EU Valentine's Contest, Forum Watch, The Lament of Captain Placeholder

WoW Europe Valentines 2009 Contest

Today Vaneras announced the 2009 Valentines contest for WoW Europe on the EU forums that gives players a chance to win a Gurky the Murloc key.

Quote from: Vaneras (Source: 12/01 Valentine Contest!)

Love is in the air and the sighs of lovers creates a mist of romance all over Azeroth. That can only mean one thing: Valentine's Day is near! To get into the spirit of the occasion, we are hosting a Valentine Card Contest. To participate in the Valentine Card Contest, simply design a Valentine Card showing your love for World of Warcraft and you could win a Gurky key!

You can learn more about this contest at our Valentine Contest page.
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/valentine2009/
You should also read the Terms and Conditions for this contest.
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/legal/contests/valentine-09.html

From January 12th, 2009 to February 1st, 2009 you can submit your Valentines cards to enter into the contest.  This is only open to European residents, and be sure to check the rules, as the minimum age varies based on the country you live in.

Forum Watch: The Oculus

Eulo created a thread on The Oculus in our Instances forum which just begs for discussion!  What do you think about the instance?  Head to the thread and discuss it with fellow community members!

In keeping the game fresh and exciting as time goes on, the developers utilize various tools. Spells change, new spells are introduced, individual talents--and entire trees--evolve, and for the first time since the game's launch we recently saw an entirely new class introduced. However, for many players (particularly those of us interested in the endgame PvE content) new encounters and new dungeons are what do the best job of holding our interest.

One of the most unique instances currently in the game is The Oculus. What are your thoughts on this instance?
How do you like the concept of mounted combat that goes beyond the standard class abilities? How well do you think the concept was actually executed here?
Furthermore, how is the tuning in both regular and heroic mode, and how challenging do you find the achievements?

Movie Watch: The Lament of Captain Placeholder

Cranius is back with a brand new movie, this time called The Lament of Captain Placeholder.  For those of you who have played long enough to remember this historic NPC, take a stroll down memory lane.  For those who never had the chance to meet him in-game, learn what all the fuss is about!  You can watch it below, but don't be afraid to visit the video on YouTube to rate it up.

Blue Posts

Even Class Skills Have Budgets

We have budgets for the power of individual spells and talents. We do not budget based on the total number of abilities available -- some classes just have more than others.

I would also call the budgets a guideline. You have to know when to change the numbers on something even if the budget suggests that will be overpowered or underpowered.

To be metaphysical for a minute, you can't define the universe with one gigantic equation. There are just too many variables. You can use simpler equations to attempt to describe small parts of things as long as you understand their limitations. A great deal of your success in WoW, perhaps even more in PvP than PvE, is your skill in using your abilities and that is a hard thing to model.

The Future of Tanks: Arms 2H and Ret Tanking?  Maybe!

We like the way the death knight's talent trees are shaping up. Specifically, you can tank using good builds from any of the three trees. One may be slightly higher than another at any given moment in time, but overall the goal is that they are very similar and they are certainly more similar than the other three tanking classes.

We can totally imagine a world in which Arms, Fury and Protection all can tank using different styles. The Prot tree would just be more about sword and board style than tanking per se. Perhaps an Arms warrior would tank with a two-hander more like a DK does. I'm not saying we will 100% for sure go down that road, but it is interesting idea to think about.

It's harder with druids and paladins because some of the other trees can heal or are ranged. (You could probably come up with a Ret tanking system). Being able to tank and heal effectively with

To some extent druids are always going to be about being able to fill very different roles. While a DK tank might have a Frost tanking build and Blood tanking build that she switches between, I don't know that you would see many druid tanks switching between Bear build #1 and Bear build #2. Some will, and that's cool. But I suspect a lot of them will swap from bear to cat or from bear to Resto.

I could easily see a Prot warrior who wants two different Prot tanking builds -- a high threat build vs. a high survivability build for example. I could see a Prot warrior who wants a Prot tanking build vs. a Prot off-tanking build or even a Prot PvP build.

But I don't think this feature automatically locks us into Prot = tanking and Arms / Fury = dps if we don't want it to be. There is a risk that it allows us to be lazy: "Oh don't worry about making Frost mages PvE viable because they can always swap specs to Fire or Arcane for PvE." We would still like to get away from X being "the PvP tree" for every class. Likewise we'd like to get away from having tanking trees too, but it's harder or perhaps impossible for some classes.

On Mandatory Talents

There is nothing wrong with "mandatory" talents per se. Generally the community considers them mandatory because they are very good talents. We don't want a bunch of trees with a bunch of mediocre talents. We love the depth that comes from players endlessly debating which spec to use or comparing talents to each other.

Where it crosses the line in when it starts to restrict player options too much. It's okay if almost all warriors take Cruelty and slightly less okay if almost all warlocks take Ruin. If there was a 31-point talent that all specs took, then it starts to hurt the other two trees in that class. Cookie-cutter specs are okay when they are something used by players who are new to a class and don't want to spend the energy just yet learning every nuance of the class. Ideally, there are a few points that come down to player preference. As an example, before Lich King the three tanking classes had very choices in their talents -- they needed to spend almost all their points just on mitigation.

The extreme alternative is something where every talent tree is equally viable. That might sound good in theory, but it makes the discussions a lot less interesting. "What's the best talent build for a Balance druid who wants to do 5-mans and Arenas?" "It doesn't matter, dude. Just take whatever and you'll do fine."

So we usually land somewhere in the middle -- talents that you pretty much are always going to have, mixed in with some that come down to player preference.

Death Knight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Death Knight Threat Generation at the High End

We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

Death Knight Single Target Threat

If I am summarizing this thread, it appears most of the concern is about single-target threat vs. well-geared dps, especially against slow-swinging or magic-using bosses who don't proc Rune Strike as often. Groups with reliable BoSanc don't notice the problem as much.

I would compare yourself to warriors more than paladins, since the next patch removes the threat of Light, which sometimes grants paladins crazy numbers.

Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Improved Faerie Fire

I am saying the tooltip, which currently reads:

Your Faerie Fire spell also increases the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increases the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by Faerie Fire.

Should probably read:

Your Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire spells also increase the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increase the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by your Faerie Fire or Feral Faerie Fire.

One of the issues we are currently discussing is what to do in the case where someone chooses a talent that they end up not using because someone else in the group also has the same buff of equal or greater potency. To be fair though this is not a new problem. Raids always had to manage buffs like Spirit or Kings that were talented. I think groups usually worked around that by just grouping with the same people a lot and making sure someone had the talent. We are seeing a lot more raids pugged these days, and in any case, you often still want the buff when you are soloing. It is something we're discussing.

Hunter (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Why Pets Must Be Leveled

In a world without pet loyalty, we feared that letting pets instantly jump to your level would make them truly disposable. When it was time for your raid or Arena you could just literally grab a pet, buy talent points, and you'd be good to go. The hunter pet is supposed to be a buddy, your loyal companion, and as such some kind of investment, not the closest bear, dinosaur or spider you could find.

It could be that our fears were not a big deal in the long run, but that was our logic for keeping pet leveling.

It is also slightly fun to have a few more milestones pop up after you've earned your last level, but by far this was a secondary concern.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Current Priest Design

We designed the priest to have lots of different tools. That in and of itself can be very powerful. You can fill lots of different roles in a group and switch from role to role very easily. While some tools (Renew and Flash Heal for example) are very reminiscent of spells from other classes, other tools (Prayer of Mending and Guardian Spirit) really have no direct equivalent.

I think the "not as powerful" clause gets invoked sometimes because if priests were better at hots than druids etc. then people start to wonder why they should ever bring the other classes. I realize you can turn that argument around, but still the flexibility needs to count for something. We do not view priests as weakened versions of the other classes either in the way we design them or in practice.

All that said, I do hear a lot of priests saying that they want to be really good at something and I do hear a lot of priests saying they want more tools that are more interesting and not just equivalent versions of other classes' spells. We get this message loud and clear. It's certainly something we will keep in mind as we sit down to work on the priest for 3.1 and beyond.

Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

3.0.8 Changes

The changes we got in for 3.0.8 (aside from some general bug fixes) were mostly designed to help locks survive longer in PvP. I don't think you have all of the changes yet -- for instance we very recently juiced up pet health for some pets. I start to lose track of which changes are on the PTR versus changes we've announced that you haven't seen yet versus changes we haven't announced. Once 3.0.8 ships this will all be a lot clearer.

Potential 3.1 Changes

For 3.1 we are probably going to make some larger changes to the class. I still don't want to oversell these. A popular yet cynical phrase among players is that their class needs to be rebuilt from the ground up (though I see this with probably every class, which is slightly amusing). We are not deleting the warlock and starting over. We are not doing that with any class and probably never will. We do want to smooth out some rough edges of the class though. A few things that I have said we want to look at are:

• Improve deep Demonology for PvP and PvE.
• Make Affliction feel less dependent on dot timers and other external mods (nothing wrong with the mods -- we just think it's getting harder and harder to play the spec with the default UI).
• Take a hard look at Soul Shards.
• Take a hard look at the way pets scale.

Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Titan's Grip: A Sacrifice of Philosophy?

I wouldn't characterize it as sacrificing our design philosophy. We have guidelines, but we also need to be able to skirt around those guidelines sometimes. That is one of the things that makes the classes and talents interesting. In a world where everything was truly equivalent, you also risk the choices being a lot less interesting. Sometimes the exceptions are the most interesting. (E.g. History tends to most celebrate those battles that were upsets, not those where the expected party indeed triumphed.)

There is certainly a risk that every spec will argue for their version of Titan's Grip. What players will need to remember is that we won't take a spec at 100% and give them a talent that adds 20% to that. If we add a talent that is a 20% boost (I am just making up numbers for illustrative purposes), the class will be balanced at 80% and we will assume everyone has the talent.

We assume all Fury warriors (at higher level) dual-wield two-handed weapons, just like we assume all Affliction warlocks are casting a lot of dots. By contrast, we do not assume that all hunters use bows or that all Demo warlocks use Felguards all the time.

It's an unusual talent, but in this case we feel it needs to be unusual to make it work.

Share On: