March 18, 2010

Ha ha! This really gets the blood pumping!

Will the buffs for Beast Mastery be enough in 3.3.3? The higher-ups seem to think… maybe.

If you’re talking best possible gear, we think BM is pretty close to Survival in 3.3.3. Marks is ahead, and that’s largely a function of armor pen, but again you are talking about absolute best gear. If you aren’t in Icecrown 25 hard modes, then gear is likely to have just as much effect on your damage as spec. Ideally, things are balanced at all levels between level 1 and 80 with BiS gear, but there are going to be a lot of points along the way where that’s probably not true. We see Survival hunters beat Marks hunters all the time in what I would categorize as average (meaning not server first guilds but capable of progressing) raids. Hopefully we’ll see some BM guys up there too, but it may take higher gear levels.

My suspicion is that the hunters with the gear you are describing will have a propensity to go Marks, because that currently yields the highest damage and raiders tend to play whatever does the highest damage. In a world without armor pen, that might not be the case (though I haven’t done the math lately).

Nonetheless, it is also true today that Marks can beat Survival, and yet there are a lot of Survival hunters raiding. Our hope is that in 3.3.3 that there will be as many BM hunters as Survival raiding, which would be a really nice bump for BM. Maybe the estimates (ours and those I’ve read) about the boost BM is getting are overly optimistic. We’ll see.

It’s possible the Survival hunters are only going Survival for Replenishment, though all 3 hunters bring some pretty solid raid benefits these days.

March 15, 2010

Viva Nathaniel

Another update to 3.3.3.

• Hellscream’s Warsong and Strength of Wrynn now provide their bonuses to player pet health and damage, as well as the absorption amounts of Power Word: Shield and Sacred Shield.

March 11, 2010

A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?

Patch notes updated with this new Hunter addition, thanks Twitter for telling me!

• Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.

March 9, 2010

Mastery System Preview

Last week, we gave you an early look at the changes we’re making to the stat system in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and explained how these changes will ultimately provide players with more interesting gear choices and make stats easier to understand. Today we’d like to go into more detail about a brand-new feature that’s an integral part of this overhaul: the Mastery system, a set of new game mechanics designed to allow players to become better at what makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. With this system, we want to accomplish three things: give players more freedom in how they allocate talent points, simplify some of the “kitchen sinky” talents that try to do too much at once, and add a new stat to high-level gear that makes you better at your chosen role.

Here’s how the system works: As you spend points in a given talent tree, you’ll receive three different passive bonuses specific to that tree. The first bonus will increase your damage, healing, or survivability, depending on the intended role of the tree. The second bonus will be related to a stat commonly found on gear desirable to you, such as Haste or Crit. The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree — meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear.

One of our primary goals with Mastery is to give players more flexibility to choose fun or utility-oriented talents rather than make them feel obligated to pick up “mandatory” but uninteresting talents, such as passive damage or healing. (For examples of the kinds of powerful but boring talents we’re talking about, take a look at the talent tier just above the 51-point talent in many of the existing trees.) In a sense, Mastery makes it so every talent in (just for example) a rogue tree essentially has an invisible additional bullet point that says “???and increases your damage by X%.” This way, if you choose a talent like Elusiveness (which reduces your chance to be detected while stealthed) or Fleet Footed (which affects movement), you won’t feel like you’re giving up damage in exchange for utility.

There will still be talents that boost damage, of course, but those talents will also affect the way you play. For example, you can still expect to see talents like Improved Frostbolt, which reduces the cast time of the Frostbolt spell; it increases DPS, but it also affects the mage’s rotation. Piercing Ice, however, is just “6% more damage” and is the kind of talent we’re trying to eliminate by implementing the Mastery system.

It’s designed partially with new players in mind. It will be much harder to have a truly terrible talent spec because you won’t be able to help but be reasonably good at your chosen role.

The mastery stat itself won’t show up until high level, and even when it does, you should have more confidence that it’s a stat you want instead of say trying to figure out the percent of your damage that is physical damage to calculate if armor pen is good for you or not.

I admit that adding passive bonuses at all to talent trees complicates the talent feature slightly. We hope to make up for that by there being less paranoia about picking “the wrong” spec. The wrong spec might only be a slight loss instead of a tragic loss. As a point of comparison, dual-spec complicates talents a little, but overall we think it was good for the game.

Does mastery on gear affect both highest trees or give no benefit at all?

Mastery on gear gives you one bonus. That bonus is the third passive (the unique one) in the tree in which you’ve spent the most points.

It’s possible you will only get the benefit of the tree in which you’ve spent the most points, or will only get the benefit from say 50 points maximum with the bonus chosen from the tree with the most points in it. We’ll have to see when the talent trees are more finalized and we start to figure out build strategies.

Overall, the goal is to spend points as you want, and not feel penalized for spending into another tree or feel like you have to game things by spending more points than you want in your tree. Remember these passive bonuses are designed to give you flexibility, not lock you into anything.

March 3, 2010

Underlined for emphasis

Patch notes altered again.

• Ferocious Inspiration now also increases the damage of Steady Shot by 9%.

Yes, that does mean that it increases Arcane AND Steady Shot damage (I double checked the PTR to be safe).

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