Anyone who has seen a Warrior Sweeping Strike Bladestorm 2 targets knows the damage is insane. And there's no excuse around it anymore, it's become to easy of an iwin button. Warriors may cry foul, claiming that your team should be spread out to avoid Bladestorm or you're just bad, but esp with melee and Warrior mobility, people will almost always be together at some point in every arena match.

This is very pronounced with Death Grip, forcing 2 players into BS for max damage makes getting a kill far too easy. The latest pet avoidance change makes this problem much bigger. Pet's can be taunted, and taunting a pet to you to guarantee full Sweeping Strikes Bladestorm damage on your target should not be allowed to happen.

We're trying to fix the interaction between Sweeping Strikes and Bladestorm. The purpose of Sweeping Strikes is to let your attacks hit more targets, not hit the targets you are already hitting harder.

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Q u o t e:
I'd love to hear how you want blade storm and sweeping strikes to work ideally vs what is happening now. I'm sure the rest of the pvp community shares this desire to know how you'd like it to work.

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Bladestorm should not be able to use Sweeping Strikes to transfer all that damage to a single target. As I said above, the purpose of Sweeping Strikes is to hit *additional* targets not just cause more damage to existing targets. I believe Whirlwind works with Sweeping Strikes correctly, so we'd like to get Bladestorm to work the same way.

This change will then let us see if any of the concern about Bladestorm in PvP is founded or if it's not an issue without Sweeping Strikes inflating the damage.

We don't think this will be a real nerf to PvE Arms warriors, but if it chills out their AE damage in those very specific situations where there are several closely grouped adds and Arms damage skyrockets, then I agree that's a good thing.

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Q u o t e:
This actually is a rather interesting interaction between abilities.

Too bad blue is lame and always ruins interesting interactions between abilities.

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Heh. This reads as: We found a fun way to be overpowered. Because it's fun and because we found it, it's not fair for Blizzard to fix it.

Maybe this will help.

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Q u o t e:
A) [Live] Warrior pops Sweeping Strikes + Bladestorm against Bob and Tom, with both within 5 yards of the warrior.

0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:01 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:01 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Tom
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:02 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:02 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Tom
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:03 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
etc.

B) [Live] Warrior pops Sweeping Strikes + Bladestorm against Bob and Tom, with only Bob within 5 yards of the warrior but Tim within Bladestorm range.

0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:01 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:01 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:02 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:02 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:03 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
etc.

C) [Proposed Hotfix] Warrior pops Sweeping Strikes + Bladestorm against Bob and Tom, with both within 5 yards of the warrior.

0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:01 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:02 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Tom
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:03 - <Sweeping Strikes> hits Bob
etc
(with 2 more Sweeping Strikes charges to go)

D) [Potential Hotfix] Same as above but:

0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:01 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:02 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Bob
0:03 - <Whirlwind> hits Tom
etc

...no Sweeping Strikes at all unless until Jill, Brenda, and Sally enter the Bladestorm, and even then only the 5th person would be hit by Sweeping Strikes (but only 1 Sweeping Strikes attack per Whirlwind, else the fifth person eats 4-5 Sweeping Strikes simultaneously).

Personally, I hope they are referring to scenario D.

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The correct answer is selection C. Sweeping Strikes grants an extra attack, but can’t proc multiple times per Whirlwind.

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Q u o t e:


EDIT for clarification:

Is it supposed to SS the 2nd target specifically or is it random?

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Technically it should hit the same target each time if nobody moves, but we know that is a fairly rare scenario. For the most part it is random, it won't be smart and alternate targets or anything like that.

Note: We are working on the hotfix for this right now.

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Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler, that is not what I said at all. I did not make any claim that the combination is overpower or not. You made assumptions about what I have said.

The interaction between abilities is fun. If it is overpowered then just nerf the damage sweeping strikes contributes to AOE abilities. This game isn't fun when you remove these kinds of interactions.

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Apologies if I misunderstood your post. We are in fact keeping the interaction. SS will still be worth hitting when Bladestorm is up. What it will not do is hit one target 4 (or in some cases even more) times. The stand alone ability Whirlwind had this bullet-proofing as part of the spell, but the new whirlwinds created as part of Bladestorm did not. We think this is one of the main causes of the "Bladestorm blowed me up" feedback.