Blue Posts, State of World of Raids, New Site Poll

Blue Posts

Arenas: Class Balance Under the Microscope (Source)

We like Arenas, and clearly a lot of players do too.

What we don't like about them is they really put class balance under a microscope. Ultimately we'd like to see the pendulum on PvP swing back a little closer to Battlegrounds and even world PvP. We think the BGs actually encompass the story of Warcraft (which is essentially Horde vs. Alliance) much better than do the Arenas.

Where the Arena currently beats the pants off the BG is that we can detect player skill much better in an Arena. That in turn allows us to offer the best loot to the best players. BG rewards by contrast have traditionally felt very grindy.

We do have some plans to change all of that. We don't have any intention of getting rid of Arenas for players that do enjoy that sort of gameplay. But we also want to give other players alternatives to still be able to get great rewards.

Arenas: Does Class Effect Outcomes? (Source)

Class certainly has an effect on the outcome, which is why it is subject to such scrutiny. At the same time, I think there is something interesting to the whole comp strategy. I think we'd lose something if you could get any 3 random people together. I'm not saying certain classes should be doomed to failure. I'm saying who you get for your third should mean something.

Finding Skill in an RNG-based Game (Source)

Within the limitation of the tools, yes I think we can. You're talking down to an awful lot of gladiators out there if your argument is that they just picked the right class or got lucky with the RNG.

If I took say a rogue-mage-priest team at the height of its power and played a team with the same gear and comp, I don't think the outcome would be 50/50 every time. If I took my team and played the best team in the world, I would expect to get stomped. That's skill.

Resilience in PvP (Source)

It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they should even bother trying to heal.

Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are discussing right now.

We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear you.

Resilience Budget on Items (Source)

While that was true to an extent, if you look at the Lich King PvP gear, you'll see that it pays a higher price for resilience. In previous seasons, you could get very high dps and resilience on the same set of gear. That is harder to do now. Rogues, like everyone else, will be risking being very fragile if they go with all PvE gear for the damage. That isn't happening now because very few people have much PvP gear. Once players can survive a few hits, then players without resilience are going to go down quickly.

(Weapons are an exception to this, at least for now.)

Again, I'm not saying that burst damage won't still be too high. That is something we're looking at.

WoW Isn't the Ghostcrawler Show (Source)

I just want to give credit where credit is due. I may be the public face, but I'm just one guy on an amazing team of class designers. Furthermore, the entire WoW team is a pretty big group these days, and many of them are just as passionate as many of you. We hear their feedback, criticism and great ideas all the time. I had nothing to do with many of the best ideas in the game.

Many of the people on the WoW dev team also read these forums. Those guys pay an awful lot of attention to what you guys say, even if they don't post as often as I do.

PvP Matchmaking (Source)

My point was that when the matchmaking is working well, it will pit you against players very close to your skill level. Playing players very close to your skill level increases the chance you will lose. The point is actually not to have the 2000+ players mowing their way through scrubs. It's to pair off the best teams against each other so that getting e.g. Gladiator means something.

What I was actually getting at though was a loftier sentiment that players run through quests or an instance and one-shot everything and then go into PvP and can lose a lot. It's a very different experience, and psychologically I think it affects players more than they give it credit for. (If you are highly-ranked or don't even play PvE much then it likely affects you a lot less.)

Talent Tree Design Based on Talent Builds (Source)

We design the talent trees with specific builds in mind. We'll slide things up and down to make them more or less attractive to various cross-spec strategies.

Players rarely surprise us with builds. When they do it's something like the Holy paladin that goes all the way down Ret but intends to heal like Holy, or the Elemental shaman who goes very deep in Enhancement.

I should say players rarely surprise us with builds but they surprise us all the time in general.

More on Crowd Control (Source)

CC isn't a bad concept. But damage isn't a bad concept either. We designed quite a few specs to focus on dealing damage, and when they don't think that's effective, they get just as grumpy (and understandably so) and feel like their spec needs some new tool to shut down the healer.

