Ask the Devs Round 1/CLASSES

Don: Since launch, we’ve been increasing the damage on the Wizard’s Secondary abilities to try and make them useful tools in specific builds and for specific play styles. While we believe we’ve made them viable for specific builds and specific gear setups, these builds are being overshadowed by the ease and effectiveness of CM and Archon. We don’t want to just keep on increasing numbers, as that would make that class spiral out of control balance-wise.

That being said, we are aware that Arcane Orb and every channeled ability not named Archon Disintegrate are not very popular. We have plans to reevaluate the Arcane Orb skill as a whole and are working toward solutions to the innate problem of the Wizard’s channeled abilities: e.g. Wizards are vulnerable when they’re standing still to channel.

One of the problems with the unattractive Arcane Power spenders is that the only way to sustain casting these abilities is with APoC. Since this relies on procs, Arcane Power spenders with high proc scalars outshine the ones with low ones. We are looking at ways other than APoC for those Wizards with high attack speed to be able to sustain casting Arcane Power spenders for an extended period of time.

Wyatt: Overall we're okay with the current state of Monk passives. That's not to say they're perfect (we'll definitely be working on them more), but we did not feel the current issues were severe enough to warrant changes at this time. The Monk got some changes to passives in previous patches, so keep that in mind as well.

There's a lot of moving parts on any class―interdependencies in which changes to one part of the class can have many downstream effects. In the case of the Monk, there are two big outstanding issues to address before further changes to passives happen: the inequity between the 4 spirit generators and their rune variants, and One with Everything.

Speaking of One with Everything, we've mentioned many times in the past that we're looking to make this passive feel less mandatory and a number of options have been discussed. This seems like a good opportunity to discuss some of the solutions that have come up internally. Please keep in mind that this topic is still very much in the air.

• The most commonly proposed solution is to simply bake One With Everything directly into the Monk's class. In essence, give the passive away for free. This has a few issues. We don't currently bake a mechanic like this into other classes, so it would be something that’d need to be explained to new players or otherwise exist as a hidden bonus. It also represents a big boost to one class that's inequitable with the other classes. In addition, some Monks don't really like the mechanic, and have built their character around not taking One with Everything. Baking this into the class would make it so all Monks would be foolish not to take advantage of it. On the upside, it certainly frees up Monks to choose new passives without invalidating the current gear choices. Besides, who doesn't like getting something for nothing?
  
  

• Another option is to alter gear in the future to not drop both an elemental resistance and resist all. Many people already comment that if you have an item with resistance to only one particular school, it's counter-intuitive that the values are lower than a similar-tier affix for resist all. One thing we have talked about doing is increasing the element-specific values so they are higher than the resist all values by a comfortable margin, while simultaneously disallowing both affixes from rolling on the same item. This would allow Monks who want to specialize in a single school of resistance to do so, and pick up One With Everything, without making the benefit of double-stacking resistances so hard to ignore.
  
  

• A third option that has been discussed is breaking up the effect across all the existing passives. For example, Resolve might become "Damage you deal reduces enemy damage by 20% for 2.5 seconds. In addition any resistance lower than your Cold Resistance is increased to the level of your Cold Resistance." The advantage of such an approach is letting people continue to gain the effect, as well as creating a lot of diversity across different Monks. The disadvantage is your gear choices will lock you even more into particular passive choices, not to mention the cumbersome tooltips.
  
  

There are other solutions that have been discussed, but my intent in sharing these is to not only spark discussion and grant insight into our thought process, but also to demonstrate that when we say "we don't want to invalidate the gear Monks are currently wearing" we mean it.

Travis: One of our goals with the Monk changes of 1.0.7 was to try to encourage build diversity and open up more options to people who enjoy more active gameplay. To actually provide players with more build diversity, the first thing we have to do is make more skills desirable. So you are correct in your statement that we buffed skills people don’t use -- that’s kind of the point. Prior to patch 1.0.7, monks suffered from an underlying problem that caused many of their skills to simply not be worth a slot on their bar. In many cases, a player would gain a larger DPS increase by simply spending Spirit on Conviction Aura than they would spending a similar amount of Spirit on Wave of Light or Lashing Tail Kick. Our intent with these changes was to try to bring the skills that have more interesting gameplay associated with them up to a similar level as those that have little to no gameplay associated with them (i.e. the more passive abilities like Mantras).

We have plans on the table for how we want to change the existing Mantras, but none of them are final yet. In the case of Retribution for example, we think the mechanic is flawed at its core and touches on the same things that make Thorns an unappealing stat on items. However, one potential solution we are looking into is to make Retribution the same as Thorns and reflect a flat amount of damage instead of a percentage of incoming damage, and at the same time change all Thorns mechanics to be effected by your primary attribute. We think this approach will help give Retribution a place in certain character builds, though we also suspect that simply making all Thorns mechanics deal 2500% more damage than they currently do may be a bit too extreme. So, when we transition to this new mechanic we will have to do more tuning.