Mearis

That was only because of the presence of druids - the problem was not CC, it was druids in small brackets. Everyone sensible agrees that druids required nerfs in the past.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Calantus

But now we have a worse problem in that all you the enemy needs is a counterspell silence and boom there goes your teammate. At least it used to require a good CC chain and/or switch to kill a person on a competant team. Paladins and shaman also have the tools they lacked in TBC in order to better deal with CC chains.

Just every time I hear people complain about the old days it involves a druid. Either it's the CC, or it's the survivability, or it's the longevity. Now you're pointing out another problem with balance last expansion with paladin and shaman healers against druids. It just seems to me that burst is the bandaid on a wound caused entirely by Blizzard's inaction in balancing the healers. To me priests were perfect. Not too strong and not too weak. Easy to run oom, easy enough to kill, but able to combat both if played well. Nobody complained about how strong priests were unless they're talking about mana burn (and most of that was from paladins because they lacked the instant healing power they have now) and priest complaints were basically relegated to our counters in rogue and hunter. If they had only brought the other healers in line with priest power I don't think we'd be having all these complaints.

 

Lithose

No, I got your point, I was correcting you on the nature of GC's post. GC never made that comment. He stated that "if" they dispersed MS any more, that they should go ahead and apply a global change and get it over with. He was using that argument to show how MS is a balancing tool used to give certain classes a unique strength, not to show that MS is required.

As for those classes, absolutely, I would argue that you would *never* see an arms warrior on any team if it wasn't for the MS effect. They have considerable draw backs and questionable utility in comparison to classes you *could* get otherwise. A lot of that is because of warriors provide the most reliable, most difficult to remove and most easy to apply MS effect....Far better than rogues, or hunters and these advantages become more apparent in larger teams where multiple dispels/cleanses become more prevalent.

In short, GC made that comment to show balance issues that would arise from making MS to easily available (IE certain classes have a portion of their strength based off it.), he did not make the comment due to overall PvP balance.


Is that because damage was low, or is that because said classes had no CC and no counters to CC themselves? Why were paladins super suceptible, while say a druid, wasn't? Instant heals, HoTs, CC...Shamans and Paladins lacked them, so when they were placed out of commission by a CC, they had no residual presence. When a druid is CCd he can still be healing for the next 7-10 seconds at a huge portion of his normal effectiveness because his healing is through hots.

Multiple things were changed due to this..Paladins have 50% curse reduction, 30% fear reduction, 30% stun reduction. They have the *most* reductions in CC length in the entire game now, also their instant heal was made larger, stronger and given a far shorter cool down, now easily comparing to hots in HPS, though falling behind in HPM.

Shamans were given an instant heal+hot, as well as the ability to remove curses. In addition tremor totems pulse was shortened and they were given far more throughput per second healing.

*In addition* druids got massive nerfs to their CC ability, Feral charge is out of reach, cast time protection on cyclone is out of reach, Lifebloom took a huge HPS and HPM hit (Which, 90% of all problems were not from CC, but from this *one* spell.)...

So, multiple fixes for the very issues you spoke of were put in...What we are seeing is what happens when you try to fix issues from two directions. They have a global fix (Burst?) and a class based fix (Buffs/nerfs), which has congealed into this mess.

Now, I agree with GC on one point, resilience was way too easy to acquire in sufficient amounts for some classes to be "survivable" enough...But even there, lets look at the biggest offenders..Druids, Rogues. Druids had multiple escape and CC mechanisms, and rogues had Cheat Death, Evasion, vanish, Blind, CloS. The reason resilience was less needed by these classes had more to do with the classes themselves being too self reliant in small groups, and not with damage being too low.

I would love to see a priest skate away with wearing 200 Resiliance in s3/4 like most druids did. Or a warlock using 200 like a rogue did, it wouldn't happen, and why? Lack of CC and damage dispersing tools.

The problem with nerfing those tools, however, is that mechanically, those classes don't perform well in larger settings, so again, I think a big problem is 5v5 vs 2v2...in short though, many of the problems stemmed from classes, not global (Though, again, I agree Resil needed to be more important.)

