Was your strawman argument easy enough for you to knock down? He said nothing like that at all. Every other dps buff is either group wide (windfury) or raidwide (bloodlust/heroism, battle shout, stupid monk or dh buffs) ONLY PI allows a priest to just give away their big cooldown to a dps, but because it is so strong, the mathematically superior model is to give it away to a dps class. So we have a world where priests are frowned at if they use their personal on themselves. But go ahead keep throwing out your logical fallacies until something sticks.
I personally want PI to be made self use only and/or slightly nerfed. The amount of people that start talking crap about me when I don’t give it to them because of ThEiR pArSeS is just obnoxious. I enjoyed giving it to one of our tanks just to spite them 
But also please remove searing nightmare. No one likes this.
The person I responded to didn’t even mention priests and not being able to cast it on themselves.
They did however mention how important players being on the same “playing field” was.
The thing is, if this reasoning is honest…raid mechanics also contribute to these same grievances. If I get a mechanic and I have to run out or move to a designated area with something, I lose damage compared to other people playing my same class. So, for the sake of appeasing the person I’m replying to, should raid mechanics be removed?
The arguments for removing PI are fallacious in nature. Players want a “fair competition” from raids, but raids aren’t a competition to begin with. Blizzard made a blue post back in December that even explained this.
“Another way of looking at this is: the “killing the boss” goal is made by us. The “ranking” goal is made and managed by players.”
Essentially, their goal (or, their job) isn’t to design an enviroment that fosters fair competition. Their goal/job is to design bosses for you/your guild/your group to kill together.
Lets not mischaratize what the blue post said: “This is a good topic, and a difficult one because it gets to a lot of questions about varying player tastes. No definitive answer–and we want people to keep talking about it–but a few thoughts:” Is the heading for that blue post. Source: External cooldowns/buffs on other players in group settings - #13 by Sigma-11129
Also since we are talking about it lets talk about this bit:
“One of the most difficult aspects of this topic is social tension. Sometimes people argue with their teammates about buffs. It’s very understandable, to me, why one possible response someone might have for that is–this can put you at odds with your own groupmates, so stamp it out. The flip side of that is: this is part and parcel of playing with real people in a large cooperative group. And preserving the human element of group play in WoW, not boiling it down to predictable mechanical interactions, is an important value. See for example, the common lament that group-finder content has lost a lot of the human interaction from the experience. Mechanics that involve interacting with groupmates bring out both the good and the bad of that, and that might be better than having neither.” Source: External cooldowns/buffs on other players in group settings - #13 by Sigma-11129
So our blue friend Sigma wrote this in the community council forums and with apologies I must say its a very silly idea. To sum it up they recognize that it can cause social tension and even “put you at odds with your own groupmates”. But this is a social game, and people say they miss socializing, and mechanics like this bring out the good and bad and that might be better than having neither. … uhhh ya we so enjoy getting mad at eachother that is the quality game play we look forward to and enjoy so much and tell stories about to our friends how we didn’t get PI all tier even though the other rogue did and it made it so angering and frustrating to me. Again, they are trying to play devils advocate, but whatever good feelings come from PI are heavily outweighed by the negative feelings. And if Blizz really wants there to be fewer people into raiding this is a great way to do that.
1 Like
Ofc not, every boss being patchwerk or not is irrelevant.
Player A to D gets no PI, can be hit by random mechanic.
Player E gets PI, can be hit by random mechanic.
The first batch of players can be hit and the PI buffed player can be hit.
This does not erase PI from the equation.
It’s always a huge + on the PI player every 2 minutes.
How is Life Grip equivalent to PI? A Priest can’t Life Grip themselves.
Also Shadow Priests exist.
Bold claim to argue that Blizzard DON’T take into account external buffs when specs that are overperforming scale incredibly well with those external buffs.
Though I’m sure it’s a coincidence that it was best to PI Venthyr Boomkins and then Venthyr Boomkins got nerfed, and then it became best to PI Demo Locks so Demo got nerfed.
A well designed ability shouldn’t create problems though. That’s why Blizzard removed crap like Improved Shadowbolt/Scorch and reworked abilities like Shaman Totems and Bloodlust.
