Another Monday, another chance for me to wax nostalgic. Firstly, I closed escrow on my new place last week and moved in over the weekend; I am super-tired, but love the new place entirely except for one thing: I believe the windows are old and have poor weather stripping. It got down to ~48 last night (not too cold for some people, but in Southern California, that is considered low) and it could not have been more than 52 or 53 in my home >_<. We have a fire place, but a family member who did our home inspection said not to use it until we get it inspected by a professional. Anyway, I am still excited.

Okay, I didn't know exactly what I was going to write about today, and I had one of those "oh come on Rey, you only suggested the once a week on Monday thing like two weeks ago, you can't fail now!" Then it hit me; I guess I just should start writing it instead of writing about how I came up with it... it's early... leave me alone.

So, a growing concern of mine has to do with the "we want Hybrids to feel more hybrid-like again and use non-main-role abilities more often" stance that Blizzard has taken toward Druids in MoP. I am truly worried that Ferals will be balanced around having to get out of a fight and throw 3 Wraths (or something) every now and then to deal our best melee damage. This may be effective in a raiding environment where boss mechanics may make melee range impossible for 10-15s every now and then and therefore a reason would exist for a Feral to pop out and start lobbing Wraths until the end of the phase, then get back into the fray with increased physical damage for a short period, but balancing Feral damage around these sorts of mechanics will simply make Feral a lackluster option for PvP, where doing anything less than your maximum for any period of time is a waste.

The flip-side of this is that Warriors and Rogues (in particular) are getting abilities to use from range that will do decent damage when not performing their primary role. I suppose it could be that Blizzard is planning on making melees balanced around their physical damage, but trying not to punish them on raid encounters that require more than tank-n-spank. In fact, the more I think about this, the more I see it being an actual possibility that Blizzard simply wants all the melee classes to have something to do (besides die in the fire) when the fight calls for short periods of "get out of melee". For instance, if the ranged classes can just sit there and pelt the boss with icebolts over and over again, then the only way for the melees to compete is for them to be in a tank-n-spank situation in which the melees can go whole-hog as well.

Interestingly, in most fights (that I remember from my raiding days) the ranged will have to move or die in the fire, and even some encounters had entirely mobile phases (safety dance comes to mind readily) where the ranged could only use instants. AHHHHHH, it is all coming together now - the melees ONLY use instants while in melee range and can do so while mobile; the ranged ONLY use cast-time abilities while stationary and cannot do so while mobile. However, the ranged classes can use instants while on the run and most melees cannot do anything while not in melee range. If we look at encounter dichotomy, then we see why Blizzard is doing this: enable the melees to contribute while not able to perform their primary positional role in the same way that casters can. Okay, so when a Mage has to move, he'll spam Scorch (if talented) to keep his DPS up, and if a Feral has to get out of melee, then he'll drop some Wraths on the boss to keep his DPS up.

What is most interesting about this is that if Blizzard gets this right, then those talents at Tier6 are useful in PvE, but definitely not mandatory. When compared to Disentanglement, both Heart of the Wild and Master Shapeshifter look stronger provided that the raiding content actually has fights which require these sorts of mechanics; yet, when I think about PvP, I have to imagine that the normal Wrath-spam will be close to the HotW Wrath-spam, since it only increases our Intellect by 50% of our agility. I am sure that the numbers are not set in stone, but it is probably going to be close enough that it is a worth-while button to press in a raid encounter, but not a required one. That being the case would mean that Wrath is a semi-powerful button to mash in general.

Blizzard said that Ferals will be getting Nurturing Instinct by spec in MoP, and that it would be powerful enough to make using a Wrath a worth-while endeavor in the situations where melee is impossible for 5-10s for one reason or another. What intrigues me is whether this will impact healing as I expect it will impact nuking. Since Blizzard has largely done away with the idea of healing-vs-damage spell power, Nurturing Instinct is likely to remain "gives X% of your Agility as spell power and causes heals to be 20% more effective on you while in Cat Form". If our mana pool is gigantic at baseline (as discussed in the previous post) then we can assume that we could actually use a fair few heals before running out of mana, and if we assume, too, that Leader of the Pack is still in MoP as our only form of mana return then we may have windows of healing followed by a return to the dps role in PvP.

