9.1 PvP talents feedback - I'm really worried about the future of the game

PVP Arenas
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I’ll begin with the fact I read new patch notes and I was terrified. I don’t want to be rude and really negative about 9.1 but it seems that people who are designing new PvP talents don’t play arenas or rated PvP and if they play any it’s random bgs at best. These new PvP talents have no deeper thought on how will they affect meta and class interaction. There is literally no thought purpose of what are they going to bring to the class. They are random ideas that are related to class identity that are cool on paper but not really useful or they don’t affect the meta in any meaningful way. I’ll bring few examples:

Seasoned Winds Honor Talent

Requires Shaman

Interrupting a spell with Wind Shear decreases your damage taken from that spell school by 20% for 12 sec.

There is no way that any Shaman would ever take it. Why? Because the classes that it can ever be useful against are already somehow countered by Shamans. For example - this talent is absolutely useless against any Mage other than Arcane. Why? Because you have to stop poly and you can’t kick Fire Mage on Fire usually. The only moment when it’s fine to do it is when Mage popped combustion and you randomly purged Hot Streak before Combustion - that’s the only situation that justify kicking Fire Mage on Fire. The only moment when you are going to kick Frost Mage on Frost school is when he is low on HP and he will be not able to use Ice Block but then you don’t need damage reduction.

Classes that it might be useful against are Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests in 2s or maybe Shadowplay in 3s since their utility, CC and damage is on the same school of magic but are you seriously going to pick this over Grounding against Mindgames? Are you going to pick it over Lasso or over Skyfury? You are rather not going for a long game vs Shadow. You want to force CDs and smoke someone with Stormkeeper. As Enha you may pick it over Thundercharge but it’s still very niche situation not bringing anything new to the table. The only other logic situation where you can take it is if you play vs Ret/H Priest and you kick Priest on Holy school so Ret deals less damage but Enha is still bad in 2s. The real problem of Enha in 2s is dying to meele specs with healing reduction. I don’t want Enha to get healing reduction though as it keeps it being unique. So basically what it’s going to achieve is replacing one useless PvP talent with another useless PvP talent.

Judgments of the Pure Honor Talent

Requires Paladin

Casting Judgment on an enemy cleanses 1 Poison, Disease, and Magic effect they have caused on allies within your Aura.

This is example from the other side of the spectrum. This talent is absolutely broken and will cause a lot of issues and it shouldn’t ever be implemented to Ret or Holy. Why? Because for Holy it’s another way to hard counter comps like Ele/Boomy/X or Ele/Shadow/X. Every H Paladin castercleave will outpressure these comps if they don’t play with H Paladin. H Paladin already has Cleanse the Weak talent that dispels the same effects from everyone in aura range that were dispelled from the main target. If you add this it means that Elemental will never keep Flame Shock on anyone = will have 0 passive pressure and even Stormkeeper will be weak since you will struggle with getting Master of the Elements proc. It will mean that you either have to play with Affliction or Mage so either you have dispel protection or enough CC/burst to control Paladin/burst him from 100-0. Basically it will absolutely remove the idea of playing different comps that current meta ones for both Elemental and Shadow Priest. On the other hand if you play a Mage and use Frost Nova on Ret and then he presses Judgement - short CD range spell that builds his Holy Power. Too bad it dispels Frost Nova from his and probably his Warrior partner that is smorcing you. This combined with undispellable Freedom will be absolutely disgusting.

20% increased healing for Restoration Shaman from Healing Rain.

