Comments on: Fixing the Forest, Part IV – Symbiosis

By: silvetica

silvetica — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:28:20 +0000

i’m kinda tired of the symbiosis qq. druids everywhere moaning, other classes moaning about what they get and the pvp crowd up in arms because it is TOO powerful.
druids have yelled for ages about holes in our toolkits.
restos wanted more raid utility. now we have ironbark and this
resto’s wanted to be less squishy. now we have this.
other resto’s wanted other stuff. now we have this.
blizz are basically saying fine we will fix one problem but you can choose which problem is fixed.
ferals get target switching fixed (soul swap or redirect)
dps druids get aggro drop (play dead, mirror images).
will we need this every fight? i doubt it.
will this be awesome used well in many raid encounters? yes.
will it be amazing in pvp? oh yes.
i am looking forward to the experiment where i discover if i can teleport with the flag .
this is without doubt the most interesting and creative spell blizz have ever made. it looks to me as if they have balanced it ok and whether we use it to it’s utmost is entirely down to us. be excited guys. be creative and learn to enjoy the huge versatilty blizz are giving our most versatile of classes this expac.
peace out
silvetica.

By: Algorython/Howlinwolf

Algorython/Howlinwolf — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:01:14 +0000

Rallying Cry from warriors would be nice, but probably OP. It’s not bloody likely to happen.

Rallying Cry
3 min cooldown
Temporarily grants you and all party or raid members within 30 yards 20% of maximum health for 10 sec. After the effect expires, the health is lost.

I use it on my Arms warrior all the time in LFR.

I agree that so far it looks like this talent is going to be either a nightmare to balance or not worth using.

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:30:14 +0000

“I don’t think that anyone is saying that you can’t find uses for Symbiosis, just that it isn’t really useful enough for our big, shiny new uber-ability. It also comes with a lot of meta-baggage and potential for intra-party/raid/pvp-group strife.”

Exactly!

While I can appreciate that 10 man raid leaders may be happy about some of the added “utility” it is bringing their raid – I sort of think that this fact alone is part of the problem. And if you only have one druid in your raid, and think that your symbiosis is going anywhere but your tank, based on how strong it is for all of the tanks, I would respectfully suggest that you are mistaken. I really don’t think it’s going to be a “swiss army knife” of anything other than class balancing issues and orginizational headaches.

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:26:15 +0000

I would hope that you are right, but I fear that it is here to stay

I definitely agree that they are going to have balancing issues galore with this, and it’s going to cause all kinds of problems.

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:23:52 +0000

But it really isn’t a shiny new toy is it? I mean nothing that it is doing it unique, and everything we have is dependant on having someone else to “give” me my “shiny”. The best abilities are additional personal mitigation cooldowns, and the worst abilities for resto are borderline pointless. Not a single one of them gives me a boost to my main role (which actually happens for guardians), which makes it fairly disappointing. I know that there are balancing problems galore, which is probably why we have the nature of the abilities that we have, but I will admit that it seems a little unfair that the bears get some truly fun shit while I’m stuck with barkskin of a different color

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:20:57 +0000

Eh, even with a mobile tranquility it’s unfortunately still really lackluster I’m afraid. Assuming that they retain the cooldowns that the original abilities have, SWG and Tranq would line up nicely – but I’d still take a mitigation cooldown over this.

Oh man, I didn’t even think about leaping as a GIANT TREE OF DOOM!

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:18:44 +0000

haha, but I already have something bound to Shift-S on Beru! (Which is also my heroic leap bind on my warrior )

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:08:45 +0000

See, I think it’s a bit of mistake for how powerful Symbiosis is looking for tanks. Because it starts becoming a balancing problem for raids with no druids (or only one druid in a 25 man), and starts to looking more like DI. I know that some 10 mans are happy for the added utility it brings, and I get that, but I think it is also a very tricky line that is being walked and if Blizzard is not very careful they are going to open up a pandora’s box that they cannot hope to contain or close again.

On that note, if it is so good for tanks, why can’t non-guardian druids get some useful, active, non-mitigation abilities that will enhance their ability to perform their main role as well?

I do hope that we see some changes with a few of the talents to make them more useful/desireable

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:54:35 +0000

heh.

After two expansions (and almost four years!) it would just be nice to have something to get excited about with regards to my class

With regards to Monk/Paladin/Warlock – Monks are new in and of themselves, but both Paladins (healing) and Warlocks are getting pretty big overhauls to the class, which means that they are getting some new, fun things to play around with as a whole. I remember reading about some of the paladin changes when they were coming out and being a touch jealous!

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:44:19 +0000

I wouldn’t say that all of the abilities are useless. The mitigation abilities will most certainly be useful in many situations – even if they aren’t really what we’d like to see