Greedy Goblin

Thursday, February 26, 2009

3.1 Patch notes

The Blizzard Dev team just published a blue post:

We are dedicated to make the game fun for everyone and to live by the "bring the player not the class" motto. However two serious unbalances must be solved with/before Ulduar released to make sure no one's raiding experience is hampered by the mentioned unbalances.

At first, what most players noticed, warlocks suck. In PvE they have a good utility to summon absent members that makes it up for their inability to damage. However in PvP they are unable to break the 1800 barrier, even when boosted by a paladin.

The second is the lack of healers. It's mostly caused by the introduction of the first hero class. While we are happy that so many players have chosen to play Death Knights, we must address the problem that they can tank and DPS easily but cannot heal, so the amount of healers seriously dropped on all servers.

We came up with the idea to solve the both problems at once: turn the more intelligent part of the warlock duo into a healer. He/she will have the same abilities as a holy paladin with three serious improvements:
  • will respond to damage immediately, due to running as a server side script
  • will have a unique ability described below
  • will not roll for shields he/she will not use, just to make screenshots
The mentioned unique ability is the modification of an existing spell:

Warlocky sacrifice
100 yd range
Instant
When activated, sacrifices your summoned warlock to grant you an effect that lasts 30 min. The effect is canceled if any warlock is summoned. Effect vary on your current form:

Imp: Increases the effect of your holy bolt by 10%.
Voidwalker: Restores 2% of total health of every group or raid member every 4 sec.
Succubus: Decreases Shadow damage taken of all group and raid members every 10%.
Felhunter: Restores 3% of total mana of 5 nearby group or raid members every 4 sec.
Felguard: Decreases Shadow and Fire damage taken by party members by 7% and restores 2% of total mana every 4 sec of party members.

The sacrificed warlock will be disconnected so he/she can write silly blogs undisturbed by the ready checks.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Lmao :D

Tbh healers aren't really a problem on our server. Plenty of them around still. The bigger problem is all the disillusioned mages and warlocks have rerolled DK or retadin so we usually end up with raids with just 1 warlock, 1 mage (if we're lucky) and 3-4 retadins and 5 DK's...

How to solve it? Get out the pally/DK nerfbat :P

Kring said...

Guide: how to kill a warlock

http://blogs.nofrag.com/RaFF/2006/dec/21/24184-guide-how-to-kill-a-warlock/

But, yeah, that would explain why demonic sacrifice will be removed in 3.1. :-)

Carra said...

Why not just delete the warlock class? All affected players will get a lvl 80 DK instead :)

Anonymous said...

What's a warlock? They're fairy tale creatures aren't they?

When my friends and I first started our guild in BC we had 3 times as many warlocks as any other class. Now we have 3 and the third just as of last night.

@ Ithilien - bite your tongue! No nerfbat! Well not for pallies anyway. :)

Anonymous said...

Absolutely hilarious. I say they delete them from the game. Would be far easier. Can't remember the last time doing a raid fight in Wrath where cookies or sub-par dps would have saved the day.

megan said...

LOL! Good one.

C'mon you know you want to make inappropriate words out of all those mats you have in your toons/bags!

Anonymous said...

warlocks lack of damage in pve? I currently top the charts in my 25 man guild as affliction..

Carra said...

I rerolled from warlock to DK this patch. Got tired of tjhe mindnumbing "pushing shadowbolt x10000".

They do seem to be fine now however, our affliction lock is topping the charts and our demo lock is pretty close to it. No more boring "press one button x 10000".

Gevlon said...

!!!THIS IS A FUN POST, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH WARLOCKS!!!