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Diablo III Builds Used by the Developers, Character Profiles Coming "Soon", Bashiok on Legendaries and More, Blizzard at San Diego Comic-Con 2012New Recruit a Friend Mount: Obsidian Nightwing
Blizzard sent out an email today reminding people that have and unclaimed X-53 Touring Rocket from the current Recruit a Friend program to claim them before July 17th. After that date the new mount, Heart of the Nightwing, will be the reward for recruiting other players. This mount allows you to carry one other player on your back.
If you have a Rocket pending and would like this new mount, you need to leave the Rocket unclaimed to get the new mount when it is released.
Terrace of Endless Spring: Protectors of the Endless
Protectors of the Endless is the first encounter in the Terrace of Endless Spring raid.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Terrace of Endless SpringStraddling the mountain range between the Jade Forest and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, the Terrace of Endless Spring has been a sacred refuge for millennia. Its peaceful fountains are said to have the power to heal and rejuvenate, but when the Sha of Fear attacked, many of the complex's guardians turned on each other in fits of terror.
Achievements
- Heroic: Protectors of the Endless - Defeat the Protectors of the Endless in Terrace of Endless Spring on Heroic difficulty.
- Power Overwhelming - Defeat the Protectors of the Endless with each protector as the last member alive on Normal or Heroic difficulty in Terrace of Endless Spring.
Protectors of the Endless
- Sha Corruption - Killing a member of the Protectors causes Sha Corruption to explode from their bodies and possess the remaining Protectors. Sha Corruption heals each Protector to their maximum health, increases their damage done by 25%, and grants them additional abilities.
- Protector Kaolan
- Touch of Sha - Protector Kaolan corrupts a player, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage every 3 seconds until players defeat Protector Kaolan.
Defiled Ground - Protector Kaolan uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Protector Kaolan desecrates the land beneath a player's location for the remainder of the fight, inflicting 100,000 Shadow damage every second and increasing damage taken from Defiled Ground by 0% for 45 sec. This effect stacks.- Expel Corruption - Protector Kaolan uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Protector Kaolan expels a mass of corruption at his location for the remainder of the fight, inflicting 100,000 Shadow damage to all players within 30 yards every 3 seconds. The damage of Expelled Corruption decreases as a player stands farther away from the source of corruption.
- Elder Regail
Lightning Bolt - Elder Regail hurls a bolt of lightning at his current target, inflicting 100,000 Nature damage.
Lightning Prison - Elder Regail imprisons 2 players in a field of lightning and stuns them. The Lightning Prison causes each player to inflict 75,000 Nature damage every second to all players within 7 yards. In 25 player Difficulty, Elder Regail imprisons 5 players.- Lightning Storm - Elder Regail uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Elder Regail summons a Lightning Storm, creating several waves of lightning strikes. The first wave strikes at Elder Regail's location and then successive waves strike in a ring around him at 20, 40, 60 and 80 yards. Each strike inflicts 400,000 Nature damage to all players within 10 yards of Lightning Storm's impact.
- Overwhelming Corruption - Elder Regail uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Corruption overwhelms Elder Regail, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage to all players every 3 seconds and increases their damage taken from Overwhelming Corruption by 5%. This effect stacks.
- Elder Asani
- Water Bolt - Elder Asani hurls a bolt of water at a random player's location, inflicting 95,000 Nature damage to all players within 3 yards of the targeted location.
- Cleansing Waters - Elder Asani summons a globe of Cleansing Waters at a Protector's location. When the globe reaches the ground, it heals all targets within 4 yards for 5% of their total health every second. Targets also receive 50% additional healing from all sources for 30 sec.
- Corrupted Waters - Elder Asanil uses this ability after gaining a single dose of Sha Corruption. Elder Asani summons a globe of Corrupted Water that empowers all Protectors, granting them 100% melee and casting speed until destroyed.
- Purified - Destroying the Corrupted Waters grants all players within 15 yards the Purified effect, increasing melee, ranged and spell casting speed by 100% for 20 sec.
- Overwhelming Corruption - Elder Asani uses this ability after gaining two doses of Sha Corruption. Corruption overwhelms Elder Asani, inflicting 30,000 Shadow damage to all players every 3 seconds and increases their damage taken from Overwhelming Corruption by 5%. This effect stacks.
Minion of Fear - Minions of Fear pour from the Terrace of Endless Spring, pursuing the Protector with the lowest remaining health.
