#44 - Aug. 14, 2009, 9:52 p.m.
Before we made the Balance druid change, we discussed a lot about the stun damage reduction talents. If we could do it all over again, many or all of them would be 15% as well. We aren't going to make that change for 3.2.2, but we might make it eventually.
Please keep two important considerations in mind. First, these talents were designed to make stuns less brutal, not to make it a mistake to stun someone. When someone laughs when they get stunned, then the survivability is too much.
Second, and more importantly, we have changed our philosophy a little on many of these countermeasures. If stuns are too important (we're largely talking about PvP here), then the solution is to make stuns less powerful or less frequent, not to give everyone essentially passive ways to withstand the damage.
I've called this the "arms race" before. We give a stun to a class. Then the other classes get a "stuns aren't as bad for you" ability. Then the original class gets the super stun that can penetrate those defensive abilities. Next you want to add the super defense that works even on super stun. And so it goes. (You can replace "stun" with silence, disarm, damage reduction or anything else). I'm not saying that countering abilities is a bad idea -- it's very much a part of PvP. But those counters work better when they are active decisions that require a little skill.
Put another way, if offense gets +10 and defense gets -5, why not just set offense to +5 and be done with it?
Again, I am talking design philosophy here. These are long-term changes not patch notes.