Beta Testing
Heroics not Enabled?
We're doublechecking to make sure the hotfix that unlocked the heroics was applied to each PTR. As a separate note, if you are not eligible to enter into a Heroic (ie You are less than level 85) then the error message will still say the instance is disable for beta. That incorrect error will be corrected in a future client build. (
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Water Disconnect Issue build 12984
As many of you have noticed, there is an issue when you go in water, you may get disconnected.
This is a known issue for this patch and we hope to have it resolved for the next patch. We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. (
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Tol Barad
Daily Quests
Have seen a few people asking if there are more quests that do not rely on winning the battle. There are.
There are 6 random dailies available on the peninsula island every day. These are available at all times, regardless of who wins Tol Barad. (
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Raids & Dungeons
Average ilvl in Dungeon Finder
Our average ilevel is there primarily because Dungeon Finder restricts usage and we didn't think it was fair to say "You must be this high to ride the ride" without defining "this." It's there to stop a fresh 85 who has no idea that's he's doing something terribly wrong by queuing right away for heroic Grim Batol. I would not use our ilevel as much of a serious metric. It's very easy to game by sophisticated players. (
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Early Cataclysm instances difficulty
So what do we do when we need to AE tank and do not have Inquisition?
You do what level 15 warrior tanks do who don't have Sunder Armor yet. You make do.
We don't spend a great deal of effort balancing the dungeons at levels below max level. We compensate for that by making them pretty easy. You didn't see a lot of tanks posting about how hard Utgarde Keep was at 70 or how hard Hellfire Ramparts was at 60 and I doubt you'll see many paladins complaining about how hard tanking is when they are 82 or whatever.
The level 85 dungeons and to a greater extent the heroics and raids are more tightly balanced because we want them to be more challenging.
If you're having trouble on the PTR with level up dungeons, it's probably because the content isn't finished yet. (
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Classes
AE Tanking
It's also highly possible that the abilities just aren't tuned right yet. If you have a reasonable idea how to tank and are feeling that AE tanking is nail-bitingly difficult to generate enough threat, then it's probably just undertuned. We want tanks to have to actually push their buttons and not just autoattack their way to high threat, but it shouldn't be so tight that a hot tick risks pulling aggro.
We recently consolidated a lot of janky threat mods that were on a lot of different abilities into core abilities like Righteous Fury and Defensive Stance. For example, warriors used to have a threat reduction modifier on Battle and Berseker Stance. We took that away and increased Defensive Stance's threat to compensate. You may be seeing data from in the midst of all of those changes. (
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[...] I used Defensive Stance as an example. We buffed the threat of Defensive Stance, Righteous Fury, Bear Form and Blood Presence and tried to get rid of any invisible -threat modifiers on other things. It's easier to tune and avoid bugs (in this case) if it's just one number and not scattered eight places in the data. As just one example, when we removed Blessing of Salvation (for LK) we added a separate, invisible spell effect that applied that buff just in case we changed our minds for any reason. Now that Salv as a 100% uptime blessing is long gone, we just added it to the tanking stances.
Sorry for any confusion. (
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Getting more powerful over time
That goes straight to customer satisfaction and longevity of the game. The more you play, the more powerful you should become. Not the weaker.
You do get more powerful. You get more powerful in an absolute sense, but not in a relative sense, because the challenges you can face become more powerful too. It is a fundamental pillar of RPG design othat as you get more powerful, you are able to handle more powerful opponents. Games lose their steam pretty quickly if you become more powerful and just use that power to steamroll the same weak opponents. Where is the glory in that? (
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Hit rating
Hit will never be an interesting stat as long as there's a hard cap on it.
