#0 - Jan. 6, 2009, 11:22 a.m.
Class and Game Balance Report 05 Jan 2009
Backround: My main character is a Death Knight on Korgath server named Nathyrra: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Korgath&n=Nathyrra
Any numerical statistics provided in this report are taken from the SK100 Arena Player Rankings: http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/player
Preface: The DK section will obviously be more comprehensive as I have the most WotLK experience with them, especially in arena. Also keep in mind that a lot of this is from an arena perspective, although PvE consideration is taken into mind for everything. People will obviously not agree with everything but something (suggestions) is always better than nothing. The opinions reflected here are my own and people very well may disagree with them. It is also by no means fully comprehensive as there are several outstanding issues that I intentionally left out and probably even more that were unintentionally left out.
General:
-Pet survivability: Although pets should remain viable targets for a team as Blizzard has stated in the past, they are simply far too easy to kill right now. Even thorns or retribution aura can almost solo a pet in very short time. Pets either need to take a flat reduced amount of damage from other players or the effects of a player's resilience should be transferred to the pet, as well as spell penetration and spell hit for warlock pets. Pets in PvP should also be immune to taunt for 30 seconds after being taunted by a tank class in order to prevent spam macro taunting to further reduce their effectiveness due to the increased range on taunts.
-Dispel resistance: This is one of the biggest annoyances in arena and PvP that any top player can attest to. It is a factor that is completely out of the hands of a player to control yet can easily decide the outcome of a fight. There are so many examples of critical things that can have absolutely horrid RNG on dispel that it's not worth listing everything. There are 2 serious problems with dispel resistance right now, however. The first being the level at where they are provided. For warlocks, their dispel resistance comes coupled with increased damage but comes at a five talent point investment deep in the Affliction Tree. For Mages, however, they get the same amount of dispel resistance (30%) in their first tier of Arcane for only a two talent point investment from a talent that also reduces their threat caused by Arcane spells. This isn't really fair at all. The second problem, obviously, is dispel priority and dispel fail rate. The solution I was brainstorming was giving everything a certain dispel value. For example, let's say polymorph is a value of 100. Dispel resistance talents could further boost this value by a certain %, let's say 30% for Arcane Subtlety. Then let's assume that lesser effects have a much smaller value, for example, Improved Scorch and Winter's Chill both having only a value of 50. Dispel mechanics such as cleanse, dispel magic, etc should all prioritize the highest value debuffs first for dispel. A paladin's cleanse could have a dispel value of let's say 100, meaning he could dispel the polymorph in one shot normally, but it would take two if the mage has arcane subtlety. However, any carry-over dispel value will attempt to dispel another effect. For this example, the paladin's cleanse could remove both a single stack of improved scorcn and winter's chill at the same time (or 2 stacks from the same debuff, etc). This system, while obviously not perfect without tuning, is a great foundation for a more consistent dispel system and should be considered.
