Mid-Morning Ghostcrawler Posts

The Future of Hunters

I acknowledge that hunters struggled in the previous Arena seasons. I think it’s vastly premature to say the situation is worse now when so few players have even been able to try Arenas at 80. We changed the hunter class quite a bit and we changed all of the other classes you were fighting as well. We don’t feel particularly confident predicting what is going to happen in the next arena season, so I’m going to take with a grain of salt anyone who can sort of cleverly intuit what the state of PvP balance will be in LK.

Will we have specs that are too dominant and others that aren’t viable? Probably, and we’ll work to get both of those cases addressed. Are hunters in either of those camps? We’ll all know soon enough.

Restoration Shamans and Chain Heal

When we sat down to design Resto for LK, tops on everyone’s list was to get them to CAST ANOTHER SPELL SOMETHING ANYTHING!

A lot of the talents were designed to do just that. We even considered some draconian measures to discourage CH spamming, like cooldowns and the like.

Then a smart designer in the room (it wasn’t me) asked why was there so much CH hate. Yes, shamans used it a lot, but you know, it is a pretty distinctive, inconic spell. We decided rather than try to make CH a bad spell, we’d just leave in those new talents to get you to cast other spells once in awhile. The difference is we think you’ll still cast CH 90% of the time or whatever, but maybe that remaining 10% will require you to think a little differently about what to cast (and at least it’s not 100%).

Arcane Mage and Balance Druid Nerfs?

Arcane mages and Balance druids are definitely something we’re keeping an eye on. We might need to hotfix either or both or we might not. I have no announcements about either at this time. But if they are overpowered at all, it is nowhere near the level at which Ret paladins were.

Elemental Shaman AoE Notes

I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep bumping posts. You’re just going to start an arms race with every other player in the forum.

We have several ideas on AE for Elemental:

A modification of Thunderstorm.
A modification of AE Totems.
A modification of Chain Lightning.
A new spell.

Feedback is of course appreciated.

Late Night Blue Posts - WotLK Class Changes and Boss Armor

Upcoming Frost Changes

We have concerns about how bursty dps has become in PvP. On the other hand, we’re pretty happy with mage dps in PvE so we want to take care not to hurt it.

For example, we discussed shifting some of Arcane’s damage between Arcane Blast and Arcane Barrage, but that actually does hurt one of Arcane’s PvE advantages over Fire — namely to be able to move around while doing some instant spells.

In the case of Frost, however, we have become concerned that it’s too easy to blow opponents up too quickly. Two of the culprits here are instant, uninterruptible Fireballs and Deep Freeze.

We are changing Brain Freeze to only proc off of Frost spells that can chill. Specifically, this limits the tactic of trying to fish for procs with Ice Lance. Ice Lance gets used a lot more in PvP, so we don’t think this will hurt Frost as much in PvE.

Secondly, Cold as Ice no longer reduces the cooldown on Deep Freeze. Deep Freeze is an (ahem) cool spell and we don’t want to nerf it too much, but you must admit that the poor frozen shmuck can endure a lot of damage while he is locked up.

Upcoming Warlock DPS Changes

We have finished a fairly comprehensive look at the dps of various classes and specs and are concerned that warlock dps isn’t quite where it should be. It’s not abysmal by any means, but we think it should be a little higher.

To give warlocks a little extra nudge in PvP, we increased Soul Link up to 20% from 15%. You may already have this change.

In PvE, overall, we just think a lot of classes benefitted from getting the warlock buffs a little more than the locks benefited from getting everyone else’s buffs. So we decided to just buff lock damage across the board (which will also help in PvP somewhat). Rather than change damage and coefficients of a lot of different ranks of spells, we just inflated talents that we were almost certain you’d already have. Shadow Mastery, Demonic Tactics and Emberstorm were all increased by 1% per rank for 5% total.

Let us know how that feels. The changes should go live before Nov 13.

Recent Fury Changes

As I posted recently in the hunter forums, we increased the armor on level 83 raid bosses by 10%. This will be a nerf to warrior dps.

In the case of Arms and Protection, we don’t think any adjustment is necessary at this time. Arms is doing very competitive dps, while Fury has fallen behind. We experimented with lowering the proc chance of Sudden Death, from where Arms gets a lot of its damage, but weren’t happy with the result and ultimately decided to buff Fury instead.

First, we increased the percentage of AP that contributes to Bloodthirst from 45% to 50%.

Second, we reduced the hit penalty on special attacks on Titan’s Grip from -12% to -5%.

