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    64 Bit Client, Healing Blue Posts, Holiday Card Contest, TCG Art, Comics

    Diablo 3 - Also worth noting today, Blizzard clarified D3 Beta Sweepstakes for those of you who are still trying to get a key - Beta Key Sweepstakes Clarification

    Patch 4.3: 64 Bit Client
    A new option popped up in the Patch 4.3 PTR launcher for the 32 bit client. It is greyed out now, but may indicate that we will see a 64 bit client for 5.0/Mists of Pandaria, it should improve performance/stability slightly for people running 64 bit systems.



    Blue Posts - Healing
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    I might have read this wrong, but I thought they meant that int would no longer increase your mana pool as it does now, but having more spirit would mean more regen, and unless I'm very wrong I don't think it would change anything apart from making spirit more meaningful and making our mana increase come from regen instead of a more static mana pool. For now I'll content myself with believing that this could actually lead to more mana over a fight, and hope I'm not living in a fantasy dreamworld when the reality is that no matter how you gear your performance will never, ever change
    Hey all, here's some more information from Ghostcrawler about this topic-

    This is our intent. We aren’t trying to nerf healers across the board, and if we were, there are cleaner ways to do that. What we want to do is make the role of the stats less ambiguous. Currently, when Intellect drives mana pool and Spirit drives mana regen, then they are both longevity stats and interact in complex ways. With the change we are proposing, Intellect provides bigger heals and Spirit improves longevity. For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren’t designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn’t feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn’t feel too much like rage or energy.

    In addition, we think fixed mana pools will help healers scale better with content. Some players seem to be interpreting the 5.0 design as healing 5-player dungeons should be easy but healing raids should be very hard. That is certainly a better situation than dungeons being very hard and raids being easy, but neither is really the goal. We want the increase in difficulty to be linear. If you can handle dungeons, you should be able to graduate to raids with the normal incremental gear improvements that most players get. This is particularly true of normal and Raid Finder difficulty settings. Heroic raiding will remain more challenging, but even in that case, keep in mind that the challenge of a raid encounter is often its complexity, which requires the group to learn and execute a lot of mechanics.

    Gearing up will still be rewarding and meaningful. You’ll still feel as powerful as you do today. Intellect and Sprit will just do different things. If you find yourself routinely running out of mana on raid fights, you are probably either overhealing a lot or the group is taking a lot of damage that is intended to be avoidable. A fight like Phase 2 Beth’tilac on heroic is about as mana-intensive as things get, and that phase doesn’t last very long, so your mana-regen mechanics and cooldowns should be sufficient to keep you going. That won’t change in 5.0.

    This is my wish for healing: Stop changing stuff. Just leave it alone. Back away from the design board. Go work on a new non-combat pet questing system or something. Or come up with someway for people to get raid gear from farming herbs. I absolutely loved my Mage prior to Cata. The constant yo-yo's of which spec is better in Cata drove me crazy and I got tired of it, so I swapped to a paladin so I wouldn't be asked to respec every week depending on which Dev got his way in the nerfs/buffs department that week.
    We hear you. Believe me. As we have said a few times lately, we understand that change (even change for the better) isn’t always desired by every player. We also don’t think it’s fair to make players live with problems and these forums are a testament to the number of things players would still like for us to change (which run the gamut from buffs or nerfs to mechanical changes or quality of life problems). The strategy that we are trying lately is to make both sides happy as much as we can and limit mechanical changes during an expansion (unless we think they really, really can’t wait) but use new expansions to fix problems.

    The complexity isn't in the size of the mana pool though, the complexity is in the amount of different regen talents and abilities that work off of either intellect or spirit. If you remove any linking of regen to intellect, then only thing left by way of "regen" would be how much mana you start with at the beginning of the fight which is a drop in the pan when it comes to regen.
    There shouldn't be any mana regen mechanics that work based strictly on Intellect. There are several that work based on max mana pool, but that is one of the reasons we want max mana to be fixed. If there are any Intellect-based mechanics I’m not remembering at the moment, we will convert those as well.

    No one liked it, its a flawed system, and the longer they keep propping it up, the more healers that will quit or reroll Dps and Tanks. I enjoyed this expansion's approach to healing a great deal. I guess that makes me no-one.
    Yes, designs like this are subjective. There are players who preferred healing in Lich King and players, like some of the game developers, who prefer it in Cataclysm. Our goal is to try to make the game as fun as possible, and we use player feedback to influence those decisions, but as you can see, feedback is often contradictory. We ask you to keep in mind that it’s difficult for anyone on the forums to be able to speak on behalf of the community. It’s fine to state your opinion, but don’t muddy the issue by asserting that “everyone” agrees with you.

