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Earlier news from today: 3.1.3 Patch Notes, 3.2: New Druid Form Art
10-player Algalon the Observer Video by Underground Kosmonavts
Underground Kosmonavts of EU-Ravencrest managed to kill 10-player Algalon the Observer today as the 2nd guild in the world to do so. They also released a video of the kill, which you can see below, from a Hunter PoV.
Music: Change of Heart by Mark Vera (http://www.mikseri.n...tists/?id=18770)
Addons: Aperture, BigWigs, Chatter, Chinchilla, Dominos, eePanels2, ElkBuffBars, FuBar, Grid, NeedToKnow, Omen, OmniCC, oRA2, PitBull, Quartz, Recount
Korean Regional Finals Winners
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)
We’re glad to announce the winners of the Korean regional final of the 2009 World of Warcraft Arena Tournament. Teams “Shipit” and “Button Bashers” have successfully fought their way up the ranks through formidable adversaries en route to winning $15,000 and $6,000 respectively.
Each team will be invited to participate in the global final at BlizzCon for a chance to further showcase their skills, win cash prizes, and compete against the other top regional teams. For video coverage of the event please visit our hosting site: http://c
Congratulations to all the winners!
1. Shipit (Death Knight, Hunter, Paladin)
2. Button Bashers (Mage, Priest, Rogue)
3. SK-Korea (Mage, Priest, Rogue)
4. Without Dimension (Druid, Paladin, Warlock)
5. Azshara (Paladin, Rogue, Warlock)
6. M Y T H (Paladin, Rogue, Warlock)
7. S Line (Death Knight, Hunter, Paladin)
8. Tenacity (Mage, Priest, Rogue)
Blue Posts
MP5 and Spirit both existing doesn't make sense (Source)
Agreed. As I have suggested in other threads, we’d like to consolidate those long-term and I don’t think anyone is going to argue that MP5 is the more interesting, better scaling or more intuitive stat. It’s an acronym for crying out loud. :)
Why healers are the role that should always have mana issues (Source)
Our general design is that tanks and damage-dealing specs don’t run out of resources (providing they manage the tools they have). Healers on the other hand need to run out of resources if your group is not playing as well as it should be or you’re in over your head. Healer mana is one of the few ways we have to end a fight (though it’s not the only way). If you have Holy paladins healing a tank and they are never going to run out of mana, then most likely the tank is never going to die. We have to put in even more brutal ways to wipe a raid – such as one-shotting damage-dealers or healer, or silencing the paladins or making them run.
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I’m not sure it’s the case that Holy priests and Resto druids never run out of mana. In any case, they do generally care about Spirit, while the problem with paladins is they have MP5 on their Ulduar gear that the community dismisses, understandably, as useless. The community and developers both perceive that as a problem. The community’s answer seems to be to change the gear while the developers are more likely to make a stat that we want to put on your gear more useful to you.
Tanking
What's wrong with specialized tanking? (Source)
Even if you could somehow make certain that paladins were the best at some kind of bosses (so that they didn't just become the trash tank), you are then tied to make sure every raid has a few of those types of bosses. Ulduar becomes 3 warriors bosses, 3 paladin bosses, 4 druid bosses, 4 DK bosses. If one of those bosses is perceived as more difficult, more necessary or rewarding of better loot, then the sense of inequity still exists.
Furthermore, we don't want every guild to have to keep 4 good tanks on their permanent roster and just slide them in for the right fight. While dual-spec makes that slightly easier than before, we still don't think it's fair to demand every guild keep someone on hand who can spec and gear as a Feral druid or Prot paladin.
We're fine with certain tanks having a slight advantage on some fights, because we recognize that's probably inevitable as long as the abilities are different. This is going to always be trickier for the hard modes, but again the goal is that you can have any class of tank as your main tanks.
Block mechanics (Source)
Think about it this way.
Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.
Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.
Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.
Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.
We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.
We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.
If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.
Avoidance tanks (Source)
I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.
Raids & Dungeons
Using immunities to get out of Hot Pocket / Heroic: Hot Pocket (Source)
It is intended that you need to survived through the slag pot to get the achievement. I'm sure you'll get grabbed again in a couple weeks, have your healthstone/health potion ready and you should get it easily.
Player versus Player
Arena Rating based on class representation (Source)
This suggestion crops up a fair amount.
Our main concern is how it would feel. Would you be annoyed at a class who got a Gladiator title just because they played the under-represented class? It is essentially grading on a curve, and that sometimes feels bad both for people at the top (the deck's stacked against me) and bottom (I didn't really earn my points) of the curve.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed with the idea though, and as our recent change to how rating is calculated should suggest, we aren't above iteration on the design.
Dispel mechanics in PvP (Source)
Here is what I will say on the topic: Dispel is useful, if not overpowered in many situations in PvP. If you have issues with it, perhaps you should bring them up in an intelligent post.
What Ghostcrawler defines as burst (Source)
Everyone is going to have their own definitions. That's fine.
All damage specs need burst to some extent. You need to be able to increase your damage for short periods of time to say burn someone down before their healer can get to them. In the absence of burst, the only real way to finish a match is to keep the healer completely CC'd or drained. Heals are pretty big even in Arenas (arguably too big), so if you can't kill a healer who is low, you can expect them to be back at full health shortly.
Bad burst (which is the way the term normally gets used) is what happens when burst becomes your whole strategy. "Who cares about crowd control or countering anything? Let's just pick a guy and focus on him until he's dead, which will probably take around 4 GCDs, and then we'll probably have won the match." We don't think that's a fun way to play. There is no decision making beyond the initial "Let's kill him." The victim has almost nothing they can do to get out of it. Someone dies and the match is over in 20 seconds.
Now it's a very imprecise term and it's clear from reading these forums for awhile that some players will define "too much burst" as....
1) Two players ganged up on me and I couldn't handle them alone.
2) I was crowd controlled and died while crowd controlled.
3) I went one-on-one against someone, and they did more damage to me without crowd control and I died.
4) While our healer was occupied, they managed to kill me. I should be able to survive a lot longer without healing.
5) I couldn't heal myself while multiple opponents interrupted my heals.
6) At some point, the match became very fast-paced. A 1 sec GCD melee was beating on me and using stuff and before I could really react, I was dead.
Incidentally, we think that last point happens a lot. When a mage has you in Frost Nova and starts casting, you can pretty much figure out what is about to happen. When a rogue or warrior or DK or paladin are up close and unloading on you, you don't necessarily realize what cooldowns and trinkets are being popped unless you can scrutinize the combat log... which of course you can't. Good players just learn from playing many matches what other classes are likely to do during that window. Less articulate players aren't entirely sure what happened and just write it off as "burst was so high that I died before I could react."
I'm not judging those players are saying it's all fine -- merely pointing out an observation we had today.
Druid
New form art: new models and higher quality textures too! (Source)
They are new models and new textures. You can tell by things like how much less blocky the bear's shoulders and rump are. There are more polys now. The difference in detail is pretty amazing and hard to really appreciate from a simple screenshot. The animations are the same as they've always been.
Honestly with things like this we have to be a little careful. While not many people will champion the fidelity of the old forms (because they look old!) players can get very attached to them. We were concerned that if we changed them too much (remove the horns for example), long-term druids might really feel disenfranchised. The artists did a great job of capturing the feel of the old forms while still updating them.
If you have more hair color choices than pelt colors available on the animal then more than one hair option will map to the same animal.
Having the art itself upgrade as you improve your gear is still something we'd love to do, but is obviously a much bigger undertaking. We'll see.
And wait until you see the new Tauren cat! That was the one most in need of an overhaul, IMO.
Other Druid forms will be getting new art too (Source)
The other forms do remain a work in progress. We decided it best to release bear and cat as soon as they were ready. We started them first because they are the oldest of the form models, and were in desperate need of a revamp and some additional textures to bring them more in line with the higher resolutions we've been using in the expansions. The Art team remains very busy on several different tasks for World of Warcraft, but now that new art for cat and bear are imminent, we'd like to keep pushing out new forms sooner rather than later.
Paladin
Changes coming to make Paladins want MP5... somehow (Source)
The problem we have is paladins are now telling us “This MP5 on our gear is useless. Give us a better stat instead.” We don’t think that will result in a balanced outcome for the reasons I have mentioned. We’re not talking about nerfing paladins for no good reason. We’re talking about shifting the sources of your regen so that the Ulduar gear is perceived as an upgrade. I don’t accept the logic that it’s impossible to make paladins care about MP5 or that denying paladins more crit and Int will get them gkicked.
Additional healing tools (Source)
I have said we totally agree that is a problem. We are definitely about giving players a choice. We do want to keep the feel of paladin healing however, and not just throw up our hands and give them Renew and Prayer of Healing. A lot of players are concerned about homogenization of abilities, so we want to be cautious.
Shaman
Ghost Wolf form revamp? (Source)
We do not currently have any plans to revamp Ghost Wolf form.
Bloodlust becoming mandatory again (Source)
On the one hand, players don't want to have to stack raids. On the other hand, everyone wants their individual contribution to be perceived as valuable so that they have a chance of earning a spot.
Even if your guild thinks Bloodlust / Heroism is mandatory (which we still think is debatable), you need a single shaman to fill that spot. Since shamans can fill a melee, ranged or healing role, we don't think this is a huge imposition. In the Sunwell days when you needed about one shaman per five-player group we think it definitely crossed the line.
We don't want you to cancel your raid if you can't find one particular spec to come along with you. On the other hand, we don't want class to be completely meaningless to the point at which raids with 3 Prot warriors, 7 Holy priests and 15 rogues are attractive.
"Bring the player" was never intended to mean you can assemble 10 or 25 random people. It meant that you have enough flexibility to get the raid buffs you need and still have ro
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Grats to them!
