Dakous

With a number of rumors floating around regarding increased HP for the expansion, and the amount of theorycraft going around regarding the expansion, I thought it might serve to combine the two (and cease my urge to derail other threads):

Theorcrafting on the premise of giant HP pools.

Let us imagine, for a moment, that not everything will scale up proportionally (as the rumored re-budgeting of stamina on items suggests). And as purely off the wall hypothetical numbers, cloth starts walking around with 12k HP, and tanks 25k.

Let's look at a number of current issues in game:

Reaction and raid wipes
How fun is it when one random factor in the raid game kills one random person instantly, effectively wiping the raid? With giant HP pools, random bug explosions on TwinEmps (my example paradigm, if you will) and Unbalancing Strikes won't one-shot your raid. C'thun's eyebolt can still wipe you, but your margin for error is no longer frustrating (any two people at any reasonable level of consciousness can survive it without potion abuse). Raids will wipe from going out of mana or taking too long to kill the boss, not "oh no, 500ms ping :tears:".

Consumables
If the new Flask of the Titans 2 (whatever the name is) is approximately 1500 HP and defense, in the context of a tank with 25k HP, that's borderline trivial. Sure, a bump to your raid's effectivity, but it shouldn't be the raid staple we have today.

PVP
Getting crowd controlled (poly, stun, fear, take your pick) to death just sucks. Sufficently high gear levels have reduced a bulk of PVP to "he who shoots first, two shots first." Not to mention assist trains, and the upcoming arena with everyone's theorycrafting that paladin+warrior (or some similarly premised combination that wins at today's twoshotcraft) will just exclude. None of those are possible if players will simply out-survive crowd control. It's still useful, it still gives an advantage, and timed well, it can shut down a player... but it won't be the current game of "remove this player from the game until we're ready to group wail on him."

Raid participation
If, as above, raids are going to run OOM to die more than go splat (blues have posted the squish factor will go down in the expansion, no, I lack the citation), this means people shifting gears and contributing efficently and the entire raid carrying their weight will be more noticable then currently, where all manner of craziness goes on (no more (super)stacking a class, otherwise you're going to lack the necessary balance of mana/efficency/tanking/control).

So...
So the question I advance is - does this seem in line with the Big Picture from what we know of changes? Am I off my rocker? Would this not solve, elegently, a number of problems with one change? What downsides do you see to this?

To answer my own last question... I'm very curious what GY running with the flag will be like in WSG, come expansion.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

darthgrimm

Cheaper stamina brings more of a pvp change.

I expect PVE to remain the same. High Burst dmg mobs will burst down your tank the same. MOB aoe will get stronger and stronger to compensate and everything will stay the same.

As a reference people alwys whine that fury warriors do same dmg as rogues and have more armour and more hp. This is not true. The extra armour means nothing to a boss ( Nobody cares soooo much about trash ) as he will insta-kill the fury war or the rogue the same.

More HP is blizzard solution to the 1-shot game that WoW tends to become. Is not funny to start a duel and lose in the next second to a pom crit pyro for 4600.

The biggest winners in this change....are ..again ... Casters. The biggest losers to everybody having more hp are .. you guessed it : Rogues.

IF stamina is increased more than damage is increased pvp will be the most affected. And rogues will drop to the bottom of the food chain.
I dont see any significant DPS incerease for rogues with the new talents to surpass this increase in general HP.

 

enshula

I have ranted about WoW's tempo before, should be interisting at least. I also feel my class plays better in a lower tempo enviornment due to having the lowest dps so i am for it at this point and largely agree with your assessment.

Flag running potentially could be trivialised by a lower tempo but at the same time there seems to be a lot more daze effects around which may or may not be dispellable. Another change is certain things are being made harder to dispel and other things easier so there really isnt enough data points.

Large scale stamina increases do give blizz the opportunity to reset consumable effect and need. Which could become an important issue to stop all 25 man raids needing 3+ people specced for tanking all using flasks. All that depends on encounter tuning though, largely number of mobs.

 

Mem

I agree on both counts. OTOH it is certainly great that they stopped the ever widening gap between the burst capability of certain classes and the ability to soak up the damage. OTOH the class that greatly depends on getting the first strike and keeping the target under control, which is the rogue, will become a pushover in PVP. Of course, we get an ability to daze the opponent but quite a lot of classes get pretty nifty defensive skills as well.
Furthermore the long cooldowns rogues do have will become a even stronger handicap.

