Posts with tag dampening

Community Manager Lore has delivered some news to the official forums that has made me rather cheerful.

Lore

After some additional discussion, we've decided to make this change only apply in the 2v2 bracket. Dampening will remain at 10 minutes in 3v3 and 5v5 arenas.

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I've been posting a lot about this potential change, since Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka tweeted about it a while back when changes went in by accident after BlizzCon. And while I am still not a fan of the change, I can agree with it way more in 2v2 than in 3v3 or 5v5.

Why is that? Well, in 2v2, especially in healer-DPS versus healer-DPS, matches can go on longer, and even result in draws far more often than in the other sizes. Simply, a healer is not designed to be easily killable by a single DPS. As a result, it's harder work to take them down in 2v2. I won't pretend that I like the Dampening system, but it's better at 5 minutes in 2v2 for (hopefully) just one season.

What we don't know yet is just how far it will go.

This is something I discussed, in vague and mysterious exchanges, with Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka on Twitter. While he certainly didn't confirm that Dampening would be moved to starting at 5 minutes, like it was at the BlizzCon tournament, he certainly implied that that was something the devs were considering. For the uninitiated, Dampening is a debuff currently applied to all arena players after 10 minutes of a match that reduces their healing and absorbs by 1% every 10 seconds.

@Topikal @holinka As mentioned in my article on it, I'm concerned about Dampening potentially moving to 5 mins with S15. Do not want.

- Olivia Grace (@oliviadgrace) January 9, 2014

@Topikal @oliviadgrace I was addressing the claim that I was live testing WoD PvP changes with my statement. You may be sad still Olivia.

- Holinka (@holinka) January 9, 2014

Now, first and foremost, I have to make it very clear that on a purely personal level unrelated to game design, I dislike this debuff immensely. I dislike the change in power, I dislike knowing that as a PvP healer, no matter how carefully and efficiently I play, my effectiveness will decrease and decrease as the match continues. It's a horrible feeling, and I think Brian Holinka was right, way back in May 2012, when he said the devs "didn't really like the idea of your power changing over time" in response to a tweet asking for an ever-increasing Battle Fatigue. And yet, here we are.

A few stealth changes have crept onto live servers in patch 5.4.2, without making it into the patch notes. Both of them relate to PvP, and while one is accidental and will be fixed it could be coming in 6.0, the other is here to stay. If you're an arena-focused hunter, you're not going to like this much.

First up, let's examine the change made to Dampening. Dampening was introduced to the game after patch 5.4 to fix the issues caused by The Crowd Chose You. Dampening is a stacking healing reduction debuff, that decreases healing done to players and pets by 1% per 10 seconds, up to a maximum of 60%. This would usually kick in after 10 minutes, but was starting at 5 minutes. This was accidental and will be hotfixed as Community Manager Lore explains:

Lore

No need for alarm – we'll be hotfixing Dampening back to a 10-minute start time (with Arena matches ending at 20 minutes).

As you might be aware, the WoW Arena Invitational at BlizzCon was configured to have Dampening begin at 5 minutes, with a 15-minute round timer. Those changes were intended solely for BlizzCon, but made it over to live servers as part of the 5.4.2 patch. Again, this was unintentional, and we'll be hotfixing things back to normal ASAP.

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However, the change to hunters' Dismiss Pet is intentional. It was being used to get full-health pets in the arena, and to reset cooldowns on things like Roar of Sacrifice. Now, hunters will only be able to swap pets before the arena starts, and this is intentional. It won't be changed back. Hit the break for Lore's post on the matter.