f13.net

Except these weekly quests would give the same amount of gold as 1 daily, and the honor and shards of about 3 dailies. They apparently can't figure out how to handle a several-hundred-people battle any more than Warhammer can, so the solution is just to make less people want to do it.

B team. Clownshoes. Cracks in the facade.

Thread (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16903638221&sid=1).

Well at least they aren't porting low level/dead people to Dalaran and making them fly back, so they haven't gone full retard yet....  :uhrr:

I was hoping they would address the issue sooner rather than later, but this is somewhat unexpected. 

As someone who enjoys WG and the massive epic feel to it, I was secretly hoping they would just spend some of their money hats to beef up their servers but very much expecting some sort of craptastic bandaid fix to be on the way.

I fully admit I don't know hardly anything about server tech. but they seem to be hurting really bad for more instance server capacity ever since the launch of WoTLK.  Thus I was hoping server upgrades all around would be a two birds one stone deal.

Yea, I was emo raging about that last night when I saw it.


I'm hoping they re-think it.

Eh, whatever. I never had enough time to do all the dailies every day, so this is fine for lazy people like me. I know a lot of people who didn't even do BGs because the honor on WG was so good.

They must figure the server shitting itself to death every Tuesday is better than what they have now, for some unfathomable reason, because that's all that's going to happen.

Put Wintergrasp on a different server behind a zone line.

There, problem solved and I know they can fucking do it because they did it wee tiny scale with the honor gear vendors in Org and SW. Chop chop, Blizz.

The issue isn't WG shitting up the server, it's WG participation shitting up WG.

Still though, massive income nerf and nearly 50% loss in honor and marks from the dailies. Woo. Just take away the WG buff/zone control and make it the new AV. We all hate AV anyways, and it would be fun to be able to do WG without camping the zone in portal.

Oh no. WG can and will shit up higher pop servers. MG comes screeching to a laggy halt when WG cranks up in prime time.

Why don't they just instance WG and cap population on it?

Can't they afford it?

After 4 years, WoW is losing me due to one stupid decision after another.

It's an upside down world when SOE is doing things right and Blizzard is doing things wrong.

The whole point of WG is no Pop Caps. Otherwise it's just AV 2.0

No, they can't.  Because of the shard mechanic it's too important to keep it 'real world.'   Instancing w/ cap means you're going to have a lot of angry fuckers who don't get in and then forum troll as their side loses WG because of it.

Pulling it into an instance w/o a cap would be ok, but then runs into the 'too many instances' problem they've been having, I'd guess.

My care-o-meter is barely registering.  Maybe now I'll bother to do WG once in a while.

I would like it, however, if they level restricted the zone. Competing with lvl 61 characters for ore spawns is highly annoying.

This.  On high-pop servers like Mal'Ganis and Proudmoore, WG ruins the entire server whenever it runs.  Since WG is on the same Northrend server as every other zone, this is something that affects -everyone- extremely adversely, even people just leveling to 80 for the first time.  I've had reports of server-side lag to the tune of 20+ seconds.

Not really the best solution but b-team, sky is falling stuff....drama much? Wake me up when it's time to care.

I really don't care since I'm not subbed anymore, but I'm with WUA on this one. The decision making from Blizzard has really gone downhill lately, and I'm wondering just how much of an impact Tigole's leaving is having.

Doomhammer's pretty high pop, and I don't notice it, really.  WG comes to a complete halt, but the rest of northrend seems happy.

It's not that the sky is falling. It's sort of a "Muhammad Ali around like 1975" vibe. They're still the champ, they'll remain champ for the forseeable future, but they've lost a step. None of their missteps of late have been a really big deal, but they keep making them.

You're just oblivious. There is a distinct increase in response time when WG is happening. Specifically when it changes state due to a tower/wall destruction or the game being won.

I just never notice it when I'm not there I guess. I happily hang out in icecrown and don't have any issues.

I will say that there is a decided immediate drop in lag the second the battle is won by either side. Like, instantly all lagged responses become normal for no apparent reason beyond the tanks not being in game anymore.

That's about the best summary of the feeling so far.

I always kind of figured the giant end-of-WSG-pause was something to do with a big I/O glut to the database as they hand out marks and honor to everyone.

Blizzard has always made fuck-ups; sometimes some pretty serious ones.  The difference between Blizzard and just about everyone else is not that fuck-ups aren't made, but that they aren't so stuck up their own asses that they can't see/implement the solutions for them.

The thing with the dailies doesn't strike me as a big deal.  The honor from the quests is pretty small compared to the honor from winning the zone, the cash is very low compared to the Argent Tournament (and hell, even compared to vulturing gold off the corpses if you're on foot), the only thing I really get out of them is the Stone Keeper's Shards, which aren't exactly epic lewt at this stage.  If the change fixes the lag in WG then I'd consider this a good change.  If it doesn't (and I suspect it won't) then it's pretty much a wash, for me.

Servers will crash on Mondays as people rush to get them all done at the last minute. Write it down.

It's ~3600 honor for the dailies people do, 30ish gold per day. It's a decent little chunk for very little effort. If you do WG every time it's up, the honor from WG far outdoes it. But a WG + 3 dailies run is about 10k honor for me, and is my usual log in for dailies thing (fuck jousting.)

Roughly 1200 honour per.


Victory, Siege, 10 Kills, Farm Elementals.


That's a significant chunk.

And just going in without dailies when it's up is STILL the best honor. I don't see much reduction in traffic coming.

Plus the fact even if you have total shit gear and are a crap spec, you can still drive a tank or man a turret or fling RP-GG's and be useful and contribute.

My WoW-interest is running low lately, but if I can't log on and catch one Wintergrasp and get 1250x3 honor plus win/lose honor for it every day, that drops my interest even further.  A couple friends have been wanting me to arena with them, and I figure catching one or two Wintergrasps each day, with the dailies, would help me get geared up for it, but if they're nerfing the dailies, feh.  If they increase honor and cash gain so that one quest is worth 7x what they are now, that's fine, better even for me than it is right now.  Otherwise, fuck that shit and I'm probably going to cancel my least-used account (which I was thinking of anyway, this just kinda pushes me the rest of the way) and put this in as the reason for my cancellation.

Wow, this really is fucking clownshoes. When is this bullshit supposed to go live, 3.1.2?

Blizz should just let world PvP go. It's tripped them up every time so far, for some damn reason or another.

MMO Champion is reporting quests at ~14g, 3700 honor, and 10 shards a piece now. Outside the cash (which isn't really a good reason to do these) I'm not seeing a huge issue here unless you were a 7 days a week guy.

I don't get why they can't just add more hardware and use phasing to basically put WG on its own bit of the serverfarm. I imagine there's some technical reason but rather than fucking up the reasons to even bother with the place they could just decouple its performance from the rest of the server so the thing doesn't fucking explode during primetime when people want to go hit the 2 loot pinatas.

