PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues

Whenever a PTR build goes up, we get a flurry of simple questions that we want to address, but that don't feel patch note worthy. We are going to be posting the answers to some of these in this thread.

We're going to leave the thread unlocked. Feel free to leave feedback here, but be aware that this is just a running list of explanations and don't expect a lot of back and forth discussion.

Likewise, you don't need to ask your question here. We'll try and cover anything we see in our forums, other forums, Twitter, etc.

The focus of this thread is on class mechanics and set bonuses. We aren't going to cover e.g. achievements, raid encounters, pet battles, account issues, or GC's favorite cover bands. Likewise, these are simple answers, not "What is your vision for my class?"

Druid
• We’re still iterating on this design for Wild Mushrooms. Currently, they each absorb 25% overheal, up to a max of 33% of the Druid’s max health (total of 75% / 100% with 3 Mushrooms out). This max size isn’t working in build 16446, but we hope to hotfix that soon. Upon blooming, their accumulated healing is split over the targets they heal. Several parts of this aren’t yet working in build 16446, leading them to be massively overpowered (which we also hope to hotfix soon). Feedback, especially in future builds, is appreciated.

Mage
• The Mage 2T15 bonus does favor taking Invocation, as people quickly pointed out, and we’re considering revising it.
• The Arcane Mage 4T15 bonus is a multiplier on all of the effects of Arcane Charges. Damage, mana cost, and number of additional targets hit.
• The Fire Mage 4T15 bonus is before Critical Mass. Net increase to your Pyroblast’s crit rate will be +6.5%.
• This build included a new version of Blazing Speed. We changed it from the previous build because we thought that it was too strong. This is definitely something we’re still iterating on for 5.2. The new version replaces Blink, but goes farther than Blink (and distance is variable instead of fixed), does not cost a GCD, and provides brief stun and root immunity, and is on a different spell school. Feedback from playing with it is very helpful. We realize that there is somewhat of a conflict here with the PvP Glove bonus, and will resolve that if needed.
• Another talent we’re iterating on is Invocation; it’s quite possible that the current version is overpowered, but we’d like people to try it out, and give us feedback about how you use it, especially as Arcane.

Hunter
• The Hunter 2T15 bonus is a chance to summon a Thunderhawk. That Thunderhawk will assist you, and will always cast 5x Lightning Bolts for 16k to 24k Nature damage. Its damage will scale with BM mastery, and will not scale with Survival mastery. However, the proc chances (which are Real PPM) vary by spec: 0.7/min for BM, 1/min for MM, 1.2/min for Surv.
• The Hunter 4T15 bonus is affected by Survival’s mastery, cannot trigger Wild Quiver, and procs at a rate of 3 RealPPM.

Monk
• Storm, Earth, and Fire is a new ability for Windwalkers. It’s intended to be fill the role of attacking 2 or 3 targets. It’s a rather complex ability, technically, and you’re seeing a very early version of it that still has some significant bugs (which we’re hoping to hotfix soon). To give you an idea of the design intent here, the spirits should mirror your damaging attacks against targets other than the one they’re on (so that it’s not a single target DPS gain). The spirits auto attack on their own. It should reduce your and your spirits damage while they’re out, but the exact tuning for that is still being iterated on. They’re currently -40% for 1 (total of 120% of normal against 2 targets), and -55% for 2 (total of 135% against 3 targets). Non-damaging attacks (such as Spear Hand Strike) should not be mirrored, but damaging attacks (such as Fists of Fury) should. Feedback very appreciated.

Rogue
• We are still iterating on Blade Flurry. We feel like the implementation of Blade Flurry on live forces rogues to go Combat on any cleave fights, while leaving Combat too far behind on any single target fights. It's fine if the rogue specs have niches, but the niches shouldn't be so rigid that you don't feel like you have any choice in spec. Blade Flurry will be how Combat does 2-5 target AoE damage. In the next PTR build, it deals 40% of normal damage to up to 4 additional targets, for a 20% energy regen reduction.
• The Rogue 2T15 bonus does apply to all finishers with a duration, including Slice and Dice, Kidney Shot, Recuperate, Envenom, and Rupture. In build 16446, the Kidney Shot increase was broken, but is fixed for the next build.

Priest
• Shadow Priests have raised concerns about both of their T15 bonuses being tied to Shadowy Apparitions. Know that we have improved Shadowy Apparitions. Previously, there was a cap of 4 out at once. In build 16446, that’s raised to 5 if you have 2T15. However in the next build, we just raised the cap to 10, which you should basically never hit. And more importantly, we significantly improved their AI. Please try them out. If they give you problems, please be as specific as possible about those situations.

Shaman
• The Elemental Shaman 2T15 bonus triggers from Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning hits (including Overloads). A Chain Lightning that hits 5 targets has 5 separate chances to trigger the Lightning Strike. If it Overloads, then 10 chances. There is no ICD, so it can proc multiple times from a single Chain Lightning. However, in the next build (or perhaps a hotfix), the damage from the Lightning Strike will be split between affected targets. There is a very high potential impact from this set bonus, so we’re keeping our eye on this, and may have to nerf it. But we’re trying it this way, since it is the most fun version.

Warlock
• Fel Armor has a significant typo in its tooltip; we added the 10% damage reduction and took away the armor. The health and healing received are still increases, not decreases.
• The new Glyph of Unstable Affliction reduces the cast time, but does not affect the GCD. Thus, it is not a DPS gain in a purely Patchwerk situation, but makes it harder to be interrupted, and allows you to start moving again slightly faster.
• The Affliction Warlock 4T15 bonus increases the damage of Malefic Grasp itself, and the extra ticks triggered by it. Same with Drain Soul.

Warrior
• The DPS Warrior 2T15 bonus has a RealPPM rate of 1.6 for Arms and 0.6 for Fury. It triggers all of the effects of enraging, including generating a Raging Blow charge, and 10 rage.

Death Knight
• The DPS Death Knight 2T15 bonus has a RealPPM rate of 1.0. The Zandalari spirit it summons has damage and attacks similar to the normal DK Ghoul, benefits from Unholy’s mastery, does not replace your current ghoul, and you can have multiple of them up at once.
EDIT: The Zandalari does physical damage and doesn't benefit from Unholy mastery.
• While the DPS Death Knight 4T15 bonus (increased Army duration) is on target, performance-wise, in most fights, it’s always challenging to have a set bonus improve a 10min cooldown. We’re considering some additional changes to this, such as also lowering the channel time and / or rune cost. We understand this is a challenging set bonus to design, so we're going to have to iterate on it a bit.

PvP Power
-- On live, PvP Power grants 0% healing to Balance, Feral, Windwalker, Retribution, Shadow, Enhancement and Elemental. In the next 5.2 build, this number will be 25% (or half of what a healing spec gets). We agree that PvP healing feels too weak for these hybrid classes. We also don't think Shadow really needs this buff, so we will likely offset it in other ways.
-- We are working on a blog (hopefully next week) to explain some of the other changes to PvP gear in 5.2. We hear your concerns and are trying to address them.

Paladin
- The Protection 2pc is additive. It's duration is 5sec per Holy Power. We realize there are concerns about this enabling block capping, and are keeping an eye on this, and will adjust if necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen, even later in the expansion.
- The Protection 4pc does incentivize Unbreakable Spirit. We’re considering possible revisions but want to try it like this for now. It's currently "You gain 1 Holy Power for each 20% of your health taken as damage while Divine Protection is active."
- The Retribution 2pc is a debuff on the target, and does not stack or roll. With Glyph of Mass Exorcism, the debuff will be applied to all targets hit by the Exorcism. It affects all of your Holy damage. Yes, that includes Seal of Truth, Censure ticks, and Hand of Light. Censure ticks are affected per tick -- whether it was up when Censure was applied doesn't matter. It functions similar to the increased magic damage taken raid debuff, except is Holy-only and self-only. Clipping some debuffs when you get back to back Art of War procs is expected, and balanced around.
- The Retribution 4pc does grant a self-buff that is consumed by the next TV, and does not stack. Wasting some procs is expected, and balanced around. Yes it is a single-target benefit that won't increase DPS on AE fights. We don't want to be in such a limited design space (we're talking about the 15th tier here after all) that every set bonus must be super generic and work in every situation. If anything, we'd rather the Ret bonus be even higher for single-target and paladins will just be stronger at single-target and weaker at AE once they have the set bonus than they are in other tiers. Set bonuses are one of the few chances we have to change what your character does (within reason) aside from all of your numbers just getting bigger.
- We changed the Repentance cast time to make it consistent with other cast time crowd control. A 1.5 sec cast time (reduced by haste) gives little opportunity for interruption.

Rogue
- During Shuriken Toss, your auto attacks are replaced with throwing Shurikens, which do 80% weapon damage, but are on the 'yellow combat table', meaning they don't glance, and don't suffer the dual wield miss penalty. The 80% number was chosen because that approximately offsets those other benefits.
- In our above description of Blade Flurry, 'normal' means the same as it previously did; that is to say, the damage that the ability would have done had it hit the secondary target.
- The 2pc does encourage using Rupture as Combat.
- Burst of Speed saying "movement-reducing" means that it no longer breaks roots, but does break snares.
- We are experimenting with allowing Smoke Bomb to reduce the damage done to allies by 20%. We agree that rogues are lacking in the group utility department and we'd like to see less use of Smoke Bomb strictly as an offensive ability in PvP.
- We are going to reduce the PvP set bonus from +50 energy to +30 energy.

