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Escape Artist facing raised cooldown?
Are they toying with the Escape Artist cooldown? I sure thought this thread, after reading the first post today, would get closed down but quick, but instead, after a player asked for Escape Artist to be removed from the game, Drysc offered the compromise of a cooldown.Wait, what? Was he joking? Escape Artist, the Gnome racial ability that allowed them to ditch any roots once per minute, got a nice buff and was made instant cast at 2.0, but I hardly think it's overpowered enough that it deserves a cooldown. Drysc's comment seems a lot like a joke (and an MVP shows up later in the thread to "deny" the change), but could the ability be facing a nerf in the form of a longer cooldown?Advocates for it point to Will of the Forsaken, another "break free" racial ability (it allows Forsaken to break fear once every two minutes, and if EA is nerfed, it would probably be given a two minute cooldown). But WotF also provides 5 seconds of fear immunity after being used, and EA doesn't provide any immunities at all.Hopefully this is all a moot point, and Drysc was just messing with Gnomes (a hilarious pastime to be sure). But it could also mean that the little kneebiters are looking at an upcoming nerf.
A Druid with 122k health? She must eat her Wheaties.
As I was browsing the WoW forums earlier, I came across this little gem of a thread. A Druid named Scarmbrena from Boulderfist managed to obtain over 122,000 health (yes, you read that right) by stacking a buff called Mol'dar's Moxie. Mol'dar's Moxie, for those that don't remember the good old days of Dire Maul North "Tribute runs," was a buff given to you by Guard Mol'dar that grants an additional 15% stamina for 2 hours.Scarmbrena describes in the thread how she was able to stack this buff a total of 15 times, bringing her total stamina to 11,896 and her health to a whopping 122,394! Just to put that in perspective, Pathaleon the Calculator (the last boss in the Mechanar), has 130,000 health.Obviously, this qualifies as an abuse of game mechanics (albeit a creative one), but even more surprising is that the patch notes for 2.1 state that the Dire Maul Tribute buffs shouldn't work on a player over level 63, yet in the screenshot linked in the thread, Scarmbrena is level 70.I can't say I recommend that anyone try this since Scarmbrena almost got banned herself for it, but it is interesting to see a player amass that much health!
A case for patience on the PTRs
You'll forgive me for trying to inject a little reason into a nerf debate (an impossible task, probably), but that's what I'm about to try and do anyway.Yesterday, mages, warlocks, and shadow priests were up in arms about the changes on the test realm to the tailoring epic outfits. Blizzard was experimenting with adding ability stats to the armor while nerfing spell damage, and tailors went ballistic over the changes. And so, within a matter of hours, Eyonix announced on the forums that the changes had already been reverted and would not go to the live servers.Now, yesterday I said the nerfs weren't that big a deal, and since then, I've seen some good points that say they were-- lots of people spent lots of time and gold getting just these recipes together (some even leveled tailoring for just these pieces), and it definitely presents a problem to make serious changes to gear that people have already sacrificed a lot for.On the other hand, there were good reasons behind the changes as well. As even a few tailors have said, these crafted pieces matched up to the Tier 4 and 5 pieces, and I see problems with basically requiring clothies to be tailors to be competitive in the endgame. Many warlocks cried the most about the changes, but because +spell damage doesn't translate directly to most of their DOT spells, in many cases, they would actually be the least affected (Update: In hindsight, I shouldn't have judged how affected anyone was by this change. But that's not the point of this article-- read on.)But my point now isn't to argue whether these sets should have been changed or not. What I want to point out now is that being outraged on the forums and yelling at Blizzard about something that's happening on the test realms will actually impede the developers' abilities to make good changes on the live ones.
Breakfast topic: Hand out some buffs
theantipoet asks a great question over on Livejournal:If "you could buff any class -- any class but your own (your main or mains if you've got multiple) -- which class would it be and how would you buff them?"I'll say that if you want cool points on this one, you should stay away from any classes you play regularly-- for me at the moment, that'll be shaman, rogue, and hunter. I really like anti's answer of priests-- they are QQing a lot, but there is no reason they should be DPSing while paladins heal in raids.Personally, I'd hook up prot warriors a little bit-- right now, their DPS is such a joke that the only way they can really play is in instances. I'm not saying that we should give them tons of DPS-- that would mess everything up in PvP-- but just a little extra DPS would let them solo, and wouldn't unbalance PvE groups that much (since it's likely that if the group makeup is right, the prot warrior's DPS will still pale in comparison to your regular DPS class's hits).A buff like that isn't really necessary, but it's an interesting thought experiment to see where you might make positive changes that don't actually affect you. So if Blizzard suddenly gave you the chance to buff any class except your own, what would you say?
