This week:
0:25 - What will stop players from just tagging World Bosses and afk'ing in 5.2?
5:39 - Wouldn't removing hit and expertise just make gearing even more mindless?
10:31 - Why do I have to resort to third-party addons and tools to raid effectively?
16:55 - How can I find a guild as someone with no current raid experience?
25:31 - Will we see new Sha-Touched weapons in patch 5.2?
27:32 - Why hasn't Blizzard fixed the issues allowing level 80 players to solo level 90 bosses?
33:13 - Would grinds be more bearable if there were smaller rewards more often?
37:36 - How do you feel about no valor upgrades in Patch 5.2?
Last edited by Lore; 01-08-2013 at 04:55 PM.
If geared level 80 tanks are unhittable by raid bosses, what keeps a full raid team from picking up two level 80s as their tanks instead of level 90s for most fights? The dps deficit (if there is one?) could certainly be overcome with a shift in raid balance, since much less healing would be required.
What about a full raid of level 80 tanks?
I feel like you touched on something important at the end of the episode that should be brought up more- the valor upgrades and valor gear are really not able to coexist on the same currency, but I think that we need to have them both in the game because they have totally different purposes. The way I understand it, valor gear is used to mitigate the RNG aspect of raiding- if I don't get a drop for 3 weeks or 3 months or whatever, I won't hold my raid back as much, since if I am capping on valor every week I can use that valor to buy the pieces that I am missing. It helps ALOT to know that no matter how cruel the RNG is or whatever, my character is always getting stronger.
The purpose of the valor upgrade system is slightly different IMHO. It allows raiders who get super lucky and blast through content to have a reason to come back every week and still play WoW. They get stronger every week, even though they have their BiS gear, and thus they help the less fortunate through raids and feel good about helping on farm weeks even when there is nothing that could drop for them. The other great thing that the upgrade system allows is for players to start out gearing raid- because there is that slightly higher cap on player power, and because it is tied to the already accepted mechanic of valor capping, its kind of a built in way to nerf raids, which I think is important for letting people see more content.
However- by tying these two systems to the same currency, every time you use valor to mitigate RNG, instead of feeling good about getting to spend valor on gear (the "Look how my hard work got me more power!", or "Take that you RNG no matter how you try you can't keep me down" feeling), it feels BAD to spend valor on gear instead of upgrades, precisely because it is bad. I think this has exacerbated some of the problems with LFR drop rates and such we have seen from this expansion, valor is no longer perceived as a good way to prevent your character from being gimped by bad drops. This also lessens the effect of the upgrade in making raid tiers more accessible- because those guilds that are having trouble clearing normal mode are getting less drops anyway, they are more likely to have to spend valor on gear instead of upgrades, so the upgrade system is not giving them the edge they need to clear content.
TL: DR We need to make different currencies for upgrades and valor gear, because the two systems are trying to accomplish different things and when they fight for space they both are less effective.
you do not really need any addons to raid with - i seriously would be able to on most encounters do without them.. i think its too emphasized as a necessity. outside of making the buffs movable in game there isn't anything else needed and i know it sounds mad ... the more addons i have removed from use the less time Ive worried about having them.. for dps a boss can be set in focus &
raid warnings for fight can entirely be macroed and outside of that i find being in voice chat often times more distracting. if a group would not allow someone to raid without having addons or a mic i find it to be somewhat narrow minded .. ive found very few people able to explain a fight to a person who had not done it yet ..they have for the most part tried to explain way too much and just confuse dps .. kill that guy and then get the adds and go do this .. is usually more than needed ..
