Monday, August 5, 2013

Monday Random Thoughts

- I played a lot this weekend but didn't do anything.

- I did not get much alt time in.

- Go no lower level alt time in at all.

- I did not run the ToT LFRs on my alts to try and get some gear.

- But I did run a ToT alt run with some really low geared alts.

- Managed to go 4 deep.

- Not bad with some people around 490 item level.

- Including one of the tanks.

- I did waste a lot of time trying to collect stuff I am still missing.

- I soloed stonecore another 30 times.

- You can get the mount on normal so I run until I get locked out a few times during the day.

- Still no mount.

- No mounts from firelands, onyxia, UP or strath either.

- That is basically what I spent my weekend doing mostly.

- Trying to collect junk I don't have yet.

- I should make a list of what I need to do so I do not forget.

- I have to be well over 1000 attempts at stonecore now and at least 600 on UP.

- Onxyia is the one I always forget to do.

- I would say I do it once every few months because it always slips my mind.

- I did finally get my last pet I needed for raiding with leashes 2.

- Took doing it on multiple characters each week since the patch came out.

- That is a horrible drop rate, or really bad luck.

- To put this in perspective, in all the weeks I have been doing them all on at least 2 characters, sometimes as many as 6, just to see if I could get extra, I only managed to get 2 extras.

- Yeap, you read that right, in the many weeks since release that I have done all of these on at least 2 characters I have only got 2 extras.

- I also never got one of them, I traded one of those extras for one of the ones I needed.

- Is the drop rate really that dismal or is my luck really that bad?

- No need to answer.

- My luck really is that bad, I already know that.

- I did do a couple of the early LFRs on saturday in the early morning.

- Seems there are much nicer groups then.

- I guess that is because the people that cause trouble were up late friday night making friday LFRs hell so they were still sleeping saturday morning, thus it made for a quite pleasant run.

- Healed for the first time in ages trying a new rotation on my priest of going straight attonement with just shields and prayer of mending on cooldown on the tank.

- I read how insane the numbers are and I wanted to test it out being I have not healed in a long time.

- My numbers were dreadful low compared to what I am used to, but I chalk that up to it being the LFR.

- But I am judging LFR vs LFR.

- And with that in mind I seemed to put out more raw healing doing straight healing than I do with attonment healing.

- I guess I need to work on it more, I trust the data, but I don't see it as it is working.

- I did manage to get the last of the sigils I needed for that character however so on to collecting 3000 valor now.

- That was part of my reasoning for doing it as well.

- Not just to test out the healing, but to get junk out of my bags and those sigils were just junk taking up space.

- I doubt I will ever get the legendary on any of my alts.

- Too much work for it on an alt in my opinion.

- Even more so when you count in horrible drop rates worse queue times and dismal groups with people I would rather not have to group with.

- If they would make the drop rates better and enforce some standard code of behavior in the LFRs then doing them would not be such an annoyance.

- And the queue time, it is beyond a joke.

- A few guild mates decided to queue up for the last LFR yesterday.

- Nearly two hours after they entered the queue popped up and they go into a group that proceeded to wipe on trash three times.

- Yes, the trash in the last one, you know the trash that it has to be nearly impossible to wipe on.

- They said that both tanks dropped before they even got to the first boss.

- Then they all dropped group after waiting another 45 minutes, which put them over 2 and a half hours.

- Two and a half hours for nothing.

- If you count on the LFR for your fun in the game, the game is completely unplayable now.

- If, and that is a huge if, you can get into it in a reasonable time frame you still have to deal with the dregs of humanity.

- Not exactly what I would consider "fun" game design.

- I think it is time blizzard went back to the drawing board with the LFR, it is not working as it should.

- Working as intended maybe, but not as it should.

- See, not even doing the ToT LFRs myself this weekend and it stresses me.

- All from hearing the horror stories of others in it.

- It should never get to this point.

- And tanks are so hard to find and they continue to nerf vengeance.

- So you are nerfing one of the only things some people even tank for because they like being able to do insane damage on the trash and have fun with vengence and expect that to get you more tanks?

