The Daily Blues

My raid sat me, not because I didn't bring a useful chunk of raid synergy, but because some other guy brought it in a more convenient package. I'm sticking with the guild though. I love those guys, even though they don't let me play much, and I think they're going places with their penchant for min / maxxing.

Seriously though, we'd like to iron out some of the disparities where one buff requires more maintenance or RNG or talent points than another, but I have a hard time imagining that many players are really being negative impacted by the relative convenience of identical buffs.

Pushing for more awesome buffs isn't going to lead to more awesome buffs. It's going to lead to more homogenization and less group synergy overall. We'd be in a land where every raid buff or debuff just passively radiates a 1% bonus or whatever so that your group composition had an almost trivial contribution to your success. I'm not sure that would be as much fun though. We don't think the buffs have to be identical. They just have to be close enough that it isn't a major consideration for most reasonable guilds or pugs.

I figured if I made the class I play really overpowered that nobody would notice. I thought I could slip it past my coworkers and the thousands of people who work at Blizzard. I figured for all their vaunted "theorycrafting" that the community would never catch on. Most importantly, I figured being able to own folks in PvP was worth risking my amazing and much beloved job for.

Or maybe it's just that all the classes and specs played by Blizzard employees are overpowered. :)

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Truth be told, I tend to gravitate towards specs that are under-represented or deemed underpowered because I want to understand first-hand what their problems are. There also tends to be less competition for spots among all the flavor of the month specs. :)

Some players like having a reason to still visit older content and a reason to do something on nights other than raid night, while other players want to be able to log in, raid, and be done for the week. It's hard to provide an incentive structure compelling enough for the first guy without the second feeling like he has to grind. The emblem system has a natural tapering off period where you start to get everything you need and have less and less a reason to keep earning them. But it can feel pretty overwhelming when a new tier starts and you're counting up the hundreds of badges you're eventually going to need.

The problem, and something for which we have a solution, is that the costs are balanced around the maximum badge income per week, which means doing both raids, the weekly raid quest, the weekly Icecrown raid quest, and a heroic run every night. That's a bit much for most players, but since the option is there, some feel like they have to do it. On the other hand, if you have more than one character you care about, then you could burn yourself out quick.

There are alternatives though. As a simple example, if you could run all your Dungeon Finder groups in one or two nights for the week without having to log on every night, it might feel less grindy to you. (Again, for some players doing anything more than a few times is going to feel grindy, but it's impossible for us to develop content faster than players can consume it.)

So... couple of thoughts here.

I think two difficulty modes work better when the following are true:

– You don't need to do the normal version 100 times before doing the heroic version.
– You aren't running both normal and heroic every week (or even 10 vs. 25 every week).

It feels more like a difficulty selection when the players who want an extra challenge can go hit that challenge right away. When you have to run the normal version a lot first, you just risk burning out faster, and you also learn the encounter specifics so well that by the time you hit heroics, the basics aren't a challenge any longer.

You get rage starved on low level content (this isn't going away)

It will still be much better than it is today. You will get more rage per damage done and for damage mitigated or avoided. Compare the amount by which your health increases over time to the amount by which boss damage increases over time. The second is larger and since we're scaling around the former in the future, the delta should be smaller than it is today.

We're balanced around infinite rage, which hurts us while OTing (this doesn't seem to be going away)

Nobody should have infinite rage, therefore the delta between tank and OT (and dps warrior for that matter) shouldn't be as drastic. If there's a fight where an OT literally has to stay in full tanking gear and spec but then never takes much damage (say for example you just sit there and dps until phase 4 at which point you have to handle adds that never appear again) then you might have low rage, but then we probably made a bad encounter.

Retribution and Enhancement in Cataclysm are unlikely to ever have to worry about mana much. That part isn't changing. My point was that because they both have cooldown limited gameplay, we need to make sure there are enough decisions going on that the specs A) aren't boring and B) have some variance in performance depending on the skill of the player playing them. I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

As your health increases, the rage you get per damage point decreases. However as you go into harder content, you are going to be taken a lot more damage. The intention is that you get about the same rage income no matter how the boss actually deals damage (fast vs. slow attacks, or raid auras vs. adds for instance).

You are also getting rage from fully avoided or partially mitigated hits, which is huge.

You can, I suppose, try to strip off all your Stamina gear in order to generate more rage, but you'll have survivability problems, and we have a mechanic in place to make sure tank damage and threat while tanking maintains high anyway.

Okay, GC – but you do realize that as your gear improves and you gain more health, your rage income decreases on older content, right? Which means that players are still going to be rage-starved on older content, especially if that older content is balanced around a certain health ratio.

True, but it will be worlds better than it is today for a few reasons. 1) You will be getting more rage per swing, since you won't be penalized for your lower dps relative to Arms / Fury. 2) You will be getting full rage on anything avoided, mitigated or absorbed. 3) You have shouts and things to fill in the gaps. 4) Your dps when tanking will be higher than it is today. 5) If we go with scaling bosses, as we've suggested we might do, then you will also crit more often on weaker creatures.

If after all that you still feel like you don't have enough rage, then pull things faster. :)

Is WoW finally starting to show cracks? I'm kinda worried now o.o

Ever onward my friend. We have so much more in store. Though we will miss him, our paths are merely taking different directions.

No one here approached dispel mechanics with the idea that PvP takes precedence over PvE, so there's little reason to object in that regard. The changes to class systems in Cataclysm we've announced thus far are being proposed to make the game better, both in terms of PvP and PvE. Mind you, we have a host of changes planned for every class we plan to share in the future. Before providing overviews of our goals for each class though, we wanted to give you a look at some changes to more broad systems.

While the feedback is welcomed, I'd caution players to consider this information with an open mind, rather than directly translating the proposed changes into the class systems of Wrath of the Lich King.