As of 4.3:
"North American realms (excluding Brazilian, Latin American, and Oceanic realms) no longer permit letters with accents in character or guild names."
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Colossal Dragonplate; LFR
Warrior Tier 13:
Protection, 2P -- Your Revenge ability now also grants a physical absorption shield equal to 20% of the damage done by Revenge.
Protection, 4P -- Your Shield Wall ability now grants 50% of its effect to all party and raid members.
Just wow. Two things: The beginnings of active abilities that affect mitigation makes me very excited. And for the first time since Strength stopped affecting Block Value, Warrior tanks will have a mitigation contribution from damage stats.
I can't wait to see what the EJ theorycrafters do with this-- at what avoidance DR point Expertise will be better point for point than Dodge/Parry. Or whether the always helpful "damage smoothing" effect of absorb shields over RNG avoidance may even be considered absolutely better in the same way Mastery was considered better even when avoidance was providing more overall damage reduction.
Shield Wall has been one of my favourite Warrior abilities since you could glyph it down to a 2-minute CD, and I'm certain that the fact that all tanks are getting a similar version of "apply tanking CD to the whole raid" means that this was designed with specific fight mechanics in mind.
I am so, so curious to see how "hard" the 25-man LFR raids end up being. On one hand, you have the massive raid-incompetence of the general WoW populace, combined with the massive co-ordination clusterfuck of twenty-five people who don't know and don't care to know each other being forced into a small space together; and on the other you have Blizzard's intimate knowledge of how simple these people require things to be in order to succeed. It really could go either way here.
I just keep thinking about how often you get a single jerk in a 5-man PuG who is intent on ruining the run for the other four... and then multiplying that by five. I wonder how many votekicks we will be restricted to per group-- and if you get booted, whether you would get any chance to recover your lockout for the rest of the week.
The more I think about this the more I remember why raiding is something that only works with an organised group.
Protection, 2P -- Your Revenge ability now also grants a physical absorption shield equal to 20% of the damage done by Revenge.
Protection, 4P -- Your Shield Wall ability now grants 50% of its effect to all party and raid members.
Just wow. Two things: The beginnings of active abilities that affect mitigation makes me very excited. And for the first time since Strength stopped affecting Block Value, Warrior tanks will have a mitigation contribution from damage stats.
I can't wait to see what the EJ theorycrafters do with this-- at what avoidance DR point Expertise will be better point for point than Dodge/Parry. Or whether the always helpful "damage smoothing" effect of absorb shields over RNG avoidance may even be considered absolutely better in the same way Mastery was considered better even when avoidance was providing more overall damage reduction.
Shield Wall has been one of my favourite Warrior abilities since you could glyph it down to a 2-minute CD, and I'm certain that the fact that all tanks are getting a similar version of "apply tanking CD to the whole raid" means that this was designed with specific fight mechanics in mind.
I am so, so curious to see how "hard" the 25-man LFR raids end up being. On one hand, you have the massive raid-incompetence of the general WoW populace, combined with the massive co-ordination clusterfuck of twenty-five people who don't know and don't care to know each other being forced into a small space together; and on the other you have Blizzard's intimate knowledge of how simple these people require things to be in order to succeed. It really could go either way here.
I just keep thinking about how often you get a single jerk in a 5-man PuG who is intent on ruining the run for the other four... and then multiplying that by five. I wonder how many votekicks we will be restricted to per group-- and if you get booted, whether you would get any chance to recover your lockout for the rest of the week.
The more I think about this the more I remember why raiding is something that only works with an organised group.
Monday, September 19, 2011
"We thought that Rogues had maybe felt a little bit not special"
Ghostcrawler said the above in an interview with IGN.
He talked about how the idea people have suggested of a "transforming" Legendary which might be used by a wider range of classes diminishes the concept, but oh this one acts like a sword if you're a Combat Rogue and a dagger if you're Assasination or Subtlely.
