Nov. 22, 2009

Wild Turkeys

I know, obviously untameable, but I can’t have been the only one who tried Beast Lore on them. And now we have the answer as to why the hunter sets almost always look… the way they look (beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder) and the thought process behind the set going in for Icecrown.

What have you done to make the tier-10 sets feel like a meaningful advancement from tier 8 and tier 9? How do they visually represent Icecrown’s lore and history?

Not only do we want them to be a meaningful advancement, but we want them to feel really awesome. This is Arthas loot you’re talking about. We started by spending a lot of time on the concept art to make sure it tied into the type of creatures you’ll encounter and the whole Icecrown art “kit” in general. For example, the rogue tier-10 set has a strong geist look to it, while the hunter set has strong Nerubian elements, and the mage set looks a lot like the Blood Princes. You can see the Icecrown look and feel in a lot of pieces, which itself drew strongly from the Lich King’s original helmet. Look for lots of blue, ice, skulls, and spikes.

We have also spent a lot longer on the set bonuses than we usually do. It’s important that they feel awesome for every class and spec. Going back to the Crusaders’ Coliseum, part of the challenge we made for ourselves was to create an instance that didn’t require as much time or resources as Ulduar to develop, yet was still cool. We had set bonuses for the tier-9 gear, but they were often simple — more crit on a common ability was a typical one. For tier 10, we’re really going for set bonuses that change your game up a little. At the very least, you should want to change your rotation a little, though this is easier with some classes than others.

Nov. 17, 2009

Shot to the heart

While ammunition still take up bag space, at least we’re getting new ones in 3.3, or so datamining tell us. Not on the engineering trainers/vendors anywhere I can see as of yet on PTR.

• Iceblade Arrow has been added to the game – Creates Iceblade Arrow x 1000. / Reagents: Crystallized Shadow x 2
• Shatter Rounds has been added to the game – Creates Shatter Rounds x 1000. / Reagents: Crystallized Earth x 2

A reminder of our proposed stat breakdown for Cataclysm.

Ranged: Hit, Crit, Haste, Mastery

Everyone also gets stamina, armor, and their primary stat (Str, Int or Agi). Resilience and Spell Pen will continue to be PvP stats.

In case you’ve lost track of how emblems are working in the next patch.

Bosses in Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity, Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, and all Heroics will drop Emblems of Triumph. Bosses in the Icecrown Citadel 10- and 25-player dungeon will drop Emblems of Frost. Choosing the Random Heroic Dungeon option via the Dungeon Finder (new in content update 3.3) and completing whatever dungeon is selected for you will award you with two Emblems of Frost the first time you do it (this is in place of the daily Heroic dungeon quests which are being replaced with weekly raid dungeon quests).

Continuing to use the Random Heroic Dungeon option within that same day to complete dungeons will award you with two Emblems of Triumph each time in addition to those dropped in the instances. The random option can also select Heroic dungeons to which you may already be saved, so you can technically do every Heroic dungeon more than once in a day by continuing to use this option.

Nov. 10, 2009

Focus follow-ups

There’s been some more discussion regarding the mana to focus conversion imminent in Cataclysm. In Ghostcrawler’s initial example, he likened the new system to something close to a cat druid’s rotation.

I said ignore the finishers, so that removes Rip and FB. You are left with a bleed (Rake), a bleed buffer (Mangle), a damage buff (SR) and then the actual attack, Shred. Someone unfamiliar with kitties might say “Oh I’ll just use all my energy on Shred, because it does the most dps” the way someone unfamiliar with focus-based hunters might say “Oh I’ll just use all my focus on Chimera / Explosive once they aren’t on cooldowns.” Our plan is to make the rotation have more depth than that. It won’t be at the Feral level of complexity without cps and finishers and because hunters have other things to manage, like Fluffy.

So with this new system, what sort of stats might we be looking at?

You probably won’t focus on Agi or Sta since it will be on your gear in relatively inflexible amounts already. You could gem or enchant for it though. You’d probably look at hit, crit, haste and mastery and decide what fits your spec and gear the best.

But don’t take alarm at the comment “Oh I’ll just use all my focus on Chimera / Explosive once they aren’t on cooldowns.”

Sorry, I meant if we remove the cooldown from those shots then someone might jump to the conclusion that hunters will just spam them. I don’t know if we will be able to remove the cooldown or not. Shred does not have a cooldown yet Ferals use many other abilities. That is one way to go. Another is to keep a small cooldown, but in general we think focus will let us take cooldowns off a lot of hunter abilities since the income rate of focus will help us balance the costs.

