Unable to Validate Game Version on PTRs
We've located an error that was causing this issue. We're working on getting a fix applied that will enable all logins once again. (
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Raids & Dungeons
Glory of the Ulduar Raider
The same post we made on this a couple months back still applies to the situation.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...04852935&sid=1
"Currently we have no plans to remove them in the foreseeable future. However, we will continue to evaluate the situation and if a decision is made to remove these rewards at any point in the future, we'll provide a one month warning so players will have time to make some final attempts. " (
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Cross Server LFG System
While feedback is always appreciated you're making some assumptions about a system that you don't have the complete details for as of yet. This is understandable since we haven't fully explained what our intentions are or how the complete system will be working.
We are in the process of finalizing just such an informational piece that we plan to post sometime early next week that should explain much more about the system, how it works, the benefits, and give you a much better foundation for providing constructive feedback during your testing and answer many of the questions that you have. (
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Why can't bosses have expertise?
It's something we actually talk about quite a bit. We won't do it for Icecrown, but it could happen in the future.
The basic problem is that bosses don't scale with gear. Their health and damage go up. That's it. You might avoid a first tier boss 30% of the time and a final tier boss 60% of the time. That means when that final boss hits you, he needs to hit for twice as much (not even counting that he already needs to hit harder to account for your higher health and armor). If you are a dps class, you might crit a low tier boss 30% of the time and a high tier boss 50% of the time. Why should you be proportionately more powerful against more powerful enemies? If anything it just makes us scale their health and damage to extreme points.
Players generally expect the monsters in an RPG to get more powerful as the characters do. Otherwise the game just gets easier over time. WoW has traditionally not scaled any mob stats beyond damage done and health. I think if we always had done it nobody would think it was weird. You don't get disappointed for example that the bosses hit harder as your health goes up, so why should it be any different of the mobs hit more often as your avoidance goes up? Sunwell Radiance felt odd because it was a sudden, unpredictable addition. If things always had worked that way I think players would just have accepted it. (
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Players below level 10 may not join raids
One of the worst experiences a new player to WoW can have is to get invited to a raid. It immediately shuts off their ability to complete quests. Yes there are ways around that, but when you're talking about a legitimately new player who may not even have the support of friends teaching them how to play, it can just kill any progress flat. Without the starting quests, the player has no direction, no sense of their role in the game and no reasonable way to gain XP. It's even worse when done maliciously, by inviting a bunch of noobs to a raid and then dropping out.
I am assuming many of you are like me and played games for years before trying WoW. But WoW has been around a long time now and some of the players picking up the game now don't necessarily have that experience to draw from. Beginning players these days might have come from consoles or handheld games or maybe WoW is even the first real game they've tried. These type of players need a little more direction. You'll see a lot of changes in 3.3 to support this, and then even more in Cataclysm.
We realize it affects the legitimate (if niche) lowbie raid case so we hope this is only a temporary solution until we implement something a little more bullet proof.
[...] If we removed the quest penalty from raids, I am fairly confident that your experience upon competing say Howling Fjord and moving into Grizzly Hills would be to spam general with "Hey, invite me to the raid!" And there would be one. Even if you didn't technically cooperate with the folks in the zone, why not splash the XP all around a bit?
Like I said, there are solutions but none of them are of the "Just flip this bit and everything will be fine" variety. They take a little thought and work. (
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Classes
Relic slot
The problem with this item slot is it has now become so spec specific that we can't offer you multiple choices per tier (because we can't make that many items and ship a patch on time). So instead we try and focus on getting you to change up your gameplay, just a little, when a new relic arrives on the scene. This doesn't happen every upgrade, and it really doesn't need to. Constantly jumping around would become as predictable as never jumping at all.
For Cataclysm, we're considering some different implementations of the piece. Perhaps we'll go back to putting some stats on them. It's too early to tell. (
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Theorycrafting and posting numbers on forums
Yeah, it's a bit of sticky wicket for us. I try to say "posting with numbers makes your argument stronger," and that's true. Some players then just pop out a link to Simulationcraft or Wowmeteronline or whatever. *Nothing* is wrong with *either* of those tools when used correctly. The problem is too many players use them as the true and accurate measurement of what someone's dps really is. What someone's max dps really is is essentially unknowable. It varies a lot depending on the encounter, gear, raid synergy, the person behind the keyboard, latency, whether someone was trying to inflate the numbers, and a host of other factors. It is almost certainly *not* what *your* dps is. If you are not topping the charts, it is rarely because of the factors measured by tools such as these.
So on the one hand, it feels unfair for us to say "post numbers" and then reply "no, not those numbers" when players try it. But we do ask that you consider what impact your post is going to have. There are several widely available tools, spreadsheet, simulators and websites of raid logs. Most likely the other players you are talking to, and particularly Blizzard, are familiar with them all. Ask yourself if you are really sharing new information when your post consists of a very brief "See? We are low. Here is my quote or link." At the very least try and provide some analysis if you can.
Not everyone is going to be an expert theorycrafter or mathematics expert, and we're not expecting you to be one in order to participate in these forum discussions. But also be honest about the fact that linking to someone else's work doesn't necessarily turn you into one either.
Was that too harsh? (
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Druid
Druid changes in 3.3
I'm not sure why so many players who want to disagree with us on class design miss some of those posts where we attempt to clarify our position.
To put it all into one place:
1) Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn't mean to buff Rejuv's duration but once we did we didn't think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn't really matter what it was called -- it was a nerf.
2) In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.
3) While we didn't change Gift of the Earth Mother with the express purpose of nerfing druids, it still had that effect. We considered the Rejuv nerf and the GotEM nerf and decided we liked the second one more and reverted the first one. Rejuv is back to 18 sec for 3.3.
4) We realize the GotEM nerf hurt PvP Resto druids a lot and that is still something we are evaluating.
5) Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don't think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we'll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We're pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we're really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.
Rereading the above, I am making sweeping generalizations a lot. Your mileage may vary and there are a ton of exceptions. One thing that hits me a lot in my position is that players assume the way they do a thing is the way everyone must do that thing. Players exhibit some pretty diverse behaviors and still get the boss down. Keep that in mind whenever you try to adopt the "accepted" or "cookie cutter" spell rotation for any class.
6) Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting "shoved down their throat" or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a "Flash Heal." Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone's life, but they just aren't reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. "Hey, I'm just here to hot the raid," is fine if it works for your group, but that can't be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.) (
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Gift of the Earth Mother
A more likely change is something like letting GotEM keep its current (PTR) functionality but also letting it reduce the GCD of just Lifebloom. (
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Warrior
Warrior Scaling
The solution to making warriors scale more appropriately with gear (instead of being bad at first and good later) is to normalize rage more. That's an answer that a lot of warriors hate hearing, which is one of the reasons we haven't done it yet. For many warriors, rage is a limitation to be overcome with enough gear. That's not really our vision of the class though. (
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Mists of Pandaria Classic Beta Known Issues - Updated 13 June
Mists of Pandaria Classic Beta Known Issues - Updated June 13
The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread
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Originally Posted by Jartin
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