MLG Orlando 2010, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

World of Warcraft: MLG Orlando Championship
A new MLG WoW tournament is coming this week-end! The stream on the site should be slightly less intrusive than the previous ones and I'll try to make sure the tournaments are once again an enjoyable experience for everyone on the site.

GotFrag.com - Teams have been officially announced for the Major League Gaming 2009 PC Circuit Championship, taking place in Orlando, Florida, at the Gaylord Palms Resort, January 9th-10th. The top four MLG Ranking Points teams for 2009 will battle it out in a double elimination, winner take all bracket for $15,000 and the right to be called 2009 MLG PC Circuit Champion.

Check 6, SK.EG, Complexity, and Button Bashers take the stage Saturday for a very special exhibition style "All-Star" tournament. Then Sunday, those four teams will compete for the gold in the championship bracket.

[...] The show begins Saturday January 9th at 12:30pm EST with the All-Star 3v3 Challenge and then again Sunday January 1oth at high noon for the 2009 MLG PC Circuit Championship. Every minute of action will be brought to you with expert commentary from, Keith "Igoaf" Trahan and Jared "Vhell" Coulston, supported by the veteran coverage staff right here at GotFrag.

Team Details
Check World of Warcraft: MLG Orlando Championship Teams!

Saturday January 9th, 2010
12:30pm - Welcome/Pre-Game Show
1pm - All-Star Challenge Winners Round 1
2pm - All-Star Challenge Winners Round 1 B
3pm - All-Star Challenge Losers Round 1
4pm - All-Star Challenge Winners Finals
5pm - All-Star Challenge Losers Finals
6pm - Dinner Break
7pm - All-Star Challenge Finals
8pm-8:15pm - Wrapup
Sunday January 10th, 2010
11:30am - Welcome/Pre-Game Show
12 noon - Championship Winners Round 1 A
1pm - Championship Winners Round 1 B
2pm - Championship Losers Round 1
3pm - Lunch Break
4pm - Championship Winners Finals
5pm - Championship Losers Finals
6pm - Championship Finals
7pm-7:15pm - Award Ceremony

To purchase the HD WoW Weekend pass for the 2009 MLG PC Circuit Championship live from Orlando, go to www.mlgpro.com/live/2009/Orlando/purchaseHD.

Spectator passes are available for those wishing to view the action in person HERE.


Blue posts
All the classes mentioned in the Upcoming 3.3 balance adjustments post from yesterday had their share of extra information today!

Gear Requirements increased for Heroic Halls of Reflection
We recently increased the gear requirement for heroic Halls of Reflection which is probably the issue. I looked at the profile you mentioned and it appears to be really close to meeting the requirements, it will probably take one more upgrade on one of those blues and you would be all set (disclaimer: no guarantees as I can make mistakes). (Source)

Healing in Icecrown Citadel
Now, healing is going to be tough on some of these encounters. This is not Halls of Stone. If it takes a few weeks to beat some of the Icecrown bosses, that's not the worst thing in the world. You might have to gear up a little or look at your normal healing strategy. We see a lot of the same complaints about Northrend Beasts when that content was new, but of course players figured out how to heal through that too. Just make sure you aren't calling every situation in which your healing is being challenged excessive, unpredictable burst damage on the part of the bosses. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rogue nerf and consequences
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is. (Source)

Nerf to Combat rogues
This question keeps coming up despite our making several attempts to answer it, so I'll just sticky it up here. Why did we nerf Combat rogues too?

We thought Combat damage was too high as well, just not as high as Assassination. (Source)

Hunger for Blood Nerf
I suspect a lot of this talk is just grumbling over being nerfed in general, but I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is over Hunger for Blood. From a design perspective, it's really nice to have a knob that is so easy to tweak like that. You don't have to go potentially break other talents. You don't have to change base points or coefficients in ways that affect other specs or even lower level members of the class. In fact the mastery system for Cataclysm works somewhat similarly, giving us the ability to adjust numbers independently without causing a cascade of undesirable effects.

To use a different example, consider Affliction locks. We want to buff their dps as I said, but we want to do it in such a way without giving them a big boost in PvP where they do pretty high damage. We don't want to over buff Destruction or Demonology (because we want Affliction to be a real choice) so we can't easily touch spells that overlap or talents that those other guys might use. If we had an Affliction talent ("Hunger for Green Fire") that let us easily tweak them up or down, then in turn we could make adjustments more easily and with less risk.

(Let's not turn this into an Affliction thread. I just wanted to illustrate the contrast between an easy to adjust and hard to adjust tree.) (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Bonus
In the next minor content patch we're making a change to the tier-10 elemental shaman 4-piece set bonus. In addition to lowering Lava Burst's cooldown, this bonus also no longer requires Flame Shock to be present in order for Lava Burst to be a guaranteed critical strike. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Buff to Warlock's damage - Details
As Ghostcrawler mentioned in the “Balance Adjustments” thread for 3.3, we would like to buff warlock PvE damage for all three talent trees. We have a few changes in mind we can share with you and welcome your feedback. That being said, of course these changes are not yet implemented and are subject to revision or reversal before the next minor patch.

Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.

Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.

Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.

As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.

Again, these are preliminary ideas. These changes might be revised or reverted before going live. Just the same, these are not necessarily the only changes we are willing to make and your feedback is appreciated. (Source)

Empowered Imp Buff
The talent would increase the imp's damage by 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%. The other effect of the talent would remain unchanged. (Source)

Demonic Pact Buff
At top rank, Demonic Pact will provide a base 10% spell damage increase for warlocks. The buff applied to party or raid members remains unchanged. (Source)

Changes in the next minor patch
One thing to keep in mind is that these changes are intended to be made in the next minor patch. It's much more risky to make drastic changes in a minor patch when we're concerned with it being released in a very timely manner. We're allowed to experiment more in major content patches when we have more testing time, including by the public.

Smaller tweaks to particular coefficients are better, more immediate adjustments we can make to improve the performance of a specialization without more drastically altering talent functionality with little testing. Taking that risk tends to lead to bigger adjustments in the other direction in the future, which is almost always perceived very negatively by the community -- as I would assume could be demonstrated by what you've written in quotes. We try to avoid the practice of "the devs giveth and the devs taketh away" whenever possible.

Another thing to consider is that we're talking about taking steps to keep all three specializations of a pure DPS class viable in PvE, even if it means some of these steps cannot, unfortunately, be taken in the next minor patch. There are other pure DPS classes a lot further away from having three viable PvE specialization choices. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Warbringer changes in 3.3.2
In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.

We'll see if any further changes come down the pipeline. (Source)

Potential changes to Shield Slam
We are also considering some changes to Shield Slam to where it won't affect players in normal tanking gear but it will affect the scaling of block value for those who are stacking it. This isn't guaranteed as we still want to make sure it doesn't have a real negative effect on PvE, but in turn we may have the threat caused by Shield Slam just straight increased. We'll see how this goes as we test it internally. (Source)

Protection warriors in PvP
There are numbers in between 1 and 10. Players have a bad habit of viewing everything in terms of extremes. Yes we want Protection to be viable in PvP and most likely it still will be. Nerfing them because they are overpowered is not the same as them being useless.

Expecting the forum-visiting WoW community to ever come to a consensus on anything is unrealistic. That said, Protection warriors in PvP wasn't one of the arguments where there were a lot of very passionate souls on both sides. Many players suspected or were outright convinced that Prot was overpowered at worst or at least really frustrating to play against. On the other hand, we've posted several times that if the totality of their beef is just seeing Prot in PvP at all, then they're out of luck.

These arguments are somewhat similar to those rogues saying "But we're supposed to do high damage" and seeing nothing wrong with being 1000 to 2000 dps higher than others in their group. Yes you're supposed to be in PvP. You're not supposed to own PvP.

If you're one of those players with no interest in PvP and just don't want to see your tanking potential hurt, then I am slightly more sympathetic, but then again you should know what I'm going to say by now. WoW is a game with PvP and PvE components. Just because one of those isn't of interest to you personally doesn't mean we should neglect it. (And as I've said, we aren't interested in nerfing Prot warriors who are actually tanking.) (Source)

[Nialyah]

I had my fun, too bad they nerfed Mutilate so fast compared to other OP classes having a long period of overpoweredness
But I knew the nerf was coming.

Havent tested it, I just hope Rogues dont become the useless class again, thanks to Blizzard.

[Master Guns]

They have some fucking nerve nerfing warriors, seriously.

[Akuen]

DK I've ran quite a bit with that I was usually ahead of DPS wise just did 800-1k more dps than me in togc..... so hrmm.. ya...... fun....
I'm sure the mut rogues that actually have all the new toys are still doing fine though... maybe....

I had my fun, too bad they nerfed Mutilate so fast compared to other OP classes having a long period of overpoweredness
But I knew the nerf was coming.

Havent tested it, I just hope Rogues dont become the useless class again, thanks to Blizzard.

[WrathFW]

To be totally honest the nerf to rogues is totally warranted. I completely understand that they should be above the hybrid classes, but not as far as they were (15-20%).

This is coming from a (what I consider to be) high end perspective. On a fight like Deathbringer Saurfang I can pull 8.5k dps as a DK (albeit with an ilvl 251 wep) and the 2 rogues we have can do the same as me (guy has slightly worse gear than me) and the other guy is on 10.1-10.5k dps. His gear is slightly better than mine but not THAT much better, even he admitted (grudgingly) that it was quite a bit more than anyone else could possibly pull. A 7% nerf is not the end of the world, they will still top the dps meters, just not by such an absurdly high margin, I'm all for sitting at 2nd place as long as I'm not left in the dirt as I have been for the last few weeks.

