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Post  Jezhra Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:24 pm

Debuff Limit, Blue Posts, Top 25 Patchwerk DPS Analysis

The Debuff Limit and You

Quote from: Daelo (Source)

We changed how the game handles debuffs (ie negative state effects on targets) on creatures with Wrath of the Lich King. The old hard cap of 40 debuffs on a target no longer effectively exists. You can now apply way more debuffs to a target without them dropping off before their duration expires. The default WoW UI will not normally display all these debuffs, but they really are still there!

Blue Posts

Class Importance in Raids (Source)

We don't mean that you can select 10 or 25 random people and expect to succeed and thrive. The mantra is not "bring any player." The mantra is not "class is irrelevant." Instead, it means that the class (or spec) involved does not trump all other issues, which we felt was increasingly happening in BC.

We honestly heard from a lot of players (and experienced it ourselves) that a group might shelve a good rogue because bringing the shaman for WF was a better overall improvement for dps, even if the shaman was face-roller. That just sounds broken.

I think what happens is that players hear "Bring the player, not the class," and add to that "Well, I play my class flawlessly and have perfect gear," and conclude that any failure is because of the game mechanics and not their own skill or gear (and luck certainly plays a factor in any RPG too).

The intent is actually that when faced with who to invite to a 5, 10 or 25 player run that you can consider the player involved. You should never have to take a terrible priest over an excellent paladin just because the priest has some uber buff or required spell. If your guild has lots of paladin healers, then go run Naxx with them.

The emphasis on encounter design is more about execution, coordination or good old gear checks rather than "at this stage, a mage must cast Counterspell or the boss will wipe the raid."

When we are balancing numbers, we can assume that your group has +haste, +AP and +crit without you having to make sure that means a shaman, warrior and feral druid is with you.

DPS in WotLK (Source)

We do want dps to be a lot closer than it was in BC (assuming equal gear and skill, which players always conveniently assume that they have). If it's not ther yet, we will get it there.

The goal is that nobody has a unique buff. The goal is that nobody has a buff or ability so amazing that they always earn raid spots, or that you stack them in a group in preference to other classes. Until we design encounters that can handle one of every spec, we don't want you to only take the specs with the best buffs (and woe be to the group in which there are two or three of you with the same spec in that situation).

Druid versus Warlock Raid Desirability (Source)

Innervate and Rebirth are amazing abilities, true. But so are Soulstones, Health Stones and Summoning. I don't really see a lot of situations where raids are stacking druids because of Innervate or Rebirth though. To some extent, both of those abilities are those you ideally never want to use and which become increasingly less useful the closer the content gets to be on farm.

And ultimately, I really don't want to derail the thread into the pros and cons of all the various class abilities. That is a big discussion.

But we do want you to have room to take who you want without worrying so much about class abilities.

Most WoW Players Aren't 80 Yet (Source)

If you're 80 already, you are a relatively hardcore player. Most WoW players are not 80 yet. If it's easy for you, it's not easy for everybody.

Current Raid Content Difficulty (Source)

We want more players to see the content. Naxxramas and Malygos are cool! We want people to see them. Heck, we brought Naxx back in part because so few people had seen it.

People Who Say WotLK Raids Are Easy (Source)

Very few of the people who are saying WoW is EZ mode have done Satharion with 3 drakes yet. Give that a shot then get back to us. Smile

Ulduar Difficulty (Source)

Ulduar will be harder. It still might be do-able by more than the most elite 5% of players, but it will be a lot more challenging. And we'll continue to have "hard modes" that are even more challenging. We'll make sure some of these challenges offer appropriate rewards.

Class Balance in Relation to Easy Content (Source)

We knew we were messing with class balance quite a bit, so it's nice that things are a little easier right now. It gives the players time to learn the new spells and abilities and gives us a chance to see how things really work out in the actual game with thousands of people beating on the mechanics. We'll continue to make adjustments as necessary. It's an MMO. Things change over time.

What Ghostcrawler Gets Out of the Forums (Source)

I made the comment in the beta forums once (which ended up sounding more condescening than I intended) that some players were treating the forums as a deli, ordering up changes to their class, and then getting upset when we didn't go implement those changes. That's not really why we're here. Here is what I get out of the forums:

-- Understanding where players are having problems.
-- Understanding when players are confused about something.
-- Understanding what's fun and not fun.
-- Catching the occasional bug.

The forums are typically not a great source of solutions, though it does happen. That's not meant to disparage the people who post here. Just like WoW has an art style, it has a design style and sometimes the solutions offered just don't mesh. (Other times they are technically difficult.)

