ghostcrawler
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Titanguard weapon enchant gone after all
Ok, so you remember how Titanguard, the 75 stamina weapon enchant, disappeared from 3.0.8? Apparently, that was intentional. Ghostcrawler spoke out yesterday on the rationale for removing it. In short, it was just too good. That 75 Stamina would have made it far and away the best tank enchant, and would have locked them into creating higher and higher tiers in future patches and expansions so tanks wouldn't just stick with Titanguard and be done with it. Not only would this lead to less variety in game, but the developers would be stuck specifically designing future encounters with the assumption that every single tank had that extra 75 stamina.Blizzard's certainly shied away from making certain enchants too powerful before. For example, the Crusader enchantment was given diminishing returns after level 60 specifically so it wouldn't overshadow any other weapon enchants. With that in mind, this move does fit in with Blizzard's modus operandi. And if nothing else, it's good that this was nerfed now, before it made its way onto the live servers. While some tanks may not be happy with the outcome, this is certainly an instance where the PTR testing process worked.Death Knights will still get to keep the +2% stamina on their Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle, in part to make up for the lack of a shield and a solid defense sigil. Ghostcrawler also did not rule out the possibility of future tanking enchants, but only if they could find out a way to prevent the same problems that caused them to take out Titanguard.
Blood Pact: Patch 3.0.8 and the portent of good things
So the patch didn't go through this week. It's alright, though. I guess we can wait another week or so for Patch 3.0.8, which seems to be getting heftier as the weeks go by. It's a patch that promises to be a pretty good one for Warlocks, and even then it's not the complete change. Ghostcrawler has said they're looking at improving Warlock DPS and survivability in the future, which means we'll probably be in a rough spot until 3.0.8 or -- later down the line -- 3.1 hits. Not excitingly, most of Patch 3.0.8 consists of bug fixes, so there won't be any major changes to gameplay or dramatic shifts in the way we do things. The biggest change is arguably in the way Ritual of Summoning works, which will save us Soul Shards the way Soulwells changed how we handed out candy. The new mechanic creates a sort of summoning object -- currently some sort of infernal flasher who opens up his cloak -- that works almost exactly like an instance summoning stone. This is great for raids, but not so hot for parties when you just want to summon one person. It has a cooldown of two minutes (down from the originally planned five).
[1.Local]: The WI week from the inside out
Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week. Don't be that guyYou are not prepared – but do you really need to be? Readers are of varying minds when it comes to how much preparation to expect (and even to demand) from fellow players in heroics and pickup raids. "Whether you like the idea of being 'carried' or not, I don't see a problem with people diving right in on heroics," notes Steve. "As many posters in this thread have demonstrated, if you know how to play your class, you can make up for being undergeared. ... I recognize that most of the folks out there in your PuGs will not be min/maxed or have ever heard of the Elitist Jerks site or have an optimal rotation. No worries -- I don't bother to look people up on the Armory, since Armory doesn't tell me anything about their skill level. And now that I'm outfitted head to toe in Naxx epics, I can do the carrying for low party DPS or a tank that isn't def capped."I actually enjoy healing bad PuGs more than guildie groups, because if everyone is geared and knows what they are doing, there isn't a lot for the healer to do -- the tank is taking steady predictable damage and I occasionally need to throw out an AOE heal if the party takes damage from something. So go ahead and 'be that guy'; I'll still heal you as long as you aren't rude and are at least trying. Just be up front with the group about where you are at in gear level or DPS when you join."
