Nakari

I went forward and made a new thread for all the lore and storyline discussion, so we no longer need to bloat this thread with it, and those [.spoiler] tags are really annoying for extended discussion :P

 

◊ Lactose

This is incorrect. For a Level 70 player (my only test case at the moment), armor penetration on gear works exactly as it does on live.
It might be scaling down (i.e. basically converted to a rating already), but armor penetration on gear is definitely working.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

Prinsesa

Wouldn't moving armor penetration into a percentage reduction have the inverse problem as the current implementation? That is, instead of being very effective against casters and useless against plate, it becomes great against plate and not so hot for clothies.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Rasputin

Wouldn't that at the same time be balanced by its inherent scaling, since it is more effective to penetrate armor at lower armor levels, meaning that you have greater penetration for lesser effectiveness per point at high armor levels, and less penetration for greater effectiveness per point at lower armor levels, creating a fairer situation across armor types?

 

• Falk

It prevents armor penetration from getting better the more you have, which is the core problem on live as it is. That it screwed casters over because they started at a lower initial armor value is related to the above.

 

Cirocco

Armour penetration as a % rating not being very affective against cloth does create a slight disparity in that spells completely ignore armour making them 100% effective against plate.

 

Lanlaorn

I don't understand your concern. The only disparity I see is that plate classes take less melee damage than cloth ones. Everyone takes 100% from spells, cloth takes 100% from melee and plate takes 50%. The effect of armor penetration should be to increase that 50%, not make casters take 125% damage or whatever.

If you mean that melee is paying itemization points for stats that are less useful against some opponents than others, this applies to the itemization points spent on extra armor on priest sets, honor gear, etc. and anyone investing in resist enchants, spell penetration gear/gems/enchants.

 

Liar

I think Cirocco voiced a valid concern. As it is now (emphasis on "now"), cloth classes are balanced around taking more damage from melee than plate wearers. They have tools to stay away (maybe there are exceptions, but this is the rule) so ArP was introduced with that in mind. Now with the change from ArP into a % based system melee is going to take even more damage from other melee while still taking the same amount of damage from spells as they do now.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Calantus

The only cloth class that can effectively kite melee is mages. Warlocks and priests have to tank the damage.

What they do with ArP is entirely dependant on what they want to do with it though. There's no "wrong" way of doing it really, if they want ArP to be the bane of clothies it's currently exactly what it should be. I'd prefer it go to a percentage but I have a clothie bias.

 

flyingtoastr

Warlocks are getting blink-lite (or is it blink-ultra?) and Priests still have more than double the armor of a normal clothie thanks to IF. All 3 of the cloth casters are also getting additional ways to handle melee (Priests sleeping/horror fearing, Mages Stunning/blowing people up, warlocks being warlocks). I don't think it's especially fair to say that "right now all the clothies are raped by Armor Penetration so it needs to be nerfed".

 

Calantus

He wasn't using future changes to describe why ArP was put in place months ago and I was just refuting his point.

 

Liar

Yes, you are right in that Priests and Warlocks may not have the escape capabilities of Mages now, but thankfully they get that in Wrath. But as melee class I am a bit worried about a % based armor reduction stat because the melee classes don't get escape mechanics from melee - then again, that would be sort of stupid since a melee class wants to be in melee to begin with. Melee classes' defenses are built on avoidance and armor.
On that note, what is going to happen if they start loading up the Arena gear with Expertise? There are already quite a few PvE expertise pieces in Wrath and a glove enchant to add more Expertise. This is yet another abilty aimed against melee for melee classes. I hope they keep this in mind when balancing Arena at level 80 when melee starts to lose out on their melee and avoidance.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Roywyn

Wowhead had 6 new level 70 PvP items datamined: Items - World of Warcraft

They are all ilvl 156, it's two cloaks (caster/melee) and four Battlemaster Trinkets - 1750HP/15sec/3min and 120AP/70SPow/60Haste/60Crit to choose.

Might be that they're planning for a month of PvP to bridge between 3.0 and Wrath.

Has anyone actually seen those items on the beta PTR yet?

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.

 

Cuer

On the beta, those 4 trinkets and 2 cloaks are sold by the standard honor Armor Quartermaster:
-- Cloaks cost 30,000 honor and 20 AB tokens
-- Trinkets cost 35,000 honor and 40 AV tokens

The older version of the trinkets no longer appear to be sold for honor; the older cloaks are. The older trinkets are still on G'eras though.

