Psyfiend for shadow priests is like the pally judgement too, except it doesnt need a first judgement to apply lawbringer, you just summon the fiend and it kills them.
I have a feeling theyll basically put everyones stats closer to the pvp template stats and make 2ndaries scale worse. Because like 10% haste on most classes is terrible. It would take like 1 tuning pass over everything to make everything smoother again even if most things stay on the cooldown. Luckily they have 3 months to give everyone another 10-15% haste.
Psyfiend for shadow priests is like the pally judgement too, except it doesnt need a first judgement to apply lawbringer, you just summon the fiend and it kills them.
Of course the first time Shadow has any sort of burst in PvP, it's a bug.
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Shadow is bonkers in BGs right now. I regularly top damage. I even solo healers with enough dots on other people to fuel insanity and mind blast procs. Theyre just too squishy, and die if focused by too many people.
Wasn’t the whole point of the change to keep people from spamming cool downs for a burst phase? Why bother at that point?
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I think the reason is because a lot of trinkets are not as powerful as class CDs. If they are on GCD, they need to compete with any other button press with a GCD and most of them would lose and ALL the power would shift to stat sticks or procs.
In other words, it would be impossible to balance so that is the easy way out. Since they still have not balanced any of the other GCD issues this might be the path they choose to go down for that too. Having this shit on the GCD could work if they had fucking made the decision to do so AFTER BALANCING CLASSES FOR IT.
I was reading in a discord channel last night that charge and disengage were taken off the GCD again as well. Not sure if other things have too or not. I still say just fuck dps trinkets and make them a utility slot. Their power levels change the performance of some specs waaaaay too much.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I still say that is the exact opposite of what they need to do. Taking the easy way out and over simplifying the game makes it boring.
I also still think the whole GCD thing is someone with more say but less clue than a lot of developers and likely most of them also don't agree with it. Which is why the rest of the game isn't balanced around it because it was a kneejerk reaction and something that could be done with a small code change on a handful of skills. Balancing everything else to make it work would involve reworking a ton of specs they likely had been iterating over for months even before the GCD decision.
The whole thing seems weird to me because aside from a couple classes, there aren’t that many off-gcd abilities anyway. It’s basically just interrupts and longish cooldowns (and not even every cooldown.)
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
As a non-stat optimized player: I like being able to do things. GCD keeps me from doing things and frustrates me.
I'd rather have more things I can just use when I want to use them and less waiting for the next click.
I’m on the other side, where at some point the gameplay shifted to the Starcraft model of maximizing APMs, which is terrible.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Honestly, I think they went bad with the design when trinkets became less like the current toys and became just another ring item.
I remember getting some bizzare and amusing trinkets. Those feel better to me as a player than "oh, this is the most optimized." I got plenty of gear slots that get fucking optimized, but rings and trinkets are terrible since there isn't even the transmog benefits to them. It's just "garbage I need to be competitive" versus "garbage I sell" with no real fun factor now.
I watched a bit of the Allcraft episode yesterday when I was eating dinner, and when they were talking about pvp Xaryu actually made some good points, that have been said before but still spot on. The problem is that basic abilities hit like wet noodles. For example, for most of wow frostbolt would take away 10+% of the targets health (in pvp), but now it probably does maybe 1% if it can even get through passive shields/heals every class has. Meanwhile their biggest cooldown Icy Veins, increases haste by 30% and (with artifact trait) increases damage by 20% for like 20s. Basically the argument was that abilities should have their baseline power buffed, but have cooldown power/duration decreased. Their example would be bringing icy veins down to 15% haste and 5% damage for 10s, but probably also reduce the cooldown a little, while also increasing frostbolt damage. It would overall just speed things up.
Now most of that was discussing pvp, but also could be done in pve because it feels similarly bad that your filler spells do nothing. Another video i saw was venruki playing with fire mage on the beta, and his concern was that fireball was a 3s cast that did like 600 damage while every other fire spell including instants did more damage. I think increasing the baseline power of things would go a long way towards people hating the slower pace.
