Pre-expansion limbo

We're in a weird limbo right now, we WoW players. Just about all serious play has ceased as people wait for the imminent expansion to drop.

I'm a bit baffled by the fact that I still see people farming Elementium and Whiptail. The sell prices for these materials have long since plummeted below all other types of metal and herbs, and they're about a week away from becoming practically worthless. I guess it takes a certain type of person to begin with to spend hours down in Uldum earning 1-2g per node. Maybe they're bots, I dunno. They could at least send their bots somewhere a bit more lucrative.

The hardest thing for me has been trying not to spend all my gold when prices are ridiculously low on just about every material I intend to use in the future. Silver lining to what is basically just a very slow sales period. I've been hovering at 5-10k liquid [non-earmarked] on my primary faction, which is far lower than I'm comfortable with. [My net worth including investments is still somewhere in the 900k ballpark, but actually selling any of it is a different story.] I've even stopped buying Tol'vir Hieroglyphics because I just can't afford them right now.

Mists will fix it all. The buyers will return en masse and all sorts of new opportunities for making gold will present themselves. I've pondered doing that thing where you stop spending gold for a while in order to reach goldcap. But that always struck me as just a pointless epeen thing. I'm more concerned with spending that gold on an entirely different pointless epeen thing which is having more mounts than Whateley.

More on Challenge Dungeons

Zarhym: "It may be helpful to think of the Gold medal armor sets as analogous to Gladiator mounts."

Watcher: "I can't promise that every possible composition will be able to get Gold... [but] every class should have multiple viable group makeups in which it can obtain Gold, assuming masterful play."

And I get a sudden burst of apprehension. Multiple CMs are talking about Challenge dungeons as if they were high-end arena PvP. I mean, I like to think I'm a good player, but I'm well aware of my shortcomings, and the idea of needing to min-max group composition is something I generally place outside of my level of commitment to the game. If gold medal times will truly be so unforgiving that this level of play is required, maybe they will in fact be out of my reach.

Or maybe the CMs are just posturing to keep player expectations in line. Really could go either way here. ^^

The numbers are bad!

Been reading a bit of Warrior theorycrafting. The current numbers have Mastery valued just ahead of Dodge/Parry in terms of total damage reduction when Shield Block uptime is maximised, which is reassuring. Mastery in Cataclysm provided less overall damage reduction than Dodge/Parry, but was sought after more for its "damage smoothing" effect, and in the later tiers to completely prevent non-mitigated hits. Being on par for damage reduction as well makes Mastery even more of a wonder-stat for Warriors. In the situation that you're using Shield Block, anyway. ;)

What's a bit less reassuring is how stupidly overpowered Shield Barrier is at the moment. Sims are currently showing Barrier preventing as much if not more overall damage than Block even at L90, while also being a superior form of damage reduction-- Block only has an effect on melee hits, while Barrier stops AoE, magic, bleeds and special attacks like Impale. The reason this concerns me is that I'm certain the design intent is for Shield Block to be the primary mitigation tool, and if this has not been achieved, Barrier is probably headed for a nerf to keep it in line. I mean unless the T14 raid encounters have been designed to deal tank damage exclusively with melee hits or something.

I know, I know, gift horse. But a broken mechanic, even when it's broken in my favour, is still disappointing.

Extremely hardcore

Our favourite Lead Systems Designer and spectral crustacean has a new twitter account and has been answering many, many questions with short and very sweet responses. This might be one of the best things to happen to WoW's community management in the past few years.

It's like forum posts, but the character limit forces people to get to the bloody point instead of rambling in a single page-long paragraph, or posting another fucking bullet point list of why their point of view is incontrovertibly correct; and forces GC's responses to be to the point without any of that pandering "we totally value all points of view even the retarded ones" bullshit. I don't think I've ever felt so satisfied reading developer feedback to player questions ever before.

I've glommed onto one particular comment which I found extremely encouraging:

"Challenge modes are extremely hardcore. Hoptallus may be harder than any raid boss ever."

Now that's what I want to read. It's been my suspicion for a while now that Challenge modes aim to match the difficulty of Heroic raids, and this practically confirms it. Un-nerfable content is still a concept which is a bit hard to conceive of for a long-time player, and to imagine that perhaps two years from now, when all the raids have been nerfed to the ground and we are farming Heroic Hellscream in our ilevel 600 gear, that a 5-man encounter could still be the hardest thing in the game is a tad mind-boggling.

Shenanigans!

Apparently there's been some shenanigans going on with people using the new cross-realm grouping in the game to farm rare spawns across multiple realms, mainly the new Darkmoon Rabbit world boss... which I would link to but doesn't seem to have a Wowhead page yet. I can, however, link to it's loot. This pet is currently listed on the AH my realm for 250k, which I doubt will sell, but I can't necessarily argue against that price considering its present rarity.

