http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=7373948824&sid=1

priests brutal gear vs deadly gear

our armour value from level 70 brutal gear has cut down to half for lvl 80 deadly gear armour?? ok, a lot more stam and resilience for level 80 gear, but..... armour cut down in half????? in level 80 gear?????? PLEASE tell me you meant to DOUBLE IT because more and more i think about this, more this pisses me off. I really SHOULD , I REALLY should see a reply from GC, and this should get fixed immediately.


I know some of you guys might think im over reacting, but please, make a stand for this. I am PRETTY sure doubled armour will definately help us.

Nice thought. However, I was posting about this back in the early days of beta, and there's never been a reply.

Not only is the armor reduced directly, there's extra combined effect since, after all, each point at 80 is only the % mitigation of 0.7 points at 70.

While armor penetration was reallocated towards other stats in the item budget for melee PvP gear, the melee plate DPS gear of season 5 now gets 30% more stamina than the PvP gear for warlocks, other casters, and healers.

The curious part is apparently there aren't any dissenting members of the dev team now to decisions like this. GC wrote in another thread (bolding added):

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Q u o t e:
Once we agree on a change (and we almost always agree -- I can't think of a single change we made where some designers were on board with a change and others had serious reservations), we will bounce it off of several people, both at Blizzard, and other expert and casual people in the community as well.

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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13908949500&sid=1

One wonders. Did all the developers think melee were underrepresented in season 4 and relative caster armor / stamina needed to be nerfed so much? That wouldn't make any sense if they were looking at statistics. So my guess is perhaps most members of the dev team being focused on PvE and then 1 or 2 having a perspective from playing primarily certain classes in PvP.

Or perhaps they test and judge primarily based upon personal experience but happen to have a small number of official testers, like they have a really good shadow priest tester fighting a less skilled mutilate rogue, as a result concluding that the matchup is an even chance for both. That would be the weakness of a too small sample size compared to the overall statistics for representation at high arena rankings like those at realmhistory.net.

I found the survivability of cloth classes to be ridiculous in TBC.

I find the survivability of cloth classes to be ridiculous in LK - just on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Blizzard and Class Balance have never been great friends.

If Blizzard is reluctant to change every single item, they could always up the mitigation coefficient for those classes. The fact that armor is lower for cloth and leather - not to mention mail wearing characters seem a *lot* squishier - would certainly explain the vulnerability they have against melee, rogues in particular. Of course, that will set off a storm of tears from rogues, but really, what doesn't?

I'd really like to see a bit more survivability for everyone not in plate in both PvE and PvP. I'll reserve judgement on resilience in PvP until we see more, but my instincts tell me it isn't going to change much.

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Q u o t e:
We changed the way we itemized PvP gear between seasons 4 and 5. The largest change is that resilience uses up much more of an item's budget, where previously it was almost bonus. We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level) because it was causing some weird issues for certain characters, like Feral druids. The next few seasons should follow this new design, though of course we might decide to change that design for some pressing reason. Since we figured very few players would keep their level 70 gear over level 80 gear, we figured it was a fine time to change things across the board.

We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

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ok... so maybe you should consider switching it back? The resilience that is.

So Brutal cloth gear having twice the armor of Deadly gear was intended? Because no other armor-classes received anywhere near this degree of penalty.

So I guess cloth having less mitigation and survival vs melee at 80 than at 70 was planned, yet we have always known that Melee > cloth in most circumstances..

HMMMMMM

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Q u o t e:


We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

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Perhaps having it scale with the amount of armor might make it interesting. Then there could be issues with that as well, but not sure what they could be at the moment. /shrug

armor pen was also nerfed when changed to a percentage instead of giving it a flat amount of armor reduction. in 70 a typical amount was around 1k in pvp and when WotLK introduced armor pen gems they needed to change it to a % or people would be running around with 2k+ easy and with what my armor is right now 4449 with 519 resil and no improved inner fire. armor pen would be way to geared for cloth killers and since now it is a % it affects everyone somewhat more equal. and that would make sence is to why they took away our bonus armor on lvl 70 gear.

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Q u o t e:
We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

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Actually since the move to rating, armor penetration on gear is now better against high armor targets than low armor targets. Sunder armor and faerie fire (and their equivalents) are still better against low armor targets.

Edit: that's assuming "reduces armor by up to x" means "reduces armor by x". Perhaps I don't understand how armor penetration rating works.

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Q u o t e:
The largest change is that resilience uses up much more of an item's budget, where previously it was almost bonus. We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level)

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It looks like the federal government needs to start regulating more then one economy. VOTE Greenspan for Arena Item Designer!

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Q u o t e:

We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

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I once got an F on a brilliant design because I was sleep deprived near comatose when I wrote a poetic recursive function and couldn't explain how it worked fully when I turned it in. Or the F I got when one of my team members wrote documentation for the wrong project.

Is the code base too difficult to extrapolate to end product or is it lack of communication?

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Q u o t e:
armor pen was also nerfed when changed to a percentage instead of giving it a flat amount of armor reduction. in 70 a typical amount was around 1k in pvp and when WotLK introduced armor pen gems they needed to change it to a % or people would be running around with 2k+ easy and with what my armor is right now 4449 with 519 resil and no improved inner fire. armor pen would be way to geared for cloth killers and since now it is a % it affects everyone somewhat more equal. and that would make sence is to why they took away our bonus armor on lvl 70 gear.

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No, given the scaling and percentages of both, the numbers hardly match up.

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Q u o t e:
We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level) because it was causing some weird issues for certain characters, like Feral druids.

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In a way, I could understand that, with a focus on PvE. Except there's one problem.

With bonus armor no longer subject to the multipliers and thus little affecting PvE tanking anyway, there's no need for the change:

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Q u o t e:
Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.

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http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=29837.0

Of course you already know that, so I'm just pointing out the obvious for the benefit of other readers.

But the conclusion is that eliminating bonus armor is utterly unnecessary for PvE since other changes already take care of the issue, so it mainly has an effect on PvP, as to be expected since it is PvP gear anyway.

And the effect on PvP is beneficial if but only if one thinks cloth survivability against melee is too high, such as if one thinks warlocks and shadow priests are overpowered against death knights and rogues.

I don't think you could think that.

So I have a suspicion what is going on is feelings about how things should be overriding class balance as a priority. Specifically, those who play melee classes sometimes think it is wrong or unrealistic that a cloth character doesn't die within several hits. Shouldn't a giant axe go through their robe in a moment?

Yet it is clear realism can't be the priority in the game where magic can change anything. Otherwise, it would be a boring imbalanced game where a charging sword-wielding attacker died immediately at 50 yards to a hunter with a gun, as guns made swords obsolete in real life. Rather, the priority should be what makes the classes more balanced and with near-equal chances of reaching the highest ratings.

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Q u o t e:
We changed the way we itemized PvP gear between seasons 4 and 5. The largest change is that resilience uses up much more of an item's budget, where previously it was almost bonus. We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level) because it was causing some weird issues for certain characters, like Feral druids. The next few seasons should follow this new design, though of course we might decide to change that design for some pressing reason. Since we figured very few players would keep their level 70 gear over level 80 gear, we figured it was a fine time to change things across the board.

We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

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Yeah I think it would make much more sense to have armor pen be most beneficial on a heavily armored target.