Patch 5.4 Dev Round Table, October 7 Hotfixes, RBG Adjustments, Blue Posts, Fan Art

D3's Barbarian Origin, Update on Lag in Public EU Games, Blue Posts

Blue Posts - NA & EU Beta Wave, Arena Gold Bug Resolution; Closed Beta Known Issues

WoW Source: Patch 5.4 Developer Round Table
Blizzard released a video that gives an overview of Patch 5.4 and then answers some of your questions.

  • Over 50% of Flex Raids last week had 2 or more raid sizes, so people are really making use of the flexible size feature.
  • Roughly the same amount of people did a flex raid last week as the number that did scenarios.
  • The Timeless Isle is somewhat of a template for endgame world content going forward. There might be some more structure in the future, but the general style of content that avoids pure daily quests worked well.
  • Adding things in the world to discover while leveling will also be a goal moving forward.
  • As far as storage space goes, choosing what to keep is part of the gameplay. No matter how much bag space players are given, it will always end up being full.
  • Heirlooms are taking up a lot of space, so a centralized storage like the one used for pets and mounts is being worked on. The toy items added in Mists of Pandaria also take up a lot of space, so a similar solution for that would also be ideal.
  • Siege of Orgrimmar is one of the more melee friendly raid zones that have been added recently. The devs are looking for things melee players can excel at or perks they can have without taking tools away from ranged players.
  • The Gnome race didn't exist when the original WoW cinematic was being worked on, which is why they didn't appear in it. There hasn't been a good opportunity to showcase gnomes in a cinematic since then.
  • Patch 5.4.1 will add a new Refer a Friend system. The whole process will be moved in game, rather than requiring you to visit the site in your browser. The system will give you a token which you can redeem for the new mount, one of the other mounts, or a pet.
  • Blizzcon will have "an exciting glimpse into the future of WoW", as well as a live raid.




Patch 5.4 Hotfixes: October 7
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Classes
  • Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    • Holy
      • To help address issues with input lag, Mastery: Echo of Light now heals for three times as much every 3 seconds (was once every 1 second). Total amount healed remains unchanged.
    • Shadow
      • To help address issues with input lag, Vampiric Embrace now heals every second instead of every time the Priest deals Shadow spell damage. The total amount healed remains unchanged.
    • Class Armor
      • Corrected an issue where the Tier-16 Shadow 4-piece set bonus was improperly applying the damage bonus to additional spells when multiple instant cast spells are cast at the same time.
  • Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    • Talents
      • Corrected an issue with Cloak and Dagger that could allow Rogues to bypass some targeting and line-of-sight restrictions.

Creatures
  • Evermaw's spawn is no longer tied to Dread Ship Vazuvius.
  • Moonfang should now always drop something when defeated.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
  • Siege of Orgrimmar
    • Spoils of Pandaria
      • Corrected an issue where Spark of Life had more health than intended on Flexible difficulty.
    • Garrosh Hellscream
      • Garrosh Hellscream should no longer use Malice against players who have an Iron Star fixated on them on Heroic difficulty.

Rated Battleground Ratings Adjustments
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
As you may be aware, we recently made a change to Rated Battleground queues that makes players wait until the match has ended to queue for a new Rated Battleground, even if they had left that match. This change allowed us to close a loophole some were using to artificially inflate their ratings, but unfortunately quite a bit of abuse had already occurred by the time we implemented the fix. Our goal now is to restore as much integrity to the Rated Battleground ladders as possible, and we’ll be doing that in two key ways.

During our next maintenance we’ll be lowering all Rated Battleground personal and matchmaking ratings for those above 2200 down to 2200. The abuse was widespread to a point that many legitimate players’ ratings have been inflated just because they’ve played against those who had used the loophole to boost their rating, and so we need to get everyone back to some equal footing. But secondly we’ll be taking action against the accounts for those who knowingly and purposely abused the exploit to boost their rating, which will result in more than just their rating being reduced.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on things, and looking to take swift action for any further issues.

The Crowd Chose You Buff
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We're not really happy with how The Crowd Chose You is working out at the moment. We're exploring a few options for exactly what we'd like to do, but we will be changing it.

what's the PTR for?
I also totally get the concern that these sorts of changes should be happening on PTR and not live. In an ideal world, they would be. Thing is, the PTR is such a different environment, especially for PvP, that we really don't see the same sort of player behaviors on the test realms that we do on live. There's a lot fewer players, and those that do test aren't worried about getting high ratings as much as they are just trying out new changes.

