Cataclysm

[Lt.Dan]

I think the issue with the watercooler is that the topics have been so  .  I can't really believe that out of everything on GC's plate criticals would even make the first page of stuff that's important or interesting.  It's like catching up with friends after buying your first car and talking about the weather.  Even pimping all the "awesome" content in patch 4.1 would be more interesting.

[Paelos]

Just a few off the top of my head.

"Hey here's some thoughts on the pros and cons of an appearance tab."
"What about that movement in pvp stuff, huh?"
"So, here's our future raid design encounter thoughts"
"Here's what we feel about gear choices right now"
"This guild leveling thing could use some more stuff like this."
"What about some outdoor world bosses again!"
"Check out these neat Archeology ideas"
"Here's some lore thoughts on the future."
"Where we'd like to head with future five mans is..."

or even "I spilled my water cooler on the floor"

[Shrike]

Ghostcrawler just put up another Dev Watercooler thingy. He talked about crits for 10 paragraphs.

I don't know what to say to that.

I do. I don't fucking care.

What I do care about is the terminally screwed up enhance shaman itemization in general and the weapon situation in particular. It's a mess. Bigtime. Fix it (actually, they might in 4.1, but that remains to be seen). Also, guild rep portability. That's another mess that needs some attention. Now. I can think of more, but that's a start. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

The blogs are fine for what they are, though it makes me smile thinking that he just wants a public soapbox and if he isnt going to do it through the forums by god someone is going to listen to him.

[Rokal]

Just a few off the top of my head.

"Hey here's some thoughts on the pros and cons of an appearance tab."
"What about that movement in pvp stuff, huh?"
"So, here's our future raid design encounter thoughts"
"Here's what we feel about gear choices right now"
"This guild leveling thing could use some more stuff like this."
"What about some outdoor world bosses again!"
"Check out these neat Archeology ideas"
"Here's some lore thoughts on the future."
"Where we'd like to head with future five mans is..."

or even "I spilled my water cooler on the floor"

Every single one of these is something they've talked about before, or at least something where you could easily guess exactly what the article would say. Do you really want dev blogs that outlines the obvious pros and cons of outdoor raid bosses?

It's not supposed to be a Q&A based on what topics the community wants covered, that would be the purpose of the "Ask a developer" thing they have been doing (with predictable unsatisfying answers, just like you'd get with any of the topics above).

I didn't find the topic of "criticals" especially exciting, but it was exactly what the feature was advertised as: insight into design decisions that were being discussed at Blizzard. It wasn't something I had really thought about (ramifications of crit % normalization vs. burden of knowledge), and it was interesting to see that what seemed like a pretty trivial number tweak actually would have a pretty complicated impact. I'd rather be surprised with topics like this that I would otherwise never have thought about, rather than re-reading another scripted dev answer about the dance studio or whatever other topic comes up every week on the WoW forums.

[Sheepherder]

it was interesting to see that what seemed like a pretty trivial number tweak actually would have a pretty complicated impact.

Erm, no.

[caladein]

Also, guild rep portability. That's another mess that needs some attention.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but wouldn't guild rep being portable defeat the entire premise of guild reputation?  Making guilds more sticky (at least for three months).  The major rewards unlocked with guild reputation already stay with you when you change guilds (or are Account Bound like the scorpion mount).

[Rokal]

it was interesting to see that what seemed like a pretty trivial number tweak actually would have a pretty complicated impact.

Erm, no.

Specifically:

We’re strongly considering just letting all heals crit for double, just like most attacks. We don’t think this would have huge PvE consequences. Healers will heal for a little more, but even if they choose to start stacking crit, they’re going to do that at the expense of Haste, Mastery or Spirit. It could have bigger PvP consequences. Most PvP healers don’t have crit chances beyond say 10% or so, so they aren’t going to crit often.

