I don't really have a large problem with cyclone other than it eating my timers (if you BoF a cycloned target, you lose your BoF timer and they get nothing), but it was very clearly a bandaid solution to attempt to give the class larger scale PvP viability.

Outside of 2v2, mana burn is much, much, much, much, much, much more game breaking than cyclone. And in 2v2 it is a tossup. I am basically a cyclone bot in 5v5, and despite cycloning 20+ times almost every game we still lose a fair bit. How often does a 5v5 lose when the priest gets 20+ mana burns off?

Mana burn and mana drains in general are the most gamebreaking abilities around right now. Drain teams are everywhere in 5v5 these days. Why? Because they are the only abilities you cannot recover from. Damage? Heal. Cyclone, or CC in general? Unless someone dies during its duration all it does is delay the game a bit. But every mana burn is mana lost forever. There is no gear that counters mana burn. There is no ability to counter mana burn after it has landed. The only defense to it is not letting it go off in the first place.

Actually the druid class is awesome. Unlike pallies who have all passive defenses and little active defenses (meaning that a crappy pally can be quite powerful while a good pally has to work twice as hard to set himself apart), the power of a druid is completely correlated to the skill of the player.

Cyclone is also a well designed ability. I often hear stuff like "omg I was cycloned/rooted 90% of the fight, nerf" and think "aha - crappy player". At high levels of play you rarely chain cyclone in 2v2. Why? Because of the many drawbacks doing it brings. The better way to peel a warrior off a druid is to have your warrior spamstring the other warrior until you are gone (at the latest when imp hamstring procs). So cyclone is very scrub friendly but rather hard to use at high levels, which counteracts what I said in the first paragraph and is needed so druids are attractive to the low-end player. The low-end player will never be good enough to use travel form or feral charge effectively, they need some easy mode defense against players too inept to counter it, much like pallies have plate armor and bubble.

But yes, druids are absolutely dependent on cyclone in 5v5. Much like priests are absolutely dependent on dispel and mana burn. Or warriors on mortal strike. All those classes would be complete wastes of space if said abilities were gone. Such is the bracket.

Divine shield is the only ability in the game that provides complete immunity to damage / CC and allows the caster to function at 100% (with the exception of melee attacks) for its duration.

The fact that it's unique is in no way justification for it being unbalanced. If you're trying to justify the prevention of heals while under its effects thing, then you'll have to deal with MS / Aimed Shot / Wound Poison too, since they all affect healing on the target, but at the same time allow the target to take damage. Preventing the target from being healed is not a good enough argument on its own.

Trinket removes cyclone, pre-emptive action (interrupts, LoS, spell reflect, grounding) allow you to avoid it completely and at the same time put the druid on the back foot. It's not a godlike GM incapacitate, it's a poly/fear that trades duration for reliability. Making it another 10 second, easily breakable CC would just make the game boring and repetitive.

It is the bracket. The more people you bring the more specialized everyone becomes. More specialization means more reliance on the one OP ability that every class brings to the table. It is simply more efficient to have someone else fill the other role instead of relying on a class' inferior secondary abilities.

For example, priests. How much does a disc priest actually heal? The general answer is, not very much. They drop their instant heals/shields and then go back to burning and dispeling. The only time a priest does a cast time heal is when the main healer is CCed or the burst is incoming.

I don't disagree that the druid class is the best designed healer in terms of skill to power ratio, and paladins are the worst. In some ways being reliant on cyclone is better for the class, because at least it is a base ability, and not a talent (thus super pigeonholing people like MS, IB, etc).

I still think druids need to be able to function better in caster form, however, but you can't really make that without nerfing their shapeshifting somewhat, and I don't really know how to do that without breaking the class. Natural Perfection was a good start; I wonder if they have more changes in line along that regard.

Vulnerability in caster form justifies the HoT healing aspect of druids and the ability to bear shift to absorb insane amounts of melee damage. Add the snare-free-super-low-mana cost travel form to that and feral charge, and you have things pretty balanced. Buffing the druid ability in caster form would only make the class OP. Yes, druids dominate 2s and 3s and lack 5s, but it's a fair trade off if you ask me. There are whole talent trees being not viable in any arena bracket, how about try fixing that first? Enhancement and retribution anyone? What happened to the all-feared enhancement shamans back in 60s? What happened to FROST SHAWK? I really feel for all people who play these specs and experience the day to day frustration that arena is for them.
Apologies for going off-topic a bit, I got carried away for a moment due to all the cyclone/druid nerf calls. Cyclone is probably on the best balanced CC in game, can't break it, can't heal it, can't dispel it. It has cast time, it has shorter duration, it costs good mana for the amount of time you control the target. My list of broken mechanics in arena is as follows:
- Random stun effects: I have nothing against stuns, but make them more controlled than random, and I can react accordingly
- Fear pathing: BEM... The Horror!!! Dear god!
- Healing reduction effects: Yes, I'm serious. MS, Wound Poison, Aimed. They should've never been added to the game in the first place. Imagine the arena game without these effects, I feel it'd be a lot more fun and place some underrepresented classes a bit higher in the brackets.

Just to comment on this, my problem with it is that Blizzard needs to be consistent. Either they are balancing PvP around 5s, in which case druids need buffs to be more competitive (as do rogues), or they are not. Balancing some classes for 2s and 3s and others for 5s is just silly.

And like everything else, they are glacially slow about changing things even when there is pretty solid data to support it. I generally admire their philosophy of patience, but when you have large cash prize tournaments floating around that further highlight the inconsistencies and imbalances of your system, I don't think it is fair to your players to just lie back and wait.

I couldn't agree more. Although they said they are balancing around 5s, if a class performs outstandingly in 2s and 3s, they're just being silent about it and do nothing. The seriousness of arena game play and blizzard's awareness about it seem to be on a different wave length.

I think these are only a problem in that it makes classes without them practically useless. I mean, I hate trying to heal someone with MS on them, but just because something makes my life hard doesn't mean it's unbalanced. What I do consider broken is that any physical damage class without a healing reduction effect (Ret Paladin, Feral Druid, Enhancement Shaman) really only become an acceptable addition to a team when you already have the healing reduction effect covered by another class.