    A change like this would be huge and would require a massive reworking of a lot of classes. Things like innervate and divine plea would be significantly devalued since they wouldn't scale not to mention the mastery of Arcane Mages (to use a non-healer example).
    It’s actually not that massive a reworking. Innervate and Divine Plea for example already use a % of max mana, so they would stay exactly the same. Innervate is 5 or 15% of max mana and Divine Plea is 12% of max mana. Arcane would actually benefit from the change, because currently the spec is harder to play when mana pools are low and has too easy a time cranking out huge numbers when mana pools are high, which makes it hard for other mage specs to keep up in later tiers without constant tweaking.

    Honestly, we don’t think a lot of players will even notice the change unless they are really in tune with how much mana their character has. A lot of players learn that say Greater Heal takes up a chunk of their bar of X length and they have an idea on how many more heals they can cast before they run OOM. In other words, they already think in terms of bar length and percentage, not absolute number. The biggest differences will be that your mana bar won’t grow from 100,000 in 4.0 to 120,000 in 4.2 and mana-pool-based regen mechanics won’t grow more and more dominant over Spirit-based regen mechanics as your gear improves (and we can certainly boost Spirit-based regeneration if needed so that healers don’t feel nerfed).

    I would point out the shaman's talent Telluric Currents. This talent scales mana regen with damage done. Since Int increases damage done, this talent allows more regen for better stats. With low end gear the mana regen can be negative since the cost of the spell outweighs the mana regenerated. With high end gear the opp set can be true.
    Yes, good catch. That is an example of an Intellect-scaling regen mechanic. It would be easy to convert it to something like the paladin mechanic of Judgement granting X% of your total mana.

    Complex for you to balance or complex for players to understand? I don't I can believe any player has a hard time getting what intellect or what spirit does now.
    Well, both ultimately, but we meant the latter. Players probably understand generally that Intellect increases spell power, mana pool and crit. What is harder to understand is that Spirit is a good regen stat up to a point and depending on your class, but that Intellect “double dips” because it makes your heals larger and increases the benefit of non-Spirit based regen, such as Divine Plea, and at a certain point, Intellect as a regen stat is more powerful than Spirit as a regen stat. It’s not exactly rocket surgery, but we’re not sure we get a lot of interesting design space out of it. Several players have pointed out that we could make all regeneration mechanics work off of Spirit, and that would be another way to go, but we thought that required even more change. Consider for example that non-healers often have no Spirit but still need to benefit from Divine Plea.

    My main concern is that while addressing their goals... they completely let the idea of what is fun for a healer fly right over their heads.
    Not at all. “What is fun” is our primary concern. As I pointed out above however, players rarely agree on what is fun and are often on completely opposite sides. If everyone agreed, our jobs would be easy. (And don’t mistake a few dozen or even hundred passionate posts as consensus on anything.)

    We don’t think ignoring a resource is fun. For healers, it would just mean using your most powerful spell in every situation, because there is no reason not to do so. Once you aren’t making decisions on the fly, you’re just going through encounter robotically, which doesn’t sound too engaging. On the flip side, content being brutally difficult might not be fun either (though we know it is for at least a small percentage of our players) so we want to make sure you aren’t overly punished for mistakes and make sure mana isn’t so precious that you are spending lots of time idle. As I also said above, we think this change will be smaller than some of you appear to be thinking, which is why I am spending so much effort to try and assuage your concerns.

    Blizzard Holiday Card Contest 2011
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
    One Blizzard holiday tradition involves creating a festive greeting card to share the joy of the season... with a unique Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo touch. We’re inviting you to join us in spreading the holiday cheer by crafting a Blizzard-themed holiday card of your own featuring characters or themes from the Warcraft, StarCraft, or Diablo series.

    To participate in our third annual Blizzard Holiday Card Contest, submit your entries by 11:59 p.m. PST on December 13, 2011. Deserving winners could receive:

    First Place
    • Wacom Bamboo Create Pen Tablet
    • Marauder StarCraft II Gaming Keyboard
    • Banshee StarCraft II Gaming Headset
    • Spectre StarCraft II Gaming Mouse

    Second Place
    • Marauder StarCraft II Gaming Keyboard
    • Banshee StarCraft II Gaming Headset
    • Spectre StarCraft II Gaming Mouse

    Third Place
    • StarCraft II Zerg Edition Messenger Bag

    While crafting your holiday masterpiece, please keep the following in mind:


    • Holiday cards must be based on the Diablo, StarCraft, or Warcraft universes -- or all three!
    • Cards will be judged for originality, design, humor, and/or holiday cheer.
    • The file that you submit must be less than 5MB, but don’t sacrifice quality by over-compressing your image.

