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Warlords of Draenor: Itemization changes on the way
According to the latest round of alpha patch notes from patch 6.0, we're in for some major itemization changes in Warlords of Draenor. While we've had bits and pieces of information regarding itemization and stat changes in the upcoming expansion, we didn't really have a lot of clarification or detail on exactly what those changes are going to be. The latest iteration of patch notes has cleared that up considerably, and expanded on what little we knew. Hit and Expertise are both gone, replaced instead with a universally useful secondary stat. Three new secondary stats have been added -- Bonus Armor, which simply increases armor; Multistrike, which grants attacks and abilities a chance to fire an additional time for 30% effectiveness; and Readiness, which reduces the cooldown of several class abilities with long cooldowns. Multistrike works for both damage and healing abilities, making it useful for all classes and specializations. In addition, the amount of role-specific stats is being reduced. Tanks will use Armor, which replaces both Dodge and Parry, and Spirit will be useful only to healers. But it's the changes to items themselves that sound absolutely intriguing.
Warlords of Draenor: Dodge, Parry, Hit and Expertise and their loss
Well, we finally have a concrete sense of how we're going to function in a world without hit, expertise, dodge or parry on our gear, thanks to the Warlords of Draenor alpha notes. So far, it looks rather interestingly painless. First up, dodge and parry as stats on gear are gone and the amount of dodge and parry we get for agility and strength, respectively, will be reduced by 25%. Active mitigation is in, avoidance is out. You can still get some small amounts of dodge or parry from class-specific effects (Riposte, for instance, has been reworked to give 100% parry after a critical strike until you parry an attack, and it can stack up to 2 times, meaning you can have two parries in a row before you lose the 100% parry from Riposte) but in general, you won't be able or willing to gear for those stats anymore. As for hit and expertise, their removal leads to the change in design to balance out how we hit things. Against monsters and such up to three levels higher (including bosses, who as skull level are always three levels higher) you'll have 100% chance to hit, 3% chance to be parried, and 0% chance to be dodged. This means that you'll still want to be standing behind them if at all possible. Tank classes, however, will have an extra 3% parry reduction baked into their tanking specializations, meaning that they will have 100% chance to hit and 0% chance to be parried or dodged. They can stand up front. Dual-wield classes (rogues, enhancement shamans, frost DK's, fury warriors, potentially windwalker monks) will have an additional 17% chance to miss with no way to improve it in order to balance their DPS out against 2h users. For the complete list of the removed/changed abilities that once granted hit or expertise or which now reduce chance to be parried, the full list is behind the jump.
Stats 201: Getting your secondary stats just right
Though we did an article covering the game's basic stats that will guide you through leveling any character, once you hit level 90 you need to start considering your secondary stats. These stats, like hit and expertise, become more important when you stop leveling through content and gear to stop at top-tier content. Unfortunately, figuring out what these stats are, what they do, and what you need isn't exactly self-explanatory -- sometimes even requiring you to consult an addon or website to figure out whether a new piece of gear is really an upgrade. Fortunately, Blizzard is working on simplifying the system with Warlords of Draenor, removing a some secondary stats and the ability to reforge gear -- which will make it a lot easier to tell what gear is an upgrade and start using it immediately. Unfortunately, if you're a new 90 or you've just boosted a new character to 90, you still have to deal with the current system, so we'll lay out just what the secondary stats on your gear mean -- and how to tweak them to your liking with reforging so you're ready to hop into LFR or whatever else you want to do.
Lichborne: Looking back at major 2013 news for death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Welcome to 2014. With this, the first Lichborne column of the new year, we're going to examine some of the biggest death knight related new stories of the past year. What were the big things that plagued us, and how were they resolved? Patch 5.2 and the rise of unholy 2013 began with patch 5.2 on the PTR. This is the patch that gave us some long-needed updates to the unholy tree. Unholy had become a very unpopular tree. While some of this was due to the fact that it just didn't do as much damage as frost DPS, it was also in large part due to its unique rotation and rune-spending scheme, which left some ungainly gaps if you didn't apply diseases just so or pre-load death runes for your AoE rotation. Blizzard finally responded to these complaints in late December of 2012 by adding some changes to the patch 5.2 PTR, including Plague Strike adding both diseases for unholy and Reaping working for Blood Boil and Icy Touch, designed to ease the complaints. Just as a bonus, Patch 5.2 bought us what I still think were some of the most fun and flavorful set bonuses of the expansion, as well as some tweaks to make Conversion and Soul Siphon as enticing as Death Pact.
