Cataclysm

[Paelos]

You're assuming many people weren't getting to cap over the standard week. If you were, this sucks. If you weren't, indifferent. Caps only effect the top end. The "value" of each point is irrelevant because they aren't tradable.

[Evildrider]

I don't think this change is a big deal.  As a raider, I'm going to get more gear from boss drops then I am the vp vendor anyway.

[Miasma]

There are only seven bosses so getting your gear from them is going to be slower too.  And now you'll have to wait three weeks to buy one 2200 piece from valor.  They are most definitely trying to slow progression down to cover the fact that there is so little to do.  We'll probably be stuck with this through the rest of the year.

[Evildrider]

Yeah but you also had the loot spread out among 12 bosses.  Half the bosses didn't even drop anything worthwhile in this tier for me. 

[WindupAtheist]

New PvP ground mounts, the Vicious War Wolf (Horde) and Vicious War Steed (Alliance), will be awarded to players for completing achievements to win 75, 150, and 300 Rated Battlegrounds respectively, rather than for being in the top .5% of the ladder at the end of each season as with Arenas. This award system is to better compliment the spirit of Battlegrounds.

"What will it take to make you motherfuckers DO THESE?!"

[Rendakor]

Let me queue randomly for them and I'll do them. The draw of PVP over PVE for me is the lower logistical requirement. Hell, even allowing teams of 5 would be a step in the right direction. Also, allow us to fight cross faction (give one team illusions if you want to pretend the lorelol still matters) so queues aren't 30+ minutes.

[caladein]

Same faction RBGs should already be in (source).

I also wanted RBGs to be random matchmaking based from the off, but figuring out fair metrics would have been a hassle, especially if Blizzard hasn't kept detailed statistics so to make some kind of win shares system not a total shot in the dark.  Would have been nice though .

[Paelos]

New PvP ground mounts, the Vicious War Wolf (Horde) and Vicious War Steed (Alliance), will be awarded to players for completing achievements to win 75, 150, and 300 Rated Battlegrounds respectively, rather than for being in the top .5% of the ladder at the end of each season as with Arenas. This award system is to better compliment the spirit of Battlegrounds.

"What will it take to make you motherfuckers DO THESE?!"

"Don't you get it? These are FUN! GO HAVE FUN! Here's a pony."

[Azazel]

How much valor do you typically get from one heroic clear?

How much does a piece of decent armour cost?

[SurfD]

How much valor do you typically get from one heroic clear?

How much does a piece of decent armour cost?

Not sure exactly on the math, but if you were capable of full clearing the current tier of raid content on normal as a 25 man group (ie, all BWD / BoT / To4W / BH) that usually capped you on valor for the week (you might have needed to run maybe 1 normal heroic, but I dont think so).   Full clearing it as a 10 man group might require one ZA heroic or 2 Regular Heroics to Full Cap.

A typical piece of gear could cost between 1200 (capes, rings, trinkets) up to around 2200 for Chest / Pants Tier pieces.

[Azazel]

When/if I come back I won't be running any raids. Last time around (at the end of LK, before the Sundering) I'd run 2-4 Heroics per night for fun and profit. I'm wondering how many typical heroics it'd take to hit their weekly cap. I have to say, taking 3 weeks to get a piece of armour due to points capping doesn't exactly fill me with a burning desire to come back.

[apocrypha]

For non-raiders the weekly VP cap isn't changing. It's still 980 a week. You get 140 VP for a ZA/ZG clear and 70 VP for any other heroic dungeon clear. You only get VP rewards for 7 of each dungeon type per week, so if you only do non-troll heroics then you'll only get 490 VP/week.

The only people this current change will affect is people who were clearing raids each week.

Also, the current VP gear (359 iLvl) is moving to JP vendors with 4.2 and you can get JPs a lot faster. You can only have 4000 JPs maximum at one time but I don't think there's a weekly cap on acquisition, someone please correct me if that's wrong.

[caladein]

Yes, Justice/Honor have an overall cap but no weekly cap.  Valor/Conquest do not have an overall cap but do have a weekly cap.

