As I briefly mentioned last post, mages now have access to a miniature mortal strike, via the talent Permafrost, at a 7/13/20% reduction to healing, afflicting all targets suffering from on of your chill effects.
My initial reaction is as follows:
Why?
After that… I thought about it, and then said the following:
Why?
The first “why” being in legitimate confusion, the second being more of a philosophical conjecture.
The Mortal Strike debuff itself used to be a warrior only thing. Nearly completely by itself, it made Arms the PvP spec of choice. It gave warriors the ability to provide massive pressure against enemy healers, and as a result warriors became very prevalent in PvP.
With only a little bit of exaggeration, every successful 5v5 arena team had a warrior for one reason and one reason only, and that was the godly mortal strike debuff.
Blizzard, apparently, decided that it was too powerful an ability for one class to sport. So it’s been spread around a bit. Rogues can do it, hunters can do it, and even Arms’ angrier, less eloquent brethren the fury warriors can do it. Well, I suppose troll priests could do it too back in the day, but that isn’t relevant anymore.
Thing is, Mortal Strike is powerful, and Blizzard decided to take the attitude of “bring the classes, not the class” for Wrath PvP.
As with all homogenization, this is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line, or as GC put it, when do you decide to just apply the debuff to everyone as soon as a match starts?
In the Wrath beta, enhancement shamans were given a mortal strike, in an effort to get them in a better place for PvP. Fearing homogenization, they lost the ability and in exchange received… well, nothing.
So with 3.2, mortal strike is getting spread around a little more.
Mages have it, as mentioned above, as do Shadow Priests, via Improved Mind Blast.
The latter makes sense, to an extent.
Shadow Priests aren’t exactly in the ideal… screw it, I calls it as I sees it. Shadow Priests suck, and suck badly. As far as being an offensive caster goes, they are stuck somewhere between a moonkin and an affliction warlock, but lacking all the perks and possessing all the crap.
A mortal strike debuff for shadow priests make sense. They need the PvP buff, and classwise, this fits rather neatly into the shadow priest mythos.
I mean, shadow priests already flay the minds of their opponents, leech their energy, wrack their bodies with disease, and can even cause them to drop their weapons from sheer terror.
Is adding a mortal strike to that skillset really a stretch?
But mages?
Warriors: my axe is coated in rabies, that’s why it’s harder for you to get better.
Rogues: it’s taken centuries to perfect this poison, a poison that rots you from the inside.
Hunters: well, yer see, there be this weetle spot right above yer heart.
Shadow Priests: hush, now, don’t speak. Let the darkness consume you…
Mages: Man, you know what sucks? Being really cold. It’s hard to heal when you’re really cold. I mean, that frostbolt is, what, -90 degrees?
Just as a quick recap, this is where mages are:
Arcane and Frost PvP are fine. Frost PvP, in fact, is in such a good place right now that Blizzard refuses to buff frost PvE out of fear of making frost PvP overpowered. Fire PvP, on the other hand, is pretty crap.
On the flipside, fire and arcane mages are in a pretty damn good spot as far as PvE goes. Sure, there are differences, but nothing hugely significant. Frost mages, of course, are pretty crappy, lagging 20-30% behind their non-frosty brethren.
So given this situation, what is your first reaction?
Is it to buff frost mage PvP? No? Why not? Clearly that’s the biggest issue with the mage class right now.
All snark aside, there are a few conclusions I can draw from this:
- This is not, in fact, going to go live, but merely Blizzard’s way of testing what a change like this would do. Consider Mortal Strike the Replenishment of PvP, and expect it to get spread around to multiple specs the same way.
- Following the same idea, mortal strike is going to be spread around, and nerfed across the board to 20%. Say goodbye to 50% mortal strike, say hello to the not quite as game changing 20%.
Personally, I think this change is following the same idea as the current Living Bomb change.
Oh, in case you didn’t know, Blizzard is currently testing with not giving LB a limit to the number of targets it can afflict. They don’t know whether they’ll go through with it, it’s just being tested.
Same thing here, methinks. It’s just a test, just to see, maybe it’ll go live, maybe it won’t. Mortal Strike is sort of in the same boat as the whole dispel game, it’s an out of control mechanic that is in desperate need of a do over.
So here’s the real question: why does MS need to be spread around at all? Why does it need to be in a place where it can be counted on to always be up?
In my opinion, Blizzard is doing this backward. Rather than weakening mortal strike and spreading it around, it should be strengthened and consolidated.
At its core, what is mortal strike? Well, it’s a way to pressure an enemy healer, just like spell interrupts, crowd controls, or other cooldowns and effects of that nature.
Why does MS need to be in a place where it’s always up? Can we not take the complete other direction, and have it be something that’s up only sometimes?
Rather than warriors having a 50% mortal strike that’s nearly always up, why not have a 80% mortal strike that can only be put up once every 45 seconds?
Instead of having it be a flat debuff that is always up, resulting in this current dilemna, why not have it be a cooldown? Something that is used to push for a kill and something that can be countered against… you know, something that actually requires strategy.
Look at it this way.
Healers have passive talents and abilities that provide small boosts to their healing. They have active abilities and cooldowns to provide large boosts to their healing.
So opposing DPS type classes should have abilities and talents that mirror that. Why should warriors, or anyone else for that matter, have access to something to passively reduce healing by such a huge amount?
