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NAO Invitational Qualifiers
Curse, Skill-Capped, and Logitech are sponsoring a player run Arena tournament with over $4000 in prizes. You can find the list of prizes on ArenaJunkies. See the structure and rules for more information about how the teams are selected.

The remaining part of this week's qualifier rounds will be held on the 28th from 7-11pm EST. The second qualifier round will take place on Febuary 3rd/4th 7-11pm EST. The Tournament itself will take place on February 17th / 18th /19th. You can watch the stream of all of them here.



Dragon Soul Difficulty Changes
Don't forget that the previously mentioned Dragon Soul changes are supposed to be going live next week, so this will likely be your last chance to complete the encounter before everyone has access to the 5% buff.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of January 31, the Dragon Soul raid will become enveloped by the “Power of the Aspects” spell, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the raid by 5%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Looking for Raid difficulty.

The spell can also be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul, if a raid wishes to attempt the encounters without the aid of the Dragon Aspects.

For those of you who raided in Firelands and/or Icecrown you’re no doubt aware that as time goes on we want to keep people progressing by adjusting the difficulty. For any number of reasons a group may be having difficulty on a specific encounter each week, and our intent in adjusting the content is to ensure the ability to keep progressing, enjoying the content, and gearing up. With Icecrown we progressively buffed the players, and while this slow progression (and ability to opt-out of the buff) were both beneficial, it led to an expectation of your characters power, and once you left the raid you could certainly feel less effective. For Firelands we attempted to fix that by nerfing the content instead of buffing players, but we nerfed the content difficulty all at one time, which was counterproductive for players who really didn’t need as severe a change as we made. With Dragon Soul we’re attempting to do the best of both by having a progressive nerf to the content, keeping player power constant while providing small increases in assistance over a long period of time, as well as allowing players to opt-out of the assistance by speaking to Lord Afrasastrasz.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dragon Soul, and that these changes encourage you to attempt a higher difficulty, or just keep pushing to down that next boss.

Mists of Pandaria PvP
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
One of our upcoming goals in Mists of Pandaria is to make the gap between the overall DPS/healing of both PvE and PvP items smaller. In fact, we have design plans for new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP than equivalent level PvE gear and weapons.

The overall goal is to reduce the barrier for crossing between PvE and PvP (and vice versa), as well as to also ensure that PvP gear is the best in PvP, and PvE gear is the best in PvE. More details on these upcoming changes will be posted as they become available.

Regardless of anyone’s rankings past or present, the process of learning and striving to improve never stops: it helps even the most battle-hardened gladiator remain able to go toe-to-toe with their fiercest opponents.

In team-based combat such as Arenas, pressuring an enemy in order to go for a kill or striving to protect your comrade from being the brunt of a focused assault are part of the experience, no matter what classes are driving to get the job done. Most matches are an incredibly complicated dance between combatants: a push and pull of offensive and defensive tactics, of coordinating switches, interrupts, dispels, crowd control, and of learning when to use your particular cooldowns or abilities, and when to change your tactics on the fly. Depending on who you ask, what class they are, what brackets they are in, and what team compositions they run, you are likely to get a totally different answer as to what particular class gives them the most trouble at any given time.

As far as the current balance of various classes: it’s something we are, as always, keeping a close watch on. We welcome you to post constructively about your observations in the appropriate threads, and the more focused and on-topic you can keep it, the better.

While it's not possible to address every individual thread or concern of the community, rest assured we are listening, regardless if you see us post within a particular thread or not.

Comics: Dark Legacy and Teh Glad
Dark Legacy Comics #323 and Teh Gladiators #308 + #309 are available!

