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Blizzard Agrees With Lack of Long-Term End-Game, Magic Find Gear Swapping Debate, Hotfixes, Blue Posts, MF Gear Swapping PollMogu'shan Vaults: Will of The Emperor
Tonight we have a preview of the Will of The Emperor boss in Mogu'shan Vaults. If you look at the abilities that have tooltips in the Encounter Journal below, you can see the damage amounts in the different difficulties.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Mogu'shan VaultsThe mogu, proud of their supremacy, kept lengthy records of their accomplishments within a great complex of vaults. Guarded by ferocious magical beings, these sacred chambers have remained silent since the mogu's departure.
Achievements
- Heroic: Will of the Emperor - Defeat the Will of the Emperor in Mogu'shan Vaults on Heroic difficulty. Title Reward:
, Delver of the Vaults - Show Me Your Moves! - Defeat the Will of the Emperor in Mogu'shan Vaults on Normal or Heroic difficulty after all members of the raid execute an Opportunistic Strike on the same construct within a single Unbalanced phase.
Will of the Emperor
- Coolant Gas - Coolant Gas fills the room, inflicting 8,000 Frost damage every 1 sec. to all players and energizing any constructs, increasing their damage dealt by 25%.
Emperor's Rage - The smallest Terracotta warriors, the Emperor's Rage strike quickly with dual axes and often formed the forward lines in Lei Shin's mechanical armies.
- Focused Assault - Every Emperor's Rage fixates on a random player, attacking only that player until the player dies or the Rage can no longer attack them.
- Unarmored - The Emperor's Rage wear very little armor, and all types of crowd control effects work against them.
- Emperor's Courage - The Emperor's Courage carry a polearm to harry opponents and form a powerful defensive wall with shields and armor.
- Focused Defense - The Emperor's Courage comes to the aid of Jan-xi or Qin-xi by fixating on a tank, attacking only that player until the player dies or the Courage can no longer attack them.
- Impeding Thrust - The Impeding Thrust of the Emperor's Courage inflicts 150% normal melee damage and reduces the target's movement speed by 25% for 10 sec. Stacks up to 4 times.
- Half Plate - The Emperor's Courage wear armor protecting the front of their bodies. The Half Plate blocks or deflects any damage dealt by players to the front of the Emperor's Courage, but they remain susceptible to movement impairing effects.
- Emperor's Strength - The heavily-armored Emperor's Strength strike earth-shaking blows with their massive two-handed hammers.
- Energizing Smash - The Emperor's Strength smash the ground in front of them, inflicting 200,000 Physical damage to players within 10 yards of the strike zone and stunning them for 2 sec. The radius of the effect increases by 1 yard after each use of Energizing Smash.
- Full Plate - The Emperor's Strength wear heavy armor that grants them immunity to all crowd control effects.
- Jan-xi and Qin-xi - Jan-xi and Qin-xi activate after 90 seconds and share their health pool.
Devastating Combo - Jan-xi and Qin-xi perform a devastating combination of five attacks. In Heroic Difficulty, the Devastating Combo consists of ten attacks.
Devastating Arc - Jan-xi and Qin-xi strikes a 25 yard hemispherical area to the left, right, or in front them. These Devastating Arc attacks inflict 100,000 Physical damage and reduce the target's armor by 10% for 30 sec. Stacks up to 10 times. The immense power of these attacks ignore any player effects that grant damage immunity.- Stomp - Jan-xi and Qin-xi stomps the ground, inflicting 100,000 Physical damage to all players within 12 yards and stunning them for 2 sec. The immense power of this attack ignores player effects that grant damage immunity.
Magnetic Armor - Jan-xi and Qin-xi magnetizes their current targets for 10 sec. If a magnetized player moves more than 16 yards away from the constructs, a strong magnetic force pulls them back.
- Opportunistic Strike - If every player avoids all the attacks in a Devastating Combo, Jan-xi or Qin-xi becomes unbalanced. All players within 16 yards gain the Opportunistic Strike ability for 3 sec, which inflicts 1,000,000 Physical damage.
Titan Spark - When any construct dies, it releases a Titan Spark.
