PST - Episode 91

This week:
0:36 - Will I need to wait until I get a BiS weapon to slot my legendary gem?
8:06 - Do websites like raidbots and wowtrack hurt the WoW community?
16:48 - Why do guilds like Method and Vodka feel the need to faction transfer to stay competitive?
23:07 - How will T14's multiple instance gating work out differently than in T11?
29:37 - Is it fair that Monks will be eligible for boosting through refer-a-friend?
34:07 - Instead of having class-based armor tokens, why not have just one universal armor token?
38:32 - How do you feel about the "Heroic Elite" extra difficulty level on Protectors of the Endless?
43:50 - Why is Blizzard introducing a 3000 point Valor cap in MoP?

Very interesting questions this week :)

Thanks again Lore!

On the topic of RaF monks. My raid leader and another raider are currently leveling up some toons through RaF, just because they heard this would be allowed. Raid Leader is so dead set on the usefulness of monks. Our main tank DK is going to be "the best off tank class ever" monk. His reasoning behind it is that (unless speccing for AMZ) DKs have 0 raid CDs, pallys and warriors each have 1, and monks have 3. And the way they transfer so much damage off every one else makes it absolutely needed for our group. I remember when you had said monks were looking like they would not bring nough new things that they would be mandatory or the one thing that would make one raid group better than a group without a monk. Yes, it's useless to try to change their minds now especially since they already paid for the RaF acct, but I could not think of any way to counter his arguements and I will miss having 2 DKs with us.

you should have someone on skype with you so that everytime you forget something you can ask them, for example when you didnt remember it was steelbreaker to kill last for hardmode iron council. think it would help you out alot.

Warriors tanks have 2 defensive raid CDs (Rallying Cry & Demoralizing Banner), and 2 offensive raid CDs (Skull Banner & Shattering Throw), ignoring Mass Spell Reflect which may or may not be complete junk.

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Originally Posted by jacobwx77

you should have someone on skype with you so that everytime you forget something you can ask them, for example when you didnt remember it was steelbreaker to kill last for hardmode iron council. think it would help you out alot.

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You also got the quest item for the Algalon unlock if you killed Runemaster Molgeim last :)

Typically council fights have a theoretical "best" kill order based on the abilities each boss has; and as Lore said, Blizzard likes making it so killing them in different orders will cause different loot to drop. In my opinion that's a nice idea because it puts incentive for groups to switch up their strategies. Here's hoping Blizzard doesn't go back on the idea like they did with Eredar Twins in Sunwell.

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Originally Posted by Fetzie

You also got the quest item for the Algalon unlock if you killed Runemaster Molgeim last :)

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yeah i know but if i remember correctly you only get the hardmode loot if it's steelbreaker thats killed last.

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Originally Posted by Lore

34:07 - Instead of having class-based armor tokens, why not have just one universal armor token?

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I really think that being hard to manage the loot isn't the reason. I think that don't putting a 10 week clock on raid content is the reason (after the first kill of course). RNG is part of the game. Maybe they could work out balancing with non-tokens gear so you don't get that token for sure, but if you get it, it will get to someone, but in the end some loot must be wasted it is how the game is designed. What I really think is that blizzard could give just a bit more of gear 2.2~2.5 loot peer boss, so less people feel cheated or something similar, not just a rng table as it is right now.

Hey, i just asked Nik from MMO-Champion and found out that when you get the "legendary" gem, and socket it into a weapon, you can't remove it. Its there forever. And by the look of the answer i got from him, you can only get 1 gem. Sorry for reposting this from my first post in the MoP thread :P

I totally agree with question two. Wowprogress and raidbots are both great tools for recruiting. You could compare it to an recruiting version of a very cheap background check. The info you get from those sites alone shouldn't be the determining factor for recruiting, but if I do see something out of the ordinary (such as a huge guild history) that is normally one of the first things I will bring up to our apps and let them explain.

