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Wait… that’s amusing. Because last I checked, Druids pay a percentage of their mana every shift, so getting out of your roots costs more as they get more gear. Oh, and every healer/decurser in the game pays a percentage of their mana do decurse all those lovely DoTs you spam, again, costing more and more as they add gear. So maybe we should go back and say that the fact that a S3 priest pays more to remove your CoA than a S1 priest is bad design?

Or just give up the Warlock ‘poor me’ routine. Maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it is NOT some random new horror Blizz thought up to persecute Warlocks. It’s the same mechanic that has been used widely and successfully before to slow down decurse-spamming. And now it’s being used to slow down Infinite Mana spamming.

So maybe percentage-based solutions are not preferable, but they’re not stupid. And maybe Lifetap is or isn’t balanced, but it seems that the devs think having a sustainable and scaling hp to mana conversion wasn’t what they wanted out of the class… and somehow the rest of the classes haven’t been falling over themselves to provide support for the warlocks. Unlike what’s happened in the past where raiders and guilds enmass have protested certain class changes.

Seems to bring back the great Hunter NGE patch… you know, where they ripped the guts out of the hunter mechanics and changed everything around? End of the world right? Well, it was until they finished testing on the PTRs and players got a chance to test it and find out that it wasn’t really the end of the world. Anyway, it’s still on PTRs. Cry some real tears when it hits live realms.

Locks are not OP in every facet of the game. Arena in particular lock performance in any bracket is merely mediocre (as in probably where they should be, before these changes). You are welcome to your opinions but I encourage you to go look up the stats. Locks are already well known as the initial default target in 5s not because of their threat but because they have zero escapes and make the best heal sponges.

PvE performance is more subjective and I am not going to bother breaking it down by group size but the overall point is that even in endgame raiding they are not the clear-cut dominating force.

This discussion went far afield. The major point that everyone seems to be missing is the shoddy design of having any mechanic where an ability gets more expensive\worse the farther you progress your character. There is simply no way to justify percentage based penalties. It doesn’t matter if you think lifetap should be nerfed or hate locks or any such dribble. What does matter is that unlike anything else in this game it will be worse to have more hp for locks.

Percentage-based penalties are stupid. I remember crafting “spells” in EQ2 being percentage based. The player response was to craft naked (to shrink their mana pool) and the best\most efficient crafters were very low level players whose mana regen was more than enough to cover the paltry costs.

BTW AQ war effort was a joke and prime example of how not to do things. If non-raiders could have donated to keep the gates closed I think you would have seen a very different uniting force across the servers.

It’s likely the single time WoW has ever seen massive and wholly uniting faction and even realm pride and teamwork. Granted, and somewhat ironically, it was ultimately still fueled by the simple greed for loot, but it still brought many of the factions and realms together like they had not and still haven’t before because they had a single massive common goal. Beggars cannot be choosers, after all, and WoW is certainly a beggar when it comes to faction identity within the WoW community.

By common, also granted, I do speak mostly to the endgame commoner — certainly there were niches of greed within the war effort yet. Also, some servers did not experience similar pride for various reasons. But there were enough servers that were brought together that it serves as a good example of what’s achievabl,e even in a self-interest focused game like WoW, with the right design.

The original Honor Rank system was basically the complete opposite. It was in your best interest to throw as many people under the bus as possible, whether ally or enemy. It’s still somewhat, though not completely after the years since, baffling that they’d choose it of any possible PvP system for a game that came from a series about faction war — to not even go that far; a game with any interest in not forcing the community to cannibalize itself, it was still stunningly illogical.

I’ve said this many times. At higher PvP levels I prefer game design pushing toward collaborative mechanics. So that instead of “everyone on his own”, the goals are shared and can be accomplished with general teamwork (and rewards come from the best cooperation).

Instead of making design build inner competition (the top VS the bottom), you make them cooperate constructively and just put the competition where it should be (factions against factions).

It has been said many times that the previous honor system and the arenas now are about alliance competing with alliance, and horde competing with horde.

Simple, be the biggest and most successful in the championships kind of game. They have the setting (insane player base with WOW), they have the knowledge (starcraft, warcraft) now they just need to make it happen.

With the state of the game as it is now, PVP rewards are indeed the most useful all around except for a couple of class types: the defensive warrior, the palatank and the feral tank (tank style). For everything else, having a PVP set is easier, quicker and requires overall less fuss than farming 10-25 raids.

Personally I think they should re-work classes for WOTLK, as it was mentioned above, and make a PVE effect and a PVP effect for every single ability, item, and talent in the game. Once done, they should make it so PVP rewards can NOT be used in any PVE instance and can only be used outside when your PVP flag is on.

I doubt they’ll do that however and I’m starting to really wonder how WOTLK will be…

Warlocks were pretty much top tier in every field of WoW – solo, one-group, two-group, raiding, battlegrounds, arenas (all three variants), world pvp, farming/grinding…the works. The only other class similar to that would be warriors – and they will get fixed as well, sooner or later. Other classes have strengths and weaknesses (e.g. enh. shaman are decent at PvE, poor at world PvP & battlegrounds and currently mediocre at arenas, and so on).

Unfortunately, the two have mixed in WoW to form an unholy concoction. The general words for Feral Druids when Season 3 Arena gear came out was, “Suck it up, go Resto, get your arena gear, then go back Feral.” Most feral gear was so much better (and easier to get) than the occasional drops along the way to high end raiding opportunities.

heartless_ wrote:
Genda, EQ2 has had it’s fair share of retooling, so don’t sit on some “holier than though” seat. Remember, SOE is responsible for the NGE, and I don’t think gamers should believe that they are not capable of doing it again.

Yes, but SOE actually improved EQ2 instead of just throwing random changes and praying that they stick. The EQ2 team took lessons to heart, particularly lessons from WoW, and the game is actually a lot of fun to play. So, while it may be fun to blame SOE for all the ills in the world, the two games were ‘improved” (or not) by two different groups.

I think the most shocking thing about this WoW episode is that it shows that WoW really doesn’t learn from other games; this isn’t a new problem that’s totally unexpected in the realm of online games. Of course, they have 10 million billion subscribers at this point and shit solid gold, so I should just to QQ more, right?

Personally, I prefer EQ2 to WoW, just my friends are now playing WoW so I suck it up and play with them.

1. Balancing for both PvE and PvP at the same time is hard. You should probably do one or the other, but not both.

and

2. Your game should be designed so that abilities and stats and such can all be different in PvP than in PvE. Then you can adjust one without affecting the other.

Bruce

Read my blog. I’m no fan of SOE, and it’s pretty much there in black and white. I’m just saying that for me, EQ2 looks like the game with the better future, game-play wise. Add that to the fact that they aren’t tooling the whole game to balance the smallest possible subset of a mini game within the game, and I’ll sit on what seat is most comfortable.