PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues, Part II

Round Two. Fight!

We aren't trying to cut off any discussion, but at nearly 2000 posts in the original thread, we thought it was unlikely many players were going to be able to follow the entire discussion, so let's try a second one.

At this point in 5.2 development, we are greatly slowing down on class mechanic changes. There will still be some, particularly in response to feedback and PTR testing, but ideas for new talents, core spells and the like are even less likely to get our attention now.

We still have not completed our tuning pass. You’ll know we're in the midst of it when you start to see a lot of PTR notes with number tweaks. Having said that, if you have specific concerns about PTR (not live) numbers, and you have some kind of mathematical evidence to back those concerns up, please let us know.

As always, this is not a good thread for whining. No thread is really ideal for whining, but we'll be particularly vigilant here. Sorry to end on a negative note, but it will likely be another long thread and we want to maximize the prospects for communication.

Paladin
To stave off the controversial Protection haste issue, we are making a chance to Grand Crusader to proc from dodge and parry at 30% instead of CS and HotR at 20%. This will improve dodge and parry slightly for active mitigation purposes without negating the +haste slant that many paladins have taken.

Mage
This is very much a PTR experiment, but we are going to try moving Blazing Speed to the top talent tier to replace Scorch. Scorch will become a baseline Fire spell. Blazing Speed’s old position on the talent tree will be replaced with a new talent.

The new talent is currently called Flameglow, and it is a “permanently on” ability that reduces all damage taken by a flat amount, based on spellpower, up to a maximum of 30% of the hit. The intent is to give mages a passive defensive option, and also one that varies with the frequency of incoming damage. Remember, mages must give up Temporal Shield or Ice Barrier to take the new talent.

We agree with the feedback that Blazing Speed makes more sense grouped with the movement talents than with the defensive talents. In addition, we have buffed Ice Floes already from live, and we have added an additional perk that spells cast within the first half a second of Ice Flows don’t consume a charge. Currently if you’re making use of spell queuing, it’s easy to waste the first charge, so this fix is intended to help with that.

That brings us to Scorch. Sorch feels really valuable to many players (above and beyond Arcane using it rotationally to avoid dropping stacks), but we’re concerned that it feels more valuable than it actually is. Yes, Elemental and Hunters can do a lot of damage while on the move, but not every spec in the game needs to do so, and mages have a lot of other advantages. Mages do have several tools to deal with movement, such as several instants and abilities such as Blink and the tier 2 talents to minimize movement time. We’d rather seem mages plan, move quickly, and plant rather than just stay moving all the time. Scorch preempts all of those tools and has the added psychological benefit of feeling like you’re always doing something, and because of that feeling of being productive, we’re concerned you have less motivation to minimize movement. Mathematically, if you’re making full use of your available tools without Scorch, Scorch isn’t much of a benefit of all, and we think the mage class would feel and play better overall without Scorch as a crutch. We debated removing Scorch completely, and we still might, but we’re sensitive to the fact that so many mages are using Scorch today and might not understand or appreciate its loss. As a compromise, we’re going to try Scorch as Fire only to preserve the gameplay for players who really like it and to help differentiate the Mage specs a bit more.

This is a big change, and the kind of thing we might revert if we and you don’t like how it plays. Try it out and let us know.

EDIT: The correct Grand Crusader number is 30% in case you're trying to theorycraft it.

Unless you can demonstrate that "scaling" is going to cause a 5-10% DPS difference between one spec and another within a single tier (say 13 ilevels or so), we're not inclined to mess with it. I'm not trying to dismiss the concerns, but it's become such a buzzword among players that I worry scaling discussions are drowning out other conversations.

Priest
- We are reverting the change to how Devouring Plague deals damage. It will have more up-front damage in 5.2 as it does in 5.1. We think the more recent nerfs to Shadow healing and Phantasm are more appropriate changes for PvP.

You mean that you're leaving haste AS IS for prot, but removing GrandCrusader from proc'ing off of CS/HotR and changing that to dodge/parry? Or do you mean that you're removing Sanctity of Battle for prot, and giving us the above change as the "fix"? Your wording was a little ambiguous, and it makes a HUGE difference about the angry prot pally mob forming or not.

No change to haste, dodge, parry or Sanctity of Battle. Grand Crusader changes to proc on dodge / parry to increase their value for active mitigation.

To address other concerns I've seen: yes, this is a small nerf to DPS when not the focused tank (and is similar to blocks for warriors). Yes, this improved Holy Power generation when AE tanking (but again is similar to Revenge for warriors, which hasn't been a gigantic balance problem). No, you shouldn't have to give up all your haste gear. This change should just let any dodge or parry you do accumulate be more attractive.

The tooltip for PW:S on the PTR was recently updated to show it shielding for 40% more than on live. However, the actual numbers for PW:S on the PTR do not reflect the 40% buff. Can you confirm if this is just a tooltip error or if there is an intended buff to PW:S in the pipeline?

We did not make a change to PW:S points nor is there anything in the patch notes or in one of my posts as far as I can recollect.

I will add that so far on our PTR raid testing, Disc priests are using PW:S along with PoH and not having abnormal HPS or mana problems. Heroic testing will tell more.

Level 90 Hunter Talent - Powershot
Yes you have stated that you are trying to rebuild it, and I am positive that it will be great if you can get it to work properly, but there is no indication that it will be fixed by 5.2

Until a time comes when I say "Sorry, we were not able to get it to work," then you can safely assume our plans have not changed.

Not 30% DR. I made the same mistake by reading it too fast. Read it again, and pay attention this time. It's a flat damage reduction (aka a number such as 3000, 2746, etc.) based on spell power, capped on a maximum 30% reduction. So if a hit would deal X damage, it deals X minus that number, but it cannot reduce the overall damage by more than 30%.

This is correct. Apologies if my initial description was insufficient. The rate of incoming damage is important here.

Thank you for additional feedback from everyone on various topics, though I am of course unable to comment on it all. Also recall my initial post in this thread: we're only interested in 5.2 (not 5.1) DPS comparisons for purposes of this thread, and also, no whining. ;)

Level 90 Hunter Talent - Powershot
Yes you have stated that you are trying to rebuild it, and I am positive that it will be great if you can get it to work properly, but there is no indication that it will be fixed by 5.2

Until a time comes when I say "Sorry, we were not able to get it to work," then you can safely assume our plans have not changed.

In fact, I posted this too soon. We have now completed rebuilding Power Shot and Glaive Toss. Both abilities always hit their primary target and are much more responsive to secondary targets in our initial testing. Once these abilities have been subjected to a QA pass, you can try them in a future PTR build and let us know how they work.

Will the 'always hit' apply to moving targets as well or is it just for stationary targets?

Always hit your primary target, even if moving.

Priest
- We are reverting the nerf to Body and Soul. It will stay at 4 sec duration.
- Holy Fire will be instant baseline. We agree it is an unnecessary nerf to remove that 5.1 functionality, but we also like the range increase from the 5.2 version of the glpyh, so just removing Holy Fire's cast time seems like the right move. Solace will still be positioned as an upgraded Holy Fire that generates mana.
- We understand that reverting the Devouring Plague change (restoring it to its 5.1 functionality) is a nerf to Shadow mastery, but overall we are still sympathetic to the arguments that losing burst from Devouring Plague is a negative in PvE and doesn't really solve the PvP burst problem (which is more about holding procs). We haven't adjusted Shadow's PvE damage yet in any case.

Paladin
- We are going to try Grand Crusader proc'd by CS, HotR and dodge and parry (at lower chances for each).
- We are going to buff Seal of Justice and Seal of Righteousness damage. Neither of these Seals is seeing enough use. Justice was always intended to be a strong PvP Seal, and it just isn't right now. We haven't solidified numbers yet - I'm just sharing our intent.

PvP
We're making a change to the way damage-to-healing conversions work so that the healing is not affected by resilience. The healing will be based on how much damage would have been done as if the target had no resilience. If you hit an opponent for 10K and have a mechanic that converts damage into 50% healing, your hit may land for 6K because of resilience, but the heal will still be 5K (50% of the unmitigated damage). This only applies to resilience, not to armor, Shield Wall or other forms of damage reduction.

