Class Q&A Series

Class Q&A Series is extended feedback Blizzard is giving before the release of patch 3.2.0 about each class.

Death Knight

Posted on the forums 25 June 2009:

Today we continue our class Q&A series with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and the development team, in which we're taking a look at each class and answering some of the top questions brought forward by their communities. Next up, we take a look at the most asked questions from the death knight class and find out more about the design philosophy behind the first Hero class, the expectations for the class, and what may lie in store for it in the future.

Community Team: We'd like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. Death knights are the newest class in the game, the first Hero class, and the only class to be added since the original launch.

Q: Where do death knights fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler:

Death knights are the only current Hero class, which means they are supposed to be the best class in the game.

No, no, I mean that death knights are an anti-magic tank, which means you bring them out for fights like Hydross and curb them for Patchwerk.

I jest again, but my point is that we introduced a new class to a game that didn't really have a niche that needed to be filled. The closest to a gap that existed was that we wanted to have more tanks available, especially for pick-up groups. But adding the dual-spec feature as well as improving some of the limitations of the existing classes has helped to fill that hole as well. Yet we did want to introduce a new class. World of Warcraft has been going on for several years now, and we thought it was time to shake things up a bit. We succeeded. Perhaps too well.

Players are obviously enjoying death knights for tanking, dps, or PvP and we'd like to think there is more going on there than just power. Some players really enjoy the rune and runic power mechanic, and I think it's fair to say that the class requires a good amount of skill to play really well. Between Death Runes and all the various cooldowns, there are a lot of opportunities to play less optimally and push the wrong button. We've asked ourselves several times if the death knight is overly complicated -- perhaps you could accomplish 90% of the design with a 3 rune system instead of a 6 rune system -- but we aren't changing it to that large a degree soon.

In terms of 3.2, we want to chill out the death knight AE damage and defensive cooldowns a little. It's fine for a melee class to have strong area-effect, but they shouldn't be so much better than warriors, rogues, and Enhancement shamans. One culprit here is [Unholy Blight], which we are considering changing to be more single-target in nature. We are also likely to split [Desecration] into two abilities: a PvP-oriented snare[ and a PvE-oriented self damage buff. We are considering shifting some of the damage from [Scourge Strike] and [Frost Strike] into [Blood Strike], which still hits for fairly paltry amounts for Frost and Unholy. We'll talk about some additional changes below.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

Their resource system is very unique. It is impossible for death knights to ever run out of resources. Any kind of benefit that makes rune-based abilities cheaper or finish their cooldowns faster are generally useless to a death knight. In fact, the whole rotation risked being very regular and even boring until we came up with a strong role for the Death Runes.

The death knight can do excellent melee damage, but also better ranged damage than most melee classes, and all three specs deal a large amount of non-physical damage.

Death knights also have a lot of abilities with medium-length cooldowns. This means they can be used multiple times per fight, but aren't always there exactly when needed. A lot of the skill involved in playing a death knight, whether for PvP, tanking, or doing raid dps, involves using these at the right time.

Death knights also hybridize into a lot of different directions. What I mean is that they have surprisingly high area damage for a predominantly melee class. They have a pet. They have interrupts, (reverse) gap-closers, and strong snares. They are very well-rounded, which has been the cause of many of the balance problems we've had with them in PvP.

Death knights don't have a dedicated tanking tree. Blood, Frost or Unholy death knight tanks are all viable, and each one can be slightly more useful depending on the boss encounter.

And then there is the obvious: they start at high level, showered in blue gear and even a mount. They have some of the best quests in the entire game in their start zone, and their identity is stitched heavily into the story of Northrend and the Lich King specifically.

Community Team: One question in particular that relates to one of the earliest designs of the Death Knight class and has been burning on the minds and tongues of every death knight for quite awhile now.

Q: How do we feel about the current viability of dual-wielding? Are there plans to improve it or have it fit a specific role for the class?

Ghostcrawler:

This is a controversial topic because we realize some players just aren't interested in dual-wielding (or seeing any death knights even do it), while others love the faster strikes that come with it. Our design has always been that dual-wielding should be an option, but that also means that it can't take over, as it often does for classes in which we provide the option.

Part of our goal with the death knight was not to have a tanking or PvP tree, and we feel we've been pretty successful with that. However, adding dual-wield to that matrix just gives us an impossible task, because then you need to have the Blood dual-wield tank spec and the Frost two-hander PvP spec and so on.

What we are going to do with dual-wield in 3.2 is just provide the Frost tree with the talents necessary to prop-up dual wielding, including a new talent that lets [Frost Strike], [Death Strike], [Obliterate] etc. hit with both weapons. This will likely mean that Blood and Unholy dual-wield specs just won't work anymore. It also carries the risk that all Frost death knights feel like they have to go dual-wield. This latter part isn't necessarily a goal, but could be the outcome. We think in this case our only option is to remove some player choice in order to provide a real choice in other areas.

Community Team: The Blood tree has been quite popular lately, but the players have been actively discussing the 51-point talent, Dancing Rune Weapon, lately. Even with the glyph for it, [Dancing Rune Weapon] only lasts through about one rotation of abilities while the Unholy 51-point talent, [Summon Gargoyle], lasts much longer.

Q: Do we have plans for any changes or improvements to Dancing Rune Weapon?

Ghostcrawler:

We tried to make Dancing Rune Weapon and Gargoyle unique, but I think it has ended up causing more problems than anything. I think it's likely you'll just see both abilities as flat runic power costs that summon a creature for a flat period of time. This will let us balance the numbers appropriately.

Community Team: Due to their effectiveness while tanking, death knights saw a rapid popularity growth as tanks which caused the reduction of the armor bonus of [Frost Presence] in patch 3.1.3. Some players are afraid this will push them out of being an option as a main tank as they felt they were when originally implemented.

Q: What are our current thoughts on the status of death knight tanks and do we have plans for further changes?

Ghostcrawler:

Almost all of the top raiding guilds considered the death knight to be overpowered as a tank and the only real option for many of the Ulduar hard modes. While the community isn't always right about everything, they are right a lot, and in this case we think the evidence is overwhelming. We wanted to make the cooldowns the unique part of death knight tanking, and we haven't given up on that design, but it has also turned out that having lots of powerful cooldowns is just an extremely potent way to tank. Many of the Naxx and Ulduar bosses were dangerous from predictable blasts of damage on cooldowns longer than the death knight ones. Plus the cooldowns could be used to survive just a bit longer. When the other tanks could survive two hits, the death knight could survive three. It's entirely possible you'll see [Icebound Fortitude] on a two-minute timer in the 3.2 patch. I want to reiterate though that our vision hasn't changed -- we still want death knights to be able to tank every encounter. Rather than posting in the forums that you are now doomed and will have to reroll, help us get the death knights in a place where they are an attractive option but not the clear best option on most fights.

Community Team: There have been some complaints among the death knight community about stats on armor pieces, especially set pieces, not benefiting the talent spec that they want to play as much as another talent spec.

Q: Are we satisfied with stats such as Armor Penetration, Haste, and Hit having very different values depending on which talent spec a death knight is using?

Ghostcrawler:

No. We don't want to create multiple types of death knight armor, other than tanking and damage dealing. We already support like 19 different types of tier pieces because for example all of the mail users want slightly different stats. It is a problem that, say, Blood wants armor penetration and Unholy does not. But our answer to that problem is going to be to make all specs regard the stats more similarly, not to provide lots of different armor choices. It's already hard enough to get a boss to drop what you want.

Community Team: With the recent implementation of the dual-spec feature, players have greatly enjoyed the flexibility of having two specs to switch between depending on what they are currently playing. But this feature has also lead to number of extra requests from players to make things easier for them when transitioning.

Q: Would it be possible to save runeforge enchants to primary and secondary talent specializations or add rune forges to more convenience places than Acherus?

Ghostcrawler:

Considering the huge benefits that the runeforge enchants already offer the death knight, it's hard to argue that they need to be even more convenient. A paladin who swaps from a Retribution build to a Protection build can't even use the same weapon, let alone have an enchant change out as well. We don't save gems and enchants as part of the dual-spec feature. The expectation generally is that you have multiple sets of gear.

Community Team: Anticipation is considered a more attractive talent than [Frigid Dreadplate] because dodge can trigger [Rune Strike]. Players feel this is a little confusing because Frigid Dreadplate is way more down in the talent tree.

Q: Are there plans to change or improve the Frigid Deadplate talent?

Ghostcrawler:

We don't necessarily consider the deepest talents in a tree to be the best ones. Generally when we push talents deep, it's because they are of limited interest to other specs or else so powerful that we want to keep them away from other specs. [Frigid Dreadplate] is a great tanking talent since it adds avoidance. I can't imagine a death knight tank actually skipping out on [Anticipation], so it doesn't bother us that the Anticipation talent is considered better. That said, we think avoidance is likely too high on all tanking classes, so we aren't likely to buff Frigid Dreadplate.

Community Team: Death Knights think that only a few players choose [Will of the Necropolis] because of the proc condition, internal cooldown, and so forth.

Q: Is there any plan to improve Will of the Necropolis?

Ghostcrawler:

There was a brief window where this talent was totally overpowered because it just added so much opportunity for a death knight getting beat on to survive. It's possible we over-nerfed it, but you have to be careful with talents like this. As soon as it slides from "only a few choose to take it" to "most choose to take it" then there's another talent that is being skipped over.

Community Team: This brings us into some PvP-focused topics. One particular spell that was brought up a lot is [Mind Freeze] and the 'delays' in it taking effect on the target which often causes the interrupt to appear on a combat log but not actually stop the spell.

Q: Is this a bug or something in particular we are investigating?

Ghostcrawler:

It is an ongoing research item. We have never been able to duplicate the situation that the players describe, that sometimes it has a delay that other interrupts do not. It is set up similarly to other abilities. However in a game as complex as World of Warcraft, we have learned not to dismiss the possible weird situations that a particular ability can get into. You have to take the combat log with a slight grain of salt -- this is a client-server game, and sometimes the two can disagree on when an event occurred. The server thinks the spell went off, while the client thinks you got the interrupt off in time. The server usually wins.

Community Team: A good number of non-death knight players are concerned regarding the healing capability of death knights, especially in the PvP setting, where they can often survive for extended periods of time with no healer and still do lots of damage.

Q: Do we have plans to change any of the death knight's self-healing abilities?

Ghostcrawler:

The healing is one of the core mechanics of the class, and one of the things that helps them feel distinct from warriors. It's the reason there is a Blood tree and Blood Runes. We have no immediate plans to change anything here. If death knights continue to be good at PvP even after some of the defensive nerfs, we'd likely look at say [Chains of Ice], the interrupts or the amount of non-physical damage they can do.

Community Team: To finish off this Q&A, let's blast through the last set of questions:

Q: Would you consider adding a Mortal Strike-like ability to death knights in the future?