That makes sense, and we don't really expect players to behave any differently than they do. It just means that, sometimes, issues that crop up on PTR don't extend to live. In this case, we saw the issues cropping up on PTR, but there was a reasonable case to be made that those behaviors wouldn't work on a live environment, where players would care more about their ratings, or the higher pool of players would mean those tactics weren't as successful as often. So, we decided to give The Crowd Chose You a shot, while also starting to think about what we could do if the issues persisted.

In hindsight, sure, it would have been better if we'd done something else to begin with, instead of making the change a couple weeks into the PvP season. Ultimately, we made a bad call, which is why we're working to make some changes now. Just be aware that making those calls isn't as simple as looking at how things are on the PTR. It can be pretty difficult to decide who to listen to sometimes.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Soul Link + Unending Resolve glyph.
There's a huge difference between giving up major defensive cooldowns for a passive effect and just having a passive effect on top of everything else.

In the case the OP laid out, the Warlock is effectively sacrificing two major cooldowns: Unending Resolve, and either Demonic Sacrifice or Dark Bargain. That's a pretty hefty price to pay, and though it certainly seems to be a popular choice at the moment (and we can discuss whether or not it's too strong), it's still a choice. We like choices. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warcraft Story
My point is that I feel like for WoW to get exciting again we need a new storyline, new heroes and new villians that we can all love and hate.
This is not the first time I have been reading a comment like this, and it is one that I personally find to very interesting due to the vastness that is the Warcraft lore... There are so many different storylines in the Warcraft universe, some obviously more known than others, but which ones would be the most interesting ones for the future?

It could be cool if you guys would share some specifics on what you have in mind when you say that you want a new storyline... are you talking about a continuation of existing storylines, or a restart of the Warcraft storyline overall? Also, do you have a particular storyline you would find more interesting than others?

Some people have already answered questions like these in the story forum, sometimes quite extensively, but in this thread I think a few lines will suffice. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Fan Art
Some more Fan Art for the Tribute book!

This article was originally published in forum thread: Patch 5.4 Dev Round Table, October 7 Hotfixes, RBG Adjustments, Blue Posts, Fan Art started by chaud View original post
Published on 2013-10-08 03:00 AM
96 Comments
Comments 96 Comments
  1. vlad's Avatar
    kinda pathetic to see the devs in those old shirts from Blizz's heyday. Hanging on to the past while subs decline to record lows. It would be pretty easy to get some new shirts.

    Crazy the devs still have not figured it all out. The game has been on the decline since LK when vanilla was totally washed out of the game. There was something kinda cool about having to earn your way up to raids and guilds that meant something. Casuals and noobs had tons of stuff to do. Solo players had lots of fun things to do. Blizz keeps desperately changing the game to get people to play but with every change you have to relearn the game and tons of people stop playing. They added more and more group activities that added way more waiting and queues to the game. After cata I found that spending half a day bouncing in circles waiting fro a group to orm was just a big waste of time. Asshats dont invite you to a group because your gear number is 3 points too low even though you have raided with top 10 worldwide guilds and can do 50k more dps than some tard that stands in fire, aggros packs and wipes a group 20 times because he cant figure out the boss mechanics, but thank god his gear level is 20 points higher than mine!!

    Just finished up a free 7day and it just solidified my hate of the game and how bad blizz fails. How clear of a failure is it that blizz makes a pvp island and all the bosses drop 95% pve gear!!! uh duh! 2 shot island just made 7 days of annoyance and all the "please try all these new features" was impossible to try because you cant grind out the gear level and etc in a week.

    I just want to love the game again. its just horrible now though. Back to all the free games.....

    end /qq
  1. galvin's Avatar
    Problem with melee and this is based on what I hear from healers. We do heroics and this is where the melee vs ranged becomes more ugly. The fact is it takes more work for a healer when you have melee instead of ranged. Melee are high maintenance. Sure the fight can be done with melee, but it makes guilds want ranged more.
  1. nekobaka's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ringpriest View Post
    Toy storage has gone to critical mass in MoP. Heirlooms aren't nearly as big a deal, because I can store them on my banking toon.
    Definitely the "toys" are an issue primarily with being BoP. I would not be against Blizzard throwing in BoAs to the mix as part of their solution to bringing BoAs cross realm and might just be an overall better system than having to mail each item back and forth between realms and then trying to remember which toon on which server did you last leave the item on. Tabards could work with the system as well.
  1. Murderdoll's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by markos82 View Post
    No its means that its not that hard. On many boss fights in SoO melee just needs to stand and watch out. But ppl are crying since then need to move on Shamans fight.... Why not make all bosses like a dummy and we win...
    Its not that we have to move at all, moving is fine, its the moving and standing there waiting with our fingers up our arses whilst the ranged can happily DPS away that is an issue. Its the fact in most cases its a liability to bring a melee. Less reaction time for melee, higher healing required in some instances. Times where we just cannot DPS the boss resulting in sometimes significant downtime. Easier to deal with some mechanics.

