Zarhym has posted a thread on the official forums to talk about class balancing analysis/theorycrafting to point out issues that may exist right now. In this thread, more complicated formulas are being revealed which will allow for better analysis to be done on mechanics that have been largely guesswork. I’ll be updating this post frequently while this thread is active.

Halo Range and Damage

With regards to Priest mechanics, the only two “difficult” things to measure accurately are the damage modifications due to range on Cascade on Halo.

Cascade does a % of its max damage/healing based on linear distance between the source and target of the bounce. It does 40% of its maximum damage at 0yd, and 100% at 30+yd, scaling linearly between those two points (anywhere between 30yd and 40yd will give 100%). It prefers farther away targets when it bounces.

Halo’s damage scaling is… a bit more complex. Sometimes the formulae that are under the hood are extremely complex looking, because we build in several knobs that we turn to get the tuning where we want it. Halo is one of those cases. The easy to understand way to think of it is that the multiplier on the max damage/healing is 10% at 0yd, up to 40% at 17yd, spikes up to 90% at 22yd, 100% at 27yd, then down to 60% at 35yd. The intent is that it is weak on targets near you, but there’s a sweet spot in a ring from 20yd to 30yd from you, and that the edges of that ‘sweet spot’ are smooth. The actual formula (warning, may seem scary!) is… 0.5 * (1.01)^(-1 * (((Distance-25)/2)^4)) + 0.1 + 0.015*Distance. I’m sure someone can post a graph of that pretty quickly. One thing to note is that the max range is 30yd, but that it includes creature’s hit boxes, so the distance between the caster and a valid target may be slightly larger than 30yd, which is why the formula makes sense out to 35yd. Again, you absolutely do not need to understand any of that to benefit from the heal!

Here’s a handy-dandy graph to show damage vs range:

As you can see, the sweet spot for range is somewhere between 20 and 30 yards away. Most ranged will stand about this far away, anyway, so by making the damage reflect this is a good design choice, IMO.

Mastery and DoT Tick Behavior

Mastery is by comparison utterly horrible for Shadow at present. It doesn’t help that the extra ticks don’t function like real extra ticks (more chances to proc things) with the exception of the mana regen from a procced VT tick.

Do you have a specific example of something that is not proc’d? The extra ticks should function like real ticks.

This is definitely good to hear. I like the prospect of ticks going all Xzibit on us and causing a tick to proc a tick that procs a tick… If this is indeed the case, here’s a quickie chart showing the average number of ‘ticks’ each real tick will have.

The line isn’t quite linear, but rather is slightly exponential. Please note that this graph is only showing average total number of ticks, assuming a proc’d tick can spawn another proc’d tick.