Of course it remains possible that the mitigation skills the class gains in the sub tree will be improved. That however means that a rogue with pvp ambitions must spec deep sub. Not an ideal solution as well.

 

Amera

That would be such an enormous shift from the way the raid game is premised I doubt it. I think one of the big appeals of wow is the "twitch factor." MC is boring partially because there is almost no way to lose short of running OOM. Naxx is fun because everyone has to pay attention all the time or something might one-shot them. I think WoW shows a shift intentionally away from this type of mechanic; I highly doubt they will make a 180 now.

I dont see why Blizzard would change this. As it is, assuming raids are blowing through tons of consumables helps them control inflation and encourages people to farm. They've shown no real signs of indicating raiding should be self-sustaining, but instead should be a giant money sink. Yes, they have nerfed many "thru-death" buffs simply because there were so many it was hard to balance around, but leaving in this dependency creates a market for alchemy/herbalism etc. Might be nice from a player or guild bank perspective, but I'm not sure what they would gain by it.

I don't follow this at all. Take two examples: 1) a static Golemagg style encounter where the only threat is running OOM (basically what you are describing) or 2) a dynamic fight where one person not moving nukes your raid for 2k. How is #1 in any way "carrying their weight will be more noticeable"? #2 or a C'thun style fight is not craziness, it is exactly having everyone paying attention or you wipe. It seems you want more of #1 where they just keep scaling the number of adds, amount of DPS, amount of HP, and so on, which can surely create a difficult fight, but not an interesting one. I think Patchwerk is about the limit of a tank and spank fight, but if you removed the "splat" element, it would be boring as hell. There would be no real execution, just a mathamatical question of "do we have the proper balance of DPS/Healing/Tankage. If you do, you win.

Okay, here's the one I agree with you on. :P I actually love the PvP combat in WoW, if not the actual system or implimentation. But this is really only because of the gear discrepency. Go join an AV on the test server with all the pre-mades and you will see a night-and-day difference to the average AV/WSG or whatever. It really is ridiculous - virtually everyone has the capacity to obliterate anyone else if they see them first, particularly casters. As a healer, over time it has simply gotten almost impossible to effectively heal through the burst damage an organized team can put out - they barely even have to target the healers first.

Just as an anecdotal example, when I first hit 60 on my priest in Jan 2006, mages were a complete joke. They had no capacity to kill you through PWS and self-heals. Now, in Sept with both of us having gotten gear, it is completely the opposite - I can't survive the front-loaded damage of a geared mage, shield or otherwise. In the duration of one CS anyone is dead.

One major problem is, Darthgrimm pointed out, many classes seem balanced around this burst ability. I mean, if everyone had twice the hit points, mages and rogues couldn't kill anyone in their moment-of-burst-glory, so now what? Without some supplimental abilities, classes (or more accurately, specs) that rely on that burst damage are pretty useless.

We're not at Diablo levels of craziness where you have to nerf PvP damage by 90% just so everyone isn't one-shotted, but a little stamina increase in the new item budget is probably not out of line.

I'm pretty sure this is intended to be just a new pvp tactic, the daze + nuke combo.

 

kharen

Having to spend vast amounts of gold on consumables from the AH doesn't make raiding a money sink, and doesn't do anything about inflation. Moving gold around within the playerbase isn't a sink, because it's not going away, it's just changing hands. Repair costs are a money sink, since the gold leaves the economy entirely. Consumable costs just transfer gold from one set of players (raiders needing consumables), to another set of players (people selling consumables/raw materials).

Now, it could be that they think the forced economic interaction between raiders and non-raiders courtesy of consumables/materials is a good thing, and they'll keep it around for that reason (although i really wish they'd add more ways to shuffle gold in the opposite direction as well...), but they certainly won't be keeping it around because it's a money sink (because it isn't).

 

Makareu

if we reach this amount of hp (and i hope it), i can't see how the mobs dammage output could scale the same. With the new talents and heals available, there's no way to keep a 25khp tank alive if a mob can 3 shots him. As it has already be stated, maybe healing the mt/ot will no more be a full time job.

For the pvp, it's quite a good move i think, and if you're worried about rogue because you'll have to figth longer in order to kill someone, you'll also have more hp. Finally you're "infinite" energy will perhaps mean something in pvp (like pve curently).

 

Chimp

As someone else mentioned, the Stamina change is aimed at rebalanced PvP, not PvE.

