World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Raid testing is not quite beginning yet, but we're getting closer. We need another PTR patch or two to iron out some stability issues and get more of our internal updates to the raid zone onto the PTR, but once that happens, we'll begin with our usual schedule of focused boss testing, one boss at a time, one difficulty at a time.

In general, when we have a day of testing, we'll try to conduct two testing sessions: one at around 10:30 PDT/13:30 EDT/19:30 CEST that is designed to be more convenient for EU testers, and one at 16:00 PDT/19:00 EDT/01:00 CEST that works better for NA testers, though all regions' servers will be open for testing during both windows. We'll make every effort to announce testing at least one day in advance, and to only schedule testing when we're relatively confident the realms will be available and accessible, but as always, this is a testing environment that is subject to bugs, schedule changes, and unforeseen service disruption. There will inevitably be some inconveniences, and I apologize in advance for them.

We'll begin by testing 10-player Normal and then Heroic mode, before moving on to targeted 25-player tests. We begin with 10-player because we tend to see a wider range of skill levels and group types participating in those tests (whereas it tends to mostly just be the very best Heroic guilds that can muster a 25-player PTR raid), which help us to better establish a broad tuning baseline for the encounters, but we'll be testing everything (except Heroic Garrosh!) in both raid sizes in due course. Once an entire "wing" of the raid has been tested in Normal, we'll unlock that section for LFR and/or Flexible mode queuing with a more open-ended testing window, measured in days rather than hours.

See you in (and beneath) Orgrimmar!

So I was in a LFR (yeah shoot me please) waiting for a tank on Dark Animus. A dps gets all upset because the queue is taking awhile and decides to shoot the 1 hp boss starter, leave group and make everyone wipe.

But lo and behold, there is no way to report a person for that anymore. It's not one of the choices for writing a ticket. The only way to report a person is by right-clicking their name, but he left the group so there is no way to right click his name. PLUS, if you could right click his name there is nothing for reporting something like this anyway. Even though this behaviour is kind of common (now I know why it's common).

Isn't this griefing? Isn't this part of the EULA? The only assumption I can make is Blizz is ok with this, they've certainly guaranteed no one will suffer for it.
The reality is that it's exceedingly difficult -- and not very sustainable -- to try and micro-manage player behavior to the level you want. Our Customer Support reps do not exist to police morals or, as you suggest, deny people access to content for long periods of time because they can be mean and cause others inconvenience.

Is what that player did cool? Absolutely not. It's a crappy thing to do to a group and it's happened to me.

So what we've done is developed a hidden system that tracks player behavior in matchmade groups on a number of different levels. We don't go into a lot of details about the system for a few reasons: A) we've been constantly evolving how intelligent the system is, B) the system is dynamic so that it can apply penalties based on varying factors -- it's analyzing trends as they change over time and accounting for them in some fashion -- and C) we don't want players to know exactly how the system starts penalizing people for less-than-average behavior and then try to game it.

Suffice it to say, the things you do in a matchmade group matter. If you're above the average in kicking players out of groups, being kicked from groups, or ducking out early (as described in the OP), deserter debuffs, kicking thresholds, and the like become increasingly less forgiving.

As for handing out suspensions or blocking people from matchmaking content for any lengths of time, that's a very different discussion. But the policies and procedures we have in place are considered with extreme care. We want to create the best and most fair environment possible in World of Warcraft, so friends and strangers alike can have a good time. And, as mentioned above, we try to put checks and balances into our game systems to ensure bad behavior isn't rewarded, and becomes very inconvenient for the instigator.

This is a social game and millions of people are playing. It just isn't feasible to expect us to have the personnel to judge every instance of player disruption and dole out whatever punishment the reporting player feels is warranted.

Note: Nowhere in my post did I say being a jerk is okay! I'm not sure how you were misled into believing that's Blizzard's stance based on the situation you laid out.

Just to check my understanding: the thread was not about griefing or players being given the all-clear to grief others, but was always about how it's not as simple to report a player as in the past. Is that right?
You bring up another point worth clarifying, regarding reporting options. If a player is reported for being mean by pulling a boss and then dropping group, verifying that behavior isn't a simple task. When I was speaking about feasibility, this is a good example. We don't have the time to take countless reports of this kind of behavior and pull game logs to verify that a player was, without a doubt, griefing. Looking at lines of code to verify that a jerk move took place is overly complicated and can't be applied effectively to every player going through the matchmaking system at any hour of the day.

The other option is for a GM, upon receiving a report of jerkishness, to watch the reported player for a given amount of time and see if he repeats the behavior for which he was reported. It's not a good means of actually catching people and still demands a lot of time.

But to reiterate, our goal is to curb bad behavior on the development side as much as possible through the way our systems are designed, by making acts of griefing as discussed here harder to pull off, or at least result in an inconvenience to the player that increases in severity for repeat offenses.

