Not everyone is going to even agree that Arcane needs "fixing" -- I don't think that Arcane mage are actually too powerful in arenas, certainly not in the higher ratings against better geared opponents, but I do think that the spec should be revised to for more elegant/less stupid play.
The success or failure of an Arena match involving an Arcane mage hinges heavily on 2 global cooldowns. An AP+PoM Pyro or Frostfire bolt (double benefit from mind mastery btw) followed by an Arcane Barrage. Two globals. Three seconds. The damage is generally 9-17k, which is a pretty large range, and a lot of controllable "burst."
Another serious problem is Mirror Image. A spammable non-DR polymorph is too powerful, but their damage, and their tendency to break existing crowd control or sheep primary targets, can completely turn the tide of a fight, and often the mirrors more than any of the players can occasionally determine match outcomes. (Retarded)
A lot of people have posted lots of "just fix or just nerf so-and-so" and Arcane "will be fine." I don't really agree; I think the tree has many problem talents that have terrible effects on the class and game and many need to be replaced/changed pretty significantly.
Arcane Subtlety - The nerf is good. Polymorph and Frost Nova should never resist dispels. Neither should any of the stackable debuffs such as WC or Improved Scorch. Why not remove dispel resist mechanic from class entirely?
Revised Arcane Subtlety - Increase damage done to targets afflicted by a magic by 2/4% and reduces the threat generated by your Arcane Spells by 20/40%.
Torment of the Weak - This is a retarded talent. It is much too much damage per point investment.
Revised Torment of the Weak - Increases your damage done to snared targets by 3/6/9%.
Improved Blink - This talent is horrific RNG. It is a good talent and not overpowered, but 30% is not enough to be reliable, but still enough to win games when that 5point eviscerate misses.
Revised Improved Blink - Reduces the mana cost of your Blink spell by 25/50% and grants you 35/70% additional movement speed for 3 seconds after blinking.
Presence of Mind - I don't believe this spell belongs in the game as a core component of Arcane's damage.
Revised Presence of Mind - Your next spell with casting time less than 10 seconds is instant, but deals 35% less damage. (Reduce cooldown to 2 minutes)
Arcane Power - The problem.
Revised Arcane Power - Increases movement and casting speed by 30% for 10 seconds. You are immune to silence and interrupt effects during this time.
Slow - With no dispel resistance, this talent is problematic. The buff I propose is somewhat large, but I believe that the reduction in burst to PoM and AP will lead to much longer games where perhaps this makes sense in context.
Revised Slow - Identical to old, except, "When dispelled the broken bonds of the magic frees the mage of all current movement impairing effects"
And that's all I got for talents.
Mirror Image polymorph should be given a 10 second cooldown, be on DR, and should not heal.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Nerdotry
I thought Serennia's post about balance issues was pretty interesting. I certainly disagree vehemently about a few things, but I thought he had some good points, and a lot of what he said is believed by the majority of non-bad players right now. Since my time in arenas has been largely goofing off in the 1800s on various teams and not really playing much against many strong opponents, I don't really have a ton to say. I've yet to play 3s at all this season actually.
I agree that DK survivability is retarded. I think the fact that a DK can walk into a 4DPS team in 5s with ZERO fear of getting gibbed, in full PvE gear, is beyond retarded. I also think that even after the incoming nerfs, the Gargoyle in smaller brackets, is a huge problem. In Nagrand or Org, it is devastating as it flies up extremely high and is near impossible to avoid, and it does devastating damage, hitting 2.5 times as hard as a Water Elemental, so hard that any 2dps team can't really afford to take more than a few attacks without a guaranteed loss. Reduce the damage and have the gargoyle fly lower so it can be LoS'd and adjust baseline damage slightly higher for PvE nerdotry. The next issue I have is minor, but DG mechanics basically force you to wait all the way until you land before you can blink beacause the spell flips your camera -- this guarantees you eat a melee special, remove the camera flip from DG. I pretty much agree with the other criticisms Avatar(Serennia/whatever) posted.
