WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 285

Fiola · 09/27/08, 1:19 PM

Originally Posted by GSH

Well, I disagree with this. I think it's more important for spells to be predictable and understandable than to be powerful. Power can always be compensated for with additional effects.

If everyone thinks a talent does X upon reading it, but it actually does Y, that's a worse thing for the game than for X to be slightly underpowered. Haven't you seen a new player get all excited about Vindication, and then you have to tell them that no, it's actually fairly useless because it doesn't work on anything hard.

To give another example, in Warhammer there are currently spells with cast times which can be cast on the run, and spells with cast times which cannot. It's crazy, and I can't find a pattern, so I have to remember that fact for every spell. There's lots of complaints on WAR forums stemming from the fact that people don't realize that spell X is much more useful than it seems because it can be cast on the run.

For a new player who doesn't know about swing timers, he probably doesn't even know about the swing timer reset caused by normal casting. The transparency added by nerfing AoW would be non-existent, unless all tooltips are updated to note, "this spell resets/does not reset your swing timer".

For players who do understand swing timer resets, one does not spec AoW because, "I get instant FoLs that don't reset the swing timer!" We spec AoW because "I get instant FoLs!" - and we see the usefulness of being able to deliver healing instantly, on the move.

Adding a 0.1 cast time to the AoW FoL would greatly reduce the "awsome fun" part of the talent - Instant healing, usable on the move - in return for extremely dubious benefits in transparency.

Anedris · 09/27/08, 1:37 PM

One of the reasons I plan to level a ret paladin in Wrath is because I don't want to be a pure DPS class. It's fun to be able to contribute to healing. It's less fun when I suffer a significant DPS hit to do so, since it encourages me to simply play like a rogue in plate. (And rogues do more damage so I could just level my rogue if that was what I wanted to do.)

I like the self-healing aspect of divine storm but AoW, being controllable, is even more interesting. I don't have the latency to watch a swing timer with any accuracy and frankly I would rather watch the fight than stare at a swing timer anyways, so I don't see any value in having it reset the swing timer. (Anything relating to swing timers is also confusing, of course.)

I hardly think that a ret paladin throwing one FoL every 10ish seconds is overpowered. It's not like we're near the top of the DPS charts and giving us any more utility is going to make us brokenly desirable and every raid will be stacking 2-3 of us. It doesn't even matter that shadowpriests provide far more healing than this ever would - ret is a unique class/spec and its raid contribution should be balanced to equal those of other class/specs. I do not think instant FoLs that do not interfere with DPS, given that our DPS is middle to low-ish, is out of line.

(And I don't care about PvP and resent whenever it interferes with PvE.)

Basically, it's a fun mechanic and having it tied up in swing timers reduces the fun. I am not seeing any downside (unless it would break PvP balance, but as I said I don't PvP, don't follow PvP, and would rather not have PvP messing up PvE).

Demonseedx · 09/27/08, 1:56 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

Ret paladins have 2 heals and only one is affected by AoW. Given a normal crit rate and that it only allows Flash of Light you're looking at a single 1.8k-ish heal every 15 seconds. A priest doing VE is a ton more healing than that for 5 people passively, and his healing throughput increases as his gear increases.

So no, you're pretty much wrong about everything.

My argument was inherently flawed because I exaggerated but the basic root is the same and really hasn't been answered. JoL, DS, FoL are all healing aren't they? How much healing does a Rogue, Warrior, or DK bring while supposedly adding the same dps? What buff/debuffs do they bring that makes them significantly better then just bringing two Ret Paladins?

flyingtoastr · 09/27/08, 2:15 PM

Originally Posted by Demonseedx

My argument was inherently flawed because I exaggerated but the basic root is the same and really hasn't been answered. JoL, DS, FoL are all healing aren't they? How much healing does a Rogue, Warrior, or DK bring while supposedly adding the same dps? What buff/debuffs do they bring that makes them significantly better then just bringing two Ret Paladins?