How long has this been running in one form or another?
The system has been around ever since matchmaking for dungeons was introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, though as I said, it's evolved quite a bit over time.

Why have I not heard about this until now?
I guess it hasn't really been out in front of everyone's faces, so I can see how you wouldn't have heard of it. That said, we've discussed it in the past many times. I know I've posted about several times since Dungeon Finder was released. I believe there have even been patch notes or hotfixes about it at times, as there was at least one occasion where some of the thresholds were off and overly penalizing, to the point that a number of players were posting concerns about it on the forums.

It sounds like the system is designed to prevent abuse towards other players, but by being that way it actually caters to the people who do abuse the system and punishes those who do not.
Getting kicked a lot isn't a good thing. But it is a factor that's monitored. I probably wasn't clear enough on that in my first post.

The thing is though, the developers can totally influence player behavior by the way they design the game.

Back when I played my first MMORPG, the rules were so strict that people couldn't afford to be jerks. They needed to form groups. Player reputation meant everything, because it was even possible to go backwards in progress and de-level.

It's the little things in WoW that ruin it, too. Things like mob-tagging. It's great that some mobs can be shared by players outside of the same party now, but it should be for all quest mobs(for your faction, at least).

Or even the gameplay itself. The team work is entirely based around performing your role well. Content is generally completed and you're rewarded or it's not completed. There's no "score" to reward us with--outside of Challenge modes. Therefore, there's nothing to encourage PUG players to really work together. This results in the culture we have where DPS players are only concerned about DPS charts, and what not.
You make a lot of good points. I'd just add that I've had countless discussions with some of our lead developers about this type of thing. They're aware of the social implications of things like matchmaking, the relative ease with which 25 strangers can complete raid content via LFR, etc., and they're absolutely committed to designing the game in such a way that it doesn't pay to be a jerk, and ideally rewards people for not only not being a jerk, but for being friendly and social. We may not always succeed. We may still have work to do. But the awareness, adeptness, and commitment are all there.

Soloing Old Raids
We've specifically avoided ever setting the expectation that old group content will be adjusted such that it can be soloed, not only by a certain level, but by every class/spec in the game. The fact that old raids can be soloed is a side effect of the game's increasing level/power cap over time. If you can pull it off, awesome!

Dungeon and raid encounters are not designed to be solod. You can farm it with a group like everyone else.

Why should one class be punished for this when most of the others can solo it? It is old content and it should not have to be done with a group some people are on low pop servers as well and do not have the luxury of this.
I don't think the low-pop argument is a good one. We're talking about the difference between soloing something, and bringing one or more friends to help. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Patch 5.4 Warlock Changes
Got a few updates for you guys. Standard disclaimer applies that this is all still in early testing and subject to change.

Fel Flame has gotten a slight rework. It now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can always be cast while moving. Also, it no longer extends the duration of damage over time effects (and, as such, no longer causes them to lose their "snapshotted" stats) and has gotten a small damage buff. The intent here is that you should be able to use this to keep up some damage when you need to move, but you'll want to stick to your standard rotation otherwise.

Looking specifically at Affliction, we're lowering the bonus damage that Malefic Grasp provides and moving that damage over into Haunt and the DoT effects themselves to compensate. We still want Malefic Grasp to be your primary filler for single target DPS, but this will make it a bit less punishing when you can't afford to channel it (especially in PvP). Haunt will once again be interrupted by movement, in favor of the Fel Flame change.

There's been a couple adjustments to the level 90 talents as well. Both Kil'jaeden's Cunning and Mannoroth's Fury have had their cooldowns and durations lowered to 60 and 10 seconds, respectively. Mannoroth's Fury now only applies to the core AoE damage spells (Seed of Corruption, Hellfire, Immolation Aura, and Rain of Fire), but increases their damage by 100% while active in addition to the range increase. Note that Rain of Fire is being changed to no longer generate enough Burning Embers to be worth using in a single target rotation (so, Destruction shouldn't feel forced into Mannoroth's Fury).

These should hopefully be hitting the PTR in the next build. Once again, please remember that we're very early in the 5.4 development process. Any or all of this may still change before the patch goes live. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Creatures

• Kor'kron Commanders are now immune to charms.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Throne of Thunder
  
  • Lei Shen
    
    • Bouncing Bolts that do not impact with a player will no longer cause Unharnessed Power to spawn on Raid Finder difficulty.
      

Pet Battles

• PvP Pet Battles are now required to last at least a minute before the match is eligible for experience to be awarded

Items

• Meta and blue gem sockets have been added to helmets awarded from Heroic Scenarios. Bonuses on the helmets have been reduced slightly to offset the addition of those sockets.

Brawler's Guild

• Razorgrin should no longer slowly regenerate health.

