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While everyone else was enjoying their time off, Ghostcrawler still kept an eye on the WoW forums and tried to reply to posts. As a WoW player, I definitely appreciate his devotion to keeping the lines of communication open with the community!
Blue Posts
Cloth PvP Survivability (Source)
First, I think the warlocks would disagree pretty vehemently about their survivability. This message comes up pretty regularly on the damage forums.
Second, we know it's posible to make very tough priests, because Disc priests were exactly like that in later seasons. It took a high amount of resilience gear and some specific talent choices, but they could take a lot of damage and heal themselves through a certain amount of it.
I agree we have some work to do on Holy priests in PvP.
I think the concept of a cloth class without a lot of mobiliy that is supposed to just heal itself through damage would be a pretty hard sell. But we try to address it on the mitigation side for priests (and the occasional fear bomb doesn't hurt).
Damage/Healing or Survivability: Your Choice (Source)
I understand your point, but we actually do ask players to choose between more damage or healing and survivability. It is supposed to be an interesting decision. When you really want a talent because it is really useful for PvP and that prevents you from getting another talent that you also ideally want, you can argue that means the talent trees are actually working. One of the things I like about PvP specs is they do place a lot more emphasis on hybrid builds in order to pick up certain talents, while a great many PvE specs choose one tree and try to max it out.
I am probably taking the mob example far beyond what you intended, but I think it is actually illustrative. You are going to defeat, by a huge order of magnitude, most of the mobs you meet. In many examples it won't even be a challenge -- you will two shot them. If the PvP matchmaking is working well, however, you will lose 50% of every match (and that assumes classes are perfectly balanced, which I won't pretend to claim). It is much harder to feel like a hero in an Arena because we aren't trying to make you feel like a hero. Psychologically, I think that is a bigger deal than a lot of players realize.
Crowd Control in PvP (Source)
Players complained endlessly about being chain feared and stunlocked too. Still do. It's the reason there are so many ways to break CC in the game now. You can't pretend that crowd control was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Damage in Arenas: Higher than TBC? (Source)
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but no, this was not the intent.
It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they should even bother trying to heal.
Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are discussing right now.
We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear you.
Player Numbers versus Blizzard Numbers: The Nerf Game (Source)
It is challenging to compare our numbers to those that come up from the community. Since I have been doing this gig, there have been plenty of times when players will say "Yeah, we figured X was overpowered," but that is almost immediately followed by "but the nerfs were too much." I have honestly yet to see more than one or two players ever agree that the magnitude of a nerf (any nerf) was justified. I'm just sayin.
We have to rely on our testing more than the community. That's just the way it has to work. Your numbers, however, are a useful reality check. In situations where the community consistently finds different numbers, we might go check our numbers again. We will do so in this case.
Something else worth pointing out is the whole concept of "your mileage may vary." Not every player has the same timing, gear, situational awareness or even rotation. In many cases our calculations are based on the higher ends of the spectrum -- the damage potential generated by the best players in ideal situations. For a class like the hunter that does require a fairly high amount of skill to master that may mean that your damage didn't drop as much (because you weren't using a technique that the experts were using to coax every bit of dps out of their attacks) or your damage may drop a lot more (because the experts are able to switch to other sources of damage more readily than a less skilled player).
All I'm saying is that WoW isn't such a simple game that a 10% buff or nerf done on our end will automatically result in a 10% buff or nef for every player out there in every situation.
Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Druids As Tanks (Source)
We don't really apply a penalty to Feral tanks to make up for the fact that they have Rebirth. (We don't really apply a penalty to Prot warriors to make up for their shouts.)
I recently said in another thread that druids can do a lot of different things well and when doing those things they have a lot less overlap in abilities used than warriors, paladins and death knights. For that reason, we don't want to keep giving bears more and more abilities. We don't want druids to be the class with 120 abilities while every other class has 30. Rebirth is in your spellbook and probably on your bar (and you have probably even clicked it) even though it isn't a tanking tool like Demo Roar or Barkskin. Different classes do have different abilities, and we want to keep as much of that flavor as we can.
We want to have four classes that can main tank (given appropriate skill and gear). We're pretty close to that right now, but we'll have to see what things look like in the next tier of content. It's possible the gear available then or the types of encounters you experience change the playing field a little, in which case we'll have to make adjustments.
Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Divine Aegis Nerf (Source)
You guys have poked holes in some of the extreme examples that have been mentioned, and understandably so, but this essentially is the gist of it. Players are really good at finding clever ways to exloit mechanics to trivialize encounters. Healing damage is a pretty well understood mechanic at this point. Shielding players from taking damage is a little scarier -- preventing 2x damage is a much bigger deal than healing 2x damage.
While we probably could come up with a system that bullet proofed every possible potential Diving Aegis exploit, I just don't know that the bang for the buck is there. Even if you have 3-4 Disc priests healing a raid, it seems like they could all be pretty effective even with a limitation of one shield per target.
If we get to the point where it feels like the third or fourth Disc priest is being excluded from a raid or an Arena team, we'll probably look into it some more. For now, we just want to see Disc be more common in general.
Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Demonic Circle (Source)
Teleport breaking snares is something we're discussing.
As I've said, we want to make some changes to the warlock class for a future patch. Since those changes will take some time and testing, we are also going to try for some more band-aid level fixes that can go live much more quickly. You will doubtless see lots of (less-informed) players say "That's it?" to which you can reply (if you so choose) that no, that's not it, but a handful of quick changes (such as perhaps teleport breaking snare) that we thought we could safely make while we are looking at the larger issues.
When we have the "sooner" changes finalized, we'll announce them. When we have the "later" changes finalized, we'll announce them too. Ideally those "later" changes can come out at the same time as Ulduar, but we'll see.
I also don't want anyone to think this was the only post on warlock (largely PvP) issues that we've read lately. There have been some insightful comments and good ideas on several threads, mixed in of course with the traditional QQ. :) For those of you who made the good posts, we thank you.
Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)
Sudden Death's Randomness (Source)
No, I think I understood the issue in this case (which isn't easy, since so many of these questions are typically written in "gotcha" format). We did want them to be random abilities. It would have been very easy to make them on-demand, but we have also had to nerf a lot of on-demand burst (just ask the Ret pallies). In your mind you are probably envisioning a Sudden Death that does what it does now when you want it to. But in our minds, if we made the ability less random we would also make it hit less hard. That might be a fine trade-off for some warriors. We have discussed making Sudden Death more like mini-Executes. The reason we haven't done that yet is it just waters down the ability. Players might start to think, eh, it's not a ton more damage than MS, so I'll just stick with MS. It is really easy for players to match out abilities when randomness is downplayed.
Incidentally, mage damage (less so Frost, but certainly Fire and Arcane) is very RNG prone at the moment.
Stance Penalties (Source)
I think in the minds of most warriors they say "Would I like to have a 10% percent damage penalty or not? I think not."
But of course that's not the way it would work. If we redesigned the stances it wouldn't be in order to give warriors 3% more crit and 10% more health. That's just a straight buff. What we would likely do is something similar to the death knight presences -- lower your health by 10% and then increase the damage reduction of Defensive Stance and give Battle Stance a tiny bit of damage reduction. (Or maybe Battle Stance would take the same damage as Berserk, but have a more meaningful bonus like movement speed or attack speed). Now your tooltips don't use the word "penalty" so you maybe feel better about them, but the balance hasn't really changed much -- Berserk would be an offensive stance and Defensive would be a defensive stance. Being in Berserk would still be risky.
If instead you're just arguing that warriors are weak and need to be buffed, that's a different issue. But there is no reason we would have to solve that by removing stance penalties.
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