Debuffs in raid, Blue posts, Fan arts

[Boubouille]

The Debuff Limit and You
[blizzquote="Daelo;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/13130050430-the-debuff-limit-and-you.html]We changed how the game handles debuffs (ie negative state effects on targets) on creatures with Wrath of the Lich King. The old hard cap of 40 debuffs on a target no longer effectively exists. You can now apply way more debuffs to a target without them dropping off before their duration expires. The default WoW UI will not normally display all these debuffs, but they really are still there! [/blizzquote"]


Blue posts

"Bring the player, not the class"
We don't mean that you can select 10 or 25 random people and expect to succeed and thrive. The mantra is not "bring any player." The mantra is not "class is irrelevant." Instead, it means that the class (or spec) involved does not trump all other issues, which we felt was increasingly happening in BC.

We honestly heard from a lot of players (and experienced it ourselves) that a group might shelve a good rogue because bringing the shaman for WF was a better overall improvement for dps, even if the shaman was face-roller. That just sounds broken.

I think what happens is that players hear "Bring the player, not the class," and add to that "Well, I play my class flawlessly and have perfect gear," and conclude that any failure is because of the game mechanics and not their own skill or gear (and luck certainly plays a factor in any RPG too).

The intent is actually that when faced with who to invite to a 5, 10 or 25 player run that you can consider the player involved. You should never have to take a terrible priest over an excellent paladin just because the priest has some uber buff or required spell. If your guild has lots of paladin healers, then go run Naxx with them.

The emphasis on encounter design is more about execution, coordination or good old gear checks rather than "at this stage, a mage must cast Counterspell or the boss will wipe the raid."

When we are balancing numbers, we can assume that your group has +haste, +AP and +crit without you having to make sure that means a shaman, warrior and feral druid is with you. (Source)

Game difficulty in Wrath of the Lich King

You have to be a little careful if you sling this around. What we don’t want is for your class mechanics to hold you back if you are vying to do the best dps you can. We are not at all guaranteeing that every raid will end up with all the dps classes within 5% of each other. The biggest factor will be skill, followed by gear and then just random luck.

We know heroics and raids are a little easy right now, and we're okay with that. Consider:

• If you're 80 already, you are a relatively hardcore player. Most WoW players are not 80 yet. If it's easy for you, it's not easy for everybody.
• We want more players to see the content. Naxxramas and Malygos are cool! We want people to see them. Heck, we brought Naxx back in part because so few people had seen it.
• Very few of the people who are saying WoW is EZ mode have done Satharion with 3 drakes yet. Give that a shot then get back to us.
• Ulduar will be harder. It still might be do-able by more than the most elite 5% of players, but it will be a lot more challenging. And we'll continue to have "hard modes" that are even more challenging. We'll make sure some of these challenges offer appropriate rewards.
• We knew we were messing with class balance quite a bit, so it's nice that things are a little easier right now. It gives the players time to learn the new spells and abilities and gives us a chance to see how things really work out in the actual game with thousands of people beating on the mechanics. We'll continue to make adjustments as necessary. It's an MMO. Things change over time. (Source)

DPS in Wrath of the Lich King and class diversity in raids
We do want dps to be a lot closer than it was in BC (assuming equal gear and skill, which players always conveniently assume that they have). If it's not ther yet, we will get it there.

The goal is that nobody has a unique buff. The goal is that nobody has a buff or ability so amazing that they always earn raid spots, or that you stack them in a group in preference to other classes. Until we design encounters that can handle one of every spec, we don't want you to only take the specs with the best buffs (and woe be to the group in which there are two or three of you with the same spec in that situation). (Source)

[...] Innervate and Rebirth are amazing abilities, true. But so are Soulstones, Health Stones and Summoning. I don't really see a lot of situations where raids are stacking druids because of Innervate or Rebirth though. To some extent, both of those abilities are those you ideally never want to use and which become increasingly less useful the closer the content gets to be on farm.

And ultimately, I really don't want to derail the thread into the pros and cons of all the various class abilities. That is a big discussion.

But we do want you to have room to take who you want without worrying so much about class abilities. (Source)

Official forums usage by developers

I made the comment in the beta forums once (which ended up sounding more condescening than I intended) that some players were treating the forums as a deli, ordering up changes to their class, and then getting upset when we didn't go implement those changes. That's not really why we're here. Here is what I get out of the forums:

• Understanding where players are having problems.
• Understanding when players are confused about something.
• Understanding what's fun and not fun.
• Catching the occasional bug.

