Cracks starting to show?

[Merusk]

Nitpick: Brass Tacks.  It's about the detailing of furniture, not the improper taxation of a good.

Carry on.

[Rokal]

The point was that they've gone the direction (and held direction depending on the POV) further and further away from what people have asked for in pvp since the beginning.

I can't tell you how many times I saw people on the official forums saying "Arena sucks, we should be able to get the best PvP gear from battlegrounds with our friends if we prefer that". They implemented rated battlegrounds as a direct response to player feedback and demands.

I personally think any sort of PvP game is worthless when you throw in a gear grind, but you can't argue that Blizzard wasn't listening when they implemented rated battlegrounds.

[Malakili]

I always wonder whether people pushing for the end-game content to be "nerfed to the ground" enjoy playing FPS or action games with godmode on. If they get bored quickly, or find the game less satisfying when using a godmode cheat, they should understand why having somewhat difficult challenges is better than having none.

Played any of the real popular shooters lately?  They certainly aren't very difficult, cheat codes or no.  I bought Black Ops because I wanted to play the multiplayer, I tried the single player because I figured, well I have it may as well try it.  I couldn't make it past the first level, it was a joke.  I don't even know if I needed to shoot my gun to win the level.  I'm with you in that I don't find things that are easy very engaging, but I've been told over and over here that the way I like to play puts me in a small minority (and it probably does), but it seems to me that people don't want to play these games for a challenge, or an engaging experience, they want to putter around and be entertained with minimal effort, and also they like shiny rewards for their trouble.  *shrugs*

[Merusk]

Games are the TV of the 21st century.  They are meant for entertainment, not achievement.

Then tack on that the 14-20 year olds that are the target market were raised on easy grades and praise for everything.  Why would you not expect that to bleed over into games?

[Ingmar]

It isn't that I don't want a challenge, it is that I don't want to be forced to go find new friends. And actually it isn't even that, I don't want to be forced to kick existing ones to the curb, over something like that. I already spent the last 4 years massaging raid lineups to get just the right mix of inclusion and skill so we could progress decently, having to do that for 5 mans is just too much.

[WindupAtheist]

It was pretty stupid of Daxxari to lose his cool and post that, and it could have been worded much better, but isn't it true?

No. The person he was responding to made an obvious and correct point, and Daxxari's response was one step above "What was that about my mother, faggot? You wanna go?"

[Ingmar]

It was a fairly nonsensical point, IMO.

"Raiding is the pinnacle of PVE content..."

"Nuh uh, HEROIC Raiding is"

As if "raiding" didn't include that. Still a retarded blue reply any way you slice it but the guy he responded to was certainly not setting the world afire with his laser insight.

[Rokal]

No. The person he was responding to made an obvious and correct point, and Daxxari's response was one step above "What was that about my mother, faggot? You wanna go?"

This is the quote he was responding to:

"Regular raids are not (and should not) be designed with hard-core players in mind."

How does this random player know better than Blizzard what type of player was "in mind" when regular raids were designed? That is why Daxxarrri acted like a fool and posted his angry response. The player was arguing with a Blizzard poster who represents the developers (and the company as a whole) about what the intent of the current raid design was.

A couple additional patch notes posted today:

    * All trade goods available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors have had their prices reduced by 50%.
    * Maelstrom Crystals are now available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors.

Is this further proof of the EQ1 Elitist bias, or are they listening to feedback?   

[Merusk]

Their previous statements about Raids and Hardcore modes are what sets their intent.  Back when the hardcore raiders were bitching in WOTLK that the casuals had tons of purps and they were bored, the dev response was, "This is why we gave you Hardcore mode.  You get better rewards and it's a challenge."  That wasn't made-up by the playerbase or that particular player, it was the intent as stated by the devs.

Now, if they've shifted that stance they've done a horrible job of communicating that shift.

[Sheepherder]

How does this random player know better than Blizzard what type of player was "in mind" when regular raids were designed? That is why Daxxarrri acted like a fool and posted his angry response. The player was arguing with a Blizzard poster who represents the developers (and the company as a whole) about what the intent of the current raid design was.

Because if I were Blizzard, I would like money?  What the fuck kind of a question is that?

* All trade goods available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors have had their prices reduced by 50%.
* Maelstrom Crystals are now available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors.

