Prinsesa

To expound on this more, Paladin healing gear consists of having STA, INT, crit, mp5 and spell power (as is the coined term in WOTLK).

Even if spell power was taken as an indication for DKs possibly using that kind of gear (since the crit can also apply to their melee attacks), the odd man out in this case is INTELLECT.

Runes and runic power regenerate all their own, so there's no need for mana at all.

Furthermore, there is a Death Knight talent, Impurity in the Unholy tree, to convert AP into spell power, akin to Shaman forgoing all spell power on their gear and getting all their spell power for Shocks from AP, but there's nothing to indicate INT ever converting into a useful stat for DKs.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

North101

Impurity doesn't give spell power, it increases that amount of Attack Power spells (which I'm assuming means the abilities that do non-physical damage) recieve (otherwise known as thier coefficient) by 4%/8%/12%/16%/20%. But that just strengthens your argument (which I agree with).

 

Hildegard

A lot of stuff isn't really intuitive right now. For example spell penetration. While one can assume that most of the players have already found out that it isn't a viable stat in PVE just from looking at it it seems quite decent. If I remember correctly the combat log says "resist" when missing with spells. So the obvious answer for this would be to stack spell penetration instead of spell hit. For us it is not a big deal, but a lot of the basics of theorycrafting aren't explained at all inside the game.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Prinsesa

I believe the combat log is going to be changed in WOTLK such that level-based resists (countered by spell hit) will be logged as "miss"-es, while resist-based resists (countered by spell pen) will be logged as "resist"-s.

I do agree though, that a lot of these arcane mechanics could use some more in-game explanation. RatingBuster and DrDamage should be part of the standard UI, for starters.

On that note, an in-game, Blizzard-made threat meter is probably THE most important thing they could add to the default UI right now. Any word if they've even though of that?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Benita

Yes, on the blizzcon where the new combatlog with unique identifiers was announced, they also mentioned a toned down version of bigwigs (im guessing the boss emotes is what is left over from that), a basic threatmeter and an outfitter kind of function.

 

Roywyn

The rule of thumb is that spell hit counters full resists while spell penetration counters partial resists.
Which is quite true for most of the game until level 70 and all of PvP. Exception are binary spells, you cannot partially resist a silence or fear, but people figure that out too pretty well.
See early Shadow/SR teams - people found shadow resistance gear, which increases their paper doll SR and they saw the effects. And Warlocks/SPriests discovered spell penetration, which did exactly what it's labeled as, i.e. reduce the resistances of the enemy.

Now looking at raiding - people find a lot of full resists against boss mobs, and get more spell hit. So far, so good.
They also experience more and more partial resists against bosses.

Crux one
Partial resists don't appear on your screen unless you have a "scrolling combat text" style mod. You just see a hit/crit for much less damage than you expect.
You have to pull out your combat log and set it up to see that those low hits are partial resists.

Crux two
If you manage to find out that you lose damage to partials, your logical conclusion is that it comes from mob spell resists (like you learned on your way from 1 to heroics at 70) and you should get some spell penetration.
Makes sense, just like armour or anything else in the game.
Until you get mocked for socketing spell penetration and make a thread about it to find out that those are indeed partial resists, but level based and they can't be overcome - just like glancing blows - and end up completely confused.


Labeling full resists are misses can help a lot to clarify hit/miss.
Labeling level based partials better (call them glancings or fizzles or whatever) would help to clarify and distinguish resist-based partials and level-based partials.


Not everything is or can be obvious in the game.
For example there are hit caps for dual-wielding melee. Combat rogues want to reach it actively, while shaman/warriors don't.
For spells, currently all casters want to reach their spell hit cap. In WotLK, shaman might not want to pursue spell hit actively.


One can't easily explain all this in a small tooltip.
But some things could be labeled clearer and more intuitive.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Pitbuller

In wotlk Enhance shamans have two soft hit caps and one hard cap.
Special attack hit cap(now 9%)
Spell hit cap(now 16%)
Dual-wielding hit cap(now 28%)
You want reach both soft caps but dont bother with hard one.

Guess how much this will confuse newbie enhance shaman?

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

• Falk

I'm actually hoping the timers being talked about are just a programmable interface to display user-defined timers based on events, that's integrated into the default UI (i.e. everyone in your raid can use this without any addons) similar to how icons and raid warnings are 'optional' tools for helping out raids.

It'd be just too... dumbed down if boss mechanics were handed over on a platter.

 

Rannasha

There's a difference between actual hit caps and the usefulness (or lack thereof) of spell penetration.

Currently, we have:

Joe Average sees an attack miss, sees an item with hit-rating. Adds 2 and 2 together and concludes that hit-rating will improve his DPS. And he's correct. He still doesn't know about the hit-cap or what determines miss-chance.

Joe Average sees a spell resisted, sees an item with spell penetration, sees that spell penetration lowers the targets magical resistances. He adds 2 and 2 together again and concludes that spell-pen will improve his DPS by countering these resists. He is wrong, because he doesn't know that full resists are compensated by spell-hit-rating and that a typical opponent doesn't have any resistances to be reduced with spell penetration.

