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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Buffs and debuffs in Mists of Pandaria
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. Last week, we talked about incoming statistics changes. This week, we're going to talk about the details to changes in buffs and debuffs and which classes can provide them. This will of course center around the warrior class and which buffs and debuffs we'll specifically bring to the table. We're also going to hopefully get more into the concept of why buffs and debuffs matter. When World of Warcraft debuted, warriors tanked primarily by their debuffs. Sunder Armor, Demoralizing Shout and Thunder Clap were considered essential for progression tanking. As time has progressed, debuffing mobs and bosses has diversified so that many DPS specs have access to these debuffs. Meanwhile, buffs grew in importance to the point that warriors (DPS or tank) also gained access to a few of those. As the game evolved from The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King and now Cataclysm, buffs and debuffs were consolidated so that various classes offered access to them to prevent any class from having a monopoly on them. Now, with Mists of Pandaria on the horizon, we're seeing more of this evolutionary process. What does this mean for warriors? Let's talk about that.
Why Dragon Soul nerfs are good for everyone, especially hardcore guilds
Blizzard took a lot of flak for the initial nerf of Dragon Soul last month; this month, the words are flying on the internet again. Dragon Soul's being nerfed a culminative 10% is too much for some people, because Blizzard has truly thrown in the towel and given up producing hard content -- or at least that's what people claim. The reality is quite a bit different. The Dragon Soul nerf serves an important purpose on several levels, no matter what your style of play. The casual guild The casual guilds will probably see the most immediate benefits from this nerf in terms of progression but the least in the long term. Bosses will be going down faster, mechanics will naturally have more error allowance, and morale of casual guilds will raise as progression happens. Players will still come and go, and some may decide that they want more of a challenge and start to look at forming hard mode groups or switching guilds altogether. But that is a natural part of any guild; personnel rotation happens. At the end of the day, this buff will probably attract and retain as many people as might move because of its effects.
RIFT devs on Russian revolution, improved itemization, and solo success
RIFT Live Producer Hal Hanlin and Systems Producer Adam Gershowitz were flagged down by fansite Magelo to tackle a grab bag of various questions about the game, including the process of injecting this title into the hearts of the Russian populace. According to Hanlin, the Russian release of RIFT was "very smooth," and he credits Trion Worlds' partner in the region, GFI, with assisting in that. Even as itemization improvements continue to roll into RIFT, the devs state that they're constantly monitoring damage output. For the next patch, Warriors will see a buff to their DPS as attack power will be tweaked to boost the pain. Hanlin promises that "soloable content is very important to us" and pointed at the success of Instant Adventures and the Chronicles of Telara as proof that Trion has responded to the desire for such content in the game. The devs touch on small details from the recent patch and their vision for expert dungeons as well.
Blood Sport: How will patch 4.3 impact PvP?
WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs. With patch 4.3 imminent and Arena season 10 due to end Nov. 29, it seems reasonable to assume the patch will appear in early December. While you're racing to get your team into title range, get that last piece of gear, or just running laps of your capital city, you might be thinking forward to the arrival of the patch and wondering what your fate will be in PvP as the nerf bat winds up for another swing. Firstly, let's deal with some housekeeping. Conquest points, the PvP equivalent of valor points, will now be far, far easier to earn from ordinary Battlegrounds. The first daily Battleground win will now award 100 conquest points, up from 25, and wins after that will award 50 conquest point, up from, well, none! The conquest cap will remain, so while it will still be far quicker to reach it through Arena, it will also be attainable via Battlegrounds of the non-rated variety. This makes it far easier for solo players to build up the resilience numbers people often demand (fairly or otherwise) for access to Arena and Rated Battleground teams or just to gear for Battlegrounds.
League of Legends prepares for Fizz patch
All this week, Riot Games has been releasing snippets of information on upcoming League of Legends champion Fizz, the Tidal Trickster. Fizz's mechanics preview gave a first glimpse into the sea monster's skills, including his ability to dodge attacks with his trident and to call a shark to eat the target enemy. A new art spotlight video gave us our first look at the champion and showed off both his signature trident weapon and one mean-looking shark. Today Riot published a patch preview video for the upcoming Fizz patch, detailing all the other changes coming with the update. Ranged carry champions are the focus of rebalancing efforts in the coming patch, with Caitlyn, Kog'maw and Graves being nerfed and Corki, Miss Fortune and Tristana due for buffs. With tournament season approaching, Riot is being careful to make these changes very minor to avoid upsetting current lane balance. Sona's auras are being nerfed a little, which isn't a surprise as Sona's usually the obvious choice for support. The season two summoner spell changes we discussed earlier in the week will also be going live with this patch, along with revamped mastery trees. Skip past the cut to watch the full video in HD.