This change currently includes Atonement, Glyph of Battle Healer, Ancestral Guidance, Vampiric Embrace, Nature's Vigil, Glyph of Siphon Life, Eminence, Glyph of Flame Shock, Leeching Poison, Death Siphon and Soul Leech.

Related, we have read feedback that certain mechanics, such as Retribution's mastery, Hand of Light, are double-dipping from resilience. If this happened, then your attack would be mitigated by resilience and then the mastery proc (which is supposed to be a percentage of the main attack) would also be mitigated by resilience. However, we can find no evidence that this is actually happening. In our testing, Hand of Light is never mitigated by resilience a second time. If anyone has additional information, please share.

Monk
The 2pc Windwalker PvE bonus no longer drops spheres in a circle. They drop right next to you, much like the Brewmaster's Gift of the Ox, so that you can shift side to side and pick them all up.

Warrior
We are currently trying Overpower on a 1 sec GCD (again). We like the way it feels and we like that it boosts Arms' damage without having to increase the damage of special attacks (which risks PvP burst), so we're going to let you guys try it next PTR build.

EDIT: Forgot Leeching Poison, Soul Leech and Death Siphon.

Leeching poison not getting that change or just forgot to list it?

It is and I did forget (and edited the note above).

Will they still be getting reduced by Battle Fatigue, or are those conversions set to ignore it as well?

Battle Fatigue will still reduce the healing.

I feel like there's a huge disconnect here between the way we play and the way you guys play. The issue with this set bonus isn't the way the orbs are dropped, it's that extra energy is very rarely something we ever need.

Our suspicion is you are viewing this through the lens of 5.1, where you are often GCD capped. The 5.2 mastery changes open up a lot more GCDs (that you can then fill with extra energy). Have you tried the set bonus on the PTR?

Battle Fatigue is gone on the PTR, that's why a ton of feedback about some hybrids heals in the ptr are false. Just saying that this is a cause of some incorrect feedback, and make PVP on the ptr quite frustrating to test.

This is accurate. Battle Fatigue isn't working at the moment on the PTR. We're aware of it and we keep that in mind when evaluating feedback. It's a good idea for you all to do so as well.

I don't care so much about Shattering throw (mostly a PVP thing), or Cleave (I don't mind if it's useless much much HS is for us), but Whirlwind, Sweeping Strikes, and Thunderclap all really need to be looked at.

Awhile ago, we made Whirlwind only cost 20 rage for Arms to address Arms needing to spend more rage on Overpower. I may have forgotten to report it and I don't think it's in the patch notes. Cleave is supposed to be expensive (like Heroic Strike). Thunder Clap is really cheap already. Sweeping Strikes is expensive but also quite powerful so we suspect it's okay, but we'll adjust if needed.

GC currently (on live) Vampiric Touch don't return mana when hit shielded targets, is this intent?

Also, dispelling VT causes it to diminish return itself and Psychic Horror intended as well? I think it devaluate the dispel protection.

The first part (vs. shields) is a bug and now fixed. The second part (the dispel DR) is intended.

the Rogue Assassination ability Venomous Wounds does not currently proc off of absorptions effects;

Also a bug. Most things that proc on an attempt to deal damage should proc if the damage was absorbed.

Paladin
We finished looking at Seal of Righteousness and Justice. Righteousness we ended up buffing by 50% so it should be a good choice against 4 targets instead of 6.

Justice is much more complicated. It was intended as a PvP seal, but the damage loss is so significant and the snare just not that valuable (which is ironic when you consider Ret's history of not being able to catch things), and Burden of Guilt is there if you really do want to snare. Furthermore, just buffing Justice's damage risks Seal twisting in PvE becoming a thing, where you stack up Censure and then swap to Justice. It could be cool if designed right, but would probably just be annoying. We just don't have much room to buff Justice, and players might still forsake it in PvP.

So, we're going to redesign it and attempt to solve another problem, which is Ret's damage outside of cooldowns (which are quite potent). Justice will now proc (and Judgment will count for the proc) a stacking debuff on the target that increases the damage of your next Templar's Verdict. With 5 stacks, this will be a big hit (but not an insta-gib) and opens up some interesting decisions about how to use Holy Power, such as Inquisition or WoG, if you're trying to hold TV. While Truth + Censure will still do more sustained damage overall, there is a chance Justice will see some situational use in PvE, and we're okay with that. Justice is a Ret-only thing, so it should be a Seal they actually use. It won't snare at all, which I expect some will call a devastating nerf, but again, there's Burden of Guilt if you really need a snare.

Combined with removing the snare, it's a really stupid change that solves none of the issues it was meant to and creates others. It's worse than no change, it's active destruction.

We went through several pages (on this and other forums) of Ret paladins saying they'd never use Justice because Truth is a lot more damage, they have Burden of Guilt if they really need a snare (and our numbers suggest plenty of high-end PvP players take it), and there are enough snares from allies that having an easy-to-apply snare isn't even that important.

Likewise, we had a lot of feedback, principally from Ret paladins, that changing Seals (occasionally - not rotationally) was something they wanted to do. Given that Ret has some problems with burst damage outside of cooldowns, we thought this was a good solution. Truth still does more sustained damage, if sustained is important to you, and has some perks such as being able to do damage to two targets at once or apply an anti-stealth dot.

Now given the size and diversity of our player base, it doesn't surprise me that other players will feel differently and expect that Justice is very important in PvP. We have to make these kinds of decisions all the time where we get competing, often contradictory, feedback.

Check it out when it's available on PTR or when we're able to provide actual numbers and let us know how it feels.

(Having a passive snare for Ret that's available all the time with no damage trade-off is just not something we're going to do. Why not just apply a snare when you enter PvP at that point?)

No more embers on SB killing blows (and it only refunds 1 ember period for the very last SB you used if killed in 5 sec).

We didn't make any intentional change here. It could be a bug.

- if you get blanket silenced and a melee attacks you (rogue's garrote comes to mind), they don't get feared, and you still lose the blood horror buff. So I spend health and a cd for no effect at all.

- if a warrior spell reflects, he can successfully reflect blood horror back at the warlock.

Silence shouldn't prevent the horror proc. We'll get that fixed. Warriors can Spell Reflect Nature's Grasp proc, so it seems consistent that they can reflect the Blood Horror proc.

If there are no enhancement buffs after this then they are truly biased.

We asked you not to whine. This is whining. Please don't do it. I don't have a lot of time, so I want to actually get something out of reading this thread, and posts like this just waste my time and that of anyone else trying to read this thread.

My apologies if I sound like a jerk. I'm not going to mention this again.

Currently to maximize DPS Enhance is casting Lightning Bolt before reaching 5 stacks of Maelstorm quite often. This is cause Lightning Bolt does the same amount of damage regardless of how many stacks of Maelstrom you have. As a melee spec I find having to 'stutter step' in order to get casts off is really akward. I was thinking that if Maelstrom Weapon increased the potency of your spells with each stack kind of like how the Healing Storm glyph operates for healing then it would be more favorable to cast an instant spell at 5 stacks as opposed to hard casting prior to the 5th stack.

This is intended behavior. We like that there is some decision about when to use Maelstrom Weapon, and the mechanic has worked this way for some time, possibly always. That said, you don't have to game it. It will be a DPS loss, but not a massive one, if you only use MW at 5 stacks. Do what works for you. Trying to use MW at various stacks to improve your DPS and failing to do so might be lower DPS than always using it at 5 stacks.

That said, HTT swings wildly in the other direction for Restoration due to both Purification and Mastery scaling.

We think this is a legit concern and we're looking at it, but we also want to make really sure any change didn't feel like a massive nerf to Resto, who relies on Healing Tide a lot for group healing. Opening up talent options is important to us, but so is enjoying your class, and big nerfs to talents to make the other choices seem better is a last resort. (Yes, we do it. You don't need to bring up examples of when we've done it. But we don't like to.) It could be that it's not worth the risk of changing, but we are considering how we'd do it.