I know this is an old argument, but this is *why* we think hit is an interesting stat. If you could just stack hit forever, you probably would, because it's a very good stat. Some of the biggest decisions to be made about gearing come when you have to engineer enough but not too much of this one stat so that you can focus on the others. We want you to look at stats other than just ilevel. Otherwise, we might as well just give all the armor and weapons a power stat, and you just pick whichever has the most power. Hit keeps you from just stacking your best stat. Maybe it doesn't add a ton of depth to say "stack hit, then stack your best stat" but it does add some. (
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Optimizing talent builds
I appreciate all the work the OP put into that post, but you have to look at your definition of "mandatory." You're taking several talents with no +damage benefit and calling them dps talents because they may lead to higher dps. But under that argument even +health talents are dps because you're likely to do higher dps when you're alive.
My personal philosophy, as I have expressed before, is that the community tends to be over-obsessed with cookie cutter builds. It's somewhat understandable because the WoW community has evolved in a direction where being badly informed is worse than being a bad player. We're all very quick to judge each other based on litmus tests, such as gear scores, achievements, or proper talent builds, that likely don't measure performance half as well as we want them to.
Even many of the so called cookie cutter builds today are honest about those talents that are a toss up. Picking talent A over talent B may be a theoretical dps benefit in the sims or even for the author of the cookie cutter build, but that doesn't mean it will work for you. I have deviated from these sacred builds often on my own characters because I found that I don't rely on certain abilities or mechanics as much as the build assumes I should. Now maybe my dps (healing, etc.) would improve if I could manage to do that, but in the interim using a build that is bad for me just because it's the anointed one doesn't make sense. A- dps with the "bad" build is superior to C+ dps with the "good" build.
If it's a talent that provides a 10% dps increase or offers an ability you'll use constantly, fine. It's hard to argue that won't benefit most players. But when I see players obsess over talents that provide a theoretical 1% dps increase that is vastly overshadowed by the noise of their own performance, I shake my head a bit. Want to see what I mean? Compare a parse of yours on the same boss from week to week. You'll probably see a dps variance of 5-10% or more. That's the role of your skill, latency, bad luck, lacking the perfect raid comp or whatever else. Worrying about that 1% dps talent was a rounding error. Let's not forget that what may be 1% on one boss probably is not on another.
Finally, getting back to a "mandatory" talent, consider what you'd call a talent that wasn't mandatory. You'd probably call it junk, the way many of you dismiss the "PvP talents." If a talent is useful, then it becomes mandatory. If it's not useful, it's dismissed. That narrow sweet spot in the middle where a talent is truly optional is held to be very, very narrow indeed by many in the community.
The Devs may be correct, in theory, that we don't need to squeeze every last drop of DPS out of our talent trees to down bosses. But in practice, you try to get in a raid with a tree that sacraficed 1% DPS for some fun utility, and you don't get an invite. Why would the raid leader take someone that didn't even spec the "right way"?
Posts like this make me very sad. You're portraying yourself to be at the mercy of uninformed yet tyrannical raid leaders who are quick to judge your performance based on perceived "tells." I know you need some basis to evaluate potential recruits or even pug members. But I do wish there was some way to turn around this virtual phobia of inefficiency -- this terror of being WRONG -- that we have managed to instill in our player base. I honestly think it's one of the greatest challenges facing the game.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying GC, but I gotta disagree with one thing you said. It is true that if you look back at parses from previous weeks your dps may vary by as much as 5-10% based on skill, luck, latency etc. However, you can't say that because of that fact, a theoretical 1% dps increase is any less significant than it would have been.
I'm just saying it's not worth it. How many attempts can you name in your lifetime as a WoW player where your doing 1% more dps would have made the difference between success and failure? And how many of those attempts could you have gotten 10% more dps if you had just totally nailed your rotations etc. on those fights instead of worrying about a theoretical 1% dps gain from a different talent?
Every bit helps, totally. I'm not saying throw a dart board at talent trees and expect to be competitive. But at times it's a bit like stooping down to pick up pennies in the gutter because you're about to plunk down six figures on a house. Hey, that's one-one hundredth less dollar I have to pay.
