#0 - Dec. 9, 2009, 2:50 p.m.
First of I would like to explain why I have chosen to put this on the general forum, For once I get the impression when I look at the blue tracker or other various blizzard message trackers that there is rarely given a blizzard response of any significance to the EU players while even a troll can get a post from GC.
And from past experience I’ve seen even less responses on the warlock forums, and I simply consider this too great a cause to simply die in the ramblings of warlocks.
Now why should soul shards be temporally removed?
The short answer is that it’s both tedious, boring and a waste of time, however a longer explaining is probably needed, for people(and blue’s) to understand the frustration I and probably a lot of other warlocks have.
So what is so bad about soul shards?
Basically how shards works is that they cap the amounts of spells you can cast to make sure you don’t overdue it, so for instance shadow burn which is an instant spell cost a shard when used, unless used as a finisher, however in arena nobody and I truly mean nobody cares if you loose an extra shard if it will insure the win. However in a long arena match it might take 8-9 shards before the battle is over.
Now a person can run with 32 shards(capped) that means after aprox. 5-7 matches you will be out of shards. However to regain shards you have to use Drain soul on a training dummy for about 1 shards per draining soul, now luckily I am running 430 haste so I only have 13.7 sec drains soul but for an unhasted person that is 15 second*32=480sec=8min of pure boredom.
Another problem is that I am not a robot and I don’t claim to be perfect so a few times I forget to grind the shards or the queue simply pops way too early for me to get a shard back. This then means, I will enter arena with 0 shards, now our pets can only be summoned if I spend a shard but since I am out of them this will highly likely result in an arena game loss only because I didn’t grind them.
So let’s recap
The idea behind shards capping spells not a working solution
8 min of boredom for a full bag of shards that last for 5-7games
Chance of loss if you forget to grind them or don’t grind enough(for instance if you enter battle with only 4 shards).
What did blizzard do to other classes with similar problems?
One of the classes which had the same problem was rogues and blind, it used to be that a rogue could only blind had he brought something on the auction house, however blizzard came in said no this is not how we like it and the rogues got fixed (and yes I mean fixed for it truly an annoying system loosing a match because of ones forgetfulness)
So what can be done about it?
Now earlier this week I read a post by GC stating that the reasoning behind shard not stacking was nothing but the chance of it having an error thus destroying something and they would simply not take that risk which is fairly understandable.
However luckily I know about bit about programming to give blizzard possible solutions to this problem which will have no chance of backfiring.
-make ingame vendor which sells soul shard for free or for 1c
-make spells stop requiring soul shards
-make soul shards proc on every tick of drain soul or even better make it proc 10 shards on every tick.
What effects will this have?
Only one, which is that in PVE locks will now be able to spam soul fire, which according to theory craft is better when you are under the effect of conflagrate(30%haste), however a compromise could be made, by just removing soul shard requirement on both pets and shadow burn(as shard burn has no pve effect since it is a nerf to your dps to use the spell)
Why do I say temporally?
Well as we all know blizzard have great plans with shards which will truly fix a lot of problems for warlocks sadly we are looking down a 6-8 month wait time, and I have simply become too tired with shards, to say it straight I have to restrain myself at every keystroke to avoid writing something offensive purely because of my deep, deep, deep, hate against soul shards.
Finally to people who doesn’t agree or think I am simply making it look worse then it truly is
I’ve played a warlock ever since the game was released, which also means I know in which situations shards are simply not a problem.
- You only pve. In pve soul shards are used much less and there is always nearby trash to fill your shard bag
- You are in the process of levelling a warlock, which means you can get a shard from every mob you kill and in many times you actually have the opposite problem(having too many shards taking up bag space)
Now as petitions have no effect according to blizzard I would like people to write why they feel shards should be removed it doesn’t have to be much just try to avoid “/vote”.
Blizzard I beg of you, change this as quickly as possible or at the very least give us an explanation why you are continuously forcing us to spend so much time on such a meaningless task :(
