PvP - Battlegrounds Item Rewards
We would LOVE to offer good gear through BGs, don't get me wrong. It's clear from this thread alone how many players enjoy BGs. In the case of "BG epics" it isn't a philosophical opposition to having better rewards. We just haven't figured out a great way to do it yet. YET. The usual pitches tend to come down to:
1) Just give everyone epics. Despite S1 and Naxx 25, this really isn't the goal.
2) Make it very random, like you have a small chance to get an epic. /wrist
3) Reward number of BGs won, which feels very grindy because the number would have to be large or you have situation 1 again. One of the things we like about both Arenas and raids is the gear rewards are gradual because of the lockout. You can't play 24/7 and gear yourself overnight.
4) Have organized BG teams. Yet, if you think the logistics (and queues) are painful for a 5-player Arena team or a raid....
5) Reward skill. This is the answer we like the best, but is also the hardest to institute. If you played many games, we could eventually get a sense for whether your presence helps determine whether your side wins or loses. But there are a lot of other factors at play -- how coordinated your side is, whether the other guys are AFK, is someone just honor farming, is someone griefing, etc. (
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PvP - Class Representation
Specifically on the topic of Arena representation, you have to be careful how you interpret those data. Consider:
1) Depending on which numbers you present, your data can be used to support your argument more or less.
2) When a class has low representaiton, you have to decide is that because they are too weak or others too powerful. For example, some specs are popular because they counter other popular specs.
3) Popularity and viability have a correlation but it is not 1:1. Druids have never been the most popular class in WoW. There are a ton of DKs right now. Some players will abandon them when their power is more in line, but others will continue to play them because they like the class or have already invested in them.
4) The community mindset typically seems to be: just keep buffing under-represented specs even if that means giving them potentially overpowered abilities. We try to balance from a broader point of view. For example, if you make an ability too overpowered you are just going to have to nerf it later. We try to peer into the future a little bit and address potential balance problems before they get out of control. (
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Concussion Blow off the Global Cooldown?
In general, we don't like damaging abilities being off the GCD. In general, we don't like ANYTHING being off the GCD. It is there for good reasons (such as not flooding the server with commands). (
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10 Players raids vs. 25 Players - Q&A (
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10 Man content is there to allow small guilds and casuals a way to see content. Blizzard realizes that having raid content that is so hard many people cannot see it negates raiding purpose. As such we have created 10 man content, a gimped version of the real 25 man raid.
Our support of 10-player raiding is a recognition that some guilds just prefer to be small.
Naxx 25 was puggable, this was not the intent. We do not want 25 man to be a bunch of randoms getting together to clear our content. Naxx 25 was that way, Ulduar 25 will not be pug friendly.
Naxx being puggable is fine and really inevitable. The problem was that Naxx 25 was so easy compared to 10, that 10 felt like a pointless exercise. Ulduar 25 will not be as pug friendly as Naxx. I suspect it will be pugged at some point, but it may take longer. Don't forget that many guilds already knew the Naxx encounters very well when LK shipped.
Since Ulduar will create a gap in raiding guilds and it seems Arena is dying, we have created greater rewards for arena as 1. and avenue to get better gear and 2. make people play arena.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here. A lot of players are doing Naxx 25 because it is quite easy compared to the challenge of getting Arena gear. Ideally say item level 226 gear should take the same level of skill to earn in PvP or PvE. When the PvE content is more challenging, as it will be in Ulduar, some players will naturally shift back to PvP as their progression path towards gear.
If the 25 man raids are not Pugs and they should be cleared by 25 man guilds, does this mean that the 10 man raid content is just "dumbed down content" for these guilds and should be skipped?
If you are in a guild organized around 25-player raiding, then you may not get as much value out of also doing 10-player Ulduar. But it depends. If you can do 10-player hard modes, that gear is an upgrade to 25-player normal. Doing 10 hard might help you gear up for 25 hard, though you could also do the same thing just by running 25 normal a lot. Ultimately, though, the intent is that you pick 10 or 25 and focus on that. We don't prevent you from doing both if are interested in it.
