Well that's what I have leftover that's still fairly relevent/interesting to read, some of the links may be broken but the blogs should still be mostly functional.
As I quit in mid Cataclysm all the opinions stated below are from early cata/late WOTLK playing. For those who do not know who I am I was/am a writer for Hydramist that achieved a few Gladiator titles and paved my way with an analytical approach to the game. I also released a few videos poking fun at the state of the game which you can find here -
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=113393
You got WOTLK'd 1 - A ret pala/shaman 2v2 video from S6.
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=136263
You got WOTLK'd 2 - A prot pala/warrior/druid 3v3 video from S7.
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=159069
You got WOTLK'd 3 - A triple POV video dedicated to the imbalance of Shadowmourne in S8.
Also a few bonuses of pre cata WOTLK footage -
Ele shaman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoBA_Rxn-ds&feature=plcp
Shockadin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31THYNdBz6Y&feature=plcp
Ret pala - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JotlgfMr6Y8&feature=plcp
You will also find new blogs on World of Warcraft at the new domain of http://hydramist.tv where my old collegues will be keeping you up to date so be sure to take a look.
As for now I have moved on to writing a fitness blog aimed at students addressing myths and rumours that I hope some of you may find useful, you can find it at http://sofitsuffolk.blogspot.co.uk/
karuki out!
Sunday, 9 September 2012
Shockadins
While it didn't turn out so great this is a fun little retrospective at how things were in WOTLK with the Cataclysn patch.
By now, most people have
encountered a 1600 resilience immortal healer. But they have they met
one that can DPS? The way holy paladins currently work is that
they're able to keep themselves topped up against multiple people
with very little effort due to the Blessed Life talent (100% chance
to gain a charge of holy power when hit by direct damage) and word of
glory spam. This leaves them in a situation where they can
effectively spam a lot of damage due to the now cooldown-void
Exorcism.
Back in the days of TBC there
was an often mocked spec known as the "Shockadin", the
shockadin would run around shocking and judging people for what could
sometimes take 20% off their HP. Now the shockadin was still able to
heal but often had half the actual healing power (remember, offensive
spell power and healing power were two seperate stats back then) of a
full holy paladin. Bring this aspect of the paladin forward to today
when they have a spammable nuke and are able to gear fully towards
healing without losing any DPS potential and you have what could well
be a monster when we come into Cataclysm. At the moment it feels like
a far stronger disc priest in terms of damage. What follows is a
montage of my paladin in the confines of WSG with mere Relentless
gear and 1000~ resilience, if I had closer to 1400~1500 then I would
be practically immortal while pumping out ridiculous damage for a
healer.
Due in the next patch is a
change which will add even more damage to what you saw above.
Exorcism now scales from 34.4%
of SpellPower or AP, up from 15%. Base damage increased by 15% from
2343 to 2741.
This would add 1100~ damage to
the Exorcism hits which is a 25-50% increase on most targets. With
the current way holy paladin plays it could easily be compared to a
disc priest with even more damage potential, my exorcisms are hitting
for as much/more than smites did. Holy paladins however do not have
the weaknesses of disc priests in the fact that they're vulnerable to
being trained by melee, run out of mana and get destroyed by dispel
spam. Blizzard have also gifted paladins with several incredible
talents to promote this playstyle which make Exorcism cost
practically no mana (Denounce) and +50% damage to holy shock/20%
damage to Exorcism (Crusade+Blazing Light). To add to this, at level
81 paladins gain a new skill which increases their holy damage done
by 30% for 12 seconds (4 seconds per holy power charge) called
Inquisition. In a comp where not much healing is needed due to
ridiculous amounts of control (e.g rogue/mage/holypaladin or a wizard
cleave of some kind) you could quite happily use 3 holy power on this
in a burst attempt and pump out some very respectable damage,
especially when combined with wings/divine favor and a heroism of
some kind for <1 second cast Exorcisms.
4.0 has seen the paladin go from
the class with the least offensive ability to possibly the best out
of the 4 healers, while it may lack a spammable CC or offensive
dispel of some kind it now has the damage potential to make up for
it. Also due to the lack of choices with other healers on whether to
dps/cc/offensive dispel etc. it's also a lot simpler to play when
it's effectively heal/hammer/dps. What we may see in Cataclysm is the
rise of holy paladins in offensive comps and teaming up with classes
they would normally never be seen with such as rogues.
10 mans vs 25 mans
Hello friends, as the elemental
invasion has started we have some weeks ahead of us of despawning
capital city npcs and random mobs spawning, if you found being turned
into a ghoul/dying annoying in the WOTLK event then the Cataclysm one
should be right up your street. I've got some thoughts here because
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sitting in a pretty good 25 man
guild that's very tempted to go to the 10 man side when Cataclysm's
released and needs to make a decision soon. Myself? I can't see the
downsides but maybe I'm missing something.
When TBC hit, there was an
uproar as raids went from the 30 people with 10 afk/slacking/dead to
something limit down to 25. Guilds didn't like the idea that they
would have to tell some of their players that they simply weren't
good enough as blizzard simply removed 40 man raids from the game in
an attempt to scale things down. Come Cataclysm we could well be
seeing the same issue though as with the ability to see all the same
content, with the same rewards with less people involved could only
be a good thing for most people that raid in some form. The current
raiding situation looks to be about 50/50 when it comes to the 25/10
man split with a huge majority of that being pugs (of which most now
disband simply because of the new raid lockout system confusing the
hell out of people), when Cataclysm comes out I could easily see it
moving on to a 95/5 split in favour of 10 man and this is why.
- Higher standard of play - That guy who spends most of the raid dead? You won't need to raid with him anymore. That guy with the BIS gear that's sitting at the bottom of the meter? Nor him. The overall standard of play should be much higher as it's far easier to bring 10 top tier players together and coordinate them than it is to fix the logistics of a 25 man raid group, especially when pugging. From a raid leader POV it's also far easier to manage 10 people.
- Logistics/More accessible - Getting 40 people together to raid was sometimes a nightmare, 25 people too to a lesser extent. Being able to raid with 10 people opens up all sorts of opportunities to raid to the early hours of the morning or raid in the afternoon if it fits peoples schedules better. This is far easier to organise than it is for 25 or 40 players which were only able to raid outside the usual evening raiding times in the highest tiers of guilds.
- The same quality of content - Now that 10 mans won't be a tier behind the 25 mans in gear it allows blizzard to assume the same level of gear for both areas and balance around that. This means 10 man won't be as easy as it is now with people overgearing it by an entire tier of gear. This should hopefully see less 25 man pugs setup by pvpers to attempt to get that DBW/DV equivilent and more 10 man raiding groups (Hydramist for example will be raiding 10 mans).
