MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

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Arena

2008-09-22 23:51:33

Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Plenty of questions still unanswered, and each day brings us that much closer to launch. I'll keep this concise, these shouldn't be too overwhelming.

-What is the vision for the arms tree?

-How do you feel about the heavily random nature of the arms tree?

-How do you feel about the function of battle stance, and the fluidity of dancing?

-WHAT do you feel is the function of battle stance compared to berserker stance?

-Is the stance mechanic as a whole being evaluated, or has it ever been evaluated over the course of this beta?

-Why does bladestorm have a self-CC element? Why doesn't it remove CC, stuns, snares or roots on use? Will this be reconsidered?

-Are there any plans to make the improved charge and improved heroic strike talents not bad? Less bad?

-Do you feel strength of arms is strong(lulz) or interesting enough for its position in the tree? I've suggested changing it into a strength-->crit rating conversion talent, any opinion on that?

-Why was enrage's bonus damage reduced so severely? Would you consider allowing deathwish to stack again now that the bonus is so low?

-Does the hamstring glyph stack with the improved hamstring talent?

-Have you looked at the math supplied by Torgal and company that demonstrates titans grip isn't such a massive increase as you think it is? If their numbers are correct, then what is your stance?

-You say you don't want any single talent point giving a 10% damage increase (as for example.) On 25-man Kel'thuzad and Sapphiron last night, mortal strike amounted to approximately 17% of my total damage done. On Sapphiron, slam was approximately 40% of total damage. Will mortal strike, bloodthirst or improved slam be nerfed based on your talent budgeting?

-Do you see the glyph of resonating power (Increases the maximum targets affected by your Thunder Clap ability by 4) as being mandatory for tanking? If yes, do you feel that's acceptable? If no, why not?

-Can you offer an approximation of the proc rate/PPM on furious attacks?

-Are there any plans to make unending fury not bad? Less bad? Seriously, it's really really bad.

-Do you feel that Vigilance is currently worth the talent point? If no, what is being done to fix it?

-Damage shield is, according to some very basic testing, not generating threat from damage dealt. Can you confirm this? If so, is this intended?

-Are there any plans to buff revenge baseline so that it's worth injecting into rotations for protection?

-Do you feel that shockwave is, or should be, our be-all answer to AoE threat generation? Is there any chance of lowering the cooldown?

-Is it possible to give Disarm the same functionality as rogue's Dismantle, or at least, the removed Shield Break skill?

-Do you feel heroic throw is strong or interesting enough for a level 80 skill?

-The devs seem to have originally planned several means for warriors to interact with the new enrage mechanics. Will enraged regeneration and the rend bonus be all that we see for the expansion, or is more being considered? Specifically, enraged assault.

-While you're doing numbers passes, any chance of restoring flurry to its original 30% bonus? Compare it to shamans flurry and it's clearly underbudgeted.

- Do you see what I did there? --------------------^

-Will we be seeing any sort of "good raid-slave" bonus for warriors who take rampage, given the overwhelming presence of feral druids across the raiding scene?

-Why was the healing component of bloodthirst nerfed?

Any response at all would be appreciated, even if it's just as brief as the questions themselves. I know hell's gotta be breaking loose in there by now.

[ Post edited by Caargon ]

Full rage bar IRL
The sky is not f***ing purple.

Caargon

2008-09-25 17:27:55

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
-What is the vision for the arms tree?

Hit stuff hard with a two-handed weapon. I'm not being cute. That's it.

Q u o t e:
-How do you feel about the heavily random nature of the arms tree?

There's always been a bit of that compared to Fury.

Q u o t e:
-How do you feel about the function of battle stance, and the fluidity of dancing?

I know we may be alone here, but we like dancing. As I said in another thread, we probably aren't going to change stances for LK, but it is something that has come up a lot and it may happen at some point. I do agree Battle's job as the "zero" stance feels a little dry, but that's not a vow to change it.

Q u o t e:
-WHAT do you feel is the function of battle stance compared to berserker stance?

Don't take as much damage.

Q u o t e:
-Is the stance mechanic as a whole being evaluated, or has it ever been evaluated over the course of this beta?

Covered. Sorry for the short responses, but you have many questions.

Q u o t e:
-Why does bladestorm have a self-CC element? Why doesn't it remove CC, stuns, snares or roots on use? Will this be reconsidered?

