Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsThe Queue: Genesis
by Michael Sacco 
Nov 11th 2011 at 11:00AM
I gave you guys Civilization last week or the week before; now see how it all began with Genesis.
Ghost asked:
The real question about monks is why are they wearing leather and not cloth? (And before you say anything about not adding an armor type for a single spec, consider holy paladin...)
Archetypal fantasy monks, like the kind you see in D&D or EverQuest or any other fantasy RPG, can wear leather armor. You have to keep in mind that these are warrior monks. We're not talking St. Francis here.
And spell plate is the reason why monks won't have a special kind of armor all to themselves. It's a massive headache.
Elwoods asked:
There was once a mention of increasing hit caps for later raid bosses, has the ever been mentioned again?
It was quietly shelved, never to be spoken of again. Probably.
Starlin asked:
With the pvp season ending as early as the 15th, any chance we could get 4.3 that day too? There's a release build on the PTR. The stars are aligned. Any precedent for a gap between season end and a new patch?
Not happening, unfortunately.
Glaras asked:
Question: After MoP hits, will players leveling through, say, Uldum have the change to get "Stood in the Fire"? I mean will Deathwing still occasionally torch the place and barbecue a few players?
I would definitely assume not. He'll still be around in 4.3, though.
John asked:
Can we get some clarification about how many times per week we can kill a boss in the DS raid?
As many times as you want, but you only get loot from the boss the first time you kill it. Keep in mind that your kills in Raid Finder do not affect your normal and heroic lockouts or loot eligibility in any way.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!
Filed under: The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 9)
Pyromelter Nov 11th 2011 2:54PM
"Thank goodness, or we'd see raids forming only to kill faceroll boss #1 for VP, then disbanding to queue again."
Something tells me that people wouldn't do this anyway, because there is still the weekly cap for VP, which (from what I remember) will easily be reached with the new and old 5mans, toss on a few raid bosses and you'll be capping your VP very quickly each week.
Killik Nov 11th 2011 5:04PM
Yeah, you're probably right. Frankly, a 25-person PuG is too scary to be a farm run.
Samuel Nov 11th 2011 11:18AM
Somebody in yesterday's comments made a good point about the possibility of having Holy Pallies wear intellect mail. That would eliminate the one-spec armor, and also contribute to the balance of armor types. If we assume that tanking and dps monks wear agility leather while healing monks wear intellect leather, the breakdown would be:
Strength Plate - (5) (ret paladins and 2 specs each of DK and warrior)
Tank Plate - (3) (tanking DKs paladins and warriors)
Intellect Mail - (3) (holy paladins, elemental and resto shamen)
Agility Mail - (4) (enhance shamen and 3 specs of hunter)
Intellect Leather - (3) (healing monks and resto and balance druids)
Agility Leather - (3) (feral druids and tanking and dps monks)
Spirit Cloth - (3) (3 specs of priest)
Non-spirit Cloth - (6) (3 specs each of mage and warlock).
Samuel Nov 11th 2011 12:01PM
Whoops, forgot about rogues, so make agility leather (7) adding the 3 specs of rogue.
MattKrotzer Nov 11th 2011 11:20AM
They could also make one of the DK specs (probably unholy) base itself around spell power, thus broadening the pool of players who would want it.
The Dewd Nov 11th 2011 11:33AM
Of they could be really sneaky and have another class planned that would be a ranged (caster), melee (melee caster?), and healer that wears plate. Or give it the old Pally model of a tank that uses spellpower.
Unfortunately, I don't think they know what they want to do. They know it's a problem but they don't want to have to give Holy Paladins an armor bonus on mail for PvP and the like - and they certainly don't want one class using two different armor types - other the 39->40 shift for the mail and plate classes.
Noyou Nov 11th 2011 11:33AM
I would say, please no to spell plate for DKs. For 2 reasons: A) it will confuse lots of people b) it will be harder to gear up.
I do like the spell mail for holy paladins. They could get some kind of armor thing baked in to the spec to give them some or all of what they lose. Having one armor type for one spec out of 31/34 seems very archaic.
Puntable Nov 11th 2011 11:35AM
Or my idea was, just like how a mail heirloom changes to plate if eqipped by a level 40 plate wearer, Armor type would be set when you equip it. Also, Spirit would be converted to hit for all DPS specs. Then you only need 3 types of armor. Intellect, Strength, and Agility armor.
Noyou Nov 11th 2011 11:39AM
Awesome idea puntable. Taking it a step further, I wonder if they could make all armor adjust to your class, give you the appropriate armor and stats. Would make it monumentally easier to deal with.
Mr. Crow Nov 11th 2011 11:39AM
@MattK: I thought about them giving spellpower plate to unholy DKs, but then I realized it would be an interesting artistic challenge to come up with a piece of armor that looks appropriate art-wise for both unholy DKs and holy Paladins.
Even if that were acceptable (with Transmog, anything goes) you've got to consider that this would require a third DK tier set to be itemized with proper set bonuses.
