RSS PTR 3.1.0, Blue posts, Dark Legacy

Patch 3.1 PTR This week The chances to see the PTR this week are very high (99%), and if I was optimistic I would say that we will most likely see it going live later today. Stay tuned! <ul style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;"><li><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=38462.0" target="_blank">Patch 3.1 Information / Class Changes Compilation</a></li><li><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=39711.0" target="_blank">Ulduar - Official Preview</a></li><li><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=39062.0" target="_blank">Talent Dual Spec Q&A with Ghostcrawler</a></li><li><a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=40176.0" target="_blank">PTR 3.1.0 Character Copy</a></li></ul> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Tanking - Health issues As I have said in similar topics, we are much more interested in solutions that let warriors and paladins feel like they are more useful on progression encounters than we are homogenizing classes even more than they already are. In other words, bumping warrior stamina and giving them more cooldowns just feels like the easy way out. If that's literally all we can do, then I am a little sad, because at some point the class distinctions are just going to come down to art. [...] Imagine that Malygos and the Obsidian Sanctum dragons breathed for physical damage. Or imagine that in Ulduar, there are no large bursts of magic damage. I am not saying that is the case, but if it were, would things feel more even? What if there are Ulduar bosses who hit very quickly but not for very large numbers? Again, the goal is still that if your guild picked a warrior for your MT that you can still complete even the hard mode encounters if your guild is good enough, and you won't constantly be wishing you had a druid or DK MT instead. However I have also acknowledged that some classes are just going to be easier on some encounters because of their mechanics, and only by complete homogenization will that be alleviated. The degree of difference is very important as is the diversity of the encounters. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/15207814691-tanking-topics-3-health.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Delay between patches I think that is totally fair. If we could get changes turned around faster, we would. We have been hotfixing more often, though we can't change everything via server patches like that. Patch 3.09 was an attempt to do a quick client patch with few changes that would require less QA testing. We hope to do more of them, perhaps even getting to very frequent and regular updates. However, WoW is a really large piece of software and any change affects a lot of people, both here working and customers. Balance problems may seem bad, but crashing servers or knocking people offline are far worse. As I have said, WoW is a supertanker, and those things don't turn on a dime. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/15234887623-pvp-and-you--mistakes-revisited.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Arena balance and loss % Arenas definitely put class balance under a microscope, though I also predict tougher fights in Ulduar may do the same for PvE. There are a couple of problems with Arenas that I would describe as round peg - square hole. In other words, some players are expecting something different out of Arena than they are getting. Part of this was because when Season 1 went live, it was a relatively easy way for players to get epics, especially compared to the raiding content at the time. Players assumed that they were "supposed to" participate in Arenas to gear-up. This wasn't necessarily the intention, but it was certainly a logical conclusion given the ease of getting the gear. Related, you are going to lose a lot of Arena matches. Players are used to beating every PvE encounter they go up against, often trivially in the case of soloing quests. If the matchmaking system is working properly, you are going to lose about as many matches as you win. I think many players profoundly underestimate the psychological effect of losing so often. They get frustrated, and they often blame us for their inability to beat other players, forgeting that they may be playing better players, or that they should lose 50% of their matches against players of equal skill. I am not saying class balance in Arena is perfectly balanced -- it's not. But I am saying that even if and when we achieve perfect balance (should such a thing even be possible), you are still going to lose a lot of matches. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/15234887831-what-good-has-arena-brought-to-the-game.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Quick leveling and "lack" of content Even as quick as leveling has become, it is still a commitment to get a character to max level and fully geared. We feel like we owe it to players who make that commitment to be competitive without bad numbers alone holding them back (within reason of course). If your class is gimped, your only choice is to reroll. While that may be a good cure for boredom, it's also a pretty heavy price for us to ask you to pay. We aren't constantly tweaking the numbers just to keep you on your toes. Believe me, if we ever thought we had truly nailed a class, we would call it done and stop messing with buffs and nerfs (at least until the level cap is increased). But we are very critical of our own designs, so we like to keep tinkering with all the classes. Although WoW is a gigantic game, some players are just going to voraciously devour whatever content we can throw at them. There are certainly a lot of different ways to play the game that you can experiment with if you do get bored. I would suggest things like trade skills, achievements or completing all of the quests you might have skipped. Collect some offspec gear and try a different role (in PvP or PvE). Rerolling can also be a lot of fun. If you're just burned out, it's also not the worst thing in the world to try out some other games -- the past couple of years has been great for them. Just check back in with WoW every now and then. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/15211006508-nerfs-and-buffs-101.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) PvP Gear rewards in battlegrounds There needs to be a way to get good gear through BGs. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a way to measure skill in BGs that is very reliable. Therefore, BG progression tends to feel pretty grindy and adding better rewards would probably only exacerbate that. It is definitely a goal to let players who like PvP but not Arenas still feel like they can advance (which includes improving their gear). It's just a big task that is requiring a lot of work. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/15234887831-what-good-has-arena-brought-to-the-game.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Developement process and decision making 1) The developers are still in charge of the game. There aren't actually any suits at Blizzard, and the highest level managers don't micromanage our design decisions. They offer their feedback and provide strategic-level (as in the future of Blizzard) direction, which is exactly what they should be doing. They are also all friends of mine -- Blizzard is a happy place to work. <img src="http://www.mmo-champion.com/Smileys/classic/smiley.gif" alt="Smiley" border="0" /> Developers at Blizzard are empowered. While you sure as heck need to be able to justify your decisions, you don't get overruled a lot. 2) The WoW team develops as a team. Our team is probably larger than you suspect, but not many people on it post regularly. Many of them do read the forums however. Our design process is remarkably collaborative. None of the decisions made on WoW are mine alone. No decision made on WoW is the decision of one person. Everything about Blizzard is "we." (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/15276979718-wheres-gc.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/deathknight.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Death Knight (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=650" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Death Knights PvP mechanics When we designed the DK class, we wanted to give them some PvP utility that felt different. Specifically, we didn't want to give them Mortal Strike, and we didn't want to give them lots of stuns, because both of those have been done to death. Removing hots we thought was an interesting mechanic. It is more situational than MS (since it affects different healers differently), and with Mind Freeze and Strangulate, we had given DKs a chance to cancel non-instant heals already. And yes, at the time, Resto druids were very dominant as PvP healers, so we didn't feel too bad about offering another way to counter them. During the beta, many of the participants were worried that DKs weren't going to be functional in PvP. Even with Death Grip there were many dire predictions of kitability, which is partially why DKs ended up with so many diverse snare mechanics (though they have fewer now than they did in beta). In the actual season though, it turned out the tanking-oriented survivability cooldowns ended up to be far more useful in PvP: Icebound Fortitude, Anti-Magic Shell, Bone Shield, etc. Of course Death Grip is still quite potent, and there are snares, interrupts, and even reasonable self-healing available. Simultaneously, many of the changes to both the Resto and Feral tree (Feral Charge for instance) as well as healing changes themselves made Resto duids less dominant than in previous seasons. As a reult, we're just not sure DKs need hot removal, and consequently, that would allow us to justify bringing up the damage of Plague Strike to where players weren't so loathe to hit the button...</div></div></div>

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