August Blog Posts

As I mentioned in On Resource Systems, haste affects casters different from melee, in that it increases the regen rate of our resource (cast time) but only increases the rate of their autoattacks. This too is getting fixed in 4.0, haste will now affect melee autoattacks (and, oddly, the mana regen of enhancement shaman and retadins -- I don't even want to touch that one as far as speculation goes, I'm uncertain that design will last past the end of 4.0 alpha.)

The 4.0 design is to make haste more valuable for everyone and, in Ghostcrawlers words, to make it serve its original purpose: Haste lets you push buttons faster.

However, unless some changes are made, multiple classes will be left out of this brave new world: Shadow priests, Retribution Paladins, and Enhancement Shaman.

Note: this assumes there's an actual haste stat. We don't have the full and accurate list yet of what stats will still be around, but I love to speculate and think so I'm posting anyways. Nyah nyah.

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This is a much-needed change with some fascinating implications. To recap, hunters will no longer use mana, they will use "focus" instead, which is just another word for energy with slightly different regen mechanics. This was, of course, the original plan in WoW: Hunters used focus, which they only regenerated by standing perfectly still.

This has fascinating implications for hunter shot design (and perhaps pvp), and also helps highlight how movement impacts the different resource systems differently. This is the second time that they have explicitly limited hunter resource regeneration in a specific way, and it is certainly deliberate.

At the end of my post I actually look broadly at the different resources and how movement/interrupt affects them all.

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I sat down tonight to write my analysis/commentary on the Blizzcon changes. I realized it would be long, so I put in a table of contents at the top. By the time the post count hit 1500 words, I knew I needed to break it into multiple posts.

The big news for everyone was that Blizzard will be returning to a more WoW 1.0 set of stats, but one that actually gives mana-based classes DPS rather than just longevity (i.e. a higher total damage cap.)

Overall this represents a good direction for gear: the tension between plate having "four" stats and other gear having "five" stats will be relieved, and healer/dps gear will be somewhat separated again (it's been a rough expansion to be a caster trying to gear up.)

Unfortunately I don't understand enough of the tanking area to have a grasp on what it means to get rid of defense: I'm not a tank, and I don't gear up my character like a tank. Tanks are different from DPS classes in that they care about different stats in different situations and defense was one of them. Part of the minigame of tank gearing was picking the best piece for that boss and balancing considerations like threat versus mitigation. Dodge wasn't mentioned in either the "trash" list or the "keep" list -- my guess is it will still exist, like spirit will be an additional healer stat, but it's unclear.

The other big announcement in this area is that they won't be forcing DPS to try to shoehorn regen stats into their gear anymore. I'm especially curious about the PvP implications of the new designs in terms of the hybrid healer/caster classes.

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8/21 update: Blizzcon announcement that haste will affect melee regen systems, and they're removing the need for casters to gear for regen stats because regen isn't a fun concern for non-healers. :)

Glad to see my thoughts were on the same lines of what Blizzard was already implementing!

Unfortunately GC completely dodged answering one of the only good questions in that panel: even with all those haste changes, they're neglecting dots and spells with cooldowns, which hits most casters, but hits spriests especially hard.

It's laudable that they're fixing haste for melee, it would be even more for them to bring all casters up to par at the same time, and not force them to wait again.

GC is posting to mages again, which gave me another opportunity to try to argue that they handle mana poorly in WoW.

GC said:

Yes, that's exactly why we did it. We thought mana was becoming too limiting for mages. That doesn't mean you are supposed to ignore it.

I can't count the number of threads I've seen today alone that basically argue "I shouldn't have to worry about my resources." That's not the vision for WoW.

Which is a good design and I agree with him. The problem is we've heard this over and over again and they don't seem to understand why they're not achieving that with mana.

After the cut is my response:

Summary

If you want resources to matter, recognize that mana does not, for many classes, play the role of a regenerating resource, and so limiting its availability without creating interactive interesting tools that help manage when and how we deal with our mana for all mana users is an exercise in futility.

Mana doesn't matter, it will not matter, unless there is both the risk of it running out and a set of player-driven tools to actually address this and still complete the fights successfully and at that class's target DPS level.

The problem isn't what your customers want or are asking for -- it's a lack of tools and a lack of fundamental understanding of the difference between pacing resources and fuel resources.

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Today I saw "Non Player Character" for the first time. It's a somewhat new webcomic about a female geeky warcraft player.

I'm not normally one for web comics, but Mary, the author of NPC, definitely makes me chuckle:

• Warcrack Game Thingy?
• Pandering (aka What female gamers want)
• Smelly Demographics

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Yay, I got a response back from WoWProgress today.

The background is that he added our kill on 8/3. The past week since then has been non-stop trolling by people who don't understand basic math, claiming that we "cheated" by convincing WoWProgress to put our kill on 8/3 thereby getting a higher score than other guilds.

We did in fact get our kill on 8/3, but it was right around midnight Atlantic Standard Time, which is when the armory flips over dates. So it was 8/3 in that it was pre-3.2, but 8/4 as far as armory dates go.

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This is, of course, now a eulogy. Because it's been nerfed due to being "overpowered", without any specification of what was overpowered (since mages still weren't #1, much less blowing people away, even with the hotstreak portion.) But it still deserves to be posted because, well, this was a brilliant change.

Summary for the non-mages: Mages cast scorch every 30 seconds, keep Living Bomb on the target which is a 12 second dot, and then use Fireball as a filler spell. After two consecutive crits of Fireball, Scorch, or the final explosion of Living Bomb, mages gain Hot Streak, a buff that allows a single pyroblast to be instant-cast.

On the 3.2 PTR, they added Living Bomb ticks (which go off every 3 seconds) to the list of spells that could interact with hotstreak. This means that a hit of a living bomb tick will reset our crit counter, and a crit will add to it.

The living bomb change was minor boost in dps -- about 3-5%. The thing is, the world doesn't just come down to DPS.

The brilliance (and I don't use that word lightly) of the living bomb change was that it solved multiple mage problems in one fell swoop and gave them a fairly minor, but needed, dps boost in the process.

1. It gave mages mobility/target switching
2. It reduced the heavy RNG of mage DPS
3. It created more skill-based differentiation
4. It can't get out of control

Details after the cut for those who want more explanations:

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Updated 8/10: A (warlock) friend of mine, Trouble who now plays as Troubadour, incorrectly identified the paladin trend line as being the warlock one. Post has been updated. Thanks to you who (nicely) pointed it out. This update was slow because I didn't actually spend more than 30 minutes at my computer since this original post and just now. I did have an awesome weekend though, yes!

I found this linked from a thread on the damage dealing forums today, and it's a fascinating bit of data.

First off, what is it?

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We got it, in what was a pretty anticlimactic kill, with only two deaths and no massive terrifying zerg at the end.

US 4th, World 12th. Put us at US 2nd/World 9th overall since our non-Yogg kills were overall faster than some of the guilds who got Yogg+0 ahead of us.

Working on the video of course -- I haven't kept up with Yogg vids, but we will be one of the few showing the portals as well, which is a pretty key part of the fight. All the videos I watched were from a ranged class or healer who was up top, which frankly is pretty uninteresting :).

Yogg has been interesting for us: we were arguably one of the worst guilds at the fight back when we started. I'm embarrassed to talk about what we considered a good stun, how many portal phases we took, etc. Yogg+1 took us a full two nights to do, and it wasn't a very clean kill.

More details below, including far-too-extensive commentary on the learning process and what we're going to do better as a guild the next time:

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We wiped 200k short of a Yogg win tonight, so I can't actually write the triumphant post I was going to.

Instead, I'm curious what characteristics others find in boss fights that cross the line from "fun but hard" to "unfun." Yogg has certainly done that for us -- and for at least some other guilds as well.

Brainstorming, a friend and I came up with:

1. Length + Phases

   It's annoying to go through 8 minutes of P1 to P2 just to try an idea you have for P3. No matter how fast your runbacks, it's tough to get in more than 5 attempts an hour.

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