More hardware costs money. Potentially losing some customers pissed over this decision may also cost them some money, but it doesn't come with extra effort involved with setting up the hardware, code changes etc. Perhaps they're running with solution they've estimated to be cheaper..?

I never thought I would completely lose interest in WoW until something better came along.  I was wrong.  After 5 years WoW is tired.  MMO's are tired.  I'd rather beat off and nap.  Wake me up when MMO's aren't the same stupid derivative crap we've been lapping up since '97.

/thread

Maybe they plan to add more hardware/address the technical issues/whatever but that it will take time and this is an interim flip-of-a-switch bandaid?

This is assuming hardware would fix it. What happens if it's some kind of problem in the server code? I'm guessing that is far from trivial to tinker with.

As an example of how fucked WG is right now, today on my server the Horde and the Alliance both won WG within 10 seconds of each other.  The Horde defended WG, we got the three-token payout.  It actually came down to the wire as the alliance had JUST broken the door.  So the alliance ran through and clicked the orb and then the Horde got an additional one-token loser payout and nerd raged over losing control of WG.

I am pretty sure that the underlying problem with WG is simply that WoW (and most other MMO's) are simply not designed to support 200+ people crammed into the same tiny bit of zone realestate.  Especially with the amount of info it needs to be sending regarding spell effects and character positions and what gear everyone is wearing. 

During most WG fights on Tichondrious, the lag in WG is so bad that on my druid, i can cast Starfall, and not even have the damage to opposing players register in my combat log until the cooldown on the spell is almost up and ready to go again.  I am also lucky to be pushing >3 FPS anywhere near the Keep Itself with so many players and spell effects crammed into such a tiny space.

And every time WG starts, Southern Icecrown becomes a lagfest for 5 to 10 minutes.  Like, doing the jousting dailys down there and it takes 30 to 40 seconds for you clicking the Defend button on your mount to even register.

You guy sounds like the same old burnouts that keep posting on every forum everywhere.  Wah Wah, MMOGs are old, Wah Wah etc.  Take a break, play a console game, play some Empire: Total War.  Go outside.  Watch a movie.  You're allowed to do that.

I'd have to agree with this.  I've been thinking recently how the cinematic trailer for Wrath was epic.  To bad this translated into "kill 10 fozzles".  Trailers need to have a disclaimer: "trailer does not reflect gameplay."

It's been like that for a long while. I've been in a few where everyone got 4 tokens, honor for a win and a loss, and zone control was seemingly random.

Oh, I totally do. I log in for Ulduar because that part of the game is fun. I haven't done a WG in two months now. But what I'm personally doing isn't germane to the I think by this point demonstrable fact that WoW now isn't the same top to bottom game WoW was a year or two ago. This WG thing is a piece but it's not the whole. They're losing a step here and there.

Exactly. 

The Argent Tourney disappointed me greatly.  Noblegarden and Children's Week were both ill-conceived.  Every major step Blizzard has taken in the past 3 months has pretty much been a downer as far as I'm concerned. 

So I barely log in. 

I'm not angry or bitter, just uncaring to the point of not playing much.

I'm going to propose that instead of us fixing performance problems, we just restrict our clients' login times.  Surely this is how real companies do business.

They can't fix population imbalance issues.  But, WG was a piece of shit from the word go.  Beating on a mage with 45,000 hit points isn't fun.  He's basically god.  I really don't get how this change puts you over the top.  Yea fewer honor dailies.  The new BG rapes for honor/hr.  Do a couple.

WG was never about pvp.  It's about the rise of the machines.  You kill them, or they kill you.  They're only kinda fun.  Pop imbalance on some servers basically means a guaranteed loss - offense/defense no matter.  We're operating on the assumption that it's the server population that fixes the imbalance on one side's favor more frequently.  While that obviously plays a role, it's only part of the problem.  The rest of the problem is that on servers where one side loses more often, people get discouraged from playing, thus making losing a self fulfilling prophecy for their side.  While I'm not sure this change will help, it might curb that a little.  So who knows.

But the Blizzard death of a thousand 'little mistake' cuts theory.  THAT's clownshoes.  You're too close.  Step away from the PC.  Your dog misses you.

It's not "death" you god damned nimrods, it's the observation that they're not as strong as they used to be, coupled with the realization that it's not likely to matter anytime soon since they have no competition. Ali after the Thrilla in Manilla. They're looking kinda fat between matches and their speech doesn't quite flow the way it used to, but even when they're off their game they'll still beat the hell out of everyone else currently out there.

Such insight!  :-P

I log in for Ulduar now. There is absolutely no point for me to log in other than that. The problem with 3.1 so far is that they added one thing. The VoA thing was an added wing on an existing loot house. The tournament thing wasn't an addition at all imo, because it sucks. In all honesty, we should at least have another 5 man by now to spend time on, and a new dragon wing open in OS at the minimum.

But we don't. The first round of expansion content was demolished by a large amount of folks in March. Then we waited a month for one dungeon. So we run that dungeon. Note that we're exactly 6 months into this expansion, and there isn't even a whisper of when we'll actually get to fight the guy on the box. ZERO.

That's frustrating to me.

EDIT: It also bothers me because Blizzard released Black Temple faster than they released Ulduar.

Since you're posting from the future, any stock tips you want to give out?

I think the talk here is a little overblown. There's already enough raid content right now that I don't have enough time to schedule everything my little guild still needs to do, and that's just raid content. I don't care for the Argent Tournament, but I know a fair number of people who like it fine.

As far as the "Illidan came out faster than Icecrown!" complaint, keep in mind that Blizzard considers Black Temple (and from what I've read, the entire TBC content release schedule to an extent) a mistake to some degree, one they had to patch by adding an extra raid *after* Illidan. They want Arthas to be in the Kil'Jaeden position this expansion, not the Illidan one, which seems sensible to me.

I will agree that the Wintergrasp change is a bad one. Even catassing WG 24/7 it takes a long damn time to get the honor for a full suit of PVP gear. If they're going to make this change they need to couple it with improved honor rewards from the BGs at a minimum.

I did WG on MG earlier today just to see what the performance was like mid-day on a big server. So no critical mass of primetime players, no huge group of daily players... just standard pop and probably primetime pop on medium to low pop servers.

Any guesses as to how it went and how we might extrapolate that to the future, post change WG? :oh_i_see:

New round of WG nerfs posted. ~50% reductions across the board to honor earned for events (towers, winning/losing)

Wat.  :uhrr:


Mother fuckers.

