It seems like the warlock uproar has gained such a momentum that Kalgan is breaking the seal of secrecy and is doing his best to calm us down.
Quote:
We definitely feel the need for warlocks to gain some sort of active defense so we don't have to try to balance them around the assumption that they're "tanking" melee classes. For example, an idea we're running with internally is the concept of a warlock being able to cast a spell that places a circle of demonic power on the ground. The warlock would be able to teleport to this location from within a relatively short range (ie: 40 yards), and would also be able to summon demons more quickly if they're standing within the circle.
Note: this idea is intended as a sneak peek, it's not something that we're planning for 2.4, it would be more likely as an expansion ability, and may change entirely before said time.
In short they, blizzard, know that we cannot possibly carry on with the silly design of a tanking class in cloth with no escape mechanism. In short we managed to hammer in their thick skull that this is not acceptable. It is not acceptable that mage have a hard time against us in the same way it is entirely bad design that we have such a hard time (impossible) against melee (rogue / warriors).
So nothing still in store to sort out the problem of season 4 gear with armor penetration, still no talk on what cloth users are getting to balance armor penetration and the dps increase of melee weapon. Kalgan just throw a bone on a HYPOTHETIC change in store for us in .... the next expantion.
In the mean time mage obviously go beserk when they heard of the remote possibility of warlock getting a blink. Kalgan swiftly move on to attempt to calm the situation and mention that in the next expantion mage will finally get spell to allow them to better handle warlocks (fair enough).
In all this what do we see?
Blizzard is aware that clothies are getting shorthanded and their play style is turning into a "tank the melee" because of lack of options.
Blizzard should be aware that the population of warrior is one the highest and strangely is growing these days...
Blizzard is still silent on what they are going to change for season 4 to allow clothies to stand a chance.
I think that blizzard is betting on the next expansion to sort things out and have already thrown the towel for clothie: for 2.4 and until the expansion cloth users will just have to bend over it seems. By then either blizzard will attempt to stem the number of people leaving by throwing us bits about the coming expansion and obviously the CM will not answer any thread on balance and will carry on answering the "rickrolls".
Kalganised yet again.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Kalganism at its best.
I was expecting a blue to eventually give us a feedback on the life tap nerf and was rather surprised that Kalgan tried to justify blizzard vision of class balance.
Kalgan posted the data he took into consideration to justify life tap nerfing:
2v2 3v3 5v5
Druid 276.0% 184.0% 80.5%
Hunter 43.0% 50.2% 43.0%
Mage 8.7% 96.0% 96.0%
Paladin 19.7% 29.5% 147.4%
Priest 113.3% 164.8% 185.4%
Shaman 37.8% 50.4% 138.6%
Rogue 144.2% 175.1% 61.8%
Warlock 149.2% 93.2% 111.9%
Warrior 130.4% 90.7% 79.3%
The problem I see with this data is that it does not show the class representation in relation to the actual wow population. According to Kalgan any class should be roughly at 100% representation, which is the ideal. I do however see a few problems here:
Druid population in comparaison to their representation on this chart.
Mage requiring a buff whereas their representation in 3v3 and 5v5 is actually good.
Priest representation being supposedly over the top when everyone knows that blizzard killed shadow.
No trend showing showing here whereas we, the players, know that blizzard is a few month behind in their analysis: arena is dynamic and Kalgan somewhat acknowledge this by trying to justify their pityfull attempt of class balance by mentioning a month old trend of decline of the warlock class.
The current trend is that hunters are on the rise, double melee dps and cheese the clothie 5v5 is on the rise. This trend is nowhere to be seen in any graph but is real. Armor penetration is adversely affecting gameplay for clothies and S4 weapons are bringing a level of damage not countered by any buff to clothies survavibility or spell damage equivalent. Spell haste does nothing to balance the situation for warlock and I expect a more severe reduction in warlock numbers in all brackets.
Rogues are all powerful is all brackets. Warriors is THE main dps class to have in 5v5. Yet no review of armor penetration or weapons dps is on the horizon.
The simple fact is that blizzard know that they messed it up in season 3 with weapons damage scaling better than cloth defenses and spell damage, armor penetration further imbalanced this situation and the proof is there: the tournament gives season 2 gear, not season 3. I do not think this is a coincidence.
Blizzard should wake up to the fact that people want to play to have fun. This means priests want to be able to be successful in arena playing shadow, not pigeonholed into discipline. The same goes for many shaman lamenting for enhancement to be sorted out. The same again for warlocks that feel that their survival options are so poor that all of them have to take soul link, whereas they wish they could have some trade offs and be able to play destruction with some mage like options of survival.
While it is rather difficult to balance all specs, the fact this is not a priority seems to bug a lot of players and it wont be long before we see people rerolling other classes or just leaving wow out of frustration.
Kalganism might turn out to be a disease that hurt shareholders after all, not players.
