World First Earth Wind and Fire (25) by Stars

Feedbot

News Feed Bot
Joined
Jul 16, 2009
Messages
7,437
Points
36
World First Earth Wind and Fire (25) by Stars
It definitely looks like a lot of the world first kills will come from Asia in the future. Stars was the first guild in the world to complete Earth, Wind & Fire (25 player). Congratulations to them!



Recent In-Game Fixes - September 2009 - 9/21
Interesting hotfix ... An ilvl 226 Bind on Equip weapon will probably make farming Coren Direbrew a lot more profitable.
Quote from: Bornakk
Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

9/21/09




Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Mobile Blizzard Authenticator
We do have a mobile team here at Blizzard looking for ways to expand our mobile services for those using all variations of mobile service providers. That said, there are always potential road blocks when working with different companies and we do what we can to work these things out. You can see our current supported mobile service providers and phones here: http://mobile.blizzard.com (Source)

Dispells in PvP
We don't want to get rid of dispelling. That would actually be an easy (if far-reaching) change. We just don't want, in this case, the only realistic way to counter a paladin healer to be to dispel Divine Plea. That just means if you don't have a dispeller, you can't counter the dude.

Knowing when and what to dispel is, we think, a cool part of PvP. But those dispels need to be real choices and you shouldn't be totally helpless without them (or else everyone needs them). (Source)

ideathknights.gif
Death Knight
Mistakes
We didn't make DKs intentionally OP. While we want people to purchase Wrath of the Lich King, there are lot of logical flaws with making one class purposely overpowered (such as angering all the players who play the other nine classes).

We made a few mistakes though, which I don't mind being up front about.

1) We have learned a lot about making classes. With the DK, we avoided some of the limitations other classes have. In the absence of a lot of tradition, we gave the early DK an answer to almost everything. While we definitely don't want to keep some of the crud that has built up on the older classes, it turns out when you make a new class without any of that junk before you scrub away the older stuff, you get a class that is too powerful. Who would have thought? The DK talent trees in particular had a lot of polish to make sure there weren't too many just terrible talents (a few haven't withstood the last year as well as others though).

To use just two examples, DKs can tank or PvP with any tree (though not necessarily with the same talent allocation per tree), and DKs have runes, a resource that is limited over short periods of time instead of long periods of time, yet they also have runic power that is quite useful in those periods where they may not have runes available. In some ways, the DK benefited from having two resources. (To be fair, there are weaknesses inherent in the rune model as well which players who have never played a DK seriously tend to overlook.)

2) As we started to work on the DK, we talked to PvP and PvE players who were comfortable with the BC status quo. What I mean is that raid leaders told us they didn't have room for DKs and Arena teams told us they didn't see the need to replace anyone on their team (especially a melee class without MS). Partially to counter this attitude, we gave the DKs a lot of different tools to handle different situations. They became a little too versatile. (Later, part of the big buff / debuff overhaul was designed to fix the same situation.)

3) I think this was one of those cases where we listened to the community, especially the beta participants, a little too much. Players had totally legit concerns about say the DK being too kiteable or the DK tank not having an answer for physical damage or whatever. Since we didn't have a ton of history or personal experience to fall back on and couldn't analyze a lot of data from live servers, we probably gave players the benefit of the doubt too often and added or buffed abilities when we didn't need to. More hardcore PvP and raid testing on the beta or PTR might help as well, since a lot of those concerns were born of solo experiences or pure speculation.

4) I think the fact that we showered the DK in blue items and mounts (to help them level up to the Northrend content quickly) and all of the effort we put into the start zone helped lead to the perception of favoritism. It feels weird to suggest we should have made the starting experience less epic to just to tone it down. On the other hand, maybe there was a way to communicate our goals better. A lot of players took the "hero class" thing (which really only meant that we modeled them after the Warcraft III heroes) to mean they should be overpowered, which was never our intent.

5) I think we just had bad luck with at least two of the DK systems. Their plate + spell damage combo just happened to be quite lethal in the early Arena seasons where 2s were predominant and burst damage was too high. Their cooldown-based tanking just ended up being really effective against a lot of the boss encounters. We didn't set out for either of those situations to be too uber. If the DK had been a caster, I don't think casters would have dominated the earlier seasons. If health pools had grown more (as they did going into BC) and we had been harsher about mana regen, then perhaps tanking wouldn't have been so overshadowed by giant boss hits that could only be survived by chaining say IBF and Bone Shield.

Ultimately, I wouldn't view the introduction of the new class as a failure by any stretch. There are a lot of players who love their DK even when she isn't overpowered. Adding a new class is a challenge, which we knew going in, and the DK didn't disappoint in that regards. It has taken a lot of iteration to kind of catch the death knight up all of the years of iteration on the existing classes, and I'm sure they're not done yet. It's also a good reason not to introduce a new class every expansion.
smiley.gif
(Source)

ihunters.gif
Hunter
Deterrence

I can totally understand that there is a perception problem with Deterrence because it affects melee and spells but not ranged attacks. Because there are exceptions to what it protects against, it can earn a reputation for being unreliable or for being actually buggy. (We haven't found any evidence that it is buggy though.)

Something we could use feedback on is if the ranged damage is really a problem or just complicates the issue by leading to players not understanding how Deterrence is supposed to work. Is it really a big deal versus other hunters? If we changed it, then it would be both a buff and a nerf to hunters in some sense.

On a philosophical level, we don't like defensive abilities that confer an offensive advantage. We aren't likely to take the penalty off of Deterrence, or it just becomes the thing you pop when you want to kill someone and don't want to be stopped instead of the thing you do to survive when the other team is doing it to you.

We also didn't want the ability to just be the same defensive cooldown that other classes have. It's important to us that different classes have different mechanics that players need to learn instead of saying "This is your Ice Block with a different name and graphic." I mention this not to say that Deterrence must stay as it is forever, but to steer your suggestions towards ideas we are more likely to embrace.

[...] If dots are the thing that you think really make hunters suffer right now, then that is a fair thing to discuss. I'm not sure making Deterrence break dots is necessarily the best answer to that though.

What I'm fishing for is some discussion of whether Deterrence is a big weakness for hunters (Plops and a few others don't seem to think it is), or if hunters have big weaknesses and Deterrence is a way to mitigate some of those, or if hunters just have weaknesses period and talking about Deterrence just muddies the waters. Those are three slightly different situations with different potential resolutions.

Saying other classes have better cooldowns doesn't carry that much weight with us. Other classes might have better heals or better snares or better crowd control or whatever. Comparing the individual abilities can only get you so far. Prot warriors have great defensive cooldowns, but you don't see many balance concerns about them. DKs and paladin "...




More...
 
Top