I actually changed a lot of my post, but at no time did I put words into your mouth, you went on the rant about hard counters, I was showing you that every other class has to deal with them...Why you think you have the right to be immune to them is beyond me, but your entire post tries to claim that tools were needed to counter a hard counter, when in fact many hard counters have become *worse* for most classes, not better.

Also, notice what you said, "higher chance"...meaning they might be more likely to beat you. Yet there are class comps which have *no chance* against most rogue comps because of the nature of rogues. I was up to 1750 and decided to do a few games with my fiance, figured it would be fine, she has 650 Resiliance but there was a problem, she is a priest..We won every game that did not have a rogue in it, rogues though killed her even through my peels. Obviously, then, I realized that for a warrior who can't peel like a rogue can, the only viable partner is...Paladins, because they can survive against..Rogues.

No class except the DK changes the landscape of 2v2 as much as a rogue does right now. It is soley because rogues that I can't even group with another healer aside from a paladin (BM hunters have something to do with it to, but at least they can be LoSd.)

Yeah, I'm not sure where you get that Rogues lost to Warriors for "over 2 years of TBC" but they stopped losing to them 1v1 around the time of HARP, and even before that there was 5-9 rupture kiting.

And Druid/War was by no means an instant loss for Priest/Rogue so I dunno what the fuck you're talking about.

It was pretty awful, you could only win if you outplayed them massively and your rogue was mutilate.

HARP got fixed in middle of TBC. Also nobody is talking about 1v1 duels... rupture kiting?

But please, let's not start a discussion whether warriors had upper hand on rogues or not. Tunnel visioning warriors was almost never a good tactic in arenas before wotlk without draining your healer out.

1) Hunger for blood - Bleed removal. Initially could dispell Mortal Strike and Hamstering as well without cooldown and no energy, but that was too overpowered.
2) Anesthetic Poison
3) Dismantle
4) UAdvantage
5) Riposte+6% parry
6) (much higher nature damage)

Are the anti-melee abilities added in wotlk and 3 of them at least are solely made as warrior counter in arenas. Seems like developers at least agree that warriors in 2v2 shouldn't be able to beat rogues most of the time, which was my answer to the initial post, as it was claimed that they should. I don't understand how it's so hard to catch this, as you could see this coming from the day new rogue talents and spells were announced. Even if they would just remove dismantle or mess with mutilate spec it pushes rogues into other specs and any other rogue spec is much, much more efficient against warriors in wotlk . You just haven't seen it yet.

It mainly had to do with the Druid being a better partner than a Priest, and not the Warrior countering the Rogue. Rogue/Priest vs Warrior/Paladin was much more even, just like Rogue/Druid vs Warrior/Druid was also fairly even.

As far as the current state of things, the scale has tipped so far in Rogues favor that makes me question anyone trying to defend them. Warriors are really frustrating to play and it's not something that can be immediately obvious, you need to play one or with one to understand why, otherwise all you can see is Bladestorm and 12k Execute crits. And I'm getting the impression that the devs are doing the latter, with the latest PTR change to fix SD burst (which I actually agree with) but without even acknowledging that Warriors have any issues at all.

So, wait..You're pointing to specific buffs and trying to garner developer intent from that?

Well, the developers allowed arms to lower its cool down on overpower to the GCD. Overpower is only ever going to get used more than once every 5 seconds vs rogues/ferals, obviously this means we were meant to destroy rogues/ferals?

The problem isn't warriors "should beat rogues all the time", understand, the problem right now is that a rogue can absolutely destroy a warrior and take very little damage while doing it, if played correctly. Considering your entire class is built to rip apart clothies, don't you think having the tools to destroy plate classes so completely is just a tiny bit overboard? I'm not advocating rogues be useless against other melee, but right now, a rogue opening on anyone but a DK, is almost a sure, 100% win for the rogue.

Now, granted, I'm going to say right here, rogues in 5v5 actually need help..But dismantle is such a "duel" oriented ability that its almost funny..It doesn't help them at all where they needed it, and in fact, only makes them stronger in the situations where they most certainly did *not* need help.

Also, I will say this, in an enviroment where PvP lasted longer, rogues might in fact need this help. Because once surviving the original 30+ seconds of uselessness a warrior will demolish a rogue. But with 30+% of your damage piercing armor, the ability to escape/reset the fight and the extremely high nature of damage, do you really expect that weakness to ever show?