I didn’t oversimplify? Read PI’s tooltip. It’s literally just Haste.
You can duplicate PI’s effect by equipping gear (granted, you’d need a LOT of gear, or Corruptions back).
I know a way to make RL jobs easier regarding PI.
I mean it still doesn’t really fix the issue.
Arguably it makes it worse for SPriests since a RL might not care enough to force them to give up PI, but with DF Talents why wouldn’t you?
And even with the legendary (or DF talents), it still doesn’t feel good to have to hold your cooldowns because popping them alongside the Boomkin/Warlock/Whoever is OP with PI for that particular patch because different classes have different cooldown cycles with Demos being 90s (without Wilfreds) and Venthyr Boomkins being 3 mins.
I think the biggest problem with this argument is that in the level of play where PI actually matters, the loss of the “social aspect” was never missing to begin with.
The high-end raiding, PvP or M+ scene (where PI is an issue) never lacked for socialisation purely because that content was never made irrelevant by stuff like automatically matchmade groups.
Any content where I care enough to actually organise PI beyond a “just chuck it on whoever you want whenever you want”, chances are that I’m already on Discord socialising with them to begin with.
I don’t think he’s mischaracterizing the blue post at all. Sigma was very deliberate about not condemning the playstyle of competing on damage, because such a playstyle is a perfectly fine thing to do in-game. However he then goes on to write several paragraphs about it’s not officially supported and how the design goal of raids is first and foremost about a team killing a boss, not a damage competition.
Since the damage competition is both created and maintained entirely by third-party player communities, I don’t see why it’s Blizzard’s responsibility to change their game in order to suit it. This is a problem that only exists within and only affects warcraftlogs. So they should be the ones to come up with a solution, not Blizzard.
That’s not quite what he’s saying. Many groups are able to handle PI without getting petty about it. There are players out there who like casting spells to directly support their teammates and there are players out there who like combining the efforts of multiple players to produce something greater than either of them could have alone. That’s the synergistic social feeling that people enjoy about PI.
Sigma is saying that they want to preserve human-to-human interaction in WoW so that raids aren’t just 20 players playing solitaire next to each other. Disagreements are a fact of life when you have human-to-human interaction. No matter what Blizzard does there will be players out there who get upset at their groupmates for one reason or another. I’ve gone on record saying that there’s no such thing as a “drama-free guild,” only a guild that is not old enough to have seen drama yet. If I knew at the time when my GM asked me to be an officer how much of this guild officer job would be mediating between adults who insist on behaving like children I would have turned her down on the spot. It’s an unavoidable consequence of gathering any amount of human beings in the same room for any length of time.
As I said earlier about guilds, compromises, and social contracts, learning to go along to get along with your guild is kind of a necessary part of healthy group play. Not just in WoW but in any team sport. Players are responsible for their own behavior in the end and we do have some degree of control over the community we’re a part of. If you can’t learn to live with the community you joined because they’re not willing to indulge your damage competition, then I’m not sure why finding another community that suits you better isn’t an option. If such a community is too difficult to find or put together then I must say that I don’t believe your position on PI is anywhere near popular enough to affect the change you want. Especially now that in DF the Twin Suns talent will be all but mandatory for Priests going forward, so Priests don’t have to give anything up to help their teammates.
1 Like
Blizz created the combat tracker, all we are doing is making that intelligible. It would be like if all the races in wow spoke different languages and you used google translate to understand it. Also, there are plenty of people who just go off details for their friendly competitions that PI is making less fun.
People in other threads have also put it quite well like this. For an organized group doing progression the spell is fine, but when it comes to farm the spell is a nightmare. With Blizzard seemingly committed to these shorter seasons there is simply no time to get through all the content and then play ring around the rosy week to week with all the different dps.
In practice in organized raids healing priests likely won’t waste the 4 points required to get Twins, but it will be pretty much mandatory for shadow priests. Why? Because unless they come up with some pretty crazy healing checks there is no way the priests won’t be using PI to boost dps spec IE at 0:00; 2:00; 4:00, so unless some big dmg even lines up with one of those times twins is probably worse than where they could put the other 4 points.