We’ve been considering whether healing is too strong in PvP anyway. You may have noticed that we made the tooltips for Mortal Strike and equivalent debuffs intentionally vague for 4.1. As I write this, those debuffs are still at 10% healing, but we’re concerned that healing is too hard to counter and we might change that number. Changing it back to 50% would probably lead to the Mortal Strike debuff being mandatory for Arena comps again, but we never got much of a chance to see its effects at say 20%. A 20% Mortal Strike debuff could easily counter any excessive healing caused by 200% crits.

With PvE crit, if you were to increase poison crit damage to 200%, you would just adjust the numbers on abilities and co-efficients so that rogues did roughly the same amount of damage that they do now. It's a relatively simple change that would be easy to number crunch and implement. Same deal with PvE healing, though as the dev diary points out, no further tweaks may even be necessary given that healers would need to trade other desirable stats to get any worthwhile crit.

I didn't think of how healer crit would impact pvp, arguably to a much larger extent than crit for any pve class/role. This was a significant impact of crit % normalization that I did not think of, to the point where they were considering large buffs to MS-style debuffs again.

I'm sorry you didn't find it interesting, I did.

[Arrrgh]

Next dev watercooler, The Importance of Proper Deck Chair Placement.

[Lakov_Sanite]

pvp ruined the game.

[Lantyssa]

Yep.

[Paelos]

I'm sorry you didn't find it interesting, I did.

Your white-knighting for the game is getting tiresome. I loved the Dev Water Cooler concept. It kept GC off the forums and made him think in advance before posting stuff. This isn't what I envisioned. Even the trolls at MMO Champion thought it was a just a stupid rambling where GC pointed out issues with a half-assed defense of why they won't change anything in this expansion. But in THE FUTURE™ they will be making changes.

[Hutch]

Next dev watercooler, The Importance of Proper Deck Chair Placement.

 

[apocrypha]

I'm sorry you didn't find it interesting, I did.

Your white-knighting for the game is getting tiresome.

And the constant doom-mongering from the burned-outs here isn't getting tiresome? 

Some of us here are enjoying wow. Whether that's because we're in guilds that have been luckier than others in terms of recruitment/retention/progress or whether it's because we enjoy the game slightly differently from you or even just because we're not burned out, I don't know, probably a mix of all of those.

If you can't accept that we may be genuinely having fun playing this game and instead need to label us as fanbois and koolaid drinkers then I'd suggest the problem is with you, not us.

[Xanthippe]

Exhibit A as to why Ghostcrawler should stick to development and Blizzard should have a real Community Manager.

Ghostcrawler is not a community manager, and lacks the skills of a community manager.  That he has been allowed to post has hurt Blizzard more than helped Blizzard.

[Sheepherder]

I didn't think of how healer crit would impact pvp, arguably to a much larger extent than crit for any pve class/role.

Except it won't.

1. The changes he's discussing for Mortal Strike are going in regardless of what they do with healing.
2. It's not mathematically possible for a character with less crit chance to gain more effect from the coefficient change.

[Paelos]

If you can't accept that we may be genuinely having fun playing this game and instead need to label us as fanbois and koolaid drinkers then I'd suggest the problem is with you, not us.

I don't argue with you that you are having fun. I don't argue that a lot of people are still playing the game and enjoying it. I don't think the game is doomed, nor is it unfixable. I will argue with you if you tell me that Cataclysm didn't cost them people by the decisions they made, and not just due to "burnout." I will argue with you if you tell me that a dev blog about criticals is somehow relevent to the discussion, especially when they use it to justify the current decisions instead of what their FUTURE™ plans are. But not for this expansion. Because it's mid-expansion and that's too soon.

There's a lot of people out there, like myself, who are sitting across the river waiting for them to go, "Ok, we're sorry. Here's the new plan."

[Shrike]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but wouldn't guild rep being portable defeat the entire premise of guild reputation?  Making guilds more sticky (at least for three months).  The major rewards unlocked with guild reputation already stay with you when you change guilds (or are Account Bound like the scorpion mount).

Not sticky enough to keep me around even when exalted. Other circumstances forced my hand, then I was back to zero. When I joined a new guild, yeah, sure, I still had the perks, but I couldn't use them until leveling up the rep again. This time, though, I was kinda out of entire zones of quests to level that puppy up. I"m not saying the whole thing should just follow you around, but there should be some mechanism to make leveling it up again easier if you do have to change guilds.

