Yea, that's right. I only post from the perspective I understand, and that's as a class that's been very weak in pvp for a couple of years now. Fear absolutely wrecks me if I don't mitigate it. Many changes (more than 3 if memory serves) were made to the break-on-damage aspect of fear, each attempting to reduce the amount of damage people would take while feared. I have no idea where it started or where it is now (I don't believe they ever revealed the % of health you could lose, at max, before fear broke), but at the end of TBC I could be fear raped by 50% of my health easily - and then fought a warlock straight up with him able to drain my health as fast as I could damage him or heal myself. Doesn't mean the warlock was broken, maybe just I was.

But I wasn't ignoring priests in my statement. Are priests really so weak that we need to give them a 10 second duration, point-blank AE, instant cast CC once every minute that cannot be countered except by a trinket? Anti-fear tools aren't immediate, after all. If you're using fear as a peel, you'll still get some separation based on the direct the target runs, his speed, the delay for a tremor totem pulse, the delay in trinket/wotf, or delay in dispell. Are priests significantly weaker than others in their class (healers) that they need an AE CC ability only counterable by a trinket?

Priests are probably facing the same problems and challenges as every other non-paladin healer in arenas right now. I'm not sure a priest-specific fix is required, but rather a broad fix. That, and fear is just a really strong ability. If the counters were removed, it's strength would have to be lessened (like poly, break on damage, w/e).

It should still be dispellable - make it root the target in place like snowy suggested for all I care, all I want is something that gets me some breathing room when a rogue/feral druid jump on me since cloth armor doesn't really do the trick and 'zerg the cloth' is a lame lame lame lame arena strategy that shouldn't be viable at any rating.

I'd like the option to use fear purely as a defensive measure so a melee without any support cannot zerg a warlock or a priest.

I really think all CC (and I include Silence) should break after a set percent of damage. Stunlocks are never fun for the other party. Have all CC share DRs with each other and tone damage back down, and arena might be fun again. Maybe it's my class, or the odd comps I play, but even when I win, I don't feel good about. I have more success mashing damage rather than trying any clever kiting, target switching or anything.

I dunno, I still feel damn good everytime my enhance/resto druid team beats DK+dps or x/paladin or pick 2 of 3 ret/rog/mage.

This is a great idea and one I have thought about for a long time and still wonder why Blizz don't implement it. The running component of Fear is just too random for both PvE and PvP. How many times have you been feared into a fire (Archimonde anyone?), feared out of LoS/range of your healer and don't get me started on fears on ring of valor.

The only downside I see is that fears can be used by priests/locks to give some range and breathing space when used defensively. Removing the running component could mean it doesn't provide the same defensive bonus.

Another alternative is to remove the RNG element to the running without removing the running. Have fear automatically make them run in the direction which moves them away from you fastest. When they're standing on you, it's still random, but if there's a melee near you, he does a 180 and runs straight away, and if you pick a direction to run they run the opposite direction.

I like the idea of the spec, especially with Barkskin active, but to lose ToL and imp ToL is gonna hurt regardless. If only it was a tier lower

You know priests have had higher AC levels than rogues since Molten Core, right?

Would have issues when you come to cliffs/falls. i.e. Either force them off the bridge or make them stay still effectively being as broken as blink is.

Stuns are not crowd control. They are stuns. I really think people should just stop asking for stuns to be removed or nerfed into uselessness.

What CC's don't allow damage at all? Saps, Traps, Repe.,Sheep, int shout

What CC's allow (~6 seconds of, or drastically increase) damage? Fear, Stuns (for your sake), Hex, frost nova, entangling roots

Thats 5 for 5 including stuns. Seems pretty even to me. Lets not bring snares into this?

Stuns negate all avoidance just as much as fear, many fears last as long as many stuns while doing full damage. Don't try to say otherwise.

Using defensive abilities offensively, in the case of well timed stuns, pali bubbles etc just increase mechanic and strategic variables for better and more complicated play. I'm sure you have feared a healer when your teams focus target was getting low. Do you really think stuns need that much of a change? Blizzard have already removed the real bad ones like the infamous "well timed mace stun bro", put Cheap Shot on painful DR, lessoned countless other CC effectiveness and nerfed CC combos into the ground.

Get more resilience and rogues will start slice and dicing again - I assure you. You'll only have to worry about KS being a spell interrupt then.

How is a stun different from a crowd control?

