PvP Balance, Blue posts, Wallpaper

[Boubouille]

PvP Balance - Ghostcrawler on Resilience

I don't think I have ever said "wait and see" though it gets quoted a lot, so maybe I did. I have always said that everyone pretty much agrees that resilience will make things better and the question is by how much.

Resilience is our primary reward for PvP gear. It is what keeps PvP gear from being uber in PvP gear and also discourages players from using PvE gear to PvP (more on this in a sec). Part of the Arena design is basically that if you win it gives you access to gear that lets you win more (that is actually the PvE design too if you think about it). If we give away resilience too readily, then the Arena rewards don't feel as valuable.

We know a lot of players are wearing PvE gear right now in Arenas. That is happening for a couple of reasons:

First, they have that gear. We made the early raiding content very approachable, but we also gave players access to it long before the Arena season started. In early BC it felt like the PvP epic gear was far easier to get than the PvE epic gear, which sent a strange message to a lot of players from which not all have recovered. So in that respect it is nice to be able to say again that PvE is a valid path to epic gear. Unfortunately, we probably went too extreme in the other direction and now the "welfare epics" are from Naxx. (I also want to add that badges and Archavon are great sources for PvP gear without you having to PvP, and Strand and Wintergrasp give a lot of honor if you want to PvP but don't want to Arena. There is also a lot of good starter PvP gear out there but it is blue and some players hate the thought of taking off their purple gear from a few seasons ago. But I digress.)

Second, when nobody has resilience gear, it allows for a strategy where you can just burst players down in a couple of GCDs. Since the attacks never take much damage, resilience isn't highly valued. What will happen is that once some players start to get resilience, everyone will have to. Once the healer (to use an example) can't be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position from the rest of the healer's team. It's an arms race in essence. Once one person putson their survival gear, everyone has to.

Now I do realize in the past this wasn't true of every spec, especially rogues, though we've tried to avoid that problem this time. I also realize that some players think they die too easily without resilience or will die too easily even with resilience. I'm not trying to wave away all of that feedback. The question was whether resilience was valuable (or perhaps even too valued) in PvP.

Blue posts

Arena Point cap to be changed
We understand the problem and will likely bump the cap. Look for an announcement soon. (Source)

Pet mechanics changes is on the list
Yes, I have tried to post several times that the way pets receive buffs from their masters is inconsistent. We need to take a holistic look at stats, especially those like hit, spell pen and haste. It doesn't make sense, for example, for a pet to receive a percentage of your spell hit. Where are they ever going to get the remainder of their hit from?

Many classes have pets now, and those classes have different stats to provide to those pets. While locks and hunters (and DKs to a lesser extent) are the most dependent on having a good system in place, the whole paradigm just needs to be reexamined. It is on the list. (Source)

Achievement: 40 Exalted Reputations
We are aware of the text being a little confusing on this, but right now it is setup to have x amount of exalted factions at the same time. We may change how this works at some point in the future but have no definite plans at this time. (Source)

Achievement: Gotta Go! and Volazj's Quick Demise in a future patch
Gotta Go = 4 minutes; Volazj's Quick Demise = no change (Source)

Engineering - Scrapbot in Patch 3.0.8
The Scrapbot will indeed gain the ability to repair in a future patch. (Source)

Using 5 marks instead of 4 for Concerted Efforts repeatable quest (AV + AB + EOTS + WSG + SOTA)
We plan to do this in a future patch.

DPS comparison between classes
The context is everything. If players are comparing themselves to a dual-wielding DK doing 7000 dps, yes then of course they are going to feel like their dps is puny. But in that example they are comparing themselves to a class in a broken situation. If we notice that players with low or high numbers always have a certain spec then it might lead us to find a bug in the spec. Assassination rogues are a little low at the moment because there was a bug in Master Poisoner for a long time that nobody detected. When we fixed it, their dps dropped. Some fights greatly favor certain classes or specs. Patch is great for classes that can blow their cooldowns to great effect. Warriors like fights like Thaddius with lots of free rage generation through damage. The context is everything.

