Blue Posts, Comics

**Azel** · 16/02/2009, 15:10

Blue posts Ghostcrawler is back and gives a few more details on what's going to happen in 3.1 for some classes. I wouldn't be surprised to see the patch hit the PTRs this week, 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 Compilation</a></li></ul><div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Making decisions while healing My point was more that when it all comes down to it, healing is generally limited by one of three things: 1) Running out of mana, 2) Running out of GCDs, and 3) Just doing the wrong thing in the wrong situation. The type 3 fights are generally the most interesting for a healer, but you're also not going to find every fight like that, and it might be exhausting if they were. I am generally referring to fights where you shouldn't heal at a certain time, or you need to move at a certain time, or you need to heal the right person at exactly the right time. Currently we think the game has strayed too far towards the type 2 style of healing, where if you miss a single global, your target might die. This may not be the case if you are on Naxxramas milk runs, but it was certainly the case in Sunwell and other more challenging content. Since you must heal for your max amount every GCD, and the penalty for failing that heal (i.e. wiping) is probably worse than the penalty for overhealing, the healing game feels very spammy. More situational or efficient heals lose out compared to heals that maximize throughput. Coordination among healers doesn't feel particularly necessary because overhealing isn't a big deal. Paying attention to what is going on in the fight is a luxury because you need to keep those max casts coming. However, part of backing out of that means carving enough bandwidth out so that players can make decisions about who to heal and which spell to use. The key word is "decisions." A rogue makes a decision about when to blow cooldowns or pop a Healthstone. A warrior tank makes a decision about when to blow Last Stand or sometimes even Taunt. If all a priest is doing is using CoH and PoM on every cooldown and filling in the space with Flash Heal, or if all a paladin is doing is spamming HL and using DP every cooldown, those aren't interesting decisions -- in fact they are the kind of thing that can be macroed and macros are often (though not always) a warning sign that the player isn't or doesn't have to decide which ability to use next. There will always be some simple "gear check" style fights. Those have their place, particularly to communicate to your group that perhaps you aren't yet ready. But they don't all have to be that way. [...] Here is a great paladin decision: "Should I heal that guy who likely won't die in the next couple of seconds or does that dependable druid have hots on him already?" Currently the answer is: "I can afford to waste the mana, so who cares?" Note that I am not saying you need to necessarily look at the target's active spells to know the answer. If you heal with the same people for very long, you form a good idea of what they are doing. In pugs you might need more explicit rules for who heals whom, but again, you can currently afford to be so sloppy with your mana that it's not worth the effort. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14990656318-so-gc-thinks-we-need-more-thinking-and-pauses.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Dual-Specialization not available to lower level characters in patch 3.1 With new features we have learned that players tend to be much more forgiving if we are too stringent at first and relax requirements over time, than if we give away too much and end up having to "nerf" a feature that turned out to be overly generous. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14990657573-dual-spec-disappointment-healing.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>) Blood Plague and HoT removal This (the hot removal of Blood Plague) is something we are definitely taking a hard look at for 3.1. Plague Strike is intentionally weak because of this ancillary effect, but that also leads to DKs not wanting to use a core ability except when doing PvP against hot-based healers (which pretty much means druids). DK survivability and utility in PvP are definitely not something we are overly worried about at the moment. [...] I meant that DKs have plenty going for them in PvP even if they could no longer remove a whole stack of Lifebloom. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14990777973-blood-plague-shouldnt-unproc-lifebloom.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/rogue.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Rogue (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=630" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?rogue" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Why was Mutilate nerfed instead of Overkill/Dirty Deeds/Glyphed Vigor? An Overkill change would have required more redesign of the talents and abilities than we were willing to make for a small patch like this. We're also unconvinced it would have fixed the problem alone. Basically, it might have helped stealth burst, but wouldn't have helped with unstealthed burst, which was still too high in our opinion. Two Mutilates and a Cold Blood Eviscerate within one Kidney Shot duration is a ton of damage, and is possible with unglyphed Vigor and no Overkill. Add a partner or an interrupt or whatever and it can mean death for most players in very few GCDs. Overkill and glyphed Vigor are something we will probably look at for 3.1, depending on how the current changes shake out. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14990477144-why-didnt-you-nerf-overkill.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Dirty Deeds / Mutilate bug There did seem to be a bug with Dirty Deeds affecting Mutilate damage, and I believe it was hotfixed yesterday (13 Feb). Mutilate should now be doing lower damage vs. poisoned targets in all cases. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14990476035-rogue-dirty-deeds-bug-confirmed.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Rogue poison damage / Consequences of changes made to Mutilate Rogue poison damage had at least two bugs in the system when Lich King launched. When we fixed those bugs, rogue damage dropped significantly. There is speculation that the same thing is true of Dirty Deeds -- that because Dirty Deeds was inflating poison damage more than we realized that rogue damage will drop too much with the Mutilate changes and Dirty Deeds bug fix. We do not have that concern at this time. We are happy with Mutilate's extra damage to poisoned targets to be 20% with or without Dirty Deeds. We plan to increase rogue PvE damage in other ways, such as through the announced (but not finalized) Hunger for Blood, Killing Spree and Lightning Reflexes changes in 3.1. I suspect the Dirty Deeds bug was introduced at the same time as the Mutilate nerf in 3.09, but can't know for sure without a lot of digging. (I say that because I suspect the Dirty Deeds talent had to recalculate bonus damage and we neglected to change this calculation when we changed Mutilate itself.) I'll report back when and if I have time to investigate or if someone else at Blizzard knows the answer off the top of their head. We are skeptical that the Mutilate change and Dirty Deeds hotfix will be the death knell for rogues in PvP, but we will keep an eye on what happens with these changes in place. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14990475915-now-that-youve-fixed-the-dirty-deeds-bug.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/warlock.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Warlock (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=680" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warlock" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Using Voidwalker to tank raid content (Sartharion) I would not expect the Voidwalker to continue to be an excellent tank for challenging raid content. The health boost was largely for PvP reasons and the damage avoidance was to make up for limitations in pet AI and master control, not to let you opt out of having to manage tons of incoming damage on your main tank. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/14990446882-voidwalkers-better-sarth-tanks-than-warriors.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/warrior.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Warrior (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=600" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warrior" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Tanking and disparities between classes We still are not convinced that warrior tanks are operating at some huge deficit compared to other tanks. There are going to be situations where one or the other classes are going to feel easier as tanks, just because the abilities and mechanics are still different despite all of our homogenization (and we really don't want to homogenize any more). I think there are some quality of life issues we can improve for warriors. Heroic Strike is definitely one of them. It does its job in letting you convert excess rage to threat without consuming a global cooldown, but it r...</div></div></div>

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