Monk
- Storm, Earth, and Fire does not affect Xuen's damage. The spirits benefit from your Tiger Eye Brew. We agree that a spell with "storm, earth and fire" in the name sounds like a shaman spell, but Warcraft 3 established it as a Pandaren monk ability.
- The Mistweaver 2pc is multiplicative. The first target gets normal healing, the second gets 115% of normal, and the third gets 132.25% of normal.

Hunter
- The 2pc and 4pc both can crit.
- Direhorn Stampedes are everything you dream them to be.

Druid
- Please note that Restoration Mushrooms are currently incorrectly absorbing 33% of overheal each, instead of 25%.

Shaman
- The Elemental 4pc does trigger from Overloads.
- We're still iterating on the cooldown/potency/duration of Elemental Mastery. In the next PTR build, it will likely be a 90 sec cooldown.
- We are experimenting with removing the attenuation of Chain Lightning. This means Chain Lightning won't do less damage on subsequent targets.

Priest
- The Shadow 2pc does impact Shadow Word: Insanity, which we're working to resolve. It extends existing effects, preserving their same damage (not recalculating).
- We are considering making the glyphs of Desperation and Inner Focus passive for Discipline.
- We are considering giving Focused Will to Holy as well as Discipline.
- We did not buff PvP Power for healer damage as we did for DPS healing. However, we believe that Discipline specifically might need more damage. One potential solution is to nerf Atonement healing but raise damage so there is no net healing change.

Warlock
- With the 2pc, an Incinerate crit has an 8% chance to generate 4/10 of an ember. Yes, this will apply to Fire and Brimstone Incinerates.
- We are strongly considering allowing Dark Intent to provide Stamina so that warlocks don't feel like they must use their imp.

Warrior
- A Prot Warrior using 2 pieces of the DPS set will get 1.0 RPPM of the enrage.
- We agree with concerns that the new Arms rotation doesn't involve much rage management. We are considering a small rage cost for Overpower. Arms will likely need some additional retuning of damage because of the changes to Overpower, Taste for Blood and Slam -- we haven't completed tuning yet.
- We made a change to warriors to double the effect of haste for them. This is similar to the shaman Flurry benefit, but is passive and not tied to an ability. We want to make haste a better stat for warriors without it eclipsing stats like crit -- we aren't trying to force every warrior to reforge.

Promises
We're not making any (except maybe that Direhorn Stampede bit). We're providing you some notes of changes we are currently trying in order to provide you context for some of the other class changes. Many of these may not make it to the live game -- that is the nature of a PTR. As always, we appreciate feedback on any of this.

Monk
- Storm, Earth, and Fire: The spirits will not mirror non-damaging abilities like Leg Sweep or Charging Ox Wave. They will mirror damaging abilities like Chi Wave. In the cases of damaging abilities that also heal (Chi Wave, Zen Sphere, and Chi Burst), their healing and yours is reduced. But for other heals which aren’t mirrored (like Healing Sphere, Blackout Kick from the front, or consuming a Healthstone), it won’t reduce the healing. In the case of Zen Sphere, the spirits will cast it on themselves when you cast it on anyone. Note that many of these things aren’t working yet, but should in the next PTR build, or perhaps the one after that. Also, in the next PTR build, attempting to cast it on a target that already has one of your spirits on it will recall that spirit.

Shaman
- The Enhancement 4pc triggers each time Windfury procs, not for each attack it generates.

Paladin
- If you have the Protection 2pc, casting Word of Glory again when you already have the block buff will replace the existing buff, if the new one is longer duration. It won’t extend.
- The Protection 4pc will not count for Holy Avenger.

Priest
- The Healing 2pc causes each Prayer of Mending heal to heal for 10% more than the last; it’s multiplicative. 100%->110%->121%->133%->146%.

Druid
- The Restoration 4pc causes each Rejuvenation tick to heal for 6% more than the last; it’s multiplicative. 100%->106%->112%->119%->126%->134%->etc.

Warrior
- We will reword the 2pc to be more clear about how it works. “Your Shield Slam and Revenge have a 10% chance to activate Victory Rush or Impending Victory as if you had killed your target.”

Hunter
- Some have asked why the 2pc procs more often for Survival than Marksmanship. Marksmanship typically has more haste than Survival, such as from Steady Focus. (Remember, RealPPM proc rates scale with your haste).

Hunter
- Aimed Shot's cast time has been lowered from 2.9 to 2.5 sec.

Shaman
- The Elemental 4pc does count Lava Bursts cast while in Ascendance.

Paladin
- The Protection 4pc counts damage after all mitigation, and does count absorbed damage.
- The Retribution 4pc set bonus has changed. It now has a chance for Hammer of the Righteous or Crusader Strike to cause your next Divine Storm to cause extra damage to your target. The idea being that you might swap from TV to DS when you get the proc, so that the RNG is something you can actually do something with rather than it just being RNG for extra damage.
- Retribution now does 50% extra healing with Flash Heal. The Selfless Healer talent has been reduced to 20/40/60% bonus healing.
- Sacred Shield's absorb effect is now dispellable, but the periodic effect is not.
- Blinding Light has a 1.8 sec cast for Holy only. We think Holy's CC chains are too strong at the moment, but we don't think Ret or Prot need the nerf.

Death Knight
- I said above that the Zandalari from the 2pc benefited from Unholy mastery. That was a bald-faced lie. It deals physical damage, like the ghoul.
- There is a good chance we're going to redesign the 4pc DPS bonus.

Priest
- The Golden Apparition from the Healing 4pc heals the lowest % health friendly target within 40yd. Note that it has no visual yet, but will not work like Shadowy Apparitions. It is a simple missile, not a summoned unit.
- Further clarification on the Healing 2pc: the Glyph of Prayer of Mending will only boost the first heal. The glyph effects won’t be carried over due to the set bonus. It will be 160% -> 110% -> 121% -> 133% -> etc.
- We are going to redesign Shadow Word: Insanity.
- We are going to nerf Divine Aegis for Prayer of Healing, but also lower the cost of Power Word: Shield (for Disc only) and increase the healing and damage of Penance. In 25 raids, Disc is using Prayer of Healing almost exclusively and we don't think the Spirit Shell change will be sufficient to change that. We actually want Disc to get back to using PW:Shield a little more, along with Penance. Disc's throughput is overall too strong in PvE, not even counting the fact that absorbs are often more beneficial than heals.
- Angelic Bulwark and Spirit Shell can no longer be dispelled.
- The 4pc PvP bonus for healing priests has changed: Reduces the cooldown of Chakra by 25 sec and during Spirit Shell, Flash Heal costs 50% less mana.

Druid
- The Guardian 4pc is currently a 50% increase to rage generation while Enraged.
- We are going to slightly increase Resto druid healing across the board.
- We still like the DR change to Cyclone, but we are going to increase its range to 30 yards, and the PvP glove bonus for Balance and Resto will be to increase Cyclone duration by 2 sec.

Monk
- Spinning Fire Blossoms’ damage now scales from weapon damage rather than attack power. This will result in an intended nerf.

Keep in mind with those changes you haven't seen yet that they may change again before they reach the PTR.

Paladin
- New Ret 4pc reads in totality (i.e. there is no mention of Templar's Verdict): "Your Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous have a X% chance to cause your next Divine Storm to also strike its primary target with a Lightning Bolt for Y Nature damage." Y is about a Templar's Verdict.
- Obviously, I meant +50% Flash of Light not Flash Heal. Those spells are tooootaly different. :)

Shaman
- We're changing the Enhance 2pc from 3 charges on Unleashed Weapon to 1 charge on all Shocks.

Priest
- Our current though on Solace is that it will provide damage and healing for both Disc and Holy. So Holy could use it for some Atonement-like healing, as could Disc, but Disc won't double dip and shouldn't feel like it's mandatory. That could change (all of this could change) as we try it out and iterate more.

Purge, we'll take that under advisement and consider a new iteration.

Khendra, we have no objection to using Prayer of Healing when you need to heal a bunch of people. That's what it's for. But when you're using Prayer of Healing in preparation for future damage because DA and SS make your AE heal better at shielding than actual Power Word: Shield, then that even further reduces your options. (In 10s, Disc tends to use Atonement more, so they're doing something more than just PoH spam. In 25s, we see some Atonement use, but it's fit in when possible and healers in 25s are just always going to be able to specialize more.)

We might in the future add another AE heal for Disc (I think you can make a compelling argument that in this day and age, healers need a variety of interesting AE heals and maybe only a couple of ST heals, while healer design for years went in the opposite direction) but that's not the sort of thing we want to drop on you in the middle of an expansion. In the meantime, if Disc uses Penance and PW:Shield some more (and Flash Heal in PvP) and doesn't trounce all the other healers, we will be satisfied and hopefully so will priests.