Lake Wintergrasp

    * Wintergrasp Victory now rewards 3000 Honor. (Down from 5000 Honor)
    * Wintergrasp Defeat now rewards 1250 Honor. (Down from 3000 Honor)
    * Tower Damaged now grants up to 750 Honor. (Down from 1250 Honor)
    * Tower Destroyed now grants up to 750 Honor. (Down from 1250 Honor)
    * Damaged Building Reward now grants up to 750 Honor. (Down from 1250 Honor)
    * Intact Building Defender now grants up to 1500 Honor. (Down from 2500 Honor)

I'm shooting the messenger and blaming all of this on you Kild. You cunt.  :oh_i_see:

This is stupid because it won't have the effect they want. Don't play smallball and take the incentives away. WG is a victim of it's own success.

Look Ingmar, someone else dislikes smallball too!

Which part of "I agree that the Wintergrasp change is bad" did you misunderstand?

Has any game ever managed to handle 200-400 connections active in the same area engaged in a related activity? It just may not be possible no matter what the server code is or the hardware.

Wut success?  It did suck, sucks, and will continue to suck.  Who cares.  Kaplan even admitted that shoehorning in siege weapons was a mistake.

If you want more than the regularly scheduled 'when they're done' updates every six months, you're gonna be a sad panda forever.  Might as well just set your mind on enjoying Ulduar, because as the rest of the market has proven, this is the only alternative.

I got my tier 8 BP last night.  Feels good man.

Actually, WG is a lot of fun when it doesn't lag out.

The only 'bad' in WG besides the lag issues is ... teammates. Which of course, is an issue that will never be solved.

On Tichondrius Northrend just crashes. Not every time, but once a day and more than once a day fri-sun is not uncommon. Also all your raids are fucked because ppl were dead outside or the instance dies with the server.

Not Blizzard's fault you can't quit their 'sucky' game.  Sorry about your 6 month wait for new content, LOTRO always has something in the pipeline.  So WoW is the only alternative?  I mean I love WoW but I unsubbed when I ran out of content.  I would do that to LOTRO but they add it faster than I can do it.

LOTRO feels wrong.  Always will.  10 day trial couldn't keep me interested past zoning into Archet.

As has been said elsewhere, they really ought to just make WG go once every 60 or 90 minutes or something. Less people dropping what they're doing to get to WG, more people going "Eh, I'll catch the next one." In which case it would then make sense to nerf the honor a bit.

If they did that, they would have to remove the PvE zone from there so it's not constantly turning over while you get your groups together. I'm actually in favor of that though, since I have never been a fan of putting pve in your pvp.

Or they make it so you can't leave the PVE instance the way you came in. You can only leave through a portal that dumps you back in Dalaran. Then you can spend the entire hour getting your group together, and it won't matter if it turns over while you're in there since you're not about to run back out into the relic chamber.

At a certain point you've been to the puppet show and you've seen the strings.  MMO's are pure shit. The novelty has worn thin.  I'm just disappointed in myself that it took me this long to realize it. 

Thx info.

edit: Decided on a shorter version.

Mom would be proud.

I heard you dislike MMOs.

I saw the "strings" years ago. So did a lot of other people around here. This isn't that, at least not for me. There's just something a bit off with the game lately. Not the sort of epic failure we've come to expect from Funcom/Mythic/whatever, by any means, but something.

I get the feeling that they keep having to top themselves, they're under that pressure, but their ambition is butting up against the limitations of the engine. Hence stuff like the clunky vehicle quests, the ideas like aerial combat that were talked up and then dropped because they just didn't work out that well, and so forth. They're still Blizzard. They're not willing to push garbage out there just because. But I don't think stuff like the Argent Tournament and particularly Wintergrasp are really working out the way they were supposed to on paper, either.

The game could use a revamp. Old world zones refurbished and improved so that you wouldn't hear "The blood elf starter area was cool but then it was back to the barrens or something, bleh!" anymore. The world and engine rebuilt with vehicles and flight and 200 person battles in mind from the beginning. Phasing used tastefully from the start. Things like that, just sort of a second fresh start in general, with the benefit of everything they've learned over the years.

It would be a massive undertaking, I wouldn't even talk about it with a straight face if it weren't for the scale of WoW's success, where they could blow the same amount as the game's entire original development budget for a mere 10% increase in subscriptions/retention and still come out winners.

I know, I'm being dumb. It's better to just take that same money and develop an entirely new game. I'm just blowing smoke on a messageboard in the wee hours. But imagine if they did do it, and imagine anything else in the genre having to ever compete with it.

Yeah, I know you're talking about more of a general malaise.  I was just expressing my newfound disgust in the MMO genre.  The treadmills aren't enough to keep me engaged anymore.  It's like someone turned off the tap.  I'm not getting those heroin bumps anymore. And this is different than just being burned out.  Anyway.

But yeah, your diea of a reconstituted WoW is a good pipedream.  In theory it would be sweet if they did a refresh like one of those EQ servers where everything is released consecutively.  But of course all the hardcores would ruin it for us.

Does it smell like the vault in here suddenly?

No, it smells like some asshole just made a bad joke. 

If SAP can do it, a game server can do it.

No he's right. These boards really have started turning into the vault or at least some geriatric version of them. Wow is what, 4 years old now? Or close to it. Of course it's becoming dated, the code limitations are starting to show with things like WG.

It's a message board, I'm not going to pretend that people should be level headed and rational but the signal to noise ratio here has gone way down. When every other post is 'rah rah, this game sucks i quit' and the game clearly does not suck nor is it losing any significant amount of it's player-base then you know the people posting are either way out of touch or somehow the minority is congregating to the place they feel their voice will be most heard.

I get it, you think other people should agree with you, most don't.

WUA's first post sounded like that but he does make a sound and reasonable argument but if every other post on these boards is gonna be "wow sucks, i already quit it" then yes, it has turned into the vault.

Heh, that was more or less my point.  Except I was just being a snarky jerk about it and spitting out dumb one liners.  :drill:

I'm somewhat surprised that I'm still finding WoW a worthwhile use of my time.  I have almost no time to raid, and pretty soon I'll have a squirming newborn that will reduce that further.  Both RL friends quit again.   Dumb dev moves and a game clearly in "retain the cash" mode doesn't stop it from being the most enjoyable MMO out there for me.  Hell, I'm running yet another character through STV and it's just as interesting as the first time (if less of a pain due to elite quest removal).

Are you seriously trying to start some shit?  On a site that discusses MMOGs?  On a forum that discusses MMOGs?  In a thread that's discussing an MMOG?  By whining about how much you suddenly hate MMOGs, because you've seen the light, and now you must pull back the curtains for the rest of us?

Because yeah.  That guy?  That's the real asshole.  Now shoo.  Adults are talking.

Haha, yep... Vault.

However, to make a comment that may even be worthwhile, the light reading I have done in here reminds me of Ye Olde Days of an aging EQ where people complained a lot but did not have anywhere else to go.  Well, nowhere that didn't suck.  I'm sensing a Circle of Life thing.