Is this further proof of the EQ1 Elitist bias, or are they listening to feedback?  

No, it just misses the problem completely.  Thanks for playing.

[Ingmar]

It isn't related to what our current slapfight here is about, but it is certainly responding to a bunch of criticism elsewhere that that stuff was priced too high.

EDIT: Point being the central narrative we've set up here is "BLIZZARD GOES AHEAD WITH ALL THEIR BULLHEADED DESIGN DECISIONS AND STICKS TO THEIR GUNS WITHOUT CARING ABOUT WHAT PLAYERS THINK". Those notes run directly counter to that idea.

[Paelos]

I could give two fucks what Blizzard's intent was. I judge them by the results of their decisions and their actions. People are certainly tired of the game. I won't argue that this expansion for many is simply a breaking point that however small was going to push them away from the game for good.

That being said, the outcry over these decisions certainly isn't small or isolated. It's splitting people down the middle into "are you kidding me with this shit?" and "STFU and play" groups. Personally, I watched half of a raiding alliance of 200 people completely give up over these decisions. I'm arguing completely from a place of small world being the norm, and I'm ok with that. I'm fucking pissed off that they went this way, and I think they aren't complete idiots for pissing off customers who've played the game for years. I'll just list the actions they've taken so far:

Applied all loot across the 10 and 25 man - Great move, very in favor of that. Been wanting it for years. Side result was the death of 25 mans. I miss them like 40 mans.
Redesign of all the old zones - Very neat. I would have never rolled an alt before this, but I got a mage to 42. It was quality stuff.
Goblins and Worgens - Totally on board with Goblins. I wish both sides had them and they merc fought each other. Worgen, meh it's ok.
Combined 10 and 25 man lockouts - Not so great. I liked the choice between the two. Whatever though.
Guild leveling - Yeah you stole this from WAR. It doesn't work here. In fact it makes everyone cloistered assholes and you have to grind rep in it. I hate this.
Heroic dungeons needed to feel tough - We were cool with tough, we weren't cool with long. The balance between the two was terrible, like most of your players.
Raids need to be hard - Yeah, but when people started floundering in just normals, that's overkill. You have a whole other tier of raiding to grind hardcore's nuts.
Mana changes - Again. We've done this. It didn't work the first time you did it and it won't work now. You'll cave. We all know it. Will anyone be left to care, though?

[Rokal]

I'm really curious to see how the guild recruitment tool they are making works out. I remember loading up EQ2 again about 3-4 years ago, and they had this awesome looking for guild tool that made it very easy to find similar-minded people to play with. The tool let you see what 'type' of guild any given guild was, and what classes they were looking for. It also had an 'about us' type of section where it was easier to get an impression of the general atmosphere of the guild.

The implementation on the PTR right now doesn't look too hot, but it has a lot of promise if done right. If there was an easier way to find similar players (potential new friends) without spamming trade or posting on the realm forums every day, I think a lot of people might be better off than they are now.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I can't tell you how many times I saw people on the official forums saying "Arena sucks, we should be able to get the best PvP gear from battlegrounds with our friends if we prefer that". They implemented rated battlegrounds as a direct response to player feedback and demands.

I personally think any sort of PvP game is worthless when you throw in a gear grind, but you can't argue that Blizzard wasn't listening when they implemented rated battlegrounds.

Except they left arena's in....which are far easier to do and with less people. People didn't want battleground 'teams' they wanted battleground to matter in pvp.  So of course rated battlegrounds are a ghost town.


edit:

# Rated Battlegrounds

    * The achievements to win 100 rated Battlegrounds have been renamed to "Veteran of the Alliance" and "Veteran of the Horde", and now award those titles.
    * Achievements to win 300 rated Battlegrounds have been added, awarding the "Warbound" and "Warbringer" titles to the Alliance and Horde respectively.

Adding titles will solve everything!

[Rokal]

People were requesting a way to advance their character in battlegrounds instead of arena. Yeah arena is still easier, but the option to do battlegrounds instead is now there as requested. I think they succeeded to some extent, battlegrounds now "matter" in the sense that you can get the best gear from battlegrounds if you have a good group of friends who pvp. I guess most people just didn't know that many people that wanted to pvp. Or maybe most of the pvp players moved onto other games like LoL or HoN. Thinking back to every guild I have been in since vanilla launch, I can only remember maybe 4-5 people per guild that cared about pvp that much. Anecdotal of course, but most people I knew that pvp'd only did it for easy loot.

