MMO-Champion BlueTracker - How to fix balance bloat

2008-10-06 03:00:31

well I went to wartools and redid the balance and resto trees (note only the balance tree has changes to it)
and here it is.

fixing the bloat and giving us 4 points to spend in pvp talents or in PvE talents. GC this is what most of us would like to fix the tree.

I also changed a couple of talents to make them a smidgen more PvP oriented those can be taken or left, dont really care.

Brambles - added typhoon to daze effect
Dreamstate - added dispel resist- doesn't stack with subtley-
Owlkin Frenzy - Added interruption, and silence to immunity effects during frenzy.

Haven't played feral in a while so not even going to mess with that tree right now.

and without further delay
http://www.war-tools.com/t58407.html

this talent tree would give us 4 points to put in PvE talent or PvP talents, allow us to do aoe dmg(gale winds) .or more single target dmg(eclipse). or give us the option to pick up impFF. or get brambles(pvp talent)

edited the talent tree after g.c.s post to show the changed talent tree.

[ Post edited by Lilianarra ]

Lilianarra

2008-10-06 20:40:57

Re: How to fix balance bloat

Here is what we're inclined to do about Balance. It isn't a done deal yet because we just talked about it and didn't make the actual changes yet, so it's possible we'll hit a snag (though I don't see why).

Moonfury and Earth and Moon down to 3 ranks from 5, but keeping the same overall benefit. That buys you 4 extra talent points to get more utility or fun talents.

We are also going to buff Eclipse's damage a little so that you feel you're paid back for the extra proc-watching (and so I won't feel so lonely when I tell you I think it's fun).

We're going to leave the Starfire glyph as is for now, since one of the reasons we added it was to buy you back some brain time if you were watching Eclipse too much.

The treant health is still something on the list to look at too. I suspect it just hasn't scaled well.

As an epilogue, here are our feelings on bloat. The problem with the Balance tree was that druids had to spend nearly all their points just on pure damage. It's hard to justify giving up damage for utility, PvP or fun talents in a raid scenario. Ideally you should be trading those talents off against each other ,not against your damage (or healing or mitigation).

Bloat (in our dictionary) does not mean there are more talents you want than you can afford. That's a *good* thing. If there were a bunch of talents you'd never ever get, now *that* would be a problem. As a contrast, we don't think Feral is bloated -- or rather in this case we bloated it on purpose so that you couldn't be the best cat in the world and the best bear in the world with the same spec.

Furthermore, don't expect us to be ripping up every other talent tree in the game at this stage. We will continue to change talent effects before Lich King ships, but don't expect a lot more massive rejuggling of the trees themselves. The dual-spec feature will shine more light on talent design (more on that at Blizzcon) and we'll have a better idea of what we want to do with trees when that goes live. Some talent trees are nice and lean, and some probably have some points we could trim here and there.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-07 20:12:15

Re: How to fix balance bloat

Update on Eclipse. Here is how we changed the talent.

It now has a longer cooldown (40 sec) and a shorter duration (10 sec) but the effects on Wrath and Starfire are doubled. It is overall a buff to the damage to justify the proc-watching aspect. We also hope the longer cooldown and shorter duration will mean it takes less of your bandwidth to do so.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-09 14:37:31

Re: How to fix balance bloat

I have followed a lot of the Eclipse number crunching.

Here are things I think are valid concerns:

-- Is 10 sec too short to get your spells off?
-- Is increasing a random chance good for Starfire? Over time, it should still work out to an increase, especially given other crit benefits. But you could proc Eclipse and not get a crit, or "waste" a crit on one you would have already gotten one.

Here are things I don't believe are valid concerns:

-- The RNG or proc-watching aspects. This was exactly the design. If you want a very stable rotation and aren't RNG tolerant, I absolutely would skip over this talent. We wanted it to be optional to some extent -- this is why it isn't the next-to-last 5 point talent (though yours isn't 5 points now anyway). Some players like to be rewarded for really paying attention to procs, or get really bored casting the same spells over and over according to a pre-determined rotation.

Now, one mistake I do see in some (not all) of the math is assuming that Eclipse will proc as soon as the previous one ends. With a 30 sec cooldown, the real cooldown will probably be closer to 38-40 sec.

Keep cranking. :) It's certainly possible our math is off.

If you want to go nuts with numbers, you might try estimates at 15 sec durations.

Edit: Added a lost D.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

Ghostcrawler