Cataclysm: Preparing For Patch 4.0.1

[fuser]

There's a lot of variables to consider though, I am assuming it's because melee stat allocation has shifted a lot. perhaps they need more hit or haste or crit than before and now they arent geared right for it.

Theres some others like the number of DPS on the 12th parse is higher and any other buffs etc. But considering all classes suffered the same shakedown its more then just a bit of allocation fix. If you dig into the warriors parse he had zero misses and a 40ish% crit. It seems the AP change really killed some melee classes where warriors cannot get one ability(Colossus Smash) that will help till 81.

[Nevermore]

Yeah, it's the removal of Armor Penetration that's really screwed the melee classes.  Feral seems to be doubly hit because instead of weapons providing a straight attack power bonus in feral form, it now adds some kind of 'normalized' dps or something.  Whatever that normalized dps increase is, it seems to be a lot less than the AP they were getting before.

[Ingmar]

If ret is having a problem it isn't due to armor pen, that was a very low priority stat for them, worse than haste even, and haste wasn't very good. I want to say fury only gemmed armor penetration if they could hit the cap with trinket procs, and I think with ICC trinkets they moved away from that, but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to fury stuff. Arms was definitely all about armor pen, but I don't even know of anyone who has tried dpsing with arms in 4.0.1 yet, because it was just so far behind already in 3.X.

Fury loses impale and deep wounds out of arms until they get the 5 points from 81-85 back (actually I think impale is just out of reach entirely now), that is probably a 20% or more dps hit right there. Rage normalization may be screwing with them too.

EDIT: Oh also enrage uptime is much lower now, so that is another piece of the fury puzzle. They can probably squeeze out some more damage by popping berserker rage to let them use raging blow more often, though.

[Nevermore]

Well, I don't know anything about Warriors or Paladins, but I can tell you the loss of Armor Penetration hits Feral really hard.  Past a certain threshold, ArP used to scale even better than Agility for cats.

[Ingmar]

It occurs to me another part of the problem is sunder armor doesn't stack as high as it used to (12% now, used to be 20%), and there are just less melee buffs total now too. Instead of 10% AP, AP shout, and str/agi shout, there are only 10% AP and str/agi now. And kings is only a 5% buff now, which is both worse than before for melee classes, and also *better* than before for casters, since it directly influences their spellpower now that they get spellpower from intellect.

[Nevermore]

Apparently the removal of feral AP from weapons has completely screwed up bleed damage, which is another reason why feral damage took such a hit.

In other hilarious "This patch was not ready for prime time" news:  The new Shaman CC spell Bind Elemental doesn't work against nature immune targets, which includes most Air and Earth elementals. 

[Ginaz]

The comments regarding melee dps seem to mirror what I saw on the ptr.  Melee seems to have gotten the short end of the stick this time around.  Even my hunter on the ptr was doing less dps than he was on live, probably because hunters relied on ArP too.  Out of my 5 80's (hunter, mage, paladin, rogue and warrior) my mage, who is my most undergeared toon by far, was putting up some big numbers.  I was getting 15-17k arcane blast crits on a regular basis, and he only has around 2.2k SP.  I'll have to fiddle around a bit tonight and this weekend to see whats what (I spent last night just getting my skills/talents in order). 

Soemthing else that pissed me off is that some of my weapon enchants are gone.  The spell power one my mage had on his staff isn't that big of a deal but I had also had blood draining on my pally's tanking sword and now thats gone.  I think my agi. enchants on my hunter's axes are gone too but I'll have to check again to make sure.

[Ingmar]

Some people were reporting that enchantments were taking a while to show up, like half an hour or more after logon before you saw the name actually on the item. I didn't notice this problem myself but I saw a bunch of posts about it.

[Azazel]

Wife's machine got fucked patching.  Copied my installation over and she works.  This SOMEHOW broke MINE.  So I tried recopying back.  Still fucked.  I tried repair and it said 'FUCK OFF'.  I'm now copying THE ENTIRE GAME across and we'll see how that goes.

I suspect I'm reinstalling from the ground up.  On my broadband that'll take Fifteen weeks.

I downloaded the three massive parts to the patch, then patched the rest via the blizz downloader, as stated above. Once that was done, I copied the extra 3 files actoss to the wife's laptop, and then patched both. That was where I left them last night when I went to sleep.

This morning. Logged on my still-pretty-good gaming desktop, and.. immediate freeze once it loaded the character and zone around it. Had to reset button my way out. Rebooted, etc, tried again. Same deal, except this time I was able to kill wow via the task manager. Logged on her laptop - it works. Then I had to go to work. Not happy about the patch killing it on my PC, though. Anyone else heard about this problem/similar? (I can't access 99% of forums from here).

