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As we mentioned in the recent post explaining the new Dungeon System, disenchanting will work a little differently in all 5 player and raid dungeons when patch 3.3 is released. We have seen a consistent pattern where players eventually need very few items from dungeons and they result to disenchanting as much of the loot as possible since those materials that can be obtained continue to have a lot of worth.
When the new Dungeon System is launched, the default user interface will give players the option to automatically disenchant items that they obtain in 5 player and raid dungeons. This option will avoid the hassle of having items picked up by an enchanter first to redistributed later and overall will make the process much smoother.
Also, with the inclusion of cross-realm-instancing in the dungeon system, there will be restrictions on trading items similar to the restrictions that are currently active in Battlegrounds. If the Dungeon System is used to complete a group for a dungeon then non-temporary items will not be able to be traded in the instance. This makes it so items like enchanting materials will not be able to be traded in the dungeon and using the new user interface option will be the only way to distribute disenchants. There will be some exceptions to this restriction though as Bind-on-Pickup items will continue to be trade-able to those present for the kill for a short duration and completely pre-formed groups that don’t use the Dungeon System to form the group will still allow trades.
To maintain the importance of the profession itself, the disenchanting UI option will only be available for groups that have a character with the necessary level of Enchanting to disenchant the items that are obtained.
We are very excited about the upcoming improvements in the new Dungeon System and don’t forget to check out the full preview here for all the details: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=11155682684
When the new Dungeon System is launched, the default user interface will give players the option to automatically disenchant items that they obtain in 5 player and raid dungeons. This option will avoid the hassle of having items picked up by an enchanter first to redistributed later and overall will make the process much smoother.
Also, with the inclusion of cross-realm-instancing in the dungeon system, there will be restrictions on trading items similar to the restrictions that are currently active in Battlegrounds. If the Dungeon System is used to complete a group for a dungeon then non-temporary items will not be able to be traded in the instance. This makes it so items like enchanting materials will not be able to be traded in the dungeon and using the new user interface option will be the only way to distribute disenchants. There will be some exceptions to this restriction though as Bind-on-Pickup items will continue to be trade-able to those present for the kill for a short duration and completely pre-formed groups that don’t use the Dungeon System to form the group will still allow trades.
To maintain the importance of the profession itself, the disenchanting UI option will only be available for groups that have a character with the necessary level of Enchanting to disenchant the items that are obtained.
We are very excited about the upcoming improvements in the new Dungeon System and don’t forget to check out the full preview here for all the details: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=11155682684
You need a full group of five people to start the Daily Random Heroic through the Dungeon System. If, however, a player leaves the group once everyone is inside the instance, the group can continue without filling the vacancy.
All Wrath of the Lich King bosses in raid and Heroic dungeons will drop Emblems of Triumph when patch 3.3 hits. The Daily Random Heroic will award Emblems of Frost for completing the dungeon. Emblems of Frost will drop in the 10- and 25-player Icecrown Citadel raid... and perhaps if another boss stumbles into the Vault he'll drop them as well. ;)
If you complete the Daily Random Heroic dungeon for the day to earn two Emblems of Frost in addition to the Emblems of Triumph which drop off of each Heroic boss, you can continue to select the "Random" option for Heroics in the Dungeon System. Doing so will award you with two Emblems of Triumph upon completion of each dungeon in addition to the Emblems of Triumph which drop off of each Heroic boss.
As it works on the test realms right now, it's no different than if a group were to fall apart mid-run on the live realms today. If anyone leaves the group or gets kicked though, the leader will be asked if he or she wants to continue the instance. If the leader chooses to continue, the group will automatically be put back into the Dungeon System to find more members.
You can form a group of five players on your realm and then select the Daily Random Heroic dungeon through the Dungeon System tool. You will be rewarded just the same except for the fact that you will not get credit toward the pick-up group Achievement reward.
The Dungeon System will make sure players are of the appropriate level, have the appropriate attunements for a dungeon (if applicable), and look at the average item level of each player. The system will put together a group according to the roles (tanking, healing, DPS) players have selected to fill and attempt to match characters as best as possible according to the items they have equipped.
