Posts with tag diminishing-returns

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we discuss how rogue PvP is going to fare in the next expansion.

I often see players talking about their experiences in PvP, sometimes in trade chat or a battleground. Almost inevitably, after a few minutes of chatting, the old stereotypes about each class start coming out. They'll start complaining about paladins having three lives, due to Divine Shield and Lay on Hands. They'll label any arena composition with a warlock as a "drain team," even though warlocks are clearly capable of massive burst damage now. If there's an arena team composition that they don't like to face, that comp is immediately labeled as cheesy or unskilled.

I don't really care if warlocks get a bum rap, it's up to them to convince the public that they can nuke too. What I am concerned about is that rogues have been stereotyped since the earliest days of vanilla WoW, and we need to break that cycle. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I would suggest watching the World of Roguecraft films. These early pieces of WoW machinima firmly cemented rogues as stunlocking gods in the minds of thousands of players. Even now, with Cataclysm putting the final nails in stunlocking's coffin, we will still be thought of as dirty fighters that need to be nerfed.

Still, it's not just being a Death Knight alone that gets you PvP fame and godhood. It does help to have the right talents, gear, and strategy. So we're going to talk about that a bit, focusing mostly on the talents. Here's two popular PvP Talent builds.

Relmstein's latest post asks an interesting question: will the removal of diminishing honor returns in patch 2.4 help Blizzard combat the ongoing AFK problem? His suggestion is that removing the diminishing honor will mean that there is more honor available in the BGs, and that that will drive players back from the "peace cave" out into the battlefield (since they were only AFK-ing because they didn't think they could earn honor fast enough.

But I've got to disagree-- people were (and are) going AFK not because they couldn't pick up enough honor, but because they didn't want to play at all. Going AFK is free honor, and it will keep being so until Blizzard just plain cracks down and starts kicking AFKers. Diminishing honor returns means nothing to serious AFKers-- all they care is that they're earning honor for free. When (or maybe if) Blizzard stops that from happening, then they'll be able to stop AFKers.

As for the removal of returns, I can only think that it'll mean, if anything, more honor farming and turtling. Blizzard says they've crunched the numbers and determined that it's the right thing to do, but I don't see how supplying those Iceblood turtlers will constant honor is going to help things. We'll have to see what effects arise when the new patch drops on the PTR.

Alright, Shamans, you can stop spamming the forums now. It appears that the much-decried diminishing returns on silence effects, like Earth Shock, have been repealed:

After further discussion about the change in patch 2.3 which adds diminishing returns to silencing effects, we've decided to revert the change. Though we do feel that being chain school locked is a problem and plan to address it at some point in the future, we weren't comfortable with the amount of testing this particular change received. (Eyonix)

I really hate to say this, but it almost looks like these forum "revolts" are working. Earlier in this patch cycle we had Paladins making thread after thread about threat reduction, and they got it. Now, Shamans have beat the stuffing out of their own little corner of WoWdom, and poof, here's the change they hated so much removed. Is this really a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, or is it more that the change was bad and that's the cause of both the revolt and the repeal?

[thanks, Hybrys]