 

Medu

PvP isn't a mess because they made PvP changes, it's a mess because they changed the direction of PvE and disregarded PvP. How could paladins running around in divine shield doing 80% of a rogues dps not raise a few flags. Surely someone at blizzard should of known that a rogue with combat dps, mutilates burst combined with prep is just a bad idea.

Personal I don't think it can be fixed. That's what i thought after a few hours on the PTR confirmed my gut feeling and that is what I still feel. PvP was hardly well balanced before wotlk, but even to get back to that state would require massive retuning of the PvE side, which is blizzard main interest.

 

Etherealsilk

I think we just looking at it differently. Crits are going to be reduced in damage more now then ever before. That isn't something you can just shrug off and say doesn't matter or that its only marginal. It does matter and is a flat nerf in damage to classes that depend on crit damage for burst. Thats my whole point. Whether overall damage is too high atm is not something I can answer, because we dont know yet. We cant know because we aren't in a resilience saturated environment to determine that. Once again back to my core argument. 400 resilience is 1/3 the cap. Damage is going to be a problem. That is a given when you dont have enough of the most important pvp stat in the game. This shouldn't be a surprise. If it is still a problem, very likely, when people are strolling around with 800+ minimum resilience then changes need to be made. But few people are atm so I dont feel that there is enough evidence to support any nerfs yet until we know more accurately what the situation will be like in a resilience saturated environment.

As to the Ret pallies. Yup you just examplified my point perfectly. Paladins were designed as a burst class and yet the main reason they were put on that team wasn't because of burst but instead for defensive utility.

To be honest I think GC is pretty much spot on. If you didn't have a MS effect you weren't going to kill anyone without high amounts of cc and control or without some form of mana drain. Which goes hand in hand with his comments.

 

Lithose

How could a rogue with CloS, Vanish, Evasion and cheat death go running around doing 90% of a warriors PvP damage and not raise a few eye brows? S3/S4 warriors had far fewer on demand defenses, and against most classes had just more HP as a defense, which they paid for with 10% zerk. However, aside from s4, most people would say warriors were nearly as strong as rogues when paired with a druid in 2s. That is because not everything can be diminished to damage+utility (Hence making my own first point null, which was intended, not need to reply to it.)

Ret paladins were *not* even a class that should have been in any bracket in any arena until s3. Even in s3 they were very diminished in terms of what they could do...Mechanically, they had the tools to make them an extremely strong class, but it worked out to be the classic case of paper Vs real world, where mana, certain small tools and control became massive issues. The thing is, these are all issues that can be fixed, and a big part of fixing them was ending the strangle hold some classes had on damage *and* the strangle hold some classes had on CC...Don't forget, not too long ago rogue CC was terrible, in many ways in fact they went from having just DPS (Like a warrior) to having DPS+a lot of caster tricks, and that is because one dimensional class design is terrible for PvP...

If you don't believe me, then you need look no further than Priests, Warlocks, Hunters and Warriors right now..Yeah, they work, no they aren't "bad"...but they haven't had many things "homogonized" to them, while others have. So those classes (Feel free to include shamans) have only gotten stronger in the areas they have always been strong in, many other classes tended to get stronger in the areas they were weak in. Rogues experienced this growth around s2, to be frank, if it didn't happen, they would still be garbage...So, saying that its somehow broken for a ret paladin to grow in the same way, is a little myopic, no?

Please, don't get me wrong though, I perfectly understand the worry about Pure Vs Hybrid, but the trick here is to give enough tools to the pure to balance the loss of comparative DPS...Which allows for more avenues of balance, rather than constricting them, if you say blizzard has failed at that, then in some cases, I agree...but it certainly hasn't been some huge oversight.

The dangerous part about increasing burst is that it doesn't really lower the value of CC, rather, it increases it.....If your risk of death in any given span of 15 seconds is extremely high, then I have dramatically increased the power of some CC combos. Take, Sheep/Sheep/Sheep/Blind....Now, counting some dispels ect, lets say that combo holds someone for about 15 seconds...If you die in 15 seconds, then the combo is a game ender, if it takes 20 seconds to kill you, however, and the DR's or cool downs are 30 seconds, then all that CC does is lower the effectiveness of your team.

