WoW Patch 3.0.3 Catch-all

I figured since today was maintenance day and everyone knows you took off from work because "the lines are too long," it would be good to get the inevitable thread about 3.0.3 started. I'm quoting the patch notes because you can't see many WoW-related sites if your office is like mine, so just skip it if you've already read them. Interesting changes for me are changed/improved aspects (Aspect of the Dragonhawk = Monkey (dodge) + Hawk (Ranged AP) in one - woot!), and increased damage from exotic pets (yaaaaay). Ferocious Inspiration has been fixed to be raid-wide too, which is how it should of been all along:

Ferocious Inspiration Rank 3

When your pet scores a critical hit, all party members have all damage increased by 3% for 10 sec.

Admit it, you're dying to roll Kara with Scurvyrex now, aren't you?

Patch Notes: (EDIT) Fine, go look them up yourselves, and grab some cheese to go with your whine.

ahh, 3.0.3, in which Ghostcrawler rips out a kidney from Ret Paladins and eats it in front of them.

While I won't miss the FOTM spec realizing they can't 2 shot anyone in a BG anymore, I am a little sad that I can't just bring any ret paladin in greens I want and realistically expect 1200 dps.

Is this on live or Beta?

For all you Arms Warriors out there... the patch note about Sudden Death is incorrect. Blizz is leaving it alone. Which is awesome.

duckilama wrote:

Is this on live or Beta?

This will be what greets you at home after you vote.

Oh hey, they nerfed gorrilladins. I wonder how much using a magic coefficient will hurt them.

Seth wrote:
duckilama wrote:

Is this on live or Beta?

This will be what greets you at home after you vote.

Oh hey, they nerfed gorrilladins. I wonder how much using a magic coefficient will hurt them.

Noticed that...those evil BASTARDS.

Seth wrote:

Oh hey, they nerfed gorrilladins. I wonder how much using a magic coefficient will hurt them.

As a melee coefficient there was a low cap of I believe 7% to have this ability "hit", and can reach 100%. Meanwhile, the spell coefficient goes along the rest of spells for a total of 17%, with a hard cap of 99% chance to hit. Depending on whether it's possible to increase your gorrilla's hit rating is beyond my knowledge, but otherwise the chance of it landing has been reduced by 10%, or a minimum of 1% with capped hit rating.

I'm less worried about the hit rating and more about the damage cap -- currently "physical aoe" abilities (swipe, volley) don't suffer from the damage cap that spells do when dealing with more and more mobs in a group -- which is why as a bear tank in heroic terrace I can do 7k dps on those mana wyrms while mages and locks are capped.

If this only affects hit rating, it's not a big change a tall.

Zablocki19 wrote:
Seth wrote:

Oh hey, they nerfed gorrilladins. I wonder how much using a magic coefficient will hurt them.

As a melee coefficient there was a low cap of I believe 7% to have this ability "hit", and can reach 100%. Meanwhile, the spell coefficient goes along the rest of spells for a total of 17%, with a hard cap of 99% chance to hit. Depending on whether it's possible to increase your gorrilla's hit rating is beyond my knowledge, but otherwise the chance of it landing has been reduced by 10%, or a minimum of 1% with capped hit rating.

I'm pretty sure the removed the 99% cap in 3.0. I'm not as certain, but I think for at least some pets they made it so your hit applies to the pet as well. If my recollection on the latter point is correct, in theory you could get it so the gorilla still has 100% to hit, but it wouldn't really be worth it.

Overall, it looks like most of this stuff is fairly small -- that's good. Blizzard tends to massively overreact and then not fix their overreactions, so having them make fairly small adjustments is a good thing. Tinker it a bit at a time to get it right, don't destroy play balance entirely.

Boomkins got nerfed a little bit; our AOE won't be mana-positive anymore. At 3+ targets, we could AOE literally forever, so that was definitely a warranted fix. The other stuff is basically tiny buffs, fixing bugs.

For mages, I was expecting Slow to get nerfed, surprised it hasn't been. An instant-cast, long-range spell that slows movement and all spellcasting by 60% for fifteen seconds, with no cooldown, strikes me as a bit OP. I'll happily use it until they fix it, but I think it does need fixing. Even in PVP blues, Skol does fairly well, and when he gets into full PVP purples he'll be pretty evil.

