Update: 8.22.2012

We're continuing the discussion in a new thread so fresh and so clean!

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We want to provide everyone with a quick update regarding the status of beta class design and balance, as well as start collecting more detailed analytics from you. Since you’ve probably seen us say many times in the past that we’re not yet in a place to start dissecting the numbers, it’s worth calling out that we now want you to bring it on!

For the purposes of keeping this thread as valuable to the developers as possible -- they will be actively reading and likely replying to posts here -- these are some things to know before posting:

• First and foremost, as a ground rule let’s keep this one thread free of pleas about ability feedback, DPS being too low or other subjective declarations. This thread should be about information sharing. If you aren’t a theorycrafter, this thread may not be for you.

• We feel the numbers are in a pretty good place right now. If you’re a theorycrafter who has been waiting for things to stabilize before submitting your class balance analysis, this is your cue to have at it.

• Make no mistake, we’re confident in our ability to balance the game. On the other hand, we greatly value player feedback. And reconciling our numbers with yours is part of that.

• Don’t consider this thread to be evidence that we feel class design for Mists of Pandaria is pretty much done. It also shouldn’t be a sign that X issue you may have been posting about for the last month is going to be ignored, or that we just don’t agree with you.

• The primary goal is to maintain a relatively stable class system for a healthy period of time in the beta, so the number crunchers among you can really start to get into the nitty-gritty details without worrying that everything will change in the next beta build.

• If there are any mechanics that are proving particularly hard to understand, feel free to ask in this thread. We understand there is a narrow line between squelching and fostering the theorycrafting community, and we’re not trying to solve everything for you. On the other hand, we don’t want you to burn too much of your time trying to figure out how potentially confusing mechanics work under the hood (e.g. monk weapon normalization). That said, we won’t just dump the coefficient for every spell -- you should be able to figure that out. However, if you just can’t figure out how a spell is designed, don’t hesitate to ask. We appreciate honest questions.

I am VERY interested in seeing the community's Thoughts on how to equalize 2h and DW Frost. Not from a "damage on beta" But equalize it for the future. It is obvious how one sided the damage is currently.

In a future build you will find that we removed the increase offhand damage bonus of ToT.

This isn't about wishlisting, it's about analyzing what is currently in the beta. Theory-crafting.

We agree, but at least it was a post that was getting at damage differences. The intent of this thread overall is to provide players a place to post and discuss numbers and answer any questions that are preventing you from doing so. There are plenty of other places to discuss other design issues and this thread will be moderated a bit more heavily than normal with that in mind. Nothing personal.

What level of uptime is Haunt being balanced around?

Is 'filler twisting', where you swap in Drain soul for Malefic Grasp to get shards back above 80% target health, the intended way for Affliction to be dpsing?

Haunt is balanced around Nightfall procs. While it may currently be a small DPS upgrade (3%?) to swap Drain Soul and Malefic Grasp, the intent is that you use Drain Soul to generate shards when you need to hit a burst window or of course below 20%.

What on earth is going on with Brewmaster mitigation? I don't even want to start theorycrafting because it feels/looks so broken :<

We're changing it a bit and haven't updated the beta in a little while.

The basic idea is that you should care about converting energy to chi, then converting that chi primarily into Shuffle and Purifying Brew. In most cases, we expect it to be optimal to mix those two abilities, not just always prioritize one over the other. Additionally, Guard should almost always be worth using. The next build you get should have a fairly stable version of Brewmaster mitigation, which includes the following changes to Brewmasters:

-- Added 5% Parry to Swift Reflexes.
-- Ox Stance now reduces damage taken by 25% (up from 20%), and health by 15% (down from 30%).
-- Shuffle now increases Parry by 20%, down from 30%.
-- Mastery now increases Stagger by 0.3% per point, down from 0.5%, and no longer increases Parry chance.
-- Brewing: Elusive Brew – New passive for Brewmasters which gives you charges of Elusive Brew when you get auto attack critical strikes: You get up to 2 charges per crit, based on weapon speed. For 2Hs, you get an average of Speed/1.8 charges. For 1Hs, you get an average of speed/2.6 charges. Max stack size of 15. (Using unusually slow weapons, you can actually get 3 sometimes, but we’re ignoring that for the tooltip.)
-- For example, with a 3.2 speed 2H, you get an average of 1.778 charges per crit (77.8% of the time you get 2, otherwise 1).
-- Elusive Brew (the ability) consumes those charges to give you 30% dodge for 1sec per charge.

It should be apparent by the information present in this thread that multi-shot is in desperate need of a retuning.

We need to make some adjustments, but aren't sure buffing Multi is the right solution. As you point out, BM AE is fine. Marks is a little low and Survival is a lot low. These can all be fixed, but if we just buff Multi then we need to nerf BM elsewhere.

What on earth is going on with Brewmaster mitigation? I don't even want to start theorycrafting because it feels/looks so broken :<

The basic idea is that you should care about converting energy to chi, and then converting that chi primarily into Shuffle and Purifying Brew. In most cases, we expect it to be optimal to mix those two abilities, not just always prioritize one over the other. Additionally, Guard should almost always be worth using. The next build you get should have a fairly stable version of Brewmaster mitigation, which includes the following changes to Brewmasters:

Added 5% Parry to Swift Reflexes.

Ox Stance now reduces damage taken by 25% (up from 20%), and health by 15% (down from 30%)

Shuffle now increases Parry by 20%, down from 30%.

Mastery now increases Stagger by 0.3% per point, down from 0.5%, and no longer increases Parry chance.

Brewing: Elusive Brew – New passive for Brewmasters which gives you charges of Elusive Brew when you get auto attack critical strikes: You get up to 2 charges per crit, based on weapon speed. For 2Hs, you get an average of Speed/1.8 charges. For 1Hs, you get an average of speed/2.6 charges. Max stack size of 15. Using unusually slow weapons, you can actually get 3 sometimes, but we’re ignoring that for the tooltip. [For example, with a 3.2 speed 2H, you get an average of 1.778 charges per crit (77.8% of the time you get 2, otherwise 1).]

Elusive Brew (the ability) consumes those charges to give you 30% dodge for 1sec per charge.

On behalf of the Paladin community on Elitist Jerks, I would like to re-post something here about Crusader's Zeal (credit to post goes to Exemplar):

We'll look at Crusader's Zeal again. Maybe the mechanic isn't even needed. We wanted it to be a source of crit, but we didn't want it to be a maintenance-y buff like Inquisition.

Most trinket procs have a generous proc chance with an ICD. Gurthalak was an exception, but had some wacky consequences as a result of our making it an exception.

We don't think the paladin 90 talents need to benefit from mastery. The healing component can be balanced around Holy healing and since all 3 talents are in the same boat, there shouldn't be talent choice consequences.

The Expertise to spell hit conversion is in and working (as far as we know). The UI may not be updated to reflect it yet.

Protection warrior rage is still flakey in the beta, assuming you want us to be in defensive stance. So I guess the first question, is are we intended to be using battle stance this much, with the potential of constant stance dancing there?

Assuming thats not the case, with a fair chunk of rage generation coming from enrage ( ie critical blocks ) and revenge, the current clunky feel when off tanking or fighting magic only bosses on live has become exacerbated, as we're now also getting hit with a large rage income reduction in these situations.

You are going to make life hard for everyone if you try to tank in Battle Stance, so we'll make sure that isn't too attractive. If super optimized tanks want to slip into Battle Stance (or Berserker Stance) in some optimized occasions, we're fine with that, but it should be a rare and hardcore tactic. On the other hand, if you are off-tanking in the sense that you aren't the target for several seconds, you can safely go into Battle Stance then. We understand warriors will always want more rage, but Protection isn't balanced around 100% uptime of Shield Block and Barrier, and nearly everything else is free.

Holy priest mana regeneration seems really low. Compared to other classes, Holy doesn't seem to have the longevity to last in a heroic or raid, and feels much like early cata, where Priests were never considered until there mana regen was nearly doubled.

We find regen is pretty similar among the healers over the course of a fight. It will feel lower in leveling greens than it did at 85 in epics however. Do you have any more information?

That's a very wide spread there. Mastery is by comparison utterly horrible for Shadow at present. It doesn't help that the extra ticks don't function like real extra ticks (more chances to proc things) with the exception of the mana regen from a procced VT tick.

Do you have a specific example of something that is not proc'd? The extra ticks should function like real ticks.

Just a reminder that we really want to focus here on damage, healing and tanking numbers. We don't want this to be a catch all "ask the blues." Ideally we'd like to see more "How does this work?" and less "Why did you change this?"

Carry on.

I did make a bug report out of this though I am reposting this here just for future reference. there is currently a bug with Faerie Swarms' damage.

This is fixed in a future build.

Also what is the status of crit suppression? Is it totally gone? Just gone for spells? Or still there? It's something that is extremely painful to test in-game.

Crit chances of players against mobs that are higher level than you are reduced by 1% per level difference, in Mists.

With regards to Priest mechanics, the only two "difficult" things to measure accurately are the damage modifications due to range on Cascade on Halo.

Cascade does a % of its max damage/healing based on linear distance between the source and target of the bounce. It does 40% of its maximum damage at 0yd, and 100% at 30+yd, scaling linearly between those two points (anywhere between 30yd and 40yd will give 100%). It prefers farther away targets when it bounces.

Halo’s damage scaling is… a bit more complex. Sometimes the formulae that are under the hood are extremely complex looking, because we build in several knobs that we turn to get the tuning where we want it. Halo is one of those cases. The easy to understand way to think of it is that the multiplier on the max damage/healing is 10% at 0yd, up to 40% at 17yd, spikes up to 90% at 22yd, 100% at 27yd, then down to 60% at 35yd. The intent is that it is weak on targets near you, but there’s a sweet spot in a ring from 20yd to 30yd from you, and that the edges of that ‘sweet spot’ are smooth. The actual formula (warning, may seem scary!) is… 0.5 * (1.01)^(-1 * (((Distance-25)/2)^4)) + 0.1 + 0.015*Distance. I’m sure someone can post a graph of that pretty quickly. One thing to note is that the max range is 30yd, but that it includes creature’s hit boxes, so the distance between the caster and a valid target may be slightly larger than 30yd, which is why the formula makes sense out to 35yd. Again, you absolutely do not need to understand any of that to benefit from the heal!

We of course don't need direct coefficients for most spells as we data-mine them anyway (and then test). There are some coefficients that we don't have data for and are a bit harder to test. Mostly pet related abilities. Shadowfiend etc. I've come up with decent enough numbers for them though.

I’ll try to put together a post explaining details of how pet scaling works soon. The general idea is that pets now inherit a % of most of your stats, but that % varies by the pet and the stat.

Shadowy Apparitions have been a bit....strange. The coefficients in-game have never exactly matched what they actually do for their entire existence (I submitted bug reports about it during the *Cata* beta). At present their actual damage is *far* more than the tool-tip says. Any idea if the tool-tip on them might be fixed for MoP so we know which coefficient and base dmg are intended? ;)

I’m not sure offhand which is correct (tooltip or damage); there may be a bug involved. We’ll double-check the tooltip on these, but the numbers I have in front of me at the moment say that they should do 97.8% of SP plus 554 at level 85, or plus 615 at 90 (and benefits from Shadowform’s multiplier). We’ll follow up on that and make sure that the tooltip and the damage match, whichever is right.

I know that modeling totem pets like the Fire Elemental has been annoying for the various Shaman theorycrafters. They seem to perform some actions randomly and they have an unexplained long "start-up" time. Any information you can give on how these things function under the hood would be welcome.

I believe there is a known issue that we’re currently working on, where many guardians that auto-assist you take a few sec to start assisting you after they spawn. We’re working to fix that, as we know that it impacts the performance of spells that summon these guardians.

In terms of number comparisons are you also "generally happy" with the AoE and multi-dotting/cleave numbers as well? We've only got a few classes implemented in SimulationCraft but there are some *wildly* different numbers when it comes to AoE.

Somewhat. There are still a few outliers that we’re working on resolving. Additionally, AoE is extremely dependent upon the exact situation. The classes that win at 10sec AoE bursts may lose at 60sec or 5min sustained AoE. Same with 2 targets vs 3 targets vs 10 targets, etc. We try to balance for a variety of scenarios, but keep some strengths and weaknesses to everyone, and make sure they feel different. That isn’t to say that if you are amazing at cleave, you must be useless on 50 target AoE, or anything like that, just that we expect some variance in performance on any given AoE situation (much more than we do on single target situations, anyway).

With Shadow Priest talent balancing, you've done a good job it seems getting Tier 3 talents to be a lot closer to one another now. Tier 6 talents still have a bit of a spread. Divine Insight seems the clear choice by the numbers on that tier unless you're able to "game" Twist of Fate to increase its uptime in which case the two become viable. If you're unable to game it then Twist of Fate is around the same level as Power Infusion which seems to be generally the worst option on that tier.

We’d be interested in seeing your analysis on this sort of thing (and other talent rows for other classes, etc). Balance of ‘power’ talent rows is something we’re trying to keep tight. I think in this specific case, we’ve been trying some new things with priest talents (the level 45 and 75 rows in particular) lately, and haven’t redone the balance on those rows since then.

While it's possible that our Retribution Paladin modeling *might* be off in terms of the exact usage of abilities, the damage range on the abilities used is something I've verified to be correct to +/- 1 damage in-game. That said, Retribution seems to be performing fairly poorly at level 85 compared to the other classes we've implemented. It has mana issues for one and I've got it Seal swapping to regen mana if it gets low, but even without mana issues its DPS still seems too low in comparison. How are they performing at 85 for you? (We've been waiting on the release of some level 90 PvE gear before worrying too much about level 90 balance for now).

We’re aiming for classes at 85 to stay roughly where they are. The mana constraint issue is something we’ll look into, as that sounds like particularly out of place. We have not noticed it in internal testing.

We will probably start pushing out our "raid" damage breakdown pages for SimulationCraft-MoP soon for the classes implemented (Shadow Priests, Warlocks, Ele/Enh Shaman, Feral/Balance Druids, Retribution Paladins and soon Windwalker Monks). We'll try to include some multi-target reports as well. If we notice any glaring issues we'll bring them up.

Thanks heaps for this opportunity.

Absolutely. We look forward to it.

Will Detonate indeed not be affected by Solar Eclipse?

Correct. Mushrooms should not be affected by Solar.

Is Bloom intended to be used in AoE healing rotations? How will it affect Harmony?

It isn't intended to be used rotationally, and may be too good at the moment. It is fine for it to affect Harmony as long as it doesn't become a vehicle to keep Harmony up. If we can make it a small little bonus, that's fine.

The changes to talents have led to a pretty big change in hunter pet focus regen. Currently BM is the only hunter spec which has any talents which regen pet focus. Since pet base focus regen is fairly low, this means that the frequency of basic attacks for non-BM pets has dropped quite a bit. Even for BM the regen is pretty low (although that at least will improve with crit rate). I'm not sure if the intention is to make hunter pets do significantly lower damage or to tweak the pet melee attack to do a far larger portion of the pet damage, or if this is just a mechanic that hasn't really been worked on yet.

We essentially took some damage from the pet and gave it to the hunter. We think overall hunter damage is fairly balanced on beta, except for the AE issue noted above.

There was a post not too long ago telling the Moonkin players that you were looking into a way for us to play around with our Eclipse.

There may occasionally be times where it’s actually worth it to use AC rotationally, but they should be generally pretty rare. What it should let you do is more directly control your Eclipse cycle, so that you can ‘game’ Eclipse to line up with fight mechanics.

Do you expect the level 30 monk talents to fit into monk rotations? Are they just there for a heal/damage combo that we'd situationally use over a more damaging attack or should we be expecting to fit them into our normal ability usage?

Is energy regen finalized for monks at 8/s for Windwalkers and 10.4 for Brewmasters?

They’re currently not intended to be used rotationally (at least on a basic Patchwerk encounter), but may adjust them somehow still. Energy regeneration rate isn’t set in stone, but we don’t currently have plans to change it.

Mastery - As of right now Mastery is going to be the stat to miss COMPLETELY. Only two (three with Incarnation) abilities will benefit from it, both of which are based on Attack Power ONLY. Even then in 483 PvP gear, with full raid buffs and ZERO Mastery, Rip is still hitting for 300k damage.

We’re currently modeling Mastery as roughly equal in value to Crit and Haste for Ferals, typically a couple % better. If you can provide any more detailed analysis, we’d be interested in seeing it.

Incarnation - As of this point Incarnation is bad for Feral druids. Due to Ravage and Pounce's 50 energy cost, there is just not enough energy to compensate normal shreds. based on my analysis you are looking at a 600 dps loss if you spec into Incarnation. If Ravage and Pounce cost 40 energy instead, then it would be a dps buff.

Incarnation should allow you to replace several Shreds with Ravages. Ravages are indeed more expensive, so the CP per energy will be lower (except above 80%, where it will be much higher). But, Ravage does ~50% more damage than Shred, for only 25% more energy. Is your modeling show that that’s not enough to be a sustained DPS increase? (Not to mention being a significant burst DPS increase.)

I'm still in the early stages for Guardian but as of this point bears will only need to gear for dodge > crit > hit/exp > haste > Mastery up to 6 rage per second. This allows for at least 1 stack of Savage Defense will be available at all time. Beyond 6 Rage Per Second you will get to 0 stacks at some point during the fight. Beyond 6 RPS, uptime on SD only grows minisculally beyond 60% (6.66 RPS - 61.16% uptime; 7.5 RPS - 61.33% uptime; 10 RPS - 61.6% uptime) For example, with 6.666 RPS, we can use Savage Defense every 9 seconds up to 3 minutes into the fight. Afterwards we can use it every 10 seconds.

While there is effectively a ‘cap’ on converting rage to Savage Defenses uptime (as you describe, that’s effectively 6.666 RPS to use it on charge cooldown), that should translate to a very ‘soft’ cap on hit/exp/crit, as streaks of rage gain and rage drought may occur. And, more importantly, Frenzied Regeneration should provide a very attractive value in bleeding off excess rage, which is effectively uncapped. Our current design is that against difficult content, Savage Defense provides more average damage mitigation than Frenzied Regeneration heals, but given that it is avoidance (and thus not necessarily reliable), you will sometimes resort to using Frenzied Regeneration to smooth over spikes when you feel you need to. The goal in terms of feeling is that you should ‘want’ to use Savage Defense as much as possible, but sometimes you ‘need’ to Frenzied Regeneration to respond to unexpected spikes in damage.

Circular references are driving me insane when it comes to simulations! Insane!!! I want my Recount so that I can obtain realistic samples :(

We would like to enable addons as soon as reasonably possible. We understand it can make analysis and even playing difficult. In all of our previous expansions, overall feedback becomes more positive simply by enabling addons, because then players are playing in an environment more familiar to them.*

One of the big challenges for us is the number of reported memory errors goes up astronomically once addons are involved, and it is important for us to distinguish between what is signal (our errors) and what is noise (the addons).

* - I feel the need to caveat that we are improving the WoW UI all of the time, but players have enormously different desires for their own personal UI. Furthermore, I wanted to address this one issue because it is very relevant to theorycrafting, but this thread should not become a UI discussion thread. :)

3% is huge. If you don't think people are going to drain twist for 3% damage you're crazy.

This is a common phenomenon where players may try to execute a very challenging rotation for a small DPS upgrade and find they do less damage than if they just stuck with the simpler rotation. We like to leave a little bit of room for very skillful players to try their hand at maximizing damage. The huge delta in damage on the same fights should suggest that player skill is still one of the most important components to DPS. Nonetheless, we can probably bring down the theoretical gain to 1% or lower.

I've found it incredibly frustrating that Misdirection hasn't worked from day one.

Misdirection works correctly in a group. There is a bug preventing it from working when you are not in a group, which means you can't MD to your pet when solo. This will be fixed in a future build.

Spending a lot of our day trying to keep both Harmony and Lifebloom up (while trying to take advantage of all the new toys we got in MOP) is just too overwhelming even in MOP 5-mans.

Yes, we agree. Both of those durations could increase without much risk.

A series of Enhancement dummy tests

Logs like this are great for comparing to our own internal tests and modeling, especially with the logs for each power talent. In this case they line up very nicely with what we expect. Thanks. In terms of overall performance, it looks like your performance is about where we want it at 90 in that gear, modulo some fine tuning. If there are others doing significantly more than that (e.g., if there are Windwalkers doing 65k DPS in that gear in that situation), we’re likely to bring them down. Additionally, should we need to increase Enhancement’s damage, it is indeed likely that we’d put that damage into their active abilities at this point.

Oh, something else from those logs I posted, despite being both hit and expertise capped, Earth Elemental was being dodged. I did not notice it for Fire Elemental.

Looking at the data I have in front of me at the moment, I don’t see why the Earth Elemental would be any different from the Fire Elemental. It’s possible that there’s a bug with the Draenei racial not transferring to pets (which it should) right now; we’ll investigate that. Pets should inherit your full hit table chances now. That’s a relatively new system, so if your testing shows otherwise, we’d like to see that data.

Oh, speaking for secondary stat balancing, the last lot of numbers I ran for Shadow Priests had Haste at something like 0.8 (relative to Int at 1.0, though true this was before Mind Surge was removed), Crit around 0.5 and Mastery a pretty poor 0.25. (Numbers for level 85).

Shadow’s rotation (especially with some talents) is something that has been in flux lately, and that’s one of the few remaining places where we haven’t balanced secondary stats how we’d like yet, while we work to nail down the rotation changes. Off the cuff, I’m sure that crit is relatively underpowered currently, due to removing the mechanic where Mind Flay crits reduce the cooldown on Shadowfiend, and not compensating for that elsewhere, yet. Mastery is also one of the last things we tune when trying to balance secondary stats, as it’s typically the easiest to get right by simply changing the coefficient on it. As I think I mentioned earlier, the extra ticks should function 100% like additional real ticks, and there were some bugs with that in your current build, which we’ve since fixed.

Is there any particular item level you're interested in exploring at the moment, for the sake of comparing apples to apples?

I've discussed this in the Mage threads, but one source of concern at the moment is the three Bomb spells and their interaction with Brain Freeze. Taking just the bomb spells themselves, they all obviously have different strengths at different numbers of targets and in different situations. Frost Bomb is weaker than the other two bombs in 2-3 target cleave situations, and that's fine.

However, with the buffs to Brain Freeze FFB, we run into a more significant problem. When only a single bomb is active, all three bombs produce similar Brain Freeze PPM, but multidotting changes the picture a great deal.

I’d say that in terms of comparing apples to apples, as you say, using ilvl 463 (dungeon blues) gear for example data is a good default. That said, we’re looking at tuning for all appropriate levels, and it’s not terribly difficult for us to adjust what we’re testing on our side, to compare to your data in other gear levels, as long as you tell us what gear you’re using (such as Ashunera did on page 2).

Regarding the mage Bomb spells, that’s something we definitely want to balance right. The concern of Brain Freeze procs making Nether Tempest always optimal for Frost mages, regardless of the number of targets involved does seem to be a problem; we’ll investigate that.

On the topic of Shadow Priest AoE again, obviously at level 90 we're going to be balanced around using our level 90 talent pick when it comes to AoE. However without that talent (as we haven't yet modeled them all) at present Mind Sear certainly seems to be under-performing.

I believe Mind Sear being underpowered is something on our radar at the moment and we’re planning on adjusting that.

some specific numbers regarding AotD and Gargoyle. the question becomes are they really meant to be so low?

Army of the Dead is low and just hasn't been buffed yet. Some full logs and specific gear used, situation, etc, would be helpful. I believe we do have some known issues with the Gargoyle in particular, with how it benefits from your haste.

Also, please excuse the constant ‘I believe’ and ‘I think’s and such included in all of our responses here; there is a whole team of people working on these things collaboratively, and in the interest of getting fast responses out to you all, I’m not always double-checking everything, but trying to be clear where that’s the case.

* Devouring Plague procced ticks do not heal unlike non-procced ticks.
* Shadow Word: Pain procced ticks do not proc Shadowy Apparitions or Divine Insight. Last I checked they also didn't benefit from 4pc T13.
* Vampiric Touch procced ticks do not proc From Darkness, Comes Light. They *do* give the extra mana regen however.
* Mind Flay procced ticks that crit didn't reduce the cooldown on Mindbender/Shadowfiend but that's no longer an issue.

Also from what I recall (memory hazy here) procced ticks also didn't count as periodic damage when it came to proccing things like the Necromantic Focus trinket.

*edit* I don't recall offhand if the procced ticks could in turn proc Wrath of Tarecgosa or not. Speaking of Dragonwrath, it performs poorly with Devouring Plague. If DTR procs on your Devouring Plague direct damage it casts another DP with "zero" orbs and overwrites the existing DoT for one that still "ticks" silently but for 0 damage per tick. Of course DTR isn't likely to be a huge concern for you at present but if you were to implement something similar in future something to watch out for.

These do all sound like bugs; I believe most of these are fixed in a later build (probably not the next one you get, but the one after that). As you've probably seen by now, Shadow is one of the specs whose rotation we are still tweaking.

Also, Powershot vs Barrage. Currently as is, there is no reason in to take Powershot over Barrage for PvE, unless you specifically need it for the knockback. They have the same focus cost, same effective cast time, same damage... but Barrage has half the cooldown, making it the clear winner. And while they both have the same effective cast time, Barrage is channeled, which means damage happens right away up front. Powershot requires a 3 second cast.

Lynx Rush's damage, in all the testing I've done, is abysmal. It does not warrant a 1.5 minute cooldown at all.

We generally try not to make you choose between Damage and Utility, so tuning talents that are each Damage+Utility can be tricky. It does seem that Barrage always wins on damage right now, so look for changes to one of them in a later build. If you have some data and/or analysis on Lynx Rush, we’d be interested.

2) Overlapping Mangle procs.
3) Thrash 6 second CD.
4) Dead GCDs.

The proc to reset the cooldown on Mangle from Thrash, Lacerate, and Faerie Fire now all occur on initial hit, instead of on bleed ticks. It should no longer be possible to get multiple procs within the same GCD, or to have any benefit from purposely leaving GCDs empty. Can you offer any further details about how the rotation can be gamed in these sort of ways?

Is it intended that Enhancement Shaman can't proc "on melee hit" trinkets from regular melee attacks during Ascendence, or just a side effect/bug of the initial implementation due to the change from physical to spell damage? I suspect the Enhsim guys would find that information useful.

This sounds like a bug. Wind Lash hits should not count as normal auto attacks, but they should count as melee attacks for the purposes of procs. i.e., if Stormstrike or Lava Lash can proc something, Wind Lash should also be able to. If you can provide an example of something you think should proc but isn’t, I can check what’s going on there.