Also, something I didn't notice before; the Hall of Legends is no longer it's own separate mini-zone; it's now just a sub-zone of Orgrimmar. The Orgrimmar map hasn't been updated yet to show it, though.

It does seem likely that this new gear will show up when the WoW 3.0 patch goes in, a month or so before the expansion, to give PVP people something else to get to help with leveling up.

 

Lithose

As a warrior, it would be far easier for me to kill a shaman with 6k armor (About half of their normal) than it would be for me to kill a warlock with 0 armor.

All cloth classes have ways to mitigate damage beyond armor, they have ways to divert it, stop it or negate it through range. Cloth classes were not balanced, even in the slightest, of being able to tank melee passively, every one has to work while they are being hit or they will die, but every one has the tools to deal with it. The least of which is priests, but I am biased because their fear doesn't work on me. (However, forcing a pummel on MC allows them to heal through exceptional amounts of damage.)

Paladins/Shamans on the other hand have very little, to no, defense..Except their armor, which makes them tough to kill..If you negate a large portion of that, they don't have the tools to compensate.

The change to armor pen is a clumsy one..There is a reason why expose armor was reverted back to a static number during the rogue testing "buffs", by having it be % its either too weak, or way too strong. I'm going to guess that most of this is not due to them wanting casters to be stronger though, but rather because they don't want to itemize +armor on any pieces due to the new druid balance.

All in all though..Its really not a problem in the arena right now except for priests. With the new non-dispellable armor Mages/Warlocks have become a lot stronger and a lot less vulnerable, especially warlocks.

 

Anedris

Given the number of things that will change on the way to 80, I would submit that there is absolutely no way to tell whether melee will need the current "clothie-bane" version of ArP to remain competitive against casters, or whether they will do just fine with the new "plate-bane" version. Too much is going to change to make any judgment on how this change will play.

 

Lanlaorn

While very true for Shaman (although they have exceptional caster defense with Earth Shock and Grounding totem), a Hammer of Justice every 30 seconds and a Psychic Scream every 27 seconds are about the same thing, and I'd rate the former as better in many cases in fact. Similarly Divine Shield is better than the 10 second sleep, IMHO.

The Shadow Priest changes are very good though, I must admit.

Edit: my point is every healer has some kind of CC tool, in case it isn't clear.

 

Lithose

Its not about need, its about the mechanic. Reducing armor by a % based amount is a clumsy change, well, one thats extremely difficult to balance at least, due to the extreme differences in armor numbers between classes and mobs. When you have ranges from 3k-18k, a % modifier is not good, its either going to be too weak, or too strong. At least right now its very strong against classes that have tools aside from armor.

Well, to be fair, every class has defenses, even shamans can EB/FS and Ghostwolf..However, the length of cool down, effectiveness and the ability to use said CC varies wildly. A paladin gets a 5 second stun every 30 seconds. A warlock gets 18 seconds of active fear every 35 seconds. Now, you can say that the fear can be broken by many abilities, and thats true, but so can the stun.

The point is that Cloth counters are often far far more effective than their heavy armor counter parts. (again priests being an exception, but between shield/MC/IF/Fear they still have a good amount of tools.)

 

Sunfire

The best solution IMO is in between.

ARP as a number is silly for clothies and it makes the way Blizz wants to differentiate cloth Arena/PvP armor from Raid/PvE armor useless (i.e. by having less stats but more +Armor).

For example: "upgrading" from T3 to T4 PvP chest becomes pretty lackluster when most of the itemization budget was spent for the extra +400 Armor ... which say takes you to 3000 Armor... when every rogue has effective +3000 (VERY easy in Beta) .... so you just upgraded from 0 to... 0.

BUT ARP as a percentage I agree is slanted toward cloth a bit.

Solution: Leave ARP a number BUT have an overall armor negation cap. You can argue what that should be - probably somewhere between 25% - 50%. That would preserve the value of the stat - preserve its advantage against cloth - but not make Armor meaningless as a clothie (since it would always be effectively 0) and avoid making the game as cloth all about how effectively you can run away from everyone else.

 

Calixtus

Well, at the risk of furthering the "grass is always greener on the other side" way this discussion is going...

There's a lot more to melee/caster balance than just raw DPS mitigation. Kiting (or rather, the total lack thereof), movement impairing effects, distribution of interrupts throughout the classes and their respective cooldowns, spell pushback, sustained DPS... Add to that the way resistances - while not exactly overflowing on PvP gear - are a form of anti-caster armor.