Runé - Frostwhisper

[Bleachy]

A 7% nerf is not the end of the world, they will still top the dps meters.

[Strawberry]

Great fucking prot warrior nerf. This is going to hurt my mobility on some encounters, like FC in ToC

[tblood]

Rogue nerf and consequences
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

Really? You don't understand this Gc? Rogues dps = other classes dps. Mmk... I really think rogues have been "Sunwelled" in a way. Our guild went and did a raid tonight, instead of pulling the standard three rogues in for the raid, we only pulled one. A combat rogue for Savage Combat. The other rogues were sat because they simply don't provide anything more than another class, especially a ranged class that can get out of the mess that melee has to go into.

And those early EJ numbers of 7% and 2% are just that, early. From the numbers I put out tonight, compared to the same fight 2 nights ago, I've seen about a %12 reduction.

And yes, HfB is almost embarrassing to spec into anymore. Especially for a 51pt talent. It's already been said numerous times, but compare HfB to Murder. Not only does it provide similar damage increase, but it doesn't require energy, doesn't require a bleed to be on the target to use, and it doesn't take up a GCD. That's why you're hearing a lot of QQ about HfB.

And why are you pulling numbers from other forums? Did you guys not do the math yourselves before you pressed the nerf button and just hoped it would be alright?

[sethers656]

The shammy change is rather interesting.....

[Baaadum]

Yayyyyyyy warlock buffs. By the sounds of it, demo locks will have obscene spell power .

[Sunstrikeisretlawl]

Still nothing about prot paladins...

[Silverbreeze]

Rogue tears are so delicious.

They take a slight nerf when they are doing 11k + DPS on Saurfang when other people are barely breaking 9-10k, and suddenly they don't bring anything to the raid. Nice.

Anyone who thinks the nerf was unwarranted is off their rocker, and because Rogues are a "pure" class (which doesn't really exist anymore since all classes bring buffs to the raid), doesn't mean they should be doing 20% more damage than anyone else in the raid, especially for a spec that pushes TWO BUTTONS.

[ElAmigo]

Artist's impression of a PvP prot warrior in S8:


Rogue DPS equivalent before nerf:


Rogue DPS equivalent after nerf:


Warlock after buff:

ahahahahahaha

[Jaqen Hghar]

Artist's impression of a PvP prot warrior in S8:


Rogue DPS equivalent before nerf:


Rogue DPS equivalent after nerf:


Warlock after buff:

Win.

Epic Win.

The J-Man would be proud.

[Delever]

-_-'.......Some of the guys posting here are REALLY REALLY retarded. Remember that blizz quote a couple days ago that went something like "focus on killing the bosses, not your own teammates"? Well....... seems like a lot of people really just dont go with it. Do you really care that much if you top the meters? Your guild works TOGETHER, as a TEAM, to deffeat a boss. Crying NERF, and TOO OP at a PURE DPS class in pve is not just going to hurt the class that is nerfed. Its going to hurt you too....Rogues bring nothing to the table but dps...it was logical enough to have them top the meters. What they should have done instead of nerfing was make mutilate have a challenging and legit rotation that d require skill for you to top the meters like the rotation we had in the very begining of wotlk. Just my 5 cents.

[fishz]

Artist's impression of a PvP prot warrior in S8:


Rogue DPS equivalent before nerf:


Rogue DPS equivalent after nerf:


Warlock after buff:

this made my day. ;D

[Silverbreeze]

Newsflash, Rogues will still top meters. Their DPS will be more competitive now instead of two button faceroll 11k DPS.

[Delever]

Newsflash, Rogues will still top meters. Their DPS will be more competitive now instead of two button faceroll 11k DPS.

Its still 2 buttons pal..... they ddint change anything that could affect the rotation.

[Deleted]

Rogue tears are so delicious.

They take a slight nerf when they are doing 11k + DPS on Saurfang when other people are barely breaking 9-10k, and suddenly they don't bring anything to the raid. Nice.

Anyone who thinks the nerf was unwarranted is off their rocker, and because Rogues are a "pure" class (which doesn't really exist anymore since all classes bring buffs to the raid), doesn't mean they should be doing 20% more damage than anyone else in the raid, especially for a spec that pushes TWO BUTTONS.

ok, consider this. one class brings no raidbuffs nor debuffs, another class brings buffs or debuffs. both classes do equal dps. which one will you pick?

[Charo]

ok, consider this. one class brings no raidbuffs nor debuffs, another class brings buffs or debuffs. both classes do equal dps. which one will you pick?

The player who doesn't fail.