Mearis

It is way too early to judge anything about the state of balance of arena given that we are at level 70 with level 80 specs, but there is an interesting new change that is not immediately obvious with the introduction of ret paladins/blood DK's,

I don't want to discuss how obscene burst or damage is right now, everyone knows it is - but that's to be expected with the new patch. I am more interested in what I think is something that a lot of people overlooked so far.

Traditional two DPS teams in 2 vs 2 have consisted of a rogue + a caster, with the caster providing crowd control/burst, while the rogue provides lockdown and additional CC, as well as a healing debuff. Those set ups tipically are quite strong versus traditional healer + warrior set ups as warriors can be controlled for extended periods, and if you spam cooldowns it can be very difficult for the healer to keep both himself and the warrior alive.

Those teams however are horrible at fighting any long game. Tipically, if the healer lives long enough for the crowd control spells to hit diminishing returns and to weather out any cooldowns, you will end up winning, as those teams have no way of restoring their hitpoints and thus gradual damage will eventually kill one of them. Druid/warrior versus mage/rogue tipically ends if the warrior can sit for an extended period on the rogue, as the pressure + a few dots from the druid is enough to wear out the rogue.

Ret paladins/Blood DK's are premiere DPS classes with excellent burst, strong utility, and very good lockdown skills - but they add something completely new to double DPS teams: excellent sustained healing. If you have spent any time in arena in the past week, you will have noticed the complete flood of ret paladin + another DPS teams. Taking a ret paladin/mage team - that team can and will kill you with insane burst, but should you survive the initial set of cooldowns, you have no real way of 'wearing out' that team as ret paladins offer enough sustained healing to more than offset the damage a DPS can do between CC DR's.

We are now in the paradoxical situation where double DPS teams can easily outlast a healer + DPS team because of how sustainable hybrid healing is. This situation right now is extremly glaring with ret paladins - but when blood DK's will end up hitting arenas, they offer nearly as much healing on demand. 2 vs 2 is by definition an imbalanced bracket, but it is by far one of the most popular brackets that players enjoy for logistic reasons and other issues. Right now arenas basically don't encourage bringing a healer for any reason, since by bringing a healer you handicap your DPS extremly heavily, and you will play defensively almost the entire game. Before, you used to be forced to play defensively to survive the onslaught, but if you survived the initial onslaught you were pretty much guaranteed to win the game - now, suriving the initial onslaught means nothing.

In this way - the retadin/x teams that we see now are very very similar in playstyle to restokin/rogue teams, albeit with much much higher burst. Shadowpriests/moonkins can also now heal fruitfully, but the opportunity cost for a moonkin/shadowpriest are much higher as their heals cost a lot more mana, and their mana runs out extremly fast with no way to keep going endlessly.

While ret paladin burst is likely to decrease relative to HP pools, real working hybrids in arenas provide some real paradigm shifts to standard team make ups. Offense is the best defense, and by playing with two dps you force the other team to spend all their resources staying alive instead of applying pressure back, and thus the little damage that you deal is easily healed away.

 

Sapp

I'll post one of the ideas I had before, when we were talking about this in IRC.

A: every 2's healer/dps team will be effectively a double DPS team at 80, due to the changes in how healers produce damage. Any priest or shaman will have decent offensive tools with short or instant casts, and a holy paladin will actually have some good power as well between holy shock and instant judgements, as well as baseline HoW.

The balance between healing and damage just shifts depending on how much of a hybrid you are fielding, and this is made spectacularly obvious with Ret.

B: Prot warriors will likely be one of the major ways to counter a lot of the more offensive builds in 2's and 3's. The power of glyphed intervene alongside the group spell reflect do a lot to mess up classes, especially when they end up CCing themselves because of it. While they lack anti-heal, they have a surprising profusion of abilities that can't be discounted. That includes a laundry list of stuns, the snare, a fear, interrupts, disarm, damage-dealing offensive dispel, and a silence. Not to mention the melee output reducers.

