f13.net

I can't spoiler stuff so I won't post the whole thing.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/13/7536073945-ptr-patch-308-notes.html

My Favorite:

I am so grinding gnome rep to get a mechanostrider.

As a shaman, I hope the nerf on water shield and LHW isn't too extreme. I rely on LHW a lot, which might explain why I haven't had mana issues that other shaman report.

That mining change is great in the sense that they finally made it equal to herbalism and skinning with the 1 hit and done, it even has the added benefit of preventing people from coming up and stealing the rest of your node after you've already got a hit in.  I'm just afraid it's gonna increase the amount of ore that can hit the market and drive the price down even more than it is now with the rapid drop in prices that seem to be happening on my server and many others.  :heartbreak:

Wait we taller folks can mount Mechanostriders now? Awesome.
I've got "The Ambassador" title already on my pally. Mechanostrider here I come.

Num - Gnomer rep was a living pain in the ass.  I finally got it by repgrinding Runecloth from my AD dungeon repgrinding because all the quests and other methods weren't working for shit, even with the human Diplomacy bonus.

Love the mining change too. About fucking time.

No more druid quest to get aquaform!  Talk about timing!

I do like the ability to ride all race mounts, my druid is getting a raptor and a skeletal knight for fun!

I do wonder what the reduction of quests for loremaster is, I'm *almost* there and if they reduce it, I may just be there ;-)

I'm guessing you'll still have to grind faction to get the other race mounts. Though personally, I'd be delighted if they'd remove that too.

No more quest for aquaform? Shit! I did that on my new one only a couple of weeks ago.

Mining change is definitely great.

The instant tapping is potentially very good as well.  As a 'lock, I'd throw a couple of dots then some huntardloladintwatrogue would come and steal the mob before it had properly tapped to me which was very annoying.  Admittedly, this is day one of WoTLK's release in the area around the starter zones and it's rarely a problem otherwise. There's probably going to be someway this will annoy and inconvenience players but for now, I like this change.

More graveyards? I got ganked at the southern end of shimmering flats 1k needles last night - the GY is by the great lift.  I welcome this change heartily.

Also, Warlock summoning change? Thank you.

Well, they would have gotten the same amount of ore whether they hit it once or multiple times. Assuming Blizz doesn't change the drop rate from mining.

I think the price drops were inevitable. More and more people are hitting 80 and that's going to change both the amount of ore mined and the demand for it.

Don't think they did.  Nobody would ever ride kodos if they did...  My Ambassador is just fine though so no worries for me ;-)

Thank god ore is cheaper and easier to get in WotLK. I was tired of playing "hunt the Khorium" or battling over shitty adamantite nodes.

Interesting for me:

"There are now three ranks in Wintergrasp: Recruit, Corporal, and First Lieutenant."
Are they perhaps finally letting us use those alleged flying siege weapons?

"Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55."
That's good news.  Now, if someone's got a nice guild on another server, I can just roll a DK and not have to grind through the Barrens again or eat a $15 transfer fee.

Yeah, but there's already so many fucking Death Knights. Seems like they should just allow you to do that with any class.

But then they might as well board up Azeroth.

Are you mining Titanium yet?

I don't know, I see a lot druids and pallies roaming around these days. Sure DKs are out there in force, but in my raids I have 5 pallies and 4 druids signing up as the two top classes, with DK's tied at 3 with almost everyone else. Maybe people aren't raiding a ton with them, or they are using them as solo/boredom toons rather than mains.

On my server, it's nothing but DKs as far as the eye can see.  Druids are few and far between, while paladins are pretty common.  The rest seem to be around, but nowhere near as much as the DKs.

Warlocks are the most endangered species as far as I can tell, but we've never had a lot of them anyway.

I second that. On Tich they are not totally overwhelming but there are a LOT of them. I rolled one and got to 80 cause it was fun as all hell, but there are just so many. I started leveling my Ret pally, which is awesome, cause I always wanted to play Ret, and now its really good.

I would say just from what I see around Dalaran the population is in this order:

-DK
-Pally
-Druid
-Everyone else
-Warlock

Being a pvp server that makes sense.

Its been a couple years for me.  Did Warlocks finally get pvp nerfed into oblivion like they so richly deserved?  Fuck you, Mr. Fear-and-dot-me-to-death-before-I-can-hit-one-button. 

Yeah, Warlocks are in a sorry state at the moment.

According to census, (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php) most popular are Death Knights (though only by about 5% now) followed by Hunters.  Then Paladins, Warriors, Mages, and Druids.

Weirdly, looks like Shamans are the least played class.

Totems are annoying. Incredibly useful and can usually guarantee you a raid slot, but still, very annoying.

I quit my shaman for a DK.  Shamans are incredibly annoying to play and all anyone wants you to do is heal. Enhance felt extremely weak in Northrend, and if I want to PEW PEW I have my druid. 

Easy class to catch on to if you're not terribly enamored with what you're playing currently. Plus, melee that isn't squishy is fun.

I can't say I've had that experience at all (http://wowwebstats.com/vf1plcy13jdde?s=bosses).  We have 2 resto shaman and we don't want them to heal in raids, we'd prefer they do anything else (Why bring a Shaman when you have Circle of Healing, Regrowth/WildGrowth/Lifebloom and Holy Light available?).  Sometimes my spirit wolves outheal the resto shaman over the course of a boss fight. :ye_gods:

Of course, I also found Enhancement to be invincible for 45 seconds out of every 3 minutes while questing in Northrend, thanks Feral Spirit.  Makes completing most group quests a piece of cake, something I haven't been able to duplicate on my DK - he just takes too much damage without any way to recover health.  I haven't PvPd as Enhance though, no illusions about that.  Through the beta all varieties of Shaman were ineffective and unfun, pushing a wide perception that the class is now crap.

Enhance? Weak in Northrend? You're doing something wrong. I've been an elite soloing machine since I hit the beach at BT.

You can keep the DKs, though. I want to like mine, but every time I play her, I just end up logging off in frustration in about an hour. DKs  are squishy when compared to prot warriors or paladins. And that's from a heavy frost DK. Things always start off well (they do good damage and all...), but I always end up in a situation that my warrior and paladin would have bulled through, but my DK faceplants.

DKs are hardly squishy. Either you're terribly undergared, or are doing something wrong.

I've comfortably MT'd everything in the game with both unholy and frost. As long as you're smart about keeping your cooldowns always running, you should have zero issues in the tanking department. Of course, knowing when to follow a parry with Icebound Fort. takes a certain amount of skill beyond reactively hitting last stand.

Never said I had any problems playing it or soloing.  I've solo'd 3 man elites with greater ease than my DK through most of Dragonblight. Still felt weak.  Just a feeling though, I don't have DPS reports or anything to prove my case. Heh. It would help if I could loosen my deathgrip on my old epics and take the higher stam quest greens so I don't end up healing myself so damn much after fights.  And yes, feral spirit is ridiculous for soloing.

I've played blood and unholy DKs.  Bloods are nigh indestructible. Blood can heal themselves for 20% health every 30 seconds untop of all the other dumb DK tricks (death strike, blood worms & mark of blood (blood line), and icebound fortitude).   Unholy is fun but doesn't have the staying power v. tougher elites.  Unholy is just sick AE and likely my spec at 80 once I'll be sufficient on my own with just death strike.  And eh, with frost you can kite. 

Of course, it could just be personal preference.  :why_so_serious:  

I gave my hunter and mage up for a DK.  Now at 80, 540def, 26k hps self buffed.  Frost tank. 

The only quest I needed to group for in my whole leveling experience was the Icecrown quest that has you killing 5 of the Horror liches near Icecrown citadel.  Those things were simply too rough for me, although had I respeced unholy I could have likely soloed them as well. 

I'm anything but squishy.  I need more stamina, which will come as my 25man gear starts falling into place.  But I've tanked all four horde bosses in the cities, 10/25man Archavon, a good portion of 25man Naxx.  Never has my gear been an issue, only skill/experience with the fights. 

Overall, this has been a wonderful change... tanking is a LOT easier than dps. 

Of course my own anecdotal experience contradicts your own, where our priest had so little to do one raid because the Shaman was all over everything, he started to smite to keep busy.  :oh_i_see:


I think Rasix was more referring to the general stigma all hybrid's get. "If you can heal, you will heal, or else!"

Huh?  You're doing something wrong then.  There were exactly two quests I wasn't able to solo in Northrend.  The Amphitheater of Anguish, and that pitfighting event at Conquest Hold.  And I soloed the first two rounds of the Amphitheater of Anguish at 76.  Everything else, including the various and sundry elite group quests in Dragonblight (including the hard one, the frost wyrm Sarathstra) was soloable - while the quest was yellow in my log.

Cycle Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield.  Solo elites in Frost Presence - the extra damage and piddly healing does not make up for the increased survivability.  Weave in death strikes as needed, but if you have any healing issues whatsoever, forego scourge strikes entirely in favor of death strikes.  Things will take longer to kill, but you will NEVER DIE as long as you've got some decent leveling tank gear.  Ghoul provides some nice added DPS except on AE fights - but don't be afraid to sacrifice him if you take some spike damage to heal up.

