The Daily Blues
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.
Don't fish? OK ... UUDDLRLRBABASTART.
Table of contents
Ghostcrawler
The biggest issue with Dks right now is that all these problems with the new trees and other things are being pointed out for Blizzard and their response is no response at all, or some lame excuse like Dks don't need work cause Dks have the newest trees since they only came out in wrath. I thought cataclysm beta was for all classes and all classes were going to be worked on. I'm not sure how the class that is the newest class was on the list of big three that started off with major changes Blizzard claimed with paladin and hunter now Dks aren't being smoothed over. So no real changes for over six weeks to two months for Dks.
We can sit here and keep saying to ourselves we know Blizzard won't forget us, but in reality with their lack of response and poor responses that Dks don't need work only prove that they have no plans to further work on Dks at all this beta which raises high concerns about the class going into cataclysm. I for one am not going to be willing to play this game with a broken class cause Blizzard neglected to bother making any fixes to Dks while they had the chance in beta.
So i'm done hoping Blizzard will look over the class. When changes are made they will be made and my mind might change about cataclysm. Till then i'm leaning away from this game.
You're also done posting for awhile. Don't fish. Don't QQ.
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There are a lot of questions in this thread, and I can't answer them all, but I can hit a few.
Is 2H Frost viability still intended? -- yes.
Is DW Unholy viability intended? -- no.
Pestilence has been nerfed too much -- Pestilence was always intended as a convenient way to spread diseases in anticipation for things like Blood Boil. It was not ever supposed to be the way DKs AE, and in fact that is the job of abilities like Blood Boil. If there was a way to make Pestilence cause no damage, we'd probably do it.
There are too many passive damage talents -- yes, we'd agree with that. It's still something we're working on. There will still be a few, especially high in the trees, but DKs are also slightly exempt (if such a thing exists) from our making sure that early talents are easy to understand for level 10 players.
DKs being GCD locked -- this is not something we see for DKs above level 80. We do see it for DKs who are converted at level 80 in Icecrown gear to the Cataclysm rules, for one simple reason -- a lot of your stats got converted to haste and you have no mastery. The equivalent would be a level 85 DK who decides to eschew all mastery on gear and stack haste to a ridiculous degree. Sure it might GCD lock you, but it's such a dps loss, why would you ever do that? This is actually a problem with many specs and skews feedback quite a bit. Be very careful in your feedback to distinguish between whether the character you are testing is wearing Lich King gear or Cataclysm gear. If we had to do it all again, maybe we would have converted some existing gear to mastery, just to avoid the situation we're in now where players are missing one of the big secondary stats.
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For one, I'd like to ask that people please don't center your posts around the idea that we're not getting any communication. The last thing we need is a good thread to get ignored/passed over because it's getting filled with a lot of posts complaining about how we're being ignored.
Yes. I had to delete a half dozen whiny posts from this thread because I wanted to post in it, but didn't want players to see "Oh, maybe whining gets results." If you don't make this kind of work for me, I'd have more time to actually answer threads.
P.S. I will continue to delete posts in this thread that are on how you feel ignored and not about DK mechanics specifically. Sorry to sound like a jerk, but I don't have the time to play forum police in a nice way.
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It's okay -- intended even -- for Frost to use ranged attack. The original "Shadowfrost" was an abomination that cherry picked select talents to boost Icy Touch to a ridiculous degree. If a Frost DK can be competitive without ever being in melee, then that crosses the line. If they are attacking at range before they close, or nuking a fleeing target, or at a second target while engaged with a first target, that's fine.
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I am reading the other thread too. It's mercifully free of QQ for the moment, so I'm hoping not to contaminate it.
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The only damage that pestilence deals is from the diseases that it spreads. . . so does mean that ideally diseases spread by pestilence deal no damage and its purpose is to allow abilities to benefit from the diseases being present? But he also says that pestilence has been nerfed too much. . . now i'm confused!
Sorry. Typed too quickly.
Pestilence was designed back in the day when DKs had to use Blood Boil as their AE taunt (a truly brilliant design direction in retrospect). DKs needed a way to get diseases on many targets quickly without tab targeting Plague Strike on everyone. So Pestilence was invented to spread diseases, but based on that initial PS/IT so that it would not replace them.
However, because disease damage ended up being pretty beefy, especially for Unholy DKs, Pestilence became a quite powerful AE attack. Even worse, if was very hard for us to shackle it. It wasn't affected by the "half damage from AE" auras we put on some trash that we wanted to be more powerful, since Pestilence wasn't a real AE.
In short, we don't want Pestilence to be an AE at all. We want Blood Boil and Howling Blast and similar spells to be your primary source of AE damage. I'm not saying we'll change Pestilence at this stage because it would be pretty tricky to implement a design that let it spread diseases that did no damage (or something equally goofy). I'm just saying that our intent is not for Pestilence to be a huge chunk of your damage. It's ultimately a utility ability.
I have to say..I'm a little saddened. You want us to make mistakes? Is that fun for the player?
Please understand I don't say we should be given everything on a silver platter but designing the trees and so on with the idea that failing is more than likely...does not sound fun to me.
I didn't say "more than likely." I said "more likely than today."
Have you ever played an electronic game on god mode? (UUDDLRLRBABASTART.) It's cute for about fifteen minutes. Then you realize there is no challenge. You don't have to keep on your toes. You can't strive to get better at the game. I can load up my personal copy of WoW right now and go through and death touch all of the bosses in Icecrown. Guess how much time I actually spend doing that. It's just not very compelling.
We don't want playing your character to be a horribly frustrating and unforgiving experience. But we do want there to be some challenge to it. If Ret was a miniature golf course (oh boy) we want to put some little windmills and castle drawbridges on the course that you need to use your elite putting skills to navigate. If every course was a two foot green with a big hole at the end, your chance of failure would be near zero and also, I'd argue, would be your enjoyment of the course.
GC, on this note, the current talent that provides random Holy Power on Beta has far too much of a delay to really "watch out" for. The Holy Power gained from abilities other than Crusader Strikes does not instantly generate, making it very awkward. Will that be something Ret will have to deal with in Live, or is that merely a bug or otherwise incomplete coding? I've found it exceedingly difficult to keep track of Holy Power because when I use an ability like Judgement, it takes longer than the GCD for that extra Holy Power to actually register. This does not seem to be the case with Crusader Strike.
This is a technical limitation of the proc system. Crusader Strike's holy power isn't a proc but Divine Purpose is. Rogues using Seal Fate for example are pretty familiar with the mechanic. There are some things we could try to improve it since it sounds like it is pretty noticeable.
The problem is, despite the changes to the rune model DK DPS specs are often GCD capped in the current Cataclysm beta. It's one of the major mechanical issues DKs currently have. Unholy is frequently GCD capped even in frost presence, which presumably isn't the presence the spec is intended to use.
I don't want to turn this into a DK thread, but this point is relevant to other classes as well.
The DK GCD lock you are describing does not happen to level 83-85 characters as far as we can tell. It does happen to players who copy over their level 80 characters and find themselves with very large amounts of haste as a result of the stat conversion. Think about it. Your character (through no actual decision you made) has only haste and crit instead of haste, crit and mastery as you will when you're higher level. Similar mechanics affect other specs. Feral druids at level 80 have insane crit levels because all of that armor pen became crit.
If you're in greens in Deepholm at 83 and can't spend your GCDs fast enough (for any class), please let us know.
if history has taught us anything, RNG is bad. when its low, its useless - when its too high, it defies the point of having a proc the first place.
That's not what my history book says. RNG is very, very good for the game. Without it, every single combat outcome could be predicted with absolute certainty. RNG can be frustrating to deal with as a player. It's a challenge you must learn to navigate and overcome. I would argue the primary source of skill in a WoW player, in PvE anyway, is being able to handle situations that they did not predict.
Art of War will proc often enough to be a significant dps increase (too large in beta at the moment, to be honest). But over the course of a long fight, it will proc with almost 100.0% certainty. If Art of War was a talent that had a 5% chance to proc per battle, then yeah, it would be hopelessly frustrating. It will proc though, so then the issue mostly becomes can you react to the timing of the proc?
Other
A frequently seen, but always interesting question on our forums is this one: What is your favourite class, and why?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469219309&sid=1
What would happen to Deathwing if his fate was in your hands?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469478737&sid=1
There are many marvellous and wonderful places everywhere in Azeroth, but which place is the prettiest?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469529652&sid=1
Just as there are many pretty and amazing things in Azeroth, so are there many horrible and disturbing things... but which is the creepiest?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469529734&sid=1
A top five list of the mightiest beings in Azeroth, listed from the most powerful to the weakest. What would your list look like?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469529050&sid=1
Arthas was slain indeed, but what happened to his body?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469339397&sid=1
If you were to design the ideal battleground, what would it look like and what would be in it?
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469479620&sid=1
Guides, Guides, Guides!
Mürdon of Earthen Ring is working on a very nice series of video tanking guides to help new & experienced tanks alike with the day to day duties of the role.
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=14469529106
Nervos of Zenedar is somewhat of a specialist on Warrior macros, and he has decided to share his knowledge with the rest of the Warrior community.
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469479668&sid=1
Andranik of The Sha'tar have posted a short guide on military roleplay, which offers tips on roleplaying a character in the military and how to run a military style roleplaying guild.
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14469219739&sid=1
Have a splendid week everybody :-)
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