Any thought on removing preparation all together and lowering the remaining rogue cooldowns. The recent cloak change makes gameplay feel smoother and I'm really digging it.

I don't think we'd remove Prep. Would the design be stronger without Prep and lowered cooldowns? Possibly. But we're convinced what would happen is that all the rogues that love Prep for whatever reason would come out of the woodwork. It's been a core ability forever and all that. Years from now when we did threads asking players what to fix about their class, I'm convinced we'd see "Bring back Prep!" I really don't mean to sound cynical; I'm trying to sound practical.

I know many of you are smart players and you expect all players to be just as logical and objective and see that there is no massive difference between a cooldown that finishes the cooldown or other spells and those spells all having shorter cooldowns. I don't think the reaction would be universal praise though.

If both just do damage, whichever does more wins, which apparently will be Truth.

Sustained damage doesn't count for as much in PvP as being able to land a kill within a narrow window. If you want to have good damage meters at the end of a BG, then Truth may be fine for you (it has other benefits because of the dot as well). If you need to kill someone while their healer is CC'd, then you may not have time to let Censure finish ticking for its full amount.

(The same is true in PvE by the way. Sometimes something needs to die right now.)

I'm fine with switching a seal to snare if I have to, but being forced to spend a talent point for the same mechanic handed to EVERY SINGLE MELEE with zero tradeoff besides maybe a GCD is really irritating.

A GCD is a DPS tradeoff.... Other abilities, like Hamstring, have costs. In any case, we balance classes around their entire package of abilities not single ones. Specs with very good snares often have weaknesses elsewhere.

I made that comment for a very specific reason, which was to try to get players to not lobby for a Seal of Truth-level ability that also snared everyone. And yet, I guess that was a mistake because my making that comment still brought out a lot of lobbying for the very thing I said we weren't going to do. :)

Can you tell us when you'll start doing PvE adjustments?

Soon? We're actually working on it now. I will try to give you our quick summary of who is likely to go up or down so you can prepare for it before you see the notes or datamining.

Apologies if I posted this already. I couldn't remember. :(

Eye of Kilrogg glyph no longer allows you to place your Demonic Circle if the location is out of line-of-sight. Then to make matters worse, it places it at your current player location instead of giving a LoS error, thereby making it even more difficult to replace a soon to expire Demonic Circle that may appear to be in LoS, but actually isn't. Eye of Kilrogg can't even be used in RBGs, yet this was somehow necessary.

We had to implement the nerf to stop some exploits where it was possible to get Demonic Circle in areas that you aren't supposed to path. We didn't want to nerf the mechanic overall and in fact we think we found a compromise where you have to either LoS OR be able to path to the location. That should cut out the exploits while still letting you use Eye to get behind a pillar or something legit.

Believe me, nothing frustrates us more than having to nerf something because of 'sploiters.

A very simple bug to fix that only requires the Meteor to check for the Glider buff or similar things before activating

Things that may seem simple to players are often anything but. That was the case here. (Typically, statements like this are followed with various players trying to tell our programmers how to code, and typically I answer that if you're that awesome at coding, please send us your resume.)

Rapture now reduces the cost of Power Word: Shield by 25% and provides mana equal to 150% (was 200%) of the Priest's Spirit, but no longer benefits from Spirit provided by short-duration bonuses.

Really..... a Mana Nerf?????

It wont't feel like a nerf when you consider that PW:S is cheaper and Meditation is now the same as other healers in cases except timing Rapture for use with things like Mana Tide (which is what we call cheesy). We also changed the Disc set bonus in PvP to make Flash Heal cheaper.

Overall, Disc in PvE on live just does not worry about mana the way other healers have to and all are supposed to. PvP is a different story, but the changes above are intended to help fix.

Paladin
Here is the current PTR Seal of Justice: Fills you with Holy Light, causing melee attacks (and Judgment) to apply Justice to your target. Justice: The attacking Paladin's next Templar's Verdict striking this target will also deal 25% weapon damage as Holy per application of Justice. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 sec. Undispellable. Using the TV consumes the stack. The Justice proc itself is not affected by mastery, nor is the mastery proc from TV counted for purposes of how hard Justice hits.

We understand the concern that this superficially looks a little like the old Taste for Blood. Taste for Blood was designed to be very random in order to limit the planning the warrior could do and limit its frequency. (It was also off the GCD, a buff rather than a debuff which made it feel even less predictable to the victim, and stackable with other big hits like Heroic Leap.) Justice is designed to be a very predictable mechanic in order to unload some decent damage even when GoaK and wings are on CD. Yes, it will be even bigger when stacked with CDs. Big hits that take a lot of planning and give their target plenty of notification and opportunities to counter are more acceptable than those that come out of the blue.

We also understand the concern that this forces paladins into taking Burden of Guilt if they want a snare. However, that is offset by the data that suggests some (but not all) paladins take Burden today (meaning the cost for taking it isn't too great), but hardly anyone uses the current Seal of Justice today; i.e. most Rets are running around with no snare at all.

On the other hand, if Ret still isn't going to use this new Justice, then there is no reason to change it, and we could just leave it as a dead spell for 5.2.

Is there a reason why Subtlety's Slice and Dice can be refreshed with a weaker (aka shorter) version when Combat's can't (you get the 'more powerful spell active' error)?

That is odd. Neither should be refreshed with a weaker aura. We'll look at it.

Could you guys PLEASE look at Death Knights final tier talents as they are now they are absolutely USELESS in a raid situation Remorseless Winter is an AoE cc that obviously dosent work on a raid boss there immune then there's gorefiends grasp an AoE deathgrip obviously useless in a raid encounter as they are immune to its affects as well then there's Desecrated Ground? i forget the last ones name but boss loss of control mechanics can not be broken by any ability. PLEASE look them over and give one of them something useful to raid boss encounter i feel left out of all the cool level 90 talents.

Originally, they all did damage in addition to their other utility so players would use them in raiding environments. Unfortunately, the damage just overshadowed everything else. Players tried to figure out how to work them into their normal rotations to maximize DPS, and then the utility almost became a liability, because you had to delay the ability (i.e. nerf your DPS) in order to use their utility. We think DK rotations have enough going on that the level 90 talents don’t need to provide say Unholy Prism etc. and the DK level 90 talents as is are still useful. We don’t have many raid bosses these days that don’t come with some kind of add that often does need to be CC’d, and raids still have trash, as do challenge modes.

I don't get the justice change either because at first GC didn't want to buff sustain because it meant buffing burst so now he plans to buff burst which will buff burst even more!?

I think we’re all using terms like “burst” too generically. The more specific problem is that Rets have a couple of really strong cooldowns that they can’t use very often. This leads to the perception that their damage is great with GoaK + Wings and weak outside of it. A few weeks ago (largely through Twitter), I explained that we could drop Wings CD, but then you’re looking at a 10% DPS increase every minute (or something). That means there are more frequent periods of high damage, but it’s a big nerf to having on-demand burst. On the other hand, we don’t want to just buff say Judgment, CS, TV and Exorcism across the board, because then inside of GoaK + Wings, Ret just blows people up. We’re trying to use the new Justice as a shorter cooldown to improve damage outside of GoaK + Wings + trinket. (It also improves damage with GoaK + Wings even more, but only for one hit. You can’t unload with Holy Avenger and the new Justice for example.)

Sweeping Strikes, Cleave, Thunderclap, Whirlwind, and Talented attacks. All vying for a place in AoE.

We treat cleaves (2-3 targets) and AEs (4, 6, 10+) targets a little differently. Because we try to have mostly 2 tank fights these days, cleave situations are a lot more common. Sweeping Strikes and Cleave are for cleaving (and I agree you could argue that Heroic Strike and Cleave aren’t as important for Arms as they used to be). Whirlwind is for actual AE situations. Thunderclap can be used for anything, though you can’t really and wouldn’t want to just spam Thunderclap.

