f13.net

Eynoix listed a small bit from the upcoming patch.
-edit- Adding in additional Info.
-edit2- I am OCD about formatting ><
-edit3- For part III !

PART I (Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910002204&sid=1 )
 
PRIEST
# Divine Spirit – this spell is now a core ability available to all priests.
# Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).
# Several area of effect (AOE) heal spells have been improved: Prayer of Healing can be cast on any groups in your raid party. Holy Nova’s mana cost has been reduced. Circle of Healing now heals for more.
# Shadow priest PvP survivability has been improved: Shadow Form now reduces magic as well as physical damage. Dispersion now removes snares.
# Penance – this spell can now be targeted on the priest.
# Serendipity – this talent now reduces the cast time of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when Binding Heal or Flash Heal are cast.
# We are also working to give Holy additional PvP utility.

ROGUE
# Hunger for Blood – instead of a self-buff, this ability can only be used when there is a bleed effect on the target. However, it has no stacks and grants a 15% damage bonus.
# Adrenaline Rush – the cooldown on this ability has been lowered.
# Lightning Reflexes – reduced to 3 ranks. In addition to 2/4/6% dodge, this talent now also grants 4/7/10% passive melee haste.
# Killing Spree – while this ability is active, the rogue does 20% additional damage.
# Savage Combat – now causes 2/4% physical damage done.
# Mace Specialization – this talent now grants haste in addition to armor penetration.

SHAMAN
# Chain Lightning – now jumps to 4 targets but does less damage. We wanted to make the distinction between Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning more clear.
# Storm, Earth and Fire – this talent now increases all damage done by Flame Shock, not just periodic damage.
# Spirit Weapons – now reduces all threat, not just melee threat.
# Unleashed Rage – reduced to 2 ranks, now also increases your critical strike chance with melee attacks by 1/2%.
# Totem streamlining: The Mana Spring and Healing Stream Totems have been combined. The Disease Cleansing and Poison Cleansing Totems have been combined.
# We are also working on giving Enhancement and Elemental more PvP utility.


PART II (Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910422662&sid=1 )

WARLOCK
# Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch).
# Improved Soul Leech – this talent now provides Replenishment (similar to shadow priests)
# Drain Soul now has a chance to produce Soul Shards even if the target doesn’t die.
# Siphon Life no longer as an active ability but the talent grants the old Siphon Life effect to Corruption.
# Curse of Recklessness and Curse of Weakness have been combined into one spell
# Consume Shadows – this Voidwalker ability is no longer channeled but has a cooldown.
# Several other warlock talents have had their ranks reduced, their effects changed or removed. This list includes but is not limited to Demonic Empathy, Shadow Embrace, Eradication, Suppression, and Pandemic.
# Additional new talents have been added.

DRUID
# Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.
# Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.
# Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.
# Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.
# Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.
# Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.
# We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

WARRIOR
# Changing stances now has a much reduced cost: you lose a maximum of 20 rage (10 with Tactical Mastery). For example, if you have 100 rage and change stances, you will have 80 rage remaining. If you have 10 rage and change stances, all of your rage is lost. In addition, we may change the penalties associated with some stances.
# You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield.
# Blood Frenzy now causes 2/4% physical damage done.
# Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP.
# We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam.
# We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries.


PART III (Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910003268&sid=1 )

MAGE
# Improved Water Elemental – this talent has been removed and replaced with a new talent that grants Replenishment (similar to Shadow priests).
# We are also working on a way to give frost mages Ice Lance “Shatter combos” in PvE.
# We are also working on more survivability for Fire spec in PvP.
# We are also working on making Spirit a more useful and interesting stat for all mages.

PALADIN
# Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
# Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
# Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
# Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
# Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
# Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

HUNTER
# Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.
# A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.
# Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.
# Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.
# Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.
# We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

DEATH KNIGHT
# Gargoyle and Unholy Blight have swapped talent positions. Gargoyle’s damage has increased and runic power cost per time has decreased.
# Pestilence – this spell no longer causes damage but just spreads diseases. Blood Boil is intended to be the general area attack, and has been changed to be castable on targets with no diseases on them, but does extra damage if diseases are present.
# Unbreakable Armor now absorbs a flat amount of damage that increases as your armor increases. It no longer boosts armor.
# The Frost tree has been shuffled. Among other things, PvP talents such as Endless Winter are closer to the top of the tree where Blood and Unholy death knights can access them.
# Sudden Doom – this talent now procs a Death Coil rather than requiring an additional button click. It works similarly to shamans’ Lightning Overload.
# Magic Suppression and Blood of the North have been reduced to 3 ranks for the same benefit.
# Blood Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.


MANA REGEN (Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910422908&sid=1 )

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

    * Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.

    * To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.

    * The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.

    * Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.

    * In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

    * We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.

    * We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.

    * These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

AE Priest Bubble seems awesome!

Combined Mana+Healing Spring and Disease+Poison Totems is such a nice change as well.


I don't understand Rogues on a good day, so someone else will have to make sense of those changes for me.

In english:

Priest: PVE buffs to make discipline viable for general PVE instead of just a gimmick tree for Sarth 3d. Obligatory slap in the face to shadow priests.

Rogue: PVE buffs.

Shaman: Frees up a couple binds, a token ele buff to go along with a token ele nerf, and a minor enhancement buff.

Awesome.  I started playing my priest again recently and Disc is fun but, yeah, healing is a bitch as Disc compared to Holy.  Fun, fun.

Wouldn't this being a full tenth-point update instead of the prior hundredth-point update also mean some sort of major content thing? Sure I'm excited by the usual round of tweaks. But I'd expect more, particularly with the growing problem of non-Raiding endgamers running out of rep to grind.

Yeah yeah more coming, it wasn't cut and pasted but it says other class ones soon to come.

First opinion all I see is more simplification of the game. Divine spirit for all 3 specs...say what....please do explain how a shadow priest earns that.

So more of just get 10 or 25 people into your it wont' matter what they do you just need 10/25 and go and you can win attitude. Weak.

I see a lot of Rogue buffs, speaking as someone without a 80 rogue.

I predict fully more changes to Paladins to affect the burst dps, that will truly fuck any holy paladins even further to again make you question WTF am I holy paladin. Ret paladins will snicker at their now cut in half holy paladins brethern. Prot paladins won't care cuz they are dealing fucktons of dps still.

Roll a tank you'll deal more damage than anyone else even pure dps classes. Then you'll mock loudly any enhancement shaman when you out dps that shaman without realizing that shaman is the reason your doing 10-35ish% more damage in your group/raid. Fucking selfish bishes.


Good cure to game buff everyone and make everything simpler.

Divine Spirit goes baseline, new group bubble talent replaces it in the Disc tree? I'm not sure what you mean by a Shadow Priest 'earning' it?


Darniaq: That was just a small preview posted by Blizzard, more to come Soon(TM).

Yeah DS has been a "Must have" buff for raiding priests for as long as I can remember.  As such, it makes sense to make it baseline like any of the 'must have' buffs for classes over the years.  Improved DS will probably stil remain a Disc Talent instead of rolling into the base, meaning the most useful part for a raid (extra spelldam) will still require at least a secondary into Disc.

The rogue buffs DO make me QQ, though.  Must be because there's so many plate classes out there in PVP these days.

DS being baseline really helps my Moonkin, which has this odd double dipping spirit/int split in terms of mana regen and tertiary bonuses.