I also think personally that a big thing about recruiting for a guild that isn't focused purely on hardcore raiding is getting the overall feel of the personality of the person applying. I've turned down plenty of apps (some really skilled players) based purely on the feeling that they would not mesh well with our raiders or the mindset of the guild.

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Originally Posted by Joszie

Hey, i just asked Nik from MMO-Champion and found out that when you get the "legendary" gem, and socket it into a weapon, you can't remove it. Its there forever. And by the look of the answer i got from him, you can only get 1 gem. Sorry for reposting this from my first post in the MoP thread :P

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Well, that sucks.

I don't know why you couldn't remove the gem but it destroys the weapon in the process. This would allow you to upgrade your weapon but keep people from swapping it with their specs. If you cannot upgrade your weapon somehow then to me it seems it will be bag clutter until/if you get BiS!

The gems are labelled unique-equip so that leads me to believe it will be possible to acquire more than 1 at some point over the expansion, either for different specs or new weapons, etc. At worst they'll do something like the ashen verdict rings where you could exchange for a new ring with your old one plus an amount of gold. Seems too punitive otherwise. Imagine it's a quest reward and you pick the wrong one :P

http://www.wowdb.com/items/89881-crystallized-terror
http://www.wowdb.com/items/89882-crystallized-horror
http://www.wowdb.com/items/89873-crystallized-dread

I really don't see the point in this Legendary, or rather - this gem being legendary. They had epic gems as a reward for killing Nightbane etc, why didn't they just make this an epic?

I think you and Ed Park need to sit down and discuss the racials in World of Warcraft. The Horde racial abilities are far and away superior to the Alliance racial abilities.

The only Horde racial abilities you fixate on are the Orc and Troll DPS cooldowns. Do you realize that the other Horde racial abilities that you think 'suck' are asymmetric in PvP? Have you ever tried to heal someone in a battleground when every single blood elf around you is chaining AoE silences? You may say, "random battlegrounds don't have coordination", but it is very easy for players over time to *learn* that whenever they hear the audible effect of an arcane torrent, they should do one more GCD of DPS, then pop their arcane torrent = perfect overlap. Players don't even have to target the ability since it is an AoE. The same goes for cow stomps; heck you can mix cow stomps and arcane torrents together. If two healers are near each other (let's say a priest runs over trying to fear melee focusing on another healer), just trinket the fear and unleash the AoE cow stomp to keep those two healers locked down. Alliance do not have a dimension like that to their PvP gameplay because they were not blessed with asymmetric racial abilities.

You play a rogue -- you know how to most effectively lock down a spellcaster using kidney shots, kicks, gouges, blinds, and so forth. You know the value of adding an additional silence into the mix since it buys time until kick and other abilities come off cooldown again = longer control chains.

I'd venture to say that the only Alliance racial you would ever deem unbalanced is shadowmeld because some night elf was hiding when defending a node in Arathi Basin -- that's the only example you can come up with. Dwarven stoneform you wouldn't notice (you'd just assume your DoTs fell off and you would reapply them). Gnome escape artist you wouldn't notice (you'd just assume someone cast hand of freedom on them). Draenei gift of the naaru just looks like a HoT you DPS through. When Blizzard introduced Goblins and Worgen, Worgen get 1% crit = garbage for most classes, but Goblins get 1% haste = godly for many classes (I've heard of a haste plateau; I've never heard of a crit plateau).

Racials don't have to be just boring cosmetic abilities like in SWTOR or Rift, but they ought to be balanced.

-HP

Crit is amazing for Warriors aswell as other classes.
Darkflight?
Nightelfs get a racial that make other classes need a higher hit cap to hit them everytime. When you have a chance to miss agaisnt a Nightelf that is pretty big.
Humans don't need to equip a break immunities trinket. Having an extra trinket slot is huge!
3% Spirit is pretty powerful during mana battles in PvP.
Escape Artist is not 'like' a Hand of Freedom...it is an EXTRA Hand of Freedom.
Being able to remove dieases, bleeds and poisons aswell as getting 10% armor is also pretty decent.