As I have said before, we have been somewhat reluctant to give Titan’s Grip such a huge buff. It is now likely more powerful than several other talents in the tree and risks being the 51-point talent to which all other classes compare their 51-point talent. Nevertheless, we feel it was the right change to make.

When a Fury warrior missed a Slam or Bloodthirst on a boss, they ended up building up a lot of extra rage that couldn’t be spent fast enough. I understand some players suggested an additional attack for Fury, and that is something we may still consider when we see players hit 80 and start experimenting more with the build. But it would be a very big change that involved touching talent trees and glyphs, as well as a lot of time necessary to iterate on the right values. The Titan’s Grip change by contrast was a simple one, and judging by the number of players who have asked for it throughout beta, one that will be welcomed by the community.

Upcoming Hunter Changes

As I have suggested a few times, we are concerned that hunters of all 3 specs are doing damage that is clearly superior to other classes. While we’re trying to achieve closer parity among specs of all classes with regard to dps, and we want to particularly make sure that hunters, rogues, mages and locks are not left behind, we do think the hunters are too far ahead, particularly at 80, in good gear, when raid-buffed.

However, we have also tried to give hunters a substantial survivability boost in PvP and we don’t want to do anything that hurts them too much in PvP.

So here are changes you will most likely see soon:

1) Ranged attacks no longer benefit from the haste effects of Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Talons. This is a nerf to hunter white damage.

2) We are also improving the armor on level 83 raid bosses by 10%. This will be a nerf to the dps of any class that does physical damage. For classes that would slide behind with such a change, we’ll take steps to adjust them — though it probably isn’t as many as you think. The raid buff stacking overhaul was very beneficial to melee (and hunters). Sunder / Expose Armor alone can be a 20%+ dps increase, which is why we decided to attack the problem from this angle.

3) Now the armor change won’t affect PvP at all and the haste buff change will only have a marginal affect in BGs and only in Arena teams that include certain comps. However, in order to make sure we didn’t nerf hunters too much, we made two changes to Disengage. First, its cooldown dropped to 25 sec (from 30) which can be talented to 16. Second, it no longer requires a target, but does require you to be in combat. Now if someone closes to melee, you can leap back without having to select them first. We require you to be in combat though so we don’t see a lot of hunters bouncing around IF / Org or using it like Blink to goofily speed up travel.

Boss Armor Change

As I have posted a couple of times recently, we decided to raise the armor of level 83 raid bosses by 10% to correct for some dps difference between casters and melee + hunters. I wanted to address the issue head on with the rogues.

We have done a lot of testing recently, and concluded that even with this change, Assassination rogues are likely the top dps spec in the game against single bosses that don’t move around a lot (like Patchwerk). This isn’t a bad place for them to be. They pay a small price both for being melee (where more damage tends to occur) and for lacking the ability to respec into a non-damage build. We don’t think they will be as far above hybrids as they have been before — as I’ve posted before, it’s very important that hybrid classes do higher dps now that their buffs do not stack.

Combat builds, especially swords, is competitive but probably behind Assassination. This is something we’d like to address, especially if it turns out to be a major difference between the specs. Additional armor does hurt Combat, but also remember it’s just raid bosses and not other players (or trash or heroic bosses).

Subtelty, sadly, is just much harder to test since so much of their damage relies on other players. Our preliminary evidence is that they generate plenty of combo points from Honor Among Thieves, but this might mean their personal dps when not in a group suffers. This is something we’re still testing.

I will add that some players have wondered if Honor Among Thieves is bugged since the cp can occur more often than 1 sec. In this case, the tooltip is just unclear. When Jimmy the Shaman crits, he cannnot “send you” a combo point more often than 1 per sec. But if you have lots of players critting all the time, you can build them up quickly. So Honor is (here it comes) working as intended.

WotLK Rogue Talents Q and A with Devs

Before we get into all the rogue Q and A below, I think it’s worth giving an e-high five to the best damn blue poster there’s ever been, Ghostcrawler. GC has gone well beyond the call of duty to help answer questions and concerns for every class. She’s meticulously explained the reasoning behind changes, received feedback, and truly listened to player concerns regarding WotLK balance.

Without his fine work and dedication I don’t think we’d have a WotLK looking nearly as good as it is. That said, let’s get into these rogue changes!

Rogue Raid Utility

In terms of the big raid buffs, the ones we consider rogues bringing are Expose Armor, Wound Poison and Mind Numbing Poison. There are plenty of others more along the lines of Kick and Sap that are harder to quantify.

It’s really great to see blizzard is taking a serious look at improving raid utility for rogues. I could definitely see expose armor stacking with sunder armor in WotLK, and potentially being changed to a percentage armor reduction…a change which nearly made it into TBC.

There are lots of ways Blizzard can add raid utility to the class and I’m very excited to see how they work poisons, EA, and other rogue abilities into future lich king encounters.

With that in mind can you tell us any plans that you have to better close this PvE to PvP gap that we’re seeing with certain trees? How do you plan to make all three trees viable across the board?

Yes, this is definitely a priority. It is a lot harder with classes in which all specs are still focused mostly on dps. We understand that some specs are just going to be better for 5-mans, for PvP or for raiding. We’re trying to equalize as much as possible, but we’re also trying to be realistic about our chances.

How do you plan to deal with talents which were still considered all too needed by rogues, particularly in the case of Relentless Strikes? Is there any possibility of making Relentless Strikes a core class ability we can all train?

Mandatory talents are tricky. There are certainly plenty of them in every tree. Every warrior spec without Cruelty is pretty experimental, as is every druid spec without Omen of Clarity. Part of the problem is we keep offering new character levels along with new talents, so each expansion ends up constraining you more and more to one tree. The real red flag, for me at least, is when a spec has so many truly mandatory talents (which is a funny thing to say, since it’s still a little subjective) that they don’t have any optional talents. Instead of a cookie-cutter build being something like 20 plus your choice, they become you must get these 24 talents. If that makes sense.

I wish GC would have just answered the question here instead of beating around the bush. To me this sounds more like a cop out for…no, we aren’t making them core abilities, deal with it until we figure out what to do later in the expansion. Either way, all 3 talent trees are looking pretty damn good.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to create anything but carbon copies of abilities in each of the 3 trees and not have SOME variance. If you want the highest DPS there will ALWAYS be a max DPS…even if by 1 or 2% one spec will ALWAYS be better.

I think it is very likely there will be a theoretical max dps build. However:

• It will probably vary from boss to boss.
• It might depend a lot on the skill of the player.
• Because there are so many variables (by design) it may be really hard to “solve the equation” for which actually is the highest dps build.
• For 90% of players (maybe more) that kind of damage difference is in the noise. Very few players can do 2500 dps one night and then 2525 dps another night (a 1% difference). Usually the delta is much larger than that because of random elements including things as non-gamey as Internet lag, how tired you are and just bad luck. If taking the most optimal build can’t guarantee you dps higher than the random element in the equation, it may very well not be worth taking. Now if the dps gain is significant by taking the best build, then I agree with you.

Rogue Talent Tree Conclusions

Rogue talents are hard because the class is ultimately very mathy. Without a finite resource like mana, it’s easy to analyze every possible move for its cost efficiency and ultimate damage delivery. This is coupled with the fact that it’s really easy for a rogue to move among trees. By contrast, before the advent of Frostfire Bolt a fire mage could mostly ignore frost. A shadow priest wants almost nothing in Holy. But having an emphais on poisons or stealth in a rogue tree doesn’t make a tree unattractive to a Combat rogue. I’m not trying to make excuses, but perhaps more than any other class, I find that rogues can evaluate a talent’s utility pretty easily. It’s a cool thing about the class, but it makes talent design challenging.

I think I mentioned this in another thread, but our team has a really amazing rogue theorycrafter who stays really in touch with the community (anonymously). We have a surprising number of really good players on the team in general, but I always feel really safe about his conclusions on rogues. But that has also meant fewer blue posts than you deserve, so I’m trying to make up for that.

WotLK Warrior Developer Q & A

It’s posts like this that really prove to me time and time again that World of Warcraft is the greatest MMO currently on the market. Ghostcrawler recently made a massive post answering warrior concerns across the spectrum. A+ job from Ghostcrawler, I hope we see more player / developer interaction like this in the future for other class concerns. (note: these questions were posed by warriors currently playing the wotlk beta)

Why does bladestorm have a self-CC element? Why doesn’t it remove CC, stuns, snares or roots on use? Will this be reconsidered?
It does great dps. It would be too good if you could do other stuff too and too good if you could Intercept someone down. We might reconsider the CC issue, but really that’s the kind of thing to pop out of PvP testing.

Are there any plans to make the improved charge and improved heroic strike talents not bad? Less bad?
We buffed Imp Charge recently. Imp Heroic Strike might seem a little bland, but that may be because we’ve changed a lot of the old talents in various trees that used to do simple things like this. Heroic really does hit like a truck now, so I assume your issue is what the talent does to rage cost?

