Cataclysm Beta - Build 13242

[twinkfist]

i'm digging the holy shockwave thing.

[KysenMurrin]

Look closely when you HotR on live. It does the same animation, they've just increased the radius.

[Palisade]

i'm digging the holy shockwave thing.

That is epic.

[Anubisknight]

Hm, pvp balance affecting pve. They slowly should get the idea that you cannot have balance for both in the same tree.

Well, what if they considered "flagging for PvP" to be like a spec change? Perhaps add another talent spec that becomes active only if you are flagged for PvP. I'm not sure how that will work for PvP realms though. Maybe just activate that talent tree in BGs??

[Proudfoot]

Consecrate hits like a wet noodle now with a large number of mobs in its effect (last pull of VC from Mr. Smite onward and my Consecrate was doing a whole 47 points per tick. Good golly, Blizzard. I am level 80....)

When ARE they going to fix Consecrate for Ret? If it's going to cost a 3rd of my mana bar and be on a long CD it should do some stinking damage. It would still only be viable on AOE pulls with the cost.

[Flex]

Consecrate hits like a wet noodle now with a large number of mobs in its effect (last pull of VC from Mr. Smite onward and my Consecrate was doing a whole 47 points per tick. Good golly, Blizzard. I am level 80....)

When ARE they going to fix Consecrate for Ret? If it's going to cost a 3rd of my mana bar and be on a long CD it should do some stinking damage. It would still only be viable on AOE pulls with the cost.

Consecration is now subject to AoE damage caps.

[PsiVen]

Slight change to health from stamina. 14 health per point of stamina on an unspecced character. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 6541&sid=1

I wouldn't really call that a slight change. If its intended its a major boost to health, and more Vengeance...lol.

If intended, this is a MASSIVE change that fucks up every bit of damage/healing balance that's been done in the Beta thus far. We're one month to release, why would they do this? Worst of all, this destroys all hope of changing our priorities to gear avoidance. You can't devalue stamina by making it more valuable unless you're also making content much easier.

[Feanorion]

Slight change to health from stamina. 14 health per point of stamina on an unspecced character. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 6541&sid=1

I wouldn't really call that a slight change. If its intended its a major boost to health, and more Vengeance...lol.

If intended, this is a MASSIVE change that fucks up every bit of damage/healing balance that's been done in the Beta thus far. We're one month to release, why would they do this? Worst of all, this destroys all hope of changing our priorities to gear avoidance. You can't devalue stamina by making it more valuable unless you're also making content much easier.

Because one month from launch, they still have no clear vision of what they want, or how to achieve it. If they did, there would not be so many fundamental mechanics changes. Not just numbers-tuning, which would be completely understandable--- fundamental mechanics are still in flux.

Ghostcrawler is piloting a rudderless boat adrift on a sea of indecision.

[Markoh]

This doesn't necessarily make avoidance useless, and actually does go along with what they wanted to do. If the idea is to make tanks have enough health that its not wotlk dieing in 5 seconds without heals. Health stacking (even with health having such a high value)will reach a point where getting more doesn't really help that much, if you can survive 10-15 seconds with no heal then stacking more health at that point really doesn't help much.

This supposedly has been there goal since they started releasing details about Cataclysm. Though I do agree that changing it this late in the game will cause havoc with their healing balance, and pretty much throws the last couple weeks of effort out the window.

[Feanorion]

This doesn't necessarily make avoidance useless, and actually does go along with what they wanted to do. If the idea is to make tanks have enough health that its not wotlk dieing in 5 seconds without heals. Health stacking (even with health having such a high value)will reach a point where getting more doesn't really help that much, if you can survive 10-15 seconds with no heal then stacking more health at that point really doesn't help much.

This supposedly has been there goal since they started releasing details about Cataclysm. Though I do agree that changing it this late in the game will cause havoc with their healing balance, and pretty much throws the last couple weeks of effort out the window.

Did I miss a post? I didn't see anything about making avoidance useless in regards to health scaling.

EDIT: "Avoidance is not on my gearing priority" =/= "Avoidance is useless", if that is what you were referring to.

[Flex]

If intended, this is a MASSIVE change that fucks up every bit of damage/healing balance that's been done in the Beta thus far. We're one month to release, why would they do this? Worst of all, this destroys all hope of changing our priorities to gear avoidance. You can't devalue stamina by making it more valuable unless you're also making content much easier.

Wouldn't you just need slightly stronger single target heals, weaker AoE heals (a coming change for Druids and Paladins) and slight boss damage tuning which they had to do anyway due to druid's savage defense changes?

[PsiVen]

The changes may or may not be slight... the point is you have to re-tune everything, and they haven't even tuned it all once yet.

This doesn't necessarily make avoidance useless, and actually does go along with what they wanted to do. If the idea is to make tanks have enough health that its not wotlk dieing in 5 seconds without heals. Health stacking (even with health having such a high value)will reach a point where getting more doesn't really help that much, if you can survive 10-15 seconds with no heal then stacking more health at that point really doesn't help much.

This supposedly has been there goal since they started releasing details about Cataclysm. Though I do agree that changing it this late in the game will cause havoc with their healing balance, and pretty much throws the last couple weeks of effort out the window.

There's a big difference between tank death not being too spiky (see: very well tuned beta heroics) and surviving 10-15 seconds with no healing. If you can get to that point, there are two possibilities:
A) Living for that long is asinine and pointless, and gemming stamina has no purpose.
B) Living for that long is actually necessary due to encounter mechanics, and stacking more stamina gives you more breathing room on these mechanics.

The middle ground is where you have strange mechanics that require the tank to survive for a very long time unhealed, yet somehow don't reward you for extending that. If every fight is weird shit like Loatheb 1.0, sure that might happen. But stamina automatically trumps avoidance in most situations because it has the potential for reliably helping.

[Neptuno]

or they add in bleed mechanics where you continue to lose hp till you are topped off... its been done before though not really in a raid setup since tanks are almost always immediately topped off in the past, but if you have 150k health pools... then this could create healer strain very easily

[Candiru]

As long as the main risk of tank death is healers going OOM then avoidance >> Stamina as Stamina provides only a negligible reduction in healing needed over the course of the fight. It will be interesting if they managed to balance it this way.

Of course, if they DO manage to get healer mana on such tight balance, then tanks taunting off each other and popping CDs / trinkets in a rotation to always have a CD up will be a massive advantage. (Although with vengeance I can see it would hurt your threat generation, so maybe its balanced?)

[RedAces]

hey,

Ghostcrawler is piloting a rudderless boat adrift on a sea of indecision.

I can't decide if your just trolling or what... the whole thinking procress that lead to this change is disclosed to us. We did not sit in their offices while they're talking about this, we don't know what the hell is going on in their heads right now. If the captain is the only one with a compass, sure as hell the mutinying sailor will describe him as

piloting a rudderless boat adrift on a sea of indecision.

I'll bet that this change is either a bug or a decision to fix a lot problems, but causes this other problem which is by far easier to fix. (Altering vengeance was said to be a really easy knob to turn.) They just can redo the 300% threat modifier to RF and call it done - problem solved.

Bye, RedAces.