MoP: War: is it really? Or is it fake?

[chaos5061]

Nerfing Talents to the ground just to make other talents look more attractive never worked.
There are two issues in situations like this. First, there is the question of whether the three talent options are relatively attractive. Second, there is the question of whether any of them are overpowered. You can't just say the second issue is always part of the first issue, and letting players choose any of three overpowered talents isn't going to be great for player balance.

We do think Shadow needs PvP nerfs, but not PvE nerfs, and we also want to be careful not to nerf any of the utility that Shadow brings in PvE. (For example nerfing Mass Dispel for Shadow, possibly through the glyph is a common suggestion, but we like that Shadow's Mass Dispel can be really beneficial in PvE). Phantasm is particularly annoying to deal with because being untargetable is so powerful. The intent of the talent was to make Fade more powerful as an escape tool, but we just overdid it with the untargeting part.

Glyph of Deep Freeze - now also lowers the stun duration of Deep Freeze by 1 sec in addition to taking Deep Freeze off the GCD.
Base Deep Freeze has a 1 sec longer duration. So a mage with the Glyph of Deep Freeze will see no change, but a mage without the glyph will have a slightly better Deep Freeze.

you seem like a smart guy, explain how this helps our current problem?
We were trying to solve a very specific problem here, where a paladin wants to join an Arena team, and the team says "Can't you just go Holy, because you won't lose anything?" or the paladin looking for an RBG team who hears "We need a rogue and a DK, but don't have room for a Ret paladin." We were specifically looking for a modest buff to group utility that was Ret specific.

On survivability specifically, I feel like we're hearing that DKs are squishy and paladins are squishy and shaman are squishy, which makes me think that once Defensive Stance for warriors isn't overpowered that all melee might feel about the same.

And now you want to take that away too, you're turning the talent into a Hand of Freedom that has a longer cooldown and a shorter duration. Despite the buffs to disc I feel this is a big and unnecessary blow to a spec that's already struggling.
While we want to see more healing priests in PvP, we don't think the right way to do that is through a really annoying defensive mechanic like this.

Single target damage is bad for shadow priests, and the only changes we're getting so far are:
We haven't made many PvE damage adjustments at all. We will. It's possible Shadow lost too much damage while moving in PvE. Nearly all of these Shadow changes were to tone them down in PvP.

The problem is the Feline Swiftness talent. It always has been. But now you're forcing feral PvP into a catch 22 situation. We're either forced to take Feline Swiftness just to stop the out of range errors when trying to use abilities, and lose our gap closer.. or we get inundated with out of range errors when trying to do anything. You know the feral hit box is still out of whack... and the feral speed bonus on the PvP set was to compensate for this.
We fixed the Feral hit box some time ago. Different races and models once had different combat reaches. It has all been normalized at least since Cataclysm.

However, to address your main concern, a different option would be to prevent Feline Swiftness and the PvP set bonus from stacking. Feline Swiftness would just remain a dead talent at least among knowledgeable PvP players.

As an editorial note, we're just going to delete posts that are nothing but whining and if that doesn't send a strong enough message, the moderators will ban you. Try to keep this thread informative. You have plenty of places on the internet where you don't have to be.

Was the damage buff it provided too strong? In almost the exact same gear I'm using, I was doing ~67k sustained single target dps. Seemed fine, provided that I had 0 mobility while doing that. Was the rotation being used to maximize it's effect not what you envisioned? I like how it changed our rotation without actually changing it. We were just hitting DP more frequently.
If you are talking about the version of Insanity where you just use Devouring Plague at one orb all the time, we thought that undermined the entire rotation. It didn't just change it, it made it so you didn't need to build up orbs any longer.

Not really sure what this mean or how this really affect gameplay nor why this change now tbh... mind to explain?
PoM makes the cast instant instead of 2 sec (reduced by haste). This means the ring will appear immediately if PoM'd, but it won't freeze immediately. After 2 sec (again reduced by haste) the freeze happens.

