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Class balance in a post-WotLK World of Warcraft
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Classes, News items
Class balance is always a touchy subject, depending on the class a person plays. But WoWRIOT has put together an impressive look a class balance in a post-WotLK World of Warcraft. After looking through much of the post, we’re pretty impressed with its accuracy and overall take on current class balance, especially as it pertains to arena and PvP.
Normally, those who actually play the game are much more interested in these kinds of balance overviews. However, the article contains an extensive look at Death Knights and everything about where their place in the game is right now. So for anybody who’s been curious as to what’s going on with the first new class in World of Warcraft, we’d say the article is definitely worth a look. For everyone who does play the game, it’s probably a good idea to at least check out your class (or classes) if only to see why you should or shouldn’t be upset with Blizzard.
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Class balance in a post-WotLK World of Warcraft originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Public Quests.
I’m not sure how familiar anyone is with Warhammer Online. Basically, it is a game that is very similar to World of Warcraft, however players are able to achieve max level without ever doing anything on their own. And yes, I do realize this is also possible on WoW, however with Warhammer Online it is actually encouraged!
And that’s where the idea for this post came from. Public Quests are unique to Warhammer Online and have caused a lot of discussion in the MMO world. They are quests that trigger when you enter a certain area, and you can choose to take part in them or simply watch from within. Often there will be a few dozen players taking part with you, with everyone helping each other to achieve the over-all goal of completing the quest. Now, since Warhammer Online is a relatively new game, I was wondering if any WoW players would be interested in this?
I know from a personal side that this would certainly be a nice brake from all the gold grinding I have been doing lately. However, if battlegrounds are anything to go by, I think there would be a lot of internal arguing, name calling and hissy fits to witness. Say for instance the quest was failed; It’s never the fault of any of the loud mouths, is it?
I don’t know… It seems like many of these new online games have almost ‘ripped off’ World of Warcraft’s playing style. They simply take everything that is good about WoW, and add their own little spin. They are probably quite pleased with themselves too. However, I have no doubt that Blizzard will get their own back and start borrowing from them. Basically, something that was once unique to Warhammer Online will soon be unique to Warhammer and World of Warcraft.
WoW Public Quests anyone? Who are we kidding, we all know it’s going to happen sooner or later…
US Maintenance, 3.0.8 Icons, Blue Posts
US Downtime - Extended maintenance
We will be performing maintenance for all realms on Tuesday, January 6th. The downtime will begin at 3:00 AM PST and end at approximately 11:00 AM PST.
Is patch 3.0.8 going live today? We don't know yet and Blizzard didn't say about it, obviously the site will be updated as soon as possible if it's the case. (It wouldn't be impossible to see it, but there is still a lot of activity on PTR forums, just don't get your hopes too high)
- Patch 3.0.8 PTR Notes and Undocumented changes
- Patch 3.0.8 Build 9355 Undocumented changes and new PvP Rewards
- Patch 3.0.8 Enchantment changes
- Patch 3.0.8 Reputation and Item changes
- Patch 3.0.8 Small notes update
Patch 3.0.8 - New Ammo Icons ?
A few icons have been added in patch 3.0.8, 9 of them are for new … ammos? We didn't see anything about that on 3.0.8 PTRs. I definitely won't jump to conclusions because there are thousands of way to use the icons but maybe we will see them on items introduced in Patch 3.1, which would be interesting now that Ghostcrawler said that hunters damage will be greatly changed in this patch. Again there is nothing official about this, and nothing unofficial either.
Blue posts
The PTR is a build, much like an actual patch. It represents the data at a moment in time. Since the PTR went out we have fixed other bugs and changed class spells and abilities, some based on feedback coming out of the PTR. If we think we are close to releasing a live build, we won't update the PTR. Otherwise, we will keep refreshing the data.
I am unable to tell you when we plan for the patch to go live for the same reasons we usually don't announce when we think a patch will go live. (Source)
Tanking in Ulduar
Most of the heated tank debates seem to involve if one class is better than another or missing a critical skill or something. Those are all totally valid issues and the kind of thing we monitor.