An 'arena pvp' game like League of Legends is much more satisfying, imo, than WoW's implementation of pvp. Gear only lasts for one round and then everyone resets again. You don't spend 3 months leveling your character to the cap, so buffs and nerfs don't sting as hard. If you run into a team composition that destroys you, you can stand back and say "maybe we should try playing X, Y, and Z champions next time to counter W" instead of making an angry post on the forums about how W is overpowered. It's easier to try again with a different strategy when your attachment to any given character is relatively small, the ability kit for each character is always small enough to quickly learn (4 abilities instead of... 20? 30?), and there is no 'grind' to catch up so that you can try your new strategy.

With the amount of DoTA-style games that have been announced recently, the writing is on the wall. This is the type of pvp people prefer, and the sooner WoW can learn from it or just stop trying to 'fix' their current implementation of pvp, the better.

[apocrypha]

Quick question, are those of you unhappy with the time it takes to run heroics still running them regularly?

I ask because they don't seem that long to me now. 3 of us from my guild have all joined another guild with 1 char each, to see if we can see some of the raid content. As a result I've been putting a healing set together on my shadow priest and have therefore been running a lot of heroics over the last few days. Almost all of them take less than 30 mins. Optional bosses are nearly always skipped, people know what they're doing and wipes are incredibly rare. In 3 days have had maybe 3 runs which didn't work out or which took a long time.

I suspect some of you are upset with how heroics were 3 months ago, not how they are now.

[Koyasha]

To the battlegrounds issue, what I, and I expect most people wanted and thought they were going to get when they announced them was for battlegrounds to track your individual contribution to victory and increase your rating, then match up people of similar rating.  Given wow's battleground system (which I haven't really liked since it went cross-server), what I wanted was to be able to queue up exactly as I did before, get into a battleground with people of a similar rating and fighting people of a similar rating, and have my actions in the battleground affect my rating.  I didn't want 'you must organize a raid-sized team of players'.  That's what I expected the rating system to do for me; match me up with people that have similar rating.

[Fordel]

To the battlegrounds issue, what I, and I expect most people wanted and thought they were going to get when they announced them was for battlegrounds to track your individual contribution to victory and increase your rating, then match up people of similar rating.  Given wow's battleground system (which I haven't really liked since it went cross-server), what I wanted was to be able to queue up exactly as I did before, get into a battleground with people of a similar rating and fighting people of a similar rating, and have my actions in the battleground affect my rating.  I didn't want 'you must organize a raid-sized team of players'.  That's what I expected the rating system to do for me; match me up with people that have similar rating.

That's pretty much what I hoped it would be, and why I assumed it was taking so long to implement. I figured they were making a really in depth system to track proper effectiveness in a BG and shit. 

I laughed, then cried when the big reveal for rated BGs was "Arena Teams, but Bigger!"

Firstly because the 5 man bracket was such a raging success, surely the 25 man bracket would be a even bigger one!

Secondly because it took them 1.5 expansions to do it.

[apocrypha]

Heh, I've just gone and read those blue posts. Lot of selective quoting going on in this thread, especially with that PvP Q&A.

[Typhon]

[snip]3 of us from my guild have all joined another guild with 1 char each, to see if we can see some of the raid content. [snip]

In WotLK this wasn't necessary.  Another perspective on this is Ingmars, "I don't want to kick my friends who aren't terribly good at this game to the curb just so that I can see more content" (paraphrasing here).

"Bring the player, not the class".  What that says is, "scrubs need not apply".  What 'casuals' want that to say is, "cool, I don't need to force my friends (well, other than 40% of them) to play classes they don't like and I can still group with them".

There is a group of people for whom the primary fun is grouping with friends.  The secondary fun is overcoming challenging encounters.   In the previous expansion they didn't have to wait six months to be able to do the content that they paid for.  What Blizzard needs to get a handle on is that they should try harder to not create encounters that make you hate your friends.  Or, allow for encounters to be scaled by the players.

I'm definitely guilty of being biased about anything any blue poster writes.  While I recognize that I have gotten to the point that I hate the way they breath, I have no sympathy for them in this regard - they put themselves there. 

