Cataclysm

[Paelos]

The mudflation design of WoW means that all of Ghostcrawler's hurf blurf about making healing harder and heroics challenging is all irrelevant after the brief 333-346 iLvl window.

You do realize part of that hurf blurf had lines like:

You do realize that people aren't willing to wait for the fun right? It's a bullshit excuse that we knew they'd toss out there to tell us to shut up and take it. We're done with that.

[Ingmar]

Yeah most of the people complaining I don't think really read the whole thing, probably just the "highlights" quoted here.

[caladein]

You do realize that people aren't willing to wait for the fun right? It's a bullshit excuse that we knew they'd toss out there to tell us to shut up and take it. We're done with that.

I wasn't saying anything about that.  Heroic design this expansion was deliberately against players who wanted them to be of trivial difficulty from the off.  Again, from GC's post:

... we don’t want to sacrifice dungeons being fun and challenging for organized groups in order to have everything be conquered by any possible group.

I quoted the lines I did because there's this assumption here that the ideas expressed in "Wow, Dungeons are Hard!" are immediately repudiated whenever a nerf, either by gear inflation or encounter design, happens.

[Ironwood]

I'm sorry, he's still talking fucking shite.

Given the JP changes, when you HIT heroics, you're overgeared.

So that's a fucking WANK argument.

[Paelos]

I've read the whole thing several times and I still put together the top 20 things he actually said:

First, let me state that we do hear you. We understand some of you aren’t having fun and preferred the Lich King paradigm, or at least something closer to the Lich King paradigm. We greatly appreciate the feedback and it always makes us sad when players aren’t having fun. We're not ignoring you. We get it. We may not always agree on every point, but we understand where you’re coming from, and we want to try to help you understand where we're coming from....

1 - The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging
2 - We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize.
3 - We don't want you to stumble your way to victory
4 - We want you to do more than push a button to get the loot
5 - We don’t want to give undergeared or unorganized groups a near guaranteed chance of success, because then the content will feel absolutely trivial
6 - We didn't like that the Heroic dungeons in Lich King and early Naxxramas had become zerg-fests
7 - Tanks, you can’t pull and AE every group in a Heroic
8 - Healers will generally have enough mana to keep you alive in any given fight
9 - DPS specs often get blamed the most for not knowing what is going on. It should be your business to understand the mechanics of the fights
10 - If you feel like you must spam your inefficient heals to the exclusion of all else, then your group is ignoring key mechanics or is just undergeared.
11 - The item level requirement is intended only to keep out players who have no idea what is appropriate content for them. We know you can game it
12 - Once 4.1 comes out, you will have access to more powerful gear that will let you then revisit the content you couldn’t do before
13 - I love the Dungeon Finder. I worked on it a lot personally. It is quite successful at finding you a group. It doesn't guarantee a successful group
14 - We think the game is more fun overall when you play with friends, which is why we put so much effort into encouraging players to join guilds for Cataclysm
15 - I’ve PUGged the Cataclysm content a lot. So have all of the designers. We want to stay in touch with what players are experiencing.
16 - We've seen a few threads that suggest that we're too proud to admit mistakes. I find that logic strange, because we do it all the time.
17 - We don't at all view the Cataclysm dungeon and raid balance as a mistake.
18 - We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up.
19 - At least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now.
20 - We want to ensure that everyone is having fun and enjoying their time with the game

Translation: Why the fuck are you people complaining? Are you not fucking paying attention? Obviously you don't fucking get it yet, so let me ram it in your earhole one more fucking time until it permeates through the mass of bong resin in that thing you call a skull. This is the way it is, you either shape the fuck up or ship the fuck out. Healers? If they can't hack it they can go fuck themselves. They were too weak to live anyway in our brand new world. Only the strong survive now, motherfuckers! You best get right with your gods and learn what's what or your guts on going to decorate my virtual floor.

[Ingmar]

I think you're reading what you want to read because you're tired of the game in general and looking for your out. None of the stuff you quoted translates like that to me.

[Paelos]

I think you're reading what you want to read because you're tired of the game in general and looking for your out. None of the stuff you quoted translates like that to me.

I'm definitely sick of the game as it stands. Sick of it in general? I think that's a bit much. My out right now is that everytime I try to put something together, another healer I know quits or rolls something else.

What I don't like is in response to player concerns, one of the men in charge comes out and blatantly says that we've been doing it wrong for years, and things aren't going to be like that anymore. He believes that many of us are acting like children and whining about a problem that will be solved with time.

