Wednesday, April 20, 2016

More Pet Tuning In Legion - Farewell Howl-Bomb

A number of pet tuning changes are coming in Legion, however even more updates are being considered.

New to the list:
  • Cleave damage reduced by 25% (no longer has a 1 round cooldown).

Dev note: We heard your concerns about adding a cooldown to cleave and agreed that this felt like a better solution.

  • Shell Armor duration reduced from 3 rounds to 2.

Dev note: Shell armor was very powerful compared to other flat damage reduction abilities, this should bring it more in line with them.

  • The damage bonus from Howl now only affects one attack.

  • Pandaren Water Spirit's Whirlpool and Geyser now share the same ability slot.

Dev note: This is our first iteration at disarming the Howl Bomb strategy in PvE, which has proven to be very powerful in too many situations. The goal is to make PvE battles more interesting and encourage the use of a wide variety of pets.
Developers are welcoming constructive discussion and feedback, as always!

I've left some feedback on one of the changes (Howl), because that one hits home for me. I'm biased since I *do use* Howl, but in non-Howl-Bomb strategies.

The Howl-Bomb nerfs were inevitable IMO, and while I'm a little sad to see it go (it was always nice to have a clutch strat if you got stuck on a fight or were short on time and needed a quick win), I'd like to think that it will be better overall for Pet Battle gameplay.

I wouldn't be surprised if a new 'go-to' strategy pops up though lol.

I don't think these changes are ready for testing on Alpha just yet, so those are just my initial thoughts. Depending on how these new tuning updates play out, I may change my point of view.

3 comments:

  1. Nooooooo! Without Howl Bomb, what is this game coming to?! That's it, WoW is officially dead. RIP.

    But really, good write up. I'll give you a shout out in WWG.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kronic Pet battlerMay 24, 2016 at 3:56 PM

    Blizzards devo team is so 1 dimensional. There is nothing wrong with the Howl-Bomb maneuver. Instead of removing power plays created by someone's painstakingly long research to figure out and create these strats, why can't they just create ways to block the move. Oh wait, there already are some, like burrow, and dive, and cocoon, and liftoff, and decoy. Stitch Jr. ignores any attack under 500 damage so moves like this and others come in very handy, and in some cases they are needed. Leave it to blizzard's devo team to screw the pooch every time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Welp... my pet battling days are over. Pet battles in WoW are officially dead.

    ReplyDelete

Creative Commons License
Perks N Peeves by Quintessence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.