Posts with tag PvE

So here we are, friends, the complete list of hotfixes for Patch 6.0.3, as of October 30th. What's happening, you may ask? Well, for starters, all the class tuning hotfixes we mentioned yesterday are in. But of course there's more:

• Resolved an issue where durations for periodic effects were not always being extended for the full amount when refreshed by another ability.
• Downfall Wing 4: Resolved an issue where Gnomish Gyrocopters may not be destroying Thresher Turrets for Alliance players.
• Razorfen Kraul: Groyat, the Blind Hunter's Drain Life ability should no longer damage or heal for an excessive amount.
• Isle of Conquest: Huge Seaforium Bombs no longer have a level requirement to interact with them.

For the complete list of hotfixes, the official site has the skinny.

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The time between expansions is a great opportunity to change your play style. You can become more proficient with PvP, learn to not stand in fire, or pick up a new class. It can be hard to find guilds to take you in as an undergeared, fresh class player, but things are also a lot more forgiving. You'll be under geared but with everyone else around you rocking some of the best gear in the game, you don't really have to worry about your gear being too huge of an issue.

For me, this is also a great time to switch between overall play styles. Back in Burning Crusade I was a hardcore raider. 25 hours a week of raiding, our guild made it into the top 150 in the world, and I'd tank like an army drill sergeant. When Wrath came around I floundered and had enough, I went down to being "mid core" -- the gray area between casual and hardcore. I'd raid with dedicated groups, but I wouldn't do more than 10 hours a week.

Proc weapons, proc trinkets, these are some of my favorite items over the existence of World of Warcraft. The end of Dragon Soul weapons from Deathwing were amazing. Were they unbalanced? Yeah. Yeah, they were, let's be honest. They were even more unbalanced than the various proc trinkets from Siege of Orgrimmar, if you want to get right down to it. That's pretty unbalanced. But only a very few cared (most of them PvP players who had every reason to care) because the items were so much fun, y'all. There is literally never going to be anything as satisfying in World of Warcraft again as the sight of four Gurthalak tentacles spawning and mind flaying that rogue to death.

I wasn't kidding about PvP'ers having every reason to hate the proc weapons from Dragon Soul. Taking a fury warrior with twin Gurths into PvP was basically a giant middle finger to everyone who was primarily a PvP'er and didn't raid. And I admit that I flipped that particular middle finger as hard and often as I could, because why wouldn't I? If I were a primarily PvP oriented player, I'd be mad too.

Still, I love proc items. And Celestalon is talking about proc items.

@withkittens1 Potentially. We try to mix it up. Some tiers we go a little more crazy with trinkets, sometimes weapons, etc.

- Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 30, 2014

Why do I love proc items so much? Here are a few reasons.

I'm looking forward to Ashram, the new PvP island zone in Warlords that seems to combine elements from zones such as the Timeless Isle, Wintergrasp, and the old days of world PvP. So I tend to go looking for information on it, which is where I found the following.

@GeodewMW @Drsoviet It does. We have to weigh the edge case of large groups against the more common "I want to play with my friend" case

- Holinka (@holinka) May 12, 2014

With cross-realm groups being possible on Ashram, this is a perfect example of the ways the game has to balance what most players will do vs. what some players will do - balance the min-maxing attitude vs. the more common, and more often executed, use of a feature or game element. Ashram as it stands will allow players to group cross realm - this is intended so that players who have characters on separate realms (my wife and I, for instance, often would run the Timeless Isle on characters that were on separate realms) can still go to Ashram. This is a good and fun use of cross-realm grouping. But there's a potential down side to this.

Since cross-realm grouping is possible, we know the next step - something like oQueue that allows you to put together a group of 40 players and go destroy Ashram on an already imbalanced server. If a certain server is already heavily skewed towards the Alliance, putting together a 40 player group (since Ashram exists in the world and not in a raid instance) and just destroying any hapless Horde you come across, or vice versa. Even if you don't pick a server with a faction imbalance, it's still feasible that a big raid group could end up owning Ashram for an extended period of time, and using players that aren't even on the server.

Decisions in the game's design are always made between these two poles - between the ease of abuse, and the benefit it brings to individual players. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, things don't work out like we'd hope. Reforging, as an example, falls into the 'possible player imbalanced use trumps player convenience' category.

One of the changes that will have a pretty significant impact on how we play both in PvE and PvP is that many buff and debuff spells are being changed or removed. It can all seem a bit complicated at first viewing, what with all the class specific changes, but it's really fairly easily broken down and it won't directly affect how you play all that significantly. We're going to go over the changes and explain what they are and how they'll change how you play, if they do.

First up is the Weakened Armor debuff. Essentially, this is the old-school Sunder/Expose Armor affect. It's gone entirely. Rogues no longer have Expose Armor, warriors no longer have Sunder Armor and the Devastate prot warrior ability no longer applies Weakened Armor. In addition, the druid ability Faerie Fire now applies Physical Vulnerability instead, increasing all physical damage taken by its target by 4% for 30 seconds. This is because it was thought that having both Weakened Armor and Physical Vulnerability was excessive, since they did basically the same thing. What this means in terms of how we play? Almost nothing. If you're a rogue, you won't use Expose Armor anymore because it's gone. A warrior tank will hit Devastate the same as they always did. Druids are still going to use Faerie Fire to debuff things. Hunter pets that had similar abilities will no longer have them.

