Erdluf

Sounds like +Hit will become a PvP and solo-grinding stat for spellcasters. If we're using the old Melee tables, against an equal level target our miss goes from 4% (of which only 3% can be removed) in TBC to 5% (all of which can be removed) in WotLK.

 

Latas

I notice you have int for one percent spell crit at 70 being 80 for all classes, but isnt it actually 82 for warlocks?

 

Whitetooth

Yes, its still is 81.96721 only for warlocks in 2.4.3.
But its now 80 for warlocks too in 3.0.1.8681, I just double checked.

 

sag_ich_nicht

I know this might be asking a lot, but could you consider making a WotLK branch of RatingBuster available on the wowace SVN Whitetooth?

(Probably best if you throw it in /branches/RatingBuster/WotLK/ or something)

 

Althor

I've been computing my rating -> percentage values at each level from 70 to 75 while I've been on beta, as a priest, and they agree with the OP's values, so it would seem his data mining method is accurate.

In regards to the 9% hit thing. Yes, it would seem that the hit cap is likely to be 9%, however that doesn't mean you still don't see *resists* against any mob that is a higher level than you. You definitely see a *lot* of partial resists against even +1 mobs. At a guess it's a lot closer to the glancing blow mechanics now than it was in TBC and earlier. But as far as I know it's impossible to mitigate these sort of partial (and full resists for single effect spells like Vampiric Embrace or Silence for example) just like in TBC's partial resists and glancing blows.

 

Whitetooth

Yes, I would very much like to start WotLK development for RatingBuster, but I still don't have access to beta yet (anyone have an extra key they don't need? :p)

 

Whitetooth

Values checked for 3.0.1.8714, no changes found.

There seems to be a new rating stat, not sure what it is yet, but it has values of 7.4038 for level 70 and 15.3952 for level 80.

 

◊ manly

Actually, it would be trivial to test whether or not spell penetration is the new 'hot' stat for casters. You get so many partial resists right now in wotlk beta even on mobs level +1, that equipping a full spell penetraiton set should make it immediately obvious within 5 casts if it does have an impact.

Remember, pre-wotlk there was a 99% hit cap and unmitigable level-based partial resists which didn't apply to binary spells (such as frostbolt). Now we have 100% being the hit cap, frostbolts having partial resists. I am fairly confident it is way too soon to conclude that we still cannot mitigate level-based partial resists, particularly given the change in hit cap.

If anyone stilll has an eye of moam, or a lot of spell penetration gems to test this, it give an answer to that.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Roywyn

Would be worth testing whether CoE has an impact on the excessive partial resists.

Also:
Looks like the spell miss rate is still/again around ~17% against +3 mobs (Tufy only had 1% hit from the racial aura).

Lots of fishy stuff going on.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

• Chicken

Just did a quick check on this through GlobalStrings.lua, the latest version of it has the following new line in it:

ITEM_MOD_ARMOR_PENETRATION_RATING = "Increases your armor penetration rating by %d.";

Unfortunately it's hard to tell whether that means anything, there's a number of other rating stats mentioned in both the old and new versions of GlobalStrings.lua which are currently unused ("<attack type> Hit Avoidance Rating" and "<attack type> Crit Avoidance Rating" are mentioned in both live and test versions of the file but no items exist that use these ratings).

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Prinsesa

Isn't current armor penetration a 7:1 ratio with other ratings at level 70? It makes sense to turn it into a rating, for uniformity and clarity.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Muphrid

I'm not sure there's any solid reason to convert armor penetration to a rating. At least, if it were to subtract a percentage of a target's armor, then it would have the exact opposite problem than it has now--instead of being more effective against low-armor targets, it would be more effective against high-armor targets.

 

Prinsesa

I wasn't thinking along the lines of a percentage armor reduction, for the same reason.

Rather, 1 armor penetration rating reduces the targets armor by 7 at level 70, then sloping downwards per level like all other ratings.

Does that make sense? I admit armor penetration may already naturally scale downwards as armor increases with ilevel.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

sag_ich_nicht

Don't know why you'd need it(Except for the fun of it. :P I'd give you a key if I had one.). The Interface extraction utility works fine on the WotLK client:

Blizzard Support

and the diffs are also available here:

http://wowcompares.com/

you could drycode it and ask someone to test it.

 

Mijae

Assuming Blizzard uses the same percent damage reduction from armor, actual boss armor values will be increasing by a little less than 50%.

6200 armor @ 70 ~ 37% ==> 9000 armor @ 80 ~ 37% (~45% increase)
7700 armor @ 70 ~ 42% ==> 11100 armor @ 80 ~ 42% (~44% increase)

Those are very rough numbers and, again, assume equal percent damage reduction at 80.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

Shuror

Wouldn't make any sense. The percentual damage increase of ignoring X armour already decreases with level.

However, I could see them making ArP a rating stat which reduces armour by X%.

Intuitively, it makes more sense that the armour penetration stat would be stronger against targets with heavy armour, in contrary to the current situation where the lower the target's armour, the higher the benefit.