This article was originally published in forum thread: NAO Invitational, Dragon Soul Difficulty Reminder, Mists of Pandaria PvP, Comics started by chaud View original post
Comments 50 Comments
  1. mmocf74f506587's Avatar
    They are such failures, they are actually making people play worse to coincide with their lack of giving a toss. More nab buff/nerfs (depending on how you look at it) to make content that's barely out easy. Although they said they would nerf the content after a few guild had killed DW it's still stupid regardless.
  1. mmoc79be39102d's Avatar
    Looking forward to both MoP & the DS nerf. The nerf couldn't have been better for us since we're atm only stuck due to high damage on our current tank(s).
  1. mmocf3525a6d0c's Avatar
    wonder what kind of mechanics that will be...
    res beeing pushed and pvpitems dealing +% damage to players or someting?
  1. mmoc4814bc6f58's Avatar
    I dont get it.. Where are people getting this "ZOMG WORLD PVP IS BACK" from ? Theres nothing about it in the PVP bluepost.
  1. Skallfraktur's Avatar
    Actually the idea of adding a stat similar to SWTOR's Expertise that someone mentioned sounds like a great way to balance PvP.Let's say we keep resilience as it is, letting it reduce dmg taken. But instead they buff it so lets say that instead of 40% dmg reduce you will have 60% dmg reduce with full resilience gear. "Expertise" will on the other hand improve your damage versus players so that it evens out the 20% buff that resilience got, so that people are still at around 40% damage reduce. Now if any class would get out of control the developers could just fiddle a bit with their "expertise". And in order to not let this affect other players they could just crunch the expertise numbers on the class-sets. This way PvE wont get affected from classes being OP in PvP and the other way around. Since if a nerf or a buff is needed in PvE all you have to do is balance them in PvP with the help of "expertise". Imo this sounds like a pretty much failsafe way to balance it without people getting angry because "PvP ruins PvE" and the other way around.-Skallfraktur
  1. mmoc6653dda655's Avatar
    Looking at this bit about PvP gear and how they want it to be viable to a degree for PvE too, they have a much more obvious solution to the PvE/PvP gear before their very eyes, and indeed the very same method they used in Vanilla; why not simply remove resilience and have PvE-earned gear be viable for PvP, and vice versa? A simple solution to a simple problem, and one that the Blizz guys seem to have forgotten.
  1. Chickat's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Skallfraktur View Post
    Actually the idea of adding a stat similar to SWTOR's Expertise that someone mentioned sounds like a great way to balance PvP.Let's say we keep resilience as it is, letting it reduce dmg taken. But instead they buff it so lets say that instead of 40% dmg reduce you will have 60% dmg reduce with full resilience gear. "Expertise" will on the other hand improve your damage versus players so that it evens out the 20% buff that resilience got, so that people are still at around 40% damage reduce. Now if any class would get out of control the developers could just fiddle a bit with their "expertise". And in order to not let this affect other players they could just crunch the expertise numbers on the class-sets. This way PvE wont get affected from classes being OP in PvP and the other way around. Since if a nerf or a buff is needed in PvE all you have to do is balance them in PvP with the help of "expertise". Imo this sounds like a pretty much failsafe way to balance it without people getting angry because "PvP ruins PvE" and the other way around.-Skallfraktur
    Omg that is genius. Blizzard could just make a stat like mastery, but it only works or enemy players. Buff /nerf the specs stat t balance.
  1. deftones's Avatar
    Or... they could flag items as 'PVE only' the same way as tokens that drop from Raid Finder/Heroics. Anything specifically flagged as 'PVE' are not useable in BG/Arena. Hell, you wouldn't even be able to queue for them with them equipped, "you must remove xxxxx/non-PVP items before doing that"....and once inside a bg/arena, not be able to re-equip them: "You can't use that here". It's pretty much weapons & trinkets that are ruining it, so that would be the only things flagged really. Come on in with your 403 zero resil armor. You'll still have weak 378 dungeon weaps.
  1. Sidone's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Irishman View Post
    Looking at this bit about PvP gear and how they want it to be viable to a degree for PvE too, they have a much more obvious solution to the PvE/PvP gear before their very eyes, and indeed the very same method they used in Vanilla; why not simply remove resilience and have PvE-earned gear be viable for PvP, and vice versa? A simple solution to a simple problem, and one that the Blizz guys seem to have forgotten.
    That does not make much sense to me. You will still end up with pve end gear people raping in pvp then.

    Tbh they should really separate pvp and pve. Your PVP ilevel does not get you in raidfinder untill you get some amount of PVE craftables; your PVE ilevel does not make you que to certain bg's. Untill you get some PVP craftables.

    It's hideous to see PVP geared people do 13k dps in whatever PVE environment, or see PVE geared players get smacked in PVP.

