Blizzards constant shanges sending them down the tubes?

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

3.09. More changes, more testing to be done. *harrumph*

Just caught some info on patch 3.09 which is due to go live this week, and as a result:

More theory crafting and rotation tests.

/facepalm

Why do you do this to me blizz? All I wanna do is provide good DPS for my comrades!!!

Ok, let’s get into it.

Here’s the changes:

Spells:

1. Arcane power damage bonus halved, and cooldown halved. (10% bonus damage, 1min CD -Needs confirmation. This could be painful on the mana bar, since Arcane Power causes your spells to cost more mana… if it’s the same mana consumption, you now have this triggered every minute eating through your mana faster…)
2. Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power = 15s cooldown, POM = 1.5s cooldown. (Means you cant POM something within 15s of using an AP, and I’m not sure, but does this mean POM activates the global cooldown? … That doesn’t sound like it’s a very useful spell any more, except for Pom pyro PVP players. (Say that 10x as fast as ya can!))
3. POM cooldown reduced from 3Min to 2Min – nice for PVP mages!

Glyphs:

1. Glyph of Arcane Missiles = +25% crit damage to arcane missiles (old glyph added 5 yards to the cast range)
2. Glyph of Mana gem = 40% bonus mana when chomping on a gem, was 10% (Nice!)
3. Glyph of Arcane Blast – Damage bonus reduced from 5% to 3%. (Has this not already been implemented??)

Looking at the above, I think I would be a fool not to take the Arcane Missiles glyph, this has 2 effects:

1. I lose my Glyph of Mage Armour, or my Glyph of Evocation. Both fantastic glyphs. *pouts*
2. If the experimentations with shot rotation prove that Ill be using Arcane Missiles more, then I will most likely need to talent into Arcane Missiles. Dang! I only used that on a missile barrage proc previously

Currently rotation:

Arcane Blast x3 (54% damage bonus (45% on arcane missiles with the current bug that stops the Arcane Blast Glyph affecting Arcane Missiles.)
Arcane Barrage (consumes the damage bonus, hits hard.)
Arcane Missiles any time that arcane barrage procs, followed with a Barrage tap.

I predict that with the change:

New rotation:

Arcane blast x3 (39% bonus damage with glyph instead of 54% L )
Arcane Missiles (consumes the buff, hopefully the glyph bug will be fixed or its only 30% bonus damage from the buff.)
Arcane barrage tap, then repeat.

What do I expect to see?

Overall I expect to see a drop to my DPS – this is expected, Arcane is overpowered in comparison to the other specs, and this is Blizzards attempt to bring it down to size. The drop in DPS will come from less damage bonus from stacking Arcane Blast, and the cast time for Arcane Missiles when we don’t have a Missile Barrage proc. On the other hand, I think this will be a bit more mana efficient since less spells are being spammed out.

One thing I would try to pay particular attention to: Clearcasting procs…

+50% crit chance on a clearcast spell, and the spell costing no mana. If you are very very lucky your 3rd Arcane Blast will trigger this. In that event, your Arcane missiles costs 0 mana, has (in my case) an 80% crit chance, a 39% damage bonus and when it crits: it crits for 275% damage instead of 250% - which could prove vurry nice… (I may be off with the % here, but I think talented arcane does 250% crit damage instead of the usual 200% talented damage, and 150% untalented crit damage.)

If after testing, the Arcane Blast glyph is still not working for arcane missiles, and this rotation proves the best: I’m going to drop the Arcane Blast glyph. That 9% bonus damage is never going to get seen unless I keep my current shot rotation. Keep the mana regen or heal-ocation glyphs as they are fantastic utility. Unfortunately this will be un-testable until the patch goes live.

I have read that some opinions are that this is a PVP nerf without affecting PVE – but as far as I can see it, the effect on PVP is not that huge. (Little less burst damage, but more availability of it) an Arcane Powered POM PYRO is still more than feasible – you just have a 1.5s cooldown on the POM before you can activate AP (lob an Arcane barrage at the target maybe between activations? Assuming AP is not on the GCD)