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Avant Garde scores the World first Val’anyr

I hate to post these world first things because it doesn’t really interest me at all but this here healing legendary mace is too cool to not follow. So major kudos and congratulations to a druid named Snuggleme (seriously?) in the guild Avant Garde on the U S-Kil’jadin server. Down below is a screenshot of the worst UI I’ve seen in a while but also of Snuggleme with her new Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings! That big blue bubble that looks completely beautiful would be the shield that procs from the mace. All joking aside, congratulations; it looks like we’re nearing the end of Ulduar so soon…

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Paladin PvP nerf and the future of Holy mp5.

Ok seriously, what’s the big fucking deal? How is it that every other class can be overpowered for weeks at a time and pretty much roll face over anybody and everybody, but the split second that a few people piss and moan about how the big bad paladin is beating on them Blizzard has a bitch fit about it and starts nerfing things left and right. EXPLAIN THIS BULLSHIT. I don’t even PvP often enough anymore and this shit gets to me, every day it a new post from some butthurt little mage or priest or god-for-fucking-bid warlock crying about how the ret paladin killed him or how the holy paladin won’t die.

“I mean he killed me! ME! He made me bleed my own blood! This is unacceptable, nerf nerf nerf!”

Holy and Ret paladins have in some form been on top of the current and previous Arena season. Furthermore, we think part of the reason some players, especially casters, feel like they are dying so quickly in PvP is because they can’t use their crowd control abilities without them getting quickly removed. Freedom was a big part of that. It’s supposed to be “Get out of jail free” card, not “you can’t ever cc me” card. If that makes sense.

It is still a very potent ability, especially talented, which almost all PvP paladins do. To be honest, we’re concerned the duration is still too long.

See? They’re concerned the duration is still too long… it’s blessing of freedom you fucktards not blessing of almost got away. This makes me laugh because casters are the ones doing all the bitching, but nobody dare say shit about death grip or deadly throw or escape artist or blink, or cloak of shadows, or chains of ice, or charge, or intercept, or demonic circle, do I continue? Assholes.

Also here’s some more crap that doesn’t interest me about holy paladin gear in Ulduar and how it sucks because all holy paladins want is intellect and haste.

The problem we have is paladins are now telling us “This MP5 on our gear is useless. Give us a better stat instead.” We don’t think that will result in a balanced outcome for the reasons I have mentioned. We’re not talking about nerfing paladins for no good reason. We’re talking about shifting the sources of your regen so that the Ulduar gear is perceived as an upgrade. I don’t accept the logic that it’s impossible to make paladins care about MP5 or that denying paladins more crit and Int will get them gkicked.

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Holy Paladins and mana regen in Ulduar

I’ve never really researched Holy Paladin stats and basics and I haven’t really played the paladin healer role since Classic WoW so all these discussions are a little alien to me. Still, I’ve always thought that mp5 is a good stat for healers in general since spirit is pretty much a waste stat unless you’re outside of the FSR. Blizzard says you do need mp5, regardless what most theory crafters are going to proove.

The issue that started all this was paladins saying “We don’t want MP5 on our gear.” The designers designed you assuming you’d have MP5 on your gear — I know; I was there. If you are effective without having MP5 then it probably means you are going to be too powerful at some point because you are able to replace a less-powerful stat with a more powerful one without missing the loss of the less-powerful one.

Imagine you could prune every less-useful stat off your gear. Imagine you could trade in armor, Stamina and everything else for just spell power and crit. Do you think you’d blow away the other healers? I do. That’s more extreme than giving up MP5 for more crit, but carries similar risks from a game-balance perspective.

Healers should care about Spirit (druids and priests) and MP5 (paladins and shamans). It’s fine to care about Int and crit too, but if you’re ignoring Spirit and MP5 and aren’t missing them, then something isn’t working right.

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Confusing itemization in Ulduar and beyond.

It’s not really unreasonable to feel somewhat confused by the way items are budgeted in Ulduar lately. Blizzard has made a pretty big shift in the typical stats needed especially in regards to things like mana regen and armor penetration so it’s perfectly natural to not know right away what’s an upgrade and what’s not. Hopefully this thread sheds a little light on the matter without having to delve into an endless pit of spreadsheets and simulators.

