Several Concerns Seek Answers

#0 - Nov. 3, 2008, 2:53 a.m.

I'll make this a lengthy post to try and attract attention for possible Blue responses: I have several questions regarding a variety of classes which basically sums up what I feel to be the community's concerns (I myself am a feral druid, fire mage, and swords rogue):

Druids:
1) Some feral tanking concerns regarding gear are valid. While there are pieces of tanking gear out there that have our needs tailored into them, the vast majority of tanking filler pieces cater to the other 3 tanking classes. Is there anything being done about this?
2) Nurturing Instinct is a talent that still increases healing done by agility. I am sure several druids out there agree that this is not in-sync with Blizzard's shift to Spell Power. Is anything being done about this?
3) Feral Survivability in PvP got hurt a lot. I have heard that there are things in the works to try and fix this. Can you confirm whether this is being looked at?
4) Typhoon is a spell that is a main tool in PvP; but several druids feel that it is lacking. Is there any way to consider a 3 second daze or lengthening the distance of the knockback?
5) Typhoon and Force of Nature: Why two 41pt talents? Seems a little controversial to me. Poor protection paladins can get a single 11 pointer but here we stand with two 41 pointers? Can one of these become trained?
6) Base damage was increased on Starfire and Wrath, and numbers have changed in PvE DPS; but as we all know, increasing the base numbers doesn't necessarily increase your DPS on the long run. At tier 7, Balance druids compete fairly well, but I am looking more into tier 8/9: Do they still compete?
7) Restoration druids have had their HPS slightly nerfed from Lifebloom (their main arsenal). I understand that you want to give more diverse tools to handle different situation, but I am sure that everyone agrees that each healer has a "staple" role. The nerf, I understand, came mainly due to PvP implications, is there any way to bump this spell a bit though?
8) Survival Instincts is a great spell that we needed. It (along with Barkskin and thank you for it) gave us much needed buttons to press in stressful situations, but I must be greedy: why did we get an exact copy of the warrior’s 11 point talent? Couldn’t there have been a strong regenerative talent or something that play’s to nature’s theme in this stead?

Hunters:
1) Several hunters still feel that the 51 point talent is one of the weakest in the game. Is there anything being done to fix this?
2) The marksmanship spec is one that has been traditionally been made for PvP; but with the new ideology being thrust into the game (Every spec for PvP and PvE) Marksmanship has had its shortcomings in PvE DPS. Mainly, they run OOM very quickly and spend too much time in Viper in order to sustain competitive damage with other classes/specs. Anything being done about this?
3) Silencing shot is somewhat of a weak talent for a 41 pointer in arms, and would be a valuable tool for hunters of all specs to have. Is there any thought given to this or is Silencing shot the end-game?
4) Quoting a previous answer to a post:
2008-10-09 13:55:37
Re: [Feedback] Hunter Concerns, Civil Edition
“On Haste: I know our item budget is a little cryptic, and to some extent we like it that way. :) However, if we removed any haste from your items, we would have to replace it with something else that is probably equally sub-optimal. It's a "B stat" for hunters if you will. We can't just peel off haste and replace it with say Agi or AP (or if we did, the total would be a lot lower) or the item would be over-budget.”
What about armor penetration? End-game hunters in SWP adore this stat above all other secondary ones. Why isn’t that stat more evident in those pieces? Or another idea is pet/ability modifiers. Some pieces in BT like Beast-Tamer’s Shoulders were quite looked for; any way items like that could be brought back?
5) Trap mastery is still a 41 point talent but why? So many great things could be made for it and several ideas have been suggested. Will this talent change?
* Possible suggestions:
* Critical Flavour: Your ranged critical hits increase your party and raid member’s armor and spell penetration by 3% for 7 seconds. This effect stacks up to 3 times.
* Focus Fire: Increases your attack speed by 30% while lowering your damage by 10% for 20 seconds.

Mages:
1) There are several known bugs in the game; mainly concerning ignites and new FoF mechanics. These bugs are pretty internal and in patch notes we barely hear about them. Are they still existent? (Ignites getting stolen by others; FoF being consumed by ignites off Molten Armor; Torment/Molten Fury don’t exactly work with each other; Mirror Image is triggering GCD on non-GCD spells). An update would be nice.
2) My main concern with mages and their gearing is specifically the stat-allocation into spirit. Two thirds of the specs have no use what so ever

Ghostcrawler

#14 - Nov. 3, 2008, 7:30 a.m.

I must admit to being a little overwhelmed by posts like this. While many of the questions are valid ones, it would take me probably an hour or more to come up with decent responses for many of them. And then because the topics are so diverse, on multiple classes no less, the responses to my response could go on for many pages.

So since I was at a loss, I just answered the druid questions, since those were first (even if that was just the result of alphabetical order).

I apologize for the brevity of some of these.

Druids:

Q u o t e:
1) Some feral tanking concerns regarding gear are valid. While there are pieces of tanking gear out there that have our needs tailored into them, the vast majority of tanking filler pieces cater to the other 3 tanking classes. Is there anything being done about this?

We are talking long and hard about Feral tank itemization right now. As I mentioned on the beta forums, we may end up pulling bonus armor altogether.

Q u o t e:
2) Nurturing Instinct is a talent that still increases healing done by agility. I am sure several druids out there agree that this is not in-sync with Blizzard's shift to Spell Power. Is anything being done about this?

There are still talents that affect just healing and not damage. It is consistent with that philosophy.

3) Feral Survivability in PvP got hurt a lot. I have heard that there are things in the works to try and fix this. Can you confirm whether this is being looked at?
We have not come to the conclusion that Ferals have become significantly more squishy than anyone else. We believe ALL classes are a little squishy at 70 and the new talents might even continue the trend at 80 (which is one reason we buffed resilience).

Q u o t e:
4) Typhoon is a spell that is a main tool in PvP; but several druids feel that it is lacking. Is there any way to consider a 3 second daze or lengthening the distance of the knockback?

When I last researched this spell, it tossed players more slowly than mobs, which made it not actually get opponents as far away as we intended.

Q u o t e:
5) Typhoon and Force of Nature: Why two 41pt talents? Seems a little controversial to me. Poor protection paladins can get a single 11 pointer but here we stand with two 41 pointers? Can one of these become trained?

There are inconsistencies like this throughout the trees. It's not a hard and fast rule that the 11, 21, 31, 41 and 51 talents are clickies. We bumped Typhoon up because it felt very PvP oriented to be the bottom talent, yet it filled a niche that we thought was lacking for Balance.

Q u o t e:
6) Base damage was increased on Starfire and Wrath, and numbers have changed in PvE DPS; but as we all know, increasing the base numbers doesn't necessarily increase your DPS on the long run. At tier 7, Balance druids compete fairly well, but I am looking more into tier 8/9: Do they still compete?

From our tests, yes. They scale very well with better gear, in part because they receive extra benefits from Int and Spirit.

Q u o t e:
7) Restoration druids have had their HPS slightly nerfed from Lifebloom (their main arsenal). I understand that you want to give more diverse tools to handle different situation, but I am sure that everyone agrees that each healer has a "staple" role. The nerf, I understand, came mainly due to PvP implications, is there any way to bump this spell a bit though?

The assumption was that it came for PvP reasons, but we also knew that the "right" way to heal PvE as Resto was to keep rolling LBs on 2-3 players at the expense of almost anything else. As I've said before, it was the answer to any healing problem a druid got into. Resto has a huge repetoire of heals now, and we still think LB will be a big part of that.

Q u o t e:
8) Survival Instincts is a great spell that we needed. It (along with Barkskin and thank you for it) gave us much needed buttons to press in stressful situations, but I must be greedy: why did we get an exact copy of the warrior’s 11 point talent? Couldn’t there have been a strong regenerative talent or something that play’s to nature’s theme in this stead?

Honestly, it's because many Ferals at the time felt like they couldn't compete without that ability (and many are still asking for Shield Wall). It's a delicate balance, and honestly our prediliction is usually to err on the side of making classes more different. Yet witness the uproar over Protector of the Pack just because it comes with a nuisance-level drawback that warriors don't have (that latter point tends to be the sticky part).

The one different thing about Survival Instinct is it is also really useful for cat-focused Ferals, while Last Stand tends to be used by tanks only. We let Survivial Instinct be used by cats for that reason.