Blue posts, The Craft of War: BLIND

[Boubouille]

Blue posts
A few blue posts I forgot to mention before christmas, I'm sure Santa brought you tons of new weapons to kill more elves.

Crowd Control in PvP
Players complained endlessly about being chain feared and stunlocked too. Still do. It's the reason there are so many ways to break CC in the game now. You can't pretend that crowd control was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. (Source)

Bug - Huge DPS Buff
To clarify, we're not just looking for any case where you see big numbers. There are situations in encounters that buff you quite a bit. We are looking for a specific bug almost certainly related to the Essence of Gossamer trinket where someone's dps is suddenly tremendously higher than the rest of the group for no apparent reason.

Like I said, it's probably fixed already, but you can never be too sure. (Source)

Password problem on PTR
We implemented some fixes overnight and we believe this issue is now resolved. Please re-test. (Source)

Talent builds in PvP
I understand your point, but we actually do ask players to choose between more damage or healing and survivability. It is supposed to be an interesting decision. When you really want a talent because it is really useful for PvP and that prevents you from getting another talent that you also ideally want, you can argue that means the talent trees are actually working. One of the things I like about PvP specs is they do place a lot more emphasis on hybrid builds in order to pick up certain talents, while a great many PvE specs choose one tree and try to max it out.

I am probably taking the mob example far beyond what you intended, but I think it is actually illustrative. You are going to defeat, by a huge order of magnitude, most of the mobs you meet. In many examples it won't even be a challenge -- you will two shot them. If the PvP matchmaking is working well, however, you will lose 50% of every match (and that assumes classes are perfectly balanced, which I won't pretend to claim). It is much harder to feel like a hero in an Arena because we aren't trying to make you feel like a hero. Psychologically, I think that is a bigger deal than a lot of players realize. (Source)

Priest (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Divine Aegis clarifications
You guys have poked holes in some of the extreme examples that have been mentioned, and understandably so, but this essentially is the gist of it. Players are really good at finding clever ways to exloit mechanics to trivialize encounters. Healing damage is a pretty well understood mechanic at this point. Shielding players from taking damage is a little scarier -- preventing 2x damage is a much bigger deal than healing 2x damage.

While we probably could come up with a system that bullet proofed every possible potential Diving Aegis exploit, I just don't know that the bang for the buck is there. Even if you have 3-4 Disc priests healing a raid, it seems like they could all be pretty effective even with a limitation of one shield per target.

If we get to the point where it feels like the third or fourth Disc priest is being excluded from a raid or an Arena team, we'll probably look into it some more. For now, we just want to see Disc be more common in general. (Source)

PvP survavibility
First, I think the warlocks would disagree pretty vehemently about their survivability. This message comes up pretty regularly on the damage forums.

Second, we know it's posible to make very tough priests, because Disc priests were exactly like that in later seasons. It took a high amount of resilience gear and some specific talent choices, but they could take a lot of damage and heal themselves through a certain amount of it.

I agree we have some work to do on Holy priests in PvP.

I think the concept of a cloth class without a lot of mobiliy that is supposed to just heal itself through damage would be a pretty hard sell. But we try to address it on the mitigation side for priests (and the occasional fear bomb doesn't hurt). (Source)

Warrior (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Clarifications on the "DR" from the latest Q&A post
My bad. You said "DR" and I even responded "DR" but what I meant wasn't diminishing returns, but breaking on damage (as fear does now). That is a topic that comes up a lot. My point was that it wouldn't make a big difference on very short stuns like Charge, but it would change being stunlocked quite a bit.

To answer several other questions, yes I realize the questions were directed at PvP. The poster even said that up front. I mentioned Fury pulling aggro because it suggests their damage may also be pretty RNG if they can't control it better.

RNG in PvP is a pretty big topic. In general you will probably find us more tolerant of random elements than players typically are. Misses, crits and resists are all very random and sometimes those numbers can determine success or failure of a match. (Source)

Sudden Death and Taste for Blood randomness
No, I think I understood the issue in this case (which isn't easy, since so many of these questions are typically written in "gotcha" format). We did want them to be random abilities. It would have been very easy to make them on-demand, but we have also had to nerf a lot of on-demand burst (just ask the Ret pallies). In your mind you are probably envisioning a Sudden Death that does what it does now when you want it to. But in our minds, if we made the ability less random we would also make it hit less hard. That might be a fine trade-off for some warriors. We have discussed making Sudden Death more like mini-Executes. The reason we haven't done that yet is it just waters down the ability. Players might start to think, eh, it's not a ton more damage than MS, so I'll just stick with MS. It is really easy for players to match out abilities when randomness is downplayed.