Are Tiger Strikes supposed to be additional melee attacks for the purposes of enchant procs? They don't seem to be affected by dodge, parries, or glancing so I'm wondering if they're really just doubled autoattacks.

Tiger Strikes are intended to feel like additional auto attacks, but are built differently. Tiger Strikes (the buff) should be able to proc from regular auto attack swings (even misses). The buff charges should similarly be consumed by regular auto attack swings (even misses), and a Tiger Strikes attack should fire. This attack is displayed in white in the floating combat text, but as you should see via the combat log, is really a ‘yellow’ melee attack in terms of how it calculates its hit table. It can miss, be dodged, parried, blocked, etc. As it’s really a ‘yellow’ attack, it cannot glance, though, and does not suffer a reduced chance to hit due to dual wielding. Its proc rate is one of the knobs we have to help tune DW vs 2H monks, since it favors DW somewhat due to not suffering the DW hit penalty. They are currently considered procs for the purposes of not being able to proc additional procs. However, they are explicitly set to count as auto attacks for the purposes of Brewing: Elusive Brew and Eminence.

Actually, is the design intention to have both Eclipses with the same damage output for single targets and AoE?

Actually, no. We’re currently intending for Lunar to be slightly better at single target damage and Solar to be AoE damage. When you have time between phases or situations where you can use Astral Communion to quickly switch sides, you should be able to further optimize performance by tailoring which Eclipse you line up with which boss phases. The difference should not be significant enough, however, that in a Patchwerk-style scenario, you are compelled to only DPS in one eclipse.

As a side note, I posted incorrect information about Mushrooms. They DO count as Solar, and we think that's fine.

Powershot and Barrage are both broken. Neither of them are doing 400% weapon damage (Edit: to primary target). Tested with static damage white bow, no pet and no gear on. On top of that, there's no scaling from RAP. So, they're extremely underwhelming for PVE.

I believe there was previously a bug with their damage calculations, but that has been fixed. If you can try in the next build that goes to Beta, and provide data, that would be helpful.

As part of my work on SimulationCraft I've been trying to determine exactly how the dot-speedup mechanic of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul works, and I've decided the way it currently works must be a bug:http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5633977563

We’re definitely actively investigating that in particular, and I’ll try to get details on exactly how it works for you.

I guess my main concern with the current windwalker is that 20-30% of simulation time is spent waiting. (while this is just an early similation and definitely not complete).

While seeing your more detailed data would be interesting, that doesn’t sound out of line with our expectations. Similar to other energy users, they aren’t expected to be 100% GCD locked. Their GCD usage should increase with gear, though. Just what % of their available GCDs being used feels ‘right’ is very subjective, and is something that we are interested in feedback on, but this isn’t the thread for that.

Regarding Windwalker Monks, the new Blackout Kick dot component is a little broken at the moment. The assumed function (or at least our consensus) of the dot was to roll in a manner similar to ignite ticks for mages, but it currently seems to do almost anything but roll at all. Is the dot supposed to stack or 'roll', or are we supposed to monitor its duration to ensure no overlap?

In addition, Fist of Fury is presently in the running to be included in the Windwalker single target damage rotation. Is this an intended design, or should it be used a little more sparingly as the situation calls for?

I believe the build currently on beta has several bugs with the Blackout Kick DoT, which are fixed in the next build you get. It should ‘roll’ like Ignite does. That is to say, that at the end of the fight, total Blackout Kick DoT damage should exactly be 20% of your Blackout Kick direct damage, regardless of any overlaps in the DoT effects (minus the usual rounding differences and whatever overkill damage there was, of course). Fists of Fury is intended to be useful on a single target, but there may be times that you save it to use it at a better time where its utility is more valuable.

Currently estimating Frost's and Fire's damage distribution to be something roughly like…

I believe there are a few changes coming in the next build that will significantly change that breakdown for Frost. Once you get that build, we’d love to see your further analysis.

The general consensus among rogues is that the Glyph of Sinister Strike is a trap glyph. The added 25% damage done by Sinister Strike for a 25% increase in energy cost is not enough to offset the damage lost due to reducing combo point generation by 25%. Less Sinister Strikes will slow down Bandit’s Guile progression and will lead to less finishers thus slowing down Restless Blades interaction and resulting in fewer uses of Adrenaline Rush and Killing Spree. Is this glyph supposed to be used by Combat rogues in PvP and not in PvE, or are there any plans to address this issue?

In a future build, you should find that glyph turned into Glyph of Adrenaline Rush: Reduces the global cooldown of your Sinister Strike, Revealing Strike, Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, and Rupture by 0.2sec while Adrenaline Rush is active. (Edit: I originally stupidly wrote Mutilate here, but it is Rupture.)

Ghost, what about the damage spread of Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast, and Icy Touch? The discrepency is huge which means not using Obliterate feels bad, especially with Killing Machine. Are you guys looking into spreading around the damage better for 2H Frost?

Our internal tests are showing DW and 2H Frost DKs where we want them in terms of damage breakdowns (but a little high overall). It’s not intended that their rotations or damage breakdowns are identical. If you can provide your data and analysis, what your modeling is showing should be the optimal rotation, etc., that’d be great.

And atm a mistweaver wiht a agility wepon is hitting harder wiht some abilities since most of the melee abilits scales wiht wepon damge, are you going to fix that in a good way? Cuz i can see alot of mistweaver going for an agility weapon. And abilites like Chi torpedo (doing 10k healing in agility and 2k in intell) and rushing jade wind do more dmg in agility gear then intell, even tho we have more attackpower in intell gear.

There were some bugs with Mistweaver damage in particular in previous builds, and still a couple known issues, as you mention. It’s not intended that a Mistweaver benefits from using an Agility weapon, even when doing full Eminence healing, and we’ll make sure that’s the case before release. I believe it currently is somewhat beneficial, which we’ll solve.

I have a question about Mastery: Master Demonology and Metamorphosis
This ability gives X% damage bonus in caster form and Y% damage bonus in demon form. The tool tips (which could certainly be wrong and in any case they are somewhat ambiguous even if they are right) imply that when you switch from caster to demon form you KEEP your caster bonus and the demon form bonus is added on top of it. However, when I compare Soul Fire damage (since that ability is available in both forms) with and without Metamorphosis it seems low, as if I was actually LOSING the caster form bonus when I went into Metamorphosis. Regardless of whether the game and/or tool tips are broken, can you tell us if you intend for the caster from bonus to stay or be dropped when you use Metamorphosis?

Master Demonologist’s damage buffs are exclusive between caster and Metamorphosis forms. The amount shown in the tooltip is the total benefit you get from mastery in that form.

Also on the subject of Metamorphosis
When I go into demon form I start doing some kind of auto-attack (I'm not sure that it actually IS auto attack but it seems like it) and I was hoping you could shed some light on what is happening because it behaves very strangely. If I equip a wand I launch “fire” balls that do white damage and the attack rate is very slow, but if I equip a staff (which has a slower attack speed than the wand) I actually speed up, launch “shadow” balls, and do yellow damage instead, and if I go unarmed it does the same thing as with a staff but less damage and maybe slightly faster.. (BTW, “fire” and “shadow” refer to the graphic you see not the magic type) I haven't yet had a chance to try swords or daggers to see if that makes any difference. What exactly is going on here?

We still have some residual cruft left over from the conversion of wands from ranged weapons to main hand weapons. The intention is currently that while you have a wand equipped, you can effectively shoot your wand as an auto attack from range, just like hunters (simple right click on a mob to auto wand), except not while moving. However, all caster spells should reset this ‘swing timer’ so to speak, so wanding should never be a part of a normal DPS rotation, any more than melee attacking is currently. This is currently working for some wands, but not others, and has some issues which we’re working to resolve. It seems that this auto wanding is also overriding the Metamorphosis Touch of Chaos, which it shouldn’t. You should be safe ignoring wanding for the purposes of DPS modeling, but if anyone finds a way to make use of it for sustained DPS we’d like to hear about it. :)

Anyway, what you’re really interested in is Touch of Chaos. While in Metamorphosis, you gain Touch of Chaos, which is effectively a ranged Shadow damage auto attack. It fires every 1sec (reduced by spell haste), even while casting.

In a future build, you should find that glyph turned into Glyph of Adrenaline Rush: Reduces the global cooldown of your Sinister Strike, Revealing Strike, Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, and Mutilate by 0.2sec while Adrenaline Rush is active.

If you aren't using Adrenaline Rush as Assassination, you're doing it wrong.

(I meant Rupture, not Mutilate.)

The execute ability is currently doing a TON of damage (equivalent to around 2 slams) is this intended?

Yes. We want to restore that button to its former glory. We figure anyone in execute range in PvP is within a couple of globals of dying already.

The removal of rage from white swings has completely removed Haste as a viable defensive stat for prot warriors… even for bears it's scales with their rage generation

The difference is that the gear we intend for Prot warriors has no haste or crit on it while the gear we intend for Guardian druids does. We don't want to slap players wrists too hard who use gear outside of what we intend, but at the same time, if we were ever in a place where the DPS plate want the crit / haste gear AND the plate tanks want the crit / haste gear, there will be some tears.

Crit is somewhat in same boat, it offers no defensive value.

You can still become Enraged, which increases rage income. As I said though, plate tanks scaling with crit is in the "nice to have" category for us.

Conversely Expertise and Hit are ridiculously powerful against rage dry spots.

On the other hand, this was by design. Unlike haste and crit, we do put hit and expertise on tanking gear, and we don’t think tanks will ever value those stats enough if they are just for threat.

I really do think Bears Rage model is really good, half their rage from white swings half from active abilities.

We changed it for a few reasons, largely based on feedback. When rage comes from white attacks, then it comes in unpredictably instead of the big chunks from yellow attacks. Now granted the other two warrior specs still must contend with that issue, but it’s usually not an issue of the group wiping if the Arms warrior mismanages rage. Secondly, when you’re kiting or moving which are not uncommon for tanks, any rage from white attacks get shut off. Your yellow attacks you can save to a degree. That said, we could experiment with putting a little rage on white attacks, but it would have to come from Shield Slam, Revenge and Devasate, because we think the overall income of rage for Protection is at the right level. We don’t want the defensive buttons to feel like something you keep up all the time like the Thunder Clap debuff.

So you're not concerned about Execute displacing Overpowers, completely removing Heroic Strike, and possibly also displacing Mortal Strike?

For 20% of the fight? No. The idea is that your rotation changes when the target is in Execute range. Overpower is free and Heroic Strike might still be applicable if your rage income is faster than you can Execute, so I don’t think the rotation just becomes Execute, Execute, Execute.

Why has all to be a mystery that has to be reverse engineered so we can mildly understand it?

The first answer is it would probably be a full time job for someone on my team to maintain the accuracy of all of that documention. The more important answer is that theorycrafting is a lot of fun for some players. It’s possible to remove too much mystery. Remember that you only need a basic understanding of combat mechanics to kill things. I’d wager you could do fine in Raid Finder with only the 6 buttons from your Core Abilities page. If you want to understand things in exhaustive detail there is a LOT of exhaustive detail. But you should be opting into it.

Again, I’d like to reiterate, that while we’re reading all of these posts, just like we read all of the posts in this forum, we’re explicitly using this thread to respond to theorycrafting data, mechanics, etc. This still isn’t the place to discuss “are you happy with this design,” “I feel underpowered,” “what is the intent with this design,” “you’re ignoring our feedback,” etc. All of that feedback is perfectly acceptable in other Beta Class threads (well, less so the "ignoring us" comments which are rarely productive).

Currently Cenarion Ward will not consume the healing bonus from Dream of Cenarius. This makes Dream of Cenarius completely and totally undesirable for Guardians. That may be intentional, but some clarification would be appreciated.

This is a bug; all three level 30 talents will benefit from the increased healing buff from Dream of Cenarius. For example, a Guardian druid in Bear Form, with Dream of Cenarius and Renewal, who has recently Mangled a target so they have the Dream of Cenarius buff up, can hit Renewal to instantly restore 51% of their max health. We just fixed it to apply to Renewal and Cenarion Ward a few minutes ago, though, so you won’t see that for a build or two.

Is it intended that to get max dps out of pets we have to have a macro that spams their special attack?

No, solving that was one of the primary reasons for the switch to energy on Warlock pets. However, there’s currently a bug which is drastically increasing their energy regen rate, making the balance of the different pets way off, and making them limited by cast times in some cases instead of their energy regen rate, as is intended.

That sounds much better for sustained DPS comparisons of 2H and DW side-by-side, but will you address weapon twisting? I don't want carry around two 1Hs and need to have "/cast [equipped:one-handed] Frost Strike; /equip 1Hs" and "/cast [equipped:two-handed] Obliterate; /equip 2H". As others have mentioned the respective +50% damage bonuses are far too significant and ought to be spread across other abilities, which will also rein PVP burst in.

Frost DKs twisting weapons like that is something that’s on our list of things to fix before release.

Glyph of Fae Silence, I keep asking this and never get a response I hope I can get one here. Is it intentional that Fae Silence does not work on targets already affected by Faerie Fire or is it a bug?

Bug.

Mangle Procs Galore
Bottom line up front: We have procs flowing out our ears between double bleeds and application all granting a 25% chance to go off.

As mentioned earlier, bleed ticks no longer proc the Mangle cooldown reset.

Seeds of Corruption:Now this spell has turned into an amazing spell compared to its current state on live. You get to keep corruption AND can have 2 seeds on one target (soulburn and regular seed) which is amazing. The question is, How are we suppose to use this spell now? spam seed the same target or do it on multiple ones? The problem is that it takes really long to detonate (cast time + travel time + detonation time) especially if you are trying to seed multiple targets. I am not sure if affliction can keep up with the other classes since the aoe is not bursty and on demand like for example, Mind seer.

We’re trying to focus on ‘how does this work under the hood’ sort of questions, rather than ‘why did you design it this way’ or ‘how are we supposed to use this’ sort of questions, but I’ll comment on this since there’s a few significant changes to Seed of Corruption that I’d like to call out.

Old Seed of Corruption: Broke on any non-proc’d damage from any source. Typically spammed on one target while in a group, and other players’ damage broke it. The ‘non-proc’d’ requirement probably is never even noticed, but includes Seed’s explosion itself. i.e., if you seed multiple mobs, the explosions from one will not pop the others.

New Seed of Corruption: Breaks on any damage from you. The explosion from one (and indeed, any other proc’d damage) CAN pop other nearby seeds.

While this means that Affliction’s ramp up time on AoEing may be longer than most, it does mean that their potential burst (when there’s time to setup the seeds) is incredibly high; Seed multiple mobs and the explosion from one will typically set off all of the others in a chain reaction. 8 Seeds exploding at the same time is probably the most burst AoE damage in the game right now, but also requires significant setup time, so isn’t really “on demand” burst. Still, it should be such that if you’re AoEing near a boss that you have already DoTs up on, it’s easy to Seed the boss and then start seeding the other mobs while your DoTs pop the boss’ seed. Additionally, the ability for Seed of Corruption and Soulburn: Seed of Corruption to stack was unintended, but we’re currently going to leave it and see how that plays out. We may change that in the future (mostly due to it not being intuitive), but will experiment with it for now.

I've been reading the new thread at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5889309137 and I have some things I want to add however I m in EU server and I can't log to pitch in. Would you consider posting a reply on my behalf?

We are looking into ways to get more direct feedback from other regions, and I totally sympathize with this situation.

While I did a lot of number crunching in college, I have little desire to do this currently, but I do have something I feel is very important to add to this discussion:

Thank you.

Given the fact that Balance is such a touchy issue, and no one takes to the forums to complain when they're top dps, I feel the devs at Blizzard put up with an amazing amount of complaining, and still do an amazing job. I applaud the CM team for sifting through the rants and raves and passing on the relevant information to the Development team, and I thank Blizzard as a whole for continuing to maintain such an incredible game.

It shows a lot of humility for Blizzard to acknowledge that despite the powerful resources at their disposal, there is a great deal of power, information, and just plain ingenuity in the community of fans. And the people at Blizzard value this information. That's a big part of why I keep playing. People from the casual gamer to the hard core theorycrafter stumble upon unforeseen builds and rotations, and the creativity of the community no doubt leaves Dev's scratching their heads at many times. So hats off to you Blizzard, keep making amazing things, and every now and then, I hope you find a thank you here and there to keep you going.

This is a super complex game, and the community is integral in fully exploring the world that we build, both in terms of in-game, and in-theory. There are so many spells and abilities and talents and glyphs and encounters and situations, etc., that trying to evaluate all the combinations and identify problems can be troublesome. Theorycrafters are a huge boon to us, and the rest of the community, because they are able to really deep dive into their own specific niches (typically a single spec), and identify problems or unintended consequences that we may miss when looking across the whole class landscape. So we figured it was about time we gave back and tried to help you guys out some as best we can. Selfishly, it can help us detect bugs in our own testing or design flaws in the rotations we've designed. There are times we assume something is working one way because that is the way we designed it and there are times when the community assumes something works one way because they can't peer at the complexities that sometimes exist under the hood.

I did some very simple 5 minute pet-only parses on the Raid dummies on my Warlock to compare pet damage, and I found a few issues. All the tests were done with Grimoire of Supremacy, and I did not use macros to force pet attacks. I'll investigate more thoroughly when I have more free time.

We mentioned earlier that warlock pets are all getting almost double the intended amount of energy regen, which is extremely skewing the pet balance. But, I wanted to say that these logs were helpful to have as comparisons as well. Glyph of Demon Training will no longer be a DPS increase when they’re energy limited, rather than time limited. The Void Lord’s damage will go down considerably once it stops spamming Torment non-stop. The Void Lord is intended to be strong DPS while it is actively tanking, but not while not tanking.

One other thing related to global mechanics - with the change to hit and expertise cap points, and crit depreciation, have there been any changes made to the way melee roll tables work overall?

The two links you mention are old, but the ideas are accurate. White attacks are still ‘one roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block Glance Crit Hit), and yellow attacks are still ‘two roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block, Crit). The only change to that is that Block against players is an additional separate roll now. Glances can still only occur on white attacks. I believe our recent blog post about this stuff included all off the relevant chances for these, but if you have more specific questions, feel free to ask.

Patch isn't live, but the tooltip for Sturdy Ox says the bonus regen was cut down to 15%, which puts us all the way down at 9.2/s.

This is a tooltip error that is fixed for the next build. It was accidentally displaying the health increase number for both of those figures. It still gives 30% increased energy regen rate.

As an aside, as our spells have become increasingly more complex, our tooltips have had a harder time capturing the real values. We then have to resolve a lot of tooltip bugs (at least the ones that can be resolved) and these then get data mined as real changes to the spells. All of that can make the beta process more confusing and feel more iterative than it really is (though it is plenty iterative).

Drain Soul is supposed to replace Affliction filler malefic grasp at certain points in fights, most notably during the execution phase of any fight sub 20%, but it is not currently supported by the talents that are supposed to affect Warlock filler spells (Soul Leach and Affliction's Grimoire of Sacrifice)

The next build should include Drain Soul being affected by Soul Leech and Grimoire of Sacrifice.

Easiest one to test with, and the one I know for certain didn't work prior to todays build, is Wrath of Unchaining. You can pop Ascendance, open and still gain stacks from using Stormstrike, but it will just idle at that initial stack count despite your standard melee attacks continuing to go off.

We found the issue that was preventing Wind Lash from triggering trinket procs, and fixed it for a future build.

In short, shouldn't Grimoire pets do as much dmg as regular pets for that duration and benefit from mastery, crit, haste and sp equally?

Yes. There’s currently a bug where the guardians don’t inherit your stats, making them do considerably less damage.

The heal spells you want to apply these buffs to are 2+ second cast time spells, and if you are still casting when the buff fades you do not gain the benefit. Which means you have 2~ seconds from casting Unleash Life to gain the Unleash Fury buff's benefit. This is an extremely short window of time!

Agreed; the duration of both of these buffs will be 10sec in the next build.

Also what's the deal with this (identical characters in identical gear):

Live

Dodge -17.33% (14.51, 2565 Rating)
Parry - 18.71% (16.57, 2928 Rating)

Beta

Dodge - 11.90%
Parry - 24.60%

The amount of base dodge and parry you get changed, as well as the diminishing returns curves. Our previous blog post on hit table chances includes the base chances. Additionally, Strength gives a significant parry chance directly (just like Agility gives dodge chance), rather than giving a small amount of parry rating.

How exactly does Shadow Word: Insanity work?

It seems like the damage is increased in some way based upon how long each DoT consumed has been ticking when Insanity is cast. Is it based off number of ticks? % of base ticks? % of ticks adjusted for haste?

The damage scales based on the percentage of ticks that have already gone off from the spell (specifically, for each DoT, the damage is increased by (# ticks elapsed / (total ticks – 1)) * 100%, so for a base SW:P which would tick 6 times, SW:I gains 20% damage per tick elapsed), the tooltip should reflect this in a future build. The intention is that you can use Shadow Word: Insanity in solo combat when a mob is getting low to help push them into Shadow Word: Death range, or before your DoTs fall off on a raid boss to eek some more damage out of them. The damage increase based on duration is there to avoid a situation where the right way to play is to apply your DoTs and then blow them up, which we don’t consider fun gameplay.

In PvE settings, there aren't too many DoT effects that present life or death decisions. Magics, Poisons and Diseases are either handled by the healer or by the Paladin him/herself. I'm assuming part of this is to help between Cleansing/Dispelling because of the new CD, but DoT effects only ever tick once every 2-3 sec; that means this Hand spell only reduces 2 or 3 of the DoTs ticks by 70%.

A lot more boss abilities are actually periodic than players often realize. Many of those can’t be dispelled. Examples include Fiery Grip on Spine or Black Blood of Go'rath during the tentacle phase of Zon'ozz.

Another question regarding Brewmasters: A few builds ago we had Recoil as a proc from our autoattacks that generated extra energy. I no longer see it in my spellbook.

I don't recall seeing any mention of this in any list of changes posted anywhere so was this removed intentionally or is this a bug?

Intentional. We’re currently opting for Gift of the Ox and Brewing: Elusive Brew to fill the role of providing value to offensive stats for Brewmasters. That’s one thing I wanted to point out though; I haven’t seen Gift of the Ox included in any of the community modeling we’ve seen so far, and it’s rather significant.

How is the Sacred Shield talent intended to work?

In the current build you have, it appears to function very oddly, but is actually bugged and doesn’t even work how it looks like it does. So, don’t bother trying to investigate the nuances of the current version of it. We just rebuilt it to function closer to our intended design. The new version you should get in the next build is much simpler and easier to understand. It’s a ‘shield over time’. Instantly, and every 6 sec, it refreshes a simple absorb shield on you, which absorbs up to X damage. That shield is no longer ‘1 charge’ or anything; it’ll work on streams of little hits or slow big hits just as effectively. The absorb shows up as a separate buff, and is removed if the main buff is removed or expires.

Regarding the healing per mana versus the healing per second between the chakra serenity and chakra sanctuary stances:

Thanks for this analysis. It does seem clear that Serenity is underpowered compared to Sanctuary, and we’ll be adjusting one of them in a future build. We also realized that the specific spells which were affected by either Chakra (including the Renew refresh and Serenity crit bonus) were inconsistent and out-of-date.

With the removal of Vengence, it did not fix my issues with Defensive Stance, but more so nerfed the better alternative. (No vengence = less Attack Power = weaker Barrier) Even so, Battle Stance still out-does Defensive by a fair margin.

Additionally, Shield Slam and Revenge will only generate rage in Defensive Stance in a future build. We want to leave some room for Prot warriors to go into Battle Stance when OT'ing or perhaps when solo, and we want to leave some room for Arms and Fury to use Defensive Stance when emergency tanking.

Lots of enhancement parses incomming! I used the ilvl 483 pvp armor and ilvl 489 pvp weapons for this test, fully gemmed and enchanted with Cataclysm materials. I used 2 potions of the tol'vir per test, but no flasks/elixirs. Heroism was used at the start of each test.

/cheer

Also, a couple clarifications on previous posts:

First, Strength gives a very significant parry chance to paladins, warriors, and DKs directly (just like Agility gives dodge chance for rogues, druids, shaman, hunters, and monks). We don't want Agi to be very attractive to plate-users and Str for leather/mail dudes.

Secondly, players have been curious about the combat table chances against players of boss mobs. What is described in that blog post is indeed accurate for a boss attacking a player. That does mean that a player has a base 3% chance to be missed, 3% chance to dodge (if they know Dodge), 3% chance to parry (if they know Parry), and 3% chance to block (if they know Block). That chance is indeed reduced by 1.5% per level difference, so a 92+ will never miss a 90. So to use a simple example, a monk with no parry on gear or other buffs has a 3% base parry chance, plus 5% from Swift Reflexes, for a total character sheet parry chance of 8%. A level 93 boss attacking that Monk will get parried 3.5% of the time. Hope that clears things up.

Edit: Added some examples of Hand of Purity uses.

I can think of many things - but Anger Management used to be a part of our toolkit and that added into our current design would help break the spikey feeling without worry of making the pool too big from auto-attacks.

Baking in Anger Management to Defensive Stance as a solution to diminish spikes without tying rage to auto attacks nor making Prot warriors have too much Battle Stance envy is sensible. We might try it again.

-You seem to have given the Succubus (and the Shivarra) a “regular” (in the sense that it is not a resource consuming auto-castable ability you can click on and off) auto attack which she does not have on live. Is this a bug? If not, is there any possibility the Imps will get a similar ability since they are now the only pet that doesn't have one?

Yes, this is intended for the Succubus, but we don’t currently have plans for the Imp to get an auto attack. The Imp is intended to stay a pure long range caster.

-I realize that fel energy regen is bugged, but I was wondering: does the what the fel energy tool tip says, that regen is 10 energy/second, reflect what is supposed to be happening and therefore we should sim with that number?
-On a related note, since pets are supposed to be energy limited rather than time limited will energy regen scale with haste or is it intend that pets won't really scale with haste (except for auto-attacks and when starting from 200 energy and cast time is briefly the limiting factor)?

The intended fel energy regen rate is 10 per second, modified by spell haste. If you have 30% haste, your pets should regenerate 13 energy per sec. I’m not sure exactly how it’s bugged right now; I believe it’s actually getting 23 per sec or perhaps 26. Regardless, 10*(1+SpellHaste%) is the intended regen rate.

-Even though regen is currently too fast, mathematically at least some of the pets should be able go Out of Energy just by casting their “main” auto-cast ability, but they never do. Using the Felhound as an example, I have seen it sit there and not cast Shadow Bite even when it has more than 60 energy and SB is off cool down. Instead it tends to wait until roughly 100-110 energy before casting, which is great because when I want to cast a time critical ability like Spell Lock there is, or very soon will be, enough energy to use it rather than having to (possibly) build all the way up from zero. Did you do this on purpose or is this a bug?

