#0 - Feb. 28, 2007, 9:59 p.m.
Q u o t e:
First off, it is a little more damage that can be absorbed than before. We all know that sometimes that's all it takes to keep on going. You start watching your hitpoints tick down and pray that you can take that damage just a little bit longer. This change gives you that little bit more. Is it enough? That's not my place to say. However, there will be internal testing done as well as continued monitoring of player feedback on this change and all of the others so please test and give feedback.
Second off, had this been an increase to damage output for Warlocks or Mages, people would be up in arms over it and be upset that they were doing more damage than before. In this case, you can take more damage than before no matter how slight it seems.
We don't intend to do large changes for any one class no matter how it may seem. Sometimes results in testing show changes to be larger than expected but these sorts of small changes are meant to build up over time so that we can better control how they affect gameplay. Feedback on even these small changes can be extremely important on many levels and help the team know what areas still need more help and more changes or even more nerfs/adjustments.
Okay, I snipped out a bit of your post Neth to simply cut down on size, if you think any of it was important to my post, feel free to remind me of it after the fact.
Without even going back to the test server, I can honestly say that 10 is the very high of workable for PoM as a PvE based spell. To give you a general idea of the range I'm talking about here, 10 seconds would be the highest 8 seconds would be high 5 to 6 seconds would be right, 2 to 3 seconds would be low, and 0 seconds would be very low. That's purely as a PvE spell, and I know the line is to test on the test server, but to be honest something like that doesn't need testing on the test server. I can adequately judge seconds just as well on the real server as the test server and I know when I want to cast another PoM using it as a staple healing spell.
I've purposefully held off casting the PoM for a wide variety of times, and five to six seconds was the sweet spot for PvE. I wasn't spamming the button, but I also didn't feel adversely restricted in my healing options.
Now then, if you do decide to forward this to the devs let it be known that statement is SOLELY for PvE. The real uproar over the PoM change is in the PvP venue, more specfically in Arena.
Why is Arena so special? It isn't a battleground, there isn't a "blend in with the crowd" option when you're throwing heals. Speaking as someone who has played hundreds of arena battles, I can honestly say as a priest, and against a priest the difference between strategies is night and day. When against a priest it's almost always the best idea to go right for the priest and burn him into the ground. Why? First, priests are the squishiest class. None of our talent trees really offer an effective way to negate that, there is no ice block a bit under halfway into a tree. Infact, our two best surviveability talents are mutually exclusive. We can't have blessed resiliance and pain supression at the same time. Taking a distant second in pointing that out is the -10% spell damage and -4% spell crit while being possible to attain both is extremely difficult to do so.
Priests really aren't desired for Arena teams. The Arena teams I'm on are guild teams, and that's really the only reason I'm able to be in one. Why are priests last picked? Because everyone else is better, no matter the spec.
Paladins: Wear plate drastically increasing their surviveability against melee focus fire, and also able to bubble to effectively negate any focus fire attempts once per battle. They also bring a nice array of battle specific buffs to the table between their blessings and auras.
Druids: Leather is marginally better armor, but they also come with a big fat undispellable CC mechanism that effectively negates the ability for the other team to focus fire them down. Also able to drop into bear form to have the same "plate" melee resistance and even post nerf, decent damage ability.
Shaman: Decent healing, mail armor, decent back up damage, and a plethora of totemic aid from removing a good chunk of possible CC, to disrupting spell casting to a huge extent making caster focus fire difficult, good ability to evade stealth means big opener stealth melee dps is limited as well, not to mention earthbind to allow kiting etc etc.
Now that I've listed their plus sides in arena healing, I'm going to borrow your plus sides for priests.
We can heal, and we can dispel. Now for the downside to that, we can't do either if we're dead and we don't have anywhere near the level of surviveability of any of the other 3 classes I mentioned. Even PoM spam didn't really bring us up to par with those three, most of the time though it allowed me to stay alive long enough for my two teammates to focus fire one of their members down, and then through improved dying I could keep them up a bit longer giving them the net advantage.
