I think the biggest problem is that removing the even playing field for the "race" is that competition for PvE again is gone.
PvE competition right now is "Who can get to and beat the last boss the fastest, then promptly release all information about the fight" to claim that everyone killing it after them had it easier. While this will probably always be true to some extent, wouldn't an entirely new way of competing in PvE be much preferable? First kills are amazing, and getting world top kills is exciting, it's got glamour and all, to me there are just way too many variables to ever make world first kills truely meaningful.
PvE is missing something to make it interesting at the same level of competetiveness as PvP has it right now. What I've been somewhat happy with has been the dawn of WWS and the WWSscoreboard. Without getting into all the flaws it has right now, it's really been interesting to see how different guilds/raid setups/classes perform on different fight and it's been a good way to gouge your own playstyle against similar people of same gear.
World firsts and videos aside, something like server ranks based on guilds performances, not only ranking "first" kills, but other factors as well. Faster clears, faster boss kills, flawless runs of clearing a zone without non-fight-mechanic forced deaths and what not? Surely it should be possible to make PvE competition on a serverwide and worldwide basis that is much aching to the battlegroups in PvP? I know I'm dying for something like that because it keeps players interested even after "The Boss" dies.
Rankings could be a great way to introduce more interest in PvE, and continuing to do PvE, compared to the <<Defeat PvE, go PvP now>> format there has been since BT/Hyjal got introduced. I think it was established way before WoW was even released that PvE content will never last long for those at the cutting edge, what would be really good would be a way to keep PvE interesting then, instead of BT Clear #28 let's hope for Warglaives go! it would be points for the guild and as such the realm, depending on random factors that could be of what I mentioned earlier.
I think I'm rambling too much now, should go sleep, I hope some people can see the sense in what I'm posting.
Elendril, I agree with the idea behind a more involved world, I love the idea of kind of a progression you build with the whole server, that's cool, and I do know that you have competed in plenty of top number kills, but I just think it could be done without having an unnecessary progression block that skews progression. I wouldn't even necessarily be opposed to requiring turnins to open the gate if there's some sort of auto adjusting feature, but my limited programming experience tells me that's not the easiest thing to code.
To add to that, despite the war effort sucking, the results it had on the server community were a lot more fun in my opinion, contests to give out loot from farm status stuff was kinda cool, having to go back and teach people how to kill Vashj and Kael over 6 months after having stopped farming them? Not as cool, in fact, pretty annoying in my opinion.
I'm all for interactive world environments, I love the idea of building up the island, I even like the idea of the sunwell gates, but in practice it's a bit of a pain in the ass and kind of ruins a part of the game I enjoy. Going "Oh hey roflz we killed X before Y" is completely meaningless when you spent a week on him while their gates were still closed.
The opening of Sunwell Plateau is inevitably a model for player-world interaction for WLK, much like how this was in turned modeled off of the AQ gates. And, just like billions of daily quests and a developing quest hub with progressively unlockable NPCs are a significant step up from the "45% done on linen!" model of the AQ gates, whatever failings this method have will be addressed the next time they do it. I would bet that this is the model that blizzard has decided to test, not necessarily adopt, particularly because they want to see if this model if feasible in the modern raiding environments. It's certainly technically easier than linking realms, so it strikes me as reasonable that they're testing this before developing anything more complex.
It could turn out rather equitable if they hand-tune the turn-in reqs by realm, or if the last three bosses are enough of a cockblock that a week or two doesn't make much difference. They could always pull a C'thun: wait until well after all realms are opened, and then nerf the encounters to be possible. There's also the possibility that they are simply willing to sacrifice this one time competetive raiding for the sake of brand-shiny-new world-immersive game design.
The lacerate changes appear to be that it gains 5% of your attack power in damage per application, from what I can tell, which would mean that a 5-stack does 155 per tick with 0 AP and 205 per tick with 1000 AP.
That sounds incredibly underwhelming. 5% of AP is like that pathetic spell damage coefficient Seal of Vengeance gets with the 5-stack direct damage hits. I understand some scaling is necessary because of the long interval until Lacerate rank 2, but that's barely noticeable.
That sounds incredibly underwhelming. 5% of AP is like that pathetic spell damage coefficient Seal of Vengeance gets with the 5-stack direct damage hits. I understand some scaling is necessary because of the long interval until Lacerate rank 2, but that's barely noticeable.