Ghostcrawler:

There are two answers to this question. The first is do we think the death knight needs any additional tool for PvP? The answer to that is definitely not. Death knights have been really well represented, if not overpowered, in PvP. The second part of the question is more philosophical though, which is whether or not [Mortal Strike] is mandatory in PvP. You can currently argue it isn't because there are teams that feature Retribution paladins or Unholy death knights (or both) that do just fine. However, it is an issue that rises up every few months or so: whether every damage class needs some option of bringing the "mortal" debuff, or at what point we just make it a passive aura upon stepping into PvP.

Q: Will [Chains of Ice] ever be subject to diminishing returns?

Ghostcrawler:

If we need it. It's not in the plan. Snares don't currently have diminishing returns, and Chains is limited based on the availability of Frost Runes. It is a possible concern that between [Chains of Ice], [Death Grip], and the ghoul stun that a death knight can lock someone down for a long time.

Q: Will ghouls ever get their voices back?

Ghostcrawler:

We have a long-term plan to add the ghoul voices back. We pulled them because they were using the vendor voices, which sounded weird when your ghoul would ask you to buy or trade. We just need to get some audio made without the vendor text. It's in the plan, but not super high priority.

Druid

Posted on the forums 15 July 2009:

Today we continue our class Q&A series with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and the development team, in which we're taking a look at each class and answering some of the top questions brought forward by their communities. Next up, we take a look at the most asked questions from the druid class and find out more about the design philosophy and expectations for the class, as well as what may lie in store for it in the future.

Community Team: We'd like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. In this case, we're looking specifically at the druid, which has one of the widest ranges of play styles in World of Warcraft because of the variety offered from the different talent trees.

Q: Where do druids fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler:

Much like the paladin and shaman, the original World of Warcraft druid was intended to be a healer for end-game content. Bears could tank Upper Blackrock okay. But honestly, nobody took cats, bears or moonkin very seriously at level 60. In Burning Crusade, this changed a little. Bears could tank a lot more content, and might have even been overpowered in the endgame if it weren't for Sunwell Radiance. Cats were probably underpowered. You still saw them, but they were there mostly for buffs or because they could slip easily from tanking to dps in a world before dual-spec. They were great for Zul'Aman for example. There were some great Balance druids, but still a lot of Oomkin. Our philosophy at this point in the game was that hybrid classes needed to give up a lot of their power, especially on the dps-side of things, in order to justify their versatility and massive buffs. In Lich King, we set out to change this and make sure all four types of druid had a PvE role in heroic dungeons and raiding. And yes, this meant four roles, because if we were going to let cats do credible dps or bears be able to tank anything in the game then we wanted players to have to commit to one extreme or the other. You can remain a half-bear, half-cat if you want to as well, but you won't be as good at either extreme and my experience is players rarely choose that route.

In PvP the story is quite different of course. Once Resto druids got enough tools in Burning Crusade, they were very difficult to counter in Arena matches. [Cyclone], [Feral Charge] and running and hotting made druids frustratingly slippery. We wanted to chill this out a little in Lich King, largely by pushing Feral Charge farther away and making [Incarnation: Tree of Life] a real option in PvP. Unfortunately, high tree armor and dispel-at-your peril hots have still kept druids difficult to counter in PvP. Feral druids have always had a place in PvP, but were never as dominant as the Resto druids. There is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here because while some druids only want to PvP as Feral, others were happy to respec to Resto for PvP. Balance druids seemed even less viable than Feral, which is not ideal and something we want to improve. We tend to take a longer view on some of these things than do the players. We've had other Balance issues that we've wanted to address in PvP first, and getting every spec of every class viable has had to take a back seat on occasion.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

Forms is the big answer. The druid versions are more meaningful than other class equivalents in the game, such as Stances or Presences. One could argue they are too meaningful, because players sometimes don't want to use any other form but "theirs." Perhaps the most unusual facet of the druid forms is that they use three different resource systems depending on the form, and these are not reset when they shift. A leveling druid can shift out of cat form to heal themselves, then shift into bear form while their mana regenerates.

Druids also have a couple of other interesting qualities. They actually fit four distinct roles into the class, even though two of the roles share a talent tree. They have some unusual utility spells, including [Revive] and [Innervate]. While druids no longer bring many unique buffs, they still pack a lot of them onto one character. Raids are still happy to get druids because of their benefit to the group. Druids also have unique travel abilities, from Travel, Aquatic, and Flight form, to the Moonglade teleport.

It's also worth mentioning that druids can be only one race each on the Horde and Alliance side. They have the least racial diversity of any class in the game.

Community Team: Let's take a look at the Balance talent tree. [Eclipse] is a crucial talent for players who are looking to perform a damage dealing role and invest in the Balance tree. There has been a lot of discussion though regarding the gameplay it provides as there is a lot of randomness involved. The buffs to a solar rotation were very well received, but the lunar rotation still has to wait for a critical strike to happen as well as an additional random proc to occur which can lead to some long gaps of nothing happening. Then when these finally fall into place players have complained about threat issues which force them to slow down or having to move to avoid something which ruins the procs they have and significantly hurts their overall damage.

Q: What are our thoughts on how [Eclipse] is functioning and do we have any plans to change how this talent works?

Ghostcrawler:

The goal of the [Eclipse] talent in the first place was to give moonkin a more dynamic rotation that involved the player paying attention and responding to the environment rather than falling into a monotonous rotation. The Eclipse in 3.2 should less strongly favor one half of the Eclipse over the other since the cooldowns are independent. Ultimately however the problem we are trying to solve is that [Wrath] and [Starfire] are just too similar. In PvP you get a little bit of interest out of the fact that they are in different schools, but in PvE by the time talents are factored in, the two spells just become fairly quick (but not instant) nukes and it's easy to math out which one to use and which one to ignore. Long-term to fix this problem we need to add another spell, separate out Starfire and Wrath from each other a little more, or make one of the other spells, like [Moonfire] or [Insect Swarm], more dynamic. I'll give a couple of example of caster rotations that "work" in our opinion: Destruction warlocks want to [Immolate] before they [Conflagrate], Frost mages can proc a [Brain Freeze] and throw out a fast [Fireball].

Community Team: Another aspect of Balance talent tree that has seen a number of discussions lately is the survivability of Moonkins while in a Player vs. Player setting. Many players agree that they have a very low survivability rate and that a spell like [Typhoon] doesn't provide enough help to prevent classes like Death Knights and Rogues from doing some serious damage to them.

Q: How do we feel Moonkins are doing in PvP and do we have plans to improve their survivability?

Ghostcrawler:

We don't think Moonkins are quite there yet, though we'll see how they look after 3.2 ships. Some of their problems are not limitations with the spec so much as they are ramifications in other parts of the PvP environment, such as some classes being able to burst them down too quickly. Of the casters, and as of this writing, only Frost mages really seem to be a potent PvP force, but it requires multiple forms of CC and escape mechanisms to get there. We really don't want to go down the road of every caster needing that many unique tools – it homogenizes the classes and makes the mage tools less compelling. We understand some players are desperate to play Balance in PvP, but our priority is on getting underperforming classes viable before we worry about the second or third spec of classes that already have a strong PvP presence. We'll get there.

Community Team: Players have also been discussing how they feel the overall playstyle of a Moonkin is just not very exciting. The best damage dealing rotation for them requires very few spells and a deep Balance spell like [Starfall] doesn't help them very much.

Q: Are there plans to make any changes to the general spell rotation for deep Balance/Moonkin Druids?

Ghostcrawler:

As I mentioned above, we do want to improve the spell rotation of Balance. We think the spells are interesting when considered alone (expect for perhaps [Starfire] and [Wrath]) but they don't necessarily play together in interesting ways. You don't try to save up a Starfall for example for great synergy with another spell. We have no problems with Starfall itself -- it is an AE with smart targeting that doesn't require channeling. It is basically just bonus damage. Often players with a gripe about Starfall are wishing that it still proc'ed stuns with [Celestial Focus] or was a stealth remover. But those uses meant players saved Starfall for only those specific situations instead of using it when they needed extra damage, which was the original intent.

Community Team: We are going to switch gears from the ranged caster damaging druids to the up close and personal Feral talent tree.

A number of players have brought up questions regarding the over-arching goal of the Feral talent tree. In the past they were able to change forms regularly and cast spells and then go back into a Feral form to continue playing. Once we merged their gear with rogues this playstyle was significantly reduced in effectiveness. As it currently stands, even with the low mana pool, they feel their mana regeneration is very poor in comparison to other hybrid classes like Shaman and Paladins which in turn continues to minimize Feral druids' ability to cast spells which they feel is pushing them further and further away from the hybrid playstyle.

Q: What are our intended goals for the playstyle of Feral druids?

Ghostcrawler:

The druid class overall is intended to be flexible, and we feel that it is. What we don't want is a class that can do all things with a single spec -- do damage like a rogue, then tank if the MT falls down, then battle rez the MT and heal her back up, etc. That might sound like a lot of fun, but that's because you're fulfilling the role of half the raid all on your own (which means it's less fun for everyone else watching you be a superstar). Every cat worth their salt will shift out to cast [Rebirth] or [Innervate]. But in order to justify cats doing credible melee damage, we felt like they had to give up some of their ability to tank, cast, and heal. Note than you can still take a more hybrid-focused build. Players don't often do that though because they'd rather do one thing really well. Now I will say that long term something we'd love to do is get rid of shifting costs altogether. We want to see druids in lots of different forms -- more on this in a minute.

Community Team: In order to provide the best damage possible, the rotation for a Feral druid is quite complex. While this is okay in itself, it is nearly impossible to pull off in a PvP scenario so they end up using just [Mangle], which they feel drastically hurts their value. To be the most effective they also rely heavily on someone else like another druid or an Arms warrior.

Q: What are our thoughts on the complexity of the Feral druid damage dealing rotation?

Ghostcrawler:

If you want to do the best damage possible, you need to be able to master a complex rotation. This is one of the features that attracts players to the Feral spec. However, it's also pretty forgiving. If you just [Shred], you're going to do decent damage. If you Shred and try to keep up [Savage Roar], it's going to be better. If you can also manage your Mangles and Rips and Rakes, then you have the potential to do very high damage (assuming you don't have to move around much and can reach the target's back).

Community Team: Feral druids have also complained a bit about their lack of utility in the PvP environment.

Q: Do we have plans to provide more utility for Feral druids such as a more reliable interrupt?

Ghostcrawler:

Feral druids have [Bash] (which they can improve through talents), [Maim] and the [Feral Charge] stun. We think their tools are sufficient for PvP and there are other melee classes that can handle it in PvE. It's not a strength of the spec for sure, but we're okay with that. We don't want all melee to be identical.

Community Team: Bear tanks have often felt inferior compared to the other tanks.

Q: How do we feel druid tanks are doing and do we have any immediate changes planned?

