MMO-Champion BlueTracker - BLizcon: Wow, what a total Evasion

2008-10-11 14:33:38

Shadowpriest: So against siege engines in wintergrasp all I can do is mindblast every 5 seconds, why is that?

Answer: We are increasing your dps and giving you aoe abilities.

Is it just me, or did the question and answer not even vaguely have anything in relation to each other?

Thanatosia

2008-10-12 02:13:58

Re: BLizcon: Wow, what a total Evasion

Q u o t e:
Shadowpriest: So against siege engines in wintergrasp all I can do is mindblast every 5 seconds, why is that?

Answer: We are increasing your dps and giving you aoe abilities.

Sorry about that one. We totally misunderstood the question and didn't figure it out until we were backstage. It's a little hard to hear up there. :)

It's dumb that so many of your abilities don't work on vehicles. We'll try to get that fixed.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-13 10:15:45

Re: BLizcon: Wow, what a total Evasion

Q u o t e:
This isn't a whine or a QQ, so I hope it doesn't come across that way, but the impression I had from reading some of the Priest replies at Blizzcon is that no one at Blizzard plays us or really knows that much about our class, which is very disappointing.

We don't talk about what classes we play for probably obvious reasons. But I can assure you that we have a lot of priest experience.

Q u o t e:
Will you be doing something similar for locks?

Yes. I believe the general problem is that you can't debuff a vehicle. We'll have to look into what solutions we have available, but it's definitely going to do unintended things to class balance if many of your spells can't kill them.

Q u o t e:
I think that's taking it a little far. I really doubt many raid leaders are going to be sitting down and comparing the 51 point talents that each class has when deciding raid invites. Of course there will be other factors that could affect how attractive one might be or not be to a raid, for example performance and DPS. That is what I'm worried about.

Needless to say, I agree with this comment. Our philosophy has generally been that numbers (whether damage, healing, mitigation, CC or even buffs) don't have to be *identical*. They just have to be *close enough* to where a raid leader doesn't feel like it will really make a difference. There are probably some leaders out there that consider your tradeskills, server lag, racial bonuses, and perhaps even IQ, mental stability and how much coffee you've had that day. But we know enough top guilds to know their raid inviters are generally smarter than that.

A few months ago we did some tests where shadow priests were doing terrific damage. Since then they have been slipping behind and we're not sure if something changed or if the initial results were buggy. But we have made some changes to prop them up.

As far as ignoring holy and disc issues, we felt like we had a bigger problem with shadow, because we nerfed the main reason they got into raids in BC so we knew we had to compensate for that. While I won't say holy is perfect, they still seem to be great and versatile healers. We are trying to get discipline to be a better PvE healer. Whenever the topic comes up, we look at the tree and convince ourselves that they should be strong, so it may just be that players haven't quite figured out how to get the most out of them yet (and it could also be that our estimates are wrong).

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:
"How viable will a holy priest be able to heal as well as other healing classes if disc and shadow can heal just as well? "

This is easily the worst question asked at blizzcon. It barely made sense.

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The kid was 6, give him a break.

We also really had trouble hearing him and I thought I could only ask to repeat the question so many times. But I thought it was awesome that he got up there. What a nice story to be able to tell your friends. It helps to remind us all that the WoW community is larger and more diverse than we sometimes remember.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-13 12:02:21

Re: BLizcon: Wow, what a total Evasion

Q u o t e:

Sorry about that one. We totally misunderstood the question and didn't figure it out until we were backstage. It's a little hard to hear up there. :)

It's dumb that so many of your abilities don't work on vehicles. We'll try to get that fixed.

To clarify, magical shadow damage over time effects will work on vehicles. For example, corruption, shadow word pain, vt, and mind flay (although the vehicle's movement won't be slowed by the mind flay).

Kalgan

2008-10-13 12:40:43

Re: BLizcon: Wow, what a total Evasion

Q u o t e:
Hey GC, while we have your attention could you comment on Shadow's glyph situation? We only have 3 major glyphs and only 1 of them is actually useful for raiding.

One of (but not the only) changes we're making to Shadow is to make some glyphs provide better dps.

Ghostcrawler