TankSpot's Interview w/ Ghostcrawler!

[Ciderhelm]

So, with the new Paths of the Titans, is the idea to have it be more obvious like "You want to go this path if you want to be a tank, you want to go this path if you want to be a melee DPS" or is it more ambiguous?

[blizzard]Yeah, we want to keep it more ambiguous. I think the best analogy is something like when you had to make the choice between Aldor and Scryer. There was a lot of debate about which was the best, and some people thought that it was clear cut, and some people didn't. We want it to be more of a theorycrafting debate about "Oh, you want to try this if you're a rogue, you want to try this if you're a DPS Warrior." But we're not trying to gear them necessarily towards [specific roles]. For example, the Path of Eonar is very healing-focused. Maybe there will be a lot more healing stuff in there, but that's not to say that a tank would never pick it up.[/blizzard]


Talking about stats for a second. The mastery stat: With Masteries, you go down the tree, you get more passive bonuses as you go down. That's what's replacing all the stuff like "This gives you more crit. This gives you more damage." What exactly does the Mastery stat do? Does that just bump up one of the Mastery bonuses?

[blizzard]It bumps up one of the bonuses. Each of the 30 trees has has one stat that Mastery will improve, and they're all different, so for example the Assassination tree would improve Poison damage but for the Combat tree it might improve something else.[/blizzard]


What about Haste then? You've already explained the rage, energy, and focus mechanics, but you mentioned that you were exploring some options through talents for Enhancement and Retribution. Any details on that?

[blizzard]The talents aren't in place yet. We know it's a problem we're going to have to solve to make it work for those guys, we just haven't yet because they generally have unlimited mana at any given time, or can get it back quickly, so anything that's going to help with energy regeneration just isn't going to help them.[/blizzard]


Right, so giving a Ret more mana doesn't really help anything.

[blizzard]Exactly.[/blizzard]


Now, with the Stamina change, or not really a Stamina change, just "Less of everything else, more Stamina", is part of the idea to kinda push back to where PVP lasts longer and we don't have bosses that one or two shot tanks? Or is the idea to increase everything's damage to compensate and kinda keep everything where it is now?

[blizzard]We think in Lich King we ended up in a place where health pools are just too small relative to the amount of healing and damage you can do, and we think everything from PVE to PVP would work better if the health pools were a little larger so that it wasn't a single heal bringing someone back up and tank health wasn't constantly going from like 95% to 5%, to 95%, to 5%; and be more like "Okay he's hurt, lets get some heals back on the tank and get him back up there again."[/blizzard]


A while back there were some epic craftable two-handers on the PTR that were tanking-related, and they got taken out because you didn't want to do a tanking two-hander sort of thing. Now in 3.2.2, the new Thunderstrike actually has dodge on it. What's going on there?

[blizzard]We still don't want to start creating two handed tanking items just for the obvious reasons; we're trying so hard to get rid of these very special case loot items, and we don't want to go back and add two handed tanking items there. We'll see how many death knights and druids end up using it. We definitely don’t want to get into the situation where druids get a tanking weapon every other tier or so and feel screwed because we don’t itemize bear sticks every time, and we’ve been very careful not to offer great two-handed DK weapons because we know we’re not going to offer them often. I’m not sure the current stats of Vendorstrike are what we’ll ship with, but we’ll see.[/blizzard]


I talked to you a bunch yesterday about Heroic Strike. Would you mind rehashing that a little bit?

[blizzard]We don't really like on next swing attacks -- all of them -- and we'd love to get rid of all of them in Cataclysm. We're pretty committed to it. We have to solve Heroic Strike and Maul, particularly, and Rune Strike too. We have a couple of ideas of how it might work, but we haven't figured out exactly all the details yet. One is that Heroic Strike could be an instant attack, maybe with a cooldown, maybe not, and could do more damage the more rage you had, and actually cost more rage. So it might cost 3 rage if you don't have much, or 30 rage if you have a lot, and that way you could still use it to bleed it away quickly, but yet it wouldn't be competing for GCD's with Shield Slam or anything like that.[/blizzard]


Any ideas on what you want to do with rage yet?

[blizzard]We definitely think it needs to be normalized a little bit more because of the problems we're having where Warrior DPS is bad with bad gear and then really great with awesome gear. Also, one idea we had on the tanking side is to get a lot less of your rage from being hit. There's basically no normalization on that at all. If you get hit for 100,000, you get a lot of rage. So, trying to shift more of that to the damage you deal, which then also helps the offtank situation for the guy that has to keep high on threat because he's going to be the tank target soon. "I can't get any rage if you don't hit me," that whole problem.[/blizzard]


So, now in Cataclysm, as far as character progression goes there's gear, talents, glyphs, enchants, gems, now there's reforging and ancient glyphs also. Are you worried that there might be a little too much passive building up your character ahead of time, and then once you get into a raid, it's just kind of going through the motions until you're done?

[blizzard]That's a really deep question. There definitely is a lot of building up your character. One of the things we're concerned about with, say, Paths for example, is that people might start being like "Oh you can't come to my raid until you've maxed out all your paths," because that's what players will do. So it's definitely a concern. I don't have a like "Here is the way we're going to stop that from being a problem" solution yet, but I totally understand the issue.[/blizzard]

[Lore]

I would like to make mention that Flak was the one who came up with the Vendorstrike question.

This is entirely because he won't stop bugging me about it.

[Flak]

Wooooooo

[Kazeyonoma]

nice nice.

[Nez]

I'm really interested to see what they come up with at release. Lots of interesting concepts.

[Warwench]

some good info, thanks for that Lore.

certainly seems that they are still at a higher concept type level with a lot of things right now and details are still TBD, which explains some of the way they answered things at Blizzcon and how they answer things on the forums. Still seems a lot of working design sessions and prototyping on their side to nail things down. which is not a bad thing, gives them lots of latitude to tweak things as it shakes out.

[Horacio]

The last question and answer is interesting and illustrates some of the issues Dev's deal with in building the game.

There is how they envision the game being played and how the players do it, of course, but there are alot of bad things players do that they do not want to encourage and facilitate but players will do anyway.

LF1M need tank, must have 35K hp. LF1DPS for Raid X, must be all epix. I don't think the Path of the Titans will reach such levels as its a little more subtle but it could....I've seen LFG spam demanding achievement links to be allowed into the raid.

[Ion]

I've seen LFG spam demanding achievement links to be allowed into the raid

That's every single pug raid on Blackrock.

Of course decent players know having the achievement is almost worthless...we carried a 1200 dps mage through both 10 and 25 man ToC last night...he either died instantly (on the faction champions) or just was bad (on every other fight)...he was easily out DPS'd by the tanks (warrior and paladin). But hey...he's got the achievement for 4/5 ToC 10 and 25 now...so he'll be able to pug the instance and get carried more because we couldn't bother to replace him.

[Satorri]

Good pick of questions for what was clearly a small window for answers. Well done. =)

[Insahnity]

We definitely don’t want to get into the situation where druids get a tanking weapon every other tier or so and feel screwed because we don’t itemize bear sticks every time, and we’ve been very careful not to offer great two-handed DK weapons because we know we’re not going to offer them often.

Why? Either give us a bear stick every time (or really, a bear/DK polearm/2h mace), or the more likely scenario, eliminate tank weapons altogether (including 1h tanking weapons). Personally, I think they are going to continue with "tanking weapons" of any kind, then making one great tanking stick and one great tanking 1h weapon is a good idea, it gives something for people to work towards. If they don't want it so clearcut, make a 2h mace and a polearm, both with similar tankish stats but are slightly different enough that people can choose between the two for different situations.

It also disturbs me that they think they have to "not offer great two-handed DK weapons because we're not going to offer them often". I mean, unless you are talking about legendary weapons (hunters had their day in Sunwell, etc.), this statement is just too easy to misconstrue as "we're gonna screw over DKs preferentially for some inscrutinable reason". Seriously, the statement should be "not offer great 2h weapons of any kind because we won't do it often" and get all the DPS plate wearers and hunters pissed equally.

I’m not sure the current stats of Vendorstrike are what we’ll ship with, but we’ll see.

That's really bad, to still call it Vendorstrike instead of Shadowstrike. They acknowledge it was underpowered, fix it already! Perhaps force of habit?

[Velhym]

Pretty sure calling it "Vendorstrike" is more tradition than anything else.

[Saiph]

Would anyone else not be surprised if they drop tanking weapons all together? DKs already don't use them (for the most part) and they made the changes for Druids to use DPS weapons. With the removal of defense, I wouldn't be surprised if they removed dodge and parry from weapons as well in the future.

[Krenian]

Tanking weapons will start looking Str/Stam, Hit and Expertise >.>;

[Insahnity]

Tanking weapons will essentially be fast and stam heavy. DPS weapons will be slow and str heavy.

The only wrinkle will be druids, as it sounds like they will get 2AP per agi instead of current 2AP per str 1 AP per agi (unless they can doubledip and get both!!). From an itemization standpoint, it's all fine and dandy to have DKs and bears share a tanking stick, but DKs use Str and Druids will use Agi more.

Getting back to my earlier post about having 2 weapons for DKs and Bears. I can see one having str and the other having agi, with Str weapon clearly being for DKs and the other being for Bears. If a DK gets a bear stick, they can reforge the Agi to Str, and vice versa for Bears who get DK sticks. Both would obviously have identical (stam heavy) stats.

[Kazeyonoma]

man, i really regret not being more active during the benefit dinner. to think all i talked to GC about was to call him out for being bad and to say he needs to hire Satrina asap.

I'm such a tool haha.

[orcstar]

..I've seen LFG spam demanding achievement links to be allowed into the raid.

You see that as a bad thing but it doesn't have to be. On our server groups often ask for achievements but merely to see if you have done it or not. And the epic achievement doesn't have to be full either. If you make a PuG and take only people who haven't done it before you'll be in for a rough night. If you as a leader can make sure that at least quite some people have done it before the chances for success increase dramatically.

I've often done PuGs where I did whisper my not completed achievement and was still accepted.

[Lore]

man, i really regret not being more active during the benefit dinner. to think all i talked to GC about was to call him out for being bad and to say he needs to hire Satrina asap.

I'm such a tool haha.

Ghostcrawler is one of the most approachable people I've ever met. Maybe it's because I've been reading everything he's ever said on the forums for a couple years now but after only talking to him for a couple minutes I felt like we were best friends.

[Darksend]

Tanking weapons will essentially be fast and stam heavy. DPS weapons will be slow and str heavy.

The only wrinkle will be druids, as it sounds like they will get 2AP per agi instead of current 2AP per str 1 AP per agi (unless they can doubledip and get both!!). From an itemization standpoint, it's all fine and dandy to have DKs and bears share a tanking stick, but DKs use Str and Druids will use Agi more.

Getting back to my earlier post about having 2 weapons for DKs and Bears. I can see one having str and the other having agi, with Str weapon clearly being for DKs and the other being for Bears. If a DK gets a bear stick, they can reforge the Agi to Str, and vice versa for Bears who get DK sticks. Both would obviously have identical (stam heavy) stats.

bears get 2 ap from 1 str and 0 from agi. that said however agi is better for both dk tanks and druid tanks as it gives avoidance and armor.

[Lore]

Why? Either give us a bear stick every time (or really, a bear/DK polearm/2h mace), or the more likely scenario, eliminate tank weapons altogether (including 1h tanking weapons). Personally, I think they are going to continue with "tanking weapons" of any kind, then making one great tanking stick and one great tanking 1h weapon is a good idea, it gives something for people to work towards. If they don't want it so clearcut, make a 2h mace and a polearm, both with similar tankish stats but are slightly different enough that people can choose between the two for different situations.

It also disturbs me that they think they have to "not offer great two-handed DK weapons because we're not going to offer them often". I mean, unless you are talking about legendary weapons (hunters had their day in Sunwell, etc.), this statement is just too easy to misconstrue as "we're gonna screw over DKs preferentially for some inscrutinable reason". Seriously, the statement should be "not offer great 2h weapons of any kind because we won't do it often" and get all the DPS plate wearers and hunters pissed equally.

I think the point was more to say, "It might be okay to have Thunderstrike be tanky since Shadowstrike is DPS and you get both, but we don't want it to mean we have to start offering twohanded tanking weapons or that Thunderstrike is the best weapon for Bears and DK tanks this expansion". It's definitely not "some inscrutinable reason" -- there are very good reasons that the old craftables never made it to live, and staves got shared between bears and hunters.

That's really bad, to still call it Vendorstrike instead of Shadowstrike. They acknowledge it was underpowered, fix it already! Perhaps force of habit?

I don't think fixing Vendorstrike's stats is exactly a priority at this point And he called it Vendorstrike to be funny. Blizzard's always been happy to poke fun at themselves when they do something silly, it's part of what makes them such a great company.

[Kazeyonoma]

Ghostcrawler is one of the most approachable people I've ever met. Maybe it's because I've been reading everything he's ever said on the forums for a couple years now but after only talking to him for a couple minutes I felt like we were best friends.

I know, when i asked who was ghostcrawler and they all pointed to him, i was shocked to see he wasn't a giant like Chris Metzen. He simply said, hey wassup, and I said, wow you're ghostcrawler! and he said and you are? and I said, I'm from tankspot and he immediately said AHH, cool awesome! and some other fanboys around him were like ZOMG TANKSPOT? WHO ARE YOU? and I said, not lore, not satrina, not ciderhelm, and not veneretio, so I doubt you know me and they all just bowed there heads in disappointment haha.

I was 2 feet from Mike Morhaime and 3 feet from Chris Metzen at the event and I was too chicken to talk to any of them. It wasn't until Matt Samia's WIFE saw me looking at him, did she tap on her husbands shoulder and gesture in my direction did Matt come to my table and talk to me and Angela, once that broke the ice i went to talk to everyone I could but by then I didn't see Chris or Mike anywhere, and didn't find GC until we had decided we were leaving.

Was funny talking to Matt and hearing how when he first started at Blizz Chris had hair as long as Samwise, and during his initial tour, he saw 2 guys playing Scooter Joust in the hallways (2 guys get on scooters, pad the entire front end of the scooter and their bodies with sofa cushions and just plow into each other at full speed). Man, I want to work at Blizz now =(