Do you guys recognize that a lot of people feel some of the 10man hard modes were overtuned?
Many would argue that the 25-player modes were undertuned. Sarth 3D was intended to be something that guilds worked on for weeks. At first it looked like that was going to be the case, but after groups got geared up, most guilds that seriously tried it seemed to be able to manage before too long. We don't think that will be the case with Ulduar. It should keep you busy. But we'll see. You players are a clever lot.
13.6% of guilds have done 3 drakes in 25 player. 4.2% of guilds have done 3 drakes in 10 player - AND that includes guilds who are wearing 25 player gear. Why can't you just admit you screwed up on 3D for 10 man and made it THE hardest encounter in the game? Considerably harder than the 25 man version in fact, and the proof is in the numbers.
I am saying we screwed up and made the 10 player harder a lot harder than the 25 player version. I think you are arguing from an absolute POV that 10 was hard and 25 was on target. You could just as easily say that 10 was the target and 25 was too easy.
I can see that it is not worth the effort to run 2 10s to gear up before 25s.
Correct. It is not the intent that you run 10 to gear up for 25. If you ran 25 Naxx, you should be ready for 25 Ulduar. The only exception might be that some of the hard modes are hard, so doing 25 Ulduar, then 10 hard Ulduar might give you an edge on 25 hard Ulduar. But it still isn't required.
Did the developers legitimately think that? The time it took to learn and complete the 3 drake encounter could be counted in not weeks, not days, not even hours, but minutes... trash included.
Oh, this is just Sarth is srs bzns talk. It was challenging. Most guilds had to look at the videos of how the earlier guilds did it and it took them awhile to gear up for it. It wasn't M'uru and it wasn't supposed to be, but it was supposed to be harder than it ended up being. A lot of the guilds who could do Sarth 25 still have not done Sarth 10 though, and that isn't by choice in every case. We'll see how long it is before hard mode Mimiron and Yog and Algalon are srs bzns. My guess is a long time.
This isn't proof of anything, it's your point of view. The only information I can gleam from it is that.. you want those unhappy with the faulty 10 man progression path, to be more vocal. Got ya.
If your contention is that 10 player raiding is harder than 25 player raiding, then we disagree. The logistics of managing 25 players in our minds outweighs the "marginalizing individual effort" that you mention. I could see a way to have 10 and 25 drop the same loot but also share a lockout. Anything else will just kill 25 player raiding IMO, which is not something we want to do. We do however want to support 10 player raiding, and that means making the difficulty more appropriate for the rewards. If that isn't challenging enough for you, we do have the 10 player hard modes.
Raid composition and "Sunwell" effect for hybrids
However, the Sunwell probem we are trying to avoid was pretty consistent and widespread. There was some variation in raid composition, but not much. I think it's far too early to declare that any LK class is headed in that direction. All we are currently seeing is a lot of "My GM said we won't bring dps warriors anymore," or "My GM says Resto shamans are terrible now."
If any of this turns into an actual trend, we'll all know it and it will be pretty obvious to everyone. DKs (of at least some specs) being too good at tanking, dps or PvP was pretty obvious to everyone except maybe a few DKs. (I know, everyone like to poke fun at the new guy.)
I understand some of you are just trying to catch a problem before it blossoms out of control. Nothing wrong with that. But we're always going to be pretty cautious on acting based on early predictions that don't have a lot of evidence (even theoretical evidence) to back them up. (
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Death Knight (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Blade Barrier mechanics in 3.1 - Sacrificying Threat for Mitigation?
I feel like you arbitrarily defining "bonus" versus "normal." If it increases your mitigation, that's something you want as a tank. If the cost of that mitigation is too high, then it may not be something you want. So far almost all DKs still seem to take it. We balanced the old version around the assumption that it was nearly always up too.
2) Blade Barrier - 5 ranks. Decreases damage taken by 1/2/3/4/5% and whenever your Blood Runes are on cooldown increases healing done to you by 5%.
