Cracks starting to show?

[kildorn]

edit: And let me come right out and say it after leveling three 85s now: the mana regen model on DPS specs of healing capable classes are all bullshit. Boomkin, Ele Shaman (less so than the others) and Shadow Priests all get dicked on mana regen mechanics, when the idea was that dps shouldn't have casual mana issues doing a dps rotation. My lock either has lifetap and constant health regen from spells, or just to completely fuck with boomkin, as destro:

2% mana restored any time I cast chaos bolt or soul fire, as well as triggering replenishment. And any time my imp crits a firebolt, I get 4% mana back. Oh, and that chaos bolt heals me if I feel I need to lifetap. They mauled healer capable dps specs because they were afraid we'd use them as off healers with limitless mana pools. but it made the casting dps specs feel like they're permanently OOM.

It's not just boomkins/ele shamans/spriests, mages (fire mages at least, and it's the best PvE spec) also have to manage their mana quite a lot. Locks just get a free pass with life tap.

It's not just lifetap, though. My shadow priest goes through half a bar of mana to kill one even con mob while questing. My lock goes through about 10% of his mana bar to do the same thing.

[Paelos]

Shit that should have happened to not make Blizzard's vision suck:

- Better tank pulling tools.  One AoE move worth an absolute fuckton of threat that only works on targets which are out of combat.  Like a rogue opener, but for tanks.

I think the biggest problem with trash in heroics currently is that tanks have no way to grab threat selectively on mobs after part of the group gets ranged CC'd. For example, if I'm facing a 4 mob pull with three casters, and one CC available, how am I supposed to make sure the two casters get to me as a warrior tank? I can't rush in there and AE.

I mean short of always taking two CC in at all times of course, which may be the answer. Not ideal I think, because that's one of my biggest gripes about TBC. Heroic LF1M lock/mage. Heroic LF1M mage. Heroic LF2M healer/ranged.

Fuck you melee dps, you need not apply.

[Ingmar]

Shit that should have happened to not make Blizzard's vision suck:

- Better tank pulling tools.  One AoE move worth an absolute fuckton of threat that only works on targets which are out of combat.  Like a rogue opener, but for tanks.

I think the biggest problem with trash in heroics currently is that tanks have no way to grab threat selectively on mobs after part of the group gets ranged CC'd. For example, if I'm facing a 4 mob pull with three casters, and one CC available, how am I supposed to make sure the two casters get to me as a warrior tank? I can't rush in there and AE.

Do what we've always done and corner/LOS pull?

[Azuredream]

It's not just lifetap, though. My shadow priest goes through half a bar of mana to kill one even con mob while questing. My lock goes through about 10% of his mana bar to do the same thing.

Oh, I was more thinking of raids/heroics.

[Paelos]

Do what we've always done and corner/LOS pull?

Yep, and that's a nice stopgap solution in some instances, not in others. It's still slow as shit, and not what I would call ideal design. The LOS pull has (and always will be to me) just a watered-down exploit of a bad system at play.

[Ingmar]

Depending on the distances involved you can also heroic throw one, charge/shield bash the 2nd, then intervene back to the other guy who ran forward to CC the 3rd caster. They should have to run far enough forward during the silences that you can find a spot to AE safely from then on, assuming your CCer isn't terrible. A moonkin or mage can range-interrupt the 2nd add for you too, instead, a DK could deathgrip, etc. There are lots of tools available, part of the idea is tanks can't do the entire job themselves anymore.

[Rendakor]

That works Ingmar, but it's fucking annoying. If it was a boss encounter I wouldn't mind that level of work, but trash should NOT be that difficult. Not over and over, 10 times between each boss fight. I've done exactly one Cata dungeon (and it was regular) on my war tank, and all it did was make me miss my DK.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If you are running out of mana as a shadow priest you are "doing it wrong" we get shadow fiend,dispersion, archangel(a fast cooldown) and now SWD is a sort of lifetap. even if its not awesome dps, throwing it into your rotation a couple times ensures your other cooldowns will keep you in plenty of mana.

In addition to all that, spirit = hit for shadow priests so there is no reason to ever take hit gear over spirit which will still boost your mana regen.

[Paelos]

That works Ingmar, but it's fucking annoying. If it was a boss encounter I wouldn't mind that level of work, but trash should NOT be that difficult. Not over and over, 10 times between each boss fight. I've done exactly one Cata dungeon (and it was regular) on my war tank, and all it did was make me miss my DK.

Yeah that should have been my main focus on my first point. It's not that there are no tools to do the job. There are tools to do it, but they require a heavy amount of tanking experience, savvy, and timing to pull off what should be the simplest parts of the dungeon in true form (ie - trash).

Plus I hate using intervene. It has always vexxed me since they put it in the game, although i can't explain why.

