Jebraltar

For a boss that takes 15-20 minutes to run, a 1% droprate is horrendous. Sure, it's not 0.01% any more, but that doesn't make it fantastic or even good.

 

Pixen

It's a huge difference. At 1% it's entirely farmable. At 0.01%, it's a joke that you read about on a forum somewhere. A 1% drop keeps people going back there, and it's the reason you actually see people with this mount instead of only hearing about it as some kind of urban legend. 15 minute runs are nothing to farm a pure vanity item.

 

richard

Don't mean to derail the thread, but a baron run can be finished in 6-7 mins now. As long as you go inside the slaughterhouse right when Ramstein comes out, you can skip the 100 mindless ones and save alot of time.

You can also skip 100% of the trash except the patchwerks at the end if you avoid gargoyles.

 

◊ EllTrain

This was all true at 70 as well.

 

Xoleum

So they are not adding/changing glyphs on this next update? =(

 

• frmorrison

MMO-Champion has a list of the glyph changes. It doesn't say where the new ones come from though.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Pharmacon

Research I'm sure. No indication that this would change just because they are new.

 

Seratha

This is actually incorrect. For most of Vanilla, Blizzard used the linear scaling item formula. Somewhere around when they released ZG, they changed the item formula for certain items from the linear formula to a logarithmic formula. Throughout TBC and Wrath, both rare items and epic items used the logarithmic formula. I never got around to doing enough testing to find if greens used a logarithmic formula, but I from what I did test, it seemed like the random suffix greens still followed the linear formula.

 

Mideci

I'm not really sure what you are saying when you toss out phrases like "throughout Wrath" which is one month old.

But regardless, I may be mistaken on some particulars, but not the fundamentals. iLvl is a "fiction" of sorts. It's a reverse engineerable number. If you understand the relative stat weights you can generate an iLvl for an item -- assuming it has nothing like a proc that can't be directly valued. Now, if the formula is indeed logarithmic, which I don't doubt, that formula is going to beyond the average WoW player to generate. And so a crude calculator is going to break more dramatically.

But the stat weights were quite probably changed in Wrath, both relatively and -- given the assertion is logarithmic -- absolutely as items continue to scale.

 

PSGarak

It's not accurate in most senses of the word to say that it's a fiction. Items do have a literal ilvl stat in their data files that can be data-mined. Blizzard, as part of their itemization development, makes sure that an item adheres to its budget by making sure that a function of the stats is less than a function of the ilvl. While the ilvl is a fiction in the sense that it doesn't have a direct impact on play the micro of play or a player's evaluation of the worth of an item, it's still a very "real" number in the sense that it is a solid constraint on the item design. It's not a player-engineered measure of item worth, it's the dev-defined measure of item worth and therefore has real (albeit indirect) meaning in the game. Even procs and crud like that get thrown into the ilvl formula, just in ways that we don't have enough data to reverse-engineer.

I'm given to understand the only thing that ever changed about the ilvl formula was when stamina was devalued. I've heard no news about any other sort of changes. I also don't see any reason for them. Spirit was explicitly said not to have changed value, the other stats were implied, and ratings have no need to be revaluated because that can be done with the ratings conversions instead, and its better to do it that way so the values remain constant. Most other aspects of scaling can also be addressed by other ways than the ilvl formula, albeit indirectly and usually in a class-specific way.

I don't think there was ever any logarithmic scaling. One of the constants in the formula was a log of something, but it was a constant, so it doesn't change the shape of the actual formula. What particular items have broken the previously-known formulas, and by how much?

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Grayson Carlyle

There was a regression done on differences between ilvl and expected ilvl from late TBC itemization. There was an error in the old formula that could be corrected by adjusting the expected budget to a logarithmic scale. The suggested formula proved to be accurate for every post-60 item and all items through BT/HS. You just happened to miss the boat, Garak!

ItemTips (ItemTips - Addons - Curse) implements the old ilvl budget formula and adds it to item tooltips. If you peruse Sunwell items, you'll see most items are budgeted to an expected ilvl of ~180, including non-socket items. If you use that same formula on current Naxx items, the estimated budget is between 270 and 290 for the 2 tiers of items. Obviously the old formula is invalid.

