To start, I think Mists is the best thing that's happened to warcraft so far. The levelling process feels so much smoother, the dungeons are more entertaining. Graphics upgrade wasn't huge but is noticable. The heroic dungeons are a bit easy but I'm perfectly fine with that depending on how the challenge mode and raids play out.
It's still in the first week but there's a ton of information I can share with people. I'm not going to write a rep guide because those exist out there, and I'm going to try to avoid anything that's already been done that isn't too hard to find so here it goes.
What to do when you hit 90.
After hitting lvl 90 what should you do? The first things I would highly recommend are unlocking the various dailies. Since there are no caps on daily quests you can do basically every daily quest you have access to every day. So which factions do you have access to? Also this is how you get to spend your JP and VP since all the items you can buy with those currencies are tied to reputations Honoured = JP. Revered = VP
The black prince. No spoilers here but you do need to pick up a quest to go see wrathion. This is related to the legendary gem upgrade. It's important you get this because you rep up by killing mobs of various types that you'll find anyways by doing your other dailies.
Doing the dread wastes quests should put you in line to do the klaxxi quests. You should be able to hit honoured with them through just the zone quests and one or two days worth of dailies. They are pretty easy dailies and at exalted you get extra weapon choices that seem mostly for xmog but are actually really nice if you don't get a 463 by then. Depending on which set of dailies you get you will be getting black prince rep.
Temple of the white tiger in Kun-lai summit has a quest involving Anduin that should unlock the golden lotus quests for you. Golden lotus rep is required for access to many other factions and it is really really slow going. The mobs you kill for these quests also generate black prince rep, most of them. You also unlock new dailies upon hitting honoured so keep an eye out for those.
Anglers and cloud serpent factions are also available and their dailies do reward valour points and the lesser charms of good fortune. which means it's a really good idea to get started on them but their rewards aren't as important as the other two factions you have access to. The rest of the factions you do not get access to right away. At least shado-pan and august celestials require the golden lotus rep. You can pick up quests that let you know about this at the main shrine area in the vale of eternal blossoms.
Many quests offer 450 gear, heroic dungeons offer 463 gear with some 470 gear from the last boss if you're lucky. Professions have felt very easy to level up this time around, engineering is a bit of a hassle but it's pretty streamlined and the profession kickbacks show up pretty early for most of them. I think that vast majority are available at 550 while one or two of them might not be available to a fair bit higher. Alchemy you can get lucky with discovering the flask early.
I also haven't discovered anything about flask cauldrons or feasts, so if anyone can tell me with certainty how they work this time around please post a comment.
That's pretty much it for level cap right now. You can start your farm and do some pokemon battles as well but neither really increases your player power much unless you're focusing on cooking, in which case you really want to get the tillers rep and farm going (in valley of the four winds).
Servers are almost up soon and I have chores around the hose to get done before then so I hope you all are enjoying the levelling process and new content. P.S. Sha of anger and galleon are pushovers.
28 September, 2012
19 September, 2012
Finally DS is done
It's been a long time, and for the most part a pretty good run, but now that dragon soul is officially off the raiding roster for me I wanted to take a detailed look at each boss and the raid tier as a whole and highlight the good and the bad. One last thing before we get started is that I highly recommend people take a look at the new crafting stuff for MoP. There is a phenomenal change regarding raid craftables.
So the raid tier as a whole was pretty short. 8 Bosses, only 5 of those had trash. The loot distribution was interesting and I've decided the idea of a "grab bag" drop is pretty lame even if you do it right. It's a nightmare for raid comp (ensuring all loot goes to someone) because your entire raid is going to say "I need something from the grab bag." I did like the interaction with VP trinkets and spine o' deathwing. I'll talk about the way spine and madness dropped gear when I get to them.
Morchok/Kohcrom. These guys were pretty cool. I've always wanted a fight where you'd have to split the raid up into two and go function individually. I was hoping for something a bit more seperating but it's a good start to showcase that it's a decent mechanic. Sure it's the first boss and anyone who can get to heroic modes can get heroic morchok down in a few goes, but I think the fight was entertaining. It's simple and straightforward, good for the first boss, and still requires people to be doing the right thing. I was also a fan of the tanks getting something to do (at least while "progressing" on it). Interesting loot drops, hand of morchok really bothered me but I'm going to wait until I get to madness to talk about that one. Good amount of trash, a bit unfortunate that on heroic you had to clear the sides, or at least we did but it was interesting and fit the lore/flavour of the instance.
Zon'ozz. We did some crazy strat for zonozz that didn't matter much to me being a tank but I think the setup of the fight generated a whole lot of opportunity for cheese. I really enjoyed the way heroic black phase functioned, in fact even on normal it was pretty interesting. The stacking dmg taken mechanic was interesting and fun for great numbers but the fight outside of the black phase was mostly uninteresting. Decent fight but felt almost like filler. Lots of hinting at old god influence but it really stopped here and at yor'sahj without counting DW himself. In summary, meh.
Yor'sahj. I really really liked the concept behind this fight. A few critical decisions about the fight design made it wonderful. First, all the abilities that were given to the globules, now referred to as oozes, combo together in some way. Yellow is giant in that every abilitiy except blue gets a benefit. Blue is terrifying in that you have no mana, red wants you to stay close while green wants you to spread out. All these things I find really cool on their own but planning for dealing with groups of them is awesome. The added ability to pick, or the requirement for some burst dmg to get rid of the oozes is a huge addition to the fight. Cooldown usage is hugely important since the spawns are ~1m 40s apart meaning your 2m CDs wont be up for for two phases in a row. The randomness makes it so you can't just plan the whole fight out and have to react. Lastly the fact that you can only kill one before the others go immune is something that could be debateable. It'd be something to help with farming it, which is always good in my opinion, but I can see why it wasn't there and both options are quite valid and an integral part of the fight. Just imagine how different it would be if you were allowed, and in many cases still unable due to dps requirements, to kill more than one. Size of the room was important. All in all, great fight and I wish we could see more of this level of design in encounters.
Since those last two bosses are non-linear meaning you could take 'em out in either order their difficulty was pretty spot on. There was no obvious order and without looking at exact kill numbers I remember many guilds going each way at the same time that we were progressing on it. I know we spent a fair bit of time progressing on each before getting either one. I don't even remember which one we settled on killing first though I think it was zonozz and the yorsahj the following night or something. My one problem here involves weapons again. Specimen slicer is a relatively early drop in the instance, more on it when we reach DW weapons.
