Do people honestly think that VQ+bears right now (1.0.3 state) is the only viable damagebuild the wd's will ever again have, and no alternatives will rise in 1.0.4 because just that one single spec is getting a slight nerf? Even though they are buffing every other ability? But you just want VQ+bears because it's so convenient to keep 4 spells on cooldown and use them when there's no mobs in sight? It's so fun?
No... the reason why people used VQ was because our ONLY passive skill that increases damage also makes our spells cost 30% more. This creates a situation where you can pick a primary spell and NOT VQ or you can pick a high damage spell AND VQ. Now, our only option is to do less damage or pick PtV + primary spell. PtV needs to be changed if they eliminate Vision Quest (which is effectively what they did).
So now we have more build choices and we also grow weaker as a class. That's not a tradeoff I was expecting or appreciate.
You're looking at this the wrong way.
Resources now matter.
No other class could just spam high-cost abilities without the gear to support it. WDs were the only ones and that was entirely due to VQ.
Bears as the sole damaging ability is not valid anymore unless you have great gear. This would be no different than saying a Wizard can't just spam Arcane Orb without the gear to support it.
Perhaps 30% on VQ is too low. I'll give you that much. But these changes represent a paradigm shift for WDs to one where we have to pay attention to our resources for high-cost abilities instead of simply being able to spam bears and hope that the mobs come out dead on the other side.
For example, Haunt glyphed for mana regen is a net positive if it runs its course. Perhaps Bears builds might work Haunt into their skillset somehow. At the end of the day, though, not thinking outside the box is going to create disgruntled players. The whole idea of the skill revamp was to allow us to think outside the box. Clinging to the status quo *is* going to result in disgruntled players.
It's also possible that they are changing mana costs somewhat. That's something we'll have to wait to see in the patch notes, though.
No... the reason why people used VQ was because our ONLY passive skill that increases damage also makes our spells cost 30% more. This creates a situation where you can pick a primary spell and NOT VQ or you can pick a high damage spell AND VQ. Now, our only option is to do less damage or pick PtV + primary spell. PtV needs to be changed if they eliminate Vision Quest (which is effectively what they did).
So now we have more build choices and we also grow weaker as a class. That's not a tradeoff I was expecting or appreciate.
I can't help but feel you're looking at one ability in a 1.04 incarnation and applying it to 1.03 abilities. Obviously PTV and VQ (1.04) would suck if you weren't spamming bears right now and tried to use spirit barrage. 1.04 is going to see a ton of abilities getting buff, and again as I said their animations being sped up which *should be* an innate buff to attack speed for us, thus increasing our damage. Blizzard said specifically WD is getting the greatest overhaul of abilities. They also said that they aren't touching splinters/bears because they want to bring other abilities more in line with it.
We're also doing a straight damage increase on many skills including (but not limited to) Acid Cloud, Firebats, Firebomb, and Spirit Barrage.
Without any details of HOW much these abilities are being buffed I dont' see how you have a case to run out of the house screaming that because VQ is being changed, that all of a sudden the class "won't do damage". Grow weaker as a class? Do you know how ridiculous this sounds? If you're going to say we run VQ because of PTV, then I can use the same logic to say that we run PTV because all the current abilities are TRASH. As in, 1.03 WD is a rubbish class.
We're getting a base mana regen increase, there's going to be better mana regen gear, with VQ you're essentially going to have a 30% regen with almost 100% uptime, and that doesn't include that you can still run blood ritual (15% mana reduction) or Spiritual Attunement with VQ and PTV and still do fine.
Simply put, we have no idea what nitty gritty details are coming out, but we know that blizzard is buffing the class. I really don't get how you can come off saying that we're going to grow weaker as a class.
Where did Blizzard say we're getting better mana regen gear?
Simply put, mana = damage. The less mana we have the less damage we can put out. It's not like bats or bears are the only things that take a lot of mana. Blizzard set expectations that we would be buffed with these changes but all they did was possibly fix pets.
No other class could just spam high-cost abilities without the gear to support it. WDs were the only ones and that was entirely due to VQ.
Bears as the sole damaging ability is not valid anymore unless you have great gear. This would be no different than saying a Wizard can't just spam Arcane Orb without the gear to support it.