 

Seratha

I say "throughout Wrath" because, shortly before the beta ended, iLvl 239 and iLvl 252 pvp cloaks were datamined. Given the item level, these cloaks would be equivalent to not only the tier after Naxx, but also the tier after that. Given that the calculated item level of the cloaks using the logarithmic formula came to the same item level given, I'd say that every other piece of gear has a good chance of following the formula.

The old formula was correct for items before 60 and even still for most items at 60. It's just that items from around ZG onward changed their formula. In fact, the old formula is still accurate for greens throughout TBC as well as all items that have a random suffix. For whatever reason, Blizzard decided to keep the random suffix items scaling slower than the items that come from quest rewards.

 

Ja7us

Hopefully the change that removed the requirement for 3 people for the Uldaman and UBRS channeling altars will be extended to the ZA gong as well. Requiring 5 people to open the door to an old raid dungeon seems pretty unnecessary.

Did anyone else notice that the stat spread on the strength/stam/crit/expertise version of the new Kirin Tor ring is significantly less optimal than the equivalents on all the others? It's got its points spent in 4 stats instead of 5, and it has a lot more budget spent on stamina.

 

Cuer

The Stamina part is odd; it almost seems like they want that to be a feasible threat tanking type starting ring. But like the other Kirin Tor rings, it's primarily a weaker version of what's available in Naxx; in this case, it's the same stat allocation as [Ruthlessness].

 

Putts

Cooking is finally being fixed, making the meta-achievement and the Chef title available. As part of that, [Fish Feast] is going to be added to the game, which is just like the [Great Feast] except with boosted stats (now on par with the best AP and Spell Power food in the game). It will require 450 cooking to train, however.

 

• frmorrison

The new KT ring with 4 stats is better for a Ret Pally than the current ring (not by much though). More stamina isn't a bad thing, especially for melee classes.


I saw WoR had the prices for the new PvP items up, so the Wintergrasp tokens will have more uses.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Emeraude

The costs for the PvP gear is totally out of whack. You'd have to spend 270k honor to get the 5-piece set if you never set foot into arena. If you do set foot into arena, you can get that armor for a reduced cost(1/5 of it's price of pure honor), but you have to pay with your arena points, but that's a waste of honor because the next tier(Hateful) is the same honor price but with higher requirements.

So for the first couple of weeks you're going to see a lot of glass cannon teams trying to get up to the rating for the Hateful stuff, and nobody even bothering with the blue stuff.

It's like they made a set for the people who fail at arena every week but didn't provide any real intro arena gear for anybody else.

There is no intro Arena gear atm, the crafted stuff is horrible as well, as it has less stamina then most heroic/10-man Naxx gear, and you trade a large amount of offensive stats for about a 4-5% crit reduction/8-10% crit damage which is quite frankly a drop in the bucket with how high PvP damage is as a whole.

Does nobody else see this as a problem?

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Cuer

Their thought is probably that the more hardcore players have already been farming Archavon to get a couple of pieces from there.

Given the large number of people who "fail at arena every week", compared to those who realistically have a chance to get the Hateful gear, there will be plenty of people who get the blue Arena/Honor cost gear, and only that. As for the others, in a few weeks they'll be at a high enough Arena Rating to get the Hateful or Deadly gear anyway, so it's not a big deal. The first few weeks of an arena season are always a bit crazy as the higher skill players get to higher ranks; this will just be another part of that.

Hardcore PVP players are the ones who should be doing Wintergrasp regularly for 7k honor in 20 minutes; the honor cost involved for the new gear is pretty trivial, at that level.

 

Antiphonal

Tailoring has a BoE set of blue-quality cloth gear (and by set I mean 8/8) that has stamina, resilience, and crit. I suppose players who wear cloth are looking at stuff like that as good enough to grind out their first purple PvP set, and then from there do the standard season-based upgrades.

 

Inoko

I made the full set for myself over a few days, and it's just completely worthless. It has no more stamina than my heroic epics, and the survivability it grants (almost none) is practically worthless against the upgraded DPS of almost every class. I just don't think Blizzard thought the first ~month or so of PvP through very well, and I would guess they just figured survivability would follow along the same sort of increase as DPS, which ... well, hasn't happened.

