For arena balance purposes all spells should require the same facing component. Movement is a huge factor in arena play. Instant cast spells that lack the facing requirement have a significant arena advantage that has nothing to do with the spells effect.
I don't think balancing around you being oblivious to what's going on makes much sense. You know if there's a Shaman and Priest on the other team that you're going to see some Bloodlusted Mana Burns, so you should be positioning yourself accordingly so your mana pool doesn't get vaporized as soon as Bloodlust goes up, and keeping the Priest as your focus target so you can see his burns casting.
I'd say Mana Burn is infinitely less retarded than Drain Mana - you can LoS a Mana Burn to avoid it, but once a Drain Mana starts channeling you can't avoid it short of dumping mana into cleansing/form shifting/earth shocking. I play a Warlock and I abuse draining through LoS objects as much as possible, but I fully realize how absurd it is.
What he is saying is that Mana burn comes faster and at a fairly low opportunity cost compared to any other mana draining skill in the game. I do not think increasing the cast time would be fair, but I do think it needs some changes to bring it in line with other mana drains. In 2 seconds a Priest can drain close to the same amount that a Hunter can, but he has to use a 15 second cooldown that is dispellable and requires a specific low damage pet to protect it. Warlocks have a channeled spell that is much easier to interupt and drains mana at a much slower rate. It is not about paying attention, it is about one spell being better than the others by a landslide.
I think the real mechanic is LoS. Blizz designed all these fun/cool arena maps with things to hide behind, and in reaction seems to be making sweeping changes because of the arena style of play (lots of things to hide behind) that affect non-arena (often little or nothing to hide behind).
This just doesn't work! Either we need to change one pvp type to match the other, but I really don't see blizz throwing random poles all over the place for us to hide behind. I don't really see blizz making separate rule sets for arena and non arena, though they were able to make 20min cooldowns not work. Perhaps blizz could turn certain changes into arena-only or everywhere-else only, but I'd guess they will just continue to care about their golden 5v5 (which not even everyone plays, and those who do play likely spend an hour or less a week actually in the arena) and to hell with the other 98% of the time we spend not in arenas.
For arena balance purposes all spells should require the same facing component. Movement is a huge factor in arena play. Instant cast spells that lack the facing requirement have a significant arena advantage that has nothing to do with the spells effect.
I don't get it, whats the point in that? It's not very hard for someone who moves with a mouse to turn around for a second, cast a spell then turn back around Hunters do it all the time if you're trying to Arcane Shot or Concussion Shot while moving.
Here's one I forgot: Pets. I hate their impact on arena at present due to pushback and keeping people in combat. A pet is supposed to add damage to the hunter/warlock and to add utility for the warlock. A felhunter is basically devour and spell lock on a stick and maybe some minor damage. But because of the side-effect of something hitting people it is also a 2nd curse of tongues and an in-combat debuff. Everyone has tried to cast a spell without pushback resistance while CoT and a pet was on them, and everyone learnt not to do it a second time because you're never going to cast that spell. Every time people ask for buffed pet survivability I cringe because while I think that yes, pets are too easy to kill, I also LIKE that they are easy to kill because they're currently broken to my mind.
If they could somehow rig a way for pet attacks to not cause pushback and not keep you in combat I'd be a happy man.
I'm sorry, but if your team is not able to kill a 6k health, zero resilience pet then I do not know what you are doing wrong. Without their pet, Hunters are very naked. Warlocks might not be quite as naked, but taking 20% more damage for soul link locks when their pet dies is a pretty big deal. Granted they can summon a Void Walker after, but that just means you no longer have to deal with a buff eating, spell locking pet.
I think the pet most people have the biggest problem with is Felhunters. To be honest, I think they are completely overpowered given their abilities, but they are squishy enough to handle fairly easily.
I don't get it, whats the point in that? It's not very hard for someone who moves with a mouse to turn around for a second, cast a spell then turn back around Hunters do it all the time if you're trying to Arcane Shot or Concussion Shot while moving.
At least that takes a little more skill than running away and doing a full compliment of dots. It at least distinguishes hunters with some decent skill from those who can't jump shoot.
I'm sorry, but if your team is not able to kill a 6k health, zero resilience pet then I do not know what you are doing wrong. Without their pet, Hunters are very naked. Warlocks might not be quite as naked, but taking 20% more damage for soul link locks when their pet dies is a pretty big deal. Granted they can summon a Void Walker after, but that just means you no longer have to deal with a buff eating, spell locking pet.
