Upcoming Class and Trinket Changes, Patch 7.2 - Artifact Traits and Crusade, Tweets

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Upcoming Class Tuning Changes - 1/24/17
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Updated the original post with a couple of additions/revisions:

  • Arcane Mage: Damage increase on most spells went from 5% to 8%
  • Fire Mage: Damage of most spells increased by 3%
  • Frost Mage: Comet Storm damage increase went from 24% to 30%, and damage of most spells increased by 4%

Upcoming Trinket Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
)
In general, we’ve found that our tuning on trinkets which relied on a direct damage or healing effect (as opposed to their raw stats) have come up a bit short this expansion. To help address that, we’re making the following changes:

  • Claw of the Crystalline Scorpid: Damage increased by 30%.
  • Arcanogolem Digit: Damage increased by 30%.
  • Entwined Elemental Foci: The amount of Critical Strike, Mastery, and Haste granted by this item’s proc has been increased by 5%.
  • Might of Krosus: Base damage reduced by 25%, but is now always a critical strike.
    • The tooltip for Might of Krosus will display the amount of damage that will result from the critical hit, not the base damage.
    • Also fixed a bug where the cooldown was incorrectly being reduced if Might of Krosus damaged at least 3 targets.
  • Draught of Souls: The Use effect of this trinket now respects the global cooldown.
    • The damage of this trinket is now reduced by 30% for Unholy Death Knights (was reduced by 40%).
    • Designer Notes: Since Draught of Souls deals Shadow Damage, it’s increased by Unholy’s Mastery, which means we needed to reduce its base damage to keep its overall value similar to other classes. It’s currently a little too low, however, so we’re increasing the damage it deals for Unholy.
  • Icon of Rot: Damage increased by 40%.
  • Pharamere's Forbidden Grimoire: Damage increased by 85%.
  • Fury of the Burning Sky: Damage increased by 40%.
  • Star Gate: Damage increased by 30%.
  • Aluriel's Mirror: Healing-over-time amount increased by 140%. Detonation effect reduced by 35%.
    • Designer Notes: Aluriel’s Mirror’s detonation effect is strong when it activates, but hard to rely on. We’re increasing the heal-over-time effect significantly to improve the up-front value of this trinket, and reducing the detonation effect slightly to compensate.
  • Perfectly Preserved Cake: Absorb amount increased by 140%.
  • Etraeus' Celestial Map: The amount of Critical Strike, Mastery, and Haste granted by this item’s proc has been increased by 5%.

As for Convergence of Fates, we’re spending a little extra time to make sure our changes here are as comprehensive as possible, so we don’t have final numbers yet. However, we can share our overall plan for the changes we intend to make. We intend to reduce its base effectiveness (before talents) for Windwalkers, and increase its base effectiveness for Retribution Paladins and Frost and Unholy Death Knights. Separately, we plan to adjust its effectiveness individually for the following talents:

We’re planning to make these changes with the next weekly restarts, alongside the release of Mythic Nighthold. Overall, this should make the trinkets in Nighthold more competitive with other trinkets available elsewhere in the expansion.

Does this mean that the CoF changes will be there as well with the reset this week, since you said you wanted a little extra time to ensure they were as comprehensible as possible?
Yes. The exact numbers haven't been completely finalized yet, but the plan is to have that finished in time for weekly resets.

We'll look into Draught and its effect for Warriors a bit more. Worth noting that the change to have it on the GCD does mean the trinket will be a bit weaker after these hotfixes for most classes (Unholy DK being the exception, due to the damage increase).

Regarding the Unholy damage reduction for Draught, again, that's only there to counteract the fact that Unholy's Mastery increases Draught's damage. Either way, its damage is going up by ~17% with this hotfix, which is pretty substantial.

We'll also take another look at Nightblooming Frond.

How about tank trinkets ? they are completely underwhelming, my 885 mythic + trinkets have higher absorbs and stam ......
Tank trinkets are on our to-do list, but not for this round of trinket tuning. We agree that they need some help.

Patch 7.2 - Class Feedback
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
images.gif
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.2 Artifact Traits
Tuning on the datamined 7.2 traits is very preliminary and/or nonexistent at the moment. I don't doubt there is a point at which additional duration on Combustion could add the correct amount of DPS for an artifact trait, even if that turns out to be a higher amount than 1s due to Combustion being less bursty than it was in 7.1.

Phoenix's Warmth--we are considering changing the mechanic on this and similar artifact traits to something other than "nearest allies", so it doesn't feel like it's inducing some complicated positioning puzzle in raids that are trying to optimize DPS. That said, it will still likely feel random to an extent (in fact, it may well be "four random nearby allies"). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

ipaladins.gif
Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.2 - Crusade
We are definitely keenly aware that people feel better when we fix a problem by buffing something, rather than fixing it by nerfing something. If you look across classes and talent rows in 7.1.5, you'll see the great majority of balance issues were addressed by buffing underperforming talents. There are a few factors that go into this decision though, and it generally has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

One issue when balancing a lopsided talent row is whether we want the overall power of the spec to go slightly up or slightly down in the process. In the case of Retribution during our tuning adjustments for the opening of Nighthold, we intended to slightly nerf the topend performance of the spec (essentially, the performance of players stacking trinkets/relics/legendaries that all build around Crusade). I know there's no easy way to deliver that message, but hopefully it's at least worth clarifying that it's not some accident of how we chose to balance the L100 row. Players say "why couldn't we buff Divine Purpose instead of nerfing Crusade", for the very understandable reason that the former wouldn't have resulted in a slight DPS nerf. But we were conscious of the slight DPS nerf when we decided to do it this way.

Another factor is that there are sometimes limits on how powerful we want an individual talent to be, regardless of balance within the row. Divine Purpose and Crusade are both very strong talents, that have a significant impact on the rotation and playstyle of the spec (and as mentioned, on gear/talent/relic/etc. decisions), even at their current strength. Balancing Retribution L100 at an even higher point would start causing more issues--Divine Purpose would allow strings of multiple free finishers very often, Crusade would continue to represent a majority of the spec's damage within a cooldown, and Holy Wrath would have to get even more bursty to try to compete with the other two. Sometimes we have to be careful about addressing all balance problems by buffing two talents up to match the highest one, because it can lead to a lot of power creep on the importance of a single talent to an entire DPS rotation. (Official Forums)

irogues.gif
Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Loaded Dice - New Outlaw Gold Trait Feedback
It should be a DPS gain even for players who are optimizing well, because you will lose fewer Combo Points to rerolling Roll the Bones (and thereby gain Run Through damage).

We will monitor the tuning as always, but it seems likely that a guaranteed triple buff would be a lot stronger than it initially appears. If you know that a particular roll is going to be a triple, then you can make sure to set up a 54 second duration on it. And given the frequency of Adrenaline Rush, that would be a very high uptime on a guaranteed triple buff. True Bearing uptime would go way up due to this, which adds many Adrenaline Rushes to the rotation on average. That positive feedback loop on Outlaw is rather powerful, and we have to watch for it when setting up this trait, but will continue to keep an eye on how it's borne out when testing begins. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Battle.Net Balance
Wasnt the ingame token thing ment to come with 7.1.5? So you could add Battle.Net balance with it instead?
No, that feature is coming at a later time. (WarcraftDevs)

Classes
As a follow up; have you guys ever found your own internal sims to be wrong?
Oh yes, absolutely. We make mistakes like anybody else in our theorycraft. We just tend to catch those mistakes... (Celestalon)
...more often, and faster, because we're comparing to live data more often, and with much larger sample sizes. (Celestalon)

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