And hey, if being unable to provide 100% mortal strike uptime somehow cripples warriors in PvP, then Blizzard is just going to have to buff them intelligently, aren’t they?
It will definitely be interesting. Being able to AoE our MS, even as it being in a weakened version, will definately…
perhaps change things up a bit.
But shadowpriests can heeeeaaaaalll!!! … oh shit I’m oom now what…?
Granted, I don’t PvP much– actually I don’t even play now– but the spec has just sucked so badly in PvP that any and all buffs are welcome. I’ll take a moral strike, a snare (oh wait), CC, a drain (well, a non-nerfed one)…
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about PvP. I understand that they do want to focus on PvP, but I’d rather that they *gasp* look at fire instead of frost in this case. How about adding Mortal strike to Impact? or to the Pyroblast DoT? There are a lot of classes that are deserving of this utility, frost isn’t one of them
Not that I’m complaining though. Gives me a reason to farm heroics for gladiator gear over T8. Oh wait, T8? nevermind…
But being really cold does suck really, really bad.
Well… The body is healed when blood carries nutrients to the affected part of the body. Blood is warm. So, healing is warm. So, it stands to reason that if you’re really cold, it would be more difficult to heal.
-OR-
Maybe when you’re enemy is chilled there’s a small amount of ice over their entire body that is more difficult to heal through.
But seriously, it certainly does bring up some interesting points to ponder.
Oh god don’t remind me of my Shadow Priest days, i spent 5 minutes when i first hit 70 in a BG and swore never to do it again.
Even with Dispersion a SP has at most 10 seconds to live when someone decides to kill it, the only good build for surviving being a target is a Focused Will/Blessed Resilience build which tags all the PvP trimmings.
but unless they buff holy DPS abilities such as Holy Fire and Smite a priest will never get a good kill on someone with that kind of build.
It even gimps healing in PvP because of the lack of Penance, Pain suppression, Guardian spirit ECT.
But enouth about priest problems (should probably have posted that in my blog), the mage buffs that interest me are the Frost changes to Empowered Frost (which should effect Frostfire Bolt imo) which allows Frostbolt to be cast an additional 0.2 seconds faster.
Do you think it would be possible for a frost mage to get a 1.5 second Frostbolt cast with enouth haste?, i’d certainly like to see Frost become a viable PvE spec as it is currently my favourate spec.
I’m glad you believe caster pvp is ok beyond SPriests. If you check your local ratings, you’ll see, its melee or bust.
Besides, Blizz doesn’t want arena games to go on for hours. This only helps their cause.
Guess we’ll see if it makes it.
Also, have you fought a holy paladin? I would add a non-dispellable snare for this purpose alone.
I would gladly put MS on a 1 minute cooldown if they either gave me:
1. A CC ability (reasonably repeatable)
2. MAGIC DAMAGE MITIGATION (lots of good plate does if EVERYONE goes straight through it)
3. The titangrip penalty removed.
4. Increase Arms burst damage
I like pvp when certain classes can do certain things and ONLY have that class do a certain thing.
Mind control I believe is the only unique ability left isn’t it? What’s wrong with having a class specific skill?
@ Spocket
I never said caster PvP was ok beyond spriests, it’s just spriests are worse off than any other caster is.
Except possibly holy priests.
I also don’t find Holy Paladins that hard to shut down. Relative to, say, disc priests and druids, holy paladins are actually fairly easy kills.
I should explain. The beginning of our 1v1, after both teammates died, it was him at 15-20% health/mana line of sighting me around the Dalaran sewer map until he was full health/mana and just took me down to zero mana and basically nipped at me until he was able to zerg me with his ranged execute. It was hard enough to get a cast off due to his constant los and unforgiving hammers. I did have him low a few times but freedom/dispel/bubble/trinket is a lethal combo. Especially on that map.
Sure if this were in a bg, things would have been different. I’m pretty sure this guy has had a lot of experience. When the AI cast of my pet/mi couldn’t hit him, what am I to do? What would you have done?
“1. A CC ability (reasonably repeatable)”
Hamstring is nicknamed ‘Spamstring’ for a reason, you know? And don’t say it isn’t a CC – it takes movement away, it controls someone, therefore it IS CC. Charge > Hamstring > blow-up-opponent – that’s Warrior PvP in a nutshell, right?
Now on the other hand if you want a way to take someone out of a fight, ala Poly, Sap, Blind, Fear etc, I can understand, and can support it; I just don’t think it will happen. Classes are getting closer together, but Warriors have NEVER been about completely removing someone from a fight. They’re the atypical brutish…well…warrior, ignoring pain while they dish it out.
@ Spocket
What spec was he? Holy/Ret hybrid? Fully holy? Prot build?
Dalaran isn’t a forgiving map anyways, those boxes are hell. Talk about wonky LoS…
[...] is a lot of emphasis on “bring the player, not the class” which has been changed, as Critical QQ put it, to sometimes mean “bring the classes, not the class.” My question is this: why? [...]
I think this falls under the same category as Dispells.
GC recently commented (that every PvP pally knew) that priests are pretty much hard counters to Pally’s. They clip our wings, and smash our bubbles. He countered that he would like to see that spread about a bit, and maybe make it not quite so powerful.
Why should warriors be the hard counter to not just priests, but healers in general?
That is not to say that I agree with homogenization. Its getting a little “stale” in a vanilla sort of way.