Cataclysm

[Simond]

...


80-85 is the new zones, 1-60 is the revamped stuff.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I think people are having a hard time comprehending just how much is being added/redone here. It's as if there's a disconnect in what they believe a company could release in an expansion vs what blizzard is saying will be in it.

[Kirth]

I'm calling a "Restoration of Outlands" in the future.

[Khaldun]

Outlands now makes absolutely zero sense, that's for sure. No reason to go there, and it is all out of whack with the timeline now. Even new toons will now start "in the time of the Cataclysm", but if you go at 58 to Outland, you'll suddenly be back in a time that precedes the Cataclysm by a very large margin. I assume you'll be able to go up to 68 with new quests in Azeroth anyway, so nobody will bother, in all likelihood.

[Jayce]

I still hear people saying that this is the lazy way out, that they just redid a few zones and called it a day.

In fact there are seven new zones* - just like the last two expansions - and in addition they redid all of Azeroth for flying mounts and some of it geographically.

*Uldum, Deepholm, Gilneas, Lost Isles, Vashj'zNaz'tatariaville, Hyjal, Twilight Highlands (Grim Batol)


(Actually I guess that with the two starting areas BC had 9 new zones but they didn't revamp the guild system, stats, remake Azeroth for flying, etc)


Regarding the point of Outland, it will especially look strange to Blood Elves and Draenei whose early stories keep going on about fighting the Burning Legion/finding Kael'thas in Outland when Azeroth seems to have its own trouble.

[Fordel]

Outland was already just a giant detour for the Alliance to begin with. The Alliance didn't have the same draw to it the way the Orcs or Elves would.


There's a small moment of "oh hey, those brave souls that stayed behind to seal the gate aren't all dead! hurrah!", followed by a lot of "but most of them ARE, in fact, dead..." 

[sickrubik]

Outlands now makes absolutely zero sense, that's for sure. No reason to go there, and it is all out of whack with the timeline now. Even new toons will now start "in the time of the Cataclysm", but if you go at 58 to Outland, you'll suddenly be back in a time that precedes the Cataclysm by a very large margin. I assume you'll be able to go up to 68 with new quests in Azeroth anyway, so nobody will bother, in all likelihood.

Put Chromie at the entrance and presto, solved. Time travel fixes EVERYTHING.

[kildorn]

Chromie, leader of the shut up about continuity dragonflight.

[Musashi]

Yea, I guess there's the usual sandy vag at the end of an expansion cycle atm.  But god damn me to hell if every swinin' dick in this thread doesn't read the inevitable "Just Re-Subbed for Cataclysm/Splooge/Holy Shit" thread and resub themselves.

Goblins, dude.  Mother fucking Goblins.  I rerolled horde already.  Time is money, friend.

If anyone is interested, I did some research yesterday and found that Ghostlands (PvE) is a relatively decent server for Horde.  The battlegroup is apparently favoring Horde.  The server itself is a large pop, which I like for Auction Whoring reasons.  It was something like 15k Horde : 11K Alliance.  So the server PvP Wintergraspy stuff should favor Horde, but still be decent games.  I normally don't like PvE servers, but I have crotchety friends who are tired of gankfests.

[kildorn]

There's a ton of "waah oversimplifying stats" "waah LFG changing" "waaah need more zones" and such.

It doesn't really matter though, since they have on the board a fuckton of content, and probably the largest overhaul of a game I've seen in a single expansion. And it all looks pretty solid. As I've said, I have my lingering doubts on a few things, but blizzcon sold me on the expansion as a whole. It looks great.

[Sheepherder]

Well, i sort of understand why you might not need / want hit, because the random chance of missing spells could "liven" things up a bit, but look at the flip side:  A lot of classes now a days in wow have some pretty complex dps rotations.  If you miss a key attack in your rotation, you can seriously fuck up your damage output.  And no one enjoys that.