[Rendakor]

That literally defeats the purpose of guild rep.

[Paelos]

That literally defeats the purpose of guild rep.

You ever notice that a lot of the decisions they made in this expansion were centered about the premise of "We wanted to make X matter?"

I think guild rep falls into that category. It's subtle punative action on your playerbase.

[Ingmar]

Exhibit A as to why Ghostcrawler should stick to development and Blizzard should have a real Community Manager.

Ghostcrawler is not a community manager, and lacks the skills of a community manager.  That he has been allowed to post has hurt Blizzard more than helped Blizzard.

What the hell does a blog post have to do with acting as a CM? He's not posting on the forums anymore, which is where the "OMG HE IS NOT A CM" complaints came from. We get it, you hate GC. Move on.  

===============

On guild rep, Shrike is right, it is far, FAR too slow to rise and far too tied to quest xp. As I always do this expansion I NOM NOM NOMed my way through all the quest content pretty quickly, going to all the new zones to achivement up, etc. The weekly cap on guild rep KILLED me, I probably got only 5 or 10% of the rep I 'deserved' for the content I did.

And that's nothing to do with guild hopping, it sucks *even for the people who will never change guilds*. They need to just do away with the cap, it serves no useful purpose, since all of the content that can give you guild rep is capped in some way already - you can only do regular quests once, daily quests are daily, heroics and raids have lockouts, etc.

[Merusk]

It's not tied just to quest activities, but anything that nets a guild achieve, meaning boss kills, PVP and dungeons all in guild groups.  I thought they had tweaked the Gxp so that these mattered more than questing in one of the few bugfix patches, anyway.   That was the original intent at least, to get you in guild groups and doing things as a part of a guild. 

Letting people max it doing only quests, which are solo content and require no guild to complete, would be foolish and against the idea of making guilds matter.

[Ingmar]

I am not talking about guild xp, I am talking about guild rep. Practically the only way to raise it IS to do group activity at this point, that's fine, what's not fine is the weekly cap.

And I still think it should have some giant multiplier based on your time in the guild. Irrational or not it honestly annoys me so much that it is a major contributor to my lack of desire to log in.

[Nevermore]

Exhibit A as to why Ghostcrawler should stick to development and Blizzard should have a real Community Manager.

Ghostcrawler is not a community manager, and lacks the skills of a community manager.  That he has been allowed to post has hurt Blizzard more than helped Blizzard.

Now see, I don't think Ghostcrawler should be allowed to be a developer, either.

[Rokal]

Except it won't.

1. The changes he's discussing for Mortal Strike are going in regardless of what they do with healing.
2. It's not mathematically possible for a character with less crit chance to gain more effect from the coefficient change.

1. I haven't seen it mentioned that the MS change was definitely being made, the dev blog makes it sound they they still aren't sure if healing is OP in PvP right now. That said, I haven't really been paying attention to PvP, so it's possible they mentioned this elsewhere.

As I write this, those debuffs are still at 10% healing, but we’re concerned that healing is too hard to counter and we might change that number

2. This isn't true, as many classes are already at 200% crit from all of their attacks (warriors with MS for example), so no changes would be made to them. For classes with crit multipliers that are different than 200% (rogue melee 200%, rogue poison 150%), they would likely make some nerfs so that overall dps was the same. For healers they might not make those nerfs. Crit has traditionally been fairly desirable as a pvp stat, so changes to crit multipliers probably would have a much larger effect on pvp than pve.

Not sticky enough to keep me around even when exalted. Other circumstances forced my hand, then I was back to zero. When I joined a new guild, yeah, sure, I still had the perks, but I couldn't use them until leveling up the rep again. This time, though, I was kinda out of entire zones of quests to level that puppy up. I"m not saying the whole thing should just follow you around, but there should be some mechanism to make leveling it up again easier if you do have to change guilds.

