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  1. #121
    Quote Originally Posted by Gilian View Post
    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 .
    Quote Originally Posted by Collected View Post
    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.

  2. #122
    Quote Originally Posted by Quilzar View Post
    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.
    Honestly I wish it was just a single hallway with maybe 10-20 packs of trash, progressively harder, and bosses after every 5 packs. With an endless hallway available as the challenge after Gold.

    Tanking:

    You get a single healer in your group who just puts a constant HoT with perfect 100% uptime on all members of the party, and it heals for let's say 10k/sec.

    It's up to you to pull as fast as possible without taking on too many mobs that their DPS outpaces the HoT on you...and it's up to you to control the damage coming from the mobs so that they aren't dealing more damage to your party members than the HoT can top off. Ie: You need to be interrupting spells targeting your party, stopping AoE abilities being cast like Bladestorm, etc., and also trying to deal as much damage as you can while also managing your own defensive cooldowns. Your party's DPS is tuned so that you still add a very decent chunk of the total damage, and can't ignore your own output.

    Gold, Silver, and Bronze are all based on how quickly you made it through the hallway. Endless mode is scored on how many packs you're able to clear through, and how fast you're able to do it.

    DPS:

    Similar to the Tanking challenge, you get a healer in your group with a constant HoT on everyone. Your party's DPS is tuned so that you're a far bigger portion of it than they are, probably something like an 4:1 ratio to make sure it's more a test of your skill and output, but still gives incentive to keep party members alive via interrupts and stuns on mobs. You need to kill groups as quickly as possible, while also shutting down abilities, and also managing the damage you receive as well so that it isn't killing you faster than the HoT is healing you.

    The faster you get down the hall, the better you do. Endless mode scored same as the tanking challenge, and factoring speed as well...that way people aren't just sitting there spamming interrupts, fears, and stuns in order to make each pack last as long as possible while waiting on DPS cooldowns to pop back up.

    You're allowed to pull additional packs any time you please, which will help your speed and improve your score...just make sure not to pull too many and let the tank or yourself die.

    Healing:

    Much like the current healing challenge, you get 3 DPS and a Tank in your group. You heal them as they clear through the dungeon. Any time a party member dies, they are resurrected @ 50% HP after 15 seconds. Healing them is the goal, but remember that often times, preventing damage is much better than healing it...so using your interrupts and CCs would be heavily encouraged, and so would aiding in DPS on some mobs which need to be burned down (ie: Lay Waste skeletons from Valithria Dreamwalker).

    After every boss, you get a mana sphere restoring 200K mana. This simulates a quick drink after bosses. It also allows for things to get more hairy and interesting since you don't need to balance around only natural mana regen (around 100K/min in ilvl 463) which doesn't really allow for a test with much very heavy healing.

    You're allowed to pull additional packs any time you please, same as the DPS test. It's scored similarly to the DPS test as well.

    To me, those would be the most ideal scenarios to put into Proving Grounds.
    Last edited by Harmann; 2013-07-16 at 06:38 PM.

  3. #123
    Herald of the Titans Lemons's Avatar
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    Proving grounds look boring as hell. Blizzard loves putting in content nowadays that takes them 2 seconds to make, but you have to spend 1,000 hours grinding to get all the achieves and the best times.

    Also...I got beef with the floor texture. Is anyone else tired of wildly oversized textures? It's just lazy! Was the room designed by giants? the inlay/scrollwork/whatever you want to call it should be much smaller and more intricate if it was designed by a normal-sized pandaren.
    Last edited by Lemons; 2013-07-16 at 10:24 PM.

  4. #124
    Quote Originally Posted by Treelife View Post
    Dunno, personally I like the fact I'll be able to literally prove I'm the #1 DD/Healer/Tank in guild. A Title and ranking system is more than enough. It's more to prove to yourself and friends than a mount or transmog stuff.
    You need to be a druid, I am going to prove I am the best healer-tank-dps in my guild....

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    Quote Originally Posted by Collected View Post
    So what is the goal of the proving grounds? To give players something else to do at 90? Or is it to tempt people into starting alts in the different roles? A sort of "I want to try tanking but I don't want to start an alt just to see if I like it" thing?
    I think there are two goals. First, it will be a hell of a lot of fun for guild bragging rights, and also just for anyone who likes an increasingly challenging feature.

    But probably another purpose is to get dps warriors, pallies and dks to try tanking in a stress free environment, especially ones not in big guilds. If you got to lvl 90 as a fury warrior, some people would not like to jump into heroic dungeons and get screamed at... especially at the end of an expansion where heroics are just go go go.

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    Quote Originally Posted by nekobaka View Post
    Based on the wording of the preview the healing aspect might not be a big issue as you are given a healer. The description for tanking was quite empty though compared to the DPS roll. I hope there are situations where the tank also has to interrupt and pop cooldowns.

    I am a little worried about warlocks and needing heals due to life tap. It would force certain talent choices.
    The tanking one should include many tasks, but one of those tasks needs to be surviving a healer silence, or like 10 seconds of increase damage. To teach you either to blow your survival cds or have your self-heals ready. But probably most of it would involve picking up adds and interrupts and hopefully positioning. Props if they require a LOS pull.

  5. #125
    From what I hear, some bosses from SoO were lazily put together, but I think most of them look pretty beast! Especially the first boss, immersus

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    Every villian is lemons

  6. #126
    Scarab Lord Arkenaw's Avatar
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    Another ugly monk tier. woohoo

  7. #127
    Really don't like these non-coloured item sets..
    Thank god for transmog!

  8. #128
    Deleted
    Glyph of Focused Mending (NYI) (New) Causes your Prayer of Mending to only bounce between the target and the caster. Major Glyph.
    Glyph of the Sha (New) Transforms your Shadowfiend and Mindbender into a Sha Beast.
    Glyph of Void Shift (NYI) (New) Void Shift causes you and your target to exchange appearances for several seconds.

    Good ?

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