Ulduar Details, Class vs. damage in Arenas, Blue Posts

Ulduar Details

Quote from: Vaneras (Source)

Ulduar will be available on PTR in the future, however we are planning on having several limitations in place so that we can control what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be available permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta.

All this basically means that if there is something we want to test, then we will enable the zone and encounter so that it is available. If at some point there is something that we no longer want to test, then the zone will be disabled so that it is no longer available.

Keep in mind though, that there will be quite a few encounters to test in both the 10 and the 25 man versions, and there will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test.

We are quite pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, so we would like to expand on that idea quite a bit in Ulduar and future raids. We are currently planning for most of the encounters to have "hard modes" that will allow for raids to increase the difficulty. Increasing the challenge will of course also mean an increase of reward level if successful.

Class vs. damage in Arenas

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

In the interest of encouraging discussion, I am going to pose a question below.

Caveats: Please don't derail this thread. It it liable to get long. Also please do not take my comments out of context or attempt to read too much between the lines. I hate having to communicate like a politician. :(

The same classes keep coming up in Arena discussions: rogues, mages, death knights and paladins. In a world with low resilience, it is perhaps unsurprising that classes that combine burst damage with so many tools for avoiding damage would be powerful.

Let's set aside the discussion of these classes for a moment (and to be fair, it is probably specs, not classes). My question is this: In an Arena match in which none of those 4 are participating, do you feel that damage is too high *given* that it will only come down once players acquire more resilience?

If you can't tell, I am trying to get the community to explore whether it is those classes or damage in general that is causing so much consternation.

Blue Posts

Burst Damage in PvP (Source)

It can be just as frustrating to feel unable to stop a healer as it can be to feel that you can't heal anything. I have personally been on both sides of that equation.

We understand that many players feel burst damage is too high right now. We hear you. But when all is said and done, there still needs to be a place for damage dealers. Killing a healer, even in the absence of crowd control, silences or whatever, still needs to be a viable tactic at the end of the day.

PvP Itemization (Source)

We changed the way we itemized PvP gear between seasons 4 and 5. The largest change is that resilience uses up much more of an item's budget, where previously it was almost bonus. We also stopped adding bonus armor (extra armor beyond what a cloth, leather, mail or plate would have at a certain item level) because it was causing some weird issues for certain characters, like Feral druids. The next few seasons should follow this new design, though of course we might decide to change that design for some pressing reason. Since we figured very few players would keep their level 70 gear over level 80 gear, we figured it was a fine time to change things across the board.

We do think it is odd that armor penetration in general is more valuable against characters with the least armor, and that is something we might change in the future.

PvE Gear in Arenas (Source)

Ideally, PvE gear should be what you use until you have PvP gear. The same should be true of using PvP gear to do a raid.

Weapons are a little bit of an exception, since traditionally their damage has been high and resilience low. That may be worth changing though.

Healing Mods: How do they change the healing game? (Source)

I have healed with and without mods.

Some players just like mods. Messing around with them and reconfiguring their UI is part of the game for them. That's cool and why we promote it.

However, I also think there is a group of players (healers even) who would be content to use the default UI if they could make it work. Identifying areas where the default party and raid UI fall down can help us to improve it.

For example, we are unlikely to ever fully support Clique-style one click healing. We just don't think it's necessary to play the game and it's more of a user preference -- perfect for a mod.

However, I do find it annoying that our raid UI can show you buffs or debuffs but not both at the same time. This can be a real pain for say a priest or druid that has both hots and dispellable debuffs and long-term buffs to manage.

A useful question to ask is: What would the default WoW UI need to do to convince you not to install a mod? ("Nothing" is a perfectly acceptable answer -- as I said, some people just like mods.)

Is WoW PvP like Chess? (Source)

I don't think chess is a good analogy for WoW PvP. That's not what we're trying to do with it.

In most chess games, split-second timing isn't an issue. At most you have a timer and have to make a decision within a few seconds. A few seconds can be an eternity in an Arena. Speed shouldn't be everything, but it should definitely count. Manual dexterity is almost irrelevant in chess as long as you can pick up the pieces, but in Arena there is certainly an element to using the ability you want at the precise right moment. Arena is not turn based.

Chess games have almost no random elements. Random elements are very much at the heart of an RPG. Now granted RNG sometimes can take on too much prominence, but the rook is never going to miss the pawn.

Chess is usually one on one. The coordination of a team is very much at the heart of our PvP, even in a BG pug situation.

I think when players bristle at my saying we don't want Arena to be chess, they think I am saying that we don't want interesting decisions, bluffing, counter moves, upsets, and all of those things that make chess interesting. That's not really what I was trying to say. What I meant was that we don't want Arenas to be all about exercising pre-memorized moves. It should be more dynamic than that.

