Addon Spotlight - Elitist Group
Today's addon is a good way to build raid PUGs (raid weekly quests, I love you so much) without wasting too much time inspecting everyone to make sure that they're not terrible. Once again the original description is just fine and I'll steal it!



Elitist Group's goal is to shift focus away from single scores that don't tell you anything about the users choice of gear. Instead of a single score you'll see a variety of information from experience in different tiers of dungeons and raids, to if their choice of equipment, enchants or gems matches their spec.

Slash command: /elitistgroup (/eg) use /elitistgroup help for a list of slash commands.

Equipment/gem/enchant
Items are categorized based on their stats. Spell power is a caster item, hit is DPS, Strength is for melee dps and so on. You can see what type of item the person is wearing, as well as if it's valid for their spec. If your Holy Paladin is wearing block gear, it will flag that they are wearing gear intended for tanks. However, if they were a Protection Paladin it will allow it.

While items will be categorized into their spec type, EG will also tell you if somebody is missing a gem or they are using green gems in epic gear.

Dungeon experience
Quickly see how experienced someone is through their achievements and stats. Everything is broken down by tier, 5 man, 10 man, 25 man and normal vs heroic. For raids, experienced is roughly 3 clears and for 5 mans it's around 6 (combined runs, not 6 of each 5 man). The scoring is setup to reward full clears. Somebody who has done the first 4 bosses in 25-man Trial of the Crusader but never clears it will have to do more runs to be considered experience than someone who clears the entire instance.

Some achievements are also factored into the score to make it easier to be considered experienced. A Tribute to Insanity or The Immortal can count for an entire full clear. Even doing 25-man Ulduar hard modes will increase your 25-man Ulduar normal mode experience.

Summary
For both 5-mans and raids, a summary window is provided through /eg summary. Allowing you to quickly see party members talents and a quick pass/no pass for all of their gear, enchants and gems.

Item level
Item levels are used to give you an idea of where gear is from, as well as the players general gear quality. It is not the sole (or even the primary) stat shown. Items have quality modifiers to stop 200 blues being worth the same as 200 epics: 100% epic, 95% blue, 90% green, 60% white, 50% grey. Heirlooms are considered 187 item level blues at 80 (~2.22 item level/player level)

Suggested dungeons are lowest item level dropped with a 89% modifier for 5-mans, 90% modifier for normal 10 and 25 mans, 91% modifier for heroic/hard mode 10 and 25 mans.

Player notes
Finished a dungeon, was your tank amazing? Player notes will let you rate him 1 - 5 as well as make a note for future reference, or for other people who group with him. You can leave one note per person, with your most recent note overwriting any old ones.

Addon communication
All notes, player data can be synced. You will only send your notes, and people can only request your gear data. This makes sure that there is less potential for people to mess up your database of players and corrupt it.

Communications can be completely disabled, or you can choose to not listen to communications from certain channels to restrict who is allowed to request data. No communications are sent while in combat, they will be queued and processed gradually to prevent any noticeable effect on gameplay.


Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Beastcleave during MLG Orlando
I don't think this is a clothie issue at all. In fact, appropriate use of Ice Block and Demonic Circle defensively made a big difference.

I also don't want to discount the skill of those players at all. Make no mistake - these are very good players. While some of the matches were over very quickly, I think you're dramatically underestimating things if you think anyone would have performed the same with same setup.

That said, coordinated damage (from the BM + the shaman's wolves for example) is just really high, and in some sense it has to be or everyone will just be healed again. We need to see more matches where everyone in the game is playing in a wounded state. You need to be able to wear someone down (without just wearing the mana of the healers down). Health just needs to be higher for everyone across the board, even in PvE, and healing power has to be lower. The buckets need time to fill and drain instead of being full or empty 90% of the time.

I also think it's cool to see warlocks, hunters, shaman, paladins, druids and whatever classes I forgot that saw a lot of use at MLG Orlando, besides just RMP. Ideally those other comps would use a bit more CC (even if it's not quite at the RMP level) and there would be some matches that would last longer. The announcers did a good job of the play by play, but sometimes there just weren't enough plays to really have a sense of the kind of back and forth that make competitive sports interesting. (Source)

[...] This thread quickly deteriorated from talking about the MLG matches to the same old tired arguments:

1) RMP is skill. Anything that isn't RMP is faceroll.

vs.

2) CC is boring. Let's kill something.

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. There is room in competitive Arena for a lot of different comps. I for one am glad to see really talented players gravitating to something besides RMP vs. RMP for every match. It was nice to see other classes in there. I do wish the hunter + shaman combos fell back on other strategies more often than instantly blowing wolves + Bloodlust. In an ideal world it would be very effective (you are gambling a lot of cooldowns on that opening move after all), just less so than it is now.

I don't fault the players at all -- they do it because it's effective. They focus because they have to focus -- because getting someone to 50% and switching targets would be ineffective. But if other teams could survive that initial burst a little more often, then it would be more risky, and in turn it wouldn't be so popular as the the first thing to do when the gates went up. I really don't think we're that far away from that, by which I mean we don't have to redesign every class to have Frost Nova + Ice Block to make Arena matches last a little longer.

But as I said above (and most smart players realize) just buffing health / lowering damage alone won't do anything but put even *more* emphasis on burst, because getting someone to 2% will be as irrelevant as getting them to 99% (because the healers will just reset the match). Lower damage *and* lower healing and the matches will almost certainly last longer, hopefully without richocheting to the other extreme of layered CC or mana drains being the only way to play. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
The problem with Warbringer
The problem with the PvP side of Warbringer is that when you consider prot warrior versus mage (just as an example), there was nothing a mage could do to a well versed warrior. The warrior carries a lot of stuns, silences, and then any attempt to root him is broken by multiple abilities. So then the warrior's teammate (like a hunter) is just doing tons of damage while the target has no defenses.

For the other side of this change, we certainly don't design 5-player or raid content with the assumption that the tank has Warbringer (or a way out of snares and roots in general). We understand that it can be a big help in specific situations but we don't feel it's the only option in any PvE circumstances. (Source)

Patch 3.3.x nerfs for prot warriors
Let's look first at the Warbringer change.

Will it nerf them for PvP? Yes. Aside from stuns and Dismantle, rooting or snaring the Prot warrior is the major way to keep him off of you. Considering all of the stuns and silences that Prot has, when they can also jump out of every Frost Nova with Warbringer, then there's not much in the way of skill a mage can employ to stay alive. They just get countered in every way.

Will it nerf them for PvE? Yes, but really slightly. I'm not sure I can ever remember a case in my WoW-playing history where my warrior or some other tank caused a wipe because of a root, so even if it did happen, it can't happen that much or be that memorable. Warriors certainly won't get sat because of some new Achilles' heel and we don't design encounters around the assumption that tanks can't be rooted. The important part of Warbringer from a PvE perspective, removing the s...




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