Interesting... I play a holy priest and a DK atm, it's fun playing on the overpowered AND underpowered ends of the spectrum :awesome_for_real:. It's hard to tell just how good the buffs are going to be without numbers (anyone else remember the 'massive COH buff' where they increased its healing by a whole 25 hitpoints? Yeah.)

About divine spirit: it's a good change (and warlocks won't be forced to use felhunters anymore!), though improved DS is pretty much useless atm; a simple flametongue totem will override it, kek. (they don't stack since wotlk)


-- Z.

DS should have been made baseline years ago. The exciting change is the new buff to PoH and Serendipity; although it's not clear whether the seredipity change will remove it's funcation as an awesome efficiency talent.

Glyphed PoH has the potential for huge HPS, this could be interesting.

Yeah it's weird having to kill shit as a holy/disc smite spec vs my "what, something  hit me?" DK.  I can't complain too badly about spelldam at least as I'm only 76 but have 1257 spelldam self-buffed. Whee! 

Not having priest-raided yet, (and not ever having had a shaman and priest in my 10-mans.. who pays attention to spell buffs in 25s as melee?) I didn't realize that about flametongue totem.  Guess I'll be speccing out of that soon enough!

I expect nothing out of the CoH "buff."  Not more than a month ago they were talking about nerfing it again because of how it marginalized other healers, now it's getting a buff? I'll believe it when I see it.

Part II

It's about time we saw these changes to enhance. It's been obvious spell damage generated threat has been a problem since 3.0. It's become a REAL problem when you hit 80 and start seriously gearing up.

The UR thing is another issue that's been obvious since 3.0. Dropping this to two talent points is simply outstanding (now I can get imp shields...), the crit buff isn't quite what anyone wanted (Hello? Expertise, maybe...), but at least it is a selfless buff. Totems, eh, it's good as I can always use more keyboard space, but I have so many conditional totem macros that it won't really affect me that much, other than maybe a bit less wear on my wrists typing up macros.

PvP now, well...good luck with that. The perfect shaman PvP buff would be removal of PvP from WoW. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, now that I think of it. Blizz will need some serious creativity there. We shall see. I'm betting it won't happen, but one never knows.

yes yes yes yes yes (rogue and priest)

One thing I noticed; mutilate rogues are about 10x more work than combat rogues. I got a new shiny and respecc'd to combat and I am never going back. Playing cooldown games keeping Hunger for Blood, Slice and Dice, Rupture up while moving around and paying attention to your surroundings is practically harder than raid healing. I'm not confident the hunger for blood change is going to make it much easier.

Combat rogues simply mash SS and use one of two alternating finishers.

Random change is... random.


Seriously, while I'm sure that is supposed to be some sort of Moonkin PvP buff... I hope there is some kind of bigger picture they just haven't shown us yet, because there is precisely zero way any Moonkin will be able to put 11 points into Feral, where 10 will be useless.

I'm interested to see how the new Rogue changes play out but I found that I rather enjoyed the mental work. It is easy to maintain all those items if you keep hitting your crits. Only critical one to keep up at all times was Hunger for Blood, the rest could easily be reapplied.

how a shadow priest EARNS divine spirit? Oh gtfo poopsocker, these changes have been long in coming because as stated multiple times, they aren't even that great, just making things a bit easier.

As to the actual shadow changes? well 15% melee AND spell reduction combined is actually pretty good. No, it's not the end all be all but I wouldn't throw it out.  As for dispersion breaking snares? woop-de-freakin-do, ill either get re-snared while in dispersion or as soon as im out of it. this doesnt really add much to survivability.

Holy/disc looks interesting, shadow looks like they still arent sure what to do with us.

Gee, we only suggested combining mana spring/healing spring and poison/disease cleanse what...3 and a half years ago?  Hell, it was back i n the day when we wore onions on our belts, as was the style at the time.

Whatever.

-edit- Moved the patch info to the first post.



Mana regen changes always scare me  :ye_gods:

The stance dance thing is fine for warriors, I suppose, but I never really used it more than just breaking fears. Granting rage when warriors block, dodge, or parry should be baseline and I thought they did that already. As explained numerous times, you don't want better gear to = shittier threat performance because of less rage, which is usually on trash mobs. Arms needs the most looking at in the warrior line, and I think it's getting it. Prot needs a few tweaks, and I think they are getting those too. I really don't think shockwave generates the kind of threat that it should for a 20s cooldown ability, but we'll see.

We get rage on block from the shield spec talent but rage on dodge/parry were taken out partway through beta.

Honestly I don't think I need it. Prot is in a really good place right now, the only things I want are lazy quality of life things like longer shout durations and maybe a change to heroic strike mechanics.

Two things stand out for me.
1.  Blizzard just fucked holy paladins.  Side note - I'm -highly- amused that the poster notes that paladin mana regen works differently, then boldly states they're going to "fix" holy paladin mana regen by nerfing the bejesus out of Divine Plea.  The main job of a holy paladin is to heal one (or two with bacon) people throughout the entire fight.  "Oh hey, I need to halve my healing for 15s because I just put a Mortal Strike on myself and can only heal for half as much so could someone else pick up the slack?  Oh, and this is going to happen every 60s.  Not a problem, right?"   :awesome_for_real:

2.  Spiritual Attunement nerf could fuck Ret paladin dps as well, while reducing their raid utility by adding Replenishment to other classes.  As it stands, Spiritual Attunement + Judgement of Wisdom + Divine Plea + Replenishment is the only thing that allows me to go full out with my DPS.  While the 50% reduction to healing on Divine Plea doesn't affect me, cutting mana regen from Spiritual Attunement -does-.  Maybe this isn't as big a concern, we shall see.  Something as simple as switching from Seal of Blood to Seal of Command (Sapph, sometimes Gluth if I don't want to judge myself to death  :oh_i_see:) is enough to cause me to be concerned about mana.

Edit - I didn't see this was already posted.  My bad.  My replies still stand!

My beautiful formatting, ignored!  :cry2:

I was waiting for that Holy Pally nerf to come.  As of right now I DO have the right gear for the instances we are doing and I HAVE to use Divine Plea to last the fights.  I don't really care that they didn't intend for that to happen, but it does.  I'm not blowing away priests, shamans, or druids with mana regen either.  They get lots of spirit and special talents to keep them high in mana pools.  Divine plea was really my only tool to keep up.

I guess I'll switch him to ret or prot now and make my priest heal again. 

Fuck.

Dear Blizzard,

Hunters should not use mana. Thanks.

Xerapis

Sorry Fordel, I missed that you added the notes to the first post.  Modified post accordingly.

 :heart:

We knew the mana regen nerf was incoming, but it's pretty sucky all over. The guys running 25-mans and nothing else won't feel a thing, but in 10-man raids this is going to be painful.

I had enjoyed the OOC regen I have on my priest (~1K mp5) as it meant that I didn't have to drink; but finding ways to weave that OOC regen in during combat required som skill I always felt, and now they're trying to take that away, much like they took downranking away. *sigh*

Wow, that's fucked up.  However, my group's holy pally never has mana problems so I don't get why others are.

Yeah, sorry hunters.  hay, at least you have Asspack of the Viper!  :oh_i_see:

A bit of an odd move. In theory, their changes to mana regen will hurt the people who knew how to properly work with 5SR the hardest, whereas joe imashbuttangud will see little change.

My guess would be your holy pally relies primarily on flash of light while the ones having trouble are using holy light.

From the description of the changes, if you're a class that doesn't rely heavily on spirit for mana regen, or are a holy paladin, then this won't really affect you. Hunters, shamans, non-arcane mages, etc. won't change much at all, regen-wise.

