Arena stealth changes coming soon
With the announcement of the upcoming replacement of The Crowd Chose You with the Dampening mechanic, many players have been worried about stealth classes, particularly rogues, being able to abuse the Shadow Sight system currently in place in arenas to stealth until the Dampening debuff starts to ramp up. At the moment, rogues can grab the crystals, intended for their opponents to be able to see them, and immediately disappear. This is most notably the case for rogues, although night elf feral druids can put Shadowmeld to use here. Blizzard CM Lore has posted on the forums about an upcoming change to remove this issue from arenas:
We're not totally sure it would be a problem, as it would require quite a bit of skill and more than a little luck to pull off, but we do see the concern and want to avoid promoting that sort of behavior. So, when the Dampening change goes in, we'll also be changing the Shadow Sight debuff to prevent the player who picks up the orb from using stealth mechanics while it's active. That will also include abilities like Vanish or Shadowmeld.
So when these changes go in, picking up the Shadow Sight orb will cause the person who collected it to take an additional 5% damage, but also give them a DoT similar to Faerie Fire, which prevents re-stealthing for a short period of time. The +damage taken effect currently lasts for 15 seconds, so it seems fair to assume the Faerie Fire-esque effect would have the same duration.
Lore is right in saying that this would not often be a problem. It's not that often that you face double rogue comps, not that often that they choose to troll with stealthing and taking the orbs for more than a couple of orb spawns, and not often that they cannot eventually be revealed by their opponents. Nonetheless, given the mess Blizzard have got themselves into with The Crowd Chose You, it's really good to see an increased level of caution with this particular mechanic.
While there may well still be kiting issues with teams that combine heavy control and good mobility, the removal of the possibility to use stealth to the particular advantage of one class over all others is a great start. What other concerns are there with Dampening? The system does leave itself open to abuse by teams that are capable of kiting, or of turtling heavily at first then unleashing heavy burst towards the end of the match. But there's really only so much Blizzard can do about that, given that it seems they're fairly intent on implementing this design into arenas.
And the last thing I'd like to know is this: just when exactly are we expecting these changes to land? They have been very shady indeed on the timing, and as The Crowd Chose You continues to wreak havoc on the ladders, this season is becoming less relevant by the day. I really don't want Mists to be an expansion where all the titles and achievements are irrelevant because of the state of PvP, but it's certainly looking that way so far.
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