I dont think current trinket design is very good though. A lot of specs are garbage unless they get the right one at a reasonable item level. I think it's fury that needs to roll with convergence of fates over anything else because of how good it is. Some healers need the carafe, while other need the highfathers, then there is the whole fiasco with arcanocrystal. There wouldnt be an issue with the GCD on activatable trinkets if their effects were stuns, shrink rays, knockbacks, etc. because they wouldnt be part of the normal dps rotation, they would be just like any other CC ability that is on the GCD as well.
Making baseline, spammable abilities weaker was absolutely a conscious decision, to increase the skill gap for specs. They don't want frostbolt spammers to be in any way comparable in performance to people who actually know how to play the specs.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Making baseline, spammable abilities weaker was absolutely a conscious decision, to increase the skill gap for specs. They don't want frostbolt spammers to be in any way comparable in performance to people who actually know how to play the specs.
See, this is one of the things that prevents me from enjoying PvP since BC. In other MMOs I've played, while there is a considerable one on one difference in performance for experience and non-experienced, you can still actually be effective in some fashion in PvP to learn the encounters and "get gud" as the kids say.
In WoW, there is no such thing. You are either a terrible burden to your team and dragging everyone down by not being 150% over optimized and perfectly in sync, or you are that thing with (likely) hundreds of hours poured into it just to reach that threshold. I'm pretty good with my paladin, nearly 20 years of PvP have given me enough skills to know what to do. I can be an asset there, but when I try on other characters it really is limiting if not downright infuriating. Several of my friends came to wow over the years, tried to do PvP, and just had a miserable time. Because it generally is miserable!
I love the game, don't get me wrong. But Wow's pvp design and environment reinforces toxic behavior and is deliberately exclusionary of new players.
Making baseline, spammable abilities weaker was absolutely a conscious decision, to increase the skill gap for specs. They don't want frostbolt spammers to be in any way comparable in performance to people who actually know how to play the specs.
They actually talked directly about that in the Allcraft too. The problem as Enc said with that is that either people know how to play optimally and burst using cooldowns and other abilities, or are a complete burden on their team because they are effectively doing zero damage by casting 2s casts that deal 1% damage. Does it increase the skill gap? Yes, but the problem is that it does it in a polarizing way instead of anywhere near linear or a gradient. It's actually just pretty much binary. And the direct follow up was that it actually makes pvp less skill based because if people who know what theyre doing are fighting, as in high ranked arena, everything is very scripted because it's just trading offensive cooldowns for defensive ones until one team runs out.
The direct result of that design is that people new to pvp or just want to dabble, cannot function at all in pvp, which turns them off and then there is one less person in the pvp pool. When the top arena players have pretty much all agreed with the idea of changing the tempo of arena by giving things like frostbolt back their damage and reducing cooldowns, they probably know what theyre talking about. It would certainly help reign in the melee dominance because a caster actually managing to get a filler spell off could be dangerous where right now it doesnt matter AT ALL, and all caster damage is done through combinations of huge cooldowns or they dont do damage and just run a CC train while their melee kill someone.
Personally I would love it if more terrible players felt like they could be a threat to someone in a BG. People would play them more and maybe blizzard would actually put some dev time into pvp. It would also reduce the insane burst in pvp from people who do know what theyre doing and enable a more back and forth gameplay and also allow for more diverse specs to be playable.
Honestly, I think they went bad with the design when trinkets became less like the current toys and became just another ring item.
I remember getting some bizzare and amusing trinkets. Those feel better to me as a player than "oh, this is the most optimized." I got plenty of gear slots that get fucking optimized, but rings and trinkets are terrible since there isn't even the transmog benefits to them. It's just "garbage I need to be competitive" versus "garbage I sell" with no real fun factor now.