This is my impression. If anything I would have gone the other way, and toned down abilities like meditation and mp5 and buffed active mana regeneration methods instead.

I wonder how these regen changes will affect newbies, speaking as someone who started a Moonkin-in-Training Druid recently.

Leveling balance druids will be no more out of mana than they were before... because it is impossible to be more out of mana.

As a raiding Disc Priest, I am now even more excited to see 3.1 on the PTRs.


I'm not sure what you're talking about with Imp DS being worth its talent points.  It doesn't stack with either FT Totem (144 SP) or Totem of Wrath (280 SP + 3% Crit Debuff) which are both a lot better.

GC has said several times over the last couple months that they know that imp. DS is lame, so I would expect a change to it somewhere in this patch too. They just might not have the final form ready to announce.

Not too bad really, most levelling folk rarely encounter fights where the time it takes to drain their mana pool is less than the time it takes a typical mob to die. The place this really starts to pinch will be in 5 and 10-mans.

Seriously.  I did Balance for a while... painful... so painful.  It was like I could keep casting and casting until out of mana and the mob would still have at least 30% of it's health left.  Then I had to whack it with a stick or dagger.

I'm curious to see how the mana regen works.  My priest practically relies on that 5s out of casting mode to get practically all of the mana spent during the battle back via Spirit Tap.

Makes sense.

And after reading the above about Mana Regen nerfs, I fully expect them to tap into my "utility" again with better regen summonables. Because Mages sooooo want to go back to being ATM machines for raids. They better find a better spin for this than claiming Replenishment classes/abilities are feeling unloved.

Keep reading and you'll see I didn't know that.  My priest is not my main. Healing blows.  :awesome_for_real:

>Part 3< (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/14910003268-upcoming-class-change-highlights-part-3.html) posted.  Summary:
Mage: We'll get back to you on that.

Paladin: Yo dawg, I heard you liked warriors, so I put a warrior in yo' class so you can warrior while you paladin.

Hunters: We liked deep wounds so much we felt paladins AND hunters needed it!  We also like mudkip and BM, but we don't like pvp burst.

Death Knight: Just try dual wielding or killing a priest NOW, cocksuckers!

ROFL paladins Blessing of kings is trainable and no longer a talent. Its not like it wasn't in the first level it was just what 3 stupid talent points to get it. Clearly another example of its the best buff that everyone wants therefore everyone gets its plain and simple, no brain power needed to apply its use. Similar to making Shaman totems raid wide instead of party only. Lets make it all easy.

ROFL Hunters ammunition is no longer consumed, never run out gun or crossbow ammo. Basically, all specs are becoming similar. No longer need to worry about stocking up on ammo cuz it never runs out now. Next announcement armor never breaks or needs repair.

Soon you need to press 2 buttons to actually fully run any character. Blizzard projects to be the MMO leader in 2yos playing full time by end of 2010.

Newsflash update, Obsidian Sanc heroic was 20 manned today on Borean Tundra earning a server first title. Blizzard caters to easy mode. Seriously Blizzard your giving a server first titles out for this and expect to be respected for smart innovative gameplay? Someone roll back when they removed pvp titles claiming to make these something to really strive for. Fwiw to the idiots out there Borean Tundra is almost a month old. So perhaps half of that 10 have all their heroic gear.

Clearly I am not their target audience anymore. I am that 5 or 10% they have stopped caring about.

I just wish MMOs came with game difficulty levels you can adjust. I do not want to play WoW on stupidly easy mode. Its like a single player game where you can adjust difficulty that is what I want. I want a Server that will kick me in the balls and mock me. Not be so boringly easy to play that I feel stupid for still playing even if your still the best polished MMO out.

Is that a major achievement?

The entire fight is walking away from the slow moving flame waves.

I don't see being five people down as any kind of a detriment.

Unless you mean with three drakes up?

AngryGumball, sense you make? Zero.


Just sayin!  :oh_i_see:

What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Part III brought out the stupid in several people.

One thing that's noticeable across the board is how Blizz is caving in on stuff they had previously stated as being off the table; trainable DS and kings, no ammo for hunters, better means for generating shards for locks. Just little changes like this make a lot of people happy. Overall I can't see many buffs I can fault. The only one which raises some doubt are the amount of silences they are throwing at paladins. I'm guessing the glyph of exorcism is looking at a possible change, since with that paladins will be able to keep another caster silenced very effectively.

From Kalgan:


So new emblems it is for T8 content. I guess they'll probably add new items to the Heroism vendor to help people fill itemisation gaps (from the point of view of a clothie, wands and shoulders are in short supply in 10-man content). T8.10 Ulduar will drop emblems of Valour I'm assuming.

The fact that Blizzard at least try and cater to the 90-95% of the playerbase that isn't you is probably why they have 11+ million subs now.

I'd love that.  :heart:

YAY! I'm lovin' the Garg-UB swap, myself.  I hate dual-wielding DKs and hope they tweak for 2h a little more.  :grin:

No ammo for Hunters should have been done a long time ago.  It was easy enough to blow-through a full 24-slot quiver of ammo just running BC dungeons, and that cost a minimum of 24g to refill. I don't know the cost of LK ammo, but fuck it's got to suck even more with the upped price of L80 repairs plus the ammo. Grats to them for the change.   Plus, it's not like the majority of their attacks were affected by ammo anymore.   Next they'll hopefully remove Bow auto attack and just make them physical dps ranged casters like they treat them anyway.  (In this they'd up the damage of their actual attacks to make up for the auto attack loss.)

I'll be interested how the mana thing affects me. I'm a would be resto shaman based around crits and since my main mana regen is from water shield procs off of critical heals, none of the changes seems to significantly affect me. It seems like I might come out way ahead. But honestly, I'm pretty sure I could chain heal for months without running out at the moment as long as I keep water shield up. And I don't think that's their aim.

Otherwise I like the shaman changes. Combining mana and healing totems is just a sop to the reality that nobody ever casts healing and gives us a bit more healing power. I could care less whether I have one or two decurse totems on my bar, it's pretty rare to need to drop both disease and poison anyway.

Circle of healing for priests is an odd choice. I didn't like the notion of gimping priests to give shaman a niche, but that's clearly what they wanted in nerfing COH with the timer. And this seems to put us back where we started. And even with the COH nerf, I found it didn't work, priests were still preferred to shaman because COH was still good enough and priests are better overall healers.

Frankly, what I really want most out of the next patch is dual spec.

I currently do not have mana issues either, but that is with heavy usage of Divine Plea.  If I do not keep that going within the confines of cooldown I will easily run out of mana quick.  Yeah, if I just did Flash of Light only I'd have no issues, but that just isn't possible.  I used to use Flash a lot more before they nerfed the glyph for it making it a HoT in the last patch.

I've been using Plea because I have my spell power nearly to 2000 and a 20% redux doesn't seem to affect me too much in the long run.  It is certainly a fair trade for not running out of mana and doing ZERO healing.  50% is nothing to sneeze at.  It will hurt, but I'll have to continue to use Plea to keep from hitting bottom in the middle of a fight that is a gear test.

Fuck you!  :heartbreak:

I'm heavy Frost spec so the rearrange probably won't affect me much, as long as they don't to something crappy like putting Howling Blast at 51.  The change to BotN will give me a couple of extra points to play around with, which is nice (and will help if they do something crappy like putting Howling Blast at 51).  Unholy Blight being more accessible looks interesting.  The change to Pestilence has some DK tanks in a panic.  Is the change to Unbreakable Armor supposed to be a buff or a nerf?

