Azurai

Interesting, I wonder how much they're planning to segregate the badges considering there's heroics (maybe not?), two more T7encounters and beyond. Part of the draw of the badge system was that you could still earn quality items without the ability to reliably clear 25 mans or even 10 mans. I can't imagine they'd actually add [Leggings of Justice][Leggings of Moar Justice][Leggings of Most Justice] for each content tier and each new item.

While I personally like the idea of a badge system to allow raiders to pick a loot reward every few clears instead of relying 100% on the RNG, I'm not so sure that's the reason the badge system was successful in TBC. Besides the rings, I can't think of anyone who actually replaced T6 gear with the badge stuff. It was mostly casuals and alts who benefited gear-wise, most raiders probably spent badges making money with nethers + gems.

 

◊ zirky

I wonder if those wealth "achievements" are per account or character. Those don't even seem like achievement as much as they are a stat to be tracked. I know many people, myself included, do most of their auctioning on a bank alt. It seems like something that would be useful at the account level than at the character level.

 

bv728

My guess is that there will be separate costs for badges; a high end item might be available for 100 Badges of Brutality, but only 10 Badges of Inequity, while low end gear will have much more similar costs. Also, I can imagine some unique rewards being on each badge type.

 

Cuer

Heroics will have their own badges, of course. They can add better gear later in the LK expansion that can be purchased with those badges, just as they did with Badges of Justice, if they want to make a continual desire for people to get those badges. But for now, at least, there will be a clear delineation between gear that can be bought with heroic badges, and raiding badges. There will be a clear path of gear progression, from heroics to 10 man content, then 25 man content.

The Achievement UI has a separate "Statistics" section that lists a huge amount of different stats; you can see the tab at the bottom of the picture that switches between them. These statistics are by character, and probably will always remain so. At some point in the future, after the release of the LK expansion, there will be Achievements that are account-wide, but there hasn't been any mention of combining statistics between characters.

 

Alerian

The screen shot shown at the top of this page looks to be the total number of badges you have ever acquired, not how many you currently have to spend on gear.

It may be that all T7 10 man badges are the same badge as heroics, all T7 25 man badges are the same badge as T8 10 mans, etc, so you'd get the following:

Badge of Brutality: Heroic and 10 man T7
Badge of Inequity: 25 man T7 and 10 man T8
Badge of Great Inequity: 25 man T8 and 10 man T9

The "Badges of Brutality PH (Nax 10) acquired" seems to indicate that part of that is a placeholder for something.

 

aleyro

There is, actually, a pretty significant gear check in T5.

Once the attunement for TK was lifted, Void Reaver became a classic gear check for the droves of undergeared guilds who were unable to kill magtheridon but wanted to give TK a try. VR had all of the traditional gear-check components: tank rotation, constant raid dmg/healing, and an enrage timer (4.5m hp in 10m) that set a minimum bar for raid wide DPS.

I find it pretty ironic that an encounter that was originally (according to legend) a "pushover" encounter (designed to reward players who completed the arduous attunement process with a relatively simplistic fight with great rewards) ended up acting as a gear check.

 

Jebraltar

I would disagree that Void Reaver was a gear check, because the actual level of DPS/healing/tanking required was so low. My guild was stuck on it for a while because people kept face-tackling orbs, but despite raid DPS that was not high at all, we never were behind the enrage until we'd lost a significant amount of raiders. A bigger factor for the increase in "difficulty" would probably be the fact that so many people heard that it was a free loot boss...and didn't take him seriously at all.

 

Kumar

Agreed. The guild I am in faced problems with Void Reaver, while we took down other bosses in T5 in less tries than VR. The main reason was that, it was "loot reaver", we will go in and get the loot. People didn't read up on the trash, people didn't read up on the fight, some casters didn't even know that the Orbs caused Silence.

 

Docjowles

Seriously, Void Reaver? Some napkin math sets the average DPS needed to beat the enrage at a whopping 500 (4500000 HP / 600 seconds / 15 DPSers). My green-wearing enhancement shaman alt can do that in 5 mans with shitty group synergy and no consumables. Void Reaver is a terrible example of a gear check for the same reason Archimonde is. If your raid is playing well, gear is basically irrelevant. The whole challenge of the fight is dodging orbs and managing threat. The enrage timer is only a factor when 3/4 of your DPS is lying dead on the floor from orb damage.

 

• Haphnet

Can we carry the discussion of Burning Crusade gear checks and their presence or absence somewhere else? Maybe even it's own thread? It just really isn't currently anything that involves Wrath and is bogging down the thread.


More on track, I'm surprised nobody hit this up yet, despite the fact it was mentioned a page or two ago:
WoW Forums -> Thanks for the training dummies!

While this still might not solve the problems with class scaling and buffs/debuffs and how they affect dps testing, it is still a very nice, long overdue addition.

 

Redcape

I actually think this solves our problems very neatly. It is easy to track the exact benefits of % raid bonuses, but much harder to actually model a real person with latency doing a raid rotation. Although modeling perfect reaction time and ideal rotations is easy, it isn't exactly accurate, but you can very easily take a WWS of a person beating on a dummy and modify their damage by the exact amounts you need to to model raid buffs. Admittedly for some classes/specs you have issues because they won't have enough crit/hit and that will actually affect their rotations, but this is a much better way of testing in my mind than the pure theorycraft we have had to rely on thus far.

