The Daily Blues: Camo looking badass -- not bug
Each day, WoW.com takes you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From the latest posts from Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) to the lowdown on StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3, we'll keep you informed.
Ghostcrawler's words, not mine.
Table of contents
Ghostcrawler
I'm not sure I agree with this. I can understand wanting to keep it simple, but like someone else said, if you're going to have 3 glyphs that we're always going to have with no variation, and none of them have any effect on the rotation... couldn't we just stick with minor/major glyphs, and just remove the prime glyphs entirely?
A few things:
First, it would be a weird world in which a warrior say could glyph Charge and Battle Shout but not Mortal Strike. It might make sense to savvy players who thought through it, but I'd wager you'd also see a lot of "Why don't they make glyphs that affect the buttons I care most about? Blizzard is dumb." (And to be clear, the point of that is not to defend ourselves against agitated forum posters, but that if something in the game is confusing like that in can get in the way of having fun.)
Second, gaining power when you level up is fun. Hitting a milestone where you get a noticeable damage bonus is fun. There is also some mildly interesting decisions about which prime glyph to use first. In other words, don't view everything through the lens of the maximum level player.
Third, not everything in the game needs to be a nail-biting decision. We don't for example really want Fury warriors to stress about whether to choose Raging Blow or not, nor we do we make it particularly challenging to choose your weapon enchant. Sometimes easy decisions make players feel more comfortable rather than every potential decision having a host of invisible pitfalls. This isn't an issue of catering to the dumb players -- it's more about there being a few safe places in the game. [I feel nearly certain after re-reading that paragraph that it's going to be hard to understand and I will end up having to clarify it for months to come.]
Finally, I'd argue that the popular glyphs on live today already were the no brainers because in most cases they led to a consistent dps increase (for dps specs of course). When everyone uses those glyphs, then you aren't making some interesting decision about how to use your abilities -- you're just doing what every other warrior out there is doing. The only way to deviate from that is to have two glyphs that affect your primary abilities in two totally different but equal ways. That's a very tall order, because more than likely we'll end up having to constantly adjust around that. "Encounter #4 in Grim Batol is unfair to warriors who use the Glyph of Furious Mortal Strikes instead of the Glyph of Meaty Mortal Strikes." What I mean is that we end up having to support multiple play styles within one tree. We're willing to do that to a limited extent (the TG vs. SMF Fury warrior for example, or the FFB mage), but it's hard enough to develop 1-2 viable rotations per spec. We don't want every important glyph bifurcating that rotation even more.
--
When enrage first changed to a proc on hit, a lot of people said the issue was fixed, so I figured I'd wait a few builds. But now we're seeing the same problems crop up again in the complaints being voiced in the beta forums. The unreliable uptime results in differences between TG and SMF, and makes RB far too much like a random proc. Damage varies wildly as you get a 20% buff that comes and goes at random, and this makes us heavily RNG reliant, if we have a fight with good RNG and we end up with near 100% uptime our damage will be absurd. A fight with bad RNG and our damage is abysmal. The current rotation is basically everything we should be trying to avoid as far as random effects go.
Damage won't vary wildly over the course of a fight, just in the second to second snapshots of where you are. You also have plenty of on demand enrages if you just need it to happen right then. Our combat model (for nearly every spec) involves having to manage random events. We see every day players who want to minimize the influence of randomness in their rotation, but they're looking for an experience like Street Fighter, not an RPG. Fury in particular is too static on Live, so we're committed to mixing it up a little.
Don't worry about TG vs. SMF balance yet. Just pick one and see how the rotations feels with your chosen playstyle.
--
That said, increasing the duration of Bloodsurge to 10 sec would go a LONG way in making fury feel less frustrating when not enraged
Yeah, we buy that. I think it also makes sense that Raging Blow not proc Bloodsurge, since that's not when you need an increased proc chance.
Other
But to answer the original poster's brief question. Why do we have the Suggestions forum in the EU? We have the Suggestions forum in every supported language for WoW across the world because we need one central place per language/region to gather suggestions from. Of course, we gather suggestions also from all over the place as we find them, but believe me it helps to have one central place for them.
Does the existance of a Suggestions forum mean that EU has strong influence over the development of WoW? Yes it does. But we also influence the development of WoW from here in Europe through your feedback. It's not the first time mentioning it, but the feedback from across all five supported European languages is usually very helpful and of a high quality.
Hope that clarifies it for you.
Blizzard