This is actually intended. We modified the auto-cast functionality to only use their basic attacks when above certain energy thresholds. This has the effect that it still uses energy fast enough to never cap out and waste energy, but pools a significant amount of energy beyond that, for you to manually use on utility spells, or simply burst damage via their basic attack. Hopefully this feels intuitive and useful.

Lastly, I think there needs to be some change to the guardian cooldowns so that we can actually use them on most attempts in raid PvE without having to worry if it will be wasted on a wipe. I won't rehash all of the proposed solutions becuase that's been done enough, but with DS teir being replaced by new gear I am worried about going back to the way things used to be.

We have new tech to reset certain long cooldowns that you’re sometimes tempted to wait around for before each pull (such as Summon Doomguard), when you wipe on an encounter. This tech hasn’t been hooked up to every encounter yet, but you should be able to see this work on some encounters (such as Stone Guard on this Friday). This won’t apply to every long cooldown. Our current rule of thumb is that it applies to cooldowns longer than 5min, but no longer than 10min, but there will be some exceptions to that. It is going to be very subjective which cooldowns are included, but again our rule of thumb is: would reasonable groups kill time waiting for this cooldown to finish before starting an encounter? Please don't lobby for every cooldown you have to be included. :)

Most of what we've been modeling so far has been focused on nailing down our "rotation" and the interaction between Purifying Brew and Blackout Kick/Shuffle. Mostly we've been trying to figure out when to use which one, and if we'll have any chi left over for anything else.

It's something I do want to add as soon as we can hammer that part out, though. Think I have most of the mechanics down on it... Seems to proc from any melee attack (including Tiger Strikes?), and doesn't appear to have an ICD.

Only question I have is what the actual proc rate is, since that's pretty darn tricky to work that one out. Guessing it varies with weapon speed?

Gift of the Ox can proc from all successful melee attack hits. On special attacks, it has a 10% proc chance. On white hits and Tiger Strikes hits, it has a [WeaponSpeed/25]% chance for 2H weapons, and [WeaponSpeed/50]% chance for 1H weapons. For example, while dual wielding 2.6 sec speed fist weapons, each white hit will have a 5.2% chance to proc.

Alright, i've been testing Incarnation for some time and i have a few questions about it.

Your analysis of Incarnation looks about in line with our expectations; we expect that the fact that you can line Berserk and Tiger’s Fury up with it will be significant. Force of Nature’s damage for Ferals looks rather out of line; we’ll investigate that.

If you guys have the time, would you mind confirming for me how Overload works with Chain Lightning, and how this behaves with the glyph.

I'm assuming that the overload chance (X) is divided by 3 and applied to each CL hit (ie: each hit gets X/3, which means the chance of a single CL overload is (1-X/3)^3).

What I'm not sure of is whether the glyph applies X/3 to all 5 hits, so the chance at least on would be (1-X/3)^5, or it goes to (1-X/5)^5 instead.

Each target hit by your Chain Lightning has a 1/3 chance of being able to proc Chain Lightning Overload. The glyph does not change this. If you have a 30% Elemental Overload chance, and cast Chain Lightning on 3 mobs, there is a 10% chance on each of those targets (individual chances) for there to be a Chain Lightning Overload cast at that target (not the original target). If you then glyph Chain Lightning and cast it on 5 targets, there is still an individual 10% chance on each of those targets to have a Chain Lightning Overload cast at them. This also works the other way as well, however, as Chain Lightning on a single target effectively will give you 1/3 the number of Overload procs as Lightning Bolt will (per cast, of course).

One of the things that I've noticed when testing Elusive Brew is that the stacks will sometimes fall off when using a slow 2hander. It turns out 3.6 base speed is a bit too slow to reliably crit every 30 seconds with ~20% crit, especially when facing boss parry/miss rates and crit supression.

Even my nearly hit/exp capped monk had his stacks fall off, as opposed to DWing's rather constant and steady gain of stacks.

Is this on the radar?

The chances of this should be low (but indeed significant), and you can still use up the stack before it falls off anyway.

Thanks for the reply. Is the intended design to have the 6 second timer ticking no matter what or start only when the target of Sacred Shield begins to take damage? Say I cast it on the tank, who doesn't take their first hit until 3 seconds after my cast. Will the second absorb be up after initial cast plus 6 seconds or initial cast plus 9 seconds?

Initial cast plus 6 seconds. When the target takes damage is now irrelevant, it just refreshes the shield every 6 sec. Think of it like a basic HoT like Renew or Rejuv; except instead of ticks healing, it applies/refreshes (but not stacks) an absorb shield.

Edit: That's Guardian's damage on a standstill target (just to clarify) :) It just doesnt have the noticable impact or power I guess I'd expect on a 5min CD ability.

Until recently, the Guardian for Ret was hitting in like the three digits. Almost all of the benefit from the cooldown was from the buff to the paladin and the explosion. We want the guardian to do some damage (he has that badass sword after all) and fixed this. I’m not sure if you have those changes yet.

I ask this since 1 point of spirit will be essentially worth the same regardless of Tier of Gear. A crossoverpoint of the importance of spirit/regen will exist. (I thought was the goal of having fixed mana pools was to avoid this.. as is, we potentially run the risk of being able to "overgear content with spirit")

It’s intentional that your regen increases over time. The idea is that your Spirit / regen increases with gear, but the amount you need to heal also increases as you do higher tier content, so that as your regen improves you are casting fewer efficient Heals and more inefficient Flash Heals and other expensive spells. The problem on live is that Intellect was also a regen stat (and a really good one that also improved your spell power) so mana regeneration grew at a faster rate than healing demands grew.

its no surprise. I am against Rapture as a regen mechanic. Its imbalanced against holy (as illustrated in the previously linked blog post of mine that others have posted). Don't get me wrong, I LIKE having lots of regen... it just really isn't fair. Then add in the fact that Weakened Soul with multiple Disc Priests is always a fight in 25's with multiple discs. (now I understand that Rapture seems to be balanced round a 60 second Rapture CD... it still presents a potential stacking issue).

We’re just not seeing a big discrepancy in longevity between Holy and Disc whether they are trying to heal efficiently or inefficiently. Hopefully with raids opening today, we’ll get more feedback from players trying the content to see how mana feels.

So I think that removing the Rage income from these skills would be a bad way to push us into using Defensive Stance. For me, it would feel much more intuitive that leaving Defensive Stance even further reduced my defensive capacity rather than that it made me have to attune to an alternate form of Rage generation.

Keep in mind that going to Battle Stance gives you rage from white attacks. Prot spending a lot of time in Battle Stance was essentially double-dipping – rage from white attacks and yellow attacks. We're fine if your damage is higher in Battler or Berserker Stance, but you need to feel the most survivable in Defensive or everyone will be miserable.

Just curious, and perhaps not relevant, but to what extent do abilities and their scaling get planned out for the increased ilvl that comes with each successive tier of content? Does that sort of thing get looked at during the beta, or is it more of a "we'll deal with that later because things are going to change anyways"?
It seems like every expansion healing is really tight at launch, and turns into roflaoefest in the last tier, because that's the only way to "challenge" the healers. Similarly, (shield) tanks are short on their avoidance early on, but then end up capping their CTC.

We balance around the last planned tier for an expansion, and even a tier beyond that, just in case we add another tier or even something like Ruby Sanctum. What we can’t predict easily are what the encounters are going to be like at that time or what set bonuses will be, because we don’t plan those out multiple tiers in advance. In the case of shield tanks capping block, we knew we were going to have a problem and we intended to nerf it before the final tier, but then decided that the nerf would be so severe and so devastating to tanks, that the problem wasn’t worth solving at the time.

Oh no, they'll see my op multi dotting :(

Dot specs do well on council fights. Who knew? :) As I mentioned before, it’s important to look at target dummy / Patchwerk damage and actual encounters. We’re not going to balance every spec to the same damage on every encounter – that would be a little boring.

However, there's no way that all of this accounts for the giant discrepancy between Blood and Brewmaster damage, nor does it explain why DK's should even be thinking of using Heart Strike over Death Strike - but if we want to come close in damage we have to.

We have had a suspicion that Death Strike damage is too low. The target dummy / Patchwerk test is even harder for tanks, because the specifics of the encounter (are you kiting, doing DPS when you’re not the target, tanking two things?) matter so much. Parses for us to compare with our internal raid tests are great.

Man, GC. I know this is your job and everything, but how do you keep all of this info in your head? I don't think I could handle this for just a couple classes, much less the entire spectrum. Ins and outs of everything from the individual workings of spells to how an entire spec should flow. Just -SO- much information.

I do spend a lot more time dealing with this stuff than many players can afford to do, but the real answer is that it's a team effort. I have a bunch of really smart designers and they are all contributing to this process, and we're further supported by our community teams (in all regions) funneling questions and information to us. I’m the one posting, but it’s very much a group effort.

Isnt this especially problematic to balance specs though?

Sorry, my answer was unclear. The question was specifically: do you look at the last raid tier? Yes, we do. We also look at the first tier and all tiers in between. We also look at players in blue gear and quest greens and even what players first getting the MoP changes at level 85 will look and feel like.

Sometimes we still get it wrong, though we have gotten dramatically better over the years. Sometimes the numbers are balanced but we decide to change the mechanics of a spell or rotation, which then means the numbers are thrown off. Sometimes encounter specifics play a big role. The Firelands raid tier had a ton of movement fights followed by Dragon Soul, which had a ton of group up fights, and those allow different specs to shine and throw a harsh light on different sets of problems. Sometimes we balance around one rotation and then some time after ship, players figure out a different rotation or stat allocation or talent selection, which we didn't foresee and which throws our numbers out of whack. Sometimes there are bugs that we don't know about and balance around, which then throw off numbers when they are fixed down the road.

But we do look at everything.

To use a concrete example, one of the things we do is whack ratings when an expansion begins so that there is room to grow into additional gear. As I have said before, this feels bad to players but is sort of inevitable because we can't start at say 75% crit chances and grow into 130% crit chances. However, we think the current loss of stats in MoP is too extreme, and is exacerbated by losing all of the passive talents and glyphs that often added haste and crit especially. We believe, and we're certainly hearing the feedback, that players are playing from level 85 to 90 with haste, crit and mastery percentages that are so low as to be unfun. We think we have room to bring those up a little, which is something we're looking at right now.

I lost this one somehow. Apologies if this is a double post:

The ppm model for combat potency on combat rogues: It's pretty clear from tooltip wording (and from my initial tests) that slower offhands will have a greater chance to trigger combat potency. What I was wondering is if Main Gauche sourced combat potency procs are based on the main hand speed, the off hand speed, or a fixed proc chance entirely?

Combat Potency’s proc chance works as follows: Can be triggered by white offhand attack and main gauche hits (must land successfully). The proc chance is 20% for Main Gauche hits, and [20*OffhandWeaponSpeed/1.4]% for white offhand attacks.

Currently Stormlash totem is scaling to ridiculous levels for certain classes(I've noticed Warlocks, Balance Druids, and Warriors so far) getting almost 400% more usage out of the totem than the myself as Elemental(With 2 back to back totems during heroism it did 300k damage for myself, but 1.2m for the warrior, 1.6m for the demo lock, 1.6m for the Balance druid.) Are you going to balance this down to those classes and then look at Stormlash and balance it around 25m but make sure it'll still be worth it for 10m.

That sounds off. It is possible something is proc'ing it than we don't intend. We don't want the shaman dropping the totem just to make someone else super awesome. It's a matter of degree -- if melee benefit a little more, no big deal. If some specs get 400%, then that may lead to a stacking issue. If it becomes a mandatory raid cooldown, then that's a problem. The benefit should be more like Shattering Throw -- nice to have, but not mandatory. (Mandatory tends to be in the eye of the beholder however.)

I'm curious about the Hunter technique of macro'ing Fox and Hawk into cast time/instant shots, respectively, to maximize uptime with the Hawk AP buff while moving.

We don't consider that fun gameplay. You're basically opting out of Aspects as a mechanic and just always benefiting from the right Aspect because you're "clever" enough to know there is a macro. Usually in this situation we put the "stance" on the normal GCD or make the shared GCD longer.

Barrage:
This ability seems to do 400% weapon damage in total but it does not seem to be normalized, unlike powershot which is normalized (as well as just about every other hunter ability). Is this an oversight or is it not normalized for a reason?

Bug (and a slightly sneaky one). The issues you raise with Murder of Crows and Dire Beast are one of the challenges with summoned creatures. It's possible they won't always get the same number of attacks off, but we can balance around the average.

As an aside, we have a lot of abilities that summon extra creatures for hunters, including Stampede. This can create client performance problems on lower end machines, so we may ultimately have to redesign some of them. (We don't want to hear raid or BG leaders asking hunters not to use certain abilities.) Stampede would be the last one we touch.

Currently because of the mana cost of spells and how slowly we generate Holy Power, im basically relying on Holy Shock and Holy light, with some WoG's / Eternal Flame on the tank. But im almost forced to not use Flash of Light of Divine Light because of the mana cost to heal ratio. More than a few casts of either of those will put me in the danger zone of going oom, with not a lot of healing to show for it. Also Holy Radiance doesnt do nearly as much AoE healing as it was in Cataclysm, where i could rely on it to keep the group up during rough raid damage periods.

Holy Radiance is quite overpowered on many Dragon Soul fights, so I wouldn't use that as a yardstick for how spells should perform. Many of the nerfs we have made to Holy paladin healing over the course of beta have come about when our internal raid tests were dominated by Holy paladins (both throughput and efficiency) and Mistweaver monks. We'll compare these results to healers on beta now that raid tests are open.

How committed is the development team to having all tanks perform within an "acceptable variance" on all encounters? In Cataclysm we saw several "niches" become severe problems for tank balance on certain heroic encounters. For example:

Deathknights on Yor'Sahj
"Bearcatting" on Madness, Spine, Ultra, and Blackhorn
Deathknight and Druid compared to Paladin and Warrior for Impales on Madness
Warriors for Blood tanking on Spine
Paladins for most of heroic T12 due to Divine Guardian
Warrior/Druid/Deathknight vs Paladin on Al'Akir

We don't think any of those cross the line. If it were the same class showing up for all of those bullet points, that would be a problem. Our tanks all have strengths and weaknesses and unusual encounter mechanics may synergize or clash with them, but that's more interesting than extreme homogeneity, which would be the alternative. We like the puzzle aspect of "solving" boss encounters according to the comp and strengths of individual groups. We think it has helped contribute to the fun of killing bosses having such extraordinary legs (meaning that we're on tier 14 now and have made hundreds of dungeon bosses).

If memory serves the first Spine kill was Blood DK / Prot paladin and the second was a pair of druids. Now granted, world firsts sometimes have to resort to unusual strategies since they undergear the fights because they haven't had weeks to farm up better gear. Your mileage may vary.

As a counter-example, paladins on Heroic Major Domo initially were able to solo-soak the scorpion cleave, letting guilds with paladin tanks keep him in scorpion form longer than those without. We thought that crossed the line and we changed the boss mechanics to disincentivize that particular strategy. I fully admit that these calls are subjective.

GC - you wanted more info on the Earth Elemental dodge thing:

Thanks, we’ll investigate this.

It was explained that "Expertise will negate dodge and spell miss, then parry".

No. I've tested this. Expertise reduces Dodge then Parry. Paperdoll is wrong and hasn't been updated yet.

Expertise does indeed reduce dodge and then parry. The character sheet itself does not appear to update correctly.

Nature's Vigil is currently affecting Frenzied Regeneration. That doesn't seem intentional.

I believe the intention is that the healing amount is increased, but that it does not deal damage based on that healing.

Hi Doctor Street. A question has arisen concerning the mage tier 6 talents and if we'll be balanced around 100 up time on their use for our dps to be competitive with other classes.

Are Mages going to be balanced under the assumption that they have perfect 100% uptime of their level 90 talents? No. Are they going to be balanced under the assumption that they take one of them and use it reasonably well? Yes.

Is that a range Mistweaver or a melee one?

Yes. :)

You're missing the point. Expertise doesn't help spell miss, which is a huge problem for any melee class that still has abilities on the spell hit table.

As far as we know, it does (and if it does not, it's a bug). You can't trust the tooltip in this case, because as I said, it is not yet updating -- you would have to actually test it in game.

Some follow ups on things that I said we’d investigate. More still to come. This thread has been great. Please try to keep it focused on theorycrafting discussion ("How does Combat Potency’s proc chance work?") and not general Q&A ("Explain your design intent with X"). Thanks!

Pet Scaling: Still working on a more comprehensive description of our new pet scaling system. Please continue to report things that seem like bugs or inconsistencies.

Shadowy Apparitions: Looks like this got fixed sometime recently; its damage matches the tooltip now. Not sure which way was correct, but an example data point is that it does 19908 damage with 16334 spell power and Shadowform and no other buffs.

Gargoyle and Haste: It was incorrectly getting only melee haste from the DK, not spell haste. It now gets spell haste from your highest haste.

Barrage vs Powershot: We’re currently planning to reduce Barrage’s damage a bit, so that it ends up being on par with the others on the row in terms of overall DPS.

Frost DK Weapon Twisting: We’re looking for a more elegant way to solve this, but may end up just disabling Threat of Thassarian and Might of the Frozen Wastes for ~10 sec whenever you swap weapons. Obviously, the weapon twisting behavior is not what we want to encourage; we want Frost DKs to choose either DW or 2H, and stick with that choice (and have them be competitive choices).

Spinning Crane Kick: Will only generate Chi if it hits at least 3 targets.

Malefic Grasp: There’s another bugfix coming still for this so it won’t match what you see quite yet, but here’s how it should work:

1) DoT hastening of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul back to +100%, from +50%.

2) Damage of MG and DS reduced, so that the total DPS gain remains constant (-40% to MG, -13.333% to DS).

3) Since MG once again simply doubles tick rate, it effectively means there should be an additional tick between each existing tick. So, if MG is active during a midpoint between normal ticks, an extra tick goes off.

Brain Freeze with Multi-DoTing: Brain Freeze will only be triggered by your most recently applied bomb.

Here are some more incoming changes relevant to Balance Druid theorycrafters.

We are experimenting with some changes to the rotation. No promises that these changes will stay, but we definitely look forward to your feedback (both in terms of theorycrafting and how fun it is). Shooting Stars should occur much more frequently, and Starsurge should be a more important (read: high damage) button. Additionally, we’re adding a new passive that has some interesting implications. Should you choose to ignore it, your DPS will likely be only a few percentage behind someone who uses it optimally, but it should hopefully provide some more varied gameplay. To use some game designer jargon, we’re happy with Moonkins’ macro level rotational gameplay, but think they needs some more mirco-level decisions.

Shooting Stars chance increased from 20% to 50%.

Starsurge damage increased by 30%.

Fae Empowerment: New passive for Balance Druids. When you cast Faerie Fire, you gain Lunar Empowerment and Solar Empowerment.

Lunar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Starfires within 15 sec by 15%.

Solar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Wraths within 15 sec by 20%.

Please note that these changes are straight DPS buffs, and we don’t think Moonkin need a buff right now, so we need to reduce overall damage (probably across the board) so that overall DPS stays the same. These nerfs may take a few builds, because we need to evaluate if these rotation changes are worth doing. However, don't be surprised when you see them, and help spread the word when you see the inevitable "I can't believe we were nerfed!" posts. :)

What was the decision process behind moving Vampiric Embrace from a passive ability to an active one?

In order to balance it, the number either needs to be very small, or the duration needs to be less than 100%. We generally think active abilities are more engaging than passive ones, so we went with the latter.

As far as your other Shadow questions go, I suggest just waiting until the next build so that you can see all of the numbers. It might take a lot of time to explain via text that would just lead to more questions. If the intent still isn't clear at that point, we can clear things up.

Nowhere was a promise made that Piercing Shots, Mastery, et al. would be exempt from break CC. "Not a fair requirement" and "probably do need to pause" are not the words of a promise.

If you CC someone (say Scatter Shot, Freezing Traps and Wyvern Sting) and your autoshot gets turned off but Piercing Shots or Wild Quiver merrily break the CC, then that's a bug. If you CC someone and then keep shooting at them, then you're a bad hunter, and it's fine to break the CC. (In other words, you're supposed to choose between CC or damage.) Serpent Sting is a bit of a gray area, because you do have control over whether you put it up. You could be in a situation where you have a dot up and then decide to CC that target, but that situation happens for a variety of classes. We provide the glyphs for that situation. (Like everything else we discuss in this thread, none of that is set in stone.)

What? It's already not worth using either single target or in an AoE situation. Also, hunter shots are currently partially blockable as are pet attacks. Pet attacks are also suffering from glancing blows. Is this intended?

All of the hunter level 90 talents are getting an across the board damage buff (they’re intended to be worth using single-target, and currently they’re not). I just meant that Barrage’s damage will be lowered a bit relative than Powershot. Hunter ranged attacks should not be blockable, and they currently are (known issue, will be fixed). Pet attacks should be blockable and able to glance.

In regards to the mage level 90 talent Incanter's Ward, I have a bad feeling the fact that Priest shield spells are absorbed on higher priority than IW is going to foster a hateful relationship between a mage with the talent and the disc priest who is spell-blocking him. It would be a nice improvement to have Incanter's Ward at least have a higher absorb priority than other raiders' absorb spells if not also higher than Ice Barrier.

That’s a bug (or rather, we’re waiting on some code changes to support it that haven’t been implemented yet). Incanter’s Ward should always be used first to absorb damage.

Is Mage mana regen intended to increase only with Haste Rating, or with total haste? At present, it appears that neither the Frost Armor 5% haste buff nor the 5% haste aura increase regen.

Bug. Mage mana regen is currently scaling with melee haste instead of spell haste like it should be. That will be fixed in a future build.

We're also really wondering about the various "ignite-like" mechanics in the game....

Specific questions: Do these mechanics have the same basic implementation internally? In other words, can we trust that there is a single set of assumptions we can make about how the damage calculation and propagation works that will allow us to simulate all these mechanics correctly? And are there any details you can give us that would reduce the number of assumptions we need to make?

Ahhh, Ignite mechanics. What a storied history they have. :)

While there have been several versions of Ignite and similar effects, historically, the general goal for quite a while now has been for this sort of effect to be simply a way to move part of the damage from an attack into a DoT, to reduce burst, and add flavor. And since these attacks were likely to happen again before the DoT finished, each one needed to "roll" the damage left over from the previous DoT into the new one. However, that damage rolling processing has always been somewhat delayed. That leads to the “munching” problem (two hits could land at nearly the same time, and the first one wouldn’t have been processed yet when the second one lands, leading to the first one’s DoT getting overwritten by the second one’s).

However, we got some code changes done in 5.0 that handles rolling periodics better. If Blackout Kick does 20% of its damage as a DoT, then at the end of the fight, Blackout Kick’s DoT should have done exactly 20% of the damage of Blackout Kick (barring any rounding errors or overkill of course). The actual logic involved is rather simple: When reapplying this DoT, take the damage left in the previous DoT and distribute it evenly across the new DoT’s ticks. Do remember that refreshing a DoT refreshes it to the full duration, plus the next tick (so that you can clip DoTs by 1 tick and have no loss).

For example, suppose Blackout Kick does 20% additional damage as a DoT that ticks every 2 sec, for 4sec.

0sec: Blackout Kick lands for 100 damage. DoT applied, with 4sec remaining, doing 10 damage per tick.
2sec: Blackout Kick DoT ticks for 10 damage. 2sec remaining, still 10 damage per tick.
3sec: Another Blackout Kick lands, and this time it crits, for 200 damage. The DoT is refreshed and extended to 4sec past the next tick; 5sec remaining, or 3 ticks. It needs to do a total of 10 damage still from the previous DoT, and 40 more for this one, for a total of 50 damage over 3 ticks, so ticks for ~17 damage, 3 more times.
4sec: Blackout Kick DoT ticks for 17 damage. 4sec remaining, still 17 damage per tick.
6sec: Blackout Kick DoT ticks for 17 damage. 2sec remaining, still 17 damage per tick.
8sec: Blackout Kick DoT ticks for 17 damage, and expires.

Hope that helps.

Spells that use this mechanic include: Ignite, Blackout Kick, Echo of Light, Devouring Plague, Touch of Karma, Hand of Gul’dan, Bloodbath, Temporal Shield, Piercing Shots, Explosive Shot, and several set bonuses.

How does Psyfiend pick which target and in what order to fear if there are more then one enemy attacking the priest? Is it based on location, order of who attacked when, or is it totally random?

Without trying it out, I believe it prefers the last target that attempted an attack on the priest.

What counts as the three direct attacks for Spectral Guise? Any attack that isn't a DoT, or is there more specific list of attacks?

Any damage event, including DoT ticks.

What exactly is considered a range attack for Phantasm? Is it any attack that can be cast beyond melee range, or are there spells that are exception to this?

The mechanics for this are identical to Smoke Bomb or Camouflage, so try those out to compare.

Our shaman guy is working on implementing Stormlash, but he's lacking details on how the damage scales, in particular whether or not it scales with the cast time of the proccing spell, and if so what the formula is. I haven't looked into it myself so I don't have any more specific questions, but any other details you could share on Stormlash would be helpful as well.

We’re currently in the process of tuning Stormlash, so you can expect its numbers to change somewhat. It does vary the damage by the cast time of the spell or attack that proc’d it, but that formula is likely to change (and/or likely to include other variables). I’ll try to get that formula for you after we tune it.

One additional addendum on the Ignite things: Explosive Shot does not do this in your current build, but will in the next. The others should all work that way in your current build.

I'm assuming you're referring to the dot it triggers, Shadowflame, but that functions as a dot with a stacking mechanic: For one, it can crit, which seems counter to the whole premise of rolling forward a fixed amount of damage. It also just doesn't roll damage in that way at all - I can cast two HoGs back-to-back or I can wait and do the second one just before Shadowflame wears off, and after the second HoG I get a 2-stack dot ticking 7 times for the same amount in both cases.

By Hand of Gul’dan, I did indeed mean Shadowflame. However, as you point out, this rolling periodic mechanic interacts rather oddly with debuffs that stack. So, we’re just going to take it off of Shadowflame. Shadowflame will be a simple DoT that can stack, not using this rolling periodic mechanic.

Pre-MoP Deep Wounds used this mechanic - does the MoP version continue to use it, or something else?

Mists’ Deep Wounds is no longer that kind of DoT; it’s now much more similar to Rend.

Why do Unholy Aura/Windfury Totem (and other attack speed buffs) not increase rune regeneration speed? Same question with goblin racial. Heroism and Unholy Frenzy however do.