[Shrike]

I mean short of always taking two CC in at all times of course, which may be the answer. Not ideal I think, because that's one of my biggest gripes about TBC. Heroic LF1M lock/mage. Heroic LF1M mage. Heroic LF2M healer/ranged.

Fuck you melee dps, you need not apply.

And you'd be making a stupid mistake. Every shaman has a ranged interrupt. DKs have several (although one is very short) ranged interrupts. Warriors have a ranged interrupt. Any of this can pull a recalcitrant caster mob in. Hell, shaman can hex a stubborn caster, taking him out of the fight for the better part of a minute. So can ret pallies.

Now finding people that will actually DO it might be an issue, but finding tanks that don't suck is an issue as well. I don't know much about healers, but I've seen enough bad ones to know they can screw the pooch as, too.. It's a basic problem with LFD. I can deal with the stupidity (for a while), but when it's tied to 45min queues, then we have a real problem and I'm not seeing any solution to that other than swearing off PuGs.

[kildorn]

If you are running out of mana as a shadow priest you are "doing it wrong" we get shadow fiend,dispersion, archangel(a fast cooldown) and now SWD is a sort of lifetap. even if its not awesome dps, throwing it into your rotation a couple times ensures your other cooldowns will keep you in plenty of mana.

In addition to all that, spirit = hit for shadow priests so there is no reason to ever take hit gear over spirit which will still boost your mana regen.

3 minutes, ~1.5 minutes, 1.5 minutes. SW:D is the only really effective form of questing mana regen. You don't get meditation, so spi is 2700 out of combat regen, 300 in combat.

The problem is the spell costs. Shadow Word: Pain is 22% base mana cost. Corruption deals nearly the same damage talented, and is 6% base mana cost. Unstable Affliction is my most expensive spell, and costs the same as Vampiric Embrace. The base mana costs on shadow priest spells are crazy high, which is why they require all these sub 5 minute cooldowns to restore %mana. Everyone else can just cast away without caring until the fight's gone on for 5 minutes.

edit: and all those cooldowns compare to my dps armor effectively restoring 2% of my mana every 5 seconds. Comparatively to any other ranged dps class, hybrid mana regen blows.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I don't run out of mana and the only class competing with my dps is a warlock, YMMV

[K9]

For grinding I use Mind Spike spam and Mind Blast/SW:D when arcangel is on cooldown and DoTs for the one kill every few minutes when it isn't. Fill in with dispersion and shadowfiend and mana isn't an issue. If anything I generally found that I had to eat to heal more often than eat to restore mana while doing 80-85+

Priest DoTs are all very expensive and as far as I can see they only do decent damage once you can ramp up all the relevant debuffs and buffs, which on world mobs just doesn't happen.

[Fordel]

Rifle skill doesn't exist anymore.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=3018


Good old shoot!

[Sheepherder]

Yeah, shoot still exists, but weapon skills are gone.  If Ingmar can't break CC it's because he rolls natural ones.

EDIT:

Fuck you melee dps, you need not apply.

And you'd be making a stupid mistake ... Warriors have a ranged interrupt. Any of this can pull a recalcitrant caster mob in.

No, they don't.

One thing not mentioned about the plate DPS and their lack of CC: what they were given are the best interrupts in the game. The only class with a badass pve interrupt AND cc are shaman. The casters all have painfully long cooldowns on their interrupts for pve boss usage.

24 seconds isn't painfully long for a ranged interrupt, and spellsteal makes one hell of a consolation prize.

[kildorn]

24 seconds is ungodly long when the boss has a 90k nuke he casts every 10 on the dot.

The comment was mostly on the lines of "melee dps is far better at pve interrupting", because they flat out are. Ranged interrupts are useful if you need to get a caster in a trash pack to come to you, or pvp. But for a boss where you absolutely must interrupt a spell they cast every 10-15 seconds, bring a frost DK.

[Sheepherder]

But for a boss where you absolutely must interrupt a spell they cast every 10-15 seconds, bring a shaman.

FIFY.

How absolutely great melee interrupts are and you totally seek to have at least one is irrelevant when shaman interrupts are better in every conceivable way.

They also bring two CC's, buff/utility totems, and bloodlust.

[kildorn]

Shaman do win the interrupt war, and have a hard CC to boot. They don't suffer any of the drawbacks of Warriors or DKs dpsing a heroic. Rogues are the same deal (relatively easy to use interrupt, CC)

But really, running with two hunters and a lock as your DPS means you have trash packs down to a trivial science from all that CC. But you're going to have a shitty time with a few bosses who expect interrupt spamming.

edit: and for laughs, the fel hunter's spell lock doesn't even interrupt half the bosses I've tried it on. Seriously, what the hell.

[Sheepherder]

Is it just showing up as immune for the silence effect?  Or is the entire cast resisted?

[Merusk]

I have basically enough interrupt tools myself without DPS having to interrupt, once you count spell reflect, the problem is DPS never notices when I have that up so it gets wasted most of the time.