Next up is the Weakened Blows ability that almost all tanks had - it reduced incoming damage. The abilities that provided it still exist, they simply don't provide it anymore. Thunder Clap is an example of an ability that currently provides the debuff, but won't in Warlords. Since all tanks applied this debuff, it basically wasn't very meaningful, and instead monsters will simply be tuned to do less damage to compensate for its removal. What changes for players? Nothing. You won't apply the debuff, but you'll still use those abilities that did once apply it.

If you only read one post about faction imbalance in random BG's this year, it should be this one. The always excellent Cynwise of Cynwise's Warcraft Manual (ask for it by name) does his usual thorough job exploring the numbers behind the game. If you were a fan of Nate Silver's election coverage, then you should be reading Cyn's work, as he does much the same kind of thing with the information behind what's going on in World of Warcraft.

This particular post is too dense for me to do it any justice, but just as a summation, Cyn explores the way faction imbalance affects random BG's in several ways - how perceived imbalance affects player choices, how the overall popularity of the factions plays out, and the way in which dividing players into factions in the first place causes instability in the representation. It's really a remarkable and remarkably well presented post, and I urge you to go read it.

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This week's Dev Watercooler post served up a lot of changes for healers. But just because the article -- and the follow up conversations on Twitter -- is dense with healing talk doesn't mean that the tanks and DPSers out there can just ignore it, because these healing notes offer some tantalizing hints at what PvE group content in Warlords might be like. Of course we're missing a lot of details with Blizzard's bit-by-bit announcements, but we can make some leaps based on what we've been told so far.

We already knew that the game would be changing significantly in Warlords. Stats are being reduced (squished) across the board, but Blizzard has already said that while stats will be going down, your relative power won't -- back in September Ghostcrawler assured us that mobs will still take the same time to kill, even though the numbers involved will be different. And in this update, Blizzard let us know that they're still on track for that relative power idea... that is, unless you're a healer, specifically saying, "we're buffing heals less than we're increasing creature damage."

So just what does this mean for future PvE encounters? Let's take a look.

If you remember after the last Dev Watercooler, there was a flurry of activity on Twitter as Celestalon and Holinka answered questions. This time Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas has taken to social media to answer questions and explain what's up. We're collecting his tweets here, to give folks a chance to see what he's got to say about the big changes coming to health and healing mechanics in Warlords.

• Currently, with healers able to heal everyone so quickly, fight damage has to almost kill them instantly to get healer attention, which is a design they want to get away from.
• The goal is for every healer to have a triage-capable healing kit without feeling the same.
• No, they're not just trying to repeat Cataclysm's healing game.
• Shamans have too many smart heals. But they have less instant cast healing that other healers.
• The changes to crit damage and healing in PvP mentioned in the watercooler are indeed PvP only.
• These changes are intended to affect all healers - this is a start for beta iteration to follow.
• Healers may have time to put DPS attacks into their rotations while healing in the new healer paradigm.
• Baseline mana regen will be higher, but you'll still use spirit to boost it when you get it on gear.

There's more after the jump.

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Addressing a forum thread about people inadvertently flagging for PvP when cross-realm grouping, Bashiok mentions a welcome change for Warlords of Draenor that I hadn't heard before -- namely, a more robust PvP toggle on/off that will prevent issues like that from occuring.

Bashiok - Re: Stop..ramming..pvp...down...my...throat!!!

Well, I understand where you're coming from, but flagging as a PvE character is based on a player's action to flag themselves (even if it's on accident), so I'm not sure it's us making you PvP. The systems that can cause someone to flag can absolutely at times be involuntary, which is notably frustrating.

In any case we are continuing toward a goal of a PvP on/off toggle for players on PvE realms to be added in Warlords of Draenor, which would absolutely and in all situations allow someone to refrain from becoming flagged regardless of their actions. Heals toward flagged players would fail, coalescing to PvP realms wouldn't be possible, misclicks and AoE's would never damage a flagged opponent, etc. It's actually quite a bit of work because of all the systems involved, but it's still something we think PvE players should have, and how the game should work for them.

source

I admit I especially like the idea that misclicks and such would never damage a flagged player, thus preventing a host of shenanigans I've seen over the years (mounted flagged players crowding on top of quest givers, stealthed players jumping while flagged in front of melee characters in order to get them to flag so that their friends can kill them, you know the ones I mean) and would put the decision to PvP squarely in the hands of the player in question.

I for one am excited for this. Keeping PvE-focused players able to absolutely refrain from PvP is fundamental to player enjoyment on both sides of the PvE/PvP debate, in my opinion.

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For our last Community Blog Topic, we asked about continuing to mix PvP with PvE.

bengstra would like PvE and PvP completely separated.

I have long held they need to keep their PvP out of my PvE. It is simply impossible to balance and one side or the other is constantly being impacted by the side they want, and have, no part in. This makes for constant ping ponging and frustration (think Stampede for a text book example of ping ponging).

It's a sizeable list -- but if your realm wasn't on the list, not to worry. Blizzard is revving up for more realm connections, and soon. Two new batches of realm connections are on the way, and the first batch of connections will be taking place on Monday, October 28.

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• Balnazzar and Warsong
• Gurubashi and Aegwynn
• Dalvengyr and Dark Iron
• Garithos and Chromaggus
• Onyxia and Burning Blade
• Maiev and Bloodscalp/Boulderfist

If you happen to be calling any of these realms home, be prepared for a brief bout of maintenance come Monday. However, Tuesday's regular maintenance should simply be a set of rolling restarts for everyone, so realms that are in the process of being connected should be hit with double downtime. This seems to be a pretty quick turnaround -- will we be seeing more realm connection announcements next week? For more information and updates on the process, keep an eye on the official forum thread.

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