In contrast a caster's Cast time, DOTs and HOTs are affected by group buffs as well as things like Heroism and Power Infusion.

Is this a bug?

If not, could you please outline exactly what it is that will affect a Death Knight's rune speed regeneration?

Sure. “Haste” is somewhat of an overloaded word, in WoW’s vocabulary. There are, mechanically, several different kinds of haste:

Melee: Affects melee attack speed
Ranged: Affects ranged attack speed
Spell: Affects spell casting speed
Regen: Affects rune/energy/focus regen speed

Various sources of haste provide some or all of those. Haste rating, for example, provides all of them. There’s a raid buff that just applies 5% spell haste. And another that just applies 10% melee and ranged Haste. Typically, we refer to the combination melee+ranged as "attack speed," to indicate that it’s only affecting your attack speed, not your regen.

However, we’re not entirely consistent about this. On the character screen, the line that says “Haste” is really showing attack speed. We try to be specific about which one we’re giving you in specific spells or abilities. For example, the goblin racial and Unholy Aura specifically state that they increase attack speed, so they don’t give regen haste. Occasionally we mess up and refer to something as the wrong type of haste, but I don’t know of any more of those offhand.

That bears the question: Is everyone else too low, or are they too high?

Mistweavers are too high. Other healers are about right.

While we are trying to hold things relatively stable for a bit so that you can really dig into rotations, monks are new, so they are less stable than other specs. There are still bugs and unimplemented tech that we need to make them work correctly. We still appreciate monk feedback -- we are emphatically not saying don't bother -- but take monk numbers with an even larger grain of salt than other classes.

Another issue is our aoe threat. Currently blood boil and DnD hit like wet noodles and that creates a lot of issues with aoe threat. The first few seconds are also an issue. Having to apply diseases to get the weakened blows debuff on the mobs can be a pain compared to the other tanks. With the few seconds time of getting diseases up can cause even more aoe threat problems.

We'll look at Death and Decay. It was fine the last time we looked at it, and I believe Unholy still uses it as part of a single-target rotation, so that implies the numbers can't be too far off for Blood.

There was at least one bug with Blood Boil (the disease bonus only affected the base points, not the AP scaling) and we buffed it even beyond that. It should hit much, much harder now.

Incidentally, the biggest problem with Army of the Dead was pet scaling, which was apparently broken for almost every class. Our apologies. We have that fixed up now so you should be able to evaluate the results soon.

What is the final word on DoT specs?

There is no doubt that "Split DPS" can influence a guild to take a DoT class over burst but encounters like Spine of DW can also encourage guilds to take burst dps over a DoT class

Multi-dotting is a perk. On some encounters, dot classes will do well. If they are doing 150% of the damage of non-dot specs, then that's not cool. We're not trying to stamp it out though.

However, I have done raid testing on two healing classes (shaman/paladin), and in both cases, regen feels too weak, and definitely feels weaker than it did starting T11 raids in blue gear. It feels like you need to spam your low throughput/slow/efficient heal more than ever. This is surprising given the fact that we are scaled to first tier epic gear levels for raid testing. It feels like either regen cooldowns or Spirit scaling needs to be bumped up across the board.

That's useful feedback. We just need to make sure that the problem is really healer mana regen and not the fact that players may not fully understand the encounters yet (so are taking more damage than intended from stuff that is supposed to be interrupted or avoided), or that certain encounter abilities are overtuned.

Rupture can still be made to be used for primary sustained dps ability by it doing the correct dmg but for fast burst like what is needed in most of the raids Sanguinary Vein has to go back to all bleeds. This also needs to be changed to make the spec usable in pvp with the lower combo point generation.

The current way Sanguinary Vein works is like how Bandit's Guile works on live which you said was to punishing. Is there anything going to be done to make this mechanic less punishing to match what was done for the other 2 rogue specs?

We want Sub to use Rupture (and recently buffed it). We don't want Sub to get the full benefit of Sanguinary Vein without having Rupture going. The old Bandit's Guile was a stacking mechanic, which feels redundant with poison stacking mechanics and combo point stacking mechanics. Having to have ability X up before you can do max damage doesn't cross the same line for us.

HS does around 20% of your DPS. Switching to Blood Boil, then, will be a considerable drop. DS does 15% of your DPS.

I mentioned Blood Boil above. We also agree that the difference in damage between Death Strike and Heart Strike was too much, so we increased Death Strike and decreased Heart Strike.

Touch of Chaos is used to refresh Corruption, then is manually canceled prior to dropping from Metamorphosis to prevent any in-flight bolts refreshing Corruption without the buff Metamorphosis confers?

We think this was a little confusing, so we renamed the auto attack override to simply "Melee", and Demonic Slash to "Touch of Chaos." The new Touch of Chaos (aka, Demonic Slash), extends Corruption (instead of refreshing, which would recalculate damage). The Melee auto attack no longer affects Corruption. This means no more problems with in-flight bolts.

1) Currently having 1 pet and the glyph to duplicate said pet (assuming Ferocity) does significantly less (about ~40-45%) of having 5 Ferocity pets on-call when using Stampede. Can you clarify if there is a bug currently with the glyph?

The gylph required new code support, which may not be in yet. Regardless, it should cause no difference in damage, from just having 5 Ferocity pets naturally.

2) Assuming the glyph is being used and 4 duplicates of your current pet are called, are the 4 duplicates called with the baseline stats, or are the buffs from the original pet copied to them; i.e. is the design of Stampede intended for it to be used after AP procs and Rabid/Bestial Wrath to maximize the damage of the other pets? It seems to fit the niche of the Doomguard for Demo currently where lining up buffs causes the Doomguard to scale in damage and would add a measure of complexity to the CD.

It doesn’t copy buffs from the current pet, but all of the pets do benefit from pet scaling (more on scaling in a bit).

how is the interaction with Malefic Grasp/Drain Soul speeding Dot ticks and KJ's cunning supposed to work? Does the slowing of cast time have some interaction with the dot ticks or does it only affect the channeled spell's tick time (and therefore dmg)?

The period of channeled spells is slowed with Kil’jaeden’s Cunning, but the DoT hastening effect of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul is not. Just the MG will deal reduced DPS -- the DoTs will stay full DPS.

Also, what is the intended interaction between burning rush and KJ's cunning?

I assume you’re referring to them both affecting movement speed? They stack, multiplicatively: normally 100%, but while casting and moving 80%, while burning 150%, and while casting and moving and burning 120%.

* What are the Echo of the Elements proc chances for Enhancement and Elemental?

Echo of the Element’s proc chance is 6% for Elemental and Restoration, and 30% for Enhancement.

* How does Flurry interact with auto-attack swing times? If you gain the Flurry buff on an auto-attack, does the next auto attack from that hand gain the haste benefit? When dual-wielding, does the Flurry buff that gets removed / added "mid-swing" affect the remaining auto-attack swing time(s)? Finally, at what point is the Flurry stack decremented?

The exact specifics of what happens to swings that are partially cooled down when the buff expires or is gained are a little hazy, but it should basically work like this: while the buff is up, both auto-attacks’ swing timers are shortened. If the buff falls off when one swing is 50% cooled down, it continues from being 50% cooled down at the slower swing time. If you gain the Flurry buff on one auto attack, the next auto attack from that hand does gain the haste benefit. The Flurry stack is decremented when the 3rd auto attack lands after the attack that triggered Flurry.

Is the Gargoyle intended to gain any benefit from Unholy Presence or Improved Unholy Presence, given the latter's classification as increased attack speed and rune regen?

Nope. Those don’t give any Spell Haste, which is what the Gargoyle cares about. (More on scaling below.)

We knocked out a lot of bugs on pet scaling. You probably have some of these now and will get more updates over time.

All pets get:
-- Crit: 100% of your Crit (Melee/Ranged/Spell individually)
-- Hit: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
-- Exp: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
-- Resil: 100% of your Resil
-- PvP Power: 100% of your PvP Power
-- Haste: 100% of your Haste (Melee/Ranged/Spell/Regen individually)
-- Dodge: 100% of your Dodge
-- Parry: 100% of your Parry
-- Armor: Various %s of your Armor, based on pet
-- HP: Various %s of your HP, based on pet

Some pets get, as appropriate to the pet:
-- SP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
-- AP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
-- RAP: Some % of your RAP, based on pet
-- Mastery: Warlock and Mage pets get 100% of your Mastery
-- Mana: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana
-- Mana Regen: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana Regen

Question >> Do the developers intend/want Holy pallys to use Selfless Healer, Glypth of Ascetic Crusader, and those types of rotations (Crusader Stirke for melee range, Judgement for extended range) to manage mana/heals?

There should be no mandatory talents or glyphs. We left Selfless Healer as an option for Holy paladins who like using Judgment. We don't have a problem with using Crusader Strike sometimes -- there are going to be plenty of situations where you won't want to stand in melee.

It sounds like part of the problem is that Holy is using Light of Dawn in every situation, even tank healing because of the Beacon transfer. In our effort to get paladins to use the spell again (instead of just spamming Holy Radiance and ignoring Holy Power), we may made it too good relative to Word of Glory. As I said recently, if we buff Holy Radiance too much and nerf Light of Dawn too much, then we're back to ignoring Holy Power. If Holy Radiance is too weak and Light of Dawn is too strong, then paladins can only AE heal once every X seconds.

We're not seeing paladins struggle with mana (including paladins who stay at range and aren't using Selfless Healer) compared to shaman, druids and priests in our raid tests. The more Flash of Lights and to a lesser extent Divine Lights you throw out, the worse your longevity will be, but of course sometimes you need to use those spells.

Question >> Is the expectation that Holy pallys will be an ultra specialized raid class? I'm curious on this, as currently the mutliple situtaional rotations are complex at best.

No, we don't do that anymore. Different healers do have different mechanics, which will enable them to shine in different situations, e.g. grouping up favors Resto shaman a lot. But the goal is that if your 10-player raid has 2 of any class of healer (and possibly even two of the same spec, though that may be tougher), you're in good shape and don't generally swap one healer for another on certain fights.

While I agree with your stance and understand that this is the ideal direction and that it is going to be hard to reach it, you have to at least acknowledge that SH is going to be better in mostly any scenario for PvE. If this continues to be the case I assure you that it will not be an option, it will become a mandatory talent.

I think that's just tuning. Do you think Selfless Healer would be so attractive without the Ascetic Crusader glyph? We don't think that glyph is super compelling for Prot and Ret these days (meaning beta) and it wasn't intended to have such strong synergy with Selfless Healer.

I agree that the issue is LoD being ridiculous right now. But there's more to it. Perhaps a solution to look at is adding Holy Power generation back to Holy Light. Maybe not every cast, but perhaps every 2 Holy Lights you cast you generate one Holy Power. Right now HR is barely worth casting, and as such very few are going to take advantage of it. Holy Power generation feels weak because of it. Mana feels weak because of Holy Power generation.

We may be being too cautious with Holy Radiance, but it is very easy to turn it into something like the new Light of Dawn, where every cast is better spent on Holy Radiance than single target heals. 25-player raids (which we aren't publicly testing yet) always allow healers to specialize a little more, and players haven't yet seen every raid fight, so they don't have a good grasp of how many group up vs. spread out (too over-simplify matters) there are.

We wanted to see what giving back a little haste and crit to everyone would do. If that isn't sufficient to bump up Holy Power generation a little, we're also considering reinstating Divine Favor.

There may be some way to return Holy Power to Holy Light, but we don't want a return to the style of spamming Holy Light on the Beacon target and nothing else. All of these mechanics are intended to give paladins options rather than there being the one true rotation that works for most rotations. Sometimes you should want to heal a wounded target and rely on Beacon to help the tank. Sometimes you should want to heal the tank directly (and benefit from Tower of Radiance to provide Holy Power). Sometimes you should want to Holy Radiance because several folks are wounded and sometimes the mana should be better spent on a Divine Light or Flash of Light. Sometimes Holy Power should be for Light of Dawn and sometimes for Word of Glory (or Eternal Flame).

This might work in an average raiding guild. But I'll tell you right now I can already spot a few encounters where a particular class is going to outshine another class due to the mechanics of the encounter and abilities of a class.

Please provide that feedback (perhaps in the dungeon and raid forum) as you see it. We don't believe it's an unsolvable problem though. Healer representation was pretty good throughout Cataclysm, even when various classes had the fight or two that was awesome for them.

I liked the old model of Wrath far more than Cata and Mists current model. When you try to make each healer a jack of all trades you essentially take away a very key aspect of why players chose to play the class to begin with. I love tank healing, and it's actually why I rolled a Paladin to begin with. But, we've been such strong AoE healers all expansion that over the course of time tank healing duty has shifted from paladins to other classes that cannot put out the output that paladins do.

The problem with that design is that you are then saying every raid needs a paladin for tank healing, or else we say e.g. Disc priest is the other tank healer and you need one of them. The group that has a Disc priest and a paladin is just screwed. All of those single-target heals and mechanics for shaman and Holy priests become pointless because those players will say "We're the raid healers. We only AE." Now that we have 6 healing specs, it would be very challenging to make them all desirable if they had narrow niches. You can make a similar argument for tank specialization. Does a guild need to keep a Prot paladin in the wings for the fight where a Prot paladin shines? Do all the tanks just do daily quests waiting for the one fight where they get to come tank? We just think it works better if most designated specs can handle any tanking or healing situation, with enough unique mechanics that things don't get too stale.

>- Is the Healing from Light's Hammer supposed to scale with Inquisition? The other 2 L90 Talents' damage scales with Inquisition but not the healing, is this intended?

Light's Hammer is built a little unusually. It probably wouldn't hurt if it benefits from Inquisition as long as that doesn't make it the go-to choice.

>- Also, some Hand spells are now 40 yards, while some are still 30. Is this intended as well, or an oversight?

IIRC, we made Salvation and Sacrifice longer so they would match heal ranges. The others are probably shorter for fear that they become too good in PvP, but my suspicion is they would all be fine at 40.

>- Glyph of Immediate Truth... where to begin...

It's intended to be a DPS loss in sustained combat (else what would be the point of the ramping?) It's intended for burst scenarios, perhaps in PvP or while solo when Censure won't always stack up.

What is the design goal for Hand of Salvation?

We removed it originally in Mists, but it does get situational use, such as say a fight like Alysrazor that has huge DPS buffs. It won't get a lot of use and we're fine with that.

>- What is the design goal for the Battle Healer glyph? The only spec that is in "Seal of Insight stance" is typically Holy.

It's intended for Holy paladins who like or are able to stand in melee or for Ret or Prot paladins who like to do a little off-healing, such as in PvP. It shouldn't be a very popular glyph for raid boss encounters.

As an aside, our internal testers who run challenge modes exclaim that they use every single ability they have to survive and to shave off time. Challenge modes are a great opportunity to use some of those mechanics that don't normally get used in raid boss fights.

Ghost, this is another question I've been meaning to ask: Will you continue to work on the Pet/Minion AI? Despite improvements over the years, it really leaves much to be desired.

I'll provide some examples from a Death Knight perspective, but I'd welcome any input from classes or specs that have had a similar experience.

AI is a really tricky thing to design, because what players really want (usually) is for the pet to read their mind and do the appropriate thing. :) Since science hasn't made computers with great decision-making ability in general yet, you're certainly not going to find it in a game. I hate to drag this out as an excuse, because it sort of shuts down the conversation, but I've been doing game design long enough to know that AI is never just as easy as "Well, it should just do this and this and then it will be perfect."

Instead, we try to err on the side of very simple behavior so at the very least it's predictable. Your pet or guardian may be stupid, but at least it will be consistently stupid instead of trying to say pick the right target and always picking the wrong target.

That said, if you can describe specific situations where you think a pet or guardian are doing the wrong thing, please let us know. (The bug thread would be a better location for that feedback than this one.)

As an aside, several of the situations you describe are encounters were the peculiarities of the fight make a pet less optimal than on others. We are totally fine with that -- it's along the same lines as not every single boss is going to be backstab-able. We don't want every spec to do identical DPS on every fight. We think that would be boring. If pet classes did sub-standard DPS on a whole lot of fights, then we think it would be a problem.

Is it worth us double checking pet scaling now (specifically FE & PFE as it appears that Primal Elementalist has some scaling issues as Elemental gears up)?

I would wait about two builds to be honest. We appreciate players going through the effort for stuff like this and don't want to waste your time.

Is there a reason Light of Dawn absolutely has to retain the beacon transfer?

No. It might be worth trying at the same 15% as Holy Radiance. We made it transfer through Beacon long ago when it was a cone-shaped spell that was tricky to use. Some paladins were not even choosing the talent, so we kept buffing it both in power and ease-of-use. It's a different spell in Mists.

Long story short, if you're hit/expertise capped as appropriate to your class, your pets will be too. If they didn't split it like that, then warlock melee pets would have twice as much hit as what they need, and no expertise.

Yeah, Strawberry has the right of it. If you cap, your pet should be capped. My apologies, as that seemed to cause some confusion. Another way to write it would be:

Pet Hit = 50% of Master Hit + 50% of Master Exp
Pet Exp = 50% of Master Hit + 50% of Master Exp

One other change I'm concerned about and find frustrating is the cooldown on cleanse. This serves no PVE purpose that I can come up with, and seems to only serve to limit encounter design and raid composition. I've found a couple places (admittedly in 5 man instances) where mobs put dots on the group more frequently than the cleanse CD, which forces me to heal through the remainder until cleanse comes off CD. It's not difficult in these cases, so it's not a question of it being game breaking, but it's frustrating being forced to spend more mana to heal through something I could cleanse if it wasn't for a CD which serves no PVE purpose. It feels like I'm being forced to play suboptimally, especially coming from a situation on live where that isn't the case.

We think it’s more fun gameplay to use a dispel at the right time rather than be asked to spam it. Since healers can’t spam dispels any more, the encounters won’t be designed with that intent. That doesn’t always mean you’ll remove a debuff the second it is applied.

(I agree your life would be easier if you could dispel whenever you want to. Your life would also be easier if you didn’t have to dispel at all, but we want our encounters to have a variety of challenges.)

Little confused.

For Hit: Do they get 50% of our hit and 50% our Exp to calculate just hit? and then calculate it again for expertise?

Or are our pets not going to be hit capped if we are hit capped. The wording confuses me.

They get 50% of your Hit added to their Hit, and 50% of your Exp added to their Hit. Same for Exp. That means that Hit and Exp are effectively combined into one communal pool for pets. That will make them hit capped if you’re hit capped. Don’t forget that Expertise grants spell hit now.

Also, is the Unholy Ghoul supposed to receive attack speed benefits from Unholy Presence and Improved Unholy Presence?

Yes. Again, I would wait a build or two before attempting to verify though.

Death and Decay: There seems to be a bug regarding this spell. The in game scrolling combat text shows that it hits 1 target 11 times, however, the combat log shows only 8 hits. Is it intended to hit 8 times or 11? And are the devs ok with the ability being in the DK single target rotation, assuming it is?

Yes, it’s fine to be in a single target rotation, and the bug where it only ticks 8 times instead of 11 will be fixed.

Can we get shaman elementals and fire totems to count as pets then?

Elementals do count as pets now. Totems are kind of a special unique snowflake. They’re not pets, but they do use their master’s stats directly for some things. It’s currently intentional that Searing Totem doesn’t cast faster with Haste, but we agree that that’s odd and inconsistent, so will likely keep that in mind if we find that shamans need more value from Haste (we think they are probably fine at the moment).

Anyways, the main theorycraft question I have is in regards to stampede mechanics and intent as it relates to the extra pet's abilities. Obviously there are two styles of abilities of note that I would love to see addressed, those are the party buffs and the target debuffs.

The pets will indeed use their special abilities, using whatever autocast settings they had last. The buffs/debuffs they apply will persist as long as they normally would.

Based on feedback, we are going to try an implementation of Stampede where the pets have more uptime (some combo of lower duration and shorter cooldown) but are weaker than they would be individually.

Is the health of Mirror Images being looked at? As I understand it they are considered Guardians not Pets.

Currently they look to be 10% of the mages Hp's at level 90 (for me that is 26,628), and that is not enough to survive a single blow from a mob where we would be interested in using Mirror Images to buy us the time to kill said mob.

Each Image has 10% of the mage's health. Basic level 90 mobs (such as a Bluehide Mushan, for comparison) hit a level 90 green-geared mage for just over 10k damage, and the Mage has a bit under 300k health. The Mirror Images have 30k health, so can take 3 hits each, not 1. We just tried it, and the Mushan took 18sec to kill all 3 images. Obviously, harder hitting mobs are going to kill them faster.

One thing to note about dancing rune weapon is that it currently is not copying the effects of death siphon and soul reaper. We don't want it to take a while to update the new abilities into dancing rune weapon like cata did.

That sounds like a bug. We'll get it fixed.

I definitely would love to use it in PvP as well as certain areas in PvE, but do you think there's some room for making it attractive to Holy paladins even in raid scenarios as well, akin to Atonement and Telluric Currents or even the Mistweaver melee healing style? Because of the way we've been designed, I know most people are more comfortable in the back healing, but there have been a niche of players who would be attracted to that playstyle of Paladin, myself included.

Ultimately, that's the niche we're trying to carve out, but it's tricky to make things like that optional. Telluric Currents started out optional but because of the way mana pools grew, it reached the point where it was considered a mandatory mana management mechanic (say that 5 times fast) for shaman. We think Telluric Currents will work as intended in Mists, but we don't want the Battle Healer glyph to become the new mandatory mechanic.

My other question is, are the weird cooldowns for our offensive CDs intended? After playing around with two minute cooldowns in Cata, it feels so odd working with a three minute cooldown with Avenging Wrath (as Ret/Prot at least, Holy iirc has it at 2 minutes) and two minute Holy Avenger (although Sanctified Wrath kinda justifies the AW CD). The Tier 14 4-piece bonus adds to that confusion, not to mention propels Sanctified Wrath to the forefront.

We don't really like having cooldowns all line up neatly. When they do, there is such a strong incentive to blow them all at once (often timed with Bloodlust) that it feels like they should just really all be one cooldown rather than requiring separate buttons (or more likely macro lines). When cooldowns have different timing, you have to think more about when to use them.

Is pvp intended to follow the same model of no mandatory glyphs?

That's a goal but it's definitely much harder to deliver on. When we say we don't want mandatory glyphs for PvE, what we're actually saying is we don't want a glyph that generally provides a DPS increase in most situations (if you are a DPS spec). In PvP, sustained DPS is only slightly valuable. On the other hand, a glyph that provides burst damage at the expense of sustained damage, or a glyph that provides extra CC or CC immunity looks awfully attractive for PvP. We'll still try and make sure there are no cookie-cutter talent or glyph builds though.

Just a question about the healing Priest 4-piece PvP bonus, Diamond Soul:

Is the resilience bonus supposed to apply only to the Priest when cast on oneself or is it supposed to extend to any eligible player target?

Any PW:S target.

Just ignore the armchair moderators. If GC doesnt like the direction the thread has gone, he will tell us and get on back on the topic they want to discuss.

The topic hasn't changed. I don't have the bandwidth to make this a "defend every class design decision discussion," as much fun as that might be. The most useful questions are when you don't understand how something works (possibly because of a bug), which makes it hard to determine how rotations should work, which makes it hard for theorycrafting. I have been guilty of straying into design philosophy, because that's dear to my heart, but I recognize that can be frustrating when I respond to post A but not post B, as it always is, which is why I try not to do it very often.

When you say "Melee/Ranged/Spell individually", do you mean my (warlock) pets get my melee crit chance, of which I have very little? If so, is it really intended that my caster pets crit much more than my melee pets just because I'm a caster myself?

Correction: Your highest crit % (of melee, ranged, or spell), is given to your pet as all 3 kinds of crit. So a warlock with 5% melee crit and 30% spell crit will have a Felguard with 30% melee and spell crit.

Do pets have any sort of base crit or crit from their own base intellect/agility, to which the inherited crit from their owner is added, or do they simply get the owner's crit chance directly, overwriting any base crit that may otherwise have been there?

No, these scaling values overwrite the base stats of the pet.

I am praying that the "lower" duration was a typo and what you meant was "longer" duration.

Yes, I meant longer duration on Stampede. Sorry.

I read these two comments where one says that R Shaman have a niche (stacked up healing), and the other comment that no healers should have a niche. I'm bringing this up specifically regarding 10 man spread raid healing, 25 man spread healing for Shaman is not really an issue. There were plenty of fights outside of Dragonsoul that were absolutely painful to heal through as a Shaman, and nothing has been done to help us spread heal AoE raid damage that is coming out regularly. It seems to me that class balance is significantly lacking with regards to 10 man spread healing.Thanks again for the feedback you've been dishing out :)

My first comment was that we don't want healer specs to be "I'm the tank healer guy" vs. "I'm the AE healer guy." These days nobody freaks out if you ask the paladin to heal the raid or ask the shaman to heal the tank, which we think is good. My second comment was that it's fine for the different healers to have different strengths and weaknesses and mechanics. We think Resto shaman fall squarely into the second category.

Currently I believe, say, an orc dual wielding an axe and a different weapon will have 1% more expertise attributed to the swings of the axe but not to those of the other weapon, from the axe specialization racial. (If this is not how it works, please correct me.) Will pets inherit (50% of) this expertise at all? If so, is it decided by whether the owner is wielding an axe in the main hand, or in either hand, or what?

Also, what about the Draenei racial, Heroic Presence? I believe we've tested this and found it not to affect pets - can we assume this will be fixed?

The draenei racial should transfer to the pet. The expertise racials should use the higher value of MH or OH.

In doing the raid testing over the past few weeks Disc priest feels like it is slacking behind the other healers. To me it is feeling rather weak in its healing to mana cost ratio. Also aoe healing for Disc seems to be quite lackluster. PoH throughput to mana cost just seems out of proportion. It was nice to get PW: Solace but at the same time to get the mana back you have to be not healing which seems rather counter intuitive as a healer in a raid. The other talents in the tree Mindbender and From Darkness, Comes Light just don't seem to restore the mana that Solace gives back as long as the downtime to cast it is there.

The question I am asking you is, do you feel that Disc is at a point where it is balanced compared to the single target and aoe healing that the other healing classes can throw out when considering throughput and mana cost as well as mana regen downtime?

Dungeon and raid tests are ongoing, but we haven't seen any real weaknesses in Disc compared to the other healers thus far. The level 45 tier is intended to provide different ways of getting back mana or being mana efficient. Solace may seem more desirable on fights where you have long periods of not healing, but those fights probably can't stress your mana that much anyway.

In that case, let me rephrase a question we've already been asking amongst ourselves for some time now: How do YOU see us using Soul Reaper in a sub-35% situation?