- Corrupted Essence - When a Minion of Fear dies, it infects the 2 closest players with Corrupted Essence, increasing their damage done by 10% for 2 min. This effect stacks up to 10 times. If Corrupted Essence ever reaches 10 stacks, the player replaces the Corrupted Essence effect with the Essence of Fear. In 25 player Difficulty, Corrupted Essences infect the 5 closest players.
- Essence of Fear - The Essence of Fear inflicts 250,000 Shadow damage to all players within 30 yards.
- Greater Corrupted Essence - When a Minion of Fear reaches a Protector, it fills them with Greater Corrupted Essence, increasing their damage done by 10% for 2 min. This effect stacks up to 10 times. If Greater Corrupted Essence ever reaches 10 stacks, the Protector replaces the Greater Corrupted Essence effect with the Greater Essence of Fear.
Greater Essence of Fear - The Greater Essence of Fear inflicts 500,000 Shadow damage to all players and horrifies them for 3 sec.
Beta Class Balance Analysis
Agree 100%, I think GC is too stuck on balancing for PvE right now, not really looking into how survival feels in PvP, rather just saying "dots are powerful in PvP", not really, especially when the enemy has heals. And survival has no burst even with the current LnL. Not to mention dispell protection, but dispells are on a 6 second cd now..
We are stuck on numbers for purposes of this thread, and numbers just don't relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE. It's easier (but not trivial) to demonstrate that (for sake of argument) Survival's damage is lower than Marks. It's much harder to argue that Survival has PvP challenges because of that theoretical disparity. If you have PvP concerns, those are totally appropriate things to relay somewhere in this forum. Not having enough CC or group utility or whatever aren't really related to understanding theorycrafting and rotational analysis, which is the purpose of this thread.
Awesome. Basically it was the tooltip applying the diminishing returns on Agility and not on Dodge that was throwing everything off. With that, we should have better evaluations from the Guardian community.
Yeah, we will try to add dodge from Agi to the Agi and dodge tooltips. Currently they’re just included in the title of each of those tooltips, which are final values after summing all of the sources and applying DR. The “(before diminishing returns)” line in the dodge tooltip, refers just to the “dodge of X adds Y% dodge” line, not the total. It’s somewhat confusing right now. All of this goes for Strength / parry as well.
Death Knight (Forums)
Question regarding Soul Reaper: assuming it costs Runic Power
We have no idea if it will cost Runic Power yet. Runic Power works okay for Unholy, but it creates a really bad rotation for Frost in execute range as you try to juggle Frost Strikes (which is why we didn't go that route to begin with). We need some time to try some things out before we're happy enough with Soul Reaper to turn you guys loose on it again.
It's not about the QQ. Yeah, other tanks get it free. So what? Classes are different. What we need to focus on is the consequences of this change. To put it briefly, Blood DKs will ignore diseases beyond using the free outbreak to maintain 50% uptime.
This is great feedback because it focuses on the consequences of things, not complaints or lobbying for buffs. While this thread aims to be all about theorycraft, there is still a place for useful feedback that doesn’t include numbers, and this post is a great example of that.
We recognize that DKs (and to a much much lesser extent warriors) currently need to sacrifice their tanking performance in order to put up Weakened Blows, and are looking at some possible solutions to that issue. We’re currently trying out a change where the Scarlet Fever passive for Blood DKs also makes Blood Boil refresh your diseases on targets it hits, but are exploring other options as well. With warriors it's trickier, but one option is to have Thunder Clap generate a tiny bit of rage. It might be fine for warriors as is though.
Druid (Forums)
I don't know if it's something new to level 86+ players but to me it seems like there is a new, unforeseen formula when calculating the Agility to Dodge variable. On my level 85 Worgen Druid on the beta, I can easily get the 243.58281085 Agility to Dodge conversion working. It does appear that Base Agility is now being affected by the Agility to Dodge (whereas on live it is not).
All Agility (base and bonus) grants dodge at a rate of 951.158596 to 1% at level 90. However, dodge from bonus Agility and dodge rating is affected by diminishing returns. “Bonus” Agility refers to all Agility beyond what you have with no gear/buffs (for example, a level 90 troll Druid has 97 base Agility and all other Agility is Bonus).
Hunter (Forums)
Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.
At the time we thought it was a problem. I'm not sure it's going to be a problem in Mists, but feel free to try and prove us wrong. Do you think that ranged weapon damage is going to grow faster in subsequent tiers than RAP is (keeping in mind that ranged weapons are now balanced like two-handed weapons)?
