Exorcism can no longer be used on players

We made a change in the 3.1.1 patch to prevent Exorcism from being used on players. We didn’t announce this change ahead of time because we were trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion. We still plan on getting the tooltip updated ASAP. Exorcism’s use in PvE has not changed at this time.

Going with a “not on players” solution is not ideal and we will be re-designing how the ability works in a future patch (the plan is sooner rather than later). We don’t like for PvE and PvP mechanics to work differently when we can avoid it. We also don’t like for a major damaging ability to be excluded from the PvP game. However, we thought this had become a balance issue serious enough to address at this time.

We shifted around paladin damage for 3.1 trying to increase sustained damage while reducing burst damage. Unfortunately, the Exorcism change did the opposite. Instead of stealing a GCD from a paladin, it actually gave them an extra one. A Retribution paladin could use Exorcism to cause damage while closing to melee and then be ready to go with their melee damage attacks. (Exorcism of course is not limited to Ret paladins either.) We changed the way paladins do damage for Lich King, so while it is unfortunate (and we accept full blame), it also isn’t too surprising that it is taking some effort to get their damage in the right place.

In the same patch where we remove the “not on players” limitation for Exorcism, we are going to change the way paladins do damage so that their normal combat moves have more depth to them instead of just using abilities every time they finish their cooldown. This should make causing damage as a paladin more interesting and also less bursty. While we have some ideas on how to accomplish that, if you have suggestions or your own ideas about how this could work, this would be a good time to share them. (As examples of abilities you don’t just use whenever their cooldown has finished, you might look at Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower or Arcane Blast.) We do request that you don’t fill the forums with posts of limited content or insight about how you don’t like to be nerfed. Nobody does.

It is always a judgment call about when a fix (a buff or a nerf) can’t wait. Some things we can’t change easily in hotfixes or small patches, and some things we consider too risky for technical reasons or for their potential effects on the game.

Q u o t e:
Come on... so instead of letting us know ahead of time, you wanted to get the tooltip changed first? What kind of excuse is that? We don't want excuses. All we ask for is some heads up so the community can discuss before the change goes through.

Q u o t e:
I am upset by this stealth fix. Pulling a tooltip rewrite as your excuse is obviously a coverup. Everyone here knows you guys don't fix tooltip's promptly and it wouldn't stop you from informing of a change publiclly till after the release.

I think my mentioning the tooltip confused some people, so I'll try again.

WoW is released in many languages around the world. We consider ourselves a global company, so when we make a text change, we get it localized to all our regions. Getting good translations, even on short tooltips, does take some amount of time for a turn-around, especially when you consider the constraints time changes place on cross-continental work.

Death Strike's tooltip is currently invalid, but because it generally still does what it's supposed to do (heal) and isn't a huge nerf to what it was before, it won't cause a lot of confusion. (I'm not talking specifically about you guys -- anyone who frequents the forums stays a lot more informed than the average player.) Changing Exorcism without changing the tooltip is going to cause confusion. Players may think it's a bug when the button just doesn't work. They may think the game is broken. That is possibly worse than an overpowered ability (possibly).

We weren't sure if we were going to get the tooltip done in time, so we weren't sure exactly when we were going to make the Exorcism change. We figured it wasn't worth it to announce "At some point in the future, we are going to change this spell." That ends up just being more confusing (Why aren't you making the change now? When are you going to make it? How exactly will it work?) We sometimes discuss long term plans, such as my reference to making paladins less cooldown-limited, but announcing "nerf soon(tm)" causes more harm than good. We ended up getting the change in at the last minute and unfortunately without the tooltip. I made a post as soon as I could.

We don't consider this a stealth nerf. A stealth nerf is generally making a change and not telling anyone and seeing if the players can figure it out. There is no way the players weren't going to figure this out. We made a post as soon as we could, within hours of the patch going out. Anyone who has been reading these forums for long knows that I'm not afraid to tell players things they don't want to hear (when we think the change is necessary). Fear of forum rage would never discourage us from giving you information we think you need.