Hagara. Another fight I think was really well designed, which the numbers were tuned a bit better and the lightning phase was a bit less buggy. One problem I had with the fight was lightning phase required so much pre-fight setup, not as much after doing it for 8 months but it probably added maybe 15 minutes to our raid every week, possibly more, trying to get everyone in the right spot. It's a touchy subject because you need to have some sort of pre-fight planning going on but hagara felt excessive. I liked the flow of the fight, even focused assault, though I wish there wasn't such an imbalance in tanks for that mechanic. I'm sure it'd be fine now, post 5.0 with all the changes, but before it was so bad that I got sat for our dk tank. That and our dps was a bit on the low side and it was a 1-tank encounter. I'm not opposed to 1 tank encounters but since the numbers are so small it's basically either both your tanks get competitive dps sets, which they can't because raid optimization forces you to send the dps gear at the dps, or you sit half your tanking roster because of a 1 tank fight. We did zonozz with 2 tanks because of the second claw tentacle but we probably didn't need to. Dps wasn't an issue for us there, so we opted for a second tank. I'll probably go on for a long time if I don't save that topic for another day. Summary, not a bad fight. Some bugs made it rough. Ice phase was trivialized by cheesing mechanics that I really hope were just overlooked. A simple ramp up on dmg from inside the bubble would have removed the stack up in the middle and nuke the crystals strat. Fun fight but clearly lacking in some areas.
Ultraxion. The standard "patchwerk" fight. I'm glad to see these every once in a while. Once per tier might not be the best frequency but with more bosses each tier it might not be a bad thing. I enjoyed the tank swap mechanic, made me pay attention. I really liked the way they made the dps pay attention while still trying to max dps. The more I think about it I really don't like the extra action bar buttons. I think instead I would have preferred something like "does x% of your max hp" on fading light to force people to use personal cooldowns. It could have been something like 80-90% so that they had to. Most classes have something to deal with it. Shields would be helpful for it as well. Hour could have been proximity like bloodboil was or like morchok stomp. I just hate the extra action bar thing even though it's a pretty neat solution to something like that. Nothing wrong with this fight, highlighted baddies who couldn't hit buttons or who didn't listen to mechanics. Not as much fun to farm but the fight was just tuned so well pre-nerf that I can't help but having a soft spot for the fight.
Warmaster Blackhorn. Aside from the buggy deck fire I think this was another phenomenal fight. I normally don't like dealing with add waves as part of the fight but they did it so well here. Every add had a well defined purpose in the fight and each person in the raid had a job to do. Soaking the barrages and onslaught I thought was a brilliant mechanic. This forces you to take damage while still letting you decide how much you take. It was an organizational nightmare but I think it was a brilliant mechanic. Optimizing how much of the damage you took was really important. Now with the nerf it doesn't matter because if you're good you can avoid deckfire on the first broadside, but during progression it was great. Again if deck fire wasn't bugged I think this would have been one of the best encounters in the raid. When blackhorn came down the tanks had to pay really close attention to basically everything they were doing. On heroic the two adds on the ground was probably more exciting than almost any other tanking job in the instance and it made me feel amazing when both tanks timed the swaps perfectly. I know it's not a huge deal but it just felt good. Goriona was interesting, especially her consuming shroud. The way people handled it was great, aoe heals only was pretty smart. There were some issues with things like bane of havoc cheesing and some interesting mage tricks soaking onslaughts. Great fight.
Spine of Deathwing. There are some truly great things about this fight and some real problems with this fight. First the good. I really enjoyed tanking this fight towards the end of it. I've never felt more active as a tank than that. I wouldn't want to do it often but damn it was unique and I really got to make a difference to the raid by being a good tank and kiting the adds well. The earlier part of the fight was pretty uninteresting especially when we hammered down the strat. We had issues healing but that was more a problem with us deciding to handle it poorly than any individual healer's performance. I think the fight concept was truly unique and exciting. The problem with the fight is that it was so tightly tuned, some might say overtuned that initially there were many guilds class stacking. Unfortunately not every class has identical dps over a 20s burst period. The fight was great in that it pushed everyone to their limits but the downside is it highlighted some class design issues. Unfortunately legendaries also made a huge difference which leads into a fairly large loot problem that comes up involving dragonwrath, fangs, spine trinkets and DW weapons. All in all this was another great fight with a huge learning curve. Better tuned than H rag (which was a fair bit overtuned imo) and more unique and iconic than H rag.
Madness of Deathwing. To put it simply I was really underwhelmed by this boss. The biggest problem is that it wasn't as difficult or intense as spine. It wasn't nearly as intense as spine. So many guilds got spine down and then felt like madness was the reward for killing spine. I think we took something like 10-15 attempts to get heroic madness down after nearly 10 times that on spine. We didn't actually fight deathwing either. We fought pieces of him that were falling off or pieces of the gold god corruption that were assaulting us. I thought the idea of the aspect buffs and platform order was interesting, especially with the meta achievement stuff that wanted you to start on each one. Ultimately the fight is just a bit of a wash. It's really lame considering it's the last fight in the expansion.
Lastly the loot issues with the last two bosses I'm actually going to save for another day as well. It's a pretty huge topic all on it's own and I think just examining the bosses is plenty for now. All in all DS was a sub-par raid with some really great highlights. I don't think firelands was great either but it had entirely different problems. Blizzard solved their difficulty curve issue for the most part. In FL you hit H rag basically completely unprepared for it. Spine wasn't nearly so big of a jump from warmaster. That said I think both of these past two tiers were a bit underwhelming and I can't wait to see the new exciting raid content in mists. MoP looks like they've basically taken care of everything I had an issue with.
Tanks changed a lot over this expansion and I think for the vast majority of it, it was for the better. Threat became trivial in exchange for focusing on survival and TDR. DKs got huge quality of life improvements. Paladins and warriors got probably the biggest upgrade to gear in that we actually have to pay attention to the stats on it instead of just stacking mastery and ignoring the rest until we stop having anything to gear for. I'll probably talk more about that later.
In review cataclysm felt like a giant test for a lot of things blizzard wanted to do. Smaller raid sizes turned out to be undesirable, content takes longer than they thought they could produce it. People wanted more things to do outside of raid, which there really wasn't any of in cataclysm. We're seeing a lot of these changes come into place and I for one am super excited about how amazing mists is shaping up to be.
That's the last you'll hear from me for a little while. I'm offline for the weekend, ISP issues, and starting sunday it's all about prep for the levelling extravaganza. I might do something like twitter to throw updates about levelling and whatnot but we'll see. I don't have the bandwidth to stream anything unfortunately but I will try and get some sort of update thing going on more to chronicle the adventure than anything else. Also expect more pictures on here come MoP. Catch you guys on the other side.
