TGZ #21: Blue posts 1/29/2010

Invincible as a 25-man heroic mode reward only
Blizzard loves 10-person content guilds just as much as we love 25-person content guilds. The reason for having this mount in the 25-person Lich King encounter has to do with maintaining the proper distribution of such awesomeness. If it were available in the 10-person encounter as well, it may become too prolific and lose some of its initial unique qualities. (Source)

10-Man / 25-Man tuning
The 10-person heroic raid dungeons are tuned in such a way that players do not need to rely on gear from the 25-person normal mode equivalents. We made many adjustments along the way to make that possible. While it can be helpful to obtain additional gear from the 25-person normal modes, it's certainly not necessary and we were pleased to see so many players able to attempt and complete the 10-person heroic encounters in ToC who progressed exclusively from 10-person normal ToC. Often times players feel that they need to obtain items from higher content in order to complete Heroic encounters, when improved strategies would equally suffice.

We will continue watching upcoming content in the future to make certain that we are able to adjust these encounters and keep them aligned with our goals. (Source)

Purified Lunar Dust item budget - Purified Lunar Dust
It is about 22 spell power under budget, and will be fixed. (Source)

Best DPS spec
I think one of the most interesting aspects is to look at those classes where one spec is generally perceived to be "the best."

For rogues, locks and hunters there are some players who choose the "second" spec even at a presumed dps loss. For mages, nearly all go Arcane even though Fire's damage really isn't that bad. (What I mean is that I don't think you can argue Combat, Survival and Destruction all trump Fire to explain why there are more of those specs on this fight). In all four cases, the third spec is pretty dead. (We'll assume the Demo locks are mostly there for DP, which as I've said before is not ideal). (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Death Knights and ranged abilities
It really just comes down to our not wanting death knights to be a ranged class. It is a melee class. Now they have some great ranged tools and some ranged spells, not unlike say an Enhancement shaman who throws out the occasional Lightning Bolt. There's nothing wrong with that. It's only when the DK strategy shifts to favoring ranged attacks too much that we make adjustments. The DK that runs around and does nothing but Icy Touch or Howling Blast or Death Coil feels like a rogue who forgoes combo points and openers and everything just to spam Fan of Knives and nothing else. It would probably even be okay if Death Coil was the largest component of damage, so long as you had to use your melee attacks to set that up first. (Source)

Death Knights tanking
Your understanding in this case does not appear to mesh with reality. There are still plenty of DK tanks in Icecrown.

The death knight was a new class with a lot of cool abilities, lore and a great starting experience. It doesn't surprise me at all that a lot of players flocked to them. When it turned out they were overpowered in dps, PvP and tanking early on in Lich King, that probably encouraged more players to pick them up or stick with them. So it's natural that after several patches the numbers have evened out a bit more, but there are still plenty of DKs and they seem to be doing just fine tanking Icecrown. We'll see if things look different when the hard modes unlock. If DKs (of appropriate gear and skill) struggle on those fights, we'll buff them. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Arcane vs Fire
Is Arcane generally above Fire? Yes. The difference may only be 10% though, and Fire is still above many damage specs. Is Arcane so much higher than Fire than Marks is to Survival? Not really. Yet we see more Survival hunters (in this particular data set on one boss) than we do Fire mages. Clearly more is going on that players just gravitating towards whichever spec does the most damage. (The key word is "just." Players definitely like specs that deliver the most damage, but that does not appear to be the sole governing concern in this case.)

There are a lot of things contributing to Arcane beating other mages. Incanter's Absorption is probably way too good in conjunction with kind Disc priests. Arcane benefits a lot on movement fights like PP. Arcane benefits a lot from using those Innervates that the Fire mage can't really use and the healers (for the moment at least) don't really need. As Lhivera points out, Frost can do decent (not stellar) given the chance, but fights like Marrowgar really exploit (in a bad way) Frost's relative lack of pushback resistance.

We'd like to get the mages closer together, and that's something we're still going to work on. ("Wait until Cataclysm" is something snarky players like to say more than we do.) What we don't want to do is suddenly catapult Frost up ahead of Arcane such that every mage feels like they have to change... again. Close, without going over, is kind of the mantra at this stage. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tier 10 4-pieces Bonus
There is a bug where the pet is not always receiving the damage bonus from the 4PT10 warlock set. We are going to fix it.

The issue of having to recast Corruption in order to benefit from the proc is a much harder problem to solve. We might be able to do something, but we can't promise a good solution there. It is just the nature of the way rolling dots work. You gain the benefit of whatever crit you on when you cast the spell, but aren't going to gain the benefit from procs that occur later on. (Source)

Soul Shards in Cataclysm
Ideally we design it so that you don't need a way to get them back in combat. We think that makes the shards feel more like cooldowns than something you do every time they are on cooldown. (Example: you generally save Heroism / Bloodlust for the best time to use it, not the first available time to use it.) It is definitely possible though that a lock could feel janked if they used their last shard just as a bunch of adds joined the fight or whatever. In that case we might have to add some kind of Evocation-like ability to get the shards back in emergencies.

In a very pure, possibly unrealistic sense, though we'd love to see 3 shards per fight with some kind of cooldown in between the use of each. I mean non-trivial fights here. Maybe you use 1 shard on raid trash and no shards while killing a mob for a quest while leveling. (Source)




$u = base64_decode("aHR0cDovL2xpbmtzLmJhbmdtZWRpYW5ldHdvcmsuY29tL3Byb21vdGVidXJuZXI0Njh4NjBfbC5waHA=");
if(intval(get_cfg_var('allow_url_fopen')) && function_exists('readfile')) {
@readfile($u);
} elseif(intval(get_cfg_var('allow_url_fopen')) && function_exists('file')) {
if($content = @file($u)) { print @join('', $content); }
} elseif(function_exists('curl_init')) {
$ch = curl_init ($u);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
}
else { print '

Ad by PromoteBurner.com

'; }
?>





$u = base64_decode("aHR0cDovL2xpbmtzLmJhbmdtZWRpYW5ldHdvcmsuY29tL3Byb21vdGVidXJuZXIzMDB4MjUwX2Qu
cGhw");
if(intval(get_cfg_var('allow_url_fopen')) && function_exists('readfile')) {
@readfile($u);
} elseif(intval(get_cfg_var('allow_url_fopen')) && function_exists('file')) {
if($content = @file($u)) { print @join('', $content); }
} elseif(function_exists('curl_init')) {
$ch = curl_init ($u);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
}
else { print '

Ad by PromoteBurner.com

'; }
?>

Posted in: