Cracks starting to show?

[Hutch]

Wait.. what? Where'd you see that one, sinij?

Class Design & Balance Q&A Recap on MMO Champion.

I'd link their source, but it seems like a copy-paste snafu occurred, because their source link points to a blizzard blog for the 4.2 patch. So this recap may or may not exist in official form anywhere, yet.

Personally, I'm glad to see they're going to turn off auto-daze for Aspect of the Cheetah.

[Xanthippe]

PvE gear will have some resilience base. PvP gear will simply have more, I think. So you'll be able to enter a BG with your PvE gear and not get slaughtered, but you'd still be better off using PvP gear.

That only makes sense if you can enter a heroic dungeon wearing pvp gear and not get slaughtered.

[Merusk]

PvE gear will have some resilience base. PvP gear will simply have more, I think. So you'll be able to enter a BG with your PvE gear and not get slaughtered, but you'd still be better off using PvP gear.

IF they can balance this, fine. They've proven unable to do so in the past.

As for the baseline.. it's there.  It's called craft a blue set of PVP gear and work your way into the current honor set.   Too many fools jump in with just PVE gear then wonder why they get slaughtered.  I don't see people complaining that PvP gear provides inferior DPS for raids and getting it addressed.

Gearing up to the current honor set can take two weeks at most.  It's a weekend of catassing one day if you're Ally and its' AV weekend. (Last AV I got 3 2200 honor pieces playing half a day intermittently.) 

[Ingmar]

What they're doing is actually making it so you have a certain amount of resilience just standing around naked, not adding it to PVE gear.

They have to do this or nobody can get into PVP without a horrible grinding up period if they didn't start right at the start of the expansion - I don't necessarily mean horrible in terms of length, just horrible in terms of ability to live longer than a few seconds. It isn't a bad change, PVP gear people will still outperform PVE geared people over all, the gap will just be narrower. Sky is not falling.

The crafted gear is an alternative, but boy it is pretty annoying to spend several thousand gold (which is what it will typically run you all told) on gear you're going to be turning around and replacing relatively fast. Better to just let people ramp up from a closer position with their PVE stuff, and I say that as a crafter who financed a LOT of stuff off of selling PVP blues right at release.

[Merusk]

I'll grant you the expense is ridiculous, but that's something they'd address once the first season of Gladiator gear is available for honor each expansion if they had any remaining competence.    There's no reason for it to take the orbs anymore, or for it to require effing pyrite or other high-end mats when a fresh 85 in greens can have a better piece for any slot within a night. 

[Ingmar]

They do actually up the ilvl of the crafted gear every season now as well, so that helps a little.

[caladein]

Rift does the same kind of thing with its Resilience-equivalent and I think it makes sense here too.  It's not a lot over there (about one piece of starter PvP armor) but it works as a nice little global damage reduction against players.

[Simond]

It's really a way to implement "PvE abilities do less damage in PvP" without, you know, admitting it.

[Ingmar]

Welcome to 5 years ago. 

[Sjofn]

The crafted PvP shit doesn't take orbs, it takes elementium and various volatile shit (ornate pyrium, for example, takes waters and elementium ... and amusingly, no pyrium at all). Crafters are just gouging the fuck out of people because they can.

[Ingmar]

The water and air ones are still really expensive though.

[Merusk]

Hm I thought they took orbs. I'm misremembering there.

The Pyrium is to buy the patterns.  Takes 5 each to buy the Helm, Legs and BP.  

As for the crafters, I was talking about doing it for yourself.  You'll be lucky to find pieces on the AH as most folks just seem to DE the ones they make for profession leveling.  Those that I did find for my rogue who isn't a LW weren't profitable for the guy building them based off of the item cost of components.  He'd have been better off just selling the components.

[Ingmar]

I raced my smithing up right at release and was able to sell non glove/belt/boot pieces for over a grand each, which in turn financed me skilling up to the next piece, etc. It worked really well but that really only works right at the start of an expansion.

[Merusk]

Right.. which wasn't what we were discussing.  You said resil gear was silly expensive to make *now.* I agreed and said it was stupid that it was so and they could alter the mats, etc.  We're talking about right now in the cycle, not after an xp launch.