No PoM: 2 sec cast, 2 sec arming time
5.1 PoM: 0 sec cast, 0 sec arming time
5.2 PoM: 0 sec cast, 2 sec arming time

I can see that 99% of this entire thread is related to PvP, but any chance of some feedback from GC on how he can think a 40-50% nerf to Disc AoE heals is a fair thing, given that at the absolute most we top the meters by 20%. Sure we needed a nerf, but an execution?
It seems like a lot more than 20% to us. In any case, you still have DA on PoH, just not guaranteed any more. You can force DA with Inner Focus. You can toss out PW:Shields on some folks.* You can also still use Spirit Shell with PoH. Using PoH without any of those absorbs will be weaker, but that will be offset by the times when you do have the absorbs. All of that ignores the argument that an absorb is probably stronger than a direct heal so maybe the ratio shouldn't even be 1:1.

* - This seems to be the most misunderstood portion of the philosophy. We want Disc to use PW:S. It's one of their signature spells. We don't want Disc to blanket the entire raid and use nothing but PW:S. But we are so far from that now -- we see almost no PW:S, except for Rapture cheesiness with Mana Tide or to proc Body and Soul. You won't be able to put PW:S on 10 or 25 people before the dragon breathes, but you shouldn't have to. You have other healers backing you up and all of you have several cooldowns (and yes PW:B counts) when you're really in trouble.

[chaos5061]

Oh, and there's no point in making Fade an escape tool. If the priest is running at 100%, gets slowed, but uses his "escape tool" to go back to 100%; IT STILL DOES NOTHING SINCE THE PERSON COMING AFTER HIM IS RUNNING AT 100%.
"Escape tool" does not mean "nobody can ever catch you." Abilities have counters and pre-counters. Phantasm was a movement ability with a damage avoidance mechanic (that allowed you to go offensive with less of a chance for retribution) on a tier with two movement abilities. The other talents are never going to compete with that.

I'm just offering a general statement here, and I'm not calling any of you out personally, but we see a lot of feedback of the form "X doesn't work because it can be countered." That is the entire point.

PvP works better, in our opinions, when you have to be smart and react to what other players are doing. That means trying to guess what they're going to do next or deciding the right time for a crutch dispel or CC. If you find yourself asking for something to be undispellable, or to punish someone for dispelling it, or you're asking for something to work while crowd controlled, or something that makes you immune to something, or something that overall leaves your opponent no options, we're very unlikely to make those changes. Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered.

Hey, The Balance 2 piece looks interesting, but the 4 piece looks weaker than lots of trinkets I've disenchanted this expansion.
Can you give us some kind of estimate for how much DPS percent you think it provides? I've disenchanted a lot of trinkets too, but that's not much of a yardstick.

what the (insert explicit here) are you thinking nerfing shadow priests this hard? you do realize it all but benches them in pve right? they needed a buff in pve as it stands now, and your nerfing them??? seriously?
How does nerfing Phantasm or Dispersion bench Shadow in PvE? We avoided utility nerfs that would risk hurting them in PvE, as I mentioned, such as targeting Hymn of Hope or Mass Dispel.

GC, it is obvious that the nerf to Mindspike glyph is a loss on dps even if you are just standing and doing damage.
This is a legit PvE nerf, but a very, very small one and as I said, we haven't made any PvE numbers adjustments to anyone yet. This one is easy to fix without PvP risk and it makes a glyph less mandatory for its DPS benefits.

If they catch your cast time spells, which only melee really seem to bother doing these days, then you'll be unable to cast Dispersion until your shadow school is available again. But yes, if a mage decided to wait for you to cast a VT and Counterspell that, instead of using a blanket Silence on you, then they could prevent Dispersion for 6s.
Yes. I predict the Dispersion nerf won't really be felt that much, especially among lower ratings.

you may think you have fixed it - but you have not. Only 3 days ago on life I was pursuing a hunter - I don't have any speed bonus except the +25% from cat - my nose was almost touching his back and I still got "out of range" errors.
The hitbox of a cat has the same hitbox as a gnome or a tauren. The nose of the model doesn't matter - it comes from the center of the model. What you're probably seeing is what all melee deal with, particularly when moving very quickly (+25% counts) and no snares. The two clients just often disagree about the position of you and your target.

That said, we are likely to make the change I mentioned yesterday about reverting the PvP set bonus and having it not stack with Feline Swiftness.

Yep. Frost is a lot better than Ret. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I just think that those saying the Sac change isn't potent are wrong. It's a huge buff to Ret utility.
Yeah, we agree. It's not "Ret mandatory on every 3s team" good, but I think you can understand why we wouldn't want that.

