Old Raid Finder and Scenarios, SMV Open Next Build, New Model Faces, Blue Posts

Stay up to date with all the news regarding Warcraft, and anything related, courtesy of MMO-champion.com!

Topic/Postby Haggle » 12 Jun 2014, 11:18

Old Raid Finder and Scenarios, SMV Open Next Build, New Model Faces, Blue Posts

Image Exclusive Content for PS3/PS4, Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Stage Demo Kadala's Improved Set Item Ratios, Bracer Crafting Costs

Image Curse of Naxxramas - Priest Minion Card Revealed - Dark Cultist

Image Skin Spotlight: Psycho Stitches

Warlords of Draenor Alpha Stream




Warlords of Draenor - Old Raid Finder and Scenario Content
The latest alpha build added NPCs that allow you to queue for older content, such as Dragon Soul Raid Finder, Mists of Pandaria Raid Finder, and Mists of Pandaria Scenarios.

You can queue by yourself or with a group for all of this content, and whoever is in the group will be able to enter the instance. There is no automatic matchmaking.

Image Image Image



Warlords of Draenor Alpha - Shadowmoon Valley Next Build
It looks like things will be reversed next build, and players will only have access to Alliance and Shadowmoon Valley, rather than Horde and Frostfire Ridge.

Image



Censer of Eternal Agony Hotfix
The Censer of Eternal Agony has been hotfixed to have a 1 hour cooldown, up from 10 minutes.

Image



New Character Models - Facial Features Variation

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Are we expected to be happy with these faces? Of course you can see they aren't identical, but is this really their idea of being "true to the original model" or claiming this isn't "same face" syndrome?
No, not at all. But I don't think we've said anywhere the face options currently present in Alpha are the intended final result of the updated character models. We'll probably do an Artcraft piece on facial options sometime soon, as it's actually a somewhat complex and interesting piece on how the original art was created, and the difficulties of translating that to higher resolution models and animations.




Warlords of Draenor Theorycraft Discussion

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
-How is bonus armor working in terms of the mitigation, just like armor? I see a separate "damage reduction by xx.xx%" when I mouse over bonus armor and I guess that's multiplicative? Currently it looks very strong for tanks considering that it’s both offensive and defensive stat.
The tooltips on the character sheet are actually misleading. Base Armor DR and Bonus Armor DR can't be combined. You need to combine the Base Armor and Bonus Armor, and then formulate a Total Armor DR (DR=Armor/(Armor+K)). Future alpha build will have that fixed. K is looked up in the game tables as mentioned, but for easy reference, it's 3610 for a 100 attacker, and 5234 for a 103 attacker.

I realized that with stat-squish affecting everything, the stats of low level weapons are totally in a mess where 164lv 2h could be lower than 115lv 2h and a lv35 quest reward could not find update until lv70…do devs have any plan to fix that to make up for the feeling of powering up and rewarding during leveling of new toons?
I think what you're seeing is how the level jumps in between expansions were removed. I don't see the lvl35 quest reward that you're referring to. Also remember that in old expansions, the power of an item was based on its ilvl *and* its quality. That's not the case at high level gear, but still is in low level gear. A Karazhan item was better than a Netherstorm item. Now that there's a smooth progression from Netherstorm to Howling Fjord, the Karazhan item can be better than Howling Fjord too, which is appropriate for its difficulty.

Players vs Lower Level Creatures, Damage Taken/Dealt Adjustments
Here are the details about how you'll still be able to solo old raids (without being Mione). This includes pseudo-code, so get your imaginary interpreters ready.

Also asked of me on twitter... Bosses are treated as IntendedLevel+3. So Garr is a 63, and Lich King is an 83, as far as these formulae go.

