Class Changes, first reactions

Overheal

Want to see how everyone like it.

I found Threat to be wildly interesting again as a Protadin, now its not just senselessly filling in every GCD with the list of spells so large and absurd I could barely fit all of them on my bars. Now I actually spend my time managing threat whereas a week ago it was like Oh Look I have threat lets help the healers heal and pop this thing to mitigate that guys damage and etc. Now you get to mind your new resource (Holy Power) And decide wether you really want to use that multi over that single. Holy Wrath is an awesome spell now as well - Single target its very potent, Multi-target its still good, and can be glyphed to stun elementals and dragonkin. huzzah!

As for Ret Im not seeing the same numbers anymore but it will take a while to get used to. Overall I like what theyve done to simplify the Paladin's Buffs and Seals and Auras. Thats a lot less hassle. Before it was like "WAAA I dont want kings give me might!" "No I want wisdom!" "Wheres my kings?" They can all go to hell now

Decided to go back on my first toon and see if they fixed rogues, and they have. Subtlety was actually a joy to play around with an level on. You get Shadowstep right from the get-go which took away 90% of the complaints I had with the spec. They now have a handy combo-point HoT so basically your down time is no longer existent. I may actually go back and level him now. Curious to play on the Druid too.

As for Raiding: Mages, you suck. Doing far and above what other classes are doing on Damage and Threat in most cases and not just the Frost mages. BGs are broken now, you go into WSG and you're spawn-camped by 3 casters who can basically 2-shot you. With 1200 Resilience! Plate! Resistance Aura! There is a good reason that they closed the Season -_-

But particularly as a tank, I like what they've done.

Oh and Earning 200g selling those Glyph dusts was worth a laugh.

TechnoPool

plate doesnt matter vs casters;)

red_ice

what does this have to do with cricket?

Nehaxak

Only really been playing the Warlock but loving the changes. Only testing out Demonology spec at the moment but wow, really nice.
Felguard's Legion Strike, Axe Toss and the Felstorm talents are brilliant in pvp. Coupled with Hand of Gul'dan beforehand if you're lucky to keep the enemy there, it's just amazing dps. I'm not great geared at all on the Warlock but Legion Strike is critting for around 4k and Felstorm is just mad, like your own personal bladestorm warrior !
That and the 50% talented ability to summon an Ebon Imp with Bane of Doom on other players is a lot of fun in pvp.

Oh and the talented ability to move around with Hellfire going is a great change too.

Free Doomguard or Infernal every ten minutes means you can have 3 pets on the go on just one target

Really enjoying playing the Warlock in demonology anyway

Nehaxak

One more thing, because Agony is now not a curse but a "Bane" - it means you can have curse of elements on a target too, that's another small change but huge impact.
Curse of Elements, Corruption or Seed, Immolate, Bane of Agony - all on the one target and easy enough to spam on multiple targets in pvp. Bane of Doom is only castable on one target at a time.

Going to try out affliction spec now when the server comes back up after the rolling restart.

Oh, currently casting or even watching another warlock cast Ritual of Souls makes my client crash randomly, not all the time, just maybe 80% of the time

Berns

Mains a rogue and only really tried him out. ICC 25 tonight and Subelty was decent, but still behind mutilate. Would love to be raiding with it but not sure it would be possible atm. Mutilate wins vs this and im guessing Combat still superior on movement fights.

Warlocks seem to have been topin the meters but aint tried mine yet. Hadnt even thought of it but but have to now prob o.O Drake run maybe on monday if it goes ahead, not sure now we know aint 310 any more

degrassinoel

the crying in trade is becoming a nuisance, even with the anti-spam feature.

Mr. CooL ICE

PvE disc priests are more interesting. It seems the Heal spell has been rescued from obscurity and can now be used as a semi utility spell. Aside from that, my 44K self buffed mana pool seems a bit insane.

PvE shadow priest doesn't seem to have changed too much, but it is kinda funny seeing a copy of myself walking at the test dummy before going BOOM. Like other casters, dps seems buffed, and that was before I realised I needed to apply my glyphs.

I had a quick go with my warrior as fury in an instance and didn't actually rearrange my bars and bindings as I only had to wait 30 seconds for a group, but damage seems about the same. That said, I am pretty sure I was playing it wrong.

Haven't had a chance to test my warrior tanking, nor my DK tank or mage. Tonight should be interesting.

Dcully

Any changes to Holy Priest?
Not subbed atm but the long evenings and an expansion are coming :P

Nehaxak

There's nerfs for some classes and buffs for others coming soon, I'll try find the actual post rather than copy in text from someone else on another forum.

