Why did DK auras need change?

#0 - Feb. 25, 2009, 7:11 a.m.

I'm really scratching my head at this.

My guess is that it was felt Blood Aura and Unholy Aura were seen too much as "must have" abilities for raids and that was seen as a problem. However, I don't think it is a problem for classes to have unique abilities to provide parties that are pretty good-- and if they were seen as "vital" by the dev team, then why not just allow other classes to be capable of providing the same effect?

Even if they did need to be altered, why change them so that half of the bonus each provides is worthless?

The flaw with Improved Unholy Presence is if you have your runes refreshing 10% faster in Unholy Presence, why would you ever want to be in another presence? There's no need to have any run speed bonus for any other presence, because anyone with this talent isn't going to be in any other presence but Unholy Presence.

The flaw with Improved Blood Presence is similar: the only players that would benefit from 10% more healing are tanks, and only a moron would ever tank in Blood Presence. That means, once again, half the benefit of the talent will never be used by anyone taking this talent. (I suppose it might be useful in PVP, but I doubt it's as useful as Improved Unholy Presence)

I don't mean to sound rude because I realize decisions on game changes are done "as a team", but this change does not seem to have been well thought out at all.

Again, I imagine the Auras were seen as "must haves" the same way Blessing of Sanctuary was probably nerfed because it was so good, but if you're going to change really good talents into something else, can you at least make them not significantly less desirable than what they are replacing?

I welcome a lot of the DK changes you guys are making, but this one I feel like I need to speak up about, because it seems silly.

Ghostcrawler

#4 - Feb. 25, 2009, 8:41 p.m.

Unholy Aura was becoming mandatory as a raid buff. We considered giving it to other classes, but realized we would just be accepting all players moving faster all the time (which subsequently also makes some boot enchants look bad). Frost Aura was kind of lame, but I'm sure we could have come up with something better. Mostly, the mechanic was just a little awkward and hard to explain. We like the new one better.

Players often wish for a buff so awesome that it guarantees them a raid slot. But that is exactly the mentality we were trying to prevent with our big buff and debuff overhaul. In the Sunwell era, raid slots were already so precious that there is a good chance a DK might not have even earned a spot, and having more than one would be a total waste... unless we gave them two mandatory buffs, in which case the Retadin, Boomkin or dps warrior might have gotten the heave ho.

The new model is designed to let you get as many buffs as you want through several different configurations of classes and specs and still have some slots left over to bring who you want.