By lowering the effectiveness of another team, you make your mana last longer and force "catch" up from them, which puts you at a net advantage. However, if you just die, well, then it doesn't matter, you don't have a chance to "counter" that lost time with some CC, because you are dead. In essence, those "damage centric" classes with low CC got worse because they actually had less time to allow for their damage to show.

Now, this is all a balance, of course, some parts of s3 were stupid..The fact that PvE gear was required to shorten some games under an hour was kind of dumb. So, perhaps in some cases, the ease of getting resil, or the low value of resil, or burst, was swung too far, but now its too far the other way.

Like GC said, there is a sweet spot, I don't think we are there yet...But I also don't think its a super long way off, either...This is more a job for a scalpel then a broad sword.

 

Mearis

Simplifying a lot, there were several succesful plans of victory in TBC arena:

- Mana drain (didn't require MS)
- Atrition melee based (think cleave teams - required MS)
- Caster based burst (didn't require MS but it helped - the only class that could provide sufficient peel provided MS though)
- CC based with light damage (eurocomp)

Now the only viable path to victory is straight up burst. The idea that you either need CC/mana drain or MS strikes me as perfectly fine. It also infinitely annoys me that people seem to believe every healer was a druid, when the problem in the past was druids, NOT healers as a whole. Find me one person who thought resto shamans were too powerful last season?

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Duilliath

I still maintain the entire rise of Druid healers was in part due to two things:
1) Drinking in Arenas
2) Melee becoming much more rampant, rogues in particular

Out of all healers, Druids are the only ones that can reliably take a Melee out of commission. Hence, Druids being too powerful was a byproduct of the dominance of Rogues and to a lesser extend the reliance on MS (= Rogue or Warrior)? (Tell me how any class that can team up with *whatever* can be fine - even druids couldn't do Druid/Druid, yet Rogue/Rogue or Rogue/Warrior managed fine up @ 2k+)

LoS issues were important, but Priests at least could cope there and Shamans/Paladins have been helped there now.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Medu

The scalpel didn't work on paladins and even the sword left a class that's extremely powerful.

The real problem facing blizzard is that they can't nerf the dps of the classes that are too strong, as none of their dps is too high. They will have to nerf aspects of the class that make them unique and interesting. Rogues will need a nerf to stuns and more shared DR on their abilities. Paladins will probably need a stun nerf, and to remove the ability to remove stuns with BoF, at least on themselves. Frost mages need a reduction in the number of frost nova's as it's crazy right now. Arcane needs a AB/slow nerf and possible removing pyro from PoM.
The problem with this is that waters down what makes these classes/specs stand out and that is the main reason I spoke out against giving everyone similiar dps.

 

Grimzilla

I have noticed that in arenas :S
I usually am the first to be targetted and killed without me doing very much, sometimes killing another weakgeared target. But most of the time im the first to die.

Are there any talents that are a must have except for Shamanistic Rage and Wolves?

With the next patch we will get some extra survivability with the Elemental Warding (10% dmg reduce), but i cant see much more that we can get to survive longer other then using a shield.

 

Cwealm

That makeup was the most fun I have had in arenas, although I am sure it was irritating as all get out for the other team. I have never played (other than briefly) over the 2000 level, so my experiences are probably much different than the more competitive players here, but TBC arena did seem like a great deal more fun and took more skill. Now, I am just doing five's to help some friends (the thrill of arena is gone), and the sum total of our arena is to deathgrip their healer into our melee and nuke him, while BoPing our priest to prevent the same.

Fights, at least at the 1500-1600 range, last a grand total of 10 seconds before the game is decided. I am not sure if it is the same at higher levels.

 

panny

In general, you will die very quickly against Rogue teams if you have no peels. If there's a chance there's a Rogue, you must use a shield. Personally, I think Earthen Power and Guardian Totems are musts for Enhancement and in the current zerg meta-game in the lower brackets, Improved Fire Nova is pretty nice too.