[K9]

Observations so far

Shaman:
 - None of the specs need to even think about mana now,
 - Earthquake is fun, and without a cooldown seems borderline OP in BG, but I'll enjoy it for now
 - Building Fulmination stacks is a bit of a hassle in PvP (except BGs with critters and such) but it gives some novelty burst damage

Priest:
 - 41K mana in disc, unbuffed Oo
 - Mana management is not a problem
 - Power Word: Barrier seems a bit overly situational
 - WTF is the point of Holy Word: Chastise? Is it supposed to do something?
 - Chakra seems really fun and interesting
 - I'm glad to have heal back

General:
 - New trees have no room for variety in speccing really
 - New glyph system is good, although the long-term income for scribes seems debatable
 - New Raid UI is not really much better than the old

[Rasix]

Heh, 3.5k gold from gems overnight.  Should have charged more.

[Merusk]

- WTF is the point of Holy Word: Chastise? Is it supposed to do something?
 - Chakra seems really fun and interesting

The point of HW:C is to give a spell for Chakra to manipulate. Other than that its just a pvp escape tool.   It's going to take a while to learn how best to manipulate Chakra, but the Aura of Restoration is much fun to just spam around the Auction House.

[fuser]

Heh, 3.5k gold from gems overnight.  Should have charged more.

I cleared 3k in glyphs in initial few hours of crazyness. Selling living bomb for 700g was insane 

[Sheepherder]

If ret is having a problem it isn't due to armor pen, that was a very low priority stat for them, worse than haste even, and haste wasn't very good. I want to say fury only gemmed armor penetration if they could hit the cap with trinket procs, and I think with ICC trinkets they moved away from that, but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to fury stuff. Arms was definitely all about armor pen, but I don't even know of anyone who has tried dpsing with arms in 4.0.1 yet, because it was just so far behind already in 3.X.

Retribution is fine.

Fury is not fine.  Traditionally the choice was to stack ArP or to stack Str/Crit, ArP was nominally top DPS if the individual could stay at cap with trinket up without much stat waste.  ArP is now for all intents and purposes non-existent, and Str/Crit has lost of shitton of DPS due to further buff amalgamation and rage normalization.

Arms might actually be doing better than fury.

[Selby]

Well, I ran my mage through a heroic tonight just to see how well I did on my new rotations.  Let's just say that on boss fights that I just cast on... the tank has a severe problem keeping aggro and I'm not even talking getting to 4 stacks...  My DPS went from a solid 5500 on a normal heroic boss fight to almost 7k (with poor rotation too mind you).  40k crits on spells are pretty awesome.  I'll be awaiting for the nerf bat to come swinging my way.

[Rendakor]

It's coming, don't worry.

Rather than try and address multiple threads, I'm just going to plop our current thoughts in this one post. Please excuse the brevity.

1) We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them.

2) We think mage dps is too high, especially Fire, and will be nerfing it.

3) We think Shadow priest dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Shadow Word: Death spam, which is tough on healers. We'll be fixing that.

4) We think Destro warlock dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Searing Pain spam, which is tough on tanks. We'll be fixing that.

5) As we suspected, PvP dps is just too high given that the health pools of Cataclysm haven't kicked in yet. While competitive PvP is over for the moment, we still want the environment to feel better so we will be buffing resilience. This change might be reverted at level 85.

There will probably be more changes after another night of raiding and BGs. Many of the bug fixes we have made today will affect dps as well. Stay tuned.

Sauce

[fuser]

Oh well, hopefully it will be hotfixed in soon. Looks like they looked at the overnight raiding and agreed WTF. Friends raiding feral finished up Saurfang tonight said he easily lost 5k DPS via the patch changes.

[Ratman_tf]

- New trees have no room for variety in speccing really

At all. I predict next expansion they remove talents and just have players pick a specalization.

[apocrypha]

EU servers started coming up about 2pm yesterday UK time, bit earlier than expected, which is always nice.

Patching problems: have you tried disabling the peer-to-peer option in the downloader? When I did this my patching went from ~50k/sec to a nice, steady 200k/sec, which is what my ADSL caps out at. YMMV ofc. My GF's ancient PC only had 13Gb of HDD space free, even after we'd gone on a slash & burn uninstall and cleanup rampage, and a Blizz post on the EU forums said that you need 25-30 Gb free to install the patch! Only option we had was complete uninstall of WoW and downloading of the entire 4.0 client. I'll let you know in another 10 hours or so if that worked.  

