Ropetown

(sorry I put this here, but I wanted to discuss something with syllabic rather then a bunch of random doofs i guess)
Syllabyic, I finally got around to reading most of your post (6 pages) and I had some comments.

First off i'd like to say that I think your post is well constructed and makes some very awesome points about the imbalance of the our factions in PvP, but I wanted to try to come to a better understanding of a few of them.
In a lot of your responses you focused on Kings being the largest imbalance in the game but I feel that kings in relationship to Tanks is only hugely imbalanced in fights where the mob has the ability to 1shot or 2 shot your tank (broodlord after the patch maybe). On most mobs we have encountered thus far in WoW, the key to keeping the tank alive is hp/s rather then oodles of hp. Once the tank reaches a certain threshold of hp there is really no need for them to have more unless, as I presume will happen in future dungeons, the mobs start hitting harder. So I feel your arguments towards tank hp should have in fact been targetting salvation, seeing as the amount of hp/s that can be dished out is in relation to keeping your healers off the top of the aggro list. However, I would have been happier to see you arguing that the +spi and +mana buffs from kings are unbalanced, since as far as I know, horde dont have a way to counteract that. It just seems that kings and salvation are disproportianate in the fact that salvation allows you do kill faster therefore needing less hp/mana, and kings allows you to last longer therefore needing less aggro control... anyways, I have a short attention span and a massively confusing train of thought, so yah... stuff

Otherwise, the other 2 things I wanted to touch on were razergore and playskill of alliance vs horde.

first just a quick question regarding razergore... is it really really easy with earthbind totems? oh how I envy you guys for that, hehe. Our raids go something like this "south side priests dead.... EVERYBODY START KITING!!!..." chaos ensues.

Lastly, I think the reason a lot of people are up in arms about your post is that you implied that alliance have less playskill then horde. And every person that mentioned something to the effect of "since I only know 3 people who know how to play a paladin right" etc. makes you wonder how it is that 90% of shamans are "great" players, and 95% of paladins "suck"... maybe paladins are the harder class to play =0... anyways, I have a ton of respect for you guys and your guild, you bring out the carebear side of me whenever I see a <Ropetown> tag. I respect that you guys have made it so far in BWL without salvation, and would even enjoy trying a night of no-salv for Ænigma, only if you guys tried razer without totems =P...

so, much <3 and other stuffs, any responses would be appreciated, but plz im trying to be peaceful about the subject and discuss it rahter then start some fun flame war... and once again sorry I put this here in your forums, if your mods dont want it here they can take it out

-manx

P.S. forgot something about kings, I rarely ask for it, and im guessing a lot of alliance are the same way about it. Its too much of a hassle to beg paladins for it every 5min (beg I say, since our paladins are friggin rude). It's pretty funny when halfway through a major boss fight snovv or pie mention on vent that they forgot to get kings... it happens a lot

*edit* link to the post http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 177574&P=1

LOL at Stabface sucking rope's balls

Also, ill trade Windfury and Purge for Kings and Salvation

The problem with blessing and kings is there only going to get more important, mobs will hit harders, more hps will be needed, more healing, while trying to pull less agro..

wait till the first UD 40 man instances come out...

horde get a little edge with sithilus and the totem+apec that give up 120 resist(as long as that doesnt get nerfed) but from the looks of it, people wont have to run mc months before they make trade skills that you can make craftables with na resists on them(think 1.8 you can already get high resist gear) so honestly that will be great for like 1 -2 weeks tops :\ and later in the instance when we need those hp and less healing agro, theres no craftables to put horde at the same level as alliance if you will.

i dont bitch about the current setup, as i see it now its not a HUGE problem, but with the way things are moving, i can see it becoming one. people will just get more hp, mana, spirit, ect.... a buff that adds a % and not a base number will just get better and better, and its already GOOD right now, there lies the problem.

hey now.... ill remember that next time you're askin for buffs manx

salvation only became an issue with the drakes and their huge aggro reducers. with AQ, maybe blizz wont decide an encounter is difficult because of aggro loss? who knows. yes, salvation gives a large edge, but i would agree kings is much more imbalanced (% modifiers are way bigger than flat rates, as seen by my awesome 720 agi i was sporting in MC tonight)

Blessing of Salvation is a bit unfair, in my opinion. While I'm sure razorgore might be significantly harder without earthbind, once you are past that encounter in BWL, the topic of the day is "aggro control". Being able to do 30% more aggro before taking it from the tank is a _very_ significant advantage. Windfury does the exact opposite, often makes rogues who push their limits go over the top with a lucky WF crit. I totally prefer grace of air on me over WF in high-end instances, maybe WF is nice for the tank, but it is too risky and an insignificant (and random) dps bonus for the rest of us melee. I'd definitely be interested in seeing Razorgore without EB if it meant being able to try the rest with 30% less aggro control, if only to see how it feels.

While it's unfair, its also trivial, because horde sees plenty of success in BWL. It would be totally cool if blizzard did something to balance it, but until horde runs into a spot where they -can't- succeed without these advantages, nothing needs fixed.

Trouble with horde perks is that they tend to taper off in usefulness. Grace of air/soe/etc don't scale like kings, which means horde will be a lot less powerful in future instances. If anything needs looking at or fixing, I would say these totems should be a scaling percentage, rather than a static bonus.

