Change to RPPM Mechanics

We think the cooldown lineup at the start of PvE encounters has gotten out of hand, and it’s having some rather negative effects on gameplay. Particularly with the number of RPPM procs most raiders have these days, the pull has just become way too important. It’s affecting gearing, it’s punishing classes that can’t capitalize on it as well as others, and it’s not how we’d like raiding to work.

To that end, we’re going to make another change to how RPPM mechanics work on the pull. Starting a raid encounter will set every RPPM proc’s “time since last proc” to 90 seconds. That means the more frequent procs will still be more or less guaranteed to go off, but the rarer (and more powerful) procs will just have a high chance. This should hopefully chill things out a little bit, without changing how you play too dramatically.

Can we clarify what 'rarer' RPPM procs are? We talking the meta-gem here?

We're not changing the actual RPPM proc rates at all, just how much time is "banked" before the pull. The underlying math that determines what the actual chances are isn't changing.

So, here's a couple hypothetical examples using very rough napkin math. I don't remember RPPMs for actual trinkets off the top of my head (and they're not particularly necessary for illustration purposes):

Trinket A has an RPPM that allows it to reach a 100% proc chance if it hasn't fired after 60 seconds. This trinket will have a guaranteed proc on the pull.

Trinket B has an RPPM that allows it to reach a 100% proc chance if it hasn't fired after 100 seconds. It will not be guaranteed to proc immediately, but will proc within the first 10 seconds.

Trinket C has an RPPM that allows it to reach a 100% proc chance after 2 minutes. It will not be guaranteed to proc immediately (regardless of how much time you've spent out of combat), but will proc within the first 30 seconds.

Make sense?

My 502 UVLS doesn't have a guaranteed proc chance 2 minutes in though. Lore's example needs a trinket D, which is only guaranteed in excess of 6 minutes of no procs.

This is true -- some trinkets will now be unlikely to proc immediately (which is the point of the change). However, it should be noted that it's extremely unlikely for any RPPM proc to take until it hits a 100% chance to activate anyway.

Trinket C has an RPPM that allows it to reach a 100% proc chance after 2 minutes. It will not be guaranteed to proc immediately (regardless of how much time you've spent out of combat), but will proc within the first 30 seconds.

Guilds are still going to wait. This change is good, but it's not good enough.

Aside from the fact that most groups wouldn't be ready for another pull within 90 seconds anyway, waiting has no effect whatsoever. As soon as a raid encounter is pulled, the time since last proc for all RPPM mechanics in the raid will be set to exactly 90 seconds. Doesn't matter if it's been 10 seconds or 10 minutes since the last pull.

I do want to say, this is distinctly a nerf to fun. It WAS A LOT of fun to open up full force pot, cloak, enchant, 2xtrinkets, meta, stormlash, + elemental + lava burst. I was hitting 75,000 spellpower

I feel like the "nerf to fun" argument gets overstated quite a bit. We're not nerfing it because it was fun, we're nerfing it because it was breaking the game.

I'm sure a lot of players would find it fun to be able to take down Heroic Lei Shen with a single spell. That doesn't make it good gameplay.

If this is intended as a 5.3 hotfix, it's not active on our servers.

I assume it is a 5.4 change.

Correct, which is why I posted it in the PTR Discussion Forums ;)

I'm skeptical to the idea that not getting a proc in the initial burst will somehow make these trinkets not worth using. After that first proc on the pull, the time since last proc is 0 anyway. It'll tone back the initial burst, definitely, but I'm not convinced that the entire value of a trinket like Unerring Vision of Lei Shen depends on that first proc.

There are some further changes to the RPPM system in development that we'd like to share with you. As you know, RPPM is something we've been doing a lot of iteration on, and we have another iteration that should be hitting the PTR soon:

As you may know, RPPM proc rates typically scale with haste. This was done because historically, attacking faster meant you had more chances to proc something, so got more procs, and we wanted to preserve that effect. However, most procs before RPPM were such that either their effect didn't also scale with haste, or their proc rate was predominantly limited by an ICD. Many of our RPPM effects thus far have had neither of these limitations, such that they effectively 'double-dipped' on haste, benefiting twice from it. In some extreme cases, the proc was designed such that they actually triple-dipped.

As RPPM effects have become more wide-spread and more impactful, this has caused a variety of problems. Primarily, it has skewed stat balances toward haste rather significantly. It's also a compounding problem where many of these procs stack multiplicatively with each other, causing insane burst when all of these procs go off together. That can be fun, but also raises the skill cap on your performance, and makes gearing choices more restricted to ones which stack together optimally.

For 5.4 we're going to change both new and existing RPPM procs to not double-dip on haste. Benefiting once from haste is fine and expected, but not twice. For example, suppose you have two hypothetical procs, Flamekissed and Villainy:

• Flamekissed's proc rate scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: Deal 500 additional fire damage". This is fine, because only the proc rate scales with haste; the effect doesn't.
• Villainy's proc rate also scales with haste, and its effect says "Chance on hit: +5000 Agility for 20sec." This is not fine, because both the proc rate and the proc effect scale with haste. The more haste you have, the more attacks you do in that 20sec period which benefit from the increased Agility.

If both the rate and effect of a proc scale with haste, we're going to remove the haste scaling from its proc rate. In these cases, we'll compensate for an expected amount of haste by increasing the base proc rate. For any procs whose effect does not scale with haste, their proc rate will continue to scale with haste as before. However, we're also revisiting the proc rate tuning on all existing procs that were made overbudget due to the addition of Unlucky Streak Prevention (which ends up increasing effective proc rate by 9%). These changes should bring RPPM procs back to being on-budget and tied with traditional ICD procs in value.

This will obviously have a noticeable effect on most players performance; don't panic. We're going to be adjusting damage/healing/tanking performance with these changes in mind.

These RPPM changes should make it to PTR soon, and you'll be able to find the exact changes to each such effect there. We now show RPPM proc rates in the tooltip of the effect, which should make it easy to find.

Lore is the change in post #256 happening concurrently with the change to essentially prevent procs on boss pulls?

Because while I'm glad to see haste being so ridiculous, I still hate the idea that 2 minute CDs could have to be held for 90 seconds to match up with procs.

We're still planning on making that change as well, yes.

However, we recognize that not everyone likes the RPPM gameplay, and are going to greater lengths to provide alternative options in Siege of Orgrimmar. In addition to RPPM-based trinkets, there will be trinkets that use the older internal cooldown (ICD) method, as well as a few on-use trinkets if you'd prefer to have an even greater degree of control over when your trinkets are active. There's even a couple trinkets with completely passive effects.

As an update to this, as part of our continued balancing, we're going to increase the "time since last proc" reset on boss pulls to 120 seconds.