"Hey folks,
I wanted to share our thoughts regarding some of the questions and feedback that we have seen in the thread.
Playstyle of Annihilation / Watchman
As many of you know, there were changes made to the playstyle of
Annihilation and Watchman in 3.0. This definitely seems to be a
contentious change for some Marauder/Sentinel players. The last thing we
want to do is to put a Discipline’s playstyle in a place that makes its
players unhappy. We will keep an eye on this and look into possible
playstyle changes in the future. We don’t want you to think that this is
feedback that we are ignoring; it is just not something we will change
in the short term.
PvP Data
Our intent behind exposing win rates for Carnage/Combat and
Annihilation/Watchman was not to suggest that they are our only data
point for decision making. The goal was to express that, by looking at
average win rates and overall performance, those Disciplines can be
viable. Understanding, however, that in some of those cases it reflects
only the best players in that class. Still, it does show that they can
play at the top levels.
Now, you all brought up a really interesting fact, which is how
frequently you see Marauders/Sentinels in the top of all overall
ratings. It is true, in looking at that data point, that
Marauders/Sentinels are definitely under-represented, we agree! However,
we think the most important part of that data is not who is missing
from the top, but who makes up the top. Looking at the top spread of
players, almost all of them are spread across only three Advanced
Classes: Powertech/Vanguard, Sorcerer/Sage, and Assassin/Shadow. That is
the real problem that we are working on addressing right now. With
those three Advanced Classes over-performing, all other Advanced Classes
(including Marauders/Sentinels) are being pushed into a bad place. This
is why you will see that we are actively working on toning down those
classes specifically (like we did yesterday in 3.1.2).
We do want to avoid just buffing other classes up, and instead need to
focus on bringing down the over-performing classes. If we concentrated
on buffing all other classes to the status of over-performing classes,
we would create a power bloat that would make PvE decisively too easy
and PvP time-to-kill too short.
To reiterate what we said in the last post: We do acknowledge that there
are issues with Marauders/Sentinels, especially around Utility and
mobility, and we will be working to address these issues in future
patches.
I do hope that this gives a little bit of perspective into our thoughts
around Marauder/Sentinel balance and how it relates to other classes.
Thanks!
-eric"
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