We are considering some other buffs to Ret still. We don't know yet if we will do any or all of these (they are emphatically not promises) but the kind of thing we are considering:

Glyph of Blessed Life - no longer requires Seal of Insight. You can have any Seal or none active, which puts the glyph in Ret's hands.
Glyph of Templar's Verdict - damage reduction triggered by Exorcism (or both) instead. That way you aren't choosing TV over a heal.
Light's Hammer - also snares targets it damages while in range. This one potentially buffs Holy too, but we're not sure that many Holy paladins would give up Prism to take it.

[chaos5061]

[Request] Introduce a Boss Sound Only Mode
Cool suggestion, I must say I personally would use that mode if it was available, but I’d still like to have the option to hear the sounds of my own spells and abilities in addition to the boss.

So murloc here is going to keep running and forward this to the devs (and I haven’t even broken a sweat!). We’ll see what their take on this is, maybe this is a particular design decision where they didn’t want for this to happen or maybe it’s a technical limitation of some sort or… if we’re lucky, they might agree with it and one day you might remember this as the Megafail sound option!
Like always, thanks for caring and for helping us improve our game. If there’s any news on the subject I’ll let you know.

Raid Finder Stacking Buff Feedback
Couldn't you just have someone take one for the team, strip naked, and die over and over to the boss until they get 10 stacks and then people can just super EZ mode clear the boss.
There is a minimum attempt requirement before the system 'credits' you with a wipe. It should always be more time-efficient to not wipe at all, but if it isn't we can tweak the threshold.

Raid Finder needs to be even easier?
We don't think LFR is too difficult, but in order to make it the right difficulty for 25 strangers with little-to-no coordination we did have to trivialize some encounters and mechanics. With a system that can correct for variances in groups, encounters don't have to be quite so binary (trivial vs. impossible). Mechanics can be more meaningful, while encouraging players to stay with groups that run into some difficulty, rather than quit and re-queue.

Raid Finder Stacking Buff Feedback
As Bashiok mentioned, there's a minimum attempt requirement before the buff kicks in. The most time-efficient option should be to not wipe at all, and if that's not the case, the threshold can be tweaked.

As if lfr wasn't dumbed down enough already. They may as well just spawn a loot chest on zoning in.
The developers don't think LFR is too difficult, but since the difference in performance between groups can vary noticeably, they had to trivialize some encounters and mechanics. With this system in place, some bosses don't have to be quite so binary (trivial vs. impossible). Mechanics can be more meaningful, while encouraging players to stay together rather than leave as soon as there is a wipe.

Rated Battleground Exploit Punishments
After a thorough investigation and liaising with multiple departments, we can confirm that the recent wave of actions taken against Rated Battleground exploitation and win trading are indeed correct. The team of investigators have made sure to avoid any false positives and we will not be overturning any of the actions taken.

We want you all to understand that the spirit of competition and fair play is especially important to us, particularly in regards to rated Player versus Player combat. As a part of this, we have now dealt with the issue that allowed some Rated Battleground teams to exploit the queuing system to gain high ratings and engage in win trading.

These, and all, exploitative activities are expressly prohibited. We are still investigating the situation carefully; any players that have taken part in exploitation or win trading will be subject to the appropriate action against their World of Warcraft accounts. For now however, we are working on resolving any remaining issues that still reside within the queue system so that this behavior will not occur again in the future.

PTR Realm Maintenance - 1/30/13
You'll be happy to learn that the PVP vendors are now available.

FEEDBACK: Megaera (10N)
Pet pathing issues are fixed in the next build.

[chaos5061]

Reputation / Questing
Hey GC, any reason to keep extra Sigils after completing the first Black Prince quests?
No. (Source)
Not a big issue, but why do they keep dropping/get looted past 10 then?
We could have made a limit of 10 but it would have been harder to stop them from dropping, since you're still on the quest. (Source)

You guys said it'd be nice to redo Outlands levelling experience at some point. I like it, what do you think is wrong with it?
You go back in time from level 60 (LK dead) to level 70 (LK alive). Also weird that you do Hellfire and never Shadowmoon. (Source)

Dailies should promote grouping, so the interesting question: Why don't they?
Mostly because the game wasn't designed that way. But it should be. It just takes us a long time to change fundamentals. (Source)

I love how you tried to wrap up dailies with gear just because no one was doing them in the first place
You're making assumptions. It was more like: when you can gear up very quickly, you also quickly lose interest in playing. (Source)