Not only is the game clearly in "retain the cash" mode, but they won't even use that cash to help improve the game.  That is the most damning thing this terrible attempt at a bandaid fix is revealing in my eyes.

It feels like Blizzard is so busy using WoW money hats to develop SC II , Diablo III, and their future MMO that they don't feel spending to upgrade their server hardware/code (like they did in the AQ-Naxx era pre-BC) is a worthwhile investment.

Ulduar is still fun even if they break the rest of the shit into the ground. It's tougher, requires actual thought from your raiders, and generally gives a feeling of satifaction when you beat something. Naxx never really did any of that. You could one-shot bosses you'd never seen, and that hasn't happened yet in my Ulduar 25 run outside of Flame Leviathan (which I think they toned down to meaningless because of the OMG VEHICLES SUUUUUUCK shouting).

I'd really like them to put more reasons in for doing heroics. Silly vanity items you could buy with heroism badges would be cool. Tabards, pets, a couple more mounts, maybe some shirts that looked fancy.

That's what I mean by cracks in the facade. That it's getting old, and the fact that Blizzard have other things on their plate is starting to show in their attention to it. Granted that may seem obvious to certain folks here, but that didn't stop me from having to clarify "I didn't say the sky was falling!" repeatedly.

Since this is the place where we post our "I Quit!" posts, my subscription runs out on Sunday. Here are the reasons I mentioned in Blizzard's survey, with a little more brevity:

1) Blizzard forced me to relearn to play my class by nerfing Death Knight's heroic dual-wield spec. This coupled with no two-hand weapon upgrades since level 80 means I'm ill-prepared to Ulduar.

2) Ulduar is bullshit-hardmode. Now, Blizzard has in these three weeks been "re-tuning" it, but the distinct lack of thousands of voices screaming "this is too easy, bads will get epixx too!" disturbing the Force leads me to conclude Blizzard is not going to get it anytime soon.

3) Naxx takes too long and is boring. Playing in a friendly casual guild means a 25-man Naxx is hard to come by. Playing Horde on a medium-population server with better players running Ulduar and Naxx not being nerfed means PUGs that can get anything done are not happening.

I think I could have told all this after one evening on the public test realm before Ulduar.

Technically, my Druid can, in fact, make the 'sky' fall.  :grin:

Now that I'm about as well-geared for PVP as you can get without Arena, I can't quit. I have nubs in quest greens and crafted blues to murdalize in battlegrounds and such. I took on some crappy rogue and DK simultaneously the other night while doing a gathering quest in WG and killed them both. I did the grinding for my e-peen, now it's time to slap newbs in the face with it.

I guess I could go do Arena, but finding a partner who's the right class/spec for us to get anywhere meaningful, reasonably skilled, and a tolerable human being on top of all that? Bleh, I'm not that sociable.

I don't think wow is so much in cash retention mode as they've hit a brick wall when it comes to the limitations of their own game. I'm sure there's some super-genious programmer out there who can magically re-write the code from scratch while not interrupting the play of the 10 million subscribers but he's probably only 10 and living in some remote village atm. The argent tournement smacks of laziness but ulduar was actually really well done. 

Anyways onto this post, I'll bite.


1. Anyone who thought deathknights dual wielding would be kept in as their main dps spec is kidding themselves. Sure, my warrior can use staves but he would be stupid to do so. Blame blizzard for that all you want but no one with half a brain didn't see that nerf coming.

2. Ulduar is harder but it's not impossible, it's actually a great raid zone if that's your thing. It's more challenging than naxx but all the top guilds still cleared it in a week and most semi-casual guilds are about halfway through. How is that too hard? Naxx is your loot pinata, enjoy it.

3. Naxx takes too long and is boring, yes...I completely agree with that statement. Wait though...are you saying naxx needs to be nerfed? Are you fucking kidding me? pugs clear naxx on a regular basis(which is a great place to find two handed weapons for ulduar btw)

This is a prime example of vault post. A complaint/quit post with a perspective that has little to no basis in reality.

Look people, stop makign me defend wow, I'm as disappointed in this last patch as anyone else and only log in to raid/daily these days but jesus christ if you keep bringing up these retarded issues I've got to say something.

I'm really failing to see how DW DK and 2H DK require relearning the class. If anything, it just means not staring at rime/KM procs all day and just rolling a rotation. If you were a paladin during any of the massive design shifts, sure. But the DK changes weren't all that sweeping.

I don't believe SAP updates every client connected to it every few seconds.

Even Oracle falls over when the transactions per second go massive.

Ya I think the teiring of the badges was a bad idea too. Look at BC and how many ppl still ran kara just for badges well into the expansion. Naxx will be a ghost town by the next content release, I'm guessing. Currently, I'm spending the badges I do accumulate on frozen orbs because there is nothing left on the vendor I want. Heroism badges are even worse.

Guys, Ulduar is super hard.

I totally agree with your points.  SAP is a badly-written application by the estimation of Many, but it does not update a client like a MMO.  I am interested in this topic because I'm now tasked with some performance analysis on SAP/Oracle animals and the WACKY things some people are doing to alleviate bottleneck... well it's just fascinating.  I'm of the opinion now that there might be (probably are) things that could be done to improve performance but maybe too unpalatable to implement.  Too bad I won't ever find out for real from a Blizz tech.

Apologies but I'm just somehow strangely drawn to this thread.

Do you know how long it would take to implement the hardware changes that would be necessary across the entire WoW server farm? This isn't just a 'hay guys lets put more memory in' sort of thing, this would be a massive amount of planning, a massive amount of hardware, and almost certainly would require redesigning the way they build the Northrend part of the server clusters, and thus rebuilding them. They can't just go wave a wand and fix it, I'd guess it would take 6 months to implement something like that, minimum. Maybe if everything is running on VMs they could do it faster than that, but I kind of doubt that's their setup.

Just to butt in for a second.  We routinely have fleet fights in the 4-500 hundred active participants range in Eve and have pushed ~1800 in one system before.

A 200 person fight is considered just a moderately sized skimish at the moment.

If CCP can do it, Blizzard certainly can.

Well sure, but all Eve has to do is render a bunch of red and green + signs on a starfield.  :awesome_for_real:

That's the client side.  The server side is still tracking all those things a WoW server would have to, position vectors, targets, attacks and etc...

The big fights are super laggy but less than 500 people is pretty much pain free at this point.

Agreeing with you, CCP achieves some (a lot?) of this via hardware, such as solid-state disks.