I suppose the comparison was unfair.  Yes, I am doing it wrong.  I'm spec'd mostly frost and I'm making gear selections based on physical appearance.  And giving the group quests a go the moment I'm eligible.  Glyph of Death Strike + having Death Strike on the hotbar might make things easier, specing deeper into Unholy for bone armor and a 3rd disease, etc.  I am playing my DK like the alt that it is.


Prior to 3.0 I was Resto because it was valuable and irreplacable.  Post 3.0 there are always too many healers around who can do the same things, only better.  Could you imagine taking 9 healers for a fight in Naxx?  We're talking about 3 healing Naxx now - some guilds are already taking shots at speed records with a mix of solo and duo healers.  Those 1 and 2 healer attempts don't contain a Shaman. 

...

I wasn't able to solo the rune giants in HF, but I didn't have ANY tank gear at the time as it was all in the bank.  Even as unholy my experience has been "Yeah I can kill that, let's see if anyone needs help" instead of "fuck I need a group for this."  My prot pally was the same way, but killed shit a lot slower.

My Enh Shaman is 4th in my line of alts, but I do enjoy playing him.  I really don't see the "weak" play comment either.  While he does take more damage than my pally ever does, he kills mighty quick.  Plus, all of the talents he has for keeping mana topped off leaves me to never have to stop.  Finally, that other talent (EDIT: Maelstrom Weapon) allows me to build up to an instant heal, chain heal, lightening, chain lightening, which I can do during battle or after.  He's just a killing machine that never has to stop.  That's before I even drop totems, which I don't do very often solo.  Yes, totems are a pain.

If I do drop totems?  Crazy burst DPS.  I just get tired of constantly picking them up and putting them down when I move every 30 yards.  It would be nice if you could preassign 4 totems to one summoning that gets cast all at once.

This guy reminds me of the rogue in my guild that has full epic gear and still can't manage to trump 1600 dps.

That's a pretty big nerf for my holy paladin.  I use that a lot.

Resto shaman are nuts right now, as far as healing throughput goes. They're also the only AE heal not looking to get murdered in upcoming patches.

That said, enhance has survival issues and elemental has generic issues (though it's actually pretty good in pvp, fuck the haters..) and totems are a pain in the fucking ass.

Oh, and getting used to imp water shield is Hard. Great talent, but I had to setup an alert to yell at me if water shield is down, because my brain was too used to "I'm not getting hit by anything, why would water shield be down!"

I hated riptide when I first got it, the mana cost is insanity. Then I figured out that riptide's purpose in life is tidal waves and was happy.

I'm currently using 2 epic Titansteel items I crafted, and I've made Titanium Rods and other stuff for a lot of my guildies. Just trying to mine Saronite I've found more than enough Titanium.

The same can definitely not be said about Khorium. That shit sucked.

This is pretty rad - the only downside is no more multiple skillups off the same node.  I always figured that was the tradeoff.

The instaclick WG orb really fucks over defense of that keep room. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.

Huh. I've found titanium to be pretty rare. Then again, I still don't have an epic flyer, which would help when I'm out gathering.

You never could.

I think he's referring to the mechanic that allowed multiple people to hit the same node and each get one skillup.

No, i could have sworn I had gotten more than 1 skill-up point off a node, but I guess I'm high.

Yeah it's meant to be a ret nerf I think,  but, uh. Whoops.  Holy pallies are so fucked, I feel for them.

Doesn't do well for prot either.  A pally tank without mana isn't very effective and tends to cause wipes.

Pally tanks don't use JOW unless soloing and doing it wrong.  Blessing of Sanc and - if you need it - seal of wisdom are more than enough.  When tanking for realz you also have the piddly regen off of Spiritual attunement.

Are you saying you don't see prot pally's judging anything?

Seal of wisdom is enough, but only just. Prot pallies simply spend a lot of time drinking or slamming pots. Just the way it is.

The only thing I can think why anyone would consider enhance "to feel weak" in Northrend is the armor degradation and an increased need to heal up after a fight. I did go from about 46% mitigation to what is now around 36% with my level 80 gear. Not too thrilled about that, but it'll go up as I move from T7 to T8 and on. As for the ability to do what I damned well pleased in Northrend, well, that's better than ever. I can solo lvl80 elites, what more do you want?

I still consider DKs squishier than their warrior or paladin counterparts. I don't like seeing them as instance tanks in groups. For my specific DK, I think I'm just not quite tuned into the class. Maybe a UI issue. I have to think too much about what I'm doing, which slows my reactions, a problem I don't have with my warrior or paladin. More time in the saddle, I guess. Also, I"m going back to unholy. I like frost, but unholy seems a bit more suited to my playstyle.

I find the phase after the doors go down to be the most annoying part of WG and where the game tends to lag out pretty hard with everyone clustering in one spot (taking the entire server with it). I believe that was a conscious decision to put more of the defense on the walls and courtyard (where the fight is more fun) and speed the WG game along if the doors go down. Thumbs up to this change.

No, just not wisdom. I was always judging light myself because I try to keep at least 4 mobs on me.  All the dodges,  Parrys and Blocks were more than enough to keep me mana'd up, but there was a definite need to keep healthy.


At the moment they are, which is why Frost Presence is getting its buffs.  They're still killing machines solo and able to take on normal dungeons without a problem, and only have a few troubles in heroics - in my experience.  I can't speak for tanking raid stuff, as the only one I've tanked is Archavon and he's a wuss.

I just meant that with the change there will be a nice increase in ore/time for all miners.  Before this patch if you go mining for 30 min. for example you are slowed down quite a bit by the time it takes you to harvest each node.  Normal nodes with 2-4 taps at several seconds each hit, Rich nodes with 5-7 taps.  I mean on a rich node you literally spend 15-20+ seconds just harvesting it, when the patch hits that will all be in 1 hit taking 1 cast.

I'd be shocked if there wasn't an increase in ore hitting the market because now each miner will be able to gather more ore in the time they spend gathering, unless node respawn times become a limiting factor, but I'm skeptical that will happen since the respawn seems to be quite quick for Northrend ore from what I've seen so far.

The difference between base and max mana for ret/prot pallies isn't very big anyway. The people thare are actually nerfed by this change are the ranged dpsers.

The funny(?) thing is, there is at least one raid encounter where a DK is going to be worse at tanking it after this change - Anub'rekhan. The easy way to do him is have a DK tank him and pop icebound fortitude every time he does his locust swarm, and just heal through it, because icebound fortitude only has a 1 minute cooldown. Now that IBF is going to be worse DR, that is going to be harder. Probably still doable that way, but it will definitely stress the healers more. As we gear up I guess it won't be a problem, but we're finally just now starting actual raiding.

I'm not into the 25-man raid stuff yet, but I've tanked Patchwerk's hateful strikes on 10-man so far, as well as main and off-tanking most of Naxx (somehow, we're having trouble with Grobbulus, I think we need more DPS cause we can survive for a good 7-8 minutes yet he doesn't die by then) and the healers said they did not have much trouble keeping me up, although they had to watch for when my cooldowns were off to apply additional healing.  The smoothing out of that damage in the next patch should be helpful, but either way it's really just something that healers had to get used to.  Healers that can adapt well say they don't have a problem healing me, although it takes a different way of going about it than other classes.

"Reduced the spell power on the Titansteel Guardian to bring it in line with its item level. "

God dammit. I bought the stupid mace because it had great stats. This really pisses me off.

They're nerfing the titansteel helmet too.

The DPS one only. The other two titansteel helmets are net improving. I believe the spellpower reduction on the guardian still leaves it a bit ahead of similar weapons in spellpower at least?

Judge of Wisdom is having its percentage adjusted accordingly to keep a similar amount of return for the classes that actually have mana pools, last I read.


IE: Instead of 1% Total Mana return, it would be something like 3-4% base return. Roughly the same amount for casters with actual mana pools and a increase for the specs that use only base pools (ret/prot etc)



It is a nerf in the sense that when everyone is raiding Ice Crown and has 4k Intellect, it won't scale like it would currently.


-edit- how u engrish

Occassionally you would get a "double yoke" node where either two nodes had spawned on top of each other or on spawns as you clear the other one.  But this has only happened to me a handful of times since release.

The only place that I noticed that happening with any frequency is copper nodes in Dun Morogh, it seemed to happen constantly there - but I haven't mined any copper since the start of TBC so maybe they fixed it.

I suspect you'd only get more supply if the nodes spawned faster.  I'd be flabbergasted if the bottle-neck in ore supply was 20 seconds harvesting :P

That might explain it - I'm a dwarf lover  :grin:

Careful, I hear the ladies flatten steel with their thighs!

I've heard if you wait like 5 minutes between gathers you can get more than one skill hit. Never had the patience to test it though.

It happened to me once in Elwynn Forest years ago when I got ganked by kobolds while mining. Got killed, rezzed, node was still there. Mined it again and got another skillup. Not really exploitable though I dont think, as nodes in NR don't generally last 5 minutes on my server.