As someone said earlier, it depends on what they want (wanted?) ArP to be. Keeping in mind that they buffed armour on all(?) cloth PvP gear about the same time as they started introducing ArP, I'll be cynical and say that the primary purpose is not to fix an imbalance in cloth-caster/physical DPS - I'll cheerfully argue that physical DPS has been balanced against everyone having armour since the dawn of the game - but to act as an stat point sink to prevent blatant outscaling and/or PvP gear aquiring too much PvE viability. If they really wanted it to tear through cloth as if, well, they were made of cloth, all they'd need to do was to not add extra armor to the gear and add ArP. Armor stat points on caster PvP gear costs part of the item budget, and is pretty much never reflected via increased performance in PvE. It's a cheap and easy way to introduce the next level of PvP gear in a way that A) Lowers PvE viability B) Forces upgrades, without unbalancing the entire ship too much.

(While we're touching the subject, didn't they at one point or another explicitly state that PvP gear started out with too high an item level?)

 

glowacks

With the apparent change to ArP rating and its effectiveness apparently being a percentage, it does indeed completely reverse the utility of the stat in PvP. The question then becomes: do physical damage classes need more help with high armor targets, or low armor targets? Since the non-physical damage classes deal equal damage across armor types, it stands to reason that despite what might be "needed" for physical classes, a very logical intention of the armor penetration stat is to flatten the difference in damage one does based on armor type. This means a percentage reduction since any set amount of armor reduction affects those of lower armor more.

However, if the rating merely translates into a percentage like every other stat, the stacking of it as it is now will not be changed. If at a given level an ArP rating of 5 was 1% reduction and a rating of 10 was 2% reduction, then the same amount of armor is being removed with the second 5, but is being removed from a smaller amount. This effectively leads to a higher percent increase in damage from stacking the rating, much like on live. In order to fix this problem, they would need to curve the rating so that the second 1% would do something along the lines of removing 1% of the *remaining* armor (or worse). That is, if 5 rating were 1% reduction, 10 rating might be 1.99% reduction. While obviously a negligible difference at small amounts (as it should be), it would be more significant a difference the higher the percentage went (1 - .99^10 = 9.56% and 1 - .99^25 = 22.2%). Now, I don't know if this fits with the actual curve for armor; it doesn't seem in my mind to curve fast enough given the above numbers. However, some sort of diminishing curve needs to be given to the rating so that each point of armor penetration is the same increase in percentage damage dealt, much how haste and crit works now, instead of having each rating point which leads to a larger percent increase since each will remove the same amount of armor from an ever decreasing "starting" amount.

Now, the change does mean that regardless of what they do with the the rating curve, the stat becomes much more useful the fewer the armor debuffs on the target. In this way it becomes an incredibly weak stat for 25 man raids who are likely to have more of such debuffs, and get stronger the smaller the group size (in general). Thus, while stacking the stat may lead to increasing returns, its utility for those in 25 man guilds might be negligible regardless.

It looks like they are still in the process of designing the stat if the level 70 stuff is not changed on Beta; I would suggest that those interested would look out for items with armor penetration and see whether the rating progression is linear like it is for every other stat, or if they finally fixed what I find to be the real problem behind armor penetration.

 

Bullshot

I haven't seen this mentioned here, which is surprising considering that the linked forum post below is over 10 days old. Apparently in the beta, the player's view of the world's NPCs are different depending on the quests the player has done.

Sourced from WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Dynamic World Change (Coolest thing ever)

 

ZeroWashu

Any interesting concept. However I wonder how this will play out when your trying to help someone or someone is in general chat asking for help. In other words, what do you do with groups that have characters out of sync? It would seem odd for someone to say "talk to X" when "X" isn't there for everyone.

I do know LOTRO tried this and the way they pulled it off was for every "dynamic" npc to be instanced. Sometimes a door led to a room with a quest NPC in it and sometimes it didn't. The problem there of course is that only those on the quest could go there to see the NPC. This is where the mechanism of dynamic world change can be problematic.

Now when it comes to scenery changes then dynamic works fine as it should be the same for everyone.

 

Prinsesa

I always suspected that the Sunwell Portal's "Phased" was probably an early experiment in this; glad to see they've taken the opportunity to use it for more depth.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Bullshot

For now it doesn't seem like it applies to mobs that are hostile to the player. From the original post in that thread, it seems like one NPC is killed by another and if you've completed the quest that leads to that, you don't see the first NPC at all (I'm not in the beta so that is my assumption). I doubt Blizzard will apply it to mobs that are hostile to the player, since that would essentially throw a wrench into the idea of helping out a guildie with a quest that you've already done.