On Ret paladins:
<Fyr> its like they went from sniffing powdered sugar for 3 years, got real cocaine for 2 weeks, and are pissed that they're going back to the sugar again

 

mofidik

It's a nice way to cover up the obvious imbalance of ret and DKs in general (to not rub of whiny?), but discussing a symptom of this doesn't strike me as time well spend. It's just those two classes that actually have good lasting/healing viability, all other hybrids and core classes still cannot "last" without a healer.

A huge problem I admit but a symptom of a much larger problem, that spreads through literally all aspects of WoW, nevertheless.

¬(-.-¬) maek stabs!

 

gia

I think the amount of healing a ret paladin can sustain isn't comparable to what a shadow priest or elemental/enhancement shaman can sustain. I'm not sure about balance druids. The issue is you can't run a ret paladin oom but you can with the other classes.

What I think should be done is to lower both the mana cost of ret damage abilities and the return they get from judgements of the wise, in a way that their dps cycle longevity remains the same but healing will run them oom pretty quick.

Another issue with dps-only teams though and pvp in general is that dps has increased a lot while healing throughput/endurance has remained roughly the same, a healer simply cannot keep up. While some may argue that the reason is that we have level 80 talents at 70 and that the situation will be fixed at level 80, I don't think this will be the case. It might be at the start once everyone is in blue pvp gear, but once wotlk s2-s3 and higher tier raid gear becomes available I think we'll be back at the current situation.

 

doogless

The idea of a double DPS team with sustainability only applies when you have a Ret Paladin, all the other hybrids eventually run OOM.

Unholy DK/Ret Paladin has been one of the strongest teams on Beta because it's double DPS, but you have light healing, almost unlimited mana (unless the Ret Paladin gets specifically targetted for drains, and even then it's not guaranteed), and a whole bunch of defensive cooldowns.

When a class has equal damage but higher base survivability, really silly things happen in PvP (see: Rogues in S3 + S4). It's nice that Blizzard has raised up hybrid DPS so that all classes have vaguely equivalent PvE damage, but it has bad consequences for PvP balance when some classes have more default defensive ability than others.

 

Mearis

I think that's the problem even moreso than the burst. Having a combination of double DPS that offers you sustained healing 'breaks' the conventional metagame since you can keep applying burst for the entire time without worrying about atrition catching up.

 

Angeron

While it's true that ret/mage are obscenely overpowered, it's important to note that a disc/holy priest combined with a mage/warlock/hunter easily counters any double ret or ret/X team where X is not a rogue or hunter. This is because without a mortal strike debuff, priest shield, renews, spammable pain suppression, and other exciting talents (hello BR), make them literally impossible to kill for ret paladins. Combine this with the great CC AND tremendous damage potential of the previously mentioned class pairings means that there actually is an alternative to double CC. Let's also not forget that any time not spent healing/pillar kiting/dispelling, the priest can spamaburn the un-CCed ret paladin. Priests have gone from being the best utility class in all 3 brackets alongside warlocks, to the best anti-paladin healer in the game.

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.

 

Mearis

Err angeron, did you unironically suggest manaburning a ret paladin? Trust me, there is no situation where this is ever productive - ever. Assuming you are kiting the ret paladins, you won't ever run them out of mana with manaburns, maybe with multiple priests who are all focused on manaburning, but even that's iffy.

Disc/arcane mage will destroy terrible ret paladin teams, but if they play intelligently and just pillar the mage during AP, they will end up running the mage out of mana. I am not saying this ironically - try it, it works.

 

Peekaboo

At this point the burst is so high that the healing aspect of a hybrid is pretty meaningless. Generally, just keep on bursting is far more effective than stopping to heal (even in a bubble continuing to dps is the way to go, if its double dps vs double dps as your partner will end up dead in the time it takes to heal up).

Even ccs with cast times have become less powerful because of so many get out of jail cards/interupts etc.

--
Clearly the current situation is broken and not even worth discussing.

--
Overall, you can simply look at healing burst vs dps burst levels and come up with a scale. At one end you have DPS zergs (little skill required) at the other you have (mana unlimited) HEALING is OP 30 hour games (little skill required as nobody can die).