Rogue damage is a problem. I see no simple solution to this as even with full armor talents and Ice Armor up, a rogue can 100-0 cloth in 3seconds. ambush-mut-evisc or just mut-mut-evisc. I've seen mut->mut for 12k total over and over. This is fucking stupid on a target that has 30% mitigation. The logic that mut rogues are "easy" to kite is retarded as if their teammate is not retarded, he can assist in eventually helping the rogue get back on you, and frequently the rogue is simply energy regenning during some of your "kite time" anyways. The unintended effect of the mutilate change has been that it isn't necessary to dump CP into kidneys (to get positioning) and all these CP can be burned on eviscerates against cloth. Two sprints, two vanishes, reduced duration on snares, and baseline movement speed -- mobility problems what? I see no elegant solution beyond reducing ambush damage and creating a synthetic positioning requirement on muti -- reduce dmg by 20% except when striking from behind or something. Create an incentive to burn CP on kidneys on nonhealers.
I played almost 150 games of 2s yesterday. Literally less than 5 didn't have a rogue or unholy DK, zzz.
Arcane mages are pretty hated. The ability to do 13-15k in two globals isn't much loved. Mirror images can be EXTREMELY gay and chain poly someone for basically 30 seconds. And yes, the spec encourages somewhat mindless damage spam, infamous ap-pom-nuke-barrage. Serennia's proposals are however ludicrous. Arcane mages don't cast. Haste is useless. Frost mages cast, but casting is so bad in this game, that they stack hundreds of haste to counter the need to cast. The only spell I ever cast is polymorph playing Arcane (with some small exceptions that are maybe 1 in 10 games).
An Arcane mage has to be able to 60-0 a player with no defensive cooldowns or he will never kill anyone. No way to run a healer out of mana, no healing debuff, long cooldowns, atrociously low survivability, and not very potent CC. Unless Arcane gains some new potent PvP mechanic, burst damage is necessary. Arcane Power is the culprit, it does scale extremely well. Without radically changing the play style, there's no simple nerf to make Arcane more fun for everyone else. (Unless you think that the class is simply too powerful and needs a damage reduction, but representation of Arcane mages does not seem to demonstrate they are too "good", just that they are perhaps too "gay")
The damage is not relatively higher than it was @ 70. I played AP/Fire in 2s BEFORE the buffs to gladiator because the damage was so high. Critting for 6.5k-7.5 was normal at 70 with AP-Pyros on relatively much smaller health pools. (I crit for maybe 9k on a no resilience target when I wear full PvE gear right now) The issue now is simply that there is a second spell with good +dmg scaling so the overall burst is somewhat stronger.
Mirror images should be redesigned. If you remove their poly, they are useless entirely, the whole point of the ability is the poly.
Mirror image is hard to balance. Does it cause some mayhem? Yes. But you can use mods (or change your tab to only select PLAYERS) to basically negate their confusion effects. They do basically zero damage. Less than one renew. A better spell would do probably 50-100% more dmg, have no polymorph, their damage would not break CC effects, and attacks that hit you for more than 30% of your remaining HP should be redirected to a Mirror. I really liked the idea in Beta that you could swap between your images, but that might be hard to balance as well -- sometimes the images are all on top of each other and it would be pretty useless, sometimes they run off and it would be quite potent to instantly warp around the map.
Arcane is always problematic to balance. I'd like to see the spec designed around using Arcane Blast to set up big burst without having crap like AP and PoM in the game, but I can't see how that would ever really work. Relying on cast time spells that expose your only tree is probably unwise. Short of replacing AP with an MS or a Mana Burn mechanic, you aren't changing that Arcane needs to kill people very quickly.
As far as healers go, my issue with holy pallies compared to the other healers is perhaps more about how much assist damage they can provide. Holy Shock and HoW are HUGE as is freedom, indirectly. Priests and shamans should pose more offensive threat than a palladin -- I don't think they do currently.
Inevitably, I think, more than resilience, but higher stamina and better play will gradually scale Arcane out of being in vogue.
I agree that DK survivability is retarded. I think the fact that a DK can walk into a 4DPS team in 5s with ZERO fear of getting gibbed, in full PvE gear, is beyond retarded. I also think that even after the incoming nerfs, the Gargoyle in smaller brackets, is a huge problem. In Nagrand or Org, it is devastating as it flies up extremely high and is near impossible to avoid, and it does devastating damage, hitting 2.5 times as hard as a Water Elemental, so hard that any 2dps team can't really afford to take more than a few attacks without a guaranteed loss. Reduce the damage and have the gargoyle fly lower so it can be LoS'd and adjust baseline damage slightly higher for PvE nerdotry. The next issue I have is minor, but DG mechanics basically force you to wait all the way until you land before you can blink beacause the spell flips your camera -- this guarantees you eat a melee special, remove the camera flip from DG. I pretty much agree with the other criticisms Avatar(Serennia/whatever) posted.
