« Guildwatch: P.S. Pho got banned Patch 3.0.8 and scamming, blue posts

Posted by admin on 01 7th, 2009

Categories: Uncategorized | no responses

World of Warcraft is a haven for scammers. People are getting robbed from their items / gold / accounts all the time, sometimes with almost no way to prove it to Blizzard to get it back. The first update to help against GM impersonations was the addition of a small icon next to the name of the Gamemaster, it seems that Patch 3.0.8 will improve the security by introducing a new interface to let players communicate with Gamemasters.

When a player is being contacted by a Gamemaster, a new icon will blink at the top right of his screen:

Clicking it will open a new frame where the Gamemaster will be able to message you (the slightly bugged text is a result of a bug on my side):

With the recent rise in the number of compromised WoW accounts, it’s always nice to see Blizzard trying to introduce new features to fight this. While we’re waiting for this patch to be deployed on live servers, you can always use the following picture if you’re not really sure about who you’re talking to. (Yes, this is a slow news day)

Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff

Theorycrafting with PTR numbers
We pay attention to player-generated numbers, but you must admit that if we took all player-generated numbers as gospel that the game would end up in a pretty funky state.

Your build will nearly always be behind ours, even in beta and on the PTR. We get the benefit of seeing the combined effects of many changes at once, including bug fixes. To estimate the effect that changes will have, you have to do just that — estimate. Some players can still generate excellent numbers, and others, whether through mailicious intent or just because they forgot to consider something, do not.

But if we are wrong, I have no problem admitting we’re wrong. We were wrong about Elemental shamans — they are lower than what we thought they would be. We were wrong about warlocks — they are probably too fragile in PvP. If we nerf hunters too much, we will fix them in later patches. But we can’t be so terrified of making mistakes that we don’t make changes when we think they are warranted.

Paid character transfers blocked on some realms
The primary goal right now is to reduce the most severe queues on our realms. At its peak concurrency Dalaran saw over a 400 person queue last night. This isn’t the highest queue across all US realms by any means. With that said, allowing transfers to the realm would have a greater negative impact on all players of Dalaran, than allowing Horde to transfer to Dalaran would have a positive impact.

At the largest gap last night between the Horde and Alliance populations of Dalaran, the Horde made up for roughly 40% of the total realm population to the Alliance’s 60%. While faction balance is a concern for all realms, overall population and realm queues have the better part of our attention at the moment, particularly as is the case for Dalaran.

Transfers may be reopened to Dalaran if and when the realm is no longer experiencing exceptional wait times at peak hours every day.

Balancing realm population
The answer at this time is not to provide experience incentives for players to transfer. We are reviewing realm populations, wait times, and faction balances at the moment to determine what solutions will work best. We’ll provide additional updates when they are available.

[...] We’re looking to open up free transfers for a number of high-population PVP realms to low-population PVP realms as soon as the request goes through the appropriate people. We would also like to make a new PVE realm available and open it up for free transfers from a number of high-population PVE realms. Lastly, we’re looking to open up free transfers to Gundrak from the high-population Oceanic PVP realms.

Hunter (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Aspects off the GCD
No, it’s not over. We took them back off the GCD. (Source)

Hunters in 3.0.8 and 3.1
We talked about it, and Aspects on the GCD is not that big an issue for us. We don’t think it’s a huge balance problem either way. We can understand though why it feels like a nerf to not have the GCD now and to get it back in 3.0.8. So we can keep Aspects off the GCD. No harm done. (They will still have the 1 sec shared cooldown.)

The argument of why you can’t just do too much damage until Ulduar is a silly one. Hunters are doing too much damage. Yes, some other specs are also doing too much damage, but we are reigning those in too.

Remember, our tests are not done with the PTR data. Our builds are more recent than that and have numbers, bug-fixes and data you haven’t seen. We try and give you a heads up to major changes when we can, but we can’t give you an accurate picture of the data with just words.

We understand the concern that Survival’s damage is too high relative to other hunters. That may be the case on the PTR but it isn’t the case for us. We have some different numbers for Explosive Shot than the PTR has. We understand the concerns about T.N.T.

