Project Lore

Blue Stew is a semi-regular column bringing you a delicious concoction of developer news, thoughts, and opinions straight from the boiling pot that is the official World of Warcraft forums. The highlights of each day include additional commentary by Project Lore staff. How Do You Separate Yourself? As a rogue, I absolutely never feel remorse for any of the actions that I perform. I play the game perfectly and I'm not afraid to Vanish and hide if I sense an impending raid wipe (don't judge me, you'd all do it if you could!) It would be so much easier if healers could just turn their fellow raiders into zombies when they died. so when Neonpeon mentions his "burden," I have absolutely no clue what he's talking about:

"I find I have a bad habit that I need to break. I'm hoping some of you have experience on something that worked. The bad habit is that when I heal I suddenly take on every life in the raid as if I'm the only one responsible for them. When someone dies, no matter what the cause, I feel guilty that I couldn't save them. Even with multiple healers in the raid I take every death as a personal failure. Over the course of a night it really affects me even when half the deaths were impossible for healers to prevent."

Guilt? Personal failure? I don't think I'm familiar with these concepts...

"It doesn't bother me that a virtual character ceases to live for a brief instant. The loss of a digital life is not worth concern. It's that people dying means the raid wipes and more and more time is wasted. The remorse comes from knowing that if you could have kept that person alive, somehow, that you could have downed the boss and moved on to the next. It's the time lost and the head bashing against the same encounter that is the struggle, not a virtual avatar changing states in a digital world."

Ohhhhh... OK. Now you're speaking my language! Who does like waiting around for wipe recovery. I may not understand the healer's plight, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to relieve them of it once in awhile. In all seriousness folks, while I can't say I've ever felt the same way as Neonpeon does, I do recognize who easy it is for us normally self-reliant DPS class players to forget who's keeping us alive during a boss fight, and there are always a few things that we can do to keep them from pulling their hair out. Rogues in particular can use skills like Feint to reduce predictable, incoming AoE damage or Cloak of Shadows to get rid of a harmful debuff before it causes any pain. But every one of us has the ability to be aware of what's going on around us. Be vigilant for void zones, fires, and other common raid hazards during a fight. You might just save your healer's life. It's the least you can do when they're saving yours with a well-timed heal every few seconds. As I haven't had much experience with playing healing classes or specs, is this something that's common amongst you guys and gals? What about the tanks out there? Do you suffer from a constant feeling of remorse, or do you just let it slide off your back and keep trucking along like nothing ever happened? While guilt can be a powerful motivator, it can also be a terrible burden that drags down your performance if you dwell on those feelings too much. Blue Nethaera abides:

"You do need to find ways to get yourself away from blaming yourself too much when someone dies. It happens. Shrug it off and unless you purposefully let them die or made some error in judgment, don't sweat it. If you do make an error, apologize but don't wallow in it. It's easy to get wrapped up in the concern of being excellent at what you're doing as a healer and a point of pride keeping everyone alive. The very best healers are concerned with these things, but the most important thing to remember is to have fun with it and if someone gets on you for what they feel you are doing wrong, ignore it. As long as you know what you are doing for the group and are doing your best, there isn't anything they can say to take that away from you."

Recent In-Game Fixes - September 2009 - 9/22 Even though the release of 3.2.2 caught all the attention today, Bornakk makes us aware that there were a few extra tweaks hotfixed into the game:

• The Faction Champions encounter in the normal 10-player and normal 25-player Trial of the Crusader instances have had a number of spells and abilities altered which should result in less overall damage.
• The Anub'arak encounter has been changed on all difficulties. Anub’arak now attacks faster, the Nerubian Burrowers should hit a little harder, and their Expose Weakness ability now caps at 9 stacks.
• Some season 7 arena weapons will now have a socket.
• Threat of Thassarian will now properly halve the damage of Rune Strike for the off-hand strike.
• Soulstone Resurrection now fades upon entering raid combat if the character who cast it is not present.
• The Idle/Inactive debuff is now cleared upon round switches in Strand of the Ancients.
• The Mistress of Pain will now target more accurately in the 25 man Heroic Jaraxxus encounter.
• The damage of Hunter’s Volley ability has been increased.

Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about the changes to Faction Champions. While it's a slice-o'-pie on 10-man at this point, my guild has still run into a major wall while trying to take them down on 25-man. I agree that they should remain untouched for heroic, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't in favor of at least a tiny nerf to their damage-dealing capabilities. We still haven't figured out how everyone suddenly starts dying after we take out the healers. The other changes to Trial of the Crusader seem less drastic, with Anub'Arak getting a small buff (and he really needed one on normal, he's way, way too easy as it is) and the Mistress of Pain being a little easier to control (as a melee DPS I can't stand how she jumps around all the time). Hunters should be happy with their Volley buff, even if it is only incremental. I'm still QQing about what they did to Fan of Knives (though I can't complain too much, as our single-target damage has gone up with changes to Envenom and Master Poisoner). Missing Brewfest Quests? Euro players like Sakhar have been wondering what's up with the absence of Brewfest quests like "Catch the Wild Wolpertinger!" and "Pink Elekks On Parade." They were completely removed from the holiday last year, Blizzard citing that tweaks needed to be made to them could not be completed in time. However, both made their triumphant return in the 2009 version of the beer-chugging event. Well, they did in the United Stats anyway. Sorry to say, friends across the pond, but for one reason or another, they chose to leave them out on European servers. Vaneras confirms it:

"The Brewfest quests ‘Pink Elekks On Parade’ and ‘Catch the Wild Wolpertinger!’ were removed to ensure that World of Warcraft contains content that complies with regional game rating requirements."

And fellow Blue Wryxian backs him up:

"This is unfortunately not correct. The Pink Elekk and Wolpertinger quests are deliberately not available in Europe. Though we would like to have them available here too, this isn't possible I'm afraid."

With the rest of Brewfest left, presumably, intact (not to mention that the real-life inspiration for the holiday, Oktoberfest, comes from the Old World), I'm left wondering why these seemingly innocuous parts of it were nixed. If I had to venture a guess, it's that, despite the theme of getting pissed, both quests run with the idea that your character can see things "under the influence" that they wouldn't be able to when stone-cold sober. As Vaneras said, this is a "game rating requirements" issue, which probably means that even if the drinking is OK, associating hallucinogenic properties with it is not. Otherwise, you know, all the little kiddies out there would be breaking into their parents' liquor cabinet and going three sheets under in order to find the horned rabbit hiding under the house.

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Now that 3.1 has been out for a while, and the dust is at least starting to settle, I think its time to take a step back and discuss how much impact the patch has really made on the game.

While the introduction of the Ulduar raid was obviously a big deal, I want to take a moment to examine how dual-specs has changed the way that we play. This feature, after all, changes the basic mechanics of how we play and will affect the game well past Ulduar and into future expansions.

At this point, I feel many of us have seen both the advantages and the pitfalls of this is action.

First the good, the increase is raid utility is undeniable. Instead of needing to sub people out for encounters because we need more heals, DPS, tanks or whatever we now just need to ask people to switch specs. I have found this to be particularly useful in 10 mans, where we can balance for 2 or 3 healers depending on the encounter.

Beyond that there are some unexpected advantages. For example the shaman who dual spec’d enhancement/elemental. While initially I thought this was the worst idea ever (great you can be DPS or DPS), it has turned out to be incredibly useful on several occasions. Sometimes having DPS at range vs melee, or having an extra buff can make all the difference in a close encounter.

There have been drawbacks too. As I think we all expected loot has been an issue. There are some players that are legitimately splitting their time between two specs. But does that mean they have a right to accumulate two sets of tier pieces while everyone else is working on their first? I certainly don’t think so, but they can make some convincing arguments. Additionally this added flexibility leaves some of the “bubble” players out of raids. Players that are used to being number 1 on the standby list are getting used less and less, as more people can fill more roles.

Personally I find myself changing specs much less often than I expected. While I can now go ret at anytime, I still find I am a tank 99% of the time, and often forget I can switch if need be. Although, being able to PvP whenever I want is certainly nice.

What do you guys think? Have dual specs been working out they way you imagined? Or are you using them much less or more than you expected?

