Battlefield: Barrens and Path of the Last Emperor
What about the quest leading up to the Battlefield barrens that offer the 502 boots?
Hi there. The quest, 'Path of the Last Emperor' will not be going away when patch 5.4 goes live. (
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Shaman (
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Patch 5.4 Resto Shaman Concerns
So first off, yes, these changes are indeed being made as measures to help with the input lag problem. We obviously recognize that they're pretty big changes and we're going to have to do some additional tuning as a result (and that goes for everyone effected, not just Shaman).
Looking at some of the Shaman-specific concerns we've seen come up:
Earthliving Weapon: We recognize that the changes mean less opportunity for Earthliving to proc, but we're not sure it's overall a big deal. Given Earthliving's duration and the fact that the new, "smart" Healing Rain will still be hitting several targets (just not all at once), we still expect that most people standing in a Healing Rain will still wind up with Earthliving active. If there is a negative impact, we don't expect it to be a big one. It is something we'll keep an eye on, though.
Ancestral Vigor: This we consider to be a good deal more important, as keeping Vigor active on as many targets as possible is one of Resto's strengths (and feels good as part of their overall kit). Due to the ramp-up time, we feel that having Vigor fall off is a much bigger setback than Earthliving. We haven't made a final call on exactly what we'll do here yet; one idea we've discussed is extending Ancestral Vigor's duration, but that could easily change as we continue tuning.
Ancestral Guidance/Ascendance: We're not sure there's actually a problem here. Currently, past 6 targets, Healing Rain's actual healing output is reduced per player it affects. The end result is that roughly the same amount of raw healing is going out if it only hits 6 players as it would if it were hitting 25. In fact, in many cases, it could actually be more. If even one of those 25 players were already at full (say they've got a bunch of absorbs on them, or used something like Divine Shield or Dark Bargain), that amount that previously would have just been overhealing will instead be allocated to someone else that actually needs it.
Again, we recognize that these changes are going to require some extra tuning, so we'll be keeping a close eye on how things shake out in continued testing. (
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Monk (
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Patch 5.4 Windwalker Feedback
We’re definitely getting very, very different results from you guys in our own testing. For clarity, I’m not just talking about simulations – we’re getting much higher performance, in tier 16 gear, in actual playtesting on the 5.4 PTR client. We’ve even gone so far as to make duplicates of several of your characters just to be certain we’re testing under the same exact conditions.
This leads us to believe one of two things:
- There’s some sort of bug we haven’t caught yet that’s causing a massive DPS increase somewhere unexpected (which is possible, and we’re investigating, but haven’t found anything to suggest that’s the case), or
- We’re doing something that the community isn’t, which could possibly be due to inaccurate simulations (which in turn lead to incomplete testing of alternative builds or rotations)
One trend in particular that we’ve noticed is that PTR Windwalkers are placing far more emphasis on Haste than we are. There’s a few minor rotational and talent differences as well when we compare our parses to yours (most of which come from the lower haste), but the biggest difference by far seems to be in how we’re prioritizing secondary stats.
Again, these are results we’re able to replicate in the same test environment you guys have, using the same gear, with the same buffs/debuffs and so forth.
We're not comparing 5.4 Windwalker to 5.3 Windwalker, we're comparing 5.4 Windwalker to 5.4 everyone else. (
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