Perhaps 30% on VQ is too low. I'll give you that much. But these changes represent a paradigm shift for WDs to one where we have to pay attention to our resources for high-cost abilities instead of simply being able to spam bears and hope that the mobs come out dead on the other side.
For example, Haunt glyphed for mana regen is a net positive if it runs its course. Perhaps Bears builds might work Haunt into their skillset somehow. At the end of the day, though, not thinking outside the box is going to create disgruntled players. The whole idea of the skill revamp was to allow us to think outside the box. Clinging to the status quo *is* going to result in disgruntled players.
It's also possible that they are changing mana costs somewhat. That's something we'll have to wait to see in the patch notes, though.
You bring up some good points but just to maintain adequate mana regen I need to have 3 offensive abilities in which only one of them really does damage. Spiders + Haunt + Nuke, I understand our trade off is we don't lose CD's anymore but we'll have two less spots on our bars. The really skilled players who could rotate 5 short CD's and spam bears will be pissed at this. The shift seems to be from panic/nuke to lay back and do moderate damage. I don't mind this change but unless our spells get huge buffs WD's will be the weakest DPS class.
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@Ruppgu I agree that the other classes got big perks to encourage a variety of class builds, but the WD only got fixes that should have been there in the first place. Blizzard did take your suggestion to fix the mana problem on the WD. You complained that every other class does not cost resources to use their primary attack (i.e. Splinters) and in most cases it actually increases their resources to use your primary attack. The WD is the only class that loses mana/resource when using the primary. The fix is kind of funny though... You HAVE to use one of your valuable Passives in order to gain resources with primary attacks. In essence, to be equal with other classes, you have to give up one of three passives. That is hardly an equal playing field. All of the other classes got a boost to DPS and the WD lost a passive slot. Wow!
On the positive side, the pet situation may be fixed and that is huge. But that is not a boost like the other classes got, that is a fix.
On the positive side, I'm excited to try pets in my build. Maybe splinters + direbats + pets.
At this point in the game though, all I care about is farming and I just don't see how farming is going to be better for me in 1.0.4. All I can see is that it will be worse and it will be better for other classes. I mean sprint barbs actually got buffed by the bash changes... it feels like a punch in the gut.
@Ruppgu I agree that the other classes got big perks to encourage a variety of class builds, but the WD only got fixes that should have been there in the first place. Blizzard did take your suggestion to fix the mana problem on the WD. You complained that every other class does not cost resources to use their primary attack (i.e. Splinters) and in most cases it actually increases their resources to use your primary attack. The WD is the only class that loses mana/resource when using the primary. The fix is kind of funny though... You HAVE to use one of your valuable Passives in order to gain resources with primary attacks. In essence, to be equal with other classes, you have to give up one of three passives. That is hardly an equal playing field. All of the other classes got a boost to DPS and the WD lost a passive slot. Wow!
On the positive side, the pet situation may be fixed and that is huge. But that is not a boost like the other classes got, that is a fix.
+1 but they didn't talk about any other abilities in general so more to come I'm sure. If all the Dots for the other classes get a boost so should ours and that will help.
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Where did Blizzard say we're getting better mana regen gear?
Simply put, mana = damage. The less mana we have the less damage we can put out. It's not like bats or bears are the only things that take a lot of mana. Blizzard set expectations that we would be buffed with these changes but all they did was possibly fix pets.
@ Lorien: Garg is getting the same buff as dogs
I may be wrong about the regen gear, I don't have a source other than I thought I recalled a part of the systems dev blog referring to gear/stat rolls.
I still think you are looking at this the wrong way and still basing this off a 1.04 VQ change applied to 1.03 abilities. I agree, mana = damage, there's no doubt about that. I'll use spirit barrage vs bears.
Bears do 236% damage per bear for 140 mana. Spirit barrage does 190% for 108 mana (spirit is willing makes it 64, since you get a refund). So you're either doing 708% total damage for 140 mana that does aoe damage, or 190% for 64. I'll just make up a term and call it a mana/damage coefficient, meaning that per mana spent, you're doing X damage. In the case of bears, it's 5.05 (708/140), in the case of SB, it's 2.9 and single damage only.