PvP
Why do RBGs have a higher cap than arenas?
To provide rewards commensurate with the extra logistics and time commitment that RBGs require. 2s esp. take very little time (Source)

adding gear upgrades to WOW was a HUGGGGGGE mistake man. you're really killing us casual pvp'ers.
Do you think it's fair to jump in mid-season and be competitive without any catch up with someone collecting gear for months? (Source)

IIRC, a big reason for not doing separate ability values for PvE/PvP was additional complexity. Still true?
We do it when it's needed. Some assume it would be a panacea. We don't think so. Players would demand even more tuning changes. (Source)

The new PvP changes seem pretty popular, except for the elite armor. Any chance of keeping a cosmetic reward for t2 players?
Overall, we think PvP needs more cosmetic / prestige rewards. Still discussing the right options. (Source)

The 5.2 PVP changes are a breath of fresh air but can we see Arena/RBG Point caps being the same I really don't like RBG's
I understand. At the same time, if RBGs aren't generously rewarding, players will just gravitate towards easy and fast Arenas. (Source)

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 - Tortos Preview
Today we take a look at another one of the Patch 5.2 Throne of Thunder raid bosses, Tortos!

[chaos5061]

Heroic: TortosDefeat Tortos in Throne of Thunder on Heroic difficulty.	10	Pandaria Raid
One-UpDefeat Tortos in Throne of Thunder on Normal or Heroic difficulty after kicking a Whirl Turtle shell through five or more other Whirl Turtles.	10	Pandaria Raid

Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

• Call of Tortos

• - Tortos lets out a rumbling call, causing several smaller turtles to enter the area and attack players.
• Whirl Turtle
  • Spinning Shell - The turtle chases players around the room, spinning rapidly and continuously inflicting 30,000 Physical damage to enemies within 0 yards and knocking them away.
  • Shell Block - The turtle hides in his shell at low health, gaining immunity to all damage. While in this state, the turtle can be kicked across the room by players, applying Shell Concussion to any creatures it hits along the way.
  • Shell Concussion - When kicked, the shell spins forward, interrupting enemies it touches and leaving them off-balance, increasing the damage they take from all sources by 15% for 30 sec.
• Furious Stone Breath - Inflicts 85,000 Nature damage to all enemies every 0.5 sec for 4.5 sec. Costs 100 Fury to cast.
• Rockfall - A lightning charged stalactite falls from the roof of the cave, inflicting 250,000 Nature damage to enemies within 5 yds. and 35,000 Nature damage to enemies within 20 yds.
• Quake Stomp - Tortos performs a massive stomp that inflicts Physical damage to all enemies equal to 100% of their maximum health and increases the frequency of Rockfalls for 9 sec.
• Snapping Bite - The turtle snaps his jaws shut around the target, inflicting 500,000 Physical damage.
• Vampiric Cave Bat -
  • Drain the Weak - Drains health when attacking targets with less than 350,000 current health, inflicting 20% of weapon damage as Physical and healing the caster for 50 times the damage dealt.
• Crystal Shell - The crystal reacts when struck, encasing the attacker in a shell that absorbs all incoming damage and healing. Initially the shell will absorb up to 100,000 damage, but healing absorbed by the shell is added to this total, up to a maximum of 500,000. The shell breaks when it cannot absorb any more damage.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 - Sunsong Ranch Improvements
Along with the previously mentioned Work Orders, some other changes have come to Sunsong Ranch in Patch 5.2.

Nana Mudclaw has realized she is getting on in years and is looking for someone to take over the Tiller's Union. She asks you to see if Farmer Yoon is willing to take over, which he is! This results in him giving Sunsong Ranch to you for free.

Farmer Yoon says: Nana Mudclaw asked ME to join the Tillers council?
Farmer Yoon says: Just think of all the knowledge I could share. Think of all the food we could grow!
Farmer Yoon says: But... I don't think I'll have time to work for the council, AND run Sunsong Ranch.
Farmer Yoon says: This farm has been in my family for generations. How can I give it up? Yet, a greater responsibility has fallen upon me.
Farmer Yoon says: There's only one solution. I have to join the council. As for the farm...
Farmer Yoon says: Chaudmmoc, I'm gifting Sunsong Ranch to you. You're in charge, now!
Farmer Yoon says: I'd better head up and talk to Nana. The farm is yours now, Chaudmmoc. I know you'll take great care of it.