- Blizzard really needs to think before they act, seriously.

- How about adding more stuff tanks like to make them want to tank instead of taking away the stuff they like because of the very few that found a way to use it to their advantage.

- So some tanks were gaming vengeance to do some insane thing.

- Big deal.

- More power to them for using the game design to their advantage.

- Perhaps they are having fun.

- You know what people that are having fun do blizzard?

- They keep playing.

- I know, hard to believe isn't it?

- Try adding some more things to LFR that make the tanks enjoy it and maybe there might be a few more willing to do it.

- So those very few that enjoyed the vengeance angle will no longer have that even.

- Just keep stripping away the fun parts of the game blizzard, that will surely make them want to play more.

- It was like when they nerfed the ore spawn rate to oblivion.

- I had fun farming my ore, it was all over the place.

- I always had enough for what I needed to do, I could always farm whenever I needed more, and it was quick and easy.

- Then you nerfed it to the point I would fly around for an hour for a stack and a half.

- More is better, more is fun.

- Flying around forever to get nothing is not fun.

- Getting it all over the place is fun.

- Blizzard seems to have some sort of agenda against people enjoying something.

- If people are having fun with something, nerf it.

- Hunters and warlock can solo the panda rares because their pets do not get hit by the spinning kick.

- They enjoy that, nerf it.

- Tanks like leading the damage done charts on AoE pulls because of vengeance.

- They enjoy that, nerf it.

- Healers like having to concentrate more of keeping people up and less on mana.

- They enjoy that, nerf it.

- Gatherers are enjoying having the resources they need around to gather when they need it.

- They enjoy that, nerf it.

- What is this obsession with nerfing everything that people enjoy.

- There is a huge difference between too powerful and needs a nerf and nerfing for the sake of nerfing.

- Blizzard nerfs for the sake of nerfing.

- Yet mages have been over powered for 6 years now and they leave them alone.

- Logic?  Blizzard has none.

- I think sometimes they try to chase people away from the game.

- Like the people that quit at the beginning of cataclysm.

- I swear I had never seen so many people quit so quickly and actually not come back.

- I've seen many come and go, but out of that huge bunch of people that quit at the beginning of cataclysm, none of them have returned.

- I still hope they will one day return.  I miss a bunch of them.

- This expansion has scared off a few too, not as many as cataclysm.

- At its absolute worst mists is still 100 times better than cataclysm was at its best.

- But the beginning of the expansion and their "daily or die" mentality killed off the game for a few people.

- Then the next raid patch where they changed it to "raid or die" it scared off some more.

- I noticed the raid or die time is when tanks started to disappear.

- Lost two of them in guild during that time and heard of others that did as well.

- Tanks do not queue for the LFR and forcing them to do the LFR meant they had to.

- Now, if it were the option of LFR or nothing I think I would choose nothing also.

- And that is why they quit, in part.

- I know a warrior tank that quit because of various things.

- The daily or die at the beginning to get the rep and gear and coins when he hated dailies.

- The raid or die at the middle when he need to do the dailies for coins and the LFR for reputation and gear.

- So he just gave up.

- Too much of what he "had to" do and not enough of what he "wanted to" do.

- Blizzard really needs to rethink their design of making things "have to" do and changing everything people enjoy.

- I think for him the final nail in the coffin of the game was the fact that warriors were extremely lacking when compared to all other tanks in the game.

- He felt week in defensive cooldowns, he felt week in self healing, he felt week in damage done, he felt rage generation never left him with enough to do what he needed to do and he felt he needed to grind everything twice as much just to stay on par with other tanks that did half the work.

- For him I understood his desire to quit the game.

- If I were him with that being my only character I like playing I too would have quit and never looked back.

- The other tank we lost around the same time I think he just got bored with doing the same thing every day.

- Lets face it, we all do the same thing every day.

- The least blizzard can do it attempt to make it fun.

- But they seem to be anti fun.

- Remember, the new blizzard motto is, if the players are enjoying it, nerf it.

