[WoW] WotLK - Beta Patch Notes

[Zerai]

Originally Posted by Clug

All this rogue angst and yet warrior/druid is still the most popular 2s combo rated over 2k.

Only reason you see lots of high rated warriors in 2s is druids. Shaman/war got nerfed with the windfury change.

Warriors build off support. Kill the support, warrior is gimp. This is where the druid comes in. And why it's a problem.

But again. War/druid is the primary war combo. Rogue/mage, rogue/warlock, rogue/druid, rogue/ret pal, rogue/priest....

[chu]

I think people that think that AOE spell reflect is gamebreaking are quite a bit wrong. A single level 1 moonfire/icelance/random instant cast spell is going to eat up the charge.

It will require an exceptional warrior to make it work real well and can be just as easily nullified by another exceptional player on the other team.

[Zest]

Rank 1 spells cost more mana than full rank spells. Aside from Mages (Ice Lance) and Shadow Priests (Vampiric Embrace), there's no real good way to use up the buff without hurting yourself. It will be a powerful ability.

Prot Warrior teams will be like Rogue teams... except the Rogue is still using S1 weapons and doesn't have Wounding Poison.

It doesn't really matter anyway. Healers got buffed too. Being able to Silence/Stun someone for 9 seconds is good and all... but don't forget Lifebloom lasts 9 seconds now too.

[Agraza]

In the latest build they took out the parry:rage talent from arms, which I expected. I mean, beyond the base % chance and the 5% talent, non-tank wars do not improve upon their parry chance. It isn't tied to any attributes and isn't allocated to dps gear, PvP or otherwise. Arms warriors are already decently successful against other melee, so why pile on the own? They need shit to cover their weaknesses such as being locked down, rage starving absorption effects, and DoTs (i.e. casters).

They yanked Heroic Leap from Fury for this lame ability that clears root and refreshes your Intercept cooldown, but they added a neat 400ac:1/2/3str talent to tier 1. TG's penalty remains completely gay, but the wording was apparently altered to not effect Bloodthirst.

The AC:STR talent seems absolutely required for new prot specs with all the shield block synergy, and the threat transfer effect doesn't seem to have been attached to Vigilance yet. Safeguard was nerfed (why?) by giving it's snare wiping effect to Warbringer, thus making Warbringer completely awesome. It's too awesome for a one point talent really, so I think this will be adjusted again. Imp.TC was reduced to +30% damage and swapped places with TM (arms), but the skill apparently has a very high threat modifier. This seems contrary to the theme of scaling up with gear.

The dps trees feel incomplete and underwhelming, but prot is still <3.

Edit - I did the math with a war on the armory. With his 20k AC he'll get like 150ish str from the new talent, and thus 101 or so block value after prot talents (+6% STR +30% BV). I don't know exactly how the math works, so that's bound to be off by a bit. Obviously that will go up a lot with buffs and level 80 values.

[Auren]

Was looking over the Shaman spells thinking I'd actually enjoy leveling up my shaman while getting random groups for dungeons in the level range as I leveled up when I noticed that Hex is a level 80 spell. This shit should be like a level 20 spell with the time it lasts scaling just like polymorph. Does blizz only want shaman to be wanted by groups once you hit 80 unless you are a healer? Sure a smart group that knows what they are doing would sometimes take a shaman but being able to cc makes you far more desirable to pickup groups. Being a person that has odd play times it would sure help me alot and I'm sure alot of other people agree. All I see these days is group looking for 1 dps/cc + tank or something of that nature. I guess I have to level solo up to 80 and not set foot in a dungeon until I get there. Why does blizz think this is warranted. Good times will be had by all, except dps shaman that is.

[Blide]

Honestly, it's an incentive for people to get the expansion. I'd expect lower level versions of it when the next expansion hits though, like water shield.

[Gnome Eater]

Why are people arguing with Makata? You do realize across 7 toons he has never breached 1700 in Arenas given his playtime?

He is quite possibly the player with the worst effort/reward in game.

[mek]

Frankly, CC is pointless until you hit heroics, and even then it's optional atm. I have been playing a shaman in beta and I keep forgetting I even have Hex, I basically use it as a rogue would use Blind - in emergencies when something is bashing on a healer (ie. me), not as a standard CC.

Of course, you CAN use it as a standard CC, but it suffers from the problem that one stupid person breaking it can wipe your group (in a heroic). And again, the pre-heroics are so easy that CC is a waste of time.

[Runnen]

I know most people here won't care one bit, but as a collector of small pets in WoW, I figured this might be good news to a few people at least. They are going to make it so some special pets (such as Murky the Baby Murloc, Tyrael, or all Collector's Edition pets) will no longer be soulbound to a character, but bound to the entire account. This would make them tradeable between characters on the same realm. Tigole stated that this could be used to "learn" the pets on all the characters on the realm by mailing the pets between characters, citing as an example that the owner of the original Collector's Edition could end up not only with the Panda Cub, the Zergling or the Mini- Diablo pet, but with all three on the same character by mailing the other two and learning them. Of course, as part of that change, learning these pets will no longer make the actual pet item disappear from inventory so you can pass it around.

If it goes Live as Tigole mentionned, then this'll put me above the 75 small pets bar.

