Ghostcrawler
Tank TimeI mentioned previously (though it very well could have been in another thread) that we have been looking a lot at tank balance. We think tanks surviving short windows of spike damage has been fairly balanced in beta for some time, and indeed we are seeing all tank classes used effectively in beta Challenge Modes and Heroic raid testing.
We have made a few changes to longer-term tank healing required, which will show up both on beta and live very soon. I mentioned that we were initially going to nerf monk and DK, but we now think they and paladins are fine. Instead, the rage tanks required too much healing, so we are causing them to take less damage and have more rage for active mitigation.
Druid-- Auto attack rage generation increased by 75%.
--
Thick Hide now provides 12% physical damage reduction.
Warrior-- Rage generation from
Revenge increased from 10 to 15.
-- Rage generation from
Shield Slam increased from 15 to 20. (
continues to give 5 extra, so 25 now).
-- Reduced internal cooldown on
Mastery: Critical Block from
from 5 sec to 3 sec.
-- Increased damage reduction from
Vanguard from 15% to 25%.
-- Increased armor from
We made a change to prevent
Dash and
Cat Form from stacking (
Dash now increases you TO 70% not BY 70%), which inadvertently also made
Cat Form stop stacking with
Feline Swiftness. To be clear,
Feline Swiftness should stack with
Cat Form. We will fix.
At both level 85 and level 90, in high-mastery conditions,
Rake will outscale
Shred for DPE and become the primary filler move for CPs.
Shred is still weaved in to extend rip duration and letting tf/proc buffed
Rakes roll, but overall the rotations is largely simplified by just spamming
Rake.
Yeah, this seems like a valid concern (i.e. the numbers make sense). We'll investigate and try to shift damage around to discourage it.
Ghostcrawler
Could we get some news if the devs are doing anything to fix the range issue with
Fire Blast's mechanic?
There are some times where we do some tricky things under the hood to make things feel better, and this is one of them. The intended gameplay is that you should be able to get a
Heating Up proc while already casting another spell, and follow that one with an
Fire Blast to force a Hot Streak proc. You should never need to cancel your current cast to get that benefit.
So, tricky under-the-hood things follow. Again, you do not need to know or understand this to use
Fire Blast effectively, or play Fire; it should “just work." But, for those interested in the gory details, here they are:
--
Fireball,
Pyroblast, and
Flurry (which was bugged until recently) have a cap on their effective travel time.
-- Their effects will take place after a maximum of 0.75 sec.
-- The fireball visual will still travel at the same speed, but you’ll see the damage number pop up and get the
Heating Up proc after 0.75 sec, even though the fireball visual is still traveling through the air.
-- We normally prefer the game to feel more visceral, by tightly syncing visuals to effects, but this change felt worth the gameplay benefit to us. In a future patch, we may be able to hasten the visual to match.
-- If you have
Heating Up, and get a non-crit, then
Heating Up gets removed, as expected.
-- However, if the non-crit came from a spell with a travel time, or from
Scorch (which is supposed to be able to replace
Fireball rotationally while moving), then we delay the removal of
Heating Up by 0.25 sec.
Ghostcrawler
has a weird interaction with the spell dmg taken debuff presently.
Yeah, this is a bug. It should be 5%. It may be fixed already.
After consideration, we are a bit worried about paladin survivability as well.
Shield of the Righteous, buffed by mastery, is a massive amount of mitigation, but the risk is that whenever paladins didn't have it available, they'd risk spike damage. (As an aside, it was also weird for paladins to suddenly be the spikey tank after years of being the opposite.) We're going to increase the Stamina benefit of
from 15% to 25%.
One additional paladin note is that we are moving the initial tick of
Sacred Shield to the end. We didn't want players to feel like the right way to play was to constantly cancel and overwrite the bubble.
This one change though makes it feel wrong, and deprives us of one of the
Sacred Shield ticks. in order to not have to reapply it and miss that initial tick again i feel as if though the way to play is to overwrite this and keep it up, constantly hitting this button. Which i believe is the opposite of your intent. I still want the absorb effect but this change just makes it feel bad =/
Hmm. It looks like our fix to move the tick to the end did not work so you just lost it. That wasn't the intent. Fixing soon (tm).
Ghostcrawler
Can you clarify how
Healing Stream Totem scales with haste, because it's starting to do my head in.
Sure. The short version is that it’s not a HoT, and it functions differently. The totem casts a heal instantly, and once every two seconds (reduced by haste), and despawns after 15 sec (unaffected by haste). So haste on a HoT typically works to add ticks at certain breakpoints, which will half the time increase the total duration beyond the base, but that doesn’t happen with
Healing Stream Totem.
Ghostcrawler
Also,
Vanish no longer(apparently) has it's +1000
Stealth level anymore.
It used to have an Effect # that said something exactly like #2 for
Stealth but, 1000.
Since that's kind of unrelated, any reason for that if it was intentional?
Vanish still adds +1000. It's just in another spell now triggered by
Vanish, which might be harder to data-mine.
I don't know off the top of my head why base rogue stealth was changed from 40 to 35, but the same is true of Feral druids and non-Ferals have lower stealth. I *think* this is all working as intended, but will investigate more.