It's not flashy enough.  I know I've never noticed it on tanks.

Then again I'm also an interrupt fanatic.. I've got mind freeze macroed with a /say that spams "Mind Freeze <Merusk>" because I'm used to being on interrupts from raiding.   We use it to keep track of who's turn it was and I've had people bitch at me in random heroics about it.  Meh.

[K9]

If you are really desperate to move a caster mob you can have a priest MC it then use Leap of Faith to break the MC, this will pull the mob to the priest. Only works on humanoids though.

[Fordel]

Ingmar's spell reflect is up like 5 of every 7 seconds a well, so its easy to just ignore it.

[kildorn]

Is it just showing up as immune for the silence effect?  Or is the entire cast resisted?

It was giving me invalid target earlier today when trying to use it for basic stuff, like interrupting hymn after pulling the levers.

[Sheepherder]

Invalid target indicates something completely different.  Possibly your macro was telling your hound to spell lock a dead or nonexistent target because it failed to set/clear focus. (you use a macro, right?)

[kildorn]

Invalid target indicates something completely different.  Possibly your macro was telling your hound to spell lock a dead or nonexistent target because it failed to set/clear focus. (you use a macro, right?)

Wasn't using a macro at the time, haven't really pvped on the lock, so I haven't reset all my felhunter macros. Was just target boss, click icon, invalid target.

[Sheepherder]

Invalid target means a UI / targeting error.  You're going to have to figure out the rest.  I'd start with dismissing and recasting the demon.

[WindupAtheist]

A Tol Barad offense win will now give 10x as much honor as a defense win. Ensuring that the battleground changes hands regularly by only rewarding offense seems heavyhanded and silly, but if this were WOTLK-era Wintergrasp it would at least work.

But this is Cata, and the battle is population balanced. It's nothing but a great way to make sure that 500 people queue for offense while only 5 get in, since that's how many queued for the worthless defense.

What the fuck are they THINKING?

My bet is that offense WILL win every battle, but only because the defensive side will begin actively lying down and letting them win. They basically just said "Win-trade this please!"

Clownshoes.

[Ingmar]

I think it is a band aid 'fix' til whatever the real solution is shows up.

[Paelos]

I think it is a band aid 'fix' til whatever the real solution is shows up.

Carpet bomb the world pvp idea?

[Ingmar]

Probably more something along the lines of tweaking the win condition and capture speed on points. 

[kildorn]

Must take/hold two is a far better win condition as far as requiring both sides to play a solid defense and offense. I'd like to see the towers altered as well somehow. They're trivial to destroy (the tanks have a truckload of hp and are automated) as is.

They could also do something with the current "encourages win trading" solution like making the honor value for offense ramp up per failed offense. Succeed immediately, 180 honor. Succeed after 10 failed attempts in a row, 1800 honor or something.

But I think right now they WANT win trading, so that the zone actually flips on occasion.

[Ingmar]

After playing it enough times, just taking 2 would favor the offense too much. Something involving the towers would be needed - maybe you need to take 2 points, but they're not capturable til the corresponding tower is down, something like that. And yeah I think the encouraging win trading thing is probably deliberate for now.

[WindupAtheist]

They could also do something with the current "encourages win trading" solution like making the honor value for offense ramp up per failed offense. Succeed immediately, 180 honor. Succeed after 10 failed attempts in a row, 1800 honor or something.

Automated population balancing. Offense can give infinity honor while defense gives a kick in the balls, and all that will do is increase the number of people who can't get in because no defenders showed up. You must have missed the tales of 5v5 Wintergrasps at the end of WOTLK.

I still maintain that Blizzard's utter inabillity to design a battleground that is... forget fun, even just basically functional this time around... represents a pretty blatant failure of competence. I can't think of anything in the past that has been so bad or imbalanced that they've had to just go "Fuck it, win trade!"

And it's not some quirk of "world" PVP fucking them up when 10 times as many people show up on one side. Again, automated population balancing.

[Ingmar]

They could also do something with the current "encourages win trading" solution like making the honor value for offense ramp up per failed offense. Succeed immediately, 180 honor. Succeed after 10 failed attempts in a row, 1800 honor or something.

Automated population balancing. Offense can give infinity honor while defense gives a kick in the balls, and all that will do is increase the number of people who can't get in because no defenders showed up. You must have missed the tales of 5v5 Wintergrasps at the end of WOTLK.

Doesn't happen on our server, but I kind of feel like that sort of thing is a separate problem that you're not going to fix through any tweaking of TB's win conditions. Regardless of population issues, TB needs mechanical changes.

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah it's a separate issue, but it does mean that incentivizing one side over the other is meaningless. Once they get the mechanics sorted out, rewards on both sides will NEED to be more or less equal or else the win trading will just continue.