Paladin
- Sword of Light now reads +30% Word of Glory and +100% Flash of Light. We wanted to reward Flash of Light more, because it's harder and riskier to use.
- For Divine Storm, several years ago, we got on this kick that thou shalt not use AE in single target fights. Ret paladins (Divine Storm) and warriors (Whirlwind) were particularly affected (and perhaps bummed out by it). The game has changed a lot since that time and now we have cleaving Arcane Barrages and core abilities like Howling Blast. We think the Ret toolkit is in a better place with separate single-target and AE finishers, but we get requests all the time to make Divine Storm more prominent. This set bonus is one way to do that. We also saw some complaints about yet another set bonus affecting TV, and thought maybe we could play with DS. We also saw complaints that TV randomly doing more damage would be frustrating. The new bonus allows you to take advantage of a proc to increase your damage. We could change the proc to Holy damage, but we would have to nerf it to account for the 2pc and Inquisition.
- For Blinding Light, we don't think it changes much that it's used at the end of a CC chain. It's still trickier to get off a cast time spell. You have to stop moving and risk interruption. Yes, you may use it defensively less often, but the net result will still be less being CC'd by a Holy paladin. No, the CC target can't stop the cast time, but we balance PvP around group play. During MoP development, we wanted to make sure paladins had more offensive pressure. Holy ended up getting plenty with higher nuke damage and access to Repentance. With the recent changes to shaman, Holy paladins are the most dominant healer in high-end PvP. We think this change along with the set piece bonus change will help bring that down a little.

Rogue
- The 2pc bonus does not affect Crimson Tempest, because Crimson Tempest’s duration does not scale with combo points.
- As previously mentioned, we chose 80% as the damage for Shuriken Toss, as that made it balanced with white attacks, to offset the dual wield miss penalty and glancing. However, that neglected to consider that it also triggers poisons more often due to not missing 19% of the time. So we’re lowering its damage slightly, to 75%. That’s intentionally under-compensating, so that the extra poison procs are still a gain, rather than just neutral. Additionally, to make absolutely clear that you do not want to run out, Shuriken Toss, and run back in, to get the Shuriken auto attacks, we’re making the auto attack override end when you get back in melee range.

Shaman
- For the Enhance 2pc, we're going to try Storm Strike gives you 2 charges on Maelstrom Weapon, for the reasons mentioned.

Death Knight
- We are changing the 4pc Frost / Unholy set bonus from Army of the Dead to Killing Machine and Sudden Doom proc more often. We don't have numbers yet and it's possible they won't work out. In addition to all the concerns mentioned, it was a really valid point that Army of the Dead is hard to use in Raid Finder, where most of our players experience raids. You rarely get countdowns before a pull and players in general are used to yelling at DKs who use Army because they had a bad experience at some point with the ghoul taunt.

Druid
- For PvP, we're considering just making the Cyclone duration buff the bonus for all druid specs. We'd likely just give Feral cheaper interrupts (their current glove bonus) baseline.

Priest
- The problem with Spirit Shell benefiting from mastery is that it changes Spirit Shell from "I want to bubble because we'll be hit by a lot of damage soon" to "I want to use Spirit Shell because my PoHs will be bigger." Once it is a throughput increase, then Spirit Shell loses some of its identity as a tool and it just becomes a cooldown. Now, we could just nerf Spirit Shell in some way ("you make a bubble weaker than a heal would have been") and then let mastery increase it back to base level again, but we would have to nerf it.
- On the topic of PW:Shield, back in say LK, the Disc play style was to tab through every target and PW:S them. It was effective, and boring. We wanted to move away from that and we were successful. However, PW:S is still supposed to be a core spell for Disc and we're seeing very little use of it on live. There should be room in the rotation for Spirit Shell, Prayer of Healing and Power Word: Shield and there isn't right now. This isn't a change in philosophy -- any time you see a spec using one spell or ability to the exclusion of others, you can assume we're probably not happy with that. As I said before, if you need to heal damage on a lot of players at once -- use Prayer of Healing. But if a lot of incoming damage is coming, you should probably PW:S several people and not use Prayer of Healing. On live, you'd still just use PoH because it's your best AE heal and your best AE absorb.

Shaman
- For Enhance 2pc, it's possible that a Storm Strike may "overstack" Maelstrom Weapon. However, you can also choose to Lightning Bolt (or whatever) before the Storm Strike, knowing that you could get up to 4 charges.

Paladin
- The Protection 2pc will indeed count Divine Purpose boosted Words of Glory.

Warrior
- We have heard the concerns of Overpower's inherent dodge avoidance in addition with dodge proc'ing Overpower might do strange things with Expertise. We are considering changes, but are loathe to nerf one of the cool quirks that Overpower has had forever.
- You might MS, OP, OP -> Slam some of the time, but Arms has so much uptime on Colossus Smash, that that rotation can't last for long. We do want Slam to beat OP + HS in the new model. We think it does (and remember we're trying Overpower at a small ragecost), but we'll double check.

Death Knight
- We agree with some of the concerns we've read on the 4pc I mentioned above. We're going to try something else. I won't mention it yet for fear of some readers getting whiplash if we change things yet again.

Just as a reminder, as I said originally, we're really focused here on simple questions and simple answers. This isn't a good place to attempt to have a dialogue on the strengths and weaknesses of various classes.

Druid
- Cyclone range reduced back to 25 yards. (It was 30 yards in an earlier PTR build.)
- Glyph of Cyclone - increases range by 5 yards (rather than 4 yards which was an odd number left over from when it was a % increase).
- Maim damage has been increased by 100%.
- Feral PvP 2pc - now also increases Bear Hug duration by 1 sec.
- Feral PvP glove - has changed. It now increases Maim damage by 100%.
- Balance / Restoration PvP glove - changes have been reverted and once again increases the range of Cyclone by 5 yards.
- Feral PvE 4 pc - now also affects Ravage and Swipe (in addition to Mangle, Shred and FB).
- To explain our Cyclone logic a bit more, we wanted to nerf the ability for PvP. The DR change is a big nerf, but we think it's important. We had previously experimented with increasing range or duration of Cyclone, but were concerned those offset the intended nerf too much.

Rogue
- PvP gloves - changed to increase healing by Recuperate by 1% of health.

Death Knight
- DPS 4pc - Causes Soul Reaper to deal additional Shadow damage to targets below 40% health (instead of 35%). Additionally, Killing Machine increases the crit chance of Soul Reaper and its additional damage to low health targets.

Warlock
- 4 pc - now increases Demonic Fury from all spells by 10% (up from 5% on certain spells).

Warrior
- We were concerned that our buffs to haste and mastery were enough to get Arms warriors to regem or be angry about passing on drops to say DKs. That's not the goal. We just wanted to make some of the stats better. We think the changes to Taste for Blood for Arms already make mastery slightly better for them, so we are reverting the change back to 55% for Strikes of Opportunity. (It was 75% in an earlier PTR build.) We also reduced the haste buff from +100% to +50%. It's still a big increase over live.
- Similarly, we were concerned that the changes to Taste for Blood devalued expertise too much for Arms. We changed the Overpower granted by dodge to 1 charge. It's still 2 for using Mortal Strike. However, we also reverted an earlier change that let Mortal Strike proc Overpower even if the Mortal Strike missed.

Editorial note
This may seem like a lot of design iteration, but it's not at all atypical for us. Trying out lots of things is how we narrow in on what we hope are the best changes. We are attempting to expose you to a bit more of the design changes that are normally behind the scenes, as only a minority of our internal 5.2 builds ever make it on the PTR realm. If the constant change gives you heartburn, that's understandable and I advise you to just wait then for the final 5.2 patch notes.

•Rapture now reduces the cost of Power Word: Shield by 25% 50% and provides mana equal to 150% 250% (was 200%) of the Priest's Spirit

At the moment (which could still change) Rapture provides a 25% cheaper Power Word: Shield and a 150% mana return on a Power Word: Shield. When we tried PW:S at 50%, it became too efficient to use nothing but PW:S. We aren't trying to kill PoH use completely, just shift to a balance where PW:S and SS are used for absorbs, and PoH is used for healing. Yes, Disc PoH will be weaker than Holy PoH, but that is offset by the incredible benefit brought by absorbs. Please don't interpret this as "Because absorbs are so good and because absorbs are my thing, it is a design failure if I ever cast an actual heal."

Death Knight
- Clarification on the 4pc: It means that if you have a Killing Machine proc up and hit Soul Reaper, that Soul Reaper will be a guaranteed crit, will consume the Killing Machine Proc, and the future Soul Reaper Shadow detonation will also be a guaranteed crit. Basically, Killing Machine will function for Soul Reaper, just like it already does for Frost Strike and Obliterate.

Paladin
- For Retribution, we were trying to emphasize what was once the most awesome spell in the Ret arsenal (Divine Storm) while reacting to some of the initial feedback that the first set bonus wasn't exciting. As often happens in cases like this, the players who liked the first set bonus and not the second have now offered their feedback. I want to stress that when this happens it's not a poll or a contest to see who can yell the loudest. We evaluate the feedback we get, weigh the strengths of the various arguments, and come to a decision. For 5.2 we're going to go back to the initial 4 pc set bonus of Templar's Verdict sometimes hitting for Holy damage. I also want to stress that anyone expecting said bonus to be a 20% DPS increase or something are going to be disappointed, so I hope that's not why you liked the bonus. :)

Incorporating Divine Storm into the single-target rotation, sometimes, is still a neat idea and the kind of thing we might do as a glyph or something in the future.

Um, the revert on the mastery changes, haste back down to 50% (though haste isn't very good for us anyway and is more a fury buff), and the rage cost on OP are all going backwards for arms DPS. I hope there's more changes coming? As it stands we would do far less in 5.2 compared to what we do on live now.