[El Gallo]

I'm pretty demanding, but there's no fucking way I expect them to come up with a way to rate an individual player's contribution to an Alterac Valley match and use that to create a SC2-like matchmaking system.  Just say the words out loud and consider how ridiculous the concept is.

[El Gallo]

It was a fairly nonsensical point, IMO.

"Raiding is the pinnacle of PVE content..."

"Nuh uh, HEROIC Raiding is"

As if "raiding" didn't include that. Still a retarded blue reply any way you slice it but the guy he responded to was certainly not setting the world afire with his laser insight.

Seems like a perfectly reasonable point to me. 
Q:Why are all the raids so fucking hard?
A:Raids are the alpha and omega of achievement!
Q:Didn't you add hardmode raids for the achievers? Why are regular mode raids so much harder too?
A: FUCK UR MOM LITTLE MAN, MY PORSCHE NEEDS A PERFORMANCE UPGRADE!!!11!

[Sheepherder]

It isn't related to what our current slapfight here is about, but it is certainly responding to a bunch of criticism elsewhere that that stuff was priced too high.

EDIT: Point being the central narrative we've set up here is "BLIZZARD GOES AHEAD WITH ALL THEIR BULLHEADED DESIGN DECISIONS AND STICKS TO THEIR GUNS WITHOUT CARING ABOUT WHAT PLAYERS THINK". Those notes run directly counter to that idea.

Not really.  The price of vendor items are immaterial when nobody really buys the stuff anyways.

[Paelos]

I'm pretty demanding, but there's no fucking way I expect them to come up with a way to rate an individual player's contribution to an Alterac Valley match and use that to create a SC2-like matchmaking system.  Just say the words out loud and consider how ridiculous the concept is.

I don't think it's that hard. You have an ridiculous amount of stats to choose from. HKs, damage, healing, deaths, caps, defense, actions, gear score, etc. It would be fairly simple to assign values subjectively to those elements are create a baseline statistical metric to match people. Hell, they admit they have such a thing in rated BGs, but they aren't willing to move it to regular bgs because then it would be too normal for the best lewts!

[Arrrgh]

AV could be done with the current dungeon finder queue pop up. Check off tank/healer/DPS when you queue for the BG. AV you'd want a least one tank, a few healers, and the rest DPS. Balance it up and start the match.

Individual ratings would be harder to implement, but as long as it screws over AFKs so that they eventually all end up facing each other across dead BGs that go on forever it would be an improvement over the current system.

[Paelos]

New GC Blog Post!

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually -- we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.

When we started these blogs, the idea was to foster developer communication to the players without some of the inherent problems of posting in forums. Some players have pointed out recently, and we totally agree, that the blogs up until now have been from a very high vantage point. We looked for topics with universal interest that would feel important and newsworthy. That has worked overall, but we also feel like we’ve lost something from when I used to be down in the metaphorical trenches talking to players in the forums.

So we’re going to try something a little different. We’re going to unleash some blogs that are much more conversational and less proclamational (that's a word now). If we deliver on this, it will hopefully feel like you’re eavesdropping on our design meetings. You won’t always learn a lot about exciting new features coming to the game, but you will (ideally) learn something about the design process itself. (When we have big, exciting news to share, or ‘State of the Game’ style blogs, we’ll still do those as well.)

But to pull off this more casual blog style, let’s establish a few ground rules:

1) No promises. I’m going to be talking about a lot of things we might do or things we could do. You shouldn’t interpret this brainstorming as patch notes. Our creative process is insanely iterative. We might pitch dozens of ideas before we find one we like. That can be really exhausting if you’re not used to it. If you’re more interested in final decisions and not idea churn, then this style of blog won’t be for you.

2) Don’t read too much between the lines. I’m going to point out a lot of design flaws in our game. “Oh no! Goatcaller admitted WoW was deeply flawed! It’s shark-jumping time!” Look, Blizzard is very critical about our own designs. There is virtually nothing in World of Warcraft that could not be improved. That has always been the case and will continue to be the case. Just because I’m going to be sharing that more frankly with you doesn’t mean that the game now has more cracks in its foundation than it ever did. There is an old saying (misattributed, from what I understand, to Otto Bismarck) that laws are like sausages; it is best not seeing them being made. My old friend and mentor Bruce Shelley used to apply the same maxim to game design.