We like numbers and it awesome that the WoW community is so good at providing them. Just don't leap to conclusions that the numbers can't support. (Source)

New spells VS. old ones
I think there is some truth to that. We also just get better at designing abilities. The newer spells often (not always) have a more specific purpose, are less clunky or just more fun. This goes for some of the talents too. Warriors compare stances to presences unfavorably and I think there is some truth to that too. (Source)

Player feedback and developers on forums
We generally use "developer" to mean someone who works on the game itself, as opposed to people in other departments of Blizzard who support production of the game. Blizzard is a place where feedback is very important though, so people throughout the company still tend to have a pretty big impact on game design.

I am a game designer, and specifically I am the lead systems designer for WoW. Game designers are not artists or programmers, but we use the tools developed by the programmers and the assets created by the artists to get content into the game. Programmers make the game run, artists make it beautiful, but it is the designer's job to make it fun. (Though again, Blizzard collaborates more than many studios do and I spend a lot of time talking to programmers or artists about class, mechanics or even achievement design.) I think a lot of players mistake me for a CM because I tend to post a lot more than most WoW designers. Mostly, I just don't sleep so it lets me play WoW, work on it during the day and still have time to post. Game balance is one of the most controversial aspects of any multiplayer game, and I benefit from being able to engage the community directly. Systems design specifically is everything that is not level, story, quest or encounter design. My team handles everything from classes to mechanics to items to trade skills to achievements to UI design, and that includes the game balance.

I do want to stress that we are a team. We come to a consensus on every major change to the game. I put enormous faith in the team to make the right call and keep any of us individually from doing something stupid. Blizzard is in a position to be able to attract and retain the best talent available in this industry. Many of them are much better game designers than I will ever be. Mostly I try and stay out of their way. A great many of them read the forums. Everything you type is seen by silent blues. I see people reading the forums when I drop by their office. We talk about what they have read all the time. These guys care passionately about doing the right thing and making the game as good as they can. Your opinion is extremely important to them. Just keep that in mind every time you post. (Source)

[US] PvP Servers free character moves
PvP character moves ended 24 hours ago. We're reviewing populations to determine the best way to move forward, as we only opened up transfers from the most impacted realms, and players on several more realms would like the option of moving characters as well. A lot of people haven't had the option yet of moving a character off of a high population realm like you have.

The transfers didn't end because "the problem isn't as bad" either. They ended because the destination realms filled up. (Source)

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Frost Presence threat hotfixed
We are looking into this issue and found one bug that we are hotfixing. I will attempt to explain:

Most auras go away when you die, but some don't. Frost Presence and Defensive Stance have some effects that go away and some that do not (this is the bug). It ends up that a DK who dies loses some of the threat bonus from Frost Presence, but doesn't get it back when he comes back to life because the game thinks Frost Presence is still active and doesn't attempt to reapply the buff. If you change presence from Frost to something else and back, then all the buffs get reapplied correctly, but most tanks probably aren't doing that.

So it's entirely possible that if you die and come back without changing presences that you have just gimped your threat generation. You aren't losing all your bonus threat generation. You are basically losing the amount that we gave all tanks to compensate for pulling Blessing of Salvation out of the game.

If all of that confuses you, the take home message is we fixed a bug where your threat would be low after dying. Again, by the time you read this, the bug should have been hotfixed.

It is likely this bug was also affecting warriors in Defensive Stance and the hotfix will catch that too. It was not affecting paladins or druids because their spells work differently.

We don't know if this is the entire issue with DK (and possibly warrior) threat being low, but it should help, especially if you ever die while raiding. Some of the guilds who are seeing this problem have very high dps, which implies they have experienced the content a lot and might not be dying that much. (Source)

Druid (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Improved Faerie Fire
I went ahead and looked at this in game, and I am happy to report that I was wrong. Any Faerie Fire should allow you to get the 3% crit, even if you didn't cast it.

So the tooltip should probably read: Your Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire spells also increase the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increase the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by [anyone's] Faerie Fire or Feral Faerie Fire.

