Is it intended that secondary stats now have twice the itemization budget of primary stats in terms of gems
Yes. With the possible exception of Spirit, there is little decision in choosing red gems in the live game. Secondary stats are often more interesting in general because there are break points, hard caps, and personal preferences. Any Agi user who eschews Agi is doing it wrong.
Let me throw some numbers at you
Sadly those aren't the kind of numbers that support compelling arguments. Classes can be overpowered with only a few abilities or have dozens and still be underpowered. If there are situations where you feel helpless, let us know. If you disagree with a design direction, let us know that too (though this thread is not the right one for that).
We understand not every player has the ability and/or inclination to come up with numbers such as healing per second or the effectiveness of cooldowns. But this one thread is for those who can. It has been enormously beneficial in helping us catch bugs or design problems as well as helping players calibrate their sims and spreadsheets. Please help us keep the signal to noise ratio strong.
This point is directed the blues (and no one else)
Sorry, these are public forums. We like and encourage players to talk to each other. The echo chamber effect is strong in our forums, so we think it's actually very healthy when players can disagree with you, provided they can do so in a constructive manner. If someone's just trolling you, ignore them and we'll take care of it. But someone disagreeing with you is not the same as trolling.
Druid (
Forums) /
Monk (
Forums)
To provide an update on tanking mechanics, I want to comment on Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters. This is somewhat of an over-generalization, but tanks typically care about 4 things when gearing in decreasing order of importance:
- Survive the maximum burst damage of the encounter (aka Effective Health)
- Minimize healing needed (aka Damage Reduction + Self Healing)
- Hold aggro on whatever you’re needed to hold aggro on (aka TPS)
- Maximize damage dealt (aka DPS)
#4 is generally much less important than #1-3, and overlaps with #3 heavily when considering gear. And #3 is relatively easy these days anyway. So, usually it just comes down to #1 and #2.
Stamina primarily helps with #1. Dodge primarily helps with #2. Most other stats help with resource generation, which typically translate into #2. Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters is in the somewhat unusual place of helping with both #1 and #2 significantly.
If you compare Mastery to Dodge for a Brewmaster, as a few theorycrafters here have done, you can see that, purely in terms of how much they reduce your damage taken, Dodge wins by a considerable margin. We balanced it that way, because we give value to how much it helps with #1 as well. Obviously, helping with #1 has some value, because you care about Stamina. We see Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters as sort of a hybrid between Stamina and Avoidance, in terms of how it helps improve your character.
It’s easy to objectively compare the value of two stats in terms of how much they help with #1, or how much they help with #2. But comparing some amount of help with #1 to some amount of help with #2 is much more complex and subjective. It’s an interesting choice that tanks have to make all the time, and one of the most successful choices in gearing that the game provides (Stamina vs. Avoidance being the primary way that choice is expressed). So, that means balancing a stat that provides a mix of both can be complex and subjective as well. After much deliberation, we’re going to try valuing the effective health benefits of Mastery for Brewmasters and Guardians significantly lower than the damage reduction benefits, and adjusting the Mastery conversion rates to reflect that.
Hopefully this provides a bit of background and perspective about the complexities underlying even the simplest of changes: In the next build, you’ll find Mastery for Guardians providing 1.25% Armor per Mastery (up from 0.65%), and for Brewmasters providing 0.5% Stagger per Mastery (up from 0.3%).
Hunter (
Forums)
While doing hunter ability testing I noticed that Wild Quiver looks to be doing only about half the damage of an autoshot (possibly a bit less). Historically Wild Quiver has been roughly the same damage as autoshot. Was this changed deliberately or is it a bug?
Yes, Wild Quiver does 50% weapon damage now, but we’ve increased the proc rate substantially to compensate. Also, the next build you get should include a significant number of changes to hunter ability damage, so it’s probably best to wait until then for really detailed investigation of their damage formulae. Super brief and incomplete summary of changes include nearly doubling Wild Quiver’s proc chance; doubling the damage of the level 90 talents; buffing BM’s Mastery considerably; Master Marksman reduced to 3 stacks; doubling the damage of Black Arrow and Serpent Sting for Survival; significantly nerfing Beast Cleave; nearly halving the cost of Explosive Shot; buffing Aimed, Arcane, and Chimera Shot noticeably; nerfing Cobra shot noticeably; nearly doubling the damage of Kill Command; reducing the cost of Arcane Shot; nerfing Focus Fire and Frenzy somewhat… There have been a lot of changes to Hunter damage.
Shaman (
Forums)
My question is, how is this talent intended to work? How much is the heal supposed to be? 25% of base maximum (which would be 20% of new maximum)? 25% of new maximum? Are health percentages supposed to remain constant through its effect? Where does this 15% come from?
We weren't able to reproduce the results you mention, but this is the intended functionality of Nature's Guardian: When it is triggered, 25% of your current maximum health is calculated. Your current and maximum health is then increased by this value. When it wears off, it reduces your current and max health by that value. It should never actually kill you, but it can reduce your current health to 1.