Damage Taken Reduction
All players receive a damage reduction factor when attacked by a creature that is lower level. This applies only to creatures from expansions prior to Mists of Pandaria. All damage taken from qualifying creatures is multiplied by DamageTakenFactor, as determined below:

LevelDiff = PlayerLevel - CreatureLevel
if (CreatureExpansion < Pandaria) then
// 10% DR per level diff, with a floor of 10%
DamageTakenFactor = max(1.0 - 0.1 * LevelDiff, 0.1)
else
DamageTakenFactor = 1.0
end

Damage Dealt Increase
All players receive a damage increase factor when dealing damage to a creature that is lower level. This applies only to creatures from expansions prior to Mists of Pandaria. All damage dealt to qualifying creatures is multiplied by DamageDealtFactor, as determined below:

LevelDiff = PlayerLevel - CreatureLevel
if (CreatureExpansion >= Pandaria) then
DamageDealtFactor = 1.0
elseif (LevelDiff < 5) then
// Ranges from 1.0625 to 1.25 vs. 1-4 LevelDiffs
DamageDealtFactor = 1 + 0.0625 * LevelDiff
elseif (LevelDiff < 10) then
// Ranges from 4.0 to 6.0 vs. 5-9 LevelDiffs
DamageDealtFactor = 1.5 + 0.5 * LevelDiff
else
// Maximum factor of 16.5 vs. 10+ LevelDiffs
DamageDealtFactor = 16.5
end

Alternate Inter-Expansion Damage Adjustments
We also want to provide power growth within an expansion, despite the fact that we've flattened the ilvl power curve within each old expansion. This applies only to creatures from expansions prior to Mists of Pandaria. To do that, we calculate an alternate set of damage dealt/taken factors, and use either these ones, or the normal ones, whichever is most beneficial to the player.

MaxPlayerLevelsByExpansion = {69, 79, 84, 89, 99, 109}
IntendedItemLevelByExpansion = {65, 115, 200, 346, 463, 609}
MaxPlayerLevel = MaxPlayerLevelsByExpansion[CreatureExpansion]
IntendedItemLevel = IntendedItemLevelByExpansion[CreatureExpansion]

if (PlayerLevel IntendedItemLevel) then
AlternateDamageTakenFactor = 1 - 0.01 * (PlayerEquippedItemLevel - IntendedItemLevel)
AlternateDamageDealtFactor = 1 + 5/3*0.01 * (PlayerEquippedItemLevel - IntendedItemLevel)
DamageTakenFactor = min(DamageTakenFactor, AlternateDamageTakenFactor)
DamageDealtFactor = max(DamageDealtFactor, AlternateDamageDealtFactor)
end

Image Death Knight (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
The stacking health buff for Blood DKs is simply sliced in half. Every 15 Runic Power spent by Breath of Sindragosa increases Maximum Health by 2.5%
Every other tick of Breath of Sindragosa will trigger an Enhanced Death Coil effect. (5% every other tick, not 2.5% every tick)

Presuming that partial blood tap charges are effectively floored ( 1.3 charges is treated as 1 charge, not 2, in terms of being able to spend it or not), do you foresee any problems with the partial charges being useless? Focusing on raiding in PVE, and presuming that conversion seems similar levels of use to mists (read: none), we'll be getting 1 or 2 charges from everything bar Dsim, and it takes 4 Dsim's to generate a "bonus charge". Uses of Dsim are already few and far between, and looking for 4 or more uses in any one combat length is rare. Do you plan on having partial charges decay at the same rate as normal charges to avoid using Dsim 3 times prior to a fight to build up .9 charges?
It takes 3 Dark Sims to collect the partial charge into a full charge. Also, conversion will likely be more valuable because of this change. This is purely a bonus, so not concerned if a couple tiny fractions are left over unused at the end of a fight.

I'm also curious if you happen to have the ppm of rune of the fallen crusader, and cinderglacier, and if there are any plans to make ppms as transparent as rppms in the spell data.
Fallen Crusader is now 2 RPPM. Cinderglacier is now 1.5*Haste RPPM.