Tuning DPS numbers is one of the last things we do, because it's dependent on all of the other changes being stable. The problems we are trying to solve now are stuff like "How to make Arms use Slam more?" and "How to make rage matter?" Once we get those issues resolved, we can tune up all of the numbers at once (because we'd agree Arms is a little low in PvE).

Myself and many many many rets would be happy to just have these gimmics gone. Please?

We agree that it feels dumb and mandatory. We don't have a global solution to swapping set bonuses pre-pull, but we are trying to implement one. In the meantime, we have a list of specific set bonuses (including the two you mentioned) to discourage for pre-pull.

Drop Skull Bash to 10 energy (currently 15), since we lost of the Glove bonus.

Skull Bash costs nothing on the PTR build. Kick too. That may have missed the patch notes.

Could you please make the bonus work for Aimed Shot (or even Steady Shot) too?

We did so. I must have forgotten to mention it.

Every other melee interrupt is already free (or effectively free for enhance and ret). Only rogues, monks, and ferals have any cost at all. The "resources need to matter more" applies only to Arms warriors, and charging for utility isn't the way to do it, they need to spend rage rotationally.

I would have answered similarly. (And yes, Spear Hand Strike is also free.)

In PvE particularly, we think it's better when players use their utility to help the group at large rather than balking because it's a personal DPS loss to do so. In PvP, you can make more of an argument that choosing to spend resources on an interrupt or on an attack is an interesting trade-off, but the fact is that many interrupts were already free (or so cheap as to be effectively free). There are exceptions to utility being free. Hamstring for example is not, but it also has no cooldown so were it also free it might as well be passive (or macro'd) because you wouldn't be making a decision about when to use it.

While we're on the subject of PoH, though:
Is there any way we might be able to get it changed into a smart heal rather than being "group-centric"?

I'll be really frank here. I don't think the group portion of the heal is long for this world. I personally dig it and I feel smart when I see 5 people in a group all at once who need healing. It makes the spell different from other AEs.

On the other hand, it's pretty gamey. (I can only heal these five arbitrary people, why?) Priests feel like they have to ask raid leaders to set up groups with their weird AE spell in mind, which is really unlikely to happen in Raid Finder. It doesn't work at all on encounters like the shrines in Sha of Fear.

We're not going to change it for 5.2. We're probably not going to change it for 5.3. But I sense the writing on the wall here that it won't last much longer. I can imagine a future iteration where Prayer of Healing is the AE equivalent of Gheal and Circle of Healing is the AE equivalent of Flash Heal. (Yes, I know Disc doesn't have CoH - I'm in a really theoretical space here.)

Sorry. I broke my own rule about simple questions and answers. Sometimes I can't help it.

That isn't it at all. Many of those upset about the push back to PW: Shield are those who played Disc Priests during Wrath. We don't want to go back there. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to go back to doing nothing but spamming one spell all day long. That's what it was like for Disc Priests, too. It was a horrible model, but I guarantee you that once we get enough Spirit, we will go right back to doing that because right now it is looking like our most reliable source of throughput.

We agree. Spamming nothing but PW:S isn't fun. We also think spamming nothing but PoH isn't fun. We're trying to carve a niche for both spells, where shields (PW:S, SS and DA (especially with Inner Focus)) are used to shield and PoH is better for healing. Disc won't provide the best healing out there, but that seems fair given that they will still provide the best shielding out there. We'll see fewer Disc priests, but still plenty, and more Holy priests and Resto druids. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable goal....

Priest
- Halo - will not longer unstealth enemy targets. That wasn't the use we had in mind when we made it a huge AE.
- Binding Heal - now also heals less for Shadow, the same way Flash does.

Druid
- Thick Hide - now also reduces crits from spells.
- Feral PvP gloves - increases the duration of Bear Hug by 1 sec. (I originally typed Bear Huge, which would also be an awesome ability.)
- Feral PvP 2pc - Thick Hide now reduces the chance to be crit by 20%. This is in addition to the Savage Roar effect.
- Feral PvP 4 pc - Now also causes successful interrupts with Skull Bash to reset the cooldown of Enrage.
- Feral PvE 2pc - Redesigned. Now gives your finishing moves a 15% chance per cp to add a cp to your target.

Warrior
- Deadly Calm - has been removed. We added it in a weak moment - a perfect example of button bloat for limited gain. Our intentions, as always, were noble.
- Glyph of Incite - no longer procs from Deadly Calm. Now procs from Demoralizing Shout.
- Glyph of Overpower - now using Overpower during Die by the Sword increases the duration by 1 sec per use.

Note: It's a three-day weekend in the USA. Don't expect updates for a few.

Yes I do realize it's 40% execute time, but Unholy mastery does not make it pull that much further ahead of frost in execute, and the KM procs being able to be used on soul reaper would make frost soul reaper much better.

We changed it to 45% execute range. Remember that Unholy does get a big mastery benefit, as you point out. Also remember that whenever Frost uses a KM to Soul Reaper, then they are not using KM on another attack, so there is some loss there. We think Unholy and Frost benefits are pretty close now, but explain your reasoning if anyone disagrees.

We changed some PvP bonus to benefit abilities for Feral (cats) so we also changed them to offer a Guardian (bear) benefit.

To be complete:

- Feral / Guardian PvP Glove: Increases the damage of Maim and increases the duration of Bear Huge.
- Feral / Guardian PvP 2pc: Increases the duration of Savage Roar and increases the critical strike reduction from Thick Hide.

Druid
- Here is our logic on cat movement in PvP. Stacking Feline Swiftness, the PvP set bonus, boot enchants and things like Stampeding Roar and Dash all stacked to be ridiculously fast. We could go back to having all of these things not stacking, but we thought that felt arbitrary and confusing. We didn't want to nerf the talent, so we thought the PvP set bonus made the most sense to hit. Long term, we could consider the movement bonuses stacking additively instead of multiplicatively, but that would do some odd things to snares without further adjustments. We also feel like giving cats Infected Wounds helped a lot with their old problem of not being able to stay on targets.

Keep in mind that some of these changes are attempts to be proactive. We don't necessarily believe that Feral and perhaps Shadow are overpowered in PvP today. However if we're successful in getting mages and warriors down to a more balanced spot, we're concerned Feral and Shadow may be the next two specs that feel broken. We are also mindful that if you knock off the top thing on any list that the next item on that list becomes the new top thing.

Warrior
- For Arms, we are going to try Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death instead of autoattacks. This will make haste slightly worse (which we can fix) but we hope will help make the rotation slightly more compelling, since autoattack procs can feel really random. With Overpower you can anticipate it a little more.
- Likewise, Overpower will cost no rage in Execute range. We agree that saving rage for Overpower and spending it all on Execute don't play well together.
- We haven't made a tuning pass on Arms (or any spec) yet. Don't fret about DPS numbers at this stage.

Mage
- For Arcane, we are going to try going down to 4 stacks (down from 6) that increase damage by 50% (up from 25%) and mana cost by 150% (up from 75%). Our goal for Arcane, which hasn't changed in some time, is for the spec to focus on mana management with the ability to go up to high DPS for a high mana cost when needed. We don't want Arcane to sit at max stacks all the time. As a player who is focused on maximizing DPS, you're going to want to maximize stacks, but it's not always going to be easy to do - that's the challenge of mastering the spec. The reason we lowered the stack size is we felt that having to build up to 6 made dropping stacks feel too punitive.
- Also for Arcane, Scorch deals 40% less damage for Arcane only, but its damage and mana are now increased by Arcane Charges. We agreed that previous iterations were too punitive for Fire and Frost. For Arcane, using Scorch as part of the base rotation won't be as powerful as it is today on live (which we feel violates the stack management I mentioned above), but it will increase with stacks.
- We are still iterating on Blazing Speed.

Monk
- We have made several Mistweaver changes to make Fistweaving more viable. As with Discipline, our goal isn't to make a hybrid healer / damage-dealer (at the same time), but to have a different healing style that can contribute some additional DPS. There are several changes here, but overall we increased damage and decreased Eminence healing to compensate for the damage increase. Overall, both damage and healing should go up relative to live. By linking the damage boost of Tiger Palm and Blackout Kick to Jab, we're asking for some short-term commitment to Fistweaving and not just mixing in parts of Fistweaving with more traditional Mistweaving.

Hunter
- We still plan on rebuilding Power Shot. We have not done so yet.
- We're not sure 5.2 is the right time to convert any of the active buttons to passive procs. While we would like to slim down the number of buttons hunters need to manage overall, changes like this are controversial and I'm sure it would feel like a nerf (even a nerf to fun) to many hunters.

Paladin
- For Protection, we do have plans to try and lower the value of haste relative to dodge and parry. We don't want to make haste terrible for paladins, but we agree that it's odd for it to be better than more traditional tank stats. It might require a nerf to Shield of the Righteous to do this, but our goal is not to nerf survivability overall. We just wanted to provide you some context if you see odd changes to tanking abilities.

I have one concern about the Eminence change. With the nerf to Eminence, it results in a nerf to our 90 talents (Xuen especially). Were the 90 talents considered with the Eminence change?

Xuen was not nerfed and is still 50%.

I too would like to hear anything about Blood DKs at this point. Even if it's just a "we think Blood DK set bonuses are in a fine spot" :).