Flex Raid Rewards
Nothing is being removed from Raid Finder. In fact, the rewards Ghostcrawler mentioned in his tweets are something brand new that haven’t previously been available in any raid content.

We want there to be some incentives to “make the jump” from Raid Finder into something more organized. However, we’d like to do that in a way that doesn’t take anything away from Raid Finder. So instead of removing set bonuses, trinkets, legendary progress, or anything else along those lines, we decided to come up with something new.

Just to be totally clear: Raid Finder in Patch 5.4 will be itemized with all the same sorts of stuff you’ve come to expect over the last couple of tiers. There will, however, be a brand spanking new type of reward that is only available to players who choose to step up into Flex, Normal, or Heroic raiding. Hope that clears the air a bit! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Sharing Development Progress
There's honestly a lot of reasons why we tend to keep things in extremely early development under wraps. A big one is that players tend to take "we're experimenting with something" as "it will be in the game in a couple months," no matter how many disclaimers or caveats we attach to it.

There's also plenty of situations where we just don't have enough nailed down yet to give players a clear idea of where things are heading. When we can't be clear, players tend to build up expectations about what they think the feature will be... and when it turns out to be something different, they're disappointed (even if the real feature is actually pretty cool). In most cases, we'd rather wait until we have something solid to share and avoid all of that confusion and heartache.

All that being said, we have a much more open development process today than we did when the game first launched. The PTR process starts earlier in the dev cycle, and is far more accessible. We have much more efficient means of gathering player feedback from the forums, fansites, social media, etc. Heck, we even have designers like Greg Street and Brian Holinka actively discussing changes with players on Twitter. We try to be as open as we can about what we can. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.4 Shadowform Change
This change (along with the other passive damage reduction changes) is something we're going to balance around. We're just extremely early in the PTR cycle at the moment, so that balancing hasn't taken place yet.

To give some insight as to where we're headed, we wanted to chill out on some of the passive damage reduction in favor of moving to more active sources of mitigation. It just doesn't feel very good to have certain players in your raid (for example) who always take more damage from the big hits than others, even though neither player is doing anything special. We'd rather the players themselves be more in control.

For those concerned about the impact this will have in PvP, there are plenty of other ways we can balance things out that do not carry over into the other parts of the game. Resilience is an obvious example, but there's plenty of knobs that can be tweaked to make that feel right.

You took the reduction from shadow priest and moonkins but not hunters? any reason hunters get love?
We did lower the passive reduction from Aspect of the Iron Hawk a bit, but since it's a talent, it wouldn't make much sense to remove it entirely. We're okay with the passive effect in this case since it's a choice (and we're hoping that this change will help make the other talents in the tier more attractive). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.4 PvP Scaling
Just sharing a tweet from Brian H. that you might find particularly interesting:

Q: “The new pvp gear is 522, but whats the point if it will get scaled down to 496?”
Holinka: “The ceiling will slowly go up next season (e.g. 1 point per week) but PvP gear will be exempt from the ceiling.”

What do you guys think of this change? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battle Experience Bug
We’d like to thank everyone who submitted information to us about this issue. We can confirm that there is a bug currently that prevents Pet Battlers from properly earning experience on characters under level 90 through PvE encounters. While the issue currently persists in game, it has been addressed and should be fixed once realms are restarted.

We appreciate your patience during this time and if there are any other updates we can provide, we'll post them here in this thread.

Not sure if you know or not, but is there a time-frame on when this restart might happen or is that just going to be next Tuesday as usual?
I'd bank on Tuesday, but there's always that slight chance something could crop up and require restarts sooner. If that's the case, Breaking News should be updated to alert players. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Pet Battle Delays
This is actually something we're planning to address in Patch 5.4. Simply put, round timers in PvP Pet Battles will get progressively shorter for a player who takes more than 15 seconds to issue a command during their turn. This change is planned to take effect in a future PTR build, so please be sure to test it out and share your feedback with us! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Classes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
DPS dks have pretty crap utility compared to DPS warriors
Gorefiend's Grasp and battle rez are pretty potent utility. AMZ blocks a lot of damage if your timing is good. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Can Boomkins get a buff on hurricane/astral storm pretty please. So weak I might as well heal adds.
It is pretty weak, but we worry part of that is because multi-dotting is just so strong. It's on our list to look at. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Is Focus a compelling resource? All it comes down to is Arcane vs. Cobra (compare to more Energy letting you do more stuff).
Feel like when we gave hunters enough focus to do their normal rotation that we made focus just an Arcane delivery tool. (Source)
"We do plan to add quivers and other art assets for hunters so they can have some cool art"... 5.4 or another bait n switch?
If you insist on calling everything a bait and switch, we will be unable to discuss anything until patch notes. Your call. (Source)
I don't even understand how that's a "bait and switch".
I guess broken promise is more accurate but still not actually accurate. (Source)

