Posts with tag nerf

Another set of Hearthstone balance changes is on the way. Several cards have been nerfed like Pyrobast, Blood Imp, and Sylvanas Windrunner. Unleash the Hounds has been buffed slightly. The rest are all balance related changes. Warlock board control decks will be hit fairly hard here with the change to Blood Imp. Hearthstone test season 2 started last week and already things are going to be shaken up!

My thoughts on these balance adjustments after the jump!

We're getting reports of insane experience gains for players via winning pet battles. Because the XP being awarded was affected by heirlooms and XP buffs -- like the Darkmoon Faire Carousel buff -- people were leveling characters from 1 to 89 in a matter of hours. (Experience for pet battles stops at level 89 and you get a chance for Lesser Charms of Good Fortune, instead.)

Community Manager Zarhym had this to say on the subject on Thursday afternoon:

.@lordreinhart @cm_zarhym Yes, pet battles are rewarding more XP than intended right now. We're testing a hotfix to address this asap. :) - World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) March 7, 2013

The XP scales with your level and how close your pets are to the pets you defeat. XP is earned via battling pets in the wild, pet tamer NPCs, and other players in pet battle PvP. No experience is gained from pet battle duels or if your highest pet is more than 5 levels above the pets you are fighting. The amount received before the nerf was roughly what a character gets from completing the capital city cooking and fishing dailies.

Because you can get XP from battling level 1 wild pets, people were camping out in major cities and decimating the battle pet population while leveling their low level pets.

As of this morning, it looks like all realms have been hotfixed so that the experience is approximately 10% of what it was. We have no further official word on the nerf as of this writing, but we'll keep you posted.

Update: It looks like from the comments and my experimentation that the nerf is scaled. While it is no longer worth it to hang around Stormwind and kill level 1 pets, if you battle in level appropriate zones with level appropriate characters, the XP gain is still worthwhile.

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Bashiok adds to his post, explaining how, in Mists, Blizzard is essentially trying to strike a happy medium between previous expansions' attitudes to gear progression. Cataclysm's gearing model devalued old content progression too quickly, allowing players to effectively jump straight into the current raids, while previous expansions had been criticized for their linearity.

Mists retains an element of that linear nature, with Bashiok saying that new characters will have to go through Mogushan Vaults, Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring, but that drop rates will be increased and the content made easier. He does note, however, that this 10% nerf is currently slated as a one-time reduction, rather than step one of a set of progressive nerfs.

What do you think of this? Hit the break for Bashiok's full post, explaining the philosophy behind the changes.

Good news. We found a bug with Stampede being too high only in Arenas. That accounts for why feedback can be so varied. More info later.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 31, 2012

Community Manager Zarhym emailed us late last night to inform us that the bug had been isolated and added to the beast mastery hunter-specific section of the blog. The bug is now detailed as follows:

If you thought the item level of endgame PVE gear purchasable with justice points was a little low, Blizzard apparently agrees with you. Bashiok just let the official forums know that a hotfix is incoming, bumping the ilvl 450 PVE rares to 458. Additionally, the hotfix brings down the item level (and rarity color!) of the ilvl 464 epic PVP gear available for honor to 458 and rare.

In conjunction with the hotfix removing the reputation requirements to access the JP gear, it should be considerably less of a hassle -- and involve a lot less PVPing -- to gear up for heroics. The downside is that the PVP gear you probably bought just to cheat the queueing system is a little worse. I can live with that.

The full post from Blizzard is after the cut.

OK, we all know I'm all for raiding accessibility. I've posted multiple times about how progressively making raids easier doesn't invalidate the accomplishments of those who went before, and about how it's all about letting people get to see content as time progresses. And I still intellectually believe that. Intellectually.

I hate to admit it, however, but my heart doesn't always fall in line with my head, and the recent change to Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider is one of those. You'll notice that the screenshot of the achievement above has removed the requirements of having to have killed heroic Spine and Madness of Deathwing, two fights I had to push my face through in order to get the mount.

This is where I turn into a hypocrite, I guess, because I don't like this at all. Not even a little bit. Especially with recent news that Blizzard is going to make the mounts off of heroic Ragnaros and Deathwing harder to attain in Mists of Pandaria. So you're making the drop mounts harder to get but the achievement mounts easier? And frankly, taking heroic Spine off of this achievement doesn't just make it kind of easier, either; it makes it massively easier.