So the raid tier as a whole was pretty short. 8 Bosses, only 5 of those had trash. The loot distribution was interesting and I've decided the idea of a "grab bag" drop is pretty lame even if you do it right. It's a nightmare for raid comp (ensuring all loot goes to someone) because your entire raid is going to say "I need something from the grab bag." I did like the interaction with VP trinkets and spine o' deathwing. I'll talk about the way spine and madness dropped gear when I get to them.
Morchok/Kohcrom. These guys were pretty cool. I've always wanted a fight where you'd have to split the raid up into two and go function individually. I was hoping for something a bit more seperating but it's a good start to showcase that it's a decent mechanic. Sure it's the first boss and anyone who can get to heroic modes can get heroic morchok down in a few goes, but I think the fight was entertaining. It's simple and straightforward, good for the first boss, and still requires people to be doing the right thing. I was also a fan of the tanks getting something to do (at least while "progressing" on it). Interesting loot drops, hand of morchok really bothered me but I'm going to wait until I get to madness to talk about that one. Good amount of trash, a bit unfortunate that on heroic you had to clear the sides, or at least we did but it was interesting and fit the lore/flavour of the instance.
Zon'ozz. We did some crazy strat for zonozz that didn't matter much to me being a tank but I think the setup of the fight generated a whole lot of opportunity for cheese. I really enjoyed the way heroic black phase functioned, in fact even on normal it was pretty interesting. The stacking dmg taken mechanic was interesting and fun for great numbers but the fight outside of the black phase was mostly uninteresting. Decent fight but felt almost like filler. Lots of hinting at old god influence but it really stopped here and at yor'sahj without counting DW himself. In summary, meh.
Yor'sahj. I really really liked the concept behind this fight. A few critical decisions about the fight design made it wonderful. First, all the abilities that were given to the globules, now referred to as oozes, combo together in some way. Yellow is giant in that every abilitiy except blue gets a benefit. Blue is terrifying in that you have no mana, red wants you to stay close while green wants you to spread out. All these things I find really cool on their own but planning for dealing with groups of them is awesome. The added ability to pick, or the requirement for some burst dmg to get rid of the oozes is a huge addition to the fight. Cooldown usage is hugely important since the spawns are ~1m 40s apart meaning your 2m CDs wont be up for for two phases in a row. The randomness makes it so you can't just plan the whole fight out and have to react. Lastly the fact that you can only kill one before the others go immune is something that could be debateable. It'd be something to help with farming it, which is always good in my opinion, but I can see why it wasn't there and both options are quite valid and an integral part of the fight. Just imagine how different it would be if you were allowed, and in many cases still unable due to dps requirements, to kill more than one. Size of the room was important. All in all, great fight and I wish we could see more of this level of design in encounters.
Since those last two bosses are non-linear meaning you could take 'em out in either order their difficulty was pretty spot on. There was no obvious order and without looking at exact kill numbers I remember many guilds going each way at the same time that we were progressing on it. I know we spent a fair bit of time progressing on each before getting either one. I don't even remember which one we settled on killing first though I think it was zonozz and the yorsahj the following night or something. My one problem here involves weapons again. Specimen slicer is a relatively early drop in the instance, more on it when we reach DW weapons.
Hagara. Another fight I think was really well designed, which the numbers were tuned a bit better and the lightning phase was a bit less buggy. One problem I had with the fight was lightning phase required so much pre-fight setup, not as much after doing it for 8 months but it probably added maybe 15 minutes to our raid every week, possibly more, trying to get everyone in the right spot. It's a touchy subject because you need to have some sort of pre-fight planning going on but hagara felt excessive. I liked the flow of the fight, even focused assault, though I wish there wasn't such an imbalance in tanks for that mechanic. I'm sure it'd be fine now, post 5.0 with all the changes, but before it was so bad that I got sat for our dk tank. That and our dps was a bit on the low side and it was a 1-tank encounter. I'm not opposed to 1 tank encounters but since the numbers are so small it's basically either both your tanks get competitive dps sets, which they can't because raid optimization forces you to send the dps gear at the dps, or you sit half your tanking roster because of a 1 tank fight. We did zonozz with 2 tanks because of the second claw tentacle but we probably didn't need to. Dps wasn't an issue for us there, so we opted for a second tank. I'll probably go on for a long time if I don't save that topic for another day. Summary, not a bad fight. Some bugs made it rough. Ice phase was trivialized by cheesing mechanics that I really hope were just overlooked. A simple ramp up on dmg from inside the bubble would have removed the stack up in the middle and nuke the crystals strat. Fun fight but clearly lacking in some areas.
Ultraxion. The standard "patchwerk" fight. I'm glad to see these every once in a while. Once per tier might not be the best frequency but with more bosses each tier it might not be a bad thing. I enjoyed the tank swap mechanic, made me pay attention. I really liked the way they made the dps pay attention while still trying to max dps. The more I think about it I really don't like the extra action bar buttons. I think instead I would have preferred something like "does x% of your max hp" on fading light to force people to use personal cooldowns. It could have been something like 80-90% so that they had to. Most classes have something to deal with it. Shields would be helpful for it as well. Hour could have been proximity like bloodboil was or like morchok stomp. I just hate the extra action bar thing even though it's a pretty neat solution to something like that. Nothing wrong with this fight, highlighted baddies who couldn't hit buttons or who didn't listen to mechanics. Not as much fun to farm but the fight was just tuned so well pre-nerf that I can't help but having a soft spot for the fight.
Warmaster Blackhorn. Aside from the buggy deck fire I think this was another phenomenal fight. I normally don't like dealing with add waves as part of the fight but they did it so well here. Every add had a well defined purpose in the fight and each person in the raid had a job to do. Soaking the barrages and onslaught I thought was a brilliant mechanic. This forces you to take damage while still letting you decide how much you take. It was an organizational nightmare but I think it was a brilliant mechanic. Optimizing how much of the damage you took was really important. Now with the nerf it doesn't matter because if you're good you can avoid deckfire on the first broadside, but during progression it was great. Again if deck fire wasn't bugged I think this would have been one of the best encounters in the raid. When blackhorn came down the tanks had to pay really close attention to basically everything they were doing. On heroic the two adds on the ground was probably more exciting than almost any other tanking job in the instance and it made me feel amazing when both tanks timed the swaps perfectly. I know it's not a huge deal but it just felt good. Goriona was interesting, especially her consuming shroud. The way people handled it was great, aoe heals only was pretty smart. There were some issues with things like bane of havoc cheesing and some interesting mage tricks soaking onslaughts. Great fight.