This… I completely don’t understand the purpose of this change. PvP isn’t PvE and you can’t taunt or force your enemy to stand in blue circle where the extra healing is. The only use for healing rain is Cleansing Waters PvP talent where you cast Healing Rain hoping that it will crit and dispel CC or any other harmful magic effects from you but not for it’s healing. Mana -> Healing relation isn’t also really worth. This doesn’t change anything and doesn’t fix any of Restoration Shaman problems. Right now Restoration Shamans struggles with single target healing and doesn’t really have good cooldowns vs high burst teams. Shaman has Spirit Link and Ascendance where both are clunky to use and require him to go into close range as Ascendance also requires you to be 20 yards from the target to copy healing. Earthen Wall while being the best thing outside of these two won’t save anyone from 20 k damage spells like Final Verdict or The Hunt. Shaman single target heals are these that are used in arena the most and they are currently weak. Chain Heal is exclusively used with Tidebringer in meelecleaves. On the other hand Shaman has insane mana regen so it feels like you are ooming enemy healer and going to win on dampening but in fact you will spend that mana in a moment spamming Healing Surges when dampening hits. If anything should be changed then Healing Wave and Healing Surge should heal more in PvP and Water Shield mana regen in PvP should be lowered.

These are just few examples and I’m sure that other guys from the forums can point more of these. While I can understand that some class changes happen because they are PvE related like Overpower and Execute buffs (that I actually think are reasonable because they are rather buffs to Kyrian and Necro Warriors in PvP rather than Venthyr) I can’t defend such PvP talents changes. It’s pretty obvious for me that they are designed by people responsible for overall class design and not by three PvP devs that actually might have any idea about current meta and overall class interaction. There is no way that you can justify such changes I mentioned above as from arena player’s point of view they are absolutely out of blue and don’t have any purpose.

New PvP talents should aim for giving more opportunities to play some iconic comps that are not really viable now and some new. New PvP talents should create some synergies between classes and overcome some hard counters. These that are absolute counters like Cleanse the Weak should get nerfed or removed. Instead we get Judgement of the Pure that actually make the hard counter even worse closing doors for some comps. Comps like Assassin/Affli/R Druid or R Shaman are not viable because Rogue can’t save Affli and R Shaman/R Druid can’t heal it through two meele players tunneling him. At the same time Affliction has 3 mandatory PvP talents that it cannot ever change or it has no chance to ever win the game. There is no excuse for this.

As role model of these PvP talent changes you should take Ice Frog and his Dota 2 patch changes. Every small tweak or change has it’s purpose. If 1 hero is too strong for a reason Ice Frog tries to tune it to the level it’s fine or redesign it shifting it’s strength to something else not to hard counter other hero. Every change has it’s meta related goal - for example if spell does a too much damage has very high mana cost then obvious way to balance it would be to lower mana cost and damage. If hero x has very high damage range spell that allows it to kite very well then maybe range nerf is the way. This way this class has to get into dangerous range to deal damage. Play with range of spells, resource costs, cooldowns. There are so many posbilities.

Now message to PvP devs. I can justify your overall class changes that are PvE related. The fact that Arms Warrior is extremely weak in PvE justifies Overpower and Execute buffs. The fact that Ret is a joke in PvE and that’s why it’s not going to get nerfed or redesigned but the fact that you provide such new PvP talents cannot be justified. There is literally no excuse. PvP talents are not going to affect PvE in any way. They should be meant to balance -> improve PvP gameplay experience. They should aim to give us new interesting comps to play and reduce the amount of hardest counters where the game is free win unless enemy gets dced or for some reason makes something absolutely stupid like fatfingering biggest defensive CD. If your devs don’t actively follow meta or play arenas. You have 3x AWC analysts - Ziqo, Supatease, Venruki. I’m pretty sure that if any of these 2-3 PvP devs would ask them on insight about certain matchups, what are the best comps for each specs and what would be the hard counters. Then they will definetely provide the information. Devs don’t even need to ask who should they buff or nerf to avoid certain class bias since both Ziqo and Ven play Mage and Supatease mains Druid but instead just gather information about the meta and then basing on it create PvP talents that actually have any purpose and goal instead of throwing random ideas because “Shaman has Wind Shear - let’s make something related to Wind Shear”.

