Oct. 27, 2009
Race Change Now Available
The new World of Warcraft Race Change service is now live. After purchasing a Race Change for a character, a player can choose any race of their same faction that is compatible with the character’s current class. For more information on the Race Change service, please read the FAQ, or visit the Race Change page to get started.
Oct. 26, 2009
All things being equal
Ghostcrawler wrote an extensive post regarding DPS and the hybrid versus pure argument.
What is a hybrid tax? Why is there a hybrid tax?
We only recognize two types of classes for PvE purposes:
Can respec to fulfill a different role = hybrid.
Cannot respec to fulfill a different role = pure.
The roles are tank, healing and damage.
In our design, having two healing trees (priest) or half a tanking tree (druid) or three dps trees (DK) does not put these classes in different categories of hybridness. A hybrid is a hybrid.
It’s the roles that your class lets you do that is important, not how those roles are organized into talent trees. The paladin is one way to organize the trees (a tanking tree, healing tree and melee dps tree) but not the only way. However, there is a reason we don’t do this for every class — it would be boring.
In our design, the pure dps classes (hunter, mage, warlock and rogue) should do slightly higher dps than hybrid damage-dealers all things being equal. All things are rarely equal. Player skill, gear, raid comp, latency, random luck and most importantly the specifics of the encounter will often favor one class, spec or player over another.
The reason we want pures to do slightly higher damage is that pures can only fulfill one role. If your guild or raid has no more need for damage-dealers, there is no way for these classes to raid with you. By contrast, the six other classes always have the option to respec for another role either temporarily or for the long haul.
The Blizzard definition of hybrid in this context has nothing to do with whether you can perform multiple roles within a single fight or even within a single raid. It has more to do with the potential for your class to ever fulfill more than one role.
Likewise, the Blizzard definition of hybrid in this context has nothing to do with the power of certain buffs or class synergy. We want all classes to bring useful tools to the raid.
Just because you’re not interested in doing anything other than damage does not qualify your class as a pure as long as the option to change roles is there. For the pure classes the only option is to reroll. We think the pure classes would start to disappear over time, at least from high-end raiding, if there was no advantage for being a pure. The hybrid advantage is flexibility.
There is not a “5% rule” that says pures should be 5% higher than hybrids in every circumstance. Again, most of the time other factors such as the encounter specifics will have a greater effect. The “5% rule” was either something a player suggested that stuck or something we threw out at some point as an example. It isn’t a hard and fast rule. We aren’t going to provide a hard and fast rule because players would then attempt to invoke that rule every time they thought their damage was too low instead of exploring other ways to improve their character’s performance.
This philosophy largely evolved in Wrath of the Lich King and is the design we plan on carrying forward to Cataclysm. In vanilla WoW, every class typically had one role. In BC, we tried to promote other roles for some classes, but we still didn’t make everyone play by the same rules. Warriors, and I hate to pick on them, were intended to be the best tank while also deliver dps that we would now label as competitive with rogues. By contrast, druids, paladins, priests and shaman were intended to be competitive healers, but have dramatically lower dps than pures and warriors. Likewise, druids, paladins, priests and shaman brought many unique and powerful buffs that were intended to compensate for their low dps. We spread these buffs out to a much greater degree in Lich King, and plan on refining that implementation for Cataclysm.
TLDR:
Hybrid = can respec to fulfill a different role (damage, tanking, or healing).
Hybrid != can fill multiple roles at the same time.
Hybrid != has awesome, amazing buffs or utility.
Hybrid != pure. Beyond that, there are no shades of gray among hybrids.
In general, we ask that players focus their feedback more on class mechanics and what is fun or not fun about the classes and not simply on “My dps is too low so you must buff me.”
Oct. 16, 2009
He who is patient obtains
A new update to the PTR.
- Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.
Oct. 8, 2009
What are the chances?
Well, apparently boring=bad to the developers, so we have already seen a change in our T10 4 piece set bonus.
- 4 piece bonus – When your Viper Sting, Serpent Sting, and Wyvern Sting abilities deal damage, you have a 5% chance to gain 20% attack power for 10 seconds.
Obviously, Viper Sting doesn’t deal damage per se but perhaps a tick is a tick so it doesn’t matter much. Unleash the theorycrafters!
Oct. 8, 2009
The law has little to say on things left undone
An update regarding pet scaling for 3.3.
We’re still working on it. One stat that will almost certainly not get scaled to the pet is armor pen. It is technically (for obscure reasons) challenging to convert the armor pen rating from the hunter to the pet. Given armor pen’s not so rosy future (as a stat on gear anyway), this one probably won’t get resolved.
We’d still like to scale haste, crit and just about everything else. We’ll get done what we can.
This thread is also accepting feedback regarding the T10 set bonuses. After reading all (currently 26 pages), the general consensus seems to be that Hunters aren’t sure how the 2P will work and the 4P (while not bad) is boring. Since the 'for until canceled’ is a bit odd in terms of wording, Ghostcrawler replied:
“Until cancelled” is what a spell shows as a duration if no duration is set and the spell is not instantaneous.
For set bonuses this generally means someone misread the data or the set bonus just isn’t done.
I would speculate that this means our set bonuses aren’t done, as Bornakk did repeat in the thread above that our set bonuses were as follows:
- 2 piece bonus – Your Auto Shots have a 5% chance to cause you and your pet to deal 15% additional damage for until cancelled.
- 4 piece bonus – Your Shot abilities deal 4% increased damage to targets afflicted with Viper Sting, Serpent Sting, or Wyvern Sting.