When I say it’s a class problem and not an item problem what I mean is that we are relatively locked into how many pieces we can drop. If we drop more pieces, the chance you will get something useful is even less. Therefore we have to make sure the pieces that do drop appeal to a wide variety of specs and classes. When you don’t care about a stat that someone you are sharing with very much cares about, that creates a problem that we do not want to fix by just making two different pieces. (Nor do we want to turn even more gear into tokens and badges. That gets lame.)

A great example of this are regen stats. By regen stats I mean MP5 and Spirit. Yes, you can get regen through other stats, but bear with me for a minute. Our basic design is that dps casters generally don’t run the risk of running out of mana, assuming they play reasonably well and aren’t in over the head. (i.e. this doesn’t mean you can point out cases where you ran OOM and claim the system is broken). But we do want healers to face the risk of running OOM. Healer mana and tanks being gibbed are the two main tools we have for ending encounters (and often even PvP). We need for healers to care about MP5 and Spirit as regen stats, but for casters to largely be able not to. We do this in part by converting Spirit into dps stats, but as I said, I’m not sure that’s ultimately a successful solution.

(Inhale.) We put MP5 on caster mail because Resto shamans use it. We don’t put it on the Elemental tier set because Resto shamans won’t use that. Many mana-users can get regen out of Int and crit, but those also improve other aspects of casting. If it benefits you too much to stack those and ignore MP5 or Spirit, you are going to end up being too effective a healer compared to other classes. The design of the Holy paladin is not that you get all your regen from crit and Int. A typical raiding Holy paladin probably gets double from Illumination what she gets from DP or Replenishment. It aint trivial. If a paladin stacks say nothing but crit, then not only is Illumination better, but you heal for more too. We run the risk that as your crit rises, you outstrip the shamans, priests and druids who are having to use MP5 and Spirit too. That’s why you can’t just say “We do use regen stats, but crit is our regen stat.” If none of the healers care about regen stats at all, then mana regen is probably still too good.

I know this is in the damage forum, but we totally agree about block. It has not kept up as a mitigation stat.

I also agree Armor Pen is confusing. You can’t look at a piece with Armor Pen vs. say AP and have a feel for whether it’s an upgrade or not. If you see haste or crit, you have some idea of what that will do for you. Armor Pen may just be damage in a slightly confusing package.

Long-term we could totally see merging MP5 and Spirit into one stat (with all of the class changes that would entail) but we’re not ready to pull the trigger on anything like that yet.

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Posted by Spooner | 15 Comments

Are “Nerfed” raids better or worse?

Looking at the design aspect of the game, through the past we’ve seen some pretty dramatic changes. When the end game was first around (back in classic with Lv 60 as the cap) everything was actually pretty damn time consuming. You could easily spend 7-8 hours in Molten Core or Blackwing Lair and not bat an eyelash because that was normal back then. If you got a group together for Blackrock Depths (and this still stands tru today) you didn’t make any other fucking plans for the night. Even in Burning Crusade the dungeons were essentially out of reach for a vast majority of players when it came to the end game content (oh hello Sunwell). I’m very happy with the current state of raiding content in the game.

People saying that it’s too easy and the game is being watered down for the casual player need to take a step back and really see the big picture. The economy sucks ass, making a product that only really appeals or rewards the extreme minority is downright retarded. And as for the current end game content being too easy, why is it then that only one guild out of millions has killed Algalon? I can respect and really appreciate the OP’s sentiment and presentation, but ultimately if you reintroduce the system of old WoW you will alienate so many players that it’d kill the game. The game’s endgame populace should look liek a really lopsided bellcurve with a few people at the bottom, tons in the middle nearing the top, and only a precious few sitting in full 25 man hardmode loot with every healer using Val’anyr.

We changed some of the base design of the game to cut down on the idea of content (and the items come with it) being only for a certain group of the playerbase. We have tried to open up content and give more people more things to do.

I don’t have any numbers to share, but we are seeing more people in the raid instances than in the past, so people are running things and picking up as many epics as possible. A lot of players are skipping normal dungeons because it’s faster to do so, but they have done it on other characters already so they know the fights and just want to get geared up asap. Sure, we could limit the number of epics to certain content and whatnot, but we don’t feel that would be a real benefit to the game. src

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