Patch 5.4 PTR - Build 17191 and Proving Grounds Preview

Why the hell are they scaling again, for "proving ground"? ffs

Originally Posted by Moshic

Why the hell are they scaling again, for "proving ground"? ffs

So it's not just "How well geared are you ground" ?

I really can't see the problem on this. I just hope it ends up more difficult than people are saying it is at the moment.

So that's it? Ha, Crom laughs at your trials. I'm going to do all 3, tank, healing, and dps, as a disc priest.

Add Instant Adventures next and I'll be back to playing a lot more. It'd fit so perfect in WoW.

Originally Posted by Moshic

Why the hell are they scaling again, for "proving ground"? ffs

So that skill is a bigger factor then gear? Maybe some HC players wont be as leet as they think they are. (Note: majority of the higher ranked players would no doubt be HC raiders, just don't be too surprised to see a "lfr-hero" or two to rank up there)

Seem's to be changing Prot pally attacks so Crusader Strike will be exactly like Hammer of the Righteous but only hit one target so making no point in having it. Also is the return of Holy Shock to all pallies classes a typo?

Finally, who needs proving grounds for training a tank. All they need is what I had, a crazed priest healer who would pull every 5 seconds in WoLK Heroic's and force me to learn control and avoidance along with controlling my defensive cool downs. I still seize up in fear for a moment every time in vent I hear someone yell I pulling now!

The DPS video below just shows Gold for DPS, stopping a few waves before the end. This is a somewhat older version of Gold, the current version on the PTR is significantly easier.

Are you kidding me? I hate these goddamn apes wholeheartedly. I will always have the Banana debuff, even when I keep running around avoiding everything. I never hit anything. Once that damn ape even span out of the arena, making it completely impossible for me as a melee to kill him. And that was not in an older version, that was about 20 minutes ago.

Bronze and Silver are Freeloot (well, if you got loot for it...) but Gold DPS is a ridiculous lot harder.

I find the lack of DK changes disturbing..

DPS DK have lots of issues in PvE and PvP and a fucking death gate gimmick is what they come up with. Blizz has gone full retard.

I haven´t been keeping up with this PG stuff, but I hope they implement enrage times on DPS that prevent tanks from topping the charts

Originally Posted by Xyrax

It lets people new to a role/class/max level go somewhere to train in their role instead of using YOUR instance run as a classroom and introduction to healing/tanking/DPS.

This is obviously a good thing, and everyone should be okay with it. People are extremely critical of bad tanks dps and heals in instances, LFR, and raids in general. Now those people actually have some place they can go to learn at their own pace.

If players jumped into the game at level 90 I could perhaps understand this but I thought the whole point of starting a character was you start at level 1 and you learn the class as you progress up the levels. For example I had never healed before I started a healer.. I jumped into an instance as soon as I could and I learnt to heal on the job. And personally I think it's the best way of learning, knowing that if you fail, people die. You learn to think quickly and pick priorities in your heals. You get thrown curve balls. I loved it. Will a single player experience offer that? I'm not so sure. Healing a bot is great and all but do they screw up like real players and stand in fire etc? Or pull two groups instead of one? Oh and I didn't let anyone die until BC dungeons.. so learning with real people in instances doesn't always equal tears.

Also with tanking.. great, you learn about threat or whatever. But will it teach you how to pull packs of mobs? Or not to pull until your healer is ready and has enough mana?

Maybe this is for the people boosted to level 80 or 85 or whatever is it now. Maybe i'm being too critical. I'm sure it's a nice feature. It just feels weird to me.

So...wait. Help me understand this. For Ret and Prot, Selfless Healer will make Judgment give 2 holy power when you use it or are they just taking out the 1 HP generation from the baseline ability for those two specs?

Wait. nevermind. I'm just blind, k.

Originally Posted by Dalarius

Clarification from a blue:

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

For clarity:

Retribution and Protection-specced Paladins will continue to generate one charge of Holy Power when casting Judgement, regardless of talent choice. Selfless Healer does not alter that.

Holy-specced Paladins who spec into Selfless Healer will now generate one charge of Holy Power from Judgement. It will not generate that charge if they choose a different talent.

Hope that clears things up. As per usual, anything on the PTR is subject to change.