As to Defense and being defense capped.  That one is kind of mandatory, due mainly to the whole idea that, while sure, sucking up a crit on a boss can add some spice to your healer's job, NO ONE enjoys wiping on a boss because their tank is 10% below the Crit cap and just got instagibbed from 2 parry hasted crits back to back.  Which can happen VERY frequently when many raid bosses hit your tank like the pimp-hand of god.

Hit Options:

1. Fix the rotations to not be retarded.
2. Put the talent tree overhaul to good use and put exceedingly large +hit% modifiers on specific abilities.
3. Give these "vital" abilities a fallback (Overpower-style) that recoups or betters the lost damage, so that a miss can be turned into a DPS gain by someone paying attention.
4. Add abilities to the tree that grant an instant cast of a spell when you miss, like the Destro Warlock's backlash is to being damaged.
5. Remove the chance to miss via talents/the aforementioned passive buff for putting x points into the tree.
6. In the case of melee give out a passive 8% +hit% to cover the specials but not DW auto-attack.

Defense Options:

1. Decrease critical strike damage bonus against attacks that hit you by ~50 - 100% via talents (making crits slightly bigger to the same as normal hits).
2. Remove the damage bonus on mobs critting but give them other benefits (flurry-type buffs?).
3. Make the crit bonus occur as a DoT effect increasing damage as it ticks (for up to the 2x crit modifier worth of damage), possibly removed on the tank reaching >90% health.

[dusematic]

I still hear people saying that this is the lazy way out, that they just redid a few zones and called it a day.

In fact there are seven new zones* - just like the last two expansions - and in addition they redid all of Azeroth for flying mounts and some of it geographically.

*Uldum, Deepholm, Gilneas, Lost Isles, Vashj'zNaz'tatariaville, Hyjal, Twilight Highlands (Grim Batol)


(Actually I guess that with the two starting areas BC had 9 new zones but they didn't revamp the guild system, stats, remake Azeroth for flying, etc)


Regarding the point of Outland, it will especially look strange to Blood Elves and Draenei whose early stories keep going on about fighting the Burning Legion/finding Kael'thas in Outland when Azeroth seems to have its own trouble.

Aren't someone of those instances rather than zones?  And if so, the previous expansions had a fuckload more.  Regardless, a redone old world just isn't interesting to me.  Not sure why.  I'm sure it will be cool, but everyone has their breaking point or we'd all still be playing Contra everyday.

[Sjofn]

I took that as those 4 raids will be the raids released over the course of the expansions life cycle (like Naxx, Ulduar, ToC and IC).

I didn't, 'cause they kept saying how half the reason the level cap is only going to 85 is because they want to be able to spend a loooooot more resources on raids. I'm also pretty sure Mr. Raid Man said the current plan was 4 raids at release.

[Paelos]

I took that as those 4 raids will be the raids released over the course of the expansions life cycle (like Naxx, Ulduar, ToC and IC).

I didn't, 'cause they kept saying how half the reason the level cap is only going to 85 is because they want to be able to spend a loooooot more resources on raids. I'm also pretty sure Mr. Raid Man said the current plan was 4 raids at release.

If, and this is a big if, they released 4 smaller raid zones at release then I think people in my boat could gloss over all the "new fuzzy world rehaul" stuff. I'd like to see more varied types of raids with fewer bosses, sort of like how 5 man heroics work now. 5 raids in 5 different areas with an end boss that drops the different token slots would be much better to me than a 15 boss raid zone. Hell, I could even get on board with them having 3 raids of 5 bosses.

[Slyfeind]

I would MUCH prefer a redo of Outlands rather than a redo of Classic. Outlands seemed like such a step backward.

[kildorn]

Well, i sort of understand why you might not need / want hit, because the random chance of missing spells could "liven" things up a bit, but look at the flip side:  A lot of classes now a days in wow have some pretty complex dps rotations.  If you miss a key attack in your rotation, you can seriously fuck up your damage output.  And no one enjoys that.