I was playing around with the talent calculator yesterday and while I will confess to only having a very tangential knowledge of Priest meta, there’s really not a ton of competition for talent points for Shadow Priests on the class tree. If their only focus is on doing damage they can easily pick up all the damage-dealing talents with a few points to spare. Since Twin Suns gates off Mind Games there’s no way they don’t pick that just off the placement alone. You say that they’d probably be better off spending the talent points elsewhere… where? There’s no other damage in the class tree and they still have a few points left over to pick up some pieces of utility on a fight-by-fight basis.
And if healing Priests don’t end up picking Twin Suns… I don’t see the problem there. We were upset with PI on Shadow Priests specifically because they had to give up their own damage in order to boost someone else’s damage. That’s not really a dilemma for healing Priests so it’s less of a big deal if they don’t take it.
Did I say that players created the combat tracker or did I say that they created the competition? Yes I am fully aware that damage meters simply record and display what people do without making up any information. That information on its own is not a scoreboard. It’s the players who turned it into one and it’s warcraftlogs who decided to credit the recipient with the “points” generated by a Priest when they cast PI. In a world where the points don’t matter (the one Blizzard designs for) it doesn’t matter who gets the credit for PI damage.
This is one of the main issues. “Muh deeps!”
I’m one of them
2 Likes
I do agree that if it wasn’t influencing logs it wouldn’t be a problem, so how could we actually accomplish that: 1) Make it self cast only. Problem solved. 2) Change it from what it is to what it really does: What do I mean, currently 25% haste for 20 seconds on a 2 min CD doesn’t resonate with enough people on what that really means. So lets just make it 20% more damage done, then you could have people understand what it is doing and realize why it sucks. Its a stronger spell than bloodlust for a single target after 3 casts. Get two priests funnelling into one target and its almost like having bloodlust up for half or more of the fight.
I still prefer my solution, which is to remember that warcraftlogs rankings don’t matter and then there’s no problem to solve. I’m not willing to propose a WoW change to a warcraftlogs solution. Yell at warcraftlogs until they fix their scoreboard and find a way to credit the Priest with the extra damage done by PI.
I don’t realize why that sucks. In fact that would make this extremely easy. Instead of a complicated haste calculation just have warcraftlogs take the extra 20% of the damage the recipient does while PI is active and credit it to the Priest. That is literally word for word what Dancers do for their dance partner in FF14.
I don’t think anyone is confused on whether or not PI gives the recipient more damage.
You seem to consistently miss my points so Ill try to be more explicit. If it was redesigned to just give 20% more damage, then the toxicity surrounding it would be overwhelming. Its slightly muted because some people are bad with numbers and don’t realize what it is doing.
And sure most people probably recognize it gives a benefit, but you want to go poll your local trade chat and ask if they understand how much dps PI gives?
We want a fair starting line for a fun and friendly competition, a game within a game that we enjoy. This button is interfering. We want it changed or removed.
That sounds like you’re taking issue with the potency then, not the design principle. Would it be more acceptable if it was a 5% damage boost?
I said as much in one of my earlier replies, I don’t have too much stake in the exact power scaling of the ability. If it’s too strong it’s too strong and I’m fine nerfing that if that’s the case. I even commented at the time that 25% is a lot of haste so I wouldn’t be super broken up if that were reduced. It’s really more of the design concept I want to protect and that I’m less willing to compromise on.
You want to change the game for the sake of the game within the game. Do you see how people who enjoy the supportive aspect of PI and don’t care about your game within a game would be upset by that? I’m glad you enjoy the game within a game. I enjoy being competitive with my logs as well. But never forget that the game you’re playing is secondary and is using made-up rules that Blizzard has no authority to enforce. If you want to have that sort of competition within your own group, why can’t you enforce the rules yourself and ask your Priests to only PI themselves? After all, you mentioned that this is mainly a problem with farm content. The extra damage is not going to make or break so if the competition is the main focus, let it be the main focus and set some terms of engagement.
In all honesty the problem becomes manageable if its power is reduced and it goes from haste to flat damage so its at least calculable. So if you can rally around that idea with me I’ll shout it from the rooftops.
