Blizzard has sent the blue posters out in force the past couple days, with several major posts detailing overhauls to important existing systems. Rage is getting the promised overhaul (though you aren’t getting the promised pony), The major dispels are being more evenly distributed among healers, and Ghostcrawler is admitting defeat and creating a dedicated Death Knight tanking tree (Blood).
The rage changes are pretty straightforward: every auto-attack that deals damage will generate rage based on base weapon speed, with off-hands generating 50% of main hand rage (I suspect that wielding a single 2-hand weapon will yield 150% of wielding a single, 1-hander, though that could get build into the arms tree, instead). Significantly, that means blocked attacks will still provide full rage, though misses, dodges, and parries will not. In addition, crits will generate 200% of the normal rage, and haste will increase rage generation, since the rage normalization formula uses the base weapon speed, not hasted weapon speed. One can assume that this will provide a much more consistent rage generation mechanic for DPS warriors across all tiers of gear, in addition to beefing up the rate of rage gain for protection warriors.
Since attacks which are dodged, parried or miss do not generate any rage, I guarantee you that hit rating will remain one of the highest priority stats to stack, particularly if the current base miss rates apply for dual wielding fury warriors. When Lich King was in beta, and Titan’s Grip applied a massive swing speed debuff, rage generation was so spotty as to make levelling Titan’s Grip nearly impossible (while the DPS gain from taking it at more reasonable gear levels still made it worthwhile). It sounds like this problem may plague fury warriors again. Regardless, I believe this may also increase the weighting of expertise compared to more standard damage stats, as the multipliers on straight DPS stats, say Strength, will decline in value (since it doesn’t increase rage gain) while expertise will remain the same, or gain in value.
Rage gained from damage dealt to the warrior is also being normalized: any attack will provide rage based on the unmitigated damage the attack would deal (regardless of whether it hits) divided by the warrior’s health (and multiplied by some constant). Assuming damage dealt relative to health level remains the same at any level or tier of gear, rage generation from damage taken will also remain the same. Interestingly, it is made very clear that simply the intent to attack is sufficient to give rage to the warrior. As an aside, that implies that, on the tech side (and assuming the blue poster doesn’t happen to be wrong about this), they calculate damage dealt before determining if you actually take the damage. Anyway, this will mean that warrior tanks should have extremely consistent rage generation, without needing bosses to absolutely maul them every hit so the few hits which do get through actually generate enough rage for the warrior to be effective.
While it is the case that warriors will lose rage generation from damage taken as they gear up, it shouldn’t be at quite the rate they do now, particularly if Blizzard follows through with their intended changes to the way damage should be coming in. On top of that, the changes to rage gained from dealing damage should mean that, as warrior tanks gear up, their rage gain from damage dealt will also improve faster than it does currently, which may offset the rage lost by health pool gains.
Perhaps to address my concern above that the normalization of rage gain from damage dealt will make missing inordinately more painful, Blizzard intends to add more instant rage gains (i.e. in addition to Bloodrage). Specifically mentioned was Battle Shout: “Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown”. If enough such tools exist, then warriors may be able to fill any gaps in rage gain, at least well enough to maintain their base damage rotation. However, as gear improves and rage generation inevitably increases (which is nice, because it makes haste succeed at GC’s stated goal of having it let you “do stuff more”), warriors and bears are going to need rage dumps. Traditionally, this has meant Heroic Strike or Maul; that’s not changing in Cataclysm. What is changing is how those abilities work: all “on next strike” abilities are disappearing (I can only think of Heroic Strike, Cleave, Maul, and Runic Strike, anyway). Heroic Strike, Cleave, and Maul are becoming instant attacks and will now consume a base amount of rage, plus extra rage, up to some maximum, which increases the damage dealt. It sounds suspiciously like GC plans to weight this so that the damage per rage spent for one of these rage dumps is highest when you max out the rage used, but never comparable to any of your standard rotation abilities. These are intended to be used when you notice you have excess rage that won’t be expended during your normal rotation.