Although a side affect of this change in PvE seems likely to affect the healing side of raids. Right now we have 12-17 healers in a raid to keep the MT & the rest of the group alive. Lets say you have 8 healers on the MT on average in 40 man raids. In a 25 man raid, that might go down to 4 healers on the MT. But, all of a sudden your MT's health pool has increased by 40%, so what was considered a dangerous damage spike, will be a blip to the HP of a tank with 16K HP. So in 25 man raids in TBC you will need much higher damage spikes on the MT needs to ensure it remains difficult to keep them alive, yet you will have possibly half the healers assigned to healing him. So if you just upped the damage on the MT by 40% in line with his HP, all of a sudden you have less healers trying to deal with more incoming dmg.

I'm not sure how that will work out in practice. Bosses that hit for a low regular dmg put can suddenly spike 12k on a tank? It seems we could have a very different style of healing required come expansion.

AoE affects in TBC would also need to be increase in dmg inline with the new HP values or they would pose little risk to the rest of the raid. At least the ratio of healers to people taking aoe dmg would remain similar, so this would be less of a problem.

 

Aloxy

I think 25k is a bit too high. Base hp for a tank at 60 is like 2500, and then top end gear gives another 4500. Say your base health increases by 500 to level 70, and that top level 70 gear gives _twice_ the health (and that would be a bit much in my opinion), that would land at 12k unbuffed. To what levels would buffs bring that? I guess it will be pretty high, a fully buffed tauren would probably hit 20k. Anyway I agree with Amera, seems pretty boring.

 

Amera

You're right; it should be "stimulates economic activity" rather than a "money sink." Either way, Blizzard has done nothing to suggest they see this as a problem.

 

Dakous

MC is boring because it is designed for people in BRD/pre-buff UBRS gear and greens, as that was the best available at the time. The enormous change between that powerlevel and epics makes a raid that gears up in MC for MC a day/night difference. Nowadays newer raids have the advantages of ZG, DM, and PVP to gear up, equalizing their gear at "blue, level 58+ required", which is significantly more powerful than a 53 "of the eagle" pair of pants.

I think Naxx shouldn't be seen as a natural progression of the raid game, I think it's intentionally designed to tax progress guilds, give them some accomplishments to brag about, and reset the raid game come expansion. A last hurrah to usher in a new era - the originally planned era that was deviated from for various reasons (a too-soon release, WoW as sold to us should've been the game they patched in with Naxx, the 25 man versus 40 man raid, lack of practical experience actually running a MMO).

When MC BoEs were a Big Deal, a guild could make a fortune while raiding and flasking the MT.

I'm not saying I think Titans will go the way of the dingo - especially if they're getting tied to defense. However, "Let's beat C'thun-70 by throwing 25 Flasks of the Titans at him!" will never again be a valid tactic. It'll make sense to put it on the 3 warriors in the raid, or the three lolferals, or the 3 paladins, if the particular encounter calls for it and the guild thinks that's where to be.

Especially to compensate for a gear weakness, as opposed to making up a significant fraction of one's HP anyway, and being necessary all the time, everywhere.

Finally, as another poster said - flasks don't control inflation. They just move money from one player group to another... and the money never comes back. Fluidity in an economy is great - stagnation is terrible. If raiders needed to buy flask of the titans and could sell X pieces of each set (X being first set bonus), then there would at least be an exchange. As it is, we can make those shields from AQ20.

I didn't call a C'thun style fight craziness - I was referring to the current practice of having 8 warriors in a 40 person raid with 8 classes - that's double the correct answer. But it works, because warriors may not always be the best answer, they're always a serviceable answer. Then scrape out some additional healing, and there you go, whatever dynamic fight you meant to be with warlocks, mages, and druids doing crowd control... "you"'re just throwing warriors at the problem. And it works, so why not?

Take the Majordomo fight when people are wearing a mix of greens, blues, and (light) purples. That is what I'm thinking of for the expansion. Noone goes splat, the fight is dynamic, people can run out of mana, you need a mix of tanking, control, DPS, and healing, and you can't infinity the fight to triviality. Any individual not carrying their weight - the mages on control (substitute warlocks for elemental versions, eccet), DPS, tanks, heals - and the raid starts going wrong, but it also doesn't squish instantly.

I fail to see what's interesting about going splat because someone's reaction time was 1.0 instead of 0.3. The word that comes to mind for me is frustrating. Not that I think 5.0 reaction times should be allowed, but there are intermediate values (1.0, for example).

I've often said that rogues start every battle with it won, and tick away the seconds to their defeat.