I also highly recommend a stun reduction meta gem.

 

Lithose

None of what you said changes the make up of the classes and not every case has to happen as you said. For example, PoM/Pyro is strong now because arcane potency increases its critical strike chance by 30%. Now, for PvE, what if you got 5% crit for X amount of time instead, it certainly wouldn't be as "spike" driven while still providing about the same damage.

Each spec has very very specific problem areas and like you said, many of them have to do with very unique strengths of the class. You don't need to get rid of those strengths to fix that area, but yes, you might need to tone them down a little bit. That also leaves a little room to buff other areas where those classes lacked due to the area your nerfing being too strong.

In short though, a Ret paladin being able to cleanse stun, for example, is still really powerful, even if he loses the ability to do it to himself...Just because the ability became "less" strong, doesn't mean it isn't still extremely unique and powerful.

 

Grimzilla

I have been playing around with talent builds a bit and came up with this:
(12/59/0)

Featuring lower dps but higher survivability, lowering slowing effect duration and disarm duration, with an triggered Blessing of Freedom on your group.

 

F4nt0m

A low resilience druid is going to die. They take even more damage than a priest does in caster form, by a significant margin. (No inner fire, no blessed resilience, no PW:S to rage starve the warrior.)

Obviously it's a nerf. It's also a nerf to every other class in the game as well. That is why I think resilience won't balance things.

"Paladins were designed as a burst class": that is simply your opinion. I see no basis for this claim in the actual game. Just because they HAVE burst doesn't mean they are a "burst class," whatever that is supposed to mean.

In fact, you bring up a counter argument in the very same sentence. They aren't just a burst class because of their defensive and offensive utility (avoiding CC on your offensive classes with BoF, dispel, and bubble increases your team's damage output, and thus your offensive utility). It's disingenuous to claim that Paladins are nothing but a "burst" class, and even worse to further claim that they will be useless with resilience because of that fact.

Warlocks et all will see their offensive stats go WAY down when they get high resilience this season. So will Paladins, if they choose to wear PVP gear. Are you claiming that with heals on both sides, the warlock will suddenly start magically winning long matches after their offense goes down below what it is currently? The Paladin will still do more overall damage, and thus the Warlock will require more healing, his healer will go oom first, and then he will die.

 

Lithose

Almost every druid I faced, in 3's and 2's past 2k and most druids in MLG tournaments (Go watch the ones with Koala) chose to use about 200 Resil and a lot of PvE gear. Not because they were tough, but because they had bear form and a lot of escape options. Bear formed allowed them to wait for the peel safely and then their escapes allowed peels to be more effective.

Druids were one of 3-4 classes that could use a lot less Resil and be ok.

 

Etherealsilk

Actually it isn't simply my opinion. Its the repeatedly stated opinion of the devs. You can try to shrug that off as "just an opinion" like you just did mine but when the devs have REPEATEDLY stated it I would perhaps give more thought to such off hand comments. I also never claimed that paladins were pure burst class. But they do rely on their burst to bring someone down. Their limited mana pool actually makes them more desperate to burst someone down before they go oom. And I am not suggesting that resilience will make them useless. I'm saying that resilience will inhibit their damage by quite a bit. Whether it does so to the point of balance is yet to be seen. Why are you so dead set against waiting to find out the facts before crying out for nerfs? If nothing else I would think you would want to wait for changes to make sure that they are nerfed to the proper degree. Perhaps not and you simply want them nerfed into uselessness. A wait and see approach is more prudent and will result in more accurate adjustments tho.

With regards to resilience hurting everyone, yea it will. But it will hurt crit relient burst more. Thats the whole point. Its not a stat that equally effects all classes, it hits some classes harder and helps some classes more. This is the reason you see different classes shoot for different resilience levels. Not everyone is pushing for the absolute max but most people are pushing for at least 2/3 of that.

Basically thats how it ended up working out the previous seasons. Whether the devs have hit the sweet spot with balance when everyone has 6-7-800+ resilience is yet to be seen. Now you bring up warlocks which I think is a trap to be honest because the dev's have already stated how they are not satisfied with warlocks and plan to do some big changes in the future. A more accurate analogy would be a retadin+healer vs a war+healer. When both sides are resilience capped I know who my money would be on in that scenario.