I'd think that if Blizz doesn't have everything virtualized (I'm assuming they do not), the prospect of upgrading everything would be daunting.  Daunting!  That's the kind of shit we have had to do at my company and, to be blunt, we are fucking hard core but it still sucks.  This kind of shit is also exactly why we are pushing to virtualize everything: life-cycle management sucks.  Still, moving servers and DBs around can be done.  Do they want to do it?  Seems like a "no" there.  I'd guess their hardware/license budget is being given to the new projects.

There's also the issue of time-frame. Do they want to run an expensive 6+ month project to fix one PVP sub-system in the game, meanwhile leaving the broken lag issue in the meantime? Even if they *were* throwing money at the problem I would kind of expect some kind of 'fix' like this to tide things over in the meantime.

(I still wish they weren't nerfing the honor gain so much, though.)

nvm, this isn't vault

Ship activity in EVE is much more mathematically predictable than character movement in Warcraft. The ships have speed and momentum that determines their turning radii. Guns fire at fixed rates and have enormous ranges. On the macro level, it's all just plugging assumptions into a bunch of formulae. WoW lets character turn 360 degrees instantaneously without losing any speed, has a number of split-second attack rotations and some very tight range requirements.

EVE can fudge the numbers a bit and nobody notices. The more players there are, and the further their ships are from one another in a chaotic battle, the less anybody notices if something is slightly off. None of that works at melee range.

1) Of course they were nerfed; Blizzard is only human. But you roll with the spec you came in, not some spec you may have once a patch hits. Until then, you do the best DPS that you are able. I realize that I painted a huge bullseye on my crotch by doing that, but it was Blizzard who kicked it.

2) I have done Naxx enough to be utterly bored with it and thus can't sustain my interest level to bring my a-game. 25-man being easier than 10-man except for a few choice bosses doesn't help any.

3) I haven't heard of a 25-man PUG clearing Naxx on my server ever and I can't imagine the horror a 10-man is likely to be. With the more capable players in Ulduar, I don't see that changing without some drastic changes to Naxx.

Re: relearning my class:

Since Ulduar hit, the consensus on elitistjerks has gone from
a) maybe DW unholy and pet with a priority system
to
b) maybe 2H unholy and faster cooldowns and hasted pet with a rotation
to
c) definitely 2H frost and rime procs and no pet with a rotation

"Luckily", I haven't logged more than twice so I haven't learned any of those. Maybe the raid DPS spec will end up at DW blood in frost presence and complete the set.

Wow - dozens of groups do it weekly on my server (although dozens more fail at Razuvious or Thaddius and break up.)

Probably the only nerf I'd ask for in Naxx is a change of Razuvious-25 to eliminate the requirement to use priest mind control. It puts too much of the fate of a PUG on whether or not the random priests who were available can handle the job.

I'd ask for two nerfs in Naxx

1.  Put in mind control orbs on Raz 25, I'm way with you on that one.
2.  Allow raids to go to Sapph + KT more directly.  Having to drag through a 2-4+ hour raid for a shot at one boss that probably won't drop your weapon is misery.

Ulduar isn't that hard.  My guild is sitting at 9 bosses down, out of 13+1 optional boss, which isn't too bad considering.  Of course, we haven't had any luck with getting to Thorim, mostly because the people in the arena cannot stay alive, and we're all not looking forward to Mimiron...  Having said that, Blizzard is likely to continue to apply slow nerfs in order to let more people enjoy their latest themed attraction.

This was the major hiccup (other than KT taking a few attempts because the melee were being noobs)  on the pug 25 that I completed this week.  One priest was a complete dick and the other priest was somewhat of a noob, so their communication was terrible.   Since Ulduar I've actually seen more Naxx pugs being successful due to already geared raiders aren't scheduling it anymore.  So you get Naxx pugs that are about 2/5 raider mains/alts,  and you still get largish blocks of other progression guild players.  The pug was very slow (I arrived halfway through and it still took almost 4 hours) mainly because the raider leader was a dickhead and a terrible at tanking (rogue playing his ridiculously over-geared paladin alt).  Didn't help that people kept dropping after every single boss.  The terrible players somehow managed to only kill themselves and not the raid on Thad. 

Shu'halo is a terrible podunk server with only two guilds on 25 man Yogg and 2 others on Mimiron.  Still, there's at least a handful of 25man Naxx pugs completed during the week Horde side.  They're also pretty well advertised and very inclusive.

There seem to be a lot less 10man Naxx happening and the volume of heroics being done also seems to be very low.  The new badge being introduced hasn't helped things. I really wish they would have approached the badge system more like they did in TBC, even if they had to greatly inflate the badge prices due to most WOLK heroics being incredibly easy for even the worst groups.

Edit: and yah, Uld really isn't too bad, but I haven't seen some of the more involved fights or just about any of the heroic due to my guild merging with another and adjusting the raid times to about 2 hours earlier than previous.  A previous guild I was in, which was mainly geared through 10 man Naxx, has made decent progress in Uld 10 despite having to carry some bad players through it.  They're like to stall out since the main tank went MIA about a week ago and came back recently with "I can't play WoW as much anymore".

Thorim is deceptive. They make you think the top is an aoe fest but you actually have to single target down most of those mobs and have people focusing on certain types. When we do it my spriest is actually the only one up there aoe'ing.

Having worked in the technical end of a Local ISP who was forced to update our login database to Oracle (buy out blues) I know one common solution is to put an intermediary demon between the database and the query. That way the demon can serialize the queries through an already up connection rather than reconnecting constantly. Setting up and tearing down connections to Oracle (and probably most databases)  for every seperate query, beats the crap out of them.

Pay some smart devs in castles made of gold to rewrite the backend to run on big iron, make a server farm that makes Google jealous. Print money.

Well, okay, that's impossible. It'd be cool though.

There's plenty of people that hate MMO's on this site.  It's called being jaded.  Fuck off. 

I had fun in Ulduar tonight wiping on the Council. Good fight, hard hitting boss, high dps needed, and some movement adjustments. It's something we have to learn and think about, as well as the 3 trash pulls on the way up being meaningful rather than 20 stupid ones. The design is solid here, and I'm in favor.

Quick point about the EVE comparisons - remember that large fleet battles in EVE have *always* been a major part of the game. Even if most players weren't engaged in them they've been used as a selling point forever and most of the omgdrama in EVEs politics comes from 0.0 alliance warfare, for whom large fleet fights are bread'n'butter.

Thus CCP have been trying to crack the 200+ person in one place issue for several years, and it's only relatively recently that they've managed to do it. For the majority of EVEs life the large fleet fights have been ultra-lagfests that people worked round anyway.

PvP in WoW has always been an afterthought and badly implemented, especially world PvP. Their focus has always been PvE and instances which don't have nearly the same technical problems as 200 people, all in different gear, having to be rendered at the same time in the same place in a non-instanced way. So Blizzard are relatively fresh to this problem. Yes, I'm sure they could fix it and as CCP show it can be done in some situations if you bash your head and your coders heads and a fuckton of hardware on the wall for long enough, but it ain't gonna happen overnight.

