Ažuriran MoP Beta Launcher, Dnevne Blue Teme
Ažuriran MoP Beta Launcher
Ažurirani Launcher ima samo novi Mists of Pandaria Logo umesto klasičnog i izmenjeni Blizzard logo.
Dnevne Blue Teme
Ažurirani Launcher ima samo novi Mists of Pandaria Logo umesto klasičnog i izmenjeni Blizzard logo.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Rogue
Assassination Idle Time
That seems like too much idle time for Assassination. We'll investigate. It could very well be a bug (in the game or the sim). (Source)
Rogue Class Design
I disagree. Simulation and formulation need to be debugged, yes, but if you don't like looking at math, what would constitute as evidence? Math can, has been, and will be improperly constructed, but without some logical/rational evidence qualitative data means nothing. It's just hearsay.
We like looking at math. You wouldn't last very long in this gig if you didn't.
I know it seems like a Catch 22, but really I think it just illustrates that estimating DPS is not at all straightforward. If it was even moderately easy to do, everyone (including us) would know exactly what all of the targets were and how far everyone deviates from those targets.
There are two problems with simulations. One is that we just don't know if they are accurate. We could determine if they are accurate, but that takes a lot of our time (which is what I meant by debugging). In my experience, they tend to be as accurate as the dedication of the the group of players working on them. What this tends to mean is that certain specs are modeled very well and others... less so. That changes over time as the commitment of key players waxes and wanes. Several systems designers got their start in the theorycrafting community. It is one we are familiar with.
The second problem with simulations is they assume perfect gameplay on a static boss. Now on the one hand it makes more sense to do that than it does to compare DPS on every boss. It's often hard, even for the community, to decide when a fight has a gimmick versus being a legit comparison fight. On live, Ultraxion is the closest thing to a one-target fight with no movement, but even then it sprays the warriors with rage and the length of any fight has relevance because of how many times everyone's cooldowns are available. On the other hand, players tend to care more about how they can actually perform on a fight, not how they could theoretically perform on a boss that doesn't exist (unless you are in Naxxramas perhaps). As an aside, it's fun to go back and compare some of the predicted simulations for various tiers with actual parses.
I mentioned already the problem with comparing parses. They are reasonably good for comparing say rogues to mages, but terrible at comparing the various specs of rogues. The reason is because of the sampling bias, where all of the good rogues (and many of the not-so-good ones) swap specs to whatever spec the highest DPS parses use. There are some problems with this. Some of the highest DPS rotations are challenging to execute. Just because the best rogue in the world hit those numbers doesn't mean you ever can. It also doesn't mean that your DPS will go up by a certain percent just because you used his spec. Some fights just work out really well for some specs, because of adds or movement or burn phases or fight duration. Are these gimmicks that should be tossed out? At some point, you're tossing out every fight. Now to be fair, I'm not saying that Subtlety is secretly the highest DPS fight on Ultraxion and nobody knows about it. However, the delta between Sub and Combat is probably smaller than most people think. The sample size for Sub is much smaller and presumably its numbers are diluted by a lot of uninformed or lesser geared or skilled players or other people just messing around.
The best test I can come up with is to do a fight as one spec and then do the fight as another spec, trying to keep all other factors equal, and see how you do. That might be feasible in Dragon Soul today where you're likely looking for something to spice things up a bit. On the other hand, your guild leader might not want to hear on cutting-edge content "Hey, mind if I try an experiment?"
As I said, it's hard. I have used the thermometer analogy before. If you want to know the temperature outside, you can use a thermometer (or more realistically, a phone app) and be pretty confident that the number you see is reasonable (72 degrees F / 22 C in SoCal at the moment, as it very often is.) There isn't a thermometer for rogue DPS. There are a lot of stats and a lot of estimations that when taken collectively can give you some idea of where things lie.
Nevertheless, if you have any numbers from beta that suggest one spec is below the others, please share them with us. We are comfortable with our testing mechanics, but they have been wrong before, and reconciling them with the numbers from other people is never a bad idea. It's really not possible to have useless data, as long as you take everything relevant into consideration as part of the analysis.
Do you think you could answer whether combat rogues are intended to viably dual wield 2.6 weapons in MoP? I've heard it may be possible, but I've yet to see it conclusively proven that we can drop our daggers for a sword or axe without losing significant DPS.
We made some changes such that Combat with a pair of 2.6 weapons will be much closer to someone wielding a fast offhand than they are today. Last I looked, I believe wielding a fast offhand was still theoretically slightly better. Hopefully it is in the realm where you can use whatever drops.