Ghostcrawler:

We think bears have felt inferior because for a long time we basically said "You are designed to be inferior." Sometimes old perceptions die hard. Bears are not inferior tanks in Ulduar and it's possible their survivability is too high in 3.2.

Community Team: [Savage Defense] has been the source of a number of debates as players feel it is somewhat lackluster and doesn't provide enough of a benefit, especially in PvP.

Q: Do we have any plans to change and/or improve Savage Defense?

Ghostcrawler:

We're pretty happy with [Savage Defense] for now. It accomplishes its goals, which were to make dps stats more useful on leather and to keep bears from hitting the armor cap so easily. You might consider it lackluster if you're counting on it saving your life, but it does account for a lot of damage over the course of a boss fight.

Q: Are there any plans to change the functionality or cooldown of the Cat form charge to better align it with the Bear form version?

Ghostcrawler:

We're happy with the distinction. We don't want to duplicate every ability since the druid has access to both forms.

Q: Can you give us the reasoning behind why the Bear form swipe is 360 degrees while the Cat version is only 180 degrees?

Ghostcrawler:

The bear change was just a quality of life issue. A bear can wipe the raid if they can't pick up incoming adds. The cat is much less likely to wipe the raid by not being able to Swipe all the adds. We don't need for cats to be an awesome AE spec. We just want them to have something to do on big packs that everyone else is AE'ing, which is what cat Swipe gives them. On the other hand, if there is a perception that bears can't manage adds, they aren't going to be used on a lot of fights.

Community Team: On to the last of the talent trees now, Restoration.

Q: Can you describe for us what the intended identity and versatilities of the Tree of Life druids are supposed to be?

Ghostcrawler:

This is a pretty philosophical answer here. If you only read one answer in this Q&A, you might want to check out this one.

The strength of the Resto druid is in heal-over-time spells. They can also do some decent single-target healing through [Nourish] or group healing through [Wild Growth]. The tree pretty much used to be a PvE mechanic since "rooting yourself" in PvP to benefit from ToL greatly limited the druid's crowd control and escape abilities. We made enough changes to the talent to get trees into PvP in Lich King… arguably too well.

Druids overall have a strong niche. We are at a little bit of a crossroads with the [Incarnation: Tree of Life] however. We are currently wondering if druids sacrifice too much just to be as good as a healer as everyone else. What I mean is that if druids were good healers in caster form but great healers in Tree form, then there might be a decision there. However, we pretty much assume that healing druids are in Tree form nearly all of the time and Balance around that. We don't think it would be fair for them to be the best healers just for taking that talent.

In addition to having to give up utility in order to heal as a Tree of Life, we have become less enamored with druids locking themselves into one form. In fact, you really never see the basic tauren or night elf druid form (you know, the one that actually shows off the awesome armor art) because all druids are in cat, bear, tree, or moonkin form nearly 100% of the time. I'm not saying we would just cut Tree of Life from the game. It's been around awhile and for better or worse, it's part of World of Warcraft now.

However, we could see taking the druid in a direction where shifting was much more common and easy to do. Maybe you only go into tree form for certain spells but leave for other spells -- this didn't work previously because of the high cost of shifting, but in the absence of power shifting, we'd love to get rid of the costs completely. Another way to go would be to make Tree of Life form a cooldown, more like [Metamorphosis]. You shift into tree when you need a healing boost, but you don't stay in it all the time. Now, I am totally waving my arms here. This is not the kind of change you are going to see in the next patch. But it is something we're thinking about long term, and the kind of thinking we'd love to have more feedback on from the community.

Note to other healers: this is why you are unlikely to see any kind of "Holy form" ever. Giving up healing to do damage works okay. Giving up everything to heal is lame.

Community Team: Both [Tranquility] and [Healing Touch] are meant to be strong healing spells but are generally viewed as very ineffective due to their lack of flexibility.

Q: Do we have plans to improve Healing Touch or Tranquility?

Ghostcrawler:

[Tranquility] is a fine spell. You can use it in situations where high amounts of damage are coming in on one group. Ultimately, we'd like to get away from the concept of groups within raids, but that's not super high priority. Having a talent that promotes a situational spell on a long cooldown though is a problem (for any spell, not just Tranquility).

Likewise, we think [Healing Touch] is fine. You use it at low levels and you use it with [Nature's Swiftness]. Maybe you use it when healing a 5-player dungeon. Druids have a lot of heals and if we made Healing Touch more usable it would come at the expense of another heal like [Nourish] or [Regrowth]. The problem again is the talents. It doesn't make sense to have so many talents support a situational spell.

But GC, you ask, if you know the talents are lackluster why haven't you improved them? The answer is that Resto druids are in a really good spot now. If we changed the HT and [Tranquility] talents to boost other kinds of healing, then Resto druids might become too powerful. If we reduce Resto healing to compensate for these talents, then druids might have less flexibility in their talent builds. We would also suffer a lot of player backlash if we weakened spells just to make talents (which you may not be able to afford anyway) any better. We'll suffer player backlash when we think the change is important. I'm not sure this one is. We'll definitely rejuggle the talent tree long-term though.

Community Team: The next set of questions are related to the itemization for druids which was the source for a wide variety of questions. For one, Restoration druids feels that critical strike rating is not very helpful for them yet it is often present on the leather casting gear.

Q: Do we have plans to improve the usefulness of critical strike rating for Restoration druids?

Ghostcrawler:

Yes. We're fine if some stats are slightly more attractive than others. The problem comes when some stats are considered junk because they are valued so much less than other stats. We don't have a ton of stats to work with when you consider that things like Int and Spell Power basically improve at a linear rate with item level. That means we need for say Haste and Crit to be attractive to all casters. This is a problem with several classes, not just druids, and was largely caused by having too many scaling talents that over-inflate the value of some stats relative to others.

Community Team: Tanking druids have regularly expressed complaints on how their tanking gear was homogenized but statistics like Block and Parry do not help them and defense provides a very marginal benefit.

Q: Do we have plans to make these statistics more helpful for them since they are on a wide variety of tanking gear?

Ghostcrawler:

We think it's interesting that a bear and a warrior tank might look at the same piece of gear and place different values on it. That's one of the elements that makes looting interesting and rewards players who understand their class. You shouldn't take a ring because it says "TANK" on it. You should take it because it benefits you. And really, when players say "wide variety of tanking gear" they really mean rings, neck, cloak, and possibly trinkets. Currently we're in a world where tanks emphasise Stamina and Armor as much as they possibly can, which makes other stats feel lame by comparison. But that will likely not always be the case, and we kind of doubt it will be as much of an extreme in the Coliseum.

Q: Have we considered providing more tanking leather and to prevent extra loot clutter possibly finding ways for Balance and Restoration druids to use solely cloth item since they often use them already?

Ghostcrawler:

No. Druids are a leather-using class. We are just going to have to make three types of leather (melee, ranged and healing). You have to understand that even though we have pushed bears and cats farther apart, we still consider them to be part of the same spec. We can't get into the business of itemizing for niches within a particular spec or we're just going to have too many items per tier. I can see the argument for having tanking and dps leather and making the casters use cloth. That's just a different design and we currently like for certain classes to be associated with certain types of armor. We like that druids look different from say priests or mages (even ignoring the forms thing). We like that we can kit druid tier piece armor to look a certain way.

Also note that if we buffed bear mitigation through more tanking-oriented leather that we'd just have to weaken them in other ways. In my experience, most bears end up with "tanking leather" anyway because they want to gem and enchant their bear gear differently. Having one set of gear that you wear as cat or bear isn't really feasible in Ulduar.

Community Team: Many players have been discussing relics and how they feel they add a lot of clutter to loot tables since they can have a wide margin of effectiveness and always have a small number of players able to pick them up.

Q: Do we have any plans to improve how players obtain relic items such as a relic token?

Ghostcrawler:

The alternative to "clutter to loot tables" is that they go on vendors. We view vendors as an absolute last resort. They are there as a hedge against being very unlucky with drops and to give players motivation to do bosses even when that boss no longer drops any upgrades for them. When the best relics are available on vendors, then every druid will have those relics quickly. They essentially just become part of the core identity of the class rather than an upgrade that you get at some point along your progression. The best solution is probably something where a boss has a 10% (or whatever) chance to drop a relic in addition to its normal loot table.

Community Team: To wrap up this Q&A, here are a couple quick questions from the far corners of druid minds.

Q: Are there any plans for a 310% speed flight form?

Ghostcrawler:

At this time we want to keep the 310% flying speed very rare – maybe 5% or less of all players. If we made a flight form that less than 1% of players had access to (since probably less than a tenth of those 5% would be druids) it's hard to argue that's a good use of art time.

Q: What do we think about making spells like Warstomp and [Innervate] usable while in forms?

Ghostcrawler:

We like the fact that Innervate requires shifting. We want druids to shift more. Warstomp I could see an argument to allow in forms since it's nice (but not mandatory) that racial benefits are useful to a variety of classes.

Q: Do we plans to alter how the GCD works for form changing so that shifting into a form is as easy as shifting out of one?

Ghostcrawler:

As I mentioned, long-term we'd love to get druids shifting more often, which means shifting has to be less painful. I don't know for sure that changing the GCD needs to be a part of that, but it could be.

Q: For the official word, do we have plans to update more druid form models at some point in the future?

Ghostcrawler:

I know for a fact that the current [Travel Form] and [Aquatic Form] are loathed by the artist who redid bear and cat. We do have plans to update additional forms at some point in the future.

Mage

Posted on the forums 19 June 2009:

Community Team: Joining us today to shed some light on the many questions we've fielded from players within the mage community is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft, Ghostcrawler, who has enlisted the assistance of several members of our class design team to provide the most thorough answers possible.

We'd like to begin by exploring the perceived role of the mage class. A lot has changed since the days when the "glass cannon" description was applied.

Q: Where do mages fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward?

Ghostcrawler:

The mage is the iconic caster -- a ranged class that wants to stay at range in order to focus on dealing damage. They can do single-target damage, area of effect damage (AoE), or crowd control. Every group should want a mage because they are reliable, powerful and flexible. Most of the mage's spells have a cast time and a lot of the gameplay involved in improving your mage revolves around minimizing the limitations of the cast time, whether it's lowering cast time through talents and gear, getting away from enemies so you have an opportunity to cast, or using the occasional ability to make a spell instant.

While all three of the mage talent trees focus on dealing damage, we are pleased with the different feel between Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Arguably mages even have a fourth potential style now that focuses around [Frostfire Bolt]. We know the stylistic differences work because there are Frost mages who just love Frost and want to see it work in Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Fire mages who want to play Fire in Player vs. Player (PvP). They prefer a play style within the same class over a different play style that would be arguably more effective within a particular aspect of the game. While understandably frustrating for those players, it also points out a success in the class design.

We used to call the mage the master of AoE damage, but we've since decided that's not a great niche for anyone. The "AoE class" feels mandatory in situations where you do have large crowds of enemies to contend with, but then the AoE class gets bored when everyone else is maximizing their single-target damage on a boss. Now we try and give AoE tools to all damage-dealing specializations (specs), though we will always make extra effort to make sure mages stay good in that department.