As to Defense and being defense capped.  That one is kind of mandatory, due mainly to the whole idea that, while sure, sucking up a crit on a boss can add some spice to your healer's job, NO ONE enjoys wiping on a boss because their tank is 10% below the Crit cap and just got instagibbed from 2 parry hasted crits back to back.  Which can happen VERY frequently when many raid bosses hit your tank like the pimp-hand of god.

Hit Options:

1. Fix the rotations to not be retarded.
2. Put the talent tree overhaul to good use and put exceedingly large +hit% modifiers on specific abilities.
3. Give these "vital" abilities a fallback (Overpower-style) that recoups or betters the lost damage, so that a miss can be turned into a DPS gain by someone paying attention.
4. Add abilities to the tree that grant an instant cast of a spell when you miss, like the Destro Warlock's backlash is to being damaged.
5. Remove the chance to miss via talents/the aforementioned passive buff for putting x points into the tree.
6. In the case of melee give out a passive 8% +hit% to cover the specials but not DW auto-attack.

Defense Options:

1. Decrease critical strike damage bonus against attacks that hit you by ~50 - 100% via talents (making crits slightly bigger to the same as normal hits).
2. Remove the damage bonus on mobs critting but give them other benefits (flurry-type buffs?).
3. Make the crit bonus occur as a DoT effect increasing damage as it ticks (for up to the 2x crit modifier worth of damage), possibly removed on the tank reaching >90% health.

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

The rotations aren't exactly retarded, they're just reliant on prior spell effects. Be it diseases being applied, or tighter things like Conflag not missing (and thus not granting backdraft charges)

Hit is a boring stat, yes. But it's really not that hard to deal with these days. Almost everyone can find hit in their talents, or other people's talents.

As for crits: they're going away for tanks. Why are we discussing ways to make them less obnoxious? Defense is dying, people, because it's a stupid fucking mechanic.

[Simond]

I would MUCH prefer a redo of Outlands rather than a redo of Classic. Outlands seemed like such a step backward.

what

[Kail]

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

That's just because of the weighting of the stats, isn't it?  I mean, you could balance it so that a bonus of +1% hit would be equivalent to a bonus of +X to str, where X is calculated so that the increase in damage for hits makes up for the loss of damage for the misses.  Say your base character will miss 10% of the time, if you could trade your +hit items in for a 12% increase in DPS, wouldn't that be a good trade overall?  

And I don't know why you'd worry about accomodating DPS rotations.  Seeing what's on the boss, what you can apply, and what's on cooldown, and then throwing the spell you think works best seems like a lot more interesting to me than looking up the optimal rotation online and doing the whole "1-2-3-1-4-5-1-2-getoutofthefire-3-1-4-5" dance in every raid for the next year and a half.

[Ingmar]

It was specifically stated in the panel as 4 raids at release - no idea how many they'll add through the patch cycle, they didn't really talk about that.

[Fordel]

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

That's just because of the weighting of the stats, isn't it?  I mean, you could balance it so that a bonus of +1% hit would be equivalent to a bonus of +X to str, where X is calculated so that the increase in damage for hits makes up for the loss of damage for the misses.  Say your base character will miss 10% of the time, if you could trade your +hit items in for a 12% increase in DPS, wouldn't that be a good trade overall?  

I'm sure Kild will come in Math a blazing, but in short, no.

+hit isn't a flat increase like +dmg or +str or whatever.

[Koyasha]

Aren't someone of those instances rather than zones?  And if so, the previous expansions had a fuckload more.  Regardless, a redone old world just isn't interesting to me.  Not sure why.  I'm sure it will be cool, but everyone has their breaking point or we'd all still be playing Contra everyday.

Those are all full zones.  Some of them sound like they should be instances (Uldum, for example) but they're not.  All of those except for the two starting zones also have announced instances and/or raids within them.

[Slyfeind]

I would MUCH prefer a redo of Outlands rather than a redo of Classic. Outlands seemed like such a step backward.

what

Way too grindy gameplay, and way too irrelevant world. I still don't know why I had to spend ten levels in outer space gaining rep with giant smurfs before I could get back to WoW.

