Why Is Blizzard To Stubborn To Change DS?

#0 - Nov. 3, 2008, 6:37 a.m.

When I look at my talent trees I see the stubbornness of blizz to change talents that are obviously bad. For instance Demonic Sacrifice. 99.9999999% of warlocks will tell you this talent is now dead. We don't want it and we don't need it. Yet it still there as a 21 point talent that I have yet to see in ANY build, whether for pvp or pve, affliction, demo, or destruction. Its useless. In fact I would argue that imp enslave demon is more useful than demonic sacrifice and any lock will tell you that is saying a lot.

Its not just DS but you have things like emp enslave demon and master conjurer. Both bad talents that no one will ever take for anything. I guess master conjurer is a minor dps increase but its in a tree that already has horrible dps. It would have to be a major dps increase to be worth it in pve. PvP both talents are useless.

So when the vast majority of a class' community says look blizzard these talents are bad they have been bad since release of vanilla wow can you please change them or make them useful why does blizzard chose to stubbornly refuse these requests?

For instance I have yet to find an explanation from blue why Fel Dom is still a 15 minute cooldown and a talent. Or why shadowburn still costs a shard? I guess these kinds of issues are not really that important to blizzard even though to the player base they are pretty important.

So why the stubborness. We don't want you to be our magic genni who gives us what ever we want but at the same time even if you disagree let us know why so we can at least sleep better at night.

Ghostcrawler

#1 - Nov. 3, 2008, 7:10 a.m.

I thought this topic was another on Divine Storm and I came in here ready to lock the thread. :)

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

Ghostcrawler

#113 - Nov. 3, 2008, 9:46 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Looks like a good list to me. I hope that you're keeping an eye on pet survivability as part of the overall picture.

Yes, pet survivability is definitely on our radar. We don't know yet if it is low or if resilience is the best answer. But it is something on our list.

Long term, I think it might be good for the game to have classes less dependent on pet dps. It's just a tough balance when you can lose 25% of your dps like that. The trick is making a change such that the pet is still useful and isn't some kind of weird invulnerable entity. This one will take some more work and is probably a very long-term fix.