Spine of Deathwing. There are some truly great things about this fight and some real problems with this fight. First the good. I really enjoyed tanking this fight towards the end of it. I've never felt more active as a tank than that. I wouldn't want to do it often but damn it was unique and I really got to make a difference to the raid by being a good tank and kiting the adds well. The earlier part of the fight was pretty uninteresting especially when we hammered down the strat. We had issues healing but that was more a problem with us deciding to handle it poorly than any individual healer's performance. I think the fight concept was truly unique and exciting. The problem with the fight is that it was so tightly tuned, some might say overtuned that initially there were many guilds class stacking. Unfortunately not every class has identical dps over a 20s burst period. The fight was great in that it pushed everyone to their limits but the downside is it highlighted some class design issues. Unfortunately legendaries also made a huge difference which leads into a fairly large loot problem that comes up involving dragonwrath, fangs, spine trinkets and DW weapons. All in all this was another great fight with a huge learning curve. Better tuned than H rag (which was a fair bit overtuned imo) and more unique and iconic than H rag.
Madness of Deathwing. To put it simply I was really underwhelmed by this boss. The biggest problem is that it wasn't as difficult or intense as spine. It wasn't nearly as intense as spine. So many guilds got spine down and then felt like madness was the reward for killing spine. I think we took something like 10-15 attempts to get heroic madness down after nearly 10 times that on spine. We didn't actually fight deathwing either. We fought pieces of him that were falling off or pieces of the gold god corruption that were assaulting us. I thought the idea of the aspect buffs and platform order was interesting, especially with the meta achievement stuff that wanted you to start on each one. Ultimately the fight is just a bit of a wash. It's really lame considering it's the last fight in the expansion.
Lastly the loot issues with the last two bosses I'm actually going to save for another day as well. It's a pretty huge topic all on it's own and I think just examining the bosses is plenty for now. All in all DS was a sub-par raid with some really great highlights. I don't think firelands was great either but it had entirely different problems. Blizzard solved their difficulty curve issue for the most part. In FL you hit H rag basically completely unprepared for it. Spine wasn't nearly so big of a jump from warmaster. That said I think both of these past two tiers were a bit underwhelming and I can't wait to see the new exciting raid content in mists. MoP looks like they've basically taken care of everything I had an issue with.
Tanks changed a lot over this expansion and I think for the vast majority of it, it was for the better. Threat became trivial in exchange for focusing on survival and TDR. DKs got huge quality of life improvements. Paladins and warriors got probably the biggest upgrade to gear in that we actually have to pay attention to the stats on it instead of just stacking mastery and ignoring the rest until we stop having anything to gear for. I'll probably talk more about that later.
In review cataclysm felt like a giant test for a lot of things blizzard wanted to do. Smaller raid sizes turned out to be undesirable, content takes longer than they thought they could produce it. People wanted more things to do outside of raid, which there really wasn't any of in cataclysm. We're seeing a lot of these changes come into place and I for one am super excited about how amazing mists is shaping up to be.
That's the last you'll hear from me for a little while. I'm offline for the weekend, ISP issues, and starting sunday it's all about prep for the levelling extravaganza. I might do something like twitter to throw updates about levelling and whatnot but we'll see. I don't have the bandwidth to stream anything unfortunately but I will try and get some sort of update thing going on more to chronicle the adventure than anything else. Also expect more pictures on here come MoP. Catch you guys on the other side.
13 September, 2012
Challenge modes and other things
Challenge modes have been a pretty big topic lately so I thought it might be a good idea to examine them and shed a bit of light on them.
What are challenge modes? They are the same 5m dungeons that you did for levelling and heroic dungeons but with a couple twists. They drop no loot. They are timed. They are higher difficulty than heroic dungeons, some bosses or trash even have new mechanics. Your gear is limited so you cannot out-gear the challenge.
Essentially the intent is to have content that doesn't grow old because it's extremely difficult and you can't out-gear it. It will have leaderboards so you can continue to compete with people by being even more awesome than them. It's also been stated that bronze is going to be hard, gold is going to be crazy.
I think they're awesome and a wicked new way to excite hardcore players. I'm going to be charging them as soon as I've got the gear for it. However, there's some problems with it I'd like to highlight along with some really key components that make it a great new direction for the game.
It's 5m content. This means that group composition is going to be extremely important and can vary a lot. We're likely to see comp comparison intensity similar to arenas. For maxing aoe/single target dps we might see things like a physical only group or a caster only group. We might see people trying to get away with things like 4 dps on trash with a paladin tank doing the minor aoe heals and mega self-heals. Perhaps something similar with a dk. People are going to try to max the effective group's dps in every situation. We're going to see certain specs and combos really shine and some fail miserably. This is both good and bad for several reasons.
1 - We're going to examine class balance and design under a light that it may not meant to be seen under. This is similar to the spine encounter. We saw mages and rogues get taken because of their 20s burst dps potential. Perhaps the aoe pack burst potential will make it so that you are almost forced to take say boomkins for example. Alternatively, and this is something we saw in H Rag they'll have balanced the instance as a whole. That is to say we'll need both great aoe burst, aoe sustain or single target burst/sustain. Who knows.
2 - In raids we see a lot of things like dropping healers for more dps or the other way around. Perhaps in challenge modes we're going to see a necessity of taking a hybrid for certain parts of the run, maybe the only person healing is a hybrid. Imagine some fights we've seen on the ptr, I can't remember the names but the one on the wall with a guy that has almost no unavoidable damage. I can't imagine a benefit to bringing a healer to that specific fight. This means that your healer might be required to have a dps spec/gear or just make sure that you've taken talents that let you do crazy dps. Examples include a lot of monk's abilities, paladin lvl90 talents and many of the druid talents such as heart of the wild.
3 - Connection issues will be a deciding factor sometimes due to the incredibly tight time restriction. Someone lagging? Too bad you'll only get bronze now. Little tricks are going to be giant. Can your tank survive that second trash pack? If yes you better be pulling it or else you're losing valuable time. I can't see a group functioning without a b-rez, or at least without being at a significant disadvantage. Someone lags a half second trying to run out of a fire and you don't have a brez means you're done the run basically.
4 - Lack of gear scaling means you're really looking at how people are playing. It was mentioned though after looking for some time I can't find the source, that you're going to need raid level hit cap for the challenge modes as oppose to the old dungeon hit cap. This means +3 lvls instead of +2 lvls hit cap. You're going to need a base level of gear to get in, but you can't gear up over that limit. Gear will not scale up, it only scales down. This is both good and bad as you really need to push yourself and your groupmates as players, but bad in that if someone is underperforming how do you deal with it, when comp is so tight this can be a problem.