[kildorn]

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

That's just because of the weighting of the stats, isn't it?  I mean, you could balance it so that a bonus of +1% hit would be equivalent to a bonus of +X to str, where X is calculated so that the increase in damage for hits makes up for the loss of damage for the misses.  Say your base character will miss 10% of the time, if you could trade your +hit items in for a 12% increase in DPS, wouldn't that be a good trade overall?  

And I don't know why you'd worry about accomodating DPS rotations.  Seeing what's on the boss, what you can apply, and what's on cooldown, and then throwing the spell you think works best seems like a lot more interesting to me than looking up the optimal rotation online and doing the whole "1-2-3-1-4-5-1-2-getoutofthefire-3-1-4-5" dance in every raid for the next year and a half.

Due to side effects of various spells (or raidwide effects of them), cooldowns, and finally damage, the actual weighting would be ~10% hit = ~25% damage

And even then, you will have a smoother experience of play if you pick the hit. Pulling something off perfectly and then dying due to the RNG instagibbing your tank is some serious gameplay bullshit, as is a string of misses because the RNG is just in a shitty mood and taking you from 7k DPS to 3k DPS because the right spells just aren't landing.

Hit will always be more important than any other stat by a large amount because your enemy in a DIKU pve is randomness. Random is interesting, and random will make people /quit if it's random in the sense of "haha you died because the server rolled a 1"

[WindupAtheist]

Way too grindy gameplay, and way too irrelevant world. I still don't know why I had to spend ten levels in outer space gaining rep with giant smurfs before I could get back to WoW.

Ditto. Thankfully now it's basically just a ten-level safari to a place that was noteworthy in the lore, that you take on your way up before getting back to real business in Azeroth.

[ajax34i]

Truth be told, if we can level up to maximum via Azeroth zones only, they can

(a) Close the portal to Outland.
(b) Let Draenor finish blowing up / floating apart / losing its atmosphere (air).

[Lantyssa]

Way too grindy gameplay, and way too irrelevant world. I still don't know why I had to spend ten levels in outer space gaining rep with giant smurfs before I could get back to WoW.

It's a very quick ten levels.  Having nearly quit several times just trying to reach Outland, I much perfer them trying to make Azeroth, where I spent 60 levels, a more enjoyable experience.  They can fiddle with Outland next content patch/expansion.

[Righ]

I think it would be much better if characters did 1-60 in Old Azeroth and the whole world was phased for the 78+ crowd. That way Outland et. al. still makes sense. I was assuming they were going that way with the phasing. The rewrite described in posts above sounds like wank.

[Koyasha]

Much of the point is to make the low level experience smooth, like it is in newer expansions, instead of annoying as it was in the old game.  Azeroth was designed with lots of intentional timesinks in the form of quests that want you to go to the other side of the bleeding world just to talk to that one guy and then go back.  Azeroth doesn't "flow."  It's a disconnected experience for new players, and the revamp will allow them to make it a smooth route through the old world, as well as actually changing the world with events.  Some players will make new alts just to see the changed content and quests.  Others will be able to make characters they may have wanted to make for a while, but haven't because of the annoyance of leveling through all that old content.

[Sheepherder]

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

You didn't "get" the implied premises, did you?  Let's list them:

1. Blizzard wants a random factor in set rotations, or alternatively FIFO rotations (need I prove this?)

Therefore:

2. The random factor could just as easily be instant cast opportunities off of failed casts, rather than procs off of crits, or hits.
3. The opportunities should be a major DPS upgrade if used perfectly, if not then slightly greater than gearing for 17% hit (let's assume 5% increase across the spectrum of players).
4. Following 3, these upgrades are detrimental if used incorrectly (high percentage of skipped opportunities, canceled casts to use opportunity, delayed casts).
5. In case 4, the player still has the option of acquiring hit and being an average DPS consistently.
6. More balanced in pvp, unlike procs off of crits or hits, which significantly inflate burst damage.