That is an interesting idea, and is consistent with the Blood theme. We would probably go with all of that happening when your Blood Runes are on cooldown. We'll keep it in mind if DK survivability seems to fall behind.
If you're balancing around the assumption that it's always up, why is it not passive?
I see where you are coming from, but that isn't the model we use very often. We balance around the assumption that priests cast Fort or that tanks are trying to generate threat. That doesn't mean the logical conclusion is just to make all of those passives.
One of the things we like about BB is it rewards the DK for using up those runes and not just sitting on them, yet you can use them on whatever you want like D&D or Vampiric Blood. If anything, we'd like to have *more* active mitigation abilities, but nailing the cooldown and cost right is tricky. It is easy to get them into the realm of spammy at one extreme or saved for that critical moment (that may never arrive) on the other. (
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Hunter (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Changes to T.N.T. in the patch notes
TnT gives % damage to Explosive Shot, Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap and that’s it. It does NOT refresh the duration of anything. Sorry for the confusion. The patch notes are like 20 pages long and we've gone back and forth on a few things. (
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Hunter Rebalance in 3.1
We wanted to do more with ammo than we were technically able to do in the short term. (
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Rogue (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Giving Vanish a .5 second immunity to stealth breaking
That's an idea that has come up a few times. It may be something we experiment with, but it's not the kind of thing you can just slap on and call it done. It would take quite a bit of testing to solve any edge cases or exploits. (
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Warlock (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Changes to fear damage treshold in 3.1
We don't like how much damage dots can do while a target is feared. It prevents us from being able to balance fear as needed as a defensive ability and it keeps us from being able to adjust locks or priests in other ways. We're trying to move PvP more into a place where you do X and someone counters with Y, and the "dot and fear" strategy just seemed too simple yet effective. Honestly, if the classes with fears didn't also have strong dots, it probably would not have been as much of a problem.
We don't think stuns needs a major change at this time. We dropped rogue PvP effectiveness in other ways, as I am sure they will be more than happy to explain to you. If we decide to make stuns break on damage right away then we would need to coordinate that with changes to rogue survivability. They are a melee class balanced around not taking much melee damage (because the target can't fight back). Locks and priests are by and large ranged classes. (
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Warrior (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Heroic Strike Spamming
This is the heart of the problem. HS in theory is something you use when you have more rage coming in than you know what to do with. In theory you stop using HS when rage is low, and then pick it up when rage is high
The problem is that bosses hit really hard these days and we have given warriors a lot of ways to make their attacks cheaper. As a result, warriors are often flooded with rage while tanking anything remotely dangerous. You can literally HS every single white hit.
We can't just cut the rage per damage number without a lot of testing, because that would affect not only tanks in low-rage situations (like tanking a heroic with great gear) but it will also affect dps warriors, especially in PvP. Hitting a warrior is always a double-edged sword in PvP because you are giving them resources.
A long-term change would be to make even more of tanking warrior threat come from damage done and really scale back the threat from damage taken. Maybe you would HS after a big dragon breath or something, but you wouldn't be able to turn 90% or more of white hits into Heroics. Of course we'd have to make sure threat overall didn't suffer, so you can see how this gets to be a pretty big change (bigger than 3.1 in any case).
The other approach is to let HS be a toggle or something else that can bleed off rage without requiring the player to hit the button virtually every 1.6 sec (or faster).
Yet another approach is to get rid of the on-next-swing concept. Make HS something you do when you have lots of rage and make Devastate something you do when you don't have as much. Again, we'd need to make sure that the tank could do something if they felt aggro slipping away.
Even longer term we need to think about whether we're even happy with this model of tank takes damage and converts it into threat or not. (
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Yet another Timewalking loot post ( As directed by GM)
Opened timewalking Cache before hotfix
Did Blizzard just hotfix an ilvl requirement onto Awakened LFR?
Best way to farm Tusks of Mannoroth?
Additional Character Slots, Season of Discovery Hotfixes - April 23, 2024
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