General WoD Alpha/Beta Discussion

[Krazzorx]

There hasn't historically been much of a subscriber increase when raid tiers came out. The largest subscriber drop in MoP was right about when ToT came out, and subscriptions stayed fairly stable around the release of SoO. Historically, it's been just a slow decline of subscribers from expansion release until they bump up with the next expansion. There aren't all that many people from my experience that come back to the game at major content patches, so I doubt there is any major revenue jump with major patches; it just holds off a decline.

Admittedly, Blizzard does say that content patches get people back. Not as much as xpacs ofc, but they do have more accurate numbers than we do. We only get numbers every 3 months so we don't see when the true increase and decrease occurs.

Made up numbers to illustrate: at end of Q1 you have 10$ at end of Q2 when a new product released you have 9$. Which makes the graph go down. But, what it doesn't show is midway through Q1 you were at 6$ before you released your next product. So, the new product did help numbers even if on the outside it looked like it hurt.

Same thing could occur here, while they lost sub numbers at opening of ToT, we don't know how far they dropped before ToT released before they possibly came back up with its release.

Regardless, we only have sub numbers. What we don't know is how many new players came to WoW compared to how many left.

Tl;Dr: too many variables, what we do know is Blizzard says they generate interest in the game mostly with xpac launches and secondary new content. And we don't have the numbers to disprove it.

[Seditian]

A lawyer can easily say he didn't sign the NDA, so that means the case will pretty much end up in the garbage bin.
That's why most companies don't even bother with NDA's besides their own employees.

You know those people that leaked windows versions under NDA? Guess what happened to them?
They were banned from any current and future testing, nothing else. And Microsoft > Blizzard in terms of everything.

That sounds plausible. Even then, not getting in any future testing is a death blow to most WoW fansites, though. So those people would still be very stupid to leak stuff if they're under the NDA.

[Auxis]

Oh boy... Flaming Arrows AND petless hunter?

And knowing Blizz they'll probably give us both on the same tier for Marksman and Survival..

[Seditian]

Oh boy... Flaming Arrows AND petless hunter?

And knowing Blizz they'll probably give us both on the same tier for Marksman and Survival..

I don't think the Flaming Arrows are a very high dps increase, isn't Auto Shot only about 8-10% of your damage? That would mean your Auto Shot DPS would go to 10-13% of your damage.

[Deleted]

Im probably gonna go with 'with or without you' looks amazing as a beast master.

[Dhomeli]

Personally I hated the 3 shots added to hunters in MoP... I liked the MM rotation in Cata just fine, and adding another shot in was annoying. /shrug Maybe that's just me.

With or Without You/"Lone Wolf" as Marskmanship alone is making me interested in playing my hunter again... idk why, but I always wanted to be more of a 'ranger'. My only question is - Do we still bring a buff to the raid if we go "Lone Wolf"?

[Seditian]

With or Without You/"Lone Wolf" as Marskmanship alone is making me interested in playing my hunter again... idk why, but I always wanted to be more of a 'ranger'. My only question is - Do we still bring a buff to the raid if we go "Lone Wolf"?

It would seriously surprise me if you still brought the buff without a pet. Luckily 10 man HC's are gone, or you'd be forced into keeping the pet. Now you might still have a choice.

[Auxis]

Well, theres Trueshot Aura, isn't there? OHHH that reminds me. It would be nice if hunters could glyph it to show the Trueshot Aura around them, like Tyrande had in W3.

[Dhomeli]

I wonder what this "big piece of info" about health we're missing is.

"I just this guy playing WoD and he got 48k hp. http://i.imgur.com/Be3Rc5X.jpg I thought the squish would make us have far less hp ?"
"It does. You're missing a big piece of info still. Wait for the next blog post."
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...83060135989249

[ATZenith]

Hype train cannot die!!

Hype train has been dead.

[Dasffion]

If they release a buggy and half assed raid tier just to rush it out the door partially finished, they will piss off as many or more customers than they would by waiting until it's properly tested to release it.

I think you're overstating how bad it would be if they shortened the testing by a month or two.

[Deleted]

I wonder what this "big piece of info" about health we're missing is.

