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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.
Warlords of Draenor: PvP Power's proposed re-design
Blizzard Community Manager Lore has been posting up a storm in the PvP forums, talking about the proposed redesign to PvP Power with Warlords of Draenor. There's also another post after the break. Lore Quote: If you guys are doing as much number tinkering as you claim I don't know why you wouldn't take this opportunity to rethink pvp power altogether I'm all for differentiating gear but I find it pretty silly that a stat called "pvp power" exists at all. We are planning to revisit PvP Power in Warlords. Our current thinking is that, instead of a flat percentage increase to your normal damage/healing in PvP (as it is currently), it'll be a bonus amount of your spec's primary stat (Strength, Agility, or Intellect). Here's an example with some completely made-up numbers: lets say a piece of gear has 80 Strength and 30 PvP Power on it. In a PvP environment, that would total out to be 110 Strength. Meanwhile, an equivalent piece of PvE gear might only have 100 Strength on it. Again, those numbers are purely hypothetical, but hopefully it illustrates the idea. That change accomplishes a couple of things for us. First, it lets us keep PvP and PvE item levels closer together, while still ensuring that PvP gear remains best for PvP and vice versa. It also "demystifies" PvP Power quite a bit; a percentage-based increase can be hard to really quantify without a lot of math, but raw stats are much easier to understand. As to the name, we can talk about it, but part of why we chose the term "PvP Power" to begin with was that it makes it extremely obvious that the stat only functions inside PvP environments. We want to be sure that players who purchase PvP gear know that it's going to be less effective in PvE situations. I'll bring it up, though :) source
Warlords of Draenor: Base resilience and Battle Fatigue potentially eliminated
Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka has been tweeting up a storm today on the topic of PvP design plans for Season 15 and Warlords of Draenor, the most interesting of which is the following: @Linklmm We dislike how large base resil and battle fatigue numbers have gotten too. Out goal is to reduce or eliminate both in Warlords. - Holinka (@holinka) January 9, 2014 I think this is an admirable goal, base resilience and battle fatigue are confusing to some, and annoying to others, but I'd be really interested to see how they do it. Resilience, although not Battle Fatigue, has been part of the game almost since PvP first got instanced, and it's a valuable option for the devs to tune incoming PvP damage so that it can cope with the ever-inflating stat levels in PvE. Yes, there'll be a squish, but then PvE will still almost certainly scale up. So I'm pleased they aren't planning on taking the rather bold step of completely removing it, to leave themselves without the option to reintroduce it easily would seem a little foolhardy, and not something they'd be likely to do. I'd imagine that if it were to go, there'd have to be some method to increase player health, or at least effective health, in instanced PvP, and there'd have to be some formula changes to healing, too. I'm looking forward to beta!
Patch 5.3 and more with Ghostcrawler
In case you hadn't heard the news, patch 5.3 is set to hit live servers tomorrow. While 5.3 doesn't include a new raid, there are a host of different new activities, including four new scenarios, heroic scenarios, a ton of pet battle changes, and of course the advancement of Mists of Pandaria's storyline as the heat ramps up between Alliance, Horde, and an outlier faction of Horde rebels. It's back to the Barrens again -- and this time, Crossroads isn't the area of contention. But on top of all of the new content comes a ton of different class and content changes as well. We sat down to chat with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street about patch 5.3's changes, as well as some upcoming changes for patch 5.4, response to subscription losses, Vengeance changes, that big unannounced feature we've all been dying to hear more about, and much more.
Patch 5.3 PTR: PvP Power percentage nerfs
The latest PTR build has brought with it a change to PvP Power, as MMO-Champion reported earlier today. The change was to the amount of points of PvP Power that it takes to push your percentage up by 1%. The number of points for a 1% increase in PvP Power went from 265 to 400. Currently, if you have, say, 12,000 PvP Power, on live servers you would get around +45% damage from PvP Power, and 22.6% additional healing from PvP Power. On the PTR, however, 12,000 PvP Power will only give you an extra 30% damage from PvP Power, and, at current numbers, which are still fairly fluid, around 30% extra healing. Of course, don't forget with those healing numbers that Battle Fatigue has been increased to a proportionate level. This change was a little surprising, so I did what I always do now, tweeted Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka to get his input on the change. He tweeted the following shortly thereafter: PvP Power change intentional. Reduce gear gap. Reduce bursty damage/healing gameplay. Reduce power of sockets. - Holinka (@holinka) April 27, 2013 Holinka makes some excellent points. This is a great way to reduce the power of sockets, and to bring down the burst which has caused such problems this season, as well as taking healing down in proportion. So what's all the fuss about? Well, players are worried that, with the resilience changes, this will make PvE gear a more equal or even superior choice for PvE come patch 5.3. And it's a reasonable concern. While it's great that PvE gear will be viable for PvP, PvP gear should still be the out-and-out best. I discussed the comparisons between various levels of PvE gear and PvP gear in an earlier article, but this change may well alter these numbers. Both Cynwise and Eldacar, PvP maths masters, are looking at the numbers, so we'll have to wait and see the result. Preliminary reports from ArenaJunkies look good, still asserting that PvP Power is strong enough to beat PvE gear. Also, I can't help thinking that Holinka and his team have considered this issue. To repeat my earlier message, don't panic! Do you want to capture flags, invade cities, attack towers, and dominate the enemy for your faction? Do you dream of riding your War Bear with pride? We'll steer you to victory with secrets of Battlegrounds and Arena, prepping you with proven addons and keybindings that win! Send questions or comments to olivia@wowinsider.com.
