Dispelling in Cata

[Khatovar]

Looks like we're going to have to work for our dispells with the expansion:
Link (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038610691&sid=1)


We wanted to introduce some of the changes to dispel mechanics coming in Cataclysm. Our goals were to make dispelling a little less trivial to do in PvP, and to make sure there is more equity in dispel capabilities among healers in both PvP and PvE.

...

In addition, we're making the opportunity cost (what the player could have accomplished with different actions) for dispelling a bit steeper. We think the cost is too low for three reasons: 1) The actual mana cost is low. 2) You never waste a dispel. If you try to dispel a debuff that isn’t there then the dispel just won’t go off. 3) We have spells that remove debuffs with minimal input on the part of the player. In Cataclysm we are raising the mana costs, making it possible to waste mana by casting a dispel when there is nothing to dispel, and removing Cleansing Totem, Abolish Disease, and Abolish Poison from the game. With these changes in mind, we are working to plan dungeon and raid encounters where dispels aren’t in constant demand or spammed in order to be successful, though some need for dispels will still be a part of the design.

As previously mentioned, we are providing three dispel capabilities to all healing classes as follows:

Druids will be able to dispel defensive magic, curses, and poison.
Paladins will be able to dispel defensive magic, diseases, and poison.
Priests will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and disease.
Shaman will be able to dispel defensive magic, offensive magic, and curses.

There is some trade-off that is being made in making these changes and we wanted to expand on this further.

Protection and Retribution paladins will lose their current ability to dispel magic.
All shaman will lose dispel disease and dispel poison in exchange for Restoration gaining dispel magic.
Restoration shaman, Restoration druids, and Holy paladins will need to talent into their defensive magic dispels.
Shadow priests won’t be able to remove disease in Shadowform.
Mage, hunter, and warlock will retain their current dispel mechanics.
Body and Soul remains the same, and basically any dispel mechanic not mentioned above is currently planned to remain as it is.
When possible, we’d like to combine dispels into a single action. For example, the druid ability to dispel curses and poisons might be a single spell with a Restoration talent that also allows it to dispel magic. This part of the design isn’t finalized, however.

[Ualaa]

The classic... Prot Pally + Elemental Shammies... will lose dispel vs Magic, although if you go with a Resto on the team, they have vs Magic.

The loss of Cleansing Totems will certainly make some fights a lot harder then they are now.

[Pocalypse]

It will also make most of the macros we use for this now ineffectual, since a dispel will go off even if there is nothing to dispel. I foresee having to pay attention to which type of debuff is on someone, and having to setup mouseover dispels.

[celticlad94]

I somehow feel that it will be harder to fight a rogue on my druid :(

[Powerwar]

Time to roll a squad of male gnome rogues with pink hair and put them into a guild called <Gaylord FoKer And Poising Friends>

If this goes live without changing the rogue class, or at least the poisons mechanics any rogue will be able to obliterate a full raid of healers/casters by just using slow casting poison and spamming FoK.

Also some old raid encounters will become next to impossible unless they change them. Chromagus in BWL is a great example about why you need cleansing totems.

Make the dispell cost similar to casting any other spell. Also make it ro be resistable based on the bad spell caster resilience, hit rating or whatever other option... and problem solved without changing completely the game mechanic.

[jinkobi]

Tankadins/Ret losing the ability to dispel... That's HUGE...

Anyone running a tankadin or retadin knows exactly what i'm talking about... Wow that really sucks monkey balls.

Looks like we're all going to have to relearn the game again or find another game when the time comes. Not just this change but the whole list of changes to come is a gigantic nerf veiled in the guise of redesigning the game.

If anyone here has ever played LOTRO - do you see what they are doing making WOW into LOTRO. They either hired Turbine designers or someone at Blizz is a hardcore LOTRO fan stealing ideas.

It won't be long before 85's can't clear level 40 content in WOW just like in LOTRO 65's can't solo level 30 content.

[genocyde]

Also some old raid encounters will become next to impossible unless they change them. Chromagus in BWL is a great example about why you need cleansing totems.
Meh, i've 5 boxed chromag with pally priest 3x mage. I don't even recall using dispels just burn him to the ground. And it's not like alliance even had shaman back then to have the totems

I for one welcome the change. Fire and forget reoccuring dispels are silly in pvp. Now I just need them to nerf heroism down to realistic and I'll feel good. (And yes I have a shaman, I just find that buff way OP)

[Seldum]

Dispel what is dispel :D

[Svpernova09]

This makes me sad face. I really think this may lower some utility of multiple shaman teams. It won't destroy the team, but auto poison / disease cleansing was really handy.