Image Druid (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Ferals when shifting into caster form lose our Mastery, AP conversion from agility, Savage Roar, and the 5% crit we get from cat form. This is the way it has always been which hasn't been a problem until now. Previously if we shifted into caster form our snapshotted bleeds stayed ticking for the same amount.

Now that DoT's are updating dynamically if we shift into caster form current DoT's lose everything. I am guessing this is just something that hasn't been accounted for with the new dynamic DoT system, but I wanted to make sure it was on the radar, and verify that it is not expected.

A couple builds from now... Mastery will work regardless of form. Agi->AP already works regardless of form. Savage Roar will be snapshot on bleeds. Leader of the Pack will still be lost in caster form.

How does the new pandemic mechanic for DoTs work with specific abilities that snapshot?

For example: If I am specced into Bloody Talons and apply a Rip, then use a healing touch to gain the 30% increase on my next two abilities, and then Re-apply rip for the 130% duration. Does that entire duration of the new Rip benefit from Bloody Talons, or only the base 16 seconds(22 seconds with 3 extensions via shred)

The entire 130%-of-normal duration of the Rip would benefit.

Image Mage (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
To clarify Improved Blizzard perk: is it triggered once per tick per target, or just once per tick regardless of number of targets?
Per damage event. A Blizzard on empty ground does nothing. A Blizzard on 10 enemies reduces Frozen Orb's cooldown by 10sec per Blizzard tick. (Yes, that may be too strong; we'll see how it goes in testing.)

Does Improved Icy Veins affect glyphed Icy Veins? If so, how much additional Multistrike does it provide? (17.5%?)
Recently changed the glyph to be 30% Multistrike. Perk bumps that up to 45%.

Is Enhanced Arcane Blast just treated as 5% haste for that one spell (dividing cast time by 1.05, multiplicative with other haste)?
No, it's a multiplier on cast time. It multiplies Arcane Blast's cast time by (1-0.05*ChargeCount). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)




Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Item Level and Leveling with Existing Characters
Will the gear that will be obtainable from the first quests at the launch of WoD be this low in item level and therefore be completely overshadowed by players' current gear?
Yes. We want players who have spent the time and effort to collect endgame Mists of Pandaria gear to go into the expansion with a bit of an advantage. We also need to make sure that players who haven't been farming endgame gear aren't struggling just to complete their first few quests in Warlords. That means, much like previous expansions, your current epic gear will likely last you for a little while into Draenor. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Profession Catch-Up - Skinning
Just following up: Skinning will be using a similar system as Mining and Herbalism, allowing someone to level up their profession purely through high level content by picking, mining, or skinning high level nodes and creatures, regardless of their professions's skill level, gain skill-ups from doing so, and obtain materials usable for crafting. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Image Druid (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Balance Druid Feedback
Yeah, the biggest problem I think is that Moon/Sunfire do too much direct damage at the moment. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Image Shaman (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Shaman Weapon Imbues
We didn't feel that Weapon Imbues were offering much in the way of gameplay. For many players, they felt like more of an annoyance ("why can't I Unleash... oh") than a buff. They're also prime targets for reducing action bar clutter. For those reasons, we decided to convert each spec's primary imbue(s) to passive effects.

However, while the effects of Windfury and Flametongue are a core part of the Enhancement rotation, Earthliving for Restoration and Flametongue for Elemental are little more than a raw numbers increase. Not really something that we need to clutter up the spellbook with. So, for Resto and Elemental, we decided to remove those effects entirely (and compensate for that when we start numbers tuning). For Enhancement, we merged Windfury and Flametongue into one passive (Enhanced Weapons) that gives the benefits of both effects.

Please be aware that the currently active Alpha build was taken in the middle of a pretty big wave of class changes (for everyone, not just Shaman). We'll be getting a full update to the patch notes out as soon as possible once we've completed that round of changes.