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Pyros

If they thought Archavon would be a decent way to get pvp gear, they couldn't be more wrong. It's the old problem of RNG, with a twist since there's more classes and less drops every week. I don't know how you can have more than a single piece unless you've been extremely lucky on rolls, or get loot priority for some reason. Hell even with that, I haven't seen a single DK PvP piece from the boss myself. Since we started farming it, I know in every 10man I've done, the pvp piece was for a class we didn't bring. I know I'm probably just more unlucky than other people, but still, you'd have to be extremely lucky to get a drop everytime you go. So no I don't think they made it as a viable way to gear yourself, but mostly a side little bonus for trying to get wintergrasp at all if you don't need honor(since it still drops badges and tier7).

As for honor and WG, it's easily balanced by the fact there's 2h30 between each game, and winning is very server specific. Cross server BGs made the balance a bit better than it used to be before, but with WG we're going backwards, and while I don't mind since my server is like 80/20 on horde side, it's not really such a great way to do honor imo.

The first few weeks of arena will just be dominated by people who've done pve, naxx gear trash pretty much everything you can get currently, and will do for a few weeks at least. You can get like 20-22k(as a plate user) in DPS gear, and if you regem for pvp with stam/resilience stuff, and enchant accordingly, it should be your best chance at not getting stunlocked to death by a single rogue or 3shotted by an arcane mage.


And the new kirin tor ring with expertise, the way I see it, it's probably meants as a tank and/or pvp version of the ring. It's pretty bad for either in my opinion, but I didn't like the naxx ring either, our feral druid took it and thought it was good though. The lack of defense makes it particularly bad for anyone but a druid, especially DKs. The bright side though is I won't have to spend almost all my money in a ring upgrade ^^.

 

Volrath50

I find the savage saronite set an acceptable starter PvP set, and far better than the way they started level 70 PvP with. I never got into arenas or even BGs at 70, because I missed season 1, and didn't have the stomach to grind a full set of blue PvP honor gear, or later, S1 gear, starting with 0 resilience. Not only that, if I did want any arena gear, I'd have to bang my head against PvP geared people for a piddly 200 arena points or so a week. I just found PvPing with 0 resilience to start with was far too frustrating and far too unfun to do. So I skipped PvP in TBC, never doing arenas, except to try them out and get insta-gibbed, and only grinding about 3 pieces of honor gear before getting too frustrated.

Whereas I'm planning on PvPing and Arenaing on my Death Knight, even though he started with no resilience. The crafted PvP gear has let me accumulate around 500 resilience or so, which, although not stupendous, makes starting to PvP with, and breaking into Arenas far less frustrating, and seem like far less of an uphill battle, because you're not starting with 100% PvE gear. I absolutely despised PvP at 70, and the simple addition of the crafted PvP gear looks like it should do a good deal to ease starting players into level 80 PvP.

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Malakitoo

As a healer, I find that the blue resilience gear is 100% needed. Wearing pve gear with less than ~400 resil makes it impossible to live through a single dps (read mutilate rogue), much less 2. That said, I would've liked to see pvp gear be better all around, starting with the blue set all the way through deadly. Having top PvP weapons that are already outclassed by 15 or 20 dps (10% better) before the season begins, with potential for the release of another raid tier before the end of the season, is not good design.

As to the patch notes, I find it irritating that having a larger mana pool doesn't give you an advantage when it comes to having your mana pool drained. I socketed int for pretty much this exact reason last season, but I guess that's a pve stat now (and I have to socket hit now anyway ).

 

Trifle

I don't know that we'll be able to live through a single mutilate rogue regardless of our resilience honestly... They should have near 100% uptime on wounding, mind numbing and crippling poisons, which will negate most of our spells. Riptide and earth shield (both at half healing, and assuming they aren't dispelled) will only be able to keep us up so long. We'll be completely reliant on our partners.

 

Gourd

The situation I find myself in is such that even when my partner peels for me, I am neither able to heal quickly nor effectively, nor am I able to gain much distance for the short period in which the rogue is not on me. This is my main concern; that it will be very difficult for me to play "catch up" even with effective peels.