The fastest way to get rep seems to be running dungeons/raids with your guild. Without any quests, it'll probably feel like a longer grind, but if you hit 85 and finish all the quests you still have the most efficient method to rep up available. Additionally, most of the guild perks that would be the most game-breaking don't require any rep (guild exp boost, extra flasks/duration, group summon, etc.). I agree that the weekly cap for guild rep & exp should be removed, and should have never been implemented.

Your white-knighting for the game is getting tiresome. I loved the Dev Water Cooler concept. It kept GC off the forums and made him think in advance before posting stuff. This isn't what I envisioned. Even the trolls at MMO Champion thought it was a just a stupid rambling where GC pointed out issues with a half-assed defense of why they won't change anything in this expansion. But in THE FUTURE™ they will be making changes.

This is exactly what the dev water cooler blog was sold as from day 1. Here is a quote from the very first 'watercooler' whose purpose was to outline what the feature was and wasn't going to be:

You won’t always learn a lot about exciting new features coming to the game, but you will (ideally) learn something about the design process itself. (When we have big, exciting news to share, or ‘State of the Game’ style blogs, we’ll still do those as well.)

The rest of the blog was dedicated to how to make tanking stats more exciting  . What exactly were you setting your expectations based on?

I'd echo apocrypha's post that your constant negativity is getting just as tiresome. I'm enjoying the game and I'm not going to filter every new development about the game through the most negative light possible. The game isn't perfect and there are a few things I wouldn't mind seeing changed as well, but it's not the shit-fest you would have us believe it is, and not every post from a CM/dev is pissing on the playerbase.

There's a lot of people out there, like myself, who are sitting across the river waiting for them to go, "Ok, we're sorry. Here's the new plan."

This already happened. Heroics were heavily nerfed and PuGing a heroic with other players now has almost guaranteed success because of the Luck of the Draw buff. I healed a PuG heroic a few days ago on my holy priest where the Shadow Priest in the group was doing literally 2k dps. I'm not even exaggerating, she even had the full +15% luck of the draw buff. The other 2 dps in the group were doing 5k dps each. We still finished the heroic after 2 wipes, it just took a while. You are still basing your nerd-rage on an end-game that hasn't been accurate for about 2 months. According to this thread, those changes were Blizzard back peddling as fast as they could and screaming "We're sorry, please don't leave!". Of course, you're not actually waiting for Blizzard to make more changes to end-game, at which point your I'm sure opinion of the game would be sunshine and roses. You're burnt out nothing but time is going to refresh the game for you.

[Merusk]

I am not talking about guild xp, I am talking about guild rep. Practically the only way to raise it IS to do group activity at this point, that's fine, what's not fine is the weekly cap.

And I still think it should have some giant multiplier based on your time in the guild. Irrational or not it honestly annoys me so much that it is a major contributor to my lack of desire to log in.

Sorry I said XP and meant rep. Yes, the weekly cap is kind of crappy, but only because it's too low.  I'm ok with the idea of a weekly cap, otherwise folks would blow through it in a few days.  The multiplier thing would also be kind of nice, too.  At the very least the guild master should be exalted from Day 1, then drop back if he passes off master (to avoid passing it along from person to person.)

[Ingmar]

Yeah, I'm thinking of alts I have had in the guild for 6 years, it seems ridiculous for them to face the same grind etc.

[Paelos]

Of course, you're not actually waiting for Blizzard to make more changes to end-game, at which point your I'm sure opinion of the game would be sunshine and roses. You're burnt out nothing but time is going to refresh the game for you.

You think I'm watching things this closely because I'm burned out? I mean if I was burned out, I'd just walk away, not give a fuck and wait 6 months. It's happened before. No, what I'm waiting for is 4.2 to drop when they start adding content back to see just how far they are willing to back off the rah-rah challenging normal raiding BS.

Hell, I can list the ridiculous things I want that will never happen so here they are for shits and giggles.

