5,3 Dev Interview - More Proof the devs are clueless about their own game.

[gynshon]

Monk
Tanks are reluctant to use Avert Harm because it can result in death, but Brewmaster already has a lot of raid utility so it may just be removed in the future.
In the future, Windwalker may see healing become less of a personal DPS loss or Tigereye Brew benefit healing.

What tank is reluctant to use Avert Harm, bad ones? Avert Harm is definitely beneficial in many situations. Now to remove it? Clueless...

On a side note:

Every week since the beginning of this tier, rolled for trinkets. ZERO trinkets from drops, zero from rolls. Our enhance is in same boat, zero rolls. Always gold. I am so pissed at this game right now...

[Teriz]

The devs also discussed doing another pass at the talents. I hope they revamp Dampen harm and Ox Wave. Those talents are pretty pathetic.

[Radio]

Yeah a tank who uses it when he's directly tanking a hard hitting boss deserves to die, situations where you aren't tanking a boss and there's raid damage to mitigate while stacked are plentiful if you pay attention.

The devs also discussed doing another pass at the talents. I hope they revamp Dampen harm and Ox Wave. Those talents are pretty pathetic.

What?! I'll give you Ox Wave since it's use is a tiny niche at best, but Dampen Harm? It's one of our best cooldowns...

[Raugnaut]

In most cases, if you use it to reduce raid AoE damage in current content, you go down to 10% health SO fast that you get gibbed by the boss right after that. This is why most guides greatly suggest using Avert Harm with Zen Meditation, as when you are doing that, you take 90% reduced damage and can absorb far more damage. Might as well bake it into Zen Med for monks.

---------- Post added 2013-05-27 at 05:44 AM ----------

The devs also discussed doing another pass at the talents. I hope they revamp Dampen harm and Ox Wave. Those talents are pretty pathetic.

Charging Ox Wave has the advantage of being a ranged stun, and a shorter CD. Dampen Harm can be used in raiding as a dps/healer for certain fights where you recieve a large AoE hit periodically, such as Annihilates on Elegon, and Jalak shouts on Horridon. Sadly, both situations are pretty niche. Dampen Harm would be more useful if it had a 90 second duration, and didn't count staggered damage (I.E if you got hit, if the unstaggered portion is < 20% health, charge isn't used, but if unstaggered portion> 20% health, charge is used).

Charging Ox Wave is fine. 30 yd range, 3 second stun, 30 second cooldown, compared to leg sweep's 5 second stun, 8 yd range, and 45 second CD.

[Totaltotemic]

Reluctance to use Avert Harm because of potential death is stupid? I guess you weren't around for the Divine Sacrifice days. The stupid design decision was putting Divine Sac back in the game in another form to begin with, it's a silly concept for an ability because the cancel protection at 20% takes half a second to kick in, meaning you can't use the ability without Zen Meditation, which itself is canceled by any number of things.

[Radio]

Charging Ox Wave has the advantage of being a ranged stun, and a shorter CD. Dampen Harm can be used in raiding as a dps/healer for certain fights where you recieve a large AoE hit periodically, such as Annihilates on Elegon, and Jalak shouts on Horridon. Sadly, both situations are pretty niche. Dampen Harm would be more useful if it had a 90 second duration, and didn't count staggered damage (I.E if you got hit, if the unstaggered portion is < 20% health, charge isn't used, but if unstaggered portion> 20% health, charge is used). CD.

What about Horridon's Dire Call? Ji-Kun's Talon Rake? Durumu's Hard Stare? Suen's Fan of Flames? The only fights this tier where I don't make a distinct use out of either Dampen Harm or Diffuse Magic are Tortos, Primordius, Dark Animus, Iron Qon and Lei Shen (Fusion slash tickles on normal), but even in those fights they can see use as emergency reactive cooldowns or planned damage smoothers.