Does anyone know if CCP patented anything in their new stackless i/o design?

EVE uses Stackless Python. Given the license, it's possible for CCP to have it's own private fork without need to release the source code (i.e. Python and Stackless Python do not use a GPL-style license) but looking at the Stackless Python page it looks like CCP is supporting the efforts of the Stackless Python group rather than doing their own thing.

Not to derail this thread any further but you are completely wrong.

Acceleration, speed, range and angular velocity combined with the rotational speed (tracking) of the guns used all have an affect in Eve, and are obvious in small scale combat.  At a guess I would be pretty confident that the only factors WoW needs for combat are distance to target and facing at the time the attack is pressed.  A 'split second' turn is important to a human, to a computer?  Not so much.

It's all beside the point of whether or not large scale combat is *possible* though.

Also limitless Z axis? Hi.

I never said it would be cheap, easy, and happen in a day.  They've made major server hardware upgrades in the past so it's not exactly unprecedented, nor is it out of their budget.  It's not just the world servers getting slammed by WG either, instance servers are getting overloaded as well with such a large portion of the playerbase raiding on a regular basis.  

WoTLK has been out for 6 months now and these problems have been present/apparent since week 1.  If they had committed to making some upgrades right after it went live and they saw how big a problem it was on live servers, the upgrades would likely be in place by now or going in as we speak.  Heck, if they had a large enough beta population (didn't pay enough attention to it know how extensive the Wrath Beta was) they should have seen how big a problem WG was going to be for their servers before the expansion even launched.

Yeah, we switched it up last night.  Ranged in tunnel, melee in arena, focus fire champions as soon as they spawn.  The arena was solid, but the tunnel then had healing issues (yeah, it was me  :awesome_for_real:)  Once I got my shit together, it only took 3 actual tries on Thorim to down him.

Then we wiped a bunch on Freya because of DPS not understanding two things.
1.  When the tank says stop dpsing the lasher, he means right now.
2.  When the raid leader says stop dpsing the little adds, he means... oh crap, half the raid died.  Whoops.

Thorim is probably my most favorite fight right now.  My guild's 7/14 but I haven't seen Freya or Iron Council myself since they did those on days I wasn't online.  Hodir is a headache and a half, if only because our healers are whiny bitches about having to move and our current MT doesn't quite get "move the guy so melee can stand in the lights."

I loved our freya attempt where the dps lead says "Ok snap lasher is a little high" and then every single dps turns and blows it up in two seconds leaving the other two completely untouched.

Hodir?  That fight isn't too bad.  Make people bring two pieces of FR gear, and it's a lot simpler.

The only thing I could wish for on that fight is to have the happy fires stand out a little more.  I rarely bother looking for them after the first freezing breath or whatever it is, because it's difficult (for me) to pick them out in the sheer chaos of 25 people running around, dodging icicles, and when I get a chance, healing the MT.

The problem we're having with hodir is that their computers aren't geared enough for the fight and they can't see the circles.

Also breaking the NPCs out of their ice when they get flash frozen again.

Yeah, the mechanics aren't too tough but it's a combination of things that are making it such a headache.  I'm sure we've got guys with the same problem as Fabricated mentions, they just don't say anything and run with the group.  Doing it in 10 vs 25 probably helps us there.   We're just not pushing enough damage out because our two highest DPSers are me and a rogue.. and we never get to stand in the light at all during the fight. He's enraged on us twice when we were close to winning the two times I've gotten in with him.

If WoW was as 'responsive' as EVE is in regards to combat, we would all have stopped playing WoW 10 mins after we tried it.



Press a button, one, two THEN it goes. Double click in space, one, two THEN you start to move. 'Good' fleet lag in EVE is a 5-10 second delay. Even in a system with only 4 other people and nothing happening, you'll have a 1-2 second delay in everything you do.

That is also interesting.  I had assumed the issue with most MMOs was DB IO in the first place and this could be one of the problems.  Maybe it's a network bottleneck but my assumption is that there is a disk IO bottleneck, which can be tuned to varying degrees based on the OS and RDBMS.  Of course, could be CPU or RAM.  Can't see the servers or disk subsystems so... eh, I'm left to pick one of the items that cannot be easily fixed by overallocating hardware.

I'll also say that EVE is not terribly responsive but at the same time I don't believe the lag was ever caused by client updates.

I think with the current market of fast disk solutions, any MMO with disk i/o problems must have been designed on the back of an envelope or something equally silly. It should be relatively easy to design in a disk i/o subsystem that won't bog down and is still quite cost effective.

We put raid icons on the NPCs' heads. Want to find the happy fire? Look for the skull.

I doubt much is done against the DB in real-time, especially writes as you have to perform exclusive locks in an environment as active as a game. Auction house and other changing, highly tabular data might be done real-time, but most data structures in an MMO aren't dynamic. It's simply wasteful to do DB lookups for things that don't change more often than with every patch.

My guess would be that nearly every data projection on the server-side is done through fairly specialized, cached memory structures that have no more look-up latency than simple memory addressing. These are populated on server boot-up and are never really changed, just referenced from a bazillion places that do change (like an instanced mob has a pointer to its mob class, rather than to an ID that it looks up in the DB.) The only significant drawback with this approach is memory comsumption and memory is relatively speaking very cheap and it scales very well.

Just to continue my delusional technical wankery, I would say that 200+ PvP sitations become unmanageable because they're exponential in nature. For every player you add to a small area, each of those players will consume more CPU time per update. Adding one player to a group of 150 might be like adding five players to a group of ten. It all depends on how much overhead there is on having players in eachothers' proximity, but there would be some overhead to it, regardless. Almost no other client-server applications are designed to allow all clients can communicate freely with all other connected clients via the server, but games are, for obvious reasons.

This is greatly simplified and it wouldn't scale this badly in practice, but just to illustrate - something like distance-checking AoE effects, with six people á two teams you have a potential 18 distance checks to do (each player AoEing and having to distance check three opponents), with 75 people per team you get a potential ~11,000 checks, just in case everyone decided to fire off an AoE at the same time.

You are essentially correct in that you don't generally hit the database itself for local real time data. The slowness issues partly stem from the fact that updates must be handled sequentially and you run into serious causality issues if you try and sidestep this fact.

I believe one of the developers here, possibly mahrinskel or stephen zepp, enumerated it a year or two ago in a long post, about planetside if I recall correctly, that some creative searching might dig up. The example was about a grenade/rocket and destructible terrain and how two clients getting out of sync are a bad thing.