Why was enrage’s bonus damage reduced so severely? Would you consider allowing deathwish to stack again now that the bonus is so low?
Because we changed it from “be crit” to “be hurt.” We might consider letting it stack.

Have you looked at the math supplied by Torgal and company that demonstrates titans grip isn’t such a massive increase as you think it is? If their numbers are correct, then what is your stance?
Our numbers say differently. I haven’t looked to see where they differ. I’ll try to get to that.

You say you don’t want any single talent point giving a 10% damage increase (as for example.) On 25-man Kel’thuzad and Sapphiron last night, mortal strike amounted to approximately 17% of my total damage done. On Sapphiron, slam was approximately 40% of total damage. Will mortal strike, bloodthirst or improved slam be nerfed based on your talent budgeting?
No. That’s not a hard and fast rule. In your example though, if you had not used Mortal Strike or Slam you probably would have used the rage for something else. In the case of TG though we do have serious concerns about it being too good (sans a stiff penalty). While we might change our minds after more data, you’re not going to change our mind by pointing out logical inconsistencies in talent trees. There are plenty of them.

Do you see the glyph of resonating power (Increases the maximum targets affected by your Thunder Clap ability by 4) as being mandatory for tanking? If yes, do you feel that’s acceptable? If no, why not?
It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.

Can you offer an approximation of the proc rate/PPM on furious attacks?
It’s a frequency-based proc. It’s a little complicated to explain but you might compare it to Omen of Clarity. I’ll try to get back to this later.

Are there any plans to make unending fury not bad? Less bad? Seriously, it’s really really bad.
Yeah, this one doesn’t feel done.

Damage shield is, according to some very basic testing, not generating threat from damage dealt. Can you confirm this? If so, is this intended?
It appears to generate threat based on the damage done. But there might be a bug.

Are there any plans to buff revenge baseline so that it’s worth injecting into rotations for protection?
Putting it into Sword and Board is something we are discussing.

Do you feel that shockwave is, or should be, our be-all answer to AoE threat generation? Is there any chance of lowering the cooldown?
No, we don’t want it to be your go-to AE ability, because then Arms and Fury can never tank a 5-player dungeon very well. We want it to be useful obviously.

Is it possible to give Disarm the same functionality as rogue’s Dismantle, or at least, the removed Shield Break skill?
I’ll have to investigate this.

Do you feel heroic throw is strong or interesting enough for a level 80 skill?
Yes.

The devs seem to have originally planned several means for warriors to interact with the new enrage mechanics. Will enraged regeneration and the rend bonus be all that we see for the expansion, or is more being considered? Specifically, enraged assault.
The problem we had with Enraged Assault was our warrior testers and designers didn’t feel like they had enough GCDs to work another attack into their rotations. It was just too much. I love the idea though (it wasn’t mine) so I wouldn’t say never.

While you’re doing numbers passes, any chance of restoring flurry to its original 30% bonus? Compare it to shamans flurry and it’s clearly underbudgeted.
It all depends at this point on whether shamans or warriors are doing too much damage.

Why was the healing component of bloodthirst nerfed?
We thought it was too good, though to be honest, there are clandestine whispers echoing through our offices in the dead of night to change it back.

Also is it intended for protection warriors to be in the 1.3 1.4k dps ballpark when prot DKs, pallies or bears do a lot more damage?
No, that is too low. We nerfed Devastate (for good reason) and haven’t given warriors anything back yet. We don’t want to just buff Revenge, because that doesn’t help dps when you aren’t the tank. Shield Slam is a good candidate.

And it *is* the intention for Arms and Fury to do damage that is very close to other dps specs. I can’t say 100%, because I feel the need to always caveat this. You may be tops on one fight, but the very next fight may work so differently that you aren’t on top. Overall it should be really hard to tell whether it’s the player or the class that is driving those numbers.

To what extent is the warrior community’s perception that the developers deliberately design warriors to be weaker than other classes at low or “casual” gear levels in exchange for being powerful at higher gear levels correct?
We worry a lot more about class balance at max level. We do try and make sure people have the tools they need to level up, but we don’t spend a lot of our time making sure rogues and warriors do similar dps at level 76. I don’t think warriors are unique here. We *have* been burned before by warriors ending up a lot more powerful with good gear than we anticipated. Warriors have a tendency to be rage-starved and do low dps and then suddenly hit some magic threshold of gear and have plenty of rage, which means more dps, which means more rage…. It may have been our referencing that phenomenon that has driven that perception. But we don’t go out of our way to compensate for that by nerfing warriors in greens or heroic blues.