wow Blue Posts Round-up: Apr 14

[Stan 5,020]

The first PTR Build of 7.2.5 is now live and Blizzard continues the discussion of Brewmaster / Mistweaver Monks and changes are coming to Enhancement Shamans - Boulderfist will be baseline.

Brewmaster & Mistweaver Monks

The ongoing Monk discussion continues, as Blizzard's tuning the Monk class in 7.2.5. You can find all changes so far in the latest Patch 7.2.5 Patch Notes.

Blizzard (Source)

That datamining is extremely incomplete. It's a 500pc jigsaw puzzle with 300 of the pieces missing. Best to wait for the actual PTR. You won't have to wait 14sec between Blackout Strikes. :)

This devalues the BoC talent as we see 33-25=8% fewer BoC's in our rotation. Considering on single target, with BoC, BoS and TP are my number 1 and 2 damaging abilities, are we going to see compensation in damage for this nerf?

We're worried about gameplay and feel right now, and will adjust damage (overall and per-talent) as needed afterward. 

This is very useful feedback, thanks.

As you can imagine, the numbers for Blackout Strike's cooldown and the CDR from Tiger Palm are very important to get right on this; we'll tweak them and try a few things. We started out with the 4-beat cycle for PTR; we may also try the 3-beat cycle soon and see how that feels.

One extremely important thing to evaluating the feel of this is what talents you were using. For example, Rushing Jade Wind + Spitfire feel totally different from Eye of the Tiger + Special Delivery, especially when it comes to GCD utilization. Please let us know which talents you're using when giving rotation feel feedback!

Thanks!

I'll be getting on PTR to test the rotation and such later, but I have one question about Spitfire Celestalon. Why was Chi Burst scrapped for it instead of Chi Wave? Nobody uses Chi Wave because of how weak (and random) it is, but Chi Burst currently sees a decent amount of use on live servers for AoE.

Chi Wave and Chi Burst usage are about the same (and both are extremely rare compared to Eye of the Tiger). We chose Chi Burst to replace to start with, because Spitfire is an AoE talent, same as Chi Burst, so would fulfill the same choice. There's still an argument to be made for Chi Wave being replaced, so we're considering that as well, so discussion one way or another (or alternatives) is quite welcome.

The reason I would think most people use eott is that it is the highest dps AND it doesn't intrude on the already tight rotation for BoC, so there is no opportunity cost in using it.

Right; Eye of the Tiger is currently taken primarily because it doesn't take up any GCDs. We're trying to open that up a bit so that you have room to take abilities like Chi Wave and Spitfire (or theoretically Chi Burst), or Rushing Jade Wind, in your rotation.

The common Blackout Combo-driven rotation right now is, in a way, not GCD locked, because it spends a significant amount of its time off GCD, but in practice it feels more like GCD locked, because that time is in between every few GCDs with little empty half-GCDs, adding a stutter to your rotation that we're trying to clean up.

Awesome feedback so far, especially from those who are actively trying a variety of talent builds. That's the most valuable, especially when you consider swapping to the other side of the Blackout Combo / No Blackout Combo line that divides the community playstyles. :)

Next PTR build, we're going to try a 12sec base CD on Blackout Strike, to speed things up a bit baseline, and hopefully remove the ~1GCD of pause that has been mentioned by several people. (And in fact add a GCD of slush)

Enhancement Shamans

Boulderfist will become baseline. Blizzard also doesn't like endless chains of Stormstrike. 

Blizzard (Source)

Thanks for all the feedback. There are a lot of issues being discussed here, but a few stand out as core rotational problems we'd like to address. There's not a specific final plan yet, so be warned there may be works in progress in upcoming PTR builds.

1) Boulderfist. During 7.1.5 iteration, we agreed with a lot of feedback that Boulderfist gave the most fun version of the basic rotation (as opposed to the spammable Rockbiter, or the slower Boulderfist we tried for a time on 7.1.5 PTR). Furthermore, a lot of the talent balancing and related issues on the spec are caused by flipping between the GCD-filled Rockbiter rotation and the charge-driven Boulderfist rotation.

We are planning to make Boulderfist baseline (possibly with the name Rockbiter). The choice would likely be to take a passive talent on L15 that leaves the gameplay identical to using Boulderfist now, or use Windsong/Hot Hand but still have a generator with a 6s recharge time.

2) Tempest and Stormbringer. Tempest has been a bit of a thorn in the side of Enhancement pacing throughout this expansion. A proc that has you press a major spender twice is already at risk of having that feast-or-famine feel. The talent making you press Stormstrike three times in order to get it back on cooldown is an even bigger culprit. At every passing moment, you either don't get a proc, or you do get one and suddenly have to spend 3 GCDs and 80 Maelstrom to deal with it (not to mention that Stormstrike has a reasonable chance of proccing Stormbringer yet again, especially as mastery increases). 

We're deciding how much of this we can or should unwind in a patch, but redesigning Tempest may be a somewhat surgical way to get at this problem. Namely, the problem of the button priority and resource usage being overrun by frequent (but not predictable) endless chain Stormstrikes. We tend not to like totally reworking popular talents, but Tempest has no good way to gradually tune it down. And in any case, amplifying the difference caused by getting vs. not getting Stormbringer procs is a result we want to avoid.

Usual reminder that these two changes will likely have a significant impact on DPS tuning, that we'll evaluate when we decide the details of the designs.