I only looked at a few of my characters last night. Was feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all tbh, and having 9 level 80s, most of whom have dual-specs has given me the heebie-jeebies, so I'm taking it slowly! Hunter changes seem awesome. Trade chat was full of dipshits saying "Huntars are RUINED!!1" but half an hour of playing mine was enough to demonstrate that they were completely wrong, at least about BM. 25 pets? Pets that can do Blessing of Kings, Bloodlust, etc? No more ammo? Ranged traps? OK THANKS!  

Druid confused me. Grid was still very broken when I went to bed so I haven't dared heal anything yet, so I have no idea how they play.

My mage seems awesome. Will take some getting used to and I may have to play with specs but I was doing ALL the damage on single targets as Arcane. AoE seemed to have been heavily nerfed on mages though, which is interesting. We did a guild HPoS for a laugh and our low-geared warlock was queen of the AoE with no problems. Our tank was a mid-geared bear and he said it was OK until "that fucking mage" (me) opened up and pulled all the agro off of him repeatedly  

One of our guildies has just bought a dx11 capable card and kept going on about how awesome it looked. I can't afford a new vidcard right now so I will be having him liquidated shortly.  

All in all day 1 was fun, if a little confusing, and not without teething troubles, but for a patch of this scope I think it's been pretty good. Compare with the most minor of patches produced by CCP for example.

[Ingmar]

Spacemonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/) is a really great tool for figuring out wtf is taking up all the space on a hard drive.

[Sheepherder]

One of our guildies has just bought a dx11 capable card and kept going on about how awesome it looked. I can't afford a new vidcard right now so I will be having him liquidated shortly.  

The DX11 mode does not add anything, as far as I can tell.

[Ginaz]

- New trees have no room for variety in speccing really

At all. I predict next expansion they remove talents and just have players pick a specalization.

Honestly, there wasn't much room for variety with specs under the old system.  You might tweek a talent here or there for pvp but that was about it.  Paladins, for example, if you wanted to tank, you specced heavily into prot and invest the rest in ret.  Reverse was true for speccing ret.  The rest of the classes, esp. the hybrids, were pretty much the same.

[Setanta]

So far I've set up my prot pally and warrior and the feral druid (plus run off on my BM Hunter to tame the Beast with the new 10 second tame).

Feral DPS... ouch. Kitty mode I couldn't break 2K in offspec T9 gear - I used to hit 3.5 :(

Warrior feels weird - queuing abilities is taking a bit of getting used to and I'm not sure if it's just me or not but TC doesn't feel like it's getting aggro the way it used to. It certainly feeld "different"

Pally... I *think* I like the changes to tanking - no more 969 and mana isn't the issue it was before having to constantly keep plea up. Threat is still an issue I think compared to the old tanking but 9K shield procs with holy power up make me grin.

Hunter Pets... zoning drops them to 1/3 health and they don't seem to hold aggro against even autoshot - WTF? Ok... so cower is on when you tame your pet, that's par for Blizz and it's hidden in your book not on your bar, but growl seems to be disfunctional. Spirit beasts got new abilities buffing agi/str for your group and a nice targetted heal... Core Hounds got Bloodlust (WTF!!!!!!!!!!). Seriously, Blizzrd hates shaman.

Next stop is to sort he enhance shaman out.

[apocrypha]

Spacemonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/) is a really great tool for figuring out wtf is taking up all the space on a hard drive.

Awesome thanks. I think the thing taking up most space was... wow.

The DX11 mode does not add anything, as far as I can tell.

in that case I shall be having said guildmate liquidated twice!

[Ubvman]

.....

This morning. Logged on my still-pretty-good gaming desktop, and.. immediate freeze once it loaded the character and zone around it. Had to reset button my way out. Rebooted, etc, tried again. Same deal, except this time I was able to kill wow via the task manager. Logged on her laptop - it works. Then I had to go to work. Not happy about the patch killing it on my PC, though. Anyone else heard about this problem/similar? (I can't access 99% of forums from here).

Delete the cache folder
Remove all add-ons (move them to a temporary folder if you want to save the useful ones - but most add-ons are unworkable now)
If you manage to get on to the login screen - put all graphics to bare minimum - this patch, they updated the water animation and shadows are nicer now.
If the above fails - delete (or move to a temp folder) the contents of the WTF folder.

That worked for me - I couldn't log on until I checked out the wow forums and they suggested the above.

PS: I would not be unhappy if they somehow permanently kill the GearScore add-on. A more annoying, misleading, misused and useless WoW add-on have yet to be invented...

[Shrike]

There haven't been much variance in specs since vanilla, at least in my chosen classes. You could fiddle some early talents around a bit to move up, but the basic stuff was all the same. Ditto in TBC.

The most you can say is you could have PvP specs and PvE specs. Some things--like PvP protection--might depart from dps specs for more anti-CC or to avoid obvious damage traps like +dodge, but they were all pretty much the same when you got down to it.

