12 December 2009

A trickier fix

Just in case a few other people were inclined to misinterpret the corruption fix, like me apparently, ghostcrawler waded into the forums to put us all straight (thanks as usual to mmo champion for the quotes):
We think Shadow Priest dps is in a good place without SW:P benefiting from haste based on the data we have seen so far.
And...
There is no bug per se. On the PTR for a time Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague all benefited from haste. We remove SW:Pain because the dps increase was too high, particularly given the ability to constantly refresh the spell with an inflated haste rating. Some players interpreted the inflated haste rating problem as the reason we removed SW:P, but I posted when we made that change that Shadow dps was just too high.
And...
The OP was pointing out that since we fixed the haste problem for Corruption we could go back and fix SW:P pain too. But that point of view is based on the assumption that Shadow priests need that additional dps to be competitive. We don't think that is the case. Hence, we have no plans to change SW:P at this time.
For the record, I still think it makes more sense to allow sw:p to benefit from haste and scale back shadow dps in other areas where appropriate (my personal choice would be vampiric touch's coefficient). And, regardless of dps issues, I take slight offence at the speed with which the corruption glyph was 'fixed' when sw:p's refresh has been buggy for over a year. But that's just me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah i'm with you on this one. Even if they removed the refreshing part SW:P and had it expire normaly.

Leigh said...

If they removed the refresh it would cause more QQ then anything, nothing worse then an almost OOM shadow priest, imagine having to use Dispersion every single CD because of the intense mana usage. TBC was a mana pot fest, averaging 20+ mana pots a raid was not fun, it took a long time to get our gear level to a point where we weren't dependent on potting.

I can see their point of view with us locking in a hasted SWP for the duration of a fight. I got that ToC heroic trinket with the push to use haste buff (it's shit for us btw just using it as an example!). I can hit a 1000 haste in a few seconds with that trinket, locking that in at the start of a fight with all the other SWP benefits would have been an unreal DPS increase that would have been nerfed within days of the patch going live which would have seen a lot of forum bashing (look at unholy DK's getting hotfix nerfed so soon after 3.3).

Still though it is annoying that SWP refresh is in a grey area for the entire expansion, right now with the buffs we got i am content enough for it to stay that way :)

Ho Ho said...

I'd rather see DP coefficient/base damage lowered than VT. VT is something we can use when multidotting and I would hate to loose that extra bit of (situational) DPS. On single-target it wouldn't really matter if DP or VT gets it's damage nerfed.