Enter at Your Own Rift: Happy half-birthday, RIFT!
It's hard to believe -- but amazing nevertheless -- that RIFT is almost a half-year old. Six months ago, hundreds of thousands of gamers rushed through the gates to become the first to explore Telara, included me, and we were introduced to what's become one of the most dominating MMOs of the year. Following this smooth release (and it was smooth), Trion Worlds set a remarkable standard for itself by pumping out meaty content updates at a steady, rapid pace and marketing RIFT out the wazoo. We've already witnessed two live events, numerous subscription specials, the addition of a ginormous raid, and my not having hit 50 yet -- to my eternal embarrassment. Of course, there have been bumps in the road as well: a lackluster initial world event, a segment of disgruntled players and opponents, and the looming specter of several heavy-hitting MMOs waiting in the wings. But for right here and right now, this is Trion's time, and the company is taking advantage of this half-year milestone to light the fireworks and lay out the good china in celebration. We got on the phone with Scott Hartsman and his Justice League to talk about what the studio has up its sleeves for this event -- and what's next for this rapidly expanding title.
The Game Archaeologist uncovers Shadowbane: Your journeys
Every time I tackle a new game for this column, I keep rediscovering a key truth: that there are the bare facts of an MMO that you can research and process, and there are the memories and experiences that transcend the features bullet points on the back of the box. It's always terrific to see players come out of the woodwork and say things like, "You know what really made this game special...?" Shadowbane is proving an interesting case study as well. Because it flew so very low on my personal radar during the entirety of its operation, I naturally assumed it wasn't that good for the few souls who did play it. It turns out that I was wrong, considering just how many testimonies we've had from people who admit that if you could get past the graphical limitations and technical issues, there was a helluva game experience waiting for you. So to follow up from last week's interview with a blogger, this week we're going to hear from Massively readers who took the time to send in their favorite memories of Shadowbane so that they could be preserved in the hallowed Game Archaeologist vaults. Let's do it!
Reader UI of the Week: Recover from corruption with Icewalker
Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter. Reader UI is no stranger to UI crashes and corruption issues. Believe me, I've had my fair share of UI crashes that completely and utterly obliterated my entire setup. It is a sad state of affairs when your settings just decide to up and leave on you. Not fun, right? Losing your user interface in a crash or through some corruption issue is annoying and demoralizing, to be sure. However, rebuilding usually takes less time than you think and sometimes adds new and unique aspects to your UI that weren't there before. In destruction comes organized rebirth, or something like that. Icewalker sent in his UI with the sad tale of UI failure and starting over, which I felt for. Poor, innocent UIs getting corrupted, probably from Old God influence, just puts me in a bad mood. So today, we will take a look at Icewalker's new, basic UI and grieve together for all of those user interfaces lost in senseless crashes and the wanton ways of home computing.
Lichborne: A guide to death knight spell alerts
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. One pretty cool change coming to Cataclysm is the advent of spell alerts, on-screen notifications that direct you to a button you really should be pushing when you get some sort of class-specific proc or buff. Of course, many high-level players have had this for a long time in the form of player-made UI mods, but now newbies, UI minimalists, and people who just get confused by UI mods get a chance to have them, too. This week in Lichborne, we'll discover what spell alerts death knights get and discuss how best to apply them in battle. Generally, when a spell alert goes off, you'll hear a sound and see a certain graphic envelop your character on screen. If you have scrolling combat text turned on, you'll also see green or yellow text describing the buff. Finally, the button for the affected ability or abilities will light up on your action bar, telling you exactly what you need to push. Once you understand all this, it's pretty easy to anticipate the effects, but let's take a quick look at what you'll see so you know exactly what to expect and what to do.
Final Fantasy XIV expands details on the battle system
While Final Fantasy XIV doesn't go out of its way to be massively accessible, Square-Enix is clearly making a conscious effort to avoid confusion wherever possible. The official player site has been steadily receiving updates about how game systems work and what's going on behind the scenes, with the newest update discussing Battle Regimens and incapacitating body parts in combat. The systems had never been discussed in-depth before, but they now offer players a chance to understand exactly what each system entails. Battle Regimens are distantly similar in theory to the skillchains that ruled Final Fantasy XI's combat, but they have many differences in practice. Rather than being a chained deployment of specific skills, chains of general ability types will both buff the party and debuff the enemy party. Body parts, meanwhile, are targeted and damaged by certain weaponskills, with a helpful chart explaining what skills target what and which types of monsters can be affected. While it doesn't reveal the full details of Final Fantasy XIV's combat, it should provide players with an excellent place to start understanding the system.