7 Likes
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Them adding all these broken new pvp talents for PvP once again reinforces how out of touch they are. WTB devs who actually play the content they are designing their stuff for, preferable with alot of experience in said content.

Meanwhile they keep adding more and more broken stuff while doubling down on PvP gearing for 9.1. Sometimes i think they forgot who they are making games for.

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I love all the new honor talents for Unholy DK

4 Likes
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Why would i take this garbanzo pvp talent as elemental if my class is already tanky and hard to kill ?
And why would i replace grounding/lasso/skyfury/wolf ? Doesnt make any sense

In my opinion what we needed is flame shock dispell protection / or a new offensive button

fun fact : this was a talent back in cataclysm for elemental shamans. so this is NOT NEW ( was also affected by grounding totem )

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They want people to play tbc it seems xD

1 Like
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They want people to play tbc it seems xD

as an affliction lover (not playing it on retail since its the opposite of what it should be) i just might. i had fun for a bit trying out new classes, esp monk that i tried some arenas with. but it didnt last long, hours in lfg for either dungeons or arenas just killed it for me. i think solo q wont fix it, so dont bring that up. its social interaction incentives that will.
so i joined a guild to find more ppl to play with, every guild is either inactive right now with few players still trying to play or they’re just a bunch of cliques with ppl they have around to fill up their rosters. content drought, nice

i’ll play new world most likely when 9.1 should be out
or quit mmos overall

i dont see myself play wow besides to raid with some friends, not because i like raid (its boring) but because they’re my friends. thats it. but i wont be doing anything else. and paying blizzard for that feels so bad. ill try to have friends migrate with me elsewhere.

the new talents and balance changes look like 9.1 is going to be god awful, even worse than now. sometimes u really wonder if the goal is to make the game the worst as possible. because they just keep outdoing themselves in that direction

on the other hand ptr is not over yet. for example for affliction they nerfed rapture to the ground and a week or 2 later brought up the changes to redesign the class. its getting reworked basically (reworked in legion mid xpac, reworked in bfa, reworked in sl but no unpruning of the class, reworked again. yeah, warlock life ).
so maybe some of the changes are about to get completed with others. like for ret, people complained about lack of utility and too much damage. maybe nerfs are coming and thats their utility and assist to their teammates. i hope. else its 100% the nail in the coffin for me. and not just that change, but all of it.

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what shamans need (at least enhancement), is ‘‘increased everything by 10%’’

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ehm why?

definetly not

1 Like
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It was Enhancement talent in Cata but it gave resistances after kick and absolutely nobody picked it ever xD

I’m absolutely mind blown with the fact that people who design these PvP talents have 0 clue about current state of PvP, meta etc. These are just random ideas - something like.

-“Shaman has some stale PvP talents and they rarely change them”
-“What about this: if you Wind Shear somebody you get 20% less damage for 12 sec so until you can Wind Shear again.”
-“Omg, that’s such a good idea! Everyone would love it”.

And then nobody takes the talent because if you interrupt Fire Mage on Fire or Frost Mage on Frost then he will Poly you and kill your partner. Seriously BLIZZARD do some research! Or ask your AWC analysts if you don’t believe us. They are your employees and I’m 100% sure they are more than happy to share insight into the meta.

When I read 9.1 patch notes I’m opting for the second option myself. This game is about to die and clueless devs are only helping it to die. How can you be that out of touch. I can’t understand that these people just do such random stuff and then in the interviews they pretend like everything was pre-planned and that we players think we are right but in fact it’s them taking good decisions for game. While me or others on the forums might not know their game engine and code so we may not know limitations some of the decisions made by them are very questionable.

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It should be: interrupting a spell reduces the cool down on astral shift by 5seconds

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Then it makes more sense

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They seem to just be adding a ton of talents without consideration. Some just seem very busted, depending on how they behave with things. I thought giving Assa a huge MS was going to be the most busted thing but it seems that wont be remotely true.