GC seeks feedback on totems, warlock spells
Since somewhat before the Wrath beta, we've been seeing a much more interactive Blizzard development team. The level of open communication with and feedback gathering from the community has been raised significantly, and with people like Ghostcrawler giving straight answers as much as he can, I'm feeling a lot better about the lines of communication between developers and players. At the moment, Ghostcrawler is specifically asking for feedback on the following two issues: Warlocks, which spells do you never use? Please don't clutter up the thread with extraneous issues. I actually think they did a pretty good job with the Spellstone/Firestone change of getting rid of two previously useless spells; I can't think of many obvious candidates off the top of my head. Eye of Kilrogg maybe, but I wouldn't want to lose that. Shadow Ward is used pretty infrequently. Shamans: Totems, totems, totems. Again, please do not talk about extraneous issues in that thread - just talk about totems. They're not going to remove or sideline them, but they are interested in making them "cooler," which is certainly much-needed. So go on and post your feedback in GC's threads (warlock, shaman). Or feel free to talk about it here, whatever. I do think totems feel clunky, but I can't think of how to fix them exactly - I guess that's why I'm not a game designer.
The role of today's Priest
Yesterday, Ghostcrawler got into a discussion with some Priests on the Healing forum. It's in a thread that started out pretty negative, but unfortunately reflected an opinion rippling its way through the Priest 'community.' Many (not all, not nearly) Priest players are getting sort of grumpy about their Healing role, and that's not actually a new sentiment. It's been sort of an everpresent issue since well before Wrath. Priests don't feel they have a role. They sort of exist, without any clear purpose.The issue that came up is that a number of Priests think Blizzard is down on them, they're subpar, the devs don't care, blah blah blah. Ghostcrawler is of the opinion that Priests are actually pretty great (not said in those words) and I gotta be honest, I agree with him on that. On all things? No. On that? Yes. Priests are very, very capable Healers. But capability is not actually the issue at all! It's an issue much harder to pinpoint. Priests, when you look at their spells as a whole product and don't get hung up on any one ability in particular, work great. It's a well rounded class, and operates very well on its own. Holy Priests are great healers, and there's really no situation where they're completely helpless. I am not sure what the phrase "healing dynamo" means exactly, but for some reason that pops into my head when I think of Holy Priests, so it's probably a good thing.
Ghostcrawler talks a bit about Resilience
Let's face it, Resilience blows right now. In their effort to give escalating rewards through the Seasons, Blizzard allocated minimal Resilience for Season 5 gear. It's not bad, but in order to make Resilience count, you would need to stack over 1,200 Resilience Rating to hit the optimal cap. That's not even possible with the current gear. In order to even reach about 900 Resilience Rating -- the point where its effects start to be palpable -- players would have to gimp themselves with all their gems and enchantments. This means severely lowered damage output. In the current Arena setting, it's all about burst damage, with matches lasting nowhere near as long as they used to back before Wrath of the Lich King. Ghostcrawler pops over the forums to talk a little about Resilience and how Blizzard feels that it still makes, or will make, a difference. He explains that the reason so many players are wearing PvE gear to PvP is because its readily available, going so far as to call Naxxramas gear the new welfare epics. He says that as more players get Resilience, other players will have to keep pace.That might take some time. Like I mentioned, even with a complete set of Deadly Gladiator gear and non-set items, it's going to be impossible to hit the Resilience cap. Resilience makes very little impact in PvP encounters right now that the risk to using PvE gear over PvP gear is minimal. Hitting 600-700 Resilience is very possible with a decent complement of PvP gear, but this only reduces damage from crits by about 17% at best. Resilience in its current design does nothing to reduce normal, or non-crit damage. Until more Resilience shows up in PvP gear or its coefficients or ratios changed, the trend of using a lot of PvE gear will probably continue throughout Season 5.
Warrior and DK threat bug hotfixed
My own Death Knight is not quite up to raid tanking yet; I've got a few more levels to go on that one. However, some players have noticed that DK threat, especially on single targets, seems a bit low - significantly lower than the other three tank classes, to the extent that the tanks were having trouble keeping threat against high DPS. It turns out that there was a slightly complicated bug involving Frost Presence, the foundation of DK tanking. It went like this: Some aspects of Frost Presence don't go away when you die, and some do (this is the bug). Part of the threat boost, however, does go away when you die. When you res and come back without changing presences, the game doesn't reapply Frost Presence, because it sees that you already have some of the effects of it. However, you still don't have all of the threat boost. So potentially, DKs who die and come back without switching to another presence (Blood or Unholy) and then back to Frost were missing out on 15% of the 45% threat that Frost Presence brings. This has been hotfixed now, so there is no further need to worry about it. If you saw your DK threat go up a lot yesterday, that's probably why. Ghostcrawler adds that "it is likely" that Defensive Stance was also being affected by this bug, although I haven't seen any prot warriors complaining about their threat since 3.0 hit.