Clearly bears is a winner, and as blizzard said it's an obvious choice because it looks so much better. Keep in mind that they are both within the same "category" of abilities (decay). Just think, when they say they are giving straight damage increases to most WD abilities, they are going to bring that gap down in that mana/damage coefficient. Spirit barrage could do 500% damage for 64 mana.
My point in all of this is that mana is being overall improved through more economic damage abilities. We feel starved for mana because right now if we use spirit barrage, we have to use a TON of mana to get it to do even close to the same damage as bears. It brings it back to my point that you're saying VQ is a nerf and is nerfing the class so we do less damage? However I"m saying that through their damage buffs, nearly 90% of our abilities are going to be much more worth it.
To sum it up: Without the mana regeneration bonus from 1.0.3-vision quest, the witch doctor is not able to sustain high amount of damage as long as he can now. Because the damage of the bears will remain same in 1.0.4 and that seems to be the DPS they want witch doctors to do at best, it will mean that the witch doctor's kill-speed is going to drop. We would simply want to have the 1.0.4 changes without losing our fastest way of clearing content. By all means they should boost the less effective builds to be competitive, but removing the competition does more harm than good.
I don't think we known enough about the patch yet to say this is necessarily true. Given the amount of iterations they did internally testing zombie dogs alone, I would be loathe to suggest they're simply going to throw a big change like this on VQ with no consideration for the impact it will have on sustained or burst dps. They may well miss the mark to some degree or other, but I'm far more optimistic about having more potentially viable (and exceptional) builds available than I am pessimistic about retaining the one build which has become standard.
VQ in it's current iteration really does more to hamstring build diversity than any other skill in the game. I think blizzard realized it was never going to be able to simply buff up short-cooldown spells or tweak longer cooldown spells when the scenario for most WDs was to simply stack a bunch of long cooldown spells for no other reason than their lengthy cooldown.
Anyway, I think we'll have more to theorize with in the coming weeks, so there's really no point in getting too worked up over the previews today.
Vision Quest now: mandatory 4 spells on cooldown (even if you use only low cooldown ones like I do), infinite mana, 0 resource management, 1 spell spamming.
Vision Quest after the patch (if everything goes right, I admit it could go wrong): incentive to use some low mana cost spells, big boost to base mana regen, consistent bonus mana regen (which should be good if you have some mana regen from items), being actually able to use cooldown spells when we need them, resource management.
From where I'm standing the 2nd situation looks better.
If we ever come to the point we're casting 2-3 Zombie Bears and running out of mana for 30 seconds, I'm sure Blizzard will do something about it. I honestly think they're trying to fix the class, not break it even worse.
To sum it up: Without the mana regeneration bonus from 1.0.3-vision quest, the witch doctor is not able to sustain high amount of damage as long as he can now. Because the damage of the bears will remain same in 1.0.4 and that seems to be the DPS they want witch doctors to do at best, it will mean that the witch doctor's kill-speed is going to drop. This is why we are complaining. we would simply want to have the 1.0.4 changes without losing skill-speed.
I read your whole post, just quoting this so it doesn't fill up the whole screen.
I'm sorry but I still think you're assuming that our other abilities won't be changed. You're saying that spirit barrage at 500% damage isn't enough? Consider the fact running spirit within, combined with something like blood ritual or spiritual attunement, or heck, even widwomaker spiders. That's an extremely cheap spell.
I'm making my assumption off of what they are doing for monks and barbs, making spirit/rage spenders WORTH IT. They want to make a resource worth it when you push the button, or as they've said the resource system isn't working. They've given those classes significant buffs, there's no reason to assume we are no different.
Let's ALSO not forget that bears is a RUNE ability. Rune of an ability that probably wasn't really intended to be spammed like a primary. But what's to say that tons of other late level runes won't be brought in line with bears? What's to say acid cloud won't be given 3x as much damage with a better DoT, or locust swarm won't have it's cast range increased and it's damage increased. We simply don't know, what we do know is that they are buffing a LOT of abilities
You say that it's unlikely that builds better than 1.03 VQ builds will emerge. You go into a whole slew of reasons why this won't happen, and it's all entirely based off of 1.03 incarnations of these abilities and runes. I'm sorry I'm just not buying it that this is really that big of a nerf. I'll also even mention the "casual" aspect of how 'lack of skill' running a 1.03 VQ bears build might be.