Those are a couple of the things I've thought about considering challenge modes. It might sound like I'm being very critical of the concept but I really do love it. I think this is a phenomenal concept for the game, I'm more just curious about how they're going to expand it with new dungeons that usually come out with the new raid tiers. The rewards I imagine will be something like weapon mogs or the like since there isn't room for a whole new set of challenge gear every tier. That said I'd love to see some cool new rewards in future tiers.
So that's challenge modes, and we've got mop around the corner so there's a thing or two I wanted to address briefly before the last week pre-mop.
We've got the scenario going live next week, with a different version for both alliance and horde. I highly recommend getting into those when you can because my understanding is that they will only be available for a short time. They will award a feat of strength. If you don't already have a horde and alliance character it might be a bit late to level them but if you look around or have some really nice friends I'm sure you can find a way to get someone up to the right level in time to see both sides. I've already got one of each and, if I have the time, might post some of the details here for people who are unable to see both sides. That said you should also read the book, it's pretty good and imo shows why we alliance think there's a horde bias over at blizzard, also shows why I have an aversion to more christie golden novels. Bring back Grubb or perhaps try and snag some of the warhammer writers 'cause those guys know what they're doing.
There's been some sneaky class changes recently that most people wont have picked up on without reading all your class changes closely. They're documented but mostly as small notes, a lot changed and you can't expect everything to make the front page.
For paladins specifically. Divine protection has changed. The base version and the glyphed version have swapped places. 40% magical is now the base version with the 20/20 version being glyphed. -10% physical dealt debuff is now only applied by your aoe. This shouldn't be an issue in 25m raids but 10m and dungeons this might be significant. DPS shamans should keep the debuff up on their own but all tanks only apply it via their aoe now.
There's a couple more but I can't remember them right now. Enjoy the new content, I'll probably get something posted before mists goes live but once it does I'll likely be missing for at least the first week and a half. Also, if you guys see just below the post there's some like/+1/etc things that you can hit. It really helps out and makes me feel better to see you guys hit those.
Edit: I stand corrected on the theramore scenario availablility. You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)
What are challenge modes? They are the same 5m dungeons that you did for levelling and heroic dungeons but with a couple twists. They drop no loot. They are timed. They are higher difficulty than heroic dungeons, some bosses or trash even have new mechanics. Your gear is limited so you cannot out-gear the challenge.
Essentially the intent is to have content that doesn't grow old because it's extremely difficult and you can't out-gear it. It will have leaderboards so you can continue to compete with people by being even more awesome than them. It's also been stated that bronze is going to be hard, gold is going to be crazy.
I think they're awesome and a wicked new way to excite hardcore players. I'm going to be charging them as soon as I've got the gear for it. However, there's some problems with it I'd like to highlight along with some really key components that make it a great new direction for the game.
It's 5m content. This means that group composition is going to be extremely important and can vary a lot. We're likely to see comp comparison intensity similar to arenas. For maxing aoe/single target dps we might see things like a physical only group or a caster only group. We might see people trying to get away with things like 4 dps on trash with a paladin tank doing the minor aoe heals and mega self-heals. Perhaps something similar with a dk. People are going to try to max the effective group's dps in every situation. We're going to see certain specs and combos really shine and some fail miserably. This is both good and bad for several reasons.
1 - We're going to examine class balance and design under a light that it may not meant to be seen under. This is similar to the spine encounter. We saw mages and rogues get taken because of their 20s burst dps potential. Perhaps the aoe pack burst potential will make it so that you are almost forced to take say boomkins for example. Alternatively, and this is something we saw in H Rag they'll have balanced the instance as a whole. That is to say we'll need both great aoe burst, aoe sustain or single target burst/sustain. Who knows.
2 - In raids we see a lot of things like dropping healers for more dps or the other way around. Perhaps in challenge modes we're going to see a necessity of taking a hybrid for certain parts of the run, maybe the only person healing is a hybrid. Imagine some fights we've seen on the ptr, I can't remember the names but the one on the wall with a guy that has almost no unavoidable damage. I can't imagine a benefit to bringing a healer to that specific fight. This means that your healer might be required to have a dps spec/gear or just make sure that you've taken talents that let you do crazy dps. Examples include a lot of monk's abilities, paladin lvl90 talents and many of the druid talents such as heart of the wild.
3 - Connection issues will be a deciding factor sometimes due to the incredibly tight time restriction. Someone lagging? Too bad you'll only get bronze now. Little tricks are going to be giant. Can your tank survive that second trash pack? If yes you better be pulling it or else you're losing valuable time. I can't see a group functioning without a b-rez, or at least without being at a significant disadvantage. Someone lags a half second trying to run out of a fire and you don't have a brez means you're done the run basically.
4 - Lack of gear scaling means you're really looking at how people are playing. It was mentioned though after looking for some time I can't find the source, that you're going to need raid level hit cap for the challenge modes as oppose to the old dungeon hit cap. This means +3 lvls instead of +2 lvls hit cap. You're going to need a base level of gear to get in, but you can't gear up over that limit. Gear will not scale up, it only scales down. This is both good and bad as you really need to push yourself and your groupmates as players, but bad in that if someone is underperforming how do you deal with it, when comp is so tight this can be a problem.
Those are a couple of the things I've thought about considering challenge modes. It might sound like I'm being very critical of the concept but I really do love it. I think this is a phenomenal concept for the game, I'm more just curious about how they're going to expand it with new dungeons that usually come out with the new raid tiers. The rewards I imagine will be something like weapon mogs or the like since there isn't room for a whole new set of challenge gear every tier. That said I'd love to see some cool new rewards in future tiers.
So that's challenge modes, and we've got mop around the corner so there's a thing or two I wanted to address briefly before the last week pre-mop.
We've got the scenario going live next week, with a different version for both alliance and horde. I highly recommend getting into those when you can because my understanding is that they will only be available for a short time. They will award a feat of strength. If you don't already have a horde and alliance character it might be a bit late to level them but if you look around or have some really nice friends I'm sure you can find a way to get someone up to the right level in time to see both sides. I've already got one of each and, if I have the time, might post some of the details here for people who are unable to see both sides. That said you should also read the book, it's pretty good and imo shows why we alliance think there's a horde bias over at blizzard, also shows why I have an aversion to more christie golden novels. Bring back Grubb or perhaps try and snag some of the warhammer writers 'cause those guys know what they're doing.
