Faction Capital Changes, Lorewalker Story, World Boss Preview, Blue Posts, MMO Report

[Alayea]

There are several changes coming for shaman in the next build, some of which won’t be easily datamined, so we’d like to let you know about them. We shifted around where damage comes from for both Elemental and Enhancement. The overall damage should be down a bit, but both specializations should still feel strong. Remember, if you’re giving feedback and making comparisons to other classes and specs, please list who you’re comparing to, as it’s quite possible that you’re feeling underpowered compared to someone who is overpowered.

The Fire Elementals were stronger than we wanted, so we reduced the amount of spell power that the standard version gets to 40%, down from 55% (Primal: 60%, down from 82.5%). The Primal Elementalist talent was also too strong, so we reduced the damage of the Primal Fire Elemental’s Immolate DoT by 65%. Also on the topic of talents, Elemental Blast was too weak, so we increased its damage and stat effects by roughly 17%, but reduced its proc chance with Echo of the Elements to 6% for Enhancement (previously it had a 30% chance to trigger an Echo for Enhancement, which made that talent pair too strong).

Further, on the topic of shocks, we recently reduced the shared cooldown of shocks to 5 seconds for Elemental shaman. More recently, we lowered Earth Shock’s damage a bit and significantly increased Flame Shock’s damage.

Specific to Enhancement, we wanted to bring DPS down a bit and also make them feel like more of their damage was coming from their active buttons, rather than passively. The one significant change that you probably won’t be able to datamine is an increase to Feral Spirits’ damage. They now get 50% of your attack power each, up from 30%. And their Spirit Bite ability’s damage has more than doubled. The net result should be that Feral Spirits are significantly stronger than before, probably somewhere between 70% and 100% stronger, depending on gear.

Enhancement shaman will still take Echo of the Elements though because, comparing it to the other talents on T4, it's pretty much mandatory. I can believe that EB combined with EotE would have been too powerful, but disagree with how sharply they nerfed it.

Speaking of DPS... I wasn't aware we were "overpowered". Also, just how can Blizzard's solution to our passive damage be to just decrease our physical damage and increase the damage of a 2min CD that should have been buffed at the start of Cataclysm in the first place? If there is such a problem, it's because of our CD-based rotation (if you can call it that). I'm not against such a system, but what are you supposed to do if you're doing everything right and still (depending on circumstances) sometimes ending up doing plain ol' white damage for 3-4 seconds? Hard-cast LB which hits like a wet noodle? Sounds like one of our CD rotation spells (excluding shock spells) could use a reduction on its CD timer -- like 1 or 2 seconds, depending on which spell. (Of course I don't want our spec to be locked down via CDs, either. That'd be just as bad, if not worse.)

Anyway, at least there's the good news of the 5sec shared CD for shocks becoming baseline for elemental.

[smoqueed]

Finally some news on the current HM boss mounts. Just hope they don't lower the drop chances too low : (

[Muezick]

Finally some news on the current HM boss mounts. Just hope they don't lower the drop chances too low : (

If they lowered them it would be to 1%. Why would they lower it at all if not to that number?

[Alayea]

A slightly lengthy post by Ghostcrawler was put up several minutes ago regarding changes to Vengeance. Here you go.

We changed how Vengeance works.

Vengeance is intended to let tanks generate additional damage and threat as content levels rise, despite not gearing for it (or at least not primarily). We're changing the design to let Vengeance play better with active mitigation, but the new design has some other advantages many of you will like.

As most all of you know by now, the idea of active mitigation is that the buttons a tank presses directly contribute to mitigation and survival. In some cases, this is timing-centric, such as Death Strike. In others, it’s both timing-centric and also involves balancing how you spend your resources among multiple abilities, such as Savage Defense vs. Frenzied Regeneration or Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier. In the latter case, it’s important that both abilities are compelling and compete well with each other. We are changing Vengeance to let those abilities be balanced.

