Username
Password
Burst damage vs. Healers efficiency in Arenas
We understand that many players feel burst damage is too high right now. But when all is said and done, there still needs to be a place for damage dealers. Killing a healer, even in the absence of crowd control, silences or whatever, still needs to be a viable tactic at the end of the day.
PvE Gear in PvP
Ideally, PvE gear should be what you use until you have PvP gear. The same should be true of using PvP gear to do a raid. Weapons are a little bit of an exception, since traditionally their damage has been high and resilience low. That may be worth changing though.
Gear Upgrade - Slightly different stats on different tiers
Unless the piece's name is orange, gear should almost always be a choice. Even if you are jumping up a tier you may be dropping some stats in order to increase others.
Gearing up is one of the most interesting parts of the game. Deciding whether you want X or Y is supposed to be a tough decision. We make no guarantee that everything that drops is an upgrade for you, even set pieces.
Building the most optimal set of gear for your particular spec is also one of the things that let more expert players demonstrate mastery of the game. If the set pieces were always better, that wouldn't happen. In fact one of the reasons we made sets smaller (not 8 pieces or whatever) is so players could still undertake the challenge of completing them without also getting in a position where they were very reluctant to upgrade again.
Buffing vs. Nerfing
We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental DPS is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse.
I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now.
They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging.
Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.
AE Damage and AE Healing
The four classes do have ways of dealing with AE damage to the raid. You have instant spells, hots, fast casts and AE heals. We have tried not to make any encounters that throw out so much damage that you can't function without a heal that hits 5 targets at once.
We throw AE damage at groups to challenge the healers, and to a lesser extent, the raid. Hitting one button 2 to 3 times in a row is not challenging. That's not how we want you to solve the problem of Saph's aura or Malygos' Vortex. It is in fact so not challenging that it starts to look pretty attractive any time more than one or two people are taking damage at once, such as most trash pulls and many boss fights.
We throw AE damage at the raid because players have proven they can pretty much handle any situation where only a few tanks are taking tons of damage (though we still have some fights like that). We feel like we need diversity in order to offer as many encounters as we do. Naxxramas and Ulduar have a lot of bosses.
If we find that we are throwing too much AE damage at the raid with the nerfs to CoH and WG, we'll adjust those encounters. I kind of doubt that will be the case since many groups have those fights on farm even without priests or druids, but because a lot of players are concerned about it, we will absolutely pay close attention to those situations. If we find that CH trivializes AE damage, or if cutting-edge guilds start stacking Resto shamans to the exclusion of other healers, we will make adjustments as well. Again, we don't think that is likely or we would have already done something. But we won't close the door on the possibility of that happening either, because clearly it is a concern of the community.
I have stated the above paragraph many different ways in many different threads over the past couple of months, so please forgive me if I start trotting it out a little less frequently.
Healing and UI Mods
Some players just like mods. Messing around with them and reconfiguring their UI is part of the game for them. That's cool and why we promote it.
However, I also think there is a group of players (healers even) who would be content to use the default UI if they could make it work. Identifying areas where the default party and raid UI fall down can help us to improve it.
For example, we are unlikely to ever fully support Clique-style one click healing.
However, raid UI can only show you buffs or debuffs one time but not both at the same time, which can be a real pain for say a priest or druid that has both hots and dispellable debuffs and long-term buffs to manage.
We understand that many players feel burst damage is too high right now. But when all is said and done, there still needs to be a place for damage dealers. Killing a healer, even in the absence of crowd control, silences or whatever, still needs to be a viable tactic at the end of the day.
PvE Gear in PvP
Ideally, PvE gear should be what you use until you have PvP gear. The same should be true of using PvP gear to do a raid. Weapons are a little bit of an exception, since traditionally their damage has been high and resilience low. That may be worth changing though.
Gear Upgrade - Slightly different stats on different tiers
Unless the piece's name is orange, gear should almost always be a choice. Even if you are jumping up a tier you may be dropping some stats in order to increase others.
Gearing up is one of the most interesting parts of the game. Deciding whether you want X or Y is supposed to be a tough decision. We make no guarantee that everything that drops is an upgrade for you, even set pieces.
Building the most optimal set of gear for your particular spec is also one of the things that let more expert players demonstrate mastery of the game. If the set pieces were always better, that wouldn't happen. In fact one of the reasons we made sets smaller (not 8 pieces or whatever) is so players could still undertake the challenge of completing them without also getting in a position where they were very reluctant to upgrade again.
Buffing vs. Nerfing
We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental DPS is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse.
I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now.
They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging.
Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.
AE Damage and AE Healing
The four classes do have ways of dealing with AE damage to the raid. You have instant spells, hots, fast casts and AE heals. We have tried not to make any encounters that throw out so much damage that you can't function without a heal that hits 5 targets at once.
We throw AE damage at groups to challenge the healers, and to a lesser extent, the raid. Hitting one button 2 to 3 times in a row is not challenging. That's not how we want you to solve the problem of Saph's aura or Malygos' Vortex. It is in fact so not challenging that it starts to look pretty attractive any time more than one or two people are taking damage at once, such as most trash pulls and many boss fights.
We throw AE damage at the raid because players have proven they can pretty much handle any situation where only a few tanks are taking tons of damage (though we still have some fights like that). We feel like we need diversity in order to offer as many encounters as we do. Naxxramas and Ulduar have a lot of bosses.
If we find that we are throwing too much AE damage at the raid with the nerfs to CoH and WG, we'll adjust those encounters. I kind of doubt that will be the case since many groups have those fights on farm even without priests or druids, but because a lot of players are concerned about it, we will absolutely pay close attention to those situations. If we find that CH trivializes AE damage, or if cutting-edge guilds start stacking Resto shamans to the exclusion of other healers, we will make adjustments as well. Again, we don't think that is likely or we would have already done something. But we won't close the door on the possibility of that happening either, because clearly it is a concern of the community.
I have stated the above paragraph many different ways in many different threads over the past couple of months, so please forgive me if I start trotting it out a little less frequently.
Healing and UI Mods
Some players just like mods. Messing around with them and reconfiguring their UI is part of the game for them. That's cool and why we promote it.
However, I also think there is a group of players (healers even) who would be content to use the default UI if they could make it work. Identifying areas where the default party and raid UI fall down can help us to improve it.
For example, we are unlikely to ever fully support Clique-style one click healing.
However, raid UI can only show you buffs or debuffs one time but not both at the same time, which can be a real pain for say a priest or druid that has both hots and dispellable debuffs and long-term buffs to manage.