I can't help but feel they picked the minimum possible number to make swipe not out-threat lacerate before the expansion hits. It's pretty clear Blizzard isn't quite sure what to do with lacerate, given it's many changes over time. Given the state of tank threat generation in TBC, and druid threat gen in particular, I can't say I blame them.
# Lifebloom healing coefficient has been reduced.
# Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form.
Mage-
# Icy Veins no longer stacks with Bloodlust/Heroism.
# Improved FireWard has become Molten Shields.
# New Talent: Molten Shields will cause your Fire Ward to have a 10/20% chance to reflect Fire spells while active. In addition, your Molten Armor has a 50/100% chance to affect ranged and spell attacks.
Paladin-
# Righteous Defense: This spell will now always be castable on friendly npcs.
# Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.
Priest-
# Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
# Power Infusion: Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell haste by 20% for 15 seconds.
Rogue-
# Improved Backstab is now called Puncturing Wounds.
# Puncturing Wounds increases your critical strike chance with Backstab by 10/20/30%, and the critical strike chance with your Mutilate ability by 5/10/15%.
Shaman-
# Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.
# Nature’s Swiftness and Elemental Mastery now share a 10 second cooldown.
# Tremor Totem now pulses every 3 seconds, down from 4.
Warlock-
# Demonic Knowledge: This buff will no longer remain on enslaved demons when Enslave Demon is removed. It will now increase your spell damage by an amount equal to 4/8/12%, down from 5/10/15%.
Edit: Added link WoW -> Test Realm Patch Notes - also... please look through the changes yourself. It's really easy to overlook stuff when they just throw stuff into the notes.
The reason they don't quite know what to do with Lacerate is because of bleed immune mobs. To make it possible to use on unbleedables, they added the upfront threat component, but to keep it "balanced" greatly reduced the threat from its damage (20%). There was a lot of hue and cry back in the day, when lots of Karazhan mobs and some bosses, as well as VR and Hydross were bleed immune, leading Lacerate to be completely useless in those particular situations (which was mostly cutting edge content at that point in time).
If they wanted to make it useful for unbleedables whilst adding some actually useful threat scaling, they could make the static threat component scale with Attack Power and/or double the static threat on crits, but there's no precedent for that.
The other solution could be to remove the 20% dmg to threat ratio (making it dmg = threat), frankly I'm not so sure that's warranted anymore. As it stands, the Lacerate change is merely a trivial DPS increase.
The sad thing is, the current form of the skill is poles apart from (what I perceive was) its original intent. When I first read about it, I thought it'd be really handy in aggro wipe encounters (e.g. Leo), imagine having a Mangled 5 stack Lacerate tick right after he drops aggro. It would surely make pickup that much easier without putting healers and random DoT classes at much risk.
It'll be interesting to see where they go with this in the future, but I really don't think removing the 20% dmg to threat ratio would be overpowering in the least, considering how many threat boosts Warriors and Paladins have gotten over the course of TBC (well itemized Expertise, Expertise in talents, reworked Devastate, not sure if Paladins got anything specifically).
edit:
Originally Posted by Copernicus
# Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form.
Clearly intended as a Feral PvP buff, and not a Bear tank buff =/
This has nothing to do with casual vs. raider, as far as I'm concerned. This has to do with design, and the cost to design of considering the "race" for world firsts as sacrosanct. I feel - as a high-end raider who has many times competed for high world-rank kills - that it is more important that the Blizzard design team has the freedom to construct events like this and like the AQ gate opening than it is to maintain a level playing field for everyone who wants to compete for world firsts. You say it wouldn't matter if the raid portion weren't included in the event, and maybe it wouldn't matter to you, but there are a lot of people who it would matter for. There are lots of people who appreciate the feeling that your character's actions in the world can have meaning - this is one of the opportunities for that to exist on a grander scale.