Also, think about how often in PvE you are doing AE vs. doing single-target damage in PvE. I think sometimes all of us (developers included) get too focused on these mythical Patchwerk fights that just don’t happen very often anymore. Increasingly, every spec is going to need an interesting AE rotation because increasingly you’re asked to do a lot of AE. (Channeling Blizzard is not an interesting rotation in our book.)

Look at it this way, you say that 90% or Locks are using sac and that's why it needs to be nerfed, but really the vast majority of those people are playing with Sac becasue they DON"T WANT TO USE A PET.

If you hate pets, take Sac (though I also have to challenge a little bit why you picked a pet class to play in the first place). What we don’t want is for warlocks to take Sac just because it’s a dps increase. The average warlock should have a demon out. If a subset of them do not because they take Sac, we’re okay with that. If very few of them have demons out because a spreadsheet said Sac is a 1% dps increase, then we’re not okay with it.

Do you consider this change to make progression PVE ret's reinstitute seal twisting as mandatory? Or is the debuff going to be mutually exclusive to Censure? Also, "melee attacks" in this case mean CS/HotR, Judgement, and white attacks only, correct? I guess I'm just concerned with how this plays into min/max PVE, esp considering the fact that seals are still on the GCD.

We don’t want to encourage more Seal twisting. We could consider a 20 sec shared cooldown on Seals if we needed to. We’d rather a PvE paladin consider which Seal made more sense for the fight at hand and a PvP paladin use Justice unless they really wanted Censure for some reason (to damage two targets at once or prevent stealth for example). As I said above, we are trying to fix a PvP problem here. If the new idea doesn’t solve that problem and paladins just prefer Truth still and we create a lot of pressure to Seal twist, then we’re doing more harm than good.

Also, is there still a passive damage component associated with SOJ, like the current 16% weapon damage as holy on Live? Or is this new Justice Debuff the only form of damage associate with the seal?

No, there is no passive component. We did that because it let us make the debuff that much larger.

Can you share the proc rate for us? is judgment 100% chance to generate a proc?

The proc rate is 100%, just like Censure. There is no random chance involved.

Will I be able to prevent the application of Judgment stacks with AMS?

It will behave like Censure (Seal of Trurth’s proc), and I don’t believe you can prevent Censure with AMS. I may not be correct with that assumption.

And do i need to state how rediculous this is for combat? its got to the point where the rogues in my guild thought about not popping ar and sb together for combat because of the rediculous nature of our energy situation and that inherently hurts our long term dps because sb wont benefit from the 2-3 cycles/finishers we use during the AR. I Hope all of what i have said makes some sense to you, im not whining here, im simply pointing out a fundemental issue with the 4 piece.

What is the inherent problem with not using Adrenaline Rush and Shadowblades together? Doesn’t that sort of give you two Adrenaline Rushes? If it’s a big DPS loss then that would be a problem, but all it really seems to be doing is changing up your rotation a bit.

What exactly is the intention? Justice for pvp. Truth for pve? Truth for cds or something?

We’d be pretty happy with Justice for PvP, Truth for single target PvE and Righteousness for AE PvE. That was the original MoP design intent, but Justice’s damage is too low, and the dot from Censure does have some PvP benefit. That said, we try not to be too heavy handed with our designs. We give players tools and let them use them creatively, so long as the specs stay relatively balanced and nobody’s rotation becomes stupidly convoluted or numbingly simple. So if players find ways to use Righteousness in PvP or Justice in PvE, we’re okay with that.

I believe he said it will last 15 seconds and stack exactly how Censure does now. If that is the case we should be able to swap between two targets in that 15 second time span. However, since the stacks will get consumed it will be more difficult to keep them up on more than one target.

Our intent was that if you were building stacks of Justice and had to swap targets, you'd then be building stacks on two targets. The more generous we make the duration, the easier that is to do, but the harder it is for enemies to escape as well.

Scorch was our only way to obtain at least some mobility before it became castable while moving (yes some of us actually PvP'd as fire before this change). Before that, and at least for me, my only option to chase somebody besides keeping living bomb up was spamming icelance and tbh, I never liked it.

Another idea is to put Scorch back in the talent tree and just remove Blazing Speed. Maybe Blink just provides too much of the same niche. Scorch trumps Ice Floes at the moment, but we think we could solve that.

Any chance shadow priest PvE damage and off-healing concerns will be addressed before 5.2 goes live? Part 1 of the thread is full of them. Part 2 just became PTR world of paladincraft.

Maybe make a separate paladin thread before having to close this one too?

RE: Shadow. We haven't buffed damage yet. Mind Blast is a likely candidate because it helps damage on the move and doesn't change rotation priorities. Mind Sear perhaps too. All of that is off the top of my head, so don't hold me to it.

RE: Paladins. Welcome to my world. :)

Your data is full of PVE Ret paladins. PVP paladins use FoJ in arenas.

I was explicitly referring to relatively high-end Arena players. Many (guessing 60% because I don't have the data right in front of me) use FoJ. The rest split between Burden and Repentance about evenly. We can't always answer why players use certain abilities, but we can usually answer what they're using.

Death Knight
- You now maintain the same percentage of health when you switch into and out of Blood Presence
- Strangulate (but not Asphyxiate) is off the GCD.

Can Hunters please see some adjustments on our end talents to make more than Glaive Toss worth taking for raids? Barrage is very limited and Powershot is useless and never taken in raids, doing less than half the DPS of Glaive Toss.

I know you've mentioned this before, but it doesn't match up with what we're seeing. Do you have a link or some other evidence we can chase down?

I may regret this, because I don't know that I can capture every one and we iterate on this stuff really rapidly. We may change a number one day and change it again the next when we look at AE or PvP damage or whatever. If frequent iteration scares you, look away! But in the interest of providing context and helping theorycrafting, I'll give it a go.

DPS Tuning Adjustments

- Arms - Increased Deep Wounds by +100%.
- Balance - Increased Starfire, Wrath and Starsurge by 9%.
- Mind Blast - Increased Mind Blast by 20%. (Yeah I know you have to stop and cast it modulo procs, but I meant in contrast to Mind Flay which makes you really plant.)

Recent datamining has shown Invocation being nerfed to reduce our natural mana regen by 100%, up from 50%.

It was that way briefly (and the PTR pull may have caught that change). Instead we are leaving Invocation at -50% mana regen, but we changed Evocation to generate 10% mana per tick for Arcane, but affected by Arcane Charges (25% per charge and consumes all charges).

The intent of this change is to try and spare you from having to do single GCDs of Evo every 3 casts, which is probably worth it but not much fun. It's a net buff to Evo total mana regen but a net nerf to frequent Evos.

A lot of Warlocks are wondering why our AOE spells are getting reduced so dramatically?

Are you referring to Seed of Corruption and Fire and Brimstone? We don't usually do 15 yard radii for AE spells. It just felt gratuitous and was causing warlocks to do a lot of extra damage in some situations without requiring any extra effort on their part. It was also a bit ridiculous with Mannoroth's Fury.

i assumed this was suppose to spread the snare from warbringer to other targets also

never actually seen it in any official patch notes.. was this an error on their part or is bugged currently on the ptr?

The Glyph of Blitz works with the snare as well as the stun.

I have not been able to catch up yet on posts from this weekend, but I will!

In the meantime:

Shaman
- We are separating out Ancestral Guidance into a damage conversion number and a healing conversion number in order to allow for better tuning and to ultimately make the talent more attractive to Resto. I am guessing at the numbers right now, but imagine it says something like: "When you deal direct damage, 40% is copied as healing. When you deal direct healing, 60% is copied as healing."

- We are changing the way Lava Burst interacts with Flame Shock. Currently, Flame Shock is required for Lava Burst to crit. This is cool rotationally but creates problems where Flame Shock dispels or swapping targets is a massive nerf to Elemental, dropping their 2.5 multiplier on Lava Burst to a 1.0. We are going to nerf Lava Burst damage, cause it to always crit (like Chaos Bolt), and then cause it to do say 50% more damage to targets afflicted by Flame Shock. The net result should be that LB + FS is still the best DPS, but failing to do so will be a 1.5 to 1.0 drop instead of a 2.5 to 1.0 drop.