If the Random option is repeatedly selected, players can run the same Heroic dungeon more than once a day. If a specific dungeon is chosen through the Dungeon System, that specific dungeon cannot be chosen more than once a day.
You could technically be given, say, Heroic Culling of Stratholme repeatedly when choosing the Random option and be eligible to repeatedly run that Heroic dungeon in one day. You cannot, however, repeatedly choose Culling of Stratholme in the Dungeon System.
If you run Heroic Culling of Stratholme through the Random option, you cannot select that Heroic instance specifically again in the Dungeon System. If you choose to run Heroic Culling of Stratholme rather than pick the Random option, there is a chance you will be selected to run Heroic Culling of Stratholme again if you pick the Random option later that same day.
We knew this change was going to be controversial, and we totally understand that e.g. cloth can be an upgrade for a Balance druid or leather can be an upgrade for a shaman.
Looting to some extent is always going to have a heavily social component. There's only so much we can do (or should do) to try and "solve" that problem for players. On the other hand, the new LFG system also removes some of the social checks and balances (not that those are huge to begin with) by potentially grouping you with folks you may never see again. On my server, perennial ninjas and jerks earn a reputation. That's going to be harder when you're talking about a battle group. Overall we expect players to just pug a lot more often, because the new system really is that good. So overall the drama over who gets the healing shoulders might arise more often. :(
Ultimately, our logic went like this: If a Holy paladin loses a great non-plate upgrade to another player, one out of five players might feel bad. If a Holy paladin rolls Need on every type of armor that drops, then four out of five players might have a bad experience. The jerk potential seemed worse than the lost-an-upgrade potential as far as whether or not players buy into using the new dungeon tool.
You can still Greed a potential upgrade item. You can still talk to your group and explain that X is an awesome item for you and would they mind passing on it or even trading it? (You can trade BoP items for a short period of time following the same rules that apply today.)
To try and improve the pug experience (at least pugs formed through the tool) we wanted to try and minimize jerkish behavior, and that includes not giving the leader a whole lot of power. I'm not talking about a player who thinks it's funny to pull the entire instance and wipe you. I'm talking about players who legitimately want to run the dungeon but have very non-conventional ideas about leadership or loot distribution. We are trying to impose a little bit of convention on these groups so that everyone has a better pug experience.
Looting to some extent is always going to have a heavily social component. There's only so much we can do (or should do) to try and "solve" that problem for players. On the other hand, the new LFG system also removes some of the social checks and balances (not that those are huge to begin with) by potentially grouping you with folks you may never see again. On my server, perennial ninjas and jerks earn a reputation. That's going to be harder when you're talking about a battle group. Overall we expect players to just pug a lot more often, because the new system really is that good. So overall the drama over who gets the healing shoulders might arise more often. :(
Ultimately, our logic went like this: If a Holy paladin loses a great non-plate upgrade to another player, one out of five players might feel bad. If a Holy paladin rolls Need on every type of armor that drops, then four out of five players might have a bad experience. The jerk potential seemed worse than the lost-an-upgrade potential as far as whether or not players buy into using the new dungeon tool.
You can still Greed a potential upgrade item. You can still talk to your group and explain that X is an awesome item for you and would they mind passing on it or even trading it? (You can trade BoP items for a short period of time following the same rules that apply today.)
To try and improve the pug experience (at least pugs formed through the tool) we wanted to try and minimize jerkish behavior, and that includes not giving the leader a whole lot of power. I'm not talking about a player who thinks it's funny to pull the entire instance and wipe you. I'm talking about players who legitimately want to run the dungeon but have very non-conventional ideas about leadership or loot distribution. We are trying to impose a little bit of convention on these groups so that everyone has a better pug experience.
Healing has always been challenging and to some extent thankless in WoW. I don't think LK fundamentally changed that.
When I heal, I like to be challenged. Just buffing healing overall, or taking some of the challenge away from the healers, I don't think makes the game more fun for them. It might be fun for a week as everyone thanks you for doing such an amazing job all the time, but playing any game in godmode typically gets old after the initial rush.
