Raidcomp Update, Tanking with a Vengeance, BG Brackets, Darkmoon Fortune

[Hermione]

Does anyone know what the final video is supposed to be about?

[bonafiedhero]

Hmm anyone know if they plan to take away the seperate Bgs for people with their xp turned off.? Its a stupid idea seeing as the idea of bgs is to get the best gear to be the better player and survive, so there is no reason why twinks cannot compete with tards in pve gear. Its the same with arenas, if everyone had the same gear, that would be great, but they dont and it doesnt pair you up based on that. If you cant get the gear, dont bg, its that simple.

[Lemons]

Really awesome BG changes. I always thought that having such a huge level descrepency in the BGs was a problem, but now they've fixed that. I expect that leveling up throught pvp should be a lot more fun now that hitting a new bracket only puts you 5 levels behind instead of 10.

[frott]

hi -

don't you have to split the feral druid (and some other classes) as having 1 feral druid doesn't give you all of those buffs/debuffs since you're either cat or bear.

[Panoramixe]

I've been hoping for a change to bg's like this for ages, great to see it's finally here.

[frott]

also, subtletly rogue is counting as ~ for stat multiplier and stamina, without showing why.

[rabbimojo]

Raidcomp options for Shadow & Flame. (5% spell crit debuff). Currently showing Destro only. Someone above mentioned that Affliction should have it, and I think Demo should be on that list as well. Currently all 3 specs are likely to take it, and all three can provide it with a (relatively) minimal penalty to themselves at worst.

As for the split BGs: The bulk of the people who queued prior to this did it in the upper half of the bracket, in my experience. Upper-half queues shouldn't be significantly affected by this. Lower-half queues should be just fine as well, since now when you hit any x0, there's no reason not to queue. I, for one, will take this opportunity to queue at any arbitrary time as I level, because it will no longer mean being -6 to -9.

For those of you griping about GC's post being carefully worded: It isn't something he wrote for you. If you know the hows and whys of vengeance from the dozens of posts on the subject during the Beta, then you're not the target audience. He wrote it for the larger population, where many don't understand the point. And for the record, GC:"which is to make sure tank threat scales as other players improve their gear" does not mean "scales with other players' gear". Interpreting it that way is frankly ridiculous. What it means is that as we progress in tiers, your raid will in general gear up. Tank threat needs to scale as that happens. Vengeance helps it do so. Simple.

[Riched]

I like the new brackets idea. I heard they were also merging battle groups, or making any player be able to play against basically any player in North America, Europe, etc.
That in mind, maybe queues won't be longer and we'll get all these new brackets.
Here's hoping anyway.

[Rolly]

"If a lucky dodge streak causes Vengeance to fall off, and that means that you can’t generate enough threat, then either our numbers aren’t tuned correctly, or you need to L2tank."

Jesus what an idiot, so now we're suppose to be able to "play" RNG? Pretty fucking tired of RNG in every single fucking aspect of this game.
Meh this expac and the just plain stupid xp curve while leveling ( quest mobs going grey before finishing a zone, with no heirlooms and just quest gear. WTF), the constant quest text insulting the player base (constantly breaking immersion), the childish inclusion of swearing that does absolutely nothing to the storyline.
This really really really was not the work of good mmo developers this was the work of mediocre console developers trying to impress 12 year olds while making their jobs easier in the future and passing it off as a bonus for the player. Sad part is others will emulate them, god I hope some of the new games are good.

edit: added "that does absolutely nothing to the storyline."

[Dragonshardz]

Those are some seriously AWESOME artworks.

[Vynicor]

Sorry if it's a stupid question but is the new BG brackets something they will introduce at Cata release or did i miss something?

Introduced in 4.0.3a. I noticed this when I jumped in a battleground with my level 11 druid and noticed no one was above level 14. I just assumed they did hidden fix to que those with similar levels together. Nice to see this written down.

[lunaspike]

How does getting a lucky dodge streak (RNG), and having a massive threat loss because of it, mean I need to L2tank? That makes no sense...

I agree with you completely. I'm sitting here looking at my dodge rating going wait a minute you mean I'm bad for avoiding damage now? And people want to question why tanks are stacking stam. Well obviously because if we avoid damage we are bad.

See this is why I think you need to have someone that actually tanks balance tanks. Having a dps balance tanks is a stupid idea, same with heals. I do two things, I heal and I tank. It isn't that I don't like to dps, I just prefer those two. I like knowing that if we win or fail it's on me at least partly. I can handle that responsibility.

Mob damage has to be scaled to give you max AP contribution even with your higher stam and avoidance. That AP boost needs to bring you within a reasonable threat range of similarly geared dpsers and the incoming damage causing it needs to be reasonably healable by similarly geared healers.

Bottomline, its more than just your gear that will matter.

The answer is pretty damn simple really. Give tanks as part of their anti crit talent one that says you get X of your stam as attack power. Stam is something that is always going to be huge on tank gear, but it will never match the 2 to 1 dps get from strength. So there is no reason they would worry about dps going tank spec for more damage. Right now I'm sitting at 4k stam, veng can give me a total of 5k attack power. So if they just converted it to Vengeance makes it so a tank gets 1 ap for every stam they have it wouldn't be even but it would be close without having to worry about the falling off or ramp up mechanic. Plus most tanks that I know of (myself included) only have issues with threat the start of a fight, not halfway through. At halfway through a fight I have a HUGE lead in threat. It's the beginning that really causes issues. It only takes a second of lost agro to lose someone in a fight.

