Thursday, October 07, 2010

Yet another PTR build for patch 4.0.1

I though they were finished with the patch build as the last one was tagged release., but I was wrong. A new PTR Build 13156 was announced on MMO Champion yesterday, and I want to discuss a few things about it.

First changes for Holy Paladins:
What can I say, all our healing spells but Word of Glory (he free holy power heal) and our aoe heals get a slight buff. If this is a sign our heals were a little too low, that will patch it at 80, but not increasing the spellpower coefficient value will mean they will still be too low at 85 and even worse after a few tiers of raid items ... I'm a little frightened by these buffs, probably the firs time it happens to me.

Now the other part of this patch:
This threat increase is general among all tanks. They all ramp up from 125% to 200% threat bonus generation. This clearly indicates that tanks were too low on threat. Is this because they don't have mastery at 80, and hence don't have Vengeance yet? According to some blue posts I don't think that was the reason of this buff. It seems that tank threat during any sort of aoe was really too low.
Blizzard told us that tanking would not be trivial anymore, I guess it was just too hard. Will this change turn tanking into a simple gearing problem with no skill as it was during Lich King? Or will it remain harder and hence more interesting?
I'm sure that change was necessary, but it's a strong increase and I'm surprised it happens so late in the testing process. As many things (like strange talent trees with talents obviously intended for another tree which are too deep to be taken, Fury of Stormrage anyone ?) it makes me feel that this patch is far from being thoroughly tested and ready for live.
I guess we'll have 2 months to "live test" these changes before the release of Cataclysm. When the new talents came out at the end of BC they were also strongly unbalanced and a lot of nerfs/buffs happened during the early days of Wrath ... we'll probably see these times again.

Ok I'm done grumbling about these changes, in the end only good news for us so we should rejoice :P
As always, have fun raiding guys.

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