1 Like
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100% - as I said in the main post. These PvP talents don’t really have any purpose. They are just random dev ideas without any meta consideration. To be honest what I’d do if I were dev. I’d basically announce that firstly all PvE related class changes will be implemented and then 2-4 weeks after season starting PvP talents will go live when we will have any idea of the meta shaping. We absolutely have no idea on how classes will interact with each other with PvE changes and then on top of it Blizzard is releasing these PvP talents.

Seriously these new PvP talents were huge chance for them to redeem themselves in PvP players eyes and to make them look better but guess what - they again prove that they have 0 clue on what they are doing.

1 Like
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It is mixed bag of their random ideas and community ideas.
For example demo got Fel Obelisk

Summon a Fel Obelisk with 5% of your maximum health. Empowers you and your minions within 40 yds, increasing attack speed by 20% and reducing the cast time of spells by 20% for 15 sec.

And it is really good talent. But thing is, blizz adds things for PvP demonology while our core toolkit is severely underdevelopt - we have only 14 skills (active and passive) in demonology, while for example fire mages have 28 (activ/passive) skills in fire. And our main source of burst is locked behind talents and splited to three talents - Demonic consumption, Summon vilefiend and Grimoire: Felguard. And even with this burst our damage profile looks extremely weird because outside of Tyrant burst we have extremely low damage output. And here Fel obelisk could have been a nice addition to core toolkit - of course with some damage tweaks to the rest of tooltip just to keep this fair and not OP as fel for balance sake.

Another thing that they(devs) are extremely out of touch not only in pvp in general but in how classes work in PvP.
Another Demo example - Call Fel Lord. In BFE blizz reworked this demon, limiting his damage output to enemy 5% of max HP. This created an issue, because with each season, players got more and more armor and versa on their gear, wich severely lowered damage of Fel lord. And on top of that, they has limited HP of Fel lord himself to 42-45K, ignoring your iLvL/Stamina, so HP of your Fel lord didn’t scaled trough all expansion, and in 8.3 Fel lord had less HP then wild Imp, and they(blizz) will fix Fel lord damage and HP only in 9.1. Blizz had to let this talent be useless trough all BFA and first season of SL.
And i bet every Class/Spec could find example of same lever of crappy treatment.

Blizz are out of touch, out of reason. They still see themselfs as rockstars of game industry, like they stuck in 2007. The people behind game development lost their touch, they don’t care about the community as whole, they don’t wanna adress community issues and desires. Blizz doesn’t need your feedback from Alpha/Beta/PTR if it is not on line with their vision. For years we tested their game, gave them feedback on various systems that they wanted to implement, like corruptions - from day one on 8.3 on PTR when corruptions hit the servers, we told them that system is bad, it is not fun to get random pieces of corruption, to get gear with good corruption but with crappy stats on it - it is not fun. We told them that we need way to get corruptions we want. And as result, blizz said that we do not understand their grand plan and vision of corruptions, and we will be happy when they’ll release it and we will all see the “glory” of their wisdom. But truth is, it was a crappy show to say the least, and in 3-5 months we have seen how blizz added a merchant with corruptions.
And this example could be applied to all systems that blizzard has added to the game in last two Xpacs.

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Except BFA was never fixed and 8.3 corruptions were biggest joke I’ve ever seen.

The fact that Summon a Fel Obelisk is nice doesn’t deny my claim that they put random stuff. Random stuff means that sometimes it might be nice but everything else shows that it was out of the blue with 0 idea.

1 Like
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=) boi, that’s gonna big huge mess

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It’s crap - too long cd, no stats. Who would sacrifice it for this trinket. It might be viable on Disc if it dealt damage like lasso and had stats but with such CD it’s useless.

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Iirc this gets removed my man.

Just checked on the PTR and it does not. Damn they removed sth else lol

They should buff hpala mana by a bit and nerf their instant healing and make them cast instead so it is fun to play and has counterplay again

But that is abs broken vs elesham or rsham yeah

LF more dk buffs

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