Part of our testing is to look at theoretical damage in subsequent and even final tiers. As I said before, we don't know yet what set bonuses and trinkets will look like, and it's possible we will tweak the design or numbers of a few abilities by then, but we do have a pretty good guess of how things will fall out. (To be fair, we used to suck at scaling. In vanilla there were some abilities that did a percent of attack power and some that just did flat numbers and that was that. We have gotten a lot better at keeping everything scaling with gear at about the same rate, particularly in the last two expansions.)
Can we have some on demand burst with survival's LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot...
What numbers are we talking about? Trying this out right now, in 463 gear, with no outside buffs, a non-crit Chimera Shot does 40 K damage. Three Explosive Shots do a total of 80 K damage, non-crit. (It's possible our numbers are different from beta at this point.)
Paladin (Forums)
Also, CS seems to hit like a wet noodle currently in beta vis a vis HotR
Are you using a white weapon for those numbers or something like that? We show Crusader Strike hitting for about 10K and HotR for 6K in gear similar to yours.
Priest (Forums)
I would IMAGINE it would be additional ticks/akin to Efflor, but am just looking for clarity. (I ask also, so we can start calculating how Haste will affect HW: Sanc from a breakpoint perspective...)
Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.
Shaman (Forums)
Glyph of Riptide. Points about the lack of AA and Resurgence procs aside (because they were addressed earlier), what concerns me most about this glyph is the usage that it's seeing by shaman in the Beta, who are recording parses where RT is their primary or secondary heal because of its Rejuv-spam-like application. This practice essentially devalues Tidal Waves management and spell weaving in favor of RT blanketing.
We like the Glyph of Riptide quite a bit because it really opens up a different healing style. You can act like a druid and blanket the group with hots, which might sometimes be really effective or at the very least give you a different style of healing to try. If it looks like every shaman is going to take the glyph, we'll nerf it, but as you point out, it has downsides (like Tidal Waves).
Glyph of Chaining is incredibly weak, such that Shaman would be better off electing to handle AOE raid damage on a spread raid as we have since Ulduar--through single-target healing.
The glyph is getting a lot of use for dungeons and 10-player raiding. It's not going to be as attractive across the board in 25-player raiding because there are usually some groups around in which you can use an unglyphed Chain Heal. The melee are often grouped for at least part of any fight, and in a 25, there are usually plenty of melee.
Warlock (Forums)
If that's the case, can we look into removing Ember decay?
Embers don’t decay until you’ve been out of combat for 30 sec, and decay at a rate of one every 25 sec. So if you’re spending a full minute between pulls, you’ll lose 1 ember. It shouldn’t feel particularly punitive. You may be remembering how it felt several builds ago, where they started decaying immediately and decayed one every 10 sec.
We aren't trying to be punitive here. What we want to avoid is the warlock feeling like the right way to play is to go build up full embers before any boss encounter or other serious fight. That stops feeling like breaking the rules in a fun way and starts to feel like a chore. "Let me eat food, drink a flask and go find something to build up my embers."
We are stuck on numbers for purposes of this thread, and numbers just don't relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE. It's easier (but not trivial) to demonstrate that (for sake of argument) Survival's damage is lower than Marks. It's much harder to argue that Survival has PvP challenges because of that theoretical disparity. If you have PvP concerns, those are totally appropriate things to relay somewhere in this forum. Not having enough CC or group utility or whatever aren't really related to understanding theorycrafting and rotational analysis, which is the purpose of this thread.
Awesome. Basically it was the tooltip applying the diminishing returns on Agility and not on Dodge that was throwing everything off. With that, we should have better evaluations from the Guardian community.
Yeah, we will try to add dodge from Agi to the Agi and dodge tooltips. Currently they’re just included in the title of each of those tooltips, which are final values after summing all of the sources and applying DR. The “(before diminishing returns)” line in the dodge tooltip, refers just to the “dodge of X adds Y% dodge” line, not the total. It’s somewhat confusing right now. All of this goes for Strength / parry as well.
Death Knight (Forums)Question regarding Soul Reaper: assuming it costs Runic Power
We have no idea if it will cost Runic Power yet. Runic Power works okay for Unholy, but it creates a really bad rotation for Frost in execute range as you try to juggle Frost Strikes (which is why we didn't go that route to begin with). We need some time to try some things out before we're happy enough with Soul Reaper to turn you guys loose on it again.
It's not about the QQ. Yeah, other tanks get it free. So what? Classes are different. What we need to focus on is the consequences of this change. To put it briefly, Blood DKs will ignore diseases beyond using the free outbreak to maintain 50% uptime.