On a stationary fight, those movement boosts are useless. On a fight where you can't AE, those area damages are useless. If you have enough mana, then you have enough mana. Yes, I can understand the argument that it might be convenient to pick all of that stuff up because it might be useful on some fight, but if you're hardcore enough to pick up a talent because you read it was a 1% dps increase, then you should be hardcore enough to know for which fights it applies to and perhaps even be willing to swap specs accordingly. There are players that swap out a lot of glyphs in between fights or even re-gem. Some cutting edge guilds respec for every boss when they're working on progression. They probably coax a 1% dps increase out of doing so. Does that mean you should?
Min-maxxing is fun. It's part of the game. Sometimes (more rarely than is claimed) it's even necessary for progression. Just keep it in perspective. It's probably not going to doom your attempt if you pick up a fun talent instead of a 1% dps increase. If the Saturday pug won't take you because you lack the anointed talent, you're probably better off not running with them.
Interestingly, the community seems to have adopted 1% dps as the trade-off they're willing to make. You don't often see posts or guides advocating a gem or talent because it provides a 0.3% dps increase. There is something magical about 1% for a lot of players.
Hey GC, was wondering if we could maybe drag you back to this thread again to focus a little on the first part of Slant's post. The part I quoted pretty much sums up how I feel right now, and I know a few others who feel the same. Sometimes it seems like Cata is right around the corner and there's just not enough time for everything to happen.
We see this every expansion. Some players start to freak out because their list of demands hasn't been met yet and they sense release is imminent. Then the expansion ships and everyone is focused on some other overpowered ability that was only a blip on the beta radar.
It's inappropriate for me to provide any hints about how close we are or are not to ship. We need to provide that information through certain channels. We're happy with the talent trees given the confines of the talent system. If we were making WoW 2.0 (which we're not), the talent panes might look very different. Perhaps there would be even fewer choices and all centered around utility. Increasingly I think exclusive choices (like Starcraft's campaign upgrade system, or the way Paths of the Titans was going to work) is the only way to make interesting choices without cherry picking. On the other hand, one thing we've definitely learned through this process is that (most) players want a certain amount of safe choice. Maybe that gets back to the whole "terror of being caught being wrong" problem, or maybe the game's just too complicated. We talked about an even more radical overhaul where choosing a spec was a bigger deal and you had maybe 3 talents after that, but ultimately we understood the risk of changing too much a game that some players have stuck with for over 5 years. (
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Talents prereq
What we do sometimes is say stick Repentance as a prereq for something you desperately need. The hope is we can count on paladins (in this example) having the crowd control, and the player can pick up the talent guilt free. And yet, we see a lot of complaints about the prereqs. "Why do I have to get that talent that doesn't benefit my dps?" If there aren't enough core dps talents, some players get agitated (and I'm not trying to dismiss that response as inappropriate). But that leaves less room for the utility ones.
I'm not trying to say we're unhappy with the talent trees. By and large, we're very happy with how they are shaping up. I'm just trying to explain some of our reasoning and why some of the alternate talent trees we see pitched are not tenable from our perspective. (
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Mage (
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3.3.5 Talent Calculator /
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Frostfire in Cataclysm
The intent is that for fire mages that emphasize the mastery stat, frostfire bolt with glyph becomes a better option than fireball with glyph (and yes it's a temporary aberration that scorch is better than fireball). (
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Paladin (
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3.3.5 Talent Calculator /
Cataclysm Talent Calculator /
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Judgements of the Pure
Judgement of the Pure lasts for 60 sec and Judgement has an 8 sec cooldown. Even if you missed a couple times in a row, it would seem like you would have ample opportunity to still get the buff up (and even if the buff falls down, your healing doesn't totally collapse). Judgement costs 5% of mana, so it's hard to imagine that's a huge mana loss if you miss.
I would consider that +hit as optional for PvP, soloing or when you just want to burn things up in a 5-player run. (
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