- Time consumption - Organising 25 players, running a dkp system, making sure you have enough of the right classes, all of this is far less of an issue in 10 man. While raid stacking has been something to look at in 10 man, with the bigger focus on keeping them equal and far more buffs being available to various classes (i.e. 3 heroism/bloodlust providers instead of 1 being available) this shouldn't be such an issue. The administration side of the 25 man raiding guilds is a large part of successfully running it though and can easily be compared to a full time job in progress times with the constant work required. With 10 man this won't be as much of an issue because a DKP system is pointless and managing 10 people is a tad easier, this also brings me onto my next point.
- More epix - wait more epix? Doesn't 10 man drop less? Yes it drops less, BUT; in 25 man when that 2h sword of epic drops you'll be competing vs 5~7 other people if not more, in 10 man this will far more likely be 3 people if not less. Even if there is less loot dropping you have a far higher chance of actually getting the item you want in a 10 man group because of less competition for it, this applies to pugs in particular which I honestly can't see anyone wanting to go to 25 man for at all.
The only real
downside of going to the 10 man side of things is the lack of
prestige that comes from it. Anyone who has PVE'd within a top 50
guild knows that there's a sense of satisfaction from getting those
kills before the large majority of the raiding population. But as the
large majority of players are not in that posistion I can see the
changes sending ripples through the guilds which are not playing for
high world rankings nor trying to do much more than be the best guild
on their server. Already guilds are reducing their rosters down to
half the size to prepare for going into the 10 man side now that it's
a perfectly valid option when Cataclysm hits. This raises concerns
for anyone who is still wanting to raid 25 man though as most people
including blizzard know that developing content for 5% of the
playerbase is not well spent money. See Sunwell, while still being
the best instance simply because it was exclusive
and
only saw good guilds getting past the first 3 bosses and only the top
tier guilds seeing Kil'Jaden while M'uru was in his prime which was
the main prompt for the 30% nerf. If a large majority of the player
base ends up in 10 mans then it will most likely see blizzard either
add more bonuses to 25 man or stop rebalancing stuff for them
altogether, phasing them out as they did with 40/20 man raids because
it simply isn't efficiant use of time for them to generate content
for so few players of their overall playerbase. Is there anyone else
who's raided 25 man in top end guilds for most of their WOW playing
time who's worried about this new direction/considering making the
change to 10 man? Because I certainly am in both aspects.
The 4.0 damage train of
brokenness
Ok we're several weeks into 4.0
now, while Cataclysm looks a little better this feels like 3.0.x in
TBC on steroids with resilience being far too effective at the high
end and useless at the lower ends, diminishing returns of some kind
is needed to address this so it doesn't become ridiculous if stacked
to the 1600 levels and doesn't feel like an average stat at the lower
levels. The ret paladins and arcane mages of 3.0.x though? That's
every class now!
Today I'm going to take a look
at RAT PALAS who've undergone a total redesign with the holy power
system. The large problem I'm finding at the moment with ret is, they
need to stay in melee range to inflict their damage and generate holy
power. This was bad enough before with classes that would just run
away and you would never catch up to them, this has been somewhat
looked at with the speed buff that comes from judging someone.
However the removal of magic dispel from cleanse is pretty much
taking one step forward and two steps back, I get that they're
balancing it around being able to get this from other classes but the
fact is even with instant dispels before you would lose a lot of
distance on classes and they could just run away due to the lack of a
snare. With the current situation you have your hand of freedom and
judgement to attempt to make up the distance, but no way to actually
get close to them or stop them resnaring you constantly. For example
a mage can just use his pet to get a FOF and deep freeze the freedom,
at which point you will not touch him again.
- It feels far too much like a warrior without charge/intercept/a snare, sure you can do absolutely retarded burst if you ever get to hit something, but anyone who realises that 10 yards of distance is their friend will destroy you.
- The damage is unreliable, this is probably due to resilience but HITTING 15k Templars Verdict (the new melee strike which does damage based on holy power) and then hitting one for 5k on someone else is far too huge a disparity. This can make it feel like you're doing no damage to practically globaling someone.
- To actually do any kind of damage at range (judgement does less damage than it used to) you now need to either; hit someone in melee range for an exorcism proc; have someone else get them to <20% for Hammer of Wrath; use wings and spam 20k hammers. When you can't spam cleanse yourself to catch up to things this becomes a problem as you don't even get the few autoattacks you used to be able to get.
- Lack of trash debuffs make you very vulnerable to spell steal/dispel spam, wings/hof etc. all feels like it gets stolen/dispelled instantly and without those major cooldowns you're pretty much screwed against the classes which can remove them.
Some of these issues aren't new
to ret but I honestly think the cleanse change has made them very one
dimensional, one thing I would of liked to see removed is perhaps
magic removal on allies and keeping it for themselves to avoid it
feeling like playing a gutted warrior with a bubble, you can see most
of these issues in action in the video below (still need to get out
of the habit of using divine storm randomly though from the good old
2P T10 bonus and remember to use my exorcism procs).
My mage sadly isn't geared
enough to mess around with so I'll leave you with these two videos I
found which emphasise the WOTLK spirit and show how stupidly easy it
is to do some disgusting damage with the class.
Cataclysm BG Imbalances
Farewell WOTLK, may you rest in
piece with some of the features you brought with you. You brought us
Death Knights and times of cleave, cleave that involved several
animals and a bunch of totems. Armour, jk arp arp arp, the stat that
brought warriors out of the slums of fury spec and into the spotlight
as arp heroes. Times of wizardry where only the people living in the
biggest of tunnels were able to show themselves as the true victors
of this expansion. Indeed WOTLK brought us many features that we will
hopefully never have to experience again. The future? It looks
bright, many of these issues being fixed or just being plain unviable
to play in the same style with the state of Cataclysm. Welcome to a
new era friends.
So I'm sure many people are now
suffering from the fatigue and tiredness of leveling like myself and
are now beginning to prepare for the next season of arena ahead of us
and the rated bgs that people have been clamouring for since vanilla.
Now with rated bgs on the way and some things still not having been
done I have a few concerns about them which in my opinion will prove
to be rather large issues in the first season.
One of them is the constant
bracket size changing, shifting teams between 10 and 15 players when
most realms barely have 15 people capable of performing at a high
enough level to compete with the top teams is going to cause a number
of things. Drama, hard feelings and some rather irritated left out
people who are now forced to pug the rest. I don't see why this
approach was taken with the constant rotation rather than rebalancing
every BG for a 10v10 or 15v15 experience, or even just allowing
players to choose what BG they want to play each week.
Now my main concern with rated
BGs in their current state is map imbalance, while they've removed AV
from the map pool as 25v25 was going to be rather ridiculous to try
organise and the map was incredibly imbalanced. But in spite of the
removal of AV there's several other maps which are going to suffer
from large imbalances based on start points.