The UB/Garg change is a split spec nerf. Mostly because Garg was far FAR too good for a 21 point talent, and UB was a great DPS tool, but not something stunningly good.

The Pest change is the largest hit in the DK list. Pest did a rather useful amount of damage, and it's cooldown being removed turned it into the default "spam me for AE with a blood rune" skill.

This change however drops my basic AE opening (DnD, IT, PS, Pest) about 800-1200 damage per target. Fordel will shortly be here to tell me to suck it up and how I deserved it for the absurdity of that AE rotation <3

If  you do pick up UB, the damage will still be there, though. Tanking as deep undeath is easy mainly due to UB and that other disease.

It's an overall boost to deep unholy, just putting Garg closer to what it was (pre nerf) and moving it. Not that unholy needs DPS increases   :awesome_for_real:

It's a hit to split spec DW builds, just because garg was so out of line, overall dps per talent point wise.

If they don't move Howling Blast to 51, I'm going to switch to a DW Frost/Unholy AoE dps spec.  Shorter cooldown on DnD + Howling Blast + Unholy Blight looks like fun.  I'm positive they aren't going to want DKs with both HB and UB, though.

It's no more absurd than the shit I already put out, AE wise. My main issue with HB in an AE trash rotation is that it's sudden absurd threat, but I don't pull much threat normally (inc thorgrim bitching me out about spiders  :awesome_for_real:)

HB/UB as a solo leveling build is amusing, it would make for a pretty rapid AE questing grind setup.

That's what the plate armor is for.  :drillf:

Besides, how can Ingmar have fun if he doesn't have to work for his threat!  :grin:

Yeah, any time I have had to off-tank or MT a Heroic I've never had to respec purely because of UB.  That, plus D&D plust frost presence has always generated more than enough threat.  It's a much better RP dump than spamming deathcoils right now, anyway, unless they reduce the damage with its new spot in the tree.

I always liked spamming BB over Pest, just because of death runes. The extra damage will be missed from the AOE rotation, though. /sob.  


Yeah, it's really aimed at nerfing the 34/39 dual wield specs.  The original garg damage & timer nerf was intended to do the same thing, but the ability is still way too powerful as a dps tool. This is a much better idea than nerfing the gargoyle to oblivion.

Roll a warrior!  :awesome_for_real: :grin:

Don't get me wrong, I have loved Wrath of the Lich King in terms of leveling up.  The quests are terrific, the storylines are interesting, the artwork and music all stellar.

Being an 80 hunter who is also an engineer has been frustrating me though.  I don't have any sort of a grasp on what a hunter is supposed to be anymore.  The nerfs and more nerfs and this nerf and that nerf without any sort of vision dismays me.  BM was OP but then nerfed into the ground.  Switched to Survival, which was as brokenly OP as BM; apparently it's being "adjusted" as well.  (I haven't played Surv enough yet to really have an opinion - I'm not a min/maxer).  I just wish I knew what a hunter is supposed to be - it seems like the devs have NO idea.  Why hunters are getting so much nerfing and buffing and changing when other classes are as broken or more stupidly so, I don't understand.

On one hand, the loss of ammo is great - getting an extra bag and no more spending 3g/stack making my bullets is great.  On the other hand, another bit of flavor has disappeared.

As an engineer, well.  Here's another thing that I have no idea what it is anymore. 

Maybe I'm just too old and set in my ways to think these things are all terrific, but I'm finding myself lacking in the desire to log in as much anymore. 

I guess I could go play a DK like everybody else. 

(Boy does this sound like sour grapes or what?!)

Hi, welcome to my side of the fence 4 1/2 months ago.  No, it doesn't sound like sour grapes to me at all.  I played a hunter from day one until I got wind of what was going down in LK and gave-up on the hunters entirely.  Loved the class to death, but like you I came to the conclusion the devs have no idea what to do with them.

The death of 1000 papercuts is great PvE dps, but sucks for PvP.  It sucks even more when you've played a class with real burst damage.  "We can't give hunters more burst because of Autoshot" has been the stock response to that complaint.  :awesome_for_real:

Really, though, it was reading Ghostcrawler's responses to hunters complaints in beta that made me give-up entirely.  The devs truly DO NOT understand, or even play the class.  This is not just your usual forum warrioring complaint, here.  I wish I'd kept them in my head, because there were comments about abilities that just don't make any sense at all if you've played the class.  The usual complaints you hear from bad players after they've gotten killed by a hunter, coming from a dev made me  :uhrr:.  SOmething like how frost trap does damage and hunters  have more abilities than any other class, and aspect switching was fine on a GCD, etc.

I'd reccommend finding another class, since I know you love Pvping too much to just go PvE and farm all day. Which seems to be all hunters are good at anymore.

"Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content"

What this also means is that PVP Ret paladins just got a ranged spell interrupt, unless they remove the glyph. Caster tears incoming.

BoK - that change wasn't unexpected. Every spreadsheet/theorycraft for every class was taking BoK as a given for every raid. Blizzard has a tendency to just baseline spells when they become thought of as raid required (see Innervate).

 :yahoo:  Just remove the damn option all together. I just don't see how they'll ever be able to balance it adequately without nerfing it into oblivion. I suppose moving Improved Icy Talons farther down the tree could completely destroy their utility and make them the selfish bastard dps spec.

Will this be that huge of a DPS hit given the recent changes didn't seem to slow down 32/39 that much (I have no idea what the current DPS gargoyle brings to the table)?  Of course, I'm the only non 32/39 DK dps in my guild.   :awesome_for_real:  One guy in my guild is actually running 32/39 using a two hander.  :sad_panda:

Would be nice to not have to listen to that dumb kid in my guild letting us all know that he does 3K DPS everytime he completes a heroic.  It's like a desperate cry for help since it's his alt and people would rather him play his tree.  Seeing a big drop in his faceroll dps may finally shut him the fuck up.

Overall I'm fine with the changes.  On my DK I rarely use the gargoyle anyways, and I don't have the 1-h or 2-h damage talent so I can still dual wield. :drillf:

More pet stuff and no ammo makes me happy for my hunter.  I don't care about the rest of the changes because I play it for my pets.  How I throw arrows out doesn't concern me besides the hassle of restocking, which meant I tended to wade into melee to conserve ammo anyways.

You're right about that - I've done very little pvp since WOTLK because it seems just completely broken for hunters - although from complaints I've heard, many people say it's broken.  Maybe I should take a WoW break instead of rerolling yet another alt (I'm not crazy about playing either my shadow priest or warlock in pvp either either, after seeing the bursty damage the plate wearers are doing).   :cry:

I really don't get the Ghostcrawler love - that guy should not be posting publicly, given some of the dumb things he's said.  Why can't Blizz hire a real community manager to handle his shit?

Blessing of Kings will be baseline? Neat, I need to figure out where I'm putting those 5 talent points.

Spiritual Focus maybe? Being able to squeeze off a heal while taking hits seems handy, especially since I'm usually running solo or with one other person who can't heal at all.

Jeezus guys, I was freakin' kidding when I said "I fully expect them to tap into my "utility" again with better regen summonables". And then I read Part III (thanks Gobbeldygook). First damned line:

• This talent has been removed and replaced with a new talent that grants Replenishment (similar to Shadow priests).

To hell with utility. I kill stuff before they get me. One dimensionality with big numbers. I don't need more. Except numbers of course.  :awesome_for_real:

Don't forget the mana regen:


All I can tell is that it'll make it even MORE advantageous to stack int on priests than it already is.