I've never enjoyed Skol in PVP before. Pretty major change.

Time to respec my hunter - again. I had skipped Barrage and Improved Barrage because it applied only to multishot, which I don't use unless I'm farming mageweave in Tanaris. Now that it applies to Aimed Shot - jackpot!

Seth wrote:
duckilama wrote:

Is this on live or Beta?

This will be what greets you at home after you vote.

Nope, I voted early last week.

duckilama wrote:
Seth wrote:
duckilama wrote:

Is this on live or Beta?

This will be what greets you at home after you vote.

Nope, I voted early last week.

Hey my statement is still accurate!

I hesitate to say they completely screwed ret paladins since I haven't been able to try it, but the patch notes on the spec are defintely not promising. Well if were screwed it was fun being useful for a short period of time.

Ret pallys before the new talents went live were already wrecking machines in full pvp gear. After the patch they were gods so I don't think you can really argue against any of these nerfs. Losing 11k+ health in a matter of seconds with 400+ resil and 850 spell power heals ticking is beyond ridiculous.

CrashedHardrive wrote:

I hesitate to say they completely screwed ret paladins since I haven't been able to try it, but the patch notes on the spec are defintely not promising. Well if were screwed it was fun being useful for a short period of time.

I doubt pallies are screwed by these changes. The endless mana was an issue for them like Boomkins, so that justified the nerfs to JoW, SoW, and other abilities that allowed them to keep 100% mana all the time.

Meanwhile, the reduction to damage does exactly what Bliz sought out to do, reduce the burst and increase the sustainable DPS (with the DoT effect now on AoW).

This will however hurt threat and longevity for Prot Pallies, and damage for Holy Pallies, so I expect there will be a slight compensation since it balanced really well for these two specs before the nerf.

If my damage as prot goes down, not a big deal, but the mana regen was perfect before to allow me to keep threat going, and that's going to be a slight issue now

I'm banking on using a high dps ret paladin as offtank in Naxx+, so I am hoping they can still put out arms/fury warrior dps.

Idlewild wrote:

Ret pallys before the new talents went live were already wrecking machines in full pvp gear. After the patch they were gods so I don't think you can really argue against any of these nerfs. Losing 11k+ health in a matter of seconds with 400+ resil and 850 spell power heals ticking is beyond ridiculous.

I'm not saying that something didn't need to be done...but these patch notes were only half of the recent changes. There have been quite a few hotfixes that brought ret paladins more in line with the damage that arms warriors were doing, and now there are more nerfs which to me seem uneccessary since the hotfixes did a lot of fixing.

Now I don't mind not having burst damage because I don't pvp all that much. You better believe there will be a flood of tears from ret paladin pvpers since they will no longer be effective at it. Burst damage is everything in pvp for a 2h weapon user.

Going from 33% down to 15% on the judgements of the wise was too much in my opinion. Maybe lower it down to 25%, but without that ret paladins are going to be seeing a huge drop in dps not only because of the overall damage nerfs but because now were going to be going oom a heck of a lot faster.

Again this is speculation because I haven't tried out the patch notes. It could be that we are just fine.

I think you guys will certainly be effective in both pve and pvp. Its not like Blizz took away one of your tools, they just made it so the class needs skill to be effective again. Honestly, you guys were lethal in just pvp blues or when geared for the wrong spec.

The Swift Flight Form is now available on the trainer at level 71, requiring 300 riding skill, and Flight Form learned.
Say what? =))
Edit:For a moment I jumped to the conclusion that it wasn't 5k , probably still 5k eh?

Crashed I see your point, and won't bother discussing whether or not nerfs are deserved, because that invariably leads to thread locks.

What worries me is that these balance issues are reflective of Blizzard's tendency to be very shortsighted; it's a fantastic waste of their time to bother balancing classes around a level 70 schematic when we'll all be >70 in about two weeks.

The up side of that is that if these nerfs are too drastic, ret paladins will probably see some more massaging of numbers in 3.1.

I don't know too much about pally mechanics, but none of those numbers look really all that dreadful to me. Am I missing something?

Delta wrote:

The Swift Flight Form is now available on the trainer at level 71, requiring 300 riding skill, and Flight Form learned.
Say what? =))
Edit:For a moment I jumped to the conclusion that it wasn't 5k , probably still 5k eh?