Specifically on BoSanc, we understand the concern. We're not ready to make any changes yet because we aren't convinced it's going to end up slanting things much one way or the other. But Ulduar is coming. It's going to be harder and it's going to have bosses no one has tanked before. There will be a lot more to discuss, and unfortunately I also suspect a lot more consternation about who doesn't feel like they have the abilities to tank Ulduar. (Source)
Naxxramas and Ulduar raid difficulty
I think some of the other players have answered this the way I would. The idea is not that you can bring 25 prot warriors because they are all excellent players and expect to clear Naxx. I exaggerate, but you get the point. The idea is that you have enough coverage over "critical" areas with fewer players so that you have enough free spots to bring who you want. I put critical in quotes, because it varies depending on groups. Some players think Heroism is mandatory. It probably isn't for Naxx but it probably was for Sunwell. Some kind of poison dispel is probably mandatory for Naxx. Innervate isn't mandatory. Battle rez is useful while learning the encounters. And so on.
Having two priests is currently mandatory for heroic Naxx to do one encounter (that gates some others). We knew we were pushing the envelope with what we could expect of of raids with that design. I think most 25-player groups have 2 priests, but I'm sure not all of them do. If we had asked you to have say 2 Survival hunters, that would clearly be over the line. If we had asked you to have a death knight MT for Saph, that would have gone against the design. Perhaps we should have left up one crystal so you only needed one priest.
I think expecting one of each class isn't too much to ask for a 25-player group, provided we aren't asking for a particular spec or a particular role (like a druid tank or a paladin healer). But this is the kind of thing we're going to have to explore a little more to see how it feels.
Ulduar is going to be more difficult than Naxx, and we expect to see a lot more concerns or complaints about specific classes, specs or buffs being mandatory. We're not designing the encounters that way, but with tougher tuning, I wouldn't be surprised to see more given how much we've seen about relatively easy raiding content. We will deal with those problems if and when they arise. (Source)
25 Players raids composition and effects of the upcoming Wild Growth / Circle of Healing changes
Seriously though, I recently addressed this in a healer thread. We knew heroic Razuvious was pushing the envelope asking for 2 priests, but we also wanted to explore a little of how much we could push the envelope. One of the nice things about Naxx is you can make progress on other wings while you wait for priests to log on or whatever.
I'd say in general we might make the assumption in a 25-player raid that you have every class available, but not every spec available. We might assume you have a paladin, but not a Prot paladin. We might require you to spellsteal but not deep freeze. In a 10-player raid you should be able to roll with 1-2 tanks and 2-3 healers of any kind. At most you might have unconventional solutions to some fights that benefit more from not having too many melee (KT) or instant hots (Malygos).
We haven't nerfed Malygos' Vortex yet because frankly people have beaten him with every combination of healers possible (including 3 Holy paladins). We are prepared to nerf Vortex however if a lot of groups suddenly can't handle the encounter any longer. Once you get a certain amount of health, which many guilds are starting to acquire, Vortex becomes a lot less deadly. I won't offer too many more tips because I think it rubbed some players the wrong way when I gave suggestions for Loken, but rest assured, it can totally be done.
[...] I don't think heroic Raz is anything close to that scale, and in any event, I would not anticipate many encounters like that. We hate to rule them out completely, just because we design a lot of boss fights and frankly the diversity is nice. One of the things that is cool about the encounter is that priests get to tank for one fight — something they never get to do (the MT can just do the control on the 10-player version) and Mind Control, which often doesn't work in instances, gets to shine. (Source)
Changing classes / specs between encounters
The best guilds in the world already send people to respec between fights or swap out classes between fights. We don't want this to be the standard way everyone raids, but we don't think it's worth implementing a lot of punitive measure to prevent either. So dual-spec won't affect those guilds much.
So then it comes down to what is most likely *your* guild (unless you are in one of those cutting-edge guilds, in which case I salute you). In your guild are all the players such amazing players that they can always hit the theortetical max dps predicted by spreadsheets and combat dummy tests? If so, then the pure classes should still be on top. If not, then you still don't have much to worry about. If you are an amazing mage and can out dps the shamans and druids, then you'll probably get a spot. If you aren't an amazing mage, but you have good friends in the guild and they like having you along then you'll probably get a spot.
The groups that might get caught are those that struggle with content and feel like stacking classes is the solution to get them through. But in nearly every case I see this, the group would do far better to just get better gear, talent builds, or learn how to handle the encounters or which buttons to push. The exception are the cutting-edge guilds that ARE struggling with cutting-edge content, but they are going to stack classes per encounter anyway (and 99% of us aren't in those guilds). (Source)
Death Knight (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Dual Wield
There are talents that benefit DW more than 2H. We think that is more interesting than every talent always giving you the same benefit no matter what your gear choices. BCB, Killing Machine and Necrosis, among others, should benefit DW.
If DW is too stron…
Extended maintenance, some hints of patch 3.0.8
Filed under: Realm Status, News items, Rumors
Maintenance will run “extended” tomorrow for all U.S. realms until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST. The last few weeks we’ve seen the down time grow as Blizzard’s worked out issues, so I wouldn’t count on the servers being up at 11:00 a.m. PST. However I’ll happily eat my words. However unlike Alex, I will not eat my hat.
We also have heard a couple sources whispering in our ear that patch 3.0.8 will be dropping either tomorrow or next week. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. Don’t take what we’re saying here as any more than a creditable rumor.
However these rumors do have some added credence in that they coincide with comments from Ghostcrawler today such as “These [changes] will be in the next patch (3.0.8) even thought they were not on the PTR,” and “We’ll be able to share patch notes soon.”
No matter if 3.0.8 drops tomorrow or not, there will be downtime. Fable II anyone?
Extended maintenance, some hints of patch 3.0.8 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Compare gear easily with Pawn
Gear is one of the main ways characters in WoW get more powerful, and pretty much the only way once we reach the level cap. However, it can sometimes be difficult to decipher whether one item is better than another - as a rogue, will 10 hit rating help you more or less than 10 Agi, assuming you’re not capped? (Less, according to most sources.)
Questions like these are why stat weighting scales were developed; they aim to answer questions like that by expressing how much each stat is worth in terms of “points,” which quantify how much each stat helps your DPS/healing/tanking. For instance, Shadow Panther has calculated that if 1 Agi is worth 1 point, 1 hit rating is worth 0.85 points, 1 Str, 0.55 points, and so on. Many different rating scales for various classes and specs can be found around the internet.
Continue reading Compare gear easily with Pawn
Compare gear easily with Pawn originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Steamwheedle Cartel holding a "Black Market" crafting event
Filed under: Herbalism, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Enchanting, Items, Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items, Jewelcrafting, Wrath of the Lich King, Inscription
I love this idea a whole lot. A group of folks on Steamwheedle are holding an RP even (which they’ve done before), but it’s a different kind of event than the usual party or dueling tournament. Instead, it’s going to be completely peaceful — they’re having a Saturday morning crafting bazaar. Down in the empty vendor stalls of Undercity, they’ll have crafters of all types and levels, some with their mats, some where you’ll have to bring your own mats, making items aplenty for players. On January 24th, they’re holding a “Black Market”, where you’ll be able to get almost anything crafted that you want (providing you’ve got the goods). They’re also having a raffle, and they’ll be serving food and drink as well. What a great idea.
In fact, I’d love to see something like this come to the game at large — maybe Blizzard could provide a bonus to crafting when it’s done at a certain time in a certain place, like create a “crafter’s market” weekly on Saturday mornings (scheduled just like the Sunday fishing tournament), where crafters can make sure to be in a certain area ready to craft for any players who might need it, and can get bonus items or currency or mats for their trouble.
For such a social game, combat seems to always end up being the only way for players to connect regularly (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the only way to bond in game seems to be killing things). It would be nice to see more of this type of connection encouraged by Blizzard, with players using the skills they’ve earned to help each other and both sides getting a nice reward for it.