Lichborne: BlizzCon 2013 news for Death Knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. BlizzCon 2013 bought with it a new expansion, Warlords of Draenor, and while we did learn a lot about upcoming changes, very few of it was actually class-specific. Mostly what we got in class specific news was the level 100 talents, which, while awesome, will likely change pretty significantly even between now and the beta, to say nothing of when Warlords of Draenor goes live. That said, there were still a lot of very interesting system changes that herald great things for death knights, and we'll go over those today as well. New Talents and Skills The level 100 talents continue the storied tradition of level 90 talents in that they very obviously take their cue from the prime death knight, Arthas himself, the Lich King. They also address something we've talked about before, ability bloat. Instead of adding new skills, 2 of them simply replace existing things.
Lichborne: DPS stats for tanking death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. So Rossi bought this up in his last column, and I feel like it is a valid question. If haste is a valid gearing strategy for Paladins, why shouldn't it be for the other tanks? The idea of haste and critical strike as being valid, even desirable stats for a tank seems almost anathema, but as of Mists, especially, it's worth a look. Paladins even have a gearing strategy built around haste. Are they the only ones? Should death knights be considering haste and critical strike rating? Should Blizzard be looking at ways to make haste and critical strike rating more desirable for tanks? We'll consider those questions this week.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Itemization Concerns
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I admit the title is a fancy way for me to say I want to talk about a bunch of stuff, all related to warriors without dedicating the entire column to one of the topics. These things I want to discuss include: The ridiculous dependence on crit to the exclusion of pretty much all other DPS stats for fury. Warrior tank threat/DPS and how it holds back the class. The ridiculous amount of hit on Throne of Thunder gear. Why I'm still annoyed that haste does nothing for protection warriors. I know I've been flogging that haste for protection horse for a while, but it just irks me to see two of the plate classes getting solid use out of haste/expertise or haste/mastery gear for their tank sets and we get nothing. Considering point #2 for warrior tanks (namely, that our DPS and thus threat is just way behind the other tanks) I find it absolutely maddening to see haste be so completely useless for protection warriors. It doesn't give us resources at all, due to the way rage regenerates in Defensive Stance - it doesn't even help us with our rage generators like Shield Slam and Revenge because haste does nothing for our GCD. I took a pair of haste legs for my tank set recently (they were still a huge upgrade, that's how bad my old tank legs were) and every time I look at that haste on them, and know I can't reforge all of it away, I get this lump in my gut where the snarky itemization elitist in me says haste? Really? I hate that guy. I hate him even more because I know he's right. Haste has no business on my tanking gear because haste does nothing for a warrior tank. Nothing. We don't even generate rage from our autoattacks, so the miniscule increase in attack speed doesn't even avail us.
Lichborne: The trouble with hit rating and expertise
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Hit rating and expertise are the life blood of the max level PvE death knight. DPS death knights need exactly 7.5% hit rating and 7.5% expertise to avoid missing raid bosses or having their attacks dodged outright. Even tanks, while a miss is less of a big deal for them, may find hit and expertise helps them keep threat and prevent key debuffs from falling off the mob. They're so powerful that if you aren't near those caps, your DPS will suffer horribly, and in most cases, the one thing you do to increase raid DPS is to hit those caps if you aren't at them already. Now, this is what we have reforging and regemming for though, right? Sometimes it's just not that simple. Today, we'll take a look at the problems with hit gear and suggest some solutions. The big problem is that once hit and expertise do their job of letting you hit the mob, they are almost literally useless. Dual wielders get a little bit of extra help for their normal weapon hits, but 2 handed wielders get literally nothing else out of them at all. They're dead stats. Arguably, it's bad even if you are at the 7.5% caps, because that means you have a bit of hit and expertise. and expertise rating that's not needed for daily questing or dungeon runs, or even for most raid trash.
The Daily Grind: How do you define MMO expertise?
MMO expertise is hard to define nowadays. See, back when there were three or four titles in the genre, it was easy (if time-consuming) to style yourself as an expert. In 2013, there's a new MMO released every other week, and so it's quite challenging to keep track of them all, let alone play more than a handful at a time or know a title's mechanics inside and out. Massively's writers and livestreamers are mostly generalists, with a couple of exceptions, meaning that we play a huge variety of games at the cost of knowing everything there is to know about one or two of them. What about you, comment crew? Do you consider yourself an expert on certain titles or on the genre as a whole? How do you define MMO expertise? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Hyperspace Beacon: Advantages and disadvantages of SWTOR's free-to-play
In a recent Gamasutra article, Funcom's Craig Morrison argued that most games that have moved from subscription to free-to-play are "using a hybrid model, where the free-to-play is a trial and then what they really want is the users to move on to whatever they've called what used to be a subscription." You don't have to look too deeply to realize that was BioWare's intention when it shifted Star Wars: The Old Republic to a free-to-play model. But is there still some advantage to just playing free-to-play? Also, the Cartel Market, SWTOR's cash shop, both opened up a new real-money economic arena and transformed the in-game market. Most free-to-play cash shops offer cosmetic items or items that don't give players a clear advantage over other players. There are certainly no endgame items available on the market, but what about other buy-to-win items?
