Upcoming boss armor change

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

As I have posted a couple of times recently, we decided to raise the armor of level 83 raid bosses by 10% to correct for some dps difference between casters and melee + hunters. I wanted to address the issue head on with the rogues.

We have done a lot of testing recently, and concluded that even with this change, Assassination rogues are likely the top dps spec in the game against single bosses that don't move around a lot (like Patchwerk). This isn't a bad place for them to be. They pay a small price both for being melee (where more damage tends to occur) and for lacking the ability to respec into a non-damage build. We don't think they will be as far above hybrids as they have been before -- as I've posted before, it's very important that hybrid classes do higher dps now that their buffs do not stack.

Combat builds, especially swords, is competitive but probably behind Assassination. This is something we'd like to address, especially if it turns out to be a major difference between the specs. Additional armor does hurt Combat, but also remember it's just raid bosses and not other players (or trash or heroic bosses).

Subtelty, sadly, is just much harder to test since so much of their damage relies on other players. Our preliminary evidence is that they generate plenty of combo points from Honor Among Thieves, but this might mean their personal dps when not in a group suffers. This is something we're still testing.

I will add that some players have wondered if Honor Among Thieves is bugged since the cp can occur more often than 1 sec. In this case, the tooltip is just unclear. When Jimmy the Shaman crits, he cannnot "send you" a combo point more often than 1 per sec. But if you have lots of players critting all the time, you can build them up quickly. So Honor is (here it comes) working as intended.

Hunter - Upcoming changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

As I have suggested a few times, we are concerned that hunters of all 3 specs are doing damage that is clearly superior to other classes. While we're trying to achieve closer parity among specs of all classes with regard to dps, and we want to particularly make sure that hunters, rogues, mages and locks are not left behind, we do think the hunters are too far ahead, particularly at 80, in good gear, when raid-buffed.

However, we have also tried to give hunters a substantial survivability boost in PvP and we don't want to do anything that hurts them too much in PvP.

So here are changes you will most likely see soon:

1) Ranged attacks no longer benefit from the haste effects of Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Talons. This is a nerf to hunter white damage.

2) We are also improving the armor on level 83 raid bosses by 10%. This will be a nerf to the dps of any class that does physical damage. For classes that would slide behind with such a change, we'll take steps to adjust them -- though it probably isn't as many as you think. The raid buff stacking overhaul was very beneficial to melee (and hunters). Sunder / Expose Armor alone can be a 20%+ dps increase, which is why we decided to attack the problem from this angle.

3) Now the armor change won't affect PvP at all and the haste buff change will only have a marginal affect in BGs and only in Arena teams that include certain comps. However, in order to make sure we didn't nerf hunters too much, we made two changes to Disengage. First, its cooldown dropped to 25 sec (from 30) which can be talented to 16. Second, it no longer requires a target, but does require you to be in combat. Now if someone closes to melee, you can leap back without having to select them first. We require you to be in combat though so we don't see a lot of hunters bouncing around IF / Org or using it like Blink to goofily speed up travel.

Mage - Upcoming Frost PvP changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We have concerns about how bursty dps has become in PvP. On the other hand, we're pretty happy with mage dps in PvE so we want to take care not to hurt it.

For example, we discussed shifting some of Arcane's damage between Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage, but that actually does hurt one of Arcane's PvE advantages over Fire -- namely to be able to move around while doing some instant spells.

In the case of Frost, however, we have become concerned that it's too easy to blow opponents up too quickly. Two of the culprits here are instant, uninterruptible Fireballs and Deep Freeze.

We are changing Brain Freeze to only proc off of Frost spells that can chill. Specifically, this limits the tactic of trying to fish for procs with Ice Lance. Ice Lance gets used a lot more in PvP, so we don't think this will hurt Frost as much in PvE.

Secondly, Cold as Ice no longer reduces the cooldown on Deep Freeze. Deep Freeze is an (ahem) cool spell and we don't want to nerf it too much, but you must admit that the poor frozen shmuck can endure a lot of damage while he is locked up.