    Edit: A bit like the person above me.
  1. good diu bro's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by verba View Post
    I dont get it.. Where are people getting this "ZOMG WORLD PVP IS BACK" from ? Theres nothing about it in the PVP bluepost.
    And given that guy post the "inb4 x" 3 minute after chaud finished publishing...

    Anyways, isnt that the problem now are PvE weapons / trinkets being used in PvP, rather than PvP gear being used in PvE, which was the classic/Tbc issue.
  1. mmoc6653dda655's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Sidone View Post
    That does not make much sense to me. You will still end up with pve end gear people raping in pvp then.
    Although you forget that at lvl 60 the PvP gear did a pretty good job of raping in PvE too, it worked both ways.
  1. Skallfraktur's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Chickat View Post
    Omg that is genius. Blizzard could just make a stat like mastery, but it only works or enemy players. Buff /nerf the specs stat t balance.
    This stat would obviously only be used on PvP items to keep PvE items out of the PvP scene, imo.
  1. Murlfireface's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by buggerlugs View Post
    Blizzard always over complicate things. PVE gear should have no place AT ALL in PVP. If they want to make concessions, then they need to make it 2-way and let PVP gear be viable for raiding. I dont care how many times someone dies while gearing up, its part of the process and it gives you experience learning how to use your character.
    Because dying instantly helps you play your class? I'm assuming that statement was aimed at PvPers, which I have some problem with that argument. Dying instantly doesn't let you play your class better. You may be able to (at best) see what happened to you that made you die so quickly, but in the long haul that doesn't help a whole lot with your skill as a PvPer...most things you need to learn (like CC, interrupting, target priority, knowing how to avoid/get out of bad situations) can't really be done without some buddies and the nearly mandatory resilience you need to survive hits. The game is still team oriented, despite any 1v1 overpowered situations. I do agree that PvE gear should not have a place in PvP at all, but you can't 100% exclude someone because they don't happen to have resilience. You start pvping with pve gear regardless, so I can see the reason to have a base amount of resilience so you don't get smashed nearly as hard and actually have time to react and try to get more real practice using your abilities and learning from the situations you are thrown into in PvP.

    If that statement was aimed at PvE, sorry for the rant, but there's still a point where that gear will barrier you from progressing in raid content sadly. There's only so much you can learn from experiencing/learning mechanics in PvE that it does just becomes a question of your personal skill playing your class and the gear that improves your ability to do so.

    Regarding the question of making PvP gear viable for raiding...they're not making any concessions for PvE (the base amount of resilience is hardly going to break the game) and those in full PvP gear can still do ok and earn PvE gear more easily with the model blizzard is trying to set forth (heck they can do decent right now, but again is not a preferred model for someone who aims to be a PvE player). In the end, we won't know how well this new system and mechanics they have yet to announce will work until we get our hands on it in beta and can give feedback on exactly how good a fit this may be for this age-old issue of crossing PvE and PvP...So, until that time I will reserve any furthur judgement on the system other than that I have high hopes it'll all work out. People need to stop jumping to conclusions and wait to see how it all goes.
  1. mmoc7d1a31b628's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Skallfraktur View Post
    This stat would obviously only be used on PvP items to keep PvE items out of the PvP scene, imo.
    Or they could make every stat in PvP items work only against other players, I think.
  1. VanishO2's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Irishman View Post
    Although you forget that at lvl 60 the PvP gear did a pretty good job of raping in PvE too, it worked both ways.
    At lvl 60, pvp gear was exactly a pve gear with "easier access". No resilience. At lvl 70, same thing.

    Except that getting pve gear was ways and ways harder than just grab a few easy points in arena for powerfull epic pve gear labeled "arena gear" (remember weapons considered "must have" for melees and other things like that?). When they started including resilience, things started to even out. Easy, but crap gear for pve (no LFD, Raid finder, etc helped). Then they decided to start including "pve stats" on pvp gear (was mostly crit rating + resilience before) like tons of hit, expertise, haste... then pvp gear started to become good pve gear again in wotlk.