- Focused Energy - A newly created Titan Spark fixates on a player, attacking only that player until the player dies or the Spark can no longer attack them.
- Energy of Creation - When a Titan Spark dies or reaches its target, it releases the Energy of Creation. The Energy inflicts 750,000 Nature damage to all players within 8 yards and energizes any constructs, increasing their attack speed by 50% for 2 min. This effect stacks.
Beta Class Balance Analysis
How much AP/SP do Feral Spirits, Fire Elementals and Earth Elementals get from the owner? What is the coefficient on a Shadowfiend's/Mindbender's attack?
I’d rather not get into listing every specific coefficient, because it's a short slippery slope from there to us just publishing every number for every spell. These are unusual, so we can understand why they might be tough to figure out.
Most pets have base DPS that is based on your class and level, and then get some % of your SP or AP as their AP, and get the standard AP/14 DPS increase to their weapon damage from that. The Earth Elemental is one of these traditional pets, getting 100% of your SP as AP (or 150% for the Primal Earth Elemental). However, the Fire Elemental and Shadowfiend/Mindbender are unusual. Their auto attacks deal magical damage, which means they also benefit from SP, as well as AP. I believe in the current build you have, they’re getting both AP and SP from you, which is complicating things further. We just simplified that, so in a future build, they will just get 50% SP from you. Try them out in a couple builds.
Again, these are just to give you some examples and point you in the right direction. Teach a man to fish, etc.
Currently they don't appear to scale with temporary percentage-wise haste buffs on the owner, such as Dark Soul: Misery. Is this intended, or will that change over the next few builds? Whatever the answer, is the same true for temporary crit buffs?
Yes, these will be fixed in upcoming builds. We’re trying to get rid of all of the "snapshotting" of stats on summoning. Let us know if you think we missed any; it will take a couple builds for you to get all of the changes, but all temporary buffs should dynamically update to the pets.
On a related note, we've been told before that pets should not benefit from any buffs on their own anymore, but in Cataclysm they still gained certain things like Bloodlust/Heroism. Will this still be true in MoP? If so, do you have a comprehensive list of which buffs can affect pets?
Pets should not be able to double dip on any of these buffs. Any that still do apply to pets will be fixed. We fixed it recently for Bloodlust, for example.
Because as an additional note, as I've been viewing streams, DPS charts, and watching some raid testing videos as well as analyzing there parses, hunters are severely undertuned right now. Some of them aren't even able to out DPS the tank (and yes, I'm aware of marking on WoL to show pets, and even then they are dealing minimal damage).
If you have done this analysis, we would love if you shared it here.
Death Knight (Forums)
The mathematical rune regen difference is minuscule, sure. That is not why Blood Tap is the default option: Death Rune costs are. So long as they exist, and such a huge part of our DPS depends on abilities that use them, we will naturally default towards talents/regen mechanics that provide them.
I'm not following you. Are you saying the DPS difference is minuscule but you'll take Blood Tap anyway?
I'll repeat: for our testing, you can pick any of the level 75 talents and do almost the same DPS. Now perhaps using Blood Tap makes the rotation easier since you know when you're getting a Death Rune, but I don't think that's what a lot of DKs are arguing. They are arguing, unless I am mistaken, that Blood Tap is mandatory because it's a DPS increase. I need to understand why there is such a disconnect.
My newest source of confusion is Archimonde's Vengeance, the behavior of this spell when you don't use it's active ability at all is very inconsistent when tanking and I don't think it's worth testing it's active behavior until I understand it's current and intended mechanics. From what I can tell the ability is only "reflecting" boss special attacks and not "white" hits.
This is a known issue and is fixed for a future build. It should reflect white attacks but doesn’t in your current build.
Quick question regarding death knight Bloodworm guardians, they seem to completely ignore the new hit / exp pet rules. It seems like the receive no benefit from their master's hit / exp. They constantly sit at about a 15-16% total miss rate, which is pretty easily seen by looking at their damage breakdown. Is this intentional, or are Bloodworms simply bugged?
Fixed for the next build; Bloodworms will get the same pet scaling as other pets, including Hit/Exp.