[kildorn]

Unless every miss results in a higher damage skill being triggered, hit will always be the best stat you can take up to your skill/spell cap. And if a higher damage ability does open after every miss, then you'd WANT to miss, which would be stupid.

You didn't "get" the implied premises, did you?  Let's list them:

1. Blizzard wants a random factor in set rotations, or alternatively FIFO rotations (need I prove this?)

Therefore:

2. The random factor could just as easily be instant cast opportunities off of failed casts, rather than procs off of crits, or hits.
3. The opportunities should be a major DPS upgrade if used perfectly, if not then slightly greater than gearing for 17% hit (let's assume 5% increase across the spectrum of players).
4. Following 3, these upgrades are detrimental if used incorrectly (high percentage of skipped opportunities, canceled casts to use opportunity, delayed casts).
5. In case 4, the player still has the option of acquiring hit and being an average DPS consistently.
6. More balanced in pvp, unlike procs off of crits or hits, which significantly inflate burst damage.

Sure, prove to me that blizzard wants a random rotation. Because there is a whole ONE class with any ability that favors a random rotation in the game of World of Warcraft. Every other class/spec has a set rotation.

Beyond this, what you're proposing is a bizarre system in which your damage output is.. completely random. Which is not what they've been going for in PVP at all. In case you've missed it, they've clearly stated such, because random in pvp eliminates skill (plenty of other things could be said to eliminate it as well, but I can state definitively that random in pvp reduces skill in the equation signifigantly)

Why do you think mace stuns were removed? Because, as clearly stated by blizzard, random is not okay. It was either massively overpowered if it happened a lot, or completely useless if it never happened. The same shit is true of any ability used on a miss where it's not a guarantee of greater effect.

Seriously, give me an example of a good "on miss" ability for, say, a warlock in which it's not gimping my damage output, rewards me for understanding it, and does not reward failing to hit. I have Immo up on a target, conflag misses. What spell would possibly reward me for skilled usage of it that would beat 14k damage, a 5s snare, and a 3 shot 30% casting speed buff, but NOT be more powerful simply as a "cast this if you miss and detonate your opponent"

Hit Rating is pretty much the easiest way to solve this. Only better done by eliminating misses from the game entirely, but that doesn't seem to be on the table.

edit: anywho, I "get" your premise, your premise just doesn't make any goddamned sense. Because it's impossible. You add skill to pvp by making complex skills that allow for branching followups based on the situation at hand (you open with a hit. You can now either apply an MS style debuff or a 90% snare, that kind of thing requires you to be aware of the fight and choose the correct option.) Adding in randomness doesn't help shit (hey, if you miss, you have these random options if you use them correctly! That's stupid, because now I'm either praying I miss because it will open doors for me, or even worse my intended move failed and thus the correct debuff I was trying to apply isn't in play, and my "skill" for choosing the right move is being punished by the RNG)

The more you eliminate random, the better the game is. Because random should never, ever decide a fight.

[Righ]

Much of the point is to make the low level experience smooth, like it is in newer expansions, instead of annoying as it was in the old game.

That's fine. Why not do that and then phase the post-Cataclysm stuff on separate from that? Just because they're writing new quests for 1-60 at the same time as writing Cataclysm content, there's no reason that the writers have to make everything post-Cataclysm, especially with phasing. If they obsolete all of TBC, they're morons - with phasing it's too easy to keep it all connected. Just because you have Goblins and Worgen at level 1 they don't have to be post-Cataclysm when they start out. They could actually give people the rather fun experience of leveling up free of faction before the Cataclysm aligns them to one.

[ezrast]

That's fine. Why not do that and then phase the post-Cataclysm stuff on separate from that? Just because they're writing new quests for 1-60 at the same time as writing Cataclysm content, there's no reason that the writers have to make everything post-Cataclysm, especially with phasing.

Because there's no point in redoing the old world if nobody's going to level in it (again, way too huge for all of it to be 60+ stuff) and allowing access to either version when leveling would be a huge division of the playerbase, which would be batshit insane after putting so much work into making the low-level content popular.