Blood Pact: Look Dreadful with PvP gear for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill personally loves this tier of PvP gear since the horns look like her favorite Disney villain, who was also purple and had a tinge of green in her fire. Even the name -- Malevolent -- is so close! I have only 7268 Honorable Kills on my warlock. I scored a few during a cross-realm Sha of Anger raid hosted by a PvP realm, but I've only played casually in random battlegrounds in past tiers. My experience includes memories of an SL/SL demonoloy lock in Isle of Conquest during Wrath of the Lich King and dealing with the, shall we say, "vicious" turnover of the Season 9/10 gear transition. Everything's a bit fuzzy for PvP in between those memories. Recently, I'm sure my DoT dominance of battlegrounds was due more to my company of guildmates, my Dragonwrath, and my heroic Cunning of the Cruel than any skill I had, but I'm not entirely new to flinging my enemies around in fear. But this is the warlock column, not the Warlocks-Who-Only-Raid column. While I reach out to warlocks around the world for warlock-centric PvP advice, how about we peruse the gearing options for dipping our toes into level 90 PvP?
PvP Power, PvP Resilience and PvE gear
For any readers who don't know, Mists of Pandaria brought about a fairly substantial change in PvP gear. Resilience and Spell Penetration were removed, and replaced with two shiny new stats: PvP Power and PvP Resilience. PvP Resilience is essentially the same as the old Resilience stat, reducing your damage taken from other players. It's active all the time, whenever you're wearing your PvP gear. PvP Power is not, as many believe, a direct 1 for 1 counter to PvP Resilience. PvP Power increases your damage against other players. So, if you're a player who has 0 PvP power, hitting a player who has 50% damage mitigation from PvP Resilience, and your hit does 100 damage, it will only hit them for 50 damage. Say you are that same player, only now you have a 100% damage increase against other players from PvP Power. Your 100 damage hit now hits another player for 200 damage. But, the player with 50% damage mitigation is still resisting 50% of that damage, so it hits them for 100 damage. Of course, these values are not correct in-game, but we're getting to that. They're just for illustration!
Encrypted Text: Deftly leveling your rogue in Mists
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. If druids are going to roll on our leather, I'll gladly roll on theirs. Regardless of your spec of choice, leveling your rogue in Mists of Pandaria should be an enjoyable experience. I tend to enjoy combat's simple Sinister Strike-spamming playstyle for the leveling grind, but subtlety's amazing burst and assassination's potent poisons are more than powerful enough to get the job done. If you were lucky enough to acquire your Fangs of the Father, they'll carry you until level 88 or 89 with their awesome damage. The first key to a swift leveling experience is to minimize your downtime. The less time you spend in combat, the longer it will take to hit 90. The second key is to increase your damage output. While our damage is already formidable, taking out targets faster is always a good thing. The third and final key is to eliminate the competition. If a member of the opposing faction is killing mobs in the same area that you are, you need to increase the supply of mobs by reducing the demand.
What to expect from patch 5.0.4
Patch 5.0.4 will be here on Tuesday, Aug. 28. As with other pre-expansion patches, 5.0.4 will include some important changes that will reflect gameplay in Mists of Pandaria. To be perfectly clear, while this is a pre-patch for Mists, it is not Mists itself and shouldn't be confused with the game we'll all be nabbing on Sept. 25. While there are some features from the beta that we'll see go live with this patch, others will not be released until the new expansion goes live in September. This is a confusing time for some players, because they're not quite sure what to expect when it comes to the pre-expansion patch. Will new features be rolled out? Will we see new instances or profession changes or playable pandaren? To avoid confusion, here's a short primer on what you will and will not see in patch 5.0.4.
Ghostcrawler briefly discusses PvP power and PvP healing
Just a short while ago, everyone's favorite blue crab, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, posted briefly on the U.S. forums in response to a thread regarding the function of PvP power and PvP healing. This certainly makes for interesting reading and may allay some fears of the PvE community regarding the use of PvP gear in dungeons and raids. Is this testing or speculation? Because PvP Power and PvP Resilience should work anywhere with regard to DPS, but of course only when you are attacking or being attacked by other players. The only thing that doesn't work is PvP Power-fueled healing. At the moment, you only gain the healing benefit when in BGs and Arenas. The reason is because that we don't want PvP gear to be super effective for PvE content (useful is fine, but super effective is not). That design goal is easily met for damage dealers, because they won't benefit from PvP Power when damaging creatures. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple check for us to determine if a healer is healing damage done by PvP or PvE. In an Arena or BG you can make that assumption, but in the outdoor world you may be engaging in world PvP, or you may just be questing. We are considering just letting PvP Power affect healing everywhere but dungeons and raids. That would solve world PvP and only risk unbalancing group questing and world bosses. Even the world bosses probably don't represent a huge game balance risk, given that the option always exists to get tons of players together to zerg them. source So to sum up, PvP power is easily developed to work exclusively in PvP scenarios for DPS and tank specs, as the game can easily tell what you're hitting. Healing is far harder, as you're always healing people wherever you are, so the game has to test for PvP scenarios before employing the PvP power. To me, as a PvPer, the second option that GC mentions sounds far more appealing. For the PvP healing buff were to only apply in Arenas and Battlegrounds seems quite contrary to Blizzard's desire to reignite world PvP. It would also leave PvP-geared healers rather defenseless outside of the Arena and Battlegrounds, were they to be attacked on PvP servers or similar while out farming, etc. I don't think that unbalancing world bosses is a huge price to pay, particularly considering Blizzard's earlier comments regarding the likelihood of world PvP taking place around world bosses. However, I'm sure PvEers will take comfort in the knowledge that Blizzard is taking steps to keep PvP gear from becoming too powerful in PvE scenarios. 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!
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.