[sinij]

PvE gear will have some resilience base. PvP gear will simply have more, I think. So you'll be able to enter a BG with your PvE gear and not get slaughtered, but you'd still be better off using PvP gear.

Everyone will wear tanking gear in PvP, esp since they are going away with PvE-only mitigation stats, like defense.

[Ingmar]

Right.. which wasn't what we were discussing.  You said resil gear was silly expensive to make *now.* I agreed and said it was stupid that it was so and they could alter the mats, etc.  We're talking about right now in the cycle, not after an xp launch.

To buy now is what I meant, I may not have made it clear. If you're a crafter yourself it is a bit better yes.

[Ingmar]

PvE gear will have some resilience base. PvP gear will simply have more, I think. So you'll be able to enter a BG with your PvE gear and not get slaughtered, but you'd still be better off using PvP gear.

Everyone will wear tanking gear in PvP, esp since they are going away with PvE-only mitigation stats, like defense.

Are you time travelling from 2008?

[sinij]

PvE gear will have some resilience base. PvP gear will simply have more, I think. So you'll be able to enter a BG with your PvE gear and not get slaughtered, but you'd still be better off using PvP gear.

Everyone will wear tanking gear in PvP, esp since they are going away with PvE-only mitigation stats, like defense.

Are you time travelling from 2008?

No, but that is direction current development team will take us back to.

[Ingmar]

Defense has been gone for years.

[Ironwood]

I liked defense.

[Rokal]

I liked defense.

It was pretty stupid. Tanks shouldn't have had to get to a certain rating level to avoid being 1-shot by RNG. They should have just disabled the ability for NPCs to crit in the first place, really. I don't think mastery has panned out perfectly for everybody, but I like it much more than I liked defense.

[Ingmar]

I sort of liked the game of shuffling it to be exactly at the cap, but not the it HAD to be capped to succeed in raids part. If it had worked more like hit rating where you could be under cap and not totally fail, but it was much better to be at the cap, I would have been pretty happy with it.

[Wolf]

I like stats that can/must be capped - hit, exp. But I'm retarded and I like tinkering around with and min/maxing my characters. Naturally I liked defense :)

[Sheepherder]

They should cut the PvE/PvP gear distinction completely, because it was never a good idea to start with except in comparison to the old honour system, where they basically just fucking ignored the fact that the loot was shit and the grind was fucking soul crushing.

[SurfD]

I liked defense.

It was pretty stupid. Tanks shouldn't have had to get to a certain rating level to avoid being 1-shot by RNG. They should have just disabled the ability for NPCs to crit in the first place, really. I don't think mastery has panned out perfectly for everybody, but I like it much more than I liked defense.

Lol, every time someone mentions the Defence stat, I always remember one of our funniest wipes back in Naxx 40.  Doing spider wing, Anub drops some piece of tanking loot, which happened to be an upgrade for one of our tanks (think it was bracers or a cape or something), and he decided to equip it on the spot because it was a decent enough upgrade to make it worth not waiting to enchant it.  As it happens, equipping the item essentially put him somenthing like .1% under the defence cap.  Of course, we didnt figure this out untill we got to Faerlina, who got in a single lucky crit while she was enraged and oneshot said tank (she crit him for something like 2k more damage then he had total health), and then procieded to enrage-oneshot like 1/3 of the raid before we got her back under controll (of course, by that time, it was pretty much game over.

I also lol at Defence, because I played a feral Tank at the time, and we needed signifigantly less defence to hit our "safe cap" because we were like 80% there through talents alone.

[Merusk]

They should cut the PvE/PvP gear distinction completely, because it was never a good idea to start with except in comparison to the old honour system, where they basically just fucking ignored the fact that the loot was shit and the grind was fucking soul crushing.

No, it was a great idea for keeping the people interested in PvP but not PvE subbed to the game.  Otherwise raid gear > all so it's Raid or don't PVP, just like in Vanilla/ BC. 

[Fordel]

I had to fuck with the defense cap AND the avoidance cap on my paladin, was fucking horseshit.

[Merusk]

I had to fuck with the defense cap AND the avoidance cap on my paladin, was fucking horseshit.