You can still do that, you just don't loot. Works for Herby.

2H Tanking Weapons have been taken out of this patch according to a new Blue post.

What's the motivation for this?  To get the .01% of DKs that are actually decent players who might like to tank to drop the class?

If this is the case, I'm fine with it.  My holy pally has around 20k mana when all buffed up in a raid, so it impacts him more than most I expect.  However, that would certainly be an actual boost to prot and ret pally's instead of what most people thought.  When I put my tank or melee gear on, my mana drops to something like 5k or lower from an unbuffed 17k (healing gear.)

Because you don't need them to tank.  Especially with the new runeforge, which is only to be used if you're under def cap.  Def cap is initially hard to get to, but once you finally hit it you'll never go back under it.  Just gem/enchant as necessary. 

Its supposed to drop from 490 to 457.

That puts it barely under ilvl 213 casting maces (they all have 461 spellpower)

So yeah, that keeps it ahead. Normal ilvl 200 gear is at 408 spellpower.

DK's are fine, they still get +25 DEF rune enchant.  Thats 25 DEF not defense rating.  That's huge.  They are better off getting a 2h'er with exp/stam/str anyway.

Don't forget +hit, either.  DK tanks prioritize:


Get to 540 def first.  Then concentrate on 2-6 as you can.  7-10 should only be added if they are on a good piece of gear that has 1-6 already on it.  That's about it.  Use mods Equip Compare and Rating Buster to figure out how much of an upgrade that gear really is. 

DEF may have a higher priority since it lends itself to the mitigation levels of IBF.  I'm not going to pretend to know the math and limits of the DEF diminishing returns.

In other words: "We don't want to force DKs to use one weapon"
*forces DKs to gem every slot +def*

I'm sad about the weapons being gone simply because they were the same models as the DK starting 'noob' weapons, and those weapons were cool looking!

Yeah, that is the big minus for me too.

Apparently with the tanking rune it's relatively easy to hit 540 without gemming for def at all.  As for weapons, is it too much to ask for a 2h sword or axe version of the Titansteel Destroyer?

I am forever baffled as to why Blizzard doesn't implement a line of 2h tanking maces suitable for druids and DKs.

Also some 2h spellpower maces for druids, shamen and paladins.

Expect the 2h maces in Ulduar+. The feral weapons were still deliberately low 'real' dps when all the current itemization was done.

Oh God fucking dammit. ><

I can understand Shaman being at the bottom - if imp Ghostwolf had the druid mechanics like it did in beta they'd a hell of a lot better - the earth totems are all messed up (no seriously, do people actually use stoneclaw - it's never been on my bar and I was a shaman main in vanilla abd BC).

on a plus side, the tapped when aggro is a godsend.

Stoneclaw is fine for solo pve, especially with the stun mechanic now. Not much use otherwise though.

Stoneclaw is, supposedly, a PvP totem. The issue is the totems you'd most want to protect with stoneclaw are earth totems...

Blizz needs to really rethink totems and their effects. Other than that, shaman are OK in PvE. PvP now...well...not so good.

It's extremely fun watching a rogue in 2v2 try to DPS down a stoneclaw totem.  :awesome_for_real:


I wish I was making this up.

I used stoneclaw when leveling to keep adds occupied for a bit. It's far FAR better after it's hp/armor was reworked and the stun was added. I always thought getting someone stunned with that in pvp should be an achievement.

Earth's only real issue is the lack of a castery totem, like fire lacks a melee totem. Those are the parts of shaman stacking that get held up. SoE and what, stoneskin? Flametongue/wrath and... searing?

Are they ever putting this thing out? It's not leaving me feeling good about the chances of their next content push being out before April.

Are you really asking when Blizzard will release something already?

I was going ask the same thing.  I'm glad Paelos did it first.  It saves me the hurt feelings I would have had if I was the one Kildorn answered in that mocking tone of his. 

I'm not mocking, I'm bitter and jaded about the 2035 tenative release date of Diablo 3.

There, there. 

Kildy pretends to be all jaded and cynical, but he's really a big softy on the inside.  Like a Lindor Ball.

Come plaaaaay with us nevermore!

You know you want my big softy.

... wait.  :ye_gods:

Aww.  Most people here pretend to be all jaded and cynical but are really jaded and cynical on the inside.  Like a Klein bottle.

I'm cynical and jaded, not the other way around.

Well 2 weeks of "maybe this week" have come and gone already. If it's not here by Tuesday, I'm giving up any hope we'll see Ulduar before summer. I guess the one takeaway from this is that it's mostly a balance patch, so the delay is coming from tweaking with balance rather than any real content load.

My guild is probably just advancing slowly, but I'm ok with summer for Ulduar.  That'll give us more time to fail to get Malygos to phase 2.    :awesome_for_real:

Just saw that Blizzard added another PVE server today and they're about to add another RP-PVE server.

The game is over 4 fucking years old, there are queues everywhere and they are still adding servers. Redonkulous.

The latency fixes in 3.0.8 better be amazing or I imagine they will be adding even more servers and offering more free transfers.  My server wasn't in the recent batch of free transfers but it is pretty packed almost every night and all instances are lagged out so bad your lucky if only half your raid disconnects during a boss fight.

Alleria was just part of the first round of transfers and the resident uberguild, Premonition, finally left the server figuring the new one wouldn't fill-up and wouldn't have the queues and latency. Good call.  They're the remnants of the old #3 us guild, so hopefully this means we'll stop having every asshat in the world transferring to our server to try and join them.   Our queue is still 800+ after 8pm est at this point.

I liked my DK initially.  It was pretty easy to faceroll in 5-mans to top dps (usually by a large margin) and in raids she's usually 2 or 3 behind our BM hunter.  But tbh I really wanted to tank and most guilds only want them as dps.  That and there's always way too many generic DPS lining up for a raid spot or group.

Keep working on the tank gear. They're getting a boost in the patch as Blizz realized they need to be more like druids with the lack of a shield and the nerf to IBF.. which was a silly thing anyway. It's less of an 'oh shit' button and more of a "this is the only way I can live" button right now.

I have the problem now of too many people wanting to tank in the raid. It's quite amusing how much it's switched in one xpac.

I don't mind others wanting to tank, but honestly, as a prot tank, without lots of things hitting me I'm totally rage starved.  The rage mechanic makes doing anything other than tanking as prot quite a silly prospect.  I swear, I was wandering into acid pools and noxious clouds just to get it started.

I didn't mean to say that I ran into a lot of people thinking DKs couldn't tank, only that most guilds don't need anymore tanks.

It's fine to have a surplus, as long as they are DK's and Druids. Even in their tank specs, they can put out respectable DPS. The two Prot tanks, much less so.

Yeah the main thing is they need to understand that when there's a glut on a given night they're the ones who need to dps a given fight. The priority list for who switches first is along the lines of:

druid > DK > warrior > pally

Pretty much if you have a protection paladin in your raid, and you do a boss fight that requires only one tank period, you have the prot pally do it because he's the most useless if not tanking. Until dual specs, anyway.

Oops. Wrong thread.

So this patch is today, right?  Right?  Hey!  Answer me, you!

I'm downloading it right now.

Oh good and it's about time.  I hate Blizzard.  They're a bunch of bums.

Darn, now I have to login today.

How convenient, since I just restarted on a TBC 10 day trial after almost four years.  It's like a whole new game!

What makes this especially amusing to me is when I quit all that time ago, I vowed I would never sub again until Blizzard got off their asses and made Entangling Roots work indoors and tie feral damage to actual equipped weapon DPS.  Well, I've been able to use Roots indoors and in this patch the notes say they're finally linking weapon DPS to feral form damage.  Ha!  I OUTLASTED YOU, BLIZZARD!  :grin:

Inc: Lolret.

Crap, so are we taking bets on how long the patcher will take today?

I knew I should have told our raid leader scheduling a 25-man run tonight was a mistake.

Took me like 10 minutes total before work.  It's like a 54MB.

Somebody spoiler-tag the final patch notes.

Why do you say that?

Constantly OOM after the patch?

Well, two things.

PvE: Several classes are getting PvE DPS buffs, leaving Ret as one of the last place classes, all things even. This is covered up by our rotation including two AOEs, and two additional spells available to us in Naxx (plus the glyph of undead). Problems with Ret DPS will truly begin to show themselves in Ulduar.

But mainly:

PvP (arena especially): -50% output of DPS from inside a bubble.

This is hard, but easy to explain at the same time.

To try quickly..

A paladin's bubble is his CC. Basically, we don't HAVE CC in PvP. So we have the anti-CC.

We also don't have a gap closer like other effective melee (ignore Enh shaman, they're fucked). See charge, intercept, sprint, shadowstep, etc. To melee you must be in melee range. Hand of Freedom helps, but you get smacked the entire time you move at run speed toward your target - and it's on a long cooldown, leaving you totally tooled after you've used it already or it's been dispelled.. How many ways does a mage have to slow/freeze you? More than one on a 30 second cooldown? Well, then you're in big trouble.

