The Daily Blues
Each day, WoW.com takes you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From the latest posts from Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) to the lowdown on StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, we'll keep you informed.
Volley? It's gone.
Table of contents
Ghostcrawler
Been many reports in Beta the Hunters ability Volley is gone is this a bug or intended
With Blizz's silence on the subject makes it more concerning
It's gone. We want to make Multi-Shot the spell hunters use for AE.
Channeling a spell that makes arrows fall out of the sky doesn't feel like a hunter ability and doesn't even really match the name of the spell.
/shakes head
You realize "only class" claims are viewed as a success by the developers. The classes are too similar as it is.
On a related subject, Pursuit of Justice is pretty under budget and Eye for an Eye is pretty risky to take, considering it could perhaps break CC on the target.
Eye for an Eye will only reflect direct damage spells, not dots.
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It is something that really needs work on because at the moment as long as you have a single Holy Power and an open GCD you will TV instead of only wanting to TV at 3 which just seems odd to me.
This would be a pretty big dps loss under most circumstances. A 3 charge Templar's Verdict hits so much stronger than a 1 charge, that it's not worth it using Templar's Verdict to fill holes.
This has pretty much been my complaint from the start. Our rotation is one part Rogue, one part feral, one part empty space, and one part mashing buttons.
It doesnt feel cohesive, it doesnt feel fluid, it has no rhythm
This specific feedback is a tricky thing to handle because a lot of Ret paladins are used to mashing buttons every GCD, and any time they aren't in that state they are going to feel a lack of "rhythm" (as you put it). Yet if you look at rogues and Feral druids, they can't hit a button every GCD because they don't always have the energy to do so.
We don't want classes / specs to use every GCD. We don't think that's good for the game, as I've mentioned before. (Casters do their waiting while casting rather than in between abilities.) The trick is to fill "enough" holes with something. For some players, especially some Ret players, that "enough" is going to feel weird for them unless it means every single hole. That's not what we're going for though. Wasting every other GCD is too extreme and isn't what we're going for either.
Yeah just to clarify though, I think most Rets understand that they are a hybrid and like GC said like an arms warrior but with no MS and better healing. However, the majority of complaints are coming from the "defensive dps" model and not necessarily just being defensive. We don't want and don't need to be offhealers or defensive utility providers, that is what we were and that is what GC has said multiple times was NOT effective.
I usually reget getting into the "what is my role supposed to be?" discussions because players then feel like they're supposed to use that as a constitution to interpret whether their class is performing correctly or not. Let us worry about that. If Word of Glory is so weak that you'd never consider using it, then that's good feedback. If it needs to heal for 50K before you'd ever consider using it, then that's good feedback too (because it either means we're barking up the wrong tree, or you personally aren't the correct audience for that talent). The fact that you have talents that affect a heal should be ample evidence that we want you to situationally cast it. The fact that you have only a couple of talents (and one really aimed at Holy sub-speccing) should suggest that we want to keep it situational.
GC do you have any planed changes for AoW? what do you think of the suggestion to make it effect hammer of wrath instead? i thought it was a pretty cool idea.
Hammer of Wrath hits too hard to be a rotational ability. We'd have to make the proc really rare or nerf the Hammer of Wrath damage. You might notice we dropped Execute from the Arms warrior rotation for the same reason -- it actually neutered Execute rather than making it a fun ability.
Could you please address any of the many greater concerns outlined in the OP instead of a tertiary flavour talent please?
I address what I want to address. The reason is because players will never agree on what the right thing is for us to address, nor do we want to turn it into a shouting match. You're better off giving us feedback and letting us answer when we think it's appropriate rather than demanding answers for specific issues.
Still wish it would get the thorn treatment, sure it would be a little homogenization but I don't think thorns returns damage equal to a percent of the damage done.
We want the talent (Eye for an Eye) to be situational or at least subjective and not a no-brainer. As an active ability, every paladin would feel compelled to take it, which then gives you fewer points to spend elsewhere.
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Talents like Eye for an Eye, Selfless Healer and Acts of Sacrifice are designed to be choices. No half-decent paladin is going to skip over a major talent like Sanctified Wrath. But we are trying to design the trees so not every talent is Sanctified Wrath. If part of what attracted you to the paladin class was being able to occasionally throw out a heal to save your friends in a 5-player dungeon, then Selfless Healer might be attractive. If you like having lots of utility in PvP, then Acts of Sacrifice might be a better choice.
It's okay -- intended even -- that some of you would skip over these talents. It's only a problem if everyone does so. We imagine a cookie cutter Ret build would tell you to absolutely take Sanctified Wrath and Zealotry, but to spend a few points where you want.
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this is how i feel. Its not that the talents can not be useful, they just pale in comparison to the fun talents of other trees and classes. When i look at a tree like holy priest or any of the mage trees im like holy crap i hope ret gets some more depth like that. i just dont think ret is there yet.
I read a ton of forum posts and I'm pretty confident in saying *every* class says this. :)
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Acts of Sacrifice just seems lackluster in a tree that isn't suppose to worry about mana.
That's not entirely the case. Ret is designed to be able to hit basic abilities with enough mana. You don't have infinite mana. You'll find that casting heals other than WoG will be really difficult and Consecrate is probably not going to happen unless you situationally find yourself with a lot of mana. In that environment, being able to do something other than dps might be attractive. I think it gets way overplayed on the forums, but it's often nice to offer something other than "I bring damage!" to a group, because everyone brings damage.
With regards to Seals, I agree with the general sentiment that it really isn't much of a choice between Seal of Truth and any other Seal right now; even in PvP, you lose such a huge amount of damage by using Seal of Justice that it's just not even a choice. Either Seal of Justice needs to be more effective at slowing targets, or Seal of Truth needs to be less powerful so the choice is more reasonable.
We're going to add a little bit of damage to Justice just because there are several talents that improve Seals in the trees and we don't want those to be completely unattractive to a PvP Retribution paladin. I think it's far too early however to be able to place judgement [sic] calls on whether damage or the movement limitation of Justice is the obvious choice. You can't do much damage if you can't get to melee and typically autoattack-based damage isn't nearly as valuable in PvP.
I'm sorry...but acts of sacrifice are probably my favorite situational talents, as they are helpful in heroics to alleviate tank damage with sac, and hof 5 seconds less is too good NOT to take. Reducing mana cost is just icing on cake. It will probably be in my pve and pvp builds, but if WoG doesn't heal for a decent amount, I doubt many will take selfless healer at all.
That's good. Now if we can just get to the point where some (not all) paladins say that they like the hybridy feel of Selfless Healer, then we're all set.
Restorative Totems- Another poor talent that buffs totem usage. It is currently an outlier when compared to Blessing of Wisdom due to making a buff more effective than its counterpart. Hopefully scheduled to be scrapped, it will be very disappointing if it remains in any shape.
Restorative Totems isn't long for the world. It's a poster child for the kind of talent we're trying to prune. We just haven't finalized a suitable replacement yet.
I am hoping this one doesn't turn out to be mandatory. Blizzard added dps talents to healing trees to help the healers while they are either over-gearing an instances, or leveling. So hopefully, they stick to their guns on it and don't force us into this talent. The flaw I see in this talent is when we're in a situation where we burned through so much mana, there may not be an oppurtunity to stop casting heals.
We want Telluric Currents to be optional. It won't be an effective way to restore your mana, but it might make you feel less guilty about throwing out a Lightning Bolt in a world where mana is more precious.
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