- Have a great day.

30 comments:

  1. I don't take warrior tanks seriously when they complain. Because they do that every patch, every expansion.

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    1. I do feel bad for him, even more so after leveling my warrior and noticing how crap they are compared to my other tanks.

      I do feel survivable, but I don't feel good about the output when compared to my other tanks.

      I might only be at 480 on it but my damage output is a miserable 15K-20K which means aggro is a bitch. I also generate rage so slow I can not spend any on offense to boost that because I never, repeat never, have enough for defensive.

      Warriors are in a horrible place. They have a right to complain. When it comes to tanks they are dead last by a long shot.

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    2. 'Horrible'... From what pov? At what kind of level did you raid on your warrior? What, leveling-wise, first LFR-wise? You feel for him because you want to feel for him.

      This reminds me how a bunch of hunters quit when hunters started using focus. Our hunter didn't. And how a bunch of ret paladins quit when Cata was out. Ours didn't. He was our top dps, still.

      Someone has to be last in tank hierarchy every tier. Warriors complain every time, even when they're not. I recall even in DS, when paladins were last, we didn't complain, but warriors still did, even though they had nothing to complain about.

      There are better guilds than mine out there that use warrior tanks. Good warriors are good. Bad ones are well... bad.

      Let's take a DK tank. We bench our DK tank for hc Lei Shen. They bring almost no raid utility either. You don't see DKs quitting left and right. Ooooh, because of dps? Yeah, that's the mentality, tank's role is to dps hard, now I get it. No, wait, I don't.

      Warriors... usually, instead of loving their class and trying to get the best out of it, they decide to look over the fence and complain how paladins have better self heals, how paladins have this and that how paladins do this and that. Eff that. Yeah, in raid with crap healers that expect your tank to selfheal extensively, your warrior isn't such a good choice. Otherwise, they take 10% less damage to even begin saying anything. I'm not gonna start on this.

      And from your guild's pov where dps isn't the issue why would you even care for tank dps. You're overgeared for whatever you're doing anyway.

      Last tier (still mop) warriors were in a good place. The whole of it. Be it normal or heroic.

      Sure, warrior tanks may be last this tier but their complaining is so ridiculous all the time, I just don't listen to them anymore.

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    3. I have not raided this expansion on my warrior. No desire too. I know warriors and they all told me the same thing. I read the forums and they all say the same thing.

      It is why my warrior was the last class to make it to 90. When leveling I too noticed that compared to every other class in the game warriors were in a horrible place. Of course it could be my own fault for leveling as prot.

      All the hunters that quit over focus were not hunters, they were people that played hunters. I consider that a difference. I did not like it at least and still do not to some extent, but I am a hunter, I learned and adjusted, it is what you do.

      For me however in the warrior case it is an alt thing. I have a DK tank, a druid tank, a paladin tank and monk tank and warrior tank. As warriors are that means I do not tank on my warrior. As you said, someone has to be last and when I have a choice of which to use, I do not use the last one. I am sure you can understand that.

      Really exceptional players will make the best of what they have even when their class is in a bad place. That is why there are still some really great hard core warriors out there. But I assure you, if they had an alt which they played and enjoyed at the same skill level they would play that instead. Not because of the someone needs to be last thing, but because of the how far in last they are.

      Example in terms I can best explain as I am a hunter. The marksman spec has always been my favorite yet I have not been able to use it competitively since early firelands because it is useless on most fights and its damage is not comparable.

      I would like to think of myself as a decent player but there is nothing I can do to make up the difference. If marksman was last by 1K I could see arguing I like it better and it is only 1K so I will play it. But if on some fights it is 15K-25K behind there is no justification to use it. It is leaving too much ability on the table.

      Now, could I get bosses down even doing 15K less? Sure, with the DPS in my group and the fact we only do normals losing 15K from me would still put us leaps and bound above most. But would that mean we are doing it the best we can? Absolutely not.

      Now that is where warriors are. Can you do it with them? Yes. Could it be done better without them? Absolutely.

