Daily Blue Posts on Patch 3.1 Changes

New Battleground for WotLK

It’s been mentioned in the past by Jeff (Tigole) and Tom (Kalgan), but from the responses I’ve read it seemed that most players figured they were referring to Strand of the Ancients or Lake Wintergrasp.

There is a new one in the works. :)

More PvP Changes on the Way

To be fair, we’ve mentioned it several times (myself included). The first time we mentioned wanting to shift focus back to battlegrounds was prior to the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Tigole (Jeff Kaplan, former game director of World of Warcraft) made a post stating that we never intended for arenas to be the central focus of WoW PvP, and that we’d like to develop a system to more accurately measure skill in battlegrounds to provide better PvP rewards for those who don’t want to do arenas.

Such an overhaul takes time though, which is why we’ve released very little additional information (though it has been repeated numerous times by other Blizzard employees on this forum).

Healers: Mana Issues

When mana isn’t particularly limited in an encounter, then the main way we have to challenge your group is by making you global cooldown limited on an encounter. Basically if you ever fail to cast a spell every cooldown, your target may die because incoming damage is so huge.

While that might feel very challenging, it also works against some of how we want encounters to play. You can’t worry about things like mana, movement, healer coordination or overhealing when missing even a single GCD results in a wipe. This does not mean we want healing to be slow and boring. We do want players to make interesting decisions when they are playing, and we fear spamming your most powerful heal every GCD and never stopping isn’t really a decision. In fact it feels more like a macro. :) So we make the risk of that behavior to be that you run out of mana.

(I’m describing a pretty extreme case too, like trying a new boss for the first time when you might be a little undergeared.)

Another way we could have approached the problem would have been to greatly increase the health of every player and then also increased the damage done by the boss. That way you wouldn’t be healing a tank for 25 or even 50% on every big heal. When someone got knocked down low, you would have to cast a few heals to get them up again and the focus would be more on who to heal rather than making sure you don’t ever miss a heal.

Plate Armor Itemization

We will look at sacrificing some Stamina for Strength on the dps gear that has both stats for 3.1. We can’t make any promises.

Plus, if we end up doing this, we may have to end up nerfing plate dps in other places, but we’ll see what the numbers look like first.

…Like I said, we want warriors (and DKs and paladins) to want Strength. Warriors wanting those Agi / AP rings that drop is a problem. Why? Because now half your raid wants those rings when they drop, and you probably won’t get enough of them. Meanwhile, the Strength ring is wasted. We get a lot of bang for the buck out of having most groups share gear with someone else. But we also don’t want to get to the point where any single item is best in slot for every dps class (or even every melee dps class).

Mage: Scorch / Winter’s Chill Changes

I think we are likely to make the following changes:

Improved Scorch: In addition to the stacking crit debuff, will improve your critical strike chance with Fireball, Scorch or Frostfire Bolt by 1/2/3%.

Winter’s Chill: In addition to the stacking crit debuff, will improve your critical strike chance with Frostbolt (possibly all Frost) by 1/2/3%.

Standard “no promises” caveat applies.

Paladin: Crusader Strike Changes?

One correction:

* Crusader Strike is now An instant strike that causes 110% weapon damage. In addition, if you strike a player while they are casting, their magical damage and healing will be reduced by 50% for 6 sec.

That is not an official change. It is something we were experimenting with, but not a change we are going to make for 3.1.

The short story is that while we want to make Crusader Strike a more exciting ability, we don’t think that this is the way to go about it. The “Overpower debuff” won’t really give them anything more interesting in PvE. In PvP it isn’t as game-changing for a warrior who already had access to an interrupt and the Mortal Strike debuff. Giving both of those to a paladin could be very game-changing and not the kind of thing we are ready to do without a lot more testing.

Sorry for any confusion. Sometimes in our haste to update the PTR as often as we can, you get a chance to see behind the curtain a little more than we intend. :)

Paladin: Healing Issues

Well, for starters, if you read that whole thread, I recall that my next line was that we decided Chain Heal was the signature ability for the Resto shaman, so we didn’t want to shove them too far away from it.

As I said in another thread recently, we think there are ways to make paladin healing more interesting without just giving them a hot, an AE heal, etc. Timing, synergies and cooldowns are all mechanics that can let a skilled player try and maximize their throughput, while still letting players who like the paladin because the class only has a few heals to manage not lose what they like about the class.

Priest: Psychic Horror Changes

We were worried about the short cooldown in combination with Psychic Horror not sharing the Psychic Scream diminishing returns. We imagined every fight starting with the priest just chain CC-ing someone.

It was intended as a defensive tool, to use when you’re having trouble with a melee class or hunter. The longer duration should make you think about when you use it instead of just firing it off as part of your rotation.

Having said that, cooldowns are a relatively easy thing to mess with, so we can always tune it up or down depending on how it plays out.

Shaman: Totem Stomping Issues

From our POV, there is no defense of totem-stomping macros.

If you want to take the time to give your pet a command and a target to kill a totem, great. But to be able to neutralize a core mechanic of the class so easily because you are clever enough to copy a macro off of the Internet is not skill.

The only reason they still exist are technical limitations, not because we like the design. (And please don’t feel the need to offer your technical suggestions. :) )

Warrior: Berserker Stance Changes

1) We want warriors to wear plate. We balance around warriors wearing plate.

2) Because of the way certain warrior mechanics work, leather is attractive.

3) One of these mechanics is AP being overvalued compared to Strength.

4) This change was to try to shift more value back to Strength.

5) Warriors are balanced around wearing plate. When warriors wear leather and do too much damage, then they end up getting nerfed. But really this is a symptom of #3, not anything players are doing wrong.

6) If you wear plate and don’t do enough damage, we’ll buff you.

7) We realize this change lets Arms off the hook… for the moment.

8) We like both the logic and gameplay of classes being able to wear armor besides “theirs.” It’s nice if a paladin uses healing cloth that is an upgrade for them and might otherwise be sharded. It’s nice if a warrior can use a rogue item if they have nothing better. But honestly, sometimes we are pretty close to just restricting classes to “their” armor and not “their” armor plus all “lesser” armors.

9) I know you might drool over stats on another character. But that’s not the way we balance. If we gave you plate with Spirit and Stamina on it, we would change warrior mechanics to make those numbers useful. You may say “If I wear the gear I am supposed to wear, I’ll be terrible.” We say “If you wear the gear your’e supposed to wear, you’ll be balanced.” We made a similar change to Feral druids lately, because they stacked AP at the expense of everything else. It was too good a stat and led them to make choices based solely on what gear maximized their AP. Sound familiar?

10) If you think your damage is low, bring that up in these forums. But say “Our damage is low.” Don’t say “We need leather.”