He talked about how ridiculous it is to expect Legendaries to be made for esoteric roles, but the only reason he could come up with for this design decision was that Rogues were feeling a bit sad and needed some cheering up.
He talked about how the idea people have suggested of a "transforming" Legendary which might be used by a wider range of classes diminishes the concept, but oh this one acts like a sword if you're a Combat Rogue and a dagger if you're Assasination or Subtlely.
He talked about how ridiculous it is to expect Legendaries to be made for esoteric roles, but the only reason he could come up with for this design decision was that Rogues were feeling a bit sad and needed some cheering up.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
A Legendary for a single class
In the most absurd example of player-manipulation in recent memory, Blizzard is encouraging people to play Rogues again by creating a Legendary dagger just for them.
Well what else am I supposed to think? We already know it is not lore-related, so it's clearly a design decision.
The devs have stated on many occasions their lack of willingness to create content which is only open to one class. We've also been told that a tanking Legendary would not be possible because the tanking classes don't all use the same type of weapon-- so any they created would be used by two classes at most.
But now they have decided on a Legendary which seems to break both of these conventions... and the only reason I can think of that makes any sense is that they're trying to make raiders more inclined to play their Rogues again.
The reason Rogues are so unpopular is only due to poor design in the first place. As far as PvE's concerned, they're just a melee class that's missing a tanking spec.
(Also, are daggers even useful to all Rogue specs? I was under the impression only one spec was PvE viable with daggers.)
I feel like I keep coming back to the same arguments again and again... Blizzard seems to be spending more of their design budget inventing systems to push people into playing the way Blizzard thinks they should play than actually designing gameplay systems.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Somewhat mollified
Two things:
No transmogrifying Legendaries.
Blizzard intends to limit as best they can players from using balatantly "silly" items like fish and frying pans.
I'm glad the devs have at least thought this through. And I now feel silly for doubting that they had. =)
Now if they could only find a way to retroactively disable players from using blatantly retarded special characters in their names.
In other news, Firelands complete!* The Firelord has been vanquished! Also, I got my sweet T12 four-piece bonus for a fairly OP level of CTC.
*News may be over one week old at time of posting.
Thinking about Transmogrification and "silly" weapons, I'm suddenly reminded of the level-twenty-something green-quality mace my Paladin tanked with for a time. It had the appearance of a oversized gnarled wooden staff, and I put Fiery on it so it looked like it was on fire. And I would charge into battle brandishing it and yelling Feel the wrath of Canadian lumber, fool! And then I would hit things with it.
That was great.
No transmogrifying Legendaries.
Blizzard intends to limit as best they can players from using balatantly "silly" items like fish and frying pans.
I'm glad the devs have at least thought this through. And I now feel silly for doubting that they had. =)
Now if they could only find a way to retroactively disable players from using blatantly retarded special characters in their names.
In other news, Firelands complete!* The Firelord has been vanquished! Also, I got my sweet T12 four-piece bonus for a fairly OP level of CTC.
*News may be over one week old at time of posting.
Thinking about Transmogrification and "silly" weapons, I'm suddenly reminded of the level-twenty-something green-quality mace my Paladin tanked with for a time. It had the appearance of a oversized gnarled wooden staff, and I put Fiery on it so it looked like it was on fire. And I would charge into battle brandishing it and yelling Feel the wrath of Canadian lumber, fool! And then I would hit things with it.
That was great.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Legitimate fear of change
Oh dear. It's not often that I am genuinely disturbed by an upcoming change to World of Warcraft.
I've spent enough time facepalming at the retarded shit players in WoW do with the few things they they already have exclusive creative control over; Character names, pets, arena teams... I can only imagine what I will be forced to view once they are actively invited to take this type of control over their character appearance too.
