World of Warcraft : Ghostcrawler

Scourge Strike and Hunger for Blood Nerfed

Kody — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:08:06 GMT

Last night Blizzard pushed another round of 3.3 hotfixes live, including nerfs to both Scourge Strike and Hunger for Blood, as well as a bug fix for rolling Corruptions.

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

Onyxia will now move at a normal speed when performing a Deep Breath.

Players will no longer die while zoning into Icecrown citadel as the Gunship event resets.

The Battered Hilt will show it's appropriate faction-racial restrictions.

Hunters, Rogues, and Shaman will once again be able to roll need on off-hand weapons when the need before greed looting system is active.

Earthen Power now properly removes snare effects.

Hunger for Blood now increases a rogues damage by 10% down from 15%.

The Ephemeral Snowflake trinket now has a very short cooldown to prevent it from restoring inappropriately large amounts of mana.

The Shadow damage from Scourge Strike will no longer be able to critically strike. The physical component will continue to be able to critically strike.

You are now able to recast Mind Flay after missing with the spell without receiving a "This spell is not ready yet" message.

In addition to this, Ghostcrawler posted an explanation as to why Scourge Strike was nerfed, which you can check out below.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

Players have made several requests for more explanation on the Scourge Strike nerf. I tried to find a post to respond to, but the ones I found were very angry and I didn't feel like a response in there was going to do anything to discourage more angry posts. So I'll just do it here.

We initially started mucking around with Scourge Strike based on numerous requests and complaints from Unholy DKs that their talented strike wasn't very appealing. At the time a lot of Unholy DKs were just using Obliterate instead, especially in PvE. Their logic made a lot of sense. It's obvious that the tree is built around Scourge Strike to some extent. There are many talents that are less interesting without Scourge Strike.

Side note 1: *You* personally may have been happy with Scourge Strike as it was. We don't take a public vote on these things. When players make a lot of sense, the designers sit down and discuss whether we agree with them and whether than warrants any changes. In this case we thought it did.

Side note 2: We have a design law around the office, named for one of the designers here, that anything overpowered is fun. There was a time when Scourge Strike hit for silly numbers. Many DKs knew it did too much damage. Others were nostalgic for that day, perhaps even subconsciously. I've read several times before something else that makes a lot of sense: too many DKs want a class that hits as often as a rogue but hits as hard as a warrior. You can see the problem there. As long as DKs do so much spell and disease damage, their strikes can't hit for really big numbers. (If you don't care about spells and disease damage, then you're probably playing the wrong class.)

In any event, we tried a lot of different things with the talent. You can probably find my old posts. There were many, which makes these claims that DKs were ignored ring a little hollow. We couldn't make it just hit as hard as a physical swing since it completely ignored armor. The problem was that in a raid environment in which armor was routinely sundered / exposed or otherwise bypassed, Scourge Strike's smaller base damage fell short. Again, you can find more detail in older posts.

That's why we came upon the answer of letting Scourge Strike do half physical damage. Half of the attack would respect armor (and therefore sundered armor as well) but the other half could still benefit from all of the DK abilities that improve Shadow damage. As a side bonus, this made the armor penetration on so much of the dps plate slightly more attractive to Unholy DKs. Players argued that this made the ability less interesting or even compromised. We understood the logic there, so we tried to let the physical and Shadow portions crit separately. We knew there was a risk of it feeling too RNG, and some players brought up that risk. But remember we were still trying to solve two other problems (SS needs to hit hard and not be boring) so we decided to try it anyway.

The parses that came out of the PTR weren't too bad. There were some big hits of course, but they didn't happen too often and in PvP the damage didn't seem out of control. Remember though, our PTRs are voluntary. We get some great players trying things out and sending feedback, which is awesome and much appreciated. We have great internal testers who beat on the raid encounters over and over again before they're ready to go public. But none of that testing compares to the flood of data we get the day something goes live. The handful of Icecrown raid parses grew by thousands over night, and many of those had Unholy DKs doing much higher damage than was warranted. Go check out any parse by a decent guild for the Icecrown raid. Once you skip over all the Mutilate rogues, there are all the Unholy DKs.

