Ulduar, Arena Balance, Blue posts

**Azel** · 03/01/2009, 11:42

Ulduar - Difficulty and Achievements <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Daelo (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/13908770558-blizz-do-not-make-ulduar-available-on-ptr.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">The reward for completing the hard modes are not going to be just achievement points, titles, or mounts, but improved, additional item rewards. I think it's safe to say that Ulduar will be a bit more difficult overall than Naxxramas, even without the hard modes. We're still going to tune the zone for accessibility(*), but a raid group that's done Naxxramas, Malygos, and Sartharion and obtained the gear from those encounters should be well prepared for Ulduar. Not only is the raid's gear better, but players should now have some raiding experience under their belts. We also have a much more accurate picture of what guilds are capable of from a healing, damage, and tanking perspective then when WotLK first went live. If Naxxramas was the introduction to raiding 101 class for players who have never raided before, think of Ulduar as the second year class. * There will be one optional encounter that is only tuned as a "hard mode" encounter. I don't think you have to worry about spoilers from Achievements, to be honest. Seeing achievement text before you fight a boss is like seeing a single piece of a large jigsaw puzzle. Sure, it's something, but it's nothing really without seeing the context of the encounter as a whole. I also expect achievements to be something tested late in the PTR process. Implementing them is one of the last parts of the development pipeline. </div></div></div> Class vs. damage in Arenas <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Ghostcrawler (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14132914177-class-vs-damage-in-arenas.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">In the interest of encouraging discussion, I am going to pose a question below. Caveats: Please don't derail this thread. It it liable to get long. Also please do not take my comments out of context or attempt to read too much between the lines. I hate having to communicate like a politician. :( The same classes keep coming up in Arena discussions: rogues, mages, death knights and paladins. In a world with low resilience, it is perhaps unsurprising that classes that combine burst damage with so many tools for avoiding damage would be powerful. Let's set aside the discussion of these classes for a moment (and to be fair, it is probably specs, not classes). My question is this: In an Arena match in which none of those 4 are participating, do you feel that damage is too high *given* that it will only come down once players acquire more resilience? If you can't tell, I am trying to get the community to explore whether it is those classes or damage in general that is causing so much consternation. (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14132914177&sid=1" target="_blank">Original thread</a>)</div></div></div> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Burst damage vs. Healers efficiency in Arenas We understand that many players feel burst damage is too high right now. We hear you. But when all is said and done, there still needs to be a place for damage dealers. Killing a healer, even in the absence of crowd control, silences or whatever, still needs to be a viable tactic at the end of the day. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14133413664-ghostcrawler-this-is-what-worries-me.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) PvE Gear in PvP Ideally, PvE gear should be what you use until you have PvP gear. The same should be true of using PvP gear to do a raid. Weapons are a little bit of an exception, since traditionally their damage has been high and resilience low. That may be worth changing though. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14135703817-gc-how-do-you-feel-about-pve-gear-in-arena.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Gear Upgrade - Slightly different stats on different tiers Unless the piece's name is orange, gear should almost always be a choice. Even if you are jumping up a tier you may be dropping some stats in order to increase others. Gearing up is one of the most interesting parts of the game. Deciding whether you want X or Y is supposed to be a tough decision. We make no guarantee that everything that drops is an upgrade for you, even set pieces. Building the most optimal set of gear for your particular spec is also one of the things that lets more expert players demonstrate mastery of the game. If the set pieces were always better, that wouldn't happen. In fact one of the reasons we made sets smaller (not 8 pieces or whatever) is so players could still undertake the challenge of completing them without also getting in a position where they were very reluctant to upgrade again. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14132373550-haste-and-me.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Buffing vs. Nerfing We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental dps is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse. I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now. I don't think the threat game was a particularly fun part of PvE for many players, but I also don't think that is why the encounters are easy right now. They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging. I am thinking of one fight in particular that will probably take some time to conquer. Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/13908768968-scary-trend-in-developer-mentality.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) AE Damage and AE Healing The four classes do have ways of dealing with AE damage to the raid. You have instant spells, hots, fast casts and AE heals. We have tried not to make any encounters that throw out so much damage that you can't function without a heal that hits 5 targets at once. As I said, those events are supposed to be about triage and coordination, not mashing the uber "fix this" button. We throw AE damage at groups to challenge the healers, and to a lesser extent, the raid. Hitting one button 2 to 3 times in a row is not challenging. That's not how we want you to solve the problem of Saph's aura or Malygos' Vortex. It is in fact so not challenging that it starts to look pretty attractive any time more than one or two people are taking damage at once, such as most trash pulls and many boss fights. Sure maybe it's not the most efficient or even smartest way to heal, but it's sooo easy..... We throw AE damage at the raid because players have proven they can pretty much handle any situation where only a few tanks are taking tons of damage (though we still have some fights like that). We feel like we need diversity in order to offer as many encounters as we do. Naxx and Ulduar have a lot of bosses. If we find that we are throwing too much AE damage at the raid with the nerfs to CoH and WG, we'll adjust those encounters. I kind of doubt that will be the case since many groups have those fights on farm even without priests or druids, but because a lot of players are concerned about it, we will absolutely pay close attention to those situations. If we find that CH trivializes AE damage, or if cutting-edge guilds start stacking Resto shamans to the exclusion of other healers, we will make adjustments as well. Again, we don't think that is likely or we would have already done something. But we won't close the door on the possibility of that happening either, because clearly it is a concern of the community. I have stated the above paragraph many different ways in many different threads over the past couple of months, so please forgive me if I start trotting it out a little less frequently. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/13908950575-worried-about-gcs-post-on-chain-heal.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Healing and UI Mods Some players just like mods. Messing around with them and reconfiguring their UI is part of the game for them. That's cool and why we promote it. However, I also think there is a group of players (healers even) who would be content to use the default UI if they could make it work. Identifying areas where the default party and raid UI fall down can help us to improve it. For example, we are unlikely to ever fully support Clique-style one click healing. We just don't think it's necessary to play the game and it's more of a user preference -- perfect for a mod. However, I do find it annoying that our raid UI can show you buffs or debuffs but not both at the same time. This can be a real pain for say a pr...</div></div></div>

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