In what I find an interesting post, Ghostcrawler went out of his way to explain the reasoning behind a lot of the various changes coming in patch 4.2. I think this type of communication is always helpful, since it lets us see the changes from a different angle. No doubt, many people will still disagree with the changes, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I’ll highlight the parts I found interesting and make some comments.
We particularly want to try to combat the perception that classes end up nerfed in PvE as collateral damage from PvP nerfs (or vice versa).
I think they’ll have a hard time ever accomplishing this. Maybe I’m just stubborn, but they do this all the time. I don’t even find it questionable anymore.
If a class is performing poorly except in the hands of one percent of the population, that’s a problem, but it’s not an excuse for that class to be overpowered when played by that one percent, especially in PvP.
It’s good that they recognize this. However, I’d rather they acknowledge that it’s equally unacceptable for a class to perform stupidly well operating at the skill level of the 99%, while underperforming when compared to the 1%. Frost mages anybody?
We changed the way interrupts interact with spell schools. Our intent when we created dual school spells (like Mind Spike being Frost and Shadow) was to allow players locked out of one school to still have something to cast, and we now have the technology to deliver on that design. However, we maintained the rule that being interrupted while casting a dual-school spell will lock you out of both schools because we didn’t want players to only use those spells as a way of avoiding interruption.
Fair enough, although I think shadow priests are still going to find Mind Spike odd. So when they’re locked out of shadow, the only damage they can cast is a spell that removes their DoTs (and dispell protection, now that Sin and Punishment is actually decent)? Not that Mind Spike is useless, it’s just such an odd choice of spell to leave available for spriests to cast when locked out.
We removed the threat caused by buffs or crowd control because we wanted to make communication and coordination easier in dungeons, especially among strangers using Dungeon Finder. We want the challenge of a dungeon encounter to be the encounter mechanics, not marking targets. We also think this change will be a quality of life improvement for tanks, who inherited a lot of the responsibility for explaining fights, marking targets and otherwise setting the pace.
Dumbing down dungeons. Honestly, I’m not gonna complain. Between wiping with morons and facerolling with morons, I’d take the latter. At least I get something accomplished doing that.
We added the cast time to Hungering Cold for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.
Hmmm, so perhaps this nerf was more for rated BGs than arenas? The nerf in arenas still seems too harsh. Their damage and death strike was what overpowered them, not hungering cold. They’ve had that ability forever and it was never considered overpowered.
The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.
Er, this is worded funny to me. They more or less turned that glyph into terrible leveling glyph. This almost implies that they changed the glyph into something that was still semi usable in PvE or PvP, which it isn’t.
The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost.
While not surprising, I do find this interesting. The DPS that spec was doing dropped overall because the good players switched specs. Kinda funny. I wonder if this explains why they over buff under performing specs from time to time. Their in-game data on an unpopular spec is inaccurate, because it’s mostly played by bad players. Definitely possible.
We changed several Balance druid mechanics to cut down on the damage they could do while moving in both PvP and PvE and to cut back on some of their strength in multi-dot fights in PvE. Furthermore, we felt like druids were spending too much time at one end or the other of the Eclipse bar by using dots rather than moving the bar back and forth as intended.
It’s definitely true that druids weren’t using the bar the way the devs probably intended. Still, it’s not like balance druids had too many great comps to run. LSD 2.0 was doing pretty good, but with the elemental shaman buffs, LSD 1.0 is probably back in the game.
We originally tried nerfing Spellsteal’s cooldown, but that made it feel really random (for both sides) since the mage had no control over which spell was stolen. We instead nerfed the mana cost to encourage tactical use of Spellsteal and discourage spamming. We’d still like to try a model where dispels have a long cooldown but remove everything, but that is too big a change for now.
I had to bold that last part. Woah. That’s a pretty big statement, should they ever go through with it. As far as the spellsteal “nerfs” stuff, that change is full of fail. Mages aren’t ooming in PvP, this isn’t going to change that.
Shadow was doing too much DPS in PvE when multiple DoTs was favored, so we nerfed their DoT damage. We want Shadow to benefit from multi-DoTs, but Shadow’s damage was just too high under those conditions. We buffed Shadow cast-time spells to compensate.
Pretty much everybody already figured this out. The reason I include this quote is because it contradicts the very original premise Ghostcrawler put forth (the first quote). Spriests are going to be forced to hard cast more in PvP to do the same damage because of this. PvE change effecting PvP. Didn’t take them long to screw that up did it?
Good stuff eh? Those were the quotes I find most interesting anyway. Most of the stuff he said was pretty obvious really. “We reduced their damage because they needed to do less damage. Derp.” Not like we really needed to hear most of that. Was their anything in the original article you found interesting that I left out? Lemme know, I’d love to hear it.
