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Incoming Charge Reversion on 5.4.7, SoO Flex Changes

by - 10 years ago

Today on Crow Sings the Blues, Blizzard both backpedals and pushes forward into the unknown. Should be fun!

CM Lore delivered some news about some changes coming to the Charge ability on the 5.4.7 PTR. The short version is that the Charge changes is being done to try and throttle the interrupt options that Warriors have in PVP, but instead of keeping the Charge change, they’re going to put Pummel and Disrupting Shout on a shared cooldown, where using one locks out the other. The full text is below.

We’re going to revert the Charge and Warbringer changes from the 5.4.7 PTR and make a different change. Here’s some context:

We feel that Warriors are too disruptive vs casters in PvP at the moment. To a certain extent it’s intended that it should be more difficult to get casts off if there’s a melee DPS sticking to you, but Warriors just have too many options along those lines currently. That’s part of the thinking behind the change to Charge: as a root, Charge would not interrupt casting, so it would be useful purely as a gap closer and rage generator, not as a way to lock down a caster.

We’re reverting it because, although we do think it’s a good change and something we’re likely to revisit in the future, it’s a bit too big of an overall change for 5.4.7. There’s a bit of a ripple effect here; making Charge a root certainly accomplishes the goal of scaling back Warrior interrupts, but it opens up some secondary issues (such as “what happens when you Charge a target with Hand of Freedom active?”) that we’d need some additional time to clear up. Put another way, we wanted to nerf Warriors’ ability to disrupt casters, not their mobility, and at this point in time the Charge change would have been a nerf to both.

So instead, we’re making a different change: Pummel and Disrupting Shout will have a 15-second shared cooldown. To be clear: Disrupting Shout will remain at its current 40 second cooldown, but you won’t be able to use it within 15 seconds of using Pummel. Likewise, using Disrupting Shout will put Pummel on cooldown.

We may still come back to the Charge change in Warlords, where all sorts of other changes will have happened (especially to CC) that allow it to make more sense, and we can spend more development and testing time on making sure it doesn’t have any unwanted side effects. For now, the shared cooldown on Pummel and Disrupting Shout will fill our original intention of making Warriors just slightly less difficult to cast against.

Meanwhile, on the twitters, floating eyeball Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas confirmed the following:

To clarify, this means that SoO LFR will stay the same, SoO Flex will be renamed SoO Normal, and SoO Normal will be renamed SoO Heroic, all of which is in keeping with the announced raiding paradigm for Warlords of Draenor. No indication yet about what happens to existing SoO Heroic… if it’s renamed Mythic but keeps the current 10/25 sizes, that’ll be confusing, but if it gets the 20-man size while folks are still working at existing sizes, it could be pretty disruptive, even with advance notice.

More information on the coming patch, and all manner of other pre-WoD changes, as it develops.


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


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