Friday, December 4, 2009

Have the forsaken been forsaken?

Patch notes always manage to annoy me. Of course they do, I am a warlock after all and even though I am now far more in tune with other character classes understanding their soft spots and where they could use some help seeing the stale and uncreative changes to the warlock class never put a huge smile on my face.

But this is not about warlocks... at least not specifically. I make it about warlocks because I happen to be a warlock of the undead variety. So chosen back in the day for the race defining ability 'will of the forsaken'.

Will of the forsaken is an absolute godsent for any warlock especially in the northrend PvP game. Together with the standard PVP trinket undead warlocks can break snares twice and happily port back to their circle of magical 'there will be a warlock here soon' glowiness (you know the little green circle things where rogues like to hang out).

But the PTR patch notes for 3.3 tell us a story of foreboding doom:

"Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc."

Which in essence means that your race defining ability now shares a cooldown with quite a few silly little pvp trinkets that are available to pretty much anyone with the gumption to cap a few towers in Hellfire peninsula or do any other moderated form of pvp.

So no matter what kind of undead you are, come 3.3. your PVP trinket will be useless. After all it's not like you can exchange racials nor do you get the option to change race after such a modification so the only real thing left to do is hunt for a new trinket.

Perhaps this is the great equalizer, a cheap little trick to snuff out the value of yet another racial to bring it in line with the collection of other marginally useful racials.

But to this here warlock, whom even with a spec that is literally built for survival it's a significant kick in his non-existing nuts (organic stuff does not stay attached post death).

I can stomach the fact that I have to go look for a different trinket, in a way it's a relief not to have to go for the pvp trinket anymore but losing yet another defensive cooldown is hard especially when you know you're reliant on it for your survival.

My warlocks future looks somewhat bleaker for it. Now rather than to trinket out of the rogue stun, port back to my circle and WotF out of the rogue stun from the rogue that's surely there I get to recapture those lovely moments all us warlocks know where we get bursted down from 100% to 0 in the duration of a single stun.

But hey, maybe we can hit the sacrifice button from our otherwise useless voidwalker before the second rogue gets to us. Or perhaps they got bored waiting on that big green glowing blotch on the floor for a warlock to appear. Or maybe we can get that 1000+ resilience we're going to need to just live through the initial stunlock burst sequence so we actually get to cast something. Or maybe I'll just stay in the tree I've been sitting in casting dots at the passing crowds.

On the bright side it may, in the long run, result in a few less undead in the world and we'd all be better of without so many of us trying to develop a new plague to turn us all into forsaken (in which case all of y'all will get our spiffy racial).

WotF much?

3 comments:

jeffo said...

I'm not a PvP'er, but I went through the 'hassle' (not really a hassle, I suppose -- a bunch of Wintergrasp battles) of PvP to get a trinket specifically to use against the pesky faction champions. First time I tried to use it I found it shared a cooldown with 'Every Man for Himself'. What a letdown!

Rohan said...

I don't think that's not quite right. Those trinkets have a 2-min cooldown. They don't replace WotF, but ensure that you can't break 2 CC back-to-back.

An Undead will be able to break CC once a minute, where every other race can only break CC once every 2 minutes.

0s - Trinket
45s - WotF
120s - Trinket
165s - WotF

Captain The First said...

You make a good point in that though it does devaluate the racial by at least 50%.

I'll have to hope rogues on my server lose their taste for parking in the big green circle I leave behind occasionally otherwise I am certainly not helped by this change.