At this point, my heart and my head are in full-out war over this. Like I said, intellectually I support the progressive reduction in difficulty as a good compromise that lets people see more content while it keeps progression moving forward.

Blizzard took a lot of flak for the initial nerf of Dragon Soul last month; this month, the words are flying on the internet again. Dragon Soul's being nerfed a culminative 10% is too much for some people, because Blizzard has truly thrown in the towel and given up producing hard content -- or at least that's what people claim.

The reality is quite a bit different. The Dragon Soul nerf serves an important purpose on several levels, no matter what your style of play.

The casual guild

The casual guilds will probably see the most immediate benefits from this nerf in terms of progression but the least in the long term. Bosses will be going down faster, mechanics will naturally have more error allowance, and morale of casual guilds will raise as progression happens.

Players will still come and go, and some may decide that they want more of a challenge and start to look at forming hard mode groups or switching guilds altogether. But that is a natural part of any guild; personnel rotation happens. At the end of the day, this buff will probably attract and retain as many people as might move because of its effects.

When the Raid Finder was first introduced, I had high hopes for its impact on the game. While the main reason behind the implementation of this system was arguably to get as many players experiencing raid content as possible, at the time, I was more interested in the impact it would have on the progression races between all of the top guilds in the world. I have always had a great deal of admiration for players in these types of guilds and have watched intently during each new tier as they all vied for world firsts. I believed the Raid Finder could benefit this type of competition by preventing heroic encounters from being nerfed while the content was still current. Surely, I thought, if so many people are able to experience raiding like never before through this new tool, Blizzard would have no pressing reason to make heroic encounters any easier.

Well, it seems I was wrong, for in the very next tier of content Blizzard released, we saw progressive nerfs to these difficult fights. Personally, I prefer to keep these encounters the way they are, at least until a new tier is released. Something just feels wrong to see the hardest fights available made easier through a series of hotfixes. Even with respect to my own guild's progression, having sweeping nerfs hit Firelands just as my guild was putting in some really good attempts on Ragnaros felt like Blizzard moved the finish line, taking what would have been a very gratifying kill and turning it into an accidental one-shot that contained none of the catharsis we had felt during previous boss kills.

What do you think? With the Raid Finder now a reality and a new expansion looming on the horizon, do you think the difficulty of heroic raid encounters should be static, like those from tier 11, or should they be more flexible?

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WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

With patch 4.3 imminent and Arena season 10 due to end Nov. 29, it seems reasonable to assume the patch will appear in early December. While you're racing to get your team into title range, get that last piece of gear, or just running laps of your capital city, you might be thinking forward to the arrival of the patch and wondering what your fate will be in PvP as the nerf bat winds up for another swing. Firstly, let's deal with some housekeeping.

Conquest points, the PvP equivalent of valor points, will now be far, far easier to earn from ordinary Battlegrounds. The first daily Battleground win will now award 100 conquest points, up from 25, and wins after that will award 50 conquest point, up from, well, none! The conquest cap will remain, so while it will still be far quicker to reach it through Arena, it will also be attainable via Battlegrounds of the non-rated variety. This makes it far easier for solo players to build up the resilience numbers people often demand (fairly or otherwise) for access to Arena and Rated Battleground teams or just to gear for Battlegrounds.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

The great Firelands nerf has arrived! Those of you who have been struggling on progression bosses (normal mode or heroic mode) will no doubt have found that the the barriers have been lowered significantly. Good or bad, that's entirely up to you and your philosophy. On the one hand, content is now much more accessible. On the other hand, there are many of you who wish you had had more time to take down bosses pre-nerf.

The overall nerf, though, changes several aspects of healing. I find myself not needing to work as hard. That doesn't necessarily mean not paying attention during a raid. With a lower amount of healing required (due to lower damage on several bosses), it just means fewer spells having to go out. Even though it might feel a little demoralizing to me, it is a little relieving in the sense that content can be seen more easily by players who normally wouldn't have been able to experience it.

We'll go over my thoughts on this week, along with some ways to make healing engaging again.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The recipes that drop from trash in Firelands have had their drop rate nerfed in a recent hotfix:

Hot fixes notes

The rate at which crafting recipes drop has been greatly reduced.

source

This makes sense from a design perspective; these patterns take some pretty rare boss drops to be made and produce gear on par with normal mode Firelands boss gear drops. On most realms, everyone who is getting the recipes is trying to sell them -- at first, for a lot; however, I've been picking them up for a tenth of what they were being listed for yesterday.