I'm already thinking that the increased mana regen + corpsespider/widowmakers + spiritual attunement (or blood ritual, as it is addition by subtraction) + VQ is an awesome build that can allow you to spam A LOT of damage, even with PTV.
we have yet to see what they are doing to some of our other stuff, they might change all the gain mana back on monster hit to a mini mana regen buff instead. looking at soul harvest, horrify, and sacrifice. the first 2 could instead of giving the low mana they give right now.
So instead of giving horrify giving 27 mana per enemy it could be 2 mana regen per enemy up to 5 same goes for soul harvests swallow your soul could also be 2 mana regen per target up to 5 durration the spells cooldown or the 30 seconds soul harvest buff is up. this would add a great active way to increase your mana to get even more mana out of the new vision quest.
as for sacrifice i could se that the mana rune gets changed to something liek 5 mana regen per dog sacrificed last for 1-2 minutes.
this is not impossible as the current regen you get from thos skills are just plain bad and i dont think anyone have used them aside from soul harvest when they first got the rune while levling.
this could be a possibility and could explain why the new VQ is so low. another thing that i dont really like is that it need an active component to activate a passive abillity. sure the old VQ was the same way, but still slightly different.
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Let's ALSO not forget that bears is a RUNE ability. Rune of an ability that probably wasn't really intended to be spammed like a primary. But what's to say that tons of other late level runes won't be brought in line with bears? What's to say acid cloud won't be given 3x as much damage with a better DoT, or locust swarm won't have it's cast range increased and it's damage increased. We simply don't know, what we do know is that they are buffing a LOT of abilities
I really think people are losing sight of the fact that in order to spam your big spells you are supposed to have gear that supports it. It is clearly unintended behavior if a Wizard just throws on a bunch of iLevel 61s and can throw out 10 or 12 Arcane Orbs and everything basically be dead.
They are giving us a resource dynamic and I totally agree with Zero & Proleteria on this one. The numbers may not be totally spot-on (maybe VQ needs to be 40%) but there's a very strong possibility that in light of the VQ change that we may see mana cost tweaks to the high-cost abilities (I can't imagine Acid Cloud wouldn't be lowered in some manner at this point as an example). Now, if this were the case, it might have been a slight blunder for them to not at least mention that in the blog, but the blog is only a blog and it's not all-inclusive.
The next 10 days will give us the MF blog, perhaps some blue clarifications on all 7 of the blogs we've seen thusfar (Legendaries, MF, and classes), and eventually patch notes.
Until we see the patch notes, though, we cannot be outright convinced that something is broken. It's clear that the blogs were designed only to be a rough overview and it's also clear that Blizzard put a LOT of effort into fixing our pets and I think it's a bit disingenuous to simply assume they wouldn't treat most/all of the big concerns of each class with that degree of care.
The change they made to VQ has the potential to be one of the most liberating changes that WDs could ever recieve. I would urge everyone to retain constructive criticism here and not to go down the "fuck, bears are broke" route immediately.
Perhaps it's more pertinent to attempt to get direct feedback from Blizzard as to whether or not they plan on adjusting mana costs on any abilities. I mean, that's a fairly key component to the discussion here and without that piece we're kinda flailing around in the dark, yes?
It seems like most of the players that are just farming Act 3 right now hate the changes and people that are still progressing enjoy the changes. Nothing against those people... but it seems to show you the point of view of both camps. At this point in time, I don't really care much about using different builds. I do care that a build I found pretty fun (direbats) is getting removed from the game though.
Ruppgu, I don't remember if I posted it in THIS thread, but (yep, it was on the previous page) Bats is not going away. If anything, it's getting better overall, due to being able to actually use cooldowns as needed instead of blowing them for regen. The build kites a lot more than bears, so the increased base regen is a HUGE help, plus dropping a Rain Dance while actually being able to have defenders out will top you off while simultaneously upping your damage by 20% for 20 seconds.