It’ll be interesting to see how that change gets balanced. As it stands now, only fury warriors have the free GCDs to really take advantage of the rage dumps. If you don’t have a free GCD available for the rage dump, you have to make the choice of replacing one of your standard rotation abilities with the rage dump, and in order for that to work, the rage dump has to deal more damage per rage it replaces than the base ability. So let’s say Mortal strike uses 15 rage, and deals 1000 damage per rage, while heroic strike deals, at 30 rage (the max it consumes), 1200 damage per rage. If you have 30 rage (and are sure you’ll also have enough excess rage to hit mortal strike on your next GCD after hitting heroic strike), you want to use Heroic Strike rather than Mortal Strike. In fact, that would mean you’d want to press Heroic Strike right around the point when you have 45 rage, ensuring you have 15 rage for MS on the next GCD, while maximizing HS damage. I think the system would end up basically ensuring you always use your rage dump for maximum rage. Consider the above case: the only way you could possibly not spend maximum rage on Heroic Strike was if you used it at <30 rage. However, if you do that, on the next GCD you may not have sufficient rage for Mortal Strike, implying a DPS loss (as you’re wasting time waiting on your auto-attack to generate rage). Since you always want to make sure you have rage for an ability on your next GCD, optimally you can’t afford to use Heroic Strike at <30 rage. Optimally, you’ll want to use it whenever the amount of rage you’ll have left over plus rage you’ll gain from auto-attack during the GCD is equal to the cost of the next ability you’ll use. Given that you can’t be sure of how much rage you’ll gain during a GCD (your attack may miss or be dodged, movement may interfere, or lag may cause you to misjudge when your swing will connect, or some such) and you can’t be sure if a proc will change what ability you want to use, I’d hazard a guess that Heroic Strike usage will be best used when your current rage is greater than the max rage used by HS plus the cost of your most expensive ability. If you want to get really exact, it’d be max rage used by HS plus the cost of your next ability or your most expensive proc, whichever is higher. I’m sure Ovale will be able to tell you that one.
The changes to Dispels are equally comprehensive. Blizzard notes there are 5 types of effects that can be dispelled: debuffs on allies (curses, diseases, poisons, and magical effects) and magic buffs on enemies. They decided to balance out the distribution of dispels among healers so that it was much more likely a group would have all of these dispels. Most importantly, they decided (for whatever reason) that dispelling magical effects from allies was important enough to warrant it that ability being given to all healers, so in any group setting, whether it be 5s or 25s, you’ll have a way to dispel magical effects from allies. Every healer then got 2 other dispels from among the remaining four. Due to these changes, some specs are losing existing dispels, and most healers will have to spec into the ability to dispel magical debuffs. Mages can still decurse things, however, so don’t uninstall Decursive yet, peeps.
In addition to providing a more equitable distribution of dispels, Blizzard wants to make dispelling a bit more involved. You will once again be able to cast dispels on people with nothing to dispel (you could happily cast dispels on anyone who didn’t have anything to dispel in Vanilla, but Blizzard was all merciful and pulled that out). Dispel mana costs are set to increase (precipitously, I think). Finally, automatic dispels are being removed: no more Abolish Poison, Abolish Disease, or, the big one, Cleansing Totem.
The goal of these last changes seems to be forcing healers to think a second before mashing a dispel. Since anything they dispel probably deals damage, whether directly or indirectly, the healer needs to weigh the opportunity cost of ditching losing a GCD to dispelling the effect versus spending the GCD on a heal. Currently, debuffs deal so much damage and dispels cost so little that the choice is simple: always dispel. However, as Blizzard moves forward with making mana more of a limiting factor on healing, healers will become more miserly with their mana pools. If the mana cost of a dispel increases to match, say, a fast-cast, low efficiency heal, that’d be sufficient to make healers stop and think about it. In a land where health pools or higher, there’s a good chance that debuffs won’t be quite as devastating, meaning the opportunity cost of casting dispels increases, while the relative gain declines. I suspect dispelling will still often be the right decision, but you’ll have to think about it a bit more.
And finally, the most recent announcement: Ghostcrawler has admitted defeat on the hybrid whose every tree can work for both of their roles. Death Knights will (re)gain their dedicated tanking tree. Remember that, during the beta, frost was the dedicated tanking tree. Eventually, GC moved to try and make every tree viable, which involved reshuffling tanking talents so that each tree had powerful tanking abilities buried so far down the tree that you couldn’t hybrid into two of them, and that has remained in place for the duration of the expansion.
