Consumable nerf

I found the following paragraph in the 1.11 test server patch notes, and I'm not happy about this:

We have re-evaluated the mechanics of consumable items in the game and concluded that these should work in a more intuitive manner. As such, most items that can not be equipped with right click abilities have been streamlined into one of three categories. Using an item of
a particular category will trigger a shared cooldown among all other items in the same category. The categories break down as follows with category cooldowns as listed.
Potions 2 minutes: This includes items such as Health Potion, Mana Potion, Invisibility Potion and Mighty Rage Potion.
Aggressive 1 minute: This includes items such as explosives, Really Sticky Glue and Discombobulator Ray.
Non-Aggresive 2 minutes: This includes items such as Healthstone, Night Dragon's Breath, Whipper Root Tuber and Target Dummy.

I'm a big fan of consumable items, but this change makes them a lot less useful. For example my warrior not only uses healing potions, but crystal restore from Un'goro, Night Dragon's Breath, and Whipper Root Tuber to heal. Plus healthstones when I could get one. These are currently all on a different timer, but after the patch they will all be on the same timer, and I will just be able to use one of them, and can throw the others away.

But while this is just annoying for my warrior, the change is devastating for my engineers, the shaman and the pally. Grenades and explosive sheep, or goblin mines, are now on different timers, so if I'm willing to spend the money on the materials and spend the time creating all these explosives, I can blow up a group of enemies with several bombs. Given the low damage output of my paladin, that is really useful, and the main reason I spent lot of effort to learn engineering to maximum skill. But after the patch 1.11 consumable nerf, all explosives will be on the same 1 minute countdown, and again I'll be forced to just chose the best of them and forget about the others.

I don't know yet how it will work with the "buff" type potions, but if these are on a 2-minute timer now too, it will be annoying. Much easier to quaff all the buff potions at once than to have to wait for a long cooldown between each of them.

This change makes the game poorer, because many consumable items that are currently used because they can be used in parallel with better items will in future just become totally useless. Who will use a fun, but not especially effective, explosive sheep, if that prevents him from using any serious bombs?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link