warlords-of-draenor-5-mans
Latest
Why Proving Ground gating on queued heroics is a good thing
It's certainly been a controversial move. Lead Encounter Designer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas took to the forums recently to clarify some hastily translated interviews he did with fansites during last week's press event. There are several key things in Watcher's post that it seems people are missing, so let's just sum it up here. Proving Ground Silver will be required for solo queue heroic dungeons Group queue heroic dungeons will have no Proving Ground requirement Proving Grounds will be updated to "further refine balance and mechanics" Let's begin at the end. Read that last point, and then read it again for good measure. Yes, Proving Grounds have some issues at the moment, as far as balance goes. A lot of those issues actually relate to how well classes downscale with gear, how dependent they are on certain levels of certain stats. For example, let's look at fire mages. Fire mages scale really well with gear, as do their Arcane brothers and sisters. Take a fire mage and scale it right down to 463, and you'll have a harder time doing a silver Proving Ground than a class that scales down really well. I did a little experiment as part of my research for this article. In an attempt to see how bad getting a Silver could be, I took a fire mage to the proving grounds. Not a new 90, but an unplayed one. My gear was woeful. I managed, with this gear, not at the hit cap, not even at ilvl 463 with downscaling, to reach wave 4 of Silver. Bronze took five tries.