A fury warrior heals himself for 3% of his total health every 10 seconds (Bloodthirst). A Death Knight in Blood Presence (which I believe is still the PvE DPS presence of choice) heals himself for 2% of all the damage he does. In addition if a DK is specced Blood he will have more passive healing for himself (Bloodworms) as well as an aura that makes all his party members regenerate health equal to 2% of the damage they cause (Blood Aura).

Rogues and Enhancement Shamans do not have passive healing abilities, but they make up for it with other utilities. Bloodlust. Totems. Misdirection (Tricks of the Trade). Cloak of Shadows. A threat dump (Vanish). So while we may have some nice little off-healing capabilities those other classes are far from worthless.

Hidden · 09/27/08, 2:33 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

A fury warrior heals himself for 3% of his total health every 10 seconds (Bloodthirst). A Death Knight in Blood Presence (which I believe is still the PvE DPS presence of choice) heals himself for 2% of all the damage he does. In addition if a DK is specced Blood he will have more passive healing for himself (Bloodworms) as well as an aura that makes all his party members regenerate health equal to 2% of the damage they cause (Blood Aura).

Rogues and Enhancement Shamans do not have passive healing abilities, but they make up for it with other utilities. Bloodlust. Totems. Misdirection (Tricks of the Trade). Cloak of Shadows. A threat dump (Vanish). So while we may have some nice little off-healing capabilities those other classes are far from worthless.

Bloodthirst cooldown is 6 seconds only, not 10.
Otherwise correct, Rogues don't heal, they avoid the damage in the first place.

Qalor · 09/27/08, 2:40 PM

The 2 major points to me are:
Instacasts don't interrupt your swing timer. You learn early on in the game that you can move, hit, hop around, whatever you want and do instas. The fact that an insta violates part of this arbitrarily, without notifying the player of this, is just a major inconsistency.

Mana. This subject hasn't been brought up as much, but it's been mentioned that current JotW mechanics allow for a full dps cycle with maybe a smidgen extra mana left over. That smidgen is not enough to support constant FoL while still going fill tilt, is it? If not, then there's no real point to this whole argument, because using FoL every time you can WILL result in a loss of dps.

Blutelf · 09/27/08, 2:51 PM

Mana is not a concern. BoW, Mana Spring totem, Replenishment, Spiritual Attunement, and of course Divine Plea will make sure that you can spam FoL to your heart's content in PVE. The calculations I saw in this thread just took JoTW into account.

Besides, what does the mana loss you mention have to do with DPS loss? It only changes the total amount of damage you can deal before losing all mana. Your DPS will decrease because your swing timer is reset.

Reading the last few pages it's been mostly bickering. Why don't you start recount, go hit a dummy for 10 minutes, and show how much the swing reset hurts DPS, or how much mana using AoW FoL on every proc costs. Hard data is something we might all be interested in, speculations and personal wishes probably not so much.

Xaoc · 09/27/08, 2:52 PM

Spells made instant through the use of talents, however, do reset yout swing timer. They also do not get any reduction in mana from Benediction because they are 'instant.'

flyingtoastr · 09/27/08, 2:59 PM

Originally Posted by Xaoc

Spells made instant through the use of talents, however, do reset yout swing timer. They also do not get any reduction in mana from Benediction because they are 'instant.'

No, SOME spells made instant through talents do not reset your swing timer. The big one here is of course Maelstrom Weapon.

Arthaal · 09/27/08, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

A fury warrior heals himself for 3% of his total health every 10 seconds (Bloodthirst). A Death Knight in Blood Presence (which I believe is still the PvE DPS presence of choice) heals himself for 2% of all the damage he does. In addition if a DK is specced Blood he will have more passive healing for himself (Bloodworms) as well as an aura that makes all his party members regenerate health equal to 2% of the damage they cause (Blood Aura).