Shaman (Forums)
I hope you like enhancement, GC, because I have 45 more parses for you to sift through
I hope *you* like Enhancement, since it looks like you did over 8 hours of parses there! Thanks. Regarding your results, they line up pretty nicely with what we have, within expected error. Our recent buff to all ratings effectively also buffed Elemental Blast, which we’ve since adjusted for (from 3500 down to 3000).
Will Echo be able to proc from Elemental's mastery? I would assume not, but the wording on the talent doesn't make it clear one way or the other. Also, does the effect have any type of internal cool down?
Yes, Overloads can be Echoed. Echo only has a very short ICD to prevent it from triggering from multiple hits of the same spellcast.
Warlock (Forums)
Is there any word on what exactly the outcome for Dark Apotheosis is going to be? All we've heard is that it is not meant to be a viable tank spec and that it is supposed to be more in line with an dps warrior slapping on a shield and taking a few hits. However recent raid testing and logs have shown otherwise, right now DA warlocks are very viable tanks.
We haven't changed our design intent. A recent change to mastery for warlocks made the glyph more powerful than intended.
If you want to get together with friends and try out warlock tanks in dungeons, knock yourself out. We have no plans to support warlocks tanking raid bosses and we don't want to see warlocks in Dungeon or Raid Finder trying to talk the designated tank into letting the warlock tank. As I said before, a glyph is not the appropriate way to let a class choose a tanking role.
I wanted to clarify that the current damage reduction is a bug, but please let's not derail this numbers-focused thread into a discussion of warlock tanking.
What about dual-wielding pets like the Wrathguard and the Shivarra? Does the fact that their models display them as having weapons in both hands mean the game actually treats them as dual-wielders, meaning they will miss even if their master is spell hit capped?
Wrathguards and Shivarra are indeed actually dual wielding, with the benefits and detriments associated with that, and are balanced with that in mind. I believe there are a few bugs with that in your current build, but will be fixed. They should miss 19% more on white attacks, and deal 50% weapon damage with their offhand attacks. They will be hitcapped for specials if you are.
How does the Affliction passive Nightfall work? I ask because I've noticed some curious behavior with the procs (ignoring the fact that it's bugged and not currently granting a shard).
The tooltip says it has a 10% chance per tick of Corruption to generate a Soul Shard, which would mean that on average you'd get a shard every 10 ticks. Nightfall seems to be doing almost exactly that, on average I saw a shard about every 10-11 ticks, and the majority of my shards were generated between 8 and 13 ticks and the spread created a rough bell curve between about 3 and 18 ticks.
The thing is, if Nightfall were truly a flat 10% chance then that wouldn't happen. If you graphed out the number of ticks per proc at a 10% chance, you'd get a logarithmic curve with 10% of your procs happening at 1 tick, and slightly less than that every tick afterwards stretching on to infinity. You definitely wouldn't get a bell curve.
However, a stacking 5% chance per Corruption tick would fit the bill exactly. On average you'd get a shard every 10.5 Corruption ticks, with a standard deviation of nearly 2.5. You'd have a guaranteed shard at tick 20, and a possibility for a shard at tick one, but both aren't going to happen very frequently.
Additionally, as far as I can tell it appears that this effect uses all Corruption ticks from all sources, which has some interesting implications for mulit-target situations.
If this is what's happening, then you've gone a long way towards allowing for consistent shard generation for single targets, without nerfing multi-target shard generation (and vice-versa), which was a problem with ICDs and PPMs on multi-target, and low proc chances for single-target.
If you recall, early on in this thread, I talked about how we sometimes gloss over certain mechanics in tooltips, for the same of simplicity and understandability. This is one of those cases. A single shard is a really significant chunk of resource, so it can’t be a very high proc rate. But with a low proc rate, it’s very random, meaning that you regularly get fights where you get relatively few shards, and some where you get a ton of shards. We wanted it to still be somewhat random, so we went with a somewhat complex system under the hood that creates "smoothed" randomness, with a simple sounding cover on it (the tooltip). We didn’t expect players to really notice at all, so huge kudos to you; what you describe is almost exactly how it works. It’s actually a stacking 2% chance per Corruption tick, which averages out to an 11.7% proc chance. It does indeed count all Corruption ticks from all sources. I believe in your current build, it only is giving 1% on the first tick instead of 2%, but that’ll be fixed in the next build.