that being said .. i still would not want to keep a person who did not use these things who was entirely clueless .. such as did not know how to use assist or to focus off of other people, died because they could not follow direction and so on .. but outside of the raid leader being able to see and use statistics from addons i really do believe blizz has provided a really good ui.. aside for being able to see the important self procs in buffs ..and debuffs
having a mic tho is cheap and vent or mummble is free
its just not really fair to say the most important tools are not there the rest is just nice- but that's not to say i would ever catch my predatory swiftness without using weak auras
& Grinding is perfectly fine when you are in a guild that is progressing in raiding.. and still somewhat competitive about it but the thing is blizzard has casual players and people that are looking to get ranked in some way on some forum bored on the web... That shows how good they are .. and then the casual person who just doesn't care anything about that........ some people really would enjoy being able to play a character that was fully geared they had not worked for and to just start raiding with it .. Grinding is horrible when you don't want to put a months worth of time into a game. It really would be nice if they allowed for actual different realm types of no ranked anything that a person could simply log into .. not gain anything no gold nothing... and pvp at max level or raid .. just for that experience.. think about all of the dead realms that no one really uses or logs into ..it would in some way in some variant be nice not to have to work for anything so hard and it be acceptable for players who didn't care about the ladder system of play or rating system ..its a game where you can spend the entire time playing it and not get anywhere while still having the rules that are applied for players who want competition in the game .. this may seem very much to make it obsolete or will never happen till free to play but the grind is only alright for those who want the glory of having spent so much game time to get what amounts to absolutely nothing. I feel there is absolutely some way in which they could separate characters caught up in this in things such as BGs - you have fully geared players and the ones that are not going head to head .. and for the casual player it seems absurd or not even fun to play this way. Obviously its not losing subs.. but there really needs to be some separation to keep things feeling more even or less like a waste of time.. i grinded up my rep only in another patch to have it bought out .. there really isn't as much fun in the game as the content and having worked for it - but still people shouldn't feel it to be so much work to get to where they want to go with it. can you really say the grind is the only thing that gives the game legs.. i had an epic experience this week catching the time-lost proto drake , but as soon as i got him .. it was gone, the thrill of the hunt. If there is anyone who says that they enjoy doing a daily for the fun of it ..and not splitting someones skull in arena or downing a raid boss, then i think maybe Ive lost complete prospective..
Sha-Touched weapons will probably require an upgrade on the anvil of thunder/lightning.......so now there is a requirement for some dailies.........fixing world PVP.......
World bosses are out in the world, PVP servers would disallow that option to AFK. I would consider it a personal challenge to see how well I could corpse camp 3 or 4 other faction AFK'ers trying to free ride a boss.......
Yes, some cool items being available earlier in the Rep ranks, making the grind easier, would be nice.
Since 5.1, the only valor I've spent on buying an item (as opposed to upgrades) was the Dominance Offensive (see also Operation: Shieldwall) Trinket. I was still rocking a blue in one of my trinket slots, and the opportunity to swap blue for purple, the big ilevel increase, and the near-perfect itemization of the new trinket was such that I couldn't really resist.
Was an 8 ilevel upgrade on some purple gloves a better mathematical spend of my VP? Maybe. But buying the trinket certainly felt better.
Valor Gear is like vendor trash. It is there as a gold sink for those players that do not know any better.........
Originally Posted by screwzloos
Well the one thing that comes to mind what would be the incentive for the tank to do it? Any gear that drops from a current boss is only for lvl 90's. I mean it would be cool to do it once to say "Hey I beat a lvl 90 boss at lvl 80" But then it becomes rather pointless in any sort of progression because you'd never be able to use any rewards until you leveled up. (In which that content would be even more out of date than when you did it at 90 and you'd already probably have better options by then)
I haven't heard of the level 80s soloing level85/90 raid bosses before, but it could be concerning. Right now Lore advertises that it's impossible for them to down 3rd boss MSV or 1st boss HoF, due to the mechanics requiring more than one player. So then they bring 3 or 4 tanks?
As for the reason they're doing it, we're already pretty sure they're not doing it for the gear in the first place. If they could down more bosses that way, they are likely to do it. If you could technically bring 10 level 80 tanks and clear entire raids with that setup, then it starts to become quite worrying! I'm not sure that that's the case, but an easy solution seems to be to just restrict current expansion raid instances to maximum level. Another option would be to have the target's level determine the effectiveness of dodge and parry, rather than the character's level, but I'm not sure if that's cause for too much calculations.
Having level 80 tanks and level 90 DPS/Healers doesn't really work out, I think. Are the level 80s able to hold aggro? Perhaps with the huge stack of vengeance they do. It would be odd if raids worked out like that.
As for valor upgrades, I'm not entirely sold on your suggestion that upgrading is better than buying. Sure, if you're already in raiding gear, then upgrading that raiding gear is better than buying the valor upgrades. However, consider you have a 476 piece, and have the choices between upgrading it to a 484 piece, or replacing it with a 489 piece? Perhaps the upgrade to 484 is cheaper point for point, but you also prevent any future upgrades on that item, while that 489 piece still has the potential to be upgraded to a 497 piece.