    Check out the official rules for more information.

    Trading Card Game Art Gallery Update
    The Trading Card game art gallery has been updated with ten new pieces.





    Comics: Dark Legacy and Teh Glad
    Dark Legacy Comics #313 and Teh Gladiators #288 + #289 are available!


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  5. #5
    Why does running WoW on 32 bit with my 64 bit version of windows 7 make the performance worse? Just curious. Thanks for the help.

  6. #6
    High Overlord drsjohnny's Avatar
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    hope 64bit comes out soon because i know i'd get some improvements hopefully anyway

  7. #7
    Elemental Lord Rixis's Avatar
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    never had any pproblems with my wow, but meh, if it can run better and this makes it run better ... woo? hopefully it won't bring it's whole own slew of problems

  8. #8
    High Overlord Critzngritz's Avatar
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    About damn time! wtb 64 bit. Time to utilize my pc's resources

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Freese View Post
    Why does running WoW on 32 bit with my 64 bit version of windows 7 make the performance worse? Just curious. Thanks for the help.
    It doesn't. 32 bit just has hard caps (esp. on RAM usage), 64 bit has caps that are unreachable for anything we can think off now.
    Originally Posted by Bashiok (Blue Tracker)
    Psshhh. Like I would actually bother reading a thread.

  10. #10
    High Overlord Daegalus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Freese View Post
    Why does running WoW on 32 bit with my 64 bit version of windows 7 make the performance worse? Just curious. Thanks for the help.
    Because it is being emulated. THe performance degrade is minor, but its there because the system has to do extra work to handle 32bit while running 64bit. Second, in cases of games, there tends to be miscommunciation between the 32bit parts and the 64bit parts. A 64bit app on 64bit os has better control of its memory and is allowed to go over the 2 gig of memory cap that 32bit processes have. THe primary issue most people on higher end systems have is memory.

    An example from personal experience. I have 12 gigs of ram. I am running a 64-bit win7. When WoW asks the system for more ram, the OS sees that I have 12 gigs of ram, and the process is only using say 1.9 gigs, so the os says we have more and gives it more. WoW tries to start using it. And goes over the 2 gig cap. The 32-bit limit is hit, and denies WoW that extra memory and the game crashes.

    A temporary fix was enabling a special flag in the WoW.exe (modifying the exe every patch and risking getting banned by warden for modifying it, but I dont know anyone that got banned) which allows 32bit processes to read more than 2 gigs of ram. It immediately solved the issue.

    Anyways, its more of a compatibility problem. 32bit on 64bit os is not ideal and when using large amounts of memory and heavy resource usage can allow the very tiny insignificant compatibility problems to be exasperated.

    [Edit] I posted about this a long time ago, with screenshots, and full details on what went wrong. http://wowarchive.yg.com/thread.html...25633121&sid=1
    Last edited by Daegalus; 2011-11-16 at 06:06 AM.

  11. #11
    High Overlord Blaze611's Avatar
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    :\ I posted something about this like a month ago.

  12. #12
    i dont get teh gladiators.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Daegalus View Post
    Because it is being emulated. THe performance degrade is minor, but its there because the system has to do extra work to handle 32bit while running 64bit. Second, in cases of games, there tends to be miscommunciation between the 32bit parts and the 64bit parts. A 64bit app on 64bit os has better control of its memory and is allowed to go over the 2 gig of memory cap that 32bit processes have. THe primary issue most people on higher end systems have is memory.

    An example from personal experience. I have 12 gigs of ram. I am running a 64-bit win7. When WoW asks the system for more ram, the OS sees that I have 12 gigs of ram, and the process is only using say 1.9 gigs, so the os says we have more and gives it more. WoW tries to start using it. And goes over the 2 gig cap. The 32-bit limit is hit, and denies WoW that extra memory and the game crashes.

    A temporary fix was enabling a special flag in the WoW.exe (modifying the exe every patch and risking getting banned by warden for modifying it, but I dont know anyone that got banned) which allows 32bit processes to read more than 2 gigs of ram. It immediately solved the issue.

    Anyways, its more of a compatibility problem. 32bit on 64bit os is not ideal and when using large amounts of memory and heavy resource usage can allow the very tiny insignificant compatibility problems to be exasperated.

