wow Blue Posts Round-up: Mar 15

[Stan 5,240]

In the most recent blue posts, Blizzard talks about Vengeance Demon Hunters & Protection Warrior changes in the latest 7.2 build and Mythic+ feedback.

Demon Hunters (Vengeance)

Demonic Wards now provides mitigation against magic.

Kaivax (Source)

Thank you for the suggestions and discussion.

In today’s 7.2 PTR update, we’re testing the following change:
 

• Demonic Wards now reduces all damage taken by 20% (was 10%), and increases Armor by 75% (was 120%).

What this amounts to is a passive reduction of all incoming damage, combined with a lowered defenses against physical damage, leaving almost no change to incoming physical, but a substantial new mitigation against magic.

Your feedback has been very helpful, so again, thank you!

Warriors (Protection)

Changes are coming to Warrior tanks, because they're failing a little behind in Nighthold in terms of magic mitigation.

Kaivax (Source)

As before, we thank you for the good feedback.

The Nighthold has put a spotlight on magic mitigation more than previous raids, and we’ve seen how that resulted in Protection Warriors (who are typically a very well-rounded tank spec) falling a bit behind other tanks as a result.

Today’s new 7.2 PTR build includes the following change:

Warrior

• Gleaming Scales (Artifact Trait) increases Spell Reflection magical damage reduction by 20%.

Gleaming Scales is a new Artifact Trait that’s coming in 7.2, and the intention here is to provide Warriors with a way to keep up with incoming spells in encounters that are magic-heavy, such as Spell Augur Etraeus or Krosus in The Nighthold. 

We’re also testing a new change to the Protection Legendary belt Thundergod's Vigor that triples the rate at which your Thunder Claps reduce the cooldown on Demoralizing Shout.

We continue to analyze and consider everything you’re telling us here (and elsewhere!), so keep it coming. Thank you!

Mythic+ Feedback

Blizzard's interested in Mythic+ feedback and there will be further tweaks to timers.

• Yesterday's build nerfed Fortified / Tyrannical affixes. (Taken from here)
• All changes coming to Mythic+ and affixes can be found in the 7.2 Patch Notes

Ornyx (Source)

Thanks for copying this over! Good feedback here that I can send on up. I think the point on differences in difficulties between affixes is particularly relevant. Seems a relevant conversation the dev team would be happy to listen to is everyone's thoughts on how you deal with the various affixes (ignore them, smaller pulls, etc), and how those experiences have evolved so far in Legion.

I would also be interested in how you guys rank the affixes in order of difficulty to deal with (this obviously changes as the rank increases, but lets look at say... 5 which is pretty average) in the current environment on live.

I'm also very aware of the differences between dungeons on Mythic+, and Ion has previously touched on the preference for Maw of Souls. I'm not exactly sure what can be done at the moment about the gaps the community sees between them, but I'm willing to take any feedback you guys want to share.

My biggest gripe with Mythic+ are the timers. Timers are the reason I didn't like CMs, and it's the reason I really dislike Mythic+ despite loving the concept.

I've seen this point of discussion too, and it's come up numerous times in my own feedback and reporting. Just wanted to say I know this is a valid opinion that I'm definitely aware of.

[hDszzT 103]

Once again they miss the mark completely. Is anyone surprised anymore?

 

[Yridaa 490]

27 minutes ago, Ammako said:

Once again they miss the mark completely. Is anyone surprised anymore?

 

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you unhappy with how they're increasing Vengeance DH's magic mitigation or that the change made isn't the issue with Vengeance DH's right now? Do you mean you'd rather see other changes instead of this tuning method? Something wrong with the Warrior magic mitigation? Something else altogether?

 

What I personally don't like about the changes in this article is the passive ways they're dealing with magic damage. Other tanks -  instead of passive mitigations - use active mitigations (Such as the Paladin's Shield of the Righteous, the Death Knight's Anti-magic Shell or the Druid's Mark of Ursol) or/and in combination with reactive mitigations (Such as the Paladin's Light of the Protector, the Death Knight's Death Strike or the Druid's Frenzied Regeneration).