Yes I agree that Blizzard should be prioritizing creating these events in the first place, no doubt about it, but it’s not like screwing over the high-end guilds is a requirement for that to happen. Look at the event now; you get to experience taking over an island fighting side by side with NPCs to unlock what is most likely the most amazing vendor in the history of WoW (disregarding the almighty Flaskataur!) available to everyone. Everyone benefits from it and everyone wants to do it. The unlocking of the raiding part is far from the same though; the reward ends up being a factor for a couple of guilds at the most…
Originally Posted by Elendril
Consider the implications of the essence "race". Sunwell guilds will have legitimate incentive to try to help along less progressed guilds to kill Kael and Vashj, to the point of helping them by sending members with them. Like the AQ War Effort contests that resulted in Medivh opening the gates first, this is an opportunity for motivated raiders to work with the community for the benefit of all involved. At this point in the TBC raid game, helping those guild get over the hump could be a big deal for them. That's very cool, in my mind. That's not to say I don't agree with the idea of scaling - I do think the requirements should scale based on some kind of criteria, but that criteria clearly won't be entirely fair either.
I agree 100% with the above; the problem is that if there is no scaling this will never happen, at least not anywhere near as much as it could, on a lot of servers.
Originally Posted by Elendril
World events are something lots of players have been clamoring to see more of for a long time, especially world events that really matter. This is one of them that impacts everyone, from the casuals farming SSO rep to the T5 raiders getting their badge gear to the Sunwell raiders fighting to open the gates. It's something that can foster a sense of purpose and community, and that's more important for the game in the "grand scheme of things" than the world first race being entirely fair - which it never is anyway.
I want and like the concept of world events as well. The events however seem to be completely separated with no interaction or overlap at all. In fact, even if most people wanted the prospect of a Vashj or Kael PUG is pretty daunting for most without proper leadership which I’m sure plenty of high-end raiders would be willing to offer if it actually mattered (you see where I’m going with this?).
Blizzard can easily make the effort scale in a decent way which will be significantly better than just setting a static amount for the progression meta-game that, like it or not, attracts decent attention and is important to a lot of high-end guilds out there. Doing this involves no trashing of content and no reduction of the epic feeling of involvement for everyone. In fact, making it scale will ensure that players on low and medium servers get to experience the same thing as players on the really big servers since every raiding guild out there will be working on this.
If nothing is done and a flat value goes live its yet another slap in the face for a lot of guilds out there who have been farming BT and Hyjal for ages, took the biggest blow from the crappy state of raiding at the start of TBC and it paints a gloomy picture for the state of raiding in WotLK. Like I said earlier in the thread this matter is very much a gamekiller for some guilds out there, like it or not.
Can anyone seriously make a decent argument for why the servers shouldn’t scale assuming Blizzard has (which we know they do) very detailed statistics to base it upon? Why wouldn’t we all want this epic event, heck it’s even a race between servers in some ways with online tracking by Blizzard, to be determined by how hard the population on each server work together towards a goal instead of the size of the server being the determining factor?
The Lifebloom change is vindictive and I feel infused with felrage at such a coldblooded PvP change, however I have a nasty feeling we will get (say) a 5% LB nerf with (eventually) a brand new 4T6 bonus which gives us a 5% LB buff, resulting in 0 benefit from the old version and a coverup of a PvP nerf and a fake PvE buff. Lets await the extent of the change...
There being only one direct PvE buff (To Protadins no less) sofar.. ah well, atleast with the instant Ghost Wolf it should help improve Shaman viability in PvP.
# Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form.
It's that bolded qualifier that makes this far more feasible than the earlier fake notes, since it wouldn't apply to Bears.
Also, I'm not very familiar with Feral PvP, but does this address any of your glaring issues?
# Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.
As a Paladin, /cheer, although I do hope damage sustained via Soul Link doesn't make it so breakable, given Turn Evil's cooldown. Also, the cast time might still pose a problem.
# Power Infusion: Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell haste by 20% for 15 seconds.
I wonder if this means PI lost its other effects.
# Puncturing Wounds increases your critical strike chance with Backstab by 10/20/30%, and the critical strike chance with your Mutilate ability by 5/10/15%.
It looks like they're trying to get more people to buy into those Daggers they put on the Badge vendor.
# Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.
Yah, correct. 7 Points required in Enhancement to get it and I think most Resto Shamans spec that far already. They do get reduced cooldown on grounding though, but I'm thinking this might be a better choice.
It's probably a decent buff to Enhancement Shamans, though. They have a very hard time catching up on people. With instant GW, you can just cast it and catch up with someone. Good stuff.