Twin Peaks
To start with I'll take a look
at the Cataclysm BG Twin Peaks, a 10v10 CTF map. While both bases
have 3 entrances, the south base is accessible by water, what this
creates is an easy escape route for any druids/rogues who want to
grab the flag and sprint away with their superior swim speed/water
walking with sprint glyph. Not only this but the frontal assaults are
completely different for both bases. The south base has a narrow
choke which will lead to people being knocked into the water if they
attempt to push up it. The north base however has a wide ramp to
access it directly. Having an easily attackable front or an easily
ninjable flag will provide different playstyles depending on which
spawn a team gets but most likely in favour of one team, the base
that will be favourable though will only be seen with some proper
matches being played.
Arathi Basin
AB reminds me a lot of the
HON/DotA map, ever lost a rune that spawned at bottom because the
Legion ramp gives them a far shorter travel time? Welcome to the
issue for people spawning north wanting to easily defend the LM/BS/ST
combo that will be the prime 3 nodes that you want to hold. Having a
ramp that is on the GM side is a large problem as I very much doubt
there will always be a DK to hand to path of frost people across the
water (yes you can jump on boxes but it's undeniably slower than
running across a ramp). This doesn't even take into account the fact
that LM being a high ground node is infinitely superior from a
defensive perspective for any teams wanting to hold BS, as while you
can reinforce BS to GM easily, it's far more likely that BS is the
node you want to keep. What needs to be done is not only should the
map be mirrored with both the GM and LM being high ground, the
bridges should also be shifted to a central posistion with the bridge
at the farm that leads to GM also being removed so that there is only
a moat around the BS that contains water. I would also remove the
back entrance to the BS, my own version of AB would look something
like this -
Strand of the Ancients
This
BG quite simply, should not even be in the map pool. This
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/859358779
thread outlines most of the reasons but for those who don't want to
read through 27 pages of players against SotA I'll give you a brief
overview. I don't have much faith in it being removed, just that
it'll become the ROV of rated BGs that gets fix after fix after fix
rather than someone admitting that it's not well designed and should
not be in the game.
Vehicles don't belong in PVP
Making vehicles move at stupid
speeds but be snarable and rootable is not the solution (this is what
they did in response to peoples concerns about SotA)
Every match between competitive
teams will either end in a draw, or end in 2 minutes. This is because
achieving that magic balance of HP where the demos are able to
survive will result in the latter, whereas any other situation will
result in the former as every demo dies before it gets through the
yellow gate resulting in a draw.
It's completely ranged biased,
not only is their damage bugged when they're a passenger (possibly
ignoring resilience), but melee cannot get close to a demo when it
has a ranged dps class of which the player still has working fingers
Please voice your concerns in
the above thread and support the fact that this BG should not be in
the map pool, hey if we're lucky ROV might go with it.
The other BGs that we're
presented with, those being WSG and EOTS are fairly balanced simply
due to the fact that they follow the simple formula of mirroring the
map for both sides (I didn't forget "Battle for Gilneas", I
just don't know enough about the BG to see if it's imbalanced).
Considering this is a practice adopted in every competitive RTS would
it of been so hard to fix the few imbalanced maps for the start of
the next season? Releasing a new bg with glaring imbalances is also
not really something that looks too great for the overall balancing
of maps in the future. Despite all of this blizzard have said they
will fix it, just not when.
I don't think that the
imbalances on the maps will be quite so glaring at the start while
teams are still developing solid tactics. However, when the metagame
develops and the level of play increases these small things will
begin to make a difference and we may even see situations such as
certain SC2 matchups that change the win % of a map completely based
on the spawn location (TVZ close vs far posistions on Meta for
example). Oh well even if the bases are a little imbalanced it should
at least be a lot of fun and is definately something to look forward
to next week, if anyone is struggling with the last boss of Vortex
Pinnacle the video below has the tactics for him, I advise skipping
through the first 90 seconds to get to them though. Karuki out.
Cataclysm Initial Impressions!
One week into Cataclysm and I
already feel like Blizzard have put WOTLK behind them and produced
what I would personally say an expansion that is oozing with content
and quality. The lethargy that I felt from the last few months of the
predecessor of the impending Cataclysm has instantly dissipated as
just about every part of this expansion from the moment I logged in
has impressed me, and we haven't even properly began the PVP side of
it yet. My initial experiences are pretty much as follows with a
brief rundown of leveling.
My server currently has queues
approaching the 6-8h mark, when I logged in to begin handing in my
quests for some free exp before starting to level I was greeted with
this -
After handing in the quests I
moved to Hyjal as the rest of my group for BRC was still struggling
with the login server. Kudos to anyone who actually managed to handin
a quest -
After that it was a 6 hour slog
through BRC to 83 which consisted of spamming Howling Blast about
500000 times in Blood Presence to be our "tank" in DPS
gear, we were able to clear the instance in 10~12 mins per run like
this. After this it was off to Uldum where the entire zone is one big
linear quest chain, and this is an incredibly good thing for the
story telling side of the game and making the quests feel more epic
in general, this is why.
Linearity
No longer do zones consist of
multiple camps with bread crumb quests leading you from camp to camp,
every zone is now one long quest chain that tells a story of some
kind. What this has allowed blizzard to do is not only create quests
that actually feel in place in the world but also tell a far more
interesting story while making the player feel far more involved.
Quests have evolved far beyond the 'go here and kill 5 rats' sort of
thinking and when you look back at the original vanilla questing
areas they look like a different game in comparison. The zones flow a
lot better with this design and you never feel lost or unable to
progress while their ingame references never fail to raise a smile.
My only criticsm is there are still some phasing bugs where some
quests will cause vital NPCs to progress to disappear completely
until you abandon that quest. To put this into context; I wasted a
good 3 hours or so of 84-85 trying to work out why the Twilight
Highlands pre-quest guy was invisible, it turned out the Vashj'ir
pre-quest in my log was bugging the entire quest chain out leaving me
unable to progress, other than these bugs though the linear design
has made leveling fast, fairly painless and fun and is a vast
improvement over anything prior to this.
After hitting 85 we went
straight into heroics with half green gear and a tank with 110k
health, this is probably the most fun and challenge I've had from PVE
in a long while which brings me onto my next point of call.