3) No complaints about the topic. If we didn’t have an interesting discussion about a topic recently, e.g. shaman mechanics, I’m not going to invent one. That doesn’t mean that the class is perfect, or that we don’t love shaman players, or that the shaman class has no direction, or that the class design is frozen in carbonite. I’m not going to keep hash marks next to every class and spec to make sure I’ve covered their "Very Important Issues" lately in a blog. World of Warcraft design being what it is, we’ll probably eventually get around to talking about everyone on here, but it may take weeks or months or years. My team is responsible for areas of the game including classes, items, encounters, trade skills, achievements, combat, and UI, so my blogs will probably stick to those topics.

Okay, all that preamble is out of the way now. I’ll probably refer back to it sometimes, if we have some players stomping all over the ground rules.

One topic we’ve been discussing lately is the role of Hit and Expertise on tank gear (or more precisely, plate tanking gear). The conventional wisdom is that Hit and Expertise are threat stats, and you may need to swap them out with some of your mitigation stats depending on the situation. Realistically, unless you severely overgear the content, we don’t think that is actually true. Tanks almost always worry about survival first and foremost, which totally makes sense, and are willing to trade off threat stats for better mitigation in almost all situations. It’s much harder to progress if the tank explodes than it is if the cat occasionally pulls aggro. (It’s not quite that simple, but I’m going to gloss over details and exceptions since I spent so much text on the preamble up above).

Once upon a time, taunts could miss, and so Hit was marginally more interesting than it is today. Once upon a time, having a boss parry your attacks could speed up its swing timer, which turned Expertise into a (often weak) survival stat. Boss parries felt very random though, both in the sense that sometimes the tank would suddenly take much more damage than anticipated and there was no easy way to know which bosses had parry speed up. (Today, you can assume none of them do.) Until recently, interrupts could miss, but asking a tank to stack a bunch of Hit just for those few opportunities when they were probably going to hit anyway but disaster would occur if they did not felt crummy too.

The problem is that there aren’t a lot of stats that are interesting to tanks. Stamina and Armor are great, but their stat budget is often in lockstep with item level. (It would be interesting to consider if we could make that not the case once again, but that’s the topic for another blog.) We got rid of Defense as a stat that tanks needed to worry about. We have managed to make Mastery pretty good to excellent for tanks, so that’s at least one stat they like to see. Dodge and (if you’re a plate-wearer) Parry are good, and slightly interesting because of talents like Hold the Line. But beyond that, it starts to go downhill. Sure Haste and Crit can sometimes be fun, but really they often aren’t worth the trade off. That leaves us with Hit and Expertise. We’d like to make them more interesting to tanks. But how?

One way is by turning them into defensive stats. They are defensive stats for Blood death knights, because the DK self-healing is tied into Death Strike, which can miss. It might be possible to do something similar for the other classes. Imagine if Shield Block had to actually hit the target. Presumably you raise your shield, but not high enough to intercept the incoming blow. Now hit becomes a mitigation stat for warriors as well. We might have to adjust the mitigation amount on Shield Block or give warriors a small Hit bonus so Hit capping wasn’t totally unreasonable, but you get the basic idea. You could do the same with paladins (make Holy Shield more interesting?) and druids as well (Savage Defense could proc on a hit).

Is this a good idea? We’re not sure yet. You won’t see this change in the 4.1 patch for certain. There are trade-offs to making Hit and Expertise more valuable. Gearing as a tank might be more fun for experienced players, but it also might be more challenging for less experienced players. The number of struggling tanks in your Dungeon Finder groups might go up. Some less knowledgeable players (and to be fair, this stuff doesn’t exactly explain itself on the character sheet) might stack Hit way too high at the expense of a more valuable mitigation stat, such as mastery.

It is the kind of thing we’re talking about though, and if you want to make a contribution to the tanking forums but aren’t quite sure on a topic, here is one potential possibility.

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer of World of Warcraft. He still has Buru’s Skull Fragment.

[Paelos]

Personally I like this new style of blog post. I'm not sure it really matters if they make tank itemization more complicated because the job itself isn't really that difficult in a raid scenario right now. I only really have to think when I'm marking up targets over and over again in heroics for CC.

[Merusk]

Bored designers, like bored engineers, will always find problems where previously there were none.