We don't think every proc needs this kind of treatment. Nightfall is kind of a big deal, so excessive RNG could cause balance or rotational problems.
I’d rather not get into listing every specific coefficient, because it's a short slippery slope from there to us just publishing every number for every spell. These are unusual, so we can understand why they might be tough to figure out.
Most pets have base DPS that is based on your class and level, and then get some % of your SP or AP as their AP, and get the standard AP/14 DPS increase to their weapon damage from that. The Earth Elemental is one of these traditional pets, getting 100% of your SP as AP (or 150% for the Primal Earth Elemental). However, the Fire Elemental and Shadowfiend/Mindbender are unusual. Their auto attacks deal magical damage, which means they also benefit from SP, as well as AP. I believe in the current build you have, they’re getting both AP and SP from you, which is complicating things further. We just simplified that, so in a future build, they will just get 50% SP from you. Try them out in a couple builds.
Again, these are just to give you some examples and point you in the right direction. Teach a man to fish, etc.
Currently they don't appear to scale with temporary percentage-wise haste buffs on the owner, such as Dark Soul: Misery. Is this intended, or will that change over the next few builds? Whatever the answer, is the same true for temporary crit buffs?
Yes, these will be fixed in upcoming builds. We’re trying to get rid of all of the "snapshotting" of stats on summoning. Let us know if you think we missed any; it will take a couple builds for you to get all of the changes, but all temporary buffs should dynamically update to the pets.
On a related note, we've been told before that pets should not benefit from any buffs on their own anymore, but in Cataclysm they still gained certain things like Bloodlust/Heroism. Will this still be true in MoP? If so, do you have a comprehensive list of which buffs can affect pets?
Pets should not be able to double dip on any of these buffs. Any that still do apply to pets will be fixed. We fixed it recently for Bloodlust, for example.
Because as an additional note, as I've been viewing streams, DPS charts, and watching some raid testing videos as well as analyzing there parses, hunters are severely undertuned right now. Some of them aren't even able to out DPS the tank (and yes, I'm aware of marking on WoL to show pets, and even then they are dealing minimal damage).
If you have done this analysis, we would love if you shared it here.
Death Knight (Forums)The mathematical rune regen difference is minuscule, sure. That is not why Blood Tap is the default option: Death Rune costs are. So long as they exist, and such a huge part of our DPS depends on abilities that use them, we will naturally default towards talents/regen mechanics that provide them.
I'm not following you. Are you saying the DPS difference is minuscule but you'll take Blood Tap anyway?
I'll repeat: for our testing, you can pick any of the level 75 talents and do almost the same DPS. Now perhaps using Blood Tap makes the rotation easier since you know when you're getting a Death Rune, but I don't think that's what a lot of DKs are arguing. They are arguing, unless I am mistaken, that Blood Tap is mandatory because it's a DPS increase. I need to understand why there is such a disconnect.
My newest source of confusion is Archimonde's Vengeance, the behavior of this spell when you don't use it's active ability at all is very inconsistent when tanking and I don't think it's worth testing it's active behavior until I understand it's current and intended mechanics. From what I can tell the ability is only "reflecting" boss special attacks and not "white" hits.
This is a known issue and is fixed for a future build. It should reflect white attacks but doesn’t in your current build.
Quick question regarding death knight Bloodworm guardians, they seem to completely ignore the new hit / exp pet rules. It seems like the receive no benefit from their master's hit / exp. They constantly sit at about a 15-16% total miss rate, which is pretty easily seen by looking at their damage breakdown. Is this intentional, or are Bloodworms simply bugged?
Fixed for the next build; Bloodworms will get the same pet scaling as other pets, including Hit/Exp.
Shaman (Forums)I hope you like enhancement, GC, because I have 45 more parses for you to sift through
I hope *you* like Enhancement, since it looks like you did over 8 hours of parses there! Thanks. Regarding your results, they line up pretty nicely with what we have, within expected error. Our recent buff to all ratings effectively also buffed Elemental Blast, which we’ve since adjusted for (from 3500 down to 3000).