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    1. I see them all over now as well. Seems no one farms any longer or the upped the rate after they lowered it. I was referring more to the original nerf.

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    3. I guess I was just unlucky. I would fly over the mountain range in the valley where I could farm all day long and never see any after the nerf. Still not all that great there.

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  3. Warriors are fine, that’s part of the vengeance nerf the other tanks were getting out of control quite frankly. Roll eyes at tanks quitting from no big #’s on trash that’s silly.
    I’ve been tanking in LFR lately and having a blast, but here’s my trick, I don’t go about it with a set goal beyond tanking something and I do it late at night. So I slowly go down the LFR menu queuing for each one for a few minutes if it pops I immediately take it. Thus I arrive as a hero to a bunch of desperate people that just want to finish whatever it is we are doing. I have yet to encounter pissy people this way they are generally grateful for a friendly tank at this point that nothing else matters hehehe. It’s not effective at gearing but I feel like I’m helping out the community and having fun while doing it.

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    1. I like the helping people idea and would love to do it but I can not bring myself to tank. If I ever do it would be early morning weekends. Much better class of people in them I find even if skill wise they are not the type you will ever see in a real raid but they are willing to work together. Those people are worth helping.

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  4. - Raid pets drops are weird. MC drops them like crazy but the others seem to be a pain.

    - No LFR, No dailies, No dungeons, No raids, No valor.

    - Posted my usual auctions though.

    - Main highlight was: I created a dwarven hunter on Icecrown US and joined the WHU yesterday.

    - Got him to lvl 19.

    - Want to participate in Frostheim's retirement party that should be this weekend. He's retiring from blogging/podcasting in case anyone hasn't heard.

    - Blizz posted about Connected Realms (previously known as Virtual Realms)... However, they said nothing useful other than the new name...

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    1. I can't believe they are delaying the virtual realms, one of the things I was most looking forward too.

      Going to be sad to see Frost stop writing. But I could sense it coming over the last year when he stopped posting as often as he used to.

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  5. These last six weeks I was on the fence about the game. I like arenas, but you can't do them every day or you get tired, so I was looking for something else to do, and somehow, despite all its supposed richness, MOP failed to deliver.

    Here's what I did:

    * Alts. I do them every expansion and I did them this one, too. Well, I leveled three or four to max level, including one brand new, plus advanced three or four others, and... the leveling was very boring, quite frankly. I did try different leveling routes, of course, it didn't save it. I guess I have seen it all here.

    * LFR and little bits of normal raiding here and there. I am grateful that I can see the bosses and the inside of each raid and do the legendary quest line, but the encounters are, quite honestly, only interesting the first few times and then they are boring. Little bits of normal raiding that I mention (upon invites from friends) were, of course, better than LFR, but they weren't very interesting either. To each his own, I guess. And LFR is LFR, of course. I didn't complete the legendary yet and I am not going to. I just don't see why I should spend so much time doing what is, well, boring and sometimes stupid, for some pixels that the developers decided to paint in orange color.

    * Rares / treasures / various achievements on the mainland of Pandaria as well as on the Isle of Thunder, etc. This was relatively fun but it didn't last. Things typically worked like this: you get 70% of your targets (eg, rares) the first day or reset, 15% the next day, then you spend the rest of your life chasing the last 15%. The first two days or resets are a lot of fun, then the fun greatly deteriorates. You place another item on your list of things to do / check, and after a few more days any lust you could have had wrt this item dies. Some time later when you accidentally complete the item, you have a short burst of fun, but a large part of it is that you can finally get the relevant item OFF your list. Meh... (Sometimes I am asking myself - why do this at all?)