- Elemental's PvE damage will still be lower than we want after this change, but we want to bring up the damage of Lightning Bolt and other sources of damage together; we need to buff more than just Lava Burst to preserve the rotation... and avoid a lot of Lava Burst PvP videos.

Warrior
- We are going to try the suggestion where Overpower lowers the Mortal Strike cooldown by 0.5 sec. This is to avoid any conflict with the 1.0 sec GCD of Overpower causing niggling 0.5 sec holes in the rotation. See how it feels. This will be an Arms DPS increase that we're not sure they need after the Deep Wounds buff, but I'll report back if we take additional steps.

DPS Tuning
- Our changes to Arcane proved very generous and Arcane has been an outlier on our DPS tests. We are going to reduce the damage from +50% per charge to +35% per charge and on mana from +150% per charge to +100% per charge.

If your post was deleted it was probably because it was A) whining, or B) doing a +1 on another post.

This is a very long thread. If it's going to remain readable (particularly if you want us to read it), everyone is going to have to do their part.

Soo, in short you just nerfed us ele shamans so we can swich targets easly?

There was no nerf. Sorry if my explanation was unclear. Lava Burst with Flame Shock should do exactly the same damage it does on live. Lava Burst without Flame Shock will do more damage than it does on live. It is a buff to unfavorable situations.

Now all that said, Elemental's damage is still low. I didn't want that message to distract players from the Lava Burst change. I also didn't want players to campaign for just buffing the heck out of Lava Burst, because that would have done damage to the rotation and PvP. Instead, we want to buff Elemental evenly. Imagine a Shamanism buff if you must until we decide the actual change.

Rogue 4 piece is COMPLETELY useless for combat. We already energy cap during Ad Rush, so giving us more energy during Shadow Blades does nothing, as de-coupling Ad Rush/Shadow Blades appears to be a DPS loss even with the 4 piece. I thought the goal was to boost combat single target damage in 5.2. Guess not.

We would need to see some numbers on this. If you hate to decouple the two CDs then I could see how it would be a problem. But decoupling them and using the set bonus should be a DPS increase.

Go back to the start, start with the principle of "Basic rotation is MS->OP->OP->X" and "Sometimes you will prioritize Slam over OP when you are running high on rage", and figure out how to make it work from there. As it is, always having OP always taking priority over all the other fillers leaves the rotation feeling too cramped and awkward, and takes all rage management out of the rotation, leaving us with no choices except hitting HS when we can't spend enough rage with the default rotation.

The intent is Mortal Strike -> Overpower with Slam used during Colossus Smash or during moments of excess rage.

We tried the change to Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death with noble intentions of making the rotation more dynamic since CS would be slightly more predictable. However, the change isn't a clear win, so we're not sure it's a good change. We are likely to go back to autoattacks proc Sudden Death, but leaving the 1 GCD on Overpower. We are also intrigued by the idea of having Opportunity Strikes (mastery) also proc Sudden Death, so we might run some numbers on that. The buff to Deep Wounds, mastery and haste should all help with Arms scaling (though we remain convinced that players often focus much too much on scaling and not on overall DPS).

Do you not have the ability in-house to test this?

Of course we do. But we're not seeing what you're seeing. Therefore we need to understand the source of the difference.

Priest
- We are sympathetic to the argument that we have been schizophrenic (to use the term incorrectly) in the Shadow PvP 4pc VT dispel bonus. Originally the enemy strategy was to just "get it over with" and dispel VT until the horror went on DR. We changed the way dispels work so that isn't much of a strategy these days, however the dispel is still in the hands of the enemy and not the Shadow priest, which we agree makes the DR extra punitive. We also think we've hit Shadow hard enough in PvP that this nerf isn't required, so we're going to remove the DR from the Horror proc from VT dispels.
- We haven't forgotten to have Solace provide a heal for Holy. That's still in the cards.

Rogue
- We think we understand the rogue concerns on the PvE 4pc better now. We don't mind Combat having to unlink AR and SB to maximize the bonus, and we still think the set bonus is a DPS increase over not having it. However, it may be the case that the value of the set bonus forces Combat to swap to another spec because the cooldown stacking is one of the mechanics that keeps Combat competitive. To try to (ahem) combat this, we are going to do something unusual and allow the set bonus to also reduce the global cooldown on rogue abilities to 0.7 sec during Shadow Blades. This should help prevent GCD lock / energy capping. Normally we are very reluctant to reduce the GCD lower than 1 sec, so this is very much an experiment.

DPS Tuning
- We continue to tweak Arcane numbers, so if you're trying to theorycraft Arcane, you may want to hold on for a bit longer. At the moment, we have restored Arcane Charges back to +50% damage and +150% mana cost but reduced the damage of Arcane Blast (-22.2%), Arcane Missiles (-22.2%) and Arcane Barrage (-13.6%).
- Likewise, I wouldn't worry about the details of monk numbers, especially healing, too much yet. If you want to keep track however, here are recent changes: Mana cost of glyph of Uplift +21%, Mana cost of Jab +33%, Teachings of the Monastery now provides 2% mana to Tiger Palm, Reduced T15 4pc from -5 sec cooldown on Thunder Focus Tea.

Metagem and Trinket proc rates
- I know I said we'd provide these, and we will. We're still making active changes to them though, so we don't want to waste anyone's theorycrafting time until they are a bit more stable. Hopefully in a few days. We haven't forgotten.

Here's the followup question then. Will this disable the AR glyph? That brings Combat to a .5s GCD with the glyph if they're stacked.

They will stack. As I said, it's an experiment.

Could you possibly speak on this subject? It feels like the tier is designed exclusively for Holy, and that makes me sad.

We've been searching for some hard numbers (key phrase there) on secondary stat values for Disc with the 5.2 changes, but so far we can't find much discussion out there beyond "Well, I guess we might want more crit so PoH will give DA again." If you know of any we might not have seen (another key phrase there), let us know.

Below are the scary guts of the new trinkets and metagems. This information is for theorycrafters. You don't need to read this to understand how the mechanics work or enjoy their benefits.

Trinkets

Agility DPS
- Vicious Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – 15% chance on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 105 sec ICD.
- Renataki’s Soul Charm – 0.56 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD.
- Talisman of Bloodlust – 3.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
- Bad Juju – 0.50 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD. Voodoo Gnomes are mostly for flavor; they deal ~200 damage before armor per hit.
- Rune of Re-Origination – 0.46 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD

Strength DPS
- Brutal Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault - 15% chance on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 75 sec ICD.
- Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun - 0.56 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. 22 sec ICD.
- Primordius’ Talisman of Rage – 3.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
- Spark of Zandalar - 5.00 RealPPM on landing harmful abilities and spells, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
- Gaze of the Twins – 1.00 RealPPM on critical harmful abilities and spells, periodic spell, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.

Intellect DPS
- Volatile Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – 15% chance on landing harmful spell. 45sec ICD.
- Wushoolay’s Final Choice – 0.56 RealPPM on damage/absorb from harmful abilities and spells, and periodic spells. 22 sec ICD.
- Breath of the Hydra – 0.50 RealPPM on damage/absorb from periodic spell. No ICD.
- Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen – 0.50 RealPPM on damage/absorb from harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.
- Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance – 1.00 RealPPM on critical harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.

Healer
- Soothing Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – On Use, 180sec CD.
- Horridon's Last Gasp – 1.00 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. No ICD.
- Inscribed Bag of Hydra-Spawn – 1.13 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. 17 sec ICD.
- Stolen Relic of Zuldazar – 3.00 RealPPM on attempting helpful spell while in combat. No ICD. Use effect has a 20sec CD.
- Lightning-Imbued Chalice – 3.00 RealPPM on heal from helpful spell and periodic spell while in combat. No ICD.