EDIT: There we go...

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/27187856197/class-balance-as-of-oct-13-2010/

Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010
Rather than try and address multiple threads, I'm just going to plop our current thoughts in this one post. Please excuse the brevity.

1) We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them.

2) We think mage dps is too high, especially Fire, and will be nerfing it.

3) We think Shadow priest dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Shadow Word: Death spam, which is tough on healers. We'll be fixing that.

4) We think Destro warlock dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Searing Pain spam, which is tough on tanks. We'll be fixing that.

5) As we suspected, PvP dps is just too high given that the health pools of Cataclysm haven't kicked in yet. While competitive PvP is over for the moment, we still want the environment to feel better so we will be buffing resilience. This change might be reverted at level 85.

There will probably be more changes after another night of raiding and BGs. Many of the bug fixes we have made today will affect dps as well. Stay tuned.

Re: Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010
We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don't see a specific change referenced below, doesn't mean it didn't change.

With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:

1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.

2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.

3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell.

4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels.

5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.

We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.

Re: Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010
Here are some more recent changes:

Shadow Priests – we lowered the damage of Shadow Word: Death, except when the target is at the 20% wounded state, at which point it will do full damage. We also fixed a bug where the energize from Masochism was causing too much threat. (This is just a clarification on the above note -- we have not nerfed it twice.)

Balance Druids – we lowered the base points and coefficients of several Balance spells, especially Insect Swarm.

Affliction Warlocks – we lowered the damage of Drain Soul slightly.

Nehaxak

Oh, just thought I'd mention it in case anyone wasn't aware, you can now buy Wrathful pvp gear set and whatever else is there, apart from (I think) the stuff from the Exceptional Arena Vendor - with just plain honor points.
I've heard you can't buy the wrathful shoulders and the high end 2h weapons but I can't confirm myself as I don't have enough points to spend to try it out.

Kiith

I'm at the vendor now, and you still need an arena score. Nothing in the wrathful set is for just honour. Relentless stuff ya, but not Wrathful.

Nehaxak

Nope, ignore that text on the vendor, you can still buy the items with just honor points. I bought the caster dps mace for 1830 honor points (I think it cost that), for my priest earlier this morning along with an offhand, both wrathful.

Kiith

Bah! i hope i can turn back in some of the relentless stuff that i just bought. I desperatly need a new weapon.

2 Espressi

Ran a couple of BGs over the weekend with the shammy, the new panels are pretty handy, I can see myself using them in Resto mode (which I haven't tried yet). It seems casters are hitting harder, and surviving less?

Also levelled a gnoam warrior to 15 (starter zones are a lot faster than they used to be!) and tanked a couple of runs through RFC, I'd forgotten how good it is to have <10sec queues!

All the new bells and whistles are taking its tool on my aging PC, I've had to turn every gfx details bar "View Distance" down to minimum, turned off all my heavy addons, and I'm still disconnecting quite a lot.

witless1

Patch and addon nightmares stopped me getting any meaningful testing done! I did manage a ToGC on the Shadow Priest (main since Vanilla) and Elemental Shaman though as well as some practice on the dummies. Both classes have had their numbers tweaked, I'm about +3k DPS compared to the last time I played them.

Shadow Priest (PVE perspective): The class has not changed much right now at level 80. Mind Blast is back in the rotation (although it never left it as the sole replenishment provider in 10m runs!) as is SWD. The shadow orbs mastery requires no real thinking, MB lights up when you have three orbs and bang it hits like a truck. Shadow Apparations while nice graphically are a bit underwhelming. They could have done so much more with this mechanic instead it's passive and requires no thought on the casters behalf, a lazy way to increase DPS. SWD is interesting again, glyphed and within execute range it hits hard, gives us a nice option in PVE but I'm not happy with how they changed it to only use it twice then it enters cooldown. An execute ability should be spammable, the numbers could have been tweaked but the bottom line is a shadow priest will die if he spams SWD and healers will QQ. The spell still won't be fully usable on gimmick fights which involve say a player damage buff or raid wide AoE because of the lashback potentially killing you. From reading on the forums and that Mind Spike is going to be underused but thankfully the threat mechanic is gone and Mastery will be reforged on sight due to the terrible scaling of it. The class basically hasn't changed since TBC in terms of playstyle and it's disappointing that the one new spell they bring in won't effect our single target rotation. I'm sure there will be number tweaks but like every class the grass is always greener on the other side.