We think the 4 pc (more runic power) is useful. Yes you get it during a cooldown when you may not need it at that instance, but you will still benefit from eventually converting the runic power to Death Strikes.

However, player perception does play into these decisions. We have occasionally designed set bonuses that we still believe were very good that players never really figured out in the way that we hoped. Alternatively, we have seen cases where bad math or someone's opinion just gets accepted as fact and takes on a life of it's own. It also occurs sometimes that we just miss something that players catch that cause our numbers to be wrong. With all of that in mind, we may yet change the Blood 4pc but haven't come to a conclusion yet.

Minor point: would a 10-rage discount on the next Execute make more sense for Overpower?

That is the actual implementation of the change I was hinting at. (Technically, it's a duration on all Overpowers not a single charge.) We are also going to try a slightly cheaper Slam. We agree that will help make it clear whether you should prioritize Slam or Overpower. We further agree that the problem wasn't really Arms having too much rage. The problem was Arms not having an engaging resource model since nearly every attack was free. A 20 Slam and 10 Overpower might work fine. Let us know.

Appreciate the update Ghostcrawler, but still waiting on news of a buff for Destro single target damage.

As I said above, it makes more sense for us to implement mechanics changes before we tune all the numbers. Otherwise, you throw out all the tuning work every time you make another mechanics change. I will post when we've finished our 5.2 tuning pass so you guys have a chance to offer feedback.

We think Destro may be a little behind, but it's not much. Affliction PvE damage is too high, which causes many warlocks to go Affliction on every fight rather than considering options. That creates a big sampling bias effect on sites like World of Logs and Raidbots. The lower performing DPS specs appear even lower than they actually are because the only players generating those logs are uninformed (which also tends to mean undergeared) or just messing around. To get a more accurate test, you need to see a player try every spec under similar circumstances (gear, skill, etc.), and those data are much more rare.

Is there a reasoning behind this? It honestly feels like you're taking the opinions of a mysterious part of the playerbase (like the same portion who you quoted as "not liking DivPurP because it was too RNG") and changing the entire spec paradigm around it. Why push for MORE class homogenization when the game already has WAY too much?

The game just isn't currently designed to support it. It creates potential problems such as:

- A Prot paladin competing with a Frost DK or Ret paladin over gear, meaning there isn't enough DPS plate to go around.
- A Prot paladin considering a tier set with dodge and parry on it to be "garbage" because it doesn't stack all haste.
- A Prot paladin looking at a Ret 2pc set bonus that she normally wouldn't touch because now the stats aren't that bad either.

In a world where tanking plate didn't exist or every loot system used the personal LFR one or 100% efficient reforging then it might work.

We understand that having a lot of haste feels fun and visceral and is more dependable than dodge and parry. We'll try to come up with a solution that keeps that in mind.

So let me get this straigt, TFB will reduce the cost of Execute as well? Or does using OP reduce the cost of Execute by 10 for X seconds? Sounds like the second one which is not bad tbh. Means Execute replaces Slam in the rotation (Unless with excess rage in Zerker Stance with CS up) which it should,

Sudden Death - Your Overpower hits have a 25% chance of resetting the cooldown on your Colossus Smash. Your Execute hits have a 100% chance of making any Overpower free for 10 sec.

We use PTR as a time of iteration to try out a lot of changes and see which ones work out or not. We think the time has come to revert some of the PvP nerfs that we made for noble reasons, but which aren't working out. Specifically, we wanted to remove blanket silences and shift the game back more towards casting and interrupts. We think the continual arms race between instant spells, silences and silence immunity isn't good for the long term health of PvP. It is a shift we still plan to make, but we don't think patch 5.2 is the right time to make it. There are a great deal of instant spells and we don't think it is fair or reasonable to remove them all and force so many players (many of whom might not even participate in PvP) to re-learn their class mid-expansion.

Warlock
- We are reverting the removal of Spell Lock.

Mage
- We are reverting the removal of Improved Counterspell.

Druid
- We are reverting Cyclone having shared diminishing returns with other forms of crowd control. While we are keeping the cooldown of Cyclone cast by Feral druids in order to make Predatory Swiftness CC less dominant, we are lowering the cooldown to 20 sec from 30 sec.

Monk
- Ring of Peace has been adjusted. It now forms a sanctuary around the friendly target, causing enemies within 8 yards to be disarmed and causes enemies who cast a harmful spell to be silenced for 3 sec. Moving out of the ring does not remove the silence, but it won't trigger again. The duration of Ring of Peace is 8 sec.

I also want to reiterate that we see very little PvP participation during the PTR. This isn't really too surprising since it takes a sizable time commitment and a critical mass of skilled players to really generate good Arena or BG testing. (By contrast, guilds trying out the new raid encounters gives us a lot of PvE testing.) We're not blaming anyone - PvP is just hard to measure until it gets into the "real world," so we are even more dependent on player feedback. Unfortunately, PvP feedback is even more subjective than PvE feedback for a number of reasons, including the lack of meaningful meters, the challenge of keeping in mind the evolving tapestry of changes to all classes, and of course the very human tendency that makes it easy for some players to be quick to take credit for their victories and quick to blame their class for their defeats. :)

This just means PvP balance is always going to take a lot of iteration. We appreciate your patience and all of the good feedback that we get.

We can't test PVP on the PTR because you disabled queueing for battlegrounds and didn't give premades PVP gear.

There are currently some bugs preventing BG queuing from working on the PTR, but I've been through enough of these PTRs to predict that even once those bugs are fixed, we'll see very few players participating. We have occasionally tried "BGs with the blues" and similar tactics, and maybe there are some other ways to encourage or even reward participation that we could consider.

If you do participate and share your feedback with us, then you are our hero. On the other hand, we still do get a lot of good feedback based on patch notes / upcoming changes posts. That is part of the patch development process as well.

We still plan on making it easy to try out the PvP and PvE gear on PTR once those items are built and relatively bug free.

GC gives in again to the demands of bad players. Relearn their class... lol!!!! How is waiting until you see a cast then pressing a button relearning your class. WEAK EXCUSE!

If you played a Holy paladin and found your Holy Shock had a longer cooldown, and found Word of Glory had been replaced with (making this up) "Phrase of Glory" with a 2.5 sec cast time, and found that Devotion Aura no longer prevented player silences, you might find yourself a little disoriented. Those are the kinds of changes we think would be necessary to allow interrupts to sufficiently serve as a counter to healing at this point in time.

While it might seem impossible to the forum-posting contingent of our player base, we lose more players to frustration at constant class design changes than we do to perceived balance problems. We have to keep that in mind when considering any changes, even those that are ultimately better for the game in the long run.

Paladin
- We knew haste would be attractive to Protection when we gave them Sanctity of Battle, which only Retribution had previously. That's why we gave them Sanctity of Battle. Even if you have a tanking set with no haste, there are haste buffs in the game. We wanted all the tanks to benefit somewhat from what were traditionally DPS stats, since part of the active mitigation design was to make tanks care more about hitting things with sword (and claws). It only gets to be a problem, as I said previously, if dodge and parry (which are going to be on some gear) are perceived as pointless. (They aren't pointless, but that's really beside the point at this stage.) We aren't going to reitemize every plate piece in the game to remove dodge and parry. We also don't want to nerf haste for paladins, because it is fun, and for the most part working as intended. We don't have a solution yet that we're willing to share, but that's the intent. I state all this, because I feel like this already long thread has become a bit too dominated by this one topic in the past few pages.

I have to agree with an earlier post about how this game should be about bringing out a good product and making it a good game. It seems more and more the justification for changes (or not making changes in this case) is the number of subs that will be lost.

This is pretty off-topic, but I'll address it anyway. Making good games is about keeping players engaged, about their having fun, their being happy.

Any game designer worth their salt wants players to love their game. That's why you choose this business. Yes, we all need to put bread on the table at the end of the day, but there are hundreds of careers that can deliver on that. We chose this one because we like games.

Now WoW is blessed with a whole lot of players. Unsurprisingly, those players like different things. The forum community is very self-selecting and generally a lot more hardcore than it realizes. You guys are really important to us. You care about the game deeply. You help us improve it just because you want it to be better. There's even a business angle - you evangelize the game to others. Everyone wins.

But making a change to the game - any kind of change, even a great change - carries with it a certain amount of risk. I can almost guarantee that someone out there will hate any change we make. If enough players dislike a change, then there is a chunk of the community that is unhappy. Sometimes we make tough decisions that are unpopular at the time, usually because we think the long term benefits are worth it and players may just not fully appreciate those in the short term. But overall, we want players to be happy. It's not a vote or a poll or anything and we're not about to turn over steering the ship to the community. But keeping players happy matters.

Consider the opposite: what kind of responses do you think we'd be seeing if I posted things like "We don't care if you like it or not, we're making this change," or "We don't care how many players we alienate - this is the way it's going to be." That would be a terrible way to keep players happy. So all I'm asking is don't beat us up for caring about the impact that our decisions make on the whole player base, not just the minority who post.

Are you on some sort of cheap drug when you make choices. Tanks care about these things dodge parry block armor HP. Thats all that should matter. It has always been this way in every game ever made. It is the D & D way and the correct way. When you take this focus away you lose your ability to be a lead developer and deserve to be removed from the team.

The answer to your first question is yes. My answer to the rest is: have you seen all of the paladins begging us not to change the way haste works for them because it is both useful and fun? Are they all wrong too? Nah, never mind, don't answer that.