    9/10 Ranged DPS just do the job better.

    I would rather take a ranged DPS to Dark Shaman, Galakras, Seigecrafter, Nazgrim, Thok, Spoils and Klaxxi over a melee any day of the week. Everything about these fights favor ranged.
  1. Outofmana's Avatar
    So camping spawnpoints the whole day, blinking your eyes once and you miss the spawn is better than daily quests? what the hell.
  1. SpartanJet's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Murderdoll View Post
    Its not that we have to move at all, moving is fine, its the moving and standing there waiting with our fingers up our arses whilst the ranged can happily DPS away that is an issue. Its the fact in most cases its a liability to bring a melee. Less reaction time for melee, higher healing required in some instances. Times where we just cannot DPS the boss resulting in sometimes significant downtime. Easier to deal with some mechanics.

    9/10 Ranged DPS just do the job better.

    I would rather take a ranged DPS to Dark Shaman, Galakras, Seigecrafter, Nazgrim, Thok, Spoils and Klaxxi over a melee any day of the week. Everything about these fights favor ranged.
    Melee aren't complaining that boss fights are too hard (although the total throw up of player/mob AoE ground effects are OUT OF CONTROL but thats another story). Melee want to be competitive right now I have a hell of a time finding pug flex raids because ranged are just more useful on most fights. To me we will be balanced when you can pick up 6 ranged OR 6 melee and nothing will change about the difficulty of the fight. They need to have mechanics that don't heavily impede melee (Thok phase 2) or at least have things equally impede both ranged and melee. The solution is not to exclude melee from mechanics.
  1. Tedstery's Avatar
    To be honest, the timeless isle got boring after a week, I prefer dailies.
  1. markos82's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Murderdoll View Post
    Its not that we have to move at all, moving is fine, its the moving and standing there waiting with our fingers up our arses whilst the ranged can happily DPS away that is an issue. Its the fact in most cases its a liability to bring a melee. Less reaction time for melee, higher healing required in some instances. Times where we just cannot DPS the boss resulting in sometimes significant downtime. Easier to deal with some mechanics.

    9/10 Ranged DPS just do the job better.

    I would rather take a ranged DPS to Dark Shaman, Galakras, Seigecrafter, Nazgrim, Thok, Spoils and Klaxxi over a melee any day of the week. Everything about these fights favor ranged.
    Range also needs to move from s**t on the ground, if that is hard then the game probably isn't for some ppl. You do realize that while melee moves loss in dps isnt that big of a problem if the mobs/boss is in range, and on many fights he is ( other then Thok ), but while range moves ( hunters excluded ) our lose in dps is much higher? Why it is? Melee that dies from inc dmg on the ground, oozes... isn't a bad game design but lack of concentration and bad reflex? If you know you need to move, then move, don't w8 for the last sec.

    Spoils can be a ranged friendly fight, but how many melee does get hit by the adds and get stunned, how many lose dps when they need to move from them or to stand in Animus like beams?

    Galakras, more melee fight the ranged, tank grabs the mobs and you aoe them, only not ignoring the prio targets. When the boss lands if you need to move, wel tough luck, so does range...

    General Nazgrim, why? because you need to move and kill adds or from that jump ability ( cant remember the name )....

    Thok, you cant dps during chase, but during standing you can and you wont be interrupted....

    Shamans, you only need to watch for oozes, if te tanks are doing that job that is you only concern, while range has to move from tornados, meteors, oozes if they get aggro.... So much dps loss there. Yes locks are first there on dps meters, but what about other range classes?

    Seigecrafter, depending on what you kill you need to move a bit. If you have enough ranged, melee can ignore adds and nuke the boss. Considering you are killing mines or lasers... One of the easiest fights on normal... And yes, as range I am the one who is on the kill duty among the others...