[Kail]

I don't think it's that hard. You have an ridiculous amount of stats to choose from. HKs, damage, healing, deaths, caps, defense, actions, gear score, etc. It would be fairly simple to assign values subjectively to those elements are create a baseline statistical metric to match people.

I can't think of a way to do this without causing a ton of problems.   If people find out what the weighting of these elements is (and you know they will), the BGs will break.  People will start playing the system rather than the BG.  Tanks standing in the middle, DPS laying down AoE on them, healers spam healing them... look, you're getting big numbers, you must be SUPER important, even if you're not actually capturing points or stopping flag carriers.  And you can say "well, base it on caps or flag returns or something" but there are always roles which are crucial to victory in certain situations yet impossible to measure, like defense.  Too few defenders and you get rolled and aren't ultimately that useful.  Too many and you're wasting people and also not that useful.  With "too few" and "too many" being HIGHLY dependent on things like where the enemy zerg is and how visible your defenders are and what your overall strategy is and all kinds of other factors which I'm not sure a computer can really gauge.

There was a post on a similar topic on the League of Legends official boards back when the game launched.   Your rating in LoL rises and falls based entirely on if you win or lose the match.  People were saying "but if I'm awesome and my team sucks, my rating shouldn't go down" and the devs said something to the effect of "there is no real way to measure how useful any particular action is (since it depends on the situation and the computer can't really judge that), and if you start rewarding useless actions, it's really going to piss off the players who are trying to win".  Which I have to agree with.  Someone farming kills on the road in AV is going to get a ton of damage, a lot of HKs, a lot of actions, etc. but are ultimately not as useful as someone who gets no kills, dies ten times, but recaps Iceblood Tower, or the guy who sits in Icewing until it burns (which is already a boring as hell role).  You could maybe just award ranking based off of wins like in LoL, but even in LoL where the teams are 5v5, it often feels like you're getting screwed by your teammates; in something like a 40v40 AV I'm not sure how much one person can really influence the outcome, no matter how skilled.

[Paelos]

I still disagree. You can weight things. You can track where kills happen in zones. You can assign all kinds of statistics in any metric. Is it easy? No, but it would be hugely effective.

[Fordel]

You make the ways to game the system also default to actually being effective in the BG too.

[Paelos]

You make the ways to game the system also default to actually being effective in the BG too.

People game the system now anyway. They run around like morons killing people on roads because they get more honor.

[Rokal]

It isn't related to what our current slapfight here is about, but it is certainly responding to a bunch of criticism elsewhere that that stuff was priced too high.

EDIT: Point being the central narrative we've set up here is "BLIZZARD GOES AHEAD WITH ALL THEIR BULLHEADED DESIGN DECISIONS AND STICKS TO THEIR GUNS WITHOUT CARING ABOUT WHAT PLAYERS THINK". Those notes run directly counter to that idea.

Not really.  The price of vendor items are immaterial when nobody really buys the stuff anyways.

The first patch note just shows "they listen to feedback". The second patch note shows this as well, but was more relevant to the discussion. Allowing players to purchase Maelstrom Crystals with Honor or Justice points makes it much easier for people to create the epic crafted items. My character is currently using 3 pieces of gear crafted with Maelstrom Crystals because there aren't better options outside of heroic raids. Once this change hits, it will again make it easier for any character to obtain more powerful gear, which will make the content easier. It is not the type of change you would see from a development team whose mantra is "tough luck scrubs".

[Fordel]

You make the ways to game the system also default to actually being effective in the BG too.

People game the system now anyway. They run around like morons killing people on roads because they get more honor.

That's what I mean, you make the most effective way to get more honor being defending the nodes or guarding the flag carrier and shit.


Instead of AFKing under the bridges at the blacksmith.

[Paelos]

The first patch note just shows "they listen to feedback". The second patch note shows this as well, but was more relevant to the discussion. Allowing players to purchase Maelstrom Crystals with Honor or Justice points makes it much easier for people to create the epic crafted items. My character is currently using 3 pieces of gear crafted with Maelstrom Crystals because there aren't better options outside of heroic raids. Once this change hits, it will again make it easier for any character to obtain more powerful gear, which will make the content easier. It is not the type of change you would see from a development team whose mantra is "tough luck scrubs".

How are you making gear with Maelstrom crystals?