It's not about possibility, and I didn't mean to imply that the fixed mathematics of EVE's simulation are hand-waving. Quite the opposite. They help make largescale online battle possible. Battles in EVE take place not only at enormous range, but each gun has an enormous range of ranges. There are no substantial LOS issues. If you start shooting at the limits of a particular gun's specs you don't expect to hit very often because the math takes such things into account.

What gets fudged is your client's understanding of the exact locations of enemy ships. All that math happens server side and feeds you failures and successes. The difference between your understanding and the server's is minimally important because ship motion is extremely predictable and the statistical error bars are large. There's only very rarely a baffling player-not-in-range experience because distribution of hits and misses will be wrong in less obvious ways than...

...in the tighter ranged, walls and pillars world of Warcraft, where very little of this applies. Somebody steps around a corner and your spell fails, somebody moves in an unpredictable way and you get all sorts of "out of range" or "facing wrong" messages. Blizzard fudges ranges a little to hide latency, and that fudging is immediately obvious when some rogue is backstabbing you while you run.

EVE avoids much of the combinatorial explosion Tarami and bhodi (yeah, I remember that post was enlightening) are talking about because individual clients don't need to be particularly promptly informed of it.

There is evidence that this may be the case. Most of the WG changes before these current ones revolved around trying to spread everyone out across the zone, instead of just clustering at the keep.

Try this thread. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9047.0).  Zepp and I (and maybe others, just skimmed enough to find it) are talking about why it isn't going to work.

I believe there is a setting in the graphics options called "projected textures" or something similar.  Have the people who cant see circles turn this on.  Even when running with every other setting turned down to low, this should still allow you to see a big blue circle on the ground, without all the fancy particle / lighting effects from spells killing your framerate.   My videocard suck (i get about 5 fps in a 25 man raid on a good day) and projected textures has saved my ass a number of times.

What surf said.  I learned about this on Friday and turned it on.. all of the sudden it didn't matter that I couldn't see the stupid blue light that indicates the snowfall.  Instead there's a horking big blue rune on the ground.   Why such a critical piece of visual information is defaulted to OFF I have no idea.

The option was added last patch. We had FUN with that on heroics and the like. Randomly WoW seemed to default this setting off regardless of graphics settings. So one patch I can see void zones, the next patch I can't see my own team's freaking Consecrate or hostile flamestrikes. <3

Holy shit, is that why I suddenly couldn't see the fucking fire patches anymore?

Yup. Worst Default Setting Ever.

Even worse than defaulting autoattack to A?   :grin:

So much worse.

Though my current lark is needing to rebind Ctrl-S from enable/disable sound. Since I hit it a lot when using ctrl-click binds to heal and trying to move out of fires.

I enable sound in raids at least once a week because it's my push to talk button.

There are actually 2 lag issues with Wintergrasp; you're only describing one of them, the lag that happens just as a normal consequence of a bunch of people fighting all together. I expect you have nailed why that one happens pretty well. This doesn't explain the massive Northrend-wide lag that hits briefly when Wintergrasp ends, though. That doesn't seem to care much about proximity. That's the one that I assume is due to some kind of I/O problem as it updates everyone.

That "Projected Textures" option is a mixed bag to me. It helps a lot on Hodir, but it made the Void Zones hard to see in OS because it puts those ridiculous runes out for all player aoes: D&D, blizz, etc. So I have to toggle it on/off based on what we're raiding.

I've never played WotLK, so it was more of a general observation of the nature of player proximity. It should apply to all games, to some extent.

Hey look, it's another wall of text full of technical guesswork!  :heart:

Heh

On my server WG is totally broken. The game ends with a successful defense after about 5 minutes, then begins again 10 seconds later. Since the Horde was holding it when the server came up, four hours later a bunch of people on the Horde side now have basically infinity WG marks and a bunch of Alliance people have 1/3 infinity marks.

You know, the great thing about Blizzard is that they don't shove things out there untested like their crappy MMO forebears used to. What's more, suggesting that anything has changed lately is being a Chicken Little.

Yes I still do green.

WG ends up borked often after patches. Usually in some unique and bothersome way; not something as awesome as that.  This may persist for 10 minutes to emergency server reboot. This is nothing new. 

Working fine on my server, however. Or it might be broken and everyone's keeping it on the down low.

edit: I'd check it out, but, alas, (future) baby doctor's visit.

Ooh, now it's about 3 minutes between battles, which end in succesful defenses after 3 minutes. Since I get one mark either way, I guess I'll park in the Alliance base, browse the web, and hope they don't roll it back.

EDIT:  Everyone on the server is here. The lag is exquisite. We're somehow running around at 12/8 vehicles and driving them around between battles. It's beyond fucked.

The jousting is broken on Alleria.  All melee thrusts hit the opponent as if they had no shields up, so no need to do the charge, shieldbreak dance right now. Just stay on top of them spamming thrust.

Haha, that might explain why jousting was so much easier today.


"Woo man, I'm kicking ass!"

Shhh, :)

Welp, we managed to take WG in like 4 minutes or something, after the first Horde kill put EVERYONE to max rank and let us zerg with siege engines. Then we got to defend it for a while as it reset every couple minutes. Then I think Blizz caught on because the between-battle clock quit counting down. Oh well, I made like 30k honor in an hour.

Lag was horrific today even with a minor patch, but we still got two bosses down in Ulduar at least.

Too Late. Hotfixed.

Sauce (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17223065238&sid=1)

Just scrap it. Seriously. It breaks the moment you patch a tree into the game.

This thread smells like death.  I'm a huge fan.

Having anywhere from nothing to five or six minutes in which to win, with everyone getting the right to drive siege engines on their very first kill, and getting to try again just a minute later if we lose? Zerging and zerging and zerging, with the Horde rushing out to meet us each time so that they could rank up too and get three marks instead of one? Finally breaking through and winning, and getting to rack up three marks every few minutes as the Horde frantically zerged us in return?

Broken Wintergrasp was more fun that normal Wintergrasp.  :why_so_serious:

Well, that's the problem right there. Needs a little bit of grind to it.

Also, servers dying due to massive quantities of players looking to get their honor on.

I bought a full pvp set for the first time yesterday on my disc priest and had a bit of fun in wintergrasp and battlegrounds.

I used my capped 75k honor (why is the cap so stupidly low?), a bunch of valor tokens, and one legs I got from VoA and did half/half on the two priest sets for the double +50 resilience bonus. I bought myself the head+shoulder enchant and that nice resilience gem, and am sitting fairly pretty now at 451 resilience.

I had dabbled in pvp as a priest but had never picked up a pvp set. I was frankly astonished at what such small numbers (-5.5% crit, -12.5% crit damage) did to my survivability.

I went from "Free HK" to "Just die already!". It takes 2 people dogpiling me to take me down, or 3 to take me down with any speed. And I didn't even spec for pvp! It's really fun being fairly invincible for a change.