I think the pet most people have the biggest problem with is Felhunters. To be honest, I think they are completely overpowered given their abilities, but they are squishy enough to handle fairly easily.
I think the point of the post was that if you buffed pets health/resil then they would be a lot harder to kill, and it would make them overpowerd. Knockback and keeping in combat is a huge advantage especially in smaller brakets that many times turn into mana wars. If your side does not have a pet you are at a disadvantage. If that pet gets more survivability that disadvantage increases.
On the other hand think how different fighting a mage with ice/molten armour to fighting one without either is. Mages and locks are clearly balanced around these armours being up, so having them so easily dispelled doesn't really make sense. I'd almost go as far as to say they should be made similar to paladin auras, or at least into undispellable buffs akin to battle shout.
I'm not saying this is a good idea for buffs like AI, MOTW, of PWF which are castable on other people, but for important self buffs it almost seems ridiculous that they are so easily removed.
Regarding hunters and warriors having no buffs, battleshout/commanding shout and true shot aura/aspect of the x are hardly trivial buffs and they are all undispellable already - and 3 out of 4 are actually group buffs.
edit: In fact I'd love to hear the justification on why hunters can dispel but aspect of the hawk/trueshot are both impossible to remove. Not only this but hunters can dispel for 135 mana at level 70, cheaper than any other class as far as I know. I don't mean to pick on hunters here but this seems like a GLARING inconsistency to me.
Where are you getting 135 mana from? The ability costs 230. It also has a cooldown, which other dispels do not have, and was clearly an attempt to allow Hunters more viable line-ups that may not have been previously available. Whether this works or not, time will tell, but I do not think this was the right way to address Hunter issues - which is an entirely different topic that I will not get into right now. Suffice it to say I really do not believe Arcane shot is overpowered, I believe all this back lash is more about people who hated Hunters pre-TBC when they were on top of the PvP scene and are ecstatic that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel these days. What is completely overpowered is a dispel that can be spammed on a whim.
Now, as for Aspects, they always have been aura type buffs because Hunters are not balanced without their aspects up. Trueshot Aura was changed because MM Hunters are not balanced with out it. Do you have any idea how pathetic a Hunter's damage is without the above mentioned talents? They combine for close to 300 AP which is around 15% of a Hunter's total AP in arena gear. For a warrior Battle Shout is a similar number, but closer to 20% of their total AP. That is no trivial number. Find me any other class that would lose that much damage by having their self-buffs purged. Should we complain about the Tree of Life aura not being purgable? After all, it is a healing buff.
All Aura type buffs fall into the same category of not being dispellable. Group cast buffs and the like have always been dispellable. As I said in an earlier post, talents that are specced for should have a lot more dispel protection, and some should not even be dispellable at all, but pointing at other classes and whining will get you no where.
I'm sorry, but if your team is not able to kill a 6k health, zero resilience pet then I do not know what you are doing wrong. Without their pet, Hunters are very naked. Warlocks might not be quite as naked, but taking 20% more damage for soul link locks when their pet dies is a pretty big deal. Granted they can summon a Void Walker after, but that just means you no longer have to deal with a buff eating, spell locking pet.
I think the pet most people have the biggest problem with is Felhunters. To be honest, I think they are completely overpowered given their abilities, but they are squishy enough to handle fairly easily.
For me, the single biggest issue I have with pets that they continue to chase you, even after you vanished or restealthed.
If I have dropped combat completely and restealth, a pet should not still be chasing me.
I think the point of the post was that if you buffed pets health/resil then they would be a lot harder to kill, and it would make them overpowerd. Knockback and keeping in combat is a huge advantage especially in smaller brakets that many times turn into mana wars. If your side does not have a pet you are at a disadvantage. If that pet gets more survivability that disadvantage increases.
I think the biggest issue is that everyone lumps all pets together. Hunter pets have very little utility and are more difficult to resummon than Warlock pets. In 2's and 3's a Hunter pet is annoying at best while a Warlock pet has the ability to change the entire fight. Given that context, buffing a Warlock pet with survivability would overpower them to ridiculous levels, but buffing a Hunter pet does not really do all that much aside from forcing people to deal with an annoyance. Plus most classes that have to worry about pushback coming from Hunter pets have talents, gear, or spells that let them resist the majority of pushback.