The Road to Mordor: Pippin's top five plugins
This past week in LotRO's been a bit like riding river rapids: There's been a lot of rapid ups-and-downs, violent lurches to avoid dangerous objects, and a whole lot of noise that's drowning out the calmer waters ahead. For every piece of good news and positive word-of-mouth, there's been a lot of unfortunate bumps, such as server queues, dynamic layers, mouthy trolls and Codemaster's launch delay. However, I believe it's all going to settle down in a couple more weeks, and LotRO will emerge the better for it. So if this is your first week in Lord of the Rings Online, welcome! Find a great kinship, take time to smell the flowers, and hunt some orc for me. Today I'd like to take a look at one of the unsung heroes of the recent content patch -- the ability to create and use plugins (also called mods and addons) to enhance your user interface. While the system is still in beta and has a rough-around-the-edges feel to it, it's already shown great potential, particularly though the creativity that mod designers are pouring into it. While there are only a small number of plugins available as of right now and Turbine has yet to expand the scope of these Lua scripts beyond constrained limits, it's not too early to beef up your UI with these spiffy additions. Read on, free peoples of Middle-internet!
Addon Spotlight: Satrina Buff Frames
Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience -- the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same! This week, Satrina Buff Frames takes your buff and debuff frames to a whole new level. A lot has changed since the early days of buff and debuff presentation. Back in the early days, we were limited by very basic buff and debuff trackers. These days, however, one addon truly stands tall and proud, a giant among men. I speak of the impeccable Satrina Buff Frames, a wonderfully customizable and skinnable buff and debuff frame that can give any user interface awesome amounts of flexibility.
Icecrown Citadel raid buff to 20%
The Icecrown Citadel raid buffs, Hellscream's Warsong and Strength of Wrynn, just went from 15% to 20% with today's maintenance. As always, this means a bunch of raid groups will be able to progress a lot farther in Icecrown Citadel, and we're two thirds of the way to the final 30%. Assuming the schedule remains constant, the last Tuesday in June, the 29th, is when we can expect to see the next 5%. Adam Holisky: I'm doing 10k single target dps right now on my huntard in ICC. today I'll magically do 10.5k. that just doesn't seem right. Basil Berntsen: It's better than suddenly reducing the health of the bosses by 30% like they did in BC While this might cheapen raiding rewards for many hard core players, I'll take a slowly increasing, optional buff against a flat out 30% HP reduction any day. Also, I suspect we might see some new achievements or rewards for players choosing to not use the buff once it finishes hitting 30%.
Upcoming Flurry buff for enhancement shaman
Enhancement shaman have been having a hard time keeping up with the top DPS classes in Icecrown Citadel, and Blizzard has apparently taken notice. Ghostcrawler popped over to the official forums today with a note on a new buff for the enhancement tree: Ghostcrawler: Upcoming Enhancement buff We agree with some of the recent discussion about Enhancement dps. We are going to hotfix a change to the Flurry talent to increase it from 25% to 30% attack speed with 5 ranks. We also agree that Enhancement may have survivability problems and understand that players don't necessarily feel they can afford the bonus Stamina from the Toughness talent, at least in PvE. We don't have an immediate change to deploy here, but it's something we'd like to fix and a candidate for future patches. source Good news for enhancers everywhere. Hopefully the upcoming Cataclysm class changes preview will hold a lot more of it for you guys, and all types of shaman, for that matter.
Champions Online dev diary brings good tidings to meleers
In a world of guns, atomic blasters, telekinetic blows and eye lasers, the superhero who relies on getting up close and personal with fists or weapons becomes the underdog. Ever since launch, melee heroes in Champions Online have struggled with the disadvantage -- perceived or real -- of having to close the gap to an enemy and wail away, as well as generally feeling Superman-levels of powerful while doing it. Enter Matt "Akinos" Danuser, who jumps on the stage for the latest Champions Dev Diary. Six months after launch, Matt and the team spent a lot of time reworking the melee power set, with the simple yet encouraging motto of "Make it fun, make it competitive, and make it fun."
AddOn Spotlight: SexyCooldown
AddOn Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience -- the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your AddOns folder will never be the same! This week, we get real sexy. Timers for spells is an imperative addon for many classes that rely on steady rotations of DoT management and keeping debuffs up on enemies. DPS can be greatly altered by the careful balance of spell effects lasting for certain periods of time on enemies. There are a lot of good timers out there for spells and abilities, but today I want to introduce you to my favorite. If this addon is old news to you, and you already know how powerful it can be, help out the less fortunate! If you're new to his wonderful piece of code, stay a while and listen, as I sing a love song to SexyCooldown.