Once you own the farm, the Work Orders board will appear and allow you to begin earning rep with various factions.

Merchant Greenfield also has received some upgrades, as he now sells bags of seeds that let you plant four patches at once. Each bag costs as much as 30 seeds and has 10 charges, allowing you to plant 40 seeds. Should you already have many seeds in your bags, his new assistant Milly Greenfield will exchange 30 seeds for a bag of seeds.

The patch notes also mention that the yield from special crops has been improved to make farming them competitive with gathering these items out in the world. It isn't clear if this is active yet from limited testing, but so far the maximum number of items rewarded from the special seeds doesn't appear to be increased. The patch notes also mention that the farm will become an inn once you own it, but that doesn't appear to work yet on the PTR.

[chaos5061]

Earlier this week, several player accounts were given short suspensions and had their ratings wiped for being involved in Rated Battleground win-trading. Upon further review, we determined that some of the players initially identified as cheating may not have purposefully participated in the exploitive behavior, and as a result, we're in the process of lifting suspensions and restoring ratings to all but the most egregious offenders. This process should be completed following the Tuesday maintenance.

As always, our goal is to identify cheaters while making sure people playing by the rules aren't inadvertently penalized. Rest assured that we'll continue to take action against players who aren't competing in the spirit of fair play.

[chaos5061]

Thing is, and this is what is puzzling GC with the whole hitbox situation.. is that we're getting out of range errors, yet our white swings are still merrily hitting the target. It's that disparity that confuses the kitties. I've never seen that kind of issue on any other melee class.
White attacks and yellow attacks are calculated differently by the engine and it make different calculations about your position. You have to remember WoW was originally designed to be mostly white attacks with very few yellow attacks. The 2013 game is a very different beast, and if we could do it all over again, we'd have the two handled really similarly. Again, this isn't anything related to druids or cats. Despite your personal experience, all melee should be encountering this.

Spirit Shell formula is slightly off - right now the metagem critical effect (1.03) is only being multiplied in on the expected aegis size on crits not on the entire crit heal. This is causing a slight decrease in the size of SS.
You are correct. Fixed.

I doubt this is even close to enough to make an rbg team want to bring a ret.
We have a problem right now where melee of all kinds are not very attractive for super-competitive RBG teams, except possibly as a flag carrier, in which case you probably want a druid or warrior. This isn’t the kind of thing we’re going to easily solve by just throwing all sorts of amazing utility at every melee spec, but we agree it’s a problem and we’re looking at longer term solutions.

It was stated abilities are meant to be counterable, but things like Cloak of Shadows and smokebomb are just fine. There is a double standard here.....
Quoting Ghostcrawler because he said it better than I could: "Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered."

Eye for an eye baseline would be kinda cool, but it'll have to be designed really well because I don't want it breaking CCs lol. I would probably rather have something else if I had to choose though.
Something we hear a lot from Retribution is they want a little more “retribution” back in their kit. We don’t think passive and/or random reflection like Eye for an Eye or Retribution Aura were super interesting mechanics but we understand the attraction of the idea in general and we’ll consider something longer term.

Reduce PW:S mana cost (this is gonna have to happen one way or another to make it viable), and make it so that a priest can't have more than 3 - 4 active PW:S to avoid PWS spam.
This suggestion (limit 3 or whatever) has come up a few times, and possibly for other traditionally-hard-to-balance spells like Eternal Flame and perhaps Rejuvenation. We are unlikely to make any of these changes for 5.2 so it’s probably beyond the scope of discussion in this thread, but we wouldn’t mind hearing more feedback on the idea over the long term. I personally worry that it might feel like a lot to have to track, which makes mods more mandatory, etc.

Looks like they need to just go ahead and buff Arms rage generation.
We’re hearing really mixed feedback on Arms’ rage at the moment and I suspect there is still a lot of experimentation and/or theorycrafting required to figure out when to use Overpower vs. Slam vs. Heroic Strike. (To be clear, we have a design, but we're not sure it's working yet.) Warriors nearly always ask for more, more, more rage, so just seeing posts requesting the same won’t be sufficient to convince us. Overall though, more analysis of how Arms rotation feels (in PvE and PvP) would be helpful.

This post is from the perspective of an Elemental Shaman that mainly focuses on PvP.
You commented on a lot of different things, which makes it hard for me to offer responses. (In general players tend to try to cover too many different topics in a single post instead of focusing on the 2-3 that really, really matter). I will try to cover a few though.