I see the genius of it. If, as they suggest, it will require a player to own the armour to have the appearance, this adds a whole new dimension to the game as players spend weeks working towards some specific look created by a certain combination of rare drops from a long-forgotten raid. A person with an investment in their character might strive for their own distinct visual flair, or perhaps just replace a few mismatched armour pieces to avoid looking too clownish.
But what percentage of players actually have an investment in their character as a character? For most, a WoW avatar is a platform for displaying one's epeen for all to see. And so we will see eight thousand Warriors with Thunderfury; twelve thousand Rogues with Warglaives; five million Death Knights with Shadowmourne.
For the rest of the lifetime of the game.
I've spent enough time facepalming at the retarded shit players in WoW do with the few things they they already have exclusive creative control over; Character names, pets, arena teams... I can only imagine what I will be forced to view once they are actively invited to take this type of control over their character appearance too.
I see the genius of it. If, as they suggest, it will require a player to own the armour to have the appearance, this adds a whole new dimension to the game as players spend weeks working towards some specific look created by a certain combination of rare drops from a long-forgotten raid. A person with an investment in their character might strive for their own distinct visual flair, or perhaps just replace a few mismatched armour pieces to avoid looking too clownish.
But what percentage of players actually have an investment in their character as a character? For most, a WoW avatar is a platform for displaying one's epeen for all to see. And so we will see eight thousand Warriors with Thunderfury; twelve thousand Rogues with Warglaives; five million Death Knights with Shadowmourne.
For the rest of the lifetime of the game.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Fear of change
As someone who plays a tank first and foremost, it was with great trepidation that I began reading the latest Ghostcrawler Dev Watercooler, entitled "Threat Level Midnight".
"Oh god..." I thought, dread filling me. "What drastic change are they forcing into the game to keep the retards playing this time?"
"Okay, okay. Sky not falling. They're just making threat a faceroll again."
Ghostcrawler then goes on to state an intention to modify tanking in the long run, replacing the requirement for active threat management with active mitigation abilities, holding the current Death Knight model up an an example of this.
So. Effect? In the short term, well tanking just got a whole lot cruisier. Tanking is fairly faceroll at the moment anyway if you're halfway-competent, the exception to this being on-the-pull threat, which I can see they are specifically acknowledging and fixing with the Vengeance "floor".
In the long term, tanking may actually become a lot more compelling when we have the ability to actually affect the mitigation performance we care about, not simply the binary: held aggro / did not hold aggro, with the only effect of any extra effort past this point being a very slight increase in overall raid damage.
I've read in the past about how the current design for Death Knight active mitigation cannot be made too powerful or central, lest the class become either overpowered when played perfectly or impossible for a less apt player to tank effectively with. I can only hope that once it is made a standard tank design, skill-based mitigation can be made to matter a lot more, perhaps even to the point where a significant and measurable difference in damage taken is possible through skilled management of the tanking "rotation", the same way that we currently see significant and measurable differences in healing and damage throughput for those roles. The possiblility of this type of gameplay is something I find very exciting.
Realistically, though, I forsee this being more a case of making Shield Block cost 60 Rage instead of 10 so you need to "manage" your Rage in order to use it, or making Holy Shield Block cost Holy Power so you need to "manage" your Holy Power to use it. Again, for the halfway-competent tank, very little will change.
Of course we can't for a second pretend this whole situation isn't yet another direct response to the "tank shortage" in LFD. We all know it. They all know it.
For bad players, and those who are randomly grouped with them [ie all of us] this is game-changing. Let's look at the current state of the five-mans in terms of unbalanced skill/gear level in groups:
A weak DPS will deal less damage. This can be compensated for by pretty much any combination of stronger players in the party.
A weak healer will have less healing throughput and run out of mana sooner. This can be compensated for by a stronger tank requiring less healing, or stronger DPS who can manage crowd-control and/or kill things faster.
A weak tank will take more damage and have a low threat output. These need to be compensated for by having both a stronger healer in terms of the increased damage they take and by the DPS making a conscious effort to either manage their own threat or execute outside-the-box play with threat-redirection/kiting/mitigation/lockdown abilities; or by a vastly stronger healer who has the reflexes, throughput and mana-management to heal any non-tanks that take aggro.