Spiritual Guidance: Food, flasks, and potions
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. I'm the fish girl. I never wanted it to be this way. I never wanted to be that girl. You know, the fish girl: the woman in the raid who takes it upon herself to make sure all her fellow raiders are eating right by supplying Fish Feast after Fish Feast. Sure, sometimes it's a fish guy (in fact, just the other day my heal captain joked that he had brought Capri Sun and orange slices for the raid) but usually it's a woman. I guess it's a maternal thing, or maybe it's wanting to save time by always going in with max buffs. Whatever it is, I wasn't always like this. In fact, I used to wonder why my raid leader's wife would so willingly spend her feasts on our raid as we wiped all over 3-drake Obsidian Sanctum. I admired her generosity, particularly because I felt they were going to waste on stupid mistakes, and her efforts deserved better. Then one day, after I had moved onto another guild, I found myself surrounded by raiders who were lacking vital nutrients in their diets. That's how it began: first I was helping with the fishing, then I started spending my own precious spices. The first day I laid a feast in a raid, I felt my feminist side cringe. But before I go off on that tangent, let me clarify that this article isn't about fish (not exclusively anyway), it's about the various consumables available to priest healers.
Moonkin may receive a buff soon
Balance druid performance has been noticeably lagging in raids. While moonkin have long had a problem being too easily +haste-capped with Wrath, there's another issue on the not-too-distant horizon in the form of the "lunar +crit cap." Essentially, when a lunar eclipse procs and the player turns to the Starfire portion of the rotation, the combination of raid buffs, gear, and procs make Starfire crits all but inevitable. While this may sound like a welcome DPS increase, it does have the unhappy result of the spec seeing increasingly less benefit from the +haste and +crit that exists in abundance on Icecrown raid gear. Blizzard has known about this for a while, but the issue with Nature's Grace and the soft +haste cap isn't easily fixable without impacting both Restoration and Starfire (where the NG proc is still useful), and the +crit cap is the effect of unintended stat inflation in Wrath. Enter Zarhym on Wednesday to announce news of a possible change to the Earth and Moon talent in a future mini-patch, granting 2/4/6% spell damage to the moonkin, up from 1/2/3%. While this isn't set in stone (and Balance players are already aware that an overhaul to the Nature's Grace issue probably won't happen until the Cataclysm content patch at the earliest), it's been greeted as a decent short-term fix. It's also a means of improving the scaling of what remains the moonkin's best stat (+spellpower). Zarhym did warn that the change may not go through in this form, and we're also waiting for news on when this mini-patch will hit. Stay tuned for future announcements.
Breakfast Topic: The effect of nerfs and buffs
A question for the readership this morning (well, two) -- is a recent nerf to a specific class a strong incentive against playing it for you? Conversely, does a buff to a class make you more likely to play it? Blizzard's observed in the past that there's often a correlation between the perception of a class as overpowered and the number of people who choose to play it (witness the proliferation of rogues in classic WoW, for example), so it seems fair to say that at least a portion of the player base's class choice is impacted by the conclusion they reach on design decisions. Then again, my own experience in-game -- and the pattern of comment votes here on WoW.com concerning class changes -- leads me to believe that yo-yoing between classes based on which one is doing "best" at any given time is not the overwhelming trend. The Warcraft Census' numbers on class population also seem to be evening out, slowly but surely, from a little bit over 6 months ago (which was itself an improvement over very lopsided numbers in favor of death knights and paladins shortly after Wrath went live). This would seem to suggest that, over the long term, people continue to play the class they like most for reasons that survive design changes. Or is it just that each character represents such a significant time investment that most people don't think it's worth it to switch mains? I'm sure that arena and PvP as a whole wind up driving a portion of this, but what impact do class nerfs and buffs really have? If your main was ever nerfed, did you wind up playing a different toon, or did it just not matter that much to you? If your main was buffed, was it genuinely more fun to play?
Hotfixes incoming for some DPS and tanks, not hunters or priests
Ghostcrawler has dropped information on the forums about a few incoming hotfixes to patch 3.3. The first three changes are posted over on the DPS role forum: Hunger for Blood will increase damage by 10% instead of 15%. Assassination rogues needed damage, but they got too much, and this will bring them back. Sorry rogues -- the tooltip, we're also told, might not change right away. Scourge Strike will crit only once, not on the shadow portion of the damage. "This change just proved to be too bursty in PvP and provide too much sustained damage in raids." He also gives lots more explanation of the change on the forums -- this one will be discussed quite a bit. Rolling Corruptions will no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. More of a bugfix than a change, says GC -- the haste value should drop out to normal after a few ticks of the spell. Elsewhere, GC says that there are no changes planned for the new hunter epic ammo, so find a friendly engineer and stick to them like glue. There is a hotfix incoming for the bug that causes tanked mobs to move around randomly -- thank goodness on that. And SW: Pain's immunity from the haste change for shadow priests will probably stay right where it is.
