Midsummer Festival, Patch 3.2 Changes and Blue posts

6/25/2009 11:07:10 AM

Each summer, the arrival of the Midsummer Fire Festival (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/events/midsummer/) signals a time of merriment and a chance to revel in the hottest season of the year by lighting celebratory bonfires across the land and sharing in what the elemental spirits have to offer. This year (beginning Sunday, June 21st and continuing until July 5), the festival features achievements. Learn more about the Midsummer Fire Festival content in our recently updated page, (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/events/midsummer/) which also includes a screenshot gallery. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/submission/screenshot-form.html) Once the event begins, submit your screenshots of Festival fun here. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/submission/screenshot-form.html)

Just to clarify, the change to resilience affects ALL player damage. This includes both normal hits and crits. We wanted to keep the proportion of damage coming from hits and crits the same and just reduce damage across the board. Crit damage is lowered twice, but will still contribute the same proportion of damage as it does today.

Dots do receive a slight relative buff since they are no longer taxed more than other forms of damage.

In all seriousness though, I'm curious about the reasoning behind this change. You've mentioned before that you'd like to slow fights down, where players go from 1-2 global cooldowns to 3-4. Is this change an attempt to achieve that goal?

That is the intent. We want to lower damage so that players don't die quite so quickly and have a chance to do something to respond. This should help lower the "burst damage" problem, along with some changes to specific classes. It does nothing for, or perhaps exacerbates, the "burst healing" problem. To attempt to counter this, we lowered the healing done by Penance and Lifebloom and hit some of the mana sustainability of Holy paladins (through Illumination) and druids (through Innervate and Improved Barkskin). Shamans were not heavily respresented in Arenas so we didn't think their healing output needed to be nerfed. It's possible healing may still be too good and that is something we'll need to keep a close eye on.

We changed the way dots were affected by resilience (or to be more specific, we started treating all player damage the same way) because Shadow priests and warlocks were also not performing at the level we wanted them to see them, and obviously they do a lot of damage through dots. Dots were not lowered the way other forms of damage were lowered, so dot classes by comparison will do more damage in PvP than other forms of damage than they do today.

Changing resilience to affect player damage is an attempt to make it unattractive to tanks and make it less useful for PvE in general. Note also that resilience becoming a more important stat in PvP means that damage (and to a lesser extent healing) will also likely go down, since wearing PvE gear in PvP will be even riskier.

We understand this change can affect rage generation. We have found however that rage is a notoriously difficult number to predict based on math and simulations alone (that's kind of an understatement given the history of the mechanic) so we need to see some more PvP tests to know what the actual effects will be and what changes are needed.

I should add that this is a pretty major change for PvP and will no doubt require additional iteration going forward. It is also not a panacea that obviates the need for additional PvP balance changes as needed. We ask that you be patient and try and direct your feedback towards constructive comments that will help improve the game. We think we can get PvP, and Arenas specifically, into a place that is more fun for everyone.

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