I think the biggest issue is that everyone lumps all pets together. Hunter pets have very little utility and are more difficult to resummon than Warlock pets. In 2's and 3's a Hunter pet is annoying at best while a Warlock pet has the ability to change the entire fight. Given that context, buffing a Warlock pet with survivability would overpower them to ridiculous levels, but buffing a Hunter pet does not really do all that much aside from forcing people to deal with an annoyance. Plus most classes that have to worry about pushback coming from Hunter pets have talents, gear, or spells that let them resist the majority of pushback.
All form of pets can change the fight dramatically just from pushback when conc aura isn't available and the fact that a drain based team can win solely based on the fact that a pet is able to prevent a healer from drinking while the other team is free to drink whenever they want (unless of course, you're playing with a pet yourself).
Felhunters and to a certain extent Felguards are a bit silly, the idea that you can stick a Felhunter on a healer and if you know how to micro manage pets it's like having an additional player sitting on them makes no sense balance wise, along with being able to devour Magic buffs that you can just spam it when it's up.
Last edited by Shadowed : 12/04/07 at 8:28 PM.
Reason: Typing out the post while doing heroics was bad
Blind's range needs to be increased considering its cooldown.
Enhancement shaman need intercept, blink, sprint or something of that sort.
Feral Druids need a slow and any form of utility, at all (purge, stun, MS... something)
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I agree Sadris, except it needs to be deep into feral so you can't hybrid spec and get it and be an effective healer. I'm not sure about blind though, maybe a bit farther? The CD isn't really that long considering what it does.
Originally Posted by Sebudai
Addons aren't a crutch, they're tools to be abused by skilled players to increase performance. Like a carpenter using a hammer, a fisherman using a lure, or Xi using curse words.
Yes cyclone has a cast time, but it's also longer ranged and you can't BoP it off. And it has no cooldown.
I dont even REALLY like rogue intercept (ShS) - giving every melee class the same abilities (snares and anti-snares) makes the game boring, no?
Rogues are very prone to snares, but have a good one themselves. Druids are virtually immune but have none, and have 30% increased base movement speed in cat form. Do you see...?
I spec feral for heroics and farming when I'm not in arena, and as such do most world PvP as feral (although in BGs I'll be running around as feral spec in healing gear, which is actually heaps of fun, in-combat weapon swapping makes me feel really ... hybridy). The changes to shifting have made a HUGE impact on my game. I use feral charge a LOT now, and really I don't feel the need for a snare as much, since I have an intercept with a 4 second root on a 15 second cooldown which I can use after a single button press.
The only times I feel really gimped are vs healers with high resilience that just spam heal themselves. I have no dispel and no healing debuff, so I'm pretty much reduced to sitting there going through DPS cycles slowly dying to consecrate / thorns / reflective shield / searing totem, hoping that a rogue comes along. Against low-res healers, I use FB and eventually the crits overwhelm them, but PvP-geared healers are impossible for me to solo. Of course, this may be different with equal gear (my feral set is 80% blue), but as it is, if I wanted to make feral a much more viable arena spec I'd give them either a healing debuff or dispel, remove all int from their gear and add some extra -mana cost to shapeshifting talents that stack with the one in the resto tree in deep feral or something. Essentially try to make feral limited almost exclusively to bear/cat forms, but at the same time try to give them more power in these forms. Of course, this would pretty much make them rogue / warrior clones, which is probably why I'm not a Blizzard dev!
I do think deep feral could use some solid tweaks for PvP though. Either increase feral's healing ability with buffs to nurturing instinct and more 2T5 sorts of abilites, or reduce caster form utility significantly (most likely through a tiny mana pool) and trade that for cat/bear utility.
At least that takes a little more skill than running away and doing a full compliment of dots. It at least distinguishes hunters with some decent skill from those who can't jump shoot.
Jump shoot is not a skill, its for people who don't know that strafing equals facing the player. I can just run away from a target strafing (in almost a straight line) spamming icelance, Pretty much the same way you didn't have to jump/aggro skill tank ossirian (think he was called that) if you proper strafed where you could hit him, and not get dazed.
Managing that just barely less than 90 degree angle is, again, more difficult than running straight away from someone. It requires slight heading adjustments based on the location of your target, and if you turn too fast, they overtake you.
The non-direction nature of warlock spells increases the ease of piller humping, dotting up multiple targets, and doing damage while running away. Imagine a 5v5 where a warlock had to find the right facing to cast CoT on multiple healers.
