Curse

As a followup to the Retribution nerf article posted earlier today, I wanted to make sure to keep everyone on top of things.  Ghostcrawler posted a number of responses to threads today, so you can find them below.  First, something I'm sure many are interested in after the post-3.0.2 latency issues -- server moves off of laggy servers -- for free!

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We will be offering free character moves from a selected high population realm to a lower populated realm, assisting in population dispersal. The ability to move a character on the selected source realms will become available on Tuesday, October 28 at 12:00PM PDT, and are scheduled to run until Tuesday, November 4 at 12:00PM PDT.

In the event that these realms meet our transfer goals before the scheduled end date, the transfers to that realm will be disabled. We highly recommend that if you are planning to transfer that you do so at your earliest convenience. No characters will be eligible for these free moves once the transfers have been closed.

Once the transfers open you can begin your transfer by visiting the Character Move page located here: https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/character-move.html

Kody note: Removed server list due to length of news.  Check the Free Character Moves thread for more details.

Two Retribution Nerfs Hotfixed to Live

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We are going to hotfix the nerfs to Judgement of the Wise (from 33% to 15%) and Seal and Judgement of Command (down 20% damage) to live. We need to start getting more testing on these changes right away to see what they do to Retribution in PvE and PvP. We still intend to lower the damage of other Seals and Judgements (except one - see below), but to hotfix those requires touching a lot more data so we think that change can wait for the 3.0.3 patch on live.

We are also hotfixing the beta to return Seal and Judgement of Blood and the Martyr back up to 95% of where the used to be. Live will just never get the nerf to these abilities at all. Hopefully this will compensate PvE Retadins for relying less on more expensive AE abilities that risk putting them out of mana.

To summarize:

Live (3.0.2 build) -- Judgement of Wise change, Seal and Judgement of Command change.
Beta (3.0.3 build) -- All nerfs already active, but Blood and Martyr un-nerfed.
Next Live patch (to 3.0.3 build) -- Catches Live up to Beta. I can't give you an estimate for 3.0.3 on Live yet, but it will be before Lich King goes live on Nov 13.

Ghostcrawler on why Paladins need to worry about mana

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We don't want mana to be irrelevant (for any class) but we don't want it to be so limiting that you spend a great portion of a long fight on fumes. When you hit that point is a little subjective and also varies based on gear and skill.

Consectation and Holy Wrath (and to a lesser extent Divine Storm) are AE spells, and those are priced so that they aren't as efficient against single targets. These would be the equivalent of a hunter using Volley or a mage using Arcane Explosion against single targets. They are useful tools in your arsenal and sometimes you are in a situation where you're mana rich or you need to burn down a mob at any cost. Exorcism is a single target spell and shouldn't be too expensive, but it's also not something you can use in every fight.

Q u o t e:
Rogues, warriors, deathknights, and shaman cannot push ALL their buttons, they can push only what they have enough resources to sustain, or can save up resources for a short period of time in order to "burst" by using their abilities together.

I think this is true as well, and it is also true for the mana-using ranged dps. They know which are their efficient and inefficient spells, and even the latter have a use sometimes. Now as I posted in another thread, if Ret paladins can't do decent damage without relying on those AEs, then that is a problem we need to look at.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We think you can go almost indefinetely on mana by using Divine Storm, Crusader Strike and a Seal / Judgement. If you want to add things to that, Consecration, Hammer or a heal perhaps, your mana will start to dip, but Divine Plea should make up for that. In PvP, you can make the choice to blow all of your mana knowing that you have time before the next fight to build your reserves back up. Or if you want to go from target to target with no downtime, don't blow all of your mana.

Classes run into situations all the time where they want to hit another button, but everything is on cooldown or they lack the resources. You even have other options -- they may just run you dry faster.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

Q u o t e:
ive tested this on beta . so has GC. and magically we have the same results! and thats the fun part about DPS, you have to decide if you want to sacrifice DPS to do something else. WELCOME TO THE PARTY! no class deserves infinite resources. its unbalanced.

While I'm not sure I could get away with saying things in exactly the same way, we do want you to have to make a decision about which abilities you use.

