Month: February 2010

We are making some adjustments to tank survivability based on what we’re seeing in Icecrown Citadel. We feel this is particularly important in preparation for upcoming Heroic attempts. This is tricky and occasionally subjective, so we might very well make more adjustments as we get even more data.

Paladin (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Sacred Duty now provides 2 / 4% Stamina, down from 4 / 8% Stamina. The cooldown advantages of the talent remain unchanged.

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.

It’s important to note that we aren’t trying to single out paladins here. We like the tank balance of warriors and druids at the moment, and we have a larger sample size of warrior tanks that we can compare. Another solution would have been to buff warriors, death knights and druids and then increase boss damage accordingly. Obviously, that would have been a much larger change with greater risks and a longer delay.

Though Ardent Defender is always a possible target for changes, we like that this talent provides such a distinction between warriors and paladins. Rather than have all the tanks have the same health, armor, avoidance and cooldowns, we’d rather have four unique tanking classes rather than just superficial or artistic differences. Yes, that design is harder to balance, but we think class distinction is ultimately more interesting, which is better for the long term health of the game. The goal remains to have all four tanks be viable for any encounter, assuming sufficient gear and skill, and any differences in performance on individual encounters to be minor. “Minor” is obviously a subjective term.

Please note that the death knight change will result in a small survivability increase in PvP, which we think is appropriate. We chose it partially with that in mind.

After further observations of the recent changes made to resilience and healing in PvP, we have made an additional change via an in-game fix so that the PvP healing debuff in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp now also lowers the effectiveness of Power Word: Shield and Sacred Shield by 10%. The majority of other strong shields or damage absorption mechanics are already affected by the healing change, so we feel this new adjustment is an appropriate step in balancing the effects of resilience versus healing. The ultimate goal is to find a better median between PvP encounters feeling too quick from burst damage, or too long from heals, shields, and absorption effects. We will continue to monitor the way these changes play out and let you know if we feel any further changes are needed. As always, feedback based on your PvP experience with these new changes is welcome.

Nibelung hotfix (Nibelung)
We are currently in the process of applying two hotfix improvements to the Nibelung staff. The first change is that we are improving the chance for a val’kyr to proc from 1% to 2%. While this may not seem like a significant improvement, it will be notable and result in the val'kyr appearing more often.

The second change is that anytime a summoned val’kyr casts her smite spell, she will heal herself for 25% of the damage done. This will help keep them alive when AoE damage is happening but not make them invincible as we still want them to feel like a summoned creature and not a special form of a DoT spell that has awesome art.

We understand the frustrations players have had with this weapon so far. We currently plan to make more proc weapons in the future and are committed to making this and other proc weapons fun and competitive items. (Source)

PvP healing changes
As was stated in the post announcing the change to healing, we'll be carefully watching the effects the change has when coupled with the recent buff to resilience. Your feedback is always welcomed and will hold infinitely more water — when you've proven through a carefully demonstrated critique of the healing and resilience changes — that you've been through a great many PvP scenarios post-patch 3.3.2.

[…] In summary — because I feel another paragraph is what you want — we feel the healing change was necessary given the current state of PvP. We made a resilience change to reduce the feel of burst "GCD" fights in PvP, but we knew such a change could easily favor healers too much. These two changes do not cancel each other out; and we expect to see more fights where health pools matter more, where it's no longer a blur of DPS classes taking opponents from 100%-0% in seconds, or healers easily keeping health pools at, or close to 100% for prolonged periods. Certain classes or class combinations could prove to be too powerful as a result, and as we've said all along, we'll be watching and ready to react. (Source)

Tanking class disparities in raid
Also remember that players pick their class for a lot of reasons and guilds pick their tank for a lot of reasons. We know that if we buff or nerf too much that we can drive population, but we also know there are plenty of other factors at play. For example, I'm not sure how powerful a tank class would have to be at tanking before you'd see its population jump if it was really frustrating or boring to play or really hard to gear or required a ton of skill to do well or if it was terrible at every other aspect of the game. (I don't think we have any of those classes in the game at the moment — I'm just pointing out an extreme, contrived case that could affect population.)

The biggest red flag for us will be if raids feel like they have to gravitate towards a certain tank class for the hard fights. (If you swap tanks for a couple of fights, that's not a big deal either, assuming the swap doesn't become too widespread, or you're blocked if you fail to swap.) It's a big deal if a particular tank class just can't cut it, or has to work much harder (or get much luckier) on the same content, assuming the content is challenging. I can't imagine too many guilds replacing their main tank for a different class because they are stalled at current Icecrown progression. Not many of the Icecrown fights really tax the tank, except for perhaps Festergut. That's about to change with LK and the hard modes. (Source)

PvP healing changes and drain spells
Drain Life isn't affected. Nor is Fel Armor, Death Coil, Haunt, Devouring Plague or Spirit Bond.

It's a little technical, but things that are actual drains are not affected. Heals that get proc'd by other effects are affected.

Currently the nerf is only 10%, so I don't expect the impact on a lot of these lower healing effects to be a big deal.

[…] Vampiric Embrace will be affected by the nerf.

Unfortunately, there isn't going to be a hard and fast rule that determines what is affected and what is not. It just depends technically on how the spells are created. The tooltip often suggests what is happening behind the scenes, but isn't 100% reliable.

Remember, the magnitude is currently small. We can't imagine too many PvP encounters that are resolved differently based on 10% less healing from VE.

This was a blanket solution, and the problem with blanket solutions is that you have very little room to handle special cases. In this case, we didn't want to wait for the elegant solution that affected say just the true priest, paladin and druid healing spells, because that would have delayed the change possibly until Cataclysm (where I suspect it won't even be needed). (Source)

[…] It's a little technical which abilities get hit and which do not. If your ability procs a heal on you, then that is affected (such as VE). If you are doing a straight out drain, like Death Coil, then it will not be affected.

It's just 10% (for now) so I don't think the effect on a lot of these secondary heals will be very noticeable to be honest. Really we were trying to hit the big healer-based heals like Penance, Flash / Holy Light, Lifebloom, etc. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Scourge Strike Bug
To be clear, while Scourge Strike should not have the physical and Shadow portions both hit by resilience, they should not independently be buffed by +damage effects either. The Shadow damage should in most cases just be a function of the physical damage done. Exceptions are things like Ebon Plague that specifically boost magic damage and don't buff physical damage. Ebon Plague should buff the Shadow damage portion of Scourge Strike. So it's possible the resilience is bugged (in which case it's about to get worse with the resilience change), but at first glance we think Outbreak and the tier 10 bonus are working correctly.

This ability has gone through numerous iterations in an attempt to get it both balanced and fun, so some confusion about how it is supposed to work is certainly understandable.

[…] I'm not sure where the interpretation came from that we're going to nerf Scourge Strike for PvE. All I was trying to say was that the current 3.3 version of Scour…