The Daily Blues

My virtual tweets to the blues today:
@neth Female Goblin rogues are overpowered because you play one.
@ghostcrawler Have a good day off? Yacht was fun? Y / N / Murloc
@belfaire What does PAX do to your hair?
Table of Contents
Ghostcrawler
When you cast Shadow Dance, a new bar appears much like if you enter stealth or any other "form." However, if a Rogue casts the Vanish ability while Shadow Dancing, their stealth bar will replace their Shadow Dance bar. This I don't have a problem with.
When the Rogue comes out of vanish, while Shadow Dance is still up, the Shadow Dance bar will not return despite the buff being up. The Rogue's original bars will appear, instead of the final seconds of what should be the Shadow Dance bar.
This is a crucial, crippling bug that needs to be fixed. Many, many times does a rogue need to vanish while Shadow Dancing to avoid CC, to break CC, and then have their Shadow Dance ruined by a UI error.
Please address this issue. I hope I typed it clearly enough.
tl;dr Shadow Dance UI gets bugged out if the rogue vanishes while it's up.
It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. Rogues essentially have 3 bars and there are just some technical reasons why we can't go back to the Shadow Dance bar once we've dropped it.
I think the real solution is probably to make it so you can't / don't want to Vanish while dancing. I assume you're Vanishing to get out of roots or dodge spells, but we could solve those in other ways. The spell dodging part of Vanish has been so frustrating to rogues for so long that frankly I'd rather figure out another way to get the same functionality that would feel better all around and leave Vanish as strictly "you want to go back into stealth."
When the Rogue comes out of vanish, while Shadow Dance is still up, the Shadow Dance bar will not return despite the buff being up. The Rogue's original bars will appear, instead of the final seconds of what should be the Shadow Dance bar.
This is a crucial, crippling bug that needs to be fixed. Many, many times does a rogue need to vanish while Shadow Dancing to avoid CC, to break CC, and then have their Shadow Dance ruined by a UI error.
Please address this issue. I hope I typed it clearly enough.
tl;dr Shadow Dance UI gets bugged out if the rogue vanishes while it's up.
It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. Rogues essentially have 3 bars and there are just some technical reasons why we can't go back to the Shadow Dance bar once we've dropped it.
I think the real solution is probably to make it so you can't / don't want to Vanish while dancing. I assume you're Vanishing to get out of roots or dodge spells, but we could solve those in other ways. The spell dodging part of Vanish has been so frustrating to rogues for so long that frankly I'd rather figure out another way to get the same functionality that would feel better all around and leave Vanish as strictly "you want to go back into stealth."
We like Revenge on UA and we certainly like the new damage Protection can do with Revenge.
If we make any change at all, it would probably be in the duration of the buff. Currently Revenge operates by giving the warrior 5 seconds in which to Revenge. This works fine when Revenge has a 5 sec cooldown, but UA removes that. Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.
If we make any change at all, it would probably be in the duration of the buff. Currently Revenge operates by giving the warrior 5 seconds in which to Revenge. This works fine when Revenge has a 5 sec cooldown, but UA removes that. Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.
The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a "rotation" like that, but you'll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn't play Balance.
Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.
We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.
The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.
We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. :)
Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.
We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.
The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.
We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. :)
Other
We will be performing rolling restarts on all U.S. realms beginning at 5:00AM PDT, March 27th. Additionally, we will be performing rolling restarts on all Oceanic realms beginning at 12:00PM PDT, March 27th. We anticipate that each realm will be down for no more than 15 minutes. The overall process will last approximately 1 hour.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Female-Goblin-Rogue will be my first. It seems like a fun combo and I'm sure someone will remember this, mark it down and try to say they are over-powered later because I said I'd play one. ;p
Blizzard
Filed under: The Daily Blues






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
TwhiT Mar 27th 2010 12:32AM
Um, shouldn't this column be "The Nightly Blues"? b/c it always is late in the evening when it's posted
Kurash Mar 27th 2010 12:43AM
@Twiht
Yes, but this is a culmination of all the blue posts that have been made... during the day.
Thus, daily.
aisenfaire Mar 29th 2010 4:00AM
@Kurash
Fairly sure TwhiT was saying that with tongue-in-cheek.
Possum Mar 27th 2010 2:09AM
Nethaera is right on female goblin rogues. Awesome.
hairyscary Mar 27th 2010 5:02AM
an other bloody restart night come on blizz..................thats how many nights in a row 4 i think if memory serves me correctly
LuminousNerd Mar 27th 2010 6:07AM
OH NO!!!11 your gaming will be interrupted for like 5 minutes so that you don't get 5FPS and 1000ms worth of lag. Your life really sucks :(
Artificial Mar 27th 2010 6:16AM
There are still problems they're trying to fix. Expect it *every* night until they finally nail down the loading screen hang problem, if nothing else...
Gamer am I Mar 27th 2010 7:03AM
"We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. :)"
Even as a feral/resto, this makes me quite excited for my balance brothers and sisters.
Corwyn Mar 27th 2010 9:34AM
"It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. "
Just because you can't fix it, that doesn't mean it is not a bug.
Thank You Kindly.
Al Mar 27th 2010 2:29PM
It's not a bug, it just doesn't function as intended with external factors.
And JoJ is a gap-closer.
Sedirex Mar 27th 2010 10:03AM
Sacco looks so cute in that picture!
Jackwraith Mar 27th 2010 10:39AM
"Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all. "
Um, no, but it WILL affect Arms, meaning the least-played and least-effective Warrior spec in the game will get nerfed AGAIN, almost solely because of PvP issues. I like my Arms Warrior, but if I have to dual-spec and pick something other than Arms every time I want to group with people for the game's original intent (you know, killing mobs...?) then I might as well just re-spec into Fury or Prot entirely and save myself the 1000G. You know, because Bladestorm was so awesome that it needed to become Ballerina...
grugan Mar 27th 2010 12:05PM
I stopped playing my warrior altogether now and will wait till cataclysm when they finally do something to fix the root of all these problematic changes to warriors, ie BLOCK