wow Blue Posts: Legion Feedback, RPPM Trinkets and Pet Battles

[Valks 2,375]

There has been a hive of activity from the blues on the official forums over the past few days, with posts ranging from responses to Legion feedback and community contributions to trinket issues to changes happening in the pet battling world.

The majority of the posts are coming out from Celestalon, one of the designers on WoW. The first post put out by him was in response to a thread concerning feedback on the Guardian Druid. It seems that players are currently unhappy with the downtime that the bear tanks will face during AoE due to the cooldown placed on many of their abilities, most importantly Thrash. He has continued the discussion with many users on his Twitter page as well, hoping to find some further feedback on the issues.
 

Celestalon on Guardian Druid AoE

+ Show- Hide

 
We'll fix the extension cheese on Frenzied Regen, don't worry. For better testing, just don't use that.
 
On the topic of Bear AoE, we'd like to hear more fair discussion about it. There's obviously a significant amount of transition shock, going from 100% spammable AoE to just 6sec Thrash and Berserk.
 
How much of the concern is that shock, and how much is actual ineffectiveness in gameplay? Thrash seems to certainly be enough to hold onto mobs once you've hit them with it, so the only weakness would be in mobs that stream in more often than its cooldown. How often does that actually happen, and when do your other single-target abilities (including Moonfire which is ranged) not suffice?
 
Tanks have different strengths and weaknesses, and this is certainly a weakness of Bears. But is it weak enough to make you unable to perform your role in a dungeon? Or unable to be brought to raid? (Since there are 2 tanks in raids, things tend to work out fine as long as each tank can do at least 1 of the jobs on each fight..)
 
(source)

Our next post from Celestalon is in response to the general feeling of discontent towards the Marksmanship Hunters at the moment. Many users feel that the specialisation is currently incomplete and needs to be reworked. It looks like the developers are completely aware of the issues and already have some fixes planned for the next build release.
 

Celestalon on Marksmanship Hunters

+ Show- Hide

Hey Marksmanship Hunters. You've given tons of constructive feedback, which we appreciate, and are using to continue iterating on things. Please keep it coming, and know that we are listening.

 
The next build will include several significant changes based on testing, and your valuable feedback. This includes highlights such as Multi-Shot becoming a Focus-generator for Marksmanship, and applying Hunter's Mark to either all or none of its targets (instead of randomly rolling against each target individually), Marked Shot hitting all marked targets, a much longer Vulnerable duration, and a few talent revisions.
 
We look forward to you all getting to try out that build, and hearing your feedback based on it! Thanks!
 
(source)

It looks like the Fury Warriors are also going to be getting some pretty major changes in the next build as well! The next post is in response to the current feedback given and the feeling of a "clunky" spec being voiced by many Warriors. One of the largest issues is the major damage dealer, Rampage, requiring the incredibly-RNG based enrage window. The changes planned seek to remove some of the unpredictability and instead bring a more planned approach to Fury Warriors.

Celestalon on Fury Warriors

+ Show- Hide

Thanks to all of those contributing useful, constructive feedback.

As we've been saying lately, this is an alpha. And an alpha is the perfect time to experiment with a variety of potential designs, and get feedback on them. So when we make changes and you dislike them, that's not a failure, that's an opportunity for successful use of the testing process. Share your feedback, and do it in a constructive way. We're listening. (And please share your feedback when you do like things as well!)

We're iterated many times on Fury so far this expansion, based on testing and feedback, and will continue to do so. Capturing the essence of a raging berserker, with fantasy-fulfilling, engaging, and enjoyable combat is a very delicate process.

The next build will include a multitude of further revisions to Fury, including things like Rampage triggering (instead of requiring) Enrage, and Furious Slash being free. We look forward to more constructive feedback once you've had a chance to try that build.

Thanks!