Right. That's why I made the quip earlier. It really seems like they want to make mana regen a minigame when all I want is to burn the forest down  :why_so_serious: Even if it means sitting between rounds and managing consumables.

As opposed to the minigame now, which is cast cast cast wait for proc use proc use abilities that make spells manaless to extend the 5s cast time window.

You can't really compare mage and priest mana mechanics though :p

I already stack int on my priest, if you're going after any other regen stat you're gimping yourself.

Yep. But I'm one of those that actually LIKES that. One-dimensionality is cathartic.

Phbbt, I have a resto shaman. The difference between in five second and out of five second is like, 20 mp5.

My main issue with raid healing and mana regen:

Without replenishment, everyone struggles for mana and has to pay attention and abuse 5sr/water shield mechanics.

With replenishment, healers have infinite mana without really thinking about it.

That's a stupid mechanic.

Replenishment is certainly a more logical target for a nerf than OO5SR regen. Though holydins could take a slap or two to their efficiency even without replenishment.

it almost feels liek the 5sR mana regen changes are intended to help disco priests a little and hurt holy priests a little, thus making disco priests a little more desireable.

At least that's they way they seem to me (ex-holy and ex-shadow, now disco for life)

Since the last patch, hunters have been broken in the sense that they immediately hopped onto the list of specs everyone hates and prays gets nerfed to the ground.  The bitching mostly revolves around Lock & Load (Frost Trap and Serpent sting/Other Traps/ are on different internal cooldowns, so you get a LNL proc every 24 seconds when someone's on your frost trap and serpent sting procs now and then) and TNT (15% chance to get a well-timed mace stun whenever you fire an explosive shot) which add up to hunters randomly blowing people up.

A particularly well-known 2200 rated hunter was unaffected by the explosive shot hotfix nerf because it made him realize he'd been using rank 1 explosive shot since 70.  Then another one, widely regarded as one of the best hunters in the world in BC, said thanks because he'd been doing the same thing.

Replenishment is going to be the mechanic they will give to the 'pure' DPS classes, so they will shut up about "why bring me when you can bring a class that can DPS AND HEAL AND TANK OMG!!!"

Instead of Tank/Heal/CC it'll be Tank/Heal/Replenishment

Right, but why bring a paladin for replenishment, when you can bring a dps that beats him by 10% and also provides replenishment?   :awesome_for_real:

Blessings, honestly. But if you're already covered for all the key blessings, fuck em.

The issue pre patch was "the raid lacks replenishment, ditch some redundant dps for it or we're going to struggle through simple content"

Really, the entire issue boils down to "encounters are being built around replenishment, this is a stupid fucking mechanic and just giving it to everyone doesn't make it less stupid, just less tedious"

Because he can tank and heal omgz!  :awesome_for_real:

I wouldn't trade our retardin for any other replenishment class except maybe a survival hunter. He kites zombies on gluth like a champion, and is a handy off-tank for 4hm. His DPS is a bit variable depending on raid comp, but he's definitely an example of "bring the player".

Mmmm, no ammo anymore, nom nom nom.

I read these complaints about hunters and I really, truly cannot understand them. My hunter's role is ranged dps. It's always BEEN ranged dps. It will always BE ranged dps. It's really rather good ranged dps, too.

Also, take the notion of "remove autoshot and then make the regular shots WAY MEANER" and shove it up your butt. I say that with love. But if I wanted to play a mage, I would play a fuckin' mage. And I hate playing mages.

Too bad Blizz balances you like a mage.  THAT is one of the wonderful  :awesome_for_real: quotes from Ghostcrawler.  "We consider hunters to be casters."   :oh_i_see:

The complaints stem from PVP play.  Like I said, death of 1000 papercuts works fine in PvE. In some ways it's what keeps hunters towards the top (misses mean less, if they happen.)  However it means your opponents just get to walk up to you and cleave you in 3 shots in pvp while you've shot them 14 times for 1/2 their health.

It's actually a combination of melee+ranged phys dps, which is why they should be under rogues and above everything else but demo locks.

It is not a combination of melee+ranged. It's pretty much all ranged. You can't do shit worth a damn in melee.


EDIT: Also, I haven't PvP'd on my hunter in a long time, because they're trying to make people do arena, which I fucking hate. I'd just as soon not PvP. So if all these complaints are related to that, yeah, I dunno about that. But a lot of the complaints sound like they go for both - and like it or not, WoW is pretty much PvE first, PvP second.

If your hunter is doing melee 'dps', you're doing it wrong.



Merusk: They also consider Mortal Strike to be a 'spell'. It's almost like Dev's use the terms in a different context.  :oh_i_see:

Fucksake, your PET.

GC has several times in the last few weeks said that the 'pure' dps classes are mage, warlock, rogue, and hunter, and they want them to be all around the same numbers, all else being equal. Everyone else is supposed to be back a little, all else being equal.

In practice the better players typically do more damage regardless of class, except at the very high end of play where basically everyone is a good player with equal gear access.

Please, the pet is pretty much ranged too. I'M not in any danger while my pet chews on someone's ass.

You have to hand it to him though. - every new post he just tops himself. Now I wish he would just go off and top himsef.

Doesn't change the fact that it's at melee range. Also doesn't cover up your horrendously faulty memory  :awesome_for_real:

No, it's an arrow that keeps stabbing the target.  It might be melee from the pet's perspective, but it's not from the Hunter's.

Are we seriously gonna have this debate?  :oh_i_see:

Depends if you're going to agree with us or not. ;D

Are you really saying that a Hunter's pet does ranged attacks exclusively?

Looking at it from design perspective, yes, I really am saying that.

Is Lant really that far off? Pets have been considered DoTs since, like, forever.

She is.

Please elaborate then, because I can't wrap my head around it.

Parry, dodge, mitigation, procs, positioning, avoidance, health, tanking, talents, pet talents.

Saying that a pet is a hunter's dot is as asinine as saying that a rogue is a priest's dot. Please stop pretending you're mentally challenged.

...

You do realize that hunter pets fall under melee mechanics, not dot mechanics, right? That they can be parried, etc as was mentioned?

Explain how putting the hunter pet on a target, puts the hunter into same level of 'danger' another melee class would.

The pets are fire and forget 90% of the time. They are DoTs with infinite duration and special bonuses. They are entirely expendable and revive-able with their own special avoidance, resist bonuses and healing bonuses. Losing a hunter pet is NOT comparable to an actual melee class dieing.

The fact this DoT stabs things instead of Ticks magical damage is irrelevant in reference to the hunters role as DPS and is not justification for 'always being on top' of the meters or whatever.



Using that ('pets are melee so are hunters') logic, Paladins and DeathKnights would be casters and my Balance druid would be a melee class thanks to my Tree's.

When you start dropping Mongoose bites on a boss for awesome damage, then you can wave the melee dps flag.

Which is why the initial point is that hunters are melee+ranged hybrids, and, as such, should be below rogues.

Reading is hard, eh?

Which you also used to justify being ahead of everything else BUT rogues (oh and demo locks ). Sorry every other melee spec but rogues, hunters need to be on top, they have a PET to worry about!

:oh_i_see:

Both of you do realize that from a design standpoint it doesn't matter if a pet does stabby, bite, fire, or shit damage an is resisted by block, parry, nature, magic, or toilet paper it's still damage done at range and while it can be managed for a more optimal output, can be used without any assistance beyond one keypress?  You're not seeing the forest through the trees.

