Ulduar, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Ulduar blue posts
The year is starting well with two blue posts about Ulduar, the upcoming raid dungeon added in patch 3.1. It seems that we'll have a lot of encounters here... and tons of items! If you didn't see it earlier (really?) make sure you check the Tier 8 and Ulduar Weapons preview!.

Itemization, haste and armor penetration rating
Couple of things:
1) If your gear didn't have haste, it would probably have armor pen instead. If you are imagining your gear having Str or Stam instead of the haste, you are probably picturing Ulduar or season 6 gear.
2) We aren't offering the best itemized gear now because we want to have something left for you to work up to. We don't want the next tier of gear to look exactly like this one, but with +2 more of each stat.
3) We do think haste and armor pen might be a little low in what you get per rating point (at least for melee). That is something we're looking at. (Source)

Ulduar PTR testing
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids. (Source)

Blue posts

Dungeon (Naxxramas) - Totems dying in Grobbulus fight
Not intended, fixed in a future patch. (Source)

Dungeon (Stratholme) - Ramstein not spawning
Don't let any Abominations get to the back gate and you'll be fine. I changed this to be more robust in a future patch. (Source)

Dungeon - Death Knight spell effects and creature spells
We've definitely noted the issues with some of the Death Knight ground effects blocking players from being able to see really important ground effects that creatures cast in encounters. We're going to see what we can do to help with this from the art side of things. (Source)

PvP Gear - Resilience and Armor Penetration on Cloth
We changed the way we itemized PvP gear between seasons 4 and 5. The largest change is that resilience uses up much more of an item's budget, where previously it was almost bonus. We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level) because it was causing some weird issues for certain characters, like Feral druids. The next few seasons should follow this new design, though of course we might decide to change that design for some pressing reason. Since we figured very few players would keep their level 70 gear over level 80 gear, we figured it was a fine time to change things across the board.

We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

PvP Gear - Burst damage
We also are trying to prevent that from happening so much this time around. Later tiers of PvP gear have more survivability but don't inflate offensive stats nearly as much. This isn't as true of the weapons of course. (Source)

The issue is really the static armor penetrations like Expose Armor and Sunder which would seem to be what GC is referencing in his post. Simple solution would be to just convert those to straight percentages as well and then the issue will also be resolved and balanced. So what percentage of armor should those abilities remove? Easiest thing would be just to balance them around how much armor they remove from a raid boss.
Yes, well put. It would take a lot of rebalancing to convert Sunder and Expose over to a percentage, but it would solve some problems too.

At a higher level, I don't think the answer to letting clothies survive longer is to make cloth more like mail. Either clothies are fragile or they're not. If they're fragile, then they need tools to be able to survive when the bad man with the axe or daggers comes a calling. If tons of armor is just something all players need, then we're spending a lot of extra dev time to itemize four tiers of armor (cloth, leather, mail and plate). I exaggerate, but I think you get the point. (Source)

PvP talk on official forums
We considered having a separate PvP forum, but honeslty we're pretty happy keeping them altogether. It is too easy for players to adopt the attitude of "Who cares, I don't PvP / PvE." But when you are talking about class or spec balance, we are going to care, so you might as well too.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that there is a lot of PvP talk right now with the new Arena season. I am sure sometimes people get clobbered (whether fairly or not) then come in here to immediately blast out a post to express their frustration. (These are usually not good posts.)

I know it can make it a challenge to filter out the threads that don't interest you, but in the long run, many ability or mechanic changes have implications for both PvP and PvE so we'd rather not have to have the same discussions in multiple places. (Source)

CoH / Wild Growth nerf
I see this logic often, but it doesn't make sense to me. It reads to me like this "If we have an ability that is overpowered in certain situations, don't put us in those situations." That doesn't make the ability not overpowered. It just means we have to tiptoe around it's OP-ness.

Wrath of the Lich King has dozens of instance bosses. It's challenging making those all feel different, and denying the encounter designers the ability to cause area damage takes a big tool away from them. In an old-fashioned raid like Molten Core, we could get away with doing damage mostly to the tank. But players have gotten a lot better at WoW since then, and many of them have seen a lot of encounters since then. I don't think Naxx or Ulduar would be very exciting if every boss, or even almost every boss, played like Patchwerk or Golemagg.

Part of the challenge of taking a lot of damage at once is supposed to be triage (who needs healing the most) and coordination (I'll heal the tank, while you heal group 2, and that other guy heals the melee, but let's not stomp all over the hots). If the equation is very simple (If area damage, then use this one spell) then there isn't much of a challenge. We don't think Chain Heal is at that level right now (largely because of cast time and fall-off), or we would have nerfed it.

