Sept. 4, 2009
Faction Action
So the faction change service is now live in the US (I actually was all pro for this pre-Cataclysm announcement, was trying to convince my guild to go Horde). For any and all of your questions about this service, Blizzard has a nice FAQ write-up that should quench your thirst for knowledge about it.
Aug. 28, 2009
On the mend
So, I’m finally recovered from whatever it was I caught at Blizzcon (or on the plane to Blizzcon, or in the airport, waiting for the plane to Blizzcon, take your pick) and have managed to organize my notes and get them posted. Do feel free to ask me any questions you might have regarding my write-up and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Now that that’s out of the way – no, I haven’t been ignoring PTR. Been sick, remember? Time to bring us back up to date with the latest Hunter changes there.
- Hunter Tier-9 2-Piece Bonus: Critical damage from Serpent Sting will now work properly with the Mortal Shots and Expose Weakness talents.
- Master’s Call: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds, Frostfire Bolt and Slow.
- Trap Mastery: Tooltip now states the correct amount of snakes summoned.
And, what would a news update be without a little blue.
Not surprisingly, there was probably a riot somewhere when Shadowmourne showed up on the big screen with the comment “Hunter Weapon”. Even I could tell it was a joke (about it being a hunter weapon, not Shadowmourne itself).
Anyone capable of using a two-handed axe can use Shadowmourne. The stat allocation may not benefit hunters or shamans as much as warriors, DKs or paladins.
Is the removal of some stats on gear for Cataclysm “dumbing down” the game too much?
What we were finding is that in many cases things had just become so complicated that players were not making intelligent decisions based on their knowledge of how various stats benefited them. That sounds like what you wanted to have happened, but it really wasn’t. Instead players would pull up a BiS list, or plug the item into a spreadsheet. If the answer was “upgrade” they equipped the item. We could pretty much just give the items a name and art and make all the stats not displayed.
If you were one of those players who picked up a piece and understood how armor pen vs. attack power benefited you or whether defense was still worth collecting after you had hit crit immunity, then you were in the minority. Hopefully we can get back to a system where eyeballing an item’s stats has some chance of being right.
This is not a “catering to the casuals” issue. This is an issue that even some of our most educated and math-savy players could not make gear decisions without the help of external tools. We’re much less concerned about more casual players because the specific choice of upgrade will mean less for them (skill outweighs the contribution of stats for all but the absolute best players) and they often choose pieces based on things like art over stats.
I’m talking about very hardcore raiders who no longer could eyeball a piece of gear with any degree of authority. I might believe that some very few of you are so proficient with the math as to be able to eyeball the stats, but I think you are vastly overestimating the number of players who can or do. Remember, the formula to convert armor penetration into damage was so complicated that we had to take the unusual step of actually spelling out how it was calculated.
With this change will you still have to make hard choices about upgrading? Absolutely. Will there still be quasi-religious debates about which neck is best in slot for a given spec? Of course. Will you still need to understand the mechanics to make the best choice for your character? We think so. One of our overall design philosophies for WoW (and Blizzard) is to be simple but have a lot of depth. Some people mistake needless complexity for depth.
Meanwhile, we think there is a lot of benefit of getting rid of problematic stats like defense and accomplishing things like letting casters improve by focusing on throughput over mana pool.
The Mature Black Dragon Sinew will still be available (somehow) for people who are working on or want to work on Rhok’delar in the future.
Aug. 16, 2009
So a little bird told me...
You can now follow my feed on Twitter.
Ideally, this will be used to talk about site updates, brief news, snippets of the Life of Fritti and of course, Blizzcon updates! I’ll still be writing my in depth posts on the message board once I get back to the hotel but for the up to the minute stuff, this should be a faster delivery method for Hunter specific news from the 'con.
Also, a follow-up regarding /castrandom.
The way we changed (“broke”) castrandom was that if it fails, it continues to try and cast the same spell again. This means it will still work as you intend for randomly casting mounts or using different versions of Polymorph since those won’t generally fail. We have no objection to using castrandom in that fashion, which was honestly more of the original intent for the macro.
Where we don’t like castrandom is when players wanted to use the macro instead of having to pay attention to procs and cooldowns. That’s just not the way we really want players playing WoW. There are some great games were part of the challenge is trying to automate your character as much as possible to respond to whatever happens. We just don’t want WoW to be one of them.
In those situations where you feel utterly dependent on a macro because our default UI isn’t cutting it, please help us to identify them (though don’t feel obligated to turn the rest of this thread into that discussion). We’d rather make the class or UI work better rather than balance around the assumption that everyone castrandom macros the ability.
Aug. 13, 2009
Design Intent of /castrandom Macros
Here’s the word from Bornakk regarding /castrandom.
We allow players to use macros for convenience, especially when automating tasks that they do often. Where macros cross the line is when they are making the decision instead of the player. In the old-days, there were addons that would essentially target a player with a debuff and cure it. That crossed the line for us – the mod was playing the game instead of the player.
In the /castrandom case, players were sometimes using these macros to cast the ability that wasn’t on cooldown without having to recognize this fact or hit the right button. Players using this system had an unfair advantage against players that weren’t. Instead of having to cope with the complexity built into the class, players could just spam one key and have the game “do the right thing.”
We recognize that in some cases, certain classes are probably over complex or else the default WoW UI doesn’t provide the information you need in a form where you can quickly notice that say an ability has proc’d or another is on cooldown. In these cases, we would like to fix the class or UI problem, not require all of our players to use macros to get around the limitation. You can help us identify those situations where you feel overly-dependent on a /castrandom macro so we can start to address those problems.
We also recognize that players sometimes used /castrandom for options that were truly random and with no gameplay consequence, such as picking a random polymorph animal, companion or mount. In these situations, we want to give you specific commands you can use to get the desired functionality. We have no problem with you rolling the dice in this manner.
So, if you used /castrandom in a macro, now you know why it no longer works.
Aug. 7, 2009
Hunter Talent Reset
Noticed you had an extra talent point (or two)? Obviously a bug which has since been fixed, so don’t forget to redo your talents when you login next!
[Previous] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 [Next]Hunter talents have been wiped in order to fix talent issues that players have been experiencing. This talent wipe will not affect glyphs, but when reapplying your talent points, please be careful to match them up to the glyphs that you currently have placed.