Tank
- Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault – On Use, 120 sec CD.
- Fortitude of the Zandalari – On Use, 120 sec CD.
- Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire – 4% chance on dodge melee ability or swing. No ICD.
- Ji-Kun's Rising Winds – 100% chance on taking damage from melee abilities or swings, that leaves you below 35% health. 30 sec ICD.
- Soul Barrier - On Use, 120 sec CD.

Legendary Metagems

Sinister Primal Diamond – 0.84 RealPPM on damage/absorb of harmful or periodic spell. No ICD.
Courageous Primal Diamond – 1.00 RealPPM on attempting helpful spell. No ICD.
Indomitable Primal Diamond – 1.00 RealPPM on damage/absorb taken from melee ability or swing. No ICD.
Capacitive Primal Diamond – 15.00 base RealPPM on landing melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD. At 5 stacks, fires Lightning Strike, which deals [280 + 75% AP] Nature damage. That base proc rate is multiplied by an additional coefficient by spec:
- Assassination: 1.535
- Combat: 0.99
- Subtlety: 0.98
- Feral: 1.934
- Windwalker: 1.084
- Beast Mastery: 1.604
- Marksmanship: 1.594
- Survival: 1.449
- Enhancement: 1.093
- Retribution: 1.923
- Frost DK (2H): 1.309
- Frost DK (DW): 1.572
- Unholy: 1.34
- Arms: 1.771
- Fury (TG): 1.784
- Fury (SMF): 1.951

This will make us mistweaver only use jab in combo with TP or we will loss so much mana.

Yes. To oversimplify, we don't want Jab, Jab, Uplift, nor do we want Soothe, Soothe, Tiger Palm. We want Fistweaving to provide significant damage and healing, but both should be less than an actual DPS spec or a traditional healer (again Atonement is the model). Fistweaving will be awesome for some situations, but we want it to be a compromise, otherwise, you'd want monks for all your healers, since you get all this bonus DPS on the side for no healing cost. In order to deliver on this, we have to make it harder to cherry pick some Fistweaving abilities and some Mistweaving abilities.

I question why Rogues are getting 0.7 GCD consideration while Feral is stuck weaving 1.5sec GCD heals into their DPS rotation.

Cat Form has reduced the GCD of spells to 1.0 sec for a few builds now. As I've said, the rogue GCD change is very much an experiment. If it doesn't work out, it's one set bonus that will eventually be replaced. This should not open the gates for everyone requesting microscopic GCDs for their spec. At the end of the day, we have a client-server architecture and the GCD provides time for data communication back and forth.

Why is the PPM different by spec considering that realPPM is supposed to give every class/spec roughly the same proc rate already?

Three reasons. A) RealPPM procs still scale more frequently with haste, which many specs have drastically more or less of. B) The proc that it gives you in this case scales directly with AP, which many specs have drastically more or less of. C) It’s not terribly uncommon for A or B (but not usually both) to occur on a trinket, and we can swallow that much variance. And there are typically other options for trinkets if one underperforms for you; there isn’t here, and we want the legendary metagems to be equally awesome for everyone. As a sidenote, we didn’t do that spec variance yet for the Sinister (caster DPS) one, but are still considering doing so. The situation there doesn’t seem quite as skewed as it did for the physical DPS, so we haven’t yet, but still very well might.

Can you at least clarify how Rune of Re-Origination would work? Wording on the trinket is not very clear.

Warning: technical mumbo jumbo follows.

At proc time, it checks how much crit, haste, and mastery you have (yes, this is a snapshot, and does NOT include the mastery raid buff). It finds which is the highest of those 3 (tie breaking rule: crit trumps haste trumps mastery), and gives you a buff of +[sum of lowest two stats] to your highest stat, and -[lowest stat A] and -[lowest stat B]. For example, if you have 6000 mastery, 3000 crit, 2000 haste, and the proc goes off, it gives you a buff that provides [+5000 mastery, -3000 crit, -2000 haste]. It does not continue adjusting that buff as stats change during its duration. Yes, this means that if you have a temporary buff to a stat that is not your highest (even with the temporary buff), and that temporary buff falls off during Re-Origination, you *could* end up with negative rating. In this obscure edge case, negative crit does reduce your crit chance, negative mastery does reduce whatever it normally does, and negative haste is ignored.

What's the rate for specs not mentioned in the list for the Capacitive Primal Diamond? Examples include Blood DKs, Prot Warriors/Paladins.

Just the base 15.00 RealPPM.

Why does the trinket note that it can stack if the RPPM isn't high enough to allow it to in the first place?

RealPPM isn’t an ICD. Note that the stacking Agi trinket is only 10 sec duration, whereas the stacking Str trinket is 20 sec duration. And remember that haste increases the frequency of procs. Neither of these is expected to stay at max stacks very much of the time. It’s more that it can quite often proc again while it’s already up and by letting it stack, that becomes an awesome occurrence, rather than a disappointing one.

Can the Capacitive Primal Diamond cause a critical strike?

Yes, but it uses your spell crit/hit rates.

One concern from Mistweavers when dealing with Capacitive Primal Diamond is that the Conductive proc would affect Eminence.

Yes, the Lightning Strike should trigger Eminence. We don’t expect that to be particularly worthwhile though.

Is this RealPPM calculated differently due to being on crit rather than being on hit? Does it account for a characters crit chance in the 1 RPPM or is it just a 1 RPPM that procs on a crit?

Currently, no, the fact that it only procs on crits basically doesn’t matter for more than flavor. However, we’re considering making these multiply the proc chance by your crit chance, so that they get the "more crit = more procs" effect that all proc-on-crit trinkets have had historically. Like I said yesterday, one of the reasons we haven’t posted all of these numbers til now is that they’ve been in flux as we make adjustments like this. This is one such change we’re still considering.

Tiger's Palm will restore 2% mana at all times. Is the possible use of Tiger's Palm to dump extra Chi (generated by Soothing Mists during down time, or Power Strikes, for example) in exchange for mana intended? Or are you planning to tie the mana regen mechanic to Muscle Memory to prevent this?

We’re currently still planning to let Tiger Palm always restore 2% mana. Yes, this is a potential way to convert chi into mana efficiently, but it still doesn’t generate as much mana as it cost to generate that chi, so isn’t mana positive. And the healing it provides, without Muscle Memory, is rather small. It’s definitely something we’ve noticed and are keeping an eye on, though.

Could you clarify on what trinkets you're talking about specifically? To me "stacking agi trinket" would seem to be describing Renataki's Soul Charm yet the context of the statement seems to indicate you're talking about Talisman of Bloodlust / Primordius' Talisman of Rage / Gaze of the Twins.

Sorry for the confusion, I was indeed talking about Talisman of Bloodlust, Primordius' Talisman of Rage, and Gaze of the Twins. They all are just RPPM random proc chances, and if the buff is already up when you get another proc, it refreshes and stacks to 2 (or 3, etc).

Renataki’s Soul Charm, Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun, and Wushoolay’s Final Choice all proc a buff that automatically gains a stack every 2 sec (and have ICDs such that it’s not possible for them to proc again while they’re already up). Also, this is a good time to note a nuance with Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire: its proc’d buff can stack just like Talisman of Bloodlust, Primordius' Talisman of Rage, and Gaze of the Twins, up to a max of 3 stacks. We didn’t note that in the tooltip since (apart from tanking large packs of mobs), it would be extremely rare for it to happen.

For Disc priests, will Atonement count as 'helpful spell'? In cata this was the case for some trinkets early on, but not in DS.

Currently, no, but since it’s RPPM, any single heal or periodic tick every 10 sec will give you the full proc frequency. A single Renew out, or a PW:S cast every 10 sec, etc.

Ghostcrawler, is it intended that abilities like denounce or roar of sacrifice prevent Lava burst from critting even though it clearly states "always deal a critical strike."?
Chaos bolt which has the always critical isn't affected by this. The nerf to lava burst damage means while these effects are up we do next to no damage with it even worse than lava burst not critting before.
Hopefully this is just an oversight.