Your bubble allows you to break all CC and run to your target. If he has distance and runs the other way, you've got a problem potentially - but it's there, and it's your anti-CC and your bread and butter in an arena situation because of the combination of the facts that you're melee/have no gap closers/are very kiteable when HoF is down/etc.

Replacing your mace with a wet noodle eliminates all possibility of bursting a player down in PvP, so there is now no reason to use your bubble as anti-CC and a gap closer, because you're not going to do anything effective to the target when the gap IS closed. If you're facing a team with a healer, since you have no MS either and already have trouble with that, you're toast. You are turned into the worst damage-dealing class the game has ever seen once inside that bubble (really, is any DPS class capable of only 50% of another class?), so trying to kill someone is silly - most especially if there's a healer around.

People argue that you can just heal while inside a bubble. These people are what I like to call "dead wrong".

Holy Light is 29% base mana. Paladins ain't sportin' much +int. How many heals do you think you have in you before you're OOM and totally useless, autoattacking away?

Those who believe healing inside a bubble is a viable tactic are fools (it's the ONLY thing you can do inside a bubble now, but that doesn't make it viable).

This is especially a problem in 2v2, when your shield now becomes a "kill my partner now while I attempt to heal him and go OOM" button, leaving you useless when you come out of your bubble.. and your partner probably dead, because you can only heal him for so long while he's focus fired.

Considering you're not going to be sitting at 100% mana halfway into a fight when this happens, you might get two heals off no him before you're smashing Divine Plea (if it's up) and watching him die while you wait for your big bad 1250 mana over 6 seconds. If it's not, or if you're quite low and that 1250 will only barely leave you with enough to heal after 6 + 2.5 = 8.5 seconds (heals are effective while your target is dead, I hear), you're back to running over and smacking someone with a wet noodle if you're not inclined to stand around doing nothing.

Ret paladins could in duels or pvp kill me(shadow priest) in approximately 5 seconds and that's being generous. They needed a nerf.  I'm all for some classes being better than others in single combat via rock paper scissors but ret was ridiculous.

Not quite yet, as it turns out.

I made one on a server I don't have a 55 on JUST TODAY.

You got lucky then.  There's even a note on the login screen that you can't yet with a forum thread (but the link doesn't work actively and you can't C&P.. there's one thing blizz fails on constantly.)

Hax!  :-o

Yeah, anyone could make DKs, wether they had a 55 or not. Now this is on the forums.

You've described every ranged DPS class/spec that isn't a Arcane Mage in regards to pvp.  :oh_i_see:

The fact that any class could go completely immune and retain the ability to heal and move was one of the first indications way back at release that WoW had put PvP on the back burner.

Every patch I keep looking for the note that it's been gutted.  This isn't that note.

The first time I remember seeing a pally go immune and then keep running around healing, I literally said, "That's horseshit!"

So, I agree with you, it's a completely bizarre mechanic that should be replaced with something else. Bubbles are fine while moving, but being able to cast and be completely immune is clownshoes.

I think Blizzard has a design spot open just for you.

And yet somehow paladin healers don't dominate PVP.

It's not paladin healing in the bubble that has the PVP'ers bitching. It's getting burst down in <10 seconds from a well geared Ret while immune. Holy Paladins absolutely need that bubble to compete in PVP.

Wintergrasp crashing the World Server when it finishes got me my Higher Learning achievement tonight, ty buggy fixes!

Yes, everyone is trying to scamper away from Northrend currently for the safety of IronForge.

Y'all need to learn about Mass Dispel.

Exactly.  If that wasn't around to begin with all of Holy PvP healing wouldn't revolve around it and they would have been given other, less offensively versatile skills to make up for it (one would hope).  Now they feel they need to start making special adjustments to it to keep it in line.  See Ice Block for how to do immunities. It's still super annoying or effective I guess depending on what side of the fence you're on, but its ancillary uses are more easily managed.

Mass Dispel is still a 1.5 second, ground targeted effect that is only on a single class no?  Honest question as aside from PvE DKing I'm months out of date.  Very spotty counter at best.

It's awful, I couldn't make it out of Dalaran hardly. Also, for some reason I was getting some serious fps problems in one of the instances after a while, which I could only chalk up to them getting choked with ppl to get out of the raining lagfire.

This is one of the worst patches in a while, which is even worse considering they delayed it for a long long time.

Are you being sarcastic?  Paladin healers are incredibly dominant in PVP.

Are they dominant again? They were shit for a while.

I noticed this as well, but to me it looked like the client had an obvious memory leak.  Dropped down to 25-30'ish fps in Northrend in a matter of about an hour (on a high end rig) and memory use had crept to about 85-90%.  Killed the client and logged back in to see memory drop back down to 40-50% used, and it continued to climb gradually as fps dropped at the same rate.  Logged out and forgot about wow for the night.

Pallies are totally the dominant PVP healers right now, just with how bursty all the damage is - they're the best because they can actually survive long enough to heal.

They're dominant less because of plate and more because 12 seconds of immunity > every other healer's lifespan in total. So 12s of healing beats 0s of healing. Resil isn't the fix, burst is just broken as hell on a few classes right now.

Well... I've heard that holy paladins are kind of... well.  Overpowered in 2v2.  It's just a rumor though!

nm

No healers are dominant in PVP right now. Paladins can lay claim to being vaguely effective at best. And they were terrible through TBC after the first couple seasons.

The idea that healers are 'nonviable' is complete bullshit.  On SK-gaming's top 100 (http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/team/2/all/all/all/all////////), most of top 2's teams have a healer and not just paladins.  Resto shaman, druids, and priests are all represented to varying degrees.

Holy paladins are as dominant now as resto druids ever were.  Just go step into the arena or even just look at the arena statistics (http://www.realmhistory.net/arena-statistics/class-breakdown.html).  Paladins are the most represented class at 2k+ by a large margin with only DKs and rogues even close.  A supermajority of those paladins are holy.

Unless I'm completely missing something, the bubble nerf doesn't help that, though, does it?  Looks like it nuts Ret but doesn't touch Holy or healing at all.

I would hesitate to say 2v2 arena is the best measurement of pvp viability. In particular I'm not sure drilling down to the small chunk of players at high ratings says much about the general state of balance.

Still, that's significantly better than I expected it to be. My experience with healers in PVP this expansion has primarily been with easily killing them as a protection warrior in pve tanking gear, but that has all been in BG/Wintergrasp.

The Skadi bug on UP is really fucking annoying.  We could not get the bastard to stop resetting randomly during the encounter.

My Skadi Likes To Reset All The Time

Healing is completely gimped atm; a Holydin actually does less healing/second to their main healing target through MS than the higher DPS class/specs do in damage to that same target (barring a DK in Frost Presence, which is why that combo's so fucking OP...  well, that and DS).

In BGs and most Arena scenarios, adding a healer is simply less effective than having another DPS along, assuming equal gear/skill.

PS:  2v2 Arena =/= PvP in general.

Proof is in the pudding, bro.  If healing is so gimp, why are the top teams in the world dominated by teams with healers, even the non-DK teams?  Why are triple DPS teams at high ratings all but unknown?  Why are quintuple DPS teams completely unknown?

Paladin healers

I guess they fixed the Heigan safe spot and increased the size of his aura so he can't be tanked on his platform easily during phase 1. Noooooo, now I have to do that horribly retarded fight how Blizzard intended.

Yeah, I don't get why people think Heigan is an enjoyable fight.

Those top teams have access to resilience gear that nobody else does, and healers are significantly harder to play in PVP than other classes. The combination of good players and gear with actual defenses on it lets healers function much better.

At least that is my theory.

It's because everyone is playing Ret pallies and ret vs. holy = failretlul.

My theory.

I love that fight. Love love love it.  :heart:

A Priest with improved death glyphed was nearly as 'viable'  :oh_i_see:

On the topic of healing. I think Ming is kind of a douchebag, but he makes some good points in this article.

Because it's different, it's pretty forgiving in it's current state (you can lose half the raid and still win), and you get to laugh at the retards who fail.

That's really the only redeeming quality to the encounter.  As a Holy Priest the fight is basically Prayer of Mending + Abolish Disease and "Oh look, the retards died even with Guardian Spirit."

Although I'm not sure what Fabricated is talking about with changes to Phase 1, we tanked him on his platform as usual Tuesday night.

We do the reverse, we make the tank and melee DPS run around, with the healers and ranged on the platform until he teleports back up.

That fight is horribly retarded due to how stupidly easy it is.  100% predictable pattern with absolutely zero randomness.  There's zero excuse to die on that fight once you've watched the pattern a few times, even if you have lag, because you can completely anticipate everything, it can even be timed, and move as soon as the room explosion goes off.  It'd take somewhere around 4000ms latency to make that fight unsurvivable.

Anybody remember the Trial of Foresight in EQ?  :drill:

Memory leak, or curious memory management.  You can watch it climb while you play, as you load more characters/terrain the memory usage climbs through the roof.  Might actually be worse than the one that's still in the LotRO client.   +100mb consumed in 5 minutes of riding through Dalaran, maybe they just increased the limit on how much of the world they'll keep in memory in the client and that's what is causing problems for long running clients.  Client seems to move faster initially, but with stutters whenever a lot of new things are loaded at once.