The forums are typically not a great source of solutions, though it does happen. That's not meant to disparage the people who post here. Just like WoW has an art style, it has a design style and sometimes the solutions offered just don't mesh. (Other times they are technically difficult.)

The forums are also not great at detecting problems. They are great at detecting *potential* problems and that's a big difference. You get a lot of false positives. If we see a lot of players complaining about the same issue (and I mean a lot of players, not the same few players starting multiple threads) then we usually will look into it. Looking into it involves a lot of discussion, a lot of data mining, and perhaps some test cases. We bounce ideas and solutions off of a lot of people internally, and people whose opinions we trust (typically because they are expert players) outside of the company. I can't think of any cases where we just took a player's word for it and just made a change because of a QQ. That is pretty easy to prove to yourself if you just examine the ratio of requests (often demands) for change to actual implemented changes.

But sometimes players are right too. Never discount that. Sometimes players are right even if all of your data suggest otherwise. One of the trickier talents for a good game designer to master is knowing when that is happening. (Source)

[EU] Migration to "Chamber of Aspects" PvE Realm
Migrations updated for Chamber of Aspects. With this round of migrations, all PvE realms except the fairly newly opened ones have had a chance to migrate to this new realm, and any possible future migration will be based only on population levels.

Realms currently with migration to the new realm: Anachronos, Bronze Dragonflight, Bronzebeard, Darkspear, Ghostlands, Hellfire, Khadgar, Kilrogg, Kul Tiras, Nagrand, Terenas, Wildhammer (Source)

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Ebon Plaguebringer not properly stacking with multiple Unholy DKs
There are a few cases where classes or specs with the same debuff don't provide equal benefit to everyone. While we don't want the actual debuff to stack, we also don't want to penalize players for not having the benefit or get into a race for who can get the debuff up first. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem to resolve or we already would have done so, but it is something we want to get fixed.

In the meantime, if your dps is suffering beyond what you can endure, you do have the option of going Blood or Frost. (Source)

Rune Strike
I'll try this once again. I used "rogue killer" as shorthand, but so many players have such blind hatred for rogues that they only noticed those couple of words and missed the actual intent of the change.

We made Rune Strike a tanking tool. Really. We even made the decision in my office, and I think it was just after dinner one night. DK threat turned out to be a lot lower than we expected, largely because if an early hit in the rotation fails to land (miss, dodge or parry) then the DKs runes and rotations are all messed up. We needed an ability that you couldn't just spam, so we made it only light up when the tank dodges or parries. But Rune Strike was packing such a punch (and it needed to) that we didn't want to let it miss or we weren't really solving the threat problem.

The problem is this makes it a very good PvP tool vs. melee classes, because they are attacking the DK (who dodges or parries) and they often rely on their own avoidance to escape melee damage.

It's dangerous from a design perspective to have an ability really overbound like that. If DK threat was too low, we couldn't buff Rune Strike because that ends up being a big PvP buff. If DKs needed to do more PvP damage to melee classes we couldn't buff Rune Strike, because that makes them better tanks.

Our intent was not that the DK is all about Rune Strike the way the Arms warrior is all about Mortal Strike. Rune Strike isn't even that interesting an ability -- it doesn't use runes and isn't tied to diseases which are actually the core mechanics we want the DK to be concerned with in PvE and PvP.

It's not that we love rogues (or that we hate them). We just didn't want the PvP Death Knight to be a Rune Strike slinging fiend. Use Blood Strike, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike or your other abilities. If those aren't enough to let you stand up to melee, we'll make adjustments, but almost certainly not through Rune Strike.

If it can't help but distract you, forget the "rogue killer" part. We didn't want Rune Strike to be this ungodly PvP tool which it just happened to be. (Source)

Rogue (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Rogue in PvE
We are taking a hard look at rogue PvE performance right now.

We don't think fixing the Master Poisoner bug is cause to give rogues a huge buff however. The issue is a little more complex than it is being portrayed in this thread. (Source)

Warlock (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Update on Warlock changes
Unfortunately I don't have any new news and I hesitated to post after the posts above that didn't want to see a claim that we're looking into something. (Sorry, man, that's what we do.)

Our goal hasn't changed and the bullets you posted at the top of the thread are still generally valid. We talked about locks just this morning, but I don't have any upcoming announcements yet. I'm sorry I can't always grace every thread with promises of buffs and new abilities, but we try to be careful with the changes we make. The fact that we still manage to break things sometimes suggest that we might not even be careful enough. Fear not, locks. We hear you. (Source)

New Fan Art
The Blizzard Fan Art Section has been updated with new artwork.