[...] On the Aspects issue, we don’t like taking things off of the GCD. There is a reason we have a GCD and it has everything to do with being a server-client based game. We tried to fix the problem with Aspects being difficult to manage by reducing the need to switch from a defensive aspect (Monkey) and an offensive aspect (Hawk). Enough people (and not just on this thread) said Viper would still be a problem, so we agreed in this case to take the Aspects off the GCD. This is a good example of feedback working. (Source)

Patch 3.0.8 pet changes
We are iterating on the pet abilities I mentioned earlier and we have new numbers for anyone out there who is still trying to theorycraft this. One of the reasons I don’t always provide numbers is because we change them a lot.

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Rank 6 Scorpid Poison – 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake – 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike – 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.

We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we’d like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community. (Source)

Rogue’s Dismantle
I just wanted to comment on this for any hunters who are new to being disarmed. Weapon chains affect your global disarm duration. They aren’t tied to the weapon per se. An offhand weapon chain works on both weapons and your bow.

When disarmed, you lose abilities tied to that item and armor, but not other stats.

Priest (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Circle of Healing nerf and other talent trees
We do care and we do listen. But I think sometimes players don’t listen to each other. There are plenty of players who say they understand CoH was overpowered (even if they disagree with our solution) and there are plenty of players who say they like healing on their priests and that their priests are the backbone of their raid. If you don’t feel that way, that’s cool, but you can’t realistically expect us to only listen to you while ignoring them.

You can tell us what you don’t like about the class and what your concerns are, and many of you have. We appreciate that feedback. But that doesn’t mean we are going to make a whole lot of changes if we don’t feel they are warranted. We’re not asking you to design a class for us to go implement.

Saying a class is broken doesn’t make it broken. You can say it’s underpowered in specific areas if you feel that way, or even that you think the mechanics are clunky and don’t play well together. That can be useful feedback. But you’re not going to be able to convince us that any of the classes in the game are horribly broken. They just aren’t. With the exception of the DK (which doesn’t seem to be hurting at all) these classes have been around a long time and through a lot of encounters. They are pretty battle-tested by now.

We think Holy is a very strong healing tree, and we know there are cutting-edge guilds who agree with us. If you aren’t in a very min-maxed guild like that, then the differences between classes should matter even less because you have so much power to improve your class’ contribution just by learning all the nuances of the spells, the best gear to maximize them and how to coordinate with other healers.

Now there are some things we would like to do to all 3 priest trees. But I increasingly feel like it is necessary for me to add every time I say this that just because we have future plans for your class does not mean we think your class is currently broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. (Source)

Rogue (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Mutilate rogues vs. other specs
As someone mentioned, Mutilate rogues seem great in PvP and pretty competitive in PvE (and will probably be spot on when some other outliers are brought down). We realize the other two rogue trees aren’t keeping up and we definitely want to see them get there. We also want to make sure the rogue group buffs feel competitive. This is a touchy subject because so many classes will claim there is no reason to take them to a raid, or that their buffs are inferior to someone else’s counterpart. There is a grain of truth to some of the latter claims, but there is also an awful lot of of hyperbole. (Source)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Shaman DPS
We are buffing Elemental shaman damage. There have been many posts about it. I strongly advise you not to play the game to see which class or spec gets the most posts. The closest correlation has to do with what we have been working on recently at work. It has nothing to do with who we think is the most broken or who we love the most or who writes the most eloquent posts. If anything I would just assume my posting is random and leave it at that.

EDIT: The thread mentioned Elemental, but I see the OP is Enhancement. My bad. We’re not buffing Enhancement damage. It’s pretty good. Once the wolf bugs are fixed (which they are next build) it should help Enhancement in PvP too. (Source)

Warlock (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Are the Warlock changes in patch 3.0.8 or 3.1 ?
There are changes in both. Those changes are mostly PvP survival considerations.

The PvP changes are not big sweeping changes but they should help. Depending on when the patch is you might be able to try them on the PTR.

Larger changes will wait for the Ulduar patch. Most of those are what we call quality-of-life issues. Cleaning up some talents that don’t quite cut it and some of the spells that don’t seem to have a clear role. Destro and Affliction dps look like they are pretty good right now. Demonology needs a little boost. (Source)