I agree with you but also that shift away from utility and bizarre for-fun items happened literally in launch vanilla, the very moment people found the handful of stat stick or combat relevant proc trinket slot items that existed to use over all the combat-irrelevant utility joke items
and it was only like 2 items. talisman of ephemeral power and the zandalari hero charm. everyone else was probably wearing their blackhands breadth or whichever from that quest, and probably a carrot on a stick. Unless someone had engineering, there really werent a ton of dps trinkets. But those on use trinkets fucked up everything. The talisman wasnt a problem on its own since it was a chance to drop off geddon, which meant 1 person/40 a week had a chance at getting one. Where the ZG trinket was a lot easier to get. And the stacking of trinkets/cooldowns has basically been a problem ever since.
Toys already do what you want trinkets to do (and in a much varied way since they don't have to be equipped), so IMO this whole thing is a solution in search of a problem.
I vividly remember jumping off the bridge between arathi and wetlands to farm tidal charm when the game was released because it was one of the earliest trinkets you could get.
Their whole legendary equipment effects and azerite traits thing should really just be equipped via trinket slot. I don't really care how you get them, but it also makes equipping the different ones kind of interesting on a per encounter basis.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Their whole legendary equipment effects and azerite traits thing should really just be equipped via trinket slot. I don't really care how you get them, but it also makes equipping the different ones kind of interesting on a per encounter basis.
No it doesn't. It makes mathing out the perfect ones for every situation a question of numbers and you will equip the ones that your class Discord spreadsheet told you to.
I disagree with utility trinket dumbing the game down. I'd argue the current lien of trinkets dumbs the game down because people just look up the most optimized trinket for their spec. A ton of players are just terrible at the game now because most of the gameplay has essentially become "just get more damage, until you're able to face tank everything and stand in the fire, but able to kill stuff before you die." I know I'm not a superstar player, but I feel I've gotten pretty good at getting out of binds in PvE thanks to how TBC ret really forced me to figure out how to use all the tools in order to do a fair bit of content that the spec was pretty gimp at when it didn't have raid gear. I'm not saying bust every spec down to that god awful stat, but maybe we should bring the game back more to a setup where sometimes success isn't unloading the most optimized damage, it's knowing how to use all the tools to squeak through when the gear doesn't just face tanking, while standing in fire. Utility trinkets probably would result in a decent number of players learning how to game them to do pull off difficulty content. Would also bring some balance. I feel the skill cap should essentially be baseline to the class, either it's something that the spec gets as an ability or it's something they will pick up form azorite stuff regardless of the content they do. That's where procs that make or break a spec should be. Not this bullshit setup where RNG can completely fuck people over because the trinket they are essentially balanced around never jobs or got help the poor bastard that has to get it off a optional raid boss, that no wants to mess with.
As for PvP. Yeah, they need to find a better balance. As a ret, I just find their incompetence in this area hilarious because the spec went through a major revision in cataclysm to ensure there wasn't easy access to front loaded burst. It's like come on Blizzard, take what you learned from ret to the other specs that are a problem because of front loaded burst (aka can roll up and blow people up in a single GCD without having to ramp up). Ironically, dumping everything into uber CDs is counter-intuitive to the goal. There is an in between point between braindead frostbolting people do death with 2-3 keybinds and uber-nuke macro of all the dps CDs in one button. A ton of it comes down to Blizzard being lazy, unimaginative, incompetent or some combination of the three. Probably doesn't also help that we seem to have group a of devs that are pinning for vanilla and tbc stuff that the vast majority of the playerbase hated. So they are wasting time trying to sell players on something they didn't like in the past, while have blinders that make them incapable of accepting that some stuff just needs to go, sure it's been around for a while, problem is it has never worked and still doesn't work.
but maybe we should bring the game back more to a setup where sometimes success isn't unloading the most optimized damage, it's knowing how to use all the tools to squeak through when the gear doesn't just face tanking, while standing in fire.
That is precisely how high M+ works, except you're required to do all the utility AND pump out optimal damage at the same time.