[Ingmar]

Which line says we've been doing it wrong? We've just been playing the design they gave us. If anything, he thinks Blizzard has been doing it wrong, hence the new design for Cataclysm. You can say they made the wrong choice to change the design, sure, and they'll probably realize it eventually (if you don't think they already have, which I personally do) but you're attaching all sorts of extra meaning onto these statements that I don't think is warranted.

[Paelos]

Which line says we've been doing it wrong? We've just been playing the design they gave us. If anything, he thinks Blizzard has been doing it wrong, hence the new design for Cataclysm. You can say they made the wrong choice to change the design, sure, and they'll probably realize it eventually (if you don't think they already have, which I personally do) but you're attaching all sorts of extra meaning onto these statements that I don't think is warranted.

He IS Blizzard though. He's the lead systems designer. When this came out, I don't think there was any way to misread the intent of, "We don't at all view the Cataclysm dungeon and raid balance as a mistake."

Hell, I could toss out all the other hemming and hawing and just quote that. He was basically saying, "We hear you, we know you are upset and that some of you are quitting, we are looking at it, but if you think we consider changing this a bad thing, you're simply wrong. We never envisioned the game turning out the way it did in WotLK and we have no intention of repeating that right out of the gate."

The rest of it was just hyperbole because it's fun.

[Fordel]

You are overlooking the Evil Kalgan. 

[Tannhauser]

18 - We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up.
19 - At least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now.

Gee, I'm glad you understand healers are frustrated and giving up.  Too bad you don't plan on fixing this.  Healing more enjoyable?  Hardly.  Granted, half of the problem with this game are the other players, but posts like this give me nerdrage.

[Sjofn]

It is more enjoyable if you're a paladin, imo. I love healing on my paladin. If you had told me a year ago I'd say that, I would've laughed right in your face. I don't know about the other classes because I haven't healed with them.

[Fordel]

You went and got more spells to cast, my Druid somehow went backwards! 


Shit, didn't we just have this exact line of conversation?

[Ingmar]

Some changes to healers incoming:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/158699/incoming-healer-changes

Since the release of patch 4.0.6, we’ve been keeping an eye on healers and how they are performing and are currently in the process of making some additional adjustments.

Priests

The cost of Power Word: Shield is being increased by 33%. While we wanted Discipline priests to be able to utilize this spell more often and with better results, we also did not want it to be the main spell (and often the only spell) used while in groups. We don’t find this to be a particularly compelling playstyle and have found that it encourages players to avoid using other spells such as Penance. We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don’t want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that.

We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent. The tooltip will not reflect this change until a future patch, however. Ideally, Holy priests should not notice much of a change to the Power Word: Shield costs.

Shaman

We are also applying a hotfix for Purification for the Restoration shaman passive from 10% to 25%. We think that shaman healing per second is not as competitive with other healers and while we hoped to bring down Holy priest and Holy paladins (in particular) in 4.0.6, which we did, shaman still appear to be behind. In this case, it is simply easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters.

In Addition- Restoration Druids and Restoration Shaman

We agree with the sentiment among some players that Restoration druids and Restoration shaman are lacking in the healing cooldown department. The shaman buff and Power Word: Shield adjustment above should bring all healers reasonably close in terms of throughput. The decision on who to bring then might end up being dictated by the strong cooldowns offered by paladins or priests. This isn’t the kind of thing we can address via a hotfix, but it is something we are looking at for the next major content patch.

As always, we appreciate your continued constructive feedback and will do our best to keep you informed of ongoing developments.

[Fordel]

When does Rift come out?


That's when we'll see 4.1 is my guess. 

[Paelos]

I'm not sure when Rift comes out, but I would imagine 4.1 is probably 1-2 months out?

[Merusk]

When does Rift come out?


That's when we'll see 4.1 is my guess.  

Next week for pre-orders, week after that for general resale.  So, no.


Re: Priests.  Ah, so people are back to spamming PW:S with the last patch? That explains why old Disc priests were happy again.  I know the ones in my guild that quit healing did so because they said "I keep running OOM, this is stupid" but would only spam PW:S and renew.  Disc healing; not like Wrath anymore.

Holy was fun before the patch, but the inability to spam anything but heal to keep your renew and Chakra rolling was frustrating.  I imagine it's a lot better now that you can use Gheal for it.  It's really not that hard to wrap your mind around after the first group or two.

[Ironwood]

I had a disc priest tonight that was clearly like that.  The whole group just dies because he can only keep me up and then I have to tank and dps the boss down.

Really, really silly.

[Paelos]

I had a disc priest tonight that was clearly like that.  The whole group just dies because he can only keep me up and then I have to tank and dps the boss down.

Really, really silly.