The Ghostcrawler Experiment
Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, is the lead systems designer at Blizzard for World of Warcraft. It's his job to make sure all the numbers work right, that the talents are spiffy, and all that "other" stuff. He became a presence during the Wrath of the Lich King beta, posting daily about updates to the game and interacting with players in a way that hasn't been seen before.The daily activity by Ghostcrawler has lead to him become a staple of sites such as WoW Insider and MMO-Champion. Every day you can see at least one or two items from him. We here at WoW Insider are particularly watchful of what he says, since his posts usually contain detailed information about why something was done and what might be done in the future. That's great content that we like to talk a lot about.However despite the volumes Ghostcrawler publishes each day, some people feel that his welcome has ran out – that this experiment of him providing community interaction has failed. Some feel that his penchant for forum interaction is time wasted, that he's done nothing more than incite riots with certain classes, and that his demeanor is less than appealing. There was a forum post today about this very topic, but that in itself is nothing new as lots of people have been QQing over Ghostcrawler for a while.Don't let all the crying fool you however – he has some major supporters throughout the community.
Ghostcrawler: Okay with Titan's Grip not being an optional talent
One of the founding points in WoW's talent system, or any game's talent system, is to allow players to customize their characters based on their personal preferences. Want to play a healer with your Priest? Great, here's a few dozen holy talents. Your Paladin needs to crit some face off? Retribution is your key.Within each of these talent trees are many, many choices. And while cookie cutter specs eventually develop, the option is still there to allow for whatever spec or combinations of specs you decide works best for you. The rest of the world be damned, it's your choice.However there are some exceptions to this. These occur in talents that we all need to play, more or less. Or in more specific terms there are talents that the rest of the tree is designed around. One such talent is Titan's Grip, and according to Ghostcrawler Blizzard is okay with that (for now).
Dispel resistance mechanics changing in 3.0.8
Here's a mechanics change that's been sort of sitting in the 3.0.8 patch notes that deserves a closer look: Dispel resistance mechanics via talents are being changed. As Ghostcrawler describes it, essentially resistance mechanics will now only protect your harmful damage over time spells and your buffs. Other types of Debuffs and Crowd Control effects, such as Fear, Psychic Scream, and Ebon Plague, will no longer be able to take any bonus from dispel resistance talents such as Silent Resolve, Contagion, and Virulence.It seems like it's one more way in which, since Wrath of the Lich King came out, Blizzard's been shying away from crowd control mechanics as anything more than a stop gap measure, in both PvP and PvE. Whether this will hold up in the long term remains to be seen, but crowd control artists, be prepared to recast those spells just a bit quicker.
Lichborne: One more round of Death Knight changes in 3.0.8
Welcome to Lichborne. Your host is inflicted with the space plague this week, but has done his best to write for you people anyway, so be grateful, you hear?We've covered 3.0.8 pretty extensively, between Mike Sacco's coverage of the initial round of changes and our week before last discussion, but the devs weren't done yet. With 3.0.8 likely to make it to live servers in the next week or two, this is probably a good time to discuss the Death Knight tweaks that have gone in the last few PTR updates.
Crafted Death Knight tanking weapons removed from PTR
One of the initial changes in patch 3.0.8 was the inclusion of Death Knight tanking weapons that could be crafted by a high level Blacksmith. As of the latest 3.0.8 PTR update, these have been removed. And all indication is that they'll stay removed. Ghostcrawler doesn't want Death Knights to hang onto the weapons throughout their time in Wrath of the Lich King, which is apparently what Blizzard is afraid will happen. The other issue with providing 2H tanking weapons was that Blizzard would have needed to start itemizing (putting tanking stats on and crafting gear for) 2H tanking weapons overall, and that's something they didn't want to do.The Ghost also points out that the new sigil and runeforge enchant should be enough to get the Death Knight defense up to where it needs to be.
