As an aside, Touraments seem to want to focus on 2v2 and 3v3's, where the action is a bit easier to follow and comment on. Even though Blizz balances for 5s.

Not that Tournaments are the end all, be all for Blizz by any stretch. In fact, I really have no clue where Blizz wants to go with tournaments, if it is a PR thing, or what. It does look like Blizz is willing to put some money into them, keep them going and try to use them as an advertising base, such as the Dell tournament this last weekend and Dreamhack before it.

I think the way Blizz balances on 5s and the way things stand, the tournaments focusing on 2s and 3s have sort of back fired. I have read a majority of negative posts around the boards commenting on the tournaments; about how imbalanced 2s and 3s are, how cookie cutter they can be at times, and how frustrating they can be when a win or a loss is because of counter comping and not skill (though skill obviously plays a role, I recognize that, but the opposite is still true at times too).

Anyway, I am curious where Blizz keeps their focus in the future, if they give up on tournaments or what. Perhaps there are a lot of casuals who would rather Blizz balance or try to balance for smaller scale PvP, if the 2v2 participation numbers are any clue. Maybe that will influence Blizz. Who knows.

Although not only about arenas, I have only had my own biased opinion regarding sheep and would love to hear from some of you other class pros what you think about it.

Given the normalization of all CC's (for the most part), I have a problem with sheep still healing the target. I would rather have an "immune" effect while the person is sheeped than have it actually heal them (to prevent Pyro->sheep->Pyro->sheep->Fireball+PoM/Pyro)...

I noticed in the WoW mage forums that this was an overwhelming request by most mages as a #1 issue they had (including myself). Just hoping for some insight from more intelligent players.


Apologies in advance if this should be in another thread.

An equally big deal is magic dispel. The reason that druids are virtually never used as first healer in 5v5 (outside of gib teams who usually have a shadow priest) is that above all, dispel must be covered. No way around it. A team without dispel is at a huge disadvantage and is unlikely to be able to compete. My team has only one defensive dispel, and the only reason that it does not hurt us that much is that the priest is generally focus fired and not CCed anyway.

Currently, magic is king and all other debuffs are second class citizens.

Onto a different topic, an issue that needs to be addressed is burst damage. If you watch the dreamhack games, there were several where someone died in under three seconds to Pandemic's PMR. We had a 5v5 against a three DPS team where our shaman took 13k damage in under two seconds. Gib teams are not very strong anymore due to mechanics changes, but there are many teams that can pull out that kind of burst maybe not reliably but often enough to win the games they should have lost otherwise. A fully geared character should not go down that fast as it is virtually impossible to react.

2nded. Either they need to give an MS-like effect to every meele-centric spec (say a -20% healing debuff on stormstrike) or nerf the current versions slightly.

No.

This would just turn all melee into boring clones.

There needs to be some form of differentiation and specific abilities given to specific classes.

Enhancement shamans, ret pallies, and feral druids are all hybrids. Pure physical dps classes SHOULD have a significant advantage over them.

Classes need to have specific, powerful and defining skills or 5v5 simply becomes "grab 4 others and queue".

Look at ele shamans and shadow priests. They're caster DPS just like mages and warlocks, why don't they get a spammable CC? What about healers, should we give paladins and shamans a bevvy of instant heals to help them avoid spell lock? Then we'd need to druids and priests more armour of course. Eventually you'd end up with 3 classes in the game - melee, ranged, and healer.

Regarding nerfing the current iterations of healing debuffs, I don't think this is necessary. If it was done, the nerfs would have to be miniscule. They're already absolutely required to kill most targets in 5v5, and even then they need to be co-ordinated with CC. Nerfing them would mean that you essentially wouldn't be able to kill a target while their healers still had mana, which would essentially make drain teams even more prevalent, and eventually you'd get to the point where people were asking for every DPS class to have a mana drain, much like the healing debuffs now.

I don't know how anyone could possibly enjoy watching a 5v5 game over a smaller bracket. You would have to pause it and rewind it about 100 times, switch point of views dozens of times, to actually appreciate whats going on. And thats the only way it would be exciting to watch.

You have an interesting point, but I think those particular comparisons are problematic. Elemental shamans have the best burst DPS in the game, and thus are a staple on arena teams. The three melee specs you described offer nothing unique at all and are thus almost never seen. Shadow priests are totally reliant upon a UA warlock in 5s and are thusly also not popular.