In the broadest sense of MMOs, a crowd control is something that removes some of your character's abilities for a limited duration. Stuns absolutely fall under this category. In WoW, the term crowd control is usually applied to something that completely removes control of your character. Again, stuns absolutely fall under this category.

So, again, how is a stun different from any other crowd control except that you can dump unlimited damage into the person who is stunned without it breaking (unless you're arguing that stuns are different BECAUSE they have no damage cap, in which case it looks pretty ridiculous)? Fear was changed in case you missed that - there is an actual limit on how much damage can be done during a fear, whereas the only limiting factor on stuns is the damage output of the people targeting the person who has been stunned.

Aside from numerous other problems with your entire post, classes with stuns are in a very dominant position in arena, and classes with fear are not. We just had a page and a half describing why fear is an incredibly weak CC at the moment. Stuns are not (and yes, stuns are CC - anything that takes away control of your character is a CC). Besides, no one is advocating removing stuns or anything like that, but making players take less damage while their character is helpless (even if that applied to other things like fear) doesn't seem unreasonable at all, especially if they aren't willing to introduce a global damage nerf.

Quite simple really: Not nearly as many abilities break stuns. You don't dodge or parry during a stun, you can't move, and you take full damage. No other CC ability has all of those advantages. Why are we even discussing which CC's are better or not better, and why (Writhe) are you even trying to argue against stuns being the best, and more towards one of many? They just flat. out. are the best. Fear, while in theory more powerful than polymorph, just doesn't compare to stuns.


Stun damage reduction would go a long way to dealing with that, but some classes (rogues, rets) rely heavily on stuns to output a majority of their burst, whereas other classes just do it regardless (arcane, DK, warrior). That would need looking into.

Love this idea and have felt that way for years. I totally empathize with someone who is feared to death by a warlock, but the randomness of fear could easily be fixed with this suggestion.


The fear defensively is the only escape I have from a mutilate rogue. After I trinket the ks>fear>stone form and run for my life. Most of the time this doesn't even seem to work as the rogue is either undead or quick enough to trinket himself and get right back on me. If he catches up to me with the help of his teammates I am soon three-stacked with poisons in one global and vulnerable to any other stun/silence. Once your trinket is down you are done for without a good peel or bop.

To me deadly brew is just so game breaking and needs to be either deeper in the assassination tree or reworked some other way. The healing debuff, snare, and curse of tongues effect in one global is just too powerful. I feel for any priest that doesn't have stone form.

I don't mean to complain solely about rogues but db just puts a priest at such a disadvantage that I know any time is see a garotte or cheap shot debuff followed by a mutilate its going to be a short and painful arena.

I don't think armor is going to be a viable defensive option for cloth at least until they do something about armor penetration. Best case they can make a change that encourages different gearing, and more setting up for the kill, but ultimately it'll still be about the unstoppable melee train on the cloth-pinyata. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want armor to be my defense, and if I recall correctly a dev (semi-)recently stated that "if they're going to buff armor, they might as well give everyone plate anyway". It's certainly a contributing factor to high DPS, but any I don't think it'll be a viable fix.


As for crowd controls, I think what Lithose said a few pages ago still holds; In a high-damage environment crowd controls mean more, not less. Stuns are no more of a problem than they used to be, the problem is that once you're out of the stunlock the rogue uses CloS, and in the unlikely even that you're still standing when that is out, you've got MS, you're not moving and you can't cast anything - before you get kicked. Arena should be about managing your crowd controls, your cooldowns, the enemy's crowd control, the enemy's cooldowns and DR. Right now there's precious little actual management involved; You do it once, your opponent can't retaliate because you're immune (or he's dead) or you can easily get out of his counter. There's no DR kicking in, there's no effective peel.

I think nerfing stuns - or any other CC - before addressing the rampant damage is going to, in want of a better word, dumb down the game significantly. CC's should be powerful - when used appropriately, and appropriately does not mean HIT IT IF IT'S IN CLOTH.

Just to clarify, yes, this is accurate.

Frost Novas, Entangling Roots, Maim, Fear and Hex (I may be missing a few here) do not instantly break on damage, and are supposed to break once the target is dealt damage equal to a certain percentage of their maximum health.

I believe this is currently set to 30% of the target's max HP, based on the last thing I read about it during beta.