Basic game mechanics should be intuitive and easy to pickup without accessing out-of-game resources like forums. Hit-rating for physical DPS does this just fine. Spell-hit and spell-penetration don't. The same happens with threat. Some classes see abilities that generate high, low, or zero amounts of threat, but nowhere does it say what the point of threat is and how it compares between classes. The built-in threat-meter Blizzard promised would go a long way into teaching new players the basics of the game. They see their bar going higher than the tanks bar and the mob changes target and bashes them. Any half-decent player picks up the hint.

There are many of these examples of very basic game mechanics that are almost essential for group-play that are not learnable by just playing the game. A great step forward in making new players perform better and improving the overall quality of PuGs is by making these essentials clear through ingame measures.

For the fine details on how much hit rating is needed, which ability generates how much threat, a player can still rely on outside sources, this information is not required for 5-mans and entry level raiding.

 

Benita

Talents missing on the char screen isnt helping either. At least the rating merge will solve some in that regard "add more hit and you get less misses" will be true then.
Which caps to reach is part of theorycrafting as its related to stat weighing for certain raid specific situations and should not be part of any default UI.

Maybe a switch to showing how much hit you actually have in total would help, as a 99% thats not increasing anymore is more intuitive than 16% that you can overgear on completely aswell with still getting the 1% of misses. Problem with this is only the different hit caps for different target lvls.

 

Siddown

Agreed, specifically DKs were not my main point anyways, the conversation just just sort of morphed that way (a little bit like a frog in a microwave). I'm quite confident that itemization will be handled better that it is in TBC which is/was already a large improvement over Vanilla. As much as people like to say that Blizzard doesn't understand their own game, they do tend to do a pretty good job fixing issues, just rarely at a fast enough pace for those of us playing the game.

 

Cranberry

Something interesting that I just picked up on - it could be nothing, but of the dozen or so items leaked so far, none have any Defense on them. The only tanking item released has Dodge and Parry, but no Defense, which is an extreme rarity among current tanking items. Is it possible Defense is being phased out in the same way that Weapon Skill (rating) was?

Also, if you recall a while back, there was some speculation that the Naxxramas bosses would be ghostly, based on some datamined models. It appears that isn't the case, based on one of the new leaked alpha shots.

And not that anyone cares, but Muradin is apparently still alive.

Update: I've been browsing deathknight.info, been through about 30 item screenshots now and still haven't seen any defense.

 

• Chicken

I would not think too much of it, if the item designers are designing along the same lines as they did in TBC, most of the items likely to be revealed with the current level cap of 75 are intended to work well for soloing and/or DPS, with a minority of the items being for group based roles. And with the change to spell power instead of separated spell damage and healing tank gear is even more the odd man out. For example, in TBC there's 237 plate items in between level 61 to 69, 30 of those have any defense on them.

Blizzard also only recently discovered the joy of making tanking items with no defense on them. If you check out some of the non-set gear from Black Temple and Sunwell you'll find there's a couple of tanking items in there that have no defense.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Cube

I don't think that there is any level 80 gear listed, though. We're seeing leveling gear, which doesn't really need any defense-you're generally fighting same or lower level mobs in the leveling dungeons, and solo content doesn't need tank stats, in general.

An admittedly quick wowhead search shows only 30 plate items with defense rating with a required level from 61 to 69. Almost all of them are from Netherstorm or upper 60's instances, so they're meant for gearing for heroics and Kara more than tanking the leveling instances.

EDIT: Clarification.

 

Mekasha

Offering credence to the theory of no more +defense gear is the changes to some of the talents designed for tanking. The warrior one that currently gives +defense skill on live has been changed to +dodge last time I looked, and the druid anti-crit talent was changed to be 6%.

Whether this means druids just flat out won't need defense, while the plate tanks will need to pick it up to be crit immune, or if bosses just won't crit anymore by default, remains to be seen.

I've seen it mentioned in several places that combat tables are most likely being reworked, so it's possible bosses will no longer crit or crush, making every tank class useful in any tanking situation (which is where blizz seems to want to go).

 

aleyro

I'm going to put my neck on the line here and state what (i suspect) many of us are thinking:

This thread sucks. It's huge, Meanders from topic to topic, has great posts mixed in with 1 liners, and isn't really "about" anything. Might I suggest the creation of some new threads?

[WotLK - PVP] newly announced PVP zones: wintergrasp, dragonblight, and dynamic arenas
[WotLK - PVP] percieved/potential class (im)balances
[WotLK - DK] Death Knight discussion: talents, abilities, etc.
[WotLK - PVE] Raids, heroics, and instances
[WotLK - PVE] class changes (general discussion)
[WotLK - World] Itemization: stats, badges, crafting, legendary speculation
[WotLK - World] Maps, Mounts, Lore, Factions, images, and videos

 

Lookit

Currently, all mobs have a 5% crit chance, with an additional .2% per level above you, meaning boss level mobs have a 5.6% crit chance. With 6% anti-crit from talents, druids could forego defense completely and focus instead on much better avoidance stats such as pure dodge rating. Much of defense's itemization budget is wasted on druids because they cannot block or parry.


