Day: April 25, 2010

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Wild Growth cooldown change in Cataclysm
This kind of thing comes up a lot, where players see us messing with cooldowns and assume it's a nerf instead of our trying to give them room to actually cast more spells.

Raising the cooldown on spells like Wild Growth and Circle of Healing are good things for healers. It's one of the few* things that will buy you GCDs to actually cast other spells. With a 6 sec cooldown, you really only get to cast maybe 3-5 other spells before you need to hit that magic button again.

Let me put it another way… if there was no cooldown on Wild Growth would you ever hit another button? The frequency with which druids use it today suggests the answer is: not often.

* – an alternative is to make the mana cost so extreme that you're making a very bad decision any time you use Wild Growth or Circle and 5-6 targets aren't seriously injured. I'm not sure that would be any more fun though. You don't always have the precious seconds to analyze the situation and calculate how many players need instant healing. It's one thing to guess whether your fast or big heal is more appropriate on a target. It's a little trickier to do that for multiple targets at once.

In before "It wouldn't be overpowered if we didn't do raid damage" and "Well we come to expect nerfs when all of our overpowered spells get nerfed." (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Warrior tanking in Cataclysm
I'll abstain from using actual quotes here, but these things were basically said above.

Using Demo Shout to tank:

— We don't like the feel of this. It hits for no damage and puts a debuff on the target that isn't visible and doesn't change the target's behavior at all.

Getting a new tanking AE to use when SW and TC are on cooldown:

— What's the point though? Why not just remove TC's cooldown rather than add yet another ability you're supposed to spam in rotation?

On warriors losing Cleave:

— You're not losing Cleave. You don't have infinite use of it, but you're not going to have infinite use of any of your abilities, because things will cost rage and if you spend rage unwisely you're going to starve yourself. Use Heroic Strike vs. single targets and Cleave against groups. Besides, I hardly see how Cleave is this panacea for the staggered adds scenario seeing as how it hits a grand total of one additional target (two if glyphed).

On tab targeting:

— We really don't want to see a scenario (for any tank) where you just stop using your single-target abilities completely. It's fine to supplement those with an AE attack, but not completely ignore them in group situations. (As an aside, the paladin doesn't really do this now because he uses the same rotation for both singles and groups. The druid doesn't do this now because Lacerate doesn't hit hard enough relative to Swipe. Both are easily fixable though.)

[…] Let's take four scenarios that cover the majority of encounters:

1) If dozens of twilight whelps are streaming in, fine, just AE tank them and have the dps use Blizzard, Hurricane, Whirlwind, etc. I think you all know how to this by now.

2) If you're doing a four pull and the mobs hit really hard, then CC one or two and dps the others down single target. You'll want to keep threat on all the loose mobs, but not by spamming an AE ability unless you can buy yourself plenty of room. I know everyone is scared of CC, but we actually made a pretty good spread of CC abilities in LK, and then sadly nobody ever got to use them. In Cataclysm we are making sure to spread abilities around even more.

3) Now, if you're doing a four pull and you think you can get away without CC, then ideally you'd use your AE attacks but still…