[Raugnaut]

As an added example, lets take most AoEs in Throne. Quills, Rampage, Lightning Storm, Iron Qon's Fist. Here would be a "good" situation to use Avert Harm. Now, lets assume its a 10 man, and the entire raid is stacked up for maximum redirection. All of these AoE hit party members for ~50k per tick. In a 10 man, this is 500k raid damage per second. 20% of 500k is 150k damage, taken every second. Now, 40% of this is staggered, so you are taking 90k damage per second, and 50k damage staggered per second. After the full 6 seconds, you would have taken a total of 540k damage up front (Ilvl 510 BrM monks would have about 620k hp), which leaves you with 13% of your hp. Now, you have a 300k stagger up, which you can, of course, clear right off. However, for each second that a BrM monk fails to take it off, it deals 30k damage to the monk, or about 4% of your hp per second. Most of these AoE are STILL going on, so you still have 50k damage coming in, or 8% of your hp per second. Should you fail to clear stagger ASAP, you are left with only 1% of your hp! the next second, death.

So, yea. Avert Harm is NOT a good raid cooldown by itself. For best effectiveness, it's used in conjunction with Zen Meditation or another cooldown, like Fort brew, or maybe even Guard. As stated previously, might as well make it baseline with Zen Med.

Also, don't even THINK about using it to mitigate raid damage in a 25 man- you'll drop to 10% health instantly.

---------- Post added 2013-05-27 at 06:05 AM ----------

What about Horridon's Dire Call? Ji-Kun's Talon Rake? Durumu's Hard Stare? Suen's Fan of Flames? The only fights this tier where I don't make a distinct use out of either Dampen Harm or Diffuse Magic are Tortos, Primordius, Dark Animus, Iron Qon and Lei Shen (Fusion slash tickles on normal), but even in those fights they can see use as emergency reactive cooldowns or planned damage smoothers.

As stated, for dps and healers. For tanks, its perfectly fine, so fine that stating its useless is the essence of ignorance.

[Deleted]

Dampen Harm is perfect for dps too... Last night we killed Animus HC and with DH I could pretty much cheese the Interruptin Jolt. It is niche, but its a strong one!

[Alucin]

I only use avert harm on a few fights. Ji-kun, durumu on the other tank. Others like horridon, iron qon or twins I probably should, but don't think of it.

[cyqu]

Reluctance to use Avert Harm because of potential death is stupid? I guess you weren't around for the Divine Sacrifice days. The stupid design decision was putting Divine Sac back in the game in another form to begin with, it's a silly concept for an ability because the cancel protection at 20% takes half a second to kick in, meaning you can't use the ability without Zen Meditation, which itself is canceled by any number of things.

not sure if serious or stupid?

its a silly concept to think that AH needs to be used with ZM.

[Mormolyce]

Every week since the beginning of this tier, rolled for trinkets. ZERO trinkets from drops, zero from rolls. Our enhance is in same boat, zero rolls. Always gold. I am so pissed at this game right now...

I heard that in WoW there's this thing called RNG.

P.S. Roll protection came in this patch bro.

[Raugnaut]

not sure if serious or stupid?

its a silly concept to think that AH needs to be used with ZM.

If you use AH as a raid damage reduction cooldown for a heavy-damage AoE phase in 10 mans, you should greatly consider it to both maximize the damage reduction and ease the healing on the healers (Suddenly having to spam single target heals on the tank when AoE healing is needed isn't helpful). In 25 mans, it's 100% needed to prevent gibbing from taking the full 90% of your health within a couple seconds, AND to have it last the max 6 seconds and be a useful raid CD.

[gynshon]

I heard that in WoW there's this thing called RNG.

P.S. Roll protection came in this patch bro.

At this stage of the game, I am pretty sure we all know what RNG is. Spend more time off the forums, and more time in the game. I was just frustrated since we haven't seen a single agi trinket drop this entire tier from the bosses, or bonus rolls while rolling every single week. It is quite ridiculous.

[Radio]

As stated, for dps and healers. For tanks, its perfectly fine, so fine that stating its useless is the essence of ignorance.

Sorry about that, your post isn't entirely clear on that point, and I tend to assume the worst of forum posters these days.