    * Battle pets. Big, big, big disappointment. I was saving this for when there is lull, hoping this was a large area to explore. Well, it wasn't. I guess I prepared too well by reading forums and guides. The irony is, I explicitly set out to take things slowly, and it still "capped out" very fast. I leveled my first trio the hard way = battling pets of their level without capturing pets of higher level and switching to them, and it took two days from level 1 to level 25. In the process, I captured about 100 pets that I didn't yet have. In the next week, I captured another 200 or so pets, a lot of them rares, growing my zoo to ~430. A couple more days and I beat all trainers. What now? The only pets that I don't have are rare pets from drops plus a couple pets like Minfernal which have to be camped. I have about 50 rares that aren't level 25 yet, but leveling them is boring. Replacing non-rares with rares is even more boring. PVP battles are meh, there isn't a lot of depth there (my winrate is about 50% with all kinds of weird setups, so...). Battle pets are kind of finished.

    So, I don't know... What are you doing that you find fun? I kind of ran out of things to do.

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    1. I just asked myself this question: would I do any of the above things if Blizzard didn't stimulate them with stuff like achievements. The results:

      * Alts - yes, I would do them. Mainly because I level alts to PVP on different classes, but also because I like trying different mechanics and I want to understand how various classes work.

      * LFR - no, if it wasn't for the reputation / legendary drops, I would only do them once, maybe twice, to see what the bosses are. This extends to non-LFR raids as well.

      * Rares / treasures / achievements - no, if it wasn't for achievements for these things, I wouldn't do them. I would appreciate having rares during leveling for variety and drops, and having treasures for the fun of it, but I wouldn't specifically chase them.

      * Battle pets - no, if it wasn't for achievements, I would maybe play a couple of battles, capture a pet here and there, and that's it.

      Meh...

      What about you?

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    2. Sorry for 3rd post in a row.

      How could I forget:

      * Archaeology. The most boring grind ever. Very long, completely pointless, the most fun you get from it is when it is done (and god, does that take a lot of time). No, if if wasn't for achievements, I wouldn't do it. No. No. NO! Never. I regret I spent so much time completing it, quite honestly. If Blizzard try to "extend" archaeology in 5.4 or 5.5 by adding another 10+10 achievements to get 5/20 items of such and such type each, I am not doing it.

      /rant

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    3. I suck at pet battle PvP worse than I do in real PvP. I have about 50 battles under my belt and I've won 2. Yeah, I need to do some research.

      Achievements are a nice motivator but I think I would still level even without achievements. I like to level and like to have one of each class, so I would still do it.

      For the pets, I will do the PvP ones only for the achievement, but would do the others to pass the time even if there were no achievements. Anyway I've had every non PvP pet battle achievements for months as is and I still do it once or twice a week.

      I would still hunt rares because I like the challenge but you get to know them after the first time or two and they lose their challenge. It is only exciting that first time trying to solo something that was meant for a group. However, as long as they drop goodies, I will kill them every time I see them. Who am I to turn away free loot?

      Your mention of archaeology made me consider a post about it because I do feel like you said. I do it for the goodies and the achievements. Still need a mount and a pet from tol'vir and from time to time I go digging. But I did all the achievements just because they were achievement and I hate, repeat hate, blizzard for adding those pristine and 20 of each achievements. Bastards. I hate RNG but having to dig forever to finish those annoyed the ever living hell out of me but I kept doing it like a fool for the achievements. I can only blame myself. But I only have it on one character and that is the only one I ever will on. My other characters did not even learn it. There is nothing fun about it.

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    4. Archeology is something I can do maybe once a month for an afternoon... I don't know if I'll ever have the patience to finish the pandaria achievs. They are just too much of a grind.

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    5. I have all the achievements, even was one of the 0.3% to get the seeker of knowledge when I did get it. It is a long grind basically of time more than anything else. More have that achievement now and more will get it. But unless you are really after it, like I was for the title, taking your time is the best way to get it in my opinion.

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  6. I dunno... I'd have to wrack my brain to figure out the last time something I really enjoyed got nerfed.

    Every single toon that I've spent time on lately (which is all of 'em, I think I've run all classes through at ones one of the LFR wings in the past couple of weeks) is still as enjoyable as it has been... I can't recall any specific nerfing of the fun of any of them.

    The nodes were nerfed because there were too many. There are fewer now, sure, but there are still plenty. I can find 4x as many nodes in MoP as I can in Hellfire Peninsula... right now there's more ore up on the AH than there's been in 6 months. Hundreds of stacks on my server. There's no shortage.

