Monday, February 9, 2009

Why People Should Chill on Whining About Arcane Nerfs

Okay, this is going to be VERY brief, but, let's be real, AP at 30% + PoM was generally overkill.

By blowing AP you FORCED defensive cooldowns such as PS, DS, IB, NS, IB, etc -- you probably could have forced these CDs doing marginally less damage. Previously you had to survive 2 minutes to reset CDs for the finishing burst/next set of defensive CDs, you now have less long to wait and still probably do enough damage to score kills.

I'm not saying OMGARCANEISBETTERNOW, but I think all the forum emoraging is blowing things out of proportion and is very out of perspective.

The big nerf everyone should be bitching about is the casting speed debuff nerf. Considering the duration and potency of these debuffs, it is generally not worth spending a global removing them, which speaks pretty strongly on how useful they are. The ability to CC 1.5 players with slow on one and poly on the other was VERY good and underutilized, it's basically gone now. I think putting a short CD on Slow and Tongues and a big fuck you to Mind Numbing would have been a better bandaid.

A lot of the strength of lolarcane I still feel comes from how stupidly gay Impact is (despite the horrible trend of 57/3/11 which I feel is awful but whatever). An impact stun into PoM-Pyro-> Imp CS-> AP Barrage->fblast->Barrage is still going to score kills and potentially 100-0.

See how it ends up playing before emoing too much, goddamn. =p

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

lol @ you thinking 57/3/11 is a pvp spec

venruki said...

lot of people do pvp with it ...............

Raddy said...

Yeah I think for a few comps it's solid...but impact wins games. It kind of seems less popular this week than last.

Anonymous said...

I'm a 51/0/20 man Raddy. Shatter + Counterspell + Frozen Target + Fast cast missiles is insane damage.

Anonymous said...

yeh for 10 games they do...

Vontre said...

An AP PoM nerf has honestly been 4 years overdue.

But hey.

Anonymous said...

No I hope the whining keeps up and the bandwagon all respecs out of arcane im tired of scrub arcane mages, plus by playing arcane they all forgot how to play frost

Niiva said...

I call it now, arcane is dead. Therefore you can say frost got indirectly buffed. 51/0/20 or some different version of this was just kickass with a hungering cold dk and may still be.

Niiva said...

Btw raddy, while I agree about impact don't you feel pathetic relying on it?

Anonymous said...

Its definitly a nerf but not nearly as bad as it seems, at least for my holy pal/mage team. Basically our strategy was sheep/stun or repentance/stun, hopefully make them trinket, then 1min later sheep/stun again, pop AP and kill someone in a HoJ. Granted, itll be a bit harder to land a kill in a HoJ now but being able to use AP every single HoJ will also make it much easier to make them trinket in the first place.

1m24 cooldown on PoM also opens up some interesting options with PoM sheep to make them waste trinket, then use it again 1m24 later to setup a combo. Overall, more options, less gimmicky burst that kills people in one GCD. I just wish theyd remove the shared CD on PoM/AP though, seems like overkill.

Anonymous said...

It also indirectly buffs the lightning trinket and the engi haste gloves, since you'll basically be able to use them everytime you AP burst now. Icy veins cooldown is still a bitch though. Arcane flows lowering IV cooldown to 1min (with ice floes as well) would balance it out a bit.

Raddy said...

@anon -- I agree entirely with the idea that PoM having a shorter CD frees you up to choose more how you use it. I've been wondering a lot if there aren't times when pom sheeping is more effective than using pom for burst anyways. (Say against shamans/war or rogue/dru)

Anonymous said...

The only time I really use PoM sheep anyway is when I cant get a sheep off a LoS'ing healer for a combo... that was offset however when my pally went 37/0/34 instead of 51/20 by repentance. PoM sheep is still devastating against double dps teams though. For example against anything rogue/X I focus X, rogue gets repentanced right when he pops out, if he trinkets he gets HoJ'ed for 6secs and then they only have 9secs to do something before eating a full PoM sheep again, by which time his teammate is usually dead.

Anonymous said...

PoM on 1m24 will definitly open up our game though. I can see many comps where PoM sheep someone, stun the other right out the gates will force a trinket, wait 1m24, do it again for a win. Even with the nerfed damage, that still leaves you with repentance for something like PoM sheep healer, HoJ dps, holy shock, blast/blast/barrage->repentance DPS, resheep healer, blast/barrage/holy shock dps in repentance. Throw in 2 lightning trinkets and thats enough damage to kill every single class in the game, possibly even those with -30% dmg during stuns, without any crits.

kzn said...

Arc/Fire works better in comps where you're zerging stuff down hardcore and barely have time to get casts off.

If you run something like RMS, on the other hand, people basically cannot stop you from stacking up to 3 ABlasts and POMing one after that, which is significantly more devastating, and significantly more reliable, than an impact proc into burst chain.

I have seen warriors go 80-0 instantly when I pom'd as 57/3/11 (a pvp version), thats never happened as 53/18/0

Kzn said...

The survivability when you go 11 into Frost is also retardedly good compared to Arc/Fire.

Christ, I cant even guarantee 1v1 wins against rogues as Arc/Fire - I could do that in worse gear and with a worse understanding of the game as Arc/Frost. Being able to tank the Garrote is huge as fuck.

iPhael said...

Im so happy about the changes its kind of silly, being able to stand up against arcane mirrors is going to be huge. Now if only they could do something like this to TNT/ExS and DRW/Oblit.

I still think they should move imp evoke into low-tier arcane tho. Think about it, the 2 specs that are struggling with mana are slave fireball and pvp frost (and 3.1 fire maybe?). Both of which go 4 tiers deep into arcane. The one spec that doesnt have mana issues is FFb, which doesnt have any points in arcane anyways. IMO the biggest killer in arc vs frost is the ability to reset with an earlier evoke, and putting us on equal ground could really smooth things over. Seems kind of like an 'everyone wins' scenario.

Anonymous said...

The new patch notes say AP is now 20% dmg with a 2mins cooldown. If this is right, this is actually a very nice buff to 2s comp that rely on CC. Sheep/stun, burst with AP (no way they can tank that with only -10% on AP), wait 1m24, do it again ftw. Before, AP cooldown always matched their trinket, now you have a 36sec window to CC/burst. Hopefully its not a typo and it really is 20% and not 10%.

Kolenzo said...

I've been saying they need to nerf the casting debuffs for a while now. Before, you were nigh useless without removing them (nevermind how broken they were vs classes that couldn't remove them). Now there's an actual choice "can I afford to remove this slow" as opposed to "We're gonna take it up the butt if I don't remove this slow".

New PoM is absolutely fucking awesome, the one problem I've had with pom since tbc is that using it on anything other than pyro (or whatever your biggest nuke is in your spec) has been a bad move in nearly every situation since arcane straight up couldn't burst without it, so the versatility it -should- provide was lost. With 1min 20s cooldown, the options are much better.

Anonymous said...

They should give bottom arcane an instant cast sheep with a 1m30s cooldown (separate cooldown from PoM, obviously). Seems like a fair trade if their gonna nerf our burst.

Anonymous said...

Yes that is a fantastic idea just what this game needs right now is more instant cast CC

Anonymous said...

Pretty clear now that frost is the overpowered spec for pvp mages.