Colossus Smash 4.1 PTR - Finally, thank you!

16/03/2011 7:32 AMPosted by Vindolol

Thank you blizzard for finally listening to you players and made a PvP change on CS. The 50%pvp and 100%pve change was wonderful and i hope you do more of these changes.

Colossus Smash is one of those abilities that we tried really hard to find one number that would work for both PvE and PvP. Ultimately it simply was not feasible to predict all the varying armour values players would have while also considering PvE unit values. Separating the PvE and PvP effect of an ability is something we will normally only consider as a last resort as World of Warcraft is already a very complex game, and having many talents and abilities list different effects depending on type of play/target will unnecessarily add to the complexity and learning curve of picking up a new class, or being a new player to the game.

However, in order to preserve balance, sometimes exceptions must be made. We don't feel that the change to Colossus Smash is an exception that will add much confusion or complexity to the game as players are already accustomed to seeing varying damage numbers depending on target type, armour value, resilience, buffs, and so on.

Nice to see a blue response but I have one question if an ability reduces something by 100% what does it matter what armour value the players have? It would surely reduce all players armour values to zero?

Well, consider this: how big of a damage increase is 100% going to be vs cloth, cloth with armour increasing buffs, leather, mail, plate, and PvE units.

Example: Numbers that may be balanced against PvE units and overall raid DPS and 5 of 10 player classes might be too strong (or too weak) against the other 5. This is to say that such abilities will see much higher returns on players with 50% damage reduction from armour than players with 20% armour based damage reduction.

This particularly becomes reality when the damage of other abilities is increased/decreased to compensate for a percentile value change that does not yield equal results across the board, as was the case with Colossus Smash and the other changes that were being tested on the PTR.