While it’s fun to have lots of minor glyphs, they really are targeted at fun, and this thread is supposed to be about the nuts and bolts of rotations and set bonuses, so it’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

We agree Elemental have too many mandatory glyphs, and we did give you the most mandatory one (Flame Shock) as a base mechanic in 5.2.

I disagree with you some on Frozen Power. We see a lot of Elemental shaman using it. It’s not the dominant talent (Earthgrab is) but it definitely isn’t niche.

I also disagree with you on the prevalence of dispels. Dispels are precious in MoP. I know it might seem like anything awesome you do gets instantly removed, but your opponent has to make the choice to blow their CD on your Flame Shock (which has a lower CD than the dispel). We are really trying to move away from undispellable mechanics on enemies. In Cataclysm and before, dispels weren't a choice and we agree that anything got removed too quickly. We're not really in that world anymore, and we think that's a huge improvement.

I keep getting a lot of lols on Twitter about Shamanistic Rage, but we think this is a pretty serious buff for Elemental in PvP (esp. considering the glyph). It’s an exciting change. We’ll see if we’re right.

Does that not seem odd to you? Where are your design principles? Where is the consistency?
Hardly any PvP paladin takes Light’s Hammer, while it’s reasonably popular in PvE. A PvP-only buff there makes a lot of sense. Nearly every priest takes Phantasm in PvP while it’s not popular in PvE. A PvP-only nerf makes sense there.

[chaos5061]

I'm glad for warriors that you decided to revert the additional nerfs to Second Wind, but there is still a potential problem with it and that tier. The problem is that it's mandatory for warriors to take because it is so necessary for their viability.
We actually agree with this, but allow me to explain our logic. As a designer, one of the things you often have to struggle with is idealistic design vs. realistic design. In a pure design space, we believe Enraged Regen and Impending Victory are balanced and Second Wind is overpowered. However, we’re not talking about a theoretical game. It’s a real, living game played by millions of players. Our changes have impact. Arms warriors (and Frost mages and a couple of other specs) have been hammered with PvP nerfs since launch, and not at all because the players did anything wrong. The new patch brings a few more hefty Arms nerfs with Shockwave, Defensive Stance, Overpower, Taste for Blood and Warbringer. We’re not trying to kill Arms in PvP and we’re not trying to make anyone who plays Arms hopelessly depressed. In this case we think it’s acceptable to have Second Wind be a little overpowered so long as Arms as a whole is not dramatically overpowered or underpowered. Long term, it’s the kind of thing we’d like to eventually fix, but in the short term, we think nerfing it does more harm than good.

just curious, what are you looking at that makes you think shadow priests are OP in pvp? It seems that we get more nerfs based on a projection of what you might think is the case, then classes that were/are OP. What about shadow makes you think it's over powered? I still feel like I get focused every game I play, and you nerfing my escape tool kit, when I don't ever see how priests had superior escapes.
There’s always an element of that in PvP. For PvE, we have a really good idea of how much damage everyone can do in every situation. That’s harder to generate for PvP and not even super relevant. We do look at who is winning a lot in PvP. We do it a lot ourselves to try and understand why. We also try to pay a lot of attention to player feedback, especially those skilled PvP players whose opinions we respect, but also the guy just doing pickup BGs who still deserves to have fun. In all of those cases, the names that keep coming up are Frost, Arms, Shadow and maybe BM.

Frost and Arms are taking some big nerfs. BM has a couple of little ones. With Shadow, I’ve tried to be honest that we’re not exactly sure of the right thing to hit. There isn’t anything there like Shockwave or PoM+Ring of Frost that feels totally broken. It’s a lot of little things that add up: damage, healing, utility, survivability. Utility we really don't want to hit and damage isn't too high in PvE. At the moment, we've nerfed burst a little, healing a little, and made some of the survivability mechanics less potent. We'll see how that feels.

Are you telling me that not only is this issue understood, but is considered acceptable? Being spammed with out of range while you're clipping someone elses model is incredibly frustrating and a major turn off to playing the game at all. It swings both ways too, being stunned by a melee ability from someone 20yds away is just awesome. I had hoped something would eventually be done to fix this crap.
Which would be acceptable? That the nose of the cat is considered the center of the model, so that anyone chasing you has to hit your nose? Or that cats just have a huge combat reach (which also means everyone else can hit you much easier than they could a smaller model)? Should tauren for that matter be easier to hit and gnomes harder? Trust me that this is a very old and involved debate in game design – the code does not always agree with the art about where your character is located, and that is particularly true on a client-server game that still tries to offer some semblance of snappy combat.

