Comic #22 Sneak Peek, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

World of Warcraft Comic #22 Sneak Peek
The latest issue of the World of Warcraft comic is on sale August 19. Check out the preview pages now!

According to the last page of the preview, the new Council of Tirisfal will also include users of Nature and Divine magic, including Thrall. We have an interesting topic on the forums about that.

Blue posts

Mage
Mage concerns
Those are good questions and sadly I don't have time right now to answer them all. I will try and address the infamous "pace yourself" comment.

First, I'm talking about PvE here, and that means I'm going to skip over Frost for the moment. Sorry. We know how Frost should work in PvE and we need to get it there without making it too good in PvP. With the Arcane changes in 3.2.2 mages should now have two viable raiding specs again, which is an improvement. I ask that you not derail this thread into a Frost discussion.

To be brief to the point of simplicity, we see the Fire playstyle as being more about lining up your cooldowns to maximize your damage (and that improves trinkets as well as spells). Mana is a consideration the way it is for most mana users, but shouldn't be at the fore front of every decision you make and you do have ways of restoring mana if you get into trouble.

Arcane is a little different. We want Arcane to care about mana more. Sorry if that offends casters who think their output should be unlimited, but if it really bugs you, I suggest you try Fire. A lot of Arcane mages like the way mana works for their spec, and Arcane Blast is pretty obviously designed with that gameplay in mind.

What we're trying to do is give Arcane two rotations: the low mana, lower dps version and the higher mana, higher dps version. The first rotation would mean doing things like keeping Blast at 3 stacks, and the second would mean going into 4 stacks. Your trade-off for going to the expensive rotation would be that you could do higher dps than Fire if and when you had enough mana to keep that cycle going. This then becomes where the player skill of Arcane comes in -- knowing when you can afford to step it up for max dps and when you need to pace yourself.

I say all that because we're still tweaking the Arcane numbers for 3.2.2 and that might include increasing the mana cost of stack 4, since the free Missile Barrage procs are already a pretty generous mana break as it is. I know some players will try and keep the 4 stack Arcane Blast up all the time and will then call it a class design problem when they run OOM. That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for. We also might lower the duration of the Arcane Blast buff / debuff to make sure Arcane Barrage is the clear choice for when you are time constrained (like say you have to move or do something else).

This means we are asking a little more out of Arcane mages. To be honest, some of them responded negatively to the Arcane buff in 3.2.2 because they felt like they had to sacrifice too much of what they enjoyed about the playstyle (which includes mana as a potentially limiting resource). We are trying to nail that sweet spot while still boosting sustained Arcane dps.

The goal is NOT to push every mage into Arcane next patch because it's the new flavor of the month for highest theoretical dps. We don't want you to have to regem and everything whenever we come out with a new patch and a new spec is on top. We want you to have a choice between Fire and Arcane (and maybe someday Frost). Arcane will "beat" Fire sometimes, but not all the time.

I know that's a lot of philosophy dumped quickly, and doubtless it will spawn a lot of other questions, but that's the idea in a nutshell. Try and take it at the high-level spirit in which it is offered instead of trying to read too much into every word I chose.

EDIT: I should have put the smiley face after Innervate. The intent of Arcane is that you have to watch your mana, but also have solutions for dealing it, principally Evocation. (Source)

Warlock
New shard system
I don't make many promises because even when I say "there is a very slight chance we may eventually consider changing this at some point in the future" that then becomes "promised us next patch."

But we are excited about the shard system and we think warlocks will view it as a cool component to their class instead of a hassle they have to put up with.

I wouldn't view it as a "buff." I'm not sure your dps really needs a buff at the moment if that's what you mean. If you mean taking something kind of marginal and perhaps annoying and making it cool, then that's what we intend to to.

Too often our recent design has just been to marginalize shards more and more. That isn't the direction we want for the class though. We want shards to be one of the main things you think about as a lock, but that includes rewarding you when you use them well. (Source)

Warrior
Rage mechanisms
We'd like to fix rage and we have a plan. However it's clear from the OP that he or she shares the view that a lot of warriors do, specifically that you don't have enough rage until you get epics at which point it finally "feels right." The implication is that our fix for rage should be that you always have the same rage you do in epics, or more to the point that you should always generally have enough rage to do what you want to do and lack of it never really holds you back.

If we changed rage to normalize it more, then it would mean that you would have say 60% of rage all the time instead of having 20% in green gear and 100% in purple gear (to use made up numbers). (Source)

[Marla]

Interesting.

[GUESSWHOIAM]

Eh, that shard system sounds really interesting, can't wait to see this.

[Felfire]

Yeah, finally, exploding soul shards and flying pit lords!

[LavaDuck]

Can't wait to see the shard changes.

Also: inb4 OMG ITS CONFIRMED!!!!!!11

[Olderonous]

That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for.

lawl

arcane mages can kiss my ass, my innervate is mine

[Barky]

wonder what the 'rewards' are when you use the soul shards well?

[Deleted]

If you mean taking something kind of marginal and perhaps annoying and making it cool, then that's what we intend to to.