As for the Avert Harm calculation though... probably best to calculate it a different way:

Our example is Iron Qon 10 heroic with 10 stacks of Rising Anger:

Base 10 man heroic fist smash does ~30k per tick, add 10 stacks of rising anger (meaning one of the harder fist smashes that you'll have to deal with) and you get ~60k per tick per person. It is physical damage so we also account for armour.


Formula for damage taken per second would have to be:

Personal DTPS = 60k * OxStance% * Armour% * Stagger%
Other player DTPS = (0.2 * (60k * X)) * OxStance% * Armour% * Stagger%
X being the percentage reduction of the individual player from armour/CDs/passives, this can range a lot between tanks/cloth classes.

Using an abritrary example a little below my gear level that doesn't take 2p into consideration:

Personal DTPS = 60k * 0.75 * 0.71 * 0.5 = 15,975

Now we'll apply an example of the damage taken from a hunter specced into iron hawk:

Hunter DTPS = (0.2 * (60k * 0.64 (armour) * 0.85 (iron hawk)) * 0.75 * 0.71 * 0.5 = 1,738.08

Or a prot pally not using any kind of active ability?

Prot Pal DTPS = (0.2 * (60k * 0.433 (armour) * 0.85 (sanctuary)) * 0.75 * 0.71 * 0.5 = 1,175.92

A mage not using any kind of active ability?

Mage DTPS = (0.2 * (60k * 0.75 (armour)) * 0.75 * 0.71 * 0.5 = 2,396.25

Even one of the weakest examples I could find had a tiny contribution to our damage taken through avert harm, even assuming a worst case scenario with no active personal/raid CDs used on the behalf of any player, no absorbs used by healers and all of your teammates being mages it would only be contributing 21,566 DTPS to the 15,975 we had earlier. If we assumed hunters as an average then we'd be looking at 15,642 total DTPS added from the 9 other players.

These calculations would be affected insignificantly if brewmaster armour didn't factor into the damage taken, and my calculations also didn't take into account the weakened blows debuff.

TL;DR: I understand that 25 man is probably dangerous for using Avert Harm, but in 10 man the extra damage taken is trivial at best when you're not actively taking melee swings. I use it regularly on Megaera rampages and Iron Qon fist smashes and it tickles. Best solution for 25 man would be to enforce a cap on the number of players affected or to raise the health cancel cap.

[Trendy-Ideology]

AH is good.
AH is fine.
People that don't use it are bad.
People that think it's bad are probably mistaken about the usefulness of any number of other skills/abilities in this game and probably playing sub-optimally as a result.


There's no situation where you can't plan for and use AH, all you really need is a guard in there somewhere, and purge liberally. Also this magically thing called communication does wonders when you can get some extra direct healing from a healer who understands that you just saved the healers a ton of mana.

[Callypso]

"Brewmasters already have so much raid utility, so we might remove Avert Harm"

Uh, what? Did I miss the other half of my spellbook? Not saying BM's are in a bad place, but i'm kinda confused where the 'lots of raid utility' comment comes from. Slows/Stuns are something nearly every tanking class has atm, and the shields from the statue are hardly worth writing home about as they have a tendency to expire without being used.... what else?




Anyone else kinda annoyed that they discuss raid utility for half the classes, but Windwalkers barely get mentioned? I'm not sure what raids the devs have been watching, but the 'no classes were excluded from heroic progress' kinda irked me, as WW's are basically bad rogues with less utility atm.

[Trendy-Ideology]

"Brewmasters already have so much raid utility, so we might remove Avert Harm"

Uh, what? Did I miss the other half of my spellbook? Not saying BM's are in a bad place, but i'm kinda confused where the 'lots of raid utility' comment comes from. Slows/Stuns are something nearly every tanking class has atm, and the shields from the statue are hardly worth writing home about as they have a tendency to expire without being used.... what else?




Anyone else kinda annoyed that they discuss raid utility for half the classes, but Windwalkers barely get mentioned? I'm not sure what raids the devs have been watching, but the 'no classes were excluded from heroic progress' kinda irked me, as WW's are basically bad rogues with less utility atm.

The biggest issue with WW atm is that it's balanced around a gimmicky trinket. I think it's got a way stronger kit than people give it credit for, it just doesn't have a raid cooldown, which is basically what everyone means when they say "utility" they really just mean "raid cooldown".

