December 15th Blue Posts

Posted by admin on 12 15th, 2008

Categories: Uncategorized | no responses

Here are today’s Blue posts:

Dual-Spec (Source)

It will swap your talents, glyphs and the position of buttons on your action bars. Note you actually have to buy the glyphs for both specs first.

150% run speed Spirit Form and new graveyards in 3.1 (Source)

There are new graveyards being added in the next patch to ease leveling 1-80 a little bit. The idea is that any corpse run should be no longer than one minute on average.

Character Re-Customization issues

A number of steps have been taken to address Character Re-Customization issues, and we believe that many players previously unable to customize their character should be able to do so at this time. Should you still experience any difficulties with the Character Re-Customization process, we encourage you to follow the instructions below:

Log out of World of Warcraft and close it completely, and open the World of Warcraft folder. From here, try restarting the game from using the wow.exe launcher.

If the above initial step does not resolve the issue, we advise logging out and closing World of Warcraft for roughly 20-30 minutes, then logging back into the game.

If these steps do not resolve your issue, we advise visiting the following Customer Service Forum thread and providing the requested information so that we may further investigate individual issues on a case-by-case basis. The thread may be found here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13392294242&sid=1

We do apologize for any frustration or inconvenience this issue has caused, and thank our players for their continued patience while we work to resolve this issue.

Polls for classes changes (Source)

I’m not sure really long threads are going to turn out as the best way to provide feedback (though I did read them all).

But polls have a lot of limitations too. You have to install a lot of infrastructure to prevent cheating. You have to assume that everyone’s opinion should carry equal weight. You have to assume that the poll asks the right questions. I also think it sets up the expectation that the poll is actually a binding vote on what we will change rather than just information-gathering.

To do list priority @ Blizzard (Source)

There’s not much logic to it, at least in the sense that we have some kind of Standard Operating Procedure that we follow.

Some changes are very simple and a designer can just go to their desk and make a change in a few seconds. We try to hit lots of these rather than let them all get bottled up behind the big, complex issues we are wrestling with.

Other changes are almost as easy. A designer feels like nobody will really object to a change and that it’s pretty low risk. At most they might bounce it off one or two more people as a santiy check.

Other changes require a lot more discussion. We might not all agree. We might need to run some tests or calculate some numbers to see what the effects of changes might be.

Sometimes we don’t know how to fix a problem. A great example of this would be a case where a spec is doing too little damage in PvE and too much in PvP. You can’t just juice talents or coefficients without making them too good in PvP. These kind of changes require a lot of brainstorming and creative solutions.

Controversial changes require a lot of research. We read the forums. We ask our friends or thought-leaders in the community what their opinions are.

Some changes are risky from a bug standpoint. These require a lot of testing to make sure they work. Having a spell just fail is bad. Having a spell cause an exploit where players can get loot they haven’t earned or win an Arena fight they should not have won is worst. Crashing the servers is about the worst thing you can do (but most of us have done it at least once.)

Some changes are hard to make and require programmer support. Maybe we need new tech to implement a feature (this was the case for a lot of death knight abilities).

Some changes require buy-off from a large number of people. Changing a talent is a relatively minor fix. Making big changes (say changing how arena works, or major class mechanics) are the kind of thing we want to run by just about every senior person on the team to get thier feedback.

I get the sense sometimes that players expect (or at least want) us to attack problems based on which is the most pressing problem. That is definitely an important consideration. But it is all about triage. Sometimes even a pressing problem isn’t worth handling right away if that means 30 minor problems can’t get fixed. Developing games is a pretty chaotic process. There are a lot of interruptions. There are a lot of considerations that have nothing to do with the actual product going on the shelves. In a game as large as WoW it can be easy to get demoralized because you just don’t have enough hours in the week to get to everything you want to do. Features get bumped to subsequent patches or expansions all the time. (But for all the chaos, it is still a lot of fun).

Also, when you say that an entire tree was unfinished, you have to understand from our point of view that we feel that way about every tree. Blizzard is it’s own worst critic. If you asked us which tree was the closest to being perfect, we would be very hard-pressed to answer that. We aways think we can improve on the game, down to individual talents. We are never going to stand back and say “That’s it. We nailed the Survival tree. It’s done.”

New stats on Feral Staves (Source)

Armor is still a good stat for bears. It’s just not an insanely good stat that trumps all others. Some staves have armor and some do not. Those with armor won’t be as attractive to hunters but it depends on what they are upgrading from. We don’t expect there to be 100% overlap in which weapons hunters and druids (and possibly even warriors) want. But there will be more overlap than there is now.

New facial textures and skin tones for DKs in 3.0.8 removed (Source)

This line has been removed from the patch notes. This should be reflected on our website soon. There are no new physical features being added for death knights in 3.0.8.

There never were any new skins beyond those that have already been added. This line in the notes originally referred to somewhat of a fix to the way the interface works when selecting one of the unique death knight faces. It sometimes acts a bit oddly when choosing a skin tone, unlike the standard faces for each race. A proper resolution has not yet been determined yet though, so this line is being pulled from the patch notes.