Wicked. shards will now be blue, because we all know blue is cooler. That's why hes writing in blue.

[Harthmut]

I wonder what could make this outdated, bag space robbing soul shard system "cooler".
I'm not saying it's impossible but i can't figure out anything but removing it.
Or maybe adding new mechanics somehow.

[bbr]

Thrall being a shaman would fall under those of the "nature magic".
Hmm....

As for warlocks.. Perhaps they start with a "buff" of having 10 souls swirling around them, counting as souls.

[Abinadai]

I wonder what could make this outdated, bag space robbing soul shard system "cooler".
I'm not saying it's impossible but i can't figure out anything but removing it.
Or maybe adding new mechanics somehow.

Perhaps adding in a tab for itself in the currency pannel?
for example you could then have as many as you want without it taking up any bag space and also make it so the amount of soul shards is displayed somewhere.

[Kemsus]

I've been a long time lurker at mmo-champion but that preview of the comic made all the "leaks" seem so much more close to reality.

What happens in that small preview of the comic made all of the lore of Cataclycm seem much more likely to happen.

BTW: love the site have been following it almost from the start but only just recently made the account

[kappesante]

sorry but i'll keep my full frost spec even if i do less dps. arcane and fire are so boring.

[phluff]

That's what those short cooldown Innervates are for.

lawl

arcane mages can kiss my ass, my innervate is mine

amen brotha

[MagicSN]

Up to now I saw the lining up of Cooldowns more in the Arcane's domain (when do I pop AP and IV?). Fire, despite the statement "we see the Fire playstyle as being more about lining up your cooldowns" does not HAVE any cooldowns (asides from potions which Arcane has as well). Fire has Combustion, but Combustion is a negligable DPS increase and it does not really matter when you pop it. The playstyle behind fire is "no Burst, but higher 'steady' dps".

I also wonder about the "Innervate" comment. Or did he confuse it with "Evocate"?

Did the blue poster confuse Fire with Frostfire? Fire does not have IV !!! And Frostfire is dps-wise ways back behind both the new Arcane and Fire. Both Theorycrafting and Simulation showed that
if there is no further change, Arcane > Fire > Frostfire.

The argumentation of the blueposter ("The goal is NOT to push every mage into Arcane next
patch because it's the new flavor of the month for highest theoretical dps"). The problem is only that the changes they did do not match with this intention... the bluepost goes one direction, the actual changes 180 degree the opposite direction. Well, maybe they still change something to make the two of them actually match. Up to now the thing the blueposter wants to prevent is exactly what has been happening with every major patch.

Personally I think they should give some Fire talent 3% hit added. This would make the itemization
for the 3 raid specs closer to each other, and also would give Fire a bit of a boost to catch up with
the new Arcane. Having the itemization closer to each other would be better also, that if the
"top dps spec" changes again, it is not that much of a problem to change specs... in the lootsystem of my guild I have to specify at the release of a new raid, on which items I want
priority (only one per slot), a list which should not be changed later. A spec-change which changes
the hit-requirement by up to 6% is a problem there.

[MagicSN]

sorry but i'll keep my full frost spec even if i do less dps. arcane and fire are so boring.

Says a frostmage who spams out frostbolts? Sorry, Fire is currently the most interesting
spec to play (with all those LB's to keep up...), while I see Frost as the most boring one...

[Fannyd]

Having played a few other classes one thing I did realise is that Warlocks don't actually have any big Damage Multiplying Cooldowns (eg, Dancing Rune Weapon, Blade Flurry).

An idea would be to be able to "use" a shard for a damage buff for a short period of time with a larger cooldown.


This could be implemented as +damage for us:
"Dark enrage" - Tap into the power of a soul and deal 50% more damage for 10seconds, 5 minute cooldown

Or maybe even summon an extra, aggresive pet (could be of ghost form):
"Raise Soul" - Raise the soul of a recently dispatched enemy, causing him to attack your opponent for 15sec, 5 minute cooldown.
A really cool feature of this could be that the soul comes in a ghost form of the actual enemy that you stole the soul from.

Of cause this may cause damage balancing issues and we may need to take a slight nerf in overall damage to make up for it, but that's cool. I'd much rather have a few cooldowns that require a bit of skill to nail.


Stuff to think about anyway

[LavaDuck]

Interesting concept Fannyd.

[Asaron]

Thrall being a shaman would fall under those of the "nature magic".
Hmm....

As for warlocks.. Perhaps they start with a "buff" of having 10 souls swirling around them, counting as souls.

Someone has probably already answered this, but WoW shamanism = commune with the elements of fire, earth, water, wind. Natural as those things may be to you and me, in WoW they aren't really considered "nature". Not in the same way as druids revere nature.

Ignore the mechanics whereby SHaman use the "nature" school of magic, the magic schools confuse things. Like druids using arcane magic by mechanics, when in fact they are gifts from elune.

[daklod]

Hm.. Cho'Galls master, wasn't that C'thun? So AQ revamp inc? :x