MMO-Champion
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Legion - Rogue Tier 19
Today we are taking a look at the Rogue Tier 19 sets.
Lunar Festival
There haven't been any changes to Lunar Festival since last year.
Healing Design in Legion
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Thanks for all the feedback. A few things:
1) It's definitely still intended that you consider mana costs in choosing heals. I wouldn't agree with the characterization that any changes (recent or otherwise) reflect an abandonment of this. It's widely accepted among players that mana became overly abundant at high ilvls in past expansions, which did in some cases undermine the resource management aspect. But the spell selections of each class are still made with the intention of mana being an important factor. They are in Legion just as they have been in the past, with the main change being to avoid having mana grow excessively generously throughout the expansion. Jumping ahead, trinkets are indeed one place where we may provide opporunities to invest in more mana. But mana regen will not be passively increasing by a large amount simply due to gear advancement, largely for these reasons.
6) Tranquility and Divine Hymn should still deliver significantly more healing than those players would typically do in 8 seconds. Having these sorts of spells (both the channeled and instant varieties) do "significantly more" than usual, as opposed to the overwhelming strength they have on live, might take some getting used to. But there is no reason they won't be strong and helpful spells to use either at specific high-damage encounter moments or simply because the player needs to catch up in a bad healing situation. In both of these cases, the intention is that the cooldowns don't completely supplant the normal healing gameplay, but give a boost to output at a key moment. On Tranquility and Divine Hymn in particular, the 8-second channel causes the biggest problem in the dungeon context, and both of these spells will do increased healing outside of raids to account for that.
The Aura talent row, Aura mastery spell, and corresponding artifact trait are all reworked in an upcoming patch. Among other things, we agree the trait giving Aura Mastery the effect of all three Auras eliminates too much of the significance of the talent choice.
7) We understand the importance of utility. I want to point out that on live, the dominance of Disc Priest and Paladin in the highest-level raiding is primarily due to their core healing function and not to unique non-healing utility (exception in some cases for Hand of Protection, but the removal of Clemency from all specs in Legion reduces that problem significantly). Avoiding a repeat situation where some healers feel left out of the most optimized Mythic healing groups is likely a question of balancing the actual heals, not of more incidental utility buttons such as Wind Rush, Tiger's Lust, Innervate and so on.
The artifact trait granting a 5% haste aura will also be changed before Holy Paladin is playable on alpha.
To illustrate with numbers: if 100 DPS is incoming and you have to choose between spending a little bit of mana to do 50 HPS, a medium amount of mana to do 125 HPS, or a large amount of mana to do 200 HPS, the correct choice is 125 HPS, but then every 5th second there's nothing to heal. All I am saying is that healers should be able to do something meaningful in this 5th second.
Note that even in your example, you could instead spend every 3rd second on your 50 HPS heal, and save a little mana over your solution (that never uses that heal and instead fills every 5th second with DPS). In any situation where healing and mana are a significant challenge, that gameplay is still present, and toolkits with different spells of varying efficiency provide opportunity for more skilled healers to know when and how much to use the cheaper options.
On 7) While I agree that HFC's healer composition issues stemmed largely from actual healing issues, I still think that more effort can be put towards ensuring that every healer has things they can do that are useful and "cool" beyond filling health bars. Similar to the above, it is less about power and more that it feels bad to be asked to justify why your spec should be brought when another spec brings X ability and not have an answer. Currently I think that HPriest/Druid/MW all have difficulty answering that question and while it may not matter much to people that have a good understanding of the entire healing picture, this topic holds a lot of sway when it comes to the general community's opinions on balance.
Again, nobody's denying the value of utility abilities that are fun to use (defined as you did in the OP as things other than healing output or equivalent shielding/damage-reduction). Merely trying to avoid conflating it with major healer balance concerns. To your point, even the Disc Priest in Warlords didn't justify being brought by some X factor that raid leaders had to have, other than their sheer volume of healing/shielding. Their extras like Body and Soul were comparatively minor. Similarly, something like Wind Rush isn't intended to dominate the importance of actual healing when deciding what classes or individuals to bring to a raid, and we'll examine it closely if it does. It likely won't, as it's somewhat weaker than the live spell Stampeding Roar (which hasn't had such an effect)--much smaller radius and no snare break (also a 2min cooldown which I believe you haven't seen yet).
Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Any plans for something like the Lorewalker quests in Legion? One of my favorite parts of Pandaria
Thank you! We loved those. There's lots of custom storytelling for artifacts this time around, but no 'Lorewalker' equivalent (DaveKosak)
Glyph if stars is why Im a moonkin. And glyph if shadows is why my priest wears a bikini.>_>
The Glyph of Stars visual effect (along with a matching Solar variant) is used for the Blessing of the Ancients talent. (WarcraftDevs)
but Light of the Martyr? At 12.5% of total mana, seems expensive for such a small net gain in healing. Will have to wait and see.
In addition to being a no-cooldown instant spell, the healing of LotM is increased by Crit and Mastery (while the damage is not). (WarcraftDevs)
However, one change that didn't make it into this build's data is that LotM will no longer flow through Beacon of Light. (WarcraftDevs)
Forums have a tendency toward negativity, so I always take feedback with salt and pepper. But this level of uniformity is unusual.
Where is this feedback? I'm seeing virtually none so far. (Celestalon)
This thread in particular gets off to a poor start, but has some helpful posts in it: https://t.co/EY8ztY4d9S
.Oh. Reminder: Please post Alpha feedback in the Alpha forums. (Celestalon)
Yeah, w/ rogue stuff at least, I've seen a tendency for people to vent where they feel comfortable. (And less moderated, maybe.)
Venting is fine, but we do also want to get good, useful feedback. Another reminder: Tuning hasn't happened. Ignore numbers. (Celestalon)
this issue is far far from a tuning issue. The spec has been gutted and simplified to be utter garbage
Then I look forward to reading your good feedback! (Celestalon)
Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
I hope your empathy improved since the "WoW Dungeons are Hard" article. ⊙︿⊙
That's why I wrote that article! Players were frustrated and confused about our intentions. (OccupyGStreet)
I thought (& still do) that using more of your class abilities and coordinating with your party was more fun and memorable. (OccupyGStreet)
But that didn't resonate with some players coming off of overgearing LK dungeons for valor runs. So we pivoted. (OccupyGStreet)
Was that the right choice? Players have been debating that topic ever since. ) (OccupyGStreet)
I do think I have become more empathetic over time though. (OccupyGStreet)
Warcraft Movie - UK Release Date
The UK release date of the Warcraft movie seems to have been pushed a little earlier.
Dark Legacy Comics #524
DLC #524 has been released.
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