Yeah.

CrashedHardrive wrote:

Going from 33% down to 15% on the judgements of the wise was too much in my opinion.

I'm holy spec primarily and haven't actually tried the "new" ret spec (post-3.0.2), but I have to say that judgement of the wise was way efficient, probably too much so. I tried out those undead attackers recently and I could just grind through as long as I had wisdom judged and constantly throw holy shock, exorcism, and hammer of wrath every time their cooldowns expired without getting lower than 95% mana. It was ridiculous. Don't misunderstand, I LOVE being able to actually use my abilities frequently without going OOM every two fights now, but it seemed like I was tipped a little too far the other way now.

with wisdom nerfed substantially + JotW nerfed, ret paladins can't keep up a "competitive" dps rotation. Now I'm not exactly heralding the end of the world, because currently their DPS rotation includes consecrate, which I don't particularly think is a required part of asingle target DPS rotation anyway (you won't see rogues working in fan of knives on a boss fight).

From what I can understand overall is that while ret paladins did need nerfs pretty bad, they are suffering from about 37 different, smaller nerfs, any combination of which would've been okay, but altogether are a serious detriment. Again, this is just me spouting EJ stuff and not my own opinions -- I'll run several heroics and ZA with a ret paladin in the next few days to see how they "feel" in terms of competitiveness.

the "wings/bubble" nerf is substantial as well, and one of those far reaching problems that end up nerfing prot/holy as much (if not more) than ret: this is ripped from banana shoulders:

note: AW = avenging wrath (wings).

PvE: Holy paladins will no longer use AW unless they really need the throughput buff and can be certain they won’t need to bubble for survival. Ret paladins may use AW, except on fights where they know they’ll need to bubble for survival. Prot paladins absolutely will not use AW (losing the TPS boost it provided), as it would lock them out of Divine Protection (which is now a Shield Wall ability rather than just being ‘bubble-lite’).

PvP: No-one (with any sense) will use AW. It’s still vulnerable to purge/steal and will still lock you out of your most vital survival ability; a paladin who’s blown their bubble is a vulnerable, probably-soon-to-be-dead paladin. And it’ll lock you out of your bubble for longer than it used to. Good times.

Again, I don't think any of these changes are as potentially game breaking as Dual Spec, but they are substantial when added together.

The Swift Flight Form is now available on the trainer at level 71, requiring 300 riding skill, and Flight Form learned.

I hope this means that you can get SFF at 70 by doing the quest line OR from a trainer at level 71. Otherwise, I know a lot of druids that are gonna be pissed.

RedJen wrote:
The Swift Flight Form is now available on the trainer at level 71, requiring 300 riding skill, and Flight Form learned.

I hope this means that you can get SFF at 70 by doing the quest line OR from a trainer at level 71. Otherwise, I know a lot of druids that are gonna be pissed.

the quest line is still there and available at 70, assuming you paid the 5000g. This is a change to pre emptively stop the QQ of level 72 druid alts whining to get into a heroic sethekk run when everyone's level 80. =)

Good point on consecrate, Seth, I wasn't using that for grinding at all.

Noobish question: are most of the concerns around Paladin nerfing from a PvP perspective? That's what I was thinking, and if this is the case, I don't understand ideas like:

...I'll run several heroics and ZA with a ret paladin in the next few days to see how they "feel" in terms of competitiveness.

Where does competition come into play besides rolling for sweet loot in a raid? Does it really matter who has the highest DPS in the damage report, and if so shouldn't that person be a dedicated/non-hybrid class?

Don't get me wrong, I completely appreciate the frustration over how much this class got buffed and subsquently nerfed since the patch because I'd imagine it at the start changed your playing style and then you'd have to go back to what you did (or apparently in some cases worse than what you did) before. I just don't get the PvE/competition element of it all (and it could be something I just made up).

I think a lot of the uproar concerning Paladins stems from how dominant they became in pvp as well as the sheer number of Pally's that grabbed a two hander and respecced Ret. Has Blizzard ever stated why they allowed the Ret changes to go live? I've never played a Pally but I appreciate their frustration as well...from the outside looking in it seems like this is the class that gets jerked around a hell of alot more than any other.

I can't comment on the pve aspect because I rarely do anything in that realm.