For every theorycrafted result we've simmed/tested so far, we've estimated that its gain is so strong that sitting on a Death Rune just to match with the cooldown is more than worth it. Not using it off cooldown is a loss. Thus, it dominates our rotation completely and frankly makes for rather unenjoyable gameplay, given how antithetical holding back runes feels.

As such, we're also getting numbers higher than your stated 7% for Unholy and 4% for Frost- far higher.
This is one of the primary reasons why we're so slanted towards generating and maintaining Death Runes as constantly as possible, and thus why we say talents like Blood Tap and Plague Leech being mandatory.

Is there something radically different we're doing than from what your internal numbers show you?

Give us some time to take another look at Soul Reaper. We certainly hear the concern, and I don't want to dismiss it, but without doing some research, I wouldn't be able to add anything new to the conversation.

Actually, sitting on runes for 6 sec to fuel Soul Reaper during an execute phase isn't a problem. It's an execute, and it should dominate the execute phase. A warrior would do the same thing with rage and Execute itself. I was more referring to the concern about whether Blood Tap and Plague Leech are mandatory because more Death Runes during execute are so important.

Another thing I noticed was the first tier talent Double Time. Reading it, I was under the impression that I could charge someone, they immediately use an escape (blink/disengage etc), then I can immediately charge again, and after the second charge the cooldown is incurred. However, at this point in time I charge something, and it is not available for use for another 10-12 seconds as it 'recharges'. This goes against what the talent reads "You can use charge twice before incurring it's cooldown". Is this intended?

Charge with Double Time should work almost exactly like monk Roll. Imagine you have Charge A and Charge B. Charge has a 20 sec cooldown, and you can use Charge B exactly 1 sec after you use Charge A, but you still have to pay the cooldown for both. If you use them back to back, then Charge A comes off cooldown in 20 sec and Charge B comes off cooldown in 40 sec.

(As far as your other question goes, I feel like we have addressed that: we like the shield requirements on Shield Wall and Spell Reflect. We added Die by the Sword and Mass Spell Reflect for warriors who just can't bear to use them.)

Is there a reason why Healing tide doesn't scale with mastery and is there a reason why healing stream doesn't scale with haste or crit ?

IT just seem's strange that Healing tide works with haste and crit but not mastery and healing stream works with mastery but not haste and crit .Looking for any insight

Those are both bugs.

For the sake of clarification, does this mean you would examine the functionality of Blood Tap and Plague Leech? Or re-examine abilities which cost a Death Rune cost?

The last time we ran a test, choosing Blood Tap was within 1% DPS of Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption (and was actually the lowest). Since your sims suggest otherwise, we'll have to figure out the source of the discrepancy. It could be the sims have bad numbers somewhere or it could be you are using a different (more optimized?) rotation than we are. Actual dungeon and raid parses will help, since most players care a lot more about those than theoreticals.

Is it really meaningful to compare Rage to Runes? Because they aren't the same...at all.

Classes are designed to be different from each other, true. The assertion was that it was bad to sit on resources to wait for a big attack. We don't think that is a problem.

Current:
Raid/Dungeon: DPS cooldown, sometimes used in emergencies to prevent wipes since they can take 2-3 hits each (6-9 swings)

Maybe in a dungeon. In raids, Mirror Images take about 1 boss hit to die even in Cataclysm. The fact that you have 3 will buy you a little time, which should be about the same in Mists.

EDIT: I screwed up the charge mechanic description. Fixed.

This is the total opposite of how Death Knights have been played since Wrath.

I don't follow. You would use Icy Touch any moment a Frost Rune became available rather than wait for an Unholy Rune?

The mathematical rune regen difference is minuscule, sure. That is not why Blood Tap is the default option: Death Rune costs are. So long as they exist, and such a huge part of our DPS depends on abilities that use them, we will naturally default towards talents/regen mechanics that provide them.

I'm not following you. Are you saying the DPS difference is minuscule but you'll take Blood Tap anyway?

I'll repeat: for our testing, you can pick any of the level 75 talents and do almost the same DPS. Now perhaps using Blood Tap makes the rotation easier since you know when you're getting a Death Rune, but I don't think that's what a lot of DKs are arguing. They are arguing, unless I am mistaken, that Blood Tap is mandatory because it's a DPS increase. I need to understand why there is such a disconnect.

Is there any word on what exactly the outcome for Dark Apotheosis is going to be? All we've heard is that it is not meant to be a viable tank spec and that it is supposed to be more in line with an dps warrior slapping on a shield and taking a few hits. However recent raid testing and logs have shown otherwise, right now DA warlocks are very viable tanks.

We haven't changed our design intent. A recent change to mastery for warlocks made the glyph more powerful than intended.

If you want to get together with friends and try out warlock tanks in dungeons, knock yourself out. We have no plans to support warlocks tanking raid bosses and we don't want to see warlocks in Dungeon or Raid Finder trying to talk the designated tank into letting the warlock tank. As I said before, a glyph is not the appropriate way to let a class choose a tanking role.

I wanted to clarify that the current damage reduction is a bug, but please let's not derail this numbers-focused thread into a discussion of warlock tanking.

* How much AP/SP do Feral Spirits, Fire Elementals and Earth Elementals get from the owner?
* What is the coefficient on a Shadowfiend's/Mindbender's attack?

I’d rather not get into listing every specific coefficient, because it's a short slippery slope from there to us just publishing every number for every spell. These are unusual, so we can understand why they might be tough to figure out.

Most pets have base DPS that is based on your class and level, and then get some % of your SP or AP as their AP, and get the standard AP/14 DPS increase to their weapon damage from that. The Earth Elemental is one of these traditional pets, getting 100% of your SP as AP (or 150% for the Primal Earth Elemental). However, the Fire Elemental and Shadowfiend/Mindbender are unusual. Their auto attacks deal magical damage, which means they also benefit from SP, as well as AP. I believe in the current build you have, they’re getting both AP and SP from you, which is complicating things further. We just simplified that, so in a future build, they will just get 50% SP from you. Try them out in a couple builds.

Again, these are just to give you some examples and point you in the right direction. Teach a man to fish, etc.

Currently they don't appear to scale with temporary percentage-wise haste buffs on the owner, such as Dark Soul: Misery. Is this intended, or will that change over the next few builds? Whatever the answer, is the same true for temporary crit buffs?

Yes, these will be fixed in upcoming builds. We’re trying to get rid of all of the "snapshotting" of stats on summoning. Let us know if you think we missed any; it will take a couple builds for you to get all of the changes, but all temporary buffs should dynamically update to the pets.

On a related note, we've been told before that pets should not benefit from any buffs on their own anymore, but in Cataclysm they still gained certain things like Bloodlust/Heroism. Will this still be true in MoP? If so, do you have a comprehensive list of which buffs can affect pets?

Pets should not be able to double dip on any of these buffs. Any that still do apply to pets will be fixed. We fixed it recently for Bloodlust, for example.

I hope you like enhancement, GC, because I have 45 more parses for you to sift through

I hope *you* like Enhancement, since it looks like you did over 8 hours of parses there! Thanks. Regarding your results, they line up pretty nicely with what we have, within expected error. Our recent buff to all ratings effectively also buffed Elemental Blast, which we’ve since adjusted for (from 3500 down to 3000).

My newest source of confusion is Archimonde's Vengeance, the behavior of this spell when you don't use it's active ability at all is very inconsistent when tanking and I don't think it's worth testing it's active behavior until I understand it's current and intended mechanics. From what I can tell the ability is only "reflecting" boss special attacks and not "white" hits.

This is a known issue and is fixed for a future build. It should reflect white attacks but doesn’t in your current build.

What about dual-wielding pets like the Wrathguard and the Shivarra? Does the fact that their models display them as having weapons in both hands mean the game actually treats them as dual-wielders, meaning they will miss even if their master is spell hit capped?

Wrathguards and Shivarra are indeed actually dual wielding, with the benefits and detriments associated with that, and are balanced with that in mind. I believe there are a few bugs with that in your current build, but will be fixed. They should miss 19% more on white attacks, and deal 50% weapon damage with their offhand attacks. They will be hitcapped for specials if you are.

Will Echo be able to proc from Elemental's mastery? I would assume not, but the wording on the talent doesn't make it clear one way or the other.

Also, does the effect have any type of internal cool down?

Yes, Overloads can be Echoed. Echo only has a very short ICD to prevent it from triggering from multiple hits of the same spellcast.

Because as an additional note, as I've been viewing streams, DPS charts, and watching some raid testing videos as well as analyzing there parses, hunters are severely undertuned right now. Some of them aren't even able to out DPS the tank (and yes, I'm aware of marking on WoL to show pets, and even then they are dealing minimal damage).

If you have done this analysis, we would love if you shared it here.

How does the Affliction passive Nightfall work?

I ask because I've noticed some curious behavior with the procs (ignoring the fact that it's bugged and not currently granting a shard).

The tooltip says it has a 10% chance per tick of Corruption to generate a Soul Shard, which would mean that on average you'd get a shard every 10 ticks. Nightfall seems to be doing almost exactly that, on average I saw a shard about every 10-11 ticks, and the majority of my shards were generated between 8 and 13 ticks and the spread created a rough bell curve between about 3 and 18 ticks.

The thing is, if Nightfall were truly a flat 10% chance then that wouldn't happen. If you graphed out the number of ticks per proc at a 10% chance, you'd get a logarithmic curve with 10% of your procs happening at 1 tick, and slightly less than that every tick afterwards stretching on to infinity. You definitely wouldn't get a bell curve.

However, a stacking 5% chance per Corruption tick would fit the bill exactly. On average you'd get a shard every 10.5 Corruption ticks, with a standard deviation of nearly 2.5. You'd have a guaranteed shard at tick 20, and a possibility for a shard at tick one, but both aren't going to happen very frequently.

Additionally, as far as I can tell it appears that this effect uses all Corruption ticks from all sources, which has some interesting implications for mulit-target situations.

If this is what's happening, then you've gone a long way towards allowing for consistent shard generation for single targets, without nerfing multi-target shard generation (and vice-versa), which was a problem with ICDs and PPMs on multi-target, and low proc chances for single-target.

If you recall, early on in this thread, I talked about how we sometimes gloss over certain mechanics in tooltips, for the same of simplicity and understandability. This is one of those cases. A single shard is a really significant chunk of resource, so it can’t be a very high proc rate. But with a low proc rate, it’s very random, meaning that you regularly get fights where you get relatively few shards, and some where you get a ton of shards. We wanted it to still be somewhat random, so we went with a somewhat complex system under the hood that creates "smoothed" randomness, with a simple sounding cover on it (the tooltip). We didn’t expect players to really notice at all, so huge kudos to you; what you describe is almost exactly how it works. It’s actually a stacking 2% chance per Corruption tick, which averages out to an 11.7% proc chance. It does indeed count all Corruption ticks from all sources. I believe in your current build, it only is giving 1% on the first tick instead of 2%, but that’ll be fixed in the next build.

We don't think every proc needs this kind of treatment. Nightfall is kind of a big deal, so excessive RNG could cause balance or rotational problems.

Quick question reguarding death knight Bloodworm guardians, they seem to completely ignore the new hit / exp pet rules. It seems like the recieve no benefit from their master's hit / exp. They constantly sit at about a 15-16% total miss rate, which is pretty easily seen by looking at their damage breakdown.

Is this intentional, or are Bloodworms simply bugged?

Fixed for the next build; Bloodworms will get the same pet scaling as other pets, including Hit/Exp.

Wait wait, hold on. That's not how Roll works so I'm really confused.

Roll has 2 charges naturally, 20 second cooldown.

I use Roll once, 20 second timer starts.
I have another charge of Roll, so I use that in the next second, just like your example warrior.
After 20 seconds, I gain one charge and can use Roll again.
I have to wait another 20 seconds for the next Roll.

There aren't any A or B Rolls because each Roll charge regenerates one at a time. This means that outside of the first Roll, you've essentially got 1 Roll every 20 seconds. You're describing Double Time as 2 Charges every 20 seconds that only regenerate after both have been spent.

No, you're correct. I completely mangled my description. It's one of those deals that works fairly intuitively when you try it, but it kind of a bear to explain. I changed my original text above. It actually works quite a bit like death knight runes (which can also be confusing, so possibly not the best example).

If you have Double Time and use Charge A, then it comes back in 20 sec. If you use Charge B as soon as you can (which is 1 sec after Charge A), then it comes back in 40 sec. You aren't getting twice as many charges of Charge. You just gain flexibility -- you can borrow a charge from the future.

If that still sounds confusing, then I invite you just to try it. It is much more intuitive in game.

Mea culpa. I try to strive to strike a balance between spending time here but not too much time, because, you know, day job. Sometimes my brain works faster (or slower!) than my fingers. :)

Edit: Double mea culpa on my bad Latin.

Agreed on all accounts. Blood Tap may not be a huge dps increase, but it is still an increase and players will gravitate towards using BT. Removing Death Rune costs fixes the problem and allows players to freely choose whichever tier 75 talent they want without feeling penalized.

We're not even convinced it's an increase.

We don't like to get into the habit of sharing our numbers directly, because among other things, I have found it usually doesn't resolve anything. Instead it just leads to additional questions as players want to delve into rotation details or challenge our assumptions or otherwise grow the discussion broader, and often broader than our typical capacity in which to participate. For that reasons, and a few others, things usually work better if you share your numbers, we compare them to ours, and we decide what to do about any differences.

However, we will make an exception this time about Soul Reaper.

I think I originally threw out numbers like Soul Reaper doing 7% of Unholy's damage. Now that the stats on gear have solidified and we have fixed various bugs and so on, we do get higher numbers (see below), but never as high as the 20%+ numbers that sometimes appear on the forums. We do assume pooling a Death Rune for Soul Reaper to generate these numbers.

-- Using ilevel 463 gear, with no talents: 76.5% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.02% of total damage.
-- Using ilevel 463 gear with Blood Tap: 99.75% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 12.88% of total damage.
-- Using ilevel 463 gear with Runic Empowerment: 95.54% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.96% of total damage.
-- Using ilevel 463 gear with Runic Corruption: 87.08% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.09% of total damage.

So as many people claim, Blood Tap is optimal for maximizing Soul Reaper. But how does that play out in terms of total DPS over the course of a fight?

-- Blood Tap: 12.32% increase over having no talent.
-- Runic Empowerment: 12.41% increase over having no talent.
-- Runic Corruption: 14.02% increase over having no talent.

Unless you are on a fight with a very prolonged execute phase or one in which the execute phase is what matters most, we don't see Blood Tap as mandatory in terms of DPS. (We're also okay with situationally one talent being "the best" so long as it isn't the best on most fights. After all, an AE talent is useless on a one boss fight.)

Now, I realize some of you are arguing that Blood Tap is not a DPS increase, but that the rotation is so much simpler with Blood Tap that it still feels mandatory. That is sort of outside of the scope of this, a numbers thread, but we will consider the feedback.

Im a little confused as to how bloodbath is supposed to work. The tooltip leads me to think that I pop bloodbath, and 30% of the damage I did at the very beginning of bloodbath is distributed as a bleed over 6 seconds. After 6 seconds, the next attack triggers another set of bleeds based on 30% of that attack.

Bloodbath is just "your attacks do +30% more damage" in the form of bleeds. It has always seemed a little more confusing than intended though so maybe there is something else going on.

My guess is that it's like that because of how they changed mastery from being x points like in cata for everyone to actually displaying the percent from conversion for each spec.

We tried to simplify the concept of mastery. Before, mastery rating converted to mastery points which converted to an individual number for your spec (such as Deep Healing for Resto shaman). We cut out the middle man and just have mastery rating and your individual mastery now. It is intended to be analogous to crit rating converting directly to crit percent instead of crit rating converting to crit points which then convert to crit percent.

Was the 12% haste Holy pallies lost via removing Judgements of the Pure (9%) and Speed of Light (3%) intended or was it something you guys didn't notice? Also, are Holy Pallies supposed to have 2.4s cast times on HL/DL?

Intended. We tried to get rid of all of the passive talents and glyphs that just added haste and crit for the purpose of feeling like an attractive talent or glyph. We can add those stats back when needed, but we have been trying to avoid every spec having an arbitrary amount of crit, haste and hit, because it's confusing and complicates stat allocations on gear (a player with tons of crit stops wanting crit on gear). For paladins specifically, we did make Holy Shock crit more often than normal, and we added back Divine Favor recently to get back some "active" haste, and there are still some mechanics like Infusion of Light. If those aren't sufficient (in our minds), we can add more haste.

Do note however that if you are comparing a Dragon Soul-geared class to one in Mists quest greens, your ratings are going to take a hit. You'll get back up to epic-levels of combat ratings when you are epically geared once again. I have opined recently about the necessary evil of nerfing stat ratings every expansion and how we'd like to find an alternative that is more palatable, but it's a non-trivial problem. (We can't for example have characters going from 50% crit in one expansion to 100% crit in the next and 150% crit in the following.)

I have a question concerning Divine Hymm, why exactly was it removed from all specs except Holy? The holy version was far more powerful at a 3 minute cooldown whereas disc/shadow had it on an 8 minute cooldown.

Shadow doesn't need a potent raid cooldown and Disc has Power Word: Barrier. It's also not a written rule that every healer needs a certain allocation of cooldowns. We want the healer specs to feel unique yet relatively desirable.

Can you please comment on Monk hates levels.. in this patched the base energy regen went from 8/sec to 13/sec (and brewmasters getting 30% bonus)

It is supposed to be 8/sec. As often happens, fixing one bug apparently caused another.

Charge's Charge A starts recharging when Charge B is discharged, but Charge B doesn't recharge until Charge A's charge has recharged, making it so that after discharging Charge A, Charge's Charge B won't recharge a second charge for 40 seconds.

I heard you liked charging, so we put a charge on your Charge...

Does your data support the conclusion that Fervor is significantly better than Thrill of the Hunt, or is my experiment flawed? An indication of which statement is correct is sufficient for my purposes. I am willing to return to the drawing board and test these talents again.

Thrill of the Hunt is weak. We are considering moving Dire Beast up to the "focus tier" and redesigning Thrill of the Hunt a bit.

Currently on the MoP Beta servers (and in fact it seems ever since Flurry was implemented for Enhancement), if you can sync your auto attacks to happen at the same time, you are consuming only a single charge of Flurry for most of the synced mainhand/offhand swing combos.

Good catch. Fixed for next build, and increased the number of charges to 5 to partially compensate.

Is this very short ICD intended to prevent situations like Normal Cast/Echo Proc/Overload/Overload Echo Proc, or will these continue to occur?

Those will continue to occur.

Glyph of Mirror Image may be a bit problematic for a minor glyph. Problem is that if the Mage is Arcane, the Mirror Images benefit from the Arcane Blast debuff; this results in nearly a 40% increase to their damage, which is a pretty hefty improvement. Fire and Frost both seem to get (in 463 blues plus crafted epics) about 200,000 damage out of a Mirror Image cast, while Arcane gets about 280,000 damage.

We’ll take a look at this. We want it to contribute the same damage, but in a different way. Them benefitting from the Arcane Blast debuff is intended, but need to be tuned with that in mind.

Was the Flash of Light proc removed from Infusion of Light because of Selfless Healer? I'm sure you have read it countless times but that while not so important in PVE was EXTREMELY(emphasis) important in PVP.

No, it was more about the number of instant heals paladins already have through Holy Shock and Word of Glory. A common complaint we hear about paladins in PvP is: how do I stop them from healing when so many of their heals aren't subject to interrupts because they are instant?

You guys haven't gotten a build in awhile, but we've made a few changes to make Eternal Glory and Sacred Shield more competitive with Selfless Healer, and we're also likely to design Ascetic Crusader. We also reinstated Divine Favor, as I mentioned. (Unrelated to haste, we're also looking at Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn as well.)

If Holy still feels too slow after those changes, we'll consider other options, but we didn't want to make too many changes at once.

On top of that, paladins really don't need a 4th throughput cooldown. They already have Avenging Wrath, Guardian of Ancient Kings, and the level 75 talent.

That was our thought and Divine Favor seemed the least interesting of the bunch, but it is something a lot of paladins seem to miss (more so than many classes missing abilities that we removed).

Why isnt Runic Corruption becoming baseline for Death Knights like it was intended to become during the Wrath Beta?
Why do we have a talent tier with three talents that do numerically the same thing?
Your post proved there is no difference what-so-ever between the three and having played with all three on the beta myself I have no change in playstyle.

We added Runic Empowerment in Cataclysm to prevent the DK rotation from becoming too predictable and cyclical. However, it was a controversial change and there were DKs that didn't like it. (In general with an audience of WoW's size, you can find someone that loves or hates any feature, so part of our job is trying to determine when that love or hate crosses some kind of threshold). With the new talent model, we thought it would be a good opportunity to give DKs a choice about what resource model they wanted. If they didn't want a passive but potentially random rotation, they could opt into Blood Tap.

With my guardian demons, I have been noticing that they have a tendency to stand around and not attack on fights where the boss either changes forms, or in council fights.

Is this part of the pet AI overhaul coming, or are they just being stubborn?

If it is the later, is there a chance that we could get that by applying/reapply a curse to a target causes them to favor that target above doing nothing?

So to be clear, you are attacking the new target and the guardian is slow to respond? Or that it isn't smart enough to know the new target?

Is it intended that lower levels can now become unhittable through avoidance since the strength to parry conversion change?

No. We'll look into it.

Don't get me wrong, I see the DK issue and agree with it, but there's always going to be a theoretical gain of a few percent somewhere on something.

We can get pretty close in most situations. The examples I was talking about were a Vael-style boss who is in execute range the entire time, or the fact that a talent that improves your AE ability isn't as useful on a Patchwerk fight. If we made some kind of crazy fight where DPS specs had to heal for a short period of time, then they might really want healing talents. But those tend to be exceptions. There will be plenty of fights where a talent choice will be ambiguous or different talents will work better for different players.

GC, is it intended that paladins can't see their Seals as a buff icon anymore?
It's kinda confusing without it.

They are on the stance bar, so we figured it was redundant to see two icons.

While numbers are part of the argument, they take a big back seat to the fun argument.

Yes, fun is more important than numbers... but not in this thread. :)

If pushback protection is for all healers this will definitely help because for example a good mage could shut out a paladin for 5 seconds enough to completely gut a paladin, die or let the burst down of another team member.

All healers should have the same pushback baseline.

EDIT: Meant RE not RC.

One slight correction to something we said a while back:

White attacks are still ‘one roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block Glance Crit Hit), and yellow attacks are still ‘two roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block, Crit). The only change to that is that Block against players is an additional separate roll now.

Correction: Block is always a separate roll, not just on players. So white attacks are technically two rolls (Miss Dodge Parry Glance Crit Hit vs. Block NonBlock), and yellow attacks are technically three rolls (Miss Dodge Parry Hit vs. Block NonBlock vs. Crit NonCrit). However, please take care in discussing this, since "two roll" has historically meant that crit is rolled separately, which is NOT the case for white attacks.

Continuing on from this post: is Runic Corruption bugged? Some DKs are noticing that multiple procs of Runic Corruption in a row are leading to the buff getting a full 3 seconds added to it. Take an instance of 3 RC procs in a row with a 2.5 second duration. 3 RC procs in a row should grant 7.5 seconds, but in actuality, is giving us 8.5 seconds (2.5 + 3 + 3).

Could this bug possibly explain why Runic Corruption is doing so well for the devs and not the players?

Yes, that is exactly what is happening and is fixed for the next build. That should account for some of the difference between RC and RE.

Is it intentional that Bloodbath does not proc off Dragon's Roar?

Yes. We will change the tooltip to clarify that it only affects melee special attacks.

From the calculator I'm assuming this [healer pushback] is 70 percent right?

Yes.

Have you guys done the low level pvp pass that Zarhym mentioned in this thread many months back?

No, not yet. Good question. We like to make sure the changes we have for level 85-90 feel shippable before we look at things at lower level. Any abilities that stand out are certainly worth mentioning (anywhere in this forum) so we will be on the lookout for them.

Is there a chance that it could be tied to both Critical Block chance and Shield Barrier potency so Mastery is relevant to both our AM Buttons, like paladins got with their Bastion of Glory talent? (You could also bring back the "Hold the Line" name this way.)

We think Prot's mastery works. Block chance is still useful since you can't get 100% uptime of Shield Block. Shield Barrier is getting a lot of attention now because it works so well on easier dungeons and older content, but we expect warriors will still be using Shield Block a lot on tougher fights.

In Fury related news, is there any chance that Raging Blow could be looked at? It's still not very powerful or integral to Fury's rotation and only accounts for a small portion of Fury's overall DPS.

We agree that Raging Blow needs to hit harder. You should be excited about using it whenever it is available.

Is it intended that Rime proc Howling blast doesn't produce 10 Runic power? Also, using conversion while in frost spec/pres causes the RP generation to go from 20% to 100%.

Yes. RP generation is associated with spending runes. We’ve fixed the bug with Conversion interacting incorrectly with Frost Presence for the next build.

Frankly, I don't see buffing Telluric Currents to be the right approach for Shaman mana regeneration

The intent of Telluric Currents is free Lightning Bolts, not a healer mana regeneration system.

(The new priest talent, PW: Solace is intended to generate mana, but it is a talent that competes against other mana regeneration / conservation talents. Always remember when looking at healer mana that you have to look at the entire package, including the costs of heals themselves.)

Do the stats of temporary pets like Feral Spirits (ones that don't have a pet stats page) adjust dynamically according to thier master's stats? Or do they still take a "snap shot" of thier master's stats?

They update dynamically now; no more “snapshotting” of stats. The next build you all get should have most of the pet scaling issues I’ve mentioned previously fixed, so if you see things that aren’t working right, try them out in the next build.

Ouch, I was already fairly resource starved on the beta and figured this was (part) of the cause. If Rime no longer gives RP from it's HB, that's going to be super painful.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, it’s always been this way. On live, you probably have the Chill of the Grave talent, which increases Howling Blast’s runic power generation by 10, making it 20 naturally and 10 with Rime. Without Chill of the Grave, it generates 10 naturally, and 0 with Rime, which is what you’re seeing on beta.

Hi, I'd like to know what your stance on Vengeance affecting defensive abilities is. I remember Word of Glory during Cata specifically not being affected by Vengeance. Currently in MoP Expel Harm can go upwards of 120k~ non-crit, as well as other defensive abilities which are affected by Vengeance (Death Siphon, Lichborne Death Coil healing, Zen Sphere healing component, Shield Barrier). There are also others which are not (Anti-Magic Zone). Where doyou draw the line? (list non exhaustive).