Haven't CTD'd yet, nor corrupted my WTF folder so the jury is still out on if this represents a step back in quality of just another step to the side.

This.  I beat this fight first time on 10man, even when other tards didn't 'get it' and died.  It's quite literally a fight you can do with 5 chaps, simply due to the challenge of the puzzle not being there.

The phase 1 change was made because his aura was smaller than the diagonal width of the platform, so you could tank him in one corner and have your healers and ranged DPS in the opposite corner.

The reason that I find heigan so dull is because Phase 2 is very boring once you've learnt the pattern and just artificially lengthens the fight.

Phase 2 IS the fight.

After once or twice it's a retarded fight.  It's stupid and boring.

Hey there's nothing stupid or boring about a fight that a tank and a healer can solo. Really!

 :awesome_for_real:

Solo... together?

THE TANK AND HEALER ARE AS ONE

Sjofn and I totally duoed the phoenix boss in Zul :P

I'm pretty sure we'll see a druid or a paladin solo Loatheb before too long. Although I doubt you could get through the eye-stalk tunnel solo.

I was finding this thread so helpful and then it went all supernatural on me!   :ye_gods:

Signe! Don't go into the light! It has a parafluxer capacimeter pentamajigger keeping the Flux Portal™ stable!

:hello_kitty:

I dunno. I haven't played around with the patch yet. The real test I suppose will be in Naxx on Saturday, if I don't go out of town.

What sucks is if you get your eye-stalks and celery-stalks mixed up, you could end up with eyeballs in your tuna salad.

Yeah I thought about that after I posted it and said, "Meh."

That or they're having sex while killing him.. which, y'know, cool.

Arenas disabled until further notice. 90% of playerbase rejoices.

I'll personally be happy if they never come back, and they take the shitty requirements off all the pvp gear.

If pvp in WoW were naked, I'd still be playing this game.  Turning it into an arms race ruined it for me. 

What annoys me about arena are the balance passes for arena that impact PvE.

Druids can stealth through the eyestalk tunnel actually.

As for "soloing" Heigan with a tank and a healer, it won't work if your healer and tank can't cure disease (as we discovered on our very first try.)

Mmh, the only healer who cannot cure diseases are druids. That said, feral druids in 25-man epics are hitting just shy of 48K HP fully raid buffed. When people are in T8-T9 gear the 50% health reduction will be pretty trivial. The 1K dps from the dot is easily healable, assuming you're doing this on normal.

For Loatheb I'd guess a restokin would probably be the optimal druid spec for soloing him, not sure though. You can make some pretty weird builds for soloing stuff.

Ditto. I enjoy wow pvp [in moderation], but haven't arena'd since mid-season3.
Calling arena 'fair' and a 'show of skill' is laughable, and that has nothing to do with how out of whack damage/healing/class balance is atm (or how badly the ninja-patched "ghost rating" system was broken).

Either nuke all rating requirements like it was in season1-2 (though that makes it harder on players joining arena in later seasons as their blues will be up against tfull prev-season gear), or just make everyone wear a full set of current-season pvp gear (with a selection of weapons / trinkets / gems / enchants made at an arena battlemaster) as soon as they enter an arena/BG. That way the leet gladiators could have the feeling of achievement from "earning" their epeen symbols and flaunt them in IF or world pvp if they want without ruining pvp for the late-comers / casuals / not-uber-pvpers.


-- Z.

They can't balance arena. To try to do so is simply hubris. When people don't start on the same footing the moment they step in the door, even if you don't factor in their gear, it's not a real competition. It would be like a football game where the teams had only certain types of plays that they could run. It would be horribly stupid and in many ways completely dominated by the teams with the better plays.

The refs could have little sessions to decide how to best change the acceptable plays so that things get slightly more even, but it's never going to be completely balanced until everyone has access to everything. The same is true in a class-based game.

You never miss a chance to rag on the Big 10, do ya?  :why_so_serious:

3.0.8 has been nothing short of a train wreck.

It fixed some, but broke a lot more. Having to disable the entire arena system and wintergrasp for this length of time? I expect this shit from Funcom, but not here.

Couple this little fiasco with LK being kicked out the door WAY too early and putting advertising on their forums, it just all screams bad to me. Like suits getting in the way bad.

But.. but.. but the Activision merger didn't change anything! Honest!   :awesome_for_real:

It is all borken.   :ye_gods:

The CEO of Activision Blizzard may be from Activision (the COO is the former CEO of Vivendi Games) but Vivendi acquired Activision, not the other way around. I.e. Vivendi owns the majority stake in Activison Blizzard and you can bet they aren't letting Activision call the shots with regards to what happens in World of Warcraft.

On the topic of Loatheb, 2 german players duo'd 25 man Loatheb (prot warrior, holy paladin) well over a month ago, you can get through the eye stalk tunnel with an invis potion.

It took them a little over 3 hours and the warrior went through 3 shields I think.  :ye_gods:

Vid of it here for those interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45G8AW875EM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45G8AW875EM)

While 3.0.8 did bork a lot of things, the lag has been so horrible on my server (especially in instances) for at least 2 weeks prior and still present after the patch that the game is basically unplayable.  Until they give my server's hamsters some steroids or hotfix those latency fixes they were planning to implement with the patch but didn't, what 3.0.8 does or doesn't do won't really matter to me or most of the people on my server.  :why_so_serious:

You just said the CEO isn't allowed to call the shots in the company he's managing.  That's even funnier than the hyperbole I was engaging in.

The CEO reports to the Board of Directors. Guess who controls the Board?

Edit: Board of Directors

Wintergrasp was already back on last night it seemed like.

4 hour emergency maintenence today. LOLZ!

I'm not sure if that's lol worthy really.

To wow addicts it is, when you absolutely love or hate something you tend to blow everything out of proportion. The patch isn't even a week old and yes it broke stuff but wintergrasp is already back, arena's are getting fixed and bugs are getting patched quick. In the timespan it's been I have to say I don't think the sky is falling.

Also, why do people keep saying wotlk was rushed? it had a couple quest bugs and yes some zoines seem empty(like crystalsong) but it released with as much content as BC and anyone with a vague memory knows they are saving things for content patches on purpose just like in BC

Someone changed something over there are WotLK would be shipping about now. There were things broken at launch and with BC too, but I don't remember entire systems and zones needing to be shut down for what-will-be-weeks just from a content patch.

This is the problem with profit vs quality. WoW is starting to plateau on new subs. Since Suits are measured by how well they're growing first, how well they're managing a distant second (if at all), they don't wait for the plateau nor the decline to insert themselves. So push-out-before-Christmas-or-else.

Having said that, maybe it was their projections for the plateau, or maybe it is the general global slowdown they wanted to stay ahead of as much as possible. But in either case, it was more people than just developers, who given the chance would always defer to "when it's done". They've had their four years of running the show, but I suspect those days are over.

Here comes the annual expansion and monetized website!  :awesome_for_real:

The problem with arena is in the ratings calculations and it will be fixed in off-hours maintenance (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/14578687862-arena-system-update.html). Wintergrasp is also open again already. What is going to be down for weeks?

I just found it funny that they had to do maintenance on their maintenance.

Wow has made so much money and even if they lose half their subs they will still be the most profitable mmo ever. I REALLY don't see them feeling in any kind of rush for anything.

LK does not have as much content as BC. Raids being numero uno here.

What makes it even more pathetic, is that the one, the single major raid dungeon to ship in LK is a god damn remake. Most of the work was already done 3 years ago. Art, sound files, zone construction. All they had to do was rework the numbers in most cases. A few fights (4H in particular) DID require substantial redesign, but even those are few and far between.

KZ, Mag, Gruul's Lair, TK, SSC, Mt. H and 2 world bosses all shipped with BC.

Nax, Maly and Sarth. (oh and the wonderful trash mob turned boss in Archavon)

It's not even comparable.

Couple this with the fact that BC brought a LOT more change to the WoW world. It introduced the arena system, two new races along with their respective home cities and 1 - 20 zones, flying mounts, heroic dungeons, 10 / 25 man raids etc. etc.

Oh yes, there is a world of difference between the two expansions. Most of them not for the better.

Let me put it in a more direct light..

My guys have been raiding in WoW since the get go. We're not a poopsock brigade (3 nights a week, 50 percent minimum attendance) but we do get to see it all. Kil'jaeden, Illidan, Archi, T5, all clear. We never, ever came close to catching up to the content patches until the very end in SWP. They launched with more than enough content to keep us perfectly entertained while they added more and more to the top end.

Now, this same crew, with the same schedule, was content complete in about 6 weeks. This also coming over the holidays when our raid attendance plummets. Of those 6 weeks, I'd wager 2 of those were spent either in ten mans or as nights off due to the holidays.

Point being, Blizzard is relying much, MUCH more on their content patches to keep people entertained. We all know Big Blue's record on how fast their patches goes live.