The imbalance is not hard to spot. Weak tanks require significantly stronger players to compensate for them or the group will fail. Making tank threat simple goes a long way in allowing DPS to compensate for a weak tank without necessitating more work for either themselves or the healer.
I still smile when Blizzard pulls out simple yet brilliant changes like this. Now they just need to follow it up with some compelling mitigation mechanics, or I might end up very bored with tanking.
"Oh god..." I thought, dread filling me. "What drastic change are they forcing into the game to keep the retards playing this time?"
Hotfix: The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done.
In an upcoming patch: Vengeance no longer ramps up slowly at the beginning of a fight. Instead, the first melee attack taken generates Vengeance equal to one third of the damage dealt by that attack. As Vengeance updates during the fight, it is always set to at least a third of the damage taken in the last two seconds. It still climbs from that point at the previous rate, still decays at the previous rate, and still cannot exceed the current maximum.
"Okay, okay. Sky not falling. They're just making threat a faceroll again."
Ghostcrawler then goes on to state an intention to modify tanking in the long run, replacing the requirement for active threat management with active mitigation abilities, holding the current Death Knight model up an an example of this.
So. Effect? In the short term, well tanking just got a whole lot cruisier. Tanking is fairly faceroll at the moment anyway if you're halfway-competent, the exception to this being on-the-pull threat, which I can see they are specifically acknowledging and fixing with the Vengeance "floor".
In the long term, tanking may actually become a lot more compelling when we have the ability to actually affect the mitigation performance we care about, not simply the binary: held aggro / did not hold aggro, with the only effect of any extra effort past this point being a very slight increase in overall raid damage.
I've read in the past about how the current design for Death Knight active mitigation cannot be made too powerful or central, lest the class become either overpowered when played perfectly or impossible for a less apt player to tank effectively with. I can only hope that once it is made a standard tank design, skill-based mitigation can be made to matter a lot more, perhaps even to the point where a significant and measurable difference in damage taken is possible through skilled management of the tanking "rotation", the same way that we currently see significant and measurable differences in healing and damage throughput for those roles. The possiblility of this type of gameplay is something I find very exciting.
Realistically, though, I forsee this being more a case of making Shield Block cost 60 Rage instead of 10 so you need to "manage" your Rage in order to use it, or making Holy Shield Block cost Holy Power so you need to "manage" your Holy Power to use it. Again, for the halfway-competent tank, very little will change.
Of course we can't for a second pretend this whole situation isn't yet another direct response to the "tank shortage" in LFD. We all know it. They all know it.
For bad players, and those who are randomly grouped with them [ie all of us] this is game-changing. Let's look at the current state of the five-mans in terms of unbalanced skill/gear level in groups:
A weak DPS will deal less damage. This can be compensated for by pretty much any combination of stronger players in the party.
A weak healer will have less healing throughput and run out of mana sooner. This can be compensated for by a stronger tank requiring less healing, or stronger DPS who can manage crowd-control and/or kill things faster.
A weak tank will take more damage and have a low threat output. These need to be compensated for by having both a stronger healer in terms of the increased damage they take and by the DPS making a conscious effort to either manage their own threat or execute outside-the-box play with threat-redirection/kiting/mitigation/lockdown abilities; or by a vastly stronger healer who has the reflexes, throughput and mana-management to heal any non-tanks that take aggro.
The imbalance is not hard to spot. Weak tanks require significantly stronger players to compensate for them or the group will fail. Making tank threat simple goes a long way in allowing DPS to compensate for a weak tank without necessitating more work for either themselves or the healer.
I still smile when Blizzard pulls out simple yet brilliant changes like this. Now they just need to follow it up with some compelling mitigation mechanics, or I might end up very bored with tanking.
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