I have a problem with armor penetration, especially since there was no commensurate armor increase on the cloth sets. Melee already ripped cloth apart; with armor penetration, they do it that much faster. This is already pushing the already-unbalanced 2s metagame more in the direction of Rogue/x and Warrior/x. As the season goes on, this effect will become much more pronounced. Expect a lot of complaints from casters who still have zero armor against melee wearing the best defensive gear they have. What's the point of having armor in the first place if every physical class can remove it all?
I have a problem with general class balance on two fronts: Warriors/Rogues and Warlocks/Shadow Priests. Warriors and Rogues perform much the same function, but Warriors have more sustainability and survivability, while Rogues have somewhat more burst. Warriors also happen to be a great counter for Rogues. This equates to Warriors being chosen over Rogues in 5s for any non-burst matrix. The same goes for Warlocks and Shadow Priests: they perform much the same function, but Warlocks have much, much, much more sustainability and survivability, while Shadow Priests have somewhat more burst. Shadow Priests are also unplayable in 5s outside of a four-dps setup.
I have a problem with the hassle and expense of Arena play. Group buffs should not require reagents during the preparation period. Durability loss should be lessened or removed. Water, the biggest hassle of them all - in terms of cost, inventory space, where you have to go to get it, and the sheer amount of it that every healer is forced to use - should be available as a non-consumable "Flask of Endless Arena Water" with a one-time honor and gold cost.
I have a problem with armor penetration, especially since there was no commensurate armor increase on the cloth sets. Melee already ripped cloth apart; with armor penetration, they do it that much faster. This is already pushing the already-unbalanced 2s metagame more in the direction of Rogue/x and Warrior/x. As the season goes on, this effect will become much more pronounced. Expect a lot of complaints from casters who still have zero armor against melee wearing the best defensive gear they have. What's the point of having armor in the first place if every physical class can remove it all?
I have a problem with general class balance on two fronts: Warriors/Rogues and Warlocks/Shadow Priests. Warriors and Rogues perform much the same function, but Warriors have more sustainability and survivability, while Rogues have somewhat more burst. Warriors also happen to be a great counter for Rogues. This equates to Warriors being chosen over Rogues in 5s for any non-burst matrix. The same goes for Warlocks and Shadow Priests: they perform much the same function, but Warlocks have much, much, much more sustainability and survivability, while Shadow Priests have somewhat more burst. Shadow Priests are also unplayable in 5s outside of a four-dps setup.
I have a problem with the hassle and expense of Arena play. Group buffs should not require reagents during the preparation period. Durability loss should be lessened or removed. Water, the biggest hassle of them all - in terms of cost, inventory space, where you have to go to get it, and the sheer amount of it that every healer is forced to use - should be available as a non-consumable "Flask of Endless Arena Water" with a one-time honor and gold cost.
There's more; I'll come back later.
I'm going to go ahead and agree with everything you said. As someone who plays both a warrior and warlock, I find that armor penetration is hilariously overpowered in comparison to the comparable "buff" to caster dps S3 sets (spell penetration???). This is less of an issue for Paladins and Shaman wearing full S2/S3, but with X sunders and passive 500~ APr, I can bring almost any cloth caster (and any non-bear/oomkin druid) to zero effective armor with ease, and sustain that with little effort. I'm not sure how to fix this, but it's definitely an issue that should be addressed in some form.
As for arena consumeables, they should just go ahead and stick a mage table in every starting area in my opinion. And getting rid of the reagent costs during prep-time and BG prep time would make the game better from the standpoint of "less frustration, greater payout". I don't think this is akin to asking for reagentless buffs everywhere in game, but in situations where people are liable to die on a per-minute basis, I think it's reasonable to allow buffs to NOT cost reagents.
Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.
I have a problem with general class balance on two fronts: Warriors/Rogues and Warlocks/Shadow Priests. Warriors and Rogues perform much the same function, but Warriors have more sustainability and survivability, while Rogues have somewhat more burst. Warriors also happen to be a great counter for Rogues. This equates to Warriors being chosen over Rogues in 5s for any non-burst matrix. The same goes for Warlocks and Shadow Priests: they perform much the same function, but Warlocks have much, much, much more sustainability and survivability, while Shadow Priests have somewhat more burst. Shadow Priests are also unplayable in 5s outside of a four-dps setup.
The biggest issue shadow priests are going to face as far as arena changes go is that Disc priests are a vital component in almost every 5v5 setup now, and many 3s and 2s setups, so they don't really have a pressing reason to improve the performance of shadow priests in 5s since the class is so well represented.
12/04/07, 6:40 PM
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