[LavaDuck]

[blizzquote="Daelo;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/13130050430-the-debuff-limit-and-you.html]We changed how the game handles debuffs (ie negative state effects on targets) on creatures with Wrath of the Lich King. The old hard cap of 40 debuffs on a target no longer effectively exists. You can now apply way more debuffs to a target without them dropping off before their duration expires. The default WoW UI will not normally display all these debuffs, but they really are still there! [/blizzquote"]

So bandwith "issues" were found to be non-exsistant then. I just remember reading something about that when it was asked during the beta.

[skojten]

im a bit concerned over the debuff dosent showing, gonna be harder to see if u have all your debuffs on your target. This just pushes even more that u need addons to see which debuff u havent aplied yet

[pOtskii]

Scanning the debuff boxes on your targets unit frame isnt really a very good way to check if your debufs are correctly applied, cant see it causing many people problems.


Personally i think the making encounters pretty universal as to what raid make up you bring and making it so no calss has a "unique" buff is a step in the wrong direction.

Its not going to kill raiding but i think it certainly takes some of the structure out of it.

[bbr]

No more debuff limit. Excellent news!

I guess it was easier than re-implementing the smart-debuff system that existed at level 60.

[Deleted]

Ebon Plaguebringer not properly stacking with multiple Unholy DKs
There are a few cases where classes or specs with the same debuff don't provide equal benefit to everyone. While we don't want the actual debuff to stack, we also don't want to penalize players for not having the benefit or get into a race for who can get the debuff up first. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem to resolve or we already would have done so, but it is something we want to get fixed.

In the meantime, if your dps is suffering beyond what you can endure, you do have the option of going Blood or Frost.

Absolutely awesome <3

[Rockeroad]

im a bit concerned over the debuff dosent showing, gonna be harder to see if u have all your debuffs on your target. This just pushes even more that u need addons to see which debuff u havent aplied yet

No as the system goes(or so far as i have seen) it will show your debuffs and a few more of other peoples.

[Haerdalis]

Funny how they take shammies as an example and end up raping many of the facets of the class in LK - such as turning the iconic WF totem into a retarded +haste and then even gimping that one by removing the ranged haste or even the better WoA which is now utterly useless. Sigh.

*coughuselesselementalcough*

[Moredhel27]

Blue posts

"Bring the player, not the class"
We don't mean that you can select 10 or 25 random people and expect to succeed and thrive. The mantra is not "bring any player." The mantra is not "class is irrelevant." Instead, it means that the class (or spec) involved does not trump all other issues, which we felt was increasingly happening in BC.

...

When we are balancing numbers, we can assume that your group has +haste, +AP and +crit without you having to make sure that means a shaman, warrior and feral druid is with you. (Source)

Would anyone be able to link to that awesome list of raid buffs/abilities that was posted here a while ago ?
It had two columns of buffs to players or debuffs to mobs and when hovering it showed what class/spec could bring that ability to a raid
Thus enabling you to select a group that brings the most benefits in as few members and then include as many other people as possible

[Astrant]

Blue posts
[blizzquote]"Bring the player, not the class"
(Source)

Unless you're an elemental shaman because blizzard refuses to admit that your spec does less DPS than the tank no matter how good you are.

[Militriax]

The Debuff Limit and You
[blizzquote="Daelo;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/13130050430-the-debuff-limit-and-you.html]Fear not, locks.([url=http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13129959506-status-on-warlock-improvements.html][b][color=white]Source[/color][/b][/url])[/blizzquote"]

Why shouldn't we fear? :-X

[ingham]

"Bring the player, not the class"

OK, so give every class the ability to tank, heal, melee dps, range dps, AoE and rename your game "World of Clones" 8) (Or Playmobil&#174; Online...)

[Cho]

Unless you're an elemental shaman because blizzard refuses to admit that your spec does less DPS than the tank no matter how good you are.

Our elemental shamens run 3.5k-4k DPS ... hmm, you lack on skill. QQ

[Korigan]

Our elemental shamens run 3.5k-4k DPS ... hmm, you lack on skill. QQ

Screenshot or it does not exist !

[habaja]

"Bring the player, not the class"
The intent is actually that when faced with who to invite to a 5, 10 or 25 player run that you can consider the player involved. You should never have to take a terrible priest over an excellent paladin just because the priest has some uber buff or required spell. If your guild has lots of paladin healers, then go run Naxx with them.

The emphasis on encounter design is more about execution, coordination or good old gear checks rather than "at this stage, a mage must cast Counterspell or the boss will wipe the raid."

