Skull mobs are always intended to be +3 levels, regardless of your level. So for example, Patchwerk's chance to hit, chance to crit, chance to score a crushing, chance to ignore your armor's mitigation, etc will all be factored by him being level 73 if you're tanking him at level 70. I don't believe their actual damage, hp, and such scales, but as for the math behind the combat system, it does. It was a design decision to keep bosses in check and never one groupable(though that's already proven to be a failure with people 4 manning Onyxia).

So you'll glance just as much on Naxxramas bosses at 70 as you did at 60, which is pretty annoying and honestly poor game design, but I suppose that's out of any of our hands as to what goes and what doesn't.

Kody I'm going to test this with Uldaman's skull level bosses later.

because imo +3 is where it starts getting ugly with the glancing damage reduction

another thing that makes his statement bullshit is that you can get Glancing blows against mobs of your level. I had one today.

Right now they could simply remove weapon skill alltogether. All it does with that change is just being a chore to skill up when you aquire a weapon type you haven't used before. The very minor crit / hit boni are ridiculous now.

He specifically says "mobs you just are not supposed to be fighting". Are you honestly foolish enough to think that the lead designer for the entire game is saying you just aren't supposed to be fighting every raid boss in the game? He's referring to things that are high enough that EVERY hit is a glance/crush.

Then why do we have glancing blows on level 60 mobs already to begin with? Why not just at +4?

What's your weapon skill in the weapon in question?

If you are referring to TL-Seria, I think I can confirm his findings as well. As a level 60 cat (which innately has maxed weapon skill 300/300), I noticed few glancings on even level mobs too. However it happened to rarely that I didn't care about that at all.

Doesn't matter. Go melee some of the bugs in Silithus, you'll notice glances quickly enough.

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imo glancings should start at +4 levels then, with the same reduction and chance as they are now at +4. There's no need to restrict damage dealing on bosses and then balance these bosses on the restricted damage dealing.

This is also one of the reasons PVP now is this instant gib fest, because player damage is reduced against PVP and balanced around this reduction. if that reduction is gone, player damage gets out of hand.

There was a time when blizz tried hunter shots under the melee mechanics, and the sudden addition of glancings, misses, parries, dodges dropped our DPS into a deep dark pit.

This change is not as extreme, but it seems awefully unfair to melee to get nerfed so. I actually feel the skill vs glancing blows balance provides a way to itemize for raids specifically, since skill is quite lackluster in other areas, and this change just dumbs down the itemization choices for melee. I think having some mechanic present to mitigate glancing blows adds to the game!

The most important test, though, will be whether fury warriors and rogues remain #1 DPSers B)

Wasn't it theorised that the silithus bugs have elevated +defence, though? Go melee some undead in deadwind pass before locking in that we can get glancing blows on even-level mobs.

Do we care what the background reason is for those glancing blows? The fact is, they are level 60s which generate glances. Much like Patchwerk and Loatheb can't crush on their melee, despite being 63s. Level isn't the sole arbiter of these mechanics, simply a good indicator.

So in light of these changes, and the sheer dropoff of white damage combat rogues will see because of it, mutilate as a raid spec pre-tbc is looking very sexy. Hell, even subtlety and assassination/backstab spec might actually be able to hold ground now. Has anyone done the math to see how much of an impact this will have on combat rogues comparatively to 31/8/13 etc rogues?

Some really tried Patch out @ 67? I wonder how he could have hit for that much.



Anyway, it is sad that weapon skill got changed, but once you nurf something it can always be buffed again.

lvl 60s generate glances for no dmg reduction.

Patchwerk hit so hard because the reduction from armor is calculated based on your level. If you're wearing level 60 tanking gear at 67 you're gonna get hit like you were in mail.

If they don't gear up appropriately, of course.

If you'd looked at the available non-epics, you'd note that there is no "geared up" to be had until nearly 70. One of the problems with the general devaluation of stats as you level in TBC is that content tuned against existing raid epics existing level of effectiveness *isn't* matched by an increase in accessible gear - compare Conqueror's Chest to the blues available to a level 67 tank and you'll be hard pressed to find an upgrade there; certainly not enough of an upgrade to counteract the significant downgrade in armor effectiveness from 7 levels.

This is where my comment about bad game design comes into play. A raid dungeon you farmed to hell and back already shouldn't become more challenging as you level up and not offer appropriate rewards. Granted - their hitpoints and maximum damage should stay the same, but that really doesn't matter when you're only mitigating 40-45% of it rather than 65-70% of it.

I guess it's one way to convince everyone to stop running Naxx and just let people level up in peace, but on the other hand that makes it feel like even more of a waste, sadly. Particularly annoying that we can't use it to quickly get a new level 60 paladin into strong gear for 60+ instancing (stupid AQ40 rep requirements; the paladin can get AD rep easy levelling from 50 to 60, but not so much Brood rep).

Hold on a minute. i thought damage reduction by armor level was dependent on the attacker's level, not the defender's.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Damage_reduction

%Reduction = (Armor / (Armor + 400 + 85 * Enemy_Level)) * 100

So the mitigation should remain the same. It's probably Hateful Strike mechanics that are screwed up in some way.

But didn't someone say that a bossess level is +3 your own level?

Easy fix (if that were the case) would be to re-fix those boss levels for MC, AQ, BWL, Naxx, to 63, and all should be fine again, yer?