There's been some sneaky class changes recently that most people wont have picked up on without reading all your class changes closely. They're documented but mostly as small notes, a lot changed and you can't expect everything to make the front page.
For paladins specifically. Divine protection has changed. The base version and the glyphed version have swapped places. 40% magical is now the base version with the 20/20 version being glyphed. -10% physical dealt debuff is now only applied by your aoe. This shouldn't be an issue in 25m raids but 10m and dungeons this might be significant. DPS shamans should keep the debuff up on their own but all tanks only apply it via their aoe now.
There's a couple more but I can't remember them right now. Enjoy the new content, I'll probably get something posted before mists goes live but once it does I'll likely be missing for at least the first week and a half. Also, if you guys see just below the post there's some like/+1/etc things that you can hit. It really helps out and makes me feel better to see you guys hit those.
Edit: I stand corrected on the theramore scenario availablility. You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)
06 September, 2012
Possible loot solutions
With the recent look at some of the gear problems there are several solutions that I'd like to examine. These will range from removing drops entirely to changing the way gear itself is designed. Please keep an open mind as I know some of these are terrible ideas, they still need to be examined.
1 - Turn everything into a point based system. Imagine valour points working for every single piece of gear. It lets you control which items you get first, which items you upgrade fastest. There is absolutely no RNG. This sounds like a great system when you first think about it, however there are some glaring faults that *really* crush this way of designing drops.
First you have to consider that the fun part about seeing what loot a boss drops is gone. I know it's exciting, especially the first time you kill a boss, to see what items it drops. Second there is no longer a restriction of what loot you can get farming, for example, morchok week in and week out. That's an exaggeration but imagine a guild working on spine heroic for a couple months and eventually getting enough tokens for heroic spine level trinkets. The difference between normal and heroic points are also a problem. Sure you could stipulate that each boss has it's own set of tokens but then again you have some crazy problems that come up with distribution and so on.
Second is that your entire raid is going to gear up at the same time, basically. Lets say you get 100 points when you kill a boss, you then notice that the amazing weapons (or shields for tanks or whatever) everyone wants are exactly 2200 points. 22 bosses down the road (give or take a few for raiders who are mia some weeks etc) your entire raid is going to get a gigantic boost in gear, imagine a boss dropping 25 pieces of loot and each one goes to a raider who will greatly benefit from it. This just doesn't work. There are more reasons this doesn't work but from what I've already mentioned you can see why it doesn't.
2 - Tokens (not points). Imagine your tier tokens, but they apply to every piece of gear you have. A ring token, a mail boot token. This makes the disparity between armour types more relevant but stats and comp much less relevant. It retains the nice part about loot "dropping" and the speed at which the raid gears up. Makes it easy for raid leaders to organize raid to make sure that all of the bosses drops go to someone instead of having to ask who needs what.
It's not quite that elegant in that you still don't get the same form of "oooh loot" as other people. It also suffers from being able to be funnelled at certain people in the raid like tanks or healers to the exclusion of all else which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This already happens somewhat but to a much smaller degree. For example, during DS most guilds threw tier tokens at their tanks for the 4p bonuses. This sort of system would make that happen every tier. An added advantage is that you could design more set bonuses (like the old school 8p bonuses) but does that really add things and still let you choose gear?
It's a decent system but leaves a lot to be desired. I should've mentioned earlier but only thought to now, I really like the idea of the gear being available in game for you to see and examine before it drops. The Dungeon Journal does this already but something like a vendor where all your int rings, for example, are beside each other and you can look at them all real nice. This has ups and downs but ultimately I like it.
3 - Change the way you design gear. After guessing at an average raid comp I went back to my guild's website and checked our raiding roster. We're down to 28 right now but at 30 we had the following: 4 strength dps, 6 agi dps, 2 tanks, 9 healers and 9 int dps. From this I took a quick glance at how the classes were distributed among armor types. We had 2 non-cloth int dps. Our agi dps was spread 3/3 among mail/leather. Healers are pretty well distributed. So perhaps some re-arranging of things is in order.
My first thought would be to merge mail and leather. This solves a lot of problems and I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing just yet. After doing that my other thought was to make all healers wear mail. I don't like this second choice at all but it's an option. I would like to emphasize that mail and agi are virtually indistinguishable outside of the way they look and the tag that says "leather" or "mail." Both use agi or int. Both have 1 healer 1 int dps and 4 agi dps specs tied to them. This is before mists and in my opinion make even more sense with the addition of monks.
The down side to this, which is a pretty big one, is that we lose a lot of class flavour. The idea of wearing a leather jerkin and a mail shirt is a very noticeable one. Sure you could still make the art to match the intent of the class and transmog exists for those who would prefer it otherwise. You'd lose some of the armour balancing of the two but you could bake that into a class bonus if you really thought it was important. Examples being that hunters get something called "ruggedness" increases armour from gear by X %.
You could also do something like change spirit to the primary stat of healers. There are enough of them in the raid at a given point such that they almost constitute more than any other dps primary stat, int being the exception. That is why I thought putting them on their own armour set would be nice but that just makes things feel weird. I mean you could let them mog back to what they normally feel like but you'd lose something when all your healers are wearing the same gear. That said, I still think leather and mail should be merged. Would save a lot of problems. Alternatively you could change the available weapons to some classes. Let ferals/guardians use daggers. Lore it by making it part of their claws or something, makes sense to me. I'm a bit curious to see how they handle hunter weapons now that they are going to be even more unique than int on plate. Lastly you'd also have no conflict of classes feeling similar among the two armour types the way mages and warlocks already feel similar.
All that said, I really think this is the least intrusive way of handling this problem I perceive. This solution offers a solid response to the problem while changing the least drastically. The one greatest problem I feel, which I realise is almost a slippery slope fallacy, is that it's a really short hop from here to making everyone wear one type of armor with only a few stats on it like "awesomeness."
4 - Quests. There's a few ways to handle the idea of loot via quests. I use the term quests loosely since you could also treat this as sort of a vendor system.
My thought is have something like a quest for every item that people want. yes it's a lot of quests but you don't need to put a lot into them since the idea would be someone is crafting you the gear and all they need to do is tell you what they need. So something like the "hand of morchok" axe would require you to get 2 hands from morchok or something like that. Of course only morchok is going to drop it but you can tune the way things drop to desired rate of gear gain. You could also have gear require multiple boss kills. You would also have multiple people able to get the same gear with the same drops, or also use the same item to get crafted into multiple items. For example perhaps the same item that is required for a str+haste proc trinket would be used for an int or agi+haste proc trinket. You could really really add some flavour to the game with something like this.