Launching with a lack of raid content along with the initiative to make raiding more accessable by considerably lowering the difficulty factor and giving multiple classes the same raid buffs and benefits has only doubled the headaches. I have zero problems with making raiding more attractive to the Average Joe. It's something I've taken a lot of enjoyment from over the years and love seeing more people getting to share that. The flip side of the coin is that they should have been ready with more content at launch, and they were not.

Fuck this turned into a soapbox moment. I'll cut it off here.

/rant on

Let me clue you in on something. If you SAW Kil'jaeden, you were in 10% of the population. Hell, probably a lot less, and I'm being generous.

Your crew is hardcore. Accept that fact, and accept that this game didn't completely meet your needs. I think you realize that's ok. The rest of the people are still working on things and don't care about the people at the top. I will grant you that the content is easier, but it needed to be. Blizzard is a company, and they realized they were creating content for a very small percentage of their cash cow playerbase. They didn't like that.

You know what I remember from BC? Group composition fights. Give me this guy, give me this class, give me this buff. If we don't have this class, we're fucked. If one person dies, we're boned.

That's not fun. That's not a game, it's a repetative kick in the balls. Fuck uber guilds, fuck SKILL in an MMO, and most importantly fuck ppl who think that this game has to be "hard" to be relevant. Hard means gear cockblocks. Hard means fights where the bosses pull mindnumbingly stupid "one person dies and you're fucked" abilities. This is not chess. This is a time>all game.

Oh and also, as of this date, only 25% of people have killed all the content in this particular expansion. That's according to Wowjutsu, which is probably flawed, but I would still believe those numbers as close. Is Blizzard comfortable that they are releasing things "too slow" when only 25% of the playerbase is done? On pure stats alone, I'd say no. I'd say it's a huge step in the right direction from when 5% could do things.

/rant off

What he said. If you beat Illidan and Kil'jaeden, you're part of what's probably more like a 5% minority and need to accept the fact that Blizzard doesn't care about you. That being said, the 25% that have cleared everything in WOTLK is only going to go so high. A lot of people (me, all my friends in-game right now) just Do Not Care.

Don't underestimate the significance of adding an entirely new class to the game.  In its entire going-on-ten-year history, EQ has only done so twice, and neither one of those launched anywhere near as smoothly as the Death Knight, regardless of how well integrated they may have become long after their launch.  Wrath definitely has less raid content than Burning Crusade launched with, by a huge margin.  It also has one less five-man dungeon, unless I'm mis-counting.  However, its heroics are easy enough to be accessible without months of gearing up (how soon after BC did you see serious pugging of heroics?  Not for a long while, on any server I played on), it has much more pvp content, and has managed to introduce a reasonably well-balanced outdoor pvp zone that is actually drawing the crowds and keeping them coming back.

I'd say development resources went into: Death Knights, PvP, dungeons, class balance, overhaul of the various systems they overhauled, and -lastly,- raids.

It's a much better situation, I think, than if they'd thrown out a load of raid content.  Sure, there's not enough raid content, and it's a little too easy for the better-coordinated and so on guilds....but it's not like those people are going to quit.  In exchange for some relatively minor dissatisfaction from a small percentage of the population (of those who have killed everything in Lich King, how many do you think are dissatisfied with how easy it was?), they've set up systems that seem more solid and well-thought out, and are therefore likely to be an excellent and much more stable base to build future content and balance off of.

That's the problem with being on top. In the continual drive for profitabilty, you are always looking for things to cut and ways to extend the spread of resources. They decided getting more people to raid was more important than servicing those who already do. And in a competitive market, they'd have taken WUA's 5% loss of players to a different game.

Instead, they've got 5% unsatisfied players who are only sticking around because there really isn't anything else worth playing. And once you accept 5%, you start accepting 8%, 10%, 20%, until eventually your disasatisified playerbase becomes a potential market unto itself.

That's where EQ1 WoW is going.

In public companies, you're not rewarded for how well you're doing, but how we'll you're growing/improving. The minute Pardo is in front of upper management saying that growth has slowed down, the vultures business 101ers start circling.

Also, remember that the profit they're making is of such an order that it's far more likely to be funding a hundred other pet projects that'll die than going back into WoW proper.

Falwell was really just griping about Blizzard's rate of content production, but fuck it.

In a magical world where all MMO developers were as good as Blizzard, you'd have three big casual Warcraft type games duking it out for supremacy and one much smaller "Vanguard done right" scampering around their ankles making a tidy little profit provided they planned realistically. The games would be like television networks, and the super "I pwned Sunwell Plateau" poopsock five-percenters would be like people who want to watch undubbed Slovakian arthouse films. At some point you just have to quit running that shit in primetime, even if a tiny minority of your customers are going to stamp their feet and fuck off to watch the International Film Channel.

I'd actually say EQ2 is the VG in this scenario. It's at least as good an experience in many ways, superior in others. They just got pulverized at launch and from a brand and marketing standpoint have never really recovered.

You know the funny part about your "If you accept 5, then 8, then 10.... a market unto itself" bit, Darniaq?  5% of Blizzard's current subscriber base already IS a market unto itself.. and more successful than any game since EQ.  5% of 11mil is 550k players.  :ye_gods: :awesome_for_real:

If ANY other dev house could get their act together and offer a focused, well-built game catering wholly to that segment they'd be set.  Too bad for them.

Essentially yes, they accept 5% dissatisfaction because the resources and gameplay time needed to actually satisfy that base is ludicrous. I don't think that the numbers are growing for those people all that much, and I also think the developers know they aren't leaving. So, why listen? It makes no business sense to coddle those people and isolate the other 11 million players.

Granted there is a balance of raiding content barrier to entry. I think they did a good job giving people more of what they wanted with 10 and 25 man versions of fights. People are getting to see it all if they want. You can kill Kel'Thuzad even if you don't have 25 people. That's a big step. I do wish they were slightly faster with their content production, obviously. The idea of an expansion a year was a joke for Blizzard to even suggest such a thing.

The other issue with endgame raid design is that, had the entry-level raid in WoTLK been as hard as Sunwell, there would have been both a massive amount of dissapointment and frustration amongst people who aren't willing to put in hours smashing their head against a wall, as well as leaving Blizzard little scope to develop ever harder raids later. I'm sure Ulduar will resolve many of these problems to an extent, although there are some folk (the ones who complain that any raid which doesn't chain-wipe 99% with the first two trash pullsof the populace is worthless) who will never be satisfied I think.

Personally I never got to do Naxx at 60, so I'm enjoying the content. I look forward to Ulduar too, although another (non troll please for the love of all that is holy) ZA-like raid on the side would be nice.

God yes, no more trolls. I'm sick to death of the fucking trolls.  And, oh hay, surprise they have animal gods who they betrayed and took powers from!  :awesome_for_real:

Hell, I'll even take a full swimming instance where 90% of the raid keeps dying because they forget to ask for a water breathing buff instead of more trolls.

I want a raid where I get to kill Taurens and Night Elves.

Go to war with cenarion circle and head to silithus.

Is what AoC and WAR were able to hit, both trying specifically for a certain segment (though not the never-pleased argumentative raid endgamers).

They just couldn't keep them  :awesome_for_real:

Just to further emphasize this, those 5% are going to be bitching regardless of how much content you feed them.  It is impossible to produce it at a rate to satify them, much less be of any use to the other 95% of the player base.  It's not the downfall Darniaq predicts.

Oh man I just remembered Kedge Keep from EQ.  This makes me both smile and cringe at the same time.  I think I'd take more trolls.

Not what I predicted though :-) It's not about the 5%. It's about the precedent of ignoring anyway at all. The risk is that once you let go of 5%, it becomes easier to let go of 8%, then 10%, then even more. Those let go become the potential marketplace for competitors.

And to be clear, I am not saying WoW is going to ignore a steadily larger base. And neither is the "5%" even my number, I just extrapolated that from WUA's throwaway number to make the point.

Most companies that dominate an industry or space go through this (and I'd guess all that are publicly traded). You are rewarded for growth, not maintenance. Eventually when you can't grow the usual way (ie, WoW's "usual" way is to activate new accounts), you start looking for ways to offset that lack of growth in other ways. For example, profit. Considering that by some estimates their monthly profit was approaching 45%, how much more growth can they get there? So what else? Content creation maybe?

I like WotLK a lot more than I did BC. I think the overall area if better at funneling people through consistent storylines than the wierd quilt of disjointed and stillborn storylines from BC. And the DK class has definitely been better launched than pretty much any other launch of a new class into an established game. So I don't necessarily share the opinion that this expansion was somehow weak.

All I've been focused on is theorizing why it could be weak.

You are rewarded for both actually, which you kind of pointed out. Businesses would like to grow if it's a viable option, and they always have plans to do that, but recently more of the focus has been on better management of business assets. Supply chain management is a great example of this, and how companies are trying to focus inwardly and accross their entire supply lines to generate more total profits. Blizzard doesn't really have the same concerns as a manufacturer, but they can still make more money by expanding and at the same time controlling costs.