Kalgan posted the data he took into consideration to justify life tap nerfing:
2v2 3v3 5v5
Druid 276.0% 184.0% 80.5%
Hunter 43.0% 50.2% 43.0%
Mage 8.7% 96.0% 96.0%
Paladin 19.7% 29.5% 147.4%
Priest 113.3% 164.8% 185.4%
Shaman 37.8% 50.4% 138.6%
Rogue 144.2% 175.1% 61.8%
Warlock 149.2% 93.2% 111.9%
Warrior 130.4% 90.7% 79.3%
The problem I see with this data is that it does not show the class representation in relation to the actual wow population. According to Kalgan any class should be roughly at 100% representation, which is the ideal. I do however see a few problems here:
Druid population in comparaison to their representation on this chart.
Mage requiring a buff whereas their representation in 3v3 and 5v5 is actually good.
Priest representation being supposedly over the top when everyone knows that blizzard killed shadow.
No trend showing showing here whereas we, the players, know that blizzard is a few month behind in their analysis: arena is dynamic and Kalgan somewhat acknowledge this by trying to justify their pityfull attempt of class balance by mentioning a month old trend of decline of the warlock class.
The current trend is that hunters are on the rise, double melee dps and cheese the clothie 5v5 is on the rise. This trend is nowhere to be seen in any graph but is real. Armor penetration is adversely affecting gameplay for clothies and S4 weapons are bringing a level of damage not countered by any buff to clothies survavibility or spell damage equivalent. Spell haste does nothing to balance the situation for warlock and I expect a more severe reduction in warlock numbers in all brackets.
Rogues are all powerful is all brackets. Warriors is THE main dps class to have in 5v5. Yet no review of armor penetration or weapons dps is on the horizon.
The simple fact is that blizzard know that they messed it up in season 3 with weapons damage scaling better than cloth defenses and spell damage, armor penetration further imbalanced this situation and the proof is there: the tournament gives season 2 gear, not season 3. I do not think this is a coincidence.
Blizzard should wake up to the fact that people want to play to have fun. This means priests want to be able to be successful in arena playing shadow, not pigeonholed into discipline. The same goes for many shaman lamenting for enhancement to be sorted out. The same again for warlocks that feel that their survival options are so poor that all of them have to take soul link, whereas they wish they could have some trade offs and be able to play destruction with some mage like options of survival.
While it is rather difficult to balance all specs, the fact this is not a priority seems to bug a lot of players and it wont be long before we see people rerolling other classes or just leaving wow out of frustration.
Kalganism might turn out to be a disease that hurt shareholders after all, not players.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
World of Meleecraft
Saison 3 has been a joke in terms of the buff given to melee via armor penetration and cheezy teams with double melee have quickle got on board the fact that sunder armor + armor penetration means a clothie has no armor left. Once sunder armor is applied 5 times, reapplying once every 30 seconds, if necessary, is enough to keep it up.
Many posts have been written on the subject, yet blizzard feel it is justified in nerfing warlocks even more. In fact blizzard dev are at least 3 months behind. The dynamic nature of pvp has left them unable to properly balance the classes and we are paying the price.
What are warlocks and clothies getting to compensate for BIGGER BADDER melee weapons and more armor penetration?
We are not getting anymore defenses.
Our armor increase between Sets tiers does not bridge the gap of better melee weapons and armor penetration
The increase in spell damage pales in comparaison to the dps increase of melee with new weapons and the usual 10% (roughly) stat increase with a new season set.
No new abilities to add to our defenses
Soul link quickly getting ovewhelmed by melee with pet unable to follow due to lack of resilience (note: a warrior dumping a full rage bar on your pet will instagib it not giving your healers any time to heal the damage)
MS type debuff given to all melee but paladin:
rogue get poison to reduce healing effect and shiv to reliably put it on.
Hunter gets MS with mortal strike and dispell with arcane shot.
Shaman getting MS via two hits of flametongue buff.
What do casters get? We are supposedly getting spell haste. However since this does not have any effect on DOTs, what good is this to us?
Is spell haste going to allow warlocks to survive? No.
Is spell haste going to reduce our fear to .5 sec and shadow bolts to 1.5 sec with a season 4 set? No.
When I play my warlock in arena, I am 95% of the time focused by melee: you cannot possibly cast any fear when focused by melee and have to rely on instants. By the way: corruption is NOT instant by default. In order to cast fear, one can take the risk with a meta gemme proc, but blizzard been so wise decided to nerf this gemme.
Arena representation and nerfs:
It seems that blizzard works out which class to nerf by looking at arena and ratings.
Let look at this rankings:http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/5/all/all/all/all/
5v5:
in all team compositions but ONE, there is a warrior.
The most popular and successfull arena teams have a warrior.
Out of the 6 most popular teams, warlocks are found in 2, warriors are in 7 ouf 8 of the most popular teams. With warlocks being further nerfed, there representation will go down in 5v5 in season 4.