The forums are also not great at detecting problems. They are great at detecting *potential* problems and that's a big difference. You get a lot of false positives. If we see a lot of players complaining about the same issue (and I mean a lot of players, not the same few players starting multiple threads) then we usually will look into it. Looking into it involves a lot of discussion, a lot of data mining, and perhaps some test cases. We bounce ideas and solutions off of a lot of people internally, and people whose opinions we trust (typically because they are expert players) outside of the company. I can't think of any cases where we just took a player's word for it and just made a change because of a QQ. That is pretty easy to prove to yourself if you just examine the ratio of requests (often demands) for change to actual implemented changes.

But sometimes players are right too. Never discount that. Sometimes players are right even if all of your data suggest otherwise. One of the trickier talents for a good game designer to master is knowing when that is happening.

Death Knight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Ebon Plaguebringer Doesn't Stack From Multiple DKs (Source)

There are a few cases where classes or specs with the same debuff don't provide equal benefit to everyone. While we don't want the actual debuff to stack, we also don't want to penalize players for not having the benefit or get into a race for who can get the debuff up first. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem to resolve or we already would have done so, but it is something we want to get fixed.

In the meantime, if your dps is suffering beyond what you can endure, you do have the option of going Blood or Frost.

Is Rune Strike Truly a "Rogue Killer"? (Source)

I'll try this once again. I used "rogue killer" as shorthand, but so many players have such blind hatred for rogues that they only noticed those couple of words and missed the actual intent of the change.

We made Rune Strike a tanking tool. Really. We even made the decision in my office, and I think it was just after dinner one night. DK threat turned out to be a lot lower than we expected, largely because if an early hit in the rotation fails to land (miss, dodge or parry) then the DKs runes and rotations are all messed up. We needed an ability that you couldn't just spam, so we made it only light up when the tank dodges or parries. But Rune Strike was packing such a punch (and it needed to) that we didn't want to let it miss or we weren't really solving the threat problem.

The problem is this makes it a very good PvP tool vs. melee classes, because they are attacking the DK (who dodges or parries) and they often rely on their own avoidance to escape melee damage.

It's dangerous from a design perspective to have an ability really overbound like that. If DK threat was too low, we couldn't buff Rune Strike because that ends up being a big PvP buff. If DKs needed to do more PvP damage to melee classes we couldn't buff Rune Strike, because that makes them better tanks.

Our intent was not that the DK is all about Rune Strike the way the Arms warrior is all about Mortal Strike. Rune Strike isn't even that interesting an ability -- it doesn't use runes and isn't tied to diseases which are actually the core mechanics we want the DK to be concerned with in PvE and PvP.

It's not that we love rogues (or that we hate them). We just didn't want the PvP Death Knight to be a Rune Strike slinging fiend. Use Blood Strike, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike or your other abilities. If those aren't enough to let you stand up to melee, we'll make adjustments, but almost certainly not through Rune Strike.

If it can't help but distract you, forget the "rogue killer" part. We didn't want Rune Strike to be this ungodly PvP tool which it just happened to be.
Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

DPS in Raids (Source)

We are taking a hard look at rogue PvE performance right now.

We don't think fixing the Master Poisoner bug is cause to give rogues a huge buff however. The issue is a little more complex than it is being portrayed in this thread.
Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Status on Warlock Improvements (Source)

Unfortunately I don't have any new news and I hesitated to post after the posts above that didn't want to see a claim that we're looking into something. (Sorry, man, that's what we do.)

Our goal hasn't changed and the bullets you posted at the top of the thread are still generally valid. We talked about locks just this morning, but I don't have any upcoming announcements yet. I'm sorry I can't always grace every thread with promises of buffs and new abilities, but we try to be careful with the changes we make. The fact that we still manage to break things sometimes suggest that we might not even be careful enough. Fear not, locks. We hear you.

Analysis: Top DPS Among Top-25 Kills of Patchwerk

There's a thread going on the Dungeons and Raids forum that lists the top DPS of each of the first 25 Patchwerk kills since expansion launch. It's an interesting list with consistent classes for the most part, but what's amazing is how dominant Hunters are, and the fact that there isn't a single Rogue in the entire list. The only Death Knight is listed as 25th in the list as well.

Highest rogue out of all of these: Somara - 4454dps & Chalon with 4415dps (then a few other rogues at 4300ish and under 4000)

Only 3 of the pures are actually getting to the top. Some of the hybrids are getting in there also.

Where is the DPS balance?

Are the hunters, Warlocks, & mages over powered? Or are the rogues under powered?

Looks like warriors are going over their specific "hybrid" dps. Same with DK's and Shaman.

Jezhra

Posts : 31
Join date : 2008-10-21

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