nailbat.us

Logos wrote:I'm still waiting on final judgment, but I'm sorta.....OK? Not Unhappy? with the changes. The big hit/miss will be the focus thing, which I'm gonna guess will be tweaked a million times between now and release, and 10 million times after.

No I know exactly what you mean. It's the 'oh, yeah, that's .. nice' reaction. Largely our class abilities are of the Old thing+new twist variety.
I mean we're getting ranged weapon dps normalized to account for ammo while ammo is removed (Old: they did it with naxx25+ bows that way when they didn't want to give us new ammo. New: We lose the ammo completely)
Trap launching (Old: Freezing Arrow. New: For the rest of the traps but on a 1 min timer)
Camouflage (Old: Deterrence. New: it has a +dps opener effect and more limited immunity function)
Cobra Shot (Old: Steady shot. New: .. specifically for BM to glyph and spec in, oh and it does nature)

Basically they're giving us bread'n'butter stuff. It's nice, and it will be useful - mostly - but it's not the kind of stuff that makes you go "oooooh, that's shiny!". It's like getting socks for Christmas. Very useful and saves you some very mundane shopping, but at the same time you're unlikely to faint from shock of how cool a present they make.

And I do have one major issue. Focus cost for defensive/high cooldown abilities. Making stuff like Rapid fire and deterrence cost focus bothers me. Those abilities already have cooldowns, the mana they currently cost is negligible under the current system in limiting their use (the cooldown does that). Rapid fire for instance is our Adrenaline Rush, but with a longer cooldown and a cost to cast it. It just seems flawed to me to put a focus cost on a long cooldown ability. I am uncertain that they understand that x mana does not translate to effective y focus as the equivalency has to include current cooldown.

I think they will either eventually get rid of the focus requirement for these abilities, or the abilities themselves will increase our focus regeneration for X seconds (or both). I think they'll come to their senses here, since popping these long CD abilities shouldn't disallow us from doing our normal rotations. Rapid Fire, for example, would lose a lot of its strength if we were focus starved, and typically we would make sure our mana was sufficient before popping it. (Side-question: will we get Focus Potions?! heh)

I hope they don't just get rid of mana and put focus on our bars. The reason this mechanic works with rogues is because of tight integration into their talents - focus reductions for certain abilities, max focus increases, focus regeneration increases....etc.