I understand that as developers it's not like you guys are spending a week in the trenches playing Arena with the general population, but I also get the distinct feeling that the way you perceive the current Arena enviroment is more than a bit off-kilter than the reality of the situation.
Even with PoM spam, there isn't a single Arena group that would specifcally say, we'd rather have a priest over another healing class. We just don't offer enough to the group, and our complete lack of surviveability is a detriment to the team.
I'm saying this as whole-heartedly as I can. I'm not a PvP machine, I like the PvE aspect of this game, however I really can't play a character that has no natural advantages in PvP, and seems destined never to have any of those advantages.
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WIth all of THAT said, I have a big idea to go with everyone elses big ideas. Yes, small changes are what you're looking for, but simply put, small changes aren't really enough as this patch has distinctly shown. When you're teetering on the brink of unplayability in one venue or the other, then a small change is enough to knock you in the hole, and a small change is enough to pull you back from the edge, but no small change is going to pull you back from the edge, give you a shave and a warm meal, and give you a new lease on life.
Very simple idea though.
Overhaul the talent trees.
Remove some, rearrange some, add some. I'm not on the dev team, and most likely for good reason so I'll leave the specifics up to you. However the general idea would be this.
Discipline would no longer be the catch all tree, it would be the surviveabilitypvp tree. Move things like blessed resilience/shadow resilience/spell warding/blessed recovery and so on and so forth from their current trees to discipline. Yes. It would require some renaming probably, and some possible condenseing, but it'd make an altogether better tree.
Then for the Holy and Shadow trees. Give them a slight re-working. Either remove CoH and Lightwell, or make them trainable abilites, but get them out of the talent trees. If you want a good idea of a well made holy tree, look at the paladins. Our holy tree in respect to healing should be a better version of that, not a worse one. As far as shadow goes, making improved fade some sort of 25/50 or 50/100% of the fade aggro reducer permanent would be a good start to placating the shadow priest population I'd assume.
The general idea is this. If you want to be a battle priest, you'd be speced deep into disc and some into holy, if you wanted to be a befouling battle scarred fallen angel, deep disc, and some shadow. Here is the key thing though, the very key thing at that. You'd have to make priests good enough on their own to withstand this sort of change. 41 disc 20 holy would need to be able to handle healing 5 and 10 mans in good healing gear, such as the hallowed set with full healing sockets and some good high-end blues for the rest. 41 disc 20 shadow would need to also be able to do the same in a dps/support role.
Basically, you could be a decent healer/ranged dps, and an excellant pvp class, or vice versa. Or you could even eschew these roles, and be a great dps/decent healer, but very poor at PvP. It's kinda simple though, it'd require alot of work on the developers part to make this class a good class over all. Not just the token base healer.
Will any of this happen? Not likely, but I can hope. Or I can at least hope that the developers will realize that an extra 300 damage on a shield is basically nothing in a PvP enviroment. I wouldn't cry foul if unstable affliction did 300 more damage on dispel, and that's about the closest thing I can equate it too.
There is a difference between burst dps and dps negation. When you're taliking about 2000+ crits of all sorts, whether they be ambush, or mind blast, or shadowbolt, or pyroblast, or insert ability here, 1700 damage on a good day doesn't sound that great anymore, specially when you realise that while they can load up another spell, or backstab for a respectable amount you have to wait 15 seconds at the minimum to attempt to absorb another 1700 damage you start to see why everyone is like whatever, it isn't going to matter. Because it isn't. You'd have to start reaching into the 3000+ to start making a noticeable difference in priest surviveability, but even then you're talking about placing all of our surviveability into a dispellable/stealable basket.
We're broken, we know we're broken, and no small change is going to be enough to fix us. When small good changes are accompanied by larger nerfs, it negates any effect that good change is going to have and sends us further into a do