Dual Wielding (Source)

On every spec for which we have allowed dual-wielding and propped it up with talents, DW tends to dominate. It’s tricky, but we want death knights to have the option of DW for dps or tanking. Too many talents will push DW as the only way to go.

Feral itemization changes (Source)

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If you go back and look at the history of this discussion, you’ll see that several Feral druids were saying it was kind of awkward that:

A) They went from weak to godly with just a couple of the right +armor trinket drops.
B) They were very dependent on getting those items to drop to be excellent tanks.
C) Armor was still so important that almost no other stat mattered. Druids in some cases were wearing BC or even level-60 items because of the +armor.

Now to be totally fair, I initially didn’t think the situation was that bad. I thought there were plenty of armor trinkets, necks and rings in the game, and that enough stamina or other stats would make up for the armor. But players showed (on this and other forums) that the math heavily favored a few, relatively rare +armor pieces. And we ended up changing our minds on the issue.

Is the gameplay of gearing up a Bear perfect now? No. We think it is a good change that armor doesn’t trump all other defensive stats by so much. However, we do think there should be a more interesting way for bears to gear up though without just wanting the leather pieces at each tier. It is something we are working on, but it’s complicated. Players have made some good suggestions, but we don’t quite have a model that clicks yet. We don’t want to give druids parry or blocks, or they lose one of the features that makes them unique. We don’t want to let them scale defensively because of AP, because AP can get to really high levels when fully buffed and much lower levels in 5-player dungeons.

[...] This thread is touching on a couple of different points:

A) Are bears competitive with other tanks at similar gear levels?
B) Is there another way to design bear defensive gear?

They are both issues worthy of discussion, but they are different issues and blurring them together just confuses the discussion. B is not necessary for A. We could slap a “you are at the armor cap” bonus on to Survival of the Fittest and, boom, you’re the best tank in the game. Now we wouldn’t do that for a couple of reasons, but my point is that it is easy to get druid numbers to where they need to be with this new system.

AP as a defensive stat (Source)

AP -> defensive stat might be okay if it only counted AP from gear and not from buffs. We already have some balance issues in the game we aren’t happy with that occur because of high scaling in larger groups.

Arcane Int for example was intended to buff your Int, not as something that would feed into your talents to boost other abilities.

Armor loss after itemization changes (Source)

You shouldn’t be losing any armor unless you already have the best jewelry and trinkets available in the game. The reason we announced this change very early was so players didn’t go through heroic efforts to procure those items only to find their armor component later nerfed. One of the reasons we made the change was because druids without those pieces felt like sub-standard tanks with regard to mitigation.

For druids without those pieces, the change should be a buff.

Is there anything planned to switch pets when dual-spec is released?
Yup. I think you’ll like it though.

New Deterrence (Source)

Preventing ranged attacks during Deterence but allowing melee attacks is also something we’ve discussed.

Upcoming hunter changes (Source)

One of the concerns with nerfing Steady Shot was hurting the dps potential for Survival hunters. One of the opportunities with the nerf was to make other shots more attractive so that hunter dps wouldn’t be so much about auto + steady.

Here are two changes we are going to try on the PTR.

Arcane Shot — mana cost lowered to the cost of Steady Shot.

Explosive Shot — damage increased substantially (e.g. from 260 to 520 base at rank 4), and additional scaling added to compensate. No longer deals AE damage to other targets.

Adding the AE component back might make a decent glyph or something, but really we felt like hunters had options for AE and what we really needed to do was give Survival a button that really did some major damage.

Priest Issues (Source)

As Nightshroud pointed out, these are kind of apples and oranges. We don’t start each day with a sorted list of priest issues and decide which is the most critical to handle first (and then somehow bizarrely decide that it’s Levitate).

Levitate was a 2 minute change that took no discussion and very little testing. It doesn’t have huge balance implications. Almost all of the suggestions that routinely get brought up in these forums are exactly the opposite: they are often big problems that require expensive (from a time budget point of view) solutions. That doesn’t mean we don’t hear you or that we aren’t working on solutions. I am sorry I do not come by more than randomly to assure you of that. (I really am.)

Elemental Shaman changes (Source)

Hopefully this won’t get buried here. Here is what we are thinking about to try on the PTR for Elemental:

Elemental Oath — In addition to existing effects, now increases spell damage done by the Shaman by 5/10% while Elemental Focus Clearcasting is active.

Elemental Mastery — Overhauled. Now increases the Shaman’s critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds. Cooldown remains 3 minutes. We recognize this might be a slight nerf in certain PvP situations where players relied on the shaman to nuke an injured person to death. Still, I’m betting most shamans will prefer the new design.

Glyph of Lightning Bolt — No longer affects cost. Now increases damage by 4%

Glyph used to fix Lightning Bolt (Source)

We didn’t make the change for that reason. We looked at what specs were getting out of their glyphs and it turns out that some specs were getting a decent dps increase while Elemental was not. No matter what we did to other talents and spells, this imabalnce would continue to keep Elemental dps lower than what we wanted.

Reasons behind the changes to Water Shield (Source)

This was the issue. It wasn’t a healer niche problem at all. Shamans were just abandoning Healing Wave to cast Lesser Healing Wave since it was more efficient for procing Improved Water Shield, which felt weird.