Inner Fire: Where do you want it to go?
by Nidaba | 07/08/2008 20:36:39 This is hopefully something that will be written clearly enough to get through and be read. It's not necessary a "we hate your spell" thread; it's mostly just a discussion of the relative merits of Inner Fire, and where we would like to suggest you go with it in Wrath of the Lich King. Vanilla WoW In Vanilla, we had this spell. It gave us AC. And attack power. We're not sure why. But the AC was nice, and against attackers our own level (at 60), it effectively pushed priests over 30% passive mitigation (physical). It was nice to be able to take some hits in pvp. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Inner Fire is intended for anything more than a leveling / grinding / pvp utility spell. There's no benefit in PvE to having it up, assuming (as we do) that priests will be behind the line of fire, and not getting beat on by big nasty monster-types. TBC We enter TBC, and Inner Fire has charges and a duration. It's magic, and purgeable. No-one really notices, but the scaling applied to the Level 70 version of the spell is completely out of whack, and we effectively lose 15% physical mitigation just from leveling. We start getting PvP gear, and the difference starts narrowing slightly. We're not improving any, but our new talents in Discipline help a lot, and we're mitigating almost as much damage as we did before. We're more vulnerable to melee now, but less vulnerable to casters, so it balances out slightly. This goes on through S1 and S2. As S3 goes on, we start noticing a trend. There's rogues and warriors who seem to be hitting harder and harder. The cause becomes clear: Armor Penetration is a stat now, and these people are wearing some of it! As we enter S4, we've hit the logical conclusion of this. Rogues and Warriors in PvP are stacking 1500+ ArPen, effectively negating a non-improved Inner Fire. With Sunders or Expose Armor, we hit 0 AC, and are naked before their attacks. This completely assumes that we even have Inner Fire still up, since not only is it purgeable, but during a Cheap Shot/Kidney Shot combo, a rogue can hit us enough times to remove it completely. Meanwhile, mages and warlocks were felt to need some small buffs, and so were granted the boon of moving their armor spells to the Physical school. This removes them from purge range, and gives them the benefit for the entire duration of an arena match. Additionally, their armors have (throughout TBC) granted PvE buffs. Priests don't mind; we're used to thinking of Inner Fire as a PvP-only buff. We're a little perturbed by the "buff 2/3 cloth classes, ignore priests" bit, but figure there must be a reason we were overlooked. WotLK We look forward to Wrath with anticipation. We see the various changes being made, and discover that we're getting an Inner Fire buff! Most of us immediately think "finally, removing the charges and making it Physical!". Instead, it's been modified to grant healing spellpower, an extremely odd term given that we all understood the objective in WotLK to be to synergize buffs and gear and remove the difference between "spell damage and healing" and "healing spells and effects". Shadow priests are up in arms. Why do holy priests get a buff from Inner Fire and they do not? PvP priests are up in arms. Why is our armor still purgeable *and* removable through charges? Math types are up in arms. Why is our mitigation going down again? This is the situation today. We have been given the carrot of Inner Fire being PvE-viable, yet with glaring flaws in the implementation. There's too many inconsistencies. As an aside, our "armor buff" is vulnerable to every single type of offensive dps class in pvp right now except balance druids. (for the list: - mages: spellsteal - warlocks: felhound devour magic - warriors: dps - rogues: dps - ret paladins: dps - hunters: arcane shot / dps / pet dps - shadow priests: dispel - shamans: purge - feral druids: dps) We would love to know: 1) Is Inner Fire going to be fixed to apply to shadow priests as well in PvE? 2) Will you please decide if you want Inner Fire to be a "burst" ability or a static ability? If the latter, move it to Physical and implement #1. If the former, scrap the ability entirely and build something new from the ground up. 3) Please at least fix the charges and magic effect disparity. One or the other, not both. And please model Discipline carefully with an eye toward physical damage, and make sure to scale the AC of our >> lvl 70 versions of the spell so we don't lose mitigation again as we level. [e] edited to clarify my vulnerability point: if Inner Fire is buffed to give something besides AC, but otherwise left alone, it's going to be stripped off extremely quickly, making it effectively useless against most of our opponents in pvp. If it's worth using, it's worth thinking about how to actually allow us to keep it up! [ Post edited by Nidaba ] Nidaba of <Fusion> http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Nidaba |
by Koraa | 07/08/2008 21:02:45 It will be changed to spell power, so that it's useful to Shadow Priests too. Regarding the charges, they're likely to stay. The spell is dirt cheap because of the charges. If we removed them, we'd have to up the mana cost. A Warrior who keeps his shout up in fights is usually regarded as better than those who don't, similar to a Priest who keeps his Inner Fire up vs those who don't. Unlikely also that it will be made undispellable, we're not even sure if we like the Mage/Warlock armors being undispellable. The dispel system in general (junk buffs, RNG resists) is something we'd also like to address as a whole. Class Designer |
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