The only difference is that, if you want to use VQ, you replace at least one of your cooldowns with Spider Queen (cast every 15-19 seconds) or Pyrogeist (cast every 4-8 seconds). Part of the Blog was that cast animations are getting quicker for us, as well. Heck, I'm not even going to be using VQ, instead shifting to some Max Mana gear and Spiritual Attunement.
Ruppgu, I don't remember if I posted it in THIS thread, but (yep, it was on the previous page) Bats is not going away. If anything, it's getting better overall, due to being able to actually use cooldowns as needed instead of blowing them for regen. The build kites a lot more than bears, so the increased base regen is a HUGE help, plus dropping a Rain Dance while actually being able to have defenders out will top you off while simultaneously upping your damage by 20% for 20 seconds.
The only difference is that, if you want to use VQ, you replace at least one of your cooldowns with Spider Queen (cast every 15-19 seconds) or Pyrogeist (cast every 4-8 seconds). Part of the Blog was that cast animations are getting quicker for us, as well. Heck, I'm not even going to be using VQ, instead shifting to some Max Mana gear and Spiritual Attunement.
Overall I see the potential greatness to these changes, but now as you stated its almost more worth while just grabbing Spiritual Attunement which Blizzard has potentially made VQ useless, to some extent its a nerf. Honestly I don't care though I'm sick of using bears.
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Giving WDs the most attention than any other class in the upcoming class
Making dogs and gargantuans viable for both tank and glass cannon builds
Boosting base mana regen
Improving animation timing issues on: Firebomb, Plague of Toads, and Corpse Spiders
Confirmed damage increases to: Acid Cloud, Firebats, Firebomb and Spirit Barrage (and possibly more)
Buffing 2Handers in regards to DoTs.
And everyone is up in arms over them changing VQ in which they have said:
As we continue internal testing, one of our checks to determine how well Vision Quest is performing is to see if a level 60 player can still summon hordes of stampeding Zombie Bears. While we can't accommodate every skill and build combination out there, the goal for Vision Quest is that a player who has chosen the right passives and gear will still be able to summon waves of stampeding bears for at least a few seconds.
Sheesh. I'm glad that blizzard is doing the game design here and not some of those who frequent the forums. I don't think people are realizing the potential that is unlocked by these overall ability buffs + a change in VQ which is probably more in line it what it SHOULD have been in the first place.
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You're looking at this the wrong way.
Resources now matter.
No other class could just spam high-cost abilities without the gear to support it. WDs were the only ones and that was entirely due to VQ.
Bears as the sole damaging ability is not valid anymore unless you have great gear. This would be no different than saying a Wizard can't just spam Arcane Orb without the gear to support it.
Perhaps 30% on VQ is too low. I'll give you that much. But these changes represent a paradigm shift for WDs to one where we have to pay attention to our resources for high-cost abilities instead of simply being able to spam bears and hope that the mobs come out dead on the other side.
For example, Haunt glyphed for mana regen is a net positive if it runs its course. Perhaps Bears builds might work Haunt into their skillset somehow. At the end of the day, though, not thinking outside the box is going to create disgruntled players. The whole idea of the skill revamp was to allow us to think outside the box. Clinging to the status quo *is* going to result in disgruntled players.
It's also possible that they are changing mana costs somewhat. That's something we'll have to wait to see in the patch notes, though.
Odd the lack of mention of Gargantuan. I assume he's getting the same changes as the dogs?
Where did Blizzard say we're getting better mana regen gear?
Simply put, mana = damage. The less mana we have the less damage we can put out. It's not like bats or bears are the only things that take a lot of mana. Blizzard set expectations that we would be buffed with these changes but all they did was possibly fix pets.
@ Lorien: Garg is getting the same buff as dogs
You bring up some good points but just to maintain adequate mana regen I need to have 3 offensive abilities in which only one of them really does damage. Spiders + Haunt + Nuke, I understand our trade off is we don't lose CD's anymore but we'll have two less spots on our bars. The really skilled players who could rotate 5 short CD's and spam bears will be pissed at this. The shift seems to be from panic/nuke to lay back and do moderate damage. I don't mind this change but unless our spells get huge buffs WD's will be the weakest DPS class.
On the positive side, the pet situation may be fixed and that is huge. But that is not a boost like the other classes got, that is a fix.