There is the problem of added dev time and the idea that you want multiple items might make it frustrating to see things that span multiple bosses when you haven't killed all of them. They could set it up in various ways to alleviate some of this. Another major problem is that it requires players to check things out before they enter the raid and adds time outside of raid that is basically required if you want to have a shot at loot. I'll guarantee you every raid leader will give one of these items to someone who knows what they're getting out of it than to someone who doesn't. I think similar items like the algalon quest or similar were very interesting and wouldn't be that out of place.
I really like this idea because it really breaks the idea that every raid boss is hoarding these items. It made sense with classical western dragons hoarding loot, which I'm fairly certain is where the idea came from, and brings it more in line with the idea that you can salvage mystical materials from extremely powerful foes. It also makes people a bit more attached to their gear when they know that the giant two handed sword they're swinging was once the incisor of deathwing or that the trinket they're using that gives them amazing haste or crit is really an old god minion's tentacle that's infusing them with strange power. That sort of thing I feel is missing from the game. This may also help remove the whole "you got gear and I didn't" thoughts from LFR. Sure you see them get a bracelet from hagara that will turn into gear but you have no idea if it's something you also wanted that they're getting from it.
I think this idea has a lot of problems the least of which is the extra dev time putting the quests and deciding how things will drop. It's another layer of loot to concern themselves with. It has another problem in that it requires people to look around outside of raid to examine gear. They could still just look up BiS lists if they really wanted and check out the mats for each of them.
The last part I wanted to mention in this is the opportunity for quests. You can put these quests basically anywhere you want. You can have them on faction people that only unlock once you hit some reputation level that's either associated with the raid or anything else for that matter to control how gear flows in. Imagine as a dev you got to control, even later into the expansion, the rate at which people could get into instances. You could toggle rep gains such that as the expansion progressed it was easier to rep up the first raid instances. The amount of control you have over this system is phenomenal.
5 - Alter drop rates of items to match representation. This means that, if you expect x% of the raiding community to play enhancement for example, you'll make those weapons drops in the appropriate %age. There are some really really obvious problems with this system including varying raid comp, lack of addressing RNG since it still will happen and ultimately punish people for playing unpopular specs. Using tanks as an example, I'd never get a shield. Since less than half of a role that is 1/5th of the raid in 10m and 2/25 of the raid in 25m the chances of a shield dropping would have to be astronomically small to be fair for the raid, which would make it pretty unfair for me. Also think about a group that uses 2 shield tanks, for which they would fight to the death for the first shield since they may not see another one.
This is, in my opinion, a heavy handed approach and one that I feel has been used (that or we've gotten horrible RNG with the shield) to a minor degree if at all. I don't like this solution because it acknowledges a problem with loot design but goes for the first solution that might occur to them.
The only benefit I can see is that in the grand scheme of things drops will be consistent. This however doesn't help the guild with 2 shield tanks that hasn't seen the shield for the entire tier.
I want to mention that I'd like to see some acknowledgement of the problem with weapons right now. Specifically with agi weapons. 1 class likes fast agi weapons. 1 class likes slow agi weapons. 1 class likes 2h agi weapons. 1 class likes ranged agi weapons. With monks it appears like that'll change slightly but since I don't know much about brewmaster or windwalker monks I'm going to leave them out for now. I only know they don't like fast agi weapons, or at least I don't think they do.
With the changes to tanking stats str weapons are much more rounded, as long as they stick to hit/expertise/mastery on them. That would be uninteresting but it's still miles better than us tanks have had so far.
If you guys have any other ideas on how to fix the RNG problems with loot or even interesting ways of handling loot generation and distribution please leave a comment. I find this sort of thing extremely interesting and would love to hear the way some of you might approach this problem. I haven't covered all of the ways, just the ones that occured to me that I thought warranted some sort of discussion, or that I at least thought was cool.
Until next time, just keep rollin'
1 - Turn everything into a point based system. Imagine valour points working for every single piece of gear. It lets you control which items you get first, which items you upgrade fastest. There is absolutely no RNG. This sounds like a great system when you first think about it, however there are some glaring faults that *really* crush this way of designing drops.
First you have to consider that the fun part about seeing what loot a boss drops is gone. I know it's exciting, especially the first time you kill a boss, to see what items it drops. Second there is no longer a restriction of what loot you can get farming, for example, morchok week in and week out. That's an exaggeration but imagine a guild working on spine heroic for a couple months and eventually getting enough tokens for heroic spine level trinkets. The difference between normal and heroic points are also a problem. Sure you could stipulate that each boss has it's own set of tokens but then again you have some crazy problems that come up with distribution and so on.
Second is that your entire raid is going to gear up at the same time, basically. Lets say you get 100 points when you kill a boss, you then notice that the amazing weapons (or shields for tanks or whatever) everyone wants are exactly 2200 points. 22 bosses down the road (give or take a few for raiders who are mia some weeks etc) your entire raid is going to get a gigantic boost in gear, imagine a boss dropping 25 pieces of loot and each one goes to a raider who will greatly benefit from it. This just doesn't work. There are more reasons this doesn't work but from what I've already mentioned you can see why it doesn't.
2 - Tokens (not points). Imagine your tier tokens, but they apply to every piece of gear you have. A ring token, a mail boot token. This makes the disparity between armour types more relevant but stats and comp much less relevant. It retains the nice part about loot "dropping" and the speed at which the raid gears up. Makes it easy for raid leaders to organize raid to make sure that all of the bosses drops go to someone instead of having to ask who needs what.
It's not quite that elegant in that you still don't get the same form of "oooh loot" as other people. It also suffers from being able to be funnelled at certain people in the raid like tanks or healers to the exclusion of all else which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This already happens somewhat but to a much smaller degree. For example, during DS most guilds threw tier tokens at their tanks for the 4p bonuses. This sort of system would make that happen every tier. An added advantage is that you could design more set bonuses (like the old school 8p bonuses) but does that really add things and still let you choose gear?
It's a decent system but leaves a lot to be desired. I should've mentioned earlier but only thought to now, I really like the idea of the gear being available in game for you to see and examine before it drops. The Dungeon Journal does this already but something like a vendor where all your int rings, for example, are beside each other and you can look at them all real nice. This has ups and downs but ultimately I like it.
3 - Change the way you design gear. After guessing at an average raid comp I went back to my guild's website and checked our raiding roster. We're down to 28 right now but at 30 we had the following: 4 strength dps, 6 agi dps, 2 tanks, 9 healers and 9 int dps. From this I took a quick glance at how the classes were distributed among armor types. We had 2 non-cloth int dps. Our agi dps was spread 3/3 among mail/leather. Healers are pretty well distributed. So perhaps some re-arranging of things is in order.