In defending the decision to backtrack on the “tri-tank”, Ghostcrawler points at dual-specs and the lack of tanking toys for DKs versus tanks with more dedicated trees (bears are pointedly not included here, ye tanks of 3 buttons). However, I think the much bigger reason for the change was his point about the new passives trees will be granting: either you pepper tanking stats in every tree, removing opportunities for damage-dealing stats (and screwing the DPS specs), or you try and make DPS stats translate to tanking stats via talents…and since each tree will have different passives, well, that will get messy. I’m guessing the system designers stared at that for months, tried things, iterated, then threw up their hands and said, “fuck it, make a tanking tree, this won’t work”.
As a nifty side benefit, this makes it easier to normalize the damage dealt between the various tanking classes.
In the next few days and weeks we should see previews of class changes. I’ll provide analysis when I can. Enjoy, in the meantime!
Oh, and you may already know it, but Paragon downed the Heroic 25 man Lich King, just before the 10% buff hit. I wrote my blog post wherein I theorycrafted out how far behind in damage raids were from a kill back on February 12th. It looks like Paragon downed him on March 26th, making it damn near a month and a half between clearing every boss up to him in heroic mode, and actually killing him. That was a long time even by my expectations. If Blizzard can maintain those sorts of time-spans on heroic kills in Cataclysm, I think we’ll hear less arguing about the difficulty of raids for the hardcore.
UPDATE: I wasn’t at all clear when I said ‘all “on next strike” abilities are disappearing’. I should have added – and have below – that Heroic Strike, Maul, and Cleave are becoming instants. I am making the assumption this means they’ll trigger a GCD and be unusable during a GCD (Blizz tends to only peel toggles and interrupts off the GCD, so I think I’m safe in that assumption). I’ve updated the post to reflect this.
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World of Discourse 
World of Warcraft: New World Order Surprisingly Like the Old World Order
Posted in Cataclysm, Commentary, Games, World of Warcraft, tagged Cataclysm, Game Balance, Game Design, Ghostcrawler, World of Warcraft, WoW on April 6, 2010| 2 Comments »
Blizzard has sent the blue posters out in force the past couple days, with several major posts detailing overhauls to important existing systems. Rage is getting the promised overhaul (though you aren’t getting the promised pony), The major dispels are being more evenly distributed among healers, and Ghostcrawler is admitting defeat and creating a dedicated Death Knight tanking tree (Blood).
The rage changes are pretty straightforward: every auto-attack that deals damage will generate rage based on base weapon speed, with off-hands generating 50% of main hand rage (I suspect that wielding a single 2-hand weapon will yield 150% of wielding a single, 1-hander, though that could get build into the arms tree, instead). Significantly, that means blocked attacks will still provide full rage, though misses, dodges, and parries will not. In addition, crits will generate 200% of the normal rage, and haste will increase rage generation, since the rage normalization formula uses the base weapon speed, not hasted weapon speed. One can assume that this will provide a much more consistent rage generation mechanic for DPS warriors across all tiers of gear, in addition to beefing up the rate of rage gain for protection warriors.
Since attacks which are dodged, parried or miss do not generate any rage, I guarantee you that hit rating will remain one of the highest priority stats to stack, particularly if the current base miss rates apply for dual wielding fury warriors. When Lich King was in beta, and Titan’s Grip applied a massive swing speed debuff, rage generation was so spotty as to make levelling Titan’s Grip nearly impossible (while the DPS gain from taking it at more reasonable gear levels still made it worthwhile). It sounds like this problem may plague fury warriors again. Regardless, I believe this may also increase the weighting of expertise compared to more standard damage stats, as the multipliers on straight DPS stats, say Strength, will decline in value (since it doesn’t increase rage gain) while expertise will remain the same, or gain in value.