We do think shamans were stacked at the end of BC, but that had a lot to do with Bloodlust / Heroism and totems affecting a limited number of targets (esp. Windfury). But in fairness to the other healers, if we get to a point where shamans are stacked again, we are prepared to do something about it. (Source)

PvE and classes survavibility
We certainly factor in plate as a benefit shared by warriors, paladins and death knights. But cloth wearers often have tools or spells to make up for their lack of armor. While we think mages and warlocks deserve a slight dps edge to make up for the fact that they are incapable of ever doing anything but dps (and those two happen to wear cloth) that is more of a mage and lock issue, not a cloth issue. (We put hunters and rogues in the same bucket as mages and locks.) We don't for example try to keep Fury warrior damage lower than Shadow priest damage. I'm not sure you could even argue that plate provides that much of a benefit in PvE.

But really the bigger issue is that the content is designed so that any reasonable mix of classes can beat it, provided your group also has reasonable skill and gear. You shouldn't be taking so much damage that the healers can't heal through it. The survivability of the dps players generally shouldn't be an issue. The survivability of the tank might be an issue, and if you are all undergeared or doing the encounters wrong, then you might notice high casualty rates. But the corpses should be wearing cloth and plate. You should never find yourself in a situation where you say "Well, if we just had more plate and mail wearers, we'd be dealing with loot drama by now."

[...] Ironically, and I think the point several players have been making, is that plate doesn't give you much if any of an edge on surviving. First, most bosses hit for so hard that your armor is irrelevant unless you are wearing tank gear. Second, a lot of raid damage is magical, for which armor offers no protection. Third, cloth wearers have several tools at their disposal to make up for their fragility. And again, if your casualty rates are that high, you're probably doing something wrong. (Source)

Blizzard testing methods
We do all of those things. Typically, we start with a few back of the envelope calculations and try it in game (kind of like you would do with a test dummy). If that seems like the right ball park, then we do the calculation to figure out real numbers for the ability, talent, enchant etc. in question. This is the "spreadsheet" step. Players deride it sometimes, but you can't balance a game the size of WoW by just guessing numbers that feel right. (On the other hand, part of being a good designer is also knowing when to ignore the numbers suggested by the spreadsheet).

Then we do some more extensive solo testing with and without buffs, against targets of various levels, and at different levels of gear.

Then we do two different kinds of more robust testing. One is more functional testing -- making sure the ability does what it's supposed to and behaves as expected with various talents, buffs, glyphs, set bonuses etc. Simultaneously, we do playtesting, where we have someone who knows the class very well in a raid or PvP setting. Depending on the magnitude of the change and our testing resources, we will also have less skilled players try out the change to see how it performs for them.

Once it's officially in the game of course, it still isn't done. Players are going to have feedback on almost any change, especially after they've had days or weeks with it in place. Despite the scope of our testing, it can't compare to the 11.5 million WoW players out there.

Now, I skipped the whole part about agreeing upon a change, since the question was about testing. That typically involves a lot of brainstorming, usually in a group setting. Once we agree on a change (and we almost always agree -- I can't think of a single change we made where some designers were on board with a change and others had serious reservations), we will bounce it off of several people, both at Blizzard, and other expert and casual people in the community as well.

When our testing is wrong, and that certainly does happen, it is usually for one of these reasons (and sometimes several at once):

• Bugs inflated or deflated the numbers. Sometimes these are unknown bugs and sometimes they are bugs we know about but try and work around.
• Players found a creative way to use an ability we didn't account for. This could be anything from a crazy talent spec, to stacking a particular stat, to a synergistic use of abilities from several different classes.
• Closely related, sometimes we just underestimate player skill. This can particularly be challenging when we try to estimate how much better you can get with repetition. We might try something for a few hours, but a player who tries an ability for several months may get really good with timing, position or other skill-based factors.
• Good old-fashioned math errors or other mistakes. These are rare, but they do happen.
• Testing errors. Maybe our "expert" player wasn't as good as we thought. Maybe our sample size wasn't large enough. In a game the size of WoW you can't test every possible combination in a matrix (okay, now try a Draenei death knight blacksmith DW with Crusader vs. a night elf shadow priest... etc. etc.), and sometimes it's the strange stacking effects from different sources that end up being the biggest problem.
• It's a big game. What I mean by that is our development has many moving parts. Maybe a new enchant was introduced after the testing that changes everything. Maybe a tweak to buff or nerf that enchant changes everything. Maybe fixing a bug way over here had unpredictable effects way over here. In an ideal situation, you lock everything down and test the entire game and every time you fix a bug or make a data change, you test everything again. Realistically that isn't possible.