I think, though, that "Ha ha, warrior survived your opener and is now unstunned... he's going to wreck you!" goes both ways. If there's no way damage can scale to the point where a rogue dies within 20 seconds, he gets two kidney shots per engagement, as an example. Battles will - egads - actually go back and forth. Also, consider this - WoW PVP tends to be built around bursts (lucky rolls) rather than consistency (so that even with discrepencies, it's worth taking on someone in case you "get lucky" this time or THEY got lucky last time). Take the 15% rogue chance to avoid AoEs talent. Well, in a 2 shot encounter, that's useless. But against a frost mage controlling him who needs to lock him down with it twice, that's a 1 in 3 chance of turning the tables and wrecking his face instead.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

BByte

There have been numerous threads about the amount of consumables current high end raiding requires. I think that the only thing keeping most people farming currently is that Naxxramas is the last instance (last 40man, last pre-expansion etc.). If players had to farm the consumables to foreseeable future, I think a lot would just stop. (And quit?)

The design is also not what seems to be Blizzard’s game design philosophy. They try to actively support anything but grinding. Of course, even when it’s not said, we know that time sinks are needed. But there’s hardly a lack of time sinks for someone raiding in Naxxramas anyway, and previous comments about post-TBC WoW seem to suggest that there should be more actual content to do.

There's +100% Stamina, and then there's increased item budgets. Potentially 300% Stamina from gear compared to current could be reality quite soon. I'd suspect the increase in base HP from 60 to 70 to be larger than 500 as well, simply to keep up with the Stamina bonuses. In any case, buffed tank HP could reach 20k quite easily.

Dropping from 15 healers to ~10 and increasing tank HP by 100% would (will?) change PvE quite a bit as well. Now it's quite impossible to conceive an encounter that would simultaneously have very limited targets, high spike damage and require mana efficient healing. If you have 2-3 tanks, a normal amount of healers in raid can heal through anything that isn't too spikey to be healable at all.

With the Stamina scaling, encounters can be designed to be challenging for pure healing efficiency without resorting to gimmicks like Patchwerk or huge AE damage. If you have a tank with 20k HP, he can suddenly take much higher spikes and live, but he'd require a lot more healing. And no, I don’t think every encounter should be challenging to healers only because of AE damage or gimmicks.

 

Krill

Direct effect of higher HP levels for healers will be of course using higher ranks of spells. As PvE bosses damage output will scale with raid HP, it's not impossible to see normal heal shifting from current 1k to 2k. And no, I don't think devs will allow +healing to reach 2k values that would make H2 or HT4 viable in end game TBC. ;)

What I expect is sort of stall in adding extra +healing on gear in favour of more spirit (that already indirectly affects +damage/healing and will do that even more in TBC), mp5 and +damage.

 

Branar

TBC first aid is going to be so overpowered.

Heavy Outlandscloth Bandage: Heals you for 6500 damage over 8 seconds.

 

BByte

They can allow +2k Healing if they scale lower level heals to receive lower bonus from +Healing as is rumored.

 

Krill

Yes, but then another big rise of +healing would open the closet with skeletons all over again, as big enough +healing rise would negate those penalties, leading to radical downranking again.

On the saide note, 12-24k HP levels look like a bit too high, if you check amount of HP regenerated via new healing spells priests recieve. If highest ranks of CoR and other new heals provide you with 1.5k HP before + healing, it means regenerating maybe 16-20% of HP pool of clothie and less then 10% HP of tank by healer with +1000 healing stat. No much, isn't it?

 

darthgrimm

Standard tank for a normal boss right now is around 10k hp. Assuming a 30% reduced cost of sta on items ( 13k hp ) .. with 10 more levels he should be around 17k for a standard fight.

Max buffed warrior i saw right now had 18k hp with last stand / lifegiving... So 80% increase from standard.

Apply 80% increase to the standard 17k hp warrior in BC and you got yourself some 25k hp tanks here and there.

I can bet the guy tanking Ilidan will brake 30k hp tho. ( for the world first kill... or whatever... since blizzard said that most likely we will be getting in hsi way and not acctualy killing him )

 

Avair

Here is my take. For PvE, decreasing the ilevel cost of stamina has the most direct effect on your MT's. My conclusion is TBC will require you to completely regear your MT's with TBC gear. Since...

* Armor in TBC will have more stamina.
* Current armor sets will not have their stamina increased. (Assumption)
* PvE encounters will be balanced around the new target HP totals.

As a rogue, high HP totals don't fill me with confidence. It pretty much destroys the possibly of stun locking, which means we spend a lot more time exposed and taking damage.