This is great feedback because it focuses on the consequences of things, not complaints or lobbying for buffs. While this thread aims to be all about theorycraft, there is still a place for useful feedback that doesn’t include numbers, and this post is a great example of that.
We recognize that DKs (and to a much much lesser extent warriors) currently need to sacrifice their tanking performance in order to put up Weakened Blows, and are looking at some possible solutions to that issue. We’re currently trying out a change where the Scarlet Fever passive for Blood DKs also makes Blood Boil refresh your diseases on targets it hits, but are exploring other options as well. With warriors it's trickier, but one option is to have Thunder Clap generate a tiny bit of rage. It might be fine for warriors as is though.
Druid (Forums)I don't know if it's something new to level 86+ players but to me it seems like there is a new, unforeseen formula when calculating the Agility to Dodge variable. On my level 85 Worgen Druid on the beta, I can easily get the 243.58281085 Agility to Dodge conversion working. It does appear that Base Agility is now being affected by the Agility to Dodge (whereas on live it is not).
All Agility (base and bonus) grants dodge at a rate of 951.158596 to 1% at level 90. However, dodge from bonus Agility and dodge rating is affected by diminishing returns. “Bonus” Agility refers to all Agility beyond what you have with no gear/buffs (for example, a level 90 troll Druid has 97 base Agility and all other Agility is Bonus).
Hunter (Forums)Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.
At the time we thought it was a problem. I'm not sure it's going to be a problem in Mists, but feel free to try and prove us wrong. Do you think that ranged weapon damage is going to grow faster in subsequent tiers than RAP is (keeping in mind that ranged weapons are now balanced like two-handed weapons)?
Part of our testing is to look at theoretical damage in subsequent and even final tiers. As I said before, we don't know yet what set bonuses and trinkets will look like, and it's possible we will tweak the design or numbers of a few abilities by then, but we do have a pretty good guess of how things will fall out. (To be fair, we used to suck at scaling. In vanilla there were some abilities that did a percent of attack power and some that just did flat numbers and that was that. We have gotten a lot better at keeping everything scaling with gear at about the same rate, particularly in the last two expansions.)
Can we have some on demand burst with survival's LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot...
What numbers are we talking about? Trying this out right now, in 463 gear, with no outside buffs, a non-crit Chimera Shot does 40 K damage. Three Explosive Shots do a total of 80 K damage, non-crit. (It's possible our numbers are different from beta at this point.)
Paladin (Forums)Also, CS seems to hit like a wet noodle currently in beta vis a vis HotR
Are you using a white weapon for those numbers or something like that? We show Crusader Strike hitting for about 10K and HotR for 6K in gear similar to yours.
Priest (Forums)I would IMAGINE it would be additional ticks/akin to Efflor, but am just looking for clarity. (I ask also, so we can start calculating how Haste will affect HW: Sanc from a breakpoint perspective...)
Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.
Shaman (Forums)Glyph of Riptide. Points about the lack of AA and Resurgence procs aside (because they were addressed earlier), what concerns me most about this glyph is the usage that it's seeing by shaman in the Beta, who are recording parses where RT is their primary or secondary heal because of its Rejuv-spam-like application. This practice essentially devalues Tidal Waves management and spell weaving in favor of RT blanketing.
We like the Glyph of Riptide quite a bit because it really opens up a different healing style. You can act like a druid and blanket the group with hots, which might sometimes be really effective or at the very least give you a different style of healing to try. If it looks like every shaman is going to take the glyph, we'll nerf it, but as you point out, it has downsides (like Tidal Waves).
Glyph of Chaining is incredibly weak, such that Shaman would be better off electing to handle AOE raid damage on a spread raid as we have since Ulduar--through single-target healing.
The glyph is getting a lot of use for dungeons and 10-player raiding. It's not going to be as attractive across the board in 25-player raiding because there are usually some groups around in which you can use an unglyphed Chain Heal. The melee are often grouped for at least part of any fight, and in a 25, there are usually plenty of melee.
Warlock (Forums)If that's the case, can we look into removing Ember decay?
Embers don’t decay until you’ve been out of combat for 30 sec, and decay at a rate of one every 25 sec. So if you’re spending a full minute between pulls, you’ll lose 1 ember. It shouldn’t feel particularly punitive. You may be remembering how it felt several builds ago, where they started decaying immediately and decayed one every 10 sec.
We aren't trying to be punitive here. What we want to avoid is the warlock feeling like the right way to play is to go build up full embers before any boss encounter or other serious fight. That stops feeling like breaking the rules in a fun way and starts to feel like a chore. "Let me eat food, drink a flask and go find something to build up my embers."
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