Seems those changes didn't go live yet, at least on euro servers, wonder how much is the lifebloom nerf. I don't really mind direct pvp nerfs since I don't pvp much, and I'd somewhat agree druids have it easy for the little I did play(getting to 1900 in a night with a war, both S1 gear), but directly nerfing my main pve spell because of pvp sounds like a pretty bad deal. Unless they felt lifebloom was also overpowered in pve, I wish they'd give us a boost in something else then tho, since it makes up for over 60-80% of our healing.
The other changes look interesting, instant travel form for pvp resto shaman looks like a fun change, even tho it still doesn't clear snares, making it only remotely useful against warriors, but good against rogues with poison cleansing totem ticking and removing snare.
This should make for some interesting new battlegrounds and arenas, as well as prevent unfortunate deaths. It somehow makes up for the CC vulnerability that shamans seem to suffer from.
Cheers for the subtle way to nerf warlocks, though I wonder if it's going to bring the classic holy pally/ms warrior combo back to its dominating status in 2v2.
I should also mention the hunter change, since it was in the "fake" patch notes for quite a while...
# Improved Mend Pet now has a 50/100% chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
Originally Posted by XI-
In summary, TBC raiding is easy. 9/10 encounters can be summarized with 1 phrase. Stay out of the fucking fire. If this is too difficult BWL was still there last I checked, so go have at it for some practice.
Yah, correct. 7 Points required in Enhancement to get it and I think most Resto Shamans spec that far already. They do get reduced cooldown on grounding though, but I'm thinking this might be a better choice.
It's probably a decent buff to Enhancement Shamans, though. They have a very hard time catching up on people. With instant GW, you can just cast it and catch up with someone. Good stuff.
Unless something changes at higher levels I remember my level 40ish or so Enh shaman hitting pretty much exactly the same in Ghost Wolf as in Caster form. So not only will you be able to run things down but in chasing something fast you'll be able to keep hitting it too.
As for druid stuff, Im interested to see what the coefficient is nerfed to. Hopefully its not too large that it impacts PvE too much. The feral change is somewhat useful though I don't think it helps too much for feral arena viability. Heals will be significantly larger (~600 with around 3k AP). It does help survival a tad in PvE where any heals hitting me would have an extra 800-1000 healing on them though that can't be the real reason for it.
Neato, instant ghost wolf. Won't help with snares and the like, but still pretty good. Means I might be able to catch Druids now!
PI/NS/EM nerf was expected and seems fair. Not sure exactly when the shared cooldown starts though. When you gain the NS buff or after it's used? Does PI stack with Bloodlust?
After the most recent round of Brutallus changes I've completely lost faith that the devs have any coherent plan for the encounter other than 'make it do lots of damage'.
Which is even more frustrating when we would've easily killed him, it seems now there is nothing we can do but wait until they fix the fight or magically select us to be one of the chosen few to test content past the second boss.
Last edited by Fleebenworth : 02/20/08 at 12:38 AM.
After the most recent round of Brutallus changes I've completely lost faith that the devs have any coherent plan for the encounter other than 'make it do lots of damage'.
I'm quite certain that's what everyone expects from him... at least he'd be a fun dps race, and a good benchmark at it, too...
Originally Posted by XI-
In summary, TBC raiding is easy. 9/10 encounters can be summarized with 1 phrase. Stay out of the fucking fire. If this is too difficult BWL was still there last I checked, so go have at it for some practice.
Well, after all the reports that it's impossible to kill him without immensively stacking shamans and exploiting grounding totem... They just have to tune Burn.
A few highlights of the latest update-
Patch Notes
Ahh, yes, well this explains the latest riot on the Shaman boards.
I wonder if the rumor about Mortal Strike getting charges will be confirmed.
Alot of those changes I've seen top PvPers complain about, one that sticks out is the combo of Power Infusion along with the Elemental Shaman's burst, and of course Lifebloom.
Interesting to see that some of those notes are close to the "fake" ones that were floating around a while ago, though these notes have some things the others didn't and the numbers are generally different.
Hopefully some of those other supposedly fake notes don't turn out to be true.
Those weren't "fake notes." It was purported to be a leak of tentative class design plans and it now seems that it was a real leak. As with all tentative plans, some of that stuff will surely be scrapped, some of it will be implemented as-is, and some entirely new ideas will appear.
02/19/08, 10:34 PM
Similar Threads