The racials are more balanced than you give them credit for. It isn't going to make any difference to 99.9% of the player base. The 0.1% of the player base that it will give an impact too also know that the impact is just a very minor advantage. I am not saying they are perfect and yes I will agree the Horde get slightly better racials, but it is so slight that the skill level of people of post on sites like this is not high enough to receive an advantage by faction changing for racials.

Regarding the Legendary and LFR, there was a blue post about the drops in LFR being a bug, but no word on why the LFR items have the socket. Personally, I think someone just copypasted the template and moved on, but we'll have to see how it shakes out.

For RaF and monks, I am hoping that they meant that the leveling RaF bonuses work, but the insta-levels will be disabled.

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Originally Posted by Ishau

The racials are more balanced than you give them credit for. It isn't going to make any difference to 99.9% of the player base. The 0.1% of the player base that it will give an impact too also know that the impact is just a very minor advantage. I am not saying they are perfect and yes I will agree the Horde get slightly better racials, but it is so slight that the skill level of people of post on sites like this is not high enough to receive an advantage by faction changing for racials.

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Have you ever run a combat log for a battleground? Check out how often and how many targets are *affected* by horde racials. Those are asymmetric abilities -- they are offensive and they affect multiple targets. They have a low skill cap because they are point blank AoEs or they are DPS cooldowns that you layer with class DPS cooldowns.

Now check out how often and how many targets are *affected* by alliance racials. Stoneform and escape artist are situational -- they are defensive and affect only one target. Furthermore, opposing players are already trained in how to handle them. If a gnome escape artists, just do what you would do if a hand of freedom were cast -- stun him, disorient him, death grip him.

Team PvP is not a one on one duel. Just because an individual gnome was able to extend his gap on you one extra time every 90 seconds does not constitute an actual advantage. He is only one gnome, it can happen only once every 90 seconds. Having any class of tauren cow stomp to stun five melee attackers bearing down on a flag carrier to establish two seconds of gap is a real advantage. There can be multiple tauren and this can happen as many times as there are tauren within a 120 second window.

Night elf targets can passively avoid abilities 2% of the time? I do not think that constitutes an advantage over a 2 minute orc or 3 minute troll DPS racial cooldown that is multiplicative with class cooldowns. Orcs and trolls also have stun reduction and snare reduction that is greater than their associated meta gem.

I disagree that the racial abilities are balanced.

-HP

Of course the 2% Night Elf passive is not going to match up to an active racial. If any race's passive benefit was so good that it effectively countered a cooldown we would have people clamoring the other way. The passives are designed in such a way that we won't really notice them.

I agree that the Alliance does not have the direct, on-demand damage increases like the Horde. Now that HP mentions it, we don't have any AoE effects either. However, the dps racials are still situational. When an Orc uses his cooldowns for a burst it's time to cc, kite or los him.

It is hard to balance something that is difficult to quantify. What is worth more: escaping a shatter combo or dealing higher average dps? How about slapping a HoT on the tank as opposed to using an additional interrupt? Can we balance racials that play differently off 30, and soon to be 33 different classes? Blizzard is trying, and we can be sure of incoming changes with resistances from half the current races being removed. I'm grateful that we have unique and interesting racials.

HP, you said the entire battle does not hinge on the actions of one gnome. I'll position that it doesn't depend on any one player no matter what race he has. A two second gap created by a Tauren can be undone with a single deathgrip, stampeding roar, fear, throwdown, snare, thunderstorm, kidney shot, intercept, mindflay, deepfreeze, concussive shot and who knows what else. Sure, it's possible to stack several Tauren and widen the gap. I'll wager some people do just that several times a day. It makes me wonder about stacking Gift of the Naaru. 80% of the tank's hp coming back over 15 seconds will be a nice addition to regular healing.

TL,DR version:
Racials are not balanced, "fixing" them will not be easy, and Blizzard keeps working on it. For every situation where one racial is useful, there is a way to counter it.