 

Nemantopia

You're correct about Paladins being a burst class, in that their strength is putting out bursts, spurts, and otherwise ugly little spouts of unresistable holy damage to go with their weapon. The problem is not that they are a burst class, it's that damage designed around bursts is not [and has never been] balanced properly pre-significant resilience, which effectively creates two PvP environments...and to get to the part where it IS balanced, you have to trudge through brutal imbalance and be punished for not being one of those top classes. You can wax eloquent all you want, it does not change the fact that this IS a literal imbalance, is NOT fun, goes counter to the stated dev designs, and points to an appalling lack of foresight by the devs for the impacts of how their PvE changes [both in design and ability] would affect the PvP game, and unwillingness to look for alternatives or even realize the need for such. Their intent, by all acounts, is great, and the problem isn't the intent. It's that for all the progress they have made toward it, they seemingly insist on taking [nearly] as many steps backwards, making their intent meaningless against the current reality. So your 'prudent and accurate' nonsense is a nonsensical opinion based on a view of the situation that doesn't account for the facts. It's true that IN GENERAL wait and see is the correct answer, but in a situation where they decided to make [seemingly] every possible change at once instead of making smaller, well reasoned changes. Instead of prudently creating a situation allowing prudence, they have thrown all the paint at the board to see what sticks, which even before the PREDICTABLE results requires overhaul on a large scale, not minor changes.

You're also correct with the effect passing anywhere from approximately 60-75% of the resilience cap will have on PvP. THAT'S THE POINT WE'VE BEEN MAKING. Instead of a meaningful but small edge like gear differences are [by the very dev philosophy you claim to support] supposed to make, it's like being a level 70 trying to arena in level 60 PvP gear with 10 less talent points suddenly wising up and filling out to the best PvP sepc and gearing up. It's not that it will change the game, it's that it will change the game ONLY at a certain level, and change the game on such a dramatic scale it hardly looks like the same game. This has been stated repeatedly by multiple people, and even an excuse of 'devil's advocate' is wearing thin as it's becoming clear you'd rather stand on the high ground that isn't even on the battlefield just to say you have it.

I'm effectively giving them a temporary pass [as are a lot of people] on cases like Warlocks, where the devs have stated they are not happy with the current state and working to balance things. The problem is what they seem to be damned content with, which only the extreme minority of posters here [namely: you] seem to find any sort of fun, and I have yet to have a conversation in-game with ANYONE who thinks the devs HAVEN'T screwed the pooch, haven't stated they're not currently having fun and are only doing the PvP to get the rewards so they CAN have fun, and has not expressed hopes that the next patch or even a series of hotfixes will help.

In short: the general population is rightfully ticked about the current state of PvP. Most of us respect the efforts the devs have made and many of the changes that are coming. But then we see things that look like any child could have said 'hey, maybe we shouldn't...' in the design room and are urged to smack them upside the head for things that are clearly oversights and lack of thought about synergy and pan-effects of changes.

 

Etherealsilk

All very well made points and I can agree and concede on all of them. So then it boils down to an impasse between wanting the game to be balanced under all gear levels/conditions and those that are the "intended" pvp conditions (an assumption I know). It doesn't seem realistic to expect them to be able to balance the game around low resilience and high resilience at the same time, mainly because resilience has turned into such a key balancing stat in pvp. So then its a choice of balancing around low or high resilience. That is the reason I've advocated what I have in such a manner. Not because I believe the game is balanced. Its frustrating how many people seem to infer that from what I'm saying. So let me be clear. At the current state of things, with top rated teams even having an average of 400 or less resilience, the game is not balanced. Its not that I'm living in some fantasy land. I did some 2's with a boomkin friend last night that had only his 70 pvp gear to wear. He was literally 2 shotted a several times by rogues. It wasn't fun. I'm also not going to pretend that being under-geared is supposed to be balanced. Perhaps thats my problem and the source of my stubborness. In essence people are under-geared for pvp and are using that as a launching off point to complain. I actually want there to be balancing changes made in the game, but I dont want these changes to be made in a way that only further upsets balance. If the dev's are attempting to balance the game around resilience saturation, which I believe they are, then they should make changes in that setting and not when everyone has Nax gear and 200 resilience instead. If their intent was to balance the pvp game around nax gear then I'd say you and most people in this thread are right. Otherwise I just want them to balance the game around pvp gear as they have in the past and make changes when they have accurate information on what is broken and what isn't.