Players sometimes wonder why the mage class has seen fewer changes than some of the other classes during Lich King. We think that's because by and large, the class works. That's not to say there aren't areas we can improve, but we think the mage has all the right tools to live up to its reputation.

Q: What is it that makes them unique when compared to other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

All of the mage specs, though less-so Arcane, focus on a single spell such as [Fireball]. At first glance, and especially to non-mages, this might make the class appear overly simple to play, but really you can have a lot going on. There are chance-on-hit abilities (procs) such as [Hot Streak] and [Firestarter] to contend with. Mages have some great tools, like [Presence of Mind] and [Arcane Power], to really kick up their damage on demand. Frost PvP in particular requires a lot of finesse to get the Water Elemental's [Frost Nova] at the right time for a [Shatter] combo. Mages are fragile though (just ask a healer), so they have to make sure they're staying alive as well and using the tools they have to do so. Even though most of their damage comes from one spell, mages have a lot going on. The damage per second (DPS) difference between a skilled and less-skilled mage with the same gear can be pronounced.

Mages still are a glass cannon when compared to priests and warlocks. While all have their armor spells, the mages also have escape mechanisms from [Polymorph] to [Frost Nova] to [Ice Block] to [Blink]. Mages should never feel "tanky" in a PvP environment. The biggest risk for homogenization occurs with the mage and the warlock, but in this case we think the mage is in a good place and it's the warlock that we want to move slightly farther away. We'll talk more about the locks soon, but we need to focus them even more on mechanics like shards and demons.

Mages also retain some unique tools, such as the town portals and the (ahem) food and beverage service. Their crowd control is still among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, in the game.

Community Team: A lot of initial questions and concerns we received from mages around the world were concerning itemization.

Q: In particular, a lot of the newer PvE and PvP mage or caster items seem to favor Fire spec and, to a lesser extent, Arcane. Do you feel as though mages are being forced to focus too much on critical strike rating (crit) over stacking more haste, spell power, and intellect, stats that are much more beneficial to the Frost mage?

Ghostcrawler:

It isn't in our best interest as designers to have Frost want very different stats than Fire. In a world where we already must add so many new items to the game with every new raid tier / Arena season, we just don't want to dabble too much with "this piece is attractive to the Fire mage, but not the Frost mage." We think the value of different stats has just crept too far apart for different specs of the same class. It's just never going to feel right when one stat is worth double or more of the value of another stat. We're making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone. Ideally you might be comparing two pieces of cloth and have to decide whether the haste or crit is more valuable to you, and not just write off everything without crit as junk. So to answer the question succinctly, yes mages are being asked to focus too much on some stats.

We also understand there are some items in Naxxramas that are superior to items in Ulduar. This isn't ideal, but is partially fallout from our decision to not have the final boss of Ulduar drop better loot than the rest of the instance, which is a design change from the previous tier. We are looking at the items on a case by case basis as the feedback comes up. While it isn't our goal to ensure that every drop is automatically an upgrade, it also isn't our goal that you try and get your group to keep going back to the old content because it provides more upgrades for you.

Community Team: There are some funky cloth legging designs out there that are difficult to truly appreciate unless one wears a tunic.

Q: Even so, will mages get robes, or at least the option of choosing robes, over tunics going forward?

Ghostcrawler:

To be totally honest, this is not a huge priority for us at this time. We embrace some level of player visual customization in World of Warcraft, but it's just not in the design vision to give players as many controls over how their character looks as some players would probably desire. One of the distinctive visual qualities of cloth is that it often looks like long, flowing robes, which is pretty consistent with the iconic fantasy wizard. No doubt some players would prefer to change the look of their weapon or weapon enchant if they could without having a game play effect, so this is just a slippery slope for us. We will keep the feedback in mind though.

Community Team: The next few questions concern the number-one issue raised by mages on the forums as of late: mana efficiency.

 [Mana Gem] and [Evocation] are commonly referred to as outdated mechanics. Many players feel the Mana Gem does not restore enough mana and should not be placed on the same cooldown with a warlock's  [Healthstone], while Evocation has too lengthy a cooldown and is typically not a reliable means of acquiring mana during boss fights.

Q: How do you view these mechanics, and are there any intentions of updating mana recovery capabilities for mages in the future?

Ghostcrawler:

Our general philosophy, in a very broad sense, is that healers risk running out of mana if they aren't careful or are in over their heads, but that damage-dealing specs generally have enough mana to do their jobs. That doesn't mean that you never need to burn a gem or use Evocation, but it does mean that if you are being reasonable about what you're doing that you should have enough mana except perhaps on very long or unusual fights. What we are more likely to do is just lower the mana costs of the main nukes: [Arcane Blast], [Fireball], [Frostbolt], and [Frostfire Bolt].

Community Team: Compared to many other damage-dealing counterparts, mages feel their AoE damage is less reliable and way too costly.

Q: Do the developers feel that the cost to mages of doing AoE damage is appropriate?

Ghostcrawler:

It's close. We don't want say the [Blizzard] spell to ever look really attractive to use against a pair of creatures or a single target. It's taxing on your mana bar to do many Blizzards, but it doesn't feel inappropriate for the amount of damage you're doing during that time. The efficiency is still good in cases with a large number of targets, which is the whole point. Now some of the other mage spells could definitely use some improvements to make them as competitive as Blizzard (the spell) in terms of usability, damage or efficiency.

Clearly it's in our best interest to make sure a spell with the name "Blizzard" kicks some major posterior.

Community Team: [Spellsteal] is a very costly spell, especially considering it can be resisted, an unnecessary buff can be stolen unintentionally or the stolen buff can be dispelled.

Q: Are there any plans to reevaluate the mana cost and functionality of this spell?

Ghostcrawler:

We think the core of the problem is that a spell that was designed to let you steal cool buffs from an enemy has sort of fallen into the niche of a general dispel. Rather than make it cheaper, we'd be more likely to let it actually only steal spells that would benefit the mage. This would be a buff in some cases and a nerf in others though, so it's not a quick and dirty change. We have considered a glyph to let Spell Steal take two buffs at a time.

Community Team: Now let's jump to some questions about specific talent specs.

Firstly, the Arcane tree is widely considered too bloated. It seems that, over time, the talent trees of all classes have really evolved to provide plenty of different options with fewer five-point talents to allow for greater customization. There are several flavorful talents in the Arcane tree (i.e. [Student of the Mind], [Magic Absorption], [Magic Attunement], [Incanter's Absorption], etc.), but many players feel that they cannot afford to spend points in such places since many of the most necessary damage-dealing talents require five points.

Q: How do you feel about revitalizing the Arcane tree to thin out some of these five-point talents?

Ghostcrawler:

Arcane is a little bloated. If you take all of the damage and mana talents there aren't many left to spend on the more fun or cool talents. We recognize that it's hard, for instance, to have a single Arcane build that can work in both PvE and PvP. To be clear though this is a problem with several of the talent trees and not a problem with Arcane alone. If you look at say the warrior Protection tree or the paladin Retribution tree, those provide a model for where we'd like to take talent trees in the future – fewer talents overall and plenty of points to spend on fun play-style choices that really do feel optional rather than talents you need to make your spec function. Also note that fixing some mage mana issues might make some of the mana talents feel less mandatory.

Community Team: To expand upon the last question, Torment of the Weak is used in several of the most popular mage talent specs for both PvE and PvP, however, the Arcane talents prior to this one are of very little use to Frost mages – and Fire mages to a lesser degree -- in PvE.

Q: Are you concerned at all that Torment of the Weak is considered to be so important to mages, regardless of specialization, that a minimum of eighteen talent points must be spent in the Arcane tree to reap its full benefit?

Ghostcrawler:

We don't think it's must-have for Frostfire builds and it doesn't strike us as weird that Frost or Fire would subspec into Arcane, since that is generally going to offer them more than say a Frost mage who subspecs into Fire.

Q: Are there plans on the horizon to improve Fire mage representation in PvP?

Ghostcrawler:

Yes. It is more important to us though to fix classes that have no viable specs than it is to bring options to classes that already have a reasonable Arena presence. We are more focused on improving hunter and warlock representation than making sure Fire has a PvP role. It's still something we would like to do, but in a game of this size there are a lot of things we'd like to do. [Dragon's Breath] is one spell we think we can improve for PvP. With a lower cool down it could be more like [Scatter Shot]. It's not necessarily that Fire is terrible at PvP, just that Frost has a lot more tools.

Q: Is threat generation from Fire mages a concern at all given their burst damage is controlled mostly by proc talents and critical chance?

Ghostcrawler:

Threat-generation is a concern. One way we'd like to fix this is through [Invisibility]. We've always been a little cautious with making sure the spell wasn't too powerful, but we think we have plenty of room to improve it. In PvE for example, it's really hit and miss whether you'll take damage that will prevent the threat wipe. Do remember that [Mirror Image] is quite useful as a threat-reduction spell. Your threat is divided among the images while it's active. Sometimes it makes sense to blow the spell right at the start of a fight, and other times when you get a spell buff or are otherwise able to go into really high damage mode for a few seconds.

Q: Do the developers still consider it an objective to improve Frost damage for PvE?

Ghostcrawler:

Yes. The challenge as always is to make sure we don't over buff Frost in PvP just to make it viable in PvE. While it would be ideal for all specs to be viable in PvP and PvE, having different PvP and PvE specs at least keeps those specs alive rather than having one tree which is good at everything. We'd like to buff Frost through [Ice Lance]. Currently another [Frostbolt] is always better than an Ice Lance in PvE. We experimented with improving this through the glyph of Ice Lance, but it turns out the glyph would have to improve Ice Lance's damage by x6 or something ridiculous like that.

Community Team: Finally, this wouldn't be a mage Q&A without a question about [Blink]. It has been discussed in the past that it's the terrain that can cause the spell to fail and not necessarily an issue with the spell itself.

Q: While mages do recognize this issue, has there been any discussion about reworking Blink so it's more intuitive and could recognize a mage failing to teleport any distance forward, wasting only a global cooldown rather than the mana and spell cooldown?

Ghostcrawler:

Blink is a movement spell, and anything related to movement can be a little dicey on a client-server game like World of Warcraft. That's not an excuse for it bugging out, but an explanation for why you can get into situations where it doesn't seem to work. In the 3.1 patch we made some technical improvements to the spell working on slopes. It used to fail a lot in the portal area of Dalaran for example, but that has been much improved. One of the places where it still seems to struggle the most is entering or exiting the tunnels in Warsong Gulch, which ironically is one of the places where it's also the most useful. Anywhere there is a change in terrain, such as entering a building, could be problematic. We are working on this issue. If you run into a problem with Blink, the most helpful thing you can do when making a Bug Report is to specify where exactly you had the spell fail. That will let our engineers zero in on solutions.