    [Edit] I posted about this a long time ago, with screenshots, and full details on what went wrong. http://wowarchive.yg.com/thread.html...25633121&sid=1
    just to clarify, wow may be 32 bit, but 4.0 and higher can address 3.5 gigs of memory not 2.0 gigs. They enabled the special flag because 3.3.5 (the last 3.x version) crashed a TON from out of memory errors. it's not magic that 4.0 suddenly stopped crashing from that.
    that said 3.5 is not going to be enough for ultra in 5.0 when they vastly increase farclip (view distance) and add in the new shadows and physics rendering/blending they discussed at blizzcon. Plus all intel chips since late 2006 early 2007 are 64 bit anyways so with the release of 5.0 it's pretty safe to say 32 bit is on it's way out the door.

    It is important to note that the SAME instruction on 64 bit vs 32 bit will require more memory. JUST opening wow in 64 bit mode will increase it's memory footprint. So take note of that. If you're on a 64 bit system but only have 2-4 gigs of ram, launching in 64 bit mode could actually DEGRADE your performance vs launching in 32 bit mode for apps that support dual mode, depending on free memory situation and VM pageouts. So these new client features are a bettering for some but misused will make things worse if you don't understand them.

  14. #14
    High Overlord Daegalus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MysticalOS View Post
    just to clarify, wow may be 32 bit, but 4.0 and higher can address 3.5 gigs of memory not 2.0 gigs. They enabled the special flag because 3.3.5 (the last 3.x version) crashed a TON from out of memory errors. it's not magic that 4.0 suddenly stopped crashing from that.
    that said 3.5 is not going to be enough for ultra in 5.0 when they vastly increase farclip (view distance) and add in the new shadows and physics rendering/blending they discussed at blizzcon. Plus all intel chips since late 2006 early 2007 are 64 bit anyways so with the release of 5.0 it's pretty safe to say 32 bit is on it's way out the door.

    It is important to note that the SAME instruction on 64 bit vs 32 bit will require more memory. JUST opening wow in 64 bit mode will increase it's memory footprint. So take note of that. If you're on a 64 bit system but only have 2-4 gigs of ram, launching in 64 bit mode could actually DEGRADE your performance vs launching in 32 bit mode for apps that support dual mode, depending on free memory situation and VM pageouts. So these new client features are a bettering for some but misused will make things worse if you don't understand them.
    Well yes, but I was trying to keep it quick. Plus I did my initial stuff back about 1.5 years ago, haven't been paying attention since. I had taken a long break from WoW at that time, so I wasn't paying attention when I came back for Cata.

    I also know about this too, but at the time, it was just so frustrating, ANYTHING would have been better. Yes it could have made it worse for some, but in hte grand scheme it would fix a lot. But thanks for filling in the blanks for others, I kinda wanted to get the gist of hte response in there.

  15. #15
    Deleted
    In regards to the healing part I love how he says
    There shouldn't be any mana regen mechanics that work based strictly on Intellect. There are several that work based on max mana pool
    did he forget that Intellect at the moment makes your max mana pool larger?

    So mana regen based around max mana pool is in fact working directly from Intellect and if they remove that then trinket, item choice, and enchants for healers goes out the window. As it stands now anything with +int proc, use, or even flat int provides us with an option to use it for regen or for throughput this gives us the ability to have more say in how our class performs and more variety in how we choose to play.

    So imo this change is a flat dumming down of healing mechanics, it's too early to say if it will be fun or not but for me less choice equals less fun.

  16. #16
    Deleted
    I hope the 64 bit version will be able to use the + 2 threads I have. (2 cores 4 threads, while WoW is running two cores are working the 3rd and 4th thread is on 0%.)

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by CoolNitro View Post
    In regards to the healing part I love how he says did he forget that Intellect at the moment makes your max mana pool larger?

    So mana regen based around max mana pool is in fact working directly from Intellect and if they remove that then trinket, item choice, and enchants for healers goes out the window. As it stands now anything with +int proc, use, or even flat int provides us with an option to use it for regen or for throughput this gives us the ability to have more say in how our class performs and more variety in how we choose to play.

    So imo this change is a flat dumming down of healing mechanics, it's too early to say if it will be fun or not but for me less choice equals less fun.

    Read again. He answered all those.
    WHEN I POST IN CAPS CURSE SPEAK FOR ALL PALADINS AND REFRAIN FROM PUNCTUATION EXCEPT AT THE END OF MY SENTENCE WHERE I USE EXTRA YOU CAN'T ARGUE WITH MY LOGIC!!!!!!!

  18. #18
    Deleted
    That greyed out 32-bit flag is present in live version launcher as well after one of the recent launcher updates.

  19. #19
    I think Ghostcrawler & Co wastes too much time for long answering to all stupid QQ. They should just do what they think its best without constant explanations.

  20. #20
    Pls make dps hard to then. Not fair that only the tank and healer have the hard job.

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