Stance penalties
I think in the minds of most warriors they say "Would I like to have a 10% percent damage penalty or not? I think not."

But of course that's not the way it would work. If we redesigned the stances it wouldn't be in order to give warriors 3% more crit and 10% more health. That's just a straight buff. What we would likely do is something similar to the death knight presences -- lower your health by 10% and then increase the damage reduction of Defensive Stance and give Battle Stance a tiny bit of damage reduction. (Or maybe Battle Stance would take the same damage as Berserk, but have a more meaningful bonus like movement speed or attack speed). Now your tooltips don't use the word "penalty" so you maybe feel better about them, but the balance hasn't really changed much -- Berserk would be an offensive stance and Defensive would be a defensive stance. Being in Berserk would still be risky.

If instead you're just arguing that warriors are weak and need to be buffed, that's a different issue. But there is no reason we would have to solve that by removing stance penalties. (Source)

Video - The Craft of War: BLIND
Every now and then, someone releases something awesome and eventually push the limits of WoW videomaking a bit further. I think this is what just happened with this video.

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[url="http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=97157"]The Craft of War: BLIND @ Warcraftmovies[/url]

A few words from the author, Percula
Earlier this year I got pretty bored and decided to do something creative in my spare time. I've been wanting to do a fight scene for a while and decided to develop a story with World of Warcraft. There are some great machinimas created by fans and at one point I thought about making a machinima as well but animation is what I do and I decided to use my skills in making something.

My thought is to make The Craft of War a series. Each episode would spotlight a different class in combat. To give you a hint of what I'm currently thinking TCoW2 will be titled Mark, Counterspell, or Execute. Blind2 is also a possiblity and there's a comedy I'd like to try as well. Of course this is all dependent upon how Blind is recieved. If people think its crap then I probably won't be making anymore, hehe. If that's the case let's not ever bring this up again I've also included the trailer for Blind at the end. I had thought about putting out a trailer a month ago but it seems stupid to have a trailer for something thats only 7-8 minutes long. I thought it turned out cool so I've included it.

All that being said I got some rather bad news a few months ago. The parent company of my game studio has decided lay everyone off. So with this impending layoff my future is unclear and I don't know when or if I'll be able to continue with The Craft of War. Perhaps this video will help me somehow if people like it and pass it around so please forward it to others. Although it's not perfect I decided to call it done and put it out there.

About the song Hide & Seek, although I don't speak or understand Japanese I thought the song fitting and would help me tell the story. I don't really have to understand the lyrics of a song to like it. It's more about the music and pacing and hopefully the song isn't about baking cakes when I'm showing fighting. If you're offended by foreign words then don't watch. There are some Spanish, German, and English songs that I'm considering for future episodes and even songs from previous fan videos you may have seen.

I don't know what kind of a reaction I'll be getting but I may not be able to respond to all of the emails. I'll try and answer the most frequently asked questions by updating this summary.

[nemesisevil]

I'd love to see berserk stance changed. It just ruins the concept of Warriors wearing plate. It's also made Battle Stance almost entirely useless for both PvE and PvP.

[niallghas]

Work of art.

More words would diminish it.

Nailgun

[Bluetoez]

That video is amazing...feels like i'm watching tales of the past III just without voices.

[topfer]

that movie is amazing. clearly i need to read up on machima, as i had no idea the extent to which it could be used. bravo.

[Disciple]

That's some award-winning animation there. I've been waiting a LONG time to see someone with these skills do something like this.

That's considerably better than the stuff I've seen the animators at Blizzard do with their own tools.

Like many, the only criticism is that I didn't much like the music either, but that's my personal preference in music, and to a large extent, my preconceptions about the sort of music that accompanies this sort of work, but it honestly detracts nothing from an excellent video. Bookmarked for glory!

/applause!!

