MMO-Champion is now recruiting moderators!
The forums have been expanding quite fast in the past few months and it's time to recruit more moderators! Thanks to the work of the existing moderators, the quality of the forums has improved over the past months and it's time to build a stronger team to make things even better!

Read this if you plan to apply
  • Do not apply if you only want to wave your banhammer at random people. Moderators are expected to post on the forums they moderate regularly, contribute, keep the sticky posts clean and updated, etc ...
  • You will be expected to be on IRC most of the time, we're not asking you to be here 24/7 but things will be much harder for everyone if you're not there.
  • Cataclysm and WoW General forums will be merged when Cataclysm goes live. "General Discussions", "Raids & Dungeons", "PvP" and "Professions" will be merged with general forums, the rest will probably be removed a little later.
  • If you apply to moderate a class forum, you will be expected to know how your class works. (Like, really!)
  • Off-Topic forums are a little inactive for the moment, but will most likely get some focus soon. If you want to apply as a moderator for one of them, now is the time.
  • No, we don't need moderators on Raid First Kills and Guild Recruitment forums. (Raid First Kills will probably go away actually)

How do I apply?
  • Make sure you're not bored and are applying for something you won't want to do anymore in 3 days.
  • You will need 100+ forum posts. This isn't because people with more posts are smarter, it's just the only way for us to check your behavior on forums and make sure you're not an idiot.
  • Fill this very simple form and wait!


Ghostcrawler will nerf you to the ground in Cataclysm!
Cataclysm will add a couple of rare elites to the game and one of them is probably a little more interesting than the others! He loves long walks on the beach, drinking gin, and nerfing paladins ... Yep! It's Ghostcrawler!

Ghostcrawler is a level 85 rare elite crab in the Abyssal Depths of Vashj'ir and will be tameable by hunters, you can probably expect a lot of camping but be careful, his Nerfbat hits hard.







Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Complicated designs and hidden maths
Yes, and no. Having a design that isn't trivially easy to model can be a good thing, because it promotes experimentation and discussion instead of just being a solved problem. I have seen a lot of theoretical discussion about how a simple talent like Incite works, and that's the kind of thing that keeps the theorycrafting portion of the community engaged.

What we really don't like, somewhat ironically, is simple but hidden math. When there are two talents and one is a 10% dps increase and one is a 5% dps increase, and every savvy player knows that intuitively and every beginner gets caught by the "trap," then that's not cool. Armor penetration was just a god stat for many classes, even though that might not be apparent without some kind of insider knowledge. If armor pen had a slight edge over say crit in some circumstances with some gear levels and some talent builds, then we probably would have kept it. It becomes an interesting decision instead of a no-brainer. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Vanish
This is correct, provided you aren't using Hunter's Mark or some kind of "I still see you, dude" ability. If you have a rogue targeted, and they Vanish, you should lose your target.

This is the case in beta as far as we know. There are some situations on live where it does not work, but they are all fixed in beta and therefore will be fixed when the Shattering occurs.

As I said before, make sure when you're reporting a bug that it is a legit bug and not "I wish Vanish made me immune to spells because that was cool when it worked even though it didn't work often."

EDIT: Faerie Fire should prevent you from using Vanish. If you use Cloak of Shadows to remove Faerie Fire, you should then be able to Vanish. It should not make you waste the Vanish cooldown and it should not let you Vanish but let the druid still see you.

vanish removes hunter's mark
We have changed this (Hunter's Mark behavior) back and forth quite a bit, so I'm not comfortable at this point saying one way or the other. Excluding a few cases like this though, Vanish should work as described above. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Slam
If you're the kind of warrior who just doesn't like Slam or think it should scale with haste, that's fine feedback to provide, but not the kind of thing we are going to change before Cataclysm.

If Slam isn't worth using for a level 85 Arms warrior in reasonable gear, that's a problem. "Isn't worth using" means that it isn't a dps gain to use Slam, not "I don't like using it." (Source)

Arms Rage Starvation
If Arms at 85 in reasonable gear doesn't have enough rage to hit Mortal Strike, Slam, Rend, Overpower and Colossus Smash nearly every time they are up, then that is a problem. Things like shouts and Deadly Calm should cover up a few rage gaps, but in general you shouldn't be standing around waiting for enough rage to Mortal Strike again. If Arms can't always hit Heroic Strike, that is intended. (Source)

Rage Generation Balance
We felt that for the high-end Lich King PvE warrior that rage was largely irrelevant. You could hit whatever buttons you wanted to when they were off cooldown. If you put electrical tape over that red bar, your gameplay wouldn't change much.

In Cataclysm, we want rage to matter. We want you to have the gameplay of managing a limited resource. We want the electrical tape scenario to make the game almost unplayable for you.

It's easy to take that to extremes. We do not want warriors to hit say Mortal Strike then have to autoattack several times before they have enough rage to hit Mortal Strike again. Standing around waiting too long isn't managing your resource -- it's just standing around (assuming you didn't blow your rage through poor decisions generally involving Heroic Strike).

However, when I write stuff like that, it's easy for players to then say "Aha! Any time I can't hit my abilities on cooldown, then my rage income is too low," meaning that they are trying to get back to their existence not being limited by rage again.

That's why I said "nearly." Are there going to be moments where you avoided a lot of damage or had your damage avoided or were in the middle of moving or (heaven forbid) wasted rage on something that you shouldn't have? Most likely. In those moments, use something like Berserker Rage, Deadly Calm or Battle Shout to get a little rage. But you shouldn't ever feel like you're in a position to take say Slam off your bar because you can just never afford it.