The mark of a good player is being able to pull off that clutch Typhoon out of Sanguine puddles, the well-timed Leg Sweep to prevent a group-wiping trash mob ability, or the perfect dispel on a dangerous poison debuff, and doing so while maintaining maximum DPS output. Any idiot can go full tryhard DPS and ignore their utility, or sit there autoattacking to let them react with their utility in time.
Dhalphir on
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
but maybe we should bring the game back more to a setup where sometimes success isn't unloading the most optimized damage, it's knowing how to use all the tools to squeak through when the gear doesn't just face tanking, while standing in fire.
That is precisely how high M+ works, except you're required to do all the utility AND pump out optimal damage at the same time.
The mark of a good player is being able to pull off that clutch Typhoon out of Sanguine puddles, the well-timed Leg Sweep to prevent a group-wiping trash mob ability, or the perfect dispel on a dangerous poison debuff, and doing so while maintaining maximum DPS output. Any idiot can go full mongo DPS and ignore their utility, or sit there autoattacking to let them react with their utility in time.
Hey let's not use race-based insults kthx.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
I know mythic requires people to be much better at execution. The problem, is that Blizz has essentially created a very polarized setup, which is running into the same issues that we see with PvP. It's not a sustainable setup. Like I said they don't have to go back to TBC levels of execution requirements and they shouldn't, but they really should move in a direction that both encourages and rewards the use of utility at the lower levels. Hell, the issue for a most specs in TBC wasn't that they required too much execution, they probably were at about the right spot for execution, but too many specs were hubbled by poor design (I've noticed TBC and MoP timewalking dungeons don't feel like they drag out, unlike Cata and WotLK dungeons) Otherwise you just get a ton of people that never really learn to play the game and then having greater difficulty moving into content that requires better execution.
Granted, i also feel like their approach with ilvls and rewards doesn't help either. I feel it was a huge mistake to have the reward for mythic raids being high ilvl gear, same when heroic raid first came out in WotLK. The rewards should have been more cosmetic (definitely, not stuff that would get removed. Maybe vanity mogs, and the mounts and pets just move to a lower drop rate once the game drops a patch that makes the mythic too easy. Also just have it drop more gear, so it's easier to make the challenge with mythic being more about execution and removing luck with drops from the equation more. Heck, would probably add some value to normal for bleeding edge progression groups since they wouldn't be mythic level gear propping them up going in the next tier (I want to say blizz assumes people have a mix of normal and heroic fear from the previous tier as the minimum or is just normal gear).
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited May 2018
You mean like a system where difficulty steadily increases, allowing people to stop at their own skill/comfort level?
The problem with doing what you want is that designing a setup to reward utility but not reward DPS is nigh impossible in WoW. A dead mob does no damage to you, after all, so in any situation, it's often going to be the case that killing mobs very quickly is better than controlling them.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Also, a lot of people want BC heroics, aka High M+ without a timer.
Now, I get why some people dislike the timers. It leads bad players to overpull, it generates a lot of performance anxiety, and it tends to cause vast nerdrage at mistakes. Those are going to be things on the PuG world no matter how forgiving timers are.
That said, without timers, the most optimal path for high m+ is to wait for CDs and BL for every. single. pull. and that would simply be anti-fun.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Also, a lot of people want BC heroics, aka High M+ without a timer.
Now, I get why some people dislike the timers. It leads bad players to overpull, it generates a lot of performance anxiety, and it tends to cause vast nerdrage at mistakes. Those are going to be things on the PuG world no matter how forgiving timers are.
That said, without timers, the most optimal path for high m+ is to wait for CDs and BL for every. single. pull. and that would simply be anti-fun.
M+ with difference metric conditions would be pretty interesting, like one week is a regular timer, but the next week is 'with fewer than X/Y/Z deaths' or something like that. Having everything be on a timer is a bit too 'we obviously designed this for e-sports' for my tastes.
Also, a lot of people want BC heroics, aka High M+ without a timer.
