"Boring" GearI think gear might get really boring if you didn't have set bonuses (and perhaps trinkets) to look forward to.
Somewhat boring gear is okay... to a point... in PvP, where you need to strike a balance between skill and gear. Players want to enter PvP thinking they have a relatively level playing field, but we still use the gear reward as an incentive to participate.
PvE gear is already relatively inflexible on primary stats. If anything I wish there was more variability from tier to tier. Players have become pretty intolerant though of gear that doesn't feel like an unambiguous upgrade. That's not intended as an insult to anyone. It's just the state of a five year old game. (
Source)
Gear InflationThey're just numbers. We don't think it starts getting scary until the human mind literally has trouble processing the digits. If your new staff has 152,420 spell power, well, yeah that's a mouthful. But if your new staff has 4000 spell power, the only thing that can really be freaking you out is that 4000 is just a really big number compared to the 100 spell power you might be used to. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars too....
When players say we had scaling problems in Lich King, what they mean (or at least what they *should* mean) is that we picked the end numbers we wanted for percentages such as crit and dodge and then picked ratings that would get us there. When we inflated the item levels to account for hard modes (with a little help from things like glyphs too) then the percentages ended up higher than we intended. That doesn't mean that exponential scaling on gear is bad. It just means that we misjudged our endpoints.
Gear inflation is just part of MMOs, or at least the kind of MMO that we make. Players are going to freak when they see the Cataclysm gear (because believe me, we did), but it's also exciting too.
(
Source)
Tanking Classes DisparitiesWarrior tanks can tank every boss in the game, and more often than not get the world first and server first kills on those bosses. More raids use warrior tanks than any other. Most cutting-edge guilds use warrior tanks. We can't detect a higher "failure rate" on warrior tanks, and frankly I'm not even sure what that means given that most everyone here agrees there are far more experienced warrior tanks than other tanks out there. Some of you are arguing "when we switch to the undergeared paladin, we do better," yet very few groups are actually switching. The best we're stuck with is some kind of fuzzy "it's harder on the healers," which is pretty hard to quantify, especially since the healers aren't running out of mana healing anyone.
This is why the developers keep going back to what we are seeing happening in the game, which is warriors tanking stuff.
[...] Yes, if we see paladins or druids (or warriors or DKs for that matter) repeating what happened on Sarth or Vezax, then we will do something while Icecrown is still relevant.
When is the appropriate time to buff or nerf is something that is always going to be subjective. Buffing someone when we aren't convinced they need it (assuming it affects relative power compared to another class) is as dangerous as not buffing someone when they do need it.
And again, it's not as simple as guilds having a favorite tank for specific fights. Druids on Thorim or warriors on Anub adds didn't cross the line for us, though I understand why it might for some people. (
Source)
Item stats on PTRsMany of the stats have gone in relatively recently. If you tried out the PTR a few weeks ago, bosses weren't dropping loot at all. We recently went back and changed our paradigm for how we wanted to handle sockets on these items. Sockets have a budget and in this case the other stats were not adjusted correctly for the socket change.
We are adding over 1400 PvE items to the game in 3.3. There are going to be some bugs. Usually we catch them all before they go live, but some still slip through. We don't try to catch them all before we make a PTR build. Sometimes we're right in the middle of doing something (e.g. changing sockets in this case) and it's not worth holding up all the massive machinery that generates a build just for a few simple bugs that aren't really going to affect the PTR experience anyway. Also consider that item bugs generally aren't as serious as class bugs since the former only affect a smaller percentage of the latter. Bugs are bugs though. I won't try to justify them. (
Source)
Author