Really quickly as an aside, Innervate is based off of the casting Druid's total mana and all Druids will have the same mana pool regardless of spec in MoP. Either Innervate will have to change, or we will bring the best buff in the game for healers. Likely, Innervate will be changed to be spirit based since that will be the regen stat, but who knows.

Okay, why did I name this post "Those Were the Days"? Back in Seasons 1/2, Feral was bad. Feral was god-awful, truth be told. Feral was better than it ever was in Vanilla, but it was still terrible to behold let alone play. In season 1 or 2 before the days of Feral Charge Cat or Infected Wounds, we would occasionally get out of range of our targets when trying to land a killing blow, which almost always led to the inevitable Moonfire-spam. Moonfire was an ability that was not terrible for Feral. I do not really recall why; we may have had some talents that simply made it work out that way, or we had an instant which did not scale well from spell power and thus had a high base damage; whatever the reason was, Moonfire-spam was the kill-shot we had against runners.

Obviously, Blizzard does not want Feral to end up spamming Moonfire as a killshot attempt at runners; we have many (and I mean many) abilities to close the gap between us and our foe, but with this focus on "Hybridity" in MoP, I cannot help but wonder if Moonfire will be one of those spells I end up putting back on my bar for those rare cases where I need to take down a Grounding Totem while my nuking-buddy is winding up a CC or something critical. It will be interesting to see, if nothing else. I am sort of hoping that we do not need to put Moonfire back on the bars - I am looking at the talents and current abilities and saying "I don't even know where Typhoon will go let alone Moonfire >_< ! ! !"

I know, I know... I promised one post per week, but this came out today and I had to write something.

Okay, so here is a quote from GC concerning the upcoming change to healers with regard to mana pool scaling around int.

For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren’t designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn’t feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn’t feel too much like rage or energy.

Okay, so the idea is that mana pools will be static in size and never change; that is, if you have a mana pool then the amount of intellect you have will not change the amount of mana you have.

Guntir pointed this out to me and it hit home, allow me to state that again:

If you have a mana pool then the amount of intellect you have will not change the amount of mana you have.

Okay, so while on Live Resto/Balance Druids have 100k mana pools, for example, because they have huge amounts of int from their gear and gems and whatever else; however, Ferals only have 26k mana because none of our gear has intellect on it. Now are you starting to see the issue? Ferals will potentially have 100k mana pools in MoP simply by virtue of this new mechanic. Intellect will no longer matter, so Druids, regardless of spec, should have the exact same mana pool size. This is HUGELY interesting!

I was concerned about us having access to Disentanglement, particularly because of the statements that Blizzard had released concerning Feral and how it was the escapist class and how other melees did not have the option etc. I was concerned that Disentanglement would be an option Ferals could take, but then Shapeshifting would become this hugely expensive move that would take a majority of our tiny mana pool and cause shapeshifting to become a choice with the consequence being that we may not have the mana for an instant-cast Cyclone later (or what have you).

Feral being a Druid with the same mana pool as a Resto Druid, on the other hand, is hugely appealing. We will just have to wait and see how this plays out.

Before I get into the stats, I thought I would share some thoughts on this little quote about MS-effects:

We dropped the healing debuff from 50% to 10% some time ago, but were convinced at 10% that it was hard to appreciate the effect at all. We want to try Mortal Strike et al. at 25% to see if it feels useful but not mandatory. If 25% is too much and 10% is too little, then it may mean the entire mechanic may not have much of a future. We decided to only change the debuff for the warrior, rogue, and hunter, restoring the original relationship between “strong” and “weak” MS that we had in Lich King.

Essentially, Rogues, Warriors, and Hunters will once again have the most potent healing debuffs in the game. At 25%, however, they are half as powerful as they were in Cataclysm. What strikes me as interesting in this change is the question of source - where does Blizzard see a lack of warrior, rogues, and hunters in high-end PvP? To be fair, I have been out of the game for a few months now and have honestly not kept up with the flavors of the month and who is on top, so it could very well be that I simply am not noticing that caster-cleaves are back in force or that DK+Spriest+Druid is the best threes comp around. I simply do not know; however, I would still guess that Rogue/Warrior/Hunter representation in the arenas is more than adequate with their 10% healing debuff.