Either you need find a way to better weed out the bad feedback or your team needs better personal understanding of PvP. Patch 5.0 warriors were IMO worse than S5 DK's.

But do you see all of the warriors claiming that they are just fine now and have been over-nerfed for 5.2? Sure, it's easy just to dismiss them as wrong, but how do we know? How should we know during MoP development when warriors were coming off a bad Cataclysm season and begging for buffs? With 20/20 hindsight, I'll totally agree that we overdid it. How to ensure that we don't get it wrong next time? We'll keep listening to players and discussing their feedback. For PvP particularly, that's really the only way I know of to get things feeling right.

If anyone out there can provide the definitive list of players who are nearly always right, please let me know. :)

Some of us feel that making PvP better should be an extremely high priority even at the expense of some players feeling a bit confused when logging in after a patch.

Totally reasonable. Some players feel like more pet battle content is an extremely high priority. It's even possible there are more of them than there are PvP players. (I have no idea off the top of my head.) I would hope by the sheer number of PvP-oriented changes we've pushed and the number of conversations we've had that it's a priority, but I get that these things are subjective.

So you have no problems making warriors or shaman relearn their class mechanics mid-expansion?

No, we have a huge problem with it. It sucks and it's ultimately our fault. On the other hand, it doesn't seem fair to make other players live with overpowered specs because of our mistake. (This applies to PvE too by the way, where it's not okay for someone to be overpowered even if you aren't trying to kill each other.)

And this reasoning right here is why my account is canceled as of the 28th.

I'm sorry that you cancelled your account. I am even sorrier that you cancelled for a change we didn't make and stated we didn't want to make (removing haste gameplay from paladins). There may be a lesson in there about making decisions in the heat of the moment.

In 5.2, no healer will be able to live through the opener of a Mage/Rogue/X comp, blanket silences, instant CC and stuns will just make those 2 classes very strong together for anyother combination of classes to combat.

That's a healer point of view, and I get that, but from the warlock or mage point of view, it was going to be impossible to ever kill anyone because the healer can't be interrupted with all of those instant heals and a silence-prevention cooldown on top of that. I'm just pointing out there are two sides to the argument, and it's not fair to just claim that you're right and they're wrong.

The reality is that moving more towards the 'interrupt heals, don't prevent them' paradigm would be wonderful. But a huge amount of changes to a great many classes need to be made to make that possible. 5.2 just isn't the time for that. I don't even think it's realistic this expansion, but I'll be they'll try.

Yeah, exactly, and we could even make the time, but we'd be scared of the huge number of changes it would take to get there. We're also concerned that some players might not even like the PvP style that we ended up with. We get requests constantly for dispel protection, impossible to counter abilities, stuff that works while CC'd and immunities to various mechanics. Those are all in the opposite direction of where we think PvP needs to go, so we have to factor in player response to all of that and leave even more design time and space for iteration.

Posts like this really bother me.
Scared to even read this thread.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't post much on forums anymore. Some players aren't here for a discussion. They just like to lob grenades. (The other reasons are that I don't have the bandwidth to address really long posts, even if they are well-reasoned, and that I can't communicate with anyone outside of the US here.)

If you somehow feel the energy cost is fair (impossibru :p), what if we could Maim any target? Rather than only our combo target? Kinda of like having Redirect built into Maim? Or convert Maim into a bleed, so it ignores armor and scales with Mastery? Or make it so does extra damage if the target is immune to stuns?

The redirect is part of what we're trying to get away from with the PS + Cyclone. It just feels like you can't counter or even predict it. We like trying to boost Maim as well because it gives druids another type of CC, but one that does take some build up and has a real cost. That's the same kind of gameplay I'm trying to advocate above: full of counters.

The problem with Feral movement speed is that they could get up to 215% speed or something like that. Yet there is no good way in the game to explain what stacks with what, so you'd have to try out mixing and matching boot enchants with Dash or whatever and figure out what worked. It was recreating the whole crazy CC DR matrix problem, which is hardly a design worthy of emulation.

I saw Bashiok post about Balance and I thought about posting something in there, but no, I'm going to continue harrasking here: Are you folks playing balance on the dev team? Do you have enough people playing on PTR? Do I need to find some time to help folks like Owlcapwn test so our cries can still be ignored?

If I could ask one thing of you guys as a community, try and tone back the "ignored and neglected" talk. None of the classes are specs are neglected by the design team. I just don't have the bandwidth (as I said above) to address each concern, even the very eloquent ones, even the ones that may be totally reasonable and accurate. When we want to comment on something, we'll comment. There isn't really a reasonable way to force us to comment on something, so just try and be at peace.

Folks, it's another long weekend, so don't expect updates before Tuesday.

On topic: Blood DK 4 piece design being off is not player perception at this point. Some of my and others posts previous on the matter show math that this bonus on raw numbers is not as good as the previous bonus.

It isn't a goal that every set bonus is exactly the same DPS / healing / survivability every time. We have a goal that we shoot for. Sometimes we overshoot. That doesn't mean every set bonus for the rest of the expansion has to also be over-inflated. Fortunately, the generous primary stats on every item solve the problem where players cling to earlier set bonuses and don't feel like they can upgrade again.

We do reconsider set bonuses that are annoying, too situational or awkward to use, or dramatically underpowered or overpowered. We haven't decided yet if Blood 4pc falls into that category.

- Glorious Tyranny weapon enchant was modified to 400 PvP Power, 200 Resilience, and 50% disarm Duration.

(No melee classes would have used it without the disarm duration.)

We are making some additional changes. The ones below are mostly for PvP purposes and were based on a lot of PTR feedback, much of it from high-end PvP players. Until 5.2 goes live, these are not set in stone.

Rogue
- Blind - cooldown increased to 2 min (from 90 sec).
- Preparation - no longer resets the cooldown of Cloak of Shadows.
- Cloak of Shadows - cooldown reduced to 60 sec (from 2 min).

Paladin
- We agree that Retribution does not offer enough benefits to an Arena or Battleground team beyond just taking a Holy paladin. We are going to try a change where Hand of Sacrifice also dispels all harmful magic effects on the target for Ret only.

Priest
- Phantasm - no longer makes you untargetable. Movement protection increased to 5 sec (from 3 sec).
- Dispersion - now belongs to the Shadow school, meaning it can get locked out.
- We are expanding the Shadow healing nerf to most of the priest healing toolkit. This means Holy and Discipline will have a passive that increases all of their healing by 25% as do most other healing classes. Holy and Discipline should see no change as a result, but Shadow's heals will be weaker. Remember that this will be partially offset relative to 5.1 because Shadow does get some healing benefit from PvP Power. (This note replaces earlier notes about Flash Heal and Binding Heal being nerfed for Shadow).

Warlock
- Blood Fear is now Blood Horror and is a 4 sec horror effect instead of a fear. It otherwise works as it does on the PTR.

Shaman
- Totemic Restoration - now behaves as though any replaced or destroyed totem was active for a minimum of 1 sec, even if the totem is dropped and grabbed for a shorter time period.
- Stone Bulwark Totem - the totem now has 10% of the Shaman's health, much like Mana Tide and Healing Tide.
- Nature's Guardian - now preserves the Shaman's health percentage when it expires.

Warrior
- Second Wind - we are reverting the nerf to the heal not working while stunned. We think we have nerfed Arms enough for PvP reasons in 5.2.

Monk
- Paralysis - duration is now 4 sec from the front / 6 sec from the back (down from 4 / 8).

Mage
- Glyph of Deep Freeze - now also lowers the stun duration of Deep Freeze by 1 sec in addition to taking Deep Freeze off the GCD.
- Ring of Frost - Presence of Mind will make RoF instant cast, but won't make it arm instantly.
- PvP 2pc bonus - the reduction in cooldown on Counterspell is now only applied if you successfully use Counterspell to interrupt (not silence) a target.

EDIT: We lowered Cloak of Shadows to 60, not 90 sec.
EDIT: Clarified Paralysis.

Nerfing Talents to the ground just to make other talents look more attractive never worked.

There are two issues in situations like this. First, there is the question of whether the three talent options are relatively attractive. Second, there is the question of whether any of them are overpowered. You can't just say the second issue is always part of the first issue, and letting players choose any of three overpowered talents isn't going to be great for player balance.

We do think Shadow needs PvP nerfs, but not PvE nerfs, and we also want to be careful not to nerf any of the utility that Shadow brings in PvE. (For example nerfing Mass Dispel for Shadow, possibly through the glyph is a common suggestion, but we like that Shadow's Mass Dispel can be really beneficial in PvE). Phantasm is particularly annoying to deal with because being untargetable is so powerful. The intent of the talent was to make Fade more powerful as an escape tool, but we just overdid it with the untargeting part.

Glyph of Deep Freeze - now also lowers the stun duration of Deep Freeze by 1 sec in addition to taking Deep Freeze off the GCD.

Base Deep Freeze has a 1 sec longer duration. So a mage with the Glyph of Deep Freeze will see no change, but a mage without the glyph will have a slightly better Deep Freeze.

you seem like a smart guy, explain how this helps our current problem?

We were trying to solve a very specific problem here, where a paladin wants to join an Arena team, and the team says "Can't you just go Holy, because you won't lose anything?" or the paladin looking for an RBG team who hears "We need a rogue and a DK, but don't have room for a Ret paladin." We were specifically looking for a modest buff to group utility that was Ret specific.