In general (and with many exceptions) you can’t balance mana-using spells around cost since casters have nearly unlimited mana at any point in time and certainly early on in a fight. Energy (and focus, and rage to a much lesser extent to where it’s actually a problem) are limited at any given moment but come back pretty quickly. Mana-spells have to be balanced around cast times and cooldowns instead. Hunters generally lack cast times, so most abilities have cooldowns which lead to annoying collisions and a lot of timer-watching. Focus should help improve that. We hope!

So it is still a priority based system. Just with 4 abilities instead of 6. I think Hunters kinda like their priority based system, and are worried it will go away with the change to “energy”. I think you and I are on the same page to reassure them that you can really have a priority system with “energy” and it really can be fun.

Yea, I think we agree. The difference is whether the priority is based on “I do more damage if I do X first because of synergy with Y” or priority based on “X is on cooldown.” Too many cooldowns can get annoying. Just ask any hunter or Ret paladin.

I was describing a rotation that could evolve if the focus model was as simple as just using your best attack and nothing else. I don’t think hunters do that today. However, we also think the hunter rotation could be more fun than it is today. You may not agree, and that’s cool, but I’m sure you can tell from reading this thread that a lot of hunters do. WoW is blessed with a large player base so it’s unlikely we will ever get 100% consensus on any game change. We have to make the decisions we think are best for the game and try to make those decisions informed ones based on the experiences players are having. We don’t make changes like this arbitrarily, because among other things, it’s a lot of work. :)

Yes, change is scary, especially since we can’t test it (yet!)

It’s impossible (or at least not logical) to make the assumption that hunters will do less damage than rogues given the very little information you have available. A lot of what makes rogue gameplay interesting isn’t the base mechanics but the way their talents affect their energy flow. You have to imagine hunter mechanics that are similar to Adrenaline Rush, Dirty Deeds, Focused Attacks, etc.

I keep going back to the Feral druid, because that rotation would still be fairly interesting if Mangle, Rake, Shred and Savage Roar were the only usable buttons. Imagine hunters had Mangle Shot, Rake Shot, Shred Shot and Savage Roar Shot. Now toss in Hunter’s Mark, Kill Command, Bestial Wrath, Lock and Load and similar talents and abilities.

I know change can be scary, but we’re convinced this is a good change. It will finally make hunters feel like a weapon-based class instead of a dps caster like mages or locks.

Abilities and damage can’t be balanced based on mana alone. If you gave mages an ability that takes 50% of their mana and does huge damage, mages would cast the ability twice (gibbing 2 players) and then complain that they go OOM too fast.

Mana is a fight timer mechanic. This used to apply to all ranged classes and healers. Presumably the trade-off was meant to be “bring 5 casters who take little damage but will be unable to do damage whatsoever after X minutes”, or “bring 5 melee who can do damage indefinitely, but take more AOE damage which means the healers will run out of mana faster”.

Increasingly mana has been made near-infinite for damage classes and specs and AOE has spread out to the ranged dps. The primary purpose of mana in the game is now only to limit the longevity of healers. This is ultimately a good thing, as it guarantees you won’t brute-force encounters by, say, 2-manning a raid boss for 3 hours with the paladin spamming his biggest heals the entire time while you slowly chip away at him. Or, more practically speaking, if your group’s tank or dps undergear an encounter, the healer is where it will ultimately show.

The fact that ret paladins and ehancement shamans are also healing classes is the reason they will continue to have mana, with near-infinite mana in their DPS specs. For hunters it will be much easier to fix their wonky mana mechanics by swapping them over to a quick-regen small-quantity mechanic. It also “feels” right because they don’t cast spells.

Gameplay-wise, I don’t see any reason mages and warlocks couldn’t also be improved by switching to a new mechanic. Why should those classes be limited at 5 minutes of damage, while hunters and melee can dps indefinitely? It might feel strange having mages not use mana, but perhaps they’ll come up with another mechanic that feels equally magical.

This is a pretty good summary. The answer is that we are changing mana-based nukers but not by removing their mana. Instead we are just going to make them less dependent on mana regen, specifically Spirit. You are correct that we really only want healers to run OOM, and we can’t really get rid of it for reasons Squirrelbot mentions. DPS casters still have to manage mana to some degree but they should have tools (e.g. Evocate) to handle that. They shouldn’t “run dry” the way a Holy priest or Resto shaman needs to run dry (ideally — I know this isn’t happening now) when the encounter isn’t going well for you.

