GC says Feral itemization doesn't work

#0 - July 22, 2009, 1:15 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Question #3 Spellpower Plate

I'd have to say a good 80% of the people who raid WoW are really, really sick of spellpower plate dropping in raids. When SP plate drops one spec of one class can use this, which means you have 29 out of 30 disappointed specs. God forbid two pieces of spell power plate drop from the same boss. The oft-suggested and effective fix would probably have a passive talent trainable by Paladins to convert Attack Power into Spellpower. I realize this would take some rebalancing of Paladins, ensuring Holy Paladins had mana(converted from Strength?) and roughly equivalent spellpower to heal. The talents Sheath of Light and Guided by the Light would probably need to be adjusted and maybe those spots in the talent trees might be a good place, and this is just me brainstorming, to have prot paladins run a little faster (they hardly need more threat or another tanking CD, come 3.2) and give Ret paladins an interrupt that they do honestly need.

Q u o t e:

We would like to get rid of spellpower plate, but we don't have a great system yet to make loot work without it. We want Holy paladins to wear plate and we don't want them to be great at say damage or tanking without having to swap gear.

The situations of Holy Paladins and Bear Druids are very closely analogous.

Holy Paladins are the only spec which will use spellpower plate. Bear Druids are the only spec which will use tank leather. (Though many specs are happy to wear a lower armor class (Boomkins wearing cloth, etc.), this does not work with tanking gear, obviously.)

GC rejects the stat translation solution for Holy Paladins as not a good idea, but this is exactly the solution used for Bears. This is true even though the exact problem GC provided (being able to do another role decently without swapping gear) applies to Bears to the same extent it would likely apply to Holy Paladins with stat translation.

I take this as an admission from GC that the current Bear itemization system is does not work, since if it did work it would be a great solution to the Spellpower Plate problem. The only alternative to the conclusion is a double standard.

Ghostcrawler

#45 - July 22, 2009, 6:30 a.m.

Q u o t e:
You're right, it isn't the only thing that matters. However, you are greatly reading into GC's quote to serve this deluded notion we're broken and unplayable to the point of only truly insane people would continue playing and enjoy it.

We certainly need fixes and tweaks, we're very strong and scale exceptionally well with the few stats we desire and the change over to Rogue DPS gear from a select few pieces of Bonus Armor Leather (because that's honestly all that mattered in TBC) has not been painful in the least.

Ever think that GC's admission that a direct conversion would be problematic could possibly stem from the fact that Protection and Retribution ALREADY scale with things like that? Tweaks would be required across the board for all three trees and there would require some sort of defining difference in stat preference to make DPS Plate desirable for Healing without making them turn around and Judge you for Retribution levels of damage.

There are cross-overs for Bears as well but contained within the same spec as they always have with some very distinct stat priorities between Cat and Bear. A lot of change would be necessary to clean up all three trees of Paladins to make Spell Power Plate no longer necessary.

Fasc is saying smart things again.

We actually like the Feral solution and would love to implement something like that for Holy plate. We just haven't figured out a way to make it work yet. The Feral tree is designed to have some crossover between dps and tanking and some degree of being able to use the same gear for both cat and bear. If you could use "rogue leather" to also heal and do ranged dps, then it might be a problem. That's one of the risks in making paladins heal using dps plate. There are solutions of course, but we haven't liked any of them sufficiently well to pull the trigger.

We can appreciate that not every Feral player is going to applaud the current implementation and some would prefer another solution, such as just having tanking leather again. We're not often going to come up with a solution for any class issue that is viewed as ideal by an overwhelming majority of people who play that class. We think it has worked out pretty well. I think Feral, bear and cat, is one of the success stories of LK in PvE.

Ghostcrawler

#256 - July 23, 2009, 1:28 a.m.

Q u o t e:

-Screwing over bears and other victims of "homogenization"

or

-Give the itemization team some more work

Obviously, laziness of itemization team > the players getting screwed.

Just to be clear, creating items isn't the problem. The problem is that when a boss has a loot list that offers specialized gear for every spec (and technically sub-spec in the bear case), it feels very RNG. Go beat on Emalon a little and pretend that was the only way possible to get that gear. I think you'd pull your hair out pretty quickly. (And come yell in the forums no doubt. :) )

Now maybe you meant give the itemization team some more work in the sense that we haven't come up with a solution yet that lets us drop say 20-30 types of armor off a boss without players getting really frustrated when theirs doesn't come up, without having the boss drop 10 items, or without converting the entire loot system to a token-turn in system. In that sense I'd agree with you.

Ghostcrawler

#257 - July 23, 2009, 1:35 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Don't you love how every time you succeed with a talent tree or itemization scheme for one class, it makes a lot of people from the classes with more awkward design even more upset that the gap in coolness and convenience is that much bigger? I'm not saying you shouldn't design things well, but wow that must be an annoying phenomenon.

Yes it is. And you can often just look at the age of the talents. There are some original talents that are still good. There are also a lot that are clunkers. :(

I know we must seem to move at a snail's pace sometimes. That's just the way we design. Blizzard isn't big on just cranking stuff out.