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So I delayed the weekly slightly to cover the "massive info dump" about Warlords of Draenor that Blizzard advertised for Thursday night at 6 PM Pacific.
Well, the "massive info dump" turned out to be a bare-bones rehash of stuff we already knew or were pretty sure was coming, with an emphasis on PvP. I'll quote a few paragraphs for fair-use purposes, but feel free to open the link to the dev post in another tab and facepalm along.
1. Squish! or Kiss Doing Half A Million Points of Damage on a Crit A Hearty Fare-Thee-Well
Well, we knew it was coming. Whether it was called "stat normalization", "stat squish", or "we have to make these Goddamned ridiculous numbers make sense", there just isn't enough room for our stats, damage and health to keep going up without teaching the WoW player fanbase - the same people we're having trouble teaching that the last two-thirds of the twentieth century happened - about how to use scientific notation.
With a hearty "Good luck with that", Blizzard is going ahead with mashing down all the spikes that used to be needed for every expansion since Wrath of the Lich King. Better late than never, I suppose.
Reassurances from whoever wrote the dev post:
It's important to understand that this isn’t a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won’t reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now.
I'm still going to miss my ridiculous crits, though.
2. Racials, or The Whole Arthas-Damned Reason I Picked a Blood Elf
Racials are going to be evened out as well, with no real specifics about how they intend to accomplish it. Well, they do start by talking about how unbalanced trolls' Berzerking is, and then about how they'll remove outliers, establish a new baseline, and then remove and introduce abilities to meet the new baseline.
But don't worry. I'm sure they won't touch your Berzerking.
Nah, they're totally going to nuke it. At least my Arcane Torrent free silence and interrupt is safe.
3. Blizzard Thinks there's Too Much CC.
From the devs again:
One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP. To address that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:
Removed Silence effects from interrupts. Silence effects still exist, but are never attached to an interrupt. [emphasis mine]
Removed all Disarms.
Reduced the number of Diminishing Returns (DR) categories.
All Roots now share the same DR category.
Exception: Roots on Charge-type abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.
All Stuns now share the same DR category.
All Incapacitate (sometimes called "mesmerize") effects now share the same DR category and have been merged with the Horror DR category.
Removed the ability to make cast-time CC spells instant with a cooldown.
Removed many CC spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.
Pet-cast CC is more limited, and in many cases has been removed.
Cyclone can now be dispelled by immunities and Mass Dispel.
PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast when they break abilities with persistent effects, like Solar Beam.
Long fears are now shorter in PvP due to the added benefit of a fear changing the players position.
Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs in order to further reduce burst damage.
Arthas damn it.
They're also going to remove and consolidate a bunch of abilities and make a bunch more spec-specific but they didn't share any specifics and I've talked too long about nothing anyway. So, on to the raid reports!
[EDIT] Turns out I gave up on this crap before the Twitter discussion with the devs was complete. Here's some links to Wow Insider and MMO Champion with the additional information from the Q&A with the devs.
First up is Tvath with a Team Z report:
Team Z tackled the Iron Juggernaut this week. This is kind of a big metal lobster. Three of our team members are from Maine so we were pretty sure we'd have no issues! We'd been accustomed to thinking of this as a fairly easy fight, but at this difficulty level things do hit harder, so it took us a couple of tries before we succeeded in murderating him. (Her? How does one tell the gender of bomb-dropping, tar-spitting armored crustaceans?) Or, as Bipolarbear would put it, "we one-shot him on the third try."
Next up is the Dark Shamans, a pair of fiendishly difficult bosses who drop fire, slime, poison, tornadoes, and walls of ashen assassins. It's like the developers at Blizzard just threw every crazy thing they could think of into this fight. We tried it a few times with our normal lineup. Then we decided to change things up and do the three-tank strategy, which works pretty well on flex. Bipolarbear swapped to healing and I brought in my paladin tank, Nortia.
I'd like to say this went very well. I'd really like to say that. But it didn't. The switch knocked the team off balance and it clearly wasn't an improvement. So we'll go back to what we were doing -- we'd been making progress and I suspect we'll knock them down next time.
We've been alternating one farm week and one progression week, trying to get everyone as geared as possible for the later fights. It's really tempting to try to zerg onward and get as many bosses as possible, but it's also important that by the time we hit Garrosh, we each have the best possible gear. So it'll be back to farming next week, but we'll continue to discuss and calibrate the balance between what sounds really fun right now and what makes longer-term sense for the team.
One thing I like is the way team members are continuing to hone their gear and play. Sardric is swapping from assassination spec to combat this week. Among other gear drops, this last session brought a new weapon for Nztorg (don't try to say it, you'll just end up spitting -- we call him NZ).
As our team has coalesced and evolved, it's been important to state a few rules:
1. If it stops being fun, we will stop doing it.
2. Singing Sunflower and choo-choo trains are banned in raid.
Yeah, that's it.
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Here's Mageartin's Saturday Night Massacre report:
I've taken over the scheduling of the SNM from Pamena, currently Tony and Tvath and myself are rotating through hosting the SNM, and if anyone else would like to take a turn, we'd be happy to have you.
This past Saturday, we went back to [Glory of the Cataclysm Raider] that we have been working on over two previous SNMs. We started with Throne of the Four Winds as we hadn't visited that raid yet, and quickly dispatched the needed achieves on normal. We then went to Bastion of Twilight and went through on Normal to get some more achieves and finally Blackwing Descent on normal. At the end of Blackwing Descent, I and a bunch of others got Reins of the Drake of the East Wind.
On my next hosted SNM (tentatively scheduled for March 15th), we will clear as many of the three raids on Heroic as we can (ignore the individual achieves) since this seemed to be what a lot of people were missing, and then finally move away from this meta.
Next up in April: Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25 player) and Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 player)
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Finally, here's the Team Kaels and Flex-o-rama report from Ninotchka:
We suspected it was coming for the past month or so, but Ash confirmed it this week. Team Kaels has lost a tank until at least the end of tax season. So we've been gearing up Kaels' death knight to take the other tanking spot, and we've been bringing in a few people to help us out. Damselle came along with us on Tuesday and Wednesday and was a great addition to the team; it's always nice to have another hunter and he's keeping Snuffy on his toes. We downed the farm heroic bosses with a couple of hiccups (cough, thank goodness for pally bubble) but ran into issues with Galakras heroic. It looks like we can't declare that one on farm yet.
I am really enjoying our Tuesday early evening flex runs. The folks in this guild really are great at stepping up to the plate when we need something - I have only to wonder if we have enough healers to find out that suddenly I have 8 healers volunteering to swap toons or specs. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to do a little bit of raiding but doesn't want to deal with the jerks in LFR to sign up for this event, we have it every week. Don't worry if you don't know the fights. It's a tiny taste of raiding, and every week someone gets at least a semi-decent piece of gear.
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Nice long one, although late, for you this week.
For the Horde!