January News/Discussion

[Sir_Die_alot]

that explains why the world server kept crashing. hmmm. think i'll hold off trying to play till there is a hot fix.

It does allow for a lot of WG marks to be made. :ph34r:

[Mirajj]

Jan 20 News

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The long awaited Patch 3.0.8 has gone live today! Hunters are nerfed, DK's are buffed, and clams come out the big winner over all!

[Lissa]

Jan 20 News

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The long awaited Patch 3.0.8 has gone live today! Hunters are nerfed, DK's are buffed, and clams come out the big winner over all!

My DPS as Survival has gone up, so I wouldn't call it a total nerf to Hunters. Come to the darkside, we have cookies. ;)

[Skandranon]

Most people have been using SK-Gaming (it lists % of Top100 teams) as a summary for balance:

2v2 has Mages at #4. Above it is Rogue (10%), Death Knights (27%), and Paladin (31%). The Paladins are mostly Holy, that leaves Unholy DKs and Mut/Prep Rogues as the melee DPS above Mages.

Just going by the spec thing on the top right of the page, it still looks like there are a significant number of Ret paladins. Not quite as many as the holy paladins, perhaps, but when Ret is the fourth most popular spec amongst all players in its own right, you can hardly leave it out. So of the four major melee classes, three of them have at least one spec that tops all ranged.

It's different for 3s, but Ret and the most popular mage spec, Arcane, are in the same ballpark, whereas Unholy DK is definitely not.

[Quark]

FYI, avoid the numbers for awhile. Besides the balance changes, they done broke it! 2100 teams are competing versus 1400 teams and then getting 14 points for a victory.

[Mavfin]

My DPS as Survival has gone up, so I wouldn't call it a total nerf to Hunters. Come to the darkside, we have cookies. ;)

Yeah, we ran (hosted, if you want to call it that) an Archavon-25 pug on Terenas last night, and 3 of the top 6 (including #1) DPS were hunters, so I don't think they were nerfed too badly. My elemental moved up a few spots, although the other elemental in the raid wasn't doing so hot. Not sure what his problem was.

I was getting 10K+ Lava Bursts in the raid, which is about 2K more than I was getting pre-patch, and LB is hitting harder, too. Love the new AoE totems, too. Now if the scribes would just get busy and discover the Tstorm glyph, I'd be all set.

[Bob the Beholder]

Yeah, we ran (hosted, if you want to call it that) an Archavon-25 pug on Terenas last night, and 3 of the top 6 (including #1) DPS were hunters, so I don't think they were nerfed too badly. My elemental moved up a few spots, although the other elemental in the raid wasn't doing so hot. Not sure what his problem was.

I was getting 10K+ Lava Bursts in the raid, which is about 2K more than I was getting pre-patch, and LB is hitting harder, too. Love the new AoE totems, too. Now if the scribes would just get busy and discover the Tstorm glyph, I'd be all set.

Elemental seems to be doing better, yes. A shaman in my guild was all over guild chat on patch day expressing complete disbelief that the 4k DPS she was putting out was actually real, and not some sort of practical joke.

[Quark]

FYI, avoid the numbers for awhile. Besides the balance changes, they done broke it! 2100 teams are competing versus 1400 teams and then getting 14 points for a victory.

And Arenas are now closed, along with Winterspring. Who wants meaningful PvP, anyway?

[Chesspiece_face]

And Arenas are now closed, along with Winterspring. Who wants meaningful PvP, anyway?

Spring break party in Venture Bay!!!!!!

"Duuuuuuuude, i'm sooooo wasted!! Need to punch something."

[Pantalaimon]

And Arenas are now closed, along with Winterspring. Who wants meaningful PvP, anyway?

Along with, apparently, instance servers disconnecting ~8-10 people every trash pull. So, umm, basically... don't be leveling, because there's a buncha reaaaalllly bored 80s:P

[Artega]

And Arenas are now closed, along with Winterspring. Who wants meaningful PvP, anyway?

I'd settle for them actually paying attention to what happens on the PTRs.

[Mordekhuul]

Some conditions that occur on live just cannot be tested on the PTR's, such as what happens when instance servers are loaded down with as many raids and 5 mans as are seen on a typical night or how Wintergrasp affects the hosts of players filling every nook and cranny of Northrend.

Anyway, at least the lag issues are fairly workable. We managed to clear 13/15 Naxx25 last night despite a number of wipes caused by 30 second lag spikes. Basically, where we'd normally clear 15/15 in about 3.5 hours, it took a full 4 to clear 13/15.

Reminiscent of the old ZG/MC days when lag spikes would render the raid impossible for 15-30 minutes at a time, but not nearly as bad (thank goodness).

They just need to fix it before Sunday when we put in more work on Heroic Sarth+3...

[Quark]

I try to stop myself from going this far, but ...

Some conditions that occur on live just cannot be tested on the PTR's, such as what happens when instance servers are loaded down with as many raids and 5 mans as are seen on a typical night or how Wintergrasp affects the hosts of players filling every nook and cranny of Northrend.