One extra thing I forgot to mention that goes along with this change: Unleash Elements is being split into three different spells, unique to each spec: Unleash Life for Restoration, Unleash Flame for Elemental, and Unleash Elements for Enhancement. Each of those spells acts as Unleash Elements currently does with spec-appropriate imbues active. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)




Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Classes
with the ap change from veng will tank do same dps while questing and raiding? sounds good for questing
Yes (other than the benefit of raid buffs, same as any DPS). (Celestalon)

Were poison proc sounds removed? Not hearing it on Rzn's stream...
Yep! They were so extraordinarily spammy and annoying, we just removed them. (Celestalon)

Image Death Knight (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
what about dps dk's or survival? they're just % damage on spell schools. Overlap between mastery/versatility... (1/2)
% damage increase to a subset of your abilities is different; it can skew the importance of different abilities. (Celestalon)
But what about balance between the two stats? One increases only some of your damage. Other increases it all but less?
Correct. That's tunable. (Celestalon)

Remove Blood Soul Reaper? Will not be used in rotation at all, since it gives no SoB stacks.
It'll trigger Scent of Blood too. (Celestalon)

Image Druid (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Since haste is becoming the overwhelming rage-generation stat for bears, perhaps crit needs some love? Crit=dodge?
We're going to improve Crit further for Bears, though no details quite yet. (Celestalon)

How is the damage of Stellar Flare calculated based on how much Balance Energy you have? And does this damage snapshot?
(1+SolarEclipse)*(1+LunarEclipse). In word... It benefits from both multipliers. Yes, Eclipses are snapshot. (Celestalon)
Can you make an example please? Don't get the formula.
Sure.You have a max Eclipse of 50%.You're currently at 40 Solar Energy.SolarEclipse=50%*(140/200)=+35%....continued... (Celestalon)
LunarEclipse=50%*(60/200)=+15%.Solar spells do 1.35x dmg.Lunar spells do 1.15x dmg.Stellar Flare does 1.35*1.15=1.5525x dmg. (Celestalon)

hey is the dmg bonus from moonkinform snapshot? so if we dot something switch to bear form and there is no 10% dmg loss ?
No, it would not be. (Celestalon)

sorry, last one and then I'll stop. I also assume that Rake (when used in stealth [Ravage] ) not awarding CP's is a bug aswell?
Rake from stealth is like Pounce, not Ravage. (Celestalon)
I got them backwards, but the concern remains. In the Alpha, Rake when used in stealth (pounce) doesn't award CP. Not intended?
Correct. Rake should award CP, regardless of stealth. (Celestalon)

Image Hunter (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Any other ideas in mind to replace it? Survival's theme can create lot of traps, explosives, and poison ideas.
No, we don't think they need any more complication. Rather have one fewer button. (Celestalon)
Thanks. Any thoughts on the BM using AS bit then? Largely my biggest remaining concern with Hunter spec flavor.
We don't think a change is worth the confusion, currently. (Celestalon)

Image Priest (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
What is the design intent/strength of Void Entropy for Shadow? If you could elaborate on the thought process behind it.
Additional orb spender. Very strong damage when the target lives a long time. (Celestalon)

In 6.0, do the partial ticks of SPriest DoTs have a partial chance to proc Divine Insight or Surge of Darkness?
Currently, no, though we're prepared to do that if it becomes an issue. (Celestalon)

Image Rogue (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
such as combat rogues mastery
We think Combat's Mastery is still suitably different. Welcome to feedback on that matter; give it a try and see how it feels. (Celestalon)

Image Shaman (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
so resto can be the Palpatine of healing now?
No, it specifically doesn't do that; Chain Heal multistrikes just do additional heals to just that target; no beam. (Celestalon)
But can it fire a beam visual to the person it multistrikes on? This is The Most Important Part!
It recasts the visual for most spells, but not for chained spells. (Celestalon)

Character / Items
So when are the shamans that wasted hours on flex for tmog getting compensated? Bonus Rolls Something.
I know it's a terrible answer, but it's not something we have the ability to track and compensate at this point. (WatcherDev)