In any case, the most interesting bit here is the suggestion that MS-effects may end up being removed entirely if 25% turns out to be too strong. The reason that this intrigues me, other than the fact that these overpowered mechanics are finally on the chopping block, is that Blizzard is not willing to delve any deeper than numbers. They suggest that if 10% is too weak, and 25% is too strong, then it is a problem that they refuse to solve by trying again at 15 or 20%. On the one hand, I think this is because Blizzard does not want to disenfranchise players by changing this value every other week, but on the other hand it may be more to the intrinsic problem that is anti-scaling.

I have discussed MS-effects ad nauseum, so I will try and keep this brief - at the core, MS-effects scale inversely with a healer's power, and while a healer's power scales pretty linearly with gear (which scale exponentially during the course of an expansion, but is pretty much static during a season), MS-effects cut that growth in half (or by a tenth, or a quarter - whatever the value of MS is at the time). What ends up bring the issue is that at some point MS-effects are either powerful enough to cause concern for a healer, or they are simply a mana-burn in that the healer has to use more mana than in the absence. Either way, this put teams without an MS-effect at a disadvantage, unless they can do 10% (or 25% or whatever MS is) more damage overall and therefore cause the same healing requirement of the opposing healer. For the longest time, the former was true, and for a very brief period in Cataclysm, the latter was true. I fear that going to a 25% MS will bring back the "non-MS teams will be at a disadvantage", and ultimately Blizzard will have to scrap the effect as the suggested in the quote.

---

To the stats! Blizzard had a "dev's watercooler" discussion about stats. Particularly, the issue of exponential stat growth was discussed. This is something that I talk about at every expansion, it seems - the public gets a glimpse of some of the gear that is released and goes bonkers over the absurd stats on each piece. Way back when TBC was released, we saw greens that had three times the amount of stam on them than tanking purples from Black Wing Lair. Then in wrath we saw the same thing but with primary stats like intellect and agility. This cycle continues every single expansion; how else could Blizzard get the public to buy those expansions unless the gear upgrade continued growing and forcing the out-dating of one's current gear?

In this, we see a growing problem - each expansion shows damage increasing in an exponential fashion. In Vanilla landing a 200 was a big hit; in TBC 2000 was huge; in Wrath we saw some caster cleaves dropping 10ks on people in a gcd; and finally, we are in Cataclysm now and I quite some months ago while dropping 30ks on Mages with FB or Ravage fairly regularly. While this damage is not going up exponentially (as my mathematically inclined readers will note), it is definitely going up in a non-linear fashion, and growing roughly with our stats on gear. If we look to MoP, then those 30ks that I can drop may well be 50 or even 75k hits, which would mean people should have something like 250k hp... some bosses in Vanilla did not have that much HP.

So, Blizzard has basically discussed two options: 1) the "MEGA DAMAGE" option and 2) the "squish" option. Basically, mega damage would be allowing the trend to continue, but updating the scrolling combat text and whatever else to accommodate "10M damage" (to show 10 million damage, as an example; I would imagine that 10K would be more inline with MoP) in the far future. I am not a fan of this method because it honestly does not fix anything. Damage will still be growing at this ridiculous rate and while people will be excited about seeing huge numbers, they will not be killing anything any faster, so it will not really matter.

The squish option basically acknowledges that each expansion's end-game content always causes exponential growth (as you can see in the image to left which I am borrowing from MMO-Champion). Notice that the growth while grinding is usually very small and the end-game makes everything crazy.





The squish method aims to resolve this issue by retroactively reducing the ilvl (or just flat stats) of each previous tier, thus reducing almost all the "current" gear into greens/blues from the next expansion.

As an example, when MoP comes out, if this were to be done, then our current gear would drop from ilvl 391 to perhaps ilvl 99, and MoP's gear would start at 100.


Also notice that the last tier, MoP (represented in red), has a HUGELY steep growth in the end-game when compared to the previous "squished" tiers. This is the interesting bit - the end-game tier would still grow exponentially at the time it was new, but once a new expansion comes out, all that gear basically gets squished down into blues/greens of the first level in the next expansion. This is exactly what happens at present, but it is done by the next tier being as strong as that exponentially grown tier of purples before it while the squish method essentially artificially does this by spot-reducing the end-game gear of the then-defunct expansion.

Blizzard rightly worries about causing players stress under this model by having us going from 30k crits at level 85 to 5k crits at level 90. However, if the HP pools support it, we are still simply doing a portion of our target's health, and the actual numbers do not really matter except to make the player feel better when they are huge. Personally, I like this method the best as it actually aims to wrangle in the out of control growth.