"I just this guy playing WoD and he got 48k hp. http://i.imgur.com/Be3Rc5X.jpg I thought the squish would make us have far less hp ?"
"It does. You're missing a big piece of info still. Wait for the next blog post."
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...83060135989249

That big piece of info could easily be;

Health pools were 600k in MoP, does a 12x reduction not constitute a squish?

[Krazzorx]

If they release a buggy and half assed raid tier just to rush it out the door partially finished, they will piss off as many or more customers than they would by waiting until it's properly tested to release it.

Which takes all of 3 months to test. We don't know how much of the other stuff can be tested in-house.

Until we get beta, any estimations of long or short beta are futile. Far too many assumptions on both sides of long vs short.

- - - Updated - - -

I wonder what this "big piece of info" about health we're missing is.

"I just this guy playing WoD and he got 48k hp. http://i.imgur.com/Be3Rc5X.jpg I thought the squish would make us have far less hp ?"
"It does. You're missing a big piece of info still. Wait for the next blog post."
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...83060135989249

Its possibly related to how there is no base health. Just stamina.

[Tiberria]

That big piece of info could easily be;

Health pools were 600k in MoP, does a 12x reduction not constitute a squish?

What it likely is and what they have hinted at a lot is they are going to squish HP levels much less relative to DPS/HPS power. That will probably be part of the changes to healing.

Today, you might have 600k HP and a Flash Heal type heal hits for ~150k or ~25% of a player's max HP. For example (just picking numbers here)if they reduce the HP level to 50k but make the Flash Heals only hit for 5k, healing potency will relatively only 40% as strong as it is today. That is probably how they hope to "fix" healing; by making it much less possible to keep the raid at 100% HP, which would reduce overhealing levels, reduce the excessive potency of absorbs, while not needing to make raid mechanics be a one shot unless someone is topped.

[Deleted]

That big piece of info could easily be;

Health pools were 600k in MoP, does a 12x reduction not constitute a squish?

I think the blog will cover the fact that even though both healthpools and dps/healing will be squished, the dps will be squished by a bigger factor. Now we have about 700k health and do about 400k dps sustained, which would destroy a player if there wasn't an insane amount of base resilience, bosses also now basically have to twoshot tanks to be able to counter the high amount of healing that is being done. To counter that, they could go with a scenario where dps and healing gets squished by a factor of 100, like going from 400k dps to 4k dps/hps, but squishing healthpools only by about a factor of 10 or so, from 700k to 70k, so instead of oneshotting another player without base resilience, to needing about 10s, and the same for tank healthpools versus boss attacks. This would give a much better gameplay, instead of seeing full health or dead, to a much more gradual healthgain or loss.

[stormgust]

I wonder what this "big piece of info" about health we're missing is.

"I just this guy playing WoD and he got 48k hp. http://i.imgur.com/Be3Rc5X.jpg I thought the squish would make us have far less hp ?"
"It does. You're missing a big piece of info still. Wait for the next blog post."
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...83060135989249

They admitted repeatedly that they do not like players going from 100->0 HP in milliseconds and vice versa. So I'd guess that big piece basically tells us how they're getting rid of such gameplay. Most likely just a change to how maxhp scales with stamina, may even be non-linear.

[fredsterr]

Its possibly related to how there is no base health. Just stamina.

Hmm this would be interesting...So no gear on would = 1 hp

Can't wait for the "Take off your gear and fight me like a man!"

[Tiberria]

Hmm this would be interesting...So no gear on would = 1 hp

Can't wait for the "Take off your gear and fight me like a man!"

No, it wouldn't be 1 HP with no gear on, because you still get a base amount of Stamina for every level that you gain.

[fredsterr]

No, it wouldn't be 1 HP with no gear on, because you still get a base amount of Stamina for every level that you gain.

Damn...yeah thats right. I just wanted to one shot a 90 as a lvl 1

[Autowand]

Hmm this would be interesting...So no gear on would = 1 hp

Can't wait for the "Take off your gear and fight me like a man!"

You get more stamina every time you level.

Edit: beat me too it, mmm slow phone.