Warlock - Upcoming DPS changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We have finished a fairly comprehensive look at the dps of various classes and specs and are concerned that warlock dps isn't quite where it should be. It's not abysmal by any means, but we think it should be a little higher.

To give warlocks a little extra nudge in PvP, we increased Soul Link up to 20% from 15%. You may already have this change.

In PvE, overall, we just think a lot of classes benefitted from getting the warlock buffs a little more than the locks benefited from getting everyone else's buffs. So we decided to just buff lock damage across the board (which will also help in PvP somewhat). Rather than change damage and coefficients of a lot of different ranks of spells, we just inflated talents that we were almost certain you'd already have. Shadow Mastery, Demonic Tactics and Emberstorm were all increased by 1% per rank for 5% total.

Let us know how that feels. The changes should go live before Nov 13.

Warrior - Recent Fury changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

As I posted recently in the hunter forums, we increased the armor on level 83 raid bosses by 10%. This will be a nerf to warrior dps.

In the case of Arms and Protection, we don't think any adjustment is necessary at this time. Arms is doing very competitive dps, while Fury has fallen behind. We experimented with lowering the proc chance of Sudden Death, from where Arms gets a lot of its damage, but weren't happy with the result and ultimately decided to buff Fury instead.

First, we increased the percentage of AP that contributes to Bloodthirst from 45% to 50%.

Second, we reduced the hit penalty on special attacks on Titan's Grip from -12% to -5%.

As I have said before, we have been somewhat reluctant to give Titan's Grip such a huge buff. It is now likely more powerful than several other talents in the tree and risks being the 51-point talent to which all other classes compare their 51-point talent. Nevertheless, we feel it was the right change to make.

When a Fury warrior missed a Slam or Bloodthirst on a boss, they ended up building up a lot of extra rage that couldn't be spent fast enough. I understand some players suggested an additional attack for Fury, and that is something we may still consider when we see players hit 80 and start experimenting more with the build. But it would be a very big change that involved touching talent trees and glyphs, as well as a lot of time necessary to iterate on the right values. The Titan's Grip change by contrast was a simple one, and judging by the number of players who have asked for it throughout beta, one that will be welcomed by the community.

Daily Blue

Hunter, Mage & Warlock DPS comparision
In our internal tests, warlocks are close to mages and below hunters, which as I've already suggested (or was that in another thread?) is a problem. I often regret posting what we're seeing at the moment, because it just leads to other questions. I offer it only to say that we do not reach the conclusion that warlock dps is sub-par. Hunters may be OP however. (src)

Hunter
Hunter DPS
We are seeing autoshot damage as much higher proportion of total damage than you are seeing. And we are seeing hunter damage much higher than other classes. That is only true when hunters can get their shots off and aren't interrupted -- this is a PvE and not a PvP concern. (src)

We are concerned that burst dps is too high in PvP at the moment. Our hope is that damage increased a lot with the most recent patch at 70, but then when everyone hits 80 their health and survivability will catch up. The logic is that with limited talent points most players just go for whatever maximizes their damage, but gear hasn't changed. However, we're not entirely convinced 80 will be better than 70. It's something we're talking about a lot right now. (src)

We still think the changes to hunters were the right ones to make (specifically the shot clipping issues), we are very concerned that hunters are doing too much of their damage from simple autoshots. The trick is to try and fix that without nerfing them in PvP, where they have historically not been stellar (at least in Arenas). (src)

Warlock
Demonic Empowerment
We compared this talent to other talents, such as Bestial Wrath which is not on the GCD, and decided to remove Demonic Empowerment from the GCD. The potential damage loss should no longer be an issue. (src)

Single target DPS
Warlock single-target dps should be competitive with mages, hunters and rouges. We try not to balance classes around their AE ability since that is situational (but often very useful). (src)

Affliction, Destruction and Demonology DPS
Affliction and Destro are pretty close. Affliction probably continues to be a trickier rotation to pull off, even with the recent (and previously announced) change to Haunt. We're not convinced yet that Affliction is the black diamond slope for experts only, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

Demonology may be lower, but we're also not sure it would be fair for Demo to get the extra survivability and do the same dps. However, we do think it is much less the case now that Demo = PvP only and Destro = PvE only. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
Curse of Elements - Moonkin and Deathknights provide this 13% debuff as part of their normal dps rotation without losing any dps. Warlocks have to give up casting a DPS curse to provide only a 10% benefit OR we have to spec deep affliction to get 13% benefit, but we still lose a DPS curse by applying it. This seems to go against the new debuffing philosophy.
Two answers here.