The point he tries to make when he says that is that healing was flat out better than DPS, by several orders. DPS did not beat a healer, usually even 2v1 or possibly more. What beat healers was CC chains, MS, and interrupts, which are not strictly DPS. Yes, Resto druids were certainly the most ridiculous of the 4, but healing was simply stronger than DPS, by a LOT. No DPS who refrained from interrupting your heals or CCing you to kill your partner or applying MS would ever kill you, EVER until your mana ran bone dry. Priest, shaman, druid, paladin. The power of those healers was pretty much directly correlated to their weakness to those various effects(of course with additional things like Cyclone vs shocks vs mana burn etc in the mix). The problem was not solely related to resto druids at all, it was related to healing being completely dominant against DPS, especially with the levels of survivability offered by late-season gear on both the healer and his partners. You just can't dismiss all the power of healing by saying it was resto druids.

Err - yeah that's kind of the point. That doesn't mean that healing dominates DPS, it means you have to use strategy to win in the arena.

Running their healer out of mana through pressure is a method. Interrupting the healer is another method. CC'ing the healer is a method.

Tunnel visioning the healer's partner while completely ignoring the healer is not a strategy that should be viable above 1600. Do you seriously believe that in a double DPS vs DPS plus healer match up the double DPS team should be able to tunnel vision the healer's partner without making an attempts at interrupting/disrupting the healer and pull off a win?

Double DPS was exceedingly viable in all seasons, but it required interrupts, switches, CC - and this is a VERY VERY good thing, and this doesn't mean that healing was better than DPS.

edit:
Ok, you play ret/DK, this explains why you think that facerolling someone without interrupts should be viable.

Actually Ret DK has around 7 interrupts, if both players are Horde Blood Elf. (I play it too). Those interrupts should be used, nay, must be used. DK's can't kill healers by just spamming SS with a gargoyle out, its easy to force bigger heals though, which provide a nice large window to interrupt.

Thanks for the personal attack. I'm sorry that my class and spec is overpowered right now. I'm sorry you had access to the strongest 3v3 makeup for the last several seasons and I'm sorry that my options were so limited as to be negligible. I'm sorry you didn't have a druid to be overpowered with. I'm not in charge of class balance, so try to keep your rabid hatred under control long enough to actually discuss things, please.

Yes, I believe that healing was too powerful at the end of TBC. Hey guess what, I believe that DPS is too powerful now. I'd love to have to use my Repentance as an off-CC while I kill someone or chain together HoJ and Arcane Torrent intelligently. Did I ever say that arenas as they are now are a panacea of balance and the model against which all over pvp should be judged? No, clearly there are problems now, but that doesn't mean a return to healer invincibility in the face of all those things you just mentioned is awesome because hey guess what, Not everyone HAS those things. As soon as they give every melee an interrupt, a gap-closer and strong survivability then sure let's turn back the clock to season 4. As long as they leave DPS classes with limited offensive utility then those DPS classes need to have a place. I didn't particularly enjoy several seasons of knowing that I was just an inferior warrior or rogue and that my team would be better off with one of those people in my place and I'd rather not return to that.

No, a dps/healer team should be able to peel one of the DPS, leaving the healer 1v1 with a DPS, a matchup which healers can win even in the current environment. Why shouldn't CCing the healer's partner and killing the healer be as viable as CCing the healer and killing his partner?

Mearis covered the you-mean-you-should-be-able-to-completely-ignore-a-healer-and-still-win angle rather handsomely, so I'll focus on pointing out that the whole point of having mana as a depletable resources contra having us all operate on energy/rage/runes is depletion.

The problem - and yes, I'll blame it on resto druids (my druid alt is now messing around in the Fjord, and for this round, I think I'll go feral over resto) - is that for a well-playing druid, that depletion either didn't occur at all, or occured so far behind all the other healers that you were largely guaranteed a win anyway. That, in turn, stemmed from superior mobility - reducing pressure taken on self, increasing drink chance - mana regen options/effeciency, good uninterruptable (as in interrupts/silence, not dispells) HPS maintainable on multiple targets with several different methods of (fairly good) crowd control. Resto druids weren't that big a hit in 5v5, because the HPS/DPS relation changed. Their action stat longevity was less of an issue because they paid for that uptime in other areas. In the smaller brackets, that was not true - an action stat longevity with little to no drawbacks, married to high mobility and good CC.