It's a lot of the resil, and a lot of the stam stacked pvp sets. Your regen suuuuucks now, but you should be able to abuse shield/pain supp/penance to be a total prick to kill barring a few people who know how to chain silences/suns/fears on you. Sadly, alliance in BGs hasn't figured out how to just dump cooldowns on priests <3

I've stuck to just one pvp set on my priest for the moment because once your in the 700-900+ resil range (depending on which pvp trinkets are used), being able to put another shield on yourself/teamates 2 seconds sooner seems more beneficial than an extra 50 resil.

Survivability is pretty great unless you run into a good hunter/rogue/warrior, with the current levels of dps and burst, healing debuffs are just brutal.  Especially rogues/warriors because if they interupt a healing spell with kick/pummel it's difficult catch up after the spell lock ends.

It's surprising how tightly PvP is balanced.  I suppose it was worse in the old days when the difference was a mere couple hundred HP. 

But yea, the key to priest PvP is mastering the spin jump.  Nothing infuriates an attacker more than that.  I recall the wise words of a Korean friend who once said, "In PvP, Priest is tank."

Yeah, the benefit from even just a little PVP gear is HUGE.  People really underrate the value of PVP gear until they actually try it - especially clothies.

A warrior doesn't even need to do a spell lock-out to ruin your day in our patch 3.1.2 world.  If an arms warrior sticks to you and lands an Overpower on a heal, you'll be healing with a 75% debuff.  You should use something like Power Auras so you know when healing is just a waste of time.

Yeah, they are pretty much the (healing) priest counter class at this point because our only escape tool, a long cd fear, can just be shrugged off by them with berzerker rage.  However, they've been tamed a slight amount in 3.1.2 with the nerfs to Jugernaught and glyph of rapid charge, not much but it's something.

Also, healing yourself is never worthless because last I checked, dead healers don't do much healing (unless your a holy priest).   :grin:

I'm not feeling really solid about my warrior post 3.1 in regards to the changes. We were way high on dps, and decent at tanking, but now we're imo way low for relative gear to the other classes. When I'm watching the lineups, rogues are usually way up there with the DKs, hunters are putting up some respectable numbers, and mages are doing pretty well.

I know it's been admitted that warrior dps was dropped too far by the blues, but I'm not sure they can fix arms dps without completely fucking up pvp. The last nerf that came in from juggernaught was obviously a pvp nerf for example. It sort of ties in with the fact that they took the obvious pvp spec and tried to make it viable in pve, while nerfing the obvious pve spec to the point where people aren't doing well with it anymore. As for tanking, there aren't a lot of fights in there where I think YEAH WARRIOR, where a druid might not be better or a DK for that matter.

There aren't really any fights where you're going to think "crap, we only have warriors," though. On the whole I think the tank balance is pretty good that way (at least in the non-25 man world). There's been some fights where my DK is a little better than Ingmar's warrior, but never to the point of Shit We Can't Do This Without the DK. There's also been some fights where his warrior is a little better than my DK. Most of them I feel we're pretty damn interchangeable though. Maybe the healers feel differently, I dunno.

I have yet to tank with a bear or paladin this expansion, it's crazy.

Tanking wise, warriors have an advantage on bosses that fear or have interuptable spells, also on bosses that have dispellable buffs (shield slam).  Also their mobility is really good with Warbringer so they should have a leg up in fights that require lots of tank movement.

It's really noticable on fights like Iron Council.  Paladins and druids are somewhat lacking in the spell interupt department (long cd's) so having a Warrior or DK off tank the two smaller bosses and interupt the smallest one's chain lightning really reduces the pressure on the healers by significantly lowering the incoming tank/raid dmg.

Haven't seen a lot of fear bosses yet in Ulduar, but I'm sure there's a few. I do agree that warriors are better for OTing in Iron Council because of the interrupts. However, they are lacking in the large add fights that seem to be prevelent in a lot of areas. It's a tradeoff situation still so it's not horrible, but I don't think it's fully homogonized either.

As for warrior dps, I don't think there's any question the fury nerf took them out of their dps niche. I've tried arms for utility, but it's still extremely sub-par even though you have basically endless rage.

Auriaya was basically made for a warrior tank - she does a group fear and then immediately starts casting a group damage blast. A warrior can just pre-rage the fear and shield bash the spell.

If they want to have arms be both PVE and PVP viable (I maintain that there is absolutely nothing wrong with warriors having a PVP tree and a PVE tree as long as both are OK enough that PVP warriors can tag along on PVE pugs without holding back the raid and PVErs can have fun in BGs), they just need to add some more PVP talents in the arms tree.  They could just be more Juggernaut-like talents that let you actually use all of your class abilities in battle stance like disarm, shield wall, spell reflect, and shield block.

The real reason there was such a shitstorm over juggernaut had nothing to do with warriors dominating arena (they aren't, they are exactly middle of the pack in 2s and slightly overrepresented in 3s and no one cares about 5s) and everything to do with there being almost no difference between PVE and PVP arms.  It's seriously a half-dozen talent points difference that are mild to moderate survivability increases and utility improvements at keeping targets in melee range.  This meant even hard-core PVErs who have a prot spec and a PVE DPS spec could suddenly wander into BGs and blow people up.  People notice IMMEDIATELY when a spec gets new-found burst potential.  Juggernaut did need a change though; autocrit is unfair to resilience.

Contrast the uproar over juggernaut with the deafening silence about resto druids.

Silence? From who?


Every other Post is a Resto Druid thread.

Lol.  Didn't they have a very similar problem with the charge mechanic upgrade talent for guardians in Age of Conan??

Speaking of Arms warriors, I fucking suck at warrior DPS. My DPS off-spec set is pretty ridiculous at this point (Mostly Naxx-25/Uld10 gear, only my rings and trinkets suck) and I can barely do 2400 or so on a combat dummy.

2400 DPS on a dummy is solid.  Going from self-buffed (battle shout/4% phys/+bleed; I'm assuming you weren't sundering it or using food/flasks) to fully raid-buffed will double your DPS.

That's not bad considering the 8 or 9 hundred you can add to that with raid buffs.  Silly.

With Arms dps in a raid you can do over 3k. You can, but in many instances you won't because you're doing different things like running your ass off, or staying out of fires which fucks with your slams. It's still not going to get near a rogue or DK right now though, and that's an issue they need to resolve. Warriors and DK's should be within about 200 dps of each other when working with similar gear, DK's having the upper hand. As it stands, DK's are putting up 1000 more dps than your similar geared warrior.

Warriors simply need to be brought up to the average level of all the other melee dps classes again. The straight-line damage nerfs were unnecessary to fury, and it's really put a dent in things. Cat druids, DKs, rogues, and in some cases even ret pallies can put out bigger damage currently.