So... you think there's a place for damage vs utility, you just don't think Blizzard can pull it off? It's an incredibly difficult design balance, exacerbated by any variables in which a player can interact with a target or variances that a target makes towards the player and the playable environment.
It is very difficult. I'm also not sure it would be very fun even if we did pull it off. In the theoretical example where you were choosing between a DPS cooldown and a healing cooldown, the pressure would often be to take the DPS cooldown and ask the healers to step it up a bit or just trust to random chance that you won't take that much damage. If the utility were group utility and not survival, then it gets even worse, because you'd always want the other guy to be the buff er... monkey so you can choose the DPS cooldown.
(Source)
Paladin
Holy Paladin Issues and Concerns
A few things:
It's hard just to compare heal costs and numbers without looking at the whole package. Paladin heals tend to be expensive because so much of their healing costs no mana. Likewise, we don't balance around perfect Beacon transference, but you can't ignore it either.
If you look at how much paladins actually heal in a fight though, it should be pretty competitive with the other healers. I know that's not easy to look at right now on beta, but it will get easier once A) raids are open, B) we enable mods again, C) more theorycrafters conclude that we aren't fiddling with numbers so much so that their time isn't being wasted. (We aren't fiddling with numbers nearly so much, so maybe that will encourage some theorycrafters).
Remember though, that each healer is different. Example: Resto shaman look great on fights where everyone can cluster for Healing Rain and Chain Heal and any time everyone stays very wounded for very long.
Because paladins have so many mana-free heals, they actually can't subsist on fumes as long as other healers. If every healer decided just to cast their Holy Light equivalent and nothing else, paladins would go out of mana faster. Now there shouldn't be any situations where you really heal like that.
Two concerns that I think warrant us looking at further are the healing of Holy Radiance and the crit chance of Holy Shock. We nerfed Holy Radiance so that Light of Dawn can be stronger -- it feels weird when the "finisher" is puny compared to the "builder." On the other hand, healers don't always have the luxury to wait for the finisher before doing some heavy healing. We've heard a lot of feedback that Holy Radiance is a little weak, so we'll take a look at it.
As far as Holy Shock goes, it did suffer from the pruning of many of the passive talents and glyphs that gave it such a high crit rate. In a vacuum, it doesn't need a high crit chance. It is an instant, relatively cheap heal that delivers on Holy Power. You're going to want to push it. But we agree that Infusion of Light is intended to help mix up what heals you cast and that it needs to proc at a reasonable rate. (Source)
Assassination Idle Time
That seems like too much idle time for Assassination. We'll investigate. It could very well be a bug (in the game or the sim). (Source)
Rogue Class Design
I disagree. Simulation and formulation need to be debugged, yes, but if you don't like looking at math, what would constitute as evidence? Math can, has been, and will be improperly constructed, but without some logical/rational evidence qualitative data means nothing. It's just hearsay.
We like looking at math. You wouldn't last very long in this gig if you didn't.
I know it seems like a Catch 22, but really I think it just illustrates that estimating DPS is not at all straightforward. If it was even moderately easy to do, everyone (including us) would know exactly what all of the targets were and how far everyone deviates from those targets.
There are two problems with simulations. One is that we just don't know if they are accurate. We could determine if they are accurate, but that takes a lot of our time (which is what I meant by debugging). In my experience, they tend to be as accurate as the dedication of the the group of players working on them. What this tends to mean is that certain specs are modeled very well and others... less so. That changes over time as the commitment of key players waxes and wanes. Several systems designers got their start in the theorycrafting community. It is one we are familiar with.
The second problem with simulations is they assume perfect gameplay on a static boss. Now on the one hand it makes more sense to do that than it does to compare DPS on every boss. It's often hard, even for the community, to decide when a fight has a gimmick versus being a legit comparison fight. On live, Ultraxion is the closest thing to a one-target fight with no movement, but even then it sprays the warriors with rage and the length of any fight has relevance because of how many times everyone's cooldowns are available. On the other hand, players tend to care more about how they can actually perform on a fight, not how they could theoretically perform on a boss that doesn't exist (unless you are in Naxxramas perhaps). As an aside, it's fun to go back and compare some of the predicted simulations for various tiers with actual parses.
