So, if it wasn't glaringly obvious to anyone who's followed a video game during its beta roll out, the mastery preview is an experiment. Warlocks, among others (enhancement, rogues, etc) ended up in the control group - we got boring simple bonuses that are easy to measure and blanace. Priests, among others, ended up in the test group - they got unusual complicated shit-procs-other-shit bonuses that will be a nightmare to balance, scale in strange ways, and might just end up being a failed experiment anyway.
On the broader topic of whether more creative or more passive mastery benefits are more fun, we just need to get players in there in beta and trying them out. The risk of more passive bonuses (like the current Enhancement one) is that it's just a little dry. Since your spell damage tends to scale roughly (roughly) with your gear, it risks just feeling like more damage. On the other hand, bonuses like Shadow and Balance affect gameplay an awful lot and may end up being just one too many things to monitor. We wanted to split the difference for now and see what feels the best.
If things go well, we might get our own shit-procs-shit bonuses before release. Or if the experiment goes badly, priests might see their shadow orbs turned into periodic crit bonus or something.
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Wondering how they can test scaling when most people won't have (any?) mastery on their gear
ReplyDeleteYou get mastery just for equipping gear of your primary armor class (example: A boomkin wearing all leather will get mastery from that gear, but a boomkin piecing in cloth because of the current terrible itemization won't).
ReplyDeleteThe testing will almost all happen in beta, anyway, not live. Being a beta lets you do a lot of weird things to brute force testing, like throwing a ton of mastery on every quest reward for a few days and looking at what happens to people's damage.