Demon Child
Premium Member
New LFG Channel
I don't think a world-wide LFG channel would be something you'd really want. It would immediately become the global chat channel for trade, spam and Chuck Norris jokes.
On live it's restricted to people using the LFG tool. The new dungeon tool honestly makes matches so quickly under most conditions that that implementation won't work. We feared people would just use the /trade channel if we didn't make a similar /lfg channel.
Dungeon system gear requirements
It uses all the items you own to make that determination, not just what you have equipped.
Honestly though, we are really relaxed about how we use this restriction. It's basically in there to prevent newly minted 80s in quest greens from rolling into a heroic dungeon that is likely to kick their butt. Most players sophisticated enough to be on these boards won't run into it in day to day practice.
Looking for raid NOT working cross-realms
If a dungeon group falls apart after 1-2 bosses, it's not nearly as big of a deal as if a raid group falls apart after 5 bosses of Ulduar. If the group wants to continue it and somebody from another realm (who can't really contact you easily) beat you to it and cleared it with their friends, that would probably leave you a bit upset. This is just one example that came to me off the top of my head.
Sure, there could be ways to resolve this with a variety of rules, but we will see how things go for now. A lot of raids are able to happen once people are found so we mainly just want to make it easier to find people for now.
Additional stats in monsters tooltips for Cataclysm
We'd be more likely to just put it on the stats screen as a tooltip for your hit chance for example. To get the information from particular creatures will require a little more work on our part.
Boss difficulty
I'm talking about an Icecrown boss being tougher than an Ulduar boss, not that the Ulduar bosses look at how much gear you have and scale themselves up accordingly.
Bosses get more damage and health. If they also got more expertise, defense and maybe armor then as character item level grew their relative strength to boss stats would not increase. As it is they increase enormously, requiring the bosses to have even more health and even more damage. Shifting some of that health and damage to other stats would fix a lot of problems.
Giving wands to level 1 characters
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They're generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters' action bars specifically so new players aren't inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.
With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets.
Chill of the Throne / Tanking
Reasons behind the change
I'll address this one more time and then leave it because I think players are more interested in trying to turn this into a huge tanking nerf than understand what's going on.
We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.
The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team.
Diminishing returns
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.
Stamina less important?
It arguably makes stam less important (though it will always be important for tanks). Many players are probably telling you right now that only stamina and armor are important because if you ever fail to avoid two boss hits in a row that you're going to die. Under that environment, avoidance loses a lot of value.
If bosses hit for less in IC (which they will, since they will hit more often) then the value of avoidance for purposes of survival increases.
I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue.
Effective Health
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.
Icecrown isn't Naxxramas
I am pretty sure on day one of 3.3 going live this forum will be filled with tanks who died and respond with "I thought bosses weren't going to hit hard."
It's Icecrown. It's not going to be Naxx.
Avoidance relative value
If you conclusion is that anything that improves your avoidance is now bad as a result of this change, you should think through it a little more. If you didn't like avoidance before, nothing changes. If you liked avoidance before, nothing changes. You just have less of it now. The relative value should not change, unless you get to the point where bosses no longer two-shot tanks so much, in which case the relative value of avoidance increases.
Death Knight
Chill of the Throne and DK Threat
It's not an oversight. The question is how many times are you prepared to use Rune Strike but can't because you haven't gotten a dodge or parry. If you are replacing most of your white swings with Rune Strikes, then you shouldn't see much of a difference.
[...] Yeah, per my previous response we are looking at Rune Strike. We're not convinced it will be a problem yet. (Source)
[...] There are a couple of flaws in your argument here. DKs macro Rune Strike not because they suffer for threat, but because more threat is generally better for a tank and there is no real penalty for macroing the ability. Players tend to macro attacks when the macro performs for them, not when they are really, really desperate to use the ability.
Second, you can't assume that less dodge turns into less Rune Strikes in such a simple manner. You have to look at how many white hits you convert to Rune Strike now and then how many you would convert to Rune Strike after losing dodge. If you have enough of a window in between dodges to still get a Rune Strike off, then you would see no effect. I suspect that's not the case, but I also don't think you'll see your threat plummet.
We also don't see too many appropriately geared tank of any class having sustained single-target threat problems in cases where you aren't supposed to have threat problems. Yes your dps classes may sometimes get dangerously close to pulling. That is part of the game. We're a long way from when the warlock would crit on a Molten Destroyer and wipe the raid because he didn't wait for 5 Sunders.
Paladin
Retribution in Arena
Ret should be viable in Arena and all aspects of the game. You have to be very careful when you analyze Arena statistics however. If say Shadow priests aren't viable in Arena, then many Shadow priests would rather stop competing than to go Disc. We have found that many paladins will switch specs at the drop of a hat for PvP purposes. You individually may not, but that doesn't prove the trend invalid. So if actual Ret spec paladins are low, you have to ask yourself how many of them are essentially behaving like Ret paladins but going to get a great talent deep in Holy or Prot. How many of them switched to Prot because Prot is too good at healing? You can't just jump to a "buff Ret" solution.
Rogue
Vanish changes reverted on PTR
It actually wasn't working well on the PTR because some casts that should not have broken it still broke it and it also prevented legitimate stealth breakers from functioning well. We probably could have lived with one of those problems, but with both it didn't seem worth the change.
Weapon swapping
We think the problems with swapping weapons get overstated a lot. There is some theoretical evidence that you can get a small dps increase by swapping weapons. In reality, many of the rogues who try it find that it's too prone to error given the marginal benefit. If you can make it work, that's great for you, but we don't think that weapon swapping will be the typical way for rogues to max out their dps.
Now if it got the point where the typical raiding rogue was dependent on swapping weapons, we'd probably do something about it.
