Dev Watercooler: Pruning the Garden of War

[Deleted]

I understand why the squish is happening, you can't increase things exponentially indefinitely, I have no issue with that. MY problem is that beyond that, and beyond the simplifying of abilities, they've stated here that they're making pre-90 content "even more accessible" which means DUMBING DOWN by anybody's reckoning.

[Stormykitten]

I don't really think that the number of movement abilities, CC (well, maybe a couple of the more egregous new instant ones), or number of abilities in general has any bearing on the current pvp scene. It is purely the difficulty in getting cast time spells off, which has nothing to do with those (CC has always been there) - it is all interrupts. There should at the very least only be 1 interrupt OR silence per class. But that's it.

It's fine with class-flavour stuff like grounding totem. But it's frustrating to read that cast on the move is to blame when it actually helps casting spells, it's just that it is countered by way too much interrupts/silence/instant cast cc. If you need to counter movement, instead add ways to avoid the spells, because that doesn't impact cast time. It's why a dodge system with cooldown like in GW2 or ESO can be really useful.

[Coronius]

Cool changes to CC, but I have to admit that I'm starting to agree with all the naysayers about the lack of info.

We're months into the final patch of MoP, the equivalent of the Dragon Soul-patch (but not as terrible perhaps), and we barely have any information about the next expansion except for the stuff they showed us at BlizzCon which frankly wasn't that much.

I really hope beta isn't too far away.

[Deleted]

I really like the stat squish, it's very, very needed. The numbers are getting really stupid. I think they should've squished further, though. But that might be hard with so many levels. Good job on that.

The abilit pruning however... I don't like it. I liked having toys such as Dampen Magic, Amplify Magic, Sentry Totem and so on. While not useful in every signle fight, or even most of them, they added flavour and were fun as hell to pull off when you were able to (mind control cap + amplify magic to increase your burst anyone?). I don't really see the problem with classes having a lot of keybindings; we have an entire keyboard to mess around with, and most of the binds are not used all the time. Let us keep our toys.

I'm 50/50 towards the CC changes. WoW PvP is very much built around CC, and without CC it turns into a silly whack-the-mole style game, where players just stand around whacking eachother with PvE rotations. There's also the issue of healers, they're way, way too powerful as it is, and without a big, fat nerf, reduced CC will make them even more of a pain. CC IS overdone in MoP though, and it does need a reduction. I just hope they handle this issue with a great deal of care.

[Deleted]

Racials are good way to make some old-school faction balancing, like they have done before. Make alliance have little bit better pvp racials, wait for the factions to balance on pvp servers and then make all racials cosmetic (orcs playing drums and growling or whatever).

[cbeefman]

I think I need to step back and take a break from these and other wow sites for a while

NONE of this feel like news to me, except maybe some of the CC changes so i'm feeling very underwhelmed by this so called "info dump"

I think I set my expectations too high

[Xummy]

"It's important to understand that this isn’t a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend."

Translation: The majority of our playerbase is too stupid to understand big numbers, so we're making life less scary for them.

(I have seen some very good reasons for an item squish. This is not one of them.)

They could have worded it better. But i´m assuming it also has something to do with the limitation of Integers, which wow prob works with.
which is from −2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647, and if they aren´t doing the squish, we´d be approaching those numbers soon, causing a crash.

[frostmeteor]

They could have worded it better. But i´m assuming it also has something to do with the limitation of Integers, which wow prob works with.
which is from −2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647, and if they aren´t doing the squish, we´d be approaching those numbers soon, causing a crash.

My guess is the integer for health is unsigned. So the range is 0 to ~4 billion. The evidence is that for 25-man heroic, Darkshaman already has 2b health. And for Heroic Garrosh, one of the reason the boss has to heal himself up several times, depending on your strategy, is to circumvent such limit.

[mittacc]

Removing the following silence from an interruption spell is a little too much imo. I would rather see them removing a spell that just says "silence", a well times interrupt should be rewarded and not just delay a spell with like half a second. I'm not even a pvper...

[Zigzagzoom]

I am glad to see some changes to the amounts of cool down type abilities. The 10 step macros some classes had were ridiculous.

[ThatsOurEric]

Holy crap. I may actually enjoy PvP again.

I know right?

[Ecwfrk]

Wait so from lv. 99 to 100 we'd get like a 30% damage boost or something with out the squish?

No, over the course of level 100 you'll increase in power with each tier of content they add throughout WoD. Without the squish though, the numbers would go from absurdly huge to insane.
Look at the difference between a Heroic gear level 85 in iLevel 410 gear, a fresh level 90 in iLevel 430ish quest greens and a level 90 in iLevel 560ish gear.
Deathwing had 300M HP in 25H. Thok has almost 2 Billion HP in 25H.
If things continued to scale the way they have been, by the end of WoD we'd likely have people pushing 5 million DPS and 25m bosses with well over 10 Billion HP, at least.