Rage gained from damage dealt to the warrior is also being normalized: any attack will provide rage based on the unmitigated damage the attack would deal (regardless of whether it hits) divided by the warrior’s health (and multiplied by some constant). Assuming damage dealt relative to health level remains the same at any level or tier of gear, rage generation from damage taken will also remain the same. Interestingly, it is made very clear that simply the intent to attack is sufficient to give rage to the warrior. As an aside, that implies that, on the tech side (and assuming the blue poster doesn’t happen to be wrong about this), they calculate damage dealt before determining if you actually take the damage. Anyway, this will mean that warrior tanks should have extremely consistent rage generation, without needing bosses to absolutely maul them every hit so the few hits which do get through actually generate enough rage for the warrior to be effective.
While it is the case that warriors will lose rage generation from damage taken as they gear up, it shouldn’t be at quite the rate they do now, particularly if Blizzard follows through with their intended changes to the way damage should be coming in. On top of that, the changes to rage gained from dealing damage should mean that, as warrior tanks gear up, their rage gain from damage dealt will also improve faster than it does currently, which may offset the rage lost by health pool gains.
Perhaps to address my concern above that the normalization of rage gain from damage dealt will make missing inordinately more painful, Blizzard intends to add more instant rage gains (i.e. in addition to Bloodrage). Specifically mentioned was Battle Shout: “Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown”. If enough such tools exist, then warriors may be able to fill any gaps in rage gain, at least well enough to maintain their base damage rotation. However, as gear improves and rage generation inevitably increases (which is nice, because it makes haste succeed at GC’s stated goal of having it let you “do stuff more”), warriors and bears are going to need rage dumps. Traditionally, this has meant Heroic Strike or Maul; that’s not changing in Cataclysm. What is changing is how those abilities work: all “on next strike” abilities are disappearing (I can only think of Heroic Strike, Cleave, Maul, and Runic Strike, anyway). Heroic Strike, Cleave, and Maul are becoming instant attacks and will now consume a base amount of rage, plus extra rage, up to some maximum, which increases the damage dealt. It sounds suspiciously like GC plans to weight this so that the damage per rage spent for one of these rage dumps is highest when you max out the rage used, but never comparable to any of your standard rotation abilities. These are intended to be used when you notice you have excess rage that won’t be expended during your normal rotation.
It’ll be interesting to see how that change gets balanced. As it stands now, only fury warriors have the free GCDs to really take advantage of the rage dumps. If you don’t have a free GCD available for the rage dump, you have to make the choice of replacing one of your standard rotation abilities with the rage dump, and in order for that to work, the rage dump has to deal more damage per rage it replaces than the base ability. So let’s say Mortal strike uses 15 rage, and deals 1000 damage per rage, while heroic strike deals, at 30 rage (the max it consumes), 1200 damage per rage. If you have 30 rage (and are sure you’ll also have enough excess rage to hit mortal strike on your next GCD after hitting heroic strike), you want to use Heroic Strike rather than Mortal Strike. In fact, that would mean you’d want to press Heroic Strike right around the point when you have 45 rage, ensuring you have 15 rage for MS on the next GCD, while maximizing HS damage. I think the system would end up basically ensuring you always use your rage dump for maximum rage. Consider the above case: the only way you could possibly not spend maximum rage on Heroic Strike was if you used it at <30 rage. However, if you do that, on the next GCD you may not have sufficient rage for Mortal Strike, implying a DPS loss (as you’re wasting time waiting on your auto-attack to generate rage). Since you always want to make sure you have rage for an ability on your next GCD, optimally you can’t afford to use Heroic Strike at <30 rage. Optimally, you’ll want to use it whenever the amount of rage you’ll have left over plus rage you’ll gain from auto-attack during the GCD is equal to the cost of the next ability you’ll use. Given that you can’t be sure of how much rage you’ll gain during a GCD (your attack may miss or be dodged, movement may interfere, or lag may cause you to misjudge when your swing will connect, or some such) and you can’t be sure if a proc will change what ability you want to use, I’d hazard a guess that Heroic Strike usage will be best used when your current rage is greater than the max rage used by HS plus the cost of your most expensive ability. If you want to get really exact, it’d be max rage used by HS plus the cost of your next ability or your most expensive proc, whichever is higher. I’m sure Ovale will be able to tell you that one.