[Boylston]

This makes me sad face. I really think this may lower some utility of multiple shaman teams. It won't destroy the team, but auto poison / disease cleansing was really handy.

It's an even bigger blow to the Multi-RetPally teams, honestly.

[Fat Tire]

It's an even bigger blow to the Multi-RetPally teams, honestly.

I agree. I am sure there will be some changes that will benefit pallies in exchange for making them warriors without MS/Snare/interrupt. And druids have to become sheepable now because being immune to almost all CC while having a magic dispel would be insane. I expect alot of changes to all classes.

Edit: Also, I really hate when blizzard releases info like this without all the details, I know they have class info coming in the next couple of days but damn if they couldn't have waited until then. Instead they get to watch a qq frenzy on the forums. They sit back and laugh at us while sipping on their coffee/gin.


edit 2: Rets will be much different to play since they are totally changing, hell they will have combo points now@?@?

Retribution and Enhancement in Cataclysm are unlikely to ever have to worry about mana much. That part isn't changing. My point was that because they both have cooldown limited gameplay, we need to make sure there are enough decisions going on that the specs A) aren't boring and B) have some variance in performance depending on the skill of the player playing them. I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

[Tonuss]

Edit: Also, I really hate when blizzard releases info like this without all the details, I know they have class info coming in the next couple of days but damn if they couldn't have waited until then. Instead they get to watch a qq frenzy on the forums. They sit back and laugh at us while sipping on their coffee/gin.
Yeah, they really should have clarified some things. Dispelling classes are panicking because they are assuming that their spells and dispel mechanics are changing but that debuffing is not.

I expect that Blizzard is going to make some pretty sweeping changes to the way debuffs work, in order to fit the new dispel mechanics and spell layouts to the way the game will play. My guess is that many of the current PvE encounters that require you to dispel poisons, diseases, and curses will instead require only that you dispel "defensive magic." All healer classes will be able to dispel defensive magic, and thus PvE is simplified. In order to keep it from becoming too simple, they are making dispels cost more mana and you will now "cast" a dispel on a target that does not need it. I assume that this also means that encounters will be designed with fewer debuffs flying around so that instead of having to spam your dispel, you'll need to pay better attention in order to properly remove debuffs.

What I would really like to see is Blizzard announce that rogue poisons (and similar debuffs from other classes) will be categorized as magic-based. The only reason being that I'd love to see the days/weeks of healer QQ turn into a massive melee QQ. It's too entertaining to read post after post about how the world has ended and so-n-so is quitting WOW for sure this time! :)

[Kalros]

This makes me sad face. I really think this may lower some utility of multiple shaman teams. It won't destroy the team, but auto poison / disease cleansing was really handy.

Stop whining already! I hate all these "Doom and Gloom" posts. If you dont like it, cancel your accounts!

[Batato]

Stop whining already! I hate all these "Doom and Gloom" posts. If you dont like it, cancel your accounts!

lol

[jinkobi]

Meh, i've 5 boxed chromag with pally priest 3x mage. I don't even recall using dispels just burn him to the ground. And it's not like alliance even had shaman back then to have the totems

I for one welcome the change. Fire and forget reoccuring dispels are silly in pvp. Now I just need them to nerf heroism down to realistic and I'll feel good. (And yes I have a shaman, I just find that buff way OP)

How can you not recall dispelling on Chromag???

I do BWL every week with a friend and if you don't dispell his debuffs within like 20 secs you get mind controlled. Plus he immobilizes you quite frequently. Soooo not sure how you pulled that off.

I always log out my team and jump on my druid healer while my pally&rogue friend burn him down.

[Kalros]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kalros http://www.dual-boxing.com/images/IPBPRO/buttons_IPBPRO/viewpost.gif (http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?p=271647#post271647)
Stop whining already! I hate all these "Doom and Gloom" posts. If you dont like it, cancel your accounts!

lol

Hopefully everyone got that I wasnt actually serious. Kind of a *wink wink to Svpernova09 (http://www.dual-boxing.com/member.php?u=9879)

[genocyde]

How can you not recall dispelling on Chromag???

I do BWL every week with a friend and if you don't dispell his debuffs within like 20 secs you get mind controlled. Plus he immobilizes you quite frequently. Soooo not sure how you pulled that off.

I always log out my team and jump on my druid healer while my pally&rogue friend burn him down.

I dunno, I blow all my cooldowns when he becomes vulnerable to frost fire or arcane and kill him in just a few seconds.

