Fear / Blind DR Unnecessary

Crowd control is a big part of PvP, but we often have to take steps to make sure it doesn't become too big a part. Where things get out of control sometimes is when teams can chain CCs with different diminishing returns together to keep an opponent locked down for an unreasonable amount of time. Rogues have a lot of different forms of crowd control. This change was to make stringing many of them together with a partner a little less powerful. More classes have access to fears than cyclones, so we thought this change would make chaining CC with a fear less powerful.

We realize there were several different ways we could have handled this and we don't expect that our solution is necessarily the one each of you would have picked had you been in our shoes.

We also realize there is a risk here of making rogue - druid combos too powerful. The druid class has changed enough that we don't think we'll see the problems we had with them in previous seasons, but it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

EDIT: I meant of course rogue+druid, not priest+druid (though that might be interesting too).

Q u o t e:
I think you meant druid/rogue combos right?

Yes. Sorry.

Q u o t e:
I don't understand what you want arenas to be? The synergy between priests and rogues has existed since vanilla wow, the comp was perfectly balanced through all of TBC because of the relatively low survivability of priests (which was a good thing) and the offsetting power of their CC/offensive abilities (again a good thing). If you raise the survivability of every class and offset the powers of their synergy together you make the game entirely too generic.

We want Arenas to be a part of the game where more than just a handful of classes, specs or comps are viable. Comp is always going to matter a lot more in Arena than in other aspects of the game and to some extent, we're okay with that. But we felt, and many (though not all) players agreed that we appeared headed for a return of RMP dominance in 3s and RPs in 2s were looking potentially worse than paladin+DK last season.

Q u o t e:
1.) You should have waited it out a bit. Priest/Rogue has been dropping steadily every update of sites that keep track of those things

It is always challenging to decide when something is a trend and not a blip. We thought that the paladin + DK dominance was slowly sorting itself out. We were wrong. The rogue + priest dominance might end up ebbing away over time, or it might not. We weren't prepared to take that chance. I know any one of you might feel that it's blindingly obvious that paladin + DK was horribly overpowered but that rogue + priest is not. These things are subjective. Our goal is to have more viable classes, comps and specs in PvP and ultimately to see more diversity in gladiators.