Now, I get why some people dislike the timers. It leads bad players to overpull, it generates a lot of performance anxiety, and it tends to cause vast nerdrage at mistakes. Those are going to be things on the PuG world no matter how forgiving timers are.
That said, without timers, the most optimal path for high m+ is to wait for CDs and BL for every. single. pull. and that would simply be anti-fun.
M+ with difference metric conditions would be pretty interesting, like one week is a regular timer, but the next week is 'with fewer than X/Y/Z deaths' or something like that. Having everything be on a timer is a bit too 'we obviously designed this for e-sports' for my tastes.
Congratulations on waiting 10 minutes on every trash pull.
Also, a lot of people want BC heroics, aka High M+ without a timer.
Now, I get why some people dislike the timers. It leads bad players to overpull, it generates a lot of performance anxiety, and it tends to cause vast nerdrage at mistakes. Those are going to be things on the PuG world no matter how forgiving timers are.
That said, without timers, the most optimal path for high m+ is to wait for CDs and BL for every. single. pull. and that would simply be anti-fun.
M+ with difference metric conditions would be pretty interesting, like one week is a regular timer, but the next week is 'with fewer than X/Y/Z deaths' or something like that. Having everything be on a timer is a bit too 'we obviously designed this for e-sports' for my tastes.
Congratulations on waiting 10 minutes on every trash pull.
I don't see it shaking out like that. M+ is still primarily for gearing up, whether it's for the dungeon itself, or the weekly chest, and players won't have that kind of patience of dungeons taking ten times longer, just to get a CHANCE at 1 extra piece of loot at the end. They can still use timers for the competitive invitiationals or whatever, but for regular players, variation is a good thing.
Is not merely about e-sports. Is about the playerbase getting older and not too willing to spend 3 hours in a dungeon just to clear it. A D&D style dungeon crawl is not how most players can play the game these days since, again, people get older!
You see it at the mythic level too, a huge distinction between the ranks on WoWProgress is the guilds willing to do splits to push for ranks and the guilds with people too old for that shit. The new guild of Preach and Fatboss, Any Hungry, was formed because the Fatboss guys fell into the latter half of the equation through Legion.
Is not merely about e-sports. Is about the playerbase getting older and not too willing to spend 3 hours in a dungeon just to clear it. A D&D style dungeon crawl is not how most players can play the game these days since, again, people get older!
You see it at the mythic level too, a huge distinction between the ranks on WoWProgress is the guilds willing to do splits to push for ranks and the guilds with people too old for that shit. The new guild of Preach and Fatboss, Any Hungry, was formed because the Fatboss guys fell into the latter half of the equation through Legion.
'Let's get through this as quickly as possible' has always been the prevailing attitude; it's not something that was invented with M+. Even those 3 hours of Blackrock Depths weren't because people were lazing about, or waiting for CDs on every pull; it was because the place was enormous. Removing the timer, or replacing it with some other type of success/failure metric, isn't going break that.
I still think rotations should overall be more straightforward and the only difference between difficulty levels is being able to do the rotation while doing mechanics. Like anything would be better than what we have during LFR where people are doing 300k dps in 930 ilvl because they don't burst correctly. Like let those people do 800k-1m dps which is what they should be doing at that ilvl, but make mechanics do things like xavius silencing you for not doing them, or reducing cast speed by a ton for not moving out of something. And moving up in difficulty just makes those penalties harsher like 10% reduction in dmg in lfr, 30% in normal, etc. that way there is still a skill gap between difficulties due to the increase in mechanics. There will always be some kind of skill discrepancy doing a given rotation, but it doesnt need to be this enormous chasm that it is now.
Also just remove 10m+ cooldowns in m+ like they do in rated pvp. No lust, no time warp, no lay on hands. Now every pull doesnt have to be balanced around lust. Playing around with spell interrupt timers would also mix some things up. It doesnt make sense that a melee dps has access to front loaded aoe damage and a 10-15s cooldown on a spell interrupt when casters mostly have back loaded dps and 30s+ cooldown on their interrupts.
