Posts with tag ghostcrawler

Today starting at 3pm Eastern time, Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, and Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka will be interviewed live on video over at Gamebreaker.tv. You can watch the stream above, where they will discuss upcoming PvP and PvE changes in patch 5.3, with Gamebreaker's Gary Gannon, and WoW Insider's Olivia Grace.

If you miss the live interview above, it will be replaced by the stream recording once it is uploaded, and you can also watch it on Gamebreaker's site. WoW Insider's Anne Stickney also interviewed Ghostcrawler, talking about patch 5.3, from a more PvE-focused angle.

And If that isn't enough patch 5.3 information you can check out all WoW insider's patch 5.3 coverage, as well as our write-up of Convert To Raid's earlier interview with Lead Encounter Designer Ion Hazzikostas. The fansite interviews are coming in thick and fast, with patch 5.3 launching tomorrow in the US and Wednesday in the EU.

Yes, patch 5.3 isn't even out yet, and we're already looking towards patch 5.4. Thanks to Ghostcrawler, we have this to think about for the future, namely that Vengeance is getting capped at a significantly lower threshold in raids in the future. If you remember back at August of last year, Vengeance saw some significant changes that increased how fast it could ramp up in raids and also gave it a far larger maximum potential. It's been adjusted over time, but in general what GC said back last August has held true -- tank DPS in raiding really did go up. To the point where on some pulls it's not unusual to see tanks leading the DPS, sometimes by extremely large numbers.

Since this is a big change that will drastically lower tank damage output (25-man tanks with their 600,000 or more health buffed will lose roughly 300,000 AP on fights where Vengeance was capping at 100% of their health) I'm not surprise it won't be coming in 5.3 -- I am a little surprised it's happening at all, because we all knew Vengeance and tank damage would do exactly what it has done when it was changed. Still, I wait to observe if it has much practical difference since aside from AoE tanking where a multitude of hits can roll in a short window of time (that 20 second ramp up period) and the tanks can make effective use of all that AP I'm not sure it will matter. 5-mans and scenarios were not mentioned, so for now I'm assuming this is only for the raids mentioned.

Recently, Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street tweeted the following:

Long-term WoW Insider readers will likely remember the post-Cataclysm dissection where the developers discussed the mistakes they had made and how they planned to rectify them for future expansions. Well, a twitter user has asked Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street the same question, for Mists of Pandaria, and Ghostcrawler had the following to say in reply:

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how.

Shaman healing always seems tenuous whenever the second tier of raiding hits in an expansion. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we suck by any stretch of the imagination, but any tier that has a lot of movement mechanics and a lot less stationary heals we generally have to work that much harder. Now, things have definitely gotten easier over the years for us, but they could always get better right?

So that was when Greg Street, otherwise known as your friendly neighborhood Ghostcrawler and lead systems designer for Blizzard Entertainment, made a tweet that had restoration shaman around the globe cheering, despite them being perhaps a bit confused as to where this came from. So what lead up to this buff? What impact has it had on our healing in the Throne of Thunder? Has it improved our quality of healing life since the hot fix went live?

I think WoW Insider was sufficiently cautious when we posted about the datamined tri-spec feature, saying, and I quote:

With the advent of patch 5.2, World of Warcraft Lead Systems Designer Greg Street "Ghostcrawler" and Community Manager Daxxarri have been posting a series of class overviews and changes. Part one went up on Tuesday, covering death knights, druids, and hunters. Part two was posted Wednesday evening and covers mages, paladins, and priests. Part three, on rogues, shaman, and warlocks, went up yesterday evening, and part four, covering warriors and monks, was posted earlier today. For many classes, most of the changes involve PvP balancing as well as trying to improve a number of talents in some way to make them more useful and thus more attractive to players, at least situationally. If you're curious about either the philosophy of class balance design or just want to know what happened to your class this patch, make sure to check it out.