Paladin

Posted on the forums 9 July 2009:

Community Team: In this segment, we will be talking with Greg Street about the paladin class and discussing where this class started and where we feel they are going, as well as covering an assortment of topics relating to itemization, buffs, abilities, and other cool stuff.

Q: Where do paladins fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler:

The paladin is an iconic class from fantasy role-playing, and one which Warcraft has been able to put its own stamp all over. Obviously they figure prominently in the lore, up to and including the Lich King himself.

The paladin started out as a defensive buffing class. Early on, buffs were pretty much the entire reason you'd want to group with a paladin. (And if you want to put a fine point on it, it took about all of the paladin's attention to keep those buffs up).

End-game paladins in vanilla World of Warcraft were pretty much healers, which was disappointing for some players to discover once they reached level 60. As most of our readers probably already know, the paladin class was exclusive to the Alliance. We realized that we kept pushing the paladin and shaman abilities closer and closer together to solve faction imbalance issues, and that process was hurting the classes, so we'd be better off just having paladins and shamans on both sides. In Burning Crusade, paladins gained the ability to tank and could do so quite well in some situations, but were still positioned more in an off tank role. In Wrath of the Lich King, we finally embraced all three specs of paladins: Protection paladins can tank anything. Retribution paladins are a legitimate dps spec in both PvE and PvP. And of course, paladins could still heal.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

Despite our design changes to share buffs around among more classes, we still kept several abilities unique to the paladin in order to keep a hint of their original role. Thus paladins have everything from their powerful Blessings to their bubbles like [Divine Shield], the ability to dispel multiple kinds of debuffs, and utility abilities like [Blessing of Freedom] or [Hammer of Justice]. Paladins can wear plate armor in all three roles, which is particularly powerful for a healer. Finally, the Seal and [Judgment] system is a unique mechanic that works like no other class.

Community Team: We've received quite a bit of feedback concerning the current itemization for paladin tier-set gear and the importance of other stats over MP5.

Q: Specifically, how do we feel about the healing itemization for paladins thus far? Do we still feel MP5 is as important as other stats such as Int, Crit, Haste, and Spell Power? Are there plans to incorporate more of these other stats in later tiers of paladin healing gear?

Ghostcrawler:

In Lich King up until now, MP5 has not been as valuable to most paladins as say Int, Crit, or Spell Power, and really it wasn't intended to be. It is particularly relevant that you are hardly ever choosing between Int and MP5. However, we also think that MP5 became undervalued as a stat and as most of you know, we are buffing it for 3.2. Furthermore, we think we have allowed paladin mana regen through Int and Crit to get a little out of control. We don't want to force paladins to care only about MP5, but we also don't want them viewing it as a total junk stat, like say Agility, either. Crit is just too beneficial to be strictly a regen stat.

From the 3.2 PTR testing so far, it seems like some Holy paladins are taking a second look at Haste and MP5 possibly instead of Crit. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, and we will adjust as necessary, but it's nice to see paladins at least consider the stats now before making a gear decision.

We have also hinted before that we've had trouble developing distinct niches for MP5 and Spirit and are considering collapsing those two stats in the future. This would be a change with a lot of ramifications though -- we wouldn't just replace MP5 on gear with Spirit and call it a day.

Community Team: Paladins provide a slew of powerful buffs and spells that help all classes with tanking, healing and damage-dealing.

Q: How do we feel about raid-wide paladin buffs instead of limiting the buff applications per class, only?

Ghostcrawler:

We think it works out fine. It's a different buff mechanic than other classes and helps to ensure that the second or third paladin is still considered valuable instead of letting a single one buff everyone.

Q: [Blessing of Sanctuary] is designed around providing buffs for tanks; are there plans to re-work its design to provide added benefits for more than just tanking?

Ghostcrawler:

No, we want it to be a tanking Blessing. However, we want it to be a superior tanking buff than Kings for the Protection paladin. In the 3.2 patch notes, we indicated that Sanctuary will also provide the same Stam buff as Kings, but will not stack with Kings (though Kings would still provide bonuses to the other stats).

Q: Do we feel [Flash of Light] and the changes in store for it will allow for additional diversification for the existing healing spells available? Aside from [Holy Light], Flash of Light, and [Holy Shock], are there any plans to provide paladins with other interesting healing spells later down the road?

Ghostcrawler:

Later down the road most likely, but it won't be for 3.2 and it won't be with something that looks like [Prayer of Healing] or [Wild Growth]. We do think paladins will have more of a use for [Flash of Light] now with the extra benefit to [Sacred Shield]. The changes to [Beacon of Light] in 3.2 should make paladins an exceptional dual target healer.

Community Team: Now that we're on the topic of paladin buffs and spells, dps and versatility has been a topic of concern for many players with respect to both PvE and PvP.

Q: All classes vary in dps from one encounter to another; however, some paladins may feel their dps can be less competitive at times in comparison to other classes, more so in straight stationary single-target dps encounters. How do we feel paladins are doing in terms of dps across the board?

Ghostcrawler:

Retribution dps is too low in PvE in 3.1. We are buffing it in 3.2 through the new way [Seal of Vengeance] / Corruption will work. This Seal is designed to really deliver damage once the paladin gets five stacks up, which will make it the Seal of choice for boss fights. [Seal of Command] will be used in PvP or PvE for short fights. We expect overall for Corruption / Vengeance to be the "go-to" Seal much of the time, perhaps even in PvP, provided you can keep the buff up.

Q: [Exorcism] will be usable in both PvE and PvP once more which is great; aside from allowing this ability to be used against other players, what were the reasons to go down this route in redesigning this attack?

Ghostcrawler:

Exorcism never did a ton of damage to players, but it was an instant attack which meant paladins could use it while closing with an enemy. It was essentially just free damage and never a decision of any kind. The new approach to the spell prevents it from being used while closing, and also makes Retribution paladins have to pay a little more attention to their combat rotation -- you want to use Exorcism when Art of War procs, and generally not at other times.

We understand this is a small adjustment to Protection paladins, which is why we improved Reckoning. The 3.2 patch will be pretty good for paladin tanks overall so hopefully they will forgive us.

Q: [Consecration] seems to utilize a sizable portion of mana per application of this spell; do we have plans on making this a bit more mana-efficient?

Ghostcrawler:

We think the mana cost is appropriate. Retribution and Protection paladins have enough ways to earn mana back that it doesn't seem to be slowing them down much.

Community Team: Specifically with the various spells and abilities that paladins have in a PvP encounter, there have been questions concerning regarding survivability and utility, let's get into some of these.

Q: Do we feel [Divine Shield] is fine in its current rendition versus other abilities such as [Shattering Throw] and [Mass Dispel]?

Ghostcrawler:

Divine Shield is just a very powerful spell, so game-changing that we thought it needed a counter. The problem is that only one class has access to Mass Dispel, which we feel makes priests too much of a "hard counter" to paladins. We understand that classes will to some extent always have other classes they are better or worse against, but we want to avoid extremes. Shattering Throw is an attempt to let someone other than a priest have the chance to break the bubble. We implemented the ability as a ranged attack to help discourage warrior "tunnel vision" in just always unleashing all their attacks on the same target rather than having to switch targets on occasion.

Q: Will it be possible to prevent [Avenging Wrath] from being dispelled as well? This ability is the means to allow for on-demand maximum dps output for a brief period of time and only affects the paladin.

Ghostcrawler:

It's possible but not probable. Really this is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that the dispel game has become too important in PvP. If the other team has a dispeller, then abilities like Avenging Wrath get totally shut down. If the other team lacks a dispeller, then they may be in trouble. This leads to junk buffs and inconsistencies on which abilities can be dispelled or not. We are going to redo the entire system, though not for 3.2. One direction to take dispelling is to give magic dispel to all the healers (since 90% of player spells are magical), but to prevent offensive dispelling of any kind, or at least prevent dispels for "your-class-is-supposed-to-have-this buff" like Arcane Int or Fort.

Q: Do we have plans to introduce a stand-alone interrupt ability for paladins?

Ghostcrawler:

We would like to add this kind of utility to paladins. First we have to get the burst damage under control so that Ret paladins are not winning PvP encounters by blowing players up. When we accomplish that, we'll look at finally giving them more tools.

Q: With the slew of options to either "jump into" or "jump out of" PvP encounters for either offensive or defensive purposes many classes receive, do we have any plans to incorporate special abilities for paladins to either help them escape tough situations or quickly get into pvp battle (i.e. [Death Grip], [Typhoon], Summoning Circle, [Disengage], etc.)? It seems paladins are the only class without a short cool-down ability on the same scale.

Ghostcrawler:

Players are pretty good at detecting problems, but for solutions they tend to just look around at what other classes have that is working for them. Homogenization is something we fight as much as we can, which is the reason not every class has [Death Grip] and not every class has [Charge]. [Judgement of Justice] is intended to be the gap-closer for paladins. If it becomes a huge liability, we'll evaluate, but at the moment paladins are doing extremely well in PvP without it.

Q: Ranged attacks are extremely limited for paladins and are not considered a primary form of dps. However, players feel they would like an ability that will aid them in bridging the gap between melee vs. ranged. Do we have any plans to implement something to this extent?

Ghostcrawler:

We've already changed the "no ranged attacks" philosophy on paladins already and don't feel the need to continue making them better at range.

Community Team: We're on our last set of questions here, so let's switch it up a tad and talk a bit about Librams and aesthetics.

Q: Do we have plans to incorporate a larger variety of Librams?

Ghostcrawler:

We try and make sure the three main paladin roles have their Librams covered. As these are special items that no other class can use, we have to make sure we don't drop them too often in PvE encounters, but we have no problem putting more on badge vendors. Usually it's just a matter of time because a new tier of content, like the Call of the Crusade patch, already involves making literally over a thousand new items.

Q: Do we have plans to incorporate Librams as a more prominent aspect of the paladin class? Also, can we expect to see Librams as a physical aesthetic item on the paladin? Much like the quiver is for the hunter (except only the hunter can see their own quiver mounted on their back).

Ghostcrawler:

This is something players suggest a lot, and honestly something we'd like to do. It's a pretty iconic image from Warcraft, especially Warcraft III, to have the paladin toting around their libram. Someone at BlizzCon last year asked if they could beat on people with it. This is a big task to put on the art team though so we would want to make sure we do it right. The same answer would apply to shaman totems and hunter quivers. On the other hand, it took a long time to finally update the druid cat and bear art so don't look for this in 3.2.

Shaman

Posted on the forums 19 June 2009:

This week we're starting our class Q&A series with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and the development team. We'll be taking a look at each class and answering some of the top questions brought forward by their communities. First up, we take a look at the most asked questions from the shaman class and find out more about the design philosophy behind the class, the expectations for the class, and what may lie in store for it in the future.

Community Team: We'd like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. In this case, we're looking specifically at the shaman, which has seen a variety of changes since the start of World of Warcraft and perhaps doesn't fit into the original description quite the way they used to.