[Firstcow]

It's an even bigger blow to the Multi-RetPally teams, honestly.

I agree. I think I need to start preparing a new team for Cata and put the DK+rets in retired mode.

[Mosg2]

Initially I thought that this would destroy the DK+Rets but in retrospect... Ok, it's going to be a pretty big blow. On the upside (I guess) there will be less classes that can dispel your HoF!

Ugh.

[Ualaa]

It sounds like only dedicated healer classes (as in, spec'd into the holy/resto line) will have the full line of decurses for the class.

It might mean, moving from a 3x Elemental (that can heal) towards a 1x dedicated healer (spec'd to heal) per team. That just means a little less dps on the trash, unless you go with a dual-spec on the healer.

It is always hard to balance both PvE and PvP. Since the dispels are getting harder, and will punish (in terms of mana) dispelling when its not needed, and the ongoing dispel type effects (totems, abolish disease/poison) are going away, this is meant to be a skill required of the healer types.

We might need to change a few teams.

But as others have said, perhaps the debuffs which we are currently cleansing/curing won't be as dramatic. For all we know, a decurse might cost as much as 3 large heals but render the target immune for 10 seconds. We don't have the details yet to make an informed judgement.

[Khatovar]

This makes me sad face. I really think this may lower some utility of multiple shaman teams. It won't destroy the team, but auto poison / disease cleansing was really handy.


It's an even bigger blow to the Multi-RetPally teams, honestly.



edit 2: Rets will be much different to play since they are totally changing, hell they will have combo points now@?@?

Retribution and Enhancement in Cataclysm are unlikely to ever have to worry about mana much. That part isn't changing. My point was that because they both have cooldown limited gameplay, we need to make sure there are enough decisions going on that the specs A) aren't boring and B) have some variance in performance depending on the skill of the player playing them. I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

OMG, they are totally out to get me! Just me! You're all inconsequential, this is so obviously because they think my team is OP!

*sigh* but seriously, combo points? :confused:

[Velassra]

OMG, they are totally out to get me! Just me! You're all inconsequential, this is so obviously because they think my team is OP!

*sigh* but seriously, combo points? :confused:

I read somewhere that warlock soulstones were going to be more like DK runes. This I think would be as bad, as all 3 of my dps are locks:(

[Ualaa]

They said every warlock will have certain abilities which trigger off of soul stones... and that you'll start each fight with so many of them. And will have a spell to replenish them during a fight, but in most encounters you'll be fine with the number you start with.

[Bloodcloud]

They said every warlock will have certain abilities which trigger off of soul stones... and that you'll start each fight with so many of them. And will have a spell to replenish them during a fight, but in most encounters you'll be fine with the number you start with.

so locks get Mana AND soul shards to worry ?? :) makes things interesting

[Tonuss]

Yeah, but soul shards won't have to be farmed. I think that it will be like DK runes, in that you start a fight with a certain number of soul shards available, and certain spells and abilities will use up one or more shards. They will probably have some sort of way to regen them during a fight that (attempts to) balances the power of those spells and abilities with their availability.

I think that they're trying to replace certain types of boring button-pushing (farming shards, spamming debuffs, spamming heals) with mechanics that are based more around situational awareness. If they succeed, it could make multiboxing harder, but it would make single-character play more exciting and fun.

[Fat Tire]

I will be personally very happy with alot of changes. I have not enjoyed Wotlk as much as I enjoyed BC. Hopefully and its looks like its going back to that type of gameplay I really enjoyed, so I am excited. Looking at this post today by GC, healing is for sure going back to BC style. WIll have to wait to find out if dps changing also, but I would imagine so.


I have found this philosophy to be a tough one to communicate. Painted broadly, we have some players who chose healing because they like to be challenged and we have some players who chose healing because they like to be the hero. In LK, raid healing can definitely be stressful at times, but we're not actually convinced the challenge is there. After a tough fight, whether it was succesful or not, ask yourself what you should have done differently. Did you use the wrong heal in the wrong situation? I'd suspect not since most healers have pretty stringent rotations these days where you use your strongest heals on cooldown and fill in the time left with your next strongest heals and so on. Did you heal the wrong person at the wrong time? Probably not because anyone you failed to heal was probably about to die. You probably overhealed a lot because there is little consequence for overhealing.

Go back and look at a few videos of BC raid encounters. A couple of points may be strking. One, several characters may be at various stages of injury -- the healers could not keep them all topped off. Second, the healers may be at various stages of mana -- in other words, it's not just a matter of having more GCDs before everyone is fine again. It's a matter of triage.