You do understand the principles of game design, yes?  (Actually that's rhetorical since you obviously don't.)

A Hunter is a melee/ranged hybrid because they have some capability to survive and fight in close range combat, not because of their damage type.  Most of their damage is done at a distance, both by their ranged weapon of choice and their pet.  Blizzard could make a duplicate of the warrior which mostly does elemental damage instead of their weapon type and it would still be a melee class.  (Oh look, I'm talking about you, Death Knights.)  They could make a mage whose spells all do slashing, piercing, and blunt which are blocked and parried like any other attack and it would still be a Ranged DPS.  (Oh look, I'm talking about you, Hunters.)

Please stop pretending you're mentally challenged.

This argument is fucking retarded.

Any other  pure dps class that stays constantly in melee range?
 :oh_i_see:


And old, too.

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet...  :why_so_serious:

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues  :awesome_for_real:

I've read this 4 times and I still don't know what the hell you're getting at.

Being both melee and ranged still doesn't make hunters a hybrid in any case. When a Blizzard dev says 'hybrid' they are talking about roles like DPS, tank, healer; melee dps and ranged dps aren't separate roles from that standpoint.

Pets automatically run to the ass of the target these days, by the way, so they generally are only going to get dodged. They also last until either the thing is dead or it is, and they aren't as easily killed in most boss fights these days. That's only in PvE obviously ...

Although pets are usually eating someone's butt in PvP too, as people are usually running to the hunter or away completely.  :drill:

But whatever, it wasn't my faulty memory, it was me never hearing anyone EVER refer to the pet as anything but a DoT before, so it truly didn't cross my mind THAT was where you were getting the "melee" part from. I could never forget my gay white tiger.  :heart:

I'm just whining about how Rogues offer little to no raid utility yet have to deal with various boss phases which require the tank and melee dps to get out of aoe range. For example Prince's shadowbolt volley. (I don't recall if mages with Arctic reach/Fire equivalent, MM Hunters can continue DPSing out of range of the Shadowbolt volley)

(http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/thumb/1/1a/Voidreaver.jpg/200px-Voidreaver.jpg)

Any fight like this is either the whole raid playing frogger or just the melee.  If it's safe in melee range the ranged guys just stand in melee range and it's business as usual.  Fuck ranged attackers!  Pussies.

Ah, now I get it.  Yeah now that I play a melee that shit bothers the hell out of me. Grobulus is particularly bad since 1) he seems to have problems repositioning himself at times and 2) our fucking tank doesn't understand backing up and then taking your finger off the damn movement key.   2-4 repositions per cloud gets damn old.

Anyway, as Sheepherder points out Lootreaver was one such fight where the ranged had to move while the melee stood still. It's also the one that the Ranged folks were always fucking up by standing too close and nuking the melee DPS.  :awesome_for_real:

Loken's aura is an example of something that punishes range but not melee. You are correct that these examples are few and far between though.

I guess the only flipside is that the amount of DPS a melee toon can do while moving compared to a ranged/caster DPS is huge.

That is the basic limitation in how badly you can punish the ranged with movement. Having to constantly shift position as a caster just tanks DPS into nothing land, where most melee can still go full bore even on the move.


It's also one of the reasons PvP is currently extra retarded.

Speaking of... my character is level 46 (or maybe it's 48, I forget) and I have never ever seen anyone in the arenas.  Does anyone ever use them?

At 70 and 80, yes.

There are two distinct types of arenas: One for awesome griefing and ones for fighting in organized arena fights.  The latter are accessible by people of levels 70+ and are broken down by level range and bracket size (2v2, 3v3, 5v5, etc).  They are what most people refer to when they say 'arena'.  There are also other arenas (Gurubashi Arena and another one) which are true FFA PVP zones.  You can attack anyone of any faction at any time in those.  You can also invite people you don't like to your group, summon them with a warlock, and gank their ass like you always wanted to.  Gurubashi is a bit cut-throat these days since there's an achievement associated with it that requires you get the booty 10 times.  There's only booty every 4 hours.

This could easily be changed by giving the bad guy a debuff that causes anyone who does melee damage to him to gain some kind of protection from his AE in direct proportion to the amount of melee damage they do.  Then only ranged, who cannot do significant melee damage, would have to worry about the AE.

You can't really "punish ranged" in a fight without punishing healers as well (especially those without many instacast heals). Another ranged-unfriendly boss is the second drakonid in oculus, since melee only need to circle-strafe him, while ranged have to be constantly or the run or they get fried by the purple field of death.. ask your healer how fun that fight is to heal sometime. :p


-- Z.

One note would be that most melee DPS classes have far more protection from damage than ranged DPS classes.

Either AE avoidance, high HP pools, clickies, or just the nature of tank healing (bounce healing due to proximity)

Try a melee dps punishing fight with casters standing in melee range. It won't be pretty, because a hit that would halve a rogue's HP would flat out kill a mage most of the time. That said, it's harder to do things with a melee heavy raid, but melee doesn't mean "suuuuck", especially not for hunter pets (as this whole thing started with) because, well, AE avoidance. The only pet unfriendly fights are ones where positioning is god, and "be behind him" isn't the right position (heigan, any dragon-type mob, etc)

Shade of Aran. Blizzard didn't hit melee, and ranged who stand in close get hit with a silence. Granted, there aren't very many like this, but Shade greatly favored melee.

I have a long standing and probably irrational hate on for ranged archetypes.  My main beef was always that ranged DPS classes were very rarely required to have the same level of situational awareness as the melee,  (to say nothing of tanks and healers) yet were looking for the same level of performance.  Encounters pretty much have to be specifically designed to reverse this, so yeah, they are rare.

Forced movement seems to be the best way to swing the balance as it doesn't appear as selectively punitive as the other options.

And Prince, Maiden, and the Demon dude all punished melee. For every example of a melee favored fight, there are at least 3x as many ranged favored fights. What I think you and I both realize is that Blizzard needs to balance things a bit better in that regard.

The thing is, I feel like melee punishing fights are still less obnoxious than the ranged punishing ones. I mean no, you didn't want to do Kara with six melee dpsers (I think our highest number of melee dps was like ... five. It was Not Fun.), but as a melee dpser, I can still function even in the fights that beat the shit out of me, I could heal through those fine on my paladin, etc. The ones where ranged has to run around like idiots were way harder to deal with as a healer, as my heals were all "lol stay still," and it was friggin' impossible to do anything like decent DPS on my hunter if I had to keep moving, so I imagine it was even worse for the clothies.

Yes, it was a pain in the ass to do Prince as my feral druid, but I could still, you know, dps. Plus once they fixed the safe spots, ranged had to dodge infernals (unless you were lucky). Maiden I had to just hope the healers could manage, even if we weren't standing totally perfect it was doable. Illhoof just punished everyone, I think. :P

Are there ANY fights in Naxx that punish ranged?

I mean, not that I can think of. I suppose Sapphiron punishes ranged equally.

Of course, it's particularly punishing as a Ret Pally. I have to switch my DPS off on Loatheb and, most of the time, Sapphiron.. and a misplaced judgement on Gluth will leave everyone wondering why the stupid paladin is dead.

Plus the whirlwinds on the trash... it's a little unbalanced.