Basically ,is it a bug that some only scale with AP from gear while others scale with Vengeace AP as well? If not, are there any that are scaling differently with Vengeance AP than they are with AP from gear? Eg. 1:1 scaling with gear from AP but 1:4 scaling with Vengeance AP?

Vengeance should work just like any other AP buff. For tanks, we explicitly make certain abilities scale with AP, so that they do become stronger while tanking. I think the simplest example is Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier. We want Shield Block to generally win against hard hitting (such as raid boss) creatures, and Shield Barrier to win against weaker hitting creatures. But we don’t want that difference to be so stark that the other feels useless in either situation. Shield Block naturally scales with the incoming damage. We made Shield Barrier scale with AP, since we know that your AP is also going to be higher when fighting those harder hitting creatures, thanks to Vengeance. If something scales off for AP and isn’t counting Vengeance that sounds like a bug. The one you mention, Anti-Magic Zone, scales with 400% of Str for Blood / Frost and 325% for Unholy (to counteract the +25% Str that Unholy gets). We didn't want AMZ to be significantly stronger for Frost or Unholy, such that you're asked to switch specs just to bring a stronger cooldown.

Is it intended that the stacks of Mana Tea a Mistweaver Monk can gain from doing DPS in Stance of the Fierce Tiger will persist through stance changes, and is it intended that in periods of downtime Mistweaver Monks are to use this fact in order to build up a reserve of Mana Tea at no cost other than what it takes to consume the stacks when later needed?

It's okay that the stacks persist, but you shouldn't be able to gain stacks in another stance.

The majority of people feel it should be 10/sec regen rate as a base. Though, the developers fully intend to bring it down to 8/sec, despite us all agreeing how starved we feel.

It's 8 for Windwalkers, with a +30% buff for Brewmasters to provide a 10.4 per second. The free Tiger Palms for Brewmasters (which you may or may not have yet - I can't remember) are intended to fill in for some of the down time.

I heard that several new builds are coming for testing. Good, and I really hope judgement of the pure will be back in any form. This is NOT about we need a buff, and I don't care how you spin your balancing, this is about the character of Paladin class. I hope that judgement to be back into holy paladin rotation and giving an effect called judgement of the pure.

Holy paladins being required to Judge was super controversial. I think we would cause a lot of unhappiness if we tried to bring it back. There are several talents that tie into using Judgment if you want to use it. We intend to handle the lower haste numbers by adding 10% spell haste into Seal of Insight.

Revenge - 4.5 sec cooldown. Instantly attack an enemy and two additional enemies for X damage. If Revenge is on cooldown, a successful dodge or parry refreshes Revenge. Generates 10 Rage in Defensive Stance.

We're going to try something like this (probably with a longer cooldown). It helps to cover up streaks of not getting to use Revenge. It does lose a tiny bit of the Revenge kit.

"Why does Holy Word: Sanctuary not benefit from haste like healing rain and Efflorescence. Is it intended?"

Not intended. It should benefit from haste.

Issue #1. Guardian dps seems to be EXTREMELY skewed towards mangle.

Issue #2. Guardian dps is pretty overpowered.

You are probably right on both counts. We'll look into it.

ust looking to ask on your stance (no pun intended.. kinda) on prot warriors and Heroic Strike / Cleave.

On live, I like where they stand, I use them frequently and am happy with that
On beta, they just arent worth using. Cleave itself hits for an astonishingly low amount, as with heroic strike. My main question is, are these abilities going to get buffed? Because even with the free heroic strike/cleave proc, It's just not worth using it over devastate. I know that it's not exactly on the gcd, but to me it's just not worth hitting the button for the extremely poor output. You could argue 'free damage is free damage' and i'd be okay with that, but i'm sure there's something else you could say :)

The rage cost on both the abilities on beta is SIGNIFICANTLY too high if the damage values are to stay the same.
It would be nice to get back to actually using those abilities instead of blindly spamming devastate until my fingers break :)

We are happy with the beta design for now. The idea is that we can't ask Prot warriors to spend Rage on offensive attacks if we are also asking them to spend resources on defensive abilities -- the defenses will just always win. The Ultimatum proc is there to let you use Heroic Strike and Cleave for free sometimes. When you aren't tanking (like you are solo or off-tanking) or when survival isn't a question (you're running an easier dungeon perhaps) then you can Heroic Strike instead of Shield Block or Barrier. As you point out, you can use Heroic Strike and Devastate at the same moment since they aren't on the same cooldown.

- Right now several Classes/Specs have extremely complicated AoE rotations, but do SIGNIFICANTLY LESS AoE damage than classes/specs that simply spam 1 or 2 abilities.

It's fine for specs to have different sorts of AE mechanics, but the simpler ones shouldn't also do the most DPS. (Granted, "DPS" when referring to AE has a lot to do with duration, area and and number of targets.)

Rune tap, and Death Pact (Possibly the whole level 60 tier of talents) are generating healing AE threat similar to that of regular healing. Is this intended? Seems rather odd, since the threat generated by the healing portion of death strike was removed. Both these healing abilities do generate AE threat on live as well, but they aren't modified by the thread modifier provided by blood presence like it does on beta.

Probably not. We'll discuss those. Specifically, as the poster mentions, the issue isn't the heals causing threat. The issue is the heal threat being magnified for a tank, such that you risk asking the tank not to use their self-heal for fear of pulling stuff off of the other tank.

Call of the Elements and the ability to reset the cooldowns of SLT/MTT/HTT potentially twice in one fight is far too good for either of the other talents to match up with it.

Call of the Elements resetting long cooldowns might give it too much synergy with other talents. We're considering having it effect fewer cooldowns but giving itself a shorter cooldown.

TANKING AVOIDANCE STATS

- Theck over at Sacred Duty mapped out avoidance stats and DR's.

Is it intended that the DR curve for dodge is 2-3x as punishing as for parry?

In other words, is it intended that tanks are going to be stacking parry over dodge by a 3:1 ratio?

Yes and no. Plate tanks now get a very significant amount of parry from Strength (the same amount that druids get dodge from Agility). So yes, plate tank parry is going to be significantly higher than their dodge. We want parry rating and dodge rating on gear to be of similar value, so we drastically eased the diminishing returns on parry for these classes. Saying that tanks are going to be “stacking parry over dodge by a 3:1 ratio” is probably exaggeration; we’re expecting you to naturally get Strength on gear, giving you the majority of your parry, and then favor parry rating and dodge rating roughly equally beyond that. There’s still some tweaking to be done to get that more tightly tuned (especially since our recent change to ratings of only needing ~85% as much rating to get the same result as before), but it’s in the right ballpark.

That talent is the only thing keeping Rshamans wanted due to our lack of spread healing(Double HTT helps with that). If you remove that ability you might as well leave us how we were in T11/T12 due to lack of such healing. It also doesn't help the other two choices are not even a choice due to how bad they are. You can make Cote a 30 minute cd and we would still take it.

We don't want Resto shaman to be balanced around a mandatory talent, and you probably don't want that either. The design we are trying internally right now is letting it reset all totem cooldowns less than 3 minutes, but lowering its cooldown to 3 minutes.

From the logs I have seen so far we are either behind other healers or barely equal in select cases with regards to healing numbers and I pray hardmodes will solve this due to our mastery. Not to mention our mana regen is nothing to brag about

We look at all of those logs and watch many, many raid boss attempts. If you have specific cases where you feel like shaman aren't competitive healers or struggle with mana, please point those out (but as I have said, Mistweavers are an outlier right now, not the target.) Specific examples are much more useful to us (and I suspect other players) than general "well, what if there's a fight with these parameters?"

A simple quick glance at this list clearly shows the cheapest spell for shaman being more expensive than ANY priest spell in either spec.

As other players pointed out:

Flash Heal costs 19,800 mana.
Healing Surge costs 18,960 mana.

In any case, as I said, you have to look at the whole package. Healing Rain heals for a lot, but it's also not a cheap spell. Paladin heals appear very expensive, yet they have a lot of free heals. Healing Surge's throughput is propped up partially by Tidal Waves. I also know shaman like to call Mana Tide Totem a raid cooldown and not a personal cooldown, but it still gives you mana. If you just stand their OOM with Mana Tide available, your raid leader may scratch her head.

Is it intended for Elemental Blast to give a random buff instead of your increasing your highest stat?

Yes.

Is it intended for Glyph of Riptide to not proc Resurgence?

No. We’re changing Glyph of Riptide to reduce the healing done by Riptide’s initial heal by 90%, instead of removing it, so that it still functions with Resurgence, Ancestral Awakening, Echo of the Elements, etc.

If this is the prefered design why do Guardians have to spend rage for Maul? It has been stated a few times that Maul would never be used except to solo things (an only if the damage comes up).

Maul is still a DPS button. It may not be one you use often, but there will be times when you don't care about surviving (when the boss needs to die NOW, or even when you're solo or running a scenario perhaps). We may eventually end up adding a proc or something (hopefully not exactly like Ultimatum), but we're not sure it's needed. At the moment Guardian damage is too high, so encouraging more Mauls isn't super high priority. :)

P.S.

As an administrative note, we deleted several posts that were off-topic to the thread. This is not a thread to offer suggestions, generic concerns, or opine about how you feel neglected. The first two issues are totally appropriate for other threads (the third is rarely appropriate). No offense is intended.

Most of the posts in this thread should be some form of "I don't understand how this mechanic works, so I can't model it," or "Here are some calculations / estimations / or PvE parses."

Right now, the specs with the spammiest AoE are doing a lot more damage. I'm harping on Destro's AoE as an example of a stupidly complex AoE rotation that does very weak damage.

Ultimately, Destro is largely using their single target spells to do AE along with Rain of Fire. You can also prepare for the ramp up by saving up embers just before the AE moment starts.

- Pyroclasm -
Is it intended for it to be a dps loss to use the Backdraft charges on CB?

For maximum sustained damage, you will probably do better using Backdraft on Incinerate. There are times when burst damage is more important though, and faster Chaos Bolts will be attractive.

I say this with a little tongue in cheek, but for some players, winning meters is more important. For others, beating the boss is. :)

- Dark Soul -
Are you happy with the benefit that each spec is deriving from this cooldown? Right now, Destro yet again feels like it falls behind because RNG can significantly negate the benefits of its cooldown (i.e. - you may not crit any more than you would normally; it's even possible to crit less frequently during its duration!

Well, Chaos Bolt always crits, so you can align them with Dark Soul....

This honestly bothers me a hell of a lot, because when you nerf energy regen for monks, you're making their best tanking stat haste.

It's a good stat for Brewmasters for sure, and it needs to be because monks will have haste on their gear. However, Brewmasters probably have the most valuable secondary stats of any spec in the game. They don't really have bad stats, and their good stats aren't a ton better than others. (If you think that isn't the case, please feel free to argue that point though.)

Based on my testing so far with the snake trap formula, it looks like snake trap is going to be doing enough damage (at least for SV) that we would want to include it in our rotation (assuming I calculated the scaling right).

You're probably right, and we don't want Snake Trap to be used rotationally. We do want Snake Trap damage to be in the non-joke range. We'll try to find some middle ground.

I don't understand why the 30s reduction in the outbreak CD was removed in contradiction to this portion in the article. Was it to make the first tier of talents more viable?

We feel like the short Outbreak for Blood wasn't a great design. It was probably the right choice at the time, but in Mists, every tank will have to focus more on what were traditionally DPS abilities (since they translate to resources and therefore threat). We didn't think it was compelling gameplay to let Blood opt out of disease transmission. That said, you can get a lot of the gameplay back through Unholy Blight if you choose.

It's especially bad if they keep this constant, quick nerf method that DS experienced. As Enhancement, I have rampup AoE, which means my numbers on fights like Yor'sajh and Madness have gone down as the nerfs have gone up because I no longer have sufficient time to get my AoE going before everything's dead.

Like I said earlier, it felt like the guys designing the classes' AoE never coordinated with the guys designing fights. It doesn't really matter if my AoE 20 seconds in is OMGWOWAWESOME if there's never a fight where AoE lasts for 20 seconds.

Class designers and encounter designers are all part of the same team. There is even some overlap in office space. You may also have tried a boss in Mists where you need to AE for five minutes or more.... At the risk of turning classes against each other, if you think there are specs that are essentially just channeling Blizzard and going from 0 to 100% very quickly, please let us know. We are more likely to adjust those than we are to give every spec very simple, boring AE rotations given that AE is more of a thing even on bosses these days.

The argument that you aren't contributing meaningful DPS on nerfed content is a little tough to address. It is most important for every spec to be able to contribute on cutting-edge content, when the risk of class stacking is at its greatest. Most reasonable players understand that as content gets nerfed, fights will get shorter and shorter, and that allows different cooldowns and mechanics to shine. If your raid leader is threatening to sit you because of your AE DPS on very easy content, then maybe he's avoiding telling you the real reason. (I jest.)

In the current beta build, survival's damge is being hindered by explosive shot ticking for almost less than a serpent sting tick.

In ilevel 460, I show Serpent Sting ticking for about 6K and Explosive Shot ticking for about twice that. Overall, Explosive Shot contributes 3x or 4x as much damage as Serpent Sting. What are you seeing?

Of course it affects our regen, and of course we are going to use it. However, the problem is that it also gives the same amount of mana to every other healer in the raid. Because every other healer gets Mana Tide plus Divine Plea/Shadowfiend/Innervate, Shaman regen will naturally feel lower than that of other classes (and probably output will also be lower because of not having a personal regen cooldown).

We like Mana Tide Totem's group benefit though. If Resto shaman struggle with mana, then we'd more likely buff the mana return from Resurgence rather than give them another cooldown. (We could also have Mana Tide give more mana to the shaman, but then you might have to make an unfun decision about whether your mana needs were more important than the other healers.)

It feels extremely weak while PvPing, have you played survival in a bg recently? You can barely make a difference without spamming cobra shot.

Survival gets a lot of damage from dots, which is just a different model than Marks. We can push damage numbers around a bit (perhaps nerf Cobra Shot so it's not quite so much of an upgrade over Steady Shot) but at some point that's just going to mean the difference between MM and SV is the name of their signature shot. Dots also can be really powerful in PvP. I would want to see some more testing before determining that Survival needs very high burst damage to be PvP viable.

90% of your playerbase lives outside of truly cutting edge content. Most of them have damage meters. Whether you like it or not, a large part of the fun of DPSing is getting to see your name at or near the top of the meter every now an then. When there are certain phases (namely AoE here) where by default you know you have ZERO chance to see your name there, it's a little depressing.

Ultimately that's why all of this matters. You may feel it's shallow, and that's certainly your right to feel that way. It doesn't change that it's a huge part of how players get valued, and value their own experience.

We understand that winning meters can be fun. We're not going to design encounters around that though. There are DPS checks, but sometimes they are to beat the boss before the healers run out of mana or before the boss enrages, and other times they are to kill a key add in an even shorter window. Players already know ways to pad meters by cleaving adds that don't matter and the like. Overall, we don't think we're doing anyone a favor by emphasizing DPS meters even more than they already are. We'll commit to making sure you don't feel like a third wheel on any fight, especially when it's new or within the first couple of progressive nerfs.

I was puzzling it over, but it would be nearly impossible to guarantee that even when we nerf encounters to 20%+ that the relative damage dealt by everyone is going to stay in sync. When the length of a fight shortens so that you can no longer squeeze your 3-minute cooldown into the fight twice, that's going to have an impact. I understand the concern, but I'm not sure of a reasonable way to solve it. We're not going to buff and nerf classes every time we do the progressive nerfs -- that would feel crappy to everyone I think.

Because it was the only time where it was really controversial?

It's easy to play the "I didn't see feedback on X, therefore there wasn't feedback on X" card. We wouldn't have removed Judging for haste if plenty of players hadn't told us they hated the mechanic. If there's a mechanic the developers don't like, I'm more than happy to state that, so there isn't a need for us to invent some kind of silent majority to justify changes. You'll just have to trust me that when I say we heard feedback, that it really exists.

Related, we don't remove mechanics just because we receive negative feedback on them (or else there would be nothing left in the game!); it's a balancing act, based on how much feedback we here from different vectors (keeping in mind that we have a lot of players who don't post on US or even English forums), the logic made in the argument, how much the argument makes sense to us, how much we respect the arguers, and so on. There's no red meter on the office wall that we can read, and even if there was, sometimes the right answer is still one that may be unpopular in the community (at least at that moment). But I digress.

Can we have some on demand burst with survival's LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot...

What numbers are we talking about? Trying this out right now, in 463 gear, with no outside buffs, a non-crit Chimera Shot does 40 K damage. Three Explosive Shots do a total of 80 K damage, non-crit. (It's possible our numbers are different from beta at this point.)

If that's the case, can we look into removing Ember decay?

Embers don’t decay until you’ve been out of combat for 30 sec, and decay at a rate of one every 25 sec. So if you’re spending a full minute between pulls, you’ll lose 1 ember. It shouldn’t feel particularly punitive. You may be remembering how it felt several builds ago, where they started decaying immediately and decayed one every 10 sec.

We aren't trying to be punitive here. What we want to avoid is the warlock feeling like the right way to play is to go build up full embers before any boss encounter or other serious fight. That stops feeling like breaking the rules in a fun way and starts to feel like a chore. "Let me eat food, drink a flask and go find something to build up my embers."

It's not about the QQ. Yeah, other tanks get it free. So what? Classes are different.

What we need to focus on is the consequences of this change. To put it briefly, blood DKs will ignore diseases beyond using the free outbreak to maintain 50% uptime.

This is great feedback because it focuses on the consequences of things, not complaints or lobbying for buffs. While this thread aims to be all about theorycraft, there is still a place for useful feedback that doesn’t include numbers, and this post is a great example of that.

We recognize that DKs (and to a much much lesser extent warriors) currently need to sacrifice their tanking performance in order to put up Weakened Blows, and are looking at some possible solutions to that issue. We’re currently trying out a change where the Scarlet Fever passive for Blood DKs also makes Blood Boil refresh your diseases on targets it hits, but are exploring other options as well. With warriors it's trickier, but one option is to have Thunder Clap generate a tiny bit of rage. It might be fine for warriors as is though.

I don't know if it's something new to level 86+ players but to me it seems like there is a new, unforeseen formula when calculating the Agility to Dodge variable. On my level 85 Worgen Druid on the beta, I can easily get the 243.58281085 Agility to Dodge conversion working. It does appear that Base Agility is now being affected by the Agility to Dodge (whereas on live it is not).

All Agility (base and bonus) grants dodge at a rate of 951.158596 to 1% at level 90. However, dodge from bonus Agility and dodge rating is affected by diminishing returns. “Bonus” Agility refers to all Agility beyond what you have with no gear/buffs (for example, a level 90 troll Druid has 97 base Agility and all other Agility is Bonus).

Glyph of Chaining is incredibly weak, such that Shaman would be better off electing to handle AOE raid damage on a spread raid as we have since Ulduar--through single-target healing.

The glyph is getting a lot of use for dungeons and 10-player raiding. It's not going to be as attractive across the board in 25-player raiding because there are usually some groups around in which you can use an unglyphed Chain Heal. The melee are often grouped for at least part of any fight, and in a 25, there are usually plenty of melee.

Glyph of Riptide. Points about the lack of AA and Resurgence procs aside (because they were addressed earlier), what concerns me most about this glyph is the usage that it's seeing by shaman in the Beta, who are recording parses where RT is their primary or secondary heal because of its Rejuv-spam-like application. This practice essentially devalues Tidal Waves management and spell weaving in favor of RT blanketing.

We like the Glyph of Riptide quite a bit because it really opens up a different healing style. You can act like a druid and blanket the group with hots, which might sometimes be really effective or at the very least give you a different style of healing to try. If it looks like every shaman is going to take the glyph, we'll nerf it, but as you point out, it has downsides (like Tidal Waves).

Agree 100%, I think GC is too stuck on balencing for pve right now, not really looking into how sirvival feels in pvp, rather just saying "dots are powerful in pvp", not really, especially when the enemy has heals. And survival has no burst even with the current LnL. Not to mention dispell protection, but dispells are on a 6 second cd now..

We are stuck on numbers for purposes of this thread, and numbers just don't relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE. It's easier (but not trivial) to demonstrate that (for sake of argument) Survival's damage is lower than Marks. It's much harder to argue that Survival has PvP challenges because of that theoretical disparity. If you have PvP concerns, those are totally appropriate things to relay somewhere in this forum. Not having enough CC or group utility or whatever aren't really related to understanding theorycrafting and rotational analysis, which is the purpose of this thread.

Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.

At the time we thought it was a problem. I'm not sure it's going to be a problem in Mists, but feel free to try and prove us wrong. Do you think that ranged weapon damage is going to grow faster in subsequent tiers than RAP is (keeping in mind that ranged weapons are now balanced like two-handed weapons)?

Part of our testing is to look at theoretical damage in subsequent and even final tiers. As I said before, we don't know yet what set bonuses and trinkets will look like, and it's possible we will tweak the design or numbers of a few abilities by then, but we do have a pretty good guess of how things will fall out. (To be fair, we used to suck at scaling. In vanilla there were some abilities that did a percent of attack power and some that just did flat numbers and that was that. We have gotten a lot better at keeping everything scaling with gear at about the same rate, particularly in the last two expansions.)

Question regarding Soul Reaper: assuming it costs Runic Power

We have no idea if it will cost Runic Power yet. Runic Power works okay for Unholy, but it creates a really bad rotation for Frost in execute range as you try to juggle Frost Strikes (which is why we didn't go that route to begin with). We need some time to try some things out before we're happy enough with Soul Reaper to turn you guys loose on it again.

I would IMAGINE it would be additional ticks/akin to Efflor, but am just looking for clarity. (I ask also, so we can start calculating how Haste will affect HW: Sanc from a breakpoint perspective...)

Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.

Also, CS seems to hit like a wet noodle currently in beta vis a vis HotR

Are you using a white weapon for those numbers or something like that? We show Crusader Strike hitting for about 10K and HotR for 6K in gear similar to yours.

Awesome. Basically it was the tooltip applying the diminishing returns on Agility and not on Dodge that was throwing everything off. With that, we should have better evaluations from the Guardian community.

Yeah, we will try to add dodge from Agi to the Agi and dodge tooltips. Currently they’re just included in the title of each of those tooltips, which are final values after summing all of the sources and applying DR. The “(before diminishing returns)” line in the dodge tooltip, refers just to the “dodge of X adds Y% dodge” line, not the total. It’s somewhat confusing right now. All of this goes for Strength / parry as well.

GC -- if you dont mind me asking -- what is the armor value for lvl 93 raiding dummies?

Theck needs that data for some of his calculations.

I'm not GC, so this isn't official, but the armor number I've gotten from other sources is 24835 for the 93 dummies.

And yet, you never see Zeherah and GC anywhere at the same time. Coincidence? In any case, the number 24835 is correct.

When he says 3 Explosive Shots adding to 80k, he's referring to the individual ticks.

I meant the entire shots, not ticks. Remember that the periodic effect is rolling now, so looking at individual ticks can be misleading when multiple Explosive Shots are chained back to back to back, so we look at entire shots instead.

Weapon modifier scaling is simply more fluid and linear. It benefits from both weapon upgrades and from additional AP as more AP boosts that +WDPS% that gets calculated in our shot coefficients.

Totally agree that certain classes/specs have scaled slower or faster than others in the past, but we’re not convinced that the only solution is to make everything an equal component of AP and weapon damage percent.

These are just hypothetical numbers, but if you have two shots, one of which does 100% weapon damage + 1700, and one which does 60% Attack Power, both of those shots will stay the same damage both in 463 gear, and gear at the end of the expansion. If you upgrade just your weapon, the 100% weapon damage will be ahead. If you upgrade just your armor, the %AP one will be ahead. We’re fine with the idea that when a new tier of content opens up, and you get a new weapon, Marksmanship (for example) gets slightly more of a boost from that than Survival. But if you upgrade a few pieces of armor first, Survival gets slightly more of a boost. And once you upgrade all of your gear, they’re equal again. If the two didn't reach the same target (which has happened in the past) then there would be a problem.

I understand and agree with your reasoning but if embers, rage, demonic, runic and holy power decay and, if you stretch the definition a little, combo points do too, why doesn't chi? Is it intended?

Chi does decay out of combat, or at least it should. It does in our current build.

Essentially, is smart healing based on absolute heath values or on relative health percentage. Further, does smart healing have an inherent 'priority', preferring to heal say, Tanks over healers over DPS?

The logic for target selection on smart heals is potentially customized for each heal, but the general behavior is that they choose their target(s) based on % health, and prefer players over pets and guardians. The specific example you’re asking about, Glyphed Surging Mist, is slightly tweaked from that in that it only smart heals players, not pets or guardians at all, unless you’re channeling Soothing Mist at them.

Once upon a time there were like two smart heals in the game and now there are probably dozens. We need to eventually sit down and see if they should all use a more consistent system. (It may be fine for some of them to work differently in the name of being different too.)

But I don't need them to be equal when I've cleared all the content, I need them to be equal when I actually getting the gear and I need my abilities to scale.

If we were talking about a situation where the hunter with the new bow gets a 10% DPS increase and the hunter going for armor had to piece together an entire set of armor to get that 10% DPS increase, then that could be a problem, but it's not nearly that extreme. It's more on par with one spec that prefers haste and gets a haste trinket while the guy who likes crit has to wait a couple more weeks for a crit trinket. We want different specs to favor slightly different types of stats and items, and it's always possible for one player's current collection of gear to favor one spec or another at that moment. We don't see it as an inherent advantage for Marks, and in fact it can be a disadvantage if the weapon drops late in the zone, or has no vendor equivalent.

We can take another look at the damage scaling from just weapon damage in subsequent raid tiers (for all specs) and make sure it feels appropriate to us.

In regards to the Explosive Shot ticks vs shots, why in the world are we comparing 3 individual shot casts to a single shot? That's just a simple curiousity in order to understand your PoV on the topic Ghostcrawler.

That was the context. The original (probably hyperbolic) claim, IIRC, was that a Lock and Load proc didn't beat a Chimera Shot.

It's not intended that every attack in the game do equal damage, and as I said before, we think the choice of hunter spec would be pretty lame if all you got was a different icon and name for essentially the same attack. Lock and Load is two free / instant shots, and a Survival hunter tends to fire about three times as many Explosive Shots as a Marks hunter fires Chimera Shots, and the three Lock and Load shots is the burst damage that a Survival hunter would want to use for a kill window in PvP. The comparison seemed reasonable to me.

Is the splash heal from Daybreak Holy Shocks intended to not apply mastery?

Bug. Daybreak splash should apply Illuminated Healing.