It does great dps. It would be too good if you could do other stuff too and too good if you could Intercept someone down. We might reconsider the CC issue, but really that's the kind of thing to pop out of PvP testing.

Q u o t e:
-Are there any plans to make the improved charge and improved heroic strike talents not bad? Less bad?

We buffed Imp Charge recently. Imp Heroic Strike might seem a little bland, but that may be because we've changed a lot of the old talents in various trees that used to do simple things like this. Heroic really does hit like a truck now, so I assume your issue is what the talent does to rage cost?

Q u o t e:
-Do you feel strength of arms is strong(lulz) or interesting enough for its position in the tree? I've suggested changing it into a strength-->crit rating conversion talent, any opinion on that?

A lot of trees have a talent like this. Giving warriors more crit is a little scary....

Q u o t e:
-Why was enrage's bonus damage reduced so severely? Would you consider allowing deathwish to stack again now that the bonus is so low?

Because we changed it from "be crit" to "be hurt." We might consider letting it stack.

Q u o t e:
-Does the hamstring glyph stack with the improved hamstring talent?

That is the intent.

Q u o t e:
-Have you looked at the math supplied by Torgal and company that demonstrates titans grip isn't such a massive increase as you think it is? If their numbers are correct, then what is your stance?

Our numbers say differently. I haven't looked to see where they differ. I'll try to get to that.

Q u o t e:
-You say you don't want any single talent point giving a 10% damage increase (as for example.) On 25-man Kel'thuzad and Sapphiron last night, mortal strike amounted to approximately 17% of my total damage done. On Sapphiron, slam was approximately 40% of total damage. Will mortal strike, bloodthirst or improved slam be nerfed based on your talent budgeting?

No. That's not a hard and fast rule. In your example though, if you had not used Mortal Strike or Slam you probably would have used the rage for something else. In the case of TG though we do have serious concerns about it being too good (sans a stiff penalty). While we might change our minds after more data, you're not going to change our mind by pointing out logical inconsistencies in talent trees. There are plenty of them. :)

Q u o t e:
-Do you see the glyph of resonating power (Increases the maximum targets affected by your Thunder Clap ability by 4) as being mandatory for tanking? If yes, do you feel that's acceptable? If no, why not?

It's not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that's another topic. :)

Q u o t e:
-Can you offer an approximation of the proc rate/PPM on furious attacks?

It's a frequency-based proc. It's a little complicated to explain but you might compare it to Omen of Clarity. I'll try to get back to this later.

Q u o t e:
-Are there any plans to make unending fury not bad? Less bad? Seriously, it's really really bad.

Yeah, this one doesn't feel done.

Q u o t e:
-Do you feel that Vigilance is currently worth the talent point? If no, what is being done to fix it?

It's pretty uber if we're talking about the same version.

Q u o t e:
-Damage shield is, according to some very basic testing, not generating threat from damage dealt. Can you confirm this? If so, is this intended?

It appears to generate threat based on the damage done. But there might be a bug.

Q u o t e:
-Are there any plans to buff revenge baseline so that it's worth injecting into rotations for protection?

Putting it into Sword and Board is something we are discussing.

Q u o t e:
-Do you feel that shockwave is, or should be, our be-all answer to AoE threat generation? Is there any chance of lowering the cooldown?

No, we don't want it to be your go-to AE ability, because then Arms and Fury can never tank a 5-player dungeon very well. We want it to be useful obviously.

Q u o t e:
-Is it possible to give Disarm the same functionality as rogue's Dismantle, or at least, the removed Shield Break skill?

I'll have to investigate this.

Q u o t e:
-Do you feel heroic throw is strong or interesting enough for a level 80 skill?

Yes.

Q u o t e:
-The devs seem to have originally planned several means for warriors to interact with the new enrage mechanics. Will enraged regeneration and the rend bonus be all that we see for the expansion, or is more being considered? Specifically, enraged assault.

The problem we had with Enraged Assault was our warrior testers and designers didn't feel like they had enough GCDs to work another attack into their rotations. It was just too much. I love the idea though (it wasn't mine) so I wouldn't say never.

Q u o t e:
-While you're doing numbers passes, any chance of restoring flurry to its original 30% bonus? Compare it to shamans flurry and it's clearly underbudgeted.

It all depends at this point on whether shamans or warriors are doing too much damage.

Q u o t e:
- Do you see what I did there? --------------------^

"Budgets" makes it sound like we are doing something so serious and important!