Blizzard wants to grow and to maintain accounts through content creation and new features. However, if the growth stopped, it would not be a gigantic problem. I think WoW has gone past the major growth stage, and is firmly in the "expansion" stage of the business life cycle. This is where you make the most money, and it can go on for years. The expansion stage is where they find new markets and expand to different mediums. The TCG is probably a good example of an expansion movement, as are the novels, and a potential feature film in the works.

As opposed to letting 95% go to focus on raids?  They can't win by catering to everyone.  They'll do what they can, it's not like they nixxed raids, but 5% of your population deserves 5% of your resources.  They're lucky if they get that much since a given activity isn't exactly composed of discreet percentages they can dole out at will, and that would be 5% more content that 95% of the population could enjoy as opposed to 5% for 5%.

WUA has it half right. The point I was making was Blizz's turtle slow content release coupled (this time around) with an extremely thin buffer to give them time to produce said content.

As far as us being hardcore, well, to each their own I suppose. Personally, I don't consider a group that only asks for 6 hours of your time a week to be too damn hardcore. I think that judgement comes solely from what content we cleared rather than time invested. Again, it's completely subjective and I only used my guys as a point of reference, so we'll call it debatable and move on.

Well, that is one fight they undertuned quite a bit versus what Naxx was at 60 (and that was probably one of the easiest). They made the 2 middle splash zones wider, and slowed the blast interval down by a good full second, they also took out the eye stalk tunnel part. For those of you that did not see the old Naxx, every 30 seconds of the first phase, 3 raid members (who were not the tank) were ported to the loatheb end of that tunnel, and you had to make it out before the first pulse of the dance phase as the entire tunnel got blasted the first blast.
Oh and the hall before him was a 40 second respawn bat and worm gauntlet too. And he aggro'd as soon as someone set foot in the room.

Not to say I wish it was poopsocktasticly hard now. I think they had a good idea making the first level of gear easily accessible to people and get people used to fights with quirks and how a raid functions together. They may have gone a little too easy on stuff to keep everyone content, but the achievements for doing things differently are a nice incentive.

I still see 25 man PUGs fail ridiculously hard at Patchwerk on a regular basis.

I think the 25 Man Vault Pickups are some of the best 'eye-openers' for both ends of the spectrum.

I've seen Vaults where single pulls of the trash killed more people than the boss.

They have been winning by catering to just about everyone. If they actually did start ignore 5% (reminder: I do not know this nor claim this), then that's a new precedent they're starting.

Also, I disagree on your second sentence there. If 5% of a single-player offline game didn't like it, so what? You got your money. But if 5% of your paying subscribers don't like it, and there's a competent alternative, that's ongoing money you lose. Take the 5%, multiply by the fee, and multiply that by however many years you have left of operating. When you replace the percentage with a hard number of billions unrealized, it's hard to ignore.

It is always a question of bang-for-your-buck. And right now WoW is in a largely unassailable position. Whoever they lose nowadays was going to quit anyway, for reasons beyond greener pastures. Because for the most part, there are no greener pastures. There's just a bunch of weak alternatives that have sparks of brilliance hidden behind a veritable farmland of non-polish.

This is what makes this and coming years so much different from the heydays of EQ1. EQ1 was a mess you could navigate through. Between that and the playerbase being much smaller, you could expect people to drop for garbage like launch-year AO and only-one-realm-complete DAoC or grindfest CoH.

Nowadays though, your Control game is highly polished, very big, broad enough to appeal to a very large base of people with similar interests, and continually done with the kind of money that supports the notion of "Blizzard polish". Every real competitor has tried to win back even just the group of us who experiment in MMOs out of habit and nostalgia, and not done such a good job at it.

But this won't last forever (in theory  :grin:). So all I've been saying is that it becomes risky to even start willingly ignore a base (if they are) because of what can come from it later.

Well, Wintergrasp is pissing me off in 3.08.  Before, it was way harder to defend than to attack, so the zone changed hands most of the matches.  Now, it looks like defenders got a huge buff.  Attackers lose time if their towers are destroyed, siege engines get rooted and go down stupidly fast to storms of AoE (but still don't get Tenacity), walls are tougher, ugh.  So, now, it's generally defense which wins, meaning whoever has the zone keeps it for most of the day, and the other faction gets to fling themselves repeatedly into a wall.

There isn't. There won't be in the near future. While I agree with your ideas in a competitive environment, that's the exact opposite of what we have. The rest of the points are moot. You can and SHOULD ignore your outliers when there is no other option for them. They are freaks and deserve none of your attention. Concentrate on the data that matters to make the most money.

Indeed. Blizzard has a completely open playingfield. With last year's twin disappointments (AoC and WAR), the idea of a big-money alternative has functionally evaporated. The dream of a choice between competing top-tier online worlds died with it. People who get tired of WoW aren't going to go to leave it for other MMOGs... they're going to take a break from them alltogether. When they do come back, they'll come back to WoW.

There are, and will continue to be, a myriad of low cost niche games. There will be no more gorillas. Even something like another LotRO is unlikely to get a funding greenlight. Compared to the console market, the risk looks too high.

Your argument only makes sense in a world of infinite resources which, despite what their competitors may think, Blizzard does not have. I'm sure if Blizzard could snap their fingers and magically make enough content appear to satisfy the top 5% of the raiding guilds without sacrificing the content for the other 95% they would do that.

Unfortunately in the real world they have to decide how to allocate scarce resources. For this expansion they decided to cater to the 95%. Time will tell if that was the right decision.

That's an excellent point. WAR had a lot going for it on paper: A relatively strong IP, EA money, people who were experiences in MMO development and had a decent game in their past (DAOC). However in between EA pushing it out the door to make 4th-quarter sales and Jacobs' clear disconnect from reality, it's sunk. Some of the same applies to Conan. And frankly, I can't see SWG2 doing all that much better, either. EA will push it out the door before it's ready, and that will be it's deathknell.

Still changes hands on my server. Your side must have competent players.

As far as I can tell, attackers always win on doomhammer now. Any slight lag and your walls are down before you can blink.

I was only in one WG this weekend (yay for putting an Elder inside of the WG fort  :awesome_for_real:) but we zerged down the walls in almost no time at all.  Yay catapult rush.

Edit:  Also, it somehow reset about 30 minutes later, and became contested again.

They already went through this 'hey we are doing our focus wrong' conversation, but it was 2 years ago. WotLK is just an evolution of it. Raid content for the tip top of the elite hasn't really been the main thrust of dev activity for a long time. You can see the bitching if you go look at what the Nihilums of the world have been saying about raid difficulty since the patch where they first nerfed Mag's Lair, if not a bit earlier.

Those people largely still haven't left. I don't think Darniaq's scenario holds much water, personally.

What I do know did happen, is at least a decent number of casual players who were fed up with the overwhelming content focus on 40 man raids in vanilla and quit because of it, came back when they changed their focus. The next frontier for this 'hey maybe we should focus on what most of our players actually want' thing is PVP. They'll eventually catch on that no matter how much they love the system they have, arenas are not the way to get everyone into PVP or to make the majority of PVP-oriented players happy, and things will change there too like they have for PVE.

Mostly they'll pick up that WoW will never, ever be an esport, and people kind of dug the casual battleground system.

This is one of the reasons I'm giving WoW a try again after a four year hiatus.

I remember the first big change that Blizzard announced, which sort of started the deathknell of the old raiding style. It was when they made it public that the next iteration of top end raids would be 25 mans, and not 40s. The hardcore raiders were pushing for 80 man raids. They were absolutely pissed at the time, like Ingmar was saying. They fully expected the game to go a certain direction, and Blizzard pulled a 180 on them.

Ingmar's also right, those guilds haven't left. Death and Taxes, Risen, Nihilium, they are all still playing while bitching up a storm.

I know that, which is why I keep saying this is all academic.

While Trippy is spot on that Blizzard does not have infinite resources, compared to everyone else who has tried, they a) did get more resources; and, b) were much smarter about applying them.

Blizzard folks are not geniouses by birth. They just know, as a team, how to iterate and eventually cut unworkable features. They did this for all games prior too. For WoW, they marshalled their resources against the game side of the virtual world, and in that process tossed off the table things like PvP mechanics, progressive raids, weather effects, housing, crafting, etc and so on. All time sinks deemed not required for launch-day. Note that all of these are features other developers sunk fewer resources into just to hit launch, and therefore compromised the truly important thing like character movement and that whole combat and balance thing.

Resources are never infinite, but they are subject to scale like anything else.

Amen. Blizzard's advantage is project management, not wizard programmers and designers.

Blizzard didn't have "rock star" developers.  If there is anything things like WAR and TR and others have taught me, its that when when you have a rockstar dev in charge, customers should run for the fucking hills.  Rockstar devs, when not brushing lint off their berets, are usually busy completely discounting something necessary to a successful MMO for no other reason than pseudo-philosophic idiosyncratic faggotrousness.   

It's about egos, lying to customers, and listening to the average person who actually plays the game. Solve those problems, and you win.

Can't disagree with any of that.  'Rockstar' developers should be nailed to the wall BEFORE your project starts.