What I mean is that one of the most boring experiences I can have in the game is to be a healer for a milk run in which a wipe is unlikely and nobody is going to take much damage. By contrast, you can still have fun in that situation as a DPS spec. You can see how fast the boss dies. You can see how much damage you can do. It can even be fun as a tank, because you can usually afford to drop some of your defenses in order to improve your dps and try and make the fight shorter. At the very least, you can try and see how much damage you can mitigate. It's possible to do some pulls and even weaker bosses with almost no incoming damage. All a healer can really do is try to heal as little or efficiently as possible, which really just means you're standing around a lot. Maybe you're tossing the occasional Wrath or SW:Pain or something, but that dps contribution is pretty trivial even compared to the trying-to-DPS-a-little tank.
Where I will agree we need to improve healing in WoW is in relationship to how much damage the tank is taking (or even a teammate in PvP). Damage to health is too high in almost all scenarios, such that only the really big, really fast, or really broad (group-based) heals count for much. Things that are fun for a healer, such as trying to be mana-efficient or matching the right heal to the right damaged character go away when you're just spamming like mad. None of this should come as news to readers of this forum, because it's the kind of thing we've said before.
What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can't just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.
A similar thing is true for PvP. If health pools are larger, but heals smaller, then you see folks with health in between 100% and 0% more often.
Healing with a shaman in LK is much more dynamic than in BC. You have a variety of spells and can shift between a few different styles. A shaman healing a tank (or anyone taking a lot of damage) isn't just spamming CH on everyone.
We think paladins would feel fine too if they really used their full arsenal. But since cost is almost irrelevant (you can afford the mana and can't afford to not have the big heal) and since Holy Light can be hasted so much and crits all the time, everything looks like a job for Holy Light. I think Beacon and Sacred Shield have done a lot for paladins and maybe there is room for one or two more heals, but I don't think the size of the toolbox is really the problem here. Druids have a big toolbox, yet some druids can go through a whole raid with almost nothing but Rejuv and Wild Growth. If we nerfed Holy Light -- hard -- then other paladin spells would look more attractive. But that would be a big change with a lot of ramifications, and not one we're going to make for 3.3.
The challenge of all of this comes in what one change does to everything else. For example, if you know the tank is unlikely to die in two hits, does that make healing feel less urgent and perhaps even boring? You may be playing better for not casting a heal that is just going to stomp on someone else's hot. You guys are coordinating and conserving mana. You're smart healers, right? But at the end of the day what that really means is that instead of casting a heal, you do nothing and just chill for a few seconds. Is doing nothing ever fun?
When I heal, I like to be challenged. Just buffing healing overall, or taking some of the challenge away from the healers, I don't think makes the game more fun for them. It might be fun for a week as everyone thanks you for doing such an amazing job all the time, but playing any game in godmode typically gets old after the initial rush.
What I mean is that one of the most boring experiences I can have in the game is to be a healer for a milk run in which a wipe is unlikely and nobody is going to take much damage. By contrast, you can still have fun in that situation as a DPS spec. You can see how fast the boss dies. You can see how much damage you can do. It can even be fun as a tank, because you can usually afford to drop some of your defenses in order to improve your dps and try and make the fight shorter. At the very least, you can try and see how much damage you can mitigate. It's possible to do some pulls and even weaker bosses with almost no incoming damage. All a healer can really do is try to heal as little or efficiently as possible, which really just means you're standing around a lot. Maybe you're tossing the occasional Wrath or SW:Pain or something, but that dps contribution is pretty trivial even compared to the trying-to-DPS-a-little tank.
Where I will agree we need to improve healing in WoW is in relationship to how much damage the tank is taking (or even a teammate in PvP). Damage to health is too high in almost all scenarios, such that only the really big, really fast, or really broad (group-based) heals count for much. Things that are fun for a healer, such as trying to be mana-efficient or matching the right heal to the right damaged character go away when you're just spamming like mad. None of this should come as news to readers of this forum, because it's the kind of thing we've said before.
What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can't just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.
A similar thing is true for PvP. If health pools are larger, but heals smaller, then you see folks with health in between 100% and 0% more often.
Healing with a shaman in LK is much more dynamic than in BC. You have a variety of spells and can shift between a few different styles. A shaman healing a tank (or anyone taking a lot of damage) isn't just spamming CH on everyone.