Also keep in mind that sometimes players assume something is a bug that is actually be design. I try to clear this up if there is a lot of confusion over a particular issue. (Source)

Spreadsheets and theorycrafting
The spreadsheets work... to a point. You must keep in mind their shortcomings. These include, firstly, assumptions about how mechanics work that aren't always correct. Some mechanics are well understood. Others are assumptions, which while often based on large sample sizes, can still sometimes be wrong.

Second, they typically model "best possible" which includes very little lag, no movement and super-human timing. The more complex the class abilities, such as for hunters or warlocks, the harder it is for players to deliver on those best case scenarios. One of the frustrating things we have to deal with is when a player gets say 6500 dps out of a spreadsheet, can't do that on an actual boss fight, and then somehow blames us for the difference. Players forget that they can move out of range of buffs, that their pet is standing in the fire, that their trinket didn't proc as often as they expected, or that they died because they were so focused on their timers that they forgot to click that Health Stone.

Third, players can get different results, sometimes legitimately and sometimes disingenously to prove a point. For every case such as the Elemental shaman tests where our numbers were inaccurate, you can find players arguing that say the Retribution or DK nerfs were "to the ground," when in fact those characters seem to be doing very well, perhaps even too well.

We do take player tests and estimates very seriously, particularly when we can verify the skill, knowledge and motivation of the player involved. At the end of the day, we are still going to rely on our internal testing to a large degree. You can have a tee hee moment about the times when we've gotten it wrong, because that certainly happens, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, our numbers tend to be right.

Do you and your co-workers use/review the spreadsheets/etc that get produced by the theorycrafting players?
Yes, we do. Sometimes we do it to help understand why there are discrepancies and sometimes we do it because we have characters too. I can think of at least two occasions where I mumbled something like "Hey, did you see how much priority this spreadsheet gives to [hit or whatever]?" and another designer said right back "Yes, that is a very credible spreadsheet." (Source)

Nerfing vs. Buffing
Players tend to think of things in terms of whether their class got buffs or nerfs. We tend to think of the overall balance of the game.

The metaphor that gets (over) used a lot is the wobbly chair -- you can cut one leg off or try and extend the other three. We would always prefer to buff rather than nerf, because frankly it's more fun. It generates goodwill and makes players excited about playing. But buffing isn't always the answer. Often a nerf involves far fewer changes the game as a whole. Because testing time is usually our limiting factor for releasing changes, we prefer to change as little as possible.

It's impossible to measure things, especially healing, in terms this simply, but imagine your class can heal 5000 health per second and the other specs can heal 4000 health per sec. Sure we can buff the other three because that's more fun than nerfing you, right? But it might also mean that PvE fights are too easy and PvP damage is too trivial (yes I realize that is an amusing thing to say right now while so many people are concerned about burst damage). Just buffing your spells affects spell balance too -- when you don't care about efficiency because even your light healing spells heal for a lot, then suddenly your toolbox looks pretty shallow, and that Spirit and mp5 on your gear starts to look like a wasted stat.

TLDR version: we prefer to buff when we can, but nerfing is typically far less risky in terms of the amount of data changed. (Source)

Game difficulty and its impact on fun
I don't want to derail this thread, but you do need to get it out of your heads that shaman or paladin QQ caused us to nerf CoH and WG. Those spells were too good. CoH was too good at the end of BC.

As a few players have pointed out, for them -- for a lot of people -- balance is fun. It's certainly not the only aspect of fun. But games in which players feel like they won or lost the game at the moment of character creation, because some abilities are just overpowered or underpowered, tend to not have the kind of legs WoW has had.

Fun is the most important concern. Trivializing content (whether PvE or PvP) may seem fun in the short term, but like playing any game with a cheat mode on, the novelty quickly wears off. Overcoming challenges is a big part of what makes games like WoW attractive.

Fun is also subjective. It's easy to say "Circle of Healing is fun for me and Renew isn't," but that may have a lot to do with the relative balance of those two abilities or your personal preference. Some players think stabbing things is fun and others think tanking is fun. We can continue to come up with cool new toys for each individual spec or role. However it also may be that nothing we are willing to do will make tanking fun for *you* specifically. (Source)

Raid difficulty and class composition
If you are asking for healers to just be buffed across the board, I'm not sure many other players would agree with you. The PvE content is pretty easy as it is and I don't believe it's the lack of healing throughput that is causing people to die in Arenas at the moment.