[deadlockk]

Amazing work.

[ShinKosh]

That video is amazing. Screams old school Tenchu but still, amazing video.

And the music, I thought it was kinda catchy

[paliolykos]

By far one of the best wow videos I have ever seen. There are some amazing skills there.

As for the song, I thought it was great. very catchy and fits the video very well. Who cares if its in another language really?

[lostdruid]

the video is simply amazing! Excellent work, though I think the music don't fit very well.
too bad it wasn't released when onyxia was still at SW

[Macalister]

Im curious as to how movies like these are made seeing how most of those animations arent in the game.. I think, atleast I havent seen them get used like this.
Great stuff apart from the song, borderline girl power.

Oh and I usually dont watch these things to the end but this one was.. good.

[justinope]

simply amazing, I can't wait for the next one

[Kimbald]

Incredibly impressed.
It even has some basic plot you actually get drawn into, simple as it may be.
The characters are real and intrigueing.
Amazing job.

[NiveouS]

That video was awesome... amazing..! Would love to see more

Loved it!

[LavaDuck]

Saw it yesterday.













*searching for jaw somewhere down here*

[Wildhorn]

MAN! This video is just AWESOME! Finaly a video where the maker(s) use their own model animation instead of the default ones!

[scoops]

I believe this Machinima is the first to provide all its own animations... Simply amazing, I can only hope that these skills in animation one day turn into something like Tales of the Past 3, epic visuals + a very long and developed plot = a great success.

[Galladriel]

The movie was outstanding...loved it to the bone and not jsut because i have a BE female rogue :P cant w8 to see the next one

[Talisien]

Simply amazing. Make more, please!

[Analogman101]

I am quite shocked at that video. I've seen Tales of the Past, and A lot of really good Animation is out there. But I've never seen anything as Fluid and interactive as this. I mean seriously, if you look at the part where they are all inspecting the pub before she comes out, one of the Guards is going up the stairs on the left, and the Animator took the time to move his feet in precision to the stairs, EVERY STEP!!! And not just that, but the entire fight in the pub.... just wow. I didn't even know WoW character skins could move like that! And I don't know if you noticed, and I don't know if it's an in-game function or not, but the Swords Ms. Blind uses get beat up as the video goes on. It may just be Weapon Skins.... but I don't remember those weapons waving any blemishes...

Simply stunning once again. The music was actually fairly fun. I enjoyed it. I'm really big into Choreography and music that fits such fights is key, and I feel the music not only matched the fights, but did in fact help the story along. As many qualms are with the music, which is silly, mine is a bit more grandiose. I would say that with the level of detail and animation in this, that the fights seemed a little lack luster... There were some neat parts, but all in all it seemed rather... Limited, in comparison to what could have been done with this kind of animation. An example is when the rogues are dueling outside the Keep. While some neat parts, it seemed more like I was watching a Wu-shu-Hong-Kong-Flying-movie than a down to earth fight between two extremely experienced fighters of the shadow. I saw in the Keep there were some little hit here and there on the guards as she Grappled with them, and I loved that. The little things like that that you can barely catch, those are the good fights to me. Where the fight is so fast, you hold your breath, watching to see what else they'll do. And when it's done, all you can do is blink and go "Whoa.... did I really just watch that!?" And the have to go back and watch it 3 more times in slow-motion to make sure you catch it all.

But again, it was fantastic to see the animation, and the level of detail put into it. I am recommending Everyone I know to watch this video, and will probably end up Downloading it in really high quality once it's available. I really Hope his company pulls through, because this is some GREAT stuff. And it would be a shame to have it end so shortly after being discovered. I am interested in seeing how he plays with the other classes. I'm interested in seeing how brutal the Warrior fight is. How chaotic the Druid fight would be, shifting from form to form to form, the Mage fight which I picture to be something almost Like Dragon Ball, in that you have this gigantic force of magic crated and released. And the Hunter fight seems like it would be fairly interesting to try and do, keeping the pets in positioning, and the hunter's fighting style of ranged only, it seems like it would almost be a John Woo-esque fight with slow-mo bullet time and such.

Oh yes. I do hope there are more of these. So much potential. I look forward to hearing about the next installment.

Good job. Good mutha fraking job!