Going out of mana is a balancing factor for any* mana using class such as healers. The fact that it was FUBAR'ed for resto druids in earlier seasons because of PvE class concerns is not a metagame healing issue - and even if it was, I'd have some pretty strong objections to choosing to address said issues with metagame PvP DPS changes.


*With some exceptions on the part of a few hybrids, and in the case of warlocks. Personally, I think calling what warlocks use "Mana" over "Fel Energy" is a bit silly when the only thing we really share with other mana using classes when it comes to action stat management is drinks and Blessing of Wisdom.

Thank you again for claiming ignorance for me, I really appreciate your ability to tell me what I was aware of. I am very clearly speaking from my own position. I did it in season 3 with a rogue. I don't care to spout off my credential to you because you don't care and I don't care. All you know is that I'm a ret paladin and I disagree with you, so you'll go ahead and tell me how terrible I am.

Let me repeat it one more time for you. I do not think the current level of damage in arenas is balanced or appropriate. I think it's laughably easy for me to do exactly what you say I shouldn't be doing, and I don't think I should be able to do it. If I had to time a repentance on a partner after a sap to force the trinket so the blind could go through to give me time to kill the dps target that would be nice, because it would be demanding and it might take more thought than ramming my CS and Judgement keys. I am again sorry that the state of my class makes you incapable of reading what I write and instead substituting what you think I'm saying because you think I'm some drooling fotm reroller who just wants to preserve his little playground of dps supremacy.

What I do think is that DPS should matter. At the end of Season 4, DPS was not the prime consideration for success. It was survivability and CC in all its various forms, from interrupts and silences to polys and fears. PMR wasn't made amazing by its superlicious burst, but by its control. Lock/druid wasn't powerful because warlocks could kill you in 2 seconds, but because they could outlast and outcontrol you. Warrior/druid worked because of control, survivability and MS. Nowhere did damage come primary, because everybody had so much hp and resilience backed up by a healer that burst damage simply didn't matter. I think that at some level, damage should be a consideration, and that control and healing as the only notable aspects in arena shouldn't necessarily be the only acceptable situation.

Before you go crazy on me, let me once again say that damage should matter, but it should not be the ONLY thing that matters. Once again, damage is too much right now and healers are suffering because of it, as well as classes without strong survivability option. I advocate a balance where damage is a viable possibility, balanced against CC and healing in a happy ideal world of equality. Clearly the damage leg of the stool is too much at the moment, but I don't think the proper course of action is to once again throw damage so far into the background that people with damage as their only real focus are once again marginalized.

I'm still unsure where you're getting two melee without interrupts since DKs have a standard interrupt in Mind Freeze, along with Strangulate and my HoJ and two Arcane Torrents and a Repentance, plus a ghoul stun for kicks. Yes, ret and unholy don't need those things at the moment to kill most teams, but they're still there and I wouldn't be surprised if the comp remained viable for a while. I think it will probably decrease in popularity as seasons go on and survivability hopefully increases, and it then might be better with a rogue who can offer similar levels of damage as well as a much larger bag of tricks and an MS effect.

I will personally be overjoyed when you stop attacking me based on nothing more than my class and start talking in a reasonable manner, but I won't hold my breath.

We are done here.

I would link you the clip of SK-gaming's PMR that instagibbed Hafu in 3 games within the first 20 seconds of the game but it is quite obvious that you don't know what you are talking about and it would be wasted. This was in season2, with PvP gear, in season4 with PvE gear damage was obviously much higher.

You think that CC'ing a dps and killing a healer was not viable in season 3 and 4. You think that healing is broken if ignoring a healer and tunnel visioning a DPS is not a viable tactic. You think requiring interrupts/silence/CC in arena is bad because it would shut out certain comps.

I am not flaming you because of your class, I am flaming you because you have terrible opinions due to a completely flawed understanding of game mechanics. I am just hoping for a better future where hopefully you are unable to cleave your way to victory even in 2s.

And I'm sure they did it without the use of stuns, silences and polys. We are indeed done here, because you're so blind with rage that you only care to tear down the straw men you put up.

No, they just straight up gibbed her with a shatter combo after the rogue opened up on her. I don't know what to tell you, you don't know anything about arenas, and now you are higher than a lot of amazing warlocks because of the travesty that is the current class balance.