    Klaxx, fun fight, depending on a kill order. There isnt that much to move from, well depending on what debuff you have...
  1. chaud's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Granyala View Post
    I don't know if the woman in the video works for Curse or not.
    We had nothing to do with the video.
  1. gutnbrg's Avatar
    how has there not been a good opportunity to put gnomes in a cinematic? If you can put a human or nightelf in a cinematic, you can stick a few gnomes in there...
  1. Murderdoll's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by markos82 View Post
    snip..
    Its quite clear you just want to refute anything to the contrary with "l2p".

    Raid Leaders want Ranged DPS.

    While there are fights in SoO that are melee tolerable and sure you can get away with bringing 3 melee to some, it is by no means optimal.

    This is probably the worst melee raid this expansion, ToT had some pretty bad melee fights but for the most part it was ok. If developers think this is melee friendly, we are in trouble.
  1. Faenlyn's Avatar
    90 comments and no one has mentioned it yet!? Am i the only one who thinks the round table hostess is the hottest chick out there that knows about WOW?
  1. du4no's Avatar
    "My bags are full."
  1. Azrile's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by gutnbrg View Post
    how has there not been a good opportunity to put gnomes in a cinematic? If you can put a human or nightelf in a cinematic, you can stick a few gnomes in there...
    Yeah.. the MoP cinematic would have been much cooler if it had been an orc and gnome fighting before they met the Panda...

    But really, MoP would have probably been the best one at using a gnome since it was a bit more lighthearted.. but I can´believe people actually think about stuff like this.. do you know how silly it seems that ´your´ race not being in the cinematics is a cause for concern?? really?
  1. F-Minus's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by markos82 View Post
    Range also needs to move from s**t on the ground, if that is hard then the game probably isn't for some ppl. You do realize that while melee moves loss in dps isnt that big of a problem if the mobs/boss is in range, and on many fights he is ( other then Thok ), but while range moves ( hunters excluded ) our lose in dps is much higher? Why it is? Melee that dies from inc dmg on the ground, oozes... isn't a bad game design but lack of concentration and bad reflex? If you know you need to move, then move, don't w8 for the last sec.

    Spoils can be a ranged friendly fight, but how many melee does get hit by the adds and get stunned, how many lose dps when they need to move from them or to stand in Animus like beams?

    Galakras, more melee fight the ranged, tank grabs the mobs and you aoe them, only not ignoring the prio targets. When the boss lands if you need to move, wel tough luck, so does range...

    General Nazgrim, why? because you need to move and kill adds or from that jump ability ( cant remember the name )....

    Thok, you cant dps during chase, but during standing you can and you wont be interrupted....

    Shamans, you only need to watch for oozes, if te tanks are doing that job that is you only concern, while range has to move from tornados, meteors, oozes if they get aggro.... So much dps loss there. Yes locks are first there on dps meters, but what about other range classes?

    Seigecrafter, depending on what you kill you need to move a bit. If you have enough ranged, melee can ignore adds and nuke the boss. Considering you are killing mines or lasers... One of the easiest fights on normal... And yes, as range I am the one who is on the kill duty among the others...

    Klaxx, fun fight, depending on a kill order. There isnt that much to move from, well depending on what debuff you have...
    The only melee class that is most problematic is the Warrior and his stupid rage mechanic. If we don't hit stuff - we don't get rage - we can't do shit, and with that we lose a ton of DPS and utility, unlike Rogues for example who regenerate energy and can explode right back into action once they return from their running away routine, similar goes for Monks, DKs, Druids, Paladin & Shaman, compared to the Warrior. The rage mechanic is just broken and ought to be replaced 2 expansions ago with something else.

    Besides there is really no point arguing about. There is a time a melee class can not deal damage to his target (may it be a boss, add or something that needs to die or be destroyed), there is no such time for ranged classes or very seldom - we can end the discussion here, everyone has to move, but not everyone has to drop all his damage while he's on the move.

    Just to give you an example, Spoils of Pandaria, Mantid mini boss, you get mines, you need to run and drop them, as a melee, you lose your damage completely for the time you're dropping mines, a caster/ranged, just run and insta cast whilst dropping mines. And that's a banal example, but there's so much of that mini crap where you have to move as melee and lose some uptime compared to range is just sad.
  1. CWP's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Granyala View Post
    I don't know if the woman in the video works for Curse or not.

    In the odd chance that she does, could you please tell her that it's very rude to constantly interrupt the developers during the interview?

    I'm not watching the video to hear her voice, I want to know what the DEVs have to say, so tell her to shut up and let the other guy express his thoughts!
    I actually wished she was the only one talking, and in frame for that matter.
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