    Reducing the vengeance scaling is a necessary step to have tanks stop being idiots. I was in an LFR run in Terrace this weekend where the DK tank with 500K health kept taunting (bosses and adds) off the DK tank with 690K health because he was trying to pad his numbers by taking as much damage as possible. I was healing that run... as you can imagine, I was *thrilled* by his efforts as he was dying multiple times per pull/boss. And it's not like he was topping the charts, I can't even recall seeing him in the top 5. But whenever the more geared tank would taunt something off him, he'd taunt back, no matter what his personal circumstances were (he was taking 200K ticks from the DoT on Tsulong... I didn't even think that was POSSIBLE to get the stacks that high). It was ridiculous. The vengeance changes won't make much difference on boss fights, aside from the removal of vengeance from standing in bad and I don't think anyone would argue against that change.

    I'd also argue that while it might be fun for a tank to top the meters every now and then, I suspect it's less fun for the dpsers who are the ones who are supposed to be up there. Every time I see a tank top the meters in group content and brag about it (or more commonly, trash the dps for being "sub-tank") I want to personally nerf vengeance to the ground. An equally geared dps should always beat a tank in dps on a normal fight, including AoE fights. Always.

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    1. I think there is more ore around because of the timing than because of the abundance. It is that no one needs it so no one is farming it and the few that have it are selling it. When it is needed and desired, I do believe the supply is not enough to meet demand. I also believe it is more fun to be able to get it when you need it than to have to search forever for it. But that is just my opinion of course, some like a hard to find things type of market.

      I understand the vengeance nerf because of jerks like that, but to change everything because of a few jerks is not right. How about allowing people to report people for disruptive game play and then they ban the person from the LFR for a month instead of changing vengeance because of some jerks?

      I have healed the LFR so I know exactly where you are coming from. Tanks not using cooldowns so they can take more damage or pulling more than they know they can handle. That doesn't mean vengeance was the problem, that means bad players are the problem. I never blamed vengeance of them, I blamed the person playing it for that happening.

      I agree that as a damage dealer main I would like to be able to beat the tank and I think I should be able to beat the tank. But if the tank can have fun with the numbers a little and allow me to be on my damage dealer so I do not need to tank I say let them have at it. With the exception of trash or gaming the system some how a tank will never beat a damage dealer on a boss fight.

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    2. I think the problem is that Vengeance scaled tank dps up high enough that it was a significant contribution to raid dps... which means that some classes were preferred to others because of their dps.

      To me, that's a problem... tank choice shouldn't be influenced by dps potential and if Vengeance was contributing to that, I'm glad it's being scaled back.

      Ultimately, good tanking should result in taking as little damage as possible which is completely at odds with Vengeance as a mechanic... and if fun for a tank is based on doing a lot of dps, you're making tanks choose between the fun option (take more damage and do more dps) or the CORRECT option (take less damage and do less dps). The fun option is the wrong one. That isn't good design, so they're changing it. Sorta.

      If anything, I don't think they're going far enough in that direction. What if they tied Vengeance to avoidance/mitigation for tanks instead of damage taken? You get higher Vengeance for each point of damage that you NEGATE (so, dodge/parry would be full benefit, mitigation would be based on the % reduction)? If you want to maximize your dps as a tank, you'll have to master a combination of a good dps rotation PLUS taking as little damage as possible. That'd be interesting to see and would put the focus where it should be... taking as little damage as possible and pushing the buttons correctly.

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    3. I can absolutely agree with that. Unless it was something like a paladin to one tank a fight having the tank with the highest DPS was the best for the raid team thanks to vengeance.

      Is it actually not uncommon to see the tank beat many damage dealers in pugs or LFR tanks to vengeance, but I read that more as a wake up call to the damage dealers.

      I am hoping the change helps. But I do dislike that when I am out and about I no longer have that choice. For the random tank in the LFR I do not want him standing in junk so he can up his DPS, but when I am out questing as a tank I liked the ability to stand in stuff to up my damage. I am in control and I know how much damage I can take.