I think they do need to improve voice chat, but for things like DBM, I don't think it is that much of a big deal. If you are standing in a fire, or need to interupt ect, DBM will tell you and spam blue letters on your screen, but at the end of the day, if it was playing the game for you, you would not have to press the interupt or move. In actual fact, if you are using DBM, you still have to put the same effort into avoiding this danger. You still have to move on your own accord or interupt. DBM is really good for displaying important information to you a lot easier, it does not make you better at actually dealing with the issue, you still have to move or interupt ect.
Arms DPS main spec // Prot warrior tank off-spec
On the third party add ons I assume that some of the top raiding guilds write their own tools ... does anyone know for sure?
This depends a lot on your role. While it's possible to time a phase transition or line up a 6s cooldown with a big hit, it's much, much easier with DBM timer bars. DPS usually don't have to worry about that sort of thing unless they're raid-leading.
I had the same question actually.
I'm pretty sure that if somebody walked up to a world boss, hit it and went AFK, that the boss would simply kill that player and reset.
Unhittable is not equivalent to "takes zero damage." Even taking a blocked swing from a current boss would do quite a bit of damage to a level 80. The damage would certainly be more than a normally-geared level 90 takes. There are definitely fights that can be cheesed for this to work (obviously), but not every single one.
Last edited by Slyvar; 01-09-2013 at 03:27 PM.
Valor gear exists because the majority of subscribers prefer new shinys over a useless stat upgrade on old shinys.
If you can down the final RF boss whilst not being in the same room as your PC, which is more exciting?
1, A new item with a new name and a new appearance.
2, Slightly bigger numbers on an old rusty item you have been wearing for ages and that you can already kill everything with.
They may sound irrational compared to the motivations of hardcore raiders but if you think about it from their perspective it actually makes perfect sense.
As far as I understand the lvl 80 paladin killing e.g. stoneguard is using a paladin-bug related to the high mastery that you can get at lvl 80; basically the boss attempts to hit the paladin - the paladin avoids it - and then there is sort of a division by zero when computing the vengeance giving insane vengeance stack.
That vengeance stack is then used to create a shield absorbing the boss-damage (the main tank-damage for stone-guards is a physical dot - you cannot dodge that), and of course helps with damage.
The thread on mmo-champion states that it is hot-fixed (by requiring you to be lvl 90).
About upgrades. I think that from the design of game perspective the VP gear and the upgrades are tools to appeal different kind of players, for example someone that can't afford to raid and may or may not pug MSV, the gear from operation shieldwall/dominance offensive could be BiS, for example the ring at 1250 VP could be an upgrade from 463, 476 or 489 and even if you can get 2x489 rings, the one from reputation could have a better itemization for your class or spec.
For my alts I consider this gear very much, is good gear for example to get into LFR by exploding the item level. Another case: I wont raid heroic with these alts, but can pug normals and they help me to get numbers so I'm not the pug that is behind in numbers or just because the item level increase I get picked over other guy who decides to upgrade his 476 for 1500 VP to 484 instead of buying a 1250 VP (if you add boots is a 3000 VP vs 3000 VP).
It seems to me that in the comments and in the answer from Lore, the discussion comes from the narrow perspective of a raider.
Blizzard should put some UI hooks into the game that would allow the built in voice chat to connect to a Mumble/Ventrilo/TeamSpeak server. What I mean is that the raid leader inserts his voice server information into the UI and that gives everyone in the raid a link that they can click which would connect the built in VoIP to the third party server. That would simplify PUGs immensely.
Yes, throughout much of my time in WoW, I've either not been in a raiding guild or have been in one quite a bit behind the curve, so VP or badge gear has been a staple for me. Raiders might say "why do you need raid gear if you don't raid?" but partly it's to give something to work for once you've cleaned out all the drops from 5 mans. (Despite being PvE focused, I tend to grind honour and conquest gear for similar reasons.) And also because I really want to raid and acquiring the best gear possible outside of raiding is one way to get a raiding team consider taking you on (I'd say it is close to a necessary condition). VP gear solves the otherwise catch 22 situation of only being considered for raiding if you have raid quality gear.
I am nervous about the absence of VP gear in 5.2 as ever since badge gear in the Kara period, I've been able to keep my character reasonably well geared thanks to it. Also so much of the current game for me now is about capping my VPs each week, I wondering what I'll be doing with them in 5.2. Spending VPs to upgrade last tier's LFR gear is much less motivating than getting new stuff.
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