Whether the Immovable Object or the Unstoppable Force wins is something we’re inconsistent about at times. We'll discuss this and make a call. I agree at first glance that it would make sense to work like Chaos Bolt.

Esentially, this makes it worth roughly ~half of a generic trinket of similar ilvl, because the proc isn't adding any itemization, unlike every other trinket in existence. If there were agility specs that had huge discrepancies in secondary stat weights (i.e. best stat is 3x+ the average value of the worst two stats) then maybe someone could find some use for it, but, as far as I know, community theorycrafting indicates that this is not the case.

This is a tricky one to balance. As you say, it doesn’t actually increase your total stats, it just converts your (presumably weaker) lower secondary stats into your (presumably stronger) higher primary stats. The larger the difference in value between your best secondary and worst secondaries, and how much of those weaker secondaries you end up with on gear, all factor into this. For many classes, haste/crit/mastery are all actually relatively close in value (despite how much some people scream that stat A is “utter garbage” and the like). In that case, this isn’t much of a DPS gain, on average. However, there’s another nuance to this that complicates things further: many classes can game the proc somehow. Just to pull a random example out of thin air (this may not be a big gain, but it illustrates the point), as an Enhancement Shaman, you could try to line your Ascendance up with a Mastery Re-Origination. This is definitely one where we’d love to see more theorycrafting.

Priest
- Power Infusion - in addition to current effects, also increases all damage by 10%.
- And now, Discipline. Recall that the main problems we are trying to fix for Disc in PvE are that they are overpowered and relying too much on Prayer of Healing spam, especially in 25s. We made some changes to Divine Aegis, but we're not happy with them. Because of the interaction with crit and mastery, we worry Disc will be too crit-dependent and won't be strong enough when they fail to crit. On top of that, we're worried that it will be too easy to push Disc priests into loving mastery and hating crit or loving crit and hating mastery. To try and address all of those problems, old and new, we are trying a few different things:

1) Divine Aegis now works differently. It causes any critical heal to proc a bubble for 100% of the heal instead of doubling the heal. In other words, a crit for Holy is a 200% heal. A crit for Disc is a 100% heal + a 100% bubble. The bubble however benefits from mastery, so it's more likely a 100% heal + a 130% bubble.
2) Power Word: Shield can now crit for Discipline.
3) Mastery now boosts shields by 1.6% per point (down from 2.5% per point) but now also increases all healing by 0.8% per point.

What we hope this does:

- Keeps the kit of Divine Aegis making crits do something special.
- Makes Disc still awesome at bubbles, but not quite so weak at heals. (Holy will cast bigger heals than Disc, but not 50% higher.)
- Makes Prayer of Healing good for periods of restoring damage, but makes Power Word: Shield better for periods of preventing damage. (Inner Focus to force Divine Aegis and Spirit Shell also help with preventing damage).
- Making crit a good stat, because it benefits most of the toolbox (including PW:S) and causing Divine Aegis bubbles, but also keeping mastery a good stat, because the bubbles are large, and even when you don't get a bubble, it will still help your heal.

"Help, I'm a nervous Disc priest. Reassure me!"

Keep casting Prayer of Healing like you do today. Keep using Spirit Shell when you anticipate big damage. Start using Power Word: Shield more than you likely do today. Remember that we buffed Penance. Atonement still works. You might need to pay more attention to Spirit (the way the other healers do today).

Yes, I wrote all of this from a PvE point of view. We made several other Disc changes to help in PvP, and we haven't reverted any unless I explicitly mentioned them.

Will the mastery provide a straight up boost to healing too or is it still a 20% buff to absorbs + x% per point of master and y% boost to your healing?

The way mastery works for everyone is there is a base amount so that you benefit even with no mastery gear. We used to call it 8 "points" but we don't use that terminology anymore. for Disc, the base amount is +12.8% to absorbs and +6.4% to heals. A character with 8824 mastery would have +36.33% to absorbs and +18.16% to heals. The 3000 mastery raid buff would bump that up to +44.33% to absorbs and +22.16% to heals. Also note that the metagem which increases the size of your crits still works.

If you had all of the above mastery and the crit gem and you cast a heal for 100K, it would heal for 122K, or if it crit, it would heal for 126K and proc a 182K absorb from Divine Aegis.

Trinkets

Update on the RealPPM-OnCrit trinkets, Gaze of the Twins and Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance: See the previous post for commentary on why, but we’re going to change their proc rate to vary based on your crit chance:

- Gaze of the Twins – [0.8*(1+MeleeCritChance)] RealPPM on critical harmful abilities and spells, periodic spell, and melee/ranged abilities and swings. No ICD.
- Cha-Ye's Essence of Brilliance – [0.77*(1+SpellCritChance)] RealPPM on critical harmful spells and periodic spells. No ICD.

Also, we’re going to try to get Rune of Re-Origination and Unerring Vision of Lei Shen on Flaskataur for you to try out. We don’t want to make every item in the game accessible (at some point it is possible to spoil the joy of getting loot completely), but those two in particular are unique effects for which we’d love to get more feedback before they drop for "real."

The lack of hunter acknowledgement in this patch is astounding

I'll assume you didn't read much of these past two threads in searching for information or you would have read my repeated pleas for no whining.

I'm also not particularly interested in anyone's excuses for why they feel like they should be allowed to whine. Sorry. Them's the rules.

The reason Jab Jab Uplift ultimately came to be was because of it's reliability. Part of it was mana efficiency, but most of it comes down to it's the only on-gcd guaranteed chi generation.

We don't really have a problem if you use Jab Jab Uplift infrequently when you absolutely feel like you need chi. But it's going to be expensive to do so. We ask healers to make decisions about efficiency versus throughput all the time. When it feels too expensive though, switch to Jab Jab Tiger Palm or just swap to actual heals.

Also please buff offensive penance to 40 yards with the glyph of holy fire. It's the only thing that is still 30.

We tried to do that, but Penance is a funny spell, which made this implementation difficult. We went ahead and just made it 40 yards for damage baseline, which will have the same problem of not all your spells being the same range if you lack the glyph, but at least then you have the option.

With the buffs to penance and the increased focus on Atonement, are you at all worried about seeing guilds stacking Disc priests simply because of their dps?

Disc and Fistweaving monks should do less DPS than a true DPS spec and less healing while in DPS mode than someone casting healing spells. The advantage they provide is that sometimes a little healing and a little DPS is what you need. These changes weren't intended to be a huge buff to Atonement, so we'll have to see how it shakes out.

It doesn't help much, either since it doesn't fix their scaling.

This word, through overuse, has now lost as much meaning as the word "clunky." You're going to have to find another way to express your concerns if you want us to pay attention to them.

Testing has shown that our Single Target DPS is dropping on the ptr with your current changes, nerfing a middle of the pack to back of the bunch class seems like there must be a vendetta.

We need numbers or a link or something. If there is testing, we need to see it if you want any hope of convincing us. (BTW, saying you're not whining and then saying we must have a vendetta against you don't really jive.)

Holy gets it's much higher than .08 mastery when it doesn't crit always. We're doing slightly better than them on crits (and only slightly), but the crit % makes it not only really low, but very random and unreliable. Years of healers preferring haste over crit for reliability in healing should factor in here somewhere I'd think.

The hot from Holy is often overhealing. Not always of course, but often. On the other hand, the bubble is almost never overhealing, and in fact often causes everyone else to overheal. You won't crit very often, but when you do, it's essentially a big crit, not unlike an Elemental shaman doing damage. That gives crit some value that other healers don't even have. On the other hand, if you feel like you must get a bubble off and can't rely on RNG, you have four great choices: PW:S a few people, Inner Focus a Prayer of Healing, cast Spirit Shell, or use PW:B.

Also, does this make disc the first spec to have a dual mastery or have we seen this before?