Will Echo be able to proc from Elemental's mastery? I would assume not, but the wording on the talent doesn't make it clear one way or the other. Also, does the effect have any type of internal cool down?
Yes, Overloads can be Echoed. Echo only has a very short ICD to prevent it from triggering from multiple hits of the same spellcast.
Warlock (Forums)Is there any word on what exactly the outcome for Dark Apotheosis is going to be? All we've heard is that it is not meant to be a viable tank spec and that it is supposed to be more in line with an dps warrior slapping on a shield and taking a few hits. However recent raid testing and logs have shown otherwise, right now DA warlocks are very viable tanks.
We haven't changed our design intent. A recent change to mastery for warlocks made the glyph more powerful than intended.
If you want to get together with friends and try out warlock tanks in dungeons, knock yourself out. We have no plans to support warlocks tanking raid bosses and we don't want to see warlocks in Dungeon or Raid Finder trying to talk the designated tank into letting the warlock tank. As I said before, a glyph is not the appropriate way to let a class choose a tanking role.
I wanted to clarify that the current damage reduction is a bug, but please let's not derail this numbers-focused thread into a discussion of warlock tanking.
What about dual-wielding pets like the Wrathguard and the Shivarra? Does the fact that their models display them as having weapons in both hands mean the game actually treats them as dual-wielders, meaning they will miss even if their master is spell hit capped?
Wrathguards and Shivarra are indeed actually dual wielding, with the benefits and detriments associated with that, and are balanced with that in mind. I believe there are a few bugs with that in your current build, but will be fixed. They should miss 19% more on white attacks, and deal 50% weapon damage with their offhand attacks. They will be hitcapped for specials if you are.
How does the Affliction passive Nightfall work? I ask because I've noticed some curious behavior with the procs (ignoring the fact that it's bugged and not currently granting a shard).
The tooltip says it has a 10% chance per tick of Corruption to generate a Soul Shard, which would mean that on average you'd get a shard every 10 ticks. Nightfall seems to be doing almost exactly that, on average I saw a shard about every 10-11 ticks, and the majority of my shards were generated between 8 and 13 ticks and the spread created a rough bell curve between about 3 and 18 ticks.
The thing is, if Nightfall were truly a flat 10% chance then that wouldn't happen. If you graphed out the number of ticks per proc at a 10% chance, you'd get a logarithmic curve with 10% of your procs happening at 1 tick, and slightly less than that every tick afterwards stretching on to infinity. You definitely wouldn't get a bell curve.
However, a stacking 5% chance per Corruption tick would fit the bill exactly. On average you'd get a shard every 10.5 Corruption ticks, with a standard deviation of nearly 2.5. You'd have a guaranteed shard at tick 20, and a possibility for a shard at tick one, but both aren't going to happen very frequently.
Additionally, as far as I can tell it appears that this effect uses all Corruption ticks from all sources, which has some interesting implications for mulit-target situations.
If this is what's happening, then you've gone a long way towards allowing for consistent shard generation for single targets, without nerfing multi-target shard generation (and vice-versa), which was a problem with ICDs and PPMs on multi-target, and low proc chances for single-target.
If you recall, early on in this thread, I talked about how we sometimes gloss over certain mechanics in tooltips, for the same of simplicity and understandability. This is one of those cases. A single shard is a really significant chunk of resource, so it can’t be a very high proc rate. But with a low proc rate, it’s very random, meaning that you regularly get fights where you get relatively few shards, and some where you get a ton of shards. We wanted it to still be somewhat random, so we went with a somewhat complex system under the hood that creates "smoothed" randomness, with a simple sounding cover on it (the tooltip). We didn’t expect players to really notice at all, so huge kudos to you; what you describe is almost exactly how it works. It’s actually a stacking 2% chance per Corruption tick, which averages out to an 11.7% proc chance. It does indeed count all Corruption ticks from all sources. I believe in your current build, it only is giving 1% on the first tick instead of 2%, but that’ll be fixed in the next build.
We don't think every proc needs this kind of treatment. Nightfall is kind of a big deal, so excessive RNG could cause balance or rotational problems.
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