[Merusk]

When/if I come back I won't be running any raids. Last time around (at the end of LK, before the Sundering) I'd run 2-4 Heroics per night for fun and profit. I'm wondering how many typical heroics it'd take to hit their weekly cap. I have to say, taking 3 weeks to get a piece of armour due to points capping doesn't exactly fill me with a burning desire to come back.

Remember that VP are for current-tier pieces of armor.   If all you ran were Heroics you always had a VP cap, even in WOTLK. You'd only get Vp/Badges for the first random heroic you'd run that day and that meant you were 'capped' at 25 badges a week at a time that armor cost 63 badges, so it still took non-raiders ~3 weeks to get a piece of current-tier gear.

Where a cap would suck is on Justice points for 2nd tier gear.  There isn't a cap there.

Also, there *is* a nice change from WOTLK in that the top-tier was changed so you have to run 7 dungeons a week, not one every day.  So if you only have time to play 3 days a week, you can run all 7 dungeons in those 3 days and still get as many points as someone running one every day.

[Shrike]

How much valor do you typically get from one heroic clear?

How much does a piece of decent armour cost?

Enough that after less than two months of raiding, I"m looking at ways to get rid of VP--like hawking BoE boots on the AH every week. Or every other. Of course, I ran a LOT of heroics, but after I had the T11 I wanted and some select off pieces, I was basically turning VP into gold.

I'm not really seeing a problem with the new caps and I'm strictly 10man at this point. I rarely hit the VP cap anyway, and frankly couldn't care less. I got enough.

[Ingmar]

When/if I come back I won't be running any raids. Last time around (at the end of LK, before the Sundering) I'd run 2-4 Heroics per night for fun and profit. I'm wondering how many typical heroics it'd take to hit their weekly cap. I have to say, taking 3 weeks to get a piece of armour due to points capping doesn't exactly fill me with a burning desire to come back.

You actually get more out of doing multiple heroics in one night now than you did in the LK model, don't worry. The valor point reward is calcluated off a weekly cap rather than a once-per-day-only thing, so say if you only logged in once that week you're getting 2-4 times the reward in the 'better' points than you would otherwise. You'll also still pile up justice points at the same rate regardless, and those can be turned into honor, crafting mats, heirlooms, etc., once you already have all the gear you need from those.

Basically the system is overall better than it used to be for everyone but full-clear raiders.

[Azazel]

KK thanks for explaining, guys

[Merusk]

Those authenticator changes look to have had some other changes on the back end, too.  I now get this message when zoning from Org to TH:

"You have been disconnected from Battle.net"  "you are now connected to battle.net"   I'd never seen that before today.

[apocrypha]

I've been getting that for a couple of months, don't think it's related to the authenticator changes. Also when RealID friends get a d/c I always see them disappear from battle.net 10-20 seconds before they disappear in-game.

[caladein]

Yeah, that's just something that comes up every once in a while.  Been happening since they added in RealID.

[apocrypha]

I seem to have got myself into a strange situation with guilds and raids...

The guild that most of my characters is in is an ancient friends & family guild with 4 active members and 4 rarely-active ones. We don't raid as a guild. So the 3 of us that wanted to raid all joined another guild with 1 character each and are now raiding twice a week with them.

That guild is currently stuck on Nef and the guild leader is insistent that we persevere, extending the lockout each week, until we down him. This is obviously taking a toll on people and we're all getting bored of it. So, some of us have started not attending the Nef wipefests and helping out with some other guilds raids when they're missing a person or two, with alts of ours (so our cranky obsessive guild leader doesn't bitch at us for not being overjoyed at the idea of another 15 wipes on Nef).

Some of these other alt-runs have been really fun, made good progress and have had a lot of nice people in them that I've gotten on with.

So I now have raid invites in my calendars, on various alts, from 4 different guilds. 

I can't leave the original guild with any more characters, we really want to keep it alive and for it to be a safe haven for the semi-active members who are friends/family/partners. I can't pull my priest out of the raiding guild we joined since the other 2 friends who joined it with me aren't classes that are needed by any of the other guilds that are trying to recruit me. I *can't* raid more then 2-3 nights a week, it's just too much. But I don't think I can face another 2 weeks of Nef wipes and bitching from people on vent.