 

hypetech

Is there anybody that could confirm or deny potion sickness still being active in the latest build? I know they removed the visual debuff icon while leaving it as a hidden debuff recently, but I'm hearing conflicting reports of whether or not it's still actually there

 

Macblade

Does anyone know if they are planning on keeping these in the game? My first thought when I heard about them was that they are something added to increase testing in Beta but would most likely be removed when the game went live.

 

Nurru

The debuff is gone, but potions do not begin their 2 minute cooldown until you completely drop combat (Vanish, Invisibility and Feign Death don't count during bosses with pulses). So it's the same thing in the end.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Zaniel

Isn't this actually worse? Now after you chug a potion you have to exit combat and then wait an additional 2 minutes. Before your potion was at least cooling down during combat, so when you exited you could immediately chug another (if necessary). This new implementation is doubly punishing -- and I remain a firm advocate of the original potion sickness.

 

Macblade

I'm not sure sure its a bad thing. You won't be able to get out of combat in most boss fights anyway, so all that it really affects is trash. I don't mind them not assuming I'll chug a pot on every trash pull.

 

Auororam

This could be a big step towards enabling potions in Arena. Keeping people in combat is already part of the general strategy to prevent drinking. (offtopic, I just typed "stinking" instead of "drinking" because this massive waft of sewer just blew into our office, people are freaking out, which is even funnier cause it's all in Japanese and I can't understand any of it). So now you can enable potions in Arena and hunters will have a slight advantage thanks to their quick cooldown.

I still feel like there will be problems to iron out, although I can't say what they would be because I haven't played arena competitively enough to know.

 

glowacks

While I was first thinking that this answer missed the whole soloing angle, I realized that it will rarely make a difference there either. In almost every situation you're looking at using a potion somewhat near the end of combat - at most 10 seconds, 15 to be very generous. The difference in cooldown there is relatively minor.

But now the question is, why have a cooldown on potions out of combat at all? The cooldown is there to prevent them from being spammed like in Diablo and wasn't in the range of 5-30 seconds previously because of the impact it would have on raiding, so as long as you put a limitation of leaving combat for 5 seconds I don't see the big deal on that being the *only* cooldown. While it may give Hunters an advantage, they'd still have to remain down for 5 seconds without someone touching them. Boss and gauntlet-trash pulses will keep potions from cheesing those encounters as well.

 

PSGarak

Does the cooldown start cycling out of combat and continue regardless of combat state, or does it only cycle while out of combat, requiring a cumulative 2 minutes OOC before you can use a potion again?

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Xaev

It seems to me that this new variation on potion sickness would prevent a tank from drinking an Ironshield before a boss pull and then later being able to drink another during the same attempt if, as speculated, the cooldown only ticks while out of combat. In keeping with Blizzard's desire to reduce the consumables required for raiding, this would reduce the possible potions required per attempt from two to one.

 

Auororam

Is the technology already there to do this? I can't think of any other spells that keep track of what they were doing before a triggered event and resume it after. At least as far as combat is concerned. I think it's more likely that the cooldown only starts if you are out of combat and continues while you are in combat.

Even if this is the case I can only think that hunters (for misdirect dmg) and tanks would be the only ones quaffing potions in the seconds before a pull, but it's easy to see that this would be required behavior for any tank.

 

• adamb10

A new wave of beta invites went out tonight so check your emails.

 

Devouress

Just checked out the legendary mount (Black qiraji battle tank) on latest beta push, and despite the fact that its wording changed to "Summons Black Qiraji Battle Tank. This mount changes appearance depending on your location.", it is still same only-ground mount. I tested it in shattrath, orgrimmar, terrokar forest and in grizzly hills, and it remained ground-only mount.
But also it is little bugged at the moment. It gives you two buffs, both with same icon, one with tooltip, second without, and when you dismount, one of them stays and you running at 100% increased speed without being on mount.

Was hoping to see wasp mount or something, but currently it seems bugged and/or not implemented.

 

Sarjin

There's actually quite a few cases where the badge items are actual upgrades. For priests, [Adorned Supernal Legwraps] and [Slippers of Dutiful Mending] are superior to the drops available in T6 instances. (Not counting the 'pseudo' Tier 6 boots which come from SWP) Similarly I have been told the leather badge pants are superior to T6 for Rogues, and a ton of other examples can likely be found.

That said, if Blizzard intends to have a situation in which Badges are only spent by people who clear the content in question, content which drops the same iLvl as the badge rewards, it seems unlikely that these badges will add yet another set of Cloth Healer Boots (or Plate Tank Gloves, or whatever) when an alternative likely drops in the instance from which the badges are acquired. I wonder what items we can expect from these vendors though, considering this. My prime candidate would be the Idol/Relic/Wand/etc. slot for caster types, as typically these vary wildly between classes, and adding these on actual instance loot tables would make these rather bloated. Plenty of raids which likely have cursed about yet another [Totem of Ancestral Guidance], and with the streamlining they do to other gearslots (which isn't quite possible for these items), I'd say these will end up on badge vendors. Not quite sure what else to expect however.

 

kharen

Trinkets would be another good option to go on badge vendors, to avoid another DST situation (or a DFT situation, if you want to look back to 1.x...).