On survivability specifically, I feel like we're hearing that DKs are squishy and paladins are squishy and shaman are squishy, which makes me think that once Defensive Stance for warriors isn't overpowered that all melee might feel about the same.

And now you want to take that away too, you're turning the talent into a Hand of Freedom that has a longer cooldown and a shorter duration. Despite the buffs to disc I feel this is a big and unnecessary blow to a spec that's already struggling.

While we want to see more healing priests in PvP, we don't think the right way to do that is through a really annoying defensive mechanic like this.

Single target damage is bad for shadow priests, and the only changes we're getting so far are:

We haven't made many PvE damage adjustments at all. We will. It's possible Shadow lost too much damage while moving in PvE. Nearly all of these Shadow changes were to tone them down in PvP.

The problem is the feline swiftness talent. It always has been. But now you're forcing feral PvP into a catch 22 situation. We're either forced to take feline swiftness just to stop the out of range errors when trying to use abilities, and lose our gap closer.. or we get inundated with out of range errors when trying to do anything. You know the feral hit box is still out of whack... and the feral speed bonus on the PvP set was to compensate for this.

We fixed the Feral hit box some time ago. Different races and models once had different combat reaches. It has all been normalized at least since Cataclysm.

However, to address your main concern, a different option would be to prevent Feline Swiftness and the PvP set bonus from stacking. Feline Swiftness would just remain a dead talent at least among knowledgeable PvP players.

As an editorial note, we're just going to delete posts that are nothing but whining and if that doesn't send a strong enough message, the moderators will ban you. Try to keep this thread informative. You have plenty of places on the internet where you don't have to be.

Was the damage buff it provided too strong? In almost the exact same gear I'm using, I was doing ~67k sustained single target dps. Seemed fine, provided that I had 0 mobility while doing that.
Was the rotation being used to maximize it's effect not what you envisioned? I like how it changed our rotation without actually changing it. We were just hitting DP more frequently.

If you are talking about the version of Insanity where you just use Devouring Plague at one orb all the time, we thought that undermined the entire rotation. It didn't just change it, it made it so you didn't need to build up orbs any longer.

Not really sure what this mean or how this really affect gameplay nor why this change now tbh... mind to explain?

PoM makes the cast instant instead of 2 sec (reduced by haste). This means the ring will appear immediately if PoM'd, but it won't freeze immediately. After 2 sec (again reduced by haste) the freeze happens.

No PoM: 2 sec cast, 2 sec arming time
5.1 PoM: 0 sec cast, 0 sec arming time
5.2 PoM: 0 sec cast, 2 sec arming time

I can see that 99% of this entire thread is related to PvP, but any chance of some feedback from GC on how he can think a 40-50% nerf to Disc AoE heals is a fair thing, given that at the absolute most we top the meters by 20%. Sure we needed a nerf, but an execution?

It seems like a lot more than 20% to us. In any case, you still have DA on PoH, just not guaranteed any more. You can force DA with Inner Focus. You can toss out PW:Shields on some folks.* You can also still use Spirit Shell with PoH. Using PoH without any of those absorbs will be weaker, but that will be offset by the times when you do have the absorbs. All of that ignores the argument that an absorb is probably stronger than a direct heal so maybe the ratio shouldn't even be 1:1.

* - This seems to be the most misunderstood portion of the philosophy. We want Disc to use PW:S. It's one of their signature spells. We don't want Disc to blanket the entire raid and use nothing but PW:S. But we are so far from that now -- we see almost no PW:S, except for Rapture cheesiness with Mana Tide or to proc Body and Soul. You won't be able to put PW:S on 10 or 25 people before the dragon breathes, but you shouldn't have to. You have other healers backing you up and all of you have several cooldowns (and yes PW:B counts) when you're really in trouble.

Oh, and there's no point in making Fade an escape tool. If the priest is running at 100%, gets slowed, but uses his "escape tool" to go back to 100%; IT STILL DOES NOTHING SINCE THE PERSON COMING AFTER HIM IS RUNNING AT 100%.

"Escape tool" does not mean "nobody can ever catch you." Abilities have counters and pre-counters. Phantasm was a movement ability with a damage avoidance mechanic (that allowed you to go offensive with less of a chance for retribution) on a tier with two movement abilities. The other talents are never going to compete with that.

I'm just offering a general statement here, and I'm not calling any of you out personally, but we see a lot of feedback of the form "X doesn't work because it can be countered." That is the entire point.

PvP works better, in our opinions, when you have to be smart and react to what other players are doing. That means trying to guess what they're going to do next or deciding the right time for a crutch dispel or CC. If you find yourself asking for something to be undispellable, or to punish someone for dispelling it, or you're asking for something to work while crowd controlled, or something that makes you immune to something, or something that overall leaves your opponent no options, we're very unlikely to make those changes. Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered.

Hey, The Balance 2 piece looks interesting, but the 4 piece looks weaker than lots of trinkets I've disenchanted this expansion.

Can you give us some kind of estimate for how much DPS percent you think it provides? I've disenchanted a lot of trinkets too, but that's not much of a yardstick.

what the (insert explicit here) are you thinking nerfing shadow priests this hard? you do realize it all but benches them in pve right? they needed a buff in pve as it stands now, and your nerfing them??? seriously?

How does nerfing Phantasm or Dispersion bench Shadow in PvE? We avoided utility nerfs that would risk hurting them in PvE, as I mentioned, such as targeting Hymn of Hope or Mass Dispel.

GC, it is obvious that the nerf to Mindspike glyph is a loss on dps even if you are just standing and doing damage.

This is a legit PvE nerf, but a very, very small one and as I said, we haven't made any PvE numbers adjustments to anyone yet. This one is easy to fix without PvP risk and it makes a glyph less mandatory for its DPS benefits.

If they catch your cast time spells, which only melee really seem to bother doing these days, then you'll be unable to cast Dispersion until your shadow school is available again. But yes, if a mage decided to wait for you to cast a VT and counterspell that, instead of using a blanket silence on you, then they could prevent dispersion for 6s.

Yes. I predict the Dispersion nerf won't really be felt that much, especially among lower ratings.

you may think you have fixed it - but you have not. Only 3 days ago on life I was pursuing a hunter - I don't have any speed bonus except the +25% from cat - my nose was almost touching his back and I still got "out of range" errors.

The hitbox of a cat has the same hitbox as a gnome or a tauren. The nose of the model doesn't matter - it comes from the center of the model. What you're probably seeing is what all melee deal with, particularly when moving very quickly (+25% counts) and no snares. The two clients just often disagree about the position of you and your target.

That said, we are likely to make the change I mentioned yesterday about reverting the PvP set bonus and having it not stack with Feline Swiftness.

Yep. Frost is a lot better than Ret. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I just think that those saying the Sac change isn't potent are wrong. It's a huge buff to Ret utility.

Yeah, we agree. It's not "Ret mandatory on every 3s team" good, but I think you can understand why we wouldn't want that.

We are considering some other buffs to Ret still. We don't know yet if we will do any or all of these (they are emphatically not promises) but the kind of thing we are considering:

- Glyph of Blessed Life -- no longer requires Seal of Insight. You can have any Seal or none active, which puts the glyph in Ret's hands.
- Glyph of Templar's Verdict -- damage reduction triggered by Exorcism (or both) instead. That way you aren't choosing TV over a heal.
- Light's Hammer -- also snares targets it damages while in range. This one potentially buffs Holy too, but we're not sure that many Holy paladins would give up Prism to take it.

Thing is, and this is what is puzzling GC with the whole hitbox situation.. is that we're getting out of range errors, yet our white swings are still merrily hitting the target. It's that disparity that confuses the kitties. I've never seen that kind of issue on any other melee class.

White attacks and yellow attacks are calculated differently by the engine and it make different calculations about your position. You have to remember WoW was originally designed to be mostly white attacks with very few yellow attacks. The 2013 game is a very different beast, and if we could do it all over again, we'd have the two handled really similarly. Again, this isn't anything related to druids or cats. Despite your personal experience, all melee should be encountering this.

Spirit Shell formula is slightly off - right now the metagem critical effect (1.03) is only being multiplied in on the expected aegis size on crits not on the entire crit heal. This is causing a slight decrease in the size of SS.

You are correct. Fixed.

I doubt this is even close to enough to make an rbg team want to bring a ret.

We have a problem right now where melee of all kinds are not very attractive for super-competitive RBG teams, except possibly as a flag carrier, in which case you probably want a druid or warrior. This isn’t the kind of thing we’re going to easily solve by just throwing all sorts of amazing utility at every melee spec, but we agree it’s a problem and we’re looking at longer term solutions.

It was stated abilities are meant to be counterable, but things like cloak of shadows and smokebomb are just fine. There is a double standard here.....

Quoting Ghostcrawler because he said it better than I could: "Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered."

Eye for an eye baseline would be kinda cool, but it'll have to be designed really well because I don't want it breaking CCs lol. I would probably rather have something else if I had to choose though.

Something we hear a lot from Retribution is they want a little more “retribution” back in their kit. We don’t think passive and/or random reflection like Eye for an Eye or Retribution Aura were super interesting mechanics but we understand the attraction of the idea in general and we’ll consider something longer term.