Source: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/2...clarification/

hmm i kinda like this new monk set, sometimes simplicity is just better looking

Originally Posted by Xyrax

It lets people new to a role/class/max level go somewhere to train in their role instead of using YOUR instance run as a classroom and introduction to healing/tanking/DPS.

This is obviously a good thing, and everyone should be okay with it. People are extremely critical of bad tanks dps and heals in instances, LFR, and raids in general. Now those people actually have some place they can go to learn at their own pace.

A target dummy may be pretty nice for a dps to learn their rotation, but it doesn't help a tank learn when to properly use what cooldown, juggle interrupts and watch the field for stray aggro headed for his healer etc. This is desperately needed to improve the overall play of the games playerbase. I would go as far as to say every MMO from this point onward should have a similar feature.

I think those are mostly people who just don't care. There are a sort of ingame guides, tooltips, etc. that they don't want to read. Why would they start doing proving grounds?
For a pug you could ask for the achievement or something. But why do proving grounds instead of queueing for LFD?

I'm just wondering how this is going to work. It's great that you have something to practice on solo now but Blizzard has added a lot of tools in the past but it doesn't really look like people are using them a lot. (The average player doesn't feel the need/want to get better at their role, I think...)

edit: Now that I read the whole blue post it sounds more like a fun solo feature than a feature to help players improve and avoid frustration in, especially, random LFD and LFR groups. That's fine. Let's just not pretend like it's going to change anything or people asked for this feature for years .

Cool!

I was hoping the the Proving Grounds were going to be more complex, perhaps a pseuo dungeon crawl with trash 'packs' and 'bosses' rather than a static room -but perhaps that will come later, I hope so! Would love to see some complex mechanics, surviving by the skin of your teeth... I'm thinking the difficulty of solo'ing Cho'gall in Bastion of Twilight as DK.

As a tank I found it very intimidating to start tanking in 5 mans, even though I knew my class inside and out and had outgeared what I was queuing for. The Proving Grounds, as I see them, aren't necessarily for 'learn to tank'/dps/heal, but a mechanism for you to get over the psychological barrier that many face. A confidence booster if you will.

I know some have/will dismiss (sic) what I've said, and will suggest that they themselves 'jumped straight in' to healing/tanking instances, but I for one -and now I know many more on my friends list -felt or still feel that tanking (which is essentially a leader role in PUGs) is daunting. So yeah I bet many people will love Proving Grounds, even though in its current iteration it isn't a Tanking God factory it will still go some small way to making encouraging more players to Tank (Heal or DPS) -and that can only be a good thing.

[QUOTE=risingforce;21771243I'm thinking the difficulty of solo'ing Cho'gall in Bastion of Twilight as DK.[/QUOTE]
This is kind of the problem.

It can't be so hard that only Blood DKs can do it (who are the gods of soloing).

Every other class would then struggle.

Its a fine balance and I don't think it can be so razor sharp than only 0.1% of the world can get the title.

Originally Posted by Galathir

Are you kidding me? I hate these goddamn apes wholeheartedly. I will always have the Banana debuff, even when I keep running around avoiding everything. I never hit anything. Once that damn ape even span out of the arena, making it completely impossible for me as a melee to kill him. And that was not in an older version, that was about 20 minutes ago.

Bronze and Silver are Freeloot (well, if you got loot for it...) but Gold DPS is a ridiculous lot harder.

You just need to follow the monkey and stay in the circle to avoid the debuff. I am not an amazing player or anything and I got Gold (on my mage) the first try this time. The second wave of Endless is another story though...

That tank is pretty bad in the proving grounds preview. I'm sitting here going "Uh there's something shooting her over there! ... Go pick up that thing! .. Dude! ...."

The DPS video below just shows Gold for DPS, stopping a few waves before the end. This is a somewhat older version of Gold, the current version on the PTR is significantly easier.

Easier? The one showcased was easier than RFC as a 90 Hunter.

I thought it would be group play like in the other two videos. Manage your threat, peel for the healer when tank is slacking, prioritize targets and CC/Off-Tank to avoid getting swarmed.

so first tank will be every monk and last will be warrior tank

Originally Posted by xinjun

That tank is pretty bad in the proving grounds preview. I'm sitting here going "Uh there's something shooting her over there! ... Go pick up that thing! .. Dude! ...."

Bad is an understatement.

You know what would be cool? A proving ground for pets ie hunters and warlocks and dks there is 2 modes,u can either send him out auto and just click his cds when they pop or the 2nd mode is you take control of said pet and do all the actions yourself.

