Dec. 6, 2009

You are cruel to subject me to such torture

With 3.3 supposedly on the horizon for Tuesday (again, nothing confirmed), it is looking more and more likely that pet scaling will not be making it in, in time for the patch. When queried directly about it today, Ghostcrawler replied:

If we can get it in. On a technical side, the implementation just ends up being a little different for every stat.

Keep in mind that pet scaling isn’t essential to good damage. It’s only essential for keeping your pet’s damage growing at the same rate as your damage, and by extension keeping your total damage growing at the same rate as other classes. There aren’t going to be 3 more tiers of content for Lich King, so it only gets to be an issue if other classes scale so much better that they leapfrog you in Icecrown / the final PvP season.

Dec. 5, 2009

Getting PvE/P right in Cataclysm

There are a lot of problems with Wrath – gear scaling, burst, weak evolution of the BG system… whatever else you can think of – but I really wouldn’t say class balance is one of them.

You know, I think that’s probably a pretty fair assessment, assuming you define “burst” as both damage and healing.

The gear scaling is “easy” to fix, meaning we know what to do and it just requires a lot of work. We are prepared for players to be sad when their ratings convert less favorably, but most would agree it’s good for the game in the long run.

I already addressed the burst issue above. If the bathtub is bigger, then the rate of health pouring in and going down the drain don’t affect the volume as severely. Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

There is going to be a big focus on BGs for Cataclysm, including the ability to get the best PvP gear from rated BGs. (All of this was announced at Blizzcon — I’m not saying anything new here.)

I also don’t want to give the impression class balance is perfect. It’s not. We have some success stories and some specs that we didn’t get to where we intended. But we had an ambitious design from the beginning, and the way we work means there is always a much larger list of stuff we want to get done than we can actually fit into a given expansion or patch. We think the trend is good, and a lot of the changes we made for Lich King are going to endure through Cataclysm, which means we’ll be able to focus more on the problems we have now rather than resetting everything.

Nov. 24, 2009

That sounds soul crushingly bad

I don’t tend to soapbox much in News updates but man…

In Cataclysm, we plan to make the old PvP titles available based on your performance in our upcoming rated Battleground system, similar to the current Arena titles which are based on your performance in the Arenas. Keep in mind, however, that Cataclysm is still relatively early in the development stages and this information is subject to change. We’ll have more on the rated Battleground system and associated rewards in the months ahead.

We feel they’re going to fit well with the new rated Battleground system. The titles were previously earned through a very cumbersome experience that didn’t necessarily measure a player’s PvP skill. With a new system for measuring performance in the Battlegrounds, we feel it’s a good fit to award the honor titles to those who excel. We do not intend for the top titles to be earned in a trivial manner. It’s going to be quite hard to get High Warlord or Grand Marshal; and not because it’s going to require that someone plays in the Battlegrounds more than everyone else on their realm each week, but because it’s going to require a very impressive win/loss ratio.

I hope they re-think this. As a Grand Marshal, it saddens me that the implication seems to be that those of us who participated in the “old system” did apparently not demonstrate enough skill to warrant that these titles become legacy. While I make no claims to being in a class with those who participate in the current Arena system with success, I do not feel that my rank was achieved solely because I was able to play for extended periods of time. Even moreso in my individual case, on a high population server where our ratio was 3:1 (or 4:1) in favor of Alliance, I faced long queue times versus organized Horde teams so every moment I was in a Battleground, I had to be performing at 110%, even if my team was not.

Cataclysm is a ways away yet, so there’s plenty of time for Blizzard to change their stance.

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.