[TeddyTauren]

I like raidcomp, but I find it rather lacking

Should it not include things like Tricks or Misdirect?
What about frost trap and piercing howl?
It would also be nice to include a geartype summary. For example:
2 Plate tank
0 Plate DPS
1 Plate heal
1 Mail physical

Something like that.

Just my thoughts. I do think it's pretty neat though.



A bug it has: Demo shout can be used by a warrior of any spec. Prot warriors are especially diligent at keeping it up. (Have 2 prot warriors in my raid, but it's still not counted)

EDIT: shouldn't it also include CC since that (hopefully) will be more prevalent in Cata? (sheep, sap, etc)

[Deleted]

The frustrating this is they are still not acknowleding the actual concerns raised by tanks when it comes to vengeance, namely:

In fights with tank swapping, when you offtank your stacks drop off and your threat is gimped
The ramp up can be long and unpredictable, plus breaks in damage from phases or avoidance mess up the stacking
Threat being scaled around a buff that is unpredictable is less than ideal

In regards to gear level and vengeance, it is likely to stack quicker with worse gear but the cap will be at a lower level due to less total stamina.

[Zinnin]

Raid comp has destro listed as the only lock spec with 5% crit debuff when in reality afflic \ demo are a lot more likely to put it up.

[Malazee]

Hi there, Chaud. Over at Petopia, I've been maintaining a large and accurate spreadsheet full of this raid buff/debuff/ability information while eagerly awaiting MMO Raid Comp's update. The project began as a way to monitor hunter pets' abilities but quickly grew into a very large-scale list of every single player-to-player ability in the game (including buffs, debuffs, dispels, resurrections, and every single "crowd control" in the game).

The list includes relevant item and spell IDs for all abilities, talents, glyphs and poisons; spell information such as duration and cooldown; and a very thorough categorization (along with an explanation) of all the crowd control abilities.

If you haven't seen it already, please feel free to look at and browse my comprehensive spreadsheets on GoogleDocs here: Malazee's Hunter Pet Spreadsheets. (The fourth and fifth sheets are the ones I expect you to find most useful.) I'm extremely confident in the accuracy of my spreadsheets because they have been poured over by many different eyes and are the product of months of investigation. I hope that my sheets are able to help you double-check your own work and fix any mistakes you may have made.

I have also been working very closely with a colleague of mine (Anyia, she did all the hard work in coding really) to develop an addon which enables this information to be viewed in-game. It's not as interactive as the MMO Raid Comp tool, but I think you'll find that it fulfills the same purpose: determining which buffs/debuffs are currently being covered by your raid group, and then determining what classes could fill those holes. The mod is called RaidChecklist, and it is completely functional and Cataclysm-ready.

Please check out both the Spreadsheets I have made and the addon that Anyia developed. If you find them useful, then please help us to spread the word about their availability.

And, of course, thank you for the update on the MMO Raid Comp tool. It was the inspiration for all the work I did on my spreadsheets.

[lemmilemming]

The Raid Comp always puts my feral cat as Tank. An option to change that would be apriciated

[Deleted]

I agree with you completely. I'm sitting here looking at my dodge rating going wait a minute you mean I'm bad for avoiding damage now? And people want to question why tanks are stacking stam. Well obviously because if we avoid damage we are bad.

I think you are all reading it wrong. He doesn't mean you are bad when you dodge, he means you are bad if dodging makes you lose threat immediately. A good tank should have enough aggro to handle a lucky streak of dodges. So when you can't handle that, either the numbers on things like vengeance are off, or you are a bad tank for not building enough aggro before, to handle the lucky streak.

That sound perfectly reasonable to me.

[lunaspike]

I think you are all reading it wrong. He doesn't mean you are bad when you dodge, he means you are bad if dodging makes you lose threat immediately. A good tank should have enough aggro to handle a lucky streak of dodges. So when you can't handle that, either the numbers on things like vengeance are off, or you are a bad tank for not building enough aggro before, to handle the lucky streak.

That sound perfectly reasonable to me.

Yet that isn't what the idiot said. He clearly doesn't tank, and has no concept of where tanking is right now. It's very easy for someone who doesn't tank, or doesn't tank on a regular basis, to make claims like that. The fact is though that tanking is hard. You are having to keep up with a great many things at once. Not only your cds, but your healers cds , boss cds, any mechanics of the raid, and threat.

I will give an example. Let's say you are fighting a boss like marrowgar. Simply because he is easier. There are times when you aren't getting hit by him. Yet when he goes back to the phase where you need to tank him dps are fully capable of unloading right away. As a tank though you have to build up your vengeance. It gets worse though because as an off tank you can't build it. So when you do taunt off the mt you have to lead it build on you again, meanwhile the mt has now had his fall off. It shouldn't be like that. I don't really need something else to keep track of, not to mention it encourages me to actively take damage instead of trying to avoid it. It's really counter to what I feel I should be doing as a tank. That is keeping him locked on me while taking as little damage as possible. Not hoping like hell he hits me good and hard so I can build up vengeance to keep up with the raid. Now you might not think 5k attack power adds much to my ability to tank. I will tell you that it does, it adds a huge ability to it. Without that extra attack power it's going to be much easier for someone to pull off me. Maybe not now because so few bosses wipe threat, but if they do in cata then it's going to present some real issues.