I still think rotations should overall be more straightforward and the only difference between difficulty levels is being able to do the rotation while doing mechanics. Like anything would be better than what we have during LFR where people are doing 300k dps in 930 ilvl because they don't burst correctly. Like let those people do 800k-1m dps which is what they should be doing at that ilvl, but make mechanics do things like xavius silencing you for not doing them, or reducing cast speed by a ton for not moving out of something. And moving up in difficulty just makes those penalties harsher like 10% reduction in dmg in lfr, 30% in normal, etc. that way there is still a skill gap between difficulties due to the increase in mechanics. There will always be some kind of skill discrepancy doing a given rotation, but it doesnt need to be this enormous chasm that it is now.
That actually sounds far worse than LFR today. A over-geared raider in LFR can more than compensate for someone doing subpar DPS, but there’s no way to carry someone who can’t/won’t do mechanics.
I still think rotations should overall be more straightforward and the only difference between difficulty levels is being able to do the rotation while doing mechanics. Like anything would be better than what we have during LFR where people are doing 300k dps in 930 ilvl because they don't burst correctly. Like let those people do 800k-1m dps which is what they should be doing at that ilvl, but make mechanics do things like xavius silencing you for not doing them, or reducing cast speed by a ton for not moving out of something. And moving up in difficulty just makes those penalties harsher like 10% reduction in dmg in lfr, 30% in normal, etc. that way there is still a skill gap between difficulties due to the increase in mechanics. There will always be some kind of skill discrepancy doing a given rotation, but it doesnt need to be this enormous chasm that it is now.
Also just remove 10m+ cooldowns in m+ like they do in rated pvp. No lust, no time warp, no lay on hands. Now every pull doesnt have to be balanced around lust. Playing around with spell interrupt timers would also mix some things up. It doesnt make sense that a melee dps has access to front loaded aoe damage and a 10-15s cooldown on a spell interrupt when casters mostly have back loaded dps and 30s+ cooldown on their interrupts.
The rotations themselves are often VERY simple in most cases, with the difference being knowing the exact right time to hit all of your buttons.
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I have a feeling theyll basically put everyones stats closer to the pvp template stats and make 2ndaries scale worse. Because like 10% haste on most classes is terrible. It would take like 1 tuning pass over everything to make everything smoother again even if most things stay on the cooldown. Luckily they have 3 months to give everyone another 10-15% haste.
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Of course the first time Shadow has any sort of burst in PvP, it's a bug.
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Wasn’t the whole point of the change to keep people from spamming cool downs for a burst phase? Why bother at that point?
In other words, it would be impossible to balance so that is the easy way out. Since they still have not balanced any of the other GCD issues this might be the path they choose to go down for that too. Having this shit on the GCD could work if they had fucking made the decision to do so AFTER BALANCING CLASSES FOR IT.
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I also still think the whole GCD thing is someone with more say but less clue than a lot of developers and likely most of them also don't agree with it. Which is why the rest of the game isn't balanced around it because it was a kneejerk reaction and something that could be done with a small code change on a handful of skills. Balancing everything else to make it work would involve reworking a ton of specs they likely had been iterating over for months even before the GCD decision.
It just reeks of power struggle to me.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'd rather have more things I can just use when I want to use them and less waiting for the next click.
I remember getting some bizzare and amusing trinkets. Those feel better to me as a player than "oh, this is the most optimized." I got plenty of gear slots that get fucking optimized, but rings and trinkets are terrible since there isn't even the transmog benefits to them. It's just "garbage I need to be competitive" versus "garbage I sell" with no real fun factor now.
Now most of that was discussing pvp, but also could be done in pve because it feels similarly bad that your filler spells do nothing. Another video i saw was venruki playing with fire mage on the beta, and his concern was that fireball was a 3s cast that did like 600 damage while every other fire spell including instants did more damage. I think increasing the baseline power of things would go a long way towards people hating the slower pace.