Between EH, chi wave, ToK, a 20% personal cooldown, zen med, and your choice of DH or DM, plus two AoE stuns and an AoE silence/disarm... I'm not sure exactly what rogue brings to the table, pretending damage is equal, besides for smoke bomb? (And tricks I guess. Which is, I'll admit, pretty nice)

[Callimonk]

The biggest issue with WW atm is that it's balanced around a gimmicky trinket. I think it's got a way stronger kit than people give it credit for, it just doesn't have a raid cooldown, which is basically what everyone means when they say "utility" they really just mean "raid cooldown".

Between EH, chi wave, ToK, a 20% personal cooldown, zen med, and your choice of DH or DM, plus two AoE stuns and an AoE silence/disarm... I'm not sure exactly what rogue brings to the table, pretending damage is equal, besides for smoke bomb? (And tricks I guess. Which is, I'll admit, pretty nice)

Yes and no. I'd say that we could use a major CD such as Stormlash - that's what I would personally like. Mostly because Rets get DA, Warriors get banners, etc. etc. insert the same, tired discussion here.

Overall, I am personally happy with where WW is. Sure, we are somewhat balanced around Rune, but the devs keep saying that the "real" reason we received the nerf that we did was because of CW... which was broken at the time.

We'll see what happens next tier, if Rune even becomes outdated at that point in time.

[Pazx]

As an added example, lets take most AoEs in Throne. Quills, Rampage, Lightning Storm, Iron Qon's Fist. Here would be a "good" situation to use Avert Harm. Now, lets assume its a 10 man, and the entire raid is stacked up for maximum redirection. All of these AoE hit party members for ~50k per tick. In a 10 man, this is 500k raid damage per second. 20% of 500k is 150k damage, taken every second. Now, 40% of this is staggered, so you are taking 90k damage per second, and 50k damage staggered per second. After the full 6 seconds, you would have taken a total of 540k damage up front (Ilvl 510 BrM monks would have about 620k hp), which leaves you with 13% of your hp. Now, you have a 300k stagger up, which you can, of course, clear right off. However, for each second that a BrM monk fails to take it off, it deals 30k damage to the monk, or about 4% of your hp per second. Most of these AoE are STILL going on, so you still have 50k damage coming in, or 8% of your hp per second. Should you fail to clear stagger ASAP, you are left with only 1% of your hp! the next second, death.

So, yea. Avert Harm is NOT a good raid cooldown by itself. For best effectiveness, it's used in conjunction with Zen Meditation or another cooldown, like Fort brew, or maybe even Guard. As stated previously, might as well make it baseline with Zen Med.

Also, don't even THINK about using it to mitigate raid damage in a 25 man- you'll drop to 10% health instantly.

---------- Post added 2013-05-27 at 06:05 AM ----------



As stated, for dps and healers. For tanks, its perfectly fine, so fine that stating its useless is the essence of ignorance.

yeah but what about getting healed and the fact you can clear stagger 2-3 times during AH, i have only done 4/12 normal soon 5 but i have never been in state where i cant clear my stagger after half of AH, taking dmg away from what i would of taken.

[Stuffs]

Between EH, chi wave, ToK, a 20% personal cooldown, zen med, and your choice of DH or DM, plus two AoE stuns and an AoE silence/disarm... I'm not sure exactly what rogue brings to the table, pretending damage is equal, besides for smoke bomb? (And tricks I guess. Which is, I'll admit, pretty nice)

Feint is pretty much the strongest personal defensive around as a whole. No cooldown, 50% reduction, or 60% I believe it was with elusiveness on AE. Otherwise 30%. Not factoring in CoS.
Tricks is nice as you admitted, and smoke bomb is another raid cooldown. More cooldowns are always noteworthy.

If they brought back a toned down Statue of Chi Ji, that would be something nice for us. My biggest thing is we're balanced around RoR. When and if they fix that trinket, we are fucked without some major buffs; they fucked with ferals and Unheeded Warning for similar reasons, when the issue wasn't half as pronounced compared to us.