The only fight in Naxx that punishes melee is Kel'Thuzad, and that's only in 25 man. The rest is pretty well balanced in terms of what we're looking for in raid content b/w the two groups. Honestly, despite WotLK being "easy" to the hardcores, TBC is going to be widely agreed as the fuckup expansion of this game. Very little improved during that time, and most of it was reversed later. The biggest changes that stuck with it were the adding of arenas (debatable), and the move from 40 -> 25 mans.

wut

Naxx trash can go fuck itself.

I would include Karazhan in the positive developments list too. It was the runaway success of Kara that made them say "holy shit, there's a HUGE DEMAND for 10 person raid content."

I haven't done Kel'Thuzad or a successful Sapphiron, but I've done every other fight as a DK (either tanking or DPSing, depending on who I was raiding with) and I tend to agree that none of the fights really PUNISH melee, not like Prince in Kara did. The whirlwinding trash in particular just isn't really that big a deal. Sure, there are ANNOYING fights if you're melee, like Gluth, but that's not the same.

In my opinion, of course. DKs don't have seals that hurt themselves, so that probably helps. You'd think being the emo class they'd be all over cutting themselves to see if they can still feel.  :why_so_serious:

None of the Naxx fights I've done have "punished" melee. Closest is Anub, but the locust swarm ain't that big a deal to dodge (quite frankly, Prince only punished melee who are too fucking stupid to book it after the curse), but the majority of the fights are simply Easier for ranged, not punishing on melee.

The thing is, melee frontloads a lot of it's damage as part of the core design of having to move and being in/out of melee range a lot. I can dump a lot of damage in a few seconds on a DK or Rogue due to energy/rune cooldowns. Ranged DPS usually needs to sit still and cast, which is why ranged punishing fights are hard to design. Having ranged move constantly completely destroys their damage output (and fucks healers), whereas having melee move constantly only slightly impacts their damage output. Melee DPS can usually eat a lot more punishment in the form of damage, too.

I went through my emo rogue "waaah all I do is eat fucking cleaves waaah" phase, but that was back in vanilla WoW, where fucking cleave was 360 degree and every goddamned trash mob had it.

See, the odd thing is I played combat all through TBC and then switched to mutilate, and I *like* that it's more work. It's more interesting, I have some choices to make in a given fight about what to prioritize and when, and so on. Combat rogueing just seemed so automatic. I suppose I should try a combat spec after this coming patch and just see where my max dps is, but I'm really enjoying mutilate. Changing Hunger for Blood though is a mercy: that is the single most OCD-inducing talent I've ever had in WoW, and it really gets irritating after a while.

Yeah, but survival hunters with gear comparable to my rogue? If played by anybody but a gibbering moron? In PvE, their dps output right now is just sick. Way way way above mine in some cases, and I think I'm reasonably good at maximizing my dps output.

I think this is honestly something that they *should* do. Have a "distant whirlwind" on some bosses that requires ranged classes to break off their attacks and move periodically--something that has to be avoided or watched for that is *distinctive* to ranged combat. Or, I dunno, a boss that mind-controls pets and sends them back at their hunter owners. I don't care what it is, just that ranged should have some *unique* dangers or problems that they have to manage that are comparable to what rogues deal with. The other melee classes generally have the armor and mitigation to survive something like retaliate or whirlwind and so they can just plow through it. Rogues have to back off and wait when they think something like that is coming.

The other advantage that rogues theoretically have, tools for managing their threat (vanish, feint, tricks of the trade) are either shared by some ranged classes (feign death) or in Wrath are irrelevant *because* it's so easy for tanks to hold threat compared to in the past.

On Tricks of the Trade, I'm still waiting for some tanks to notice just how much it buffs their dps output if I use it consistently on every pull...I tested the other night and the tank was in the top three to four of a ten-man raid when I had tricks on him, dropped to seventh when I left it off. Even if it's not necessary for managing threat (it definitely helps a weaker tank grab initial aggro, and in longer fights, if a mob has slipped past the tank, I can go fetch it and bring it back to the tank rather than getting it onto me) it buffs total raid dps pretty significantly by the end of a raid.

But for rogues, on a lot of Wrath fights, even some trash fights, it's not that you have to move or reposition, it's that you've got to run the hell out of the fight and then just sit there with your thumb up your ass for a bit while the mob whirlwinds or retaliates. So that's equivalent to forcing ranged to move.

Bingo.  Why didn't I think of this before?  The clouds have lifted.  Will it be fixed, is my question.

Are you certain that you wanna restart that discussion?  :awesome_for_real:

I recall someone - Kalgan, or GC - saying hunters were supposed to be great in pve because they suck so bad at pvp.  Or something.

Yeah, sorry. Pretend I never said it.

Not sure why everyone is of the opinion that hunters are somehow crap for PvP in Wrath, Survival is borderline OP and MM can hold it's own.  With 3.0.8 causing half of all hunters to go Survival and DK's getting toned down it's becoming even more evident just as a casual observer.

I'm not sure percentage wise how well they're represented on 2k+ teams or whatever but I do know that the top overall rated arena player atm is a survival hunter who with a resto shaman as a 2v2 partner has a rating over 2.6k in that bracket with 2k+ ratings in 3v3 and 5v5 as well.

Explosive shot is serious business, aimed shot has given hunters a pvp niche since TBC when they gave it the mortal strike debuff and now it's instant cast in Wrath, and the new disengage post 3.0.8 is an amazing survival tool especially with it having such a short cd (too short imo).  Then you add additional tools like Wyvern sting, scatter shot, entrapment, and Lock'n Load to the mix and the general consensus by most of the WoW populous is still Hunter+PvP = fail.  :uhrr:

Was bored and did some pvp on my mage this weekend and fighting a survival hunter is just as annoying and painful as fighting a DK.  If they got the jump on me and weren't in green gear Explosive Shot -> Aimed Shot ->Steady Shot/afk auto shot -> Explosive Shot/Kill Shot + the few auto shots and pet attacks that fit in that 6 second window is typically more than enough to kill.  Whenever I tried to blink into mele range (since hunters no longer have a dead zone, the only issue I ever had with hunters in pvp since having one as an alt pre-BC) more often than not a scatter shot was there waiting for me.  Then you add the instant on demand cc of Wyvern sting in addition to their traps and things get really annoying.  If I got the jump and for whatever reason Wyvern sting wasn't available the new disengage would help them turn the tables or escape if other players were nearby.

If my hunter wasn't a big ugly cow on a backwoods server I'd probably go jump on him right now and pew pew with all this good stuff before it gets nerfed, shocked there weren't any in 3.0.9 actually to go with the buffs to BM.  Guess I'll just stick to leveling my DK though since there's almost no scenario where I'd consider leveling 1-80 *again* a good/fun idea   :awesome_for_real:

That's a crappy excuse they're throwing out there as cover for "We don't fucking know how to, nor do we care about, fixing hunters so they're not gimpy or overpowered."

Vash: It's about representation as a whole, never about specific individuals.  There were hunters in BC who were amazing and able to climb into the top tiers and the season finals.  Did that mean that hunters were OK and needed no buffs?   I'm sure we can find holy paladins and holy priests that rape face too, does that mean it's a damage spec and needs to be toned down or that there are exceptional players out there?

Probably not  :awesome_for_real:

25 man ramps up his stupid ability that chain ice blocks people so it can actually hit the MT. You have to get the melee away from him, and you have to not stack more than a couple together, lest the healers not catch up in time. Also, most of the initial wave mobs rely heavily on ranged nuking them away from the group, and you need the ranged people to perform CC's on the people that get MCed.

