Useful Challenge Mode Question

#1 - Aug. 24, 2012, 6:24 p.m.

I haven't had the chance to try this out myself with school starting and being relatively busy on live selling mounts, but I was wondering about something in challenge modes that has been irking me for awhile.

Hit/Expertise below cap for most any class (I think all of them in mop) are the most important stats to get. For ret paladins in mop, they are worth more than str according to the most recent sims.

My question is how these caps interact with gear scaling?

I have thought of several answers to this question and all of them are depressing.

1. All aspects of your gear scale, so you will have to do the math to figure out how much of each stat you will have to stack relative to your item level on each individual item.[/i][/b]
-Explanation: Say I have 483 expertise now and I plan to run a theoretical lvl 85 challenge mode which scales my gear to ilvl 359. My reforged expertise on my bracers will be worth less than my expertise on my belt, and both will need to be calculated individually to find out my total "359 ilvl expertise." on both items.
-Concurrently, I need to figure out where to allocate more hit and expertise and calculate how much reforges are worth.
-This becomes much worse when you have crit and haste caps to reach as well.

2. Your hit and expertise remain the same all other stats (or maybe only int/agi/str) scale.
-I don't see this happening because this means your throughput truly does scale with gear as those stats will allow more and more of other stats as you need to reforge and gem for increasingly less of it as your gear gets better.

3. Hit and expertise not needed for challenge modes.
-This would change gearing entirely and you would probably have to build a set of gear specifically for challenge modes with all your gear having neither of these terrible stats.
-This probably wouldn't happen.

Answer 1 is the most likely way blizzard will be doing this, and it is by far the most punishing to the user. The only viable way I see people overcoming this is building a set of gear specifically for challenge modes. This brings up the ever-increasing issue of bagspace, my banks are overflowing with transmog sets, and adding a main and offset gear only for one aspect of the game to get another set of transmog gear is incredibly punishing to anyone who likes to use their bagspace for other things, such as professions.

On top of this, I personally have a prot/holy/ret set for all occasions and switch specs constantly because I like being a true hybrid and excelling at any role that my guild or the raid group needs. I will have 6 sets of gear gemmed/enchanted/reforged in mop if this is the case, but I am wondering if this is what blizzard wanted when they wanted to cater specifically for the overachievers of wow.

Watcher

Game Designer

#2 - Aug. 24, 2012, 7:04 p.m.

Option 4) None of the above.

Hit and expertise are needed in challenge modes; in fact, creature level is increased by 1 in challenge mode, so that the hit and expertise values needed are identical to those needed for raid content. When you enter a challenge mode, your absolute hit and expertise percentages will not change; your other secondary stats will be reduced proportionally to compensate.

If you have +7.5% Hit and 6% dodge reduction from Expertise in your normal gear (let's say item level 489 raid gear), when you enter a challenge mode, you will still have +7.5% Hit and 6% dodge reduction from Expertise. You can think of it as us reforging your gear for you to make sure that you stay at your pre-scaling Hit and Expertise values, so that you don't need to deal with a separate set of gear, gemming, and/or reforging.

Watcher

Game Designer

#15 - Aug. 24, 2012, 9:16 p.m.

Watcher real quick question, and it's something that has been nagging me a bit, but what would happen to special procs?

Say a a trinket or special weapon (like No'kalad) that does a burst damage or increases a primary stat. How will these procs be handled for Challenge Mode? Will they be scaled down or will they do the same damage?

Procs will function, but will be scaled down. A hypothetical ilvl 500 weapon or trinket that has a proc effect that deals 50,000 Shadow damage might only deal 35,000 Shadow damage when you are in a challenge mode (numbers are made up -- heavily rounded for simplicity).

On a separate note, at this time, our plan is to disable set bonuses from functioning entirely inside challenge modes -- they are not always precisely balanced against each other the way classes as a whole are, and due to the gear normalization, if bonuses were functional, the optimal challenge mode gear at the start of the expansion would likely be PvP sets.

That said, there will be very slight power creep as players get access to items that have ideal stat distributions for them, more sockets, and so forth, but we view that sort of optimization as interesting gameplay that we'd like to preserve, especially bearing in mind that when everything is scaled down to a fixed level, an LFR version of an item is equivalent to the Heroic version for the purposes of challenge mode effectiveness. Overall, though, the difference in power will be very slight, and this sort of min-max'ing will only be relevant to players who are vying for the top spots on realm- or region-wide leaderboards. The benefits of doing 1% more damage from having an optimal set of gear will pale in comparison to the time saved or lost by dodging a specific patrol, or aggressively pulling the next pack as you're finishing off the current one.