(source)

The next blue post actually involves a rather large community post from a user over on Altered Time, a Mage-specific theorycrafting site. The post is an exceptionally detailed look at RPPM trinkets over the past few expansions and the various problems surrounding them. For those of you that don't know, RPPM stands for Real-Procs-per-Minute, also known as the rate of a random trinket triggering over the course of a minute.

Without the proper knowledge of the subject, the post can be very difficult to understand, but it essentially details the problems with trinkets currently. Celestalon has since noted that this issue has been discussed and noted as not working as intended, but we won't see a fix to it until patch 7.0.

Celestalon on RPPM Trinkets

+ Show- Hide

Aye, thanks to you and a few other community members for helping identify that bug. Indeed, we're going to wait until 7.0 to fix it.

But we're going to go a step further, as well. Warning, the following is super techy. You do not need to understand it, it's just for the theorycrafters.

Conceptually, the intended difference between random chance procs and On-Use effects should be that the chance ones are unreliable, whereas the On-Use ones are active when you want them to. This extra proc chance on the pull (which you identified is actually stronger than intended) goes against that rather significantly, ensuring that the random chance ones are active when you most want them to, on the pull.

As such, we're going to change the functionality of RPPM procs in Legion. The TimeSinceLastProcSuccess and TimeSinceLastProcAttempt will both be set to 0 on the start of boss encounters, instead of the 120 and 10 respectively that it currently is. This will significantly affect the overall DPS value of these trinkets, and we'll adjust tuning on all trinkets to account for this change.

(source)

Our last blue post of the day is coming from Aerythlea, which concerns the changes to some of the most popular battle pets on live servers. These changes are currently planned on the Legion Alpha, but it looks like these might seriously impact the value of certain pets.

Aerythlea on Pet Battle Changes

+ Show- Hide

We’re getting close to deploying some changes to pet battles that we’ll test in the Legion Alpha. We wanted to outline some of them here for you, so that you have a thread in which you can talk about this with us. As always, these are changes we’re testing, subject to further change, not final, etc.
 
Undead racial

• During its invulnerability round, the active Undead pet will now do -25% damage.

Developer note: The Undead racial ability has been one of the most powerful, and this change should help bring it in line with the others.
 
Frog Kiss + Sleeping Gas

• Now has a 1-round cooldown.

Dev note: The ability to chain stun opponents (until resilience kicks in) simply feels bad. Rather than a blanket change to resilience, we’re trying a surgical change to one of the more aggravating aspects.
 
Thunderbolt, Avalanche, Grave Destruction, Carpnado, Arcane Storm, and Psionic Storm

• Base Damage reduced by approximately 15%

Thunderbolt

• Will now have a 5-Round cooldown, to match the other abilities with similar damage and effect.

Cleave

• Added 1-round cooldown

Dev note: AoE abilities are very powerful in the current battle pet metagame, especially “meteor”-type abilities, which are quite effective against both groups of enemies and single targets. This should bring them closer to their intended power level.
 
Graves

• Clobber and Bonestorm slots swapped

Dev note: Graves has a bit too easy of a time damaging the entire enemy team. Though we see other setups with Graves, it’s been too easy to AoE, and a bit too powerful among AoE pets. We are wary of opening up additional new Graves combos with this change, and we’ll be testing this closely and reading all of your feedback.

• Graves’ base stats changed: At level 25, Graves’ Speed will now be 244 (was 211), Power will now be 297 (was 314), and Health will now be 1587 (was 1668).

Dev note: Graves’ base stats, along with the Undead racial (which favors slow pets), made him an unfortunate opponent to play against. Combined with high AoE and Consume Corpse, he had very few downsides. This change should help bring his output in-line with other, similar pets.
 
Overall, this constitutes a triple nerf to Graves. However, depending on your ability choices, you may consider the Clobber/Bonestorm slot swap an improvement. Please feel free to leave your feedback in this thread, and we’ll be here reading (and responding where necessary).
 
Thank you very much!

(source)