So how else do we do Instructor Razuvious and Grand Widow Faerlina without taking a priest to the raid, which may well be sub-par compared to the paladin healers...

"Uber buff or required spell" = Mind Control

[hosehead]

Blue posts
Would anyone be able to link to that awesome list of raid buffs/abilities that was posted here a while ago ?
It had two columns of buffs to players or debuffs to mobs and when hovering it showed what class/spec could bring that ability to a raid
Thus enabling you to select a group that brings the most benefits in as few members and then include as many other people as possible

It's on the left column - "RAID COMPOSITION"

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/

[aikouka]

It's on the left column - "RAID COMPOSITION"

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/

I think he's referring to the list that was in a news post awhile ago... you know, the one that said something like "Major AP - Unleashed Rage, Abomination's Might" and had entries similar for each type of buff.

[hosehead]

I think he's referring to the list that was in a news post awhile ago... you know, the one that said something like "Major AP - Unleashed Rage, Abomination's Might" and had entries similar for each type of buff.

My bad. Sorry

[Amgyn]

somebody post the most possible debuffs in a target in a 25man raid...

.... go!

[Amgyn]

3.0.2 - On Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking

With the release of upcoming content patch players will see a change in the way we allow buffs and debuffs to stack exclusively in a raid. For the most part, what this change means is that many buffs and debuffs that were previously allowed to stack together no longer can, and that many buffs and debuffs that only a single talent specialization could bring can now be brought by multiple different specializations. The philosophy behind this change shows up in many of the changes we have made in Wrath of The Lich King, such as when we made almost all buffs raid-wide. We want players to be able to form raids and parties based on who they want to play with, rather than who has the correct talents and abilities to min-max their raid performance.

Raid composition will still matter to some extent, but without this change, it would have overwhelmed every other aspect of raid planning (as we added new capabilities to each of 30 different talent trees). You no longer need to rigidly control the melee/spellcaster balance of your raid, or make sure every group has all the critical buffing classes, etc. This change has many class balance implications.

IMPORTANT! Before we are done, we will thoroughly test the performance of every class. It should not be assumed that one class' current performance relative to others in beta is final. Some classes (and specializations) will need to be reduced in power and some increased. Many may feel the change has more impact on class X than class Y. We will address all of those concerns via our internal testing and community feedback.

There are thirty or so different categories into which buffs and debuffs fit. Here you will find a comprehensive list of the changes made broken down by category and which spells/talents are in that category.

• Armor Debuff (Major): Acid Spit (exotic Hunter pet), Expose Armor, Sunder Armor
• Armor Debuff (Minor): Faerie Fire, Sting (Hunter pet), Curse of Recklessness
• Physical Vulnerability Debuff: Blood Frenzy, (2nd Talent Spec TBA)
• Melee Haste Buff: Improved Icy Talons, Windfury Totem
• Melee Critical Strike Chance Buff: Leader of the Pack, Rampage
• Attack Power Buff (Flat Add): Battle Shout, Blessing of Might
• Attack Power Buff (Multiplier): Abomination's Might, Trueshot Aura, Unleashed Rage
• Ranged Attack Power Buff: Hunter's Mark (only Hunters benefit, so no need to exclude against other class abilities)
• Bleed Damage Increase Debuff: Mangle, Trauma
• Spell Haste Buff: Wrath of Air Totem
• Spell Critical Strike Chance Buff: Moonkin Aura, Elemental Oath
• Spell Critical Strike Chance Debuff: Improved Scorch, Winter's Chill
• Increased Spell Damage Taken Debuff: Ebon Plaguebringer, Earth and Moon, Curse of the Elements
• Increased Spell Power Buff: Focus Magic, Improved Divine Spirit, Flametongue Totem, Totem of Wrath, Demonic Pact
• Increased Spell Hit Chance Taken Debuff: Improved Faerie Fire, Misery
• Percentage Haste Increase (All Types): Improved Moonkin Aura, Swift Retribution
• Percentage Damage Increase: Ferocious Inspiration, Sanctified Retribution
• Critical Strike Chance Taken Debuff (All types): Heart of the Crusader, Totem of Wrath
• Melee Attack Speed Slow Debuff: Icy Touch, Infected Wounds, Judgements of the Just, Thunderclap
• Melee Hit Chance Reduction Debuff: Insect Swarm, Scorpid Sting
• Healing Debuff: Wound Poison, Aimed Shot, Mortal Strike, Furious Attacks
• Attack Power Debuff: Demoralizing Roar, Curse of Weakness, Demoralizing Shout
• Stat Multiplier Buff: Blessing of Kings
• Stat Add Buff: Mark of the Wild
• Agility and Strength Buff: Strength of Earth Totem, Horn of Winter
• Stamina Buff: Power Word: Fortitude
• Health Buff: Commanding Shout, Blood Pact
• Intellect Buff: Arcane Intellect, Fel Intelligence
• Spirit Buff: Divine Spirit, Fel Intelligence
• Damage Reduction Percentage Buff: Grace, Blessing of Sanctuary
• Percentage Increase Healing Received Buff: Tree of Life, Improved Devotion Aura
• Armor Increase Percentage Buff: Inspiration, Ancestral Healing
• Cast Speed Slow: Curse of Tongues, Slow, Mind-numbing Poison.
  