Triage is one of the things missing from today's healing game (even though you likely learned First Aid through a triage quest). Loosely defined, triage is deciding who needs immediate attention (vs. who is stable vs. who is a lost cause). We want healers to be able to make decisions like "The tank is wounded, but she is unlikely to die in the next few hits, and hots are ticking on her, so she's probably okay for a moment and I can heal this Ret paladin over here," vs. "The rogue is wounded, but my big heal would overheal for a ton and I need the mana, so I can use a small heal." We want the dps to likewise be thinking about ways to minimize damage on themselves, not because they'll die in a global (i.e. before they could respond anyway) but because the healers are going to risk running out of mana.

Today, in LK, healing risks feeling even more like whack-a-mole. Injury? Heal. Injury? Heal. You're testing your reflexes more than your decision-making ability. Whack-a-mole can be challenging, but it doesn't have much depth. It's easy to add depth though. Let's start with the notion that there are two hammers. The little hammer can dispatch most of those moles, but sometimes you can use your big hammer too. The big hammer has limited charges or whatever. Now let's have some of the moles pop out a little slower so that you have time to consider which hammer to use. See where I'm going with this?

Running out of mana doesn't have to be, and won't be, the only reason you fail an encounter. But it is a point of failure that we don't have today. Adding it back in will make the encounters feel more distinct from each other and will actually, we believe, make healing more interesting and ultimately more fun. I agree it's going to be a tough sell though. In one of our playtests recently, the healer came back frazzled. "I couldn't keep everyone topped off," she said. "It took me half the dungeon to realize that I didn't have to." Once that clicked, she said she started having fun. Hopefully it will click with other players quickly too.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Velassra]

I will be personally very happy with alot of changes. I have not enjoyed Wotlk as much as I enjoyed BC. Hopefully and its looks like its going back to that type of gameplay I really enjoyed, so I am excited. Looking at this post today by GC, healing is for sure going back to BC style. WIll have to wait to find out if dps changing also, but I would imagine so.


I have found this philosophy to be a tough one to communicate. Painted broadly, we have some players who chose healing because they like to be challenged and we have some players who chose healing because they like to be the hero. In LK, raid healing can definitely be stressful at times, but we're not actually convinced the challenge is there. After a tough fight, whether it was succesful or not, ask yourself what you should have done differently. Did you use the wrong heal in the wrong situation? I'd suspect not since most healers have pretty stringent rotations these days where you use your strongest heals on cooldown and fill in the time left with your next strongest heals and so on. Did you heal the wrong person at the wrong time? Probably not because anyone you failed to heal was probably about to die. You probably overhealed a lot because there is little consequence for overhealing.

Go back and look at a few videos of BC raid encounters. A couple of points may be strking. One, several characters may be at various stages of injury -- the healers could not keep them all topped off. Second, the healers may be at various stages of mana -- in other words, it's not just a matter of having more GCDs before everyone is fine again. It's a matter of triage.

Triage is one of the things missing from today's healing game (even though you likely learned First Aid through a triage quest). Loosely defined, triage is deciding who needs immediate attention (vs. who is stable vs. who is a lost cause). We want healers to be able to make decisions like "The tank is wounded, but she is unlikely to die in the next few hits, and hots are ticking on her, so she's probably okay for a moment and I can heal this Ret paladin over here," vs. "The rogue is wounded, but my big heal would overheal for a ton and I need the mana, so I can use a small heal." We want the dps to likewise be thinking about ways to minimize damage on themselves, not because they'll die in a global (i.e. before they could respond anyway) but because the healers are going to risk running out of mana.

Today, in LK, healing risks feeling even more like whack-a-mole. Injury? Heal. Injury? Heal. You're testing your reflexes more than your decision-making ability. Whack-a-mole can be challenging, but it doesn't have much depth. It's easy to add depth though. Let's start with the notion that there are two hammers. The little hammer can dispatch most of those moles, but sometimes you can use your big hammer too. The big hammer has limited charges or whatever. Now let's have some of the moles pop out a little slower so that you have time to consider which hammer to use. See where I'm going with this?

Running out of mana doesn't have to be, and won't be, the only reason you fail an encounter. But it is a point of failure that we don't have today. Adding it back in will make the encounters feel more distinct from each other and will actually, we believe, make healing more interesting and ultimately more fun. I agree it's going to be a tough sell though. In one of our playtests recently, the healer came back frazzled. "I couldn't keep everyone topped off," she said. "It took me half the dungeon to realize that I didn't have to." Once that clicked, she said she started having fun. Hopefully it will click with other players quickly too.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

So what it sounds like here, is that the healer is going to have to bust ass while the tank tanks everything. Sounds like in vanilla. I stopped healing and went shadow. Fuck whack a mole.