Maybe punishing melee is too strong of a term, but it's certainly one of the few fights where I thought having primarily ranged DPS with a couple melee for interrupts would be a huge advantage due to the abilities involved.

I think of KT more as punishing healers than punishing melee, since there's really nothing that the melee can do to mitigate the situation other than 'stand on star' or whatever. But yeah, you're right in that bringing too many melee to that fight is a big disadvantage.

There are exceptional players playing every class considering the sample size of the WoW population, that is pretty much a given.  My point was that the class is not fundamentally broken if you can put it in the hands of a great player and they can become one of the highest rated players in the game.  Broken would be if in the hands of great player who plays with great team members breaking 2k is nigh impossible.

 It may just be that hunter PvP requires a far more different playstyle than other classes have to adjust to when going from PvE to PvP or that hunter PvP requires more player skill to exceed than other classes.  Both arguments are debateable and I don't really agree with either but they are entirely different arguments than: class is broken in PvP please fix it. 

Until every max level player is given the option to be any class, given the exact same gear as every other player, and forced to play 10 arena games a week, how any given class is *represented* at X+ arena rating isn't really a meaningful class balance stat simply because your looking at a subset (Arena pvp) of a subset (general PvP) of the population.  Given how unpopular PvP is currently, especially arenas, due the general imbalances and stereotypes (i.e. if your not a DK, ret pally, holy pally, mut rogue, or arcane mage don't bother) I'm of the opinion it's an even worse stat than usual.

With most hunters going Survival since 3.0.8 for PvE more and more will be trying it out for PvP and as more hunters realize how strong it is in PvP I'm willing to bet there will be a corresponding rise in hunter arena representation over the next few weeks/months.  This is assuming of course that 3.1 is still a ways off because hunters are getting a major revamp and who knows what will happen to them in PvP post 3.1  :why_so_serious:

I mean it's not like the hunters I've seen lately smashing face (mostly mine :grin:) in Wintergrasp and BG's are ultra hardcore arena vets with full deadly gear, just your average smattering of hunters and they bring the pain almost as hard as that full Valorous DK with Betrayer of Humanity that enjoyed making a b-line for me and 2-3 shoting me everytime.  :ye_gods:

I'm the psycho emo.  I cut others to see if I'll start caring.

Having lots of mele on Malygos is no picnic either.  You'd think Blizzard would have a little foresight and in an expansion that adds yet another mele dps class (bringing the ratio of mele dps:ranged dps up to 1:1) would eliminate boss fights of the Maiden of Virtue/Prince variety that actively punish raids for bringing more than a select handful of mele.  It's almost a slap in the face that the 2 pinnacle bosses of this raid tier (not counting Sarth3D) are right out of the old mele unfriendly playbook, yet have a lot of the best mele weapons/gear.  What's even worse is that this is even more punishing in 10 man content where you don't have lots of extra healing going around to keep large amounts of mele alive.

I don't even mind fights that make mele constantly move or have us take splash dmg or dodge whatever, but fights/mechanics that actively encourage raids to bring as few mele as possible as some sort of pseudo difficulty really need to go the way of 40 man raids and die, especially as you get deeper into difficult content.

Bah, I've heard people call warlocks* the emo class.  I have to wonder why a person that sacrifices his or her very humanity for power is considered emo...

That's actually valid since warlocks do cut themselves.  And with talents, they can cut themselves better and start cutting their pets.

They tap the great dark powers of the beyond to summon a scantly clad girl who would stab them if they could?

If pvp is not currently broken, it is certainly a hell of a lot different than it's ever been before.

Hunters are broken.  There is one spec that's OP and I'm sure that will be nerfed right quick.  Another spec is useless for everything because the devs think it's too easy to play, therefore it doesn't deserve to do as much damage.  Or something.  

Now, if your definition of broken really is all about who is tops on the arena meters, I don't know what to say.  Plenty of people play WoW without ever going to arena.  Ever.  Some of us consider arena to be a complete bastardization of the game - to the point where it should have it's own server - why don't they separate the population for the rest of us so we can dink around in our world and fish and level and quest, and they can go play their World of Arenas fps game.

Battlegrounds are broken.  The hunter class is broken.  Blizzard has no idea what it's doing with hunters, it's fairly clear.  Let's nerf 'em some more and ignore DKs and make ret Pallies stronger and priests weaker and ... honestly, I don't understand what the vision is here.

Succubi would tie them up, whip them, then fsck the hell out of them to steal their soul.  I can think of a number of people who love to be sexed to death by a hawt demon girl.

In Soviet Russia, emos cut you!  :why_so_serious:

Rogues are not particularly hard done by.  From looking around I've found on average that rogues seem to hover around 25% or more damage reduction via armor in epics (the rogue I looked at had one blue and was at ~27%).  Warriors seem to trend towards 50% (my warrior has ~48% with a few blues).  Both can expect around 20k health in DPS gear.

20 000 x 1.50 x 0.90 (Stance Penalty) = 27 000 Effective Health
20 000 x 1.25 = 25 000 Effective Health

Our savior is an extra 2k effective health, which will not give a warrior a single extra cleave/WW taken before they keel over and will only save them when a rogue takes similar damage but dies to >2k overkill.  However, against any magic damage a warrior will always take 10% more damage than you (2k health), so effectively there are three boss fights in Wrath where a warrior is not disadvantaged compared to a rogue.  Fury warriors are more squishy than rogues.  :why_so_serious:

Dual Spec Q&A (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/dualspec.html)


Huh.

Also, the gear switching thing could prove to be nice.  Especially for Druids.

Mobile Lexicon's  :heart:

Craaaaaaaap, that means we need one of our regular raiders to switch to Inscription!

EDIT: Never mind, reading failure. We're all good.  :heart:

A couple things that annoy/worry me:

Worry: 'one time fee' could be high
Annoy: Can't do it at lower than max level - I wanted to be able to level my druid as moonkin but be able to swap to tree for instances on the way up.

Why don't they just have meeting stones serve as "field" lexicons?

Because we really don't need more people hanging out at the naxx meeting stone <3

Hey, letting you have dual specs at level 60 or so would overwhelm people worse than a third heal spell would overwhelm a paladin.

I wonder what the cooldown will be on that field lexicon thing will be, if any.

Yea, that would almost be an achievement: How many different thing were you doing while getting blastwaved out of the Naxx meeting stone area.. Eating, Drinking, Staring blankly into space, entering the zone, using the dual spec system... Good times.

Oh Man, I never even thought of that. Sjofn, can we transfer to a PvP server?

No.

Fuck yeah, awesome.

In other news; I might have to find yet ANOTHER guild as my Guild Leader has taken to raiding with his Wife's guild because we can't get 25 mans together on a regular basis.  It doesn't help that he doesn't like recruiting and just wants his lootz now.   :why_so_serious: So, I may foresee a server x-fer for the wife and I in the future.

That's awesome.  Our "A-Team" raid group is undergoing an extended implosion this week as well.  I'm excited to see how it shakes out!*  The raid leader decided to stop leading, some people don't want to play with others anymore, and the OT was booted from the guild.

I'm interested to see more about the item management, if they add some way to allow players to remove offset gear from bag space, that would be the part that I will probably be happiest about.  Wasting entire bags on offspec gear is not fun.

Also, two specs isn't really enough for some classes.  Meh.

* I hate guild drama.

Sometimes a guild has just gotta embrace the ten man.

In my case, it probably helps that I don't really like 25 because it feels SO CROWDED. Maybe it would be better for me if I was a ranged somethingsomething instead of a DK.