I don't think a world-wide LFG channel would be something you'd really want. It would immediately become the global chat channel for trade, spam and Chuck Norris jokes.
On live it's restricted to people using the LFG tool. The new dungeon tool honestly makes matches so quickly under most conditions that that implementation won't work. We feared people would just use the /trade channel if we didn't make a similar /lfg channel.
Dungeon system gear requirements
It uses all the items you own to make that determination, not just what you have equipped.
Honestly though, we are really relaxed about how we use this restriction. It's basically in there to prevent newly minted 80s in quest greens from rolling into a heroic dungeon that is likely to kick their butt. Most players sophisticated enough to be on these boards won't run into it in day to day practice.
Looking for raid NOT working cross-realms
If a dungeon group falls apart after 1-2 bosses, it's not nearly as big of a deal as if a raid group falls apart after 5 bosses of Ulduar. If the group wants to continue it and somebody from another realm (who can't really contact you easily) beat you to it and cleared it with their friends, that would probably leave you a bit upset. This is just one example that came to me off the top of my head.
Sure, there could be ways to resolve this with a variety of rules, but we will see how things go for now. A lot of raids are able to happen once people are found so we mainly just want to make it easier to find people for now.
Additional stats in monsters tooltips for Cataclysm
We'd be more likely to just put it on the stats screen as a tooltip for your hit chance for example. To get the information from particular creatures will require a little more work on our part.
Boss difficulty
I'm talking about an Icecrown boss being tougher than an Ulduar boss, not that the Ulduar bosses look at how much gear you have and scale themselves up accordingly.
Bosses get more damage and health. If they also got more expertise, defense and maybe armor then as character item level grew their relative strength to boss stats would not increase. As it is they increase enormously, requiring the bosses to have even more health and even more damage. Shifting some of that health and damage to other stats would fix a lot of problems.
Giving wands to level 1 characters
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They're generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters' action bars specifically so new players aren't inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.
With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets.
Chill of the Throne / Tanking
Reasons behind the change
I'll address this one more time and then leave it because I think players are more interested in trying to turn this into a huge tanking nerf than understand what's going on.
We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.
The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team.
Diminishing returns
The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.
Stamina less important?
It arguably makes stam less important (though it will always be important for tanks). Many players are probably telling you right now that only stamina and armor are important because if you ever fail to avoid two boss hits in a row that you're going to die. Under that environment, avoidance loses a lot of value.
If bosses hit for less in IC (which they will, since they will hit more often) then the value of avoidance for purposes of survival increases.
I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue.
Effective Health
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.
Icecrown isn't Naxxramas
I am pretty sure on day one of 3.3 going live this forum will be filled with tanks who died and respond with "I thought bosses weren't going to hit hard."
It's Icecrown. It's not going to be Naxx.
Avoidance relative value
If you conclusion is that anything that improves your avoidance is now bad as a result of this change, you should think through it a little more. If you didn't like avoidance before, nothing changes. If you liked avoidance before, nothing changes. You just have less of it now. The relative value should not change, unless you get to the point where bosses no longer two-shot tanks so much, in which case the relative value of avoidance increases.
Death Knight
Chill of the Throne and DK Threat
It's not an oversight. The question is how many times are you prepared to use Rune Strike but can't because you haven't gotten a dodge or parry. If you are replacing most of your white swings with Rune Strikes, then you shouldn't see much of a difference.
[...] Yeah, per my previous response we are looking at Rune Strike. We're not convinced it will be a problem yet. (Source)
[...] There are a couple of flaws in your argument here. DKs macro Rune Strike not because they suffer for threat, but because more threat is generally better for a tank and there is no real penalty for macroing the ability. Players tend to macro attacks when the macro performs for them, not when they are really, really desperate to use the ability.
Second, you can't assume that less dodge turns into less Rune Strikes in such a simple manner. You have to look at how many white hits you convert to Rune Strike now and then how many you would convert to Rune Strike after losing dodge. If you have enough of a window in between dodges to still get a Rune Strike off, then you would see no effect. I suspect that's not the case, but I also don't think you'll see your threat plummet.
We also don't see too many appropriately geared tank of any class having sustained single-target threat problems in cases where you aren't supposed to have threat problems. Yes your dps classes may sometimes get dangerously close to pulling. That is part of the game. We're a long way from when the warlock would crit on a Molten Destroyer and wipe the raid because he didn't wait for 5 Sunders.
Paladin
Retribution in Arena
Ret should be viable in Arena and all aspects of the game. You have to be very careful when you analyze Arena statistics however. If say Shadow priests aren't viable in Arena, then many Shadow priests would rather stop competing than to go Disc. We have found that many paladins will switch specs at the drop of a hat for PvP purposes. You individually may not, but that doesn't prove the trend invalid. So if actual Ret spec paladins are low, you have to ask yourself how many of them are essentially behaving like Ret paladins but going to get a great talent deep in Holy or Prot. How many of them switched to Prot because Prot is too good at healing? You can't just jump to a "buff Ret" solution.
Rogue
Vanish changes reverted on PTR
It actually wasn't working well on the PTR because some casts that should not have broken it still broke it and it also prevented legitimate stealth breakers from functioning well. We probably could have lived with one of those problems, but with both it didn't seem worth the change.
Weapon swapping
We think the problems with swapping weapons get overstated a lot. There is some theoretical evidence that you can get a small dps increase by swapping weapons. In reality, many of the rogues who try it find that it's too prone to error given the marginal benefit. If you can make it work, that's great for you, but we don't think that weapon swapping will be the typical way for rogues to max out their dps.
Now if it got the point where the typical raiding rogue was dependent on swapping weapons, we'd probably do something about it.