We think paladins would feel fine too if they really used their full arsenal. But since cost is almost irrelevant (you can afford the mana and can't afford to not have the big heal) and since Holy Light can be hasted so much and crits all the time, everything looks like a job for Holy Light. I think Beacon and Sacred Shield have done a lot for paladins and maybe there is room for one or two more heals, but I don't think the size of the toolbox is really the problem here. Druids have a big toolbox, yet some druids can go through a whole raid with almost nothing but Rejuv and Wild Growth. If we nerfed Holy Light -- hard -- then other paladin spells would look more attractive. But that would be a big change with a lot of ramifications, and not one we're going to make for 3.3.
The challenge of all of this comes in what one change does to everything else. For example, if you know the tank is unlikely to die in two hits, does that make healing feel less urgent and perhaps even boring? You may be playing better for not casting a heal that is just going to stomp on someone else's hot. You guys are coordinating and conserving mana. You're smart healers, right? But at the end of the day what that really means is that instead of casting a heal, you do nothing and just chill for a few seconds. Is doing nothing ever fun?
For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.
Why are we doing this?
The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.
We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.
We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.
Why are we doing this?
The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.
We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.
We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.
Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion.
The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance -- basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.
You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don't really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.
This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it's not the best possible upgrade.
Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.
If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.
If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don't know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.
This is not a tank only problem. Casters won't upgrade to gear that doesn't have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.
We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don't put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.
It's an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn't just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don't scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).
We didn't decide until last night to do the Icecrown Radiance. Without the extra tiers that the Ulduar and ToC hard modes included, then the max gear level might have been more like ToC normal 25 is today, and we didn't add Jormungar Radiance.
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard
DKs macro Rune Strike not because they suffer for threat, but because more threat is generally better for a tank and there is no real penalty for macroing the ability. Players tend to macro attacks when the macro performs for them, not when they are really, really desperate to use the ability.
Second, you can't assume that less dodge turns into less Rune Strikes in such a simple manner. You have to look at how many white hits you convert to Rune Strike now and then how many you would convert to Rune Strike after losing dodge. If you have enough of a window in between dodges to still get a Rune Strike off, then you would see no effect. I suspect that's not the case, but I also don't think you'll see your threat plummet.
We also don't see too many appropriately geared tank of any class having sustained single-target threat problems in cases where you aren't supposed to have threat problems. Yes your dps classes may sometimes get dangerously close to pulling. That is part of the game. We're a long way from when the warlock would crit on a Molten Destroyer and wipe the raid because he didn't wait for 5 Sunders.
The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance -- basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.
You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don't really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.
This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it's not the best possible upgrade.
Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.
If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.
If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don't know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.
This is not a tank only problem. Casters won't upgrade to gear that doesn't have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.
We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don't put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.
It's an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn't just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don't scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).
We didn't decide until last night to do the Icecrown Radiance. Without the extra tiers that the Ulduar and ToC hard modes included, then the max gear level might have been more like ToC normal 25 is today, and we didn't add Jormungar Radiance.
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard
DKs macro Rune Strike not because they suffer for threat, but because more threat is generally better for a tank and there is no real penalty for macroing the ability. Players tend to macro attacks when the macro performs for them, not when they are really, really desperate to use the ability.
Second, you can't assume that less dodge turns into less Rune Strikes in such a simple manner. You have to look at how many white hits you convert to Rune Strike now and then how many you would convert to Rune Strike after losing dodge. If you have enough of a window in between dodges to still get a Rune Strike off, then you would see no effect. I suspect that's not the case, but I also don't think you'll see your threat plummet.
We also don't see too many appropriately geared tank of any class having sustained single-target threat problems in cases where you aren't supposed to have threat problems. Yes your dps classes may sometimes get dangerously close to pulling. That is part of the game. We're a long way from when the warlock would crit on a Molten Destroyer and wipe the raid because he didn't wait for 5 Sunders.
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.
What I was trying to say above was that a half strength cooldown that is available twice as often is not the same. You can multiply the numbers to convert them to the same relative uptime but that doesn't mean they are of the same utility.