Lichborne: What do I do at level 90? And 2 other burning death knight questions
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Reading a guide is all well and good, but sometimes, even after you read, you still have questions or need clarification. This week, I've taken 3 questions I see death knights ask a lot at various places around the web, and provide some advice and clarification. Why don't tanks need so much hit and expertise? If you've been reading the column, you've probably noticed that I have de-emphasized hit and expertise when discussing blood death knight tank gear and strategy. This is for a very good reason. Certainly, active tanking is the rule of the day in Mists, which means in theory that tanks should want hit and expertise so their abilities land. In theory, if your Death Strike doesn't land, you don't get the healing or the blood shield, right?
Encrypted Text: Mists of Pandaria guide to a raid-ready rogue
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. I'm not a fan of gearing up. I hate watching my gear fade into obsolescence. I hate swapping out my legendary Fangs of the Father for a set of blue weapons that were given to me after I washed a few yaks and played the role of a pre-employment drug screener for some amped-up goats. Bill Gates infamously picks lazy people to do difficult jobs, because they'll find the easiest way to do it. I am that lazy person. I am always looking for the quickest way to get my rogue into raid-ready shape. The quicker that my rogue is geared up, the quicker I can get back to Eviscerating leveling players of the opposing faction. With a couple of weeks of grinding daily quests and some heroic dungeons mixed in, your rogue can be ready for the first tier of MoP raiding.
Patch 5.0.4 changes hit and expertise
We've covered this topic in terms of how it will work for Mists of Pandaria, but it can be easy to forget that as of next week, hit, expertise and spell hit will be functioning differently than they do now. Some big things to remember: Ranged attacks will be able to be dodged. This means that hunters will need expertise, making all physical DPS use the same hit and expertise formulas. Hunters and enhancement shaman will more closely share gear in the future, and as for patch 5.0.4, you hunters are going to want expertise. Expertise is now a rating, same as hit, and is normalized so that the same amount of expertise is needed to remove chance to be dodged as is to cap hit for special attacks, namely 7.5%. At level 85, you're looking at around 770 rating in each stat to hit 7.5%. (Without access to a reforge addon, I was just eyeballing it; I keep ending up slightly over.) This will cap hit for specials and white non-dual wielding and removed dodge. To remove parry would take a full 15% expertise, well over 1,500 rating. (Frostheim, our resident hunter guru, tells me that it's exactly 769 rating for 7.5% at level 85, and 666 rating if you have a hit or expertise racial. Evil.) Spell hit is intended to be equivalent to the chance to be missed and the chance to be dodged, so you're supposed to aim for 15% hit. You won't need to worry about expertise as a spellcaster; only hunters will need it, and they don't require 15% hit, only 7.5% hit. It's the same amount of total rating, but spellcasters get it all from hit, while melee and hunters get half of it from hit and the other half from expertise. The draenei hit racial adds exactly 1% hit, counted on your character panel, so if you see that you have 8.5% hit on your draenei, you can reforge away 1% hit safely. The human, orc and dwarf weapon racials add 1% expertise while using their various weapons. Trolls and dwarves gain 1% expertise with all ranged weapons for hunters of those races. As soon as you equip the proper weapon, the expertise is automatically calculated on your character panel. Again from Frostheim - "Also it's worth noting that pets inherit hit and expertise 50/50. So 1% hit gives your pet 0.5% hit and 0.5% expertise. Thus hunter who is hit and expertise capped will have a pet who is both, and a warlock/mage who is hit capped at 15% hit will have a pet that is melee hit capped and (dodge) expertise capped." Hopefully this will help you when you're on your way to the reforger come patch 5.0.4. You'll likely need less hit and slightly more expertise than you do now. If you're a hunter, you'll need expertise, period, which is kind of weird if you've played a hunter before. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Encrypted Text: Lifestyle of the Pandaria rogue
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. After writing Encrypted Text for nearly four years now, I have gotten into the groove of writing about how rogues will handle upcoming expansions. The upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion looks to repeat most of the last two expansions' changes: a complete poison revamp, talent trees slashed to the core, and no news on our missing Swirly Ball. Wait, Swirly Ball is back? Everything I know about rogues just went out the window. The developers avoid implementing major class changes via patches, preferring to deploy them via expansions. There's a natural separation between expansions that softens the blow of redesign a class mechanic. While rogues weren't fundamentally altered during Cataclysm's patches, there are already several changes brewing for us in Mists. We're gaining more raid utility, dropping a few outdated mechanics, and becoming more flexible with our abilities. How will these changes affect your day-to-day lifestyle?