I don't always have the game right in front of me when I am reading forums (most often I am on a painfully topical beach sipping mai tais) so I try not to guess unless I am pretty sure about something. I was pretty sure about this, but I was wrong. It happens. There are like 15,000 spells in the game. (Source)

Hunter (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Player theorycrafting vs. Developers numbers
Players generally do a great job generating numbers with what they have. They don't always have the most up to date numbers, and we don't make a herculean effort to get numbers to them. PTRs are our best shot, but even they can lag behind our most current builds.

As a most recent example, Elemental shamans were perplexed by why their numbers were different from ours and there was some amount of shouting that we didn't know what we were talking about and why couldn't we just accept the community's numbers and balance around those? It turned out that the shamans had misunderstood the way a talent worked (almost certainly because of unclear statements on my part) and that when they were able to test on the PTR, their numbers were close to what we predicted. Happy ending.

I don't know know why the EJ hunter numbers you cited don't match ours. It would take a great deal of time for us to dig through all the numbers that we are presented with to understand where the disagreements occur. In this case I suspect it is because Explosive Shot does less damage now than it does on the PTR, but I don't know. Survival is a miniscule percentage of total hunters out there, so we really won't mind them getting a significant bump, but it isn't our intent that they are far and away the highest dps hunter spec (BM shouldn't be either).

We do our tests under a variety of conditions, and fully raid buffed is certainly one of them.

The Ulduar comment I made has been widely mininterpreted, but I made it because so many players were using the argument "We may be okay now, but we won't scale." While some players understand "scaling" perfectly well, it also gets thrown around a lot by less-informed players as the generic reason for why something fails ("RNG" occupies that niche on the PvP side of things sometimes). In the hunter case, it may be that they do scale just fine but it is irrelevant because we are rebalancing hunters for 3.1.

GC while im excited that your changing us for 3.1 that is months away. Will you be inclinded to hotfix us if you see Live dmg output is extremely low?
Yes. We are even trying to build in more hooks when we do things like this so we can do changes if needed.

Also GC consider that there is a reason why Survival is not played by most hunters. The mechanics for the tree feel too clunky and with the addition of 30 sec CD to LnL that isn't represented on the UI, the tree has become extremely Clunky.
Fair enough. Just buffing dps isn’t always enough to change something from not fun to fun. There are however some hunters even in this thread who want to play Survival and just can’t justify it at the moment.

Cunning pets overall just are a waste of code at this point. Roar of Recovery is useful, but at a 6min cooldown makes it a drop in the bucket.
While 400 dps is low, you are making the assumption that anything that isn’t a raiding pet is a waste of code. Those pets weren’t intended to be for raiding – that’s what Ferocity pets are for. Thanks for all of the numbers though, Neruse.

Sorry we're a bit panicky ... we're all thinking of Ret Pally's back in Beta and how you didn't listen then when folks said they were OP and umm ... they were?
Sure, but the Ret pallies said they weren’t and were really upset with the magnitude of the nerfs (which turned out, I think, to be on target or even a little light). I understand what you’re trying to say, but players can be very selective about when we’re supposed to listen to them or not.

On LnL, we’re still messing with the specifics on it. It’s too early to comment until we have something we’re happy with. (Source)

Rogue (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Rogue DPS getting better in Patch 3.0.8
Patchwerk isn't necessarily the perfect test case for dps. It is a simple fight, but these days it is also getting very short and some classes thrive on short fights where they can maximize specific abilities or cooldowns. The rogues don't have to move, but neither do the hunters or Frostfire mages. The warriors aren't getting a ton of extra rage from collateral damage.

But I tend to agree that rogues are too low. They should look better in 3.0.8 when some of the 6000+ dps outliers are brought down some.

I think in retrospect rogues (talking Assassination really) were the victims of a couple of tricky bugs. We all freaked out at the damage they were doing near the end of beta and lowered their damage only to find later that a few poison bugs were causing some of the excessive damage.