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The stats on Val'anyr, the new legenary healing mace that is obtainable in Ulduar, were revealed a little while ago, but the special proc that is on the mace has been a bit of a mystery since its tooltip was discovered. Ferraro over at Paladin Schmaladin has been posting over the past few weeks about the mace, and the discussion sparked a couple of developers - Bornakk and Ghostcrawler - to let the community know exactly how the proc works. The basics are these: There is a 10% chance on any heal for the weilder of Val'anyr to gain the blessing from the mace, as long as the heal is not completely overhealing (ie the target is not at full health when you heal them). It is a 15 second effect with a 45 second internal cooldown. For the next 15 seconds, all of your healing spells will create a shield on their target(s) for 15% of the heal. This includes overheal and spells that do no actual healing. The shield will stack with itself, and will max out at 20,000 damage absorbed. Bornakk gave a few examples of how it actually works and Ghostcrawler has answered many of the questions that have come up since then. Check out their posts on the official forums for the complete details. Unfortunately I won't be seeing one of these in my guild for a long time (and we haven't even seen a shard drop). Anyone out there close to collecting the 30 shards needed for it?

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I'd like to talk about the Paladin class, but more specifically about the idea of dual speccing. I started WoW on the day it was released, and up until about six months ago, I was a retribution pally. I stuck to my guns and took all the punishment Blizzard gave us, but when they supposedly fixed us and gave us amazing DPS only to take it away a month later I finally had enough. It was then I decided to read up on tanking. I spent weeks researching the spec and trying out different talent specs to get the most out of my paladin. Currently I've become the Main Tank for my guild on Kargath, and we are kicking Naxx’s butt right now. A few weeks ago I got to a point where I was stuck, though. I've obtained every upgrade I possibly can for my tank spec outside of Naxx. So I asked myself, what do I do now? I'm still running heroics and collecting badges for more gear, and during recent Naxx trips plate healing gear has been dropping left and right. Since nobody else wants it, I've started collecting it all. Now I'm spending those badges from heroics on healing gear. So aside from my tank gear I now have an epic healing set that's got my skills as follows: 2005 Bonus Healing, 26% Crit rating, 388 mana regen and a 17K+ mana pool, all unbuffed. Now that I have the gear, I've changed specs many times to work on my healing skills simply because I find it fun. The problem is I've done it so many times I'm capped at 50g per talent point reset. Personally I find this to be stupid and annoying. I know there are several things in the game that act as money sinks (Haris Pilton's bag for instance) but respeccing? Come 3.1, Blizzard is going to give us "Dual Specs" that will be 1000g and it will even change our glyphs and action bars. Great, but without an ETA on the horizon why don't they just remove the fee to reset for now? Why are players penalized for wanting to try something new? I've even had to pay twice simply because I've put a talent point in the wrong spot once and had to reset (which they addressed finally). What's worse is if I'm specced as a tank and my guild needs a healer, it costs me 100g to go holy and then back to protection. Anyway, I'm curious to see how many more people are out there that play an active role in two specs in their guild and if they are tired of the fees. Do you think that while we wait for the dual spec feature, we should get the option to change for free or are you ok with paying 50g per switch till 3.1 and then paying another 1000g to have the option?

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You ever get to the point on your main WoW toon that the game seems to loose it's luster? Days in AV for honor points or hours Raiding Hyjal for the chance at a drop that 20 other people want? Well, I have a solution for you: Make an alt!

Not some simpleton bank mule or AH stand-in - make a real alt that you will play.

Why you ask? Several reasons:

1. To know another class as well as your main. This helps you understand the dynamics of working in a party or raid better.
2. To have two additional potential money making professions. Gathering professions on an alt can sometimes be key to making huge money in WoW
3. To re-experience the wonder of playing the easy, fun low level content.
4. To challenge yourself to level faster and more efficiently
5. To see the interactions people have with your new class that may be different from your main's class. There's nothing like playing a huge DPS toon then becoming a holy healer. People openly seem to love DPS and tend to forget the healers. Come on people - let's show some love here.

And those are just a few reasons.

So go make an alt.

And play another 85 days... lol

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