[Sharmai]

I'm planning on starting (if not joining) an achievement guild so that tidbit of information will be useful.

[Basren Dragonsnack]

Resto Druids got the nerf bat big time in the latest changes:

Flourish AE Heal Talent changed to Wild Growth: heals for 1087 over 7 seconds down from 4417.

Lifebloom was also nerfed again. Less healing and more mana cost.


I definatly agree Flourish was OP and needed to be scaled back, but a 75% drop seems a bit rough. I'm having a hard time figuring out what role they want resto druids to fill in a raid.

[Mageling]

Originally Posted by Basren Dragonsnack

Resto Druids got the nerf bat big time in the latest changes:

Flourish AE Heal Talent changed to Wild Growth: heals for 1087 over 7 seconds down from 4417.

Lifebloom was also nerfed again. Less healing and more mana cost.


I definatly agree Flourish was OP and needed to be scaled back, but a 75% drop seems a bit rough. I'm having a hard time figuring out what role they want resto druids to fill in a raid.

I think a good question is if they are trying to create all of the healing classes able to perform in every role of raid healing?

[Incognitogamer]

Originally Posted by Mageling

I think a good question is if they are trying to create all of the healing classes able to perform in every role of raid healing?

They're trying to make all healing specs viable in all instances. So they are getting all kinds of tricks and spells to make that happen.

[Sharmai]

Originally Posted by Auren

Was looking over the Shaman spells thinking I'd actually enjoy leveling up my shaman while getting random groups for dungeons in the level range as I leveled up when I noticed that Hex is a level 80 spell. This shit should be like a level 20 spell with the time it lasts scaling just like polymorph. Does blizz only want shaman to be wanted by groups once you hit 80 unless you are a healer? Sure a smart group that knows what they are doing would sometimes take a shaman but being able to cc makes you far more desirable to pickup groups.....

Shaman hex is worthless. Read it again. It has a 45 sec cooldown. How many times have you seen a pull where the mages sheep is whacked by accident and it has to be re-sheeped? In a PuG heroic that's a wipe if it doesn't get re sheeped.

In a non-heroic it doesn't matter you don't need sheep but heroics are what matters and in heroics your going to need CC. Non-spamable CC puts you lower then mages (obviously), hunters, rogues, and even any spec druid now since roots works indoors and is spamable on melee mobs.




I wouldn't be to worried though. Once people are hitting level 80 and doing heroics the ineffectiveness of hex will become obvious and the bitching will cause blizzard to make it spammable in a patch. Or maybe add a glyh that does it or something. The only groups that are going to be taking shamans in heroic pugs are groups that can't find any other class OR are so overpowered for the instance that they'd rather have more DPS.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by Makata

For the love of all things holy will you people stop pluralizing stun. We have 1. Cheap shot requires stealth so unless you honestly are suggesting the best way to kill someone is to leave them alone for 5+ seconds so you can drop combat or you have more than 1 or 2 vanishes a game, we have 1 mother fucking god damned stun.

No, you don't.

And don't diminish the various blind/restealth/stun combos because they are large part of the reason, along with snare + anti-snare, evasion and COS, that rogues are doing quite well in arenas on average.

The bottomline with WoW, and it is made very apparent with WAR as contrast, is that you can't give heavy amounts of CC to a DPS class. It's fucking ridiculous, and only fun for the DPS class. Likewise if you give too much CC/control to a healing class, they're equally overpowered. This goes in a nifty little power curve from druids ruling 2s and 3s due to longevity and mitigation, but not 5 because they have shit for countering burst.

This curve also applies to cocksuck rogues/warlocks being largely less desired pieces of shit in 5s because the CC+damage they provide is diminished when balanced with the AE power and controlled burst of mages/hunters/shaman.


See how that works? All of the classes that dominate small scale play are much less important in full group PVP. Blizzard has made a very conscious decision about catering to douchebags in 2v2s, allowing the same arena gear to be used in all 3 arena styles, allowing PVE gear (which insanely benefits burst comps and random specific other comps), fuck, even HAVING 2v2 and 3v3 at all.

All of this flattening is just shuffling the deck to maybe give the new underdogs a boost in arena. Again rogues were turds when arena first came along. They also got shit on in PVE with ae and 360 effects. Druids got the big fuck you because they couldn't solo heal a group without shad/ret/shm due to having no rez. The warlock's history of being "mushroom" is a long and storied past, since nobody wanted to fucking play a class where "summon and healthstones are your raid utility!" that required farming to even break even, long, long ago.

I know we all look down upon the casuals from our lofty ivory towers, but holy fuck the balance problems are quite obvious right now. You don't need to bust out a slide rule and abacus to figure out that 90% of the teams in 2s you currently face have rogues or druids on them and they fucking rape you. It's really that simple.

It is also mindboggling to comprehend that you can't see this. One of my friends' 11 year old brother finally farmed up his weapons on his rogue and is in garbage gear, and went from mediocrity to hay, wow, 1800 rating by just mashing buttons.



And I do think the PVP discussion is relevant in WOTLK talk because as far as anyone knows the decisions made to talents are meant to serve both PVE and PVP, right?

I'm still not understanding the holy/disc priest PVP changes. They seem to think priests cast more than instants in arenas 95% of the time... meh.