Welcome to our site for WoW classes blues, which classes will update in this news? Warlock improving demonology, Priest glyph of mind flay, Mage buffing arcane spec and so on.

Warlock improving demonology feels like one of those "I'm going to take things out of context to try and add fire to my own agenda" deals. Apologies if that's not what's going on. The context was how do you find 3 distinct niches for a dps class such that each of the trees has its moment to feel special and shine yet over the course of a raid tier, all 3 feel like they do about the same dps. That's a really challenging goal. It wasn't a "buff Demo" discussion as much as what the roles should be for pure dps talent trees, unless you fall back on the classic "PvP, PvE and the spec nobody takes."

If we buffed Demonology, and we buffed it too much (even if it was only on some fights) then what you'd probably see is most raiding warlocks shift to Demo. This is exactly what happened when we made Survival better than Beastmaster. What does that really accomplish other than giving players whiplash and perhaps giving those players who really just love a certain spec a little bit of time in the sun?

Priest glyph of mind flay. I'm almost positive that the way it works is the glyph leaves a 10% snare on Mind Flay today on live (the glyph didn't change in 3.2). The reason is because we thought it might cause a lot of bugs related to whether a target was officially snared or not. A 10% snare isn't particularly useful but it is noticeable. What we're talking about is changing the glyph to not affect the default snare at all. The glyph would just boost range.

Mage buffing Arcane spec. I said we wanted to buff Arcane but wanted to do so without adding back some of the fast burst damage that we have worked hard to reduce in PvP. We agree that it's worth changing things that can be really frustrating to play against even if it doesn't reward the other guy with high representation or ratings.

Bracket balance. It's not, in our mind, an issue on which bracket is the most balanced. It comes down to which bracket is the most balance-able. The 2s bracket has two flaws built into its design. One is that it tends to select for those classes who have a lot of different options and utility built into one class. Since your team is just one other guy, and he or she is often going to be focused or CC'd, you can't rely so much on your teammate's abilities.

You have to rely on your own abilities. What players kept asking for, and the direction we realized we were taking, was just to give more and more abilities to more and more classes so that everyone had everything. We don't think that's good for class design long term. Arena is intended to be about teamwork not self-sufficiency. The second problem is the relative balance of power of healing. If a healer can keep themselves and one other person alive in 2s, then they probably can't keep three people alive in 3s. That tends to squeeze healers out of 3s.

On the other hand, if a healer can keep a three-player team alive, then they can probably keep a two-player team alive trivially. We didn't remove the 2s bracket from the game. If you like it, it's still there for you. But we wanted to be able to focus more of our balance effort on the 3s bracket and wanted more of the high-end potential gladiators to focus their balance feedback and effort on that bracket as well.