In between you have a sweet spot where skill becomes important and games can generally end within five minutes. CC becomes important as burst heals and burst dps (and cooldowns) are reasonably well balanced. Games will be fast and one mistake can mean your demise (e.g., using trinket too early, not getting out of los, popping cooldown at wrong time, ccing the wrong target etc.)

What Blizzard intends, I believe, is a 2vs2 arena that works a lot like the old rogue/mage combination. If played with skill you have enough cc and burst to overcome most healing in a short period of time. The average game will be over under a minute rather than 30 minutes. They want most double dps teams to have this capability (and be better balanced vs other comps that rogue/mage ever was). They also want healer/dps teams to have enough burst to kill someone when the opponent healer goes off to drink.

Right now they have gone overboard on the dps burst. Previously, sustained and burst healing was too high. They need the middle ground.

 

Grizlor

It's just the survivability cooldowns, really. That's it. Classes that do decent damage but lack survivability cooldowns/abilities will always be inferior to ones that do. That's why rogues were so dominant in S3/S4 and worked well with so many other classes, whereas warriors really only had druids (and sort of shamans, but not so much, especially in S4). Similarly, Enhance Shamans and most hunters didn't work with double DPS at all, and offspecs like shadow priests, feral druids, ret paladins, and non frost mages could really only find success with a rogue partner to lock people down and protect them.

A paladin can instant heal himself with flash of light for like 1700 occasionally, plus whatever mediocre healing divine storm can do. Back before paladins had Crusader Strike and Divine Storm, and judgement did laughable damage, all they really had was seals + autoattack, so bubble effectively cut their dps in half. Flash forward 4 years, and paladins have gotten:

- Judgements now doing high damage, with +25% crit rate and two talents that boost its critical damage
- Two instants on short cooldowns.
- Hammer of Wrath scaling off AP, instant cast, larger window of availability, +50% crit rate through talents
- Avenging Wrath not causing forebearance, allowing use of bubble after/during burst.

So all of these changes, combined with insane reduction to their long duration stun through the prot talent + pvp set bonus allows the class to play very offensively for what was originally a "defensive hybrid," because they have stun, repentance, and bubble to fall back on if they get in trouble, or they can continue killing you through using these abilities. If anything, bubble should just be changed to 50% damage reduction to be returned to its original intent.

The other dominant class (at 80), death knights, also has a high number of tools at their disposal, including anti magic shield, icebound fortitude, bone armor, decent healing through death strike (if needed), and possibly Lichborne. Basically that would be like rogues losing stuns and stealth, but gaining heals, shorter cooldown cloak of shadows, 1 minute cooldown shield wall that granted stun immunity, deterrence, and bloodthirst or something.

I'm really not sure what needs to be done here, but going the "warrior route" would probably be the best idea, like how shield wall actually requires a shield. A team that falls back on survivability tools should grant the other team a bit of respite, and that just isn't happening right now, when a rogue can continue wailing away on you while cloaked, or a paladin can jump around stomping you with bubble on.

 

Vazu

Personally, I see resto-kin / Shadowstep Rogues dominating 2v2s come S5. I know they are good right now, but with the changes to spellpower and such, plus 10 more talent points, it only gets better. Imagine a Druid with a spec like this. Now you have a Druid who can do even MORE damage, still has NS plus huge range on Cyclone AND Typhoon, which is an amazing 2s quality spell.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

gia

Mana burning a ret paladin is a recipe for failure currently, believe me I've tried even on beta at 80 where pallies have no int on their gear. They get back to full mana in 2 judgements and everything you spent draining them is just wasted. You're basically mana burning yourself.

But I hope this post doesn't degenerate into just "paladins are OP", with the announced changes they are much closer to being balanced, the only broken things remaining are the close to infinite mana and the 20 second cd stuns (which are insane).

There are many more things that I'm very worried about, the first being Dismantle, does anyone think that rogues actually needed this skill? Frostbite + Frost Armor is also getting silly combined with shattered barrier / chilled to the bone / permafrost, not to mention 36 yard slow and arcane barrage.

 

Vazu

They'll fix Paladins so they aren't as "bursty". Blizzard doesn't want to see 2v2 matches with people in full S5 lasting 20 seconds. That's not cool at all. The whole intent behind Resilience was to draw matches out. To allow players more room for strategy. All they really need to do is reign in the holy damage component of their burst attacks, and do something about their stun cooldowns.