I dont think current trinket design is very good though. A lot of specs are garbage unless they get the right one at a reasonable item level. I think it's fury that needs to roll with convergence of fates over anything else because of how good it is. Some healers need the carafe, while other need the highfathers, then there is the whole fiasco with arcanocrystal. There wouldnt be an issue with the GCD on activatable trinkets if their effects were stuns, shrink rays, knockbacks, etc. because they wouldnt be part of the normal dps rotation, they would be just like any other CC ability that is on the GCD as well.
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See, this is one of the things that prevents me from enjoying PvP since BC. In other MMOs I've played, while there is a considerable one on one difference in performance for experience and non-experienced, you can still actually be effective in some fashion in PvP to learn the encounters and "get gud" as the kids say.
In WoW, there is no such thing. You are either a terrible burden to your team and dragging everyone down by not being 150% over optimized and perfectly in sync, or you are that thing with (likely) hundreds of hours poured into it just to reach that threshold. I'm pretty good with my paladin, nearly 20 years of PvP have given me enough skills to know what to do. I can be an asset there, but when I try on other characters it really is limiting if not downright infuriating. Several of my friends came to wow over the years, tried to do PvP, and just had a miserable time. Because it generally is miserable!
I love the game, don't get me wrong. But Wow's pvp design and environment reinforces toxic behavior and is deliberately exclusionary of new players.
They actually talked directly about that in the Allcraft too. The problem as Enc said with that is that either people know how to play optimally and burst using cooldowns and other abilities, or are a complete burden on their team because they are effectively doing zero damage by casting 2s casts that deal 1% damage. Does it increase the skill gap? Yes, but the problem is that it does it in a polarizing way instead of anywhere near linear or a gradient. It's actually just pretty much binary. And the direct follow up was that it actually makes pvp less skill based because if people who know what theyre doing are fighting, as in high ranked arena, everything is very scripted because it's just trading offensive cooldowns for defensive ones until one team runs out.
The direct result of that design is that people new to pvp or just want to dabble, cannot function at all in pvp, which turns them off and then there is one less person in the pvp pool. When the top arena players have pretty much all agreed with the idea of changing the tempo of arena by giving things like frostbolt back their damage and reducing cooldowns, they probably know what theyre talking about. It would certainly help reign in the melee dominance because a caster actually managing to get a filler spell off could be dangerous where right now it doesnt matter AT ALL, and all caster damage is done through combinations of huge cooldowns or they dont do damage and just run a CC train while their melee kill someone.
Personally I would love it if more terrible players felt like they could be a threat to someone in a BG. People would play them more and maybe blizzard would actually put some dev time into pvp. It would also reduce the insane burst in pvp from people who do know what theyre doing and enable a more back and forth gameplay and also allow for more diverse specs to be playable.
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I agree with you but also that shift away from utility and bizarre for-fun items happened literally in launch vanilla, the very moment people found the handful of stat stick or combat relevant proc trinket slot items that existed to use over all the combat-irrelevant utility joke items
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No it doesn't. It makes mathing out the perfect ones for every situation a question of numbers and you will equip the ones that your class Discord spreadsheet told you to.
As for PvP. Yeah, they need to find a better balance. As a ret, I just find their incompetence in this area hilarious because the spec went through a major revision in cataclysm to ensure there wasn't easy access to front loaded burst. It's like come on Blizzard, take what you learned from ret to the other specs that are a problem because of front loaded burst (aka can roll up and blow people up in a single GCD without having to ramp up). Ironically, dumping everything into uber CDs is counter-intuitive to the goal. There is an in between point between braindead frostbolting people do death with 2-3 keybinds and uber-nuke macro of all the dps CDs in one button. A ton of it comes down to Blizzard being lazy, unimaginative, incompetent or some combination of the three. Probably doesn't also help that we seem to have group a of devs that are pinning for vanilla and tbc stuff that the vast majority of the playerbase hated. So they are wasting time trying to sell players on something they didn't like in the past, while have blinders that make them incapable of accepting that some stuff just needs to go, sure it's been around for a while, problem is it has never worked and still doesn't work.