I've got some concerns about the damage of Arcane Shot versus Cobra Shot. GC has said regarding Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn that it doesn't feel very good for the builder to do more than the spender, and I think this applies here too. I'm in the vendor pvp gear fully gemmed except the meta and my Arcanes are hitting for 15-20k (so we'll say an avg 17.5k for calculating purposes) and my Cobras are hitting for 22-27k (24.5k for calculating). I went ahead and reforged for the raid levels of hit and expertise and then crit, leaving me with 5.36% haste, which brings my Cobras to a 1.9 second cast.

We agree that Arcane Shot should probably beat a Cobra Shot. It's something we can adjust as we continue to refine hunter numbers.

Can you clarify on what you mean by losing some of the Revenge kit?

I just meant that "Revenge" makes more sense to hit someone back after they hit you, not Charge in and exact revenge against a creature that has never seen you before. It's a minor point. Kit is important to the game, but fun is too.

Also, are you able to elaborate on your previous comments about Dire Beast's tier move and Thrill of the Hunt's redesign? Like are there any thoughts on this that you would be willing to share? Both potential changes actually have pretty substantial impact on the playstyle of the Beast Mastery Hunter, far more than the other two specs.

This is sort of like the Soul Reaper problem, where giving a hint of something without you guy being able to dive into all the details and trying it out ends up producing more questions than answering anything. However, for the same reason I mentioned Soul Reaper (we didn't want DKs to keep spending effort exploring it when we're potentially going to redesign it), I'll offer a little.

At the moment, Dire Beast is on the same tier as Fervor and Thrill of the Hunt. Thrill of the Hunt has been redesigned to make Arcane or Multi-Shots free. Readiness is no longer a talent and we might try it as a core ability in some form. There is a new talent called Blink Strike with Murder of Crows and Lynx Rush. Blink Strike lets your pet teleport behind a target and cause damage on a 20 sec cooldown, somewhat like the old Warp Stalker ability. We are trying to preserve the idea of Murder of Crows in a format that is more performance friendly (as I said before, creating units is surprisingly tough on the client). Try not to make assumptions about the numbers of any of these until you get a chance to try them.

I did some extensive mathematics on warrior tankiing, more precisely, Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier.

Short Version: There is currently nearly no reason for any warrior to use Shield Block. The amount of physical damage done by a boss melee swing to be high enough that the 30%/60% block outshines the absorb puts it out of reach of the vast majority of the playerbase. Obviously, this is even more true with non-blockable or magic damage, but even with the kind of attacks that can be blocked, Shield Barrier is just plain better for everything other than non-nerfed 25H bosses who use debuffs on the tank.

Thanks for the great analysis.

The scaling we chose for Shield Barrier was to keep it competitive with Shield Block with very high end gear (beyond even the gear available in the first tier). The problem is this is one of those situations where linear AP scaling can't really fit the curve nicely. Shield Barrier (and by extension Frenzied Regen) will either be too good at low gear levels or too weak at high gear levels. We could use a more complex curve, such as squaring attack power as long as that doesn't prove confusing. For sake of argument, imagine that Shield Barrier (and Frenzied Regen) is roughly half as strong as it is on beta when you're in greens, but scales up in strength about 50% faster than it currently does.

Hey GC, I'm fairly positive there's some crunching or something weird going on with Bloodbath for both Arms and Fury (and likely Prot as well). I noticed its damage seemed a bit low when I was testing it, but never really got around to seeing if it was truly bugged or something until today.

We’re not able to reproduce any discrepancy. Maybe you’re seeing some because you’re using Bloodbath in the middle of doing your rotation, making it difficult to clearly identify which attacks were made with Bloodbath active and which weren’t (combat log timestamps aren’t necessarily 100% reliable for this). Can you reproduce this if you hit Bloodbath, wait a second, then start attacking, and then stop using any specials at least a second before Bloodbath ends? This shouldn’t be an issue in practice, but the exact timing of the buff going up and fading make analysis of it difficult. It’s possible that there’s a bug with some damage being munched, and we want to solve that if so.

Is it still intended for block to have diminishing returns? I'm looking at some data this evening, and as far as I can tell we're getting exactly 1% block for every 1% mastery all the way up to around 38% block (which is as high as my data set goes). If there were any meaningful DR on block (i.e., a cap lower than 1000 or so), I should have seen some nonlinearity by that point. But it's perfectly linear.

The data set is gathered from the character sheet, so it's possible (though unlikely, in my mind) that the character sheet block percentage just isn't updating properly.

Nope, Block chance does not DR.

I haven't tested this myself, but I had read somewhere that the new weapon chain (Living Steel Weapon Chain) is designed to also be applied to ranged weapons. The spell description says "Requires One-Handed Axes, Two-Handed Axes, Bows, Guns, One-Handed Maces, Two-Handed Maces, Polearms, One-Handed Swords, Two-Handed Swords, Staves, Fist Weapons, Daggers, Crossbows"

That is the intent, yes.

Is this intentional or has aimed shot just not been tweaked yet to use a more straightforward formula?

We can give it a more sane formula. The damage it does is about in the right place.

Hey GC, sorry to ask/bother you again -- but is Divine Purpose supposed to have synergy with Hammer of Wrath, that the tooltips are not telling us? Also asking because it also affects how valuable the talent is with this extra synergy -- since it affects gameplay in an execute phase.

Just a bug left over from the Cataclysm version. Divine Purpose should proc from Word of Glory, Templar's Verdict, Inquisition, Eternal Flame, Shield of the Righteous, Light of Dawn and Divine Storm.

I am also wondering if we will see any Compensation for this nerf to our mana and our throughput as from what I seen we are not the top of the pile in healing or mana for beta. And like you pointed out it cuts out about 8% of our total healing and a big chunk of mana

As I said before, Resurgence and Water Shield are where we would add back Resto shaman regen if needed. It felt a little low last week so we might do that. Determining whether healer mana is sufficient is a slow process for us because it takes lots of testing (theoretical and in game) under a variety of situations. It's impractical to "target dummy" healing.

As it stands now there are no useful glyphs for Holy PvE since Ascetic was removed, Blessed Life nerfed and, while Battle Healer was buffed, it's still weak.

Every Holy paladin was taking those glyphs, which removed the choice about which glyph to use. Battle Healer is tricky to balance for Holy, because it wouldn't take much for every paladin to feel forced into melee, which isn't the intent. It should be an option.

So the question is, was blood tap meant to have a gcd and what was the thought process in adding one to the ability if it was meant to be added?

We didn't want DKs to feel the need to macro it into every ability, which is how it was trending. DKs have a 1 sec GCD now and free globals so we don't think it's too much of a hardship.

Hey GC, did you all do something intentional to rage generation? It was 5 rage per second for MH strikes and 2.5 rage for OH strikes (full report here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5978458015?page=7#129). Now it seems to have been reduced to 2.5 rage per second for MH strikes and 1.25 rage per second for OH strikes. Is this intentional or a bug of some kind?

We lowered it. Fury had an abundance of Rage for sure. For Arms, we need to balance the number of free attacks (CS, MS and OP) vs. the spenders (HS and Slam). There is some incentive to sit on Heroic Strikes to build up the stack rather than use them whenever possible, but if you sit on them too long, then you will overflow with Rage. We are trying to engineer a decision about when to Heroic Strike and when to Slam instead, but that decision is dependent on not having too much Rage (especially before everyone is geared in epics in the very first tier).

I acknowledge that this is different feedback than we have received from some players, so there may be something else going on. The feedback is never clear cut because we know that there are warriors out there who never want to feel rage limited and want to essentially be a cooldown-driven class and it's hard to separate that feedback from the players who understand the design intent.

Is Sacred Shield limited to one target still? The talent would be tremendously better if it had a small target cap.

Also just to confirm EF does not longer have a target cap? It's still pretty limited without one but just wanting to confirm.

Sacred Shield is limit one. We could consider removing the target cap, but I suspect since it is free now you might see paladins trying to blanket a group and ignore their other spells, which would have gameplay and balance ramifications.

Eternal Flame does not have a target limit. It is in nearly every way a Word of Glory that also has a hot component. One exception is that Eternal Flame does not work with Harsh Words.

Do we still need to wait another build before testing pet scaling, or can we get started once we drag ourselves away from pet battles?

Yes, please go nuts. Warlock pet energy regen is something we are still futzing with so that may still be a little squirrely.

1. Lightning Shield does not appear to be able to proc Echo of the Elements. Intended?

Intended.

2. With Unleashed Fury, it appears that synchronized weapon swings might be suffering from a hidden cooldown on Static Shock.

Another good catch. Fixed for next build.

I thought it would have been fixed in this build, but Drain Soul is doing too much damage out of Execute.

There’s a bug in the current build you have, where Drain Soul is doing significantly more damage than it should (triple, I believe), all the time. That should be fixed for the next build.

Is it intended for Eternal Flame not to consume Bastion of Glory because its not consuming it (while WoG still is)?

Unintended. Fixed for next build.

Can you tell us a bit about the changes to Stormlash Totem? Pre-patch i was getting 1mil dmg single target from two Stormlashes on a 10min test, Post-patch I got 220k on the same test.

The build you just got includes our latest pass at tuning Stormlash Totem. It is not intended to be on the same scale as Bloodlust in value to a raid. Some specs will get more benefit from it than others, but everyone should get at least something out of it. In particular, Stormlash will favor class abilities and passives that increase all damage, or that increase nature damage. But, in the grand scheme of things, Stormlash shouldn’t be a major impact on class/spec balance, even if one spec gets double the damage from it another spec does, since its total damage contribution isn’t a significant percent of a player’s total damage.

Fundamentally, there’s a base Stormlash damage, which is currently (but may be too strong) 30% of SP or 20% of AP. Then, various attacks deal a percentage of that base damage. Auto attacks deal 40% of base for main-hands, and 20% for off-hands, and are normalized to a 2.6 weapon speed. Spells and abilities generally deal 100%, and are normalized to a 1.5 sec cast time. It generally only procs from direct non-periodic damage, but there are exceptions for Mind Flay, Malefic Grasp, and in the next build Drain Soul. Finally, we do customize these formulae for certain spells which we want to tune to be stronger or weaker, to make up for significant deficiencies or proficiencies.

I just tested the new Army of the Dead with pet scaling fixes. At level 90 in full 483 PvP gear it dealt 297k damage. AoTD lasts 40s, so that's 7.43k DPS. It does not seem to be scaling any better than before.

Just for comparison, how does an Army of the Dead compare to, say, a Scourge Strike, a Festering Strike, and 2 auto attacks? I don’t have numbers in front of me on that, but it seems like 297k would significantly outweigh that, which is what you’re giving up to Army (well, plus 6sec of disease time, to be fair).

How are the devs feeling about Fae Empowerment?

We’d definitely still like more feedback on Fae Empowerment. I don’t want to taint feedback too much with what we think about it, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s gotten a bit on the complex site, now that it provides the DPS boost we’re looking for. How it breaks up the rotation, and how it feels to use Faerie Fire rotationally, how that contributes to the feeling of repetitiveness, etc, are all things we’d love more feedback on.

The intended design is that we never fill all our GCDs, except maybe while Avatar and/or Bloodlust are up. So we'll never get close to where we were.

Slam is the rage dump, which only works if you have the ability to use Slam when you need to dump rage. This means you need empty GCDs. Always. At every gear level.

I'd say that when you use cooldowns (even things like Battle Shout and Storm Bolt), it's fine to use every GCD, but that means there are times when you don't fill every GCD either.

We also don't have a problem with warriors eventually filling every GCD when they have the maximum amounts of haste and crit possible in the final tier of gear. But that needs to be an eventual destination, not where everyone starts in quest blues.

We don't want Arms to stand around waiting for 2-3 Mortal Strikes before being able to afford a Slam, even in quest blues. (We also don't think that's happening.) Once you have enough Rage to Slam regularly, then the only thing to spend Rage on is Heroic Strikes. Once you're able to hit Heroic Strike almost on cooldown, then there is no little room for warriors to scale with haste and crit (you'll get the extra damage of course, which is always nice, but you won't have the rage). We don't want to reach that point anytime soon.

Last Build, Feral Spirits had a minimum (character un-geared) damage range of ~555 to ~833 at level 85. In the latest build, their base damage is now 516-517. Is there a reason their damage was nerfed and the range reduced to Base+1?

The base damage may have been reduced to line up with where we wanted the desired scaling rate to put them. The damage range being only 1 is a bug that we’ll get fixed (what you currently see is the average damage).

We also calculated their attack power scaling to be 31%, is this the intended value?

Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t want to get into confirming or listing every coefficient, but yes, Feral Spirits get 31% of your attack power.

The tooltip damage for Spirit Bite is 96-144, but in practice it seems closer to 158-206. Is there a tooltip error at work here?

Where are you seeing the tooltip for Spirit Bite? The one I see is “Bites the enemy, causing Nature damage.” No damage value listed there. Regardless, 96-144 is the correct base damage range, but it also is increased by attack power.

Both normal Elementals and Empowered Elementals benefit from the Orc Racial Command (+5% damage). Why don't Feral Spirits also get this benefit? Is it a bug that the Elementals get the racial bonus?

Normal Fire Elementals benefit from the Enhancement Mastery for ALL attacks, but the Feral Sprit's Spirit Bite (nature spell) does not. Is this intended?

Feral Spirits should benefit from Command and Mastery. This is fixed for next build.

I'm curious about how pets inherit Mastery. Is this just in cases like where Frostburn increases Water Elemental damage directly via Mastery? Or does the pet gain some kind of bonus of its own from mastery. And if so, what kind of bonus? In many cases, the Master's own mastery bonus may not make sense for the pet (e.g., a Water Elemental has no way to gain or benefit from Fingers of Frost, a Succubus summoned by an Affliction Warlock has no use for Potent Afflictions, etc).

Sometimes it doesn’t have a use, but it’s done for consistency across a class. So yes, a Succubus has no use for Potent Afflictions. But a Water Elemental should do increased damage against frozen targets (broken in your current build, should be fixed in the next).

Ghostcrawler: I don't believe this was ever specified in your posts, but our initial tests after this patch seem to indicate that melee pets inherit our melee haste rather than the maximum of our melee haste and our spell haste. We had assumed it would work similarly to crit, where you said it would use the maximum of our spell crit and our melee crit. Is this discrepancy intentional?

Yes. Crit is done that way because Agi and Int give a huge part of your overall crit chance, and are physical and spell crit only, respectively. For example, a Warlock’s melee crit will be significantly lower than her spell crit. But that’s not the case for the different haste types, which are typically within 5% of each other, and most importantly scale together. Additionally, it would be odd if something like the 5% spell haste raid buff increased your hunter pet’s attack speed and focus regen rate.

Is it intended that Increased Critical Damage Meta gems don't apply to crits done by pets?

This is something that we’re keeping an eye on, but for now, yes, that’s intended.

Assuming they don't already and I just missed it, should pets inherit damage multiplier buffs? This is an issue for Frost and the Mage L90 talents -- the Water Elemental is worth about 20% of our total damage, and if Incanter's Ward is the only L90 talent that benefits the Water Elemental, it's got a big leg up on the other two options; a Frost Mage will pretty much always choose it over Invocation or Rune of Power, even if all three talents are comparable for the other two specs.

In the next build, you should find Incanter’s Ward giving increased spell damage like the others, and the Water Elemental benefitting from the level 90 talents.

Necrotic Strike doesn't seem worth it, and heres the math that agrees with me.

Great theorycraft. We increased Necrotic Strike’s damage from 100% weapon damage to 150% weapon damage, and its heal absorb component has been increased from 70% of AP to 100% of AP and benefits from PvP Power now. It’s fine that it varies in usefulness based on the damage reduction of the target, but it should almost always be worth using when the heal absorb is going to be fully used.

The Totemic Restoration talent does not appear to be working as the spell description indicates on totems with longer than a 1 minute CD.

The examples you gave seem to match what is intended. The cooldown is reduced by half the percentage of the duration that was lost. If your Spirit Link totem is pulled back up after 3sec (50% lost duration), its cooldown will be reduced by 25% of the full cooldown, or 45sec.

GC, in an earlier post you said pets would inherit the highest % of our crit (between melee/spell/ranged) and use it for all of their abilities; however, the fire elemental appears to be using spell crit for its fire blast casts. As an enhancement shaman, I have virtually no spell crit to speak of (in these solo tests I'm doing, I only have 8.26% on my character sheet => 5.26% chance to crit with spells against level 93 boss mobs).

We’ll investigate. it does appear to current give the highest crit to melee crit, but only spell crit to spell crit, which is a bug.

Is the Gargoyle still bugged or has the guardian fix build not been released yet? It does not appear to be getting any of our spell haste. With 0 gear on, it casts 11 times while up. With gear on and roughly 10-11% haste, it still only casts 11 times.

Make sure you’re looking at spell haste not melee haste? We just verified at least in our current build (and I don’t think this has changed in the last week) that increasing haste from 15% to 66% increased the number of casts the Gargoyle got off from 11 to 16 (that’s obviously a very extreme amount of haste, not realistic).

Echo of the Elements gains no benefit from Healing Storm glyph.

We’ll look into this. These sort of single-use buffs commonly get consumed by the initial cast and not apply to any proc effects, but I see how you’d want it to. So, it may be intended, but we’ll discuss it.

Enhancement currently gets the Burning Wrath +10% spell power buff. Spell power buffs do not work on enhancement at all, so is it supposed to be the +10% AP buff?

This is intended. Enhancement themselves do not benefit from it, but the rest of their raid does.

Now that FR has been reworked, I have some new numbers. Nothing has changed.

Your current build doesn’t have the changes to Frenzied Regeneration and Shield Barrier yet. If you’d like to get a head start on theorycrafting their value, the current formula for their heal/absorb is: 18.6 * (AP/1000)^2 - 0.047 * AP.

So there hasn't been much commentary from Blues lately about Monks compared to the other classes. Does that mean we're perfect already or just that we're still under so much work there isn't much to tell us about? :)

I believe the build you currently have still has Zen Sphere is way way too strong. For testing content and giving feedback, it’d be helpful if you didn’t use Zen Sphere.

I noticed earlier today while beating on dummies that Xuen seems to be triggering Eminence now. This was as a WW too (which I assume is bugged), so I'm not sure how much healing he would do for a Mistweaver, but it might be something to test out.

Yes, Xuen should be triggering Eminence (but only for a Mistweaver in Serpent stance; always triggering it is a bug in the current build). He also will soon learn a bit about how to tank; increased armor and health, and if you’re a Brewmaster, he gets a provoke and increased threat generation.

Is Shuffle intended to be capped at 12 seconds? Even if it is, Shuffle needs to refresh to that cap if Blackout Kick is used with >= 6 seconds left on Shuffle rather than just wasting the Chi as it does currently.

Yes, the 12sec cap is intended. While you’ll never want to refresh it with >6sec remaining on it, I’ll look into possibly just refreshing it to 12sec if you have >6sec, so that it lessens the pain of that mistake.

At present it seems that Retribution and Protection Paladins get some sort of extra passive mana regen every couple of seconds that isn't accounted for by mp5.

Unlike mp5 regen which is constantly ticking this unknown regen only ticks every few seconds and adds somewhere between 1k and 2k mana.

There's no hint of this extra regen in the spellbook or the character sheet that I can see.

Is this extra regen intended? And if so, what are the details of it? i.e. how often does it tick and how much for?

Guarded by the Light and Sword of Light grant 6% of max mana every 2 sec, but isn’t mentioned in the tooltip currently. Guarded by the Light in particular was starting to read like a novel. We can add it back though to reduce confusion.

It appears that elemental's primal fire elemental can't glance its auto-attacks, but enhancement's can.

Testing this in our latest internal build, both of them are getting glances, and I don’t see why that would be different in yours. I do note that your log there is attacking a Raider’s Training Dummy, whereas Bink’s log is attacking a “Training Dummy”; not sure which one, but some lower level dummy. Chance to glance is lower on lower level targets, all the way down to 0 on targets lower level than you. I’d guess Bink’s elemental was attacking an 85 dummy while he’s 90.

What's the intended interaction between Combo breaker mastery procs and Tigereye Brew? Currently Tiger Palm procs do not contribute to generating brew, but Blackout Kick procs do. Which is bugged? Ideally, they should both add stacks.

The free Tiger Palms and Blackout Kicks from Combo Breaker should count toward Tigereye Brew.

Ghostcrawler, you probably have the best resources to do this: Can test Gargoyle with extreme levels of haste (100-200%?) just to see if he's getting GCD capped. If not it's an AI issue severely limiting his dps time.

It’s not a matter of getting GCD capped. Even with extreme levels of haste, he isn't capped. There’s some delay between his casts just because the AI can be slow about starting the next cast after one finishes; it doesn’t use spell queuing like players do. Regardless, the Gargoyle is tuned around this effect on his casting speed, and also tuned around him not benefitting from Mastery. Your Gargoyle being 3% of your total damage isn’t an issue to us; it’s a cooldown to help you stack extra damage during important moments, and it does that.

Currently the Shivarra doesn't seem to actually do any off hand swings, but I'm assuming this is a known bug that will be fixed. More importantly, there seem to be weird things going on with the AP scaling of these dual-wielding pets. Both the Shivarra and the Wrathguard appear to get the exact same amount of AP per owner SP (2.9), which is odd given that the Succubus and the Felguard get such different amounts (1.67 and 3.5, respectively). Is this intended?

Also, is it intended that the dual-wielders have a different base weapon damage than all the other warlock pets?

All of these things are correct and intended (though coefficients like that may chance as our tuning progresses). The Shivarra will get her offhand swings in the beta build after next.

Currently unholy death knights are facing an issue regarding gnaw and leap in pvp. Unholy death knights are the only pet owning spec to have to toggle their pets resource in pvp. The ghouls main ability claw currently drains the ghoul of all his energy making it impossible to case gnaw and leap because of their energy cost.

This is fixed for the build after next. The Ghoul will only autocast Claw it if it has at least 60 energy, so that it reserves enough for Gnaw and Leap.

The ret paladin Glyph of Mass Exorcism also increases the Exorcism cooldown by 5 seconds. The cooldown increase is not in the tooltip. Is this intended behavior?

Nope. Fixed for next build.

In this last build, Fel Energy has stoped regenerating when the pet is out of combat, is this an intended change?

No.

Is this intended or will we see a cooldown on SW:I in an upcoming patch?

It's intended. Mostly you're just benefiting from multi-dotting.

The amount of downtime Blood dks have to deal with in beta, is way too much, and it isn't fun at all. In some setups it is almost double of that what it is on live.

We understand that Blood's rotation feels really different because of the 1 sec GCD. We're not sure yet what we want to do about that, if anything. The wrong solution, we feel, is to give Blood more buttons to hit, because fundamentally we like the rotation in terms of rune usage and decision points. We could give Blood a 1.5 GCD and Frost and Unholy a 1 sec GCD (or tie it to presence or something).

Another issue I'd like to bring up using these sims is that, Blood dks still feel like we are lacking behind dps wise (and threat, in terms of ST, compared to other tanks, pre execute phase.), especially in lower levels of gear.

We're not seeing that. At lower gear levels, monks and DK tank DPS is slightly high compared to paladin, warrior and druid. At higher gear levels, druid tanks are slightly high. That's all within the level that we can tweak by ship. If you have specific numbers, feel free to share them.

BM hunters also have a similar issue with their pets outside of raids. Special attacks that require focus (i.e., Horn Toss, Froststorm Breath, Burrow Attack) never go off (unless you spec Fervor or have Rapid Fire up) because our pets are very focus starved. You have to manually turn off their basic attack (Smack/Bite/Claw) to cast those specials. Any chance of upping pet focus regen or removing/reducing (or pooling) focus cost for those specials?

We reduced the cost of those specials to 20 focus, so the autocast will use them. Having it pool focus on the basic attacks would be problematic as it would cross over the 50 focus limit where it does 100% more damage for 120% more focus.

I am curious as to what happened with the Thrill of the Hunt talent for Hunters.

That build was taken in the middle of making some changes to Thrill of the Hunt. Internally, it’s currently 3 Arcane Shots or Multi-Shots at -20 focus cost, but that’s looking too strong, so we might change it to 2, or even something else, by the time that change gets in a build to you.

now given the current model with my gearing on beta its 60k ap at vengeance cap so thats about a 64k shield at 20 rage this model came with the udnerstand that it was also nearly double at about 40-45 rage and 250 percent at 60 rage usage.

The formula mentioned earlier was for a maximum (60 rage) Frenzied Regeneration or Shield Barrier.

Changing the ghoul to have that behavior will make macroing "Claw" into all of our abilities mandatory, much the same way the Blood Tap macro was nearly mandatory. Why not just make Gnaw and Leap free?

Edit: Also, regarding Unholy's AoE rotation, is it intended for Unholy DKs to have orphaned Frost runes? Currently when we do our normal AoE rotation, we can Scourge Strike and Blood Boil...but the left over Frost rune either goes unused or we use Icy Touch.

Would it be possible to have Blood Boil attached to Reaping? Or have a cost change to 1 Blood/1 Frost rune, with a damage increase as well (100% more damage for Unholy?) Having to use Icy Touch to fill out our rotation does not feel like it is intended at all.

Why would that change require you to macro Claw into your abilities?

Blood Boil is on Reaping in a future build.

1) DRW is currently completely bugged and dealing weird damage. Maths regarding this below.

We'll investigate.

What is the formula for Rune Strike? The datamined tooltip from Wowhead says 140% weapon damage + 10% of AP. The in-game tooltip suggests 140% weapon damage + 14% of AP. This second value seems closer to the reality, but it still doesn't really adds up to the numbers we're seeing when fighting. It seems to be very slightly higher in reality.

We’ve changed the formula for it to be 155% of weapon damage, but normalized (the fact that it wasn’t normalized before was a bug), in a future build.

Soul Reaper, when used as Blood spec, is not refunding its rune if parried. I'm not sure about dodges or misses, or about Soul Reaper (Frost) or Soul Reaper (Unholy).

Fixed for a future build. All versions of Soul Reaper should refund its rune if it misses, consistently with other rune attacks.

Scourge Strike's tooltip is incorrect. It states that it deals 18% additional Shadow damage per disease, but the reality in-game is that it deals 25% additional Shadow damage per disease (before any bonus through the Dreadblade mastery). What version should we use for our simulations?

It's 25%. We can update the tooltip.

The tooltips for Blood Plague and Frost Fever seem incorrect as well, and the reality damage values differ from the in-game tooltips in our spellbook. This is a very minor difference (talking about two-number digits), but a clarification would still be appreciated.

Fixed.

It looks as if the damage of Pyroblast is so much higher than Fireball that a Fire Mage can theoretically drop Fireball from rotation; the higher DPET if Pyroblast almost exactly balances the reduced number of Hot Streaks:

Hot Streak will increase Pyroblast’s damage by 25%, and Pyroblast’s normal damage has been reduced by 20% in a future build.