Q: Where do shamans fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler:

The shaman class has a pretty dynamic history. In classic World of Warcraft there was a period where everyone viewed shamans as overpowered. I remember one of my earliest experiences in the Barrens trying to group with a shaman to do a group quest. But he just told me was an overpowered shaman ( [Frost Shock]!) and didn't need the help.

In vanilla World of Warcraft, shamans at the end-game were healers. Period. By The Burning Crusade, we decided that all three of their trees should have viable roles in the end-game. We also decided that hybrid classes (those that can fill more than one role, such as damage and healing) should do less damage than the classes that could only fill the damage role. This philosophy generally worked, in some cases too well, because Sunwell raids were infamous for stacking lots of shamans.

In Lich King, a primary goal for raiding was to give players far more flexibility in which classes they brought and try to de-emphasize "raid stacking" as much as possible. This meant we needed to share the unique, mandatory buffs among more classes and specs so that, for example, a raid wasn't gimped if they happened to lack a +spell power or +crit buff. However, we didn't want say shamans to no longer be attractive for raiding so we brought up their damage a lot. It might still not be as high as rogues or warlocks, but it's close, and if you have the right gear and really know how to play, you can even beat those classes on some bosses. No raid worth its salt would turn down an Enhancement, Elemental or Restoration shaman for fear of bringing down the raid.

In PvP, especially Arenas, shamans have never really been a powerhouse class and we view this as a problem. Shamans have always had a place in the 5 vs. 5 bracket, where their buffs are most meaningful spread out among multiple characters. Elemental has sometimes had a niche as the "kill the wounded guy" spec. Currently, however, much of the PvP community is very focused on the 2 vs. 2 bracket, where teams that pack a lot of abilities into a single class tend to dominate. This is something we need to improve for the shaman class.

Shamans have three really distinct roles. Enhancement is melee DPS. Elemental is ranged DPS. Restoration is healing. Once upon a time there was a potential tanking role for shamans as well, but we have pretty much phased that out.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

Totems, totems, totems!

Okay, that's the obvious answer, but it goes deeper than that. The weapon enchants are an unusual part of the shaman class, as are mechanics like the shield spells ( [Earth Shield], [Lightning Shield]) and [Frost Shock]. Shaman buffs and utility spells are quite powerful, including the infamous [Heroism] / [Bloodlust], but also their self-rez ability, [Reincarnation]. As envisioned from the start, shamans were also the "offensive" hybrid. Things have inevitably blurred a bit since then, but they are still a counterpart and complement to paladins – paladins have cleanse, shamans have purge; paladins will let an ally move freely to escape or catch an opponent, shamans will snare an enemy to let their ally escape or catch him or her; paladins will make sure their allies' casts aren't interrupted, shamans will interrupt enemy casts; and so forth.

Don't underestimate the gear either. Shamans are only one of two mail-using classes in the game, and the only non-plate wearer that can use shields. Shaman shields provide a lot of defense and stats for the Restoration and Elemental shaman.

One of the other unusual things about the class is their degree of hybridization. An Elemental shaman can easily throw out heals if a group needs a little extra help. A druid, by contrast, would need to shift forms first, possibly giving up other abilities to do so.

Community Team: There is a unique quality to shaman due to their use of totems as a means of protection, healing, and even as an offensive tool. At the same time, there is a strategic element to being able to place the right totems to do the best job and even more important to place them in the optimum possible spot.

For some players, totems' lack of mobility and range limitations seem to be more of a liability than an element of strategy, and some shamans in PvP encounters often choose not to place any totems at all.

Q: Are there plans to look at totems in general, the way they are managed, their uses, and their benefits in the future?

Ghostcrawler:

Absolutely. One of the features we have been working on is a way for shamans to drop all four totems at once (on one global cooldown). This will hopefully make the totems more attractive while soloing and will let the shaman in a group environment quickly get his or her totems down again if the group has to move or they get destroyed. We'd like to get this feature in soon, but we want to make sure the user-interface works well and feels integrated to the rest of the game, so we can't yet announce a date. And of course, this is still in the planning stage, and so subject to change.

In PvP, we want to make sure we end the use of "totem stomping macros" where a pet class essentially programs their pet to automatically kill any totem they see. It's perfectly acceptable for pets to kill totems, but the player should at least have to make a decision and spend some of their attention to do so.

We want to look at the range of the buff totems and make sure you don't regularly get out of range on say large boss fights.

Finally, as a small quality-of-life improvement, we are going to let low-level shamans trade in the four elemental totems that clutter their bags for a single totem they can equip in their totem slot. Since the four "clutter"; totems can't be destroyed or sold, currently there is no way to get rid of them. This change will essentially give shamans their four bag slots back.

Q: And, what are the possible impacts of considering changes to a system like this?

Ghostcrawler:

Sometimes you will see the community suggest ideas that basically write totems out of the game. That's not what we want. A shaman player should care about totems and use them often. Obviously being able to drop four totems on one global cooldown is a pretty decent buff to the class as a whole, which will require some balance attention.

We have talked a few times about improving the health of individual totems, but if we did, we don't want to do it by much. One of our Restoration shamans said he still wanted to be able to whack down enemy totems with his healing mace at the end of the day. The balance for totems being able to cause damage or other effects while the shaman also does is the fact that they can't move and are relatively fragile.

One longer-term change we are considering is removing the buff totems (replacing them with normal spells) and making all of the totems do something more active, like the current damage or healing totems. We've even discussed letting shamans carry a totem on their back (the tauren do it already) but that may be too far out there.

Community Team: To continue down the path of totem questions, there are many different types of totems available, and at times the amount seems to be overwhelming. In some cases, there seem to be some totems that don't have a clear, obvious use to players, such as the [Sentry Totem].

Q: Is there any plan to look at the way totems are being used and either update little-used totems or consolidate totems that don't seem to be of a particularly great strategic value individually?

Ghostcrawler:

There are still some totems that just aren't cutting it anymore, and we want to continue to consolidate those so that shamans don't have any totems that they just never, ever use. Sentry Totem is a possible candidate for the chopping block. It's hard to really carve off unique niches for [Magma Totem] and [Fire Nova Totem], so those may get merged. Stoneskin is not a terribly exciting totem, so maybe there is a way to just tack that benefit onto another Earth totem. Finally, we are exploring the possibility of the elementals coming out of any Fire or Earth totem respectively rather than to have to drop a new totem just for their temporary benefit.

We combined or cut some totems for Lich King, and you should expect another round of that at some point in the future. As always, we're unsure of how many of these changes we will get in for the 3.2 patch. We're trying to keep the list of class changes down compared to 3.1, where some players felt whiplash from so many frequent and sometimes substantial changes to their class.

Q: In addition, many valued enhancement totem relics are only available via random drops, which has been voiced as something that we've wanted to avoid in the past. Are there any plans to change this?

Ghostcrawler:

The "relics" (the items that fill the ranged weapon slot) are always tricky to hand out, since they can only be used by one class, and are often attractive to only one spec. We have typically put them on badge vendors, and that might be the way to go with them in the future. On the other hand, several "best in slot" items for every character are subject to the inherent randomness of boss loot drops. Typically these upgrades are attractive but not so mandatory that you can't do your job without them.

Community Team: Shamans currently have the lowest base health of any class, and this often leads to concern over their survivability.

Q: Is there any reason that they start this way or is there any future change in store to address this disparity between their base health and that of other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

This is one of those weird legacies that has been in the game forever. Nobody currently working on classes can remember why that decision was initially made, so we plan to revert it for 3.2.

Community Team: Looking into the Player vs. Environment (PvE) aspect of the game, there are various concerns that are brought up. One recurring concern among all shamans, whether they are Elemental, Enhancement, or Restoration, is in regard to itemization. For some, they are looking for better two-handed weapons. For others, they are looking for that better one-handed axe. Others wonder at the choices that are made in relation to the stats or gem bonuses that are placed on items. An example brought up regularly is concerning Armor Penetration being prevalent in Ulduar despite it not being the most desirable stat for shamans who choose to play as Enhancement. In addition, many shamans express concerns that the options for upgrades are more limited for them than other classes.

Q: When itemizing for the shaman class, what are the aspects that are looked at, and are there plans to make additional improvements to the way itemization is done for the class or for specific talent specs?

Ghostcrawler:

One of the problems we have with dropping one-handed weapons is the overlap. If we drop axes, rogues can't use them. If we drop swords, shamans can't use them. If we drop fists, death knights can't use them. We are looking at changing one of these restrictions in 3.2, though it likely won't be for shamans to use swords.

It is our basic assumption that Enhancement shamans dual-wield and Restoration and Elemental shamans go for a one-handed weapon and shield. While we don't prohibit players from playing with other types of gear, they may not find their damage or healing output to be as high. At this point in time, we aren't trying to support a two-handed DPS build. That would require a pretty extensive reworking of the tree, and we also want to make sure some class besides rogues are using one-handed weapons.

We got a lot of questions on specific itemization, especially in the new Ulduar tier. The designers do feel like we've let the value of various stats get too far apart for the classes as a whole. When some characters want armor penetration and some don't yet they are supposed to share basically the same gear, it makes the randomness of loot drops even more frustrating. We just need to get Enhancement to where they feel like armor penetration is as valuable as other melee stats.

We're also in the process of taking a hard look at all the stats in the game. Something that gets brought up in our meetings a lot is that haste and crit are relatively straight forward stats and most players have a reasonable intuition about what boosting those stats will do. When you start to throw something like armor penetration into the mix, it's hard to estimate exactly what that will do for your character. We're not sure armor penetration is a rousing success as an interesting stat (though it can be quite good for some characters).

Q: What is the expectation for how shamans choose the gear they use?

Ghostcrawler:

Players sometimes have the expectation that everything that drops that they can use should be an upgrade for them. This isn't strictly speaking the developer view though. We want gear to be a little bit of a puzzle where you have to analyze if that piece is really an upgrade or not and how it fits with your other stats. Remember also that much of the normal versions of Ulduar is itemized at the same level as Kel'Thuzad and Malygos.

There are some pieces that are just inferior to what they should be and we are getting those updated over time. As I mentioned above, we also want to improve the situations where some stats are so superior for your spec compared to other stats that pieces with the latter on them are just perceived as junk.

While we have a lot of bosses in Ulduar, those bosses also drop an awful lot of loot. Having loot drop that is attractive to more than one spec is paramount in making the bosses feel rewarding enough. Otherwise boss loot tables are just too large and your chance of getting what you want is low. (The huge loot table works for Emalon who is easy to reach, but not Algalon.) We have to avoid the situation where say the Elemental shaman only wants one set of shoulders in the whole instance and those shoulders are unattractive to everyone else in the raid. This is why we often say that we need to fix these problems on the class side, not the item side.