Reduce PW:S mana cost (this is gonna have to happen one way or another to make it viable), and make it so that a priest can't have more than 3 - 4 active PW:S to avoid PWS spam.

This suggestion (limit 3 or whatever) has come up a few times, and possibly for other traditionally-hard-to-balance spells like Eternal Flame and perhaps Rejuvenation. We are unlikely to make any of these changes for 5.2 so it’s probably beyond the scope of discussion in this thread, but we wouldn’t mind hearing more feedback on the idea over the long term. I personally worry that it might feel like a lot to have to track, which makes mods more mandatory, etc.

Looks like they need to just go ahead and buff Arms rage generation.

We’re hearing really mixed feedback on Arms’ rage at the moment and I suspect there is still a lot of experimentation and/or theorycrafting required to figure out when to use Overpower vs. Slam vs. Heroic Strike. (To be clear, we have a design, but we're not sure it's working yet.) Warriors nearly always ask for more, more, more rage, so just seeing posts requesting the same won’t be sufficient to convince us. Overall though, more analysis of how Arms rotation feels (in PvE and PvP) would be helpful.

This post is from the perspective of an Elemental Shaman that mainly focuses on PvP.

You commented on a lot of different things, which makes it hard for me to offer responses. (In general players tend to try to cover too many different topics in a single post instead of focusing on the 2-3 that really, really matter). I will try to cover a few though.

While it’s fun to have lots of minor glyphs, they really are targeted at fun, and this thread is supposed to be about the nuts and bolts of rotations and set bonuses, so it’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

We agree Elemental have too many mandatory glyphs, and we did give you the most mandatory one (Flame Shock) as a base mechanic in 5.2.

I disagree with you some on Frozen Power. We see a lot of Elemental shaman using it. It’s not the dominant talent (Earthgrab is) but it definitely isn’t niche.

I also disagree with you on the prevalence of dispels. Dispels are precious in MoP. I know it might seem like anything awesome you do gets instantly removed, but your opponent has to make the choice to blow their CD on your Flame Shock (which has a lower CD than the dispel). We are really trying to move away from undispellable mechanics on enemies. In Cataclysm and before, dispels weren't a choice and we agree that anything got removed too quickly. We're not really in that world anymore, and we think that's a huge improvement.

I keep getting a lot of lols on Twitter about Shamanistic Rage, but we think this is a pretty serious buff for Elemental in PvP (esp. considering the glyph). It’s an exciting change. We’ll see if we’re right.

Does that not seem odd to you? Where are your design principles? Where is the consistency?

You guys love to lawyer us. :)

Hardly any PvP paladin takes Light’s Hammer, while it’s reasonably popular in PvE. A PvP-only buff there makes a lot of sense. Nearly every priest takes Phantasm in PvP while it’s not popular in PvE. A PvP-only nerf makes sense there.

I'm glad for warriors that you decided to revert the additional nerfs to Second Wind, but there is still a potential problem with it and that tier. The problem is that it's mandatory for warriors to take because it is so necessary for their viability.

We actually agree with this, but allow me to explain our logic. As a designer, one of the things you often have to struggle with is idealistic design vs. realistic design. In a pure design space, we believe Enraged Regen and Impending Victory are balanced and Second Wind is overpowered. However, we’re not talking about a theoretical game. It’s a real, living game played by millions of players. Our changes have impact. Arms warriors (and Frost mages and a couple of other specs) have been hammered with PvP nerfs since launch, and not at all because the players did anything wrong. The new patch brings a few more hefty Arms nerfs with Shockwave, Defensive Stance, Overpower, Taste for Blood and Warbringer. We’re not trying to kill Arms in PvP and we’re not trying to make anyone who plays Arms hopelessly depressed. In this case we think it’s acceptable to have Second Wind be a little overpowered so long as Arms as a whole is not dramatically overpowered or underpowered. Long term, it’s the kind of thing we’d like to eventually fix, but in the short term, we think nerfing it does more harm than good.

just curious, what are you looking at that makes you think shadow priests are OP in pvp? It seems that we get more nerfs based on a projection of what you might think is the case, then classes that were/are OP. What about shadow makes you think it's over powered? I still feel like I get focused every game I play, and you nerfing my escape tool kit, when I don't ever see how priests had superior escapes.

There’s always an element of that in PvP. For PvE, we have a really good idea of how much damage everyone can do in every situation. That’s harder to generate for PvP and not even super relevant. We do look at who is winning a lot in PvP. We do it a lot ourselves to try and understand why. We also try to pay a lot of attention to player feedback, especially those skilled PvP players whose opinions we respect, but also the guy just doing pickup BGs who still deserves to have fun. In all of those cases, the names that keep coming up are Frost, Arms, Shadow and maybe BM.

Frost and Arms are taking some big nerfs. BM has a couple of little ones. With Shadow, I’ve tried to be honest that we’re not exactly sure of the right thing to hit. There isn’t anything there like Shockwave or PoM+Ring of Frost that feels totally broken. It’s a lot of little things that add up: damage, healing, utility, survivability. Utility we really don't want to hit and damage isn't too high in PvE. At the moment, we've nerfed burst a little, healing a little, and made some of the survivability mechanics less potent. We'll see how that feels.

Are you telling me that not only is this issue understood, but is considered acceptable? Being spammed with out of range while you're clipping someone elses model is incredibly frustrating and a major turn off to playing the game at all. It swings both ways too, being stunned by a melee ability from someone 20yds away is just awesome. I had hoped something would eventually be done to fix this crap.

Which would be acceptable? That the nose of the cat is considered the center of the model, so that anyone chasing you has to hit your nose? Or that cats just have a huge combat reach (which also means everyone else can hit you much easier than they could a smaller model)? Should tauren for that matter be easier to hit and gnomes harder? Trust me that this is a very old and involved debate in game design – the code does not always agree with the art about where your character is located, and that is particularly true on a client-server game that still tries to offer some semblance of snappy combat.

1. Are you happy with how many different categories there are?
2. Are you happy that some abilities affect more than one DR category?
3. Are you happy CC is so complicated, that not even sites like Arena Junkies can track how they all interact?
4. If you are not happy, would you please please please consider reworking CC and DR and make it transparent in the tool tips?

Our sense is that there probably 2-3 too many different categories. I also totally agree that the system is way too opaque, especially for new players. Mentioning DR and perhaps PvP CC durations in the tooltips (perhaps only in PvP, perhaps only as an advanced option) is something we’ve wanted to do for some time (so is Path of the Titans, so is Dance Studio… you know how it goes).

We also talk often about whether the game would be better off with only a single DR category. It makes it easier to learn for sure. But it’s also a really risky change. Much of the depth of PvP skill involves knowing what ability DRs with what. A lot of Arena comps are built on that mechanic. It gives us a lot of room to provide surgical buffs or nerfs by changing which DRs with what. Overall, I think there is a chance we would scale down the number of different DRs, but it’s a small chance. We’re much more likely to just spell them out more explicitly (which to be fair also chips away at the knowledge base that differentiates an expert PvP player from a merely tolerable one).

That's what I'm trying to say in more attention grabbing ways. I can try running the numbers in simcraft or wrathcalcs if that will help, but I'm not the math expert that some of the silent laser chickens are.

Nope, you did a fine job. It will take us some time to analyze all this, but I wanted to drop a quick note to say we appreciate the work.

Now moving into patch 5.2 We'll have a similar feel except we'll have a lot of GCDs where we can't do anything because we've blown our rage on AOE. We'll proably go... Mortal Strike > Thunderclap > Whirwlind > Twiddle our thumbs for 3 seconds while we wait for MS to come off CD. We don't have that filler of overpower to do something else whilel we wait.

This could be a problem. We’ll look into it more. Off the cuff, we could make Whirlwind 20 rage (just for Arms!) to keep parity with the cheaper Slams.

MAKE SEPARATE TALENTS FOR PVE AND PVP!!!!

I’ll refrain from the caps, but we do that all the time. Check out Colossus Smash. Check out (live) Taste for Blood. Check out the duration on Polymorph. We do it as a last resort, because it does cause more risk for bugs and is more for players to have to remember, but when it’s the right solution, we definitely go there. We nerfed Devouring Plague’s up front damage because that reduces PvP burst without having a huge impact on PvE (because the difference in burst in this case is over such a short time frame it’s unlikely to really be felt). If that solution hadn’t worked, then we could have considered DP to do less damage in PvP.

I'll also posit that even if PvE and PvP had totally different rule sets, it wouldn't reduce the volume of players campaigning for buffs or nerfs. "Everyone" would still think it was their class holding them back and would want us to twiddle with the numbers even more. Once in awhile we'll say something like "We'd love to help you guys, but we just can't buff you any more because of PvE / PvP." The more typical situation is that someone thinks they need a buff while we disagree. Splitting out the rules doesn't change that. :)

Perhaps there is a much simpler solution (a numbers tweak rather than a mechanics tweak)?

I feel like we’d have to nerf Divine Aegis dramatically to have the same effect. The Spirit Shell change was mostly so priests could go back to using it at the right moment and not just on cooldown because it was a throughput increase. Those are the two major changes that weren’t numbers tweaks.

At this point in time, we're going to lock this thread. We aren't trying to squelch discussion, and in fact just created a Part Two thread, but we were concerned that it's unreasonable to expect players to follow a discussion with nearly 2000 posts.