Maybe in retrospect we made a mistake messing with Scourge Strike at all. Maybe a superior solution would have been to let some Unholy DKs just migrate over to Obliterate or whatever. Just remember as passionately as you feel about things now, many DKs felt just as passionately back then when they urged us to reconsider Scourge Strike. As another designer commented recently "You rarely see indifferent players come to the forums to post their indifference."

Will it stay this way for long? It's too early to tell. This implementation has a chance of working out, but we also want to see the Icecrown hard modes start up as well as the new Arena season kick in.

World of Warcraft Anniversary Interview: The Creation of a Raid Dungeon

Kody — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:38:38 GMT

As I promised in the interview with Greg Street and Cory Stockton, here's a look inside the creation process of a dungeon like Ulduar. It's cool to have a better idea of what each dungeon goes through before players get their hands on it, and even some insight into the way the dungeons and encounters are designed!

Walk us through the creation of a raid instance like Ulduar. When do your various teams come into play, and how much influence do they have on tasks they're not directly involved in during the creation process?

Cory: As far as the kickoff goes for Ulduar... Ulduar was something we were working on all through Northrend, and we kind of realized that we had the content we wanted to ship it. Then we're sitting there with Ulduar, so we had some time to go back to it and beef it up from what we originally had planned for Ulduar.

We kick off, you know... brainstorming names, story, we have Alex Afrasiabi telling us the background, what we need to get across to players. So we kick off there, and it comes to a level design phase where we lay everything out in 2D. You've probably seen this at BlizzCon; we use these 2D illustrator maps to plan the layout of the whole dungeon, figure out where the bosses are gonna be, what we're gonna do.

From that point we talk about it more, decide we like what we have and start building it in 3D in what we call a "block out." The block out is just a really basic 3D form of the dungeon that we can run around in and see what the first stage is like. With Ignis, we knew how the fight was gonna be with the water pools on the side, how far we wanted players to have to drag the adds into the pool.

So in an instance like that, we're able to lay out all of that in 2D to get a sense of feel for units of measure, and then we get it into the basic 3D form and we can actually go in and spawn him, you know we didn't have his model done yet right, but we could spawn him there and get a feel for if there needs to be any changes before we get the final art going. We do that individually for everything in the whole place to lay it out, figure out how much space we need for the fights.

From there we get the encounter team involved. The encounter team comes in and we have meetings on the actual fights individually, and at the same time the art team begins working on final art. Those two work side-by-side from there until the end of the dungeon, or the production time, whatever that might be. Some dungeons that are smaller, we can kick out in two-to-three months, but something like Ulduar that's huge can take more time -- up to four-to-five months.

And during that time, they're working on the fights in Stranglethorn Arena spawning Razorscale there, fighting him, getting it down for how it's gonna play out and what he does while the art is being built for that room. As things start coming in, we'll start putting things together... we'll start placing the creatures in the actual instance and do internal testing.

Everything goes through testing here, we have a QA team that does that, but we test everything ourselves in 10-man form with the encounter guys, Greg is in on that, Tom Chilton, Alex Afrasiabi, all of us. So we go through as players and get a feel for it. From there it's just tuning, we get feedback after every session and work on tuning everything.

Then it goes on to Greg's team where the item art is getting hooked up, filling out the achievements, which all of those falls under Greg's team.

So could an item guy go up to the encounter guys and say "Hey, I have this awesome idea for a boss fight," or a class designer say "This room would look really awesome with a pink elephant ghost hovering near the ceiling."

[Greg Street laughs]

Cory: Oh 100%.

Greg: We're super collaborative here, our offices are full of very open people and we're talking to each other a lot. If someone gets this crazy idea about something and champions it can often get it into the game.

Cory: A lot of times we'll see a model come in from art and they'll end up creating a weapon the creature is holding and one of the item guys will say "oh I want to drop that," and at that point a task will go in, the artist goes in and rips the weapon out of the creature's hands, scales it down to fit the races in the game and we'll actually use that as a weapon.

Like with Razorscale when we saw his model we decided we wanted to get a mount for that. We had no idea until the art came in for him, and we saw it, and it looked so good we decided we had to get it in as a mount. So a lot of times things just happen... we try to plan as much as we can, but sometimes we end up getting things, and we all play this game just like anyone else. So there's a lot of things like that, that come out even though we didn't start with it planned and using it makes it feel so much better.