This is a situation where the distinction among the shaman specs can hurt them a little. Restoration and Elemental shamans both basically want caster gear, but the healer wants regen and the nuker has no use for it. This means if there is mana regen on mail, it is pretty much only useful for a Restoration shaman. (Healing plate presents the same problem for paladins.) We don't have a great solution for this problem yet other than just dropping three kinds of mail.

Community Team: Continuing to discuss the PvE element of the game for shamans, the introduction of Ulduar changed the strategies players had employed in the past to account for these larger-than-life encounters. Restoration shamans in particular have brought up a concern for their role as raid healer being diminished in light of their inability to effectively raid heal like they once did with the use of [Chain Heal] specifically. Many have taken to the role of main target heals and are concerned about their continued effectiveness in a raid environment.

Q: Where do we feel the role of the shaman is in raids now and where do we see that going in the future?

Ghostcrawler:

We want all three shaman specs to feel like they can contribute to raids, and to be honest, we think they're in a pretty good spot certainly relative to some classes that have specs that are perceived as much more viable than other specs. Enhancement can do great melee damage. After the recent [Lightning Overload] change, we think Elemental can do competitive ranged damage. I know there is some concern about Restoration shamans losing their healing niche of area damage. We think that perception might exist in Ulduar just because recent talents, glyphs, and set bonuses have all propped up things like [Lesser Healing Wave] over [Chain Heal]. Chain Heal is still quite useful in some situations and with different gear in the next couple of tiers, we expect to see more shamans going back to it. We don't want to see them return to just using Chain Heal as was the case in much of Burning Crusade. We do think Restoration shamans are at the risk of running out of mana perhaps more than any other healer right now, and in fact the seemingly unlimited mana in some healers is what leads to Chain Heal getting stomped on by other big heals. This is a problem we plan on addressing.

Q: Is the change in how shamans are used situational only as we move forward into the next encounters, or is this a shift in philosophy as to the role of the shaman in raids?

Ghostcrawler:

It isn't a philosophy shift. We want Restoration shamans to be a strong group healer with the option of focusing on a single target with [Lesser Healing Wave] as needed. Restoration shamans have two distinct healing styles now that they can shift between, and we want to preserve that. We don't want to return to the Sunwell era, where 95% of healing came from Chain Heal. It's just a boring play style. (And yes, paladins, we hear you.) We suspect that with a new totem or set bonus that propped up Chain Heal a little more, you'd see it getting a lot more use. We're cool with that. It's fun when you upgrade your gear from tier to tier and it actually pushes you into a slightly different play style.

Elemental shamans have had a couple of opportunities to shine in Ulduar -- blowing up constructs on  Ignis the Furnace Master <Ignis> is one example. We try to make sure the encounters are diverse enough that the same classes aren't always in the spotlight on every encounter, but we also don't want to constrain our encounter designers' creativity too much. Elemental may suffer from so many fights in Ulduar requiring movement. Also, while we have given Elemental strong AoE in the form of the [Magma Totem], some players feel like this comes at too high a cost to their buffs and mobility, so this is something we'll look at.

We're pretty happy with Enhancement shamans in raids, though we want to continue to analyze whether their DPS is where it should be and if their buffs are comparable to other classes that can bring the same benefit.

We do hope we've finally settled the issue of which weapon enchantments shamans should use with the now normalized Flametongue.

Community Team: Let's shift gears a little and go into the realm of Player vs. Player. As we spoke of previously, survivability and mobility are a couple of shaman concerns that recur more strongly when in reference to PvP interactions. More specifically, shaman performance and visibility within the top-rated teams in the Arena is a much-discussed topic. Players have noticed difficulties both in being able to avoid stuns and roots as well being able to move effectively in the playing field without losing the benefit of their totems.

Q: Are there any other considerations in store for improving overall performance for shaman in PvP encounters (whether in Arena or in Battlegrounds)?

Ghostcrawler:

Mobility is a big problem. One of the designers described casting shamans the other day as "turrets," which is very apt. You sit and spin and shoot (or heal). We need to get shamans some more mobility, and we have some ideas for how to do that without just giving everyone [Blink]. We want to see more shaman gladiators soon!

For Restoration shamans, we think their survivability is low, especially while stunned. Teams have learned to kill the shamans first, because if they don't, the shaman healing output is good, especially in larger teams. In fact, shamans generally are more powerful on the larger teams because of the nature of their powerful buffs affecting more people. In general, we'd like to get the community back to being more focused on the larger Arena brackets, but we realize we have some work to do there first. [Earth Shield] is too easy to dispel. An idea we'd like to explore is just letting a single charge get dispelled at a time.

Elemental shamans used to have a niche of being able to blow up a wounded target on demand, but we have been trying to back off some of these really high burst moments. We do need to improve their mobility though, which includes not just the standard melee escapes, but also a way to not lose so much DPS when moving. Elemental is a caster and all casters are getting beat up a little too much by melee at the moment.

Players sometimes accuse Enhancement of being too much of a one-trick pony. It's understandable that saying "I bring damage!" when so many classes have multiple forms of crowd-control and crowd-control breaks may not cut it these days. Players often request more anti-CC in the form of the Feral Spirits, but we don't want to turn that ability into something that is saved only to be used as a PvP trinket. Again, mobility (both offensive and defensive) will help Enhancement. A lot of the spec's damage come from procs and sustained effects, while PvP is more about front-loading damage at the right moment. We definitely can make some changes to give Enhancement more of that, but it requires a lot of changes to the talent tree and playstyle and not the kind of thing you can just hotfix in. On the other hand, Enhancement can offensively dispel, interrupt, and use Tremor and Cleansing Totems while still being a melee DPS. They do have a lot of utility -- they just need a little help in order to bring it about. They no longer have mana problems in the longer matches.

One of the challenges of designing the shaman class is that we think it is one of the most challenging classes to play in PvP. (Players sometimes call this having a "high skill cap.") The shaman has to think about defense and offense at the same time, while many classes can worry about one or the other. For example, a Holy paladin can concentrate on keeping his or her group alive while the Restoration shaman has to do that while also keeping totems up, offensively purging buffs from the enemy team, using Wind Shock to interrupt spell casts, etc. The challenge is making it not too difficult for the average player but also not too powerful for the guy who can master all of the shaman's tools. (Warlocks and hunters have very similar challenges, by the way.)

Q: What considerations are being made for combating the use of totem-killing macros in PvP, and is this seen as a problem currently?

Ghostcrawler:

It is a problem. Totems are fragile by design, since they essentially can do their jobs while the shaman does other things. We're fine with this except in the case of pets being able to target and kill totems via macro without any input from the player. We want the player to at least have to target the totem first before commanding the pet to attack. We have a technical change in 3.2 which will prevent macros from doing this while still giving macros the functionality that players currently enjoy elsewhere. Players have made many suggestions for how to accomplish this technically (a common one is to rename the totems), but the solution is a little more complicated than that. Whacking a totem with your weapon or wand is fine because you are making a choice and spending valuable combat time (similar to dispelling a buff or debuff). Using macros requires no player interaction, and is not working as intended. One totem that is just too easily destroyed is Mana Tide, for which we could see bumping up the survivability. Again, remember that while totems are fragile, they aren't particularly expensive (especially if we get the change in to drop more than one at a time) and the shaman can do other things while the totems are doing theirs. We're sympathetic to warlocks and hunters being the two classes most affected by the removal of totem stomping, and we do think their respective representation is low, but we don't think the way to buff them in Arenas is by letting them be ultimate totem stompers. On the other hand, a reason to just not hotfix in more health to totems is that that change would primarily nerf warlocks and hunters, who need nerfing the least in Arena at the moment.

Warrior

Posted on the forums 16 July 2009:

Today we continue our class Q&A series with the development team, in which we're taking a look at each class and answering some of the top questions brought forward by their communities. Next up, we explore the most asked questions from the warrior class and find out more about the design philosophy and expectations for the class, as well as what may lie in store for it in the future.

Community Team: We'd like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. In this case, we're looking specifically at warriors, which have been stalwart base for comparisons since the start of World of Warcraft.

Q: Where do warriors fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler:

Historically, warriors have always been one of the most dominant classes in World of Warcraft. In Molten Core and for raids afterwards, warriors were THE tank, no question. DPS warriors could also top the damage meters, and were a very potent PvP force. We think we allowed the warrior class to overshadow some other classes, which is probably to be expected given the iconic nature of the plate-wearing fighter in RPGs that long preceded World of Warcraft. We think they are in a fairer place now, in that there is room on the stage for other classes, yet they are still a very powerful and popular class to play. The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage...), and we haven't completely nailed that design just yet.

One of the things we want to do in the future is take a hard look at the Arms and Fury trees. There are several talents which just haven't weathered the course of time well and pale in comparison to some of the newer Wrath of the Lich King talents. We're happiest with the Protection tree -- we made a conscious effort to pare down that tree and remove a lot of mandatory talents in order to give the warrior more flexibility to take some more fun or utility-oriented talents. We need to make the same pass on the dps side of things. The reason we haven't done so yet is that warrior dps is in a pretty good place and we don't want to have to nerf the class across the board just to make some talents a little sexier. We will eventually do this though. We also need to make some decisions about the difference between Arms and Fury. Traditionally, Arms was the PvP tree and Fury was the PvE tree. We understand some players prefer that model, but we don't like the way it cuts off such a big chunk of the class from players who might not have much interest in the PvP or PvE parts of the game. However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel "soldierly." Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger. With the death knight, we allowed all three trees to more or less be able to tank. There is a desire among some players and designers to see Arms tank with a two-hander while Prot tanks with a shield. We're still not sure that's the direction we'll go -- it's a ton of re-design and will never work for say the druid or paladin classes.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler:

The big ones are stances and rage. Other than warriors, only bear druids use the rage mechanic, and that is pretty much just because that form is intended to mimic warriors. Rage is an unusual resource because it is infinite over the course of minutes, but can be very limiting over the course of seconds. While the basic mechanic of rage is interesting, it has caused us lots of balance problems over the course of World of Warcraft -- sometimes in the favor of the warrior and sometimes not. It's probably time to give the mechanic another look.

Stances are intended to be a major battlefield decision for warriors, though we realize it doesn't always pan out this way. You have access to different abilities in different stances, but pay a rage cost as well as sacrificing the potential to use other abilities. More on this below.

Warriors also have some unusual mechanics like say their ability to move quickly around a battlefield, to survive massive physical damage through plate armor and Defensive Stance, and game-changing abilities like Spell Reflect.

Community Team: :Warriors have quite a few abilities that are contingent on certain circumstances like Overpower and Intervene.

Q: What is the reasoning behind this and do we have any plans to change that type of gameplay?

Ghostcrawler:

We like situational abilities. When specs don't have situational abilities, it's easy to fall into a very fixed rotation. We call this the metronome. Push button 1, 2, 3 on your keyboard over and over until the bad guy drops loot. We have made more of an effort in all the classes to have certain moments that require players to pay attention a little more and then reward them when they both cause those situations to happen and then execute on them.