Rogue damage is a problem. I see no simple solution to this as even with full armor talents and Ice Armor up, a rogue can 100-0 cloth in 3seconds. ambush-mut-evisc or just mut-mut-evisc. I've seen mut->mut for 12k total over and over. This is fucking stupid on a target that has 30% mitigation. The logic that mut rogues are "easy" to kite is retarded as if their teammate is not retarded, he can assist in eventually helping the rogue get back on you, and frequently the rogue is simply energy regenning during some of your "kite time" anyways. The unintended effect of the mutilate change has been that it isn't necessary to dump CP into kidneys (to get positioning) and all these CP can be burned on eviscerates against cloth. Two sprints, two vanishes, reduced duration on snares, and baseline movement speed -- mobility problems what? I see no elegant solution beyond reducing ambush damage and creating a synthetic positioning requirement on muti -- reduce dmg by 20% except when striking from behind or something. Create an incentive to burn CP on kidneys on nonhealers.
I played almost 150 games of 2s yesterday. Literally less than 5 didn't have a rogue or unholy DK, zzz.
Arcane mages are pretty hated. The ability to do 13-15k in two globals isn't much loved. Mirror images can be EXTREMELY gay and chain poly someone for basically 30 seconds. And yes, the spec encourages somewhat mindless damage spam, infamous ap-pom-nuke-barrage. Serennia's proposals are however ludicrous. Arcane mages don't cast. Haste is useless. Frost mages cast, but casting is so bad in this game, that they stack hundreds of haste to counter the need to cast. The only spell I ever cast is polymorph playing Arcane (with some small exceptions that are maybe 1 in 10 games).
An Arcane mage has to be able to 60-0 a player with no defensive cooldowns or he will never kill anyone. No way to run a healer out of mana, no healing debuff, long cooldowns, atrociously low survivability, and not very potent CC. Unless Arcane gains some new potent PvP mechanic, burst damage is necessary. Arcane Power is the culprit, it does scale extremely well. Without radically changing the play style, there's no simple nerf to make Arcane more fun for everyone else. (Unless you think that the class is simply too powerful and needs a damage reduction, but representation of Arcane mages does not seem to demonstrate they are too "good", just that they are perhaps too "gay")
The damage is not relatively higher than it was @ 70. I played AP/Fire in 2s BEFORE the buffs to gladiator because the damage was so high. Critting for 6.5k-7.5 was normal at 70 with AP-Pyros on relatively much smaller health pools. (I crit for maybe 9k on a no resilience target when I wear full PvE gear right now) The issue now is simply that there is a second spell with good +dmg scaling so the overall burst is somewhat stronger.
Mirror images should be redesigned. If you remove their poly, they are useless entirely, the whole point of the ability is the poly.
Mirror image is hard to balance. Does it cause some mayhem? Yes. But you can use mods (or change your tab to only select PLAYERS) to basically negate their confusion effects. They do basically zero damage. Less than one renew. A better spell would do probably 50-100% more dmg, have no polymorph, their damage would not break CC effects, and attacks that hit you for more than 30% of your remaining HP should be redirected to a Mirror. I really liked the idea in Beta that you could swap between your images, but that might be hard to balance as well -- sometimes the images are all on top of each other and it would be pretty useless, sometimes they run off and it would be quite potent to instantly warp around the map.
Arcane is always problematic to balance. I'd like to see the spec designed around using Arcane Blast to set up big burst without having crap like AP and PoM in the game, but I can't see how that would ever really work. Relying on cast time spells that expose your only tree is probably unwise. Short of replacing AP with an MS or a Mana Burn mechanic, you aren't changing that Arcane needs to kill people very quickly.
As far as healers go, my issue with holy pallies compared to the other healers is perhaps more about how much assist damage they can provide. Holy Shock and HoW are HUGE as is freedom, indirectly. Priests and shamans should pose more offensive threat than a palladin -- I don't think they do currently.
Inevitably, I think, more than resilience, but higher stamina and better play will gradually scale Arcane out of being in vogue.
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