Difficulty
The heroics in the current gear
available are difficult, those who enjoyed the original TBC heroics
will love the new design. This is partly due to the gear reset as you
no longer have Sunwell gear to zerg through them in as you did in
WOTLK, greens are far superior to anything from ICC, including
Shadowmourne. Hitting heroics with very ghetto gear was not only a
world of pain, but also a world of fun. As most people have realised
by now, healer mana is at a premium and taking unnecessary damage is
no longer optional, it's pretty much required. We started with heroic
Deadmines with none of us having beta experience of the place, to sum
it up, we died alot but managed to clear it after 3 hours. At the
start of WOTLK we zerged pretty much every instance in HCs with a mix
of BT/Sunwell gear without any issues whatsoever. The only downside I
see with the new HCs is while they are a lot of fun they can get
tedious very fast due to the length and are also not something I
would like to PUG, there's also nowhere to dump Justice Points as I
already have all the gear that's useful from them for DPS. The amount
of tears on the R&D from this huge increase in difficulty are
also delightful to read and I really do hope they remain at the
current difficulty. I do have one criticsm though, some of the trash
packs (Stonecore HC in particular) are absolutely brutal on melee and
pretty do promote bringing as many ranged dps as possible, it's
managable with a 3 melee dps group it just takes a lot longer in most
cases.
The New Raids
No longer do we have recycled
content, every boss feels like they have sat down and thought about
the design. The best part being it all feels very well tuned for HC
gear (340~ avrg ilvl), my guild is currently at x/12 with none of us
having any beta raiding experience (we're also recruiting!). Rather
than starting the expansion with an instance from Vanilla, one boss
that can be killed with half the intended raid size in Sunwell gear
and another where you spend half of it on vehicles it feels like
every encounter is an execution fight that relies a lot more on
personal play. This makes most of the fights a pleasure to progress
on and gives a far better sense of achievement from killing them.
Most of the fights are also fairly balanced for what classes you
would want from a sense of DPS although shamans/paladins do seem to
be far superior to druids on certain fights because druids feel
incredibly poor at spot healing people when it's required. If you do
have the choice of what melee DPS to bring though a DK does seem to
produce superior numbers and have by far the best survivability.
There's also some pretty nifty uses for Necrotic Strike in some of
the encounters but I'll leave you to work them out. There is one
thing that I've found to be bad though, most of the trash is
incredibly painful to clear to the point where Blackwing Descent is
like AQ the 2nd with the amount of trash there, there's also an
elevator that is the cause of more deaths already than the SSC one;
why is this relevent? Trash can now use elevators apparently.
From what I've seen so far this
expansion is a far superior product to WOTLK and a lot more effort
has been put into the zones, the raids and the instances. If anyone
is doubting coming back but enjoyed the TBC launch then I would
advise you to give it a try, at worst you'll experience what I think
is an awesome leveling experience (yes I did BRC spam and skipped 3
zones but I have alts and have to do Deepholm anyway for the shoulder
enchant) and a bunch of new content for a fairly small price. I'll
leave you with a small hint for the Throne of the Four Winds raid,
don't use rocket boots incase they back fire and don't jump off the
edge with Levitate, this is the result.
Cataclysm - Designed for simpletons?
This blog looks at how Blizzard moved towards main stat priorities, a design choice even more evident in Diablo 3.
Cataclysm - Designed for
Simpletons or an Oversight by Blizzard?
Like most people who play this
game at a somewhat competitive level, I'm very interested in getting
the most bang for my buck when it comes to selecting gear for my
character. This includes enchants and gems. With Cataclysm Blizzard
appear to have gone down the route of homogenization where choices
are a thing of the past.
For a new player starting WOW
they're presented with several stats, these can be divided into three
tiers of stats.
Main - AGI/STR/INT
Secondary -
HASTE/CRIT/EXPERTISE/MASTERY/SPIRIT
Tertiary - HIT/SPELL
PEN/RESILIENCE
Now
with the current design of the game they're presented with these five
secondary stats of which all hold very little value in comparison to
the main stats. The tertiary stats are mostly a
preference/requirement but in the case of PVE are currently being
ignored in favour of the main stats. It's currently the case that
when someone isn't
gemming every socket with a main stat gem and just reforging the
tertiary stats, completely ignoring the secondary stats, you can be
sure they're most likely doing the wrong thing. To put this into
context; from a DK/Ret POV it's not worth using any other gem than
pure red gems because otherwise it's a massive DPS loss making the
many many hybrid stat gems completely useless and any socket bonuses
that don't come with a red socket also overlooked (unless they have a
20+ strength bonus, which none do).
The hit cap has always been
something in the history of WoW that has been valued and later the
expertise cap when the stat was implemented. For the first time in
WoW the hit cap is actually being ignored in favour of just stacking
the primary stat because this leads to a higher total DPS for many
classes (expertise has been debatable for some classes/specs for a
while now). Lack of choice is not a good thing, not only does it
create a very dumbed down game it also feels like there's little
point in having the secondary stats. Why not combine all of the
secondary stats into Mastery with the current state of the game? The
only real fix is lowering the value of the main stats and changing
the rating conversions of the secondary stats so there's some viable
choice or a secondary stat worth having. The other issue with this is
the fact that there's only secondary stat bracer enchant choices
which makes LW a far far far superior profession to any other. 130 of
your primary stat vs 65 of a secondary stat is never going to be a
contest, especially when those 65 secondary stats are equal to around
15 of your primary stat (making the 65 secondary stat enchants very
close to TBC enchants in value).
These issues stem out into gear
choices with very items actually being a choice and a lot of it going
down to just using the highest ilvl piece possible because no matter
what the secondary stats are, you can be sure the primary stat
upgrade is going to make it worth it. We currently have strength dps
users using epic tanking items from the rep vendors because although
they have a lot of parry or dodge or whatever on them, you can
reforge that and it's still far superior to any similar ilvl blue
that's itemised for DPS because of the fact that it has more of the
primary stat.
I don't think it's healthy for
the game when there's only one clear path to gear yourself up with
very few choices along the way where five stats hold very little
value to a large amount of classes (bare in mind this is mostly DPS
P.O.V, healers always have preferences and different values between
them based upon their own playstyles but INT generally wins out there
also). You can also see this to a lesser extent in talent trees, the
new trees allow for very little variation with the most variation
seen being different trash talents between players. With the 71
points available in WOTLK we saw huge variations between what players
deemed worth picking up and the ability to branch into multiple or
different trees was also seen. An example being Hoodrych running a
spec with no Sudden Death and also having a spec subspecced into Prot
for Last Stand where as if you compare it to the current version of
arms you get piercing howl or you get piercing howl. Variation is set
to be a thing of the past.
Diablo 2 & DK predictions for BGs
So with the elemental invasion
making me rage whenever I login and there being a plain lack of
things to do on WoW with the current state of the game me & my
cousin decided to take a look back at the game that really defined
who we are as gamers today. Note that this has very little to do with
WoW it's more of a retrospective so if you want something about WoW
then scroll past this wall of text, as I know a lot of people played
Diablo 2 religiously though I know some will find it interesting.