Q: What would be the impact of changing those class mechanics?

Ghostcrawler:

I think if anything, abilities like this need to be more prominent. You should be less effective at your job if you ignore them, and ideally you'd also be less effective if you just macro'd them in. We like macros (obviously, or we wouldn't have them in the game), but we like for them to simplify chains of things that you have to do often without making decisions in between point A and B. We don't like it when playing your class becomes how clever your macro can be to the point at which you are pushing one button to play your class. That's not playing an RPG -- that's programming a robot.

Community Team: Stances have long been a debated aspect of warriors' gameplay from the pluses and minuses each one offers to the restrictions they apply on what abilities are available for use.

Q: What is the overall purpose of stances and how are stances intended to be used?

Ghostcrawler:

The purpose of stances is for warriors to have to make decisions in combat. How badly do I want to Intercept now? Should I pay the cost of Spell Reflect? Ideally, we want warriors to switch stances in combat -- not every few seconds, but a few times over the course of a battle. Now we realize it's going to be harder to enforce this in raid fights unless you have a battle with a lot of movement or other unusual circumstances.

We get a fair number of suggestions from players trying to basically slip the stance concept out of the warrior class: make it not take rage, or let them do more abilities per stance so they don't need to switch stances so often. That's not really what the warrior is all about though. You should care what stance you're in and it should be a decision to change stance. Note that if you pay too high a price to change stances, that counts as there not being a decision though.

Q: Has there been any thought on moving away from restricting abilities based on the stance a player is in?

Ghostcrawler:

No. The design intent of warrior stances is that you change your toolbar when you go from one stance to another and that that decision isn't a trivial one. Now, the third part aside from the rage cost and ability limitations is the penalties (such as 5% damage taken in Berserker). We cut those in half recently, and we'd eventually like to get rid of them altogether. We just don't want to see Arms warriors in PvP in Defensive Stance 100% of the time. We have seen DKs stick with Frost Presence in PvP despite losing 15% damage, so I don't think you can just argue "Oh, no warrior would EVER do that."

Community Team: There has recently been a growing number of concerns with warrior damage, as a whole.

Q: What are our thoughts on the overall damage for warriors in each of the three specs?

Ghostcrawler:

Warrior damage was too high in Naxxramas and then a little low early in Ulduar. We think it's in a pretty good place now and warriors will get a small damage buff in 3.2. Part of the concern here is we used to exempt warriors from the design philosophy that pure dps classes should do more damage than hybrid dps classes. We try to no longer play favorites here. Warrior damage should look like that of Feral druids, Enhancement shamans, Retribution paladins, and death knights. If their damage isn't at that level, then it's possible our numbers need some tweaking. However don't always assume that you can't possibly improve your gear or your button mashing either. Also remember that some fights just favor one class or spec over another. We're totally cool with that, so long as it isn't always the same exact class or spec that gets to shine.

Community Team: Warrior shouts have added some unique utility to the class in the past, but now they tend to be used very sparingly.

Q: What is the reasoning behind their short duration and do we have plans to improve the duration similar to the buffs other classes already provide?

Ghostcrawler:

The shouts are supposed to be buttons that warriors push in combat. They aren't intended to be pre-fight buffs like Arcane Intellect or Prayer of Fortitude. We had a discussion about this recently and decided with glyphs and talents that the duration isn't a problem. If you lack Booming Voice and the minor Battle Shout glyph, it might be more annoying.

Q: Demoralizing shout tends to have a very minimal impact in most situations, are there plans to improve this ability?

Ghostcrawler:

I think by "most situations" you must mean "PvP." Demo Shout has a massive benefit against raid bosses. It's probably 20% less damage from a typical boss and literally like 50% against say Thorim's Unbalancing Strike. However, removing 400 attack power from a Feral druid with 9000 attack power, or a Shadow priest who doesn't care about attack power at all is of much more limited use. Monsters and players use pretty different combat formulae (which is one of the weird things about the old design of say Vindication). We would like Demo Shout to be more useful in PvP, at least against characters who rely on attack power.

Community Team: The rage mechanic as a whole is very unique, but sometimes leads to situations where players aren't able to perform due to lack of resources. A prime example of this is when a tanking warrior's gear is much higher than the content they are at, by taking less damage they get less rage which results in less threat and therefore cannot perform at a higher level.

Q: Are there any considerations in store for improving this mechanic and allowing more rage generation in these situations?

Ghostcrawler:

Yes. In 3.2 we changed Shield Specialization to provide a little rage on a dodge, parry, or block. This will help in say the 5-player dungeons or in the first few seconds of a raid boss fight. It does not solve the problem of the Prot warrior who is not being targeted (because they are there to pick up adds later in the fight or something). We want to solve that problem by letting Prot warriors generate more rage through doing damage. It could be in the future that we shift most of rage generation to damage done and have little or none in damage taken (and we would have to change a lot of other mechanics to make this work obviously).

Now, long-term we need a better solution to rage generation. Tying it to damage done is logical in the theoretical world of game design, but has problems in reality. When your gear sucks, you have rage problems. When you have great gear, you are no longer limited by rage. That's just not a great model, and one of the reasons warriors are overly gear dependent.

Q: Where do we feel warriors fit into the current raid environment and where do we see them progressing in the future?}}

Ghostcrawler:

Obviously warriors were the traditional tanks and pretty much the only tank in much of World of Warcraft's history. Warriors now share tanking responsibilities with three other classes, which can feel psychologically like a nerf. In Ulduar, we think warrior tank balance is about where it should be -- death knights were a little ahead, paladins were a little behind, and druids were about even with warriors. We are making a few Prot changes to 3.2 to help in some of the areas where they fall short, such as damage done. Death knights are getting a nerf, paladins are getting a buff, and druids might get a nerf or stay as-is. There are plenty of guilds progressing through hard modes with warrior MTs on almost every fight, and we don't see that changing in the Crusader's Coliseum.

We're happy with warrior dps in Ulduar. Whether you go Fury or Arms probably depends on whether you need Trauma or Rampage, and we know warriors in good guilds who flip between both specs. There is some evidence that Fury may overtake Arms dps once you get really good weapons. Dual-wield yet again shows its propensity to scale very well. Warriors will get a slight dps buff through Armored to the Teeth.

Community Team: Sticking with raiding content for a moment. Many tanking Warriors have felt the there is little value in both Strength and Block Value attributes.

Q: We have expressed an interest in improving Block Value for tanking warriors in the past; do we have any definite plans to update this?

Ghostcrawler:

Shield Block Value just isn't a strong mitigation stat these days. However, the amount it would need to be increased is enormous in order to make a difference vs. bosses that can hit for 40K. The problem with improving shield Block Value by so much is that Prot warriors would be nigh invulnerable -- they literally might take no damage -- against large groups of adds, in easier content where opponents don't hit that hard, and in PvP. The real problem is that the amount blocked doesn't scale with the amount of the swing. We think block needs to be a percentage of damage blocked in order for the stat to do what we want. But the trade-off would mean that warriors (and paladins) couldn't block every incoming hit, especially from large groups. Avoidance might also need to come down across the board, and many talents and abilities would need to be redesigned. This is a major change that isn't the kind of thing we can crowbar into 3.2 with a clean conscience. It is almost certainly the future for the block stat.

Q: With strength on tanking gear currently providing a very minimal benefit and still using up a lot of stats on items, do we have plans to improve how this stat works for tanks?

Ghostcrawler:

Strength is good for dps and threat. It's not a super mitigation stat (through block) but we also don't know that it needs to be. We have made some big improvements to Prot warrior dps in Lich King, but too many players still view the primary role of the tank to stack avoidance and mitigation and then complain when their threat is low because they avoided all dps stats. Now, we do think the game of survival is more fun than the game of the threat management, but we also need to get players out of the mindset that it's okay for tanks to ignore dps stats and just do trivial damage. They don't need to top the charts, but their damage should be a meaningful component of damage done. We're willing to change the way the game works to accomplish this goal.

Community Team: Let's jump over to the topic of player-versus-player interaction. Discussions on the survivability of warriors in PvP have been ongoing.

Q: Do we have any plans to make warriors less reliant on healers in PvP conflicts?

Ghostcrawler:

We have taken small steps with Enraged Regeneration and increasing the healing on Bloodthirst. We don't want the warrior to be great at healing as say a Shadow priest or death knight. On the other hand, we want healing to be a major part of the PvP experience. We're okay with the occasional all-dps Arena team, but they need to be rare or a major chunk of the game just gets marginalized.

Not related to PvP, we do think warriors have too much downtime when leveling. Healing may not be the solution to that, but we think it needs a solution.

Q: With strength being the stat that provides the most benefit in dps scenarios, do we have plans to implement PvP gear like cloaks and rings that have strength instead of attack power?

Ghostcrawler:

Doing that just means the item isn't of any interest to say leather or mail wearers, which means we have to create twice as many kinds of rings. The problem is that some classes value Strength and some value Attack Power. Things would work better if some valued Strength and some valued Agility, and Attack Power was a useful secondary stat to both. This has the added benefit of solving the whole problem where leather and mail look attractive to warriors. If leather had Agility on it and plate had Strength on it, then it's pretty clear who is getting what item. Strength for rogues and Agility for warriors wouldn't be junk stats, but they wouldn't be as attractive as the other stat. Again, this is a big change. We wouldn't just gut rogue dps by stripping Attack Power off all of their gear.

Follow-Up Questions:

Community Team: Some players feel that, while tanking, having to continually hit Heroic Strike to match your weapon's swing can become somewhat tedious.

Q: Do we currently have any plans to change Heroic Strike to make it no longer necessary to hit that button on every weapon swing?

Ghostcrawler:

Yes, we really don't like way Heroic Strike works. On-next-swing attacks just don't feel right and for tanks especially you can convert every white attack into a Heroic Strike. Unfortunately, they do the job, which is why we haven't changed it yet. It's job is to let warriors bleed off excess rage by converting it to damage and / or threat. It's possible to fix this in other ways, such as perhaps the hit consuming more rage the more you have Execute-style.

Community Team: It appears that many players who enjoy the Warrior class for its damage aspects continue to feel that, without best in-slot items, their class's performance is very truncated.

Q: Is this an issue that we have seen in the Warrior class? If so, do we have any plans to accommodate those players who do not have best in-slot items, while still keeping those with the very best equipment from being too powerful?

Ghostcrawler:

This really just gets back to the way rage works, which is that damage leads to rage so you have to pick a point at which you balance warriors. High damage and high rage? Low damage and low rage? The way to fix it is to normalize rage even more so that you always get X rage per second regardless of gear. But once you always get X rage per second you essentially just have rogue energy. So, as with the previous question, we don't like the way it is working and want to change it but we don't have a perfect substitute in the can just yet.

External links

US Forums Class Q&A Series

EU Forums Class Q&A Series

US Forums Re: Tanks thoughts on the Warrior Q&A