Or an even cooler proving ground feature,you get turned into a random npc from the world of warcraft universe and have to fight as him/her/it against a player who also is a random npc. Imagine the battles THE LICH KING VS OLD BLANCHY or DEFIAS PILLAGER VS RABID WILD BEAR orrrrrr ermmmm TIMMY VS MANKRIKS WIFE!

Originally Posted by Gilian

I think those are mostly people who just don't care. There are a sort of ingame guides, tooltips, etc. that they don't want to read. Why would they start doing proving grounds?
For a pug you could ask for the achievement or something. But why do proving grounds instead of queueing for LFD?

I'm just wondering how this is going to work. It's great that you have something to practice on solo now but Blizzard has added a lot of tools in the past but it doesn't really look like people are using them a lot. (The average player doesn't feel the need/want to get better at their role, I think...)

edit: Now that I read the whole blue post it sounds more like a fun solo feature than a feature to help players improve and avoid frustration in, especially, random LFD and LFR groups. That's fine. Let's just not pretend like it's going to change anything or people asked for this feature for years .

Originally Posted by Collected

If players jumped into the game at level 90 I could perhaps understand this but I thought the whole point of starting a character was you start at level 1 and you learn the class as you progress up the levels. For example I had never healed before I started a healer.. I jumped into an instance as soon as I could and I learnt to heal on the job. And personally I think it's the best way of learning, knowing that if you fail, people die. You learn to think quickly and pick priorities in your heals. You get thrown curve balls. I loved it. Will a single player experience offer that? I'm not so sure. Healing a bot is great and all but do they screw up like real players and stand in fire etc? Or pull two groups instead of one? Oh and I didn't let anyone die until BC dungeons.. so learning with real people in instances doesn't always equal tears.

Also with tanking.. great, you learn about threat or whatever. But will it teach you how to pull packs of mobs? Or not to pull until your healer is ready and has enough mana?

Maybe this is for the people boosted to level 80 or 85 or whatever is it now. Maybe i'm being too critical. I'm sure it's a nice feature. It just feels weird to me.

This is why the WoW community is deemed a foul one nowadays.

People play the game for fun and having have to read walls of texts which you had to dug up for proper/gear/spec/keybinds is a big dent on the experience of the casual player. Why?

Due to how game works right now questing is only really viable when you are a dps. Hence, a class with other specs than dps may end-up in level-cap with only limited knowledge of his/her class outside the spec they played with all along.

However, suppose you are a Priest who wants to try out the healing aspect of his/her class, your first time doing in a dungeon leads into the following:
a) Gets you kicked out of the instance as well as being insulted
b) Making a group of tolerant people miserable
c) Ending up with a poor soul who is kind enough to switch to healing so that (s)he do your role instead while you dps as you used to.

In all three cases you end-up with an undesirable gaming model due to at least a single player experiencing bitterness instead of having fun.

For this reason proving grounds is essential to gameplay as well as being a viable pre-condition to using "Looking-for" tools to enchance the overall player experience.

To elaborate more on this point:
The completion of proving grounds' can be made into the pre-condition for using LFBG/LFD/LFR, to queue for Flex raiding and HC Scenarios.
In turn to make them appealing at the same time, the initial completion of these scenarios can reward half of the equivalent currency for the most expensive main-armor piece.

The examples are as follows:
A priest dings level cap and is required to complete the bronze-level of DPS-proving grounds to queue as dps in LFD and bronze-level of Healer-proving grounds to queue as a healer in LFD. LFD, LFBG and maybe the Scenarios would require the completion of Bronze-level.
Upon completing the bronze for a spec the first time, the player would be prompted to claim their reward of 1.1k JP or 1.1k HP (Granted a chest-piece costs 2.2k JP or HP for PvE or PvP respectively).
For pure dps classes or those that has less than 3 specs, this could be balanced so that entry into dungeons with different specs for the first would grant them 1.1k JP or 1.1k HP.
Druids could get some exclusivity on this or the earning of these rewards would be limited to a maximum of three times.

Same would be repeated for Silver-level which would be the requirement for queuing for LFR/Flex/HC Scenarios.

If you complete Gold or hold a rank in the Endless trial you'd be recognized for someone being capable of normal raids or heroic raids respectively.