Q u o t e:
-Will we be seeing any sort of "good raid-slave" bonus for warriors who take rampage, given the overwhelming presence of feral druids across the raiding scene?

That is in the long-term plan. On the other hand, we can't really imagine a warrior skipping that talent because it is so useful solo. Mostly, we need to make sure the big raid buff overhaul really works the way we want it to.

Q u o t e:
-Why was the healing component of bloodthirst nerfed?

We thought it was too good, though to be honest, there are clandestine whispers echoing through our offices in the dead of night to change it back.

Q u o t e:
Any response at all would be appreciated, even if it's just as brief as the questions themselves. I know hell's gotta be breaking loose in there by now.

Sorry so brief, and sorry to many of the excellent follow-ups to this post that I have so brazenly ignored for now. But so many other players pointed out this thread that I wanted to stop by.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 19:27:07

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Just keep this post in mind the next time you wonder why we don't answer more questions. Most of the responses to my responses were a) we're wrong, or b) we're dumb, which honestly I think we both could have expected before the Q&A session. :)

I'm not trying to be cynical, but it feels like not a great use of both of our time, yanno?

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 19:45:06

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
Yeah, let's avoid the whole "Beg for a dev, wah wah wah..." "Oh look, a dev posted... KILL IT!" *rabble rabble rabble rabble* thing.

lol

Honestly, you're not going to drive me to drink or anything. There are always legitimate questions the community is interested in. But there are also questions of the variety of "Do you realize how stupid you're being?" and the answers to those are rarely going to make you happy.

We do think about this stuff quite a bit. I have rarely ever seen a developer (including the artists and programmers here too) making a decision without thinking it through very carefully and bouncing it off a couple of other people first. We try not to take ourselves too seriously, but we take the game VERY seriously.

It's entirely possible to be meticulous and come to the wrong decisions, but I think that is far superior to making sloppy decisions. Just something to keep in mind.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 19:49:29

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
While I don't support option B, I really think you have to be open to customer feedback telling you that you're wrong. You're only human (well, maybe crustacean), you will get it wrong occasionally like the rest of us. That is the value of a feedback forum isn't it? Being able to find out when you're going in the wrong direction.

Totally. One-hundred percent agree. I am wrong constantly. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me and sometimes yes, you are going to change my mind.

My point was more that when you ask a question of the variety "We all think X sucks, why did you do it?" you have to be prepared for the answer to be "We don't think it sucks."

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 20:07:49

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
For the record, Locks turning into demons is pretty scary, murder spree is pretty scary, a lot of classes are pretty scary. I think we have a right to be a little scary in some aspects of the game.

Now here is an interesting phenomenon. Nobody likes their 51-point talent,. Nobody. You'll find a few players here and there that will stuck up for it, but that's very rare. They will all, however, point to another class and how they got the cool talent. I'm serious here. Go look at some other forums.

I suppose you can say we totally dropped the ball and can't come up with anything good for anyone, but I honestly don't believe that. :)

Q u o t e:
You are saying warriors may be doing too much damage (which boggles the mind), how are you testing this? From every raid I have been in (be it 10 or 25 man) the warriors were prety much last with equivalent levels of gear. Is it intended? and if so, do you think it's perfectly ok for warriors to be weak for one or two tiers of raiding just because in the last tier we become competitive?

Here is similar case. Go look at the other forums. The list of threads I've seen lately of classes who say they are not doing enough damage: hunters, shamans, paladins, rogues, priests, death knights, druids, warlocks. I am not exaggerating. Maybe the druids have quieted down with the recent Balance changes. I haven't heard much out of the mages lately. Sometimes you'll see maybe a Retadin saying "Okay, we might be doing a tiny bit too much damage, but we still shouldn't be nerfed."

Also just keep in mind that most people posting about how their classes need to better do have a teeny bit of conflict of interest. I'm not saying most of the community is trying to badger us into making them OP. But it's something you do have to be cognizant of.

Q u o t e:
Back to the topic, and using your words, do you guys really think the randomness state of Arms is intented? Because I am pretty sure the vast mayority do not like it.

Here's the thing. Players don't like the random number generator. They don't like the randomness of loot drops. They don't like the randomness of resist rolls. They don't like the randomness of crits or procs or matchmaking.

In our minds, there can definitely be too much RNG. We put badges on bosses to get around the frustration inherent when a boss fails to drop your item on the 100th kill just because of probability. A talent that says 1% of the time you'll hit for 1000% damage may be balanced, but it's never going to be that fun.