So yeah, sounds like a simply solution, but there's a lot of other things to consider.
Hal Nov 11th 2011 11:47AM
I'm going to go ahead and suggest something radical here:
"Don't change anything."
Seriously, why would this be such a terrible thing? There are a lot of issues involved in changing things as they currently stand. Balance, itemization, stat conversion, visual design, all of those things start getting buggered if you change things as they currently stand, and the solutions might not just be complicated, but end up upsetting people more than the current arrangement does.
So, let's just leave things as they are, eh? Yes, only holy paladins use spell plate. Disenchant it and move on. Yes, not every raid has a holy paladin, but then some raid groups go without leather or mail wearers. Shall we simply go with "heavy" and "light" armor instead?
Kurly Nov 11th 2011 11:56AM
@Samuel
Your breakdown should be.
Spirit Cloth - (3) (3 specs of priest)
Hit Cloth - (6) (3 specs each of mage and warlock).
Cloth Without Hit or Spirit (9) (3 specs of priest) (3 specs each of mage and warlock).
loop_not_defined Nov 11th 2011 12:01PM
If they ever add more specs, I think adding Ranged Spell DPS specs for Paladins and Death Knights would help eat up some of that spell plate gear.
loop_not_defined Nov 11th 2011 12:03PM
@MrCrow
Consider that there's Death Knight look-a-like armor that Paladins already have to wear (if not using Tier).
Unowitz Nov 11th 2011 12:34PM
The bottom line is that your raid will always have gear drop that can't be used. And it's unfortunate.
Granted, spell plate can only be used by 1 spec so it stands out. However, it also has the lowest chance to drop. For my 10 man raid we often use 2 holy pallys, so our gearing up is slower than most. (It is nice when you are the only pally and holy is your off spec).
One solution could be to allow for Ret pallies to benefit from intellect plate. Which would help even things out a bit...but then they would have to up the drop rates for those items... (DKs using int plate just seems weird...I mean they are DKs...they shouldn't look like Holy Pallys....they should be the exact opposite.)
Besides this, the only other solution that I would love to see, is to have generic armor & weapon "token" drops for all raid bosses. These tokens would be different than the tier tokens and everyone in the raid could roll on it. ie: chest token, leg token, shield token, etc.
But this has been discussed before, and unfortunately Blizzard probably wouldn't do this because raid groups would gear up too fast. (Heaven forbid). Thus eliminating the endless farming of the same bosses, week in, week out for that one item that refuses to drop... /cough Caster Shield...
Pyromelter Nov 11th 2011 3:02PM
It would be infinitely easier, simpler, and better if Holy Paladins simply used Strength Plate, and have holy paladins' mana and spellpower scale with strength (while giving holy pallies a nerf to attack power).
As to this:
'"Don't change anything."
Seriously, why would this be such a terrible thing? '
Because intellect plate pollutes loot tables with things that virtually no one can use, unless you have a holy paladin in your party. Ever fight a boss in a 5-man farming for one item, and there is an int plate item on the boss? It's about the most enraging thing on the planet. Giving holy paladins the option to use spell mail or just simply scale with strength would remove a metric ton of frustration.
If blizzard was able to implement "smart" loot tables where loot would drop that only is usable by the party composition, this might not be an issue. For example, imagine a 5-man party of a priest, warrior, mage, death knight, and rogue, a smart loot system would never see spell plate, spell leather, or any mail in a composition like that. Now imagine that part got a spell plate drop from the last boss in a 5-man. Initiate /nerdrage at that.
Swifteye Nov 11th 2011 3:11PM
Oh God no @ the idea of Unholy DKs using spell plate!
I pretty much gave up on my Disc Priest after failing to convince roughly fifty million bear and Warrior tanks that PW:S had been changed to no longer negatively affect Rage generation...
... so how many groups is my Unholy DK gonna get kicked from because 3 of the 5 party members didn't get the memo that DK + Int gear =/= completely and irreparably retarded player?
Grovinofdarkhour Nov 11th 2011 4:30PM
@ MattKrotzer
I fear you may have just found your way onto every unholy DK's shit list. :)
Jinja Nov 11th 2011 11:20AM
I've thought about the hit thing and my opinion is that they imagined increasing required hit would make it even harder for casual or slower people to get geared enough to be able to do forelands/ds, as doing previous content would probably be more required for the higher hit gear or they lose a lot of stats to gem and reforge to new hit cap. On the flip side, you would have high endgame people who min/max that are going to have this massive headache of stat changing depending on what raid tier they're doing. And in general it's just a huge headache to have to know you need 17% for bot, bwd, and to4w, while you need 19% (random number) for fire lands,and you need 21% for ds. This would be especially harder on newer people coming along after 4.3 and don't know how raid tiers are split.
Killik Nov 11th 2011 11:45AM
Yep, I imagine that's why they dropped it. It makes a certain amount of sense that higher-tier bosses would have better defences, but it would introduce a non-intuitive mechanic. As you say, is it 17% hit for BoT, 21% for Firelands and 30% for DS? What happens next expansion?