As things are now, there's still a little variation in enhance. Mostly because the sim isn't really ready for prime time. Still, you can lean to AoE some (which will probably disappear in Cata) or to single target damage (hello early grind spec). Early elemental tree abilities are also debatable, even compared with improved shields. I can say that at first blush enhance is easily comparable to the pre-4.0 builds. Without the sim I can't say for sure, but even with ST weirdness, I was pulling down easily 3-400dps more on the dummies in Darnassus. One heroic run didn't prove much except even fully single target I could do as much damage as I used to, even without the old magma/FN combo. That's also suffering from the usual lack of buff stacks, since the mobs still die so quickly (15k+ lava lash crits are  ). Also, mana is simply not a concern. Recovery is huge. Also, nice to have an on demand ablative shield and SR for when you inevitably pull aggro.

Too many new abilities and not enough keys, though. I had to write at least half a dozen new macros just to keep new abilities hotkeyed. I see a G13 in my near future.

[apocrypha]

Resto druids can successfully solo heroics. We have a resto druid that has now solo'd Gun'drak, Halls of Reflection, and the Forge of Souls. The two talents that enable this are Nature's Ward - Spell - World of Warcraft and the new Gift of the Earthmother talent.

Any time you drop below 50% health, you instantly get a fresh rejuv that heals you for 15% of the total healing (roughly 2k healing), but because it works in bear form and most mobs don't hit for shit, you can easily solo any heroic. There's no cooldown, and it applies to every single hit below 50%. The only risk is that you pull too many mobs that all melee at the same time and kill you. In Gun'drak, you can take roughly 2-3 packs. In HoR and FoS, you should only do one pack at a time.

Oh, it also works while stunned.

(e) fixed the wowhead link linking to old talent.

That doesn't work for me at all. Just tried with my resto druid (5.4k gs), who does indeed have Nature's Ward and Gift of the Earthmother. Yeah, was getting lots of rejuv refreshes from hits but wasn't nearly enough to keep me alive in Drak'Tharon Keep. The first two mobs killed me in about 30 seconds. Plus I was doing so little damage to them that it would have taken hours to actually kill them. Maybe that EJ poster has seriously OP gear or something?

[caladein]

Considering how the spells work, it does seem highly dependent on your health pool since your healing is mostly coming from auto-Rejuv healing for 15% of health.  If you're in middle-ICC Resto gear over say, end-Heroic ICC Bear gear, that could certainly make the difference.

[Azazel]

Got it working. Kinda. Updated my drivers. Now my computer gives me a black screen on 50% of restarts. Also, WoW seems quite unstable. I've been randomly disconnected 3 times in a row from since gating to Dalaran. I wasa fine for 25mins when sitting by myself in the middle of nowhere with the level 10 mobs outside IF.

[K9]

Ok, starting to get the hang of Chakra, this is a really cool mechanic.

[Fordel]

It may just be that I have my dpsers trained to not be retards.

My build: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Thorgrim&gn=Slap+in+the+Face

I will say I eventually stopped trying to get rend up before my first thunderclap, the snap aggro on the pack as a whole is more important than spreading the rend immediately. That can wait for the 2nd thunderclap. Also I don't think it is worth it to sit on shockwave until you have 3 thunderstruck charges.

We weren't AEing is why you didn't have AE threat problems. 

I was also chaining Thorns onto you during multi pulls, which is OP as shit at 80.

[angry.bob]

I went through my all my level 80 toons last night and specced them. I thought it was a little wierd that the hunter and warlock pet talent lines didn't really have any talents that improve the pets much above the other two talent trees. If they're going to make me put 31 points into the Demonology line, at the end of it I want demons that shoot rape beams out of their eyes and one shot anything below level 70. Spending 31 points and ending up with demons that regenerate mana or whatever 6% faster and have a 6% damage buff is more than a little underwhelming. Frankly, most of the talent trees I used had little to do with what they claimed to.

[Simond]

I thought it was a little wierd that the hunter and warlock pet talent lines didn't really have any talents that improve the pets much above the other two talent trees.

My pet does alright from talents. Mind you, I'm an unholy DK...

[Rasix]

Heh, last night I did some transmutes and icy prisms and they were on 2 hour timers.  Today they're back to normal. 

[Morfiend]

I was also chaining Thorns onto you during multi pulls, which is OP as shit at 80.

Was dueling my feral druid friend. Thought he was lagging out spinning in circles, then I died. Noticed I just killed myself on his Thorns. He laughed at me.

Heh, last night I did some transmutes and icy prisms and they were on 2 hour timers.  Today they're back to normal. 

Alchemy gem transmutes where on a 30ish minute cooldown for my friend last night. Dont know if they have changed today.