Steamwheedle Cartel holding a “Black Market” crafting event originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Queue: Pandapocalypse
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Lore, The Queue
On Friday I responded to a question regarding Pandaren, and it turns out I’m about half wrong. Partially right, but also partially wrong, which is certainly a problem. My answer was based off of something I talked about with a random Blizzard employee, but in hindsight that’s a pretty poor move on my part, they wouldn’t necessarily know the little inner workings of one or two departments within the company. What I said was refuted with quotes from J. Allen Brack and Chris Metzen, which I’m willing to put more weight in as far as game lore goes. The Chinese did, indeed, have a problem with the Pandaren being in-game.
I was right in that there are no laws against virtual pandas getting shivved or whatever, but there definitely was an issue with the Pandaren race, culturally. It’s much more likely it just ran into a lot of friction when it came down to dealing with censors and the cultural shift, and it became not worth it to risk losing players over. I’m sure the fact that the Pandarens’ original design was much more Japanese (see above) than Chinese didn’t help, but that was shifted in the right direction eventually and may not have had an actual impact at all. And with that said…
Continue reading The Queue: Pandapocalypse
The Queue: Pandapocalypse originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Scouting around with the Crashin’ Thrashin’ Racer
Filed under: Cheats, How-tos, Fan stuff, Instances, Bosses, Wrath of the Lich King
Cabinetsanchez over on LJ has documented something that I saw in action yesterday while running a few instances — while it’s a ton of fun to run my Crashin’ Thrashin Racer around (I’m undefeated since I picked up the achievement the first day I got the toy, by the way), players have found a few extra ways to make the Racers work for them. Yesterday, I saw one of my group members using the Racer a few times to scout the instance ahead and see what pulled with what, and as CS says, it worked great: while the Racer will aggro enemies, they won’t tag on to the rest of the group — they’ll just reset after they destroy the little car.
CS also says that the Racer takes no falling damage, so you can send it exploring off of cliffs and platforms, and he says that though the car is considered level 60, its aggro range is pretty small (I can attest to this, as we were driving it pretty close to enemies yesterday without it registering on their radar). And he’s got an even more devious use (some might say this is an exploit): bosses aggroed by the racer will sometimes despawn after they conquer it for up to 30 seconds or so. That seems like a hotfix waiting to happen, but I haven’t personally tried it, so it may not be as useful as it sounds.
The downside of this is that the Racer was meant to be a fun item, and if it really does lead to behavior that Blizzard considers exploiting, they might have to think twice about including great items like this in the future. We’ll have to see what their ruling on this is, but hopefully no matter what happens (I’m guessing a quick hotfix, maybe even shrinking the range of the Racer’s controller), this won’t prevent Blizzard from giving us more fun toys later on.
Scouting around with the Crashin’ Thrashin’ Racer originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mike Morhaime wins 2008 award from OC* Business Journal
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items, Making money, BlizzCon
The Orange County Business Journal has awarded none other than Blizzard’s own Mike Morhaime with the runner up for their Businessperson of the Year award (the main award went to some CEO of an investment company, much more boring than running a fantasy world full of orcs and elves). The Journal cite’s Blizzard’s huge successes in a rough financial year as reason for Morhaime’s honor.
The paper isn’t quite completely familiar with what Blizzard does (did you know Diablo III was “released” in June of last year? Don’t know why I haven’t seen it on store shelves yet!), but there are a few interesting tidbits in there for us, including the fact that WoW was so popular on its original release day that Blizzard had to bring employee copies out to their Fry’s to sell them to hungry fans. And Morhaime talks a bit about Blizzard being part of Activision, and reveals the biggest change we’ve heard of yet since the takeover: “The big difference here is we are one step closer to the public markets. It requires that we spend more time than we used to in educating analysts and investors about Blizzard, where we used to be able to not deal with that side of the business.”
So hopefully Blizzard’s higherups aren’t spending too much time trying to sell stock rather than making great games. He does reiterate, however, that Activision has continued to be hands off (especially as long as Blizzard is making so much money for them), so a lot of the things that fans have guessed are Activision influences are probably decisions that Blizzard themselves have already made. Still, success is success — pretty good for a guy who started out writing test software for Western Digital. Congrats to Morhaime on the award.
*Don’t call it that.
Mike Morhaime wins 2008 award from OC* Business Journal originally appeared on WoW Insider on Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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