Most, if not all of us main tanks, prefer the active and reactive mitigations as opposed to the passive mitigations listed in this article. Actively engaging the player in how to deal with mechanics rather than have it be a flat out stat is much more desirable and on top of that raises the skill ceiling (Differentiates good from bad players and allows striving towards perfection of execution of mechanics).

 

I can only assume Blizzard decided on this passive change for the Vengeance DH because they do not have the timeframe to weave in/design a suitable active magic mitigation skill. A "quick and dirty" change to Demon Spikes however might have been good enough (Lower physical damage mitigation and add a magic damage mitigation to it, and alter the Demonic Wards passive skill to make it balanced). But this might mean people will complain that Demon Spikes would be a glorified Shield of the Righteous and make points about homogenization.

 

The Demon Hunter is the new class so it makes sense that it is not as well defined and developed as other classes. The same was true for the Monk and Death Knight when they got released. And even in Legion we have seen complete overhauls of the rune system for DK's and brews for Monks.

[PatrickHenry 293]

"I Dont like timers."

That's a heck of a solution!  How else do you propose to make cutoffs for who receives how many rewards, or who receives none or substantially fewer rewards? 

[DeathsDesign 92]

1 hour ago, Yridaa said:

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you unhappy with how they're increasing Vengeance DH's magic mitigation or that the change made isn't the issue with Vengeance DH's right now? Do you mean you'd rather see other changes instead of this tuning method? Something wrong with the Warrior magic mitigation? Something else altogether?

 

What I personally don't like about the changes in this article is the passive ways they're dealing with magic damage. Other tanks -  instead of passive mitigations - use active mitigations (Such as the Paladin's Shield of the Righteous, the Death Knight's Anti-magic Shell or the Druid's Mark of Ursol) or/and in combination with reactive mitigations (Such as the Paladin's Light of the Protector, the Death Knight's Death Strike or the Druid's Frenzied Regeneration).

Most, if not all of us main tanks, prefer the active and reactive mitigations as opposed to the passive mitigations listed in this article. Actively engaging the player in how to deal with mechanics rather than have it be a flat out stat is much more desirable and on top of that raises the skill ceiling (Differentiates good from bad players and allows striving towards perfection of execution of mechanics).

 

I can only assume Blizzard decided on this passive change for the Vengeance DH because they do not have the timeframe to weave in/design a suitable active magic mitigation skill. A "quick and dirty" change to Demon Spikes however might have been good enough (Lower physical damage mitigation and add a magic damage mitigation to it, and alter the Demonic Wards passive skill to make it balanced). But this might mean people will complain that Demon Spikes would be a glorified Shield of the Righteous and make points about homogenization.

 

The Demon Hunter is the new class so it makes sense that it is not as well defined and developed as other classes. The same was true for the Monk and Death Knight when they got released. And even in Legion we have seen complete overhauls of the rune system for DK's and brews for Monks.

So out of curiosity, have we forgotten about Empower Wards ?  Demon spikes functions very much like Ironfur in it's effect.  Empower Wards is a bit different that Mark of Ursol in that it has a cooldown which Mark of Ursol does not (.5 seconds is not a cooldown), however they are both still active Magic damage mitigation abilities.  Which I personally use on my DH when tanking quite often.

I think the point Blizzard is getting at is that the DH as a tank is geared more towards physical mitigation through passives and actives while not really being able to equally mitigate active damage.  While I agree some tuning could be required I'm not sure adjusting their passive is the right course of action.  Personally I would like to see Empower Wards have maybe 2 charges as well as Demon Spikes having it's 2 charges.  However this may increase the the active magic mitigation to a point that is over-tuned but at this point I'd rather the class be over-tuned than left behind the curve.

