Ghostcrawler
Dungeons and Scenarios
Re: Cataclysm heroic dungeons. As a player, I liked them. I like strategy > gogogo.
But, Cat dungeon difficulty did not play well with random matchmaking, and those players felt like we offered them no alternatives.
One strategy is to hope players stick with the tough dungeons but bail on the random matchmaking and find friends and guilds to run them.
But that's not what happened. A lot of players just gave up on heroic dungeons and then had no other PvE endgame. :(
Source@Ghostcrawler Can Heroic Dungeons require premades like Heroic Scenarios, and actually... y'know, be heroic? :PPotentially. That's what we do with challenge mode and heroic scenarios.
Source“Don’t queue for a NORM Scenario BEFORE Heroic! You wont get your purple chest- you get a blue one instead!!!” @Ghostcrawler is this true ?Yes, you only get one first of the day from scenarios. We want heroics as a replacement option not something else to have to do.
Scenario rewards are counter-intuitive. Used to different settings in Dungeon Finder being completely un-linked.That's understandable. Our goal with the heroic scenarios was to provide alternatives, not even more to do.
SourcePvP Changes
what is the point of pvp gear now? Lack of blizz responses is discouraging. Pvp gear =no point. The community wants a responseThe community (or at least part of it) asked vociferously for PvP gear to matter less in PvP to allow for catch-up.
yeah pvp gear is a joke. No point in even buying it. Just afk in LFR and u can beat someone in full pvpBy "full pvp" do you mean Honor or Conquest? Conquest, no way.
Sure, but what about honor gear? 20 item level deficit vs. LFR gear is a lot for PvP power to overcome post-nerf.If you'd rather LFR to get gear instead of Honor gear, that seems fine. You'll want to graduate to Conquest either way.
But at the same time, when a new season comes serious PVP'ers "must" LFR to stay ahead (aka not get behind)You can earn all your Honor gear in a week or two depending on how much you play. LFR is nowhere near that generous.
SourceFeel like we have addressed this a bunch. PvPers told us they wanted PvP to be more about skill and less about gear.
PvE'ers told us they would participate more in PvP if they didn't die immediately until they had better gear.
Letting someone use PvE gear as *starter* gear in PvP (and vice versa) allows more crossover and gives you more opponents.
SourceReputation and Questing
I really don't get people harping on about it, there hasn't been a daily rep with useful gear since 5.1Depends what other gear you have access to. It can't be rewarding for both heroic raiders and folks in blues.
5.2 had gear same ilvl as 5.1. Barrens has gear lower ilvl. Most of it feels wasted even on LFR players.We heard from a lot of players who didn't want to have to raid or wanted catch up for their alts that wasn't 5.0 reputations.
You mentioned story gating working well (5.1, 5.2). 5.3´s story was over in a day. Way less intrested in doing stuff now.Part of our faster development cycle means that 5.3 was pretty far along before we could evaluate 5.1 and 5.2 player reaction.
SourceWhat is it about questing you find more appealing? Don't you think by 90 people are pretty sick of questing?
At max level, we want players to have a reason to go out into the world. Quests are one way to do that.
SourceBut we didn't have many alternatives to max quests at launch. Patch 5.3 and 5.4 have more outdoor options.
SourceThe Barrens has a lot of content, but not a lot of quests. The next patch will have an even more ambitious area.
SourceWe try not to make you completely dependent on other players to be able to able to play WoW. But...
We believe you will have more fun if you find a group of friends, and we will try to do more to enable that.
does dynamic open world scenarios similar to public quests in warhammer online sound like a good alternate to dailies?Potentially. We're dabbling that with the Battlefield Barrens stuff and plan to do more.
Still not sure how I feel about requiring a pre-made group for random heroic scenarios. Feels like a step backwards.We found in Cat that hard can be fun and matchmaking can be convenient, but the two don't work well together.
SourceClass Changes
Re: Disc change: Nerfs are ok, but why remove a fun mechanic that allows good players to set themselves apart?If it was just a tough thing to do that rewarded skillful play, that would be fine, but it was like a secret trick you had to know.
Is it really that bad to have less obvious ways to improve your play? What's wrong with a bit of depth?We don't have a problem with less obvious ways to improve play. In this case it felt like exploiting a bug.
SourceWasn't Blink Strikes changed to reduce some of the button clutter? Does the dev team want to bring that back?We are pretty happy with the new
. Just want to make sure the other talents are still taken seriously by hunters.
Sourceany plans on bringing points back to points back to Talents for leveling? Maybe taking two talents per tier by points?We'd like some tangible reward for gaining a level, but it can't be 90 new spells to clutter your action bar.
I wouldn't advocate for a ton more spells but more talent tiers would be nice. Cluttered bars are the opposite of fun.
We agree. You all will just have to help us win the forum arguments when others claim pruning action bars is dumbing the game down.
SourceCurrent Vengeance concerns include excessive tank DPS and motivation to do things like solo tank a two-tank boss.
Now you think tank DPS is excessive and it wasn't the case 5-6 months ago. Anything in particular changed your mind?The trend of trying to increase damage taken to increase damage done is a more recent one.
Survival->damage tradeoff has been around for ages, this has just made it really extreme. I like the change tho.Yeah, survival -> damage done is fine. The problem now is damage taken -> survival + damage done.
But isnt that the way Rage has worked since...forever? Take damage=rage to spend on defense and/or offense?Avanguardia doesn't do that any longer for similar reasons. Tanking should be about mitigating / avoiding damage.
Not really. 1) Tanks should want to attack bosses. 2) Tank DPS should matter even in 25s. 3) Mitigation should scale with content.
SourceDo the devs acknowledge the real issues with the Mage class atm? Heavy RNG/Crit scaling on Fire and poor scaling on Frost.Recall, our guidelines for scaling concerns. We only care if gear scaling causes a 5-10% dps loss within a single tier.
SourceRaiding
Raiding in its current form has lost its niche among the players but i might be wrong. I mean from player participation %Our numbers don't look very different. I am sure LFR stole some folks from 10s, but overall my suspicion is most didn't raid before.
SourceWe were trying to preserve the older tier a little, but that feels weird when you can jump into LFR and see everything.
SourceThere is some confusion about what you are supposed to do when a new tier comes out: finish the current one or jump to the new one?
SourceGC what you fail to understand is HMs are meant to be stuck on, not NMs. That's why they are HEROIC MODEWe'd rather it be a few weeks on
Durumu il Dimenticato N, a few weeks on
Lei Shen N, then just a few weeks on H
Jin'rokh il Demolitore. That pace feels better.
Source