Go for it. I’m more ambivalent about that change than anything else. I don’t really actively support it but I’m fine if that’s the change Blizzard were to make and I wouldn’t stand in your way. So long as the design concept of an external party buff is maintained then I’m happy.
The other advantage I think flat damage has is it widens the variety of specs that like to receive it. In any given raid group, especially at Heroic and below, the top damage dealer could be any spec and no matter which spec they are they’d be the best target. I’m usually one of the top damage dealers in my raid but I’ve actually gone on record instructing our Priests not to PI me because Feral scales incredibly poorly with haste.
Agreed, it also goes back and makes the damage creditable to the priest so we can actually see how they are doing, and it won’t be reflected so much for the receiver in terms of making them look insane, and still helps kill bosses faster.
1 Like
You have a covenant ability exponentially increased damage, haste, and crit with # of spellcasts in a window, and a legendary that nearly doubles it’s duration. It’s scaling at an unprecedented level. You’re arguing that the scaling isn’t the issue, but some of the stats that get fed into it.
PI doesn’t create game problems though. There’s nothing in the game that would be “fixed” with the removal of PI. Everything that players take issue with in regards to PI is external.
Innervate is literally just free spells (mana). I suppose interesting is subjective though.
This level of play is such a small minority of the playerbase. Most cutting edge guilds don’t even need to optimize PI outside of world first. Why does every priest in the game need to lose the ability to appease this minority?
It’s not being mischaracterized. Yes, it’s a great point of topic with no definitive answer. I’m not using the blue post to condemn the idea of competition, using logs as a scoreboard, whatever. People can do whatever they want during their raids. My point was what the blue post was getting at:
Logs, competition, all of that player made stuff…it’s not the game they make. This is what players bring into the game. It isn’t their job or their goal to design raids to cater to those aspect, their job is to design a raid that has bosses in it for you to kill.
4 Likes
Scaling absolutely is the issue. Scaling also includes cooldown stacking though.
Stuff like Venthyr Boomkin, Demo Lock or Fire Mage might have only been just strong with their own inherent scaling (and lust ofc). But once you start introduce stuff like NF Fairies or PI into the equation, since those classes scale incredibly well, PI scales them beyond the pale in regards to balance.
Is a problem within the game about how abilities interact within a social setting not a game problem?
The problem people have is entirely WITH one of the tools in-game.
I mean if Innervate just gave you X mana back, it’d be pretty flat, I’d agree. But making spells cost zero is a different beast to just returning a chunk of mana.
Innervate is purely interesting because Healer resources work differently than how DPS resources do.
Haste is just…Haste. Fundamentally the thought regarding PI largely stops at “which DPS spec benefits the most from having an extra Bloodlust every 2 minutes”. Innervate has a bit more optimization that swings heavily between fights because healing changes a lot more between fights than DPS does.
It’s not particularly interesting for the Priest to use or the DPS to use. I think NF Fairies or Paladin NF Blessings are a much more interesting way of handling utility than PI is.
That level of play is the only part of the game where PI is used effectively though.
Keep in mind I’m not advocating for PI’s literal removal. Just making it self-cast.
1 Like
Is your argument that these classes weren’t “beyond the pale” without PI?
Even if you’re right and Blizzard came out and said that PI scaling was why they nerfed these specs, there are 24 dps specs in the game. If 3 of them are broken with PI, you don’t fix the problem by removing PI; these scaling specs are still going to scale better and be the strongest specs. You fix the scaling of the specs with op scaling.
It isn’t an inherent problem. It isn’t a problem that most players even have. It’s not something that Blizzard needs to solve. If players come in with their own external goals outside of “kill the boss”, Blizzard doesn’t need to cater to those goals.
If every player with “a problem in a social setting” complained about how handling mechanics impacted their parse, should Blizzard cave in and remove those mechanics?
Wasn’t someone in this thread earlier complaining about having to micro-manage PI? He even linked a spreadsheet for it lmao.
Optimally. The word you’re looking for is optimally. And that’s true of literally every ability.
Keep in mind there are several priests, many of which are in this thread, that enjoy the aspect of using it to buff other players. Also, keep in mind despite my arguments here, I’m pretty indifferent to whether it goes or stays. I just think that most of the arguments for removing it are silly.
1 Like