We design the classes in WoW so that the possibility exists that you make a mistake, that you use the wrong spell at the wrong time. This is one of the things that rewards knowledge of the game and mastery of the class and in return lets players become more skilled at PvE or PvP. It's easy to come up with situations where a rogue or warrior uses the wrong button at the wrong time and very well might pay for that mistake.

One of the things we didn't like about the way Ret was working is you could just unload with everything and keep doing it every time an ability finished its cooldown. There wasn't a lot of skill involved. If you lose to a Ret paladin, it was hard to say to yourself whether you lost to a good or bad player. I think even the most cynical among you has lost to a player in PvP before and knew you had your head handed to you by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

That's not a backhanded slap at Ret players. But we, and I think you actually too, would be better served by a system where you did have to think about what the right ability to use was. Good players would be rewarded for knowing how to play, while less-skilled players would get trounced by more skilled players of other classes.

To use PvE examples, sometimes you want to mash Consecrate, because there are multiple mobs or you need to burn down that Stoneskin Gargoyle. But if it's a button you always push under most circumstances and the high mana cost isn't a consideration, then it's never a choice. You're just hitting buttons when they light up. You could make similar arguments about when is the right time to "waste mana" to heal yourself.

I know everyone likes to boo Resto druids in Arenas, but usually that playstyle took a lot of skill. You probably beat some Restos that didn't know what they were doing. But the ones who did Cyclone the right targets and Feral Charged at the right time were very hard too beat -- probably too hard to beat, but at least there was some skill involved.

Does that make sense? Do you see the difference?

Mana Regen versus Mana Drains in PVP

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We will do some tests and analysis of whether Ret is too susceptible to mana drains in PvP since that seems to be something the community is worried about.

Making Sense of the (Paladin) Changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

The damage was too high in PvE and PvP. It was too high for some time in beta. We found (or more accurately the players found) a couple of bugs that we hoped were causing the inflation. When we fixed the bugs, unfortunately, Ret damage was still too high. We made the infamous "surgical" attempt to fix Ret's damage, but that ended up not doing as much as we hoped. We then made a second round of larger nerfs that just went on to the beta build.

Since then, what we're finding is that Ret's dps seems okay on PvE but only if they use a lot of expensive AE spells like Consecration and Holy Wrath even against single targets in long fights (e.g. raid bosses), which in turn causes them to run out of mana too quickly. Players suspect that if they don't use those spells that their dps won't be competitive. That is what we are looking at right now. Buffing Martyr / Blood might be an option since those are more often used in PvE and riskier to use in PvP.

The "Shatter Combo" Problem

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

Thanks Lhivera and others. That is a very clear explanation.

In order to get the same effect from Fingers of Frost as from actual frozen targets, we would have to set up the spell the same way as freezing, so that you could sneak that Ice Lance in between Frostbolts. Right now you get 2 big hits from Fingers of Frost, which you rightly want to spend on Frostbolt. If we changed Fingers of Frost so that Frostbolt always broke it, then you would want to get that Ice Lance in there, but your overall dps would go down. We'd need to compensate Frost some other way for that nerf, and it's the kind of thing that might not be popular with the mage community because we'd be nerfing Fingers of Frost's damage potential in order to force you into using Ice Lance all in the name of more interesting rotations. (Obviously we're not that nervous about making unpopular changes when we think they are warranted, and overall encouraging players to use different kinds of spells is a good thing.)

Of course if we also made Fingers of Frost (or Ice Lance) better, then we're just going to have problems with Frost in PvP.

Frost's PvE dps is very good right now -- if anything it's a little closer to Fire than we predicted. If Frost starts to fall off for any reason, that would be a good opportunity to revisit FoF to see if we can get more of the behavior you're describing, because ultimately I agree it would be cool to see more PvE Ice Lances.

If you have good suggestions though on how to preserve Frost's PvE dps without making it OP in PvP and without having to change a whole bunch of spells, please share them.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

There are a few buffs that are still party-wide and not raid. Typically these are spells which would have felt really lame with the lower numbers needed to justify them going raid-wide. Vampiric Embrace is another example.