1. Are you happy with how many different categories there are?
2. Are you happy that some abilities affect more than one DR category?
3. Are you happy CC is so complicated, that not even sites like Arena Junkies can track how they all interact?
4. If you are not happy, would you please please please consider reworking CC and DR and make it transparent in the tool tips?
Our sense is that there probably 2-3 too many different categories. I also totally agree that the system is way too opaque, especially for new players. Mentioning DR and perhaps PvP CC durations in the tooltips (perhaps only in PvP, perhaps only as an advanced option) is something we’ve wanted to do for some time (so is Path of the Titans, so is Dance Studio… you know how it goes).

We also talk often about whether the game would be better off with only a single DR category. It makes it easier to learn for sure. But it’s also a really risky change. Much of the depth of PvP skill involves knowing what ability DRs with what. A lot of Arena comps are built on that mechanic. It gives us a lot of room to provide surgical buffs or nerfs by changing which DRs with what. Overall, I think there is a chance we would scale down the number of different DRs, but it’s a small chance. We’re much more likely to just spell them out more explicitly (which to be fair also chips away at the knowledge base that differentiates an expert PvP player from a merely tolerable one).

[chaos5061]

That's what I'm trying to say in more attention grabbing ways. I can try running the numbers in simcraft or wrathcalcs if that will help, but I'm not the math expert that some of the silent laser chickens are.
Nope, you did a fine job. It will take us some time to analyze all this, but I wanted to drop a quick note to say we appreciate the work.

Now moving into patch 5.2 We'll have a similar feel except we'll have a lot of GCDs where we can't do anything because we've blown our rage on AOE. We'll proably go... Mortal Strike > Thunderclap > Whirwlind > Twiddle our thumbs for 3 seconds while we wait for MS to come off CD. We don't have that filler of Overpower to do something else whilel we wait.
This could be a problem. We’ll look into it more. Off the cuff, we could make Whirlwind 20 rage (just for Arms!) to keep parity with the cheaper Slam.

MAKE SEPARATE TALENTS FOR PVE AND PVP!!!!
I’ll refrain from the caps, but we do that all the time. Check out Colossus Smash. Check out (live) Taste for Blood. Check out the duration on Polymorph. We do it as a last resort, because it does cause more risk for bugs and is more for players to have to remember, but when it’s the right solution, we definitely go there. We nerfed Devouring Plague’s up front damage because that reduces PvP burst without having a huge impact on PvE (because the difference in burst in this case is over such a short time frame it’s unlikely to really be felt). If that solution hadn’t worked, then we could have considered DP to do less damage in PvP.

I'll also posit that even if PvE and PvP had totally different rule sets, it wouldn't reduce the volume of players campaigning for buffs or nerfs. "Everyone" would still think it was their class holding them back and would want us to twiddle with the numbers even more. Once in awhile we'll say something like "We'd love to help you guys, but we just can't buff you any more because of PvE / PvP." The more typical situation is that someone thinks they need a buff while we disagree. Splitting out the rules doesn't change that.

Perhaps there is a much simpler solution (a numbers tweak rather than a mechanics tweak)?
I feel like we’d have to nerf Divine Aegis dramatically to have the same effect. The Spirit Shell change was mostly so priests could go back to using it at the right moment and not just on cooldown because it was a throughput increase. Those are the two major changes that weren’t numbers tweaks.

[chaos5061]

Patch 5.2 Faction Rep and Valor Gear
The raid rep (and their delicious, delicious Valor epics) includes LFR. You will need to kill bosses though to keep progressing it. No more ICC trash rep runs.

I never found it to be bad, just boring as hell to go clear trash for hours on end to cheese the rep earning mechanic.
Yeah, but then we'd probably want to balance rep gain speed with the assumption that you're chain-running trash, which makes people who don't do it (but are raiding and killing bosses) slower at getting access to those items. That doesn't really make much sense, mechanically or in the kind of in-world sense of "impressing" a group of people with your accomplishments.

"Huzzah! The hero hath once again slain many inconsequential foes, to leap through thine magic portal, and oft returneth to... doeth the same task over and again! Verily, this is a champion worthy of our shiny baubles and trinkets."