The primary reason we haven't fixed it yet is because rogues seem to be doing very well in PvP and careless dps buffs for noble PvE purposes could just make that situation worse. I do apologize for the situation rogues are in currently and we hope it will look better after 3.0.8.

P.S. I know some players don't give a fig about PvP and are offended that we have to worry about PvP balance when solving PvE problems. WoW is enjoyed by a lot of different players for different reasons and we try to keep them all in mind. (Source)

Warrior (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Defensive Stance threat hotfix
This thead has gone pretty far afield, but I did want to mention that we hotfixed a bug where warrior threat in Def Stance would sometimes be lower following a death. Basically, the threat modifier was not being reapplied properly until you changed stances.

We don't imagine this was a huge issue in threat generation but there were certainly cases where it cropped up. (Source)

New World of Warcraft Wallpaper
A new wallpaper has been added to the official website

[EvilHomer15]

not much news at hunter section

[Nest]

Look's like GC still doesn't have a clue how PvP work's...

[Sebid]

The Ashbringer ...

[Rugus]

not much news at hunter section

We are still fighting that damned pet-bar bugs... Why on earth do they take all this time to fix a so annoying thing. Oh I forgot: they had to fix the clams.

[Statix]

I sure hope with 5 marks for 'Concerted Efforts' will increase the honor it gives.

[Genericrogue]

Nice to see that they're acknowledging Combat's clear inferiority...oh...wait....

[Cocoa]

Oh I forgot: they had to fix the clams.

and even that didnt come out well, instead of not stacking when you pick up clams, now the meat doesnt stack when you open them... comes out to a wash for me.

[Azaga]

Rogue DPS getting better in Patch 3.0.8

Hm.... GC really didn't say that. He said that rogue dps will "look" better, after some broken specs are nerfed next patch.

[Deleted]

We are still fighting that damned pet-bar bugs... Why on earth do they take all this time to fix a so annoying thing. Oh I forgot: they had to fix the clams.

Don't forget that they had to fix it so that we won't get mana from using Tame Beast with Aspect of the Viper!

[Ishir]

Blizzard is still in the dark about pvp problems...

Mages, DK, Rogues and Ret. don't want resilience, even if Deadly Gear was free, they wouldn't used them.


Once the healer (to use an example) can't be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position from the rest of the healer's team


This is false, i have +900 resilience and don't survive that long, even with the WG tenacity buff, with around 50.000 hp, im dead in a few seconds...

Because you have 10 people pewpewing you in WG at once? You get tenacity for being outnumbered...

Here's how it is supposed to work (whether resilience contributes enough is another story):

Scenario 1 - No survivability (% health)

ClassStartRound 1Round 2Round 3
Healer1003000
DPS100505050


Scenario 2 - Healer has high survivability (% health)

ClassStartRound 1Round 2Round 3
Healer1005030100
DPS1005000


Once the healer can survive the Round 1 burst the DPS damage drops off, the healer can heal themselves up, and the DPS eats dirt.

Scenario 3 - Both have survivability (% health)

ClassStartRound 1Round 2Round 3
Healer100503010
DPS100704010

*"Rounds" are arbitrary lengths of time, GCDs, 10s, minutes, whatever.

Once both have survivability, the healer can survive the initial burst and the DPS dealer can survive long enough to make sure they can wear the healer down. Who will win? Hopefully the player with the highest skill.

GC's statement is true - once the healer has survivability to outlast the burst, then the DPS has to worry about survivability too.

(All caveats of PvP not being a 1 vs 1 game etc. apply - it's an illustration, jerks :P)

[wildi]

PvP Balance - Ghostcrawler on Resilience
..What will happen is that once some players start to get resilience, everyone will have to.

is not going to happen because:

Some classes with very little escapability have to stack as much resilience as they can, while other classes have built in survivability so they can afford to not use resilience and focus on stats to increase their burst.

Warlocks, priests and shamans are forced to stack resilience. Mages, paladins, dks and rogues can run around in pure pve gear and be just as hard to kill, but are able to kill you.

Once the healer can't be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position..

Killing someone requires damage, not resilience. Burst classes do not necessarily need huge crits to burst people down. Resilience has little to no effect on large non-crit numbers + see above whats going on in pvp.