3v3:
The most popular team is RMP with a whooping 17.5% representation. The second best composition is one, you guessed it, with a warrior. We finally find warlocks in the third most popular 3v3 with a representation as half of that of warriors. With the nerf to warlocks, the latter will loose this third place to hunters most likely. Expect more cheezy double dps teams in season 4: warrior, shaman, paladin , double warrior druide, warrior rogue healer, with a "stick the warlock" strat that simply works since the class with be defenseless and with no armor.
2v2:
Two teams take the crown here: warrior again with a druid and warlock + druid. With a representation of 24.5% for warrior teams compared to 13.8% for warlocks. Altough the top class is yet again warriors in 2v2, blizzard decided to nerf warlocks more. the simply effect of this is just drop the warlock from dominating this bracket and being second to letting others like hunters take the second spot.
All in all, one wonders how silly blizzard can be and what process of thoughts they follow to decide what class to nerf. If arena dominance is the main driving reason, other classes than warlocks are clearly dominating all brackets and have well above average class representation in ALL brackets. This further nerfs will just drive an entire community away and it is sad to see how blind the dev are.
If you found the courage to read all this, well done. Just remember one thing, melee weapon buffs, armor penetration, MS debuffs galore with sunders and NO balancing buffs to casters armors/dps means that the game is moving towards melee complete dominance.
Ponder this:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2008/february/brutalgladiatorgreatsword.jpg
Many posts have been written on the subject, yet blizzard feel it is justified in nerfing warlocks even more. In fact blizzard dev are at least 3 months behind. The dynamic nature of pvp has left them unable to properly balance the classes and we are paying the price.
What are warlocks and clothies getting to compensate for BIGGER BADDER melee weapons and more armor penetration?
We are not getting anymore defenses.
Our armor increase between Sets tiers does not bridge the gap of better melee weapons and armor penetration
The increase in spell damage pales in comparaison to the dps increase of melee with new weapons and the usual 10% (roughly) stat increase with a new season set.
No new abilities to add to our defenses
Soul link quickly getting ovewhelmed by melee with pet unable to follow due to lack of resilience (note: a warrior dumping a full rage bar on your pet will instagib it not giving your healers any time to heal the damage)
MS type debuff given to all melee but paladin:
rogue get poison to reduce healing effect and shiv to reliably put it on.
Hunter gets MS with mortal strike and dispell with arcane shot.
Shaman getting MS via two hits of flametongue buff.
What do casters get? We are supposedly getting spell haste. However since this does not have any effect on DOTs, what good is this to us?
Is spell haste going to allow warlocks to survive? No.
Is spell haste going to reduce our fear to .5 sec and shadow bolts to 1.5 sec with a season 4 set? No.
When I play my warlock in arena, I am 95% of the time focused by melee: you cannot possibly cast any fear when focused by melee and have to rely on instants. By the way: corruption is NOT instant by default. In order to cast fear, one can take the risk with a meta gemme proc, but blizzard been so wise decided to nerf this gemme.
Arena representation and nerfs:
It seems that blizzard works out which class to nerf by looking at arena and ratings.
Let look at this rankings:http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/5/all/all/all/all/
5v5:
in all team compositions but ONE, there is a warrior.
The most popular and successfull arena teams have a warrior.
Out of the 6 most popular teams, warlocks are found in 2, warriors are in 7 ouf 8 of the most popular teams. With warlocks being further nerfed, there representation will go down in 5v5 in season 4.
3v3:
The most popular team is RMP with a whooping 17.5% representation. The second best composition is one, you guessed it, with a warrior. We finally find warlocks in the third most popular 3v3 with a representation as half of that of warriors. With the nerf to warlocks, the latter will loose this third place to hunters most likely. Expect more cheezy double dps teams in season 4: warrior, shaman, paladin , double warrior druide, warrior rogue healer, with a "stick the warlock" strat that simply works since the class with be defenseless and with no armor.
2v2:
Two teams take the crown here: warrior again with a druid and warlock + druid. With a representation of 24.5% for warrior teams compared to 13.8% for warlocks. Altough the top class is yet again warriors in 2v2, blizzard decided to nerf warlocks more. the simply effect of this is just drop the warlock from dominating this bracket and being second to letting others like hunters take the second spot.
All in all, one wonders how silly blizzard can be and what process of thoughts they follow to decide what class to nerf. If arena dominance is the main driving reason, other classes than warlocks are clearly dominating all brackets and have well above average class representation in ALL brackets. This further nerfs will just drive an entire community away and it is sad to see how blind the dev are.
If you found the courage to read all this, well done. Just remember one thing, melee weapon buffs, armor penetration, MS debuffs galore with sunders and NO balancing buffs to casters armors/dps means that the game is moving towards melee complete dominance.
Ponder this:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2008/february/brutalgladiatorgreatsword.jpg
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