Hi GC, registered to ask re button bloat vs. removing ablities is sin. What do you think of turning most abilites into glyphs?
If those glyphs feel mandatory then it doesn't help with the button bloat. Consider hunters... (Source)
What would be an optional ability? Serpent Sting? Arcane Shot? Snake Trap? I'd probably glyph the first 2 and not the last. (Source)

Stampede was one of the reasons why I quit Hunter in 5.0. I absolutely hated the direction the class was going.
Can you elaborate? In a burst sense? Because it was one of those (like Titan's Grip) that players campaigned to get... (Source)

Wasn't Blink Strikes changed to reduce some of the button clutter? Does the dev team want to bring that back?
We are pretty happy with the new Blink Strikes. Just want to make sure the other talents are still taken seriously by hunters. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Do the devs acknowledge the real issues with the Mage class atm? Heavy RNG/Crit scaling on Fire and poor scaling on Frost.
We're happy with the way crit works for Fire. We understand not every player is tolerant of RNG, but Fire's DPS is competitive. (Source)
Frost is as popular as any time I can recall lately esp. in 10s. Any scaling problems it has don't seem to be holding it back. (Source)
Recall, our guidelines for scaling concerns. We only care if gear scaling causes a 5-10% dps loss within a single tier. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Would the team consider changing Hymn of Hope so that it returns mana to only healers?
Potentially. We'll discuss. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Can I demand you revert the change where recuperate sucks? I speak for everyone*! *Also I am a sollipsist today.
We've actually heard the Recuperate feedback a lot lately. We'll look into it. (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
When will Enhancement Shamans get a finishing move, like all the other melee dps have.
I tweeted about homogenization a bit ago. This is a great example where we could give in and give executes to all. Should we? (Source)
Why can't Shamans do extra damage for the first 20% or so? That's a different sort of Execute, but a neat niche?
It is a neat niche... and one already occupied by Marksman.... (Source)

Lava surge procs off crits not ticks. What elemental shaman takes crit? Comon dude. We're in need of QoL changes not nerfs...
This is a cart / horse problem. You don't stack crit b/c it's not a good stat for you. Why not make it a good stat? (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Can you explain why Warlocks with Glyph of Demon Hunting are receiving the tank-exclusive debuff while carrying flags in RBGs?
We were worried it made them too survivable. Why are you using that glyph in PvP if not for the defensive benefits? (Source)

lock: "Damage mitigation may be the thing to be nerfed, but we will know more when Patch 5.4..." it's a joke right?
No. Guilds tell us they like to bring lots of locks because they require less healing but still bring lots of damage. (Source)

If they aren't a tank spec, why do they receive the tank debuff in RBGs?
Any flag carrier gets a debuff. The one on tanks is stronger to help compensate for their survivability. (Source)
So warlocks can be tagged as tank on pvp? What about a change in DA's PVP. so they get what realy they are? NOT a tank!
I'm trying to understand. Is the concern that DA warlocks make unbeatable flag carriers? (Source)
I thought DA warlocks got the 50% dmg debuff as well.
They do. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Are you guys happy with the current situation of arms warriors on pve? It's quite sad that everyone has better dps and utility
Skull Banner and Rallying Cry are pretty nice utility.... (Source)
Nice utillity every spec of warrior has. If your group needs banner or rally, you could just as easily bring fury
If raids feel like they have to bring an Arms and Fury warrior for utility they're going to run out of raid spots quick. (Source)

players dont play it because its not good compared to Fury. Arms got community. in DS most played Arms
Yeah, but every time Arms wins, even a little, all the Fury warriors come out to the forums. It's sort of a no-win situation. (Source)

I think you should read this thread and give people some advice
I don't think the 1.5 GCD is a big PvP balance problem and I'm convinced warriors would complain about empty GCDs. (Source)
I've never understood the fascination with a quicker GCD. If anything, you hand out shorter GCDs too often.
But many warriors hate having empty GCDs and with HS off the GCD, that gets even worse. (Source)
I think their wrists in 10 years will appreciate the empty GCDs! The price we may for responsive game play...
Back in I think it was Cata, warriors used the term RSI in trying to get their rotations improved. (Source)

But isnt that the way Rage has worked since...forever? Take damage=rage to spend on defense and/or offense?
Defensive Stance doesn't do that any longer for similar reasons. Tanking should be about mitigating / avoiding damage. (Source)

Why would any group bring an arms warrior that is struggling with a boss?
Because for nearly every guild, your group comp isn't what's holding you back. It's not meeting the encounter mechanics. (Source)

The problem is that neither fury nor arms are strong. Prot is in a weird spot because pally/monk. What do we do?
Fury is plenty strong in PvE. Arms is probably a little behind, but not so far that you can't play it. (Source)

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