Totem Talk: Hit rating, expertise, and enhancement in Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once a lonely tauren shaman in a bad Scarlet Crusade-themed transmog set, Josh Myers is now a female dwarf shaman with pigtails who raids as all three specs on a regular basis. He kept the same transmog set, though. A long time ago, in a Mulgore far, far away, I was a young tauren shaman who was attempting to gear up as enhancement after hitting level 70 for the first time. Enhancement shaman who have only started playing within the last two years won't remember the confusing beast that was enhancement gearing of yesteryear, but it was an adventure. First off, we gemmed strength exclusively. Yes, strength. Despite sharing gear with hunters, we got more (read: any) attack power from strength than we did from agility. More importantly, and this is where Mists of Pandaria changes will come into play, the enhancement shaman of The Burning Crusade didn't try for hit rating on their gear. In fact, we avoided it like a bear tank gemming agility avoids sunders on Warmaster Blackhorn. We did like expertise, which made the few items it existed on like Shard of Contempt best in slot, but it was almost never included on items, and there were no expertise gems. As a result, the majority of enhancement shaman ran with nearly zero hit rating and zero expertise. If you're reading this today, your jaw might have hit the floor. Never, you'll say, while pulling up your character sheet and crying over the whopping 2,284 secondary stat points we need to put into hit rating and expertise. Yes, you read that correctly. We spend 2,284 stat points simply making sure we can actually hit the boss.
Lichborne: The effect of the new stat changes on death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. We're still a couple of weeks away from the dam burst that is the Mists of Pandaria press event, but in the meantime, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler. He listed some stat changes coming in Mists that, while ostensibly not as complicated as those in Wrath, still hold some interesting and possibly major implications for class balance in the coming expansion. Let's dive right in and see what they mean for death knights. Blocking takes a week While it doesn't directly affect us, the blocking changes will certainly shake up the tanking hierarchy that we're a part of, so it's worth pointing out that the usual single roll combat table for dodging, parrying, or blocking a hit is gone. Instead, the chance to block will be calculated only after the dodge and parry chance is calculated. This essentially means that being unhittable is gone. You can't just stack to 102.4%. Of course, death knights and druids have never been able to do this, but they will now be joined by the shield tanks.
The Soapbox: On armchair development
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. A couple of weeks ago I penned a Soapbox that, to put it mildly, elicited passionate responses. While a few people sided with me in my belief that MMO combat is silly and sucky, the cries of the masses drowned us out with variations on "you know nothing, Jon Snow" and "go back to consoles, you inexperienced newb!" Some of the responses got me to thinking about game design in general and about game designers and their cult celebrity status in particular. When you cut through the anonymous insults and keyboard courage, most of my would-be critics were actually right about one thing: I'm not a game "developer." You know what's funny, though? That doesn't make a lick of difference when it comes to the ability to talk intelligently about games and game design.
Lichborne: The state of the patch 4.2 death knight
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Now that patch 4.2 has been out for a few weeks, it's a good time to look at the fruits of our nerfs. Patch 4.2 saw a surprising amount of death knight changes, from the nerfing of Obliterate to the last-minute buffing of Unholy Might. Nearly as conspicuous was the near complete lack of blood tanking changes. With all of this in play, we definitely expected some shakeups when patch 4.2 went live; now, it's time to take a look at how those shakeups have played out. Most stuff went more or less as expected, but there have been a few surprising twists. We'll tackle it all after the break.
Lichborne: More blood tanking questions answered
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. With the new patch 4.1 Call to Arms feature likely to be stuck near permanently on tanking, death knights are going to find themselves with a pretty nice little incentive to stay in their blood spec a bit more often. With that in mind, it's pretty lucky that we just finished going over the basics of blood tanking and gear tweaks for blood tanks. Considering that's still the hot topic, though, and that we're likely to see a surge in death knight tanks looking for that Call to Arms bonus in patch 4.1, I want to take one more week to keep on this whole tank thing and answer some of the questions I've seen floating around, both here and elsewhere.
Encrypted Text: Dissecting rogue stats
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any article suggestions! Do you remember when armor penetration was all the rage? While combat rogues lusted after all the ArP as they could get their hands on, the other physical DPS classes shared the same desire. I forgave all of the feral druids who asked for the leather gear with armor penetration on it; I know we have to share the agility-based leather gear with our furry friends. I didn't put my foot down until hunters, warriors, and even death knights started rolling on our stuff. While having such a powerful stat allowed us to scale competitively, it also created a massive amount of gear competition. Blizzard's developers decided to end armor penetration's reign as the top stat and actually named a successor to the throne -- agility. Agility is now a rogue's best stat, and since it's always on our gear, we never have to worry about whether we'll see it or not. The plate DPS classes now only want strength, and so our precious leather is safe from their clutches. The stat redesign also shifted the balance of power between the other secondary stats, and we saw several stat functions changed as well.