So, regular raiders will still be running LFR whether they want to or not to min max their rep. Or can you guys do something creative like killing x boss on ANY difficulty gives rep once per week, period?
Yes, you gain rep from boss kills once per week regardless of difficulty.

This reminds me of dailies.
Sure, you can loosely apply that to any task with some variance of repetition. Feel free. Except that continuing to fight to take back areas, or retrieve items, or slay ne'er-do-wells generally makes some sense in the context of the narrative in daily hubs. Those damn monkeys stoled muh fruits again! Etc. etc.

Going into a raid and not killing bosses does not.

So here's a question, why have valor gear gated behind rep at all? I definitely see it as a step in the right direction having valor gated behind raids instead of dailies. But it's still a double-tax. You earn valor points, but in order to spend said points, you need to earn rep on top of it.
The whole point of a steady and measured currency to buy items is to offset the RNG of boss loot drops. If you're unlucky you still have this absolute system, and no matter what, you know that in X time you can fill in at least a few of those gaps. The intent of these currencies wasn't as a type of separate loot progression, but that is the way a lot of people perceive it, and certainly some of our designs have even worked to support that perception. The whole original intent in mind though it makes more sense to ensure that you're killing bosses to be able to buy Valor items, and not just farming up Valor from other sources. Of course we could take Valor out of everything but raid kills/completions to avoid that... but Valor is a nice reward to have in a lot of various systems, and lets people pick and choose the ways they want to earn it.

I don't want to imply though that having Valor items on daily quests was in any way a failed experiment. Obviously some of you weren't too keen on having the items behind those reps, and so in 5.2 we're trying this. We may have some mix in the future, we may not, let us know how you think it feels when the patch is live and if the new daily hub is compelling enough to gain your attention without a meatier (ie ilvl based) reward.

If it is.. will a person get enough rep from just three wings of LFR to be able to buy something to avoid running into the 3000 point valor cap?
Yup, we'll make sure items are paced out to hopefully avoid that. Getting to Friendly is pretty quick, and there are items available at all reputation levels.

[chaos5061]

LFR Difficulty and Purpose
New players discover what the basic principles of raiding are.
Raid Finder is not an introductory tool for raiding. It's aimed to players that can't participate in organized raiding (or don't wish to) for whatever reason.

Players don't see the entire raids of a new patch in less then 2 hours, but instead they get a feel for how the new raid feels and what it looks like, and incase they want to discover the other part they are encouraged to join a raiding guild and really get into the game.
It's true that if you're a normal or heroic raider, it kinda sucks to go in and discover the whole place in just 2 hours. For 5.0.4 raids, Raid Finder was unlocked one week after the raid was released on normal mode.

Less gear; This is again an encouragement for players to join raiding guilds.
Which is exactly the opposite of what LFR is supposed to do. It should be a venue of character progression for those players. Arbitrarily punishing them so they join raids would defeat the purpose of it in the first place. The gear is already lower ilvl, and the other rewards from Raid Finder are lower as well.

More pugs: Players who can't join a raiding guild due to IRL would be encouraged to create a pug when they have the time for it
So, if we get rid of half the content from the Raid Finder, players are going to get into more pugs because we got rid of the abilty to conveniently get into pugs? Think about it, players who can't join a raiding guild probably can't schedule either their playtime with complete strangers.

Gearing up alts would be harder, as you can't receive full BIS LFR gear anymore.
BiS LFR gear? At this rate, I swear one day we'll see "BiS green gear" used as an argument to justify something... I'm not attacking your point though (especially for those that enjoy gearing up alts it'd be definitely a negative aspect).

[chaos5061]

Don't forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a Marvel Heroes Closed Beta Key. Go here http://www.zygorguides.com/forum/sho...-Later-Tonight and read the rules in the second post and then make a post in the thread for your chance to win. For everyone who doesn't know Marvel Heroes is a ARPG type game like the Torchlight and Diablo Series with Marvel Characters like Spiderman Wolverine and others from all the different Marvel comics.

[chaos5061]

Also have a contest running for a Defiance Closed Beta Key. You can find it here http://www.zygorguides.com/forum/sho...8036#post88036 read over the rules and make a post in the thread to enter. If you want to know more about Defiance read the 4th rule in the first post and I explain what some of the game is about.