In each category, you can only benefit from the most powerful spell granting that effect. For example, Fel Intelligence grants spirit and intellect, both weaker than Arcane Intellect and Divine Spirit. If a player has Fel Intelligence and receives a stronger Arcane Intellect buff, he will gain the intellect value from Arcane Intellect and the spirit value from Fel Intelligence.

In most cases, fully-talented players will have exactly equal power on the strength of these buffs and debuffs. Fel Intelligence is an example of where one ability is weaker than others. The buffs in the "Increased Spell Power Buff" category are also not all the same potency, as they scale and grow in radically different ways. In virtually every other case, however, the buffs are equal. This means, for example, that fully-talented Battle Shout and Blessing of Might now grant the exact same amount of attack power.

In addition to this change, we also needed to address the "mana battery" roles in a raid. The mana regeneration effect they grant is no longer limited to their own party, and it no longer depends on the amount of damage they deal. Each time they trigger the mana regeneration effect, 10 people in their raid group will receive a buff which causes them to regenerate 0.5% of their maximum mana each second. This buff, Replenishment, will be given preferentially to raid members with the lowest mana, but will re-evaluate which raid members receive it each time it is fired. Replenishment is provided by Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters, and Retribution Paladins.

Finally, we have modified Heroism and Bloodlust to affect the entire raid. However, all affected raid members will be unable to cast or benefit from Bloodlust/Heroism for 5 minutes.

Below you will find a list of the changes to abilities which exhibit new behavior regardless of the exclusive categories. The changes usually mean the old behavior was removed and replaced by the new behavior. Numbers listed are for maximally-talented versions. Here is that list of changes:

• Improved Scorch: Increases spell critical strike chance against the target.
• Winter's Chill: Also increases spell critical strike chance against the target.
• Elemental Oath: Grants 5% spell crital strike to raid members.
• Improved Moonkin Aura: Grants 3% haste of all types.
• Earth and Moon: Increases spell damage taken from all schools by 13% on the target.
• Misery: Causes spells cast at the target to have +3% spell hit.
• Shadow Weaving: Buffs only self.
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Buffs only self.
• Expose Weakness: Buffs only self.
• Shadow Embrace: Buffs only self.
• Blood Pact: Grants health instead of Stamina.
• Fel Intelligence: Has replacement ranks that grant flat values of Intellect and Spirit.
• Frost Aura: Excludes properly against all other resistance buffs.
• Grace: Reduces damage taken by target by 3%.
• Rampage: Increases melee and ranged critical strike chance by 5% for the raid.
• Improved Faerie Fire: No longer benefits melee and ranged hit chance, only spell hit.
• Hunter's Mark: No longer increases attack power bonus from attacks against the target.
• Improved Hunter's Mark: No longer grants melee attack power.
• Sting (Hunter exotic pet - Wasp): Now acts as a minor armor debuff.
• Waylay: Attack speed reduction changed to 20%.
• Icy Touch: Only slows melee attack speed (not ranged or spell).
• Tree of Life: No longer grants healing based on spirit, grants 3% increased healing received to raid.
• Demonic Pact: Now buffs raid instead of debuffing monsters.
• Focus Magic: Now buffs raid instead of debuffing monsters.
• Totem of Wrath: Now grants a flat amount of spell damage, and all enemies in its radius have an increased chance of being struck by criticals.
• Heroism: Cannot be recast while caster has Exhausted debuff, and those with Exhausted debuff cannot be affected by it.
• Bloodlust: Cannot be recast while caster has Sated debuff, and those with Sated debuff cannot be affected by it.
• Vampiric Touch: Grants Replenishment mana regeneration buff to up to 10 raid members on dealing damage.
• Hunting Party: Grants Replenishment mana regeneration buff to up to 10 raid members on specified shots.
• Judgements of the Wise: Grants Replenishment mana regeneration buff to up to 10 raid members on Judging.