The more you eliminate random, the better the game is. Because random should never, ever decide a fight.

Tell that to a good poker player. I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole, but randomness provides plenty of opportunity for skill - dealing with unexpected situations and having contingency plans for when things go wrong.

[WindupAtheist]

That's fine. Why not do that and then phase the post-Cataclysm stuff on separate from that? Just because they're writing new quests for 1-60 at the same time as writing Cataclysm content, there's no reason that the writers have to make everything post-Cataclysm, especially with phasing. If they obsolete all of TBC, they're morons - with phasing it's too easy to keep it all connected. Just because you have Goblins and Worgen at level 1 they don't have to be post-Cataclysm when they start out. They could actually give people the rather fun experience of leveling up free of faction before the Cataclysm aligns them to one.

Yeah, so they can do twice the work in not only designing a whole new version of the world to level in, but a whole separate version of the world for high-level people on top of that, in the process guaranteeing that everyone leveling will live in an essentially dead world where every player above level 78 (or whatever) might as well have quit the game. Then for extra fun they can develop extensive faction-neutral goblin/worgen leveling paths for... uh... basically no reason whatsoever.

Even if Blizzard has essentially infinite money, I think they want this expansion to come out before 2015.

I sweated the whole time-paradox thing briefly, until someone in this thread pointed out the obvious: The timeline has been fucked since WOTLK launched, with death knights rebelling against the Lich King and then somehow traveling back in time to fight in Outland and level up.

[Selby]

It's a very quick ten levels.

The way it is now is no way remotely how it was when it was released.  It was a grindfest of epic proportions.  8 hours per level in zones that were very hit or miss as to whether you liked them or not (I *hated* HFP and still do).  Then once that was done it was a 150 quest chain to get into the heroics and eventually raids, plus the rep grind to revered or whatever stupid level it was to even be able to get the keys to do heroics to finish up the chains.  Add into this that it was still an epicly bad grind in the 1-60 world with elite mobs all over the place and dungeons with less than stellar loot that you had to run if you ran out of quests to do at your level (of course all of this was in a world that was much less populated now due to all the l33t 70's being Shatt all night long waving e-peens).  WotLK has improved on this so much it isn't funny.  Sure, the hardest of the hardcore may find it a tad easy, but the barrier for entry is such that the average Joe who at least wants to see if raiding and end-game is for him has a chance to at least begin to see it rather than having to grind his way to the chance to get purples.  And the rest of us with jobs and a casual guild can see a decent chunk of it as well.

I did not like TBC when it came out and took some serious time off from the game because of it. 

[DraconianOne]

The timeline issues were raised at Blizzcon.  I'm sure I remembered someone asking how come there be goblin and wolfman DKs if it's all post-Wrath.  Apparently the developers just shrugged their shoulders and moved to the next question. 

Personally I believe that there are two types of players: on the one hand you've got those who are likely to say "the existence of goblin and worgen death knight classes shows an inconsideration on behalf of the developing team towards the established holistic canonicty of the Warcraft universe and the pervasive, sequentilization of character and event lore as ludologically determined in this games forebears c.f. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (and expansion),  Warcraft 2 (and expansion) and Warcraft 3 (and expansion). Thus the meta-paradigm of the very edifices that support the historical imperatives of Azeroth will be rendered inconsistent and illogical."

Then there's the rest: gamers who only speak in exclamation marks and are likely to say simply "Dude! Goblin Death Knights! Ossum!"  I'm in this group.

Anyway, some overview maps of both new and old zones are up on wow.com  Looks like Uldum in particular is actually a zone and will have two 5-man instances in it. Also of note is that some of the old world zones are now geared towards different levels: 1K Needles is 40-45, WPL is 35-40 and EPL is 40-45/45-50.  Looks like they've also reduced the range of levels of zones like Hillsbrad - a zone I liked all but for the constant having to fuck off to somewhere else to level a bit more before doing the next part of the quest chain. Looks like there'll be a neutral port between WPL and Hinterlands too.