My first thought would be to merge mail and leather. This solves a lot of problems and I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing just yet. After doing that my other thought was to make all healers wear mail. I don't like this second choice at all but it's an option. I would like to emphasize that mail and agi are virtually indistinguishable outside of the way they look and the tag that says "leather" or "mail." Both use agi or int. Both have 1 healer 1 int dps and 4 agi dps specs tied to them. This is before mists and in my opinion make even more sense with the addition of monks.
The down side to this, which is a pretty big one, is that we lose a lot of class flavour. The idea of wearing a leather jerkin and a mail shirt is a very noticeable one. Sure you could still make the art to match the intent of the class and transmog exists for those who would prefer it otherwise. You'd lose some of the armour balancing of the two but you could bake that into a class bonus if you really thought it was important. Examples being that hunters get something called "ruggedness" increases armour from gear by X %.
You could also do something like change spirit to the primary stat of healers. There are enough of them in the raid at a given point such that they almost constitute more than any other dps primary stat, int being the exception. That is why I thought putting them on their own armour set would be nice but that just makes things feel weird. I mean you could let them mog back to what they normally feel like but you'd lose something when all your healers are wearing the same gear. That said, I still think leather and mail should be merged. Would save a lot of problems. Alternatively you could change the available weapons to some classes. Let ferals/guardians use daggers. Lore it by making it part of their claws or something, makes sense to me. I'm a bit curious to see how they handle hunter weapons now that they are going to be even more unique than int on plate. Lastly you'd also have no conflict of classes feeling similar among the two armour types the way mages and warlocks already feel similar.
All that said, I really think this is the least intrusive way of handling this problem I perceive. This solution offers a solid response to the problem while changing the least drastically. The one greatest problem I feel, which I realise is almost a slippery slope fallacy, is that it's a really short hop from here to making everyone wear one type of armor with only a few stats on it like "awesomeness."
4 - Quests. There's a few ways to handle the idea of loot via quests. I use the term quests loosely since you could also treat this as sort of a vendor system.
My thought is have something like a quest for every item that people want. yes it's a lot of quests but you don't need to put a lot into them since the idea would be someone is crafting you the gear and all they need to do is tell you what they need. So something like the "hand of morchok" axe would require you to get 2 hands from morchok or something like that. Of course only morchok is going to drop it but you can tune the way things drop to desired rate of gear gain. You could also have gear require multiple boss kills. You would also have multiple people able to get the same gear with the same drops, or also use the same item to get crafted into multiple items. For example perhaps the same item that is required for a str+haste proc trinket would be used for an int or agi+haste proc trinket. You could really really add some flavour to the game with something like this.
There is the problem of added dev time and the idea that you want multiple items might make it frustrating to see things that span multiple bosses when you haven't killed all of them. They could set it up in various ways to alleviate some of this. Another major problem is that it requires players to check things out before they enter the raid and adds time outside of raid that is basically required if you want to have a shot at loot. I'll guarantee you every raid leader will give one of these items to someone who knows what they're getting out of it than to someone who doesn't. I think similar items like the algalon quest or similar were very interesting and wouldn't be that out of place.
I really like this idea because it really breaks the idea that every raid boss is hoarding these items. It made sense with classical western dragons hoarding loot, which I'm fairly certain is where the idea came from, and brings it more in line with the idea that you can salvage mystical materials from extremely powerful foes. It also makes people a bit more attached to their gear when they know that the giant two handed sword they're swinging was once the incisor of deathwing or that the trinket they're using that gives them amazing haste or crit is really an old god minion's tentacle that's infusing them with strange power. That sort of thing I feel is missing from the game. This may also help remove the whole "you got gear and I didn't" thoughts from LFR. Sure you see them get a bracelet from hagara that will turn into gear but you have no idea if it's something you also wanted that they're getting from it.
I think this idea has a lot of problems the least of which is the extra dev time putting the quests and deciding how things will drop. It's another layer of loot to concern themselves with. It has another problem in that it requires people to look around outside of raid to examine gear. They could still just look up BiS lists if they really wanted and check out the mats for each of them.
The last part I wanted to mention in this is the opportunity for quests. You can put these quests basically anywhere you want. You can have them on faction people that only unlock once you hit some reputation level that's either associated with the raid or anything else for that matter to control how gear flows in. Imagine as a dev you got to control, even later into the expansion, the rate at which people could get into instances. You could toggle rep gains such that as the expansion progressed it was easier to rep up the first raid instances. The amount of control you have over this system is phenomenal.
5 - Alter drop rates of items to match representation. This means that, if you expect x% of the raiding community to play enhancement for example, you'll make those weapons drops in the appropriate %age. There are some really really obvious problems with this system including varying raid comp, lack of addressing RNG since it still will happen and ultimately punish people for playing unpopular specs. Using tanks as an example, I'd never get a shield. Since less than half of a role that is 1/5th of the raid in 10m and 2/25 of the raid in 25m the chances of a shield dropping would have to be astronomically small to be fair for the raid, which would make it pretty unfair for me. Also think about a group that uses 2 shield tanks, for which they would fight to the death for the first shield since they may not see another one.
This is, in my opinion, a heavy handed approach and one that I feel has been used (that or we've gotten horrible RNG with the shield) to a minor degree if at all. I don't like this solution because it acknowledges a problem with loot design but goes for the first solution that might occur to them.
The only benefit I can see is that in the grand scheme of things drops will be consistent. This however doesn't help the guild with 2 shield tanks that hasn't seen the shield for the entire tier.
I want to mention that I'd like to see some acknowledgement of the problem with weapons right now. Specifically with agi weapons. 1 class likes fast agi weapons. 1 class likes slow agi weapons. 1 class likes 2h agi weapons. 1 class likes ranged agi weapons. With monks it appears like that'll change slightly but since I don't know much about brewmaster or windwalker monks I'm going to leave them out for now. I only know they don't like fast agi weapons, or at least I don't think they do.
With the changes to tanking stats str weapons are much more rounded, as long as they stick to hit/expertise/mastery on them. That would be uninteresting but it's still miles better than us tanks have had so far.
If you guys have any other ideas on how to fix the RNG problems with loot or even interesting ways of handling loot generation and distribution please leave a comment. I find this sort of thing extremely interesting and would love to hear the way some of you might approach this problem. I haven't covered all of the ways, just the ones that occured to me that I thought warranted some sort of discussion, or that I at least thought was cool.
Until next time, just keep rollin'
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