Would you rather have a cooldown that prevented 90% of incoming damage once a fight or a cooldown that prevented 5% of damage eighteen times a fight? You might be able to make arguments for both, probably depending on encounter specifics, but I find it hard to argue that the decision is irrelevant.
High avoidance is important because it makes the bosses hit hard. If avoidance was nigh irrelevant then bosses would not need to hit harder. They hit harder because you are avoiding so much damage. I'm not sure how many other ways to say it. I'm not arguing you should gem parry, but I find the arguments that avoidance is irrelevant and only health matters to be specious.
That's just not true. If you turned your back on a mob, your armor and health would not change. The boss would hit you a lot more. You would be a worse tank. If you could somehow remove all of your dodge and parry, you would take more damage.
I think what is happening here is that some of you are adhering too tightly to the guideline that since bosses can potentially two-shot you that avoidance is unreliable and health * armor is king. I understand that logic. But don't take it to the illogical conclusion that avoidance is irrelevant. If your 50-60% avoidance went to 0% you would notice quickly.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.
What I was trying to say above was that a half strength cooldown that is available twice as often is not the same. You can multiply the numbers to convert them to the same relative uptime but that doesn't mean they are of the same utility.
Would you rather have a cooldown that prevented 90% of incoming damage once a fight or a cooldown that prevented 5% of damage eighteen times a fight? You might be able to make arguments for both, probably depending on encounter specifics, but I find it hard to argue that the decision is irrelevant.
High avoidance is important because it makes the bosses hit hard. If avoidance was nigh irrelevant then bosses would not need to hit harder. They hit harder because you are avoiding so much damage. I'm not sure how many other ways to say it. I'm not arguing you should gem parry, but I find the arguments that avoidance is irrelevant and only health matters to be specious.
That's just not true. If you turned your back on a mob, your armor and health would not change. The boss would hit you a lot more. You would be a worse tank. If you could somehow remove all of your dodge and parry, you would take more damage.
I think what is happening here is that some of you are adhering too tightly to the guideline that since bosses can potentially two-shot you that avoidance is unreliable and health * armor is king. I understand that logic. But don't take it to the illogical conclusion that avoidance is irrelevant. If your 50-60% avoidance went to 0% you would notice quickly.
While other classes can viably dual wield, it's a core part of the rogue class. As one aspect of the many changes we're making in patch 3.3 to improve the learning curve for brand new players, we're making it so that rogues, by default, know how to dual wield.
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They're generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters' action bars specifically so new players aren't inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.
With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets.
We've looked at what the average player does when getting started. You'd be surprised how many folks are running around not understanding their role in the game, or even what they're supposed to be doing. The changes we're making aren't necessarily to make the game easier, but to make sure that the objectives of leveling, questing, exploring, learning one's class, and figuring out the user interface are better presented to those who have little experience with games like this. We don't want to discourage new players because we're not doing as good a job as we could with easing them into the World of Warcraft experience through better tooltips, more sensible introductions to each class, etc.
It's more based on the data we've collected. We've looked at what many players just getting started in this game are doing when they first enter the world. A large percentage of players are doing things very wrong (i.e. what I mentioned in my previous post with the Attack button and the idea of giving wands to casters at level 1). As Ghostcrawler mentioned in a thread yesterday:
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They're generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters' action bars specifically so new players aren't inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.
With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets.
We've looked at what the average player does when getting started. You'd be surprised how many folks are running around not understanding their role in the game, or even what they're supposed to be doing. The changes we're making aren't necessarily to make the game easier, but to make sure that the objectives of leveling, questing, exploring, learning one's class, and figuring out the user interface are better presented to those who have little experience with games like this. We don't want to discourage new players because we're not doing as good a job as we could with easing them into the World of Warcraft experience through better tooltips, more sensible introductions to each class, etc.
It's more based on the data we've collected. We've looked at what many players just getting started in this game are doing when they first enter the world. A large percentage of players are doing things very wrong (i.e. what I mentioned in my previous post with the Attack button and the idea of giving wands to casters at level 1). As Ghostcrawler mentioned in a thread yesterday:
Blizzcast 11
Let's think back to the good times at Blizzcon and not release any new information. If you want to read it for some reason, you can find it here.
Written by Michael 'chaud'
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