I'm going to use Savage Defense (a short duration large dodge buff) and Frenzied Regen (a large instant heal) as examples. Getting the balance between SD and FR right is challenging. We want SD to win on average, but you’re limited on how often you can use it, and it’s not necessarily reliable -- sometimes you really need a heal NOW, and so FR is the right button. SD should win, but FR shouldn’t be too far behind, and they should scale similarly.

SD scales with the incoming damage: if BossA hits you for 60k, and BossB hits you for 120k, then SD is twice as valuable (in absolute terms) on BossB than on BossA. FR scales with your attack power: even a few 5man trash mobs will cap out your Vengeance, so your AP will be the same on BossA as on BossB. FR isn’t any stronger on BossB than BossA.

On top of that, AP and boss damage scales differently as ilevel rises. We tried a solution to that problem where FR scaled exponentially with AP in the last build. That has worked fairly well, but still failed at keeping SD and FR balanced when boss damage was significantly different from the baseline we used as a tuning point. For example, 25-player raid bosses hit twice as hard as 10-player raid bosses, which makes SD twice as valuable.

But wasn’t this post supposed to be about Vengeance? Currently, Vengeance increases your AP by 5% of the damage taken, stacking up to the cap, which happens quickly. We are changing Vengeance to increase AP equal to 5% of the damage you take for 20 sec. This buff will "roll" so that as it gets refreshed the unused part is added to the new buff, similar to how Ignite or Stagger work. The net result will be that Vengeance stacks by the amount of DPS being thrown at you over 20 sec. There is no cap.

Additional nuances:

-- Avoidance will not count against you. Avoiding an attack will extend the current Vengeance stack back to 20 sec (as if you were hit again for the same DPS).
-- Blocks, absorbs, Stagger and Shield of the Righteous will also not count against you. The damage before these effects is used for the Vengeance calculation.
-- To reduce ramp up time, we bump you up to halfway to whatever your average Vengeance level would be based on each individual hit. Essentially, we skip the first 10 sec of ramping.
-- Tank damage in 5-player groups will decrease. We think this is a good chance because it is weird and demoralizing when tanks consistently top damage meters in dungeons.
-- Tank damage in 25-player groups will increase. We think this is a good change because it makes tank DPS as relevant in 25-player raids as it is in 10-player raids.
-- With this change, Brewmaster damage will be extremely overpowered. We will fix it, but you may get a build where they are ludicrously good.

The rest of this post is nitty gritty details for theorycrafters. You do NOT need to read or understand this in order to effectively play a tank.

-- Whenever you get hit, Vengeance is added based on the damage of the hit before block, crit block, absorbs, stagger, and Shield of the Righteous.
-- Whenever you avoid an attack from a mob where MobLevel>=TankLevel-3, your existing Vengeance is extended to 20sec remaining.
-- Based on how hard you’re hit, we estimate how high Vengeance’s equilibrium point will be: DamageTaken / 1.5.
-- If you’re not at least half that high on Vengeance, we bump you up to that amount
-- The new Vengeance value is calculated as: 0.05 * DamageTaken + OldVengeance * OldVengeanceSecondsRemaining / 20
-- Frenzied Regeneration and Shield Barrier’s formulae have changed to:
Frenzied Regeneration at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Agi*2), Sta*2.5)
Shield Barrier at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Str*2), Sta*2.5)
-- Yes, these do mean that it uses your AP without base AP from Str/Agi (but does still slightly include AP from Agi/Str when you’ve got the 10% AP raid buff or other +%AP buffs).
-- Please feel free to ask any questions you have about the mechanical details of this.

[Noblia]

" Remember, if you’re giving feedback and making comparisons to other classes and specs, please list who you’re comparing to, as it’s quite possible that you’re feeling underpowered compared to someone who is overpowered.


That has to be the dumbest comment I have ever read. What an fing retard! Blizzard is showing its true colors when it comes to balance.

Yes when comparing your gimp enhancement shaman make sure its none of the classes that can kick your ass(arcane blast x6 mage) in 3 shots. Compare it to that weed you just picked. You totally kicked its ass.