    With the many stats/mechanic changes from tbc to wotlk and to cataclysm (like removing def, increasing intelect benefits, etc.) and with the way they were designing pvp gear now, they got some serious problems (like out of control healing in pvp) and again ppl using pvp gear to do the same job as a pve geared player (bad players have bad performance, no matter their kind of gear, you can have ppl doing insane healing, dps or even tanking in pvp gear, actually most tanks in LFD for instance are season 10 geared).

    When I see ppl advocating the end of pve gear in pvp, altough I understand it, I don't get how exactly they think it would work out. I mean, we don't get pvp gear while leveling for example. So basically, you would get to 85 and had to queue to BGs/Tol barad naked... decreasing even more the team's performance on it and bothering everyone else way more. Saying that you get to 85 and just "buy the gear from AH" is kinda of unfair since a pve player can get to 85 with decent gear to start his dungeons and never spend a gold on gear if he wants while still reaching the gear for decent raiding. And on top of all that, these same ppl think that the other way shouldn't happen (removing pvp gear from pve), wich should happen even now (making it worth 0 or 1 ilvl for LFD/LFR to reduce even more the chances of failing like Blizzard now wants).

    Will never get why ppl think it's unfair pve gear in pvp, while pvp gear in pve isn't. Since we're discussing "pvp-only" players against "pve-only" (since Blizzard always stated that players who do both pve and pvp should always get a edge over pve-only or pvp-only players by having the best gear from both worlds), it's unfair that someone can just afk-honor grinding (even without AFKing is easy), choose with piece they will buy and then get inside a dungeon or raid and, if not perfoming ok, will still get carried by others most of the time and roll on the drop at the end. While a full pve player will, most of the time, get rapped in a BG or RBG or arena (unless he happens to be a OP class/spec with a OP piece of pve gear, like the current trinket+rogue combo that get a entire team to protect him) and leave it without nothing except the honor points, but probably will get tired of being destroyed before he gets enough resilience to trade his entire pve gear.

    If a pvp geared player had to pass the entire process in pve like a pve players needs in pvp (changing most of it's gear to "see the entire content"), then it would be called even. But until it happens...

    This is kinda what Blizzard wants to address with their announcement of resilience baked into our toons. Not that it is a good decision, but it's a atempt to fix that problem. Wich also means they don't plan on removing pve gear from pvp.
  1. Skallfraktur's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kreft91 View Post
    Or they could make every stat in PvP items work only against other players, I think.
    Well, that wouldn't change the fact that PvE items can be used in the PvP scene with great benefits. Something that people tend to dislike.

    Using PvE gear in pvp in the case i described would pretty much be useless, since without the "expertise" stat you have nothing to negate the increased effects of resilience and PvE gear would in this case make you do less dmg in PvP compared to if you were decked out in PvP gear.

    What i propose:

    Buff resilience ("capping" resilience puts you in the 60-70% dmg reduction area)

    Add a stat that increases damage done by you against other players. Using full PvP gear would counter the increased power of resilience, making it just as powerful as it is today with a total damage reducation of around 40%

    If a class is OP in PvP but not PvE, use this stat to balance the class, preferably by tweaking the stats on that class' set pieces to not affect other classes.

    If a class is OP in PvE but not PvP, do the changes needed, then tweak the stat on PvP items in order for the class to stay as they were.
  1. ZenX's Avatar
    Actually, resillience can be changed to a damage/healing increase in PvP, while Stamina could be used as damage reduction against enemy players.
  1. Alayea's Avatar
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    One of our upcoming goals in Mists of Pandaria is to make the gap between the overall DPS/healing of both PvE and PvP items smaller. In fact, we have design plans for new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP than equivalent level PvE gear and weapons.
    Yeah, sounds promising...
  1. Typhron's Avatar
    So much for fixin' the game. :V
  1. Doombringer's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by briand18 View Post
    Who cares? How many things have SWTOR copied from WoW? Oh right, almost everything....lol
    What are you, 12 years old?

    WoW has been riding on the shoulders of other MMO giants -- Everquest, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies to name a few -- and have borrowed many fundamental ideas, from simple concepts to complex systems, from these games.

    Blues have even gone on record, on the forums, saying that Blizzard does not innovate, they mainly put polish on others' ideas.

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