Elemental Shaman: Complete overhaul and the class is actually fun to play again. Lava Burst coming off of CD randomly adds a nice priority rotation to the class, Lightning Shield stacking to 9 and hitting for big numbers is nice and adds an extra dimension for managing GCDs on shocks in the future (moot point at the mo with T10 4 piece bonus). The addition of searing / fire elemental totem adds a nice passive bonus increase -- in contrast to the shadow priests apparitions it requires a bit of management and thought on when to use them. Beta testing and feedback is rather positive for the class as well which is encouraging after a rather lackluster expansion.

From other classes that I have seen:

- Affiction Warlock: Doing unreal DPS and the class looks fairly interesting with the changes made. If they could bring the playstyle and changes for affliction into Shadow e.g. Soul Swap would have solved the target switching problem for Shadow.

- Arcane Mage: 2 button hero class still and even more so now that mana isn't a problem

Overheal

I dont know if anyone else has noticed this but it feels like I do less threat and more damage in Prot; and others more threat and less damage in Ret.

TheDoc

Might fire the Warlock up for a little bit of fun, hearing alot of good things about the class changes

I guess during the downtime before cata I should mess with my characters and see whats what.

witless1

If I can get the time / motivation I will get my lock to 80 and have it as a strong possibility for a new main. Affliction is pushing big numbers and the playstyle is immense if you like the challenge of watching DoTs. Demo locks look like a good craic to play as well, a little whirlwinding Felguard and managing guardians / demons looks to have really beefed up the playstyle.

TechnoPool

Overheal wrote: »

I dont know if anyone else has noticed this but it feels like I do less threat and more damage in Prot; and others more threat and less damage in Ret.

this is true, sayes so pretty much in the patch notes

copeyhagen

my first reaction was to log my hunter, not know what was going on, minimize, look at hunter blogs for talent advice, maximize, log out.

then it was back to world of tanks, instant games, no queues, loads of fun

i might try cata when it comes out but i think till then i remain on hiatus

Dustaz

copeyhagen wrote: »

my first reaction was to log my hunter, not know what was going on, minimize, look at hunter blogs for talent advice, maximize, log out.

then it was back to world of tanks, instant games, no queues, loads of fun

i might try cata when it comes out but i think till then i remain on hiatus

Change hunter to mage, world of tanks to sc2 and LoL and i could have posted this

Its funny, a guildie whos 2 main chars are a pally and a boomkin is overwhelmed with how different the game is due to the changes in those classes, whereas me on my mage im pretty much "hmm, meh". Having said that, started to see a lot more of the pally/druid guy back on LoL and sc2 again:)

Like a spa i paid for 3 months so ill buy cataclysm and level up in it and give raiding another go round but unsure how long ill stay.

Nehaxak

copeyhagen wrote: »

my first reaction was to log my hunter, not know what was going on, minimize, look at hunter blogs for talent advice, maximize, log out.

then it was back to world of tanks, instant games, no queues, loads of fun

i might try cata when it comes out but i think till then i remain on hiatus

I switched two of my toons to Alliance the other day, the Paladin and Priest @ €25 a pop I get instant queues, even in the early hours of the morning :eek:
Unfortunately though, Alliance are completely shít at pvp and it's been like a 95% loss rate in any BG, even AV. There is no organisation, no teamwork, no reporting of leechers, shítloads of botters and undergeared crappy skilled players.
I know it's not all rosey on Horde side but they're considerably better at pvp than Alliance, better at teamwork, everyone seems to hate botters and leechers, always arguing how shít they're playing and that they should be better, constantly improving tactics etc., etc., So much better than Alliance at pvp it's frightening.

What we've started to do on Draenor Horde side though, and it's working really well, is to get a group of at least 3 people together to join BG's - the queue times go from 25+ minutes down to 2 or 3 minutes and instant at times. I'm convinced at this stage it's not just a population issue but a bug of some sort as if a group of 3 Horde can get almost instant BG's yet you have to wait 25+ minutes if you're solo ? Does not compute !

Dcully

Lads would yas recommend resubbing to get to grips with the changes or wait till closer to Cata?

Dustaz

Dcully wrote: »

Lads would yas recommend resubbing to get to grips with the changes or wait till closer to Cata?

Nah, save your money unless you actually want to play the game.

Resub when cata comes out and youll have the levelling process to adjust to the really big changes. The rest of the class changes are just numbers/rotations/talents which really only affect raiding/instances and bgs and the current thinking will be out of date by 85.