Legion Pet Battle Tuning - Feedback wanted

[Paladance]

All right, maybe the alpha itself is a thing. I was rather thinking about the general pet battle scene that even without the access can imagine the results. Now I sound like a doomsayer, blah.

Though I can understand that without an availability to actually go through the Legion challenges (you need to level characters…) it's difficult to have a waypoint even for the testers.

[Jerebear]

The big thing for me is changing howl doesn't impact howl bombing really (The changes to the PWS do though). Any shattered defenses ability would have given the same impact, so you don't have to use howl. Heck, for most of the Tanaan battles that i did use PWS on, I used a flock or stampede or similar. If those got the same treatment as howl, they would be semi useless abilities (you still get the one attack of double damage, but now you have to lock yourself into 3 rounds of combat for 1 ability double damage...not worth the tradeoff...plus since it is multihit and the debuff is applied at the end, it would reduce the damage of the ability overall).

Then if you consider the howl nerf by itself, it makes the ability less useful. Prowl and Supercharge affect the next hit but both are buffs (better than a debuff) and have more than 100%. Granted they last 1 round while howl lasts two, but honestly that isn't a characteristic that matters much in PvE (and debuffs can be cleansed or swapped out in PvP). If they were gonna keep the nerf on Howl, I would hope they boost the damage a little to make it more worthwhile. Maybe 125%?.

I think the PWS change was fine and did what it needed to do, but the change to howl feels incomplete. I can't post on the alpha forums, but those are my thoughts.

[Vakeetah]

Howl is definitely overnerfed and not nearly worth using - other than with maybe [ability]Surge of Power[/ability], one of the standard use-cases which is possibly still on the OP side even with the "only for 1 hit" nerf.

Meanwhile, [ability]Stampede[/ability]/[ability]Hunting Party[/ability] still apply the 100% damage taken debuff, and are insane in conjunction with [ability]Black Claw[/ability]; and I'm willing to bet that abilities like [ability]Enrage[/ability] or [ability]Reckless Strike[/ability] are not going to get the "only for 1 hit" treatment either.

I still believe a damage cap would put an end to the Howl debate once and for all; but failing that, if they want to target Howl Bomb specifically, they could make it so that the new Howl debuff "morphs" into Shattered Defenses at the start of the following round. Would mess up the timing for bombs (which are non-existant anyway, with the changes to PWS) while having no impact on the current functionality.

[Aries]

The howl bomb nerf seems pretty pve focused, I've never really had a problem with it in pvp so not so much a balancing change but something to make the pet content they currently have/do harder for us to get through. I would have preferred to have seen a big buff to AI so that the content they make doesn't just catch a howl+whitlpool+gyser with their face and instead reacts accordingly. But anyway... There is one thing I don't particularly like currently and thats abilities that do an amount of damage that is "split" between the enemy team... I.e. Changes from an aoe to a single target skill basically depending on the amount of enemy pets. I think it is a bad mechanic... And I'm saying it's bad as someone who has pets that I really like that would get nerfed by a change to this. An yet I still think split damage as a mechanic should be removed.

[Paladance]

It isn't as simple as "one option or another". Not splitting further into cooldowns, currently there are 3 types of AoE (think [ability]Spiritfire Beam[/ability], [ability]Arcane Explosion[/ability] and [ability]Thunderbolt[/ability]) and each has its own "yays and nays".

What we'd need is a formula that balances out the damage at each stage of the encounter, not only the beginning or the end.
The AE-likes are supposed to do that, but in practice it doesn't go very well because spammable AoE moves are in general lame. And who the fel designed the [ability]Flux[/ability]? (Don't look here, there are always huge values at the ability pages )
I know that's because of [ability]Prowl[/ability], but the simultaneity never was a reason for breaking other abilities.

Okay, so how to build THE AoE ability from scratch?

• It has to have a reasonable cooldown -- not too short, to discourage spammability, and not too long, because of the big impact seen with Graves himself. Two or three rounds are enough.
• It should retain the total amount of damage dealt regardless on the stage, but in another way than the 1:1 split.
• The backline damage should be coverable by currently available AoE heals, like [ability]Bleat[/ability]. There may be some measuring problems because of breeds and healing RNG, but I believe that there is a good approximation. An ideal clone would be boring anyway!
• The damage dealt to the last survivor should correspond to the damage from a standard ability for that cooldown.

As EU buddy [url=http://www.warcraftpets.com/account/profiles/Vakeetah/]Vakeetah[/url] said, the general formula goes that way:

[BASE + (BASE/20) x AP]

For [ability]Bleat[/ability] (The model AoE heal, with not the highest HPR, but decent nevertheless. Warning: a 4R cooldown!), the base is 15.
The further calculations, sadly, I need to leave for someone more familiar with theorycrafting, or just write them another day. ^^