Fix for unintentional instance lockouts in the works
One of the more annoying things that has come about in Wrath of the Lich King is the ease at which you can be saved to an instance. It used to be that you were saved to a heroic or raid instance whenever you killed a boss or got loot. Now if you more or less step in the place, you end up being saved to it.This can cause a problem if someone in your group forgot that they already ran the instance or raid during the lockout period (a day for heroic instances, a week for all current raids). That person loads an already completed version of the instance. The place has all the trash, all the quirks, except for the bosses. You'll spend a half hour clearing to the first boss, only to discover that he's not there – he's already been killed. And oops, you're saved to the instance too."Epic fail," as has been yelled out on my vent when this happens.
Extended maintenance, some hints of patch 3.0.8
Maintenance will run "extended" tomorrow for all U.S. realms until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST. The last few weeks we've seen the down time grow as Blizzard's worked out issues, so I wouldn't count on the servers being up at 11:00 a.m. PST. However I'll happily eat my words. However unlike Alex, I will not eat my hat.We also have heard a couple sources whispering in our ear that patch 3.0.8 will be dropping either tomorrow or next week. We'll have to wait and see on that one. Don't take what we're saying here as any more than a creditable rumor.However these rumors do have some added credence in that they coincide with comments from Ghostcrawler today such as "These [changes] will be in the next patch (3.0.8) even thought they were not on the PTR," and "We'll be able to share patch notes soon."No matter if 3.0.8 drops tomorrow or not, there will be downtime. Fable II anyone?
The Queue: Pandapocalypse
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. On Friday I responded to a question regarding Pandaren, and it turns out I'm about half wrong. Partially right, but also partially wrong, which is certainly a problem. My answer was based off of something I talked about with a random Blizzard employee, but in hindsight that's a pretty poor move on my part, they wouldn't necessarily know the little inner workings of one or two departments within the company. What I said was refuted with quotes from J. Allen Brack and Chris Metzen, which I'm willing to put more weight in as far as game lore goes. The Chinese did, indeed, have a problem with the Pandaren being in-game.I was right in that there are no laws against virtual pandas getting shivved or whatever, but there definitely was an issue with the Pandaren race, culturally. It's much more likely it just ran into a lot of friction when it came down to dealing with censors and the cultural shift, and it became not worth it to risk losing players over. I'm sure the fact that the Pandarens' original design was much more Japanese (see above) than Chinese didn't help, but that was shifted in the right direction eventually and may not have had an actual impact at all. And with that said...
The future of healing in the Arena
If you've been in the Arena during Season 5, you probably have noticed a particular change to the way gladiators fight. It can be summarized in a single word: "Damage." In the bygone days of Season 4, drain teams and Mortal Strike debuffs were all but an entry requirement to high ranked play. Without a strategy to reduce or nullify your enemy's healing, you were unlikely to produce sufficient burst DPS to actually kill anyone. A few double-DPS teams managed to thrive, but for the most part, a gladiator's number one priority was shutting down the healer. That dynamic is all but dead in Season 5. Players output such a high level of damage compared to other players' health that healing is almost a non-factor in most matches. My friends, Ghostcrawler is aware of this dynamic, and is looking into it. (It turns out, Ghostcrawler mostly plays a healer in the Arena.) As stated by the crab himself, the Arena should not simply be about burst damage. (Nor, however, should it be solely about healing or solely about crowd control.) Of course, Ghostcrawler does admit he has difficulty saying what the long terms plans are going to be. The design team hasn't had enough whiteboard time to say anything with complete honesty. But he also hopes that as more Resilience gear enters the PvP system, the damage might scale down to be more reasonable. (To quote, "It's mostly just math.") Still, there's hope that future teams will include more than just seeing which team can burst down the other first.