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Bobs - 60 Hunter <Shaman Trainer> Zuluhed
Kitchen - 47 Paladin <Shaman Trainer> Zuluhed

Which is exactly why the drakes were made tauntable. They were full-tilt unkillable by horde before that change (fix) was made.

People don't seem to quite get that a small advantage is only small if you only have one of them.

There's a reason that the _vast_ majority of guilds who have killed Nefarian are alliance. You take Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom(which you can stack with resistance auras, fire/frost totems cannot be placed at the same time as a mana spring totem, and it can also be placed on every single person in the raid by one paladin, with some nuisance, while you need 8 shamans to mana spring every group), Blessing of Salvation, Cleanse, and Judgement of Wisdom(hi infinite mana for priests), and put them together, they add up to simply making pve raids in general easier for alliance.

Is that OK? Well, that's really for Blizzard to decide. But there are no equivalents to these things, that cannot be denied, and the number of things that Horde has that alliance has no equivalent to(uh.. earthbind and windfury?) is not only much fewer in number, but much weaker in pve in general.

So, if Blizzard has any care for pve balance(independent of pvp as it is), we may see some changes. If we don't, then that just means that they don't really care that much, and they feel that as long as Horde _can_ beat things, even if it's considerably harder, then that's OK.

Now, are shaman unbalanced in pvp? Well, maybe, but that doesnt really have anything to do with pve.. and IMO they should both be balanced, and balanced seperately. You can't give someone strength in pvp and say it makes up for pve.

rockbiter totem - adds ~100 attack power a large amount of hate to party members' melee attack.

something like this would probably do the trick.

the rockbiter bits been brought up hundreds of times, but from the sounds of it, blizzards just going to change salvation. supposedly shamans are getting some bloodlust spell in the near future, maybe that will be a 30% threat increase or something to that sort.

but still, i feel salvation is only an issue due to threat reduction on mobs, once blizzard realizes that adding threat reduction attacks to a mob does not make an encounter hard, we will not hear any more salvation gripes.

To be honest, I'd rather they removed salvation altogether and added something completely different to paladins. I enjoy the aggro difficulty as horde in BWL, it feels like that is how the encounters *should* be done. After seeing Vael done by alliance (from many perspectives and angles) and seeing (and doing) Vael as horde, it seems pretty obvious (at least to me) that the horde's version of Vael is what was intended. Same with all of the other bosses.

90% of all horde/alliance bitching would become inconsequencial if salvation was removed and paladins were given another, completely unrelated ability (as long as that ability was neither underpowered or overpowered)

To be honest I don't think Blizzard will do anything to Blessing of Salvation in regards to a need to balance Horde/Alliance raid encounters. Here is one reason why.

Paladins have the ability to reduce the threat of a group/raid with a 5-15 min buff, however Shamans have the ability to increase the damage done by a group via the use of a totem. So with that rational you keep your MT group buffed with said totem (sorry I don't remember the name of it but it has to do with extra attacks and there is another for agility) and you have yourself a a couple MT's and DPS warriors with some pretty nice stats which should mitigate the lack of reduced threat from the rest of the raid.

Granted I have never done MC/BWL/ZG as a horde account but on paper this theory seems logical. BoS does have it's disadvantages as well, there have been several times where someone would either forget to get BoS or have the buff run out and all of a sudden you have a rogue or ranged DPS class on top of the hate list. Which as alot of us know is a wipe in alot of the BWL encounters.

The problem is this ability to increase the damage done (I assume you are talking about a WF totem) is a random 20% chance to proc to a warrior in a 1h weapon and shield in defensive stance already doing shit damage. Both the WF totem and the Agi totem are on the same element, air so we can only drop one of them per shaman. 250 mana for WF for a 1 minute 30 second buff for only 5 ppl.



Oh please, that's not a disadvantage, that's just bad playing and planning. If only we all had it that bad.

I'm in agreement with what Carino said. If they do add this bloodlust it will probably be on the enhancement line replacing stormstrike and requiring 31 points to get. Totally gimping how far we can get in the restoration tree.

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--Girdletush

Windfury does not significantly increase the threat done by a warrior for the simple reason that the vast majority of threat done is by base hate of special abilities. An MT on a serious mob already has more rage than they can spend, so the extra rage from Windfury strikes doesnt help at all, and the hate from the extra white dps is meaningless compared to the hate built by Sunders and so on. We're talking maybe 5% here on the average boss mob, if that.

It's patently ridiculous to state that Windfury has much value at all in pve, it just doesn't. It's pretty mediocre.

It also doesn't matter how far you can increase the damage done by your non-tanks, if the tank himself can't solidly keep aggro. +10% damage(and very variable, randomized damage increases which is terrible for aggro) on rogues makes the problem even WORSE, not better.

It's pretty much a given that Blessing of Salvation will be changed, but I'm hoping they'll also cut out and change a bunch of the other abilities as well in the paladin revamp. Give them more pvp crap, for all I care, in exchange. It doesnt really matter.

Judgement of Wisdom is basically an I-Win button in any mana dependent fight for healers, for example, because it triples or quadruples their resting mana regen rate.

Judgement of Wisdom is pretty situational. Especially with the amount of debuffs that numerous classes can add to a mob without debuff priority as of yet. I think the longest I have ever seen JoW on a mob was Ebonroc which lasted about 22 seconds but was bumped by deep wounds, mortal strike, SW:P and CoS/CoE