Such huge numbers are not just difficult for many people to wrap their heads around, they're even more of a problem for computers. Shaving 2 digits off an 11 digit number can reduce the processing power to do a calculation on that number by 20%. And as others have already pointed out, when the numbers get too big, things either crash or the computer has to break them down into numbers it can manage, run calculations on each piece, then put it all back together which uses a ton of processing power.
In a nutshell, smaller numbers mean less lag.

[Nhodjin]

I'm not sure why there seems to be so much hate on the changes, I for one like them.

Let me tell you why -

Ability bloat is a real thing, I have so many spells on my bars that I don't use it's just clutter. I may use some of those abilities in some given situations that arises once a week or longer.

The stat squish I also am excited for because it's not that 1 million is hard to grasp versus 1000, it's that I don't care to see a million or 400k pop up on my screen, in a lot of cases it's distracting. To me it sounds like people upset about the damage number (as that's all it really is is damage/health numbers) because seeing those big numbers makes them feel more powerful? I'm not quite sure.

The reduction in CC couldn't have sounded any sweeter. I can't name the amount of arena's I've done where I get cc'd straight for about 30 or more seconds (this is also after using my trinket). The druid nerf to cyclone being dispellable is awesome. Everything else in the game in terms of CC I can think of is able to be dispelled one way or another, however cyclone being an instant cast in some cases (feral) and not even being able to be dispelled was stupid.

I'm extremely excited for these changes, and think it's a step in the right direction.

PS. you wouldn't be upset about the squish if they hadn't made every expansion jump over 100 ilvl's from the previous from the start. I understand that it's there fault and we're used to them now, but I do honestly think it's a step in the right direction. Also not sure why there's so much QQ before we even see EXACTLY what they have planned.

This guy! My thoughts exactly. I'm quite amused that people are so stupid to think that blizzard belives WE are not smart enough to understand 1 million dmg.
That is not what they are saying, the perfect example is Reckfuls 1 billion dollar video or w/e it's called, we know it's a big number but we do not really FEEL it. Same with 1 million dmg, and you're forgetting that they are not only scaling down everything in mop but also in WoD. Otherwise we would be doing 10 million crits or more in Warlords, and that's not very fun imo.

[jeremynative]

Finally no more 100-0 stuns and 8 second fears and trinket is worth having

[Shockeye]

Those CC changes to PVP may get me back into the PVP game. I've avoided it for MoP because as a healer as soon as I show up it's an instant chain of CC and then death, many of those CCs being reapplications of an ability (ie Cyclone). It's not fun at all. I loved casual PVP in Cataclysm (ie non-arena, random group BGs) but MoP, no thanks. And I miss having fun with it, so these changes are great.

Also, hurrah for the long overdue squish. The numbers have been getting stupidly over the top for no reason at all other than massaging egos that like to see big numbers. Way back when one of the things that attracted me to WoW was how it was very conservative in the numbers with regards to health, damage etc. There's no need for a boss to have 15 million health and DPS to be doing 200k and all of that. It's utterly meaningless.
Hopefully the squish brings these numbers down to sensible levels, and those charts do suggest this.

[Siddown]

I understand why the squish is happening, you can't increase things exponentially indefinitely, I have no issue with that. MY problem is that beyond that, and beyond the simplifying of abilities, they've stated here that they're making pre-90 content "even more accessible" which means DUMBING DOWN by anybody's reckoning.

Is it a bit like how posting in BOLD ALL CAPS dumbs down an argument?

[zrankfappa]

1) squish - uh fine
2) reduce ability bloat - sounds good, but i bet i miss the ability to do something that they remove. i'll get over it.
3) racials - i play horde, and always thought the trolls had best racials. that being said, of my 11 90's only two are trolls.
4) reduce cc - bout time. i'd like to see it taken a bit further and remove cc beaking trinkets, or just make cc not work on players.

Ultimately Wow is moving towards a sort of Diablo III abilities model, resource generators, resource consumers, and a proc. In the end we will all just be pressing 11211231121123112 .....

[mc9]

Well, according to the graph, WotLK is when they started messing up with scaling of playing power. Which makes perfect sense. Then it got out of control and stupid. No wonder.

[psychok9]

I like almost all changes...
My question is how they can scale down old content, with new and close stats!

[valliant13]

all you babies crying about them "dumbing down the game" are pathetic. This isn't vanilla anymore. Think of it if you owned a business....make an easy to use product that everyone can use and make a ton of money, or make something very complex and have a lot of un-needed things included with it that only targets a certain demographic and make an okay amount.

This is the direction of the game, if it stops being fun stop playing. However WoD to me is going to be insanely fun. The squish is also absolutely necessary. 300k+ damage single target is absurd. I can't wait to see realistic numbers again, on top of the ease on processing power.