That is precisely how high M+ works, except you're required to do all the utility AND pump out optimal damage at the same time.
The mark of a good player is being able to pull off that clutch Typhoon out of Sanguine puddles, the well-timed Leg Sweep to prevent a group-wiping trash mob ability, or the perfect dispel on a dangerous poison debuff, and doing so while maintaining maximum DPS output. Any idiot can go full tryhard DPS and ignore their utility, or sit there autoattacking to let them react with their utility in time.
Hey let's not use race-based insults kthx.
Granted, i also feel like their approach with ilvls and rewards doesn't help either. I feel it was a huge mistake to have the reward for mythic raids being high ilvl gear, same when heroic raid first came out in WotLK. The rewards should have been more cosmetic (definitely, not stuff that would get removed. Maybe vanity mogs, and the mounts and pets just move to a lower drop rate once the game drops a patch that makes the mythic too easy. Also just have it drop more gear, so it's easier to make the challenge with mythic being more about execution and removing luck with drops from the equation more. Heck, would probably add some value to normal for bleeding edge progression groups since they wouldn't be mythic level gear propping them up going in the next tier (I want to say blizz assumes people have a mix of normal and heroic fear from the previous tier as the minimum or is just normal gear).
The problem with doing what you want is that designing a setup to reward utility but not reward DPS is nigh impossible in WoW. A dead mob does no damage to you, after all, so in any situation, it's often going to be the case that killing mobs very quickly is better than controlling them.
Now, I get why some people dislike the timers. It leads bad players to overpull, it generates a lot of performance anxiety, and it tends to cause vast nerdrage at mistakes. Those are going to be things on the PuG world no matter how forgiving timers are.
That said, without timers, the most optimal path for high m+ is to wait for CDs and BL for every. single. pull. and that would simply be anti-fun.
Yeah it's from "mongoloid" which is a term for people of Asian descent that has come to mean "stupid" in internet parlance.
M+ with difference metric conditions would be pretty interesting, like one week is a regular timer, but the next week is 'with fewer than X/Y/Z deaths' or something like that. Having everything be on a timer is a bit too 'we obviously designed this for e-sports' for my tastes.
Congratulations on waiting 10 minutes on every trash pull.
I don't see it shaking out like that. M+ is still primarily for gearing up, whether it's for the dungeon itself, or the weekly chest, and players won't have that kind of patience of dungeons taking ten times longer, just to get a CHANCE at 1 extra piece of loot at the end. They can still use timers for the competitive invitiationals or whatever, but for regular players, variation is a good thing.
You see it at the mythic level too, a huge distinction between the ranks on WoWProgress is the guilds willing to do splits to push for ranks and the guilds with people too old for that shit. The new guild of Preach and Fatboss, Any Hungry, was formed because the Fatboss guys fell into the latter half of the equation through Legion.
'Let's get through this as quickly as possible' has always been the prevailing attitude; it's not something that was invented with M+. Even those 3 hours of Blackrock Depths weren't because people were lazing about, or waiting for CDs on every pull; it was because the place was enormous. Removing the timer, or replacing it with some other type of success/failure metric, isn't going break that.
Also just remove 10m+ cooldowns in m+ like they do in rated pvp. No lust, no time warp, no lay on hands. Now every pull doesnt have to be balanced around lust. Playing around with spell interrupt timers would also mix some things up. It doesnt make sense that a melee dps has access to front loaded aoe damage and a 10-15s cooldown on a spell interrupt when casters mostly have back loaded dps and 30s+ cooldown on their interrupts.
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That actually sounds far worse than LFR today. A over-geared raider in LFR can more than compensate for someone doing subpar DPS, but there’s no way to carry someone who can’t/won’t do mechanics.
The rotations themselves are often VERY simple in most cases, with the difference being knowing the exact right time to hit all of your buttons.