I think what I'm going to have to do is try and initiate a discussion about how a) banging our heads on a brick wall with Nef is a bad idea and how we might actually progress further if we gear the raid up a bit more by farming earlier bosses and b) how being stressy and blaming people on vent for Nef failures is driving us away.

[Ingmar]

Point a) seems incredibly obvious and I would hope the raid leader will listen to you on that.

[Azuredream]

The guild I was with used to extend the lockout every so often if we felt we were close but eventually we realized that nobody liked doing that so we just stopped extending it ever under any circumstances. Not only is it more fun than hoping for a perfect storm attempt you also get some more upgrades with which you can use against the boss that was cockblocking you. Hopefully your GL will see sense. If it's one of those wannabe-hardcore GLs, then god help you.

[apocrypha]

She's definitely not hardcore wannabe - one of the reasons we were attracted to this particular guild was their proclamation of being family-friendly and having a policy of real life always coming before wow.

I think one of the problems is that she's the main tank and specifically wants a trinket from Nef... and actually said once, before one of the pulls "trinket for MT ofc"... which was met with a kind of stunned silence (and then a wipe, lol), and hasn't been repeated since!

But yeah, if we don't down him tonight I'll start the discussion and do everything I can to keep it a friendly discussion. Cos I'm good at that, Mr Diplomacy me. </green text>

[Rendakor]

Well in 2 weeks Nef (and the rest of the current raid content) is getting a 20% nerf and you guys should be able to down him, so the situation can't go on for much longer. 

[apocrypha]

Thanks fuck for that. 

[Miasma]

Yeah I just would stick with the guild on nef, after 4.2 it will be much easier.  The extensions could be more of a pride thing than the trinket, she probably wants to get it done before the nerfs hit.  The 20% nerf could almost be considered a 40% nerf since the health pools are being reduced by 20% and the damage output is reduced by 20%.

I think it will be interesting to see if most guilds switch to two healing t11 instead of using three.  I imagine t12 will still need three healers.

[Paelos]

There's released another post about how you can get new shiney awesome mounts if you do those rated battlegrounds. We already knew about the desperation to get people to do rated BGs, but I think the language of the post was extremely funny.

In order to best accommodate players under the unique play style of Rated Battlegrounds, we’ll be offering all-new PvP ground mounts -- the Vicious War Wolf (Horde) or Vicious War Steed (Alliance) -- in a unique way. If you want to sit your knickers on these sweet new rides come patch 4.2, Rage of the Firelands, you must earn achievements for winning either 75, 150, or 300 Rated Battlegrounds.

"Unique" is Blizzard's new buzz word for "shitty." Also, since when is grinding wins a unique way of rewarding people?

[Ingmar]

What they mean by the latter 'unique' is 'only from rated BGs.'

[apocrypha]

Raid leader listened to reason, I think she was getting tired of it too. We did a fresh run of BoT and downed 3 bosses and had a really fun night in the end. I suck, really REALLY hard at avoiding the big pink deep breath on V&T however  

[Paelos]

What they mean by the latter 'unique' is 'only from rated BGs.'

That's still not unique, even if that is the case.

[Ingmar]

Welcome to marketing-speak!

It sure is better hearing this stuff than what GC actually thinks, am I rite? 

[Paelos]

Anything that keeps GC from speaking to the public can only be good for society at large.

[SurfD]

I think one of the problems is that she's the main tank and specifically wants a trinket from Nef... and actually said once, before one of the pulls "trinket for MT ofc"... which was met with a kind of stunned silence (and then a wipe, lol), and hasn't been repeated since!

Wait, what?

Is she a druid? Cause I cant possibly think of any reason why a tank (of any sort) would want the Prestors, and even for a Druid it is pretty damn sub optimal.  Essence of the Cyclone off of Halfus would be a better trinket for a druid tank (and easier to get too), since the Haste Proc off of Prestor's is almost completely useless to a Druid tank (haste is currently the worst stat for feral tanks, even ranking under Hit / Expertise).  Hell, Heroic Tia's Grace (from 5 man Lost City) is a superior trinket to either, since it gives more total Agility, and has Mastery which can be reforged to dodge.

[Ingmar]

Yeah that is a little baffling.