One, this is an entirely new system. It's going to take some time to see how it feels and tweaks on our part to get right. Assuming the overall change ends up feeling good, then we do need to look at situations where one class feels like they are paying substantially more (whether it's cost, talents, procs, giving up dps or whatever) than another class.

Second, we don't want the buffs to be utterly identical or we lose some of the differences between classes and ultimately depth to the game. While we do want to do more work on it per my above statement, if the litmus test for players is that their talent has the same number of ranks and is located in the same spot on the talent tree and has the same duration and the same ease to apply, they risk being disappointed.

Blood Pact (Imp) - This debuff is inferior to the other increased health buffs AND requires a specific pet out. This also seems against your new philosophy.
Our logic was the lock always had the option of bringing out another pet whereas the other class might have to respec or just end up with a buff that wasn't needed.

Stealth Detection channelled on VW - This seems really clumsy and difficult to use. Why did you move it from a passive buff on the FH to an active channel on the VW. Surely it would be better as a passive buff on the VW.
The Felhunter just felt like a jack-of-all-trades PvP pet. One of the things we're trying to do with locks is get more of the demons feeling useful. The Voidwalker gets used a lot while leveling and then gets parked, even though it is one of the more -- perhaps the most -- iconic pets. A passive buff is something we'll consider though.

Backdraft - Any plans to make this affect the GCD? I dont know if the tech can cupport this, but making immolate not consume a charge(and i guess not receive the haste) would really help. Also, is backlashed spells consuming the backdraft charges intended?
Affecting the GCD is always something we're reluctant to do. Removing Immolate would be possible -- it's just a change to the spell description. We can discuss it. Having backlash and backdraft play nice together is harder. This problem creeps up for a lot of different classes when one spell can proc multiple effects.

Fire and Brimstone - Are you happy with this talent, especially at 5 points?
I think the talent is fine. Five points might be a little steep. We do need some 5 point talents, especially in that slot, and all of them (throughout the game) risk becoming too general purpose, and therefore mandatory, if we keep buffing their effects. I'll put it on the list for consideration though.

Glyph of Souls - Could you explain the reasoning for changing to this to -70% mana cost. I dont like using hyperbole, but I can't think of any circumstance where this would be beneficial or useful. Unless you are changing Ritual of Souls?
We felt like it was a band-aid to the actual problem, which is that shards have changed from something to power certain powerful warlock spells to a generic resource. Rather than give you a couple of places here and there to opt out of them, we'd prefer to change the whole system. Bigger changes unfortunately take more time, but it's something we are talking about right now.

Master Conjurer - Any chance on tuning this talent a bit - it's nearly there but just needs to provide a little bit higher buff to the stones imo.
There are technical limitations to that prevent some of the buffs we would ideally grant to the stones. We might end up having to redesign the talent slightly.

Curse of Exhaustion - What's the reasoning behind the nerf to 30%?
It was 30% for a long time. We tried it at 50%, but it's ranged and renewable so it seemed like it shouldn't be as good as Hamstring and Wing Clip.

Drain Mana - I think it's pretty safe to say all warlocks consider this spell to be of very limited use. It really seemed not to scale at 70, and at 80 it drains even less of a % of a targets mana pool. Have you considered Drain Mana's usefulness in the expansion?
Rank 7 drains more than rank 6 and so on, so it does improve with level. It doesn't scale in the coefficient sense. To answer your question, we have considered it and didn't find it to be much weaker than it is today. It's something to keep an eye on though.

Reading back on this makes me a little paranoid that you will interpret my answers as our feeling that locks are broken. That isn't the case. In a game of this size there are always some things you'd want to look at given more time. I have just tried to be candid about what some of those areas are for warlocks. They exist for all classes though. It's an MMO. It changes over time.