The [Glyph of Frost Nova] and [Glyph of Fear] corroborates this kind of behavior, but nothing in the game currently hints at what the base amount of breaking damage is.

what you just ignore is that hex lets you still move at normal speed and use for example totems or instahealtrinkets or battlemastertrinkets, frostnova and roots even let you heal or cast normally. While stunned you are unable to do anything... that is what makes stuns so OP at the moment

A huge part of problem with rogue stuns is what rogues can do when you are not stunned- evasion, dismantle, gouge, blind/sap, vanish, CloS, constant interrupts on casters etc. They just have too many tools that can be turned into a way to buy time until DR(or CD) on stuns wears off.

They also don't suffer from getting better gear like some other offensive CC. If you get better gear as a priest/lock then fear will break faster which negates the point of getting better gear. If a rogue gets better gear then it's all good- more damage, zero chance of stun breaking earlier.

Something needs to give.

Death and Decay cower has been totally removed.

I don't entirely agree with your statement that priest fear cannot be countered by other means. Taken quite literally, I suppose this statement is valid, however this does not take into consideration how easy it is to anticipate the fear and prepare for it accordingly. Disregading the fact that priest are less mobile than any other class (with a fairly short-range crowd control that is centralized at the player), when a priest is running at you, there shouldn't be a doubt in your mind what they are going to do - preemptive actions are in order.

This. Rogues have been routinely buffed with new and revamped "tools" that take away what originally were class weaknesses to the point that their only real current counters are equally overpowered classes (ret, DK). CloS. Dismantle. A much easier Blind. Etc. I simply do not understand the idea that a rogue, unlike every other class in the game, needs a way to beat anyone he comes across. This is a very old gripe about rogues, but it's pretty undeniably true, and has been undeniable true since ~ S2 and the original Cheat Death. It would be one thing if they realistically had to choose what to use, but they just use everything and deal extreme damage besides.

At some point, someone forgot the "glass" part of the glass cannon DPS class, and deeper talant trees allowed for blending talents that really were never supposed to go together. Everyone remembers the facerolling that was HARP.

That's not even touching the current issues of Mut damage, Shadowstep Ambushes for five digits or Deadly Brew.

A brute force fix would be putting Cloak of Shadows and Evasion on a shared cooldown - it's not supposed to be an offensive bubble - and either removing Dismantle completely or making it a 41+ in Combat and thus precluding either Mut or Shadowstep rogues from using it.

An idea I was tossing around in my head regarding dispell resistance and the annoyance of having multiple resists on a critical dispell versus how important some dispellable debuffs are to certain classes.. One solution could be to change dispell abilities so that instead of simply removing the (de)buff it reduces its duration by 100% of its max duration. Talents that now provide dispell resistance could then be changed to reduce the time lost to dispell abilities by a %.

Let's say Contagion is changed to reduce the effectiveness of dispells by 30% (instead of a 30% resist chance). The warlock casts Corruption (18s) on a target. It remains on the target for 2 seconds before dispelled. The dispel would normally reduce the duration by 18 seconds, effectively removing the debuff, but because of Contagion the dispell is reduced to only removing 70% of the duration, i.e 12.6 seconds.

So 18 seconds minus the 2 seconds that passed minus 12.6 seconds means the Corruption would stay on, but reduced to having 3.4 seconds remaining. The dispeller could then dispell again to cut another 12.6 seconds, leaving the dot in the negative and thus removing it completely, but then you'd have to weigh the cost of another GCD versus the danger caused by leaving the debuff on for the remaining time.


This is in line with how stun/fear resist talents were changed from a resist chance to a reduction in duration.

Too bad this would just mean that lifebloom blooms that much sooner. Nice change for Druids......but not one I see as needed.

I do like the general idea though.

I think a better question to ask is why were you in LOS of all 3 of them before the match even started? And before your partners could even touch them?

I'm not saying those classes aren't very strong, but shouldn't your mage/partners be out in front waiting to stop them getting to you? (And you should be out of LOS.) For instance, polymorph the DKs as he runs mounted towards your team, counter spell the Mage, and/or frost nova the DK and Ret pally. You still might lose, depending on the dispelling, but you shouldn't die in a single silence.

Yes, but they set that percent of your HP very, very high. It was a buff, fear breaks early LESS now. I think it would balance it a lot more if they lowered that percentage greatly, then nerfed the fear resist/break talents and skills.

Lifebloom already blooms when dispelled. This would actually delay the bloom over the current situation.

I like the idea though. You can't just remove all dispel resistance, there are too many classes that would be screwed with no dispel protections (similar to how Destro Warlocks are now). However, screwing people over just because they rolled bad and wasted 4 Abolish poisons/Cleanses on that Viper Sting isn't balanced either.