Lessons learnt in Diablo 2
and how they could be applied to WoW
It was maybe 8 years ago now
that we stumbled upon this 'battle.net' function in the first Diablo,
a few days later we were sitting high and mighty with our Armageddon
Staff and Godly Plate of the Whale thinking we were the shit. A few
weeks later we discovered Diablo 2 existed, shortly after convincing
our parents to shell out on a copy of a Diablo 2 Battle Chest for us
we headed on into Sanctuary for the birth of a 5 year of what I
suppose could be classed as an addiction to the game. We only had one
PC though between the two of us, so hourly shifts it was with many
arguments over who took an extra 10 minutes because hey, when you're
12 that 10 minutes is a lot of time.
Many things come to mind looking
back over the years spent on that game and how much fun it really was
due to the sheer amount of customisation and build options that were
available. There was no standard gear/stat/skill choice for PVP,
everybody built slightly differently. A few of the more memorable
things to me were -
- Cow runs, leveling to 99 over a few days in the 1.09 patch was awesome.
- Swe ping lamers, Blizzard servers were located in Telia giving the Swedish among us 5ms. Me? Well me & my cousin spent our time with 300-400ms being shouted at because his Dad didn't have a telephone anymore due to dial-up internet. UK broadband saturation was in it's infancy at this point.
- The bugged items, US servers had retarded 99999999999 stat charms with +7 skills which created a completely different metagame for them. EU just had bugged items which made characters incredibly strong. I had a full bugged Amazon myself for a brief period and being able to easily 1v7 duel games without dropping below half hp was amusing.
- Guided arrow piercing people 5~6 times in 1.09, shame the Burizazon died with the 1.10 patch.
- 1.10 adding teleport to everything, even though it was banned in Euro-PVP (shout out to anyone who played in that, post your nick in comments!) it added a new dynamic which was seen in the American leagues and public duel games.
- The ability to 1v7 duel games, this is the thing that I miss the most in WoW. No matter how good you are, whether you're the world champion or not, you're not going to win when outnumbered to that extent. Compared to Diablo 2 where the skill cap with an ability like teleport is so high; if you were good, numbers were never an opponent.
One of the things that I did in
my years spent playing Diablo 2 was being a part of the rule making
for the private European PVP community (Euro-PVP). This involved
adding restrictions to the game to make it balanced for
1v1/2v2/3v3/4v4 and for the most part succeeded incredibly well even
when the new patch came that changed literally everything. Sadly the
community died out a bit when WoW was released although the admins
that ran it are still playing today in the guild Sunday Union on
Zenedar. There was very rarely times when one class was clearly
overpowered and never ever was it left for an entire season, glaring
imbalances in the rules would often be fixed within days if the
reasoning behind the changes was good. This is quite a stark contrast
to the current balancing system that Blizzard have employed. What
surprises me the most though on this topic is that the players have
not taken Blizzards game into their own hands yet again and imposed
their own restrictions to add a semblance of balance.
If players were to take the game
into their own hands again, what would actually be possible? Arenas
would be a bit of a logistical nightmare outside of TRs due to people
not all being on the same server/bg. But the main thing that does
come to mind is duelling. Duelling has always been something that a
lot of people have enjoyed, to the point where big money even
exchanges hands from it. What if there were a ruleset in place that
actually made 1v1 competitive? Limits on certain stats/items as were
imposed in Diablo 2 worked incredibly well while still keeping the
heart of the game intact and in some cases actually made the game
even more playable. To put that in perspective, 4v4 with everyone
able to teleport was a nightmare, 4v4 with map control mattering and
laying down invisible hammers/blizzards while your barbian blocked
the enemy amazon turned the game into a tactical masterpiece.
What I propose from this is
really as follows; when pvp is more established in Cataclysm, people
sit down and look at duelling and what could be changed to make some
of the match-ups more balanced. A proper duelling tournament could be
great fun with the right restrictions imposed as obviously you don't
want druids killing people with thorns and nor do you want mages Ice
Lance spamming people to death and using nothing else. While some may
argue duelling is somewhat 'balanced' as it is, it's often an uphill
battle for one side in the hope that they can win rather than playing
right so that they know they can win, see the current state of mage
vs rogue from the rogue's perspective. In any game built like WoW and
Diablo 2, player enforced restrictions can change the metagame and
enhance it greatly. I hope that in Cataclysm we see something similar
to Euro-PVP crop up and change the face of duelling as it would
certainly be a worthwhile pursuit!
Deaths Knights in Cataclysm -
Part 2
Lets face it, with the current
state of our beloved "Knights of Daeth" every team will
want at least one, most would like two, maybe three. Death Grip will
be one of the biggest and most influential cooldowns of all of the
BGs due to the logistical commitments required to win and often
because singling out key players with it can sway a team fight
greatly in your favour. Being able to coordinate double grips will
give the teams that do so a large advantage especially in CTF bgs,
this would instantly take their flag carrier 65+ yards away (can be
even further if gripped into a knockback).
Other than grip being the
premier utility skill of bgs, DKs also bring AMZ to the table of
which the uses are fairly obvious. They also prove to be an
interesting and probably the most viable flag carrier, lets take a
look at the cooldowns available -
- IBF - 3 min cooldown - 50% less damage taken, stun immunity, 12 second duration; this is obviously 'the big one' that you want to use when being opened on, even more so when the other team has a rogue/warrior.
- Vampiric Blood - 1 min cooldown - +15% hp +25% healing taken - 10 second duration; great when under huge pressure that you can't escape, glyphed it gives an extra 40% healing taken but is very situational as to when the glyph will be more useful than the base ability.
- Bone Shield - 1 min cooldown - 20% less damage taken, +2% more damage done; This has a minimum of 6 seconds duration and can be precast before entering any big fights, the fact that it reduces magical damage makes it a very valuable cooldown to have when you know a big burst is inc.
- Rune Tap - 1 min cooldown - 10% of HP healed; Not much to be said here, another free heal.
- Dancing Rune Weapon - 1 min cooldown - 20% parry - 12 second duration; 20% parry vs melee is never a bad thing with DKs having an innately high parry chance to begin with.
- Will of the Necropolis - 45 second cooldown - 25% less damage taken, refreshes Rune Tap cooldown - 8 second duration; This procs automatically at <30% HP and is one of the best cooldowns in the game as far as survivability goes, a straight 25% less damage taken and a free rune tap when combined with any other cooldown is very likely to see you living through most things.
- AMS - 45 second cooldown - up to 75% of hp in magic damage absorbed - 7 second duration; No DK will run without this being glyphed, I can see it being used both to stop big wizard cleaving destroying you and for avoiding debuffs such as roots that will destroy your mobility. Either way the best thing about this is it's an ability unique to Death Knights and one of that main things that makes them a far superior flag carrier to other classes.