At this point in the game though, all I care about is farming and I just don't see how farming is going to be better for me in 1.0.4. All I can see is that it will be worse and it will be better for other classes. I mean sprint barbs actually got buffed by the bash changes... it feels like a punch in the gut.
+1 but they didn't talk about any other abilities in general so more to come I'm sure. If all the Dots for the other classes get a boost so should ours and that will help.
I may be wrong about the regen gear, I don't have a source other than I thought I recalled a part of the systems dev blog referring to gear/stat rolls.
I still think you are looking at this the wrong way and still basing this off a 1.04 VQ change applied to 1.03 abilities. I agree, mana = damage, there's no doubt about that. I'll use spirit barrage vs bears.
Bears do 236% damage per bear for 140 mana. Spirit barrage does 190% for 108 mana (spirit is willing makes it 64, since you get a refund). So you're either doing 708% total damage for 140 mana that does aoe damage, or 190% for 64. I'll just make up a term and call it a mana/damage coefficient, meaning that per mana spent, you're doing X damage. In the case of bears, it's 5.05 (708/140), in the case of SB, it's 2.9 and single damage only.
Clearly bears is a winner, and as blizzard said it's an obvious choice because it looks so much better. Keep in mind that they are both within the same "category" of abilities (decay). Just think, when they say they are giving straight damage increases to most WD abilities, they are going to bring that gap down in that mana/damage coefficient. Spirit barrage could do 500% damage for 64 mana.
My point in all of this is that mana is being overall improved through more economic damage abilities. We feel starved for mana because right now if we use spirit barrage, we have to use a TON of mana to get it to do even close to the same damage as bears. It brings it back to my point that you're saying VQ is a nerf and is nerfing the class so we do less damage? However I"m saying that through their damage buffs, nearly 90% of our abilities are going to be much more worth it.
I don't think we known enough about the patch yet to say this is necessarily true. Given the amount of iterations they did internally testing zombie dogs alone, I would be loathe to suggest they're simply going to throw a big change like this on VQ with no consideration for the impact it will have on sustained or burst dps. They may well miss the mark to some degree or other, but I'm far more optimistic about having more potentially viable (and exceptional) builds available than I am pessimistic about retaining the one build which has become standard.
VQ in it's current iteration really does more to hamstring build diversity than any other skill in the game. I think blizzard realized it was never going to be able to simply buff up short-cooldown spells or tweak longer cooldown spells when the scenario for most WDs was to simply stack a bunch of long cooldown spells for no other reason than their lengthy cooldown.
Anyway, I think we'll have more to theorize with in the coming weeks, so there's really no point in getting too worked up over the previews today.
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Wise ElderVision Quest after the patch (if everything goes right, I admit it could go wrong): incentive to use some low mana cost spells, big boost to base mana regen, consistent bonus mana regen (which should be good if you have some mana regen from items), being actually able to use cooldown spells when we need them, resource management.
From where I'm standing the 2nd situation looks better.
If we ever come to the point we're casting 2-3 Zombie Bears and running out of mana for 30 seconds, I'm sure Blizzard will do something about it. I honestly think they're trying to fix the class, not break it even worse.
I read your whole post, just quoting this so it doesn't fill up the whole screen.
I'm sorry but I still think you're assuming that our other abilities won't be changed. You're saying that spirit barrage at 500% damage isn't enough? Consider the fact running spirit within, combined with something like blood ritual or spiritual attunement, or heck, even widwomaker spiders. That's an extremely cheap spell.
I'm making my assumption off of what they are doing for monks and barbs, making spirit/rage spenders WORTH IT. They want to make a resource worth it when you push the button, or as they've said the resource system isn't working. They've given those classes significant buffs, there's no reason to assume we are no different.
Let's ALSO not forget that bears is a RUNE ability. Rune of an ability that probably wasn't really intended to be spammed like a primary. But what's to say that tons of other late level runes won't be brought in line with bears? What's to say acid cloud won't be given 3x as much damage with a better DoT, or locust swarm won't have it's cast range increased and it's damage increased. We simply don't know, what we do know is that they are buffing a LOT of abilities
You say that it's unlikely that builds better than 1.03 VQ builds will emerge. You go into a whole slew of reasons why this won't happen, and it's all entirely based off of 1.03 incarnations of these abilities and runes. I'm sorry I'm just not buying it that this is really that big of a nerf. I'll also even mention the "casual" aspect of how 'lack of skill' running a 1.03 VQ bears build might be.