GC says good things coming for Warlocks
Ghostcrawler said some things over at the forums that should make our year start brightly. Or grimly, depending on what makes your Warlock smile. I mentioned something about the problematic Soul Shard mechanic, which was on top of Ghostcrawler's to-do list for the class. He says that Blizzard is looking at making it "more interesting and less of a hassle," which should be music to our ears. They're exploring two models -- one is a major change in gameplay, but is "very cool", while the other would be a quick fix. The clunkiness of Soul Shards have been around for four years, so I think we can all wait just a bit longer for something very, very cool.Another big thing he mentioned was the simplification of Affliction's rotation. It's not something I'm completely sold on, considering I actually have a lot of fun with Affliction, but the stuff is a bit of a headache to keep track of and I do need AddOns to help me monitor all those debuffs. Ghostcrawler also notes that Warlock DPS -- mostly Affliction, at least -- is built up over time, but since fights don't last very long, they're looking at how to fix things. Although he also says it might fix itself in Ulduar, which won't be the ez-mode players have been treated to in early Wrath. Blizzard will also be improving demons, which is totally awesome considering they're worlds better now than they were four years ago. Finally, Ghostcrawler gives a nod to PvP, knowing that Warlocks do need a bit of work there, too. Very encouraging words to kick off our 2009, don't you think?
WoW Insider's predictions for 2009
Another year has come and gone, and we're on the verge of WoW's fifth year of existence. So it's time once again to look into the crystal ball, and pull out some predictions. Some of these are surefire (we're definitely going to hear more about the content patches for Wrath this year), some are tossups depending on who you ask (will we see another expansion in the works?), and some are just random guesses. But we're guaranteed one thing: 2009 is going to be a wild year, so if you want our very first insight on what might happen, here you go.These are compiled from the WoW Insider staff -- we differed in a few places, and where we did, I've pointed out who thought what. Keep in mind that no one can predict the future, of course, so these are predictions, and that's all. By now we should all know that Blizzard will do all they can to keep us guessing. And feel free to put your own predictions (or just respond to ours in the comments below. Happy New Year -- here's to a great 2009!Update: Also be sure to check out Big Download's PC predictions for 2009 -- they've got something to say about Blizzard's next expansion, too.
Shifting Perspectives: The Druid of 2008
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author is completely spaced out on cold medication, and is somewhat concerned that her raid performance has improved under the circumstances.The time has come (the Allie said)To talk of many things.Of Roots and Bash and Travel Form,And Strength (which scales with Kings).Why Tauren cat form sucks so hard,And whether trees have wings!And, yes, before anyone asks, I'm tripping on too much cough syrup and ibuprofen after receiving a belated viral Christmas gift from a relative. So I'll just put this out there right now; this column's probably on the weird side. I took a long look at all three Druid specs over 2008 and saw a few sad things, a few happy things, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants, and now I'm channeling the famous Mary Tyler Moore episode "Chuckles Bites the Dust," and that has to stop because I do not believe Mary Tyler Moore ever played a Druid.If you're completely uninterested in reading an account of any spec that's not your own -- although that would make me weep into my little cup of generic label cough syrup -- here's a set of quick links to each: Balance Feral Resto
Judgement of Light to cause no threat in 3.0.8
It's not in the 3.0.8 patch notes, but apparently Paladins should expect removal of all threat from Judgement of Light in the next patch. This is being done to address the wonky nature of JoL threat -- since for fights in which large portions of the raid are taking damage it gives a huge threat boost via healing threat, while for fights in which only a few raid members are taking damage it only gives a small threat boost via healing threat. Or to put it concisely, as forum poster Tippocabra did, "threat from Judgement of Light is not consistent." The new "no threat" JoL should be nothing if not consistent, though it has some tanking Paladins concerned about reduced threat. (For Retribution or Holy Paladins who have ever found themselves using JoL in a group situation, however, the threat decrease can only be a good thing.) Ghostcrawler assures us, however, that this is not meant to nerf Protection Paladin threat -- and though he doesn't go into specifics, we have to assume that means the threat Protadins would previously receive from JoL will be coming from elsewhere.