But overall we are not at all trying to minimize or reduce the random element in the game. The random element is one of the few things that distinguishes an RPG from a game of "pure skill" like an FPS. We don't want it to swamp the element of skill, but I don't think it does. With some exceptions (and discounting for abuse), the players with the highest arena ratings really are very good players. Despite the randomness of the game, they still do rise to the top. The guilds who get instances on farm (moreso than the ones who get first kills) usually really do understand the encounter and class mechanics in play. TLDR: we're not really trying to get randomness out of WoW.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 20:15:08

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
Also is it intended for protection warriors to be in the 1.3 1.4k dps ballpark when prot DKs, pallies or bears do a lot more damage?

No, that is too low. We nerfed Devastate (for good reason) and haven't given warriors anything back yet. We don't want to just buff Revenge, because that doesn't help dps when you aren't the tank. Shield Slam is a good candidate.

And it *is* the intenion for Arms and Fury to do damage that is very close to other dps specs. I can't say 100%, because I feel the need to always caveat this. :) You may be tops on one fight, but the very next fight may work so differently that you aren't on top. Overall it should be really hard to tell whether it's the player or the class that is driving those numbers.

If warriors aren't there, we'll get them there. If we think they're there at ship and we're wrong, believe me, we'll know it pretty quickly. The numbers generated by the community will point out the problems. The reason we aren't getting data that good at the moment is because A) it's a moving target with all the changes, B) we don't think the community has had long enough to really learn, experiment with and min / max the new abilities, and C) there are still a lot of bugs. There is no point nerfing say shaman into the ground when it turns out that a bug in Lava Burst is causing dps to appear much too high.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 20:18:29

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
Hit stuff hard with a two-handed weapon. I'm not being cute. That's it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pretty simplistic, but that and what Fury seems to be (do the same with two weapons) rather similar.

When you're talking about vision, simpler is usually better IMHO.

Fury: Hit stuff fast with two weapons.

Prot: Hit something with your shield. It used to be "get beat on," but we're slowly, slowly changing that.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 20:32:04

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
We thought it was too good, though to be honest, there are clandestine whispers echoing through our offices in the dead of night to change it back.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Something I'd like to point out.

You always wonder why we don't understand what you mean, or we point out that you have said things, when you claim you haven't..

This is why.

Sorry. I try to keep my walls of text interesting to read, but I know I can be too precious sometimes. I also realize not everyone here speaks English as their first language.

We took down Bloodthirst's healing because it felt like it was too good for awhile. (And I don't really mean "felt." I mean we talked about it a lot, tried it out, looked at some numbers and came to that conclusion.) But just today (?) we were talking about it and one of the designers said "I kind of think we nerfed BT too much." So that put it back on the table. Maybe he's wrong. It's too early to tell. But it is possible we might buff it.

One of the things warriors have ALWAYS complained about was how bad they were without a healer. I remember when BC shipped and warriors saw the opening cinematic and said "Did you catch that the orc with Ashkandi had a pocket healer?" (Aside: Talk about your *&%&*$ items that will never drop.)

Enraged Regeneration is an attempt to give warriors more of an ability to take care of themselves, when alone, in PvP, or in a raid when they're about to die. (I also don't buy that nobody cares about solo -- there were an awful lot of people doing Quel'Danas dailies. A big complaint we got from healers and tanks was how hard it was to do dailies alone.)

In any case, we worried with BT + ER that Fury might be too good at self-healing. I think the jury is still out on that though.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 20:42:41

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
To what extent is the warrior community's perception that the developers deliberately design warriors to be weaker than other classes at low or "casual" gear levels in exchange for being powerful at higher gear levels correct?

We worry a lot more about class balance at max level. We do try and make sure people have the tools they need to level up, but we don't spend a lot of our time making sure rogues and warriors do similar dps at level 76. I don't think warriors are unique here. We *have* been burned before by warriors ending up a lot more powerful with good gear than we anticipated. Warriors have a tendency to be rage-starved and do low dps and then suddenly hit some magic threshold of gear and have plenty of rage, which means more dps, which means more rage.... It may have been our referencing that phenomenon that has driven that perception. But we don't go out of our way to compensate for that by nerfing warriors in greens or heroic blues.

Q u o t e:
Ghost I appreciate your presence here and I can understand why you may not like to post and answer questions like this, but I dont think the people who countered your points are trying to do it out of malice but rather to explain inconsistancies in your logic.