We always had that one priest in the guild who was really sweet and showed up to everything and really wanted to do well, but she would never listen to us telling her to check EJ or improve her stuff. With change it's gone from  to 

[K9]

Advising people to look at EJ has lost a lot of value over the past year. They chaps who run the forum are so caught up with their hardon for a single megathread for each spec that finding up-to-date information is a slog. I'd actually say the Tankspot forums are more helpful, and definitely more friendly. The EJ folk are so far up their own arses it's unreal,

On an unrelated note, is anyone else having difficulty accessing mmo-champion.com?

[caladein]

I don't see why the length of the thread matters.  The first post will have 95% of the information you might need and the rest should be on the last page or two in the event of a recent hotfix/patch.  The rest is likely to be either irrelevant, harebrained, or both.

[Ingmar]

I don't see why the length of the thread matters.  The first post will have 95% of the information you might need and the rest should be on the last page or two in the event of a recent hotfix/patch.  The rest is either irrelevant, harebrained, or both.

Very often (at least back when I was bothering to read EJ) for the classes I play the front post is not reliably up to date, if there's even a usable first post for the spec. There never was for prot warriors, for example.

[K9]

Indeed; the priest forum actually has reasonably good guides, but even those get updated infrequently. The content is also not aimed at the majority of the raiding population, and frankly doesn't always offer the best primer on how to fill a role outside of gearing up. It's very hit and miss, and the level of discourse is a lot less friendly than other sites.

[Fordel]

The Official Class forums, almost all of them have stickies for each spec, these are actually up to date and useful.

[kildorn]

Yeah, due to how the threads are managed on EJ, the WoW forums are now better places for theorycrafting.

It's depressing, because usually the first post will be awesome levels of detail and information.. from three patches ago. And somewhere on page Not The Last One, will be some updated statistics, and then three pages of people giving anecdotes of what they've seen done while mods warn them about it.

Heck, for the last three times I went looking for a pre raid gear quicklist, that section of the EJ post was just a link to someone else's forums.

[apocrypha]

The mudflation design of WoW means that all of Ghostcrawler's hurf blurf about making healing harder and heroics challenging is all irrelevant after the brief 333-346 iLvl window.

You do realize part of that hurf blurf had lines like:

They’re only going to get easier from here on out.

In Cataclysm, the Heroic dungeons and raids are intended to be challenging -- and they are, at least until you overgear them.

Tanks, you can’t pull and AE every group in a Heroic (again, until you overgear the content).

We also just tend to nerf content over time because the original players hitting that content have moved on, so we want to open it up to a wider audience.

Yeah, that was kinda my point.

Why go to all the effort to make heroics so unforgiving, endure the rage from the playerbase because of it, even retaliate defending the design decision.... when they knew all along that it was only going to be like that for a couple of months?

What's happened is that they've made the mistake, YET AGAIN, of listening to the vocal 2% at the top of the hardcore chain and making major design changes based on that feedback. This has, AGAIN, pissed off huge numbers of their playerbase and they're frantically trying to claw their way back now. It's the kind of retarded design process that CCP do!

Personal anecdotes add very little to this kind of discussion, but in the absence of hard subs/login figures from WoW it's all we have. Personally I'm already waiting for the next content patch and logging in less. Linear and mandatory questing zones (hello Therazane rep) have burned me out on any further alt levelling. Being in a small guild denies me access to any raiding other than Argaloth (whoopee). 70 VPs/day is such painfully slow progression rate towards gear that is only marginally better than I've got already that it feels pointless.

Heroics haven't stayed hard for long, when they were hard it didn't actually make them any more fun, crafting is mostly pointless, raid content is unavailable. Some days I log in and have some fun if I'm drunk enough, other days I can't be arsed. That's a dangerous place for Blizz to be in with WoW imo.

[Rendakor]

There are a couple hotfixes to /lfd and votekick coming, including one to finally nerf people getting a tank to insta queue them then having the tank drop group. This will now remove the whole group from the zone.

[Paelos]

There are a couple hotfixes to /lfd and votekick coming, including one to finally nerf people getting a tank to insta queue them then having the tank drop group. This will now remove the whole group from the zone.

That's clever.

[Lakov_Sanite]

The only reason people did that was to do something to avoid 45min dps queue's and while i admit you shouldn't game the system, this isnt solving the problem its dealing with the symptoms.  if anything its taking away an avenue people had to make trying to play more tolerable and im no sure blizzard gets that.  sure blizzard cant magically make more tanks and healers appear but they could try and make them more fun to play.