Will non-armor items be usable for every spec? Like a 5 man dungeon boss has a cloak in his loot table, can it roll every stat?
No, there'll be competition in those slots too. Just based on stats, instead of armor type. (Celestalon)
...class, since there will be so much rng around stats on gear (sockets, minor stats, warforged)
None of those affect who can use items. Nothing has changed regarding how you form 5-player groups. (Celestalon)

Will current SoO gear be reassigned tertiary stats in 6.0 with the squish? or just hit/expt/spirit replaced?
You'll start to see Minor Stats on Draenor gear. SoO gear will get stat replacements for the obsolete stats. (WatcherDev)

Versatility
So if you pick versatility you trade some DPS for healing / armor (and vice versa)?
Yes. (Damage reduction, not Armor.) (Celestalon)

Will pure dps want versatility over other stats?
Absolutely, sometimes. (Celestalon)

So its basically a stat only for Hybrids? pure dps should avoid it?
No, it's absolutely still valuable to pure DPS. (Celestalon)

Won't versatility be another "god stat"?
Only if we overtune it, which we won't. (Celestalon)
If it is tuned lower considering healing/armor, no one will take that stat. lose/lose either ways
It will not be the highest DPS stat for anyone, but will still be valuable for its versatility. (Celestalon)

Why not make Versatility increase healing taken instead of reducing damage? Would eliminate a lot of potential problems.
Because it feels more rewarding if upgrading your character is reflected in your own performance, not your allies', in general. (Celestalon)
There have been exceptions to that in a few cases, but for a widely-valuable secondary stat, it's a good guideline. (Celestalon)
Maybe increase healing taken and Stamina then? Just seems like the ability to gear into non-DRing damage reduction is an issue.
We initially planned to put diminishing returns on the damage reduction, but decided not to since it hardly makes a difference. (Celestalon)
We normally have to use DRs when some stat scales from -50% to -75% or so (doubles in value otherwise). This goes from 3% to 15%. (Celestalon)
You don't plan on having Vers trinket procs or fight mechanics like Primordius ever again?
Oh sure, we may, but even in those extreme cases, you're talking about going from -10% to -20%. Still negligible scaling. (Celestalon)

Will dps->healing conversions (atonement, leeching poison, etc.) double dip from versatility stat?
They shouldn't, no. We already have safeguards in place for other damage/healing bonuses. (WatcherDev)
Sad day, was hoping to have some fistweaving fun with it ;pah well, c'est la vie!
It's still excellent for Fistweaving, just doesn't scale exponentially. (Celestalon)

Will Versatility affect Mend Pet? Any chance Versatility's dmg reduction or Leech heals could also work on your pet?
Yes, to all of the above. (Celestalon)

if raid-wide Versatility min is ever high enough to be effective, isn't it just the new Shadow Resistance?
If your whole raid decides to stack Versatility, you'll do a bit less damage as a group and take a bit less damage. Seems fine. (WatcherDev)
Resistance was something like a 50-60% damage reduction from a few pieces of gear. Kind of a different story. (WatcherDev)

seems to me that versatilty is basically "all my main stats in a secondary stat", too strong, maybe?
That's down to the numbers tuning. It's definitely balanceable. (WatcherDev)

Versatility = tank stat, plain and simple
It offers something for everyone. You might even say it's... versatile. (WatcherDev)

That was my concern as well. Amplify at least had the benefit of interacting with secondaries.
Amplify didn't really interact - was just bonus stats. Playing up hybrid gameplay/survival is a difference. (WatcherDev)

Hello! Right now Versatility seems too good on paper for non-short enrage timer fight. How much rating will it takes for 1%? Thx
More than it takes for 1% crit. (Celestalon)





More...
User avatar
Haggle
Rhyme News Reporter
 
Posts: 5159
WWW

Return to Warcraft News



Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot]

cron