I'm already thinking that the increased mana regen + corpsespider/widowmakers + spiritual attunement (or blood ritual, as it is addition by subtraction) + VQ is an awesome build that can allow you to spam A LOT of damage, even with PTV.
So instead of giving horrify giving 27 mana per enemy it could be 2 mana regen per enemy up to 5 same goes for soul harvests swallow your soul could also be 2 mana regen per target up to 5 durration the spells cooldown or the 30 seconds soul harvest buff is up. this would add a great active way to increase your mana to get even more mana out of the new vision quest.
as for sacrifice i could se that the mana rune gets changed to something liek 5 mana regen per dog sacrificed last for 1-2 minutes.
this is not impossible as the current regen you get from thos skills are just plain bad and i dont think anyone have used them aside from soul harvest when they first got the rune while levling.
this could be a possibility and could explain why the new VQ is so low. another thing that i dont really like is that it need an active component to activate a passive abillity. sure the old VQ was the same way, but still slightly different.
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I really think people are losing sight of the fact that in order to spam your big spells you are supposed to have gear that supports it. It is clearly unintended behavior if a Wizard just throws on a bunch of iLevel 61s and can throw out 10 or 12 Arcane Orbs and everything basically be dead.
They are giving us a resource dynamic and I totally agree with Zero & Proleteria on this one. The numbers may not be totally spot-on (maybe VQ needs to be 40%) but there's a very strong possibility that in light of the VQ change that we may see mana cost tweaks to the high-cost abilities (I can't imagine Acid Cloud wouldn't be lowered in some manner at this point as an example). Now, if this were the case, it might have been a slight blunder for them to not at least mention that in the blog, but the blog is only a blog and it's not all-inclusive.
The next 10 days will give us the MF blog, perhaps some blue clarifications on all 7 of the blogs we've seen thusfar (Legendaries, MF, and classes), and eventually patch notes.
Until we see the patch notes, though, we cannot be outright convinced that something is broken. It's clear that the blogs were designed only to be a rough overview and it's also clear that Blizzard put a LOT of effort into fixing our pets and I think it's a bit disingenuous to simply assume they wouldn't treat most/all of the big concerns of each class with that degree of care.
The change they made to VQ has the potential to be one of the most liberating changes that WDs could ever recieve. I would urge everyone to retain constructive criticism here and not to go down the "fuck, bears are broke" route immediately.
Perhaps it's more pertinent to attempt to get direct feedback from Blizzard as to whether or not they plan on adjusting mana costs on any abilities. I mean, that's a fairly key component to the discussion here and without that piece we're kinda flailing around in the dark, yes?
Pet buffs, yum.
I don't remember if I posted it in THIS thread, but(yep, it was on the previous page) Bats is not going away. If anything, it's getting better overall, due to being able to actually use cooldowns as needed instead of blowing them for regen. The build kites a lot more than bears, so the increased base regen is a HUGE help, plus dropping a Rain Dance while actually being able to have defenders out will top you off while simultaneously upping your damage by 20% for 20 seconds.The only difference is that, if you want to use VQ, you replace at least one of your cooldowns with Spider Queen (cast every 15-19 seconds) or Pyrogeist (cast every 4-8 seconds). Part of the Blog was that cast animations are getting quicker for us, as well. Heck, I'm not even going to be using VQ, instead shifting to some Max Mana gear and Spiritual Attunement.
Overall I see the potential greatness to these changes, but now as you stated its almost more worth while just grabbing Spiritual Attunement which Blizzard has potentially made VQ useless, to some extent its a nerf. Honestly I don't care though I'm sick of using bears.
And everyone is up in arms over them changing VQ in which they have said:
Sheesh. I'm glad that blizzard is doing the game design here and not some of those who frequent the forums. I don't think people are realizing the potential that is unlocked by these overall ability buffs + a change in VQ which is probably more in line it what it SHOULD have been in the first place.