I'm not talking about the state of S5 specifically or the S2-S4 for that matter. I'm just saying that in general there should be a place for crowd control and for healing and for silencing and mana drain and also just plain killing someone.

Deathknight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Wandering Plague (Source)

It's hard to take that 1% dps rule of thumb too far. For example, Howling Blast can do a lot of damage, but you have to consider how the DK would spend those runes if he or she had skipped that talent. Just because Howling Blast is 20% of your dps or whatever, does not mean the talent is a 20% dps incrase.

Wandering Plague is probably okay and Gargoyle is probably too good. Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade are probably better candidates to buff for Unholy (though there are some DW builds that get a lot more out of them).

The DK talent tree is new and has't been subjected to anywhere near the scrutiny of the existing class talent trees. I'm a little surprised we haven't had to tweak it more than we have already, but I suspect more of that will be coming.

Paladin (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Buffing Pets (Source)

Okay, the issue is that paladin buffs are class based, which is funky with regard to pets. Got it. I'll put it on the list.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Shadow PvP (Source)

With regard to Shadow PvP, as a few players have suggested, the question is always whether to buff or to nerf to bring everyone up to the same level. Players would always prefer buffs, and frankly so would we, but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude more work to do so (when you start talking about inflating mob health across the board for example). If incoming damage were lower, through whatever solution, would Shadow priests be able to do their job?

Dispersion is a new ability, and like many of the new abilities, it's going to take some test driving before we're entirely happy with it. The spell still comes up a lot in our design discussions. I'm not going to risk saying anything beyond that until we have something more concrete to offer. I am sorry to sound so guarded at times, but honeslty, players can get really upset if they feel they were promised something that for whatever reason we end up not delivering.

Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Some Clarifications (Source)

I suppose I need to clarify this since it is getting quoted out of context across the Internets.

My comment about Fury pulling aggro was to suggest that they also can be very RNG and burst-heavy and therefore maybe it is a warrior issue and not an Arms issue.

Aside: You may have noticed I do tend to bring up PvP issues in PvE threads and vice versa. My purpose is to gently remind players that despite your individual interests, that we must take both ways to play into consideration whenever we make changes. In my effort to post as much as I am able I sometimes type too quickly, but I'll try to be more clear.

I do have a lot of Arena experience as Arms. I tried Fury a few times but couldn't make it work, though some of the changes in LK were made to address that.

To the cynics in the crowd, I'm afraid you're stuck with me. Snicker about how elite you are if you must, but at the end of the day, if I don't understand your problems they aren't getting fixed. For my part I will make every effort to understand them.

We continue to discuss the direction we want for warrior stances. I will bring up the points you guys have made.

State of World of Raids

I wanted to take this time to make the community aware of some things we have coming for World of Raids.  Tomorrow we'll be updating the website with the first major feature related to our first poll on the site, "Why do you visit World of Raids?" so keep your eyes peeled.  Moving into 2009 we'll continue to focus heavily on features that support the community -- and guilds especially -- including new sections on the site, content focused on group and raid activities, and many more guild spotlights.  In addition to that, we have a few layout improvements in the works to make viewing the latest news less annoying (think less scrolling), as well as giving you quicker access to content and features that interest you.

Related to the Raiding Guild Spotlight feature, we have our latest that we'll be releasing tomorrow as well, and thanks to feedback from the community it will be the first that doesn't target one of the more well-known guilds in the world.

New Poll: What instance would you like to see as the surprise in 3.2?

Last week's poll had the most activity yet, so thank you everyone for participating!  We had over 21,000 votes throughout the week with more than 38% of you saying you've been playing since WoW's release!  32% of voters have played for around 3 years, and only 0.25% have started within the last month.

With that said, it's time to move on with our latest poll.  It's a "Looking Forward" kind of poll related to a recent forum thread: "What instance would you like to see as the surprise in 3.2?"  Feel free to add your vote in the "Other" section if you don't see something you'd most like to see!  It's both embedded in this news article, and of course available on the main page in the "Latest Polls" widget.

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