      So effectively they are penalizing me for being smart player that knows what I can and what I can not do because of bad players? I find that unfair. But, I do agree, something needs to be done of those bad players will keep getting worse.

      This is exactly what I said would happen when they first went to the active mitigation model with vengeance. The two do not work together well for the average player. pair them up and they take more damage to try and increase their DPS.

      I like your idea of tying the two together. For example, when I hit savage defense I gain vengeance 500% the damage taken, but I gain no vengeance when I am not using an active mitigation cooldown.

      Now that idea is not only brilliant but solves the problem with what I said, that the two together actually hurt each other.

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    4. That's the thing, though, they can't design a class based on an edge case like "this dude likes to take as much damage as possible while questing to max out his dps"... I mean, if that's your goal, quest as a dps and pull big. :)

      I don't consider that penalizing you, as a tank you shouldn't be doing big dps. Either run as a dps, or tank in dps gear, or don't run in Blood/Def Stance/etc. There are ways to decrease your tanking effectiveness while increasing your dps that don't completely unbalance end-game content.

      One other upside of that change would be that dodge and parry should become more interesting again... but at this point I believe Blizz is looking more to remove those stats from the game entirely so that may not be the direction they want to go. It's hard to predict where things will go, I believe right now they're sitting pretty solidly in the middle of this debate and aren't sure which way to go, they just know that they have to go in ONE of the directions since the current straddling doesn't seem to be working out.

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    5. I'll also add that I don't think playing solo can possibly scale Vengeance up significantly no matter how much damage you're taking... if you can survive it without a healer (or three), it can't possibly generate a ton of Vengeance. You might only THINK you're getting significant benefit by taking a lot of damage (but not enough that you can't keep yourself alive through it), it might not actually be true. I've recently started tracking Vengeance numbers on my tanks using TellMeWhen (I think you've mentioned you use something else, it probably has a similar option), you should do that if you aren't already and see if you will actually be losing anything significant.

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    6. I level my tanks as tank, I quest on my tanks as tanks, I do content on my tanks as tanks. I've been doing that since before vengeance was a dream is some most likely now fired employee at blizzard.

      So when vengeance came out it was like the best thing since sliced bread for me. Forgive me for liking it and then being upset they take it away from me. I am sure if they gave your class something you really enjoyed and then said nope, we are taking it away because some idiots don't know how to use it, you would fight to not lose it either right?

      With or without it, my tanks are tanks and will quest and level as such. There is no reason to change.

      I too get the idea that dodge and parry are on the way out and unless they did something to make them more attractive, like your idea, I say good riddance to them. They can take hit and expertise with them on their way out.

      I use need to know, it is like tell me when. I should look into that.

      I do not need to use anything to know the difference between doing 18K single target on my DK and never needing to use cooldowns or pulling 10 or more mobs and doing 200K with the use of a few cooldowns. In the end it "averages" out to doing 20K per mob instead of 18K, so the boost is minimal, but it is surely faster to kill 10 at once than to kill on at a time and any amount of vengeance, even minimal, is a plus.

      Anyway, aren't that what cooldowns are meant for? To keep yourself alive. It is actually a great way to learn to tank. It is sort of how I play around and practice. I see how much I can survive on my own. Vengeance is actually want first made me want to push it as far as I can go. Because it was fun seeing the numbers go sky high the more I pulled. So in a way vengeance made me a better tank. If it were not for vengeance I don't think I would continuesly press myself to go further and further and pull more and more thus learning my limits and my cooldowns.

      Having high vengeance is not all bad. At least not as bad as people make it out to be. It is just like anything else, in the wrong hands it looks bad.