Difference between classes is the spice of the game, to be sure, but it also creates glaring and crippling imbalances. Paladin/shaman vulnerability to spell lock makes them all but useless on serious 2s and 3s teams, for example, while druid reliance upon slow incoming damage and kiting/mobility makes them similarly weak in 5s. The classes are not only different, but they aren't equal at all. There has to be a happy medium where each class can bring a different flavor but still be useful.

Hybridity actually is worth a lot. The Feral druid cannot switch mid fight to heal, but he can switch pre-fight between tanking and DPSing, and that gets him a slot on the raid any day in my opinion. Other hybrids have abilities that make them very desirable on min/maxxed raids. You may not need more than one of each hybrid's DPS spec, but you do need multiple hybrids in general because their abilities buff groups as well as entire raids. It is rather balanced in PvE right now, and that's why you see most PvE'ers crying anytime something changes due to PvP. I think it is less about Hybrids being useless, and more about melee versions of hybrids being useless, because for every hybrid their ranged and/or healer versions are very desirable. Elemental Shaman have no CC, but they have very large damage and they can actually toss out some decent heals in a pinch. Boomkins have very good CC, can be fairly bursty, and can off heal equally well. Paladins really only have Holy, and even though Ret was buffed it is still not as good as Holy simply because Holy Paladins are far tougher to kill and bring the exact same utility on top of healing. I think this is the most important piece of the puzzle - the melee version of Hybrids have the exact same Utility as the caster/healer versions. Thus there is no reason to bring a melee since you can get the same utility out of a caster, and casters generally have much more difficult damage to control. The Paladin's melee bubble does not affect spells, you do not have to be in someone's face so getting snared means almost nothing unless you need to get away from someone, and the majority of classes have some form of snare. Because of this, you need a *lot* of timers to burn in order to stay on casters effectively, and the only classes that have those timers are Warriors and Rogues. The more you restrict snares the less you need timers to deal with them (and as such can begin to nerf the timers back as well).

I think melee in general needs to be looked at for Arenas. Having intercept on a 15 second timer and spammable snares for both Rogues and Warriors and Healing debuffs should not be necessary to set foot in an Arena as a melee. If the Dichotomy of melee vs. ranged was more balanced as a whole and did not rely on a "War of Timers" as it were, you would see more Melee hybrids being viable. On the other hand if you give melee hybrids access to something caster hybrids are not, it may make them desirable enough to bring along. The only problem becomes that they may become more desirable than warriors/rogues if they start getting healing debuffs, or if you give them something else very powerful they may just flip things to where their caster versions are no longer desirable.

That's exactly the point I was making. A shadow priest with spammable CC would be imbalanced. A paladin with a selection of hots would be imbalanced. Balance revolves around classes having unique roles. What needs to be changed are the classes' abilities to perform those roles, not the roles themselves.

That's all I was saying. I wasn't suggesting giving all melee healing debuffs, or all healers PW:S, or all casters fear etc.

I do agree that, in an ideal world, it would be great if enhancement shamans / ret pallies / feral druids could make viable additions to teams that already have a warrior / rogue / hunter by bringing a unique ability that helped create synergy.

As it is, however, this isn't really possible unless you start making raid-sized arena brackets, where you can have full melee groups and full caster groups etc (buffing hybrids' ability to buff their group to make them viable in arena, where they'd be buffing 1-2 people, would of course unbalance PvE).

Fear really shouldn't send me across the map at run speed or god forbid im feared while sprinting. At least polymorph keeps you in a certain area.

I just recieved a full duration priest fear while a rogue was beating on me and a mage bursting on me. I went from 100% to 10% in the space of one fear (died right after since the mage imp cs'd me right as the fear wore off). Not only did it stop me from defending myself, but it also brought me into LOS of the mage in the first place. I can't trinket that fear because I should have broken out of that and there'll be an unbreakable kidney shot waiting for me once I get out if I do blow the trinket. We faced this team right after and beat them so I'd say we had a fair shot at beating them if that freakish fear hadn't gotten me killed. It's not a big deal in the end, they took ~15 from us, we then took ~15 from them, and really they were a strong enough team that they might have won anyway. But it shouldn't happen that I die to random stuff because it's 1) unfair 2) not fun 3) pointless.

Is anyone in the "random is fine" camp going to defend that random fear death as adding anything to the game?

My personal favorite in arenas, especially blade's edge: you can't blink in certain places, you blink back where you started. Lord knows you can charge/shadowstep wherever you want.

You're talking about two different things, losing because of a spell resist isn't as bad even it's annoying the entire game is based on random chance, however losing because you got feared from 100% -> 10% or you spend 7-8 seconds being stun locked by a Warrior is the kind of random chance that shouldn't be their for arenas.