I think you're probably right. But from my POV, they really, really want a blue post, and when they get one, they then say they're quitting the game. So why did I want to post again? :) They didn't really want a blue post. They wanted to hear that we were buffing their class, or at least changing our minds on something.

Q u o t e:
Explain shockwave? Most prot warriors have been really happy with this talent for quite a while. I'm pretty big on bladestorm for PVE too, it just needs a little tweaking to get to the point where its right for PVP as well (damage down, reliability of use up). I do however think you're being too heavy handed and reacting too strongly to Titan's Grip. I think its borderline for being too powerful unmitigated, but I think you're first pass at a counter-balance was draconian to put it mildly.

Heh. I get so many requests to change the cooldown, or the cone or whatever on Shockwave. "Great, I get another Thunder Clap for my bottom talent. Why can't I turn into a demon?" I like Bladestorm, but there are a lot of warriors posting here who don't.

Q u o t e:
I don't go to other class forums often because I find it hard to resist the urge to call them all whiners, but I'm well aware of what you're talking about.

I lol'd again. Man, I wonder if I could get away with that as my sig? Bad idea probably. :)

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 21:00:32

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
Do you think some of the design is being rushed by the looming deadline?

Nope. We just can't worry about stuff like that or one of two things would happen: we'd get rushed and sloppy, or we'd just keep delaying the release. Class design, item design, talent design and game balance are never realy done, so we just keep working on them.

The truth is we can release stuff on a day one patch. We'll also have [a period] in between the 3.0 patch and the actual release of Lich King in which we'll get more time to see the new talents and mechanics in action before everyone starts leveling again. And then there are hotfixes, mini-patches (there will doubtless be a few) and then big content patches.

We have enough experienced people on the team now who have been through this a couple of times that we plan on being able to respond to problems in a timely fashion.

But since we can't wait until everything is 100% perfect (because it never is) it doesn't make much sense to worry about the impending release either.

It's the blessing and the curse of MMO development. :)

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-25 22:37:31

Re: Crunch time, simple but vital questions.

Q u o t e:
Sorry, you need to actually pay more attention to people in guilds that have actually killed KJ or are working on him now. Not just some random player that doesn't really know their class. Remember the 25 man Naxx log I posted in the thread that stated you were probably going to nerf Devastate instead of fixing our other two trees? That is the type of data you need to be looking at, and Titan's Grip was not used because it was doing a good 1k less DPS than what a Flurry/Devastate build does. This is from a raiding DPS Warrior in one of the most progressive end game guilds on the planet. And still you disregard it...other than perhaps a "coincidental" nerf to Devastate.

I never said we don't communicate with those guilds. We are actually in close contact with a lot of them. We just don't carry on the conversations here. We get direct feedback from some of the best tanks in the world. Players tend to assume that we see random posts that say "Prot's dps is hawt!" and make a knee-jerk nerf based on that. We do a lot more research. It's probably inappropriate to mention them, but we read a lot of good forums (for various classes) beyond this one.

Q u o t e:
And that's another sore point. Your reason was because it was making up too much of a tanking Warriors damage, yet I don't know if you actually realize why. The standard rotation on live is SS>Rev>Deva x2. S&B is so good that it made Revenge not worth the GCD which is why an additional Devastate was added into the rotation. Devastate did not need to be nerfed at all, something needed to change about Revenge. The simplest solution is to buff it's damage and crit rate to where it beats Devastate by at least a 10% margin for pure damage (per use) as well as 10% threat (per use).

Your solution gets us to pretty much the same place but with higher dps. We don't want to inflate every class to doing e.g. 4000 dps in the first raid of LK or we're going to be in crazy land by Icecrown. Rather than buff everything to Devastate's level, we brought it down. Prot needs to use Revenge more, agreed, but if Prot warriors can get more dps and therefore threat out of spamming Devastate, they are going to do that unless rage starved. Devastate works better when it's the third choice after SS and Revenge. (The crit chance was also too high. That would have started doing weird things to Prot as well.) The fact that dps warriors were looking at Devastate as a way to increase their dps, was just icing on the cake.

We are going to buff Shield Slam's damage (but probably it's flat damage because it scales very well already) to make sure it remains the go-to ability for Prot, even when not tanking. We will probably add Revenge to S+B to make sure it gets used more (and might buff it's AP coefficient a tad). I think those changes will leave Prot in a better place.

Ghostcrawler