Today, Im gonna ramble.
I mean properly ramble :p
Browsing blogs and viewing peoples opinions on patches 3.09, and 3.1, and talking to friends in game *waves*, are Blizzard digging themselves a hole?
Siha, at Banana shoulders recent post talks about some of the changes being implemented to Paladins.
Summary: Untested, inconsiderate, premature.
Mages?
They want to nerf the PVP capabilities of the arcane mage. Ok, I can see that. They don’t want to nerf PVE. Ok, I can see that too, they are overpowered.
2 Minute evocation back to 4 minute evocation?
Class becomes UNPLAYABLE.
It only clicked when reading SpicyTunas blog and chatting with friends over Teamspeak, the way Arcane is played is hard and fast, burning evocations and mana gems like crazy to keep on casting.
I trigger my evocation when I hit about 4k Mana, then a gem when im back down about 6k from my Mana cap (I have 21k mana raid buffed). I usually always end up around 1-3k mana when my evocation is up again.
I don’t usually get time for a third evocation unless it’s a technical boss fight that involves a lot of moving around (ergo, not casting, regenerating mana on the move and not needing it as badly anyway! (441 Mana regen in combat 556out of 5SR for me. (I think))
If I need a mana potion in a boss fight, its going badly. This is with a 2 minute evocation.
Again… 4 minute evocation? That leaves me stood there for two minutes wanding… screw that! Frostfire here I come again I think. Arcane is no longer feasible for PVE again if this is true and goes ahead.
Replenishment requirements:
Guess what? We have cleared 10 man naxx repeatedly, and are half way through 25 man naxx, without a single “replenishment” class in the guild that raids. When the mana regen changes go ahead, even with the new additions of replenishment options, we wont have any (Im NOT nerfing 1k off of my dps to give people back a pitiful amount of mana from frost…) The changes to be frank, may very well screw over our raiding viability, despite the quality of the members.
Im sure there has been outcry on the forums, but we all know blizzard Nerfs first and “fixes” later. Just look at hunters.
Poor bastids had a perfectly reasonable spec get nerfed into the ground, then have Blizz turn round, apologise for making a mistake, and promise to repair BM back to a reasonable level. All through the PTR testing for this, BM hunters were crying out that it was too much, but nobody cared up in Blizz HQ. (And looksie, some of those fixes come with 3.09 - untested...)
There is a good 11 Million players on WOW, maybe more – that’s a good 1 Million + per class on average. Every time your class gets nerfed to the ground the players have 4 options.
- Suck it up, biatch. (Many players are not bothered about operating at 100% or ar oblivious to their capabilities anyway)
- Reroll another class
- Respec to something else
- Quit playing.
Many will suck it up, perform poorly in comparison to others, and then probably end up taking one of the other 3 options out of desparation.
Rerolling? How long for? Your no longer at end game, your missing the end content with your raiding friends, your behind the curve, your gonna get replaced before you get to 80. To boot, its guaranteed that at some point the class you just were will get buffed back up to OP for a period.
Respec? An action, we have all seen. Beast mastery went from being the biggest chunk of hunter specs to the lowest. (Another blogger put up a chart on pre 3.08 and post 3.08 hunter stats, Ill try to find it.) Ok, kudos to them. How many of these hunters decided to just stop playing instead of re-rolling? Well – to put it bluntly, I know 2 active hunters, both pissed off with the way their class is just now. They don’t play them very often. (One has given up now I think about it.) Hunters used to be one of the most common classes, now I barely ever see them - especially in raids.
Quit playing? I don’t see me doing this any time soon, im too much of an altoholic to let such changes affect me. I love the game for the adventure and social aspect, and the challenges of trying my best whenever I can, BUT… Look at SWG. Blizzard are seriously heading towards NGE status. Classes are becoming unrecognizable, changes are becoming bigger and bigger, and some changes are being stealthed in without even a patch note or warning. This is bad business. Very bad. Communication is king, and GhostCrawler cant reach everyone by simply spamming a forum. (Many posts will be picked out and relayed by reliable bloggers, and wow insider, this is the only way I get such information - but I do get some 200 items a day into my feed reader to go over...)
Are they getting desperate? Is activision digging in their claws too deeply? Some of the changes are things that have been QQd over for 4 years, such as hunter ammo pouches.
Result: Blizzard are removing them completely. No hunter I have spoken to is actually in favour of this. They have had their character a long time, and have accepted the inconvenience of 4 bags, and ammo costs. At most they think maybe Blizz should have added a bag slot specifically for ammo, so that hunters get the normal 5 bags. They fully expect this change to break their class before they fix it. Bag space is great, but its only a problem if your unorganised in the first place.
As per my recent post on this change… What about the warlocks? They have to carry a couple of bags worth of soulshards (even with a soul-shard bag, they often need spares for raiding.) or a dedicated bag, putting them in the same situation as hunters.
Sure, they have their perverted wardrobe to summon people now – that saves them a couple of shards, and looks pretty funky – but they still have to carry shards to pop one up every time someone has to run off for repairs, reagents, gear change, respec, or is too slow to get summoned by the summoning stone outside instance.
(Big bonus though – you can go straight into the instance and summon everyone from there! No more Tauren on proto drakes getting in the way…)
They still need to create soulwells, soulshards, firestones, use shards for some spells and abilities, and have a backup since it can be hard to gather them in raids. Especially in pugs where you often get kicked if your DPS isn’t too high, and the speed mobs go down to AOE your basically going to be standing there draining souls and doing no DPS otherwise you miss the opportunity. DPS = poo, out on arse you go. Simple changes could be as little as allowing shards to be double stacked, or stacked in 5’s – but Im willing to bet that they would sooner do away with shards entirely, or put them on a currency or rune type system so they don’t take bag space at all. (Or as mentioned for hunters, make it a separate consumables bag so you can still carry all the normal crap we all do.)
Anyway, that’s my rant. (For now.) Im not really pissed off, (Except maybe that I have spent about 2 hours a week for the last month re-testing shot rotations in anticipation to yet another arcane nerf.) I still enjoy the game immensely - I wouldn’t be addicted to it if I didn’t. I’m enjoying the challenges, socializing and playing with all my characters, but in all honesty, I see Blizzivision making some critical errors as the game advances that I am positive will drive players away.
I would put money on the population dropping to about 8 Million by July, as players bleed off – even with new raid content incoming. Too many people are family/group players, who would stop playing if a friend/family member/spouse does – so although you may only lose 5% of the hunters who cancel their account with a bad change (50,000 people = a good half a million £ a month of your profits blizz…) – they would take at a guess, one person each with them to another game. (Looksie, you just lost a million a month in subscriptions.) Theres 9 other classes out there waiting to get targeted...
Be smart about it…
-V
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