- Death Strike - The UF strike for tanks still remains and while the rune cost is outdated, the new design is great. The Mastery for Blood DKs is based upon how much your Death Strike heals, your Death Strike heals for up to 25% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds or a minimum of 7% of your maximum health. Now with mastery stacking each Death Strike can provide you with a shield for over 100% of the healing done. To put this in perspective here's a Death Strike heal from Heroic Lich King - Capitalism Death Strike Capitalism +0 (O: 81912) - 82k overheal is still an 82k+ shield with a good amount of mastery. Mastery will easily be the primary stat for any DKs that are aspiring to carry flags within the BGs because of the ridiculous shields that are possible due to this.
- Death Pact - 2 (3) minute cooldown - 40% of HP healed; I say 2(3) because Raise Dead is on a 3 min CD whereas Army Ghouls can also be sacrificed. Similar uses to Rune Tap as I don't see teams killing your Risen Ghoul anytime soon and Blood has very few ways to effectively spend RP.
Personally I think that when the
carrier is under pressure nothing will come close to Blood DKs. while
druids may be able to run circles around lesser teams, when it comes
to playing good teams you're going to want something meaty. Another
great thing is that they can still provide utility with
grip/strangulate/DS/NS and the damage is far from bad with a quick
gear swap to DPS items. The ridiculous amount of cooldowns will also
let them run far less resilience and still be a target that you won't
want to touch in a fight and even if they do take a bit of a
battering the Vengeance makes Necrotic Strike scale to ridiculous
numbers, we're looking at an extra 7.5k healing reduction per strike
although the limited amount of Unholy Runes for Blood limits this a
little.
Another thing that could be
overlooked is the 20% mount speed talent that DKs have, a built in
Crusader Aura is always going to be amazing for making it back into
combat. Something that has changed a lot though from the previous
incarnation of DK is their spread damage, before 4.0.x came diseases
were something to be feared (ok maybe not feared but they did a lot
more damage). With the current state of diseases they tick for
500~600 at level 85, this makes the Contagion talent to offset the
pestilence nerf not even worth taking as whether your diseases are
ticking for 300 or 600 on the entire enemy team, who actually cares
when you have 150k HP. Only big use for diseases other than their
synergy with skills will be antirogue as they have such a huge
duration now, rather than the spread pressure that you could achieve
before.
I do feel that the rest of the
DKs uses in BGs crosses over very heavily with the arena part that I
wrote last week so check that out if you missed it as they will also
be able to play the same very disruptive/class that sets up swaps in
BGs. So with that I'll leave you to ponder over these thoughts, until
next time - Karuki
Cataclysm - The simplification of WOW?
Cataclysm - the simplification
of the game
One thing that defines a good
player in a lot of games is decision making. This goes for just about
every genre but is even more prevalent in games where you have
multiple skills to use for various situations. MOBA (multiplayer
online battle arena) games such as BLC/D2/DotA/HON etc. have
succeeded in this aspect. WoW once felt like this games, a choice to
be made on what skill to use in what situation. Over the course of
the expanions I'm honestly starting to feel more and more like every
decision is a black & white choice with there being one obvious
answer in nearly every situation.
Back in the days of Mace Stuns
and War Glaives, there was often a choice of what to do, a lack of
need to use every GCD on damage, a reason to plan ahead, a game where
thinking would nearly always come out ahead of mashing buttons. Fast
forward to today and we have a game where every GCD is required to be
used on whatever, classes are GCD capped on pure damage rotations and
there's very little choices to be made about what skill to use. The
difference in playing skill on certain classes between a 2000 rated
player and a 2600 rated player is often very very tiny (with
awareness/team chemistry being the thing holding them back more),
because the game has become over simplified. To put this into context
lets look at a few examples of how dumbed down some classes have
become.
Warriors -
In
S6/7 the damage was fairly balanced, the usage of charge/intercept
for interrupting spells was often a good thing and stance dancing to
pummel at
the right time
set the good warriors apart from the bad. Making that decision to cut
your rage to interrupt was not something that could just be spammed
without thinking, because that would leave you in a situation where
your pressure drops and MS could fall off quite easily, overpower
also had to be timed to get the maximum effect.
Fast forward to today and
there's very little to differentiate high end warriors from the
randoms that found a bind for Colossus smash, the most efficient way
to currently play warrior is to literally spam every GCD on a
damaging ability (because they now have that many abilities that you
don't have GCDs spare for well placed PH spam). This was a problem
that was added with Cataclysm, along with HS being off the GCD
leading to ridiculous amounts of burst. With the recent change to
their mobility they now never have a reason to leave battle stance
and nearly every charge is better used as a distance closer to do
more damage. The playstyle has devolved from a class that could
bounce around targets creating pressure with the 50% MS debuff into a
tunnelvision fest of damage spam because hey if there's no MS lets
just balance everything around ridiculous damage.
DKs -
DKs currently have unrivalled
mobility, but a steady string of damage nerfs to all of their core
abilities removes the need to think about anything other than just
using every GCD possible for NS, because SS is trash and DC has eaten
2 nerfs and NS is just more effective at this point. This creates a
nice binary class that can go by the following rule;
in melee range - ns
no melee range (as if this ever
happens with DA)- death coil
The amount of interrupts the
class has don't really take much brain power to use as most of them
can be used pre-emptively without any need to even hit a cast. I'd
much rather have the class that was able to put out pressure on
multiple targets and drain mana effectively through a lot of spread
damage than this tunnel vision wreck of a class.
Mages -
With the ridiculous amounts of
interrupts being given out left right & center in Cataclysm mages
have been put into a situation where casting stuff is actually
detrimental a lot of the time, giving them the choice of Ice Lance or
Ice Lance. Not only does this feel retarded to play against, it's not
a fun playstyle to play, the days of timing shatters with Water
Elemental Novas is sadly long gone for a playstyle that's far more
brute force than the mages of the past.
Hybrids
Every hybrid now having an
interrupt along with the fact that they all had a decent amount of CC
to begin with makes cleave teams far more potent and makes fake
casting far less effective. When there was less interrupts/interrupts
were on the GCD you would be able to fake cast and then happily free
cast, with every class having a stun/interrupt/second interrupt (just
in case!) it makes fake casting a game of luck (along with the fact
that they've all been given stupidly high damage). Am I the only one
that preferred it when hybrids were a support class rather than
something that can slot into nearly every comp and make a lot of
teams more fustrating to play vs than fun?
These are just some of the many
things that've been simplified and ended up detrimental to the
progression of the game, balancing a game around 30 specs/classes is
certainly not going to end well with the current path of progression
being taken. Class doing bad? add an interrupt/stupid damage/some
form of unavoidable instant CC etc. (look how many of these have been
added to hybrids in the recent patches and how much it's effected the
meta-game). Some food for thought, karuki out!