When it comes to nerfs, maybe change is good
Here's a fascinating post over on Terra Nova. Joshua Fairfield has been playing a lot of Arena PvP, and he suspects something very interesting: that the developers might not be trying for equilibrium in PvP at all. They may actually be trying for imbalance.Our assumption, he says, is that with every nerf and/or buff, the developers are trying to reach a nirvana of balance-- a game where every class has an equal chance to win when all of their abilities are used correctly. Keep in mind that the "chance to win" could only involve a percentage of the time-- Blizzard has already stated that they're working for a "rock, paper, scissors" solution, where rogues beat casters but warriors beat rogues, and so on. But we've assumed that the main goal is a balance, where as long as every class is played well, every class will win a certain percentage of the time.But Fairfield suggests the opposite-- that "games that seek permanent engagement by communities," i.e. MMORPGs like WoW, are actually working against equilibrium, and fighting to keep things constantly interesting. Mages are winning because of Pyroblast's high damage? Nerf it to make Mages use other spells. Warriors are being kited around? Give them a way out of it, so other classes have to learn new strategies.That's a wacky way of looking at game design, but it works for games like WoW because we're already expecting the rules to constantly change. Chess has an established balance-- rook moves a certain way, queen moves another way, and every game they will always move those ways. But WoW is dependent on the rules changing every patch-- if players maxed out their characters and learned all possible strategies, they'd quit paying the monthly fee. So in that strange sense, Blizzard should be happy when lots of players cry foul over a nerf-- the more players they affect with a change, the more they can keep interested. "Any change disrupts the current equilibrium," and forces players to figure out new ways to win.
Druids get a hotfixy gift
From a hotfix that is now live on the servers: The Druid ability Lacerate will now land a small amount of instant damage, causing it to generate threat against bleed-immune creatures. The Druid ability Mangle (Bear) will now generate 50% bonus threat So good news for druids who tank. Blizzard isn't completely giving them back all of their DPS-- Lacerate's debuff doesn't affect "skeletal" creatures (as it shouldn't, since they can't bleed), and Mangle doesn't give any more damage, but Blizzard says they realize Mangle works best as a "snap aggro" tool, and with the bonus threat, it should do that. I'm sure droods will still have their problems, but these are two nice buffs for tanking druids, no question.More are on the way, too-- Blizzard says they plan to up the armor on many high end Bear Druid items, "particularly raid sets," as many druids felt that those pieces didn't scale as well as warriors' did. Those changes, says Blue, won't be coming until 2.1.0, but they are coming.
Mystery buff incoming for priests! [Update 2]
Yep, a mystery buff -- doesn't that sound exciting? We have no idea what it is, because the CMs don't have the go-ahead to tell us yet, but Nethaera claims it's "a positive change." And though she's trying not to overplay it, there are a lot of hopes riding on it being something good. Nethaera hopes to have more information for us on Tuesday -- but until then, it's speculation run wild! Do any of you have predictions for the priest's mystery buff?Update: Nethaera is currently telling us that we may get news tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th. Sorry to get everyone's hopes up, but hopefully we'll have some official news soon.Update 2: I believe we have the final word on improvements for priests this patch via Nethaera.
Seeing the effects of guild affiliation
See, this post by superdeluxe over on Livejournal, I think, constitutes exactly the kind of great "emergent gameplay" that the folks at Terra Nova are so ga-ga over lately. The poster found his way into a guild that, because of their size, is well-known and loved on his side of the server, and as a result, he finds that he's getting "10-20 times the amount of Free buffs/free stuff/bow's/hugs etc than I did before."He's not on an RP server-- rather, his guild has just built up a social reputation, and he's benefiting from it. Likewise, a commenter on the post says his guild, because of PvP, has a negative reputation, and as a result, he became Kill-on-Sight for a number of opposing faction guilds around the server. The only way this stuff is built into the game is that Blizzard has put everyone's guild name above their character, and players have socially created all the rest of these affiliations themselves.Now, a lot of it simply follows from common sense: my guild isn't huge, but every time I see someone with my guild name, I'll /wave and buff, even if it's someone I don't know that well. We haven't really made too many enemies (well, we did have a little tussle with the alliance that we seperated from, but they've since dissolved), but as we've moved further and further into the endgame (we're still not server-first, but we're working on it), we've created more and more of a reputation as a known and trusted guild on the server.What other examples of this have you seen? I'm fascinated with the way players treat each other based on guild affiliation-- at their essence, guilds are mostly the social structure within a realm in the World of Warcraft.
Raiding and the consumables dilemma
Praetorian, over on Elitist Jerks has posted an interesting examination in the role that consumable buffs play in raiding. While this just popped into my own guild's forums, and although it's a couple of weeks old now, the point is still current and relevant.Praetorian summarizes by saying:"Consumables are too powerful, such that Blizzard's raid designers are forced into the untenable position of balancing around unbuffed groups and having their content steamrolled, or balancing around buffed groups and forcing players into a cycle of unpleasant farming in order to even have a chance."He goes on into great detail, breaking down the differences between the different tiers of raiding gear in terms of how they help in raiding, and then into the consumables. In the end, he calls for a change in how raids are approached by Blizzard in the development phase of the game.What do you think of Praetorian's analysis? Do you carry a lot of consumables with you, and do you think things need to change?[Thanks to Forge for the submission!]
