Are the devs going "oops" with Titan's Grip?

#0 - Jan. 11, 2009, 11:20 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Got my warrior to 30 today, and i'm suddenly feeling a power that I have never felt before. I'm critting like crazy.

I can only imagine what things will be like with Titan's Grip.

Are the developers regreting putting this OP talent in?
#60 - Jan. 12, 2009, 5:43 a.m.
Blizzard Post
I would love to go back and link all of those posts where warriors argued that TG was underpowered as long as it had a hit penalty, or that it "wouldn't scale well."

It's a very good talent. While normally we like for talents to be of roughly the same power, in the case of Titan's Grip, we understand how huge it is and are willing to balance Fury around it. We don't relly think TG will be an optional talent as we design most talents to be. At the moment we're okay with that.
#118 - Jan. 12, 2009, 8:34 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Q u o t e:
Why are you willing to sacrifice your design philosophy for one talent? You do realize this is going to lead to future pointing of fingers with people saying "well, that might be your intent, but hey, look at Titan's Grip - you made an exception for them!", right?


I wouldn't characterize it as sacrificing our design philosophy. We have guidelines, but we also need to be able to skirt around those guidelines sometimes. That is one of the things that makes the classes and talents interesting. In a world where everything was truly equivalent, you also risk the choices being a lot less interesting. Sometimes the exceptions are the most interesting. (E.g. History tends to most celebrate those battles that were upsets, not those where the expected party indeed triumphed.)

There is certainly a risk that every spec will argue for their version of Titan's Grip. What players will need to remember is that we won't take a spec at 100% and give them a talent that adds 20% to that. If we add a talent that is a 20% boost (I am just making up numbers for illustrative purposes), the class will be balanced at 80% and we will assume everyone has the talent.

We assume all Fury warriors (at higher level) dual-wield two-handed weapons, just like we assume all Affliction warlocks are casting a lot of dots. By contrast, we do not assume that all hunters use bows or that all Demo warlocks use Felguards all the time.

It's an unusual talent, but in this case we feel it needs to be unusual to make it work.