[kildorn]

The only reason people did that was to do something to avoid 45min dps queue's and while i admit you shouldn't game the system, this isnt solving the problem its dealing with the symptoms.  if anything its taking away an avenue people had to make trying to play more tolerable and im no sure blizzard gets that.  sure blizzard cant magically make more tanks and healers appear but they could try and make them more fun to play.

They made tanking and healing "fun"/"easier" in wrath, got the queues down. The universal response they heard seemed to be "zomg it's too easy to tank/heal" and changed it back in Cata. The response has been queue times went up.

I can see why they wanted the changes (end of cata healing was BORING), but they need to sit down and grasp that until the next content patch when we start using points to outgear heroics there will be a lack of healers and tanks because the people who were willing to do it when it was relatively easy have stopped doing it.

I know I went from "tanking's not that bad, I'll actually brave the LFD system as a tank or healer" to just not logging in much anymore, because even if I do roll a guild heroic group, it's still just a 30-40 minute slog through stuff that isn't interesting, it just hits hard as hell.

[Paelos]

The only reason people did that was to do something to avoid 45min dps queue's and while i admit you shouldn't game the system, this isnt solving the problem its dealing with the symptoms.  if anything its taking away an avenue people had to make trying to play more tolerable and im no sure blizzard gets that.  sure blizzard cant magically make more tanks and healers appear but they could try and make them more fun to play.

I'll fully admit I would tank more randoms if it was more engaging, and less strategic handling and relying on people I don't know to perform CC timely. Right now the time commitments simply don't let people make that decision, as indicated. I like the dungeons a lot, just not the time involved to get home, so to speak.

[caladein]

Why go to all the effort to make heroics so unforgiving, endure the rage from the playerbase because of it, even retaliate defending the design decision.... when they knew all along that it was only going to be like that for a couple of months?

What's happened is that they've made the mistake, YET AGAIN, of listening to the vocal 2% at the top of the hardcore chain and making major design changes based on that feedback. This has, AGAIN, pissed off huge numbers of their playerbase and they're frantically trying to claw their way back now. It's the kind of retarded design process that CCP do!

It's not an accident (or a mistake in my opinion), it's what Blizzard always does.  Leveling gets easier, achievements get easier, bosses get easier.

There wasn't a scramble to add the ICC buff or nerf Ulduar achievements, just as there wasn't to nerf Halfus, it's a deliberate plan to release something, and then make it easier at some point later in time.  Wrath Heroics were just so easy that the only nerf of significance they had was scaling drakes.

[Rokal]

I would probably tank more randoms if there were a couple more dungeons to do. As is, I geared to 346 pretty fast between dungeons, rep, and crafted stuff. After that your only incentive to run a dungeon is daily VP, unless you're helping a guild member or friend get their daily done. I guess there is also reputation factions with tabards, but really for most classes there is one faction or two max that have good rewards for you at exalted, and the rest don't benefit you after revered. A smarter move probably would have been putting fluff items at exalted with each faction, similar to the camel mounts. A cool pet or tabard probably would have made getting reputation to exalted with more factions compelling.

I've tanked more randoms since 4.0.6, and i've been able to complete dungeons with some pretty terrible groups. The 15% buff to dmg/hp/healing was
huge.

I think if you actually solo-queue for some Heroics now, you'll find your success rate with 4 random players much higher.

Why go to all the effort to make heroics so unforgiving, endure the rage from the playerbase because of it, even retaliate defending the design decision.... when they knew all along that it was only going to be like that for a couple of months?

I don't think they planned to nerf the heroics this quickly. The accelerated nerfs were probably legitimately a response to criticisms they were hearing. The fix they did do (15% buff for 3+ randoms) was pretty smart, in that pre-formed groups still can play the slightly harder version of the heroics if they want to. It was a good compromise for both players who dungeon with friends, and players who solo-queue. I sort of wish they had just implemented that change instead of making that change *and* some of the nerfs to bosses like Baron Ashbury, Ozruk, and High Priestess Azil.

For what it's worth, I had a blast during the first month or so of Cata doing heroics with guild members and friends while the content was still new and challenging, and none of us over-geared the content. I don't think the content tuning was a mistake, in that sense: it was really fun with a coordinated group.

[Threash]

Give tanks three chances at the valor points from the daily dungeon, healers two.  That will bring down queue timers, you have to reward people for doing the unpopular thing.  Or hell make it so queueing as a tank = always getting valor points.

[01101010]

I honestly enjoy tanking. DPS want to pull off me or target the wrong mob, it's their problem - I am no longer about having all mobs on me if dunces are going to not /assist. I go at my own pace and if some idiot runs ahead to gather mobs, I either leave or just stand there. But as a tank, I can get away with that since my queue times are all of 2 min if that.