Is it intended for Healing Stream and Healing Tide to not benefit from mastery on the first ticks or is it just a technical limitation from totems? If so does this mean that crit does not benefit on first tick either for HTT(Have yet to see it but didn't do extensive testing on it).
Fixed for next build. It also dynamically adjusts with your mastery instead of snapshotting it.
Speaking of ICDs and Enhancement, could you clarify how Windfury is working for MoP?
Historically, Windfury has had a 3 second ICD between procs with a shared lockout between hands. It would also proc from white hits along with Stormstrike and Lava Lash. So my questions are this:
1) Is the 3 second ICD still the plan for MoP. I just did some initial testing against a training dummy, and that still seems to be the case.
2) Is the ICD still supposed to be shared between both hands for MoP?
3) Is this ICD a fixed 3 second ICD for MoP, or is it effected by Haste at all?
4) Is Windfury supposed to proc from Stormstrike and Lava Lash? From my testing, I didn't see a single proc when just isolating Stormstrike and Lava Lash attacks. On Live, I'm seeing both yellow attacks proc Windfury. I'm assuming this is just a bug, but I want to confirm if this is by design for MoP
Windfury should be mostly the same as on live. 1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) Fixed. 4) White attacks and Wind Lash only. Other than adding Wind Lash to being able to proc it, it doesn’t look like it’s changed in quite a while; are you sure that yellow attacks trigger it on live? (Easy way to test just yellow attacks: Turn 90degrees away from a target dummy. White attacks won’t hit, but yellow attacks can, at exactly 90degrees).
- Do you meet #1?
- If yes, then any further value in this category is 0.
- If no, then get more stuff that increases your #1 value (primarily Stamina).
It’s not that simple though. Meeting #1 is somewhat binary, like you describe, somewhat not. If you beat an encounter without dying, obviously you had enough effective health. But more effective health would still be useful; it’s definitely not without value. Healers can use slower, more efficient heals on you if you have more of a health cushion. You can tank more mobs at a time. You also may have gotten lucky with avoidance, and never took a special attack and an undodged auto attack at the same time, or perhaps never got 5 undodged hits in a row. Every pull is different. There are definitely diminishing returns on the value of more effective health, but it doesn’t instantly diminish to 0 at some magical ‘enough’ point.
Warlock (
Forums)
I was looking at the warlock changes in the upcoming beta build and noticed a few things. Why are you nerfing affliction so much? I agree it needed a nerf, but so much that it will go below the other 2 specs by a large amount?
Not to mention destroying a glyph and adding a new ability that kills clipping. People will just ignore the glyph and Pandemic and just refresh dots right after they fall off to do max dps. Clipping with or without the glyph is useless now, but with the glyph it's like nerfing yourself. Drain Soul is barley better than MG under 20% today, now with it getting a HUGE nerf it will be completely useless as an execute.
We encourage you to try out the changes and see what has changed rather than relying on information that has been datamined. To help further explain, we’ll briefly summarize what has changed with Affliction damage.
We noticed (thanks to the community interaction in this thread) that the Everlasting Affliction glyph was providing a huge DPS increase, but as we’ve said, we don’t want huge DPS increases to come from glyphs. Instead of simply nerfing the glyph, we baked the benefits that the glyph provided into the entire class via Pandemic, a level 90 passive ability, and changed the glyph to something completely different. We also changed the design of Malefic Grasp to, hopefully, make the ability more reliable and simple; our intention was not to nerf it. It’s important to note that we reduced the base period of Unstable Affliction and Corruption from 3 seconds to 2 seconds, so both Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul should give you the same additional DoT damage now as they did before.
One other clarification about the warlock changes: Drain Soul still deals double damage under 20%. It being missing from the new tooltip is just a tooltip error and has been corrected for the next build.
Now onto what some others have brought up. Does the MG/DS under 20% effect count as the dots themselves ticking? Considering how that would nerf shard regen if not, I personally believe it does. Since I can't test it yet, some clarification would be wonderful.
Yes. In all ways, the additional ticks of the DoTs provided by MG/DS should function as additional ticks of the respective DoTs. For example, the extra Corruption ticks that occur (for 50% damage) from MG are able to proc Nightfall. This means that you’re actually getting
*more* Corruption ticks than before, so we reduced the proc chance per tick of Nightfall to compensate; you should get the same number of Nightfall procs per time as before.
The Malefic Grasp mechanic change should not be a nerf at all. However, the 25% nerf to most Affliction-specific abilities should amount to a ~20% (very ballpark number, don’t hold us to that number if you model it as 21.8% or something) nerf. This is indeed a rather extreme amount, because they really were that extremely overpowered. We had been balancing them previously based on not having that glyph (and so when I said that we were seeing Affliction only a little ahead of Destruction, that was based on Affliction not having that glyph).
My personal testing on target dummies and every sim i've seen is now hoping Affliction at the bottom of the warlock heap
Any sources for this so we have something to actually go on? As we said above, Affliction damage was too high. Not every damage adjustment needs to be greeted with sky is falling rhetoric or the discussion quickly loses its benefit.