 

darthgrimm

Why were rogues the most powerfull class at game release. Low HP from everyone.... a CB evis would take over 50% of your target's hp.

The other day i did a CB evis on a mage and all i got was.. "Absorb" .. GG

 

diospadre

Wow, how long did it take you to come up with that amazing conclusion?

 

Mosh

A lot of people like the current difficulty of encounters. Yes, it's frustrating when someone lags out and gets the raid killed, but it's also no fun giving people all the time in the world to react to different boss abilities. I wouldn't be enjoying raiding nearly as much if I got an additional three seconds of warning on Dark Glare or if Web Wrap ticked for 500 instead of 800 on the broken left side. There's plenty of easy raid content in the game if you measure by a personal skill level (most of ZG/AQ20, practically all of MC, most of BWL).

 

Ele

In all honesty I like the current WoW tempo, it's unforgiving, true, but also more fun.
I raided for years in EQ (as a cleric) and it was a slow pace game, with very few fights heading towards the "controlled chaos" type, it was more "can healers' mana last long enough?" and I'm glad the mana management is no longer the only important factor, timing should be more important as it shows people reactions.
If you take a mob that beats 1, 2 or even 3+ people a time, your only goal is to keep those alive while the boss goes down. If many more variables are added into an encounter, it can only get more interesting as Blizzard showed us already in some fights.

Boss -> Tank -> healers -> DPS is no longer the only solution to every raid, although different roles for different classes do exist.

Raising a tank HP to let's say 20k, would mean that cloth users will have around 12k and warlocks even more than that. Aside from making totally trivial any previous raiding zone (unless it's going to be scaled up to level 70), it would move fights in a direction I personally don't like. Spikey unpredictable damage must exist to make a healer's life interesting, uncrittable tanks were already a mistake in that regard.

Changing the tempo of a fine tuned system such as wow would redraw completely the evaluation on every item, consumable, buff and debuff. If a tank cannot get 3-4 shotted, it's just a mana management game, it's like playing football (soccer for americans) on a manager PC game, instead of experiencing the action on the field, you get to deal with just the plain math and the burocracy behind it.

If Blizzard wants to move towards larger HP pools and less "1 shotting raids" encounters, I'm all for it as long as they implement a new raiding paradigm: I'm now damn curious on what they're gonna bring into the game.
Let's be honest, they pushed every usable concept to the limit, tank switching, AEs, nasty effects from mobs, intricated scripts. They really must have a neat idea in the drawer if such change is going in like that.

 

malthrin

That's all I've been seeing in the change to downranked heals. It isn't going to prevent the practice by a long shot - it's just adjusting for the inflation in our +healing stat. We'll upgrade our gear in order to use the same spells and heal for the same amount that we do today.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

◊ Praetorian

High HP tanks do two main things from a healing/design perspective:
1) Makes those high rank heals more useful. Personally I use max rank HW heavily on Emps and on Patchwerk to an extent, and the little rush of "oh hell yeah" that I get from landing a timely 4500pt crit heal that doesn't overheal at all is a source of far too much enjoyment for me. But far too often you can't afford to time a 4k+ heal because it puts the tank at risk of spike damage.
2) It lets design differentiate between "spike damage" and "sustained damage." Right now, there isn't much of a difference. If they want to give us a fight that will seriously tax our mana as healers, they have to practically kill the tank every other second. The Patchwerk MT is a good example of this. He takes high "sustained" DPS, but that means a mob that melees for over 20% of the tank's health every 0.8 seconds. Blink and you can still lose your MT. Raise tank HP, and you can meaningfully differentiate between a mob that can do huge spikes, and a mob that requires sustained healing and thus significant mana management.

 

Avair

I'm sorry you disagree that it is an interesting or valuable conclusion.

In all seriousness, there are some real implications here though, specifically for tanks vs. other classes/specs. A rogue for instance in Naxx gear is going to keep most of their effectiveness for a good portion of the expansion. However, MT's are going to end up having to get all their gear earlier.

Specific Implications
* Existing tanks sets are obsoleted much earlier, since their primary stat is stamina.
* MT's will have to spend more time at 70 running instances to get new tanking gear to prepare for raid content, as compared to other classes.
* A fresh 60 warrior in the expansion could very easy gear up to MT status, a process which right now takes a long time via MC/BWL/Naxx.
* The value of a full dreadnaught set geared warrior on eBay drops dramatically after the expansion.