This was brought up in another thread, It's far more useful for everyone including Warlocks/Priests if Fear has some form of consistency instead of a chance it'll break as soon as you cast it, or a chance that it'll last the full duration even if you do 50%+ of their health.

Serennia does a pretty good job of bring up common problems in his blog Playing to Win: To What Extent? from Endless Rage | GAMERIOT

I had never thought about the warlock summon trick, I can see this as game breaking if someone can get out of combat and get away to drink/bandage/avoid focus.

The heal and drink is something else that I never really thought about. I have seen people do it but I haven't done it or seen my teammates do it.

I use the heal+drink all the time, it's pretty huge really. I never used the drink+sit macro exploit though as it felt wrong to me. I'd have a hard time explaining why one is wrong and one is fine, but in my mind the division is quite clear.

You're not suppose to be able to drink after you've taken damage because it puts you back into combat and you stand up so a drink + sit macro is pretty clearly getting around that mechanic, theirs no mechanic you're getting around with healing + drinking you have a 0.3s-0.5s window before you enter combat that you can take advantage of.

Randomness to a certain point is fine, but fears are the only ability right now that can change the outcome of the match based on where/how far you run or how much damage it takes to break, given the only thing that stops you from spamming fear is DR the random factor comes into play more often then say a Warrior who crits you 4 times in a row while you're stunned by a Rogue or Paladin.

I said this in my last post, while I don't like random chance to a certain extent it's fine, but that doesn't mean it can be used as an excuse to leave every ability as is.

Or a melee class dedicated to "locking down" the warlock, judicious use of trinkets, LoS'ing (not possible with every class, I realise), having a shaman with a finger hovering over the tremor totem button, a priest / pally ready to cleanse it, etc etc etc. If fear really is that powerful that it swings games then the simply answer is that you'll need to alter your strategy to focus on countering it.

Oh yeah, I'm not trying to say that these abilities are balanced or perfectly fine as they are now. I'm just saying that normalising them and removing all randomness so that the overall average effect is condensed into a predictable, reliable, and unchanging constant is a bad idea.

Maybe mace stun chance should be lowered, maybe it should change into an immobilisation effect, maybe it should have a silent X second cooldown, etc. That's all fine, but the randomness it adds is an important part of the game.

Breaking after X damage is mostly an example, can always be a range just shouldn't be a range of between 5 damage to 10,000 damage before it breaks, instead of removing the running component make it run you 1-5 yards away from the Warlock even if you have Sprint up and so on.

The closet example I can think of is the tornado's in Nagrand during S1 where you take the outcome of the match out of the hands of the player and make it completely based off luck.

I think the big distinction here is how easy something is to stop: With the sit-spam macro, there wasn't a whole lot you could do to stop someone if they really wanted to drink, unless you had some form of stun/CC ready to go. On the other hand, if someone does a heal/drink all it takes is one shot, and I force someone out of drinking.

This could be expanded to other areas too: Pets despawning in lordaeron is probably a flawed game mechanic, but if the player follows you(which he will, unless he's CC'ed/rooted), this doesn't happen, and he has the ability to recall his pet, so this in many ways is more of a "creative use of game mechanics". On the other hand, someone running to an area where pets/melee players simply can't get to, tends toward the abusive category.

Basically what I'm getting at - while there are certainly shades of gray here, a major distinction can be drawn between situations where a player can counter what their opponent is doing(i.e. hit someone who's tried to heal/drink to keep them to 0/1 mana ticks) and things that there's really not much of a counter to(going somewhere a larger character can't get to due to geometry, or sit-spamming). I think from players' perspective, while a mechanic may be annoying, if they have the *opportunity* to stop it it's one thing, but if a game flaw is something they have little/no way of preventing/countering, is when it really becomes infuriating.

My understanding of the pets in lordaeron thing was that it wasn't a bug at all, simply game mechanics and the size of the arena. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I may be, it's been a while since I played hunter), but pets should despawn when they get too far from their owner right?

When I heard people calling it a bug, I simply assumed that RoL wasn't big enough for this to happen, and that other factors (beyond simply distance) were forcing the despawn. I'm also fairly sure I've despawned a pet in Nagrand.

Regardless of its bugged / intended status, I do think it's a good way to counter the "fire and forget" mentality that surrounds pets a lot of the time.

From the tomb to outside of the entrances it's around 40 yards, pets despawn (I believe) if they're farther then 100 yards from the owner, so if the Hunter is camping the entrance and you run to the very back of the other one I could see pets despawning. I'm sure it's possible to despawn pets in Blade's Edge and Nagrand, but due to the nature and design of the map it's not a rare occurrence.