[Ualaa]

I like that mana is a resource which has to be managed.
And that you have more then one tool for a given heal.

In today's game, you go for the biggest heal possible, as often as possible.
And because of the mana pool size and mana regeneration, the costs are not much of an issue.



But as an analogy...
You have 100 mana, for this entire fight.
Your small heal costs 5 mana and heals for 5.
Your medium heal costs 15 mana and heals for 25.
Your big heal costs 25 mana and heals for 50.

You cannot just spam the big heal on everyone; you'll run out of mana.
The DPS will almost never require heals for 50, and its a quarter of your mana.
It is the most efficient heal for the tank, provided the tank will survive for it to land.

[Shodokan]

I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

The way i interpret this is that blizzard is adding new talents to add more variety and options to a ret/enhance shaman's rotation and allow for choices, for example more things like exorcism. the whole "less that you now have combo points to manage" means that they don't want to make them into rogues/druids and rather have them continue their priority rotation but add some flavor to those choices in the priority.

[Khatovar]

Link (http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=12947281614&sid=1&pageNo=3)

Based on a lot of feedback and concerns being raised in this thread and mirrored threads in other regions, we'd like to make a few clarifications in no particular order.

Shaman will get Cleanse Spirit as a base spell that removes curses. Restoration will have a talent to add magic dispelling (on friends or enemies) to Cleanse Spirit.


We recognize this change risks making shaman too vulnerable to rogue and hunter poisons in PvP (and especially mind-numbing), and we might very well offer a talent or mechanic to compensate for that.


We also recognize the challenge for magic-based controllers in PvP, say mages, to handle teams with druid healers and we might have to reconsider the druid ability to avoid Polymorph. We think it’s important for PvE reasons for all healers to be able to dispel magic however.


For the most part, talents that reduce a chance to be dispelled are going away. We want dispels to be more expensive, but we also want them to be effective when you do choose to use them, so we want to downplay the random aspect. Mechanics such as Unholy Blight granting dispel immunity, or rogues reapplying poisons so quickly will be handled on an individual basis. We’ve had a little bit of an arms race going on because some of those debuffs could be removed so trivially; but on the other hand, death knights and rogues need those debuffs to function. Balancing that will be an ongoing process.


We also want to downplay the role of “junk buffs” that protect dispels. Our usual course of action here is to make those buffs undispellable such that you dispel the thing you actually want to dispel.


If we didn’t mention a specific dispel mechanic (like Shield Slam), then you can assume it probably isn’t changing, at least for now. A lot may change in beta.


We want to stress yet again that one of our goals behind these changes was to help us design 5-player dungeons and 10-player raids. Currently having the ability to remove, say, a poison or disease can make an encounter go from challenging to easy, yet not every group has those abilities. With this new matrix, the encounter designers can make anything that must be dispelled a magical effect, while curses, poisons or diseases would be in the category of helping you win, but not an instant wipe if you lose. In 25-player raids, we have more flexibility to ask you to dispel more types of effects.


We understand that in some cases we are making changes that have been core to some classes for a long time (shaman losing poison and disease dispel for instance). While we don’t want to make any beloved classes, or even spells unrecognizable to players who have stuck with that class for years, Cataclysm is also an opportunity for us to fix some of the class systems and mechanic issues we've had for a long time. We have to be careful about having too many sacred cows that keep us from being able to iterate on the design. The dispel matrix we had was somewhat arbitrary and could change a PvE encounter or PvP battle dramatically, almost in a binary manner, depending on what dispels were available to the group involved. When dispelling is trivial, either because it’s too easy or because someone is capable of dispelling too many things, then neither PvE or PvP feel as strategic or tactical as we think they ideally could be.


Defensive dispels (say, a shaman removing a debuff from an ally) should always hit. We don’t want healers to have to stack +hit for PvE. When you are dispelling buffs on an enemy, you will still have a chance to miss.

[EsaJunttila]

Planing to play 2 druid+3 Rogue team. ;-) No problem.

This might be just good. Don't worry. Something will replace the loss.

You did know, btw, that there is this psychological mechanism... What was it? Ah, "resistance for change". ;-)

[lightstriker]

I am not gonna worry about this. I remember when the Honor System was announced. The WoW form had hundreds of pages screaming murder. I should be worry, since i run a mix healing/dps team; pally, 2 shammy, druid and priest.