Simulationcraft #'s are up for all 3 Warlock Specs @ Level 90 (Pre-raid gear)

We aren’t able to debug your simulations, but will say that those very much do not reflect the numbers we’re seeing. We’re seeing Destruction slightly above Demonology (1-3% difference) on a single target, and Affliction slightly (3-5% difference) above Destruction. Those are gaps that we expect to tune tighter by ship. I’m not sure if your simulation of Affliction/Demonology is too high, or if your simulation of Destruction is too low, or if our results are off. Providing statistically significant logs of these performances would be very helpful.

It's not like Ret or Prot needed damage nerfs, either.

You're going to be see a lot of number tweaking from here on out. If you think any of the changes are off base, I'm afraid you're going to have to offer a little more evidence to support your claim, or else this forum is going to be reduced to "don't nerf me, bro" posts. :(

Ret was doing too much damage. Prot's damage is fine even with the change, and to answer a related question, that is assuming spending some Holy Power on Word of Glory.

Are there any plans of restoring Greater Healing Wave at all to the Resto Shaman toolkit? I haven't seen any acknowledgement from the developers of this issue thus far.

Currently Healing Surge without Tidal Waves is barely less HPM than Greater Healing Wave, but with the availability of Tidal Waves, Healing Surge soars past it. Due to the massive HPS gains of Healing Surge and the nearly imperceptible difference of HPM outside of Tidal Waves, Greater Healing Wave becomes practically obsolete except for the occasional Natures Swiftness if you chose the talent.

We are talking about reducing the cost of Greater Healing Wave slightly to match Healing Surge (which is how the equivalents are for priests). This may mean that shaman can heal efficiently with Healing Surge (with Tidal Waves) but we think that might be fine for them. GHW would still get use because sometimes the Healing Surge just isn't sufficient to keep someone alive. Healers also tend to migrate from their efficient heal to their big heal in later tiers, which we're fine with. It makes it feel like all those gear improvements are doing something.

I'm still worried with the new change that FR will not be used as often as it once was before. I understand the 2500% of AP formula was a little overpowered but this new formula is only SLIGHTLY buffing what was previously supplied. My main problem is the fact that low level Frenzied regen is just not providing that much healing when you compare it to your total health. At top end Heroic DS level gear, the heal will only provide ~10% of our total health. At heroic 90 dungeon level gear your looking at 10-12% of the total health. Even if you estimate 60,000 Vengence AP and 500k health, you are only looking at 13% of the total health. Is it your intent to have FR that low in comparison to the total health? I can see it being useful at 15% to 20% but 10 just seems low even in top-end current content.

We’re making another adjustment to this in a future build: It uses that formula, or 2.5x your Stamina, whichever is higher.

Reaping - Whenever you hit with Blood Strike, Pestilence, or Festering Strike, or Blood Boil, the Runes spent will become Death Runes when they activate.

Currently this change doesn't work as I imagine it's intended because of a long standing bug involving Death Runes. When an ability that triggers Reaping is used the rune that is made into a Death Rune is based the cost of that ability, not the rune used to pay for it.

This is "mostly" fixed for a future build. I say "mostly," because there’s still one exception. It won’t work on runes that you couldn’t normally make Death runes by your spec (e.g., you made them Death Runes using Blood Tap or Plague Leech). This is because if you managed to convert your Blood runes to Death runes as a Blood DK, you’d end up able to use all 6 runes on Death Strike, endlessly. Similar issue with Unholy and Blood Boil.

On the subject of the effect formerly known as wild hunt, when I last tested this effect on beta (quite awhile ago at this point), it was doing 120% more damage for 100% more focus. This is consistent with how it works on live, although the tooltip stated (and still does) that it does 100% more damage for 120% more focus.

Actually, this was a bug. It had been intended to be a way to bleed off excess focus at a reduced efficiency (similar to Heroic Strike for warriors). However, it was actually acting as a *more* efficient way to convert focus to damage, which was a bug. This unintended functionality has the downside that it encourages you to only use Claw above 50 focus, to maximize damage; autocast won’t do that, so you have to do it manually. So, after discussing this a bit, we see 3 viable solutions:

A) "Fix" the bug, making it less efficient above 50.
B) Change autocast logic to only autocast above 50, and preserve the "more-efficient-above-50" functionality.
C) Change it to simply be 2x damage for 2x cost.

Option A, while the originally intended functionality, would feel punitive at this point, so we’re leaning away from that. Option B might cause your pet to waste significant focus when she gets surges of focus, such as from Focus Fire or Go for the Throat, and hits the focus cap. So, we’re leaning toward Option C, since there wasn’t really much engaging gameplay from this anyway, and this just allows it to be an overflow valve for excess focus.

General Question: Have there been any changes in DoT mechanics in Mists, compared with Cataclysm? More specifically, how additional ticks are added with additional haste, and how recasting a dot while it's already up (which currently allows the next tick of the current dot then starts the new dot from that point)?

Nothing has changed in this regard, other than the few rolling periodic type spells we mentioned earlier. However, the benefit of this functionality (being able to clip the last tick with no loss) has been extended to a few additional spells. These spells have been turned into periodics, despite not really doing anything periodically, so that you can take advantage of this same ability to clip the last couple seconds with no loss. Inquisition, Haunt, Revealing Strike, Envenom, and Savage Roar work this way. For example, Savage Roar uses a 3 sec periodic tick rate under the hood, so that if it normally lasts 18 sec, and you recast it after 17 sec, it will have 19sec remaining. Total of 36 sec for two casts of it, despite clipping it by 1 sec. We hope this is a nice little quality of life change (and should obviously have no downside).

Theres already enuff proof and parses out there showings rets damage is barely middle of the pack on the beta currently. I really wish we could see gregs proof or parses whatever you wish to call it and really see ret paladin numbers.

If you have proof or parses, please share them here.

We welcome and appreciate player feedback, and the discussions in this thread and elsewhere have been excellent in pointing out design problems or bugs. However, we aren't going to get ourselves into a situation where we have to convince the community to allow us to make the design or balance changes we feel are appropriate for the game. We don't think that would end well. Sadly, if you think our numbers are off, the burden is going to be on you to convince us of that fact. We show Retribution in ilevel 463 gear doing almost identical damage to warriors and DKs, which is as it should be.

[Editorial note: we removed a few posts that were off topic. Please feel free to share feedback on nearly every class-related topic in this forum provided it is constructive (and ideally detailed and brief). However please reserve this particular thread for its intended purpose.]

Ghost, I can't recall if you mentioned or wrote about this during the Cataclysm Beta (in which case, my apologies for asking again), but: Could you please explain the logic behind Death Knight diseases not benefitting from Haste?

In general, caster dots tick faster from haste but melee dots don't. We want the haste stat to let you "do more stuff." Haste already lets melee do more stuff because it brings them more resources, which in turn lets them do more stuff. DK runes regen faster with haste. Warriors earn more rage from more frequent auto-attacks. Ret paladins have the Sanctity of Battle passive to let them also "do more stuff" with haste.

If we ever needed to make haste more beneficial for melee, we'd consider it, but that's the general logic.

Is Frost being a competitive PvE spec possible, or am I getting my hopes up a little too soon?

While I hate to say something like “No, really, we mean it this time!”, yes, we’re trying very hard this expansion to get Frost equally PvE viable with Arcane and Fire. We’re aiming for Arcane and Fire being as PvP viable as Frost is, too. We added the recent ramping mechanic because we were worried about Frost's damage being too good in both PvE and PvP.

Honestly maybe we are just better players and look op to the average war/dk.

Yeah, that's probably it.

as i said i will continue to await ghostcrawlers answer as to why it was soo brutally assaulted like this and to his joyous prayer answering response

I just had to quote a "brutally assaulted" question. That's a new one over the standard "gutted." Actual answer below the next quote.

We’re making another adjustment to this in a future build: It uses that formula, or 2.5x your Stamina, whichever is higher.

I am quoting myself here, but this mechanic for Frenzied Regen also applies to Shield Barrier to make sure the floor isn't too low. The 3000 Shield Barriers some of you are talking about would be more like 30,000 with this change. As I said earlier, we want those abilities to be good abilities, but we couldn't make them scale linearly with attack power without them being too good with bad gear or too bad with good gear.

269s of combat, ghoul cast 69 claws. At 40 energy per, that's 2760 total spent. figuring 10 regen per second, the expected number of claws in that time span with 0 haste scaling on Energy is 69.75. So i'd say the ghoul is not currently getting energy regen from haste. Is this intended?

In the current build you have, the Ghoul’s energy regen was indeed not benefitting from your haste. That’s fixed for the next build. This also applies to the Army of the Dead ghouls.

Also, reaping is not currently functioning as you described. DDDDUU when used on 4 blood boils becomes dbdfUU.

That fix didn’t make it into the build you currently have. It should be in the next build.

As I have said before, we're not yet in the stage of development where everyone makes sure all of their changes are in before we pull a build -- that would just require too much needless coordination and make it harder to get builds out. We tend to just pull builds -- for now -- and get what we get.

Is it intended that Sacred Shield not scale with haste while the other options on the tier do? It behaves (more or less) like a proactive HoT, so it'd make sense.

That's an easy fix.

Maybe you don't have to actually debug the simulations, but take a look at this comment made by the warlock developer of simcraft.... Maybe you guys could just take a look at the actions lists for all 3 specs that he uses and see if maybe something could be learned from there:

One point of confusion seems to be about refreshing Corruption in Metamorphosis. There may currently be some bugs with that. The intended functionality (which we will double check) is that Touch of Chaos and Void Ray both extend Corruption by 6 sec, up to a maximum of 18 sec, and both cause the damage to be recomputed. We’re trying to evaluate further what differences there may be between our results and yours. Again, actual logs (e.g. World of Logs) would help us compare the most easily.

Well, not really about ret, but prot, but does proof that Shield of the Righteous falling behind Judgement and Holy Wrath (against single targets) count?

It almost feels like Glyph of the Alabaster Shield is going to be mandatory.

Well, you didn't exactly provide proof, but Judgment in particular does hit really hard for Prot, especially with Vengeance stacked. You have a lot of motivation to use SotR though, so I don't expect it will drop out of the rotation. If paladin damage was low compared to other tanks, that would be a problem (and SotR a potential place to buff it), but we're not seeing that.

(Editorial note: we removed several posts debating the merits of various tanks. Again, perfectly legit topic, but we have a whole forum for those discussions. This thread is about numbers and rotations.)

Currently Rushing Jade Wind is causing 6sec shuffle for each target it hits. (given the cap on shuffle is 12sec, it basically means you get 12 sec shuffle if you cast on more than 1 mob).

This is something we're keeping an eye on for balance problems but for now, this is intended. There is a chance we may change it in the future.

07/21/2012 02:23 PMPosted by Eflow

Still on lvl 90 talents for monks, whats the intent on Xuen tiger?

Xuen does indeed cause Eminence for Mistweavers and is purely DPS for Windwalkers. For Brewmasters, he has a provoke, not a taunt. Provokes are what we normally give pets and they work like taunts but don’t work on most bosses. For example, Army of the Dead ghouls have a provoke. He should be decent at tanking and scales with your stats, the hope being he is useful as an off-tank. However, he won't be able to tank a raid boss (since he has a provoke, not a taunt), but he should be able to tank some adds and dungeon mobs. Please try that out and let us know how he does.

07/21/2012 10:30 PMPosted by Requîtal

Is it intended for Judgment to no longer apply/refresh Censure anymore? If so why was that change made?

Yes, Judgement has had quite the long history and has been a relatively unique ability since its inception. It's been a mix between a ‘ranged’ type attack or a ‘spell’, or for most of the past few years it’s been a ‘melee’ attack with a long range. That’s why it triggered Censure. But it also shared a bunch of properties with spells. So, for Mists, we decided to finally make it consistent with everything else and just say that it’s purely a spell, just as much as Exorcism or Holy Shock are spells.

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Windwalk Totem currently does not prevent warlocks from becoming snared via KJ Cunning. Is this intended or bugged?

Fixed in the next build.

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Is it intended for Healing Tide Totem to act as healing done by the shaman, or as a separate entity to avoid being split by Ascendance(Resto) as its currently not being duplicated and divided.

Intended. Totems' actions don't count as the shaman's. This is consistent with Searing Bolt not triggering Echo of the Elements and other similar effects.

07/23/2012 04:38 AMPosted by Canibehealz

Pets are currently not taking bonus health from Ancestral Vigor from what I can see. They're receiving the buff but not gaining any maximum health.

We plan to fix this in a future build. Currently, pet scaling from your own health is overwriting buffs. We plan to fix this. (This would also affect Glyph of Water Elemental, by the way).

Back in the Black Wing Decent and Bastion of Twilight myself and a few friends of mine discovered that dots already on the target don't actually get re-evaluated when their caster receives a large haste boosts such as heroism and time-warp. This forces you to reapply your dots so that their period of ticking is shortened by the haste gain.
As you can probably tell this is quite a hassle. Especially as an Aff lock with mucho spell haste procs.

Is this still the case?

Yes. The parameters of a DoT are determined at cast time. This may be a good time to explain one related topic though: Refreshing DoTs and whether that recalculates their parameters. For several classes, we have various mechanics that allow you to refresh or extend an existing DoT. In some of these cases, doing so recalculates their parameters; in other cases, it does not. Why the inconsistency, you ask? The rule we follow is that if the mechanic allows you to perpetually extend one DoT forever, it needs to recalculate. If it isn’t intended to let you maintain one DoT forever, it doesn’t need to recalculate. For example, the Demonology warlock's spell Touch of Chaos extends Corruption significantly, and it’s quite likely you’ll roll one corruption the whole fight, so it then recalculates.

GC, just a quick clarification. The new Armor Damage Reduction formula used for 86+ characters:
Armor / (Armor + 4,037.5 * Level - 31,7117.5)
Does this continue on to level 93, similarly how the current Cata formula worked to 88 until this expansion? or is there another formula for level 91 and beyond?

It continues on to level 93. Just to clarify to make sure there are no misunderstandings, adding denotation for which variables are of the target and which are of the attacker:
DamageReduction = TargetArmor / (TargetArmor + 4037.5*AttackerLevel – 317117.5).

EDIT: Updated

07/23/2012 02:16 PMPosted by Boomerang

Since everyone is thinking it, I'll ask . . . what should we read into the fact that you, and not GC, is now responding to posts in this forum?

That I’m not as busy as others are right now (which is a terrible understatement). ;)

07/23/2012 01:44 PMPosted by Crithto

Alternatively, there’s a new mechanic coming for Affliction where Haunt adds 1 tick to each of your DoTs when it hits; that does not recalculate damage.

I wanted to post a correction on this part. Our design process is very iterative and we’re constantly trying out new things. The above mentioned mechanic for Haunt extending DoTs is something we’ve been trying internally, but have decided not to go with for now, so don’t expect to see it in a future build.

Since everyone is thinking it, I'll ask...

I still love you guys, but I have to travel a bit for business. Rest assured, you're in very capable hands. We spend extraordinary efforts to make sure the development team is all on the same page, so you shouldn't notice any differences.

07/24/2012 08:59 AMPosted by Aedilhild

Is there an ICD for Strikes of Opportunity? I don't believe players ever confirmed or defined one (if they did, I'm open to the answer/verbal abuse).

There's only a 0.1sec ICD.

There's only a 0.1sec ICD.

Is this about the general size of "tiny ICDs" used to prevent things from chain-proc'ing off of the same attack/ability? (for example, is there also a 0.1 sec ICD on static shock and echo of the elements? perhaps even flametongue weapon?)

We don’t frequently use tiny ICDs like that, but it solves problems in a few cases. Static Shock and Flametongue have no ICD at all. We mentioned Echo of the Elements having a short ICD before, and yes, it is also 0.1sec.

07/24/2012 07:43 PMPosted by Cozmo

While GC is gone, someone take the opportunity to fix healing priests please!

Aw, and he specifically instructed me to make sure healing priests remain sad in his absence. :*(

07/24/2012 06:28 PMPosted by Elysian

Is it intended that, while stealthed, if the priest takes ANY damage (including any dots on the priest when spectral guised is used), knocks the priest back out of stealth and ends the ability? It makes the spell basically a momentary target drop, since most class specs now have access to dots.

Yes. Unless otherwise specified, stealth breaks on taking damage or perfoming any offensive action. While this does make it less powerful than if it didn't break on damage, we still expect it to be valuable in PvP. Additionally, dispels before you use Spectral Guise can remove many of the DoTs that would otherwise break it.

07/23/2012 04:17 PMPosted by Strawberry

If you switch targets while he's tanking something, he'll provoke the new target off you when his cooldown ends - so in essence, he can only "tank" something you're attacking.

We’re going to try to solve this by making Xuen fixate on the target you summon him on. If that target dies, he’ll revert to assisting you.

07/24/2012 10:58 PMPosted by Keleshara

Not sure if this has been addressed but it seems like I am now generating a burning ember when out of combat. Is this intended or a bug? I am running the glyph of burning embers. I do have to say if it is intended it made QOL for a destro lock so much better.

Yes, this is intended; Destruction warlocks now only decay down to and regen up to 1 Ember out of combat, similar to how Demonology does with 250 Demonic Fury. Oh, and in the next build, we are toning down the fiery effect and sound at 1 Ember.

07/25/2012 09:04 AMPosted by Hyjinx

Wait, are you sure about that Zar? I remember previous Flametongue testing showing that it had around a ~0.15 ICD. This was to help prevent using double Flametongue imbues and weapon syncing for Enhancement.

What Zarhym shared is correct, the development team just double-checked. =)
Flametongue has no ICD. Using Flametongue on both weapons should naturally be a DPS loss over using Windfury and Flametongue.

Explosive Shot mechanics
Some time ago, GC announced that explosive shot would join other effects in having "ignite" mechanics. We have been testing it recently to model it in Simc and FemaleDwarf. The mechanics have clearly been changed, but don't match the typical ignite model. For example individual ticks to crit and debuff changes on the target affect the damage of future ticks. Further, some damage appears not to get rolled into the ignite-style debuff. We have looked at a few models (e.g., the ES under LnL don't do ignite but other do, crit dmg is subtracted from the dot pool, etc.). So far the models don't correctly model crits. Can you please explain the actual and/or planned future mechanics here?

The version in your current build has a bug with this rolling periodic-type effect on Explosive Shot in particular. That’s been fixed for the next beta build. I believe, in that build, it’s not counting the extra initial periodic tick that Explosive Shot deals when calculating the rolling damage. Regardless, fixed for the next build.

07/25/2012 06:30 PMPosted by Fluttërshy

Colossus is not proccing of auto-attacks -- is this a bug?

Yes, this should be fixed for the next build.

07/25/2012 09:06 PMPosted by Delmortis

Currently, the Gargoyle's Gargoyle Strike scales with a mechanism that does not seem to compare with any other pet ability mechanisms. We know you do not want to share specific values, but an explanation on what exactly affects the scaling of the spell would be helpful in modelling it.

Wow, this was an obscure bug! Turns out that Gargoyle Strike was accidentally hooked up to a mechanic that made its damage scale in a very odd way. We just removed that and adjusted its damage to compensate. In the next build, Gary the Gargoyle will get 70% of your AP as SP, and Gargoyle Strike will do base damage based on level (623 at level 90) plus 82.6% of SP. Hope that helps!

07/26/2012 11:53 AMPosted by Vishiz

In it's current state Zen sphere went from OP to useless, leaving tier30 practically useless for the windwalker monk, any plans to change this in a future build?

It’d be much more useful if there was some theorycrafting to back this up. Has this been tested? If so, please share your findings and numbers with us.

Everyone’s feedback and hard work testing class abilities has been great. We really do appreciate it! I just want to echo what Ghostcrawler said earlier in this thread:

06/19/2012 09:12 PMPosted by Ghostcrawler

Just a reminder that we really want to focus here on damage, healing and tanking numbers. We don't want this to be a catch all "ask the blues." Ideally we'd like to see more "How does this work?" and less "Why did you change this?"

Speaking of ICDs and Enhancement, could you clarify how Windfury is working for MoP?

Historically, Windfury has had a 3 second ICD between procs with a shared lockout between hands. It would also proc from white hits along with Stormstrike and Lava Lash. So my questions are this:

1) Is the 3 second ICD still the plan for MoP. I just did some initial testing against a training dummy, and that still seems to be the case.
2) Is the ICD still supposed to be shared between both hands for MoP?
3) Is this ICD a fixed 3 second ICD for MoP, or is it effected by Haste at all?
4) Is Windfury supposed to proc from Stormstrike and Lava Lash? From my testing, I didn't see a single proc when just isolating Stormstrike and Lava Lash attacks. On Live, I'm seeing both yellow attacks proc Windfury. I'm assuming this is just a bug, but I want to confirm if this is by design for MoP

Windfury should be mostly the same as on live. 1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) Fixed. 4) White attacks and Wind Lash only. Other than adding Wind Lash to being able to proc it, it doesn’t look like it’s changed in quite a while; are you sure that yellow attacks trigger it on live? (Easy way to test just yellow attacks: Turn 90degrees away from a target dummy. White attacks won’t hit, but yellow attacks can, at exactly 90degrees).

07/26/2012 11:25 PMPosted by Zeherah

While doing hunter ability testing I noticed that Wild Quiver looks to be doing only about half the damage of an autoshot (possibly a bit less). Historically Wild Quiver has been roughly the same damage as autoshot. Was this changed deliberately or is it a bug?

Yes, Wild Quiver does 50% weapon damage now, but we’ve increased the proc rate substantially to compensate. Also, the next build you get should include a significant number of changes to hunter ability damage, so it’s probably best to wait until then for really detailed investigation of their damage formulae. Super brief and incomplete summary of changes include nearly doubling Wild Quiver’s proc chance; doubling the damage of the level 90 talents; buffing BM’s Mastery considerably; Master Marksman reduced to 3 stacks; doubling the damage of Black Arrow and Serpent Sting for Survival; significantly nerfing Beast Cleave; nearly halving the cost of Explosive Shot; buffing Aimed, Arcane, and Chimera Shot noticeably; nerfing Cobra shot noticeably; nearly doubling the damage of Kill Command; reducing the cost of Arcane Shot; nerfing Focus Fire and Frenzy somewhat… There have been a lot of changes to Hunter damage. :)

Also note that while we understand everybody is eager to get a response, please try to refrain from repeatedly posting the same question or asking for updates on design questions. We are reading everything and responding to what we can. Thanks.

To provide an update on tanking mechanics, I want to comment on Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters. This is somewhat of an over-generalization, but tanks typically care about 4 things when gearing in decreasing order of importance:

1. Survive the maximum burst damage of the encounter (aka Effective Health)
2. Minimize healing needed (aka Damage Reduction + Self Healing)
3. Hold aggro on whatever you’re needed to hold aggro on (aka TPS)
4. Maximize damage dealt (aka DPS)

#4 is generally much less important than #1-3, and overlaps with #3 heavily when considering gear. And #3 is relatively easy these days anyway. So, usually it just comes down to #1 and #2.

Stamina primarily helps with #1. Dodge primarily helps with #2. Most other stats help with resource generation, which typically translate into #2. Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters is in the somewhat unusual place of helping with both #1 and #2 significantly.

If you compare Mastery to Dodge for a Brewmaster, as a few theorycrafters here have done, you can see that, purely in terms of how much they reduce your damage taken, Dodge wins by a considerable margin. We balanced it that way, because we give value to how much it helps with #1 as well. Obviously, helping with #1 has some value, because you care about Stamina. We see Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters as sort of a hybrid between Stamina and Avoidance, in terms of how it helps improve your character.

It’s easy to objectively compare the value of two stats in terms of how much they help with #1, or how much they help with #2. But comparing some amount of help with #1 to some amount of help with #2 is much more complex and subjective. It’s an interesting choice that tanks have to make all the time, and one of the most successful choices in gearing that the game provides (Stamina vs. Avoidance being the primary way that choice is expressed). So, that means balancing a stat that provides a mix of both can be complex and subjective as well. After much deliberation, we’re going to try valuing the effective health benefits of Mastery for Brewmasters and Guardians significantly lower than the damage reduction benefits, and adjusting the Mastery conversion rates to reflect that.

Hopefully this provides a bit of background and perspective about the complexities underlying even the simplest of changes: In the next build, you’ll find Mastery for Guardians providing 1.25% Armor per Mastery (up from 0.65%), and for Brewmasters providing 0.5% Stagger per Mastery (up from 0.3%).

I was looking at the warlock changes in the upcoming beta build and noticed a few things. Why are you nerfing affliction so much? I agree it needed a nerf, but so much that it will go below the other 2 specs by a large amount?

Not to mention destroying a glyph and adding a new ability that kills clipping. People will just ignore the glyph and Pandemic and just refresh dots right after they fall off to do max dps. Clipping with or without the glyph is useless now, but with the glyph it's like nerfing yourself. Drain Soul is barley better than MG under 20% today, now with it getting a HUGE nerf it will be completely useless as an execute.

We encourage you to try out the changes and see what has changed rather than relying on information that has been datamined. To help further explain, we’ll briefly summarize what has changed with Affliction damage.

We noticed (thanks to the community interaction in this thread) that the Everlasting Affliction glyph was providing a huge DPS increase, but as we’ve said, we don’t want huge DPS increases to come from glyphs. Instead of simply nerfing the glyph, we baked the benefits that the glyph provided into the entire class via Pandemic, a level 90 passive ability, and changed the glyph to something completely different. We also changed the design of Malefic Grasp to, hopefully, make the ability more reliable and simple; our intention was not to nerf it. It’s important to note that we reduced the base period of Unstable Affliction and Corruption from 3 seconds to 2 seconds, so both Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul should give you the same additional DoT damage now as they did before.

07/26/2012 02:32 PMPosted by Sensations

Is it intended for Healing Stream and Healing Tide to not benefit from mastery on the first ticks or is it just a technical limitation from totems? If so does this mean that crit does not benefit on first tick either for HTT(Have yet to see it but didn't do extensive testing on it).

Fixed for next build. It also dynamically adjusts with your mastery instead of snapshotting it.

My question is, how is this talent intended to work? How much is the heal supposed to be? 25% of base maximum (which would be 20% of new maximum)? 25% of new maximum? Are health percentages supposed to remain constant through its effect? Where does this 15% come from?

We weren't able to reproduce the results you mention, but this is the intended functionality of Nature's Guardian: When it is triggered, 25% of your current maximum health is calculated. Your current and maximum health is then increased by this value. When it wears off, it reduces your current and max health by that value. It should never actually kill you, but it can reduce your current health to 1.