I want Ghostcrawler fired, and never hear from him again. I want them to just put out 4.1 already and make a firm commitment to put 4.2 on the PTR by the end of May. I want them to make a vast difference in difficulty between the Firelands regular and the heroic version. I want them to dump the shared lockout bullshit. I want them to get rid of the stupid guild reward system, or at the very least make it so you don't HAVE to do everything with your guild to get credit. I want them to keep CC out of heroics going forward in their designs. I'd like them to stop designing shit around pvp. Also, I'd like them to ease the fuck up on the mana conservation and stop touting healer challenge as the best thing ever for the game.

Every day I check the feeds just to see if today is the day they finally got it yet.

[WindupAtheist]

Bring back pre-Cata beeyotch!

I am still so incredibly butthurt over my ret paladin. They finally went ahead and listened to all those toolboxes on the forums going "Ret is so faceroll, all you do is push buttons as they light up! My class is skillfull, I had to install a couple of mods before I could just push whatever was lit up!" Like DPS is serious fucking business.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Bring back pre-Cata beeyotch!

I am still so incredibly butthurt over my ret paladin. They finally went ahead and listened to all those toolboxes on the forums going "Ret is so faceroll, all you do is push buttons as they light up! My class is skillfull, I had to install a couple of mods before I could just push whatever was lit up!" Like DPS is serious fucking business.

I'm not sure you got the memo, all of wow is supposedly serious business now, apparently.

[Paelos]

I'm not sure you got the memo, all of wow is supposedly serious business now, apparently.

And if you don't like it, you're just burned out.

[caladein]

I want them to make a vast difference in difficulty between the Firelands regular and the heroic version.

The lack of that is one of the best things about this tier of content!  My guild first killed Nef about a month ago and the next week we were able to start working on the easier heroic mode bosses.  We almost certainly won't full clear the place on Heroic while it's current but we'll have new stuff to work on until Firelands is out instead of being stuck farming normal modes and reminding ourselves why we're not doing heroics every few weeks.

[Sheepherder]

2. This isn't true, as many classes are already at 200% crit from all of their attacks (warriors with MS for example), so no changes would be made to them. For classes with crit multipliers that are different than 200% (rogue melee 200%, rogue poison 150%), they would likely make some nerfs so that overall dps was the same. For healers they might not make those nerfs. Crit has traditionally been fairly desirable as a pvp stat, so changes to crit multipliers probably would have a much larger effect on pvp than pve.

Fairly desirable is not the expression you want.  There's a reason pvp healers rock a whopping ~10% crit.

Also: Mortal Strike, Slam, and Overpower are 2.2x damage on a crit due to (effectively) mandatory talents, not 2x.

[Rokal]

2. This isn't true, as many classes are already at 200% crit from all of their attacks (warriors with MS for example), so no changes would be made to them. For classes with crit multipliers that are different than 200% (rogue melee 200%, rogue poison 150%), they would likely make some nerfs so that overall dps was the same. For healers they might not make those nerfs. Crit has traditionally been fairly desirable as a pvp stat, so changes to crit multipliers probably would have a much larger effect on pvp than pve.

Fairly desirable is not the expression you want.  There's a reason pvp healers rock a whopping ~10% crit.

Also: Mortal Strike, Slam, and Overpower are 2.2x damage on a crit due to (effectively) mandatory talents, not 2x.

Traditionally fairly desirable as a pvp stat. That statement didn't imply I was talking only about healers. Burst healing/damage naturally matters more in pvp. You could expect that pvp healers might stack more crit if healing crits became more powerful.

My point stands that crit % normalization would have more complicated impact on pvp than pve. It wasn't really something I thought about/considered prior to the dev diary.

[Merusk]

err.. no.  Traditionally crit was a non-factor in PVP because of resil. You had to give up too much resil to make crit matter at all, and then all that crit you'd amassed was worthless as you pounded on a guy whose resil was taking 5 or better % off if your chance so it was best to not even worry about it.

Now the change in the cata patch that made Resil a flat damage reduction instead of a reducer changed a lot of this, but I stopped following PVP mid-wotlk when I realized it didn't matter anymore if I sucked or not.