 

Muphrid

It may be more intuitive, Shuror, but all such would do is take an already difficult problem (how do you balance physical DPS classes' scaling when armor penetration gives them better and better chances against cloth as gear rises?) and flip it on its head (replace cloth with plate).

The appeal is purely aesthetic, nothing more. It doesn't make the job of balancing easier. It just reverses the inequity.

 

Densor

Alternatively, they could be making it directly counter % mitigation. So a ArPen rating of x would equal y% armor penetration which would lower a targets mitigation from armor from z% to (z-y)%. It would still be pretty rape against clothies (by reducing their armor mitigation to 0%) AND it would be good against plate (by reducing their armor mitigation by the same amount, which would actually have better damage returns against them. It still be useful and capped in PvE, too. For instance:

Random physical DPS'er with 10% armor penetration:

vs clothie w/ 16% armor mitigation: .94/.84 = 11.9% damage increase
vs plate-wearer w/ 55% armor mitigation: .55/.45 = 22.2% damage increase
vs PvE boss w/ 2000 armor after debuffs translating to 12% armor mitigation: .98/.88 = 11.4% damage increase

Also, remember that the plate-wearer is still taking 41.5% less damage from physical attacks compared to the clothie, although that is down from 46.4% less damage before the armor pen. I think this is the best way to implement it:

The alternative way are having armor pen % reduce armor value on the target:

15k armor = 58.692% DR
13.5k armor = 56.116% DR
10% armor reduction @ 15k armor = 4.4% DR reduction or a 6.2% damage increase

1500 armor = 12.420% DR
1350 armor = 11.338% DR
10% reduction @ 1.5k armor = 8.7% DR reduction or a 1.2% damage increase

That makes it more balanced in PvP, but I think it looks to be a nerf to the effectiveness of Armor Pen in PvE. Plus, it still leaves clothies getting raped significantly more so than plate-wearers.

 

Athyr

Does anyone know if the Death Knight "Spells" function based on spell hit / crit calculations or melee? More specifically what I am interested in is, does the spell crit scale based on int or agi?

Blizz modified the spells so that they benefit from Str/AP and not Spellpower. I don't know if they made the same int to agi conversion to determine the crit

 

Catalept

There's a couple of important requirements Blizzard has to satisfy:

Firstly, the best pre-xpack raiding gear should be on par with the best post-xpack 5-man gear. New players should be able to gear up for new raids, and old-world raiders should not have an undue advantage at the start of the new set of raiding tiers. The minimum gradient necessary for this puts them at equal-par.

Secondly, there should be a meaningful gear-barrier between raiding tiers. i.e. players should have to farm content for a bit before moving on... it might not be a customer requirement, but it's certainly a business requirement . If the 'gear gap' between T7 and T8 was only 10 ilevels, it'd be possible to blow through T7, and hit T8 immediately without ever looking back. Blizzard wants to keep content-consumption rate at a fairly slow rate (bleeding-edge insomniac guilds notwithstanding), because their content-production rate is fairly slow.

Between these two requirements, it's not just the absolute gap, but also the gradient that has to increase each time the level cap goes up.

The notion that ilevel has some linear relationship to player level was a fair rule of thumb in Vanilla, but even in BC it lost a lot of relevance. WLK finally puts it to rest.

 

Prinsesa

EDIT: Corrected by Borodin. Disregard my comment.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Borodin

Read up a bit on this page - seems the 9% hit for spells has been disproven / updated. A tester has shown it was back to 17% vs +3 Mobs.

 

Akka

I understand what you say and it makes certainly sense, but I'm still not convinced.

First, I think that the best gear from 5-men instances should be a tad inferior to the best gear pre-expansion. I still consider that the only gear which should surpass Tx, should be Tx+1. Let Sunweel gear be a real raid advantage for having completed BC (wouldn't it be quite anti-climaxing if Kil'Jaeden gear would only serve as killing frozen boars during leveling ? :-/).
One could argue that Sunwell guildes would plow too fast through the T7 tier, but that's absurd to me : Naxx v2 has been clamored to be an "entry-level raid" supposed to be "as easy as MC". Guilds who were able to finish Sunwell will certainly butcher this instance, even in greens, if half of this is true.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Mikari

RatingBuster now works for the beta btw.

 

Fragged

Speaking as a member of a class that's already had to replace all my gear once (as a tank the stamina changes last time forced us to replace nearly all of our gear.) It's really not that bad, and it's looking like I'll have to do it again this time (with the new emphasis on strength as a warrior threat gen stat keeping my sunwell gear on is probably not going to be very realistic.) Those of us in Sunwell now quite simply don't need an advantage - we're quite likely to be the ones on the bleeding edge of content again come level 80 even if we ended up replacing all our gear by level 75 this would be true.

A gear reset (where it's easy to effectively catch up on a different character) is a good thing for blizzard. If someone is sick of raiding as their current class/role it gives them a very real chance to take a current alt up without worrying about their ability to get back to where they were with raiding. The reality is a gear reset is likely to come because I'm sure Blizzard understands that giving sunwell raiders an extra advantage at 80 would just lead to content being consumed more quickly (and that's not good for us or for them, delays in gearing up make content last longer before it's a boring farm.)