"I agree" post on the "Rockstar" thing.

Also, I think they're seeing a drop off on arenas from a general casual viewing. Also the fact that they dropped the new, huge rating requirements by 100 points. The adding of these bullshit ratings was the start of my lack of interest in arenas since I only participated in them for the "welfare epics" so I could have some kind of vague parity in BGs and ability to actually do things in PVE since I'm a casual player.

The whole ratings for Arena thing is starting to truly reach stooge level of hilarity.


You have team ratings and personal ratings AND super secret hidden ratings...  :oh_i_see:

Discounting personal ratings, this is not all too different from what Blizzard did for Warcraft 3 if I recall.  You had your ranking (Arena Rating) and a hidden score for match-making purposes.

But you didnt need a certain ranking to build higher tier units. It's one thing to have rankings for match making. Its another to make ranking a gear cockblock.

The arena thing really annoys me as well.  I suppose I am one of those beat head on wall people because I am participating, but my team will probably not get a high enough rating to get the "good" gear, much less the top of the line gear.  Some of why I am still playing is that the death match thing is kind of nice and the ratings do sometimes provide some entertaining games against equally unskilled people where if we win we are left wondering what went right.  I don't know how long that sort of thing will last though with no other real incentive.

It didn't.  Only the top 0.5% get Gladiator.  Thus, by looking at how many people get gladiator it's possible to figure out how many people participate in the arenasl.  Unfortunately, the hall of fame is no longer viewable, but arenajunkie's estimates (http://www.arenajunkies.com/calculator/) (WARNING: They do not screen their advertisers very well and have in the past served up trojans in their banner ads; do not click without NoScript installed) of how many people would get gladiator in previous seasons allows for us to just see how fast the arena population has been growing.  Their estimate is always conservative, but generally in the right ball park.  By their estimations, season 4 was by -FAR- the most popular season ever.

My guess is that there will be a drop-off from season 4 because

1. The current PVP gear is pretty terrible for PVE; unlike season 4, pvping to pveing is not the optimal thing to do with fresh 80s.  Assuming they stick to the pattern they did in TBC, pvping to get gear for pve will become optimal again in later seasons.

2. People haven't had time to level up all their 70 alts.  Some of my guildies are working on their third and fourth 80's, but Casual Carl probably hasn't done so yet, so the sheer number of teams participating will be down.

3. The arena ratings on gear were too high.  I don't know what blizzard was thinking, but on most BGs 1600 was pretty safe for season 4 challenger and that was at the peak of participation.  You need over 1600 to get any arena gear in season 5.  Locking out literally 65% of your players from all arena gear is pretty  :uhrr:

You left out another reason (and what I consider to be the most key reason) that Season 4 was so popular. Season 4 was in the latter stages right before an expansion. People had done most of everything and were bored as hell with raiding content at that point. They knew the reset button was coming, so they wanted to try something else for fun, and it they got decent dps gear from pvping, they could level faster in WotLK.

Arenas only work if people are bored with everything else.

There was a stupid Yo Dawg meme attached to this pic, so I edited it up.  It's pretty awesome how cool arenas are.  Even when you win, you lose.   :grin:

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/201105/7c0eb1c4b6rk8.png)

I'd rather have it WITH the meme.  :oh_i_see:

Is that screenshot for real?  That is totally awesome if so.

Yes, it's real, it was posted on Arena Junkies with the Yo Dawg meme and has even been linked to in a few places, which is how I came upon it.

I got a good chuckle out of it and if anything it definitely helps validate my decision to stay away from pvp when not raiding and level a fun alt instead.  That's a pretty sad statement for the current pvp situation considering I was pretty heavy into pvp and had a good time back when I last played during the S2 - S3 era.

WinterGrasp is fine, when it isn't imploding onto itself creating a Time/Space paradox in the server reality.

One major problem with wintergrasp that I imagine blizzard figured out is that you can only have one. Don't get me wrong I'd love for a variety of outdoor pvp zones but at least on my server there's never hundreds of players at any given battle, a few dozen on each side at most. if that were to be spread out through several diff open pvp areas the combat would be very dull as you try to defend against the massive army of 5.

I think in a way this was one of warhammers biggest flaws, they decided to have world pvp everywhere and it was hard to find (for me at least) until players got funneled into the endgame.

On Doomhammer, as long as it isn't 6 am or whatever, it's pretty much packed. Like, "The first 3 raid groups are full, form a 4th" packed. If everyone wasn't moving at 3 FPS and crashing every other minute, it would be  :drill:

Except we are moving at 3 FPS and the entire zone can crash half a dozen times per battle round, so its currently  :awesome_for_real:

Blizzard just sent me a 10-day trial.  I get to play my Draenei again.  Whee!

I don't do Wintergrasp because it runs on a three-hour cycle and I can never be arsed to be there, I don't know what comes from there that I would want, and because it just sounds like a huge overcomplicated pain in the dick.  Blizzard's vehicle system is basically just lame, and I don't really want to fight just to pug some raid boss or farm widgets.

I don't do Arenas because frankly I'm not that good, I don't care enough to get good, and I'm not going to help fill out the lower ranks if I can never ever get the better gear. Small-scale deathmatches sound boring as fuck anyway.

I do the occasional Battleground just because. Since all the good gear requires Arena rankings and even the lame shit costs 4x as much honor if you don't have Arena points, there really isn't much reason to bother.

WOTLK basically murdered PVP for me. I just want to do Battlegrounds and buy decent loot with my points. Fuck all this other noise.

Yep. It's not cool and sexy, but it gets games made.

Is it the expansion free trial?  There's one right on the website, too.  I thought I'd wait until I could actually make a DK to give it a go.  My highest level is only 40.  Also, I TRY to play Alliance but I just can't seem to do it.  I can't get past level 15 before I lost interest and go back to my whorish hordish ways. 

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I helped someone with a quest!  Yay me!  I did warn him, however, how dreadfully awful I am at this game but he didn't mind and let me save his pasty white mage ass anyway.

I'm not sure what you find complicated about it? Have you done the Strand of the Ancients battleground? It's that, but scaled up to a 100+.


The Main benefits outside of the Loot Pinata inside and the Zone Ore/Herb/Elementals outside, are the WG 'Buff', WG Tokens and the large amount of honor the zone vomits out.

The WG Buff (which you'll get anywhere in Northrend if your side owns WG) lets bosses in 5 mans drops Stone Keeper shards. Each boss drops 3-4. You use these shards to buy stuff: http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43228#currency-for:0+2+1 . It's mostly PvP oriented stuff, some Twink Gear via the Bound to Account stuff, and a ridiculous mammoth. The buff itself also gives a 5% XP bonus while in Northrend.

The WG Tokens, are just like other BG tokens, but for WG obviously. They let you buy: http://www.wowhead.com/?search=titanforged and http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44914 and http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44912 AND http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44115 (wowhead is behind a bit, the last item is 9 WG Tokens, not Shards)

The Zone itself just spews out honor while the battle is going on. For a 30 minute play session, it's something like 2-4k honor, depending on how successful your side is. This is on top of the honor gained from doing the daily pvp quests in the zone. (Kill 20 Enemies, Kill 3 Siege engines, Destroy 3 towers, Some variation of a pve farming one no one ever does, Just win the round etc...) They are all Raid quests, so they pretty much auto complete once the action starts.

Easily 5-10k Honor per session.



My only issue with WG currently is the fact it's a victim of its own success. The Server/Zone just starts shitting bricks once 300 people open up onto each other. They are working on it, and it's getting better, but as with all things Blizzard, it's on the Soon(TM) time table.

Yep, it's the Wrath trial.

Annoyingly, the patcher isn't smart enough to go from Burning Crusade to Wrath even if it's activated on your account.  I spent my first day downloading two gigs of installer even though I was almost fully patched from the trial last fall that I got to play one day of.  :|

I prefered the Horde, but I got dragged over to Alliance by someone who now hates the game and Draenei tickle several character fetishes at once.  I ignore the populace anyways, so it doesn't matter much.

I love Wintergrasp, on my server, even at 1:00am on a weekday its packed, probably between 80 - 150 per side. But ever since 3.08 its been laggy as hell, and I think this really benefits the attackers, as its really hard to coordinate killing the vehicles. I guess its better than benefitting the defenders, as both factions get the buff on and off all the time.

-- wrong thread

The world of Blizzard not caring about AQ War Efforts anymore when they bug out or when Blizzard outwardly just breaks their own rules in favor of more money, in order of my comments Hello Grizzly Hills and then hello Drakkari. Good Luck on Borean Tundra we'll find out in March if Blizzard still has broken brand new world server events from 2006. Level 49 Alliance shaman on Borean Tundra now.

 :awesome_for_real:

What the hell are you talking about ?  Cut back on the Mescaline.

Apparently he's really concerned about the AQ opening event working on new servers. (Where it doesn't come automagically opened, you have to do the whole stupid event.)

Must have a stake in getting the useless bug mount or the poopsocker title.

But it does automatically complete itself, eventually.

 :oh_i_see: