PST - Episode 95

This week:
0:49 - How do you decide how many healers/DPS to bring for progression?
6:31 - If Blizzard wants PvP realms to be for world PvP (and everything that comes with it), why allow people to fish without a pole equipped?
11:04 - Would Blizzard ever implement a MOBA-style battleground?
16:40 - How can Blizzard handle cross-realm gathering spawns?
26:52 - How will the new healing model scale into later tiers?
33:13 - Should Blizzard be punishing those who received the Heroic Firelands mount through the recent glitch?
44:27 - Would it be a good idea to make changes in instances based on what you'd accomplished as a player/
49:02 - Now that pet battles are coming, should non-combat pets be considered an "increase in player power"?

Its possible blizzard might just let rarity and price go through the roof, to the point where crafted gear, gems and potions are just unaffordable.

Even with the fishing change, you still need to equip a pole to attach a lure, so even if you were using the plain fishing pole before, fishing in high level areas will still be mildly dangerous.

On the subject of the Rag mount, if Blizzard had taken away all the mounts gained from normal they would have not only indignant players who lost it, they'd have even more running to defend the mounts, as they do still drop albeit at 1%. Do you really think anyone would have bought that none of the however many who got mounts would have rolled that secret RNG 100 and got it anyway? It's not worth the hassle to take away old content mounts from possible legitimate lucky players.

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Originally Posted by Kcen

Its possible blizzard might just let rarity and price go through the roof, to the point where crafted gear, gems and potions are just unaffordable.

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Possible but not likely, as content is balanced around such things; nothing unites the playerbase more than something that screws everyone over. If Blizzard does what they said and not have any of Pandaria be a CRZ, then current content would be fine, but leveling up a profession from scratch would be a horrific chore. Hmm, maybe that would get a few of the fairweather crafters to rethink that power increase.

Ah, Lore, another great PST show. I hope you never stop doing what you do, because your big 3 shows are one of the few shows on any media platform that I just don't miss (thank goodness I can watch at my own convenience though). Your shows always entertain me, make me think, and make me chuckle. You're blessed with the ability to be so entertaining by just being yourself. I'm so glad that your part of our beloved WoW community. I hope I can always find a common interest so I can continue to enjoy your insights into something I am as passionate about as World of Warcraft!

Oh, and the good person at the center of you always shines through - don't let that ever change either, eh? :D

Lore, watch out for your rabbits.

Hey Lore,

Your next topic might need to be is 25 man raiding going to be seen as the B league of raiding, with paragon having now downsized other top guilds might do the same to compete with them at the same setting.

Pre 4.3 LFR fiasco they were considered the best guild in the world and many still rate them as such and over 90% of the raiding guilds now being 10 man its probably considered the new competitive format.

My understanding is that 25 man is getting an extra loot drop in MoP. With the increased gearing speed in 25 PLUS that extra loot, what are the odds 25s make a comeback? I know my guild is wanting to go 25s now.

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Your next topic might need to be is 25 man raiding going to be seen as the B league of raiding, with paragon having now downsized other top guilds might do the same to compete with them at the same setting.

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A guild like Paragon will certainly thrive in an environment where individual talent and responsibility are much more important. Kudos to them for taking such bold action.

Haste is already a stat which increases healing throughput and mana cost (except for HOTs where it just increases throughput).

As for rarity of spawns after CRZ, they can also go after the problem from the demand side, bringing down the cost of resources by making potions take fewer consumables to make, make skilling up professions through old content take fewer resources, etc..

Haste increases mana used for hots too. More spells cast per second means more mana per second.

[G][Laura]: Hi.
[G][Other Guy]: Hey, did you hear about the rags mount?
[G][Laura]: No, what?
[G][Other Guy]: 100% droprate on normal now!
[G][Laura]: You still have to run all of Firelands though, right?
[G][Other Guy]: Yeah.
[G][Laura]: Yeah, not worth it.
[G][Other Guy]: I know :(

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Originally Posted by lauragnome

[G][Laura]: Hi.
[G][Other Guy]: Hey, did you hear about the rags mount?
[G][Laura]: No, what?
[G][Other Guy]: 100% droprate on normal now!
[G][Laura]: You still have to run all of Firelands though, right?
[G][Other Guy]: Yeah.
[G][Laura]: Yeah, not worth it.
[G][Other Guy]: I know :(

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This makes my brain explode.

Essentially old content.... that you outgear (largely.... Rags isn't really outgeared yet and is still very lethal).... but people won't run it for the shiny?

How f**kin' lazy HAS the WoW population gotten?

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Originally Posted by Leucifer

This makes my brain explode.

Essentially old content.... that you outgear (largely.... Rags isn't really outgeared yet and is still very lethal).... but people won't run it for the shiny?

How f**kin' lazy HAS the WoW population gotten?

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I ran it plenty often enough when it was content...I can't imagine bothering with doing it now that it's not. Especially for something as trivial as a mount.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Leucifer

This makes my brain explode.

Essentially old content.... that you outgear (largely.... Rags isn't really outgeared yet and is still very lethal).... but people won't run it for the shiny?

How f**kin' lazy HAS the WoW population gotten?

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Guys like Ion and I run stuff for the challenge of doing it. To an extent it's a competition, something that's difficult but that not everyone can doing. Getting the achievement or the mount in and of itself is meaningless, but is a symbol of that it was a challenge. When that symbol represents something that is no longer a challenge, it loses relevance for us. We don't care that it's shiny, that's not the point. If it no longer represents a challenge, especially when we did it when it was a challenge and accomplishment, then wtf is the point (for us).

Joke, pookums. Still...

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Guys like Ion and I run stuff for the challenge of doing it. To an extent it's a competition, something that's difficult but that not everyone can doing. Getting the achievement or the mount in and of itself is meaningless, but is a symbol of that it was a challenge.

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This, mostly. Running it when it was current was fun, continuing to run it when it wasn't current because Tarecgosa was too good and two people had it half-finished wasn't fun, and going back to slog through it for the sake of a single probably-a-mistake mount was nowhere near incentive enough to pull us away from our week-long love affair with Guild Wars.

ZA Bear makes a good comparator. I've got a war bear, not because it looks awesome (which it does), but because it represents a thing that was at one point hard to do, which is the reason we were doing it at the time. I've never bothered getting a battle bear, not because it is ugly (which it is), but because it represents you ran new ZA without wiping more than once.

With instanced mining nodes for each player the market will reach its natural equilibrium and should not crash.

Once ore drops below the price point where a player could earn more gold performing something else, they will stop mining and perform that other activity instead. We don't need to artificially restrict the number of nodes - within reason*.

I wouldn't run around Twilight Highlands mining if Elementium Ore only commands 15g per stack. Long before that price point I become a buyer rather than a supplier and perform the JC "ore shuffle" instead. Or I go skinning.

You may note that some people do continue mining at that price point and we know who or rather WHAT they are.

If you are concerned about ore prices going through the floor then you should know that it has little* to do with how many nodes are available to legit players or how many players having mining. Botting is the issue and after 8 years Blizzard still have virtually no control over the level of bot activity in the game.

Botting acts as a deterrent to real miners and you will note that during the temporary lull following a ban wave that ore sky rockets in value because there are so few real miners out there. As those old miners gradually realise that the price has risen they return to the activity and prices stabilise at a "reasonable" price until the next bot plague.


*Huge Caveat - when I talk about the number of spawns available to legit players not having any bearing on whether the market crashes, I am obviously saying that "within reason". Clearly if the earth was plastered in nodes then no one would ever bother buying any ore from the AH. A stack would be worth 1 silver.

It would be quite easy for Blizzard to tune in a reasonable spawn rate in combination with personal instanced nodes such that the market for ore and the supply of miner labour would balance itself around other activities. A "reasonable" spawn rate would take into account the number of nodes that could be farmed per hour. They would take into account the time spent flying between nodes and the amount of ore dropped by a node. Blizzard don't need to be incredibly accurate with setting that rate, they only need a rough ball park figure and the market will do the rest.

The price of ore is determined by supply and demand. The level of "supply" is determined as much by the gold per hour of non-mining activities as it is by the spawn rate of ore or the number of people with the mining profession. The level of demand is also determined by the gold per hour of other activities as much as it is for example the number of people wanting plate armour or gems. If skinning earns 5k per hour, the BS wanting to make plate armour will go skinning and become an ore customer thereby driving up the price of ore until farming it gets closer to skinning levels of gold per hour.

Only irrational bots for whom "time" has little value or opportunity cost will continue mining and cause prices to dramatically diverge from the balance point - as it quite frequently does now.

On the DOTA-style BGs: They could replace the Arathi Basin passive point system with actual peons/peasants that had to bring back the resources to your base. That would be the minion spawns. If you wanted, you could also give players a buff for each enemy player they kill, that increases their damage done to NPCs by X, so that it's not efficient to just kill either players or NPCs.

On spawns: I believe the current system already (slightly) increases the spawn rate depending on how many nodes have recently been gathered, with a minimum of 1 node always up in a node pool. (This was clear at the start of Cata when high pop servers had more herbalists in Uldum than Whiptail spawns, so it was simply more efficient for them to each sit on a spawn point and wait for the inst-repop)
I think the personal spawn system could work economically, because it attaches a fixed rate of resource creation to the amount of characters with such a profession. Right now there is a theoretical maximum as to how much resources a server can generate, which means there can only be an X amount of related crafting professions and if there are more people than the professions allow, you basicly have no positive impact on the economy and most likely, prices will go up because each gatherer and/or crafter will still want the same revenue over time, while they have less resources at their disposal to make money of.
This would also mean that a person that can only ever play during peak hours does not get reduced farming efficiency purely due to their schedule, more closely as to how crafting works. (= only dependant on the server for AH, nothing else)

The in-game changes would be nice, like that guy on Krasus' landing (I can't believe I still remember that name!), but it would have to have a decent internal CD on the chat spawned or you'ld have a clapfest every time a guild zones in from their raiding. I think Blizzard mostly is not that keen on something like this because it gets boring very fast unless you randomize it enough or it doesn't happen every time you go from the bank to the AH and back. I do think that it would be nice if you did one of the heroic versions of a classic instance, that you'ld see the changed/cleared instance if you'ld go in on normal (as long as everyone inside has the heroic achievement). Maybe get in some talking stuff, perhaps even have some lore/legendary chain go through there just so you can go back into this instance and see what exactly you (and your 4 best friends) have accomplished exactly.


And obviously, the Zergling is the Mew of WoW pet battles

What you are saying about phased mining/herbing would be bad for world PVP..
I know that one of the bigest reasons for going and killing someone is that he is taking your nodes..