And in closing.

You guys are worried about the color of the curtains when the foundation hasn’t been poured yet. All 30 talent trees are changing for Cataclysm. It’s very premature to try and assert hunter dps will be low or focus will be impossible to manage based on the limited information you have.

Nov. 9, 2009

De-Beta-able

At this point, the only thing we can do is speculate about the mana to focus/energy conversion of Cataclysm.

If you ignore combo points (which we aren’t planning on adding to hunters), then the biggest decision energy-users face is whether to use a single 60 energy attack or two 30 energy attacks. The answer depends on a lot of variables, including which does more damage, what is on cooldown, the synergy between the abilities, etc.

If you consider the cat druid (because it’s slightly simpler) and ignore finishing moves, then the druid rotation would look something like getting up a +bleed attack, applying a bleed dot, getting up a +damage buff, and then doing the actual damage. You could imagine something similar like that for hunters. I don’t mean hunters are going to be a +bleed class, but more that the choice of what attack to push next should have some decision behind it. It won’t just be Serpent Sting x 1, Chimera Shot x 1000. Repeat.

Also most of the answers quoted above were from Blizzcon. These answers fall into three basic categories: things we know we’re going to do, things we’d like to do, and things we hadn’t really thought about before someone asked a question (e.g. taming mounts).

Also, Enhancement shamans will almost certainly stay as mana-users but still share (non Int) gear with hunters. This likely means some kind of attack power to mana regen mechanic like Ret paladins have currently. However development on stuff like this is still early.

The latest PTR patch had a bunch of bug fixes.

• Concussive Barrage: This ability is no longer subject to spell reflects.
• Explosive Trap: The damage from this trap will now scale properly with the hunter’s attack power.
• Glyph of Immolation Trap: Now properly increases damage by 100%. In addition, this glyph will now modify the tooltip of Immolation Trap correctly.
• Glyph of Mending: This glyph will now modify the amount healed in the tooltip on Mend Pet.
• Point of No Escape: This ability no longer stacks and now only functions for the hunter.
• Roar of Sacrifice: Corrected tooltip error.
• Silencing Shot: Updated tooltip to include the functionality that this ability also interrupts spellcasting on NPCs.
• Volley: The tooltip for this ability will now update properly from haste.
• Carapace of the Old God: Now tradable using the Bind-on-Pickup trade system.
• Crystalforged Trinket: Can now be refunded at its vendor.
• Dragonstalker Set: No longer displays a duration on the Nature’s Ally buff.
• Giantstalker Set: No longer displays a duration on the Nature’s Ally buff.
• Insignia of the Alliance: Item level changed to 60.
• Insignia of the Horde: Item level changed to 60.
• Level 58 PvP Items: A variety of PvP items with a minimum level of 58 were not being translated properly when a player used the Paid Faction Change service. That has been corrected. Paladin- and shaman-specific items still will not be translated, as there is no opposite version to translate them into.
• Qiraji Bindings of Command: Now tradable using the Bind-on-Pickup trade system.
• Reclaimed Shadowstrike: No longer has a cooldown to create Reclaimed Thunderstrike.
• Reinforced Shadowstrike: No longer has a cooldown to create Reinforced Thunderstrike.
• Windrunner Set: The set bonus which grants Greatness to the hunter’s pet will no longer spuriously show the hunter also gaining that buff.

Nov. 3, 2009

Replenishment and Cataclysm

Don’t expect it to go away for Cataclysm. Since it specifically mentions non-Spirit based regen and the fact we’re going to be switched to focus…

We still like Replenishment. There are only so many ways a class can buff a group’s damage or stats, so boosting regen is a distinct buff that is brought by a sufficiently large number of classes. It’s really nice to have Replenishment, but with mana regen from gear and talents being what they are now, you can certainly run without it.

We don’t plan on cutting Replenishment for Cataclysm. However, since Spirit largely becomes a stat that only healers care about, one of two things will likely happen: you bring Replenishment just for the healers, or Replenishment changes to affect both Spirit and non-Spirit based regen, but affects Spirit more.

Replenishment seems to offend some healers who don’t want to feel reliant on other classes. But we have explicitly designed WoW’s endgame content to be largely group-based, and synergies like this are a part of that. Tanks have to depend on priests for stamina buffs and hunters and rogues for threat buffs. At a higher level, all dps have to rely on dps buffs to do their job.

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