Hard to say if Blizzard will consider this worth fixing-- mainly because it's such a hard thing to limit without removing some functionality from the cross-realm feature itself. I think the least disruptive solution would be to give World Bosses specifically a special flag to prevent them from being engaged by off-realm players. Using this technique to hunt other rare spawns is a lot less overtly disruptive, but still a bit disheartening considering the amount of time I spent hunting then just on my own realm.

I am in love with the Warrior ability Shield Barrier. It really is the most beautiful, responsive, awesome-feeling ability. Damage comes in, you hit a button and wham, stop it in its tracks. Assuming the Protection buffs currently in beta make it through to live we are looking at a situation of having sufficient rage generation to maintain optimal uptime on Shield Block and still have leftover rage to use Barrier as needed to cover the gaps. The only wildcard is boss avoidance-- your rage generation relies significantly on your ability to hit the boss-- so I'm actually getting excited about reforging into expertise/hit again. The jury's still out on how theoretically optimal this will be, but in terms of my own playstyle I'm pretty sure I'll end up doing this. I guess it would make really good sense from a design point of view if stats that provide a benefit to the reactive rotation were more optimal than passive avoidance, but I'm less confident that the designers would bend over backwards to create this situation in the game.

Warrior...in'

We can no longer CTC cap. =(

This brings mitigation stats back to the forefront, especially with the brand new ability Shield Barrier. While tanking your major choice is between two spells: our old friend Shield Block costs 60 rage [lol totally called it] and makes you CTC capped for 6 seconds; Shield Barrier will consume 20 to 60 rage and grants you a damage absorption shield based on your Attack Power multiplied by the amount of rage consumed.

The obvious conclusion is that since Block mitigates a percentage of incoming damage and Barrier is a fixed amount*, there will always be a break point in incoming damage where for anything higher it is better to use Block, and anything lower to use Barrier.

[*though scaling with attack power means that incoming damage is a factor in the absorb size due to Vengeance]

My experience doing Dragon Soul this week has been for Barrier to "feel" better in most situations. The only time I felt like I needed Block was while tanking Warmaster Blackhorn. I attribute this mainly to overgearing the content, so incoming damage for the most part would have likely been below the aforementioned break point, not to mention the amount of mechanics in DS that deal magic damage [on which Shield Block no longer has any effect]. Banking rage to use Barrier in anticipation of large bursts of predictable damage feels amazing.

As I mentioned before, the inability to CTC cap makes mitigation stats relevant again. I swapped my Stamina trinkets for dodge and mastery, and changed a buttload of stam gems back to mastery and parry. Because any mitigation effects are applied before the shield absorb, gearing for mitigation makes Barrier even more effective for general use. I have to wonder whether Mastery will be less of a wonder-stat moving forward if its major benefit of smoothing damage can be replicated with intelligent Barrier use.

Yesterday I heard that Prot Warriors will be getting buffs to passive damage reduction, active mitigation by way of increased rage generation, as well as a minor buff to damage. Didn't realise we needed buffing, but happy enough to hear my class is getting more powerful.

Warlockin'

They made Warlocks easier to play I guess. But this is Blizzard, so you know they will add high skill-cap mechanics anywhere they can, and that's the only thing I find I can focus on.

Warlocks at the moment are all about generating resources and then spending them on high-damage abilities. The clever thing about the system is that it allows you to save your high-damage phase for when you need it, with a fair amount of wiggle room for doing so without losing any efficiency. So you can save it for a burst phase, or just hit it when your trinkets proc.

As mentioned before I quite like the way Destruction feels for single target fights. The mechanics are simple enough; generate Embers, aim to have close to four when Dark Soul comes off CD [or save for the burst phase] so you can get three to four Chaos Bolts in while that buff is up, otherwise spend Embers during your most powerful trinket proc.

Still getting a feel for Demonology. Switching in and out of Metamorphosis at will is a really cool mechanic with multiple uses. I really would like to see some better theorycrafting for Demo. Or I suppose I can just go do a bunch of dummy testing. What's harder to test, though is the value of Demonic Fury generation. Currently I only cast Doom and Touch of Chaos while in demon form, because I my understanding is that Soul Fire is more valuable as a Fury generator.

Speaking of theorycrafting, wtf is the deal with Noxxic. Those guys seem to just make assumptions based on the tooltips and present them as fact. I lost count of the number of times while reading their pages on both Warlocks and Warriors that they basically just rephrased the ability tooltip and followed it up with the most useless advice like "use this when you need AoE damage".