Tuesday Question: Is Patch 3.3 this week?
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
No, not tomorrow.
Except if something goes really wrong, it should go live next week. (Not official, etc etc)
Patch 3.3 Menu Update
The Patch 3.3 menu has been updated with a bunch of new articles and categories. The last batch of articles should be available tomorrow, I'll spend the rest of the week updating and polishing them to make sure they're pretty for the release on live servers.
I'm also going to boost my ego for a second and thank all the people reading the site daily, apparently I was the most viewed user on Youtube yesterday. (AH! AH! In your face Surprised Kitty!!)
World 3rd Tribute to Immortality in Korea
Tribute to Immortality first kills are fun, each new kill happens on a new continent. This time a Korean coalition of multiple guilds known as "Team Force" completed the achievement on November 30th according to this post! Congratulations to them.
Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Why you won't get a release date for 3.3
We've explained many times over why we don't provide release dates for patches. Yes, we have a target date for the patch, however there are still numerous obstacles that could push back that target date by multiple weeks. We understand that publicly releasing a date and then pushing it back would lead to a far worse outcry on the forums than we see when simply letting players speculate about when the patch will be released. (Source)
Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Are Death Knights unpopular?
They aren't. If you mean they are less popular than warriors as main tanks, that's true. But that is also the case for druids and paladins, whom some of you claim are self-evidently overpowered.
But DKs are very popular in cutting edge guilds for dps and quite popular as off tanks. This is hand waving, and I don't have any concrete numbers to back this up, but my suspicion is that DKs are either the most popular off tank or else are number two after warriors. Warrior + DK is a very popular tank setup for many guilds capable of clearing heroic raid content.
One conclusion that I think you can draw from looking at what classes and specs the very good guilds bring is that there is a lot of variation, and certainly much more than in BC. (Source)
Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Subtlety Tree
That's a good assessment. Ultimately, we'd like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.
Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it's likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It's going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can't just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.)
I don't think we're there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn't and hasn't been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we're a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won't feel like they are horribly gimping their group's progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we'll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).
Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have -- it's easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it's scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn't really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)
I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that's a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more "juice" (by which I don't just mean higher dps). I'll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you're AE'ing everything down?
PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I've said before we think we've kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It's a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.
We try very hard not to give due dates on some of these changes. When you read through threads like this, I think you can see why. The risk of sharing so...
More...
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
No, not tomorrow.
Except if something goes really wrong, it should go live next week. (Not official, etc etc)
Patch 3.3 Menu Update
The Patch 3.3 menu has been updated with a bunch of new articles and categories. The last batch of articles should be available tomorrow, I'll spend the rest of the week updating and polishing them to make sure they're pretty for the release on live servers.
- Patch Notes - Patch Notes, Talent Calculator
- Icecrown Citadel - Icecrown Raid Gating, Ashen Verdict Faction, Achievements
- Icecrown Citadel - Items - Icecrown Raid Loot, Shadowmourne, Tier 10 Armor.
- Icecrown Citadel - Entrance - Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang
- Icecrown Citadel - Plagueworks - Rotface, Festergut, Professor Putricide
- Icecrown Citadel - Crimson Hall - Blood Princes, Blood-Queen Lana'thel
- Icecrown Citadel - Frostwing Halls - Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, The Lich King,
- Icecrown 5-Man - Icecrown 5-Man Loot (A lot more to come here)
- Loot Lists - Icecrown Raid Loot, Icecrown 5-Man Loot
- Quests - Shadowmourne, Quest Tracking, Weekly Raid Quests (Also a lot more soon)
I'm also going to boost my ego for a second and thank all the people reading the site daily, apparently I was the most viewed user on Youtube yesterday. (AH! AH! In your face Surprised Kitty!!)
World 3rd Tribute to Immortality in Korea
Tribute to Immortality first kills are fun, each new kill happens on a new continent. This time a Korean coalition of multiple guilds known as "Team Force" completed the achievement on November 30th according to this post! Congratulations to them.
Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Why you won't get a release date for 3.3
We've explained many times over why we don't provide release dates for patches. Yes, we have a target date for the patch, however there are still numerous obstacles that could push back that target date by multiple weeks. We understand that publicly releasing a date and then pushing it back would lead to a far worse outcry on the forums than we see when simply letting players speculate about when the patch will be released. (Source)
Are Death Knights unpopular?
They aren't. If you mean they are less popular than warriors as main tanks, that's true. But that is also the case for druids and paladins, whom some of you claim are self-evidently overpowered.
But DKs are very popular in cutting edge guilds for dps and quite popular as off tanks. This is hand waving, and I don't have any concrete numbers to back this up, but my suspicion is that DKs are either the most popular off tank or else are number two after warriors. Warrior + DK is a very popular tank setup for many guilds capable of clearing heroic raid content.
One conclusion that I think you can draw from looking at what classes and specs the very good guilds bring is that there is a lot of variation, and certainly much more than in BC. (Source)
Subtlety Tree
That's a good assessment. Ultimately, we'd like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.
Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it's likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It's going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can't just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.)
I don't think we're there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn't and hasn't been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we're a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won't feel like they are horribly gimping their group's progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we'll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).
Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have -- it's easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it's scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn't really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)
I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that's a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more "juice" (by which I don't just mean higher dps). I'll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you're AE'ing everything down?
PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I've said before we think we've kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It's a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.
We try very hard not to give due dates on some of these changes. When you read through threads like this, I think you can see why. The risk of sharing so...
More...
