Gurth: Far more broken in pvp/pve than DWTR

#1 - Jan. 1, 2012, 11:45 p.m.

DW: Chance to duplicate spell proc. Low proc, does maybe 20k on average burst. Takes over 3 months to get on 25 man, longer on 10. Legendary.

Gurth: Equal chance to proc to DW. Does ~9000 damage every tick on 4k resil. Ticks for 10 seconds. Epic. Can be got every week by supercasuals in pug LFRs.

Meleecylsm continues. Melee were top dps on most fights in FLs yet were somehow still whiny and were pandered to by blizzard.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#123 - Jan. 4, 2012, 7:11 p.m.

01/02/2012 05:07 PMPosted by Sliphe

Seal hits are melee attacks, Gurthalak procs off melee attacks. It isn't a bug.

It is a bug because Ret has 2x the chance for it to proc off every attack unlike any other melee. No other melee has that interaction with Gurth.

This is true, and has been fixed. Gurthalak should not proc off of Censure.

For other classes, the sword overall does the damage we intend, but it's variable, so a few spectacular numbers are occasionally posted. Those shouldn’t be accepted as typical. Likewise, random burst can sometimes cause high damage in PvP, but we don’t think those situations with Gurthalak are reliable or severe enough to be a balance problem.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#145 - Jan. 4, 2012, 9:31 p.m.

01/04/2012 11:14 AMPosted by Omegal
This is true, and has been fixed. Gurthalak should not proc off of Censure.

Does this also apply to Souldrinker's heal proc that was also showing an unusually higher proc rate for prot paladins then prot warriors, most likely do to Seal of Truth as well?

Yes. The bug was with Seal of Truth, so Souldrinker will proc less for paladins as well.

Censure was not proccing the weapon. Seal of truth was, and this caused ret to have double the chance to proc it on melee attacks. This is what they are fixing.

No amount of latching on to the accidental use of the word censure will change that. There is a reason it was worded as "double the proc chance," because melee attack + seal was the problem. Censure triggering the weapon wouldn't even add that many procs to be an issue.

The specific bug was that paladins running Seal of Truth had two chances with every swing to trigger the proc with Gurthalak or Souldrinker. They now have one chance.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#372 - Jan. 5, 2012, 10:50 p.m.

Note: I have doubled the post-limit cap on this thread.

There are several things that we want to follow-up on and clarify:

We noticed Retribution DPS was higher than we expected. We investigated and realized Gurthalak was the cause. We further realized (and several players independently discovered) that the weapon proc was activating twice as often for Retribution as intended.

Retribution was getting more than twice as many proc chances than we intended. This was caused by the application of Censure, not the dot itself ticking.

This was not an accidental bug fix of some sort. The proc was happening more often than we expected and desired, leading to damage higher than we expected and desired, so we took steps to fix it.

We changed the duration of Gurthalak’s proc some time ago. The 4.3.2 tooltip change simply acknowledges this fix. The weapon’s damage should not change in 4.3.2.

Gurthalak is still a fantastic weapon for Retribution paladins and any other two-handed DPS plate-wearers. The average DPS reduction is lower than the 10% figure some have quoted. The sword’s damage can be quite variable, and there are isolated cases where it may have briefly contributed 20% or more of someone’s damage, but those are statistical outliers.

Being nerfed is never fun. We get that. The increased proc chance was our mistake, as always, and we apologize for not catching it sooner. Retribution paladin damage for players without Gurthalak is where we intended it to be. We expect Retribution damage with this change to also end up where we intend it to be. If damage falls unacceptably low for some reason, we will certainly consider taking additional measures.
Again, thank you very much for all of the useful feedback. We pay close attention to these things.