Philosophy of Balance
This blog is basically a look at how balance has changed over the seasons and IMO got ruined with Cataclysm taking it a few steps too far, bare in mind this was written back in late WOTLK.
In any competitive game, we've
come to expect a degree of balance. Throughout E-sports there has
always been little imbalances between things, an example being the
map layout for DotA/HON slightly favouring the Scourge/Hellbourne for
bottom rune spawns for a while, or ZVX on a close posistion spawn on
Metalopolis. In TBC we had druids being the superior healer for
nearly every comp due to moblity and lifebloom being fairly broken,
in WOTLK we had the same situation where druids became incredibly
tanky towards the end, In Cataclysm it looks like we're heading the
same way when resilience increases and HoTs become more effective
(think about, druids were okish/bad in s1/5, good in s2/6 and
progressively better from there, having them being good in the first
season doesn't look great for the later ones). The issue with this is
that the philosophy of balance has headed in a completely different
direction with the introduction of 'all 30 classes/specs must be
balanced'.
Disclaimer: This is ignoring
obvious things like druids/pve gear/WLD being over the top in S4 as
it's more meta-game related and none of these things were that
ridiculous other than glaives in S3, funny how the last season of
every expac is ruined by PVE gear.
One of the biggest ways to
balance things is via assumptions. In TBC you could fairly accurately
assume some things for the high tier comps -
1) It will have a
hunter/warrior/rogue for MS debuff
2) It will have either a
shaman+paladin of some spec or solo priest/druid or double healer of
some kind
3) Every class has 1, maybe 2
viable specs so there's little variation here to be taken into
account for
(arms/sub/affl/frost/mm/resto/resto/holy/disc/shadow/muti/demo/ele
and maybe enh, anything else was rare).
Now how did these contribute to
the balancing?
1) Allowed blizzard to balance
healing around the presence of the 50% MS debuff and balance caster
damage around this, this is a key factor in why wizard cleaves were
not half as bad to deal with as while people did run MLD, it was more
of a pressure comp than a 'lol u globaled m8' comp. This also made
CC'ing the MS user far more effective as it would allow the debuff to
drop off and then big heals could land.
2) I don't remember any top tier
comp that had a solo paladin healing, many were either double healer
or with an ele/enh shaman because of how much warlocks would destroy
them if they didn't run some kind of cleave with tremor totem (curse
of tongues being 60% contributed a lot to this). What this allowed
the balance team to do was to assume a high end comp would have
either a druid or a priest as the solo healer with both classes
having very different roles/playstyles within the teams.
3) Simple one here, less
variables and synergy means less possible comps, having more
possibility with 30 classes/specs makes balancing a nightmare, could
anyone see a 30 race RTS working?
Because of the ability to work
off of assumptions it made balancing the viable stuff far easier and
with a few changes it could of been very close to balanced. Now in
WOTLK we had the first taste of 'everything must be viable'. This
spawned abominations such as prot healing paladins and even DKs of
which were far less fun to play against than the immortal druids of
S4. The MS assumption still remained though but damage started to be
looked at as if there was no MS, giving birth to the ridiculous
caster cleaves of late WOTLK.
Now
entering Cataclysm, none of these assumptions apply anymore. MS makes
so little a difference that not only is it not required, CCing the MS
user is practically pointless. This leaves healing in a bursty state
and means that every class has now been balanced around having stupid
damage rather than a 50% healing debuff that can be negated with good
play. Looking at it like this I'm fairly sure that removing MS was
not exactly the best of ideas as it was also one of the biggest mana
drainers when it was 50% (and good teams played around the 50% debuff
to conserve mana, this isn't possible now). I don't know about you
but I'd rather see healing doubled in effectiveness in arena and the
MS changes reverted, yes people won't be able to run random comps
like feral/ret/priest but
being able to run random comps like that and do ok is part of the
problem because it's nearly impossible to balance when you have the
best part of 200+ semi-viable comps to take into account for with
very little assumptions being able to be made other than 'they have a
healer'.
Just
a little finishing point, many games with large amounts of characters
(e.g Street Fighter, Smash Brothers, MVC etc.) opperate by a tier
system. The tier system pretty much puts those 'feral druids' (i.e.
Sakura in SF4)
http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2008/oct/17/street-fighter-4-tiers-character-rankings/
into a lower band of characters and leaves it at that, not to say
that they don't get used because they do by the people that like
them, just not often in high end competitive play which is far from a
bad thing. As long as every class has at least one viable PVP spec
not only would it be better for the game, it would be far better for
balancing the game and putting it back in the realms of being
competitive again.
PVE vs PVP
This blog was an early look at PVP vs PVE near to the end of WOTLK.
PVE
and PVP players have long been at each others throats in a battle for
supremecy, a constant argument over 'which requires more skill' with
the general
(there are lots of exceptions so this will all be very generalised)
attitude of both sides looking a bit like this;
How
much truth is there behind the argument though? From my own
experiences whilst most PVE'ers that aren't very good in PVP are
fairly happy to admit it, the ego of PVP'ers that are raiding often
consumes them when it comes to 'invalidating' any mistakes they make
because 'pve is easy'. This leads to a permanent headache for any
raid leader when it comes to raiding with these individuals as
despite being 2.6~2.8k rated in the arenas they are pretty much
without a clue as to what's going on in this so much 'easier'
environment. To take an example, a certain beast cleaving paladin
that was rank 1 on the prestigious cyclone battlegroup for a few
months in season 8 must of had a ui that looked somewhat like one
gigantic flash of light button combined with the attention span of a
4 year old made him an incredibly unreliable paladin to raid with
despite being at the 'top of his game' according to his ratings. See
if you can guess who the pvp focused players are in
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-t84x7nd5psvfkgle/sum/damageDone/?s=11837&e=12114
this raid.
Ignoring the lower end of the
scales where teams are struggling to break 2400 and guilds that still
haven't killed HC LK, the mistakes both sides make are fairly similar
and despite common sense dictating that arena players would have
superior awareness this is very much not the case when the random
2.6k rated wizard cleave heroes in my pug die to a number of things
including;
- Sindragosa Debuff - completely unaware of a stacking debuff on instant death
- Defile - don't expect them to move from this
- Putricide Oozes - or this
- Festergut Vile Gas - or spread out for this as that would be 'too easy'
- Deathwhisper Ghosts - ghosts that do huge amounts of aoe damage? wat?
Obviously team PVE also dies to
these things, but they're not the ones claiming everything is easy
and are suposedly meant to have far superior awareness to their
surroundings. This pretty much describes the issues of the large
majority of PVP'ers that I have raided with in PUGs with the above
attitude issues being combined with a lack of class knowledge leading
to substandard dps.