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  7. High vengeance isn't all bad, no, but Blizzard wanted to stop having to balance fights around it so they're scaling it back (and it should only be noticeable on a few AoE-heavy fights and even then shouldn't be a huge decrease in dps). Instead of jacking up AP to 5x its normal value, maybe now it'll be 3x... or 3.5x. So your dps will go from 120K to 100K. That's not a nerf to fun, it's a dps balancing pass. You still get the benefit of increased dps, you still get benefit from pulling bigger, you just don't get 100% of the benefit for each mob coming in, there are diminshing returns, as in most other elements of the game (dps AoE, for instance, which isn't linear as you add more mobs after a certain number). Vengeance is just being brought back in line with all of those other mechanics that work that way. Basically, it was broken and now that they've figured out how they want to fix it, they're fixing it.

    I'm going to take a GC response completely out of context since it applies here as well (the original context was related to PPM trinkets and how raids were gaming them by sitting for 15m before pulls to ensure they'd pop right on the pull... Blizz is adding some forced RNG so there's no additional benefit after a typical amount of recovery time after a wipe and someone complained that it's a "nerf to fun" since he isn't hitting 75K spell power anymore):

    GC: I feel like the "nerf to fun" argument gets overstated quite a bit. We're not nerfing it because it was fun, we're nerfing it because it was breaking the game.

    GC: I'm sure a lot of players would find it fun to be able to take down Heroic Lei Shen with a single spell. That doesn't make it good gameplay.

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    1. Just pretend that's in response to the @GE comment above rather than a new comment.

      Sigh.

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    2. Very good analogy. Didn't think of it along the lines of the AoE cap. I do not believe tank vengeance was subject to the AoE cap. I could be wrong but it sure did not seem like it was.

      Wouldn't it have been better to just make it subject to the standard AoE cap all other classes have?

      While I do argue that it is fun to see those numbers as a tank I understand the need to tighten it up and agree with it. I just believe there were better ways to do so. I liked the change from 100% health down to 30% health and thought that would have been enough. That was a more suitable fix in my opinion then trying to confuse most people with the diminishing returns idea. I've tried to explain that to many people in my years player and I can tell you that the vast majority just can not understand it. Math like diminishing returns it just confusing to most. I understand it, I understand the reasoning, but it is not something I would ever want to try to explain to someone. It is not a player friendly concept.

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    3. My guess... it's because not all dps class AoE abilities have that cap. Chain Lightning, for instance... glyphed, it hits 5 mobs for a lot, unglyphed it hits 3 even harder... even if the pack has 40 mobs in it, it'll still only hit 5 or 3 mobs. The shammy will hit those 5 or 3 mobs a LOT harder than any of the capped AoE classes will so the tank has to be able to stay ahead of the shammy on threat for those particular mobs. That's a LOT harder to guarantee if they're also subject to a base AoE damage cap like dps have. So, their base AoE damage has to be uncapped... whether 5 mobs or 40, they have to hit them all equally hard and that should be enough to hold off the shammy 5 or 3 target burst.

      So, the only reliable way they can keep dps in check while not messing up that delicate balance is to decrease the scaling of the bonus... ie. Vengeance. So that's what they've done. 100% for the first mob, 50% for the second, 33% for the third, etc, or wherever that ends up. You still get benefit for the 40th mob, it just won't be 100%. That's actually better than the dps cap since dps are capped at something like 10 mobs... tanks are still getting benefit whenever more mobs are added.

      Anyway, average players won't need to know or care about the changes... and they probably won't even notice their dps has decreased a bit. Diminishing returns have always been in the game for things like dodge and parry, that's never really been an issue before, I doubt it will be here either.

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    4. A hunters serpent spread is (was) the same way. It was not bound by the AoE cap because it applied an actual ability individually to each target. So managing that cap can indeed be hard in some cases, like the one you mentioned and the one I mentioned.

      Diminishing returns have always been a clunky mechanic that I think can be handled better. Yes, the average player won't even know what they are, but the average player that wants to get better comes to me, and I do not want to have to try and explain it to them. I've done it many times over the years if I think there was only one person, ever, that understood it.

      They have removed stuff that made a lot more sense in the game because it was considered too complex, why not remove DR on things like that and just blanket lower it from the start, or slow up ramp up time, or cap it lower, or... well, so many other things that when someone asks it can be easily explained.

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