[emulous]

@Ishir

Your point is both erelivent and false because of these very simple and easy to understand points that EVERYONE seems unable to understanding..

• The resilience cap is impossible to achieve even with full deadly
• Point for point damage stats give far better results then resilience
• High damage gear is by far easier to get then high resilence gear
• Even if you do obtain high resilience and last 50% longer.. 50% of 2 seconds is still only 3 seconds.

I currently play a mage and at the start of the season I obtained all the PvP gear I could lay my hands on, specced my fav frost PvP spec that I had planned out from level 70 and went into the arena and lost..

then I lost some more.. then a few more times.. so.. I went away and loaded myself up with PvE gear.. reduced my HP by over 1500.. reduced my resil by over 600 but gained 600-800 more spelldmg for 20 seconds and specced arcane..

This alone has seen me cakewalk to 1650+ rating and I have enough rating and points to buy the hateful legs and gloves but right now they worstless to me and I would rather run with my heroics / T7 gear.

[emulous]

Because your class has high escape abilities.
Clothies with low escape abilities and are left tanking mellee are forced to rely on resilience.

What happens when a mellee player catches up with you? You get hit like a hammer right?

Welcome to the world of other clothies that dont have escape abilities like mages.

I agree with Ishir.

Then you are a retard.. and I will enjoy farming idiots like you for free rating.. because what your tiny little brain can't seem to graps is that resilience is not doing enough and you will be waiting 2-3 season before you get a decent amount of resilience. At which point who gives a shit? melee willl most likely all be in uldar gear and ripping you a new one aways..

How can you be so blind to see that I am actually on your side and give solid and valid reasons why simply waiting for people to get resilience and see whats happens in pointless because..

* The resilience cap is impossible to achieve even with full deadly
* Point for point damage stats give far better results then resilience
* High damage gear is by far easier to get then high resilence gear
* Even if you do obtain high resilience and last 50% longer.. 50% of 2 seconds is still only 3 seconds.

Honestly L2READ and use your brain!

[Eilt]

Did the default text get increased? I do not like the way it looks the text showing recent forum topics and the text for the subject of the post (on the main page) and subsequent entered text are too big!

Is this an mmo change or did I mess something up in my settings somewhere?

And no, I can not just make text sixze smaller, because the text inside the blue posts are still the perfect size, just the stuff I mentioned looks terrible.

[Balbaroy]

Man emulous you're a prick and also lrn2spell. Anyway, can ghostcrawler really think that resilience is going to be the answer? How can he even suggest that? I don't know how they're going to fix arenas, it seems like a huge task right now. tbh it really sucks and I don't see it changing anytime soon. :/

[danightryder]

The post on rogues almost brought a tear to my eye. However they are still not mentioning changes like they have done for other classes.

"But I tend to agree that rogues are too low. They should look better in 3.0.8 when some of the 6000+ dps outliers are brought down some"

Was a stupid comment to make though, why don't they just put us up there with the 6000+ DPS classes ;D

And

"I do apologize for the situation rogues are in currently and we hope it will look better after 3.0.8"

Only makes us think that their not gonna make any changes. They hope rogues are top since other classes won't be no more

[nemesisevil]

It doesn't make sense! What is even a full cap of resilience going to do against such extreme burst!? Not to mention the fact that some of the classes will favour dps gear and ignore resilience because of heavy base defenses.

[Elenion]

Looks like they did see my post in that thread about possible bugginess with Frost Presence.

[emulous]

Man emulous you're a prick and also lrn2spell. Anyway, can ghostcrawler really think that resilience is going to be the answer? How can he even suggest that? I don't know how they're going to fix arenas, it seems like a huge task right now. tbh it really sucks and I don't see it changing anytime soon. :/

wtf is your problem..

~ds__swoosh quoted me and made a comment that completely contradicts himself without even reading or understanding my comment.. and ends up saying he supports the ridiculous idea that resilience will fix things.. then you call me a prick and then agree with everything I've said?