We are sympathetic to players who don't enjoy a match that revolves entirely (key word) around CC'ing or mana-draining the healer. There has to be a place for just killing each other in Arenas. Now there does have to be a place for healing, CC and draining too (and there may not be enough of that right now).

Speaking entirely personally here, I find Arena matches, especially between very highly talented teams to be really exciting, while chess puts me to sleep. I don't download many chess videos.

Haste on Items (Source)

1) If your gear didn't have haste, it would probably have armor pen instead. If you are imagining your gear having Str or Stam instead of the haste, you are probably picturing Ulduar or season 6 gear. :)
2) We aren't offering the best itemized gear now because we want to have something left for you to work up to. We don't want the next tier of gear to look exactly like this one, but with +2 more of each stat.
3) We do think haste and armor pen might be a little low in what you get per rating point (at least for melee). That is something we're looking at.

Itemization in General (Source)

Unless the piece's name is orange, gear should almost always be a choice. Even if you are jumping up a tier you may be dropping some stats in order to increase others.

Gearing up is one of the most interesting parts of the game. Deciding whether you want X or Y is supposed to be a tough decision. We make no guarantee that everything that drops is an upgrade for you, even set pieces.

Building the most optimal set of gear for your particular spec is also one of the things that lets more expert players demonstrate mastery of the game. If the set pieces were always better, that wouldn't happen. In fact one of the reasons we made sets smaller (not 8 pieces or whatever) is so players could still undertake the challenge of completing them without also getting in a position where they were very reluctant to upgrade again.

MP5 and the Five Second Rule (Source)

We have talked about doing something like this. However, as confusing as it can be, one of the things we get from MP5 is a different stat that might appeal to some players (depending on class and play style) more than others. With a change like you suggest, then Spirit becomes something everyone wants in large amounts, and we lose some of the difference in play style. (A few players mention this above.) Traditionally, paladins never cared much about Spirit regen because they were never out of the five second rule, while druids cared quite a bit because they could sit back and let hots tick. This changed toward the end of BC.

Deathknight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Dual Wield versus 2H DPS (Source)

The goal is to let death knights make a choice between DW or 2H dps. We realize there is a risk that DW will overtake 2H at some point, but that is not the goal. For most existing classes that promote DW, we allow DW to dominate.

It's hard to tell if that is happening yet on DKs. Patchwerk is a short fight where blowing cooldowns reaps big benefits, and I tend to agree with the opinions that this guy won the lottery.

We haven't decided if we are going to take steps yet to back off DW damage. I think the jury is still out on whether we are going to see a lot or most DKs go the DW route. If DW DKs are only going for the fastest possible weapons in order to maximize procs per unit time, then that is something we might address.

I definitely wouldn't vendor your Colossal Skull-Clad Cleavers just yet. :)

Anti-Magic Shell (Source)

We buffed AMS because we dropped the mitigation of Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield by a pretty hefty margin.

I believe we did adjust the AMS glyph, but I'm not in front of my desk at the moment.

One idea that has been circulating is to have AMS and AMZ share a cooldown so that the DK can't just pop both in rapid succession. It's possible this might make AMZ pretty unattractive in PvE though, which is why we haven't pulled the trigger on that one yet.

Summon Gargoyle (Source)

My suspicion is the Gargoyle is OP at the moment. It may only be in situations where the DK needs a lot of burst on demand, but it definitely seems more popular than we suspected it would be.

Heart Strike (Source)

Heart Strike should be your go to ability in most cases. When you are at risk for breaking CC, you can use Blood Strike instead. But the intent is that Heart Strike will do more damage. It competes with Frost Strike and Scourge Strike in the other trees.

Blood/Frost/Unholy Spec Performance (Source)

For PvE, we've seen some pretty decent numbers come out of Blood. I think players just need more time to try out all the build combinations. For PvP the big hits of Scourge Strike, the mitigation of Bone Shield and AMZ and the extra damage from the Gargoyle and ghoul probably make Unholy overshadow the other trees. This should be better next patch.

Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Savage Roar (Source)

We fixed Savage Roar as you described.

Hunter (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Exotic Pet Damage on PTR (Source)

The PTR did not have the nerfs to Rake and Scorpid poison. We reduced their AP coefficients. They should still be fine pets, just not head and shoulders above the others. We also fixed a bug where Spirit Strike was not playing well with Longevity (and this bug fix was also likely not on the PTR).

I can't recall off the top of my head the history of the exotic pet damage (i.e. when we made changes relative to data pushes). We increased it a couple of times, though I suspect what you are seeing on the PTR for them is what you will see in 3.0.8.

More on Exotic Pets (Source)

I have said most of this before, but perhaps some of you are just joining us. :)

1) Exotic pets should be a choice. We do not want every BM (or every hunter for that matter) feeling like they have to get an exotic pet to be competitive. We spent a lot of effort to get say gorillas, crabs and spiders up to snuff so we didn't want hunters to actually enter LK with fewer pet choices. Even a 51 BM hunter should feel like a crab (especially a crab) should be a useful pet.

2) Exotic pets should be a choice, part ii. They should not be demonstrably below say cats and scorpids. That seems to be the case on live at the moment, so we adjusted it. Because of the somewhat convoluted way that pets scale, it's not always easy to predict what the average pet will look like on live -- it varies enormously depending on gear and buffs (more on this below).

3) Our target is that the exotic pets are slightly better than normal pets. The key word is "slightly." If you forego an exotic pet for whatever reason, you should not feel like you are gimping your team or group. Note that part of the value of the exotics is their unusual abilities, some of which can fill in missing debuff holes if you are lacking certain classes in your group.

4) We offered the Spirit Beast as a challenge for hunters to try and tame. It would be a big mistake if we made this pet the best one in the game. For starters, it would no longer be rare. :(

5) We disagree that the 4 extra pet talent points are useless. You can call them useless if you only care about your pet's dps and can max that out without those talent points. Not all pet talents were intended to buff dps. (More on this below too.) At the end of the day, the BM 51 is just one talent point. It shouldn't grant you a 10% dps increase. We like for the 51 point talents to be attractive but not mandatory.

6) If you think that no hunter cares about the look of their pet, you are just wrong. :) Very optimized players might be willing to tame an untextured cube if it had the highest dps. However, a great many hunters (I would argue probably even the majority) rolled their class because they wanted to tame pets. Being able to tame exotic pets is very exciting for them.

7) The way pets scale is convoluted. Certain stats scale while others don't. Pets double dip from buffs because the pets benefits from the buff directly and indirectly through the hunter. In short, this is something we want to clean up. We just need to figure out how to do it the right way to avoid these problems in the future. This applies to warlocks, DKs, and to a lesser extent every class with a temp pet like druids and shamans.

8) On the topic of hunter pet talent trees, obviously this was a new feature for us. We have a much better idea now of what works and doesn't. For example, I don't know that pets need many more clickable abilities as hunters have so much to manage already. It also threw a rather harsh light on the system that allows you designate abilities to be autocast or not -- that system can just be buggy and frustrating. We have some plans to look at the trees in a future patch (not expansion). We might even add another tier to make sure that 51 BM hunters can improve their pets dps (slightly) with those bonus talent points.

Explosive Shot (Source)

I agree it should make up its mind whether it is a physical or magical effect. We'll look into it.

Readiness (Source)

We did consider it, and thought it was an interesting talent build choice, but it ended up dominating. We made some changes pretty late in the cycle that ended up inflating hunter damage, especially the chunk coming from pets. We also went back and forth a little on which raid-wide buffs would affect ranged attacks. Hunter dps just ended up being higher than we thought.

More on Readiness (Source)

It affects all 3 specs, but we changed Arcane and Explosive to offset that some, as well as fixing a glyph that was hurting Marks. Steady was just a huge portion of hunter damage, and not a particularly interesting ability (in that you can just sit there and mash the button without worrying about timing other abilities around it), so when we wanted to bring hunter dps down, it was an attractive target. FWIW, ammo was another one. We considered nerfing how much damage all ammo in the game contributed, but went with the SS change for the reason I stated.

Volley (Source)

I agree with the first part, which is why we buffed Volley quite a bit. But in retrospect, we buffed it too much. We didn't want hunters to have the highest single-target damage and highest AE damage, as well as bringing great buffs and CC to the group. With the new Volley, I expect every PvE hunter will still be using that button on large groups, but going back to Multi on smaller ones.

I disagree with the "trash meter" comment. For one, players do care about trash. Elemental shamans and rogues for example felt like there was so much AE'ing going on that they were not attractive specs for raids. Players can say "nobody cares about trash," but we don't buy it. Raids wipe on trash. Raids are called when trash respawns. For speed clears, to satisfy a hard mode achievement or bear-mount style challenge, the rate at which you can clear trash very much matters. If it didn't I'm not sure you'd mind a Volley nerf at all.

Second, you AE on an awful lot of bosses too.

Paladin (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Should Paladins get a Mortal debuff? (Source)

I can understand why paladins think they need utility besides just massive damage and the occasional stun.

That said, the Mortal debuff is in a tricky position. If we hand it out to too many more classes then it feels like we should just put everyone in a healing debuff aura when they step into Arenas, because it will just always be on. I think it's probably a good thing that Arms doesn't corner the market on the debuff anymore, but I'm also not sure we want to keep handing it around to every dps spec.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Meditation (Source)

One of the issues with Meditation per se is that players don't seem to be having many mana regen issues, especially with 25-player raid gear and especially with some form of Replenishment in the raid. We're trying to get a better feel for what to do with mana regen at the moment.

One of the things I said before about "mandatory" talents like Meditation is that we like to have good talents, even ones that convince players to branch out from their dominant tree into a second tree. Where it gets tricky is when it doesn't feel like a decision. Meditation has felt like that at some stages in the game, but if we're reaching a point where people can just stack Spirit or Int and not worry about regen, then Meditation starts to look a lot less mandatory.

There are some other things we want to do with the Priest talent trees. It shouldn't take until next expansion. However I am extremely reluctant to give hard or even estimated timelines for things like this. You can see how some players can get impatient even with vauge timelines.

More on Meditation (Source)

The purpose of talents like Meditation was not to allow you to ignore the five second rule. The FSR is there to reward casters who can occasionally take a break to allow for regen. We are concerned that some of the talent and gear choices that we've introduced have allowed players to opt out of the FSR.

Int can be beneficial to any Spirit-based healer now that Int also affects regen. Depending on your class and spec, it can even be better than Spirit.

Overall though I think you are interpreting my comments too narrowly. There is no reason for us to move Meditation or even make it baseline if we change the numbers or the mechanics behind regen. Since signs point to regen becoming too trivial in the future (thereby making stats benefitting regen unattractive) this is something we are looking into.

The whole mechanic for mana regen (for all classes) is something we're not entirely happy with.

Shaman (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Chain Heal's Performance (Source)

The four classes do have ways of dealing with AE damage to the raid. You have instant spells, hots, fast casts and AE heals. We have tried not to make any encounters that throw out so much damage that you can't function without a heal that hits 5 targets at once. As I said, those events are supposed to be about triage and coordination, not mashing the uber "fix this" button.

We throw AE damage at groups to challenge the healers, and to a lesser extent, the raid. Hitting one button 2 to 3 times in a row is not challenging. That's not how we want you to solve the problem of Saph's aura or Malygos' Vortex. It is in fact so not challenging that it starts to look pretty attractive any time more than one or two people are taking damage at once, such as most trash pulls and many boss fights. Sure maybe it's not the most efficient or even smartest way to heal, but it's sooo easy.....

We throw AE damage at the raid because players have proven they can pretty much handle any situation where only a few tanks are taking tons of damage (though we still have some fights like that). We feel like we need diversity in order to offer as many encounters as we do. Naxx and Ulduar have a lot of bosses.

If we find that we are throwing too much AE damage at the raid with the nerfs to CoH and WG, we'll adjust those encounters. I kind of doubt that will be the case since many groups have those fights on farm even without priests or druids, but because a lot of players are concerned about it, we will absolutely pay close attention to those situations. If we find that CH trivializes AE damage, or if cutting-edge guilds start stacking Resto shamans to the exclusion of other healers, we will make adjustments as well. Again, we don't think that is likely or we would have already done something. But we won't close the door on the possibility of that happening either, because clearly it is a concern of the community.

Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Current PvE Performance (Source)

We're generally happy with locks for PvE too. I think the rotations are more interesting than they were in BC and it's nice to see Affliction up there with Destro. Demo is probably still too low, but see below.

As I've suggested before, there are a few things we are looking at on the PvE side of locks:

1) Get shards into a place that is more interesting and less of a hassle. We have two models we're considering. One is very cool, but a huge change to gameplay, which might mean it has to wait. The other is more of a quick fix that we'd do until we can implement the very cool model.

2) Simplify Affliction's rotation a little bit. This might involve making dots last a more uniform duration (so you didn't feel that external mods were mandatory) or just reducing the number of spells you're expected to cast.

3) Locks are still built a lot around damage over time, but a lot of fights just aren't lasting a long time. This might mean locks needs some more options for quick damage, or the problem might fix itself in Ulduar.

4) We're a lot happier with demons in LK, but we still have some work to do. The Voidwalker, Succubus and maybe the short-term demons aren't quite there yet. Improving demons should also help kick Demonology up a notch.

5) There are a couple of awkward places in the talent trees still.

Note that I am only talking PvE here. Some of these changes will help PvP too, but some of the lock problems in PvP will require different solutions too.

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