Another difference between the
two sides is playstyles, people that aren't doing both often have
problems transistioning between the two. Arenas requiring quick
adaptation, reacting to what's going on and quickly thinking of ways
to deal with it often leads to problems when they have to follow a
set pattern or listen to instructions in PVE. A common example being
again related to Paladins that I've played with which will either
spam cooldowns aimlessly in PVE/not use them at all when required and
sometimes focus a bit too much on using a HOJ on something resulting
in a dead tank when really the playstyle should be just turretting
heals. The same can be said about PVE players entering into the
arena, due to not having a good idea of what's going to happen nor a
predictable amount of damage incoming it's very hard for players new
to arena to deal with the amount of pressure some teams can put out
which leaves them struggling against heavy dps teams and doing a lot
better in slower drawn out matches giving them time to work things
out. Conclusion of this being that the PVE-centric players often have
problems dealing with unexpected situations and the PVP players that
deviate from the plan can often cause confusion which leads to wipes
brought on by the fact that the PVE players have trouble adapting to
suddenly having to cover a different role.
The argument that PVE is just
against a script is very often brought up however most of the actions
put out by the scripts are reactionary, what's the difference between
sidestepping after seeing a flying ooze coming towards you vs seeing
the right spell pop up on your focus cast bar at the right time and
counterspelling it? - there isn't any, both are pre-determined
reactions to an event, whether it's a player or a script producing
the event there is no difference, the only part that really should
come into this is that PVP'ers are often having to make far more of
these decisions at a far quicker rate.
This
isn't to say that PVP'ers are bad at PVE though, look at previous
projects such as PVE is Hard
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/World-of-Ming/PVP-PVE
which took BT/Hyjal down in mostly season 3 gear and to look at a
more recent example Vicious Cycle. From what I know, both of these
guilds started to have problems with players showing up to raids once
the easy content was down, VC stalling at HC modes in ICC and PVE is
Hard failing at the first real test of a raid group (bare in mind
that S3 gear was not at all bad in BT, the weapons were>the non
Illidan/Archimonde PVE stuff so it was not as big a gear issue as
many made out at the time); Brutallus. Was PVE so easy once the
content became more demanding? not quite, but it does fit in with the
general experiences a lot of guildmasters have had with recruiting
high end pvpers, they have the tendancy to guild hop and get bored
rather fast. This does not apply to everyone however as there are
some excellent PVP'ers that have been/are in world class guilds. Take
Deus Vox for example
http://www.wowarmory.com/team-info.xml?r=Laughing+Skull&ts=5&t=hella+many+points&select=hella+many+points
whilst only Kollektiv has been active on the tournament scene
recently both him and the ex-Pandemic guys are not only claiming top
tournament posistions and R1 titles they're also getting top 10 US
PVE kills and top WOL
http://worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/Festergut/25H/Combat_Rogue/
posistions as well, players that excel in both areas though are a
true rarity as not many are able to achieve that (no matter how much
they like to claim that it's 'easy').
To take a quote on PVP'ers in
top end PVE guilds -
"My
personal feeling is that people who come from a long history of
mainly pvp focussed play are difficult to control, they tend to have
a greater feeling of entitlement and individualism, because they are
used to a far greater level of self determinism. That said, they
also have a far higher level of patience and focus than many pure pve
players." - Log - GM of Infamous in Vanilla
http://www.realmhistory.net/outland/106/guild/infamous/973.html
At the end of the day both areas
can be condensed down to a few simple steps of analysis -
1. Identify Target
2. Know strategy to kill said
target
3. Avoid/Prevent abilities said
target can use to kill you
4. Execute strategy and kill
target before they kill you
This is also why when something
new comes up in PVP it takes a while before effective strategies and
counters are found to it (e.g. Beast Cleave) in the same way it takes
a while before there's full strategy guides available on the
interwebs for claiming your next lot of epics. A player who focuses
solely on one area of the game is unlikely to really excel in the
other without putting some serious effort in no matter how 'easy' the
welfare modes are (in general if it's puggable then it doesn't
matter, so 95% of the current content); to put it into context,
avoiding wiping the raid with a defile on HC LK requires the same
reactions that it does to spell reflect sheeps/cyclones, you have to
pre-emptively react to both abilities (good luck spell reflecting
hasted sheeps/cyclones without <50ms if you don't have your shield
out before they cast), whether you can achieve either comes down to
the level of experience of the player of expecting that particular
'script' to happen and reacting to it.
Title sharing on Sturmangriff
/ Charge Battlegroup
Can someone go help Barburas
take rank one in 5s as well?
His
team has done a great job screwing up the 7 way tie in the 3s Ladder
but there's still a bunch of teams left in 5s that are sharing rank
one at 2434
rating wth a 1900 team on the first page,
having more R1 slots than Gladiator slots is kinda dumb especially
since this could of easily been over 60 Wrathful Gladiator's from one
battlegroup. Hopefully Blizzard decide on some way to differentiate
tied teams from titles in Cataclysm or change the system so it's
harder to tie as the rampant win trading and title sharing is putting
a smear on what was once a fairly prestigious title to get; this is
just one of many BG's though which has a huge amount of teams sharing
with many of the worst battlegroups producing nearly as many Wrathful
Gladiator's as normal Gladiator's.
Initial 4.0 Death Knight
Thoughts
These are my current thoughts on
the biggest DK changes for Unholy coming in 4.0 at level 80 as
they're looking more finalised now.
- AMS off the GCD should of done
ages ago, no more ams'd while sheeped/feared now.
- Not having to use PS/IT to
reapply diseases constantly due to Festering Strike is going to
increase our damage a fair amount, resilient infection will also make
cleanse wars with DK's a battle that healers aren't going to win.
- Runic Empowerment is a really
really dumb mechanic, runic corruption should be how it functions by
default (have fun if you're playing frost and being spammed with
useless runes).
- Dots being able to crit is
going to make the aoe damage insane in PVE for Unholy DK's although I
don't think it was really such a great idea to nerf pestilience and
then rebuff it with a talent, feels a bit filler-ish.
- New rune system will make them
play somewhat similar to rogues in the sense that using every rune as
soon as it comes up won't be a requirement anymore to avoid a dps
loss.
- COI Change should of been done
in S5.
- Dark Transformation is going
to raise the skill cap hugely as pet control is going to be vital now
rather than just as a tool to blow shit up and stop people drinking
that can be suicided without thinking.
DK's benefitting more from
strength than arp is also going to be great when the patch comes as
warriors/ferals are doing very very little damage now with the loss
of it. Karuki "knight of daeth" out.
As far as I can recall I've only
had good experiences with PvP players swapping to PvE. However I
believe that they have a bit of a harder time taking orders and might
be a bit more arrogant generally than players who has played mostly
PvE, this ofcourse varies from person to person though but that's the
overall picture that I've gotten. I also think that they have better
focus from the start and have an easier time to adapt in stressful si
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)