We brought the dps of various specs more in line because we wanted players to be able to bring Retadins, Moonkin, Survival hunters and various DKs without feeling like they were gimping their dps. You typically only have 15 dps slots in a 25 player raid.

We brought the tanking ability of the 4 tank classes more in line because you typically only have 2 tanks in a 25 player raid (and you can usually get by with only one well-geared, well-spec'd tank). If we had tanking niches, then some fights were just going to be much harder for some groups (or they would feel like they had to rotate players in and out).

But the assumption for 25 player raids is that you have around 8 healers. There are only 5 healing specs. Chances are you are going to have more than one class healing (and honestly, even if all your healers are the same spec you can still manage the content at the moment). We didn't think we needed to make all the tools the same. In a 10 player raid you may only have 2-3 healers, but in that case having healing niches is probably better because it encourages you to not stack the raid with one spec (though again, plenty of groups clear Naxx with 2 of one healing class).

This explanation usually brings up the suggestion that 25-player raids should scale better from 5-player groups, and presumably have 5 tanks and 5 healers. That would be nice if it worked, but we just think we can offer better encounters with 1-2 (and sometimes more) tanks and 7-8 healers (less when you're uber).

Bottom line is we'd ideally like to see 25-player raids with as many different healing classes / specs as possible, but not unduly punish those groups who just don't happen to have that distribution of classes in their guild. (Source)

Druid (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Loss of Savage Roar when shapeshifting
We fixed Savage Roar as you described. (Source)

Hunter (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Exotic pets in 3.0.8
The PTR did not have the nerfs to Rake and Scorpid poison. We reduced their AP coefficients. They should still be fine pets, just not head and shoulders above the others. We also fixed a bug where Spirit Strike was not playing well with Longevity (and this bug fix was also likely not on the PTR).

I can't recall off the top of my head the history of the exotic pet damage (i.e. when we made changes relative to data pushes). We increased it a couple of times, though I suspect what you are seeing on the PTR for them is what you will see in 3.0.8. (Source)

Hunter changes in 3.0.8
It bothers me that after years of testing and months on a beta no one thought about us being able to spec into readiness. I assume that readiness was moved up so that we can use it in BM as well as the other 2 specs since it is a major talent.
We did consider it, and thought it was an interesting talent build choice, but it ended up dominating. We made some changes pretty late in the cycle that ended up inflating hunter damage, especially the chunk coming from pets. We also went back and forth a little on which raid-wide buffs would affect ranged attacks. Hunter dps just ended up being higher than we thought.

As far as steady shot goes wont that hurt all 3 specs? MM and SUV much more than BM?
It affects all 3 specs, but we changed Arcane and Explosive to offset that some, as well as fixing a glyph that was hurting Marks. Steady was just a huge portion of hunter damage, and not a particularly interesting ability (in that you can just sit there and mash the button without worrying about timing other abilities around it), so when we wanted to bring hunter dps down, it was an attractive target. FWIW, ammo was another one. We considered nerfing how much damage all ammo in the game contributed, but went with the SS change for the reason I stated.

Also for years hunters havent had a great AOE ability, hitting with the original volly was a joke, now its great maybe a bit op on trash but I dont think anyone cares who is topping the trash meter and I have never seen a volly used on a boss.

I agree with the first part, which is why we buffed Volley quite a bit. But in retrospect, we buffed it too much. We didn't want hunters to have the highest single-target damage and highest AE damage, as well as bringing great buffs and CC to the group. With the new Volley, I expect every PvE hunter will still be using that button on large groups, but going back to Multi on smaller ones.

I disagree with the "trash meter" comment. For one, players do care about trash. Elemental shamans and rogues for example felt like there was so much AE'ing going on that they were not attractive specs for raids. Players can say "nobody cares about trash," but we don't buy it. Raids wipe on trash. Raids are called when trash respawns. For speed clears, to satisfy a hard mode achievement or bear-mount style challenge, the rate at which you can clear trash very much matters. If it didn't I'm not sure you'd mind a Volley nerf at all.

Second, you AE on an awful lot of bosses too. (Source)

Priest (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Changes to talent trees
One of the issues with Meditation per se is that players don't seem to be having many mana regen issues, especially with 25-player raid gear and especially with some form of Replenishment in the raid. We're trying to get a better feel for what to do with mana regen at the moment.

One of the things I said before about "mandatory" talents like Meditation is that we like to have good talents, even ones that convince players to branch out from their dominant tree into a second tree. Where it gets tricky is when it doesn't feel like a decision. Meditation has felt like that at some stages in the game, but if we're reaching a point where people can just stack Spirit or Int and not worry about regen, then Meditation starts to look a lot less mandatory.

There are some other things we want to do with the Priest talent trees. It shouldn't take until next expansion. However I am extremely reluctant to give hard or even estimated timelines for things like this. You can see how some players can get impatient even with vague timelines. (Source)

Why not remove MP5 and the five second rule to turn mana regen into a rating based on spirit?
We have talked about doing something like this. However, as confusing as it can be, one of the things we get from MP5 is a different stat that might appeal to some players (depending on class and play style) more than others. With a change like you suggest, then Spirit becomes something everyone wants in large amounts, and we lose some of the difference in play style. (A few players mention this above.) Traditionally, paladins never cared much about Spirit regen because they were never out of the five second rule, while druids cared quite a bit because they could sit back and let hots tick. This changed toward the end of BC.

[...] The purpose of talents like Meditation was not to allow you to ignore the five second rule. The FSR is there to reward casters who can occasionally take a break to allow for regen. We are concerned that some of the talent and gear choices that we've introduced have allowed players to opt out of the FSR.

Int can be beneficial to any Spirit-based healer now that Int also affects regen. Depending on your class and spec, it can even be better than Spirit.

Overall though I think you are interpreting my comments too narrowly. There is no reason for us to move Meditation or even make it baseline if we change the numbers or the mechanics behind regen. Since signs point to regen becoming too trivial in the future (thereby making stats benefitting regen unattractive) this is something we are looking into.

The whole mechanic for mana regen (for all classes) is something we're not entirely happy with. (Source)

[LavaDuck]

3.0.8 PTR is still unavailable for EN testers.
We've been stuck on retrieving character list since the PTR was open.
Wouldn't get my hopes up for the 3.1 PTR.

Lots of encounters and more hard mode achievements.. Hmm.. Well, people will still whine and cry about something.

[skojten]

i like how they think about Itemization, a littel less haste

[Herocules]

Would be better to just have haste work like it does for casters, that also makes stuff like bloodlust more fun

[Meatshield]

If there are some encounters of Ulduar on ptr there is again no real competition on normal live servers...
I want to see ALL raids havin no idea whats happening in a fight, we´ll have guides again and few guilds rushing through this encounters because of knowing them...
THX

[Cho]

Dungeon (Naxxramas) - Totems dying in Grobbulus fight
Not intended, fixed in a future patch. (Source)

Dungeon (Stratholme) - Ramstein not spawning
Don't let any Abominations get to the back gate and you'll be fine. I changed this to be more robust in a future patch. (Source)

Haha, they still didnt found the bug with Hadranox in AZ getting killed by the undead adds. hf with free achievements + loot ... ~~

[talrob]

tl;dr

..but I can see all the 'waaahhh achievements aren't content' people quitting and good riddance to them

[drsjohnny]

tl;dr

..but I can see all the 'waaahhh achievements aren't content' people quitting and good riddance to them

hehe indeed i love doing achevments can't wait for new raid to get put up hoping this patch will come out this month

[Amrael]

It affects all 3 specs, but we changed Arcane and Explosive to offset that some, as well as fixing a glyph that was hurting Marks.

what is the glyph they're talking about?

[Zus]

what is the glyph they're talking about?

Glyph of Steady Shot - it was not functioning if you had 5/5 Marked for Death.

[Crusemissile]

YAY MORE LOCK CHANGES

[Goht]

someone heared already some rumers how much bosses finally we will fight in ulduar?

[Qwios]

"Raids wipe on trash. Raids are called when trash respawns."

There are trash respawns in WotLK?

[Puffy]

I find it stupid that these days there is a stamina difference on the pvp gear on cloth vs all the rest.

Imo it all should have the same value.

Why? Quite easy, cause the days of melee outlasting the rest (more stamina) is over. All dmg is unbalanced and a cloth doesnt have more dmg compared to rogue (leather) or DK (plate)

[Ninthelora]

I hope ulduar is gonna be a lot harder then naxx, that was piece of cake.

[nemesisevil]

I really hope they do something about mobs running behind you or to the side of you when tanking, it's very irritating to have to move around and correctly position yourself so nothings behind you.

[dakkuuan]

hmm..rogues aren't mentioned again...this seems to be coming a trend.

[Jukaï]

hmm..rogues aren't mentioned again...this seems to be coming a trend.

I agree. Quite disturbing actually.
Nerf Rogues.

:

[Krypt]

So fucking easy bosses with fucking hard hard modes. Got it.

[Bainz]

Well, at least they aren't doing the same thing they did in WoTLK Beta for the encounters.
The top PvE Guilds will still blow through it when it comes to Live though.