Why is ret aura so terrible for us then? I have an aura that, untalented, doesn't help me in any way and has a paltry 30 yard range? On top of that, I take knockback damage in order to maximize my DPS (which, with 4.5k crit judgements during AW turn out to be a killer) while they heal themselves

In PvP, DKs have more lives than a cat... deathstrike crits brings them back up from the dead an annoyingly large majority of times.

Hidden · 09/27/08, 3:02 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

No, SOME spells made instant through talents do not reset your swing timer. The big one here is of course Maelstrom Weapon.

It's not *some*, it's all that are used by melee classes, Fury Warriors instant Slam and Shamans instant whatever. Blizzard just doesn't care about changing it for Holy/Restoration/Restoration because it doesn't matter, it'd be extra work with no use.

Fiola · 09/27/08, 3:07 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

No, SOME spells made instant through talents do not reset your swing timer. The big one here is of course Maelstrom Weapon.

Which is not in the game yet. Everything we've seen up to now behaves like AoW does. (Non-instacast spell made instant will reset swing timer)

Does NS still reset swing timers on PTR/Beta? Then it seems we should be asking whether instant cast mechanics in general need to be standardized. (vs. making AoW act like Maelstrom Weapon) Also note that there are plenty of baseline instants that do reset the swing timer on Live - Priest instants, mage instants, druid instants . . .

There's plenty of inconsistency to go around.

Hidden · 09/27/08, 3:41 PM

Originally Posted by Fiola

Which is not in the game yet. Everything we've seen up to now behaves like AoW does. (Non-instacast spell made instant will reset swing timer)

Does NS still reset swing timers on PTR/Beta? Then it seems we should be asking whether instant cast mechanics in general need to be standardized. (vs. making AoW act like Maelstrom Weapon) Also note that there are plenty of baseline instants that do reset the swing timer on Live - Priest instants, mage instants, druid instants . . .

There's plenty of inconsistency to go around.

There are zero inconsistencies.
Live: All base spells with a cast time reset the swing timer, all without a cast time don't. Restoration Shamans and Restoration Druids can use NS to cast an instant heal that still resets the swing timer.
Beta: All base spells with a cast time reset the swing timer, all without a cast time don't. Slam was changed to delay the cast timer so you can always use it when you want and don't need to wait for the next swing. Enhancement Shamans and Fury Warriors have gotten talents that give them procs to make cast time abilities instant. Because the swing interrupt is coded into the spell and not checked every time the spell is used, they both interrupted the swing timer in their first implementation and were then fixed to make the spells truely instant, not resetting the swing timer. It's just logical that when Blizzard removes the "wait for next swing/shot to use an ability just after it"-abilities from Warriors and Hunters and makes all instant abilities used by other melee classes not interrupt the swing timer that they also make AoW proc real instants that don't reset the swing timer.

flyingtoastr · 09/27/08, 3:53 PM

Well, actually Moonfire does reset the swing timer in live despite it's instant status, but we can chalk that up to very odd programmer choices.

Siawn · 09/27/08, 3:55 PM

Originally Posted by GSH

On a general level, it's a bug that should be fixed overall. Instant spells have certain characteristics. They can be cast on the run, and they do not reset the swing time. It's intuitive that a spell that becomes instant should behave like an instant cast spell. It makes the game simpler, more predictable, and easier to understand, especially for people who don't run mods like Quartz.

If it is necessary that AoW reset the swing time, a better solution is for AoW to reduce the FoL cast time to 0.1 or 0.2 seconds. Then it would obvious to all that it was still non-instant spell, and obeyed the rules for non-instant spells.

Please tell me you're not advocating that an ability be horribly nerfed because, "New people might be confused." Anyone who cares that it resets their swing timer will know about it, and act accordingly. Those who don't obviously aren't playing on a level where it would matter. Obviously I, and every other Paladin, would prefer that the ability be changed to stop resetting the swing timer, but in lieu of that, giving it a cast time, albeit a short one, is a terrible idea.