 

Gourd

I'd prefer them to keep their burst and lose their ability to win against healers by atrophy.

 

Angeron

* sounds too much like a whine. Suffice to say that giving classes with insane burst capabilities great survivability/longevity talents is probably not a great idea for balance.

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.

 

Mearis

Yeah, that's my view. This however has to be done without impacting their ability to sustain their damage in PvE.

 

mhr_78

Art of War sure needs a nerf, compared to a shamans maelstrom weapon which needs 5 procs to be usefull it's too good for 2 points and lower in the ret tree (even ignoring the fact that it also raises crit coefficient which is a huge burst boost).

However i have a paladin alt and the mana return has always been a problem - which is now luckily fixed. But... Art of War and Sheath of Light surely need a nerf for pvp reasons, luckily most ret pallies suck in such a regard that they are plagued by tunnel vision on their targets hitpoints and ignore everything else - but the possible utility they have at hands of a decent player is about ten times the amount that other hybrids like shamans and druids get.

At least for druids, casting heals is heavily penalized (drop out of moonkin/feral forms and back into) - let alone for ferals who do not even have a halfway decent +spellpower utility talent - i ignore nurturing instinct just for the reason that you won't remotely get close to the spellpower values that shamans and paladins get.

 

Amera

2v2 has never had any semblance of balance and I'm honestly surprised by their design decision to continue to have it award nearly full points and titles. That being said, with the variety of new DPS talents that exist, I can't see how double DPS won't just reign supreme in its current form.

If a melee hybrid is going to be able to legitimately compete for spots with other melee classes in team matricies, they have to either offer the same tools or actually bring something new and useful to the table. For the entirety of TBC, warriors were better choices than hybrid melee despite having virtually 0 utility simply because of their sustained damage (amplified via MS). For the last two seasons, rogues dominated because they had that, obscene levels of CC, and weren't usually viable targets.

At the simplest level, all the hybrid melee classes were inferior because, despite their various utility abilities, sustained damage amplified via MS was the easiest way to fit into so many different team setups. Paladins had more burst and more utility than warriors/rogues, yet never came close to replacing them. Shaman had more burst and more utility than warriors/rogues, yet never came close to replacing them. Ferals were just bad.

So to be blunt, I think hybrids need to be able to manage similar sustainable pressure to other melee classes if they want to be competitive. Burst is a poor solution that most people don't like because it involves too much RNG, especially in the case of paladins where you still have uncontrolled elements (SoC) in addition to the standard RNG elements like crits (and to be fair, shaman as well with windfury).

So this is a long-winded way of saying that sustained damage was more important than burst for long-term melee viability, and I think this will probably be the case again at 80. Casters have been the focal point of spike damage, while melee has been the focal point of sustained damage. I'm not convinced this needs to change as a model, especially in the more balanced 3s and 5s brackets.

 

Mearis

2s is static as a bracket because people favour it. Blizzard probably hates that people like it so much, but if everyone likes 2s, Blizzard cannot merely stop supporting it.

I don't think anyone opposes sustained damage from damage dealing hybrids. People oppose sustained damage AND utility from them. At some point, you do have to have a way of exhausting resources from people who provide utility.

 

Amera

If utility consists of Hand spells and cleanses, that's a utility trade-off for MS/hamstring or stuns/blind/sap/crippling, and is actually a worse since the MS debuff still magnifies sustained damage so much. It certainly isn't enough to justify running out of mana a minute or two into the match.

We're kind of thread chasing here, but I think adding in small amounts of healing to the group/player is a decent extra bonus to make up for not having MS, unless it amounts to sustainable HL or HW spam (basically anything approaching a full healer HPS).

 

Mearis

I agree that MS is incredibly powerful, but it is a one trick pony. You then end up with arena compositions with one person who provides MS, and everyone else who provides non-stacking utility if you believe that the price of not having MS means that you are entitled to sustainable utility/healing.

At this point, just call it a day, give every melee MS, and then balance things accordingly.