It was.. BUT.. it was worth it when you were a tiny, unkillable god who killed 50+ mobs at once as you cycled through the 4 shields in your backpack.

I miss my BC-era Pally Tank.

[Wolf]

you should try a mastery caped prot pally now. Will be easy to get with justice and dungeon drops next month. I don't know how BC was, but when I was leveling mine last month I was pulling 20+ mobs my level in deepholm and surviving without much issue. She was no-where near the cap and didn't even have shield wall at this point.

[Merusk]

With block only mitigating damage instead of stopping it it's just not the same.  You'd hit 100% avoidance, majority of it being block which stopped ALL damage and you were literally unkillable by anything other than bosses or screwing up positioning so mobs were behind you.  I wasn't kidding about 50+ mobs.

I'd pull the entirety of the elites on top of black temple in Shadowmoon Valley when I got bored and wanted to farm, knowing that so long as my shield held out I could stay up there as long as I wanted.

The tradeoff was that casters would fuck your entire day... which they still pretty much do, don't they?

[Fordel]

There was that trinket that would heal you every block, that made things pretty god damn silly at times. I also leveled my prot paladin from 70-78 inside a cave in the howling fjord abusing a endless stream of iron dwarves that were THEORETICALLY supposed to kill you if you 'failed' sneak in and out of the cave using your scarecrow golem disguise... and they would kill any other class/spec eventually. Prot Paladins were immortal against melee mobs though, you just needed to bring 3-4 shields. The only reason I didnt go straight to 80 is because the mobs turned grey. It took like 6 hours total I think, spread out over a few nights on a weekend. Didn't even have to pull and looting was futile after about 3 minutes as the bodies just piled and piled and piled.


The avoidance cap/uncrushable thing was horseshit because it was put in specifically in an attempt to make sure ONLY Warriors could tank bosses. They also just failed to account for their own itemization scaling and paladins managed to force the issue regardless.

[Sheepherder]

No, it was a great idea for keeping the people interested in PvP but not PvE subbed to the game.  Otherwise raid gear > all so it's Raid or don't PVP, just like in Vanilla/ BC.

Uhh, no.  You're contradicting yourself there.

If raid gear and pvp gear are the exact same thing there's no reason to discriminate one way or the other, except in determining which is faster or easier to get.  In vanilla, either/or didn't matter (when there was PvP gear of matching ilvl as the current raid gear, anyways ) except you had a reasonable expectation of getting raid gear, whereas the old honour grind was even more fucked up than arena rating.  A simple failure to set reasonable barriers to entry.

In TBC optimal gear was still raid gear even though they had delineated the two and had kept the ilvl on current season gear relatively in line with the PvE gear, so no, that seperation of the two obviously does jack shit in and of itself.  This was exactly because PvE gear still had better stats for PvP than the PvP gear.  In that case the PvE/PvP separation made it worse because they didn't hand out Cataclysm's Edge with it's ridiculous amount of cloth gibbing armour penetration to gladiators, and the PvP crowd didn't get appreciable amounts of ArP on PvP gear until Sunwell came out.

[Simond]

With block only mitigating damage instead of stopping it it's just not the same.  You'd hit 100% avoidance, majority of it being block which stopped ALL damage and you were literally unkillable by anything other than bosses or screwing up positioning so mobs were behind you.  I wasn't kidding about 50+ mobs.

I'd pull the entirety of the elites on top of black temple in Shadowmoon Valley when I got bored and wanted to farm, knowing that so long as my shield held out I could stay up there as long as I wanted.

The tradeoff was that casters would fuck your entire day... which they still pretty much do, don't they?

Yeah, and having half of the tanking classes be essentially immune to damage and the other half not was certainly conducive to class balance. But don't worry about 'nerfed' block - it's going away completely in MoP! 

[Wolf]

With block only mitigating damage instead of stopping it it's just not the same.  You'd hit 100% avoidance, majority of it being block which stopped ALL damage and you were literally unkillable by anything other than bosses or screwing up positioning so mobs were behind you.  I wasn't kidding about 50+ mobs.

Well, yeah, this sounds just silly :) You have to press buttons now but you can still pull quite a bit.

[Outlawedprod]

They are getting desperate.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2999630289?page=1#6