After having played Guardian Druid, Protection Paladin, a very minor amount of current level 101-110 Protection Warrior, and Vengeance Demon Hunter I honestly enjoy the DH more.  It's a more active play-style than the others which I like.  Granted I don't run the "typical" passive talents.  For Mythic+ I really enjoy using Spirit Bomb and Soul Barrier as it creates a very interactive tanking experience.  However for single target Raid Boss fights these talents are not ideal and thus I switch them out depending.

I think it comes down to that I like where DH is, but I think it could be more.  I think that Blizzard is trying to get to that "more" point but maybe aren't going about it the right way.

[hDszzT 103]

2 hours ago, Yridaa said:

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you unhappy with how they're increasing Vengeance DH's magic mitigation or that the change made isn't the issue with Vengeance DH's right now? Do you mean you'd rather see other changes instead of this tuning method? Something wrong with the Warrior magic mitigation? Something else altogether?

Because Warriors struggle with magic mitigation and Blizzard's answer is to nerf Spell Reflection.

On Live we have 30% for 5 seconds on a 24 seconds cooldown. For a raid like Nighthold which is full of magic damage this simply does not cut it especially with the nerfs to Ignore Pain from Emerald Nightmare which they never reverted or amended. They were giving us 10 seconds active time on Spell Reflection with that new 7.2 trait, and they're scrapping that in favor of 50% reduction instead.

Sure, every 24 seconds you'll be able to block 20% more of some of the bigger hits. Where 24 seconds sometimes still isn't enough, but you're expected to eat everything else with Ignore Pain anyway (doubled duration on Spell Reflection would have helped a fair amount here, at least you could have have 40% uptime on it. fwiw Guardian Druids can get 100% uptime on 30% magic damage reduction on top of their other mitigation abilities. Also as far as I'm aware they have a flat 6% damage reduction on everything; that includes magic damage, and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see that on Warriors.)

They're seemingly acknowledging that magic damage is a problem so they're buffing Vengeance DH in what I think is a good way. Is it enough? I don't know, but at least it's a clear buff. It overall doesn't really touch their physical damage reduction, but it helps with magic mitigation. Then they "fix" it for warriors by effectively nerfing one of our magic damage mitigation abilities and buffing a legendary, of all things they could choose to buff.

Edited March 15, 2017 by Ammako

[Unicurn 1]

13 hours ago, DeathsDesign said:

So out of curiosity, have we forgotten about Empower Wards ?  Demon spikes functions very much like Ironfur in it's effect.  Empower Wards is a bit different that Mark of Ursol in that it has a cooldown which Mark of Ursol does not (.5 seconds is not a cooldown), however they are both still active Magic damage mitigation abilities.  Which I personally use on my DH when tanking quite often.

u shouldnt be serious while u are saying .5 isnt cooldown , it also costs 45 rages mate. thats something that you got to keep it in mind to use those rages wisely

Edited March 16, 2017 by Unicurn

[DeathsDesign 92]

7 hours ago, Unicurn said:

u shouldnt be serious while u are saying .5 isnt cooldown , it also costs 45 rages mate. thats something that you got to keep it in mind to use those rages wisely

Thing is... .5 seconds isn't a cooldown in my opinion because the Global Cooldown is  1 second, and the average time it takes someone to press a button from the time their brain triggers the notion that a button press is needed is around .25-1 second (imho... no research to back this up).  As far as the rage is concerned if you're playing the druid class properly rage management shouldn't be an issue.

[Unicurn 1]

On 3/16/2017 at 5:06 PM, DeathsDesign said:

Thing is... .5 seconds isn't a cooldown in my opinion because the Global Cooldown is  1 second, and the average time it takes someone to press a button from the time their brain triggers the notion that a button press is needed is around .25-1 second (imho... no research to back this up).  As far as the rage is concerned if you're playing the druid class properly rage management shouldn't be an issue.

you right mate but since it does not stacks or anything i think its all ok ;)