 

Drops

2v2 as a ret paladin, I'm killing all the people that have not adapted any tactics whatsoever to try and kill me (they never needed to before).

Some classes we have a undisputed advantage against--warriors, ferals just have a terrible chance, and a real reason for nerfs/buffs. But most people see me running up to them, and don't try to get away, and then complain they get flattened when I start hitting them. I still get shamans going ghost wolf with JoJ trying to out-run me. I get locks trying to drain-tank me. I get rogues who think they can stand toe to toe without any mindfulness of their abilities. Then they cry OP is the reason for their failure, despite their lack of tactical display.

It should not be surprising that these people fail, because there's now a real penalty for doing so. There is now, no time to think in combat when ret gets into melee distance. You either pre-plan or learn to react fast based on experience. It's not like I stealth, have incredible movement speed, and a plethora of ranged attacks. I can't catch a druid that stays outside my 10 yard limit for most of my abilities, and repent doesn't work on travel form. In fact, anyone who really can kite long enough will wear down a ret to the point he has to stop and heal without being able to regen mana. HoF doesn't last forever, can be purged, and we're more susceptible to CC than ever before.

JotW restores 33% of base, every 8 seconds (7 with the new bonus), which is just enough to cover a single DPS rotation with no extra utility. To maintain a positive mana flow would require a reduction in the use of offense, healing, and/or utility. Meaning, we're not going to be working at full strength as mana becomes more critical.

A lot of people don't seem to understand the word 'disarm' to remove my ability to use CS and DivS when I sloe in, or silence to remove Judgments, HoJ, and even bubble at the right time. They sort of spam those abilities haphazardly expecting them to somehow work miracles--boggling to me, as I am used to waiting for the most opportune moments for a HoJ that can only be used every 60 sec, and likely trinketed instantly.

Everyone remember back when holy was considered OP-ed? It barely took one season to figure out how to counter a holy paladin's abilities to provide the window of opportunity to win. Experience is what I think that's what's missing most of all right now, with some moderate OP elements.

 

mofidik

So what you're saying is that melee shouldn't be allowed to hit rets, and when you kite them they can't do anything as, by your logic, they have no utility outside damage. In short summary that'd be: wrong.

Your post is nothing but an insult to the intelligence of every single person that reads EJ, there's so many references to "well, you're just terrible, so that's why this happens". While, in fact the entire PoV of your post is simply from a very, very poorly played ret.

¬(-.-¬) maek stabs!

 

Drops

Your interpretation of my post is also "an insult to the intelligence of every single person that reads EJ".

I actually said we're OPed in certain circumstances, and flat out OPed against some whole classes. But that it's not a hard fast and general rule, and gave a bunch of examples why.

I don't even mention the word utility in my whole post.

 

mofidik

And your examples only imply that the people you're fighting are bad, or you get into those situations because _you_ play poorly. That's a worthless analyses. And that's actually addressing the point where you can't be hitting stuff, the notion that every class should get away from you needs to ring a malecowdung bell in your head somewhere too.

The reason I mentioned utility is because you describe being kited as the end of your worth, which isn't true when you're a paladin. In fact, if you had given a proper thought to it, you'd have noticed this is the soul reason this thread exists: you still have, amongst other things, very solid healing capabilities. Oops!

Are paladins OP'd? It's a relative term, as long as you're biased enough you can argue either. Do paladins have flaws? They can be kited past their bubble/BoF (if dispelled instead of your array of own buffs + potentional ones from partner), when not dispelled. Do the only class flaws not having a teleport or an MS (at least partially made up by the burst potentional, and the fact that it doesn't stack with the one your partner might have) warrant a position to simply state everyone you win against is bad? Personal gut feeling [and a wee bit of common sense] from rolling over stuff on my own paladin says no.

People are perfectly used to paladins having great burst, they've always been amongst the ones with the highest burst potentional. What's changed is that the burst is in most cases not in the realm of things you can physically survive and that's the problem. On top of the fact that the most important part of that burst is done while immune, and that you if you fail you have a far better shot at surviving until the next gib opportunity arises than normal *cough* balanced *cough* double DPS teams.

¬(-.-¬) maek stabs!