Slam's balance is also tricky. We nerfed its damage at a time when beta warriors were considering not using Mortal Strike at all. But Heroic Strike should never look more attractive than Slam for Arms. Heroic Strike is for times when you've hit every button and still have rage. We realize with certain amounts of haste that Slam may eventually fall behind, but we don't think we'll be there in the first tier of content so we have time to evaluate how the rest of the mechanics and abilities are working before we make any changes there. If we're wrong, and Heroic Strike does fall higher in the priority than Slam for Arms, then we'll nerf one or buff the other. (Source)

Haste
The actual explanation is that haste (in Cataclysm) gives melee more resources, and all of our melee (though Ret still the least) can often do more when they have more resources. To use your warlock comparison, the lock can cast faster (i.e. "do more") with more haste. Warriors already have that, because haste gives them more rage, which lets them hit more buttons. If haste provided more rage *and* more damage, then there is a chance that melee would scale better than casters and that haste would trump every other secondary stat (except possibly hit) for Arms. (By contrast, giving warlocks more mana over short time periods wouldn't really do anything for them.)

It's definitely possible that haste isn't good enough for Arms yet, but we want to avoid it slipping into the master stat. We might be able to make say Rend or Slam scale very slightly with haste to make up the difference. It will be confusing if some melee attacks scale damage with haste and some don't, but that might be the lesser evil. (Source)

Rage Cap (100) too low?
I don't think that's it. We just like the design (of rage capping at 100). Usually when players want deeper pools, they are asking for more slush room so that they don't waste resources if they unexpectedly get more than they could handle or didn't get to spend it as efficiently as they anticipated. But that's part of the challenge of the resource. You have to keep the max in mind and base your decisions around not wasting it. Procs (of all kinds) get wasted all the time, by almost every class. One of the marks of skill of good players is trying to minimize that loss, and by extension, knowing when it's okay to take that hit.

Remember, our goal isn't necessarily to try to make things as easy as possible for you. (Source)
This article was originally published in forum thread: Moderator Recruitment, Ghostcrawler Pet, Blue Posts started by Boubouille View original post
Comments 123 Comments
  1. Sinra's Avatar
    I somehow suspect that ghostcrawler will be laughing inside everytime someone dies to this.
  1. conqq's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sinra View Post
    I somehow suspect that ghostcrawler will be laughing inside everytime someone dies to this.
    I hear he hits really hard and reduces damage and healing 20% per debuff
  1. Ghrog74's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Simca View Post
    I doubt they'll give another, additional title just for doing something before somebody else.

    This is just like the mount debate, High Warlord/Grand Marshal debate, and other title debates (Light of Dawn, etc):

    1. Blizzard introduces hard-to-get cool-looking thing.
    2. A few players get hard-to-get cool-looking thing.
    3. New content increases the ease to obtain cool-looking thing (new Dire Maul makeover, new raids, new Rated Battlegrounds system, etc.).
    4. Some of those players get upset because they wanted to be the only ones to have the cool thing OR they wanted everyone to go through the same amount of work as them.

    Let's face facts though. If I were to go kill LK25 heroic today and get Light of Dawn, I would have probably put in about 2% of the work compared to somebody in a guild like Paragon.

    Basically, just because you get something cool doesn't mean you have a monopoly on said "cool thing". Eventually, the "cool thing" will get easier and easier to obtain due to leveling up (85 will trivialize Light of Dawn, Frostwyrms, and others) or gearing up or gold deflation (Mechano-Hog) or other changes. When it does, you can A) Keep using the "cool thing" because you like it and it is still cool OR B) Find a new "cool thing" (they're always adding new rare mounts, pets, and titles).

    It's the nature of the game that old things get easier over time.

    Look at it this way, though: You now are Exalted with a reputation that nobody else will ever be able to get Exalted with. You'll have an automatic head-start on any new Exalted achievements, and you'll even get a Feat of Strength to wave around to boot.
    The difference being that the things you mentioned are not feats of strength. A feat of strength by blizzards definition is something that is perfectly acceptable to suddenly become impossible to get. The other things are standard achievements and as such there is the understanding that they will almost all be universally available for pretty much ever. Now what we have is something that wasn't outgeared but was in fact nerfed. To say it wasn't nerfed shows a lack of intellectual honesty and a certain degree of spin. Wether or not the nerf was a good thing or not is debateable, (I personally fall into the "slap in the face" crowd, although I wouldn't use such vulger termanology in describing it) but you cannot honestly deny that it was in fact a nerf of the achievement, and nerfing something that required such an amazing gut wrenching solo grind to obtain and showed true dedication to something so small as getting this Feat of Strength in which the only benefit is in the feat itself and the title, then nerfing the difficulty by about 30-40% of the time and gold spent on obtaining it letting others get it right after being told to hurry up or it's gonna go away by blizzard really is a poor move on Blizzards part, especially for those that did hurry up and grinded out the rep at the end when we were flat out told by Blizzard that it's going away.

    Basically it shows a huge lack of integrity on Blizzards part. We questioned their honesty before, but after Blizzard pulled this on people multiple times regarding this one achievement, we can't help but wonder if maybe they will change their mind and go back to the other way, after all, Blizzard has given us zero reason to trust them so far, why should we start now.

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