I mentioned already the problem with comparing parses. They are reasonably good for comparing say rogues to mages, but terrible at comparing the various specs of rogues. The reason is because of the sampling bias, where all of the good rogues (and many of the not-so-good ones) swap specs to whatever spec the highest DPS parses use. There are some problems with this. Some of the highest DPS rotations are challenging to execute. Just because the best rogue in the world hit those numbers doesn't mean you ever can. It also doesn't mean that your DPS will go up by a certain percent just because you used his spec. Some fights just work out really well for some specs, because of adds or movement or burn phases or fight duration. Are these gimmicks that should be tossed out? At some point, you're tossing out every fight. Now to be fair, I'm not saying that Subtlety is secretly the highest DPS fight on Ultraxion and nobody knows about it. However, the delta between Sub and Combat is probably smaller than most people think. The sample size for Sub is much smaller and presumably its numbers are diluted by a lot of uninformed or lesser geared or skilled players or other people just messing around.
The best test I can come up with is to do a fight as one spec and then do the fight as another spec, trying to keep all other factors equal, and see how you do. That might be feasible in Dragon Soul today where you're likely looking for something to spice things up a bit. On the other hand, your guild leader might not want to hear on cutting-edge content "Hey, mind if I try an experiment?"
As I said, it's hard. I have used the thermometer analogy before. If you want to know the temperature outside, you can use a thermometer (or more realistically, a phone app) and be pretty confident that the number you see is reasonable (72 degrees F / 22 C in SoCal at the moment, as it very often is.) There isn't a thermometer for rogue DPS. There are a lot of stats and a lot of estimations that when taken collectively can give you some idea of where things lie.
Nevertheless, if you have any numbers from beta that suggest one spec is below the others, please share them with us. We are comfortable with our testing mechanics, but they have been wrong before, and reconciling them with the numbers from other people is never a bad idea. It's really not possible to have useless data, as long as you take everything relevant into consideration as part of the analysis.
Do you think you could answer whether combat rogues are intended to viably dual wield 2.6 weapons in MoP? I've heard it may be possible, but I've yet to see it conclusively proven that we can drop our daggers for a sword or axe without losing significant DPS.
We made some changes such that Combat with a pair of 2.6 weapons will be much closer to someone wielding a fast offhand than they are today. Last I looked, I believe wielding a fast offhand was still theoretically slightly better. Hopefully it is in the realm where you can use whatever drops.
So... you think there's a place for damage vs utility, you just don't think Blizzard can pull it off? It's an incredibly difficult design balance, exacerbated by any variables in which a player can interact with a target or variances that a target makes towards the player and the playable environment.
It is very difficult. I'm also not sure it would be very fun even if we did pull it off. In the theoretical example where you were choosing between a DPS cooldown and a healing cooldown, the pressure would often be to take the DPS cooldown and ask the healers to step it up a bit or just trust to random chance that you won't take that much damage. If the utility were group utility and not survival, then it gets even worse, because you'd always want the other guy to be the buff er... monkey so you can choose the DPS cooldown.
(Source)
Paladin
Holy Paladin Issues and Concerns
A few things:
It's hard just to compare heal costs and numbers without looking at the whole package. Paladin heals tend to be expensive because so much of their healing costs no mana. Likewise, we don't balance around perfect Beacon transference, but you can't ignore it either.
If you look at how much paladins actually heal in a fight though, it should be pretty competitive with the other healers. I know that's not easy to look at right now on beta, but it will get easier once A) raids are open, B) we enable mods again, C) more theorycrafters conclude that we aren't fiddling with numbers so much so that their time isn't being wasted. (We aren't fiddling with numbers nearly so much, so maybe that will encourage some theorycrafters).
Remember though, that each healer is different. Example: Resto shaman look great on fights where everyone can cluster for Healing Rain and Chain Heal and any time everyone stays very wounded for very long.
Because paladins have so many mana-free heals, they actually can't subsist on fumes as long as other healers. If every healer decided just to cast their Holy Light equivalent and nothing else, paladins would go out of mana faster. Now there shouldn't be any situations where you really heal like that.
Two concerns that I think warrant us looking at further are the healing of Holy Radiance and the crit chance of Holy Shock. We nerfed Holy Radiance so that Light of Dawn can be stronger -- it feels weird when the "finisher" is puny compared to the "builder." On the other hand, healers don't always have the luxury to wait for the finisher before doing some heavy healing. We've heard a lot of feedback that Holy Radiance is a little weak, so we'll take a look at it.
As far as Holy Shock goes, it did suffer from the pruning of many of the passive talents and glyphs that gave it such a high crit rate. In a vacuum, it doesn't need a high crit chance. It is an instant, relatively cheap heal that delivers on Holy Power. You're going to want to push it. But we agree that Infusion of Light is intended to help mix up what heals you cast and that it needs to proc at a reasonable rate. (Source)
