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
great post!
ReplyDelete