One of the interesting artifacts of this system before the nerf was that the people most likely to get the recipe were people farming reputation by doing trash runs. The people most likely to be able to craft the items were the ones in the more organized and progression-minded raiding groups. Now that the drop rate has been reduced, in a few weeks when more guilds are making it farther into the instance, it's possible that more recipes will drop into the laps of raiding guilds than trash PUGs.

Click past the jump for a list of the recipes that are affected.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Well, almost every week. Okay, every other week. Semiannually. Every leap year.

Seriously, sorry about the inconsistency lately. Family illness struck last week, and though the situation made it impossible for me to write a column, I still feel bad about leaving you guys in the lurch. I'll do everything in my power to keep the column weekly going forward. Because if I don't, the warlocks win. And they can never win, you guys. Never.

With that out of the way, we're at the point in the expansion when most of what I said about the various specs early on is now almost completely false. I feel it is time again for me to address the mage nation about the state of the mage. This time around, though, I thought I'd tackle each spec separately, since the state of the mage is quite different depending upon what sort of mage you happen to be. Over the next three weeks, we'll take a hard look at the state of the three mage specs, focusing on PVE, and see where we're at as a class.

We start this week with the left-most mage spec: arcane.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen is busy looking in the mirror instead of playing a proper spec. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com, produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

In previous weeks, Spiritual Guidance has tackled how to heal the various raid encounters in tier 11. This week, we're going to revisit each boss on heroic difficulty. Once more, I'll be examining which spec is better equipped to handle the fight while also examining the differences in the new encounter and how to deal with them. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started.

First, I want to point out that a major difference between any heroic and normal mode encounter is that abilities in heroic do an increased amount of damage. In order to avoid being redundant, please keep in mind that when I point out the differences between modes that the need for more healing will be assumed. If the increased damage significantly impacts the strategy of the fight, however, I will explain how.

Blizzard has already reduced the vendor price for cut green gems (presumably to reduce jewelcrafters' propensity for vendoring the majority of every prospected stack of ore). While they left the uncut gems at 5g, it became much more profitable to shuffle all possible colors of gems into enchanting mats and blue jewlery.

Well, the latest testing from the patch 4.2 PTR has reduced the price of uncut gems, too. On the live realms, they vendor for 100g a stack, leaving a decent vendor floor price for ore. Once this change goes live, they will be worth 50s each or 10g a stack. This should indeed have the desired effect of causing fewer of these to end up vendored for inflationary vendor money, with the potentially undesirable effect of making mining less profitable.

Assuming you're transmuting, disenchanting, or otherwise making good use of 5 of the 6 colors of uncommon gems, this will likely not change your life much. You will make 10g instead of 100g when you vendor a stack of the borderline useless Zephyrite, but most of your money will be coming from the other activities. Also, you can still occasionally sell these to other jewelcrafters for their daily.

Bottom line, though, is that the new "floor" price of Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore is basically gone now. There are no more guaranteed sales, and if you flood a market (like enchanting mats) by processing thousands of stacks of ore, you can't count on any vendor based fallback to at least get you your money back.

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The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 06 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby.

We're now two full weeks into patch 4.0.1 with our new and improved enhancement spec. Improved? Actually, no. Our DPS is only marginally improved over the previous incarnation, while our fellow melee brethren were buffed to the teeth. My rough analysis shows the difference between us and top melee DPS, usually warrior and death knight, has widened significantly since the patch.

I'm going to preface all of this analysis by saying that I am not the top enhancement shaman, by far. I play well, I study my class, I optimize my spec, gems, forging, gear and rotations. I don't die to stupid stuff -- well, at least not often! In other words, I try to push my damage without sacrificing myself. Be forewarned that some of these numbers I'm embarrassed to post in such a public manner, and while I'm hardly the benchmark for DPS, I can at least provide a baseline of what your average progression raider's numbers look like.

On average across eight of 12 hard-mode fights in ICC (excluding the gimmick fights Gunship, VDW and BQL, and excluding H-LK because we're just now working on him), the top melee DPS was doing 50 percent more damage than me pre-patch and 64 percent more post-patch. I could narrow that gap down to about 15 percent on a standstill fight such as Deathbringer Saurfang, but on high-movement fights such as Sindy, the top melee would do as much as 80 percent more damage than me overall.

As much as it pains me to say this, as a raid leader I have to ask the question: Am I dead weight in raids right now? Will level 85 with Unleash Elements bring better output?