Regarding the bloatedness of this thread, perhaps the time to start new threads and lock this one down would be with the release of WotLK beta, when much more information is more widely available.

 

Putts

Aleyro, I think that a lot of different threads regarding different aspects of the expansion might be appropriate once a large-scale beta hits and more people have the ability to discuss the game based on firsthand experience without fear of breaking the NDA, but in the meantime, it seems like a lot of discussion is based on rampant speculation. For now, I think that keeping as few WotLK threads as possible is the best way to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation.

 

flyingtoastr

Rule 47.

The problem is that everything is tied together (and yes, speculation falls into that) and seperating everything is basically saying "PvP and PvE can't be in the same topic so therefore they have nothing t do with each other". Remember that everything here is just from random leaks. Maybe waiting for an open beta would be a good idea before we start making an entire topic devoted to class balance (with 2 classes without any abilities it would be a little difficult, no?).

But again, Rule 47. The Internet is not your personal army. If you think new threads need to be made do it yourself, it isn't anyone else's job to do it for you.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

◊ manly

Well, its easy to prove actually. If you run the tests on a large amount of mobs, you'll notice that you get pretty much the same amount of partial resists from normal casts compared to casts on mobs with COE up (which removes a lot of resistance). ie: spell penetration is useless because it isn't commonplace to see mobs with it (thank god).

In fact, if mobs had consistently resistance, it would only further cement the need for COE/COS. Either you add like 50-ish resistance to most mobs so that you give a reason for players to put some on their gear, but that would get totally removed from cos/coe. Or you assume COE/COS is always up, and put like 100+ resistance on most mobs, which makes it extremely painful to kill low hp mobs, or aoe mobs. In either way, COS/COE totally fudges up the spell penetration mechanic as a whole and makes it impracticable.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Cube

I think the druid crit chance change is so Blizzard can slim down the leather gear sets even more than the spell change does. For plate wearing classes, I still see Defense being a requirement-warriors, pallys will get full benefit from it, and DK's will get everything but shield block ability(which is cheap, ilvl-wise, anyway).

Plate, as of now, has 5 different sets for 2 current classes(3 in the xpac): DPS warrior, Prot warrior, Prot Pally, Retadin, and Holy Pally. Retadin and DPS warrior gear currently has a lot of overlap, but they do, technically, have different requirements.

Since DK's don't need any int(or, as far as we have seen, spell damage), they will use warrior-style itemization. That means that we'll still have the 5 different sets. If Protadins are revamped to not need spell damage, and retadins are changed to use more warrior-like itemization, we can drop the total number of sets to 3: Prot, DPS, Holy.

Currently, there are 5 different itemization requirements for leather, but only 2 leather wearing classes: Feral DPS(strength, agi, AP), Resto(healing, spirit, some haste), Balance(hit, haste, etc.), Feral Tank(high armor, Defense, agi, stam, str), Rogue(agi, hit, crit, AP).

The way things are currently, the expansion would leave us with 4 sets: Feral DPS, Feral Tank, Caster, and Rogue sets. With the removal of defense and the current proposed balance druid changes, we can get 3 total sets: Feral(high agi, str, stam, armor), rogue(agi, AP, hit, haste), and caster(high spell power, spirit, and haste).

 

flyingtoastr

To be fair, the only difference between "ret" gear and "warrior" gear is the intellect (which most ret pallys would be happy to live without anyway and which blizzard seems to be moving away from, see the new sunwell ret pieces). For all other intents and purposes we want the exact same itemization (9% hit, certain crit cap, then stack Strength as much as possible). I really think the smart thing to do would be the often prophesied Strength > Intellect conversion for ret, which would put retadin and warrior gear equal in all regards.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Moogul

Or people could refrain from so much needless speculation, and limit themselves to concise, useful posts, regarding recently released information, and then this thread could be 1/3rd as big.

Ijago <Casual Jerks>

 

gia

I would probably go the extra step and remove STR and bonus armor from leather entirely so that all of it is usable by both ferals and rogues, with feral tanks mix and matching the stuff with the most sta/agi/hit for a tanking set. This way there are only 2 sets, spellpower leather and physical leather.

 

Jone

I'd rather see them take AP out of the game and give hunters and rogues 2 AP per strength, but that's really just an aesthetic issue.

Bonus armor, however, has always been a feral tank's best scaling stat, and when they failed to itemize heavy armor gear in BC, most ferals continued to use pieces with bonus armor from pre-BC, mixed in with some high armor greens from questing. During Burning Crusade we've been fairly happy to accept that tanking is a specialized role requiring specialized gear for all three types of tanks. Despite this, there are only four non-tier leather drops with bonus armor from Karazan to Black Temple, and three of them are boots.

Giving druids even better armor coefficients has been suggested: instead of making rogue gear more attractive, this would actually increase the reward for using items with bonus armor, no matter how outdated. If you reduced it instead, you would need some other drastic change to make up for it, like scaling armor off of some other stat or letting ferals use mail.

The complications involved make me think they'll probably have to keep making specialized tanking armor for feral druids, just the same as every other sort of tank.