Demonology's is similar. Ultimately, we want mastery to be about what your spec uniquely does, but it also has to affect a large enough percent of your damage or healing to make the stat compete against crit and haste. Our design intent for Disc is not to cast nothing but bubbles, so even though bubbles are a big part of the kit, they aren't going to be 90% or whatever of actual heals. So in this case, we felt it made sense to have mastery also help the heals in order to keep it competitive.

The DA is 160k and the heal is 200k for a 360k heal. The DA is also only 160k so it's less likely to hit the max bubble size cap.

We increased the DA cap from 40% to 60% to work better with the new design.

As someone mentioned before, because you've shifted such a huge portion of our crit heals into an absorb, we're now even more susceptible to dispels in PvP. Making DA undispellable is a pretty big hammer, so I understand that you're reluctant to do this, but there must be some middle ground.

We will discuss this. My gut is that you aren't critting enough in PvP for loss of DA to amount to that much lost healing, but it does make Inner Focus less useful, and in any case, the change isn't intended to be a PvP nerf.

Ghostcrawler, all this disc priest information... I love you. Please run away with me where we can live out our lives in peace together.

You got it. I'll bring the gin. Peace out, everyone.

Paladin
- We're worried that we're not going to be able to get the new Seal of Justice on PTR in a good place. We still like the goal of giving Ret more damage outside of their long cooldowns, but Censure just brings a lot of benefits that are going to be hard to reproduce in any kind of "build up to burst" mechanic. When faced with decisions like these where the new design isn't a clear win, we think the right decision is to revert the change. It's possible we could buff Seal of Justice (the 5.1 version) to 20% damage from 16% damage, but overall it would still probably not get much use in PvP.
- However, we haven't given up on the idea of solving Ret's problems of long cooldowns. We are going to try changing the 4pc PvP set bonus to lowering the cooldown on Avenging Wrath by 1 min. This is a set bonus that has worked out pretty well in PvE and would help Ret keep up pressure more frequently without getting to the point of one-shot abilities.

Priest
- We are going to make the new Divine Aegis undispellable.

I appreciate the gesture, but i think this still has a problem. Chiefly that PI and Hero don't stack, both being haste buffs.

That was just a bug. Sorry. They should stack.

Blue please clarify if mastery will effect Spirit Shell.

No. It does on 5.1 but will not in 5.2. When mastery affects Spirit Shell it changes the spell from "turn your heals into absorbs" into "use this as a healing cooldown because it makes all your spells stronger."

Moving Sudden Death back to White swings might be the solution to fixing this problem, but even than it's looking optimal even during CS to use the two stacks of Overpower to reduce Mortal Strike's Cooldown.

We did return Sudden Death to white swings and Strikes of Opportunity (mastery) at a 10% proc chance. Overpower still has a 1 sec GCD and reduces the cooldown of Mortal Strike to avoid the 0.5 GCD hole.

We want Slam to be worth using when you don't have Overpower procs or when you want to maximize DPS during Colossus Smash. We don't want to buff Slam so much that the rotation just becomes MS -> Slam.

When it feels too expensive though, switch to Jab Jab Tiger Palm or just swap to actual heals.

To be technically correct, I should have said Jab -> Tiger Palm. We talk about Jab Jab Uplift so often that it has become a thing around the office. I joked about making our next Arena team name Jab Jab Uplift.

By actual heals, I meant Spinning Crane Kick, Surging Mist or anything that grants chi, assuming you're using Renewing Mist on CD already.

A bug that's been there since PI was put into the game? Wow...

It's really an MoP bug. Previously you cast PI on someone, where the behavior was intended.

I assume it is still going to be calculated as the expected value of the heal cast outside of SS including crits and any resulting aegis? In that sense it is indirectly affected by mastery as mastery buffs the base value of the heal as well as the aegis portion of the crit.

Yes. Spirit Shell on live today doesn't know whether your heal would have crit or not. We're not running a simulation and then intercepting the results and turning them into bubbles -- we're just predicting the average. It shouldn't work any differently. Yes, your crit won't benefit from the bubble part of mastery, but the heal part of mastery should almost entirely offset that.

Metagems
We switched Capacitive to use melee hit/crit instead of spell hit/crit.

Could you explain why Balance Druid dots function differently with respect to Crit than every other class' dots? Currently Crit updates dynamically for Balance Druids whereas other classes get snapshot values.

Good question. We decided to dig into all of the dots and found they worked pretty inconsistently. (Consistency isn't always critical because it does lead to a certain amount of homogeneity, but too little consistency can just be confusing too.) We made a pass at all of the class dots and made them snapshot crit chance. This will have implications in any simulations out there.

However, this has some implications on the Unerring Vision of Lei Shen trinket. We’re tentatively fine with the idea of you seeing that proc go off, and reapplying DoTs which crit for their whole duration, in most cases. There’s a couple cases where those periodic crits cause other effects, which end up being very powerful. For example, a Balance Druid can now apply Moonfire and Sunfire, and pretty much chain instant Starsurges for 15 sec, many of which are extending that Moonfire and Sunfire, probably out to 20-25 sec. That’s extremely strong, but we’re going to try leaving it alone for now.

The one which is simply too strong to leave is for Shadow. For Shadow having Unerring Vision and the PvE set bonuses would mean that every SW:P tick guaranteed crits, so spawns a Shadowy Apparition, which has a 65% chance of extending SW:P and VT. And the VT ticks have a 10% chance of spawning a Shadowy Apparition as well. And both can trigger a mastery tick, both of which can also spawn another Shadowy Apparition. The net result is that the feedback loop is so strong that in attainable gear, it’s net positive, resulting in SW:P and VT lasting forever (or at least until you get very unlucky and get a long string of failed procs, which will probably take several minutes to happen).

Since 100% crit SW:P and VT that never need to be refreshed is a wee bit too strong, we’re building in a failsafe. We’re fine with you getting a normal SW:P/VT duration of all crits, but not forever. When Shadowy Apparition extends SW:P and VT, and that DoT has already lasted longer than its normal duration, it will recalculate its crit chance. The result should be that the trinket procs, you reapply SW:P/VT, and get 18/15 sec of crits, then they drop to your normal crit chance.

When Smite healing mastery is useless…

Mastery increases Atonement healing. Suppose I have mastery such that my Absorbs are increased by 36.33%, and healing is increased by 18.17% (same values we mentioned yesterday). I Smite for 35391, non-crit. Atonement heals the tank for… 35391*1.1817=41820. Now suppose that Smite crits, for 70782. Atonement crit heals the tank for 41820, plus a Divine Aegis for… 41820*1.3633= 57012. (Atonement critting is still based on whether the Smite crit).

Haste, mastery, and crit will all benefit Atonement healing. Yes, when PI and Bloodlust are stacked, you’ll be GCD capped, so haste isn’t helping you during that brief cooldown window, but that’s a small portion of the overall time.

While implementing support for this, I was wondering about a few things:
- Does the damage from this scale with SV mastery? (Assuming yes)
- Do pet attacks proc it? (Assuming no)
- Do dot based abilities proc it on initial application? Do they proc it on ticks? (Assuming yes and no based on the wording, but this is of particular interest to SV with explosive shot and BA)
- Can the lightning strike proc wild quiver?

All of your assumptions are correct. Lightning Strike cannot proc Wild Quiver.

Does Slice and Dice count as haste for the real PPM system?

Yes. RPPM uses the highest of all haste/attack speed/cast speed effects.

Is that a 10% proc chance on just mastery (retaining the 20% we previously had on swing) or 10% on swing and 10% on mastery?

Sorry. It's 10% on swing and a 10% on mastery.

EDIT: Atonement numbers replaced with numbers on a tank vs. on yourself.

Did I miss a 50% atonement healing nerf somewhere?

Whoops. Atonement heals yourself for half, and that's where our numbers came from.

Correction: Atonement heals the tank for… 35391*1.1817=41820. Now suppose that Smite crits, for 70782. Atonement crit heals the tank for 41820, plus a Divine Aegis for… 41820*1.3633= 57012. (Atonement critting is still based on whether the Smite crit).