[hiragana]

The cities will still be quite busy if thats where all the level 90 vendors are. Personally i dont mind no auctioneers, i prefer to do my auctioning away from the very crowded areas anyway. Probably keep my auctioning characters in the ah in valley of strength? (one near the arena, not played for a few months). Then the rest of my characters in the new cities near to where the action and vendors are. Plus they look ace.

[smoqueed]

If they lowered them it would be to 1%. Why would they lower it at all if not to that number?

They lowered Invincible and Mimirons head from 100% to 5%, but left both OS drakes 100% so they're kind of weird with their droprates. They make some that were really hard to get easier while leaving others to be RNG nightmares. I'm just wondering if the HRag mount will be lower than the HDW mount since it is going to be in the BMAH too. The dropchance will have to be low or it won't sell for much.

[Azrile]

" Remember, if you’re giving feedback and making comparisons to other classes and specs, please list who you’re comparing to, as it’s quite possible that you’re feeling underpowered compared to someone who is overpowered.


That has to be the dumbest comment I have ever read. What an fing retard! Blizzard is showing its true colors when it comes to balance.

Yes when comparing your gimp enhancement shaman make sure its none of the classes that can kick your ass(arcane blast x6 mage) in 3 shots. Compare it to that weed you just picked. You totally kicked its ass.

It makes perfect sense. Lets say there is a bug (or otherwise unintended thing) happening with survival hunters and they are doing a crapload of dps compared to everyone else. The devs have acknowledged this issue and plan on fixing it... or just it is widely known that in every raid, that survival hunter is always tops of the dps by a wide margin.

If you are a fire mage.. do not go on the forums and say ´omg, we are so weak.. I am only doing 75% of the damage of a survival hunter´.. It is a meaningless comment because the ´ balance problem´ is with the survival hunter.

But yeah, it is funny when dumb people call other people dumb because they can´t understand something that makes perfect sense to non-dumb people.

[Noblia]

It makes perfect sense. Lets say there is a bug (or otherwise unintended thing) happening with survival hunters and they are doing a crapload of dps compared to everyone else. The devs have acknowledged this issue and plan on fixing it... or just it is widely known that in every raid, that survival hunter is always tops of the dps by a wide margin.

If you are a fire mage.. do not go on the forums and say ´omg, we are so weak.. I am only doing 75% of the damage of a survival hunter´.. It is a meaningless comment because the ´ balance problem´ is with the survival hunter.

But yeah, it is funny when dumb people call other people dumb because they can´t understand something that makes perfect sense to non-dumb people.

You can spin it anyway you want buddy. They are basically saying, if you feel gimp its because your comparing yourself to an op class... Well no fing way genius! What an epiphany! Its been like that for 7 years. Its going to be that way until the last wow server is shut off. Spin it more fanboi.

[swallowtail]

BAANEEEEELLIIINGGG PETTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! woooooo

[Kirse]

You can spin it anyway you want buddy. They are basically saying, if you feel gimp its because your comparing yourself to an op class... Well no fing way genius! What an epiphany! Its been like that for 7 years. Its going to be that way until the last wow server is shut off. Spin it more fanboi.

In many cases a class is OP due to bugs that have made certain abilities or weapons OP. You don't know what you're talking about. Data helps Blizz to determine the source of the problem.

[tremulant]

You can spin it anyway you want buddy. They are basically saying, if you feel gimp its because your comparing yourself to an op class... Well no fing way genius! What an epiphany! Its been like that for 7 years. Its going to be that way until the last wow server is shut off. Spin it more fanboi.

That's not what they're basically saying. Not at all.

How do you not understand that feedback like comparing your gimped class to a broken class that's doing twice as much damage as all the others is completely useless information to them... And it won't get your class fixed.

But if you claim that your class is doing significantly less damage than the other average classes that all seem to be balanced within a close percentage to each other,
then that is good feedback that supports your legit claim, and may actually get your class buffed.


EDIT: and you're applying a comment he made about 'beta feedback' to 'live realm feedback' because that's obviously not what he meant.

[Pumps]

But can you fly over the capitals? Like Silvermoon?

[Deleted]

But what those world bosses drop ?????????????????????????????????