The Daily Blues
Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.
The Daily Blues, in which Ghostcrawler talks about the thunder and the clap.
Table of Contents
Ghostcrawler
We generally don't try to execute actual "stealth nerfs." The community will nearly always figure it out anyway so we don'y gain much by trying to hide anything. Sometimes "stealth nerfs" are just things we didn't manage to document, but many times they are misunderstandings.
(I'm talking about live anyway. On betas and PTRs numbers are going to change quite a bit — that's the whole idea.)
Allow me to make some slight edits to your post.
"The reason why Warbringer and Shield Slam got nerfed was because they were overpowered."
What is overpowered is something we, and only we, get to determine. If players bring something up, we typically look into it. Just because sometimes player opinions align with ours does not mean the former drive the latter. There are plenty of counter examples of the community convinced something is a problem that we think is working fine.
The forums are a good source of feedback for us, but don't turn them into some kind of design council.
At the very least, you should be able to reduce your chance to miss a Taunt to zero if you reduce your chance to miss with a weapon to zero. It's also possible we'll just let them always hit.
Seriously though, silence isn't a dispel. Dispels are tied to magical effects. Silences are just tied to things that (more or less) logically require an audio component (in the game fiction — I'm not talking about your sound card) to work. Most caster spells qualify but some other abilities do too.
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As soon as I read that I thought, "Man, GC just opened up a can of worms". I understand where you are coming from but now we get to read 10 pages of "Wait, I don't have to make noise to do X, why does it obey silence!?"
That response is certainly possible, but I figure part of what I can do out here (in exchange for all the feedback we get) is offer the occasional intent behind a game decision. Sometimes players can get us to question those decisions, but in cases like this it's going to take more than "It doesn't seem to *me* like silence could stop a Thunder Clap." Trying to arbitrate how the physics of magic should work is a pretty futile exercise. :)
Other
Thank you for your patience.