#117 - Feb. 16, 2012, 8:53 p.m.
Q. Is Mind Numbing nerfed, now that it won’t affect all casts for the duration?That's a bit of a misunderstanding. Base Mind-Numbing is unchanged and works as it does now. The new Shiv effect stacks on top of the base Mind-Numbing, and is more than triply effective on the single next spellcast.
Q. Any chance of a sweet UI element warning the rogue that he’s approaching 5 stacks of paralytic poison, or letting him know that it went off?Making it easier to track buffs and debuffs in the UI, including using the Spell Alert system, is something we're always looking at.
Q. Y U NERF CRIPPLING?Sadly, because it was too good -- which is pretty much the same reason anything ever gets nerfed. Basically, we're looking to chill out some of the passive, automatically-applied snares on some classes get because there's no real gameplay to them beyond just I touch you and you're snared.
Crippling is an important tool though, and we didn't want to take it away entirely. By lowering the base snare and allowing Shiv to still apply the -70% form, snaring opponents or kiting other melee classes that also have snares becomes something you'll need to think about and manage.
Is Crippling going to last 12 seconds in PVP now, instead of 8 seconds?Nay. PvP durations are capped at 8 (and nothing should break that rule), but PvP durations aren’t shown in the tooltips.
Q. Under the proposed system, it looks like it won’t be possible to take both Paralytic and Leeching Poison. Will we have to have to choose between Paralytic and Crippling? You can take both Paralytic and Leeching, but you'll be able to actively make use of one at a time. That said, switching poisons isn't necessarily impossible in the heat of combat -- the cast time on swapping will be fairly short.
That said, we're taking a look at the decision involved in the current placement of the different Poison-related talents, and that's something we may reevaluate. Still early days yet – and that applies to everything in this list.
Q. But Daxx! RAWR RAIDING! What's this PvP nonsense?We'd like Shiv to be useful when raiding too, and increasing the availability of such effects makes it easier to design encounters that permit them to shine. It bears mentioning that, even now, the various Shiv effects could be useful in existing raid encounters. There’s no reason to expect that they couldn't be useful in Mists raid design too.
Also, there's more to PvE than raiding. Just because a talent isn't useful when you're fighting Ultraxion doesn't mean it isn't useful in PvE at large. There's still leveling (remember, tier 1 talents should ideally be relevant and useful to a level 15 player!), outdoor dailies, the upcoming challenge modes, and more to consider.
Sooooo… Does this mean that rogue damage might go up if we lose some control/mobility/survivability?We want rogue PvE damage to remain top-tier. But yes, if rogues end up with less control or mobility or survivability, and they have to choose among those areas, then that allows us to safely improve their damage potential in PvP while keeping the class balanced overall.