The changes to Dispels are equally comprehensive. Blizzard notes there are 5 types of effects that can be dispelled: debuffs on allies (curses, diseases, poisons, and magical effects) and magic buffs on enemies. They decided to balance out the distribution of dispels among healers so that it was much more likely a group would have all of these dispels. Most importantly, they decided (for whatever reason) that dispelling magical effects from allies was important enough to warrant it that ability being given to all healers, so in any group setting, whether it be 5s or 25s, you’ll have a way to dispel magical effects from allies. Every healer then got 2 other dispels from among the remaining four. Due to these changes, some specs are losing existing dispels, and most healers will have to spec into the ability to dispel magical debuffs. Mages can still decurse things, however, so don’t uninstall Decursive yet, peeps.
In addition to providing a more equitable distribution of dispels, Blizzard wants to make dispelling a bit more involved. You will once again be able to cast dispels on people with nothing to dispel (you could happily cast dispels on anyone who didn’t have anything to dispel in Vanilla, but Blizzard was all merciful and pulled that out). Dispel mana costs are set to increase (precipitously, I think). Finally, automatic dispels are being removed: no more Abolish Poison, Abolish Disease, or, the big one, Cleansing Totem.
The goal of these last changes seems to be forcing healers to think a second before mashing a dispel. Since anything they dispel probably deals damage, whether directly or indirectly, the healer needs to weigh the opportunity cost of ditching losing a GCD to dispelling the effect versus spending the GCD on a heal. Currently, debuffs deal so much damage and dispels cost so little that the choice is simple: always dispel. However, as Blizzard moves forward with making mana more of a limiting factor on healing, healers will become more miserly with their mana pools. If the mana cost of a dispel increases to match, say, a fast-cast, low efficiency heal, that’d be sufficient to make healers stop and think about it. In a land where health pools or higher, there’s a good chance that debuffs won’t be quite as devastating, meaning the opportunity cost of casting dispels increases, while the relative gain declines. I suspect dispelling will still often be the right decision, but you’ll have to think about it a bit more.
And finally, the most recent announcement: Ghostcrawler has admitted defeat on the hybrid whose every tree can work for both of their roles. Death Knights will (re)gain their dedicated tanking tree. Remember that, during the beta, frost was the dedicated tanking tree. Eventually, GC moved to try and make every tree viable, which involved reshuffling tanking talents so that each tree had powerful tanking abilities buried so far down the tree that you couldn’t hybrid into two of them, and that has remained in place for the duration of the expansion.
In defending the decision to backtrack on the “tri-tank”, Ghostcrawler points at dual-specs and the lack of tanking toys for DKs versus tanks with more dedicated trees (bears are pointedly not included here, ye tanks of 3 buttons). However, I think the much bigger reason for the change was his point about the new passives trees will be granting: either you pepper tanking stats in every tree, removing opportunities for damage-dealing stats (and screwing the DPS specs), or you try and make DPS stats translate to tanking stats via talents…and since each tree will have different passives, well, that will get messy. I’m guessing the system designers stared at that for months, tried things, iterated, then threw up their hands and said, “fuck it, make a tanking tree, this won’t work”.
As a nifty side benefit, this makes it easier to normalize the damage dealt between the various tanking classes.
In the next few days and weeks we should see previews of class changes. I’ll provide analysis when I can. Enjoy, in the meantime!
Oh, and you may already know it, but Paragon downed the Heroic 25 man Lich King, just before the 10% buff hit. I wrote my blog post wherein I theorycrafted out how far behind in damage raids were from a kill back on February 12th. It looks like Paragon downed him on March 26th, making it damn near a month and a half between clearing every boss up to him in heroic mode, and actually killing him. That was a long time even by my expectations. If Blizzard can maintain those sorts of time-spans on heroic kills in Cataclysm, I think we’ll hear less arguing about the difficulty of raids for the hardcore.
UPDATE: I wasn’t at all clear when I said ‘all “on next strike” abilities are disappearing’. I should have added – and have below – that Heroic Strike, Maul, and Cleave are becoming instants. I am making the assumption this means they’ll trigger a GCD and be unusable during a GCD (Blizz tends to only peel toggles and interrupts off the GCD, so I think I’m safe in that assumption). I’ve updated the post to reflect this.
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