No, there is no excuse for this patch. It spent twice as long on the PTR as it should have because they kept adding crap instead of splitting it up, and beyond that made some incredibly bad decisions that somebody should have seen beforehand. Why was all meaningful PvP killed? Well, in Wintergrasp's case victory caused a possibly-infinite loop of applying and removing the buff to the winning side. If only one person was on the PTR, this still would have shown up even if it hadn't crashed the server. If it didn't show up on PTR, then the reason for having PTR is a failure because they're pushing live something different than they're testing.

In Arena's case they changed the way ratings work by adding a third, hidden system. Now, from what they said it sounds like it would work in a vacuum where everyone started at 1500 equally. Guess what? People were 2200 when the patch hit. Did they even consider this?

I haven't raided seriously yet, but have heard of lag being worse than it was pre-patch. Remember now that Arenas were disabled, Wintergrasp (a huge contributer to lag on Mal'Ganis) was disabled, and they pushed live optimizations for instances in general and Naxxrammas in particular. Just what, then, did they screw up to make it worse under the most ideal circumstances?

I've seen some rocky major content patches since WoW was released, but for a "minor" patch this has been pretty spectacularly bad.

[Artega]

It's relieving to know I'm not the only one wondering what the hell happened. With some of these bugs (not to mention all the damn typos), I'm really and truly wondering just what they used the data from the PTRs for... if they did at all.

[Taelas]

Considering all the things that went wrong... yeah, I'm a little baffled too.

[Sir_Die_alot]

It's relieving to know I'm not the only one wondering what the hell happened. With some of these bugs (not to mention all the damn typos), I'm really and truly wondering just what they used the data from the PTRs for... if they did at all.

The ptr didn't even have the ability to report issues with items/abilities like it normally does. Maybe they just expected people to throw up GM tickets?

The lack of any significant changes also made for few people having interest in the test realms. On the pve one I'd often be one of 3 people on it.

[NiteFox]

Considering all the things that went wrong... yeah, I'm a little baffled too.

It's pretty simple. They had to rush the patch out before the Lunar Festival started.

Previous incidents where patches were released during holiday events resulted in, well, frankly a huge whine-fest ("Baaawwh, extended maintenance during festivals! Gief game time! Extend the holiday!") and this patch has two changes to the next festival (Love Is In The Air) that had to go live before the event started, namely removing the Perma-Peddle achievement as a requirement of the event meta, and making Pledges of Adorations soulbound.

The problem is that the Lunar Festival runs until the day after Love Is In The Air starts, there would be no break between festivals. Blizzard pretty much had to push the patch this maintenance to avoid:

A) Whining due to the fact that a pretty major non-content patch was pushed during the middle of an event.
B) Get those important LIITA changes applied before the event ran.

Granted, the masses of problems suck. If we could have counted on the player base being mature enough to swallow a more refined patch in the middle of what is actually one of the longest events on the calendar, then all this could have been avoided.

Problem is that the player base isn't that mature. As little as four seconds browsing the thread titles in the official boards is proof enough of that fact.

I'm not being a Blizzard apologist here, they could have done things very differently, in fact they should have; but when you've got what is essentially an unpleasable fanbase with previous form for acting like children over the tiniest of issues, you can't really blame them fully for this blunder.

[Lissa]

Granted, the masses of problems suck. If we could have counted on the player base being mature enough to swallow a more refined patch in the middle of what is actually one of the longest events on the calendar, then all this could have been avoided.

You do realize that they've been working on this patch for over a month and a half for a non-content patch? How long do you think it takes to refine bug fixes, minor holiday changes (it's probably a bit that has to be turned on or off to effect whether something is BoE or BoP and you're removing something, not adding), and fixing glaring issues. From what we're hearing from people on the boards here, they didn't take much feedback on the PTR because some of their feedback mechanims weren't in place.

[Quark]

and this patch has two changes to the next festival (Love Is In The Air) that had to go live before the event started, namely removing the Perma-Peddle achievement as a requirement of the event meta, and making Pledges of Adorations soulbound.

This is flat out false, as previously they've made a BoE item BoP through a hotfix and they've changed a meta achievement after the event occurred already, neither with ill effects.

[Mordekhuul]

and they've changed a meta achievement after the event occurred already

When? The meta-achievement change I can remember right now is when they made "Hallowed be thy Name" no longer require the mask achievement to be complete, which they waited for 3.0.3's release to modify.

I think it is way too easy to sit back and complain that Blizzard are a bunch of incompetent idiots with zero knowledge as to what is really going on. Like most WoW forum threads, we seem to be debating heatedly based on pure conjecture that has no grounding in what may really have happened.

My perspective is that a bunch of crap went wrong. We don't know why. We don't know whether they were working 60 hour weeks trying to prepare for the patch, but missed something major, didn't have enough people dedicated to it on the dev or testing side because of the Ulduar patch, or whether something more out of their control happened. Either way, it is a very minor disruption on the order of less than a week, that didn't even remotely compare to some of the major lag-fests and bugs we saw years ago.