That Warlock Thing
Seems Blizzard is doing some minor change involving warlocks.
Seems warlocks are unhappy about it.
Seems that you have to be over level 60 to even notice this – since my own warlock just dinged 58, my reaction was immediately “Uh, OK“, since like every other caster pre-60, my itemization involved high levels of INT, resulting in a larger mana than health pool. This changes radically post-60. Hi, expansion!
Seems Blizzard admitted through a community rep that the high-end itemization and gameplay style of a class thoughout the entire game was being clubbed like a baby seal thanks to “PvP issues“.
Seems thanks to those PvP issues that most of the reaction from PvPers not warlocks can be briefly encapsulated thusly: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA (breathe) HAHHAHAHAHAH”
Seems that yet again, reationary far-reaching gameplay changes are being driven through a knee-jerk response to PvP imbalances, which tend to be the hard crucible of gameplay competitive min-maxing.
Seems that there’s probably not a lot that can be done about this, since part of what makes MMO PvP compelling is its existence within a larger world, which includes much of a larger gameworld that has – and wants – little to do with PvP.
Seems like the effects of this are going to be fairly far-reaching, and either Blizzard will have to dial back the planned adjustment, or redesign the class entirely. Which you generally do not want to do when the vehicle is in motion. Or perhaps embrace community proposals from a now-panicked class which is staring down the barrel of a virtual gun.
Seems Blizzard is pretty commited to battleground-style PvP, so this probably won’t be the last time something like this happens.
Seems like this has happened before.
Case in point: the Ahn’Qiraj war effort.
It’s likely the single time WoW has ever seen massive and wholly uniting faction and even realm pride and teamwork. Granted, and somewhat ironically, it was ultimately still fueled by the simple greed for loot, but it still brought many of the factions and realms together like they had not and still haven’t before because they had a single massive common goal. Beggars cannot be choosers, after all, and WoW is certainly a beggar when it comes to faction identity within the WoW community.
By common, also granted, I do speak mostly to the endgame commoner — certainly there were niches of greed within the war effort yet. Also, some servers did not experience similar pride for various reasons. But there were enough servers that were brought together that it serves as a good example of what’s achievabl,e even in a self-interest focused game like WoW, with the right design.
The original Honor Rank system was basically the complete opposite. It was in your best interest to throw as many people under the bus as possible, whether ally or enemy. It’s still somewhat, though not completely after the years since, baffling that they’d choose it of any possible PvP system for a game that came from a series about faction war — to not even go that far; a game with any interest in not forcing the community to cannibalize itself, it was still stunningly illogical.
Sorry for the necro but I wanted to touch a few points:
Locks are not OP in every facet of the game. Arena in particular lock performance in any bracket is merely mediocre (as in probably where they should be, before these changes). You are welcome to your opinions but I encourage you to go look up the stats. Locks are already well known as the initial default target in 5s not because of their threat but because they have zero escapes and make the best heal sponges.
PvE performance is more subjective and I am not going to bother breaking it down by group size but the overall point is that even in endgame raiding they are not the clear-cut dominating force.
This discussion went far afield. The major point that everyone seems to be missing is the shoddy design of having any mechanic where an ability gets more expensive\worse the farther you progress your character. There is simply no way to justify percentage based penalties. It doesn’t matter if you think lifetap should be nerfed or hate locks or any such dribble. What does matter is that unlike anything else in this game it will be worse to have more hp for locks.
Percentage-based penalties are stupid. I remember crafting “spells” in EQ2 being percentage based. The player response was to craft naked (to shrink their mana pool) and the best\most efficient crafters were very low level players whose mana regen was more than enough to cover the paltry costs.
BTW AQ war effort was a joke and prime example of how not to do things. If non-raiders could have donated to keep the gates closed I think you would have seen a very different uniting force across the servers.
Sullee said:
This discussion went far afield. The major point that everyone seems to be missing is the shoddy design of having any mechanic where an ability gets more expensive\worse the farther you progress your character. There is simply no way to justify percentage based penalties. It doesn’t matter if you think lifetap should be nerfed or hate locks or any such dribble. What does matter is that unlike anything else in this game it will be worse to have more hp for locks.
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Wait… that’s amusing. Because last I checked, Druids pay a percentage of their mana every shift, so getting out of your roots costs more as they get more gear. Oh, and every healer/decurser in the game pays a percentage of their mana do decurse all those lovely DoTs you spam, again, costing more and more as they add gear. So maybe we should go back and say that the fact that a S3 priest pays more to remove your CoA than a S1 priest is bad design?
Or just give up the Warlock ‘poor me’ routine. Maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it is NOT some random new horror Blizz thought up to persecute Warlocks. It’s the same mechanic that has been used widely and successfully before to slow down decurse-spamming. And now it’s being used to slow down Infinite Mana spamming.
So maybe percentage-based solutions are not preferable, but they’re not stupid. And maybe Lifetap is or isn’t balanced, but it seems that the devs think having a sustainable and scaling hp to mana conversion wasn’t what they wanted out of the class… and somehow the rest of the classes haven’t been falling over themselves to provide support for the warlocks. Unlike what’s happened in the past where raiders and guilds enmass have protested certain class changes.
Seems to bring back the great Hunter NGE patch… you know, where they ripped the guts out of the hunter mechanics and changed everything around? End of the world right? Well, it was until they finished testing on the PTRs and players got a chance to test it and find out that it wasn’t really the end of the world. Anyway, it’s still on PTRs. Cry some real tears when it hits live realms.