 

Briseis

That i feel is the point, you're entirely right, it isn't fun being bursted down in seconds.
Unfortunately, it won't stop happening when you hit 400 or so resilience from crafted gear, it won't stop when you perhaps get to 500-600 from the blue pvp gear and some honour accessories, it won't even stop if you reach 800 resilience (as people complained about it on beta).
So the question is, if you are not a class with burst or a lot of survivability, are you willing to (and should you have to) grind through all the honour and arena points required to reach this mythical plateau of "high resilience" just so that you can start having fun and actually achieve something?

 

Taja

I haven't played on beta but going from a 500 res priest with 18k hp to a 22khp priest with 850 resilience we noticed alot of difference already. Some games we actually managed to dispell people. Of course he still dies sometimes really fast but not as bad as the first week.

 

Emth.

The problem with a universal change (such as resilience reducing all damage or crit damage by a more significant amount) is that all it does is punish the the weaker DPS classes. No one's calling for enhancement shaman or shadow priests damaged to be reduced. Certain classses/specs need sweeping nerfs (everyone knows who they are) and that's that.

Talk of a permanent MS effect in arena situations seems laughable at the moment, considering I can't even keep myself up for longer than 20 seconds against a solitary arcane mage, ret paladin or any class with a MS effect. What a kick in the teeth to be given a way to remove tongues only to be met with Slow and Mind Numbing...

This may be the case, but it's so, so broken that certain classes need that amount of gear to be viable. I don't want to spend 6 hours a day honour grinding just to be on par with some DK or paladin in unsocketed naxx10 gear who joins a triple dps team.

 

Traj

That may be but it is better than the current situation. Plus it gives a better point to balance from, it is much easier to buff classes than nerf them. It would also allow for tweaks to many classes instead of the sweeping changes that is currently needed. Of course this still wouldn't fix the fact high survivability classes are doing as much or more damage than everybody else. Ret, DKs, and feral should all do less damage, especially less spike, than all the clothies.

Resilience could also just do a % damage reduction only to player damage and not npc. That way their almighty pve wouldn't be effected. But hey, Blizz has needed to switch to a two rule system for a long time, why should they start now?

 

thevidon

Everybody needs to calm down about DK's survivability levels. Unholy DK's are taking a MASSIVE nerf to their survivability and the other specs are taking a big hit also in 3.08. Wait until the changes go through to complain please.

I totally agree that unholy DKs in double and triple dps teams are unbalanced right now. Once full DPS teams are no longer viable (inevitable) and the nerfs go through, I doubt anyone will be complaining about DKs being overpowered.

 

Hildegard

Lockdown and burst
I think that the main problem with rogues is the combination of lockdown abilities and burst. Mainly preparation which allows three times Vanish/Garrote, two times kick and two times cold blood offers too much lockdown and burst in a too small time window. The very same thing applies to shadow dance. Maybe Garotte should only interrupt and not silence anymore but have no more positional requirement.

PVE and PVP gear
Something that generally annoys me is the fact that PVE gear seems to be there first. So the best gear for a class like rogues will be found in raid instances and if the raids open earlier than the next season a class like paladin or rogue will have a constant advantage by using top end PVE gear. Even in season 3 a rogue equipped with only PVP gear wasn't in any way comparable to the T6 geared ones. So if balancing goes towards working in the potentials of PVE-geared rogues, any rogue in PVP only gear will have a very hard time. If balance is based around PVP geared rogues than the PVE geared ones will be overpowered.

At the moment I don't see an easy solution to this problem.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard