[WoRBot]

Yogg-Saron+0 Video: Paragon of EU-Lightning's Blade

Paragon of EU-Lightning's Blade releases a video of their world 2nd Heroic: Alone in the Darkness kill. Like the Stars video, it's in two parts on YouTube due to length constraints.

Phases 1 & 2

Phase 3

Soundtrack:
Taniuchi Hideki - Kessen
Don Johnson Big Band - Road
Toshiuki O'mori - The Selected Moon

Wintergrasp - PTR Focus Testing - July 13th, 2009

Quote from: Dresorull (Source)

In the next PTR build we will be implementing several changes to how the Wintergrasp queue and group formations will work.

• While in the queue for Wintergrasp, you will have an icon on your mini map that will allow you to leave the queue. This will function much like the current battleground queue button that is present on the mini map.
  
• Players that queue for the Wintergrasp battle and are selected to join will be placed into raid groups upon entering the zone. These raid groups will function similarly to the battleground raid groups with a few exceptions. Players can leave it at any time, the leader can issue invites, etc. The only restriction is that if a player leaves Wintergrasp while the battle is active, they will be removed from the raid (to make room for the player that will take their place).
  
• If the battle is not active this does not happen.

Thank you all for your feedback and bugs so far, it is incredibly helpful to us.

Coliseum & Isle of Conquest Questions

This looks to be similar to the class Q&A series where the community team collects questions and then conducts an interview with the developers.

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

Now that players have had a chance to digest a good deal of the information we've released about patch 3.2.0, Call of the Crusade, we're asking for any follow-up questions you may have about the major PvE and PvP features coming. Whether you have been following every bit of text that's been released about the Crusaders' Coliseum and Isle of Conquest, have been on the test realms every day testing whatever bits of new content you can, or have just taken a cursory look at our announcements, we'd love to hear from you.

We'll be compiling a small list of questions from players around the world regarding the Crusaders' Coliseum and Isle of Conquest, taking them to leading members of our development staff and returning to you with the best answers we can provide.

So who wants to get this thing started?

Patch 3.2.0 Under Development Page: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/

Blue Posts

The future of Block (Source)

I feel like we've been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we'd rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

You shouldn't overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren't setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It's totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we'd rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren't going to manifest themselves until you have item level 200 items, then you're worried prematurely.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By "legitimate" I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That's not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn't care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to. :(

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don't want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs -- there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won't be able to actually hold aggro. It's okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don't Shield Slam all that much. That's fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set.

+Threat Abilities (Source)

There has been a lot of discussion about +threat moves being a crutch and tanks should just be able to hold aggro based on their dps. But that implies that your dps is as high or higher than a class or spec who can only dps. There will probably be +threat added to stances and abilities for the foreseeable future. That does not mean your dps needs to be 10% of a dps raid member.

3.2 Avoidance Changes (Source)

The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on "slightly."

This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with "Patchwerk" to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance "come to Naaru" that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone's avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn't understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point.

[lora]

dont like where wg is going :/

[Eulo]

I was getting flashbacks to "inv. inv. who has the raid? inv. starting the raid. wtf are there two raids?!" Guess that won't be the case.

[The green fox]

Well no matter if you like the wg we got now or want something else then I think that making it slighly instance is the only thing they can do. On alot of servers wg is unplayable and making it a game about pvp and viechle combat and less about who got the least lag or can spam most aoe is better then nothing.

I agree its not perfect but I just dont see what else they can do, and before somebody says buy new servers then my guess would be that by the time the new servers were ready we would have a new expansion.

[ryguy]

I agree, the whole "buy more servers" is such a idiotic comment.

I'm a game developer for Sony SOE (no I don't work on Everquest) and before we even THINK about new server equipment, we take a look at the game first. We check out our dead reckoning and make sure there isn't anything else we can "fake" or make communication more efficient. (Send only what you need, when you need)

Once we execute the above, we bill our hours, even if we just took a peek.

If that's not enough, we have our IT look at the hardware (again, bill hours) and see exactly what is needed instead of blindly buying more servers.

All these players think Blizzard and other game companies have this infinite supply of money. The truth is, these companies have bills. They pay for maintenance, development, the lights that light up the vending machine, the Playstation games in the break room, and the "free" soda.

Another thing, just because you pay 14.95 a month does not put you on the board of directors

[adrenalize]

ryguy said:

I agree, the whole "buy more servers" is such a idiotic comment.

I'm a game developer for Sony SOE (no I don't work on Everquest) and before we even THINK about new server equipment, we take a look at the game first. We check out our dead reckoning and make sure there isn't anything else we can "fake" or make communication more efficient. (Send only what you need, when you need)

Once we execute the above, we bill our hours, even if we just took a peek.

If that's not enough, we have our IT look at the hardware (again, bill hours) and see exactly what is needed instead of blindly buying more servers.

All these players think Blizzard and other game companies have this infinite supply of money. The truth is, these companies have bills. They pay for maintenance, development, the lights that light up the vending machine, the Playstation games in the break room, and the "free" soda.

Another thing, just because you pay 14.95 a month does not put you on the board of directors

But Blizzard make ?98 Million a month from suscriber fee's, surely they can throw money at the servers until the magically fix themselves.* I hear that dollar bills stuffed directly in the processer socket make excellent gains in performance**

* This may be Sarcasm
** This Is Sarcasm

[Valaelea]

adrenalize said:

But Blizzard make ?98 Million a month from suscriber fee's, surely they can throw money at the servers until the magically fix themselves.* I hear that dollar bills stuffed directly in the processer socket make excellent gains in performance**

* This may be Sarcasm
** This Is Sarcasm

A hardware solution for a software problem isn't a real solution.

Its a complication.

[koenigsegg]

Paragon a new guild? Don't think I heard from them before when it comes to world first...or top-10. Not that I searched their name or something like that.

EDIT: Ah, they formed right before WotLK...a merge.

This post has been edited by koenigsegg: 14 July 2009 - 04:23 PM