So it took this thread about a page to go back to exactly where it was before.

I'd like to get some discussion going on the upcoming dispel mechanics changes, massive changes / nerfs to Unholy (warranted mostly), and other balance changing effects going in in 3.0.8.

Notes are changing constantly, but most recent notes include gems such as:

DK:

Unholy
* Virulence now reduces the chance that your damage over time diseases can be cured by 10/20/30%. (Old - Affected all spells)
* Necrosis now give your auto attacks an additional 4/8/12/16/20% shadow damage. (Up from 2/4/6/8/10%)
* Summon Gargoyle now persists up to 30 seconds (Down from 1 minute). Damage from Gargoyles has been reduced from 64-86 to 51-69.
* Anti-Magic Zone now lasts up to 10 seconds. (Down from 30 seconds)

Blood:
* Will of the Necropolis has been changed - Damage that would take you below 35% health is reduced by 5/10/15%.

Some warranted changes there, but I really hope they do similar things to Arcane mages and rogues to bring them in line. While they are at it, Ret too, since it has been almost completely untouched recently.

Rogues:

Mutilate won't double proc off-hand poisions.
Deadly Brew nerfed.

Ret took a pretty big hit with the 50% damage reduction while under the effect of Divine Shield already. There's a lot of ret changes that went in the previous iterations of the PTR, as I understand it - just not more of them since.

The dispel change is interesting and definitely removes a lot of the rng element - I'm not sure the categorization is necessarily correct though. The RNG impact of removing Hand of Freedom/Hand of Protection quickly is as big if not bigger than as a lot of offensive effects and yet they are still protected under this model.

On that note - does the druid dispel protection even protect your hots against Plague Strike? It seems to use a different mechanic because it causes lifebloom to fall off without blooming (which in itself is pretty annoying), and I can't recall ever seeing a hot survive a plague strike while PVPing on my druid.

There is a difference between saying DPS should matter, and DPS should be the prime consideration for success, which seems to be what you are implying. The basic problem with pure DPS being the #1 stat is that it in any measurable sense it lacks skill. Standing next to someone and mashing your PvE dps rotation is not really skilled, it is just a function of gear. After the 3.0 patch I could run up to someone on my ret paladin and follow them around mashing CS, Judge, DS over and over and they would usually die in the first set. If they didn't, they would inevitably die in the second or third barring some type of peel. If I wail on this priest for three damage rotations and he dies, does that somehow imply that I was skilled? No, it just shows that I can mash a few buttons when they blink READY and kill someone, which is dumb.

Even if you add in tossing out an HoJ and repentance (and maybe torrent) to interrupt spells, I still shouldn't be able to get a kill against a fully geared healer. I have done nothing special at all. What I should do instead is provide pressure, which means he is having to heal himself to stay alive instead of having free reign to use GCDs to do other things. If I get help from a teammate with an interrupt, maybe then I can snag a kill, but if not the pressure keeps going up regardless. This is how it should be - damage is perfectly needed and viable because it provides pressure, not because it gives you free kills. I show my skill in killing this priest by timing my stuns correctly over a longer period of time, and coordinating interrupts and CC with my teammates. Kills should be about coordination, not about mashing buttons.

The fact is that right now as a Ret paladin anyone can run at someone and hit 234234234234 and kill them without question in one or two damage windows is bad for the game. As much as people bitched about warriors in TBC, in general they were actually pretty balanced outside of mace stun. They rarely just gibbed anyone - they applied pressure over time by doing consistent damage and snaring, and relied on their teammates to both keep them alive and stay on a target. They were an excellent team-based class, bad solo but great with support, which is what arena should be about. Rogues, ret paladins, and DKs are actually poorly designed in a lot of ways because they are far too self sufficient, and it really shows in smaller brackets.

Yeah we'll have to see how that plays out. Still, dispel protection on sheep was probably on my top 5 reasons to /emo as a holy paladin after 3.0. Defensive dispelling was always such an annoying double whammy since you wasted both mana and a GCD if you failed at something, which with a mage meant you probably then weren't ready to heal the cast that was following the CC.

Well, as a hunter, it's currently close to worthless to try to dispel a BoP (or HoP I guess) since I have Tranq shot on a 15s cooldown, a target generally not yet stripped of buffs, and a chance to fail anyway. The upcoming patch reduces the cooldown to 6s, which means I can at least TRY to strip a target if I have free GCDs, but still if I fail I'm wasting GCDs, mana, and a cooldown. It's obviously a much different situation for priests or shaman, who strip two buffs per cast on no cooldown, but I'm dispelling one buff on CD - I really hope it's not going to fail when I need to clutch off a HoP.

Some nice fixes are now in the pipeline, though the underlying problem of damage in general being too high, and the result that stuns become incredibly powerful (since they allow damage to continue while negating healing/defensive moves) seems mostly unchanged. I would add a passive 25% health increase to all players in arena -- massive resilience buffs worry me because healing throughput is very high, almost as buffed as damage is... it's just the burst that is so killer.

If I could add anything to this discussion, it would be that in the medium term, DKs should be seen not as a problem class, but as an exemplar for what classes should be like. There is a severe lack of potent defensive cooldowns to reward players for skilled use of them and to counter burst without just straight buffing healers.

It would seem really simple to just move some of the amazing talents to be baseline, changing cooldowns and damage but maintaining the secondary elements. With the number of instant cast heals/spells in game now, it seems that knockbacks are probably the most likely candidate for defensive abilities that are less likely to be used for offensive purposes. For example:

Druid: Feral charge baseline, 30 sec CD; typhoon baseline, 1 min CD.
Priest: Low mana cost, single application poison removal to reward being peeled for several GCDs; divine hymn cooldown severely reduced, but operates only as a single target buff, 1 second cast.
Rogue: Shadowstep castable on friendly targets (and useable while rooted again)... make defensive SS baseline, 1 min CD.
Shaman: Thunderstorm baseline; fire nova stun baseline.
Warrior: 30% damage reduction buff on intercept made baseline; shield wall grants immunity to disarms.
Warlock: Shadowfury baseline (1 min CD); add pet ability (VW taunt preferably) that reduces enemy damage output by 40% for 15 seconds, 2 minute CD; pets move 30% faster when retreating (useful, but not a get out of jail free card).


At this point, I would throw these into the game without even considering balance.... damage dealing is just so overwhelming at the moment. I would also add a reverse death grip ability to one or more classes (pulls a friendly player to you), as it would help 3s/5s greatly and could be countered by stun/root effects.


Regarding rogues: It's pretty easy to assign every class as either a rough counter or prey to any other, maybe not "hard" counter, but nonetheless. It is worth noting that all of the classes at the top of the heap (DK, Pal, Mage, Hunter) are those that soft counter rogues best. Imagine if, for example warlocks, shadow priests, moonkin, and elemental shaman dumped on most classes the way DKs do... rogues would be at the very top of all the rankings, as they feast on the those casters.

On the other hand, it's also pretty easy to overrate rogues based upon the numbers, as their abilities function so well for double dps (sap/blind; stuns to keep burn target from reacting) and for peeling from a healer. Since they partner extremely well with almost any class you'd expect to see the average rogue more highly ranked.

As a result, I wouldn't rely on the numbers to judge rogues. Having access to one to play, and having played against one, I'd agree with what I think is the majority of the community that they need to be retuned. Removing Overkill and Vigor (and slightly buffing Focused attacks to compensate), while revivifying shadowstep and then seeing how things play out would be a great start in my opinion. CS, Mut, KS, Mut, Mut, Evis in 10 seconds with 50-60 energy left over after focused attacks AND the ability to Cold Blood once or twice AND the ability to 5 energy TotT their partner for 15% more damage during this is just too much, given the repeatability of the whole chain.

I know your post specifically mentioned Ret, but what about mana DPS classes? Obviously right now Arcane is bursty as hell and shouldn't be considered, but mana DPS in general. Obviously they're not able to provide the same steady level of pressure without going OOM, so what's their place (to you)? Pressure in the form of burst? Pressure from CCs/Interrupts?

Yes, that's why I said since HARP. ShS was almost as good at warrior killing with double evasion. And the person I was responding to was talking about Warriors vs Rogues in general, which includes dueling.

Re: Rogue/Priest vs Druid/War. I must admit I didn't play this comp at very high levels but I still hit 1900s on my alt (started in S3 with 0 gear) and as I recall, the warrior didn't do much damage to me with PW:S denying rage + Evasion. My Priest would chase their Druid with Mana Burn/Fear and if I caught their Druid in caster form it was game over pretty quickly.