A Not So Soothing Nerf

[Roo]

This is the latest in a series of attempts to make skills that are mildly useful in certain key moments completely useless...

The island is guarded by swarms of level 59-62 elite hydras and nagas, and it's not a place for the faint of heart. Using one of the perks of being a priest, however, I was able to Mind Soothe past all the guards along the trail.

A tad on the hypocritical side I would think.

Even if you were merely exploring, the ability to bypass "swarms of 59-62 elite hydras and nagas" strikes me as something that just might have a desperate need to be examined and action taken to make sure this was the intended result of using the ability at any time by anyone.

Just because you did not exploit, does not mean others took the same fair play to heart.

[Quark]

Realistically, making key guards see stealth and resist soothe would have been far, far smarter.  But I guess that route would have, yknow, made sense, so Blizzard didn't take it.
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Every time I hear someone cry out for stealth-seeing mobs, I want to scream. It's the worst idea for getting rid of bad farming, period. Imagine you play the role of the rogue who's sapping mobs throught an entire instance for your group. You get to a group of 4, go up to sap, and *bam* you're dead because they saw right through your stealth and your group couldn't get aggro in time. It's already bad enough when my Sap misses, is resisted, or the 90% stay-in-stealth doesn't kick in. Now you're saying that a random mob should see right through my stealth and the only way I'd know that is by already getting suckered by them a previous time?

No thank you.

[MongoJerry]

Even if you were merely exploring, the ability to bypass "swarms of 59-62 elite hydras and nagas" strikes me as something that just might have a desperate need to be examined and action taken to make sure this was the intended result of using the ability at any time by anyone.

You're talking about a not-yet-implemented zone, and "swarm" was probably an overdramatic statement of mine. Presumably, there will be better placed mobs when the island is developed, along with guards in the underground passage leading to the King. Plus, when the assumed escort quest happens, Mind Soothe isn't going to help you at all, as the King won't know to hug the walls, hills, or go around buildings. Anyway, my warlock and mage friends were able to get to the same spot on their own without trouble, so it's not like Mind Soothe was the overpowered skill in your example.

[WarLocke]

I can't speak for Mind Soothe instance abuse at higher levels.

However, earlier today on Stormrage (after maintenance), my Mind Soothe was still instant-cast, and worked on non-humanoids.

The sky isn't falling yet.

[Treesh]

However, earlier today on Stormrage (after maintenance), my Mind Soothe was still instant-cast, and worked on non-humanoids.

The sky isn't falling yet.
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That was because Stormrage wasn't one of the servers that underwent the extended maintenance. At first, only those who had the 16+ hour maintenance had that code implemented. There were plans to implement it on the rest of the servers soon. Those plans may have changed, may not have.

Edit: Updates on the changes showing that the rest of the servers are going to get that code implemented on Saturday morning.

[whyBish]

At first, only those who had the 16+ hour maintenance had that code implemented.  [right][snapback]65459[/snapback][/right]

They haven't figured out clustered technology yet?

[Taeme]

It's already bad enough when my Sap misses, is resisted, or the 90% stay-in-stealth doesn't kick in.

Dang man I'm so sorry to hear an ability does not work totally according to plan 100% of the time!

Now you're saying that a random mob should see right through my stealth and the only way I'd know that is by already getting suckered by them a previous time?

No thank you.
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I just asked a level 60 friend of mine who's quite good at being a rogue. I'm not so good, only got a level 10. I ask him, hey man, if a mob breaks your stealth, are you dead?

He says no. Quote unquote "numerous escape methods". I'm interested in how having high detection mobs would be such a horrible problem when rogues aren't exactly out of options. But hey, can I ask if you were one of those that got stung by the Doan fix?

[Quark]

Dang man I'm so sorry to hear an ability does not work totally according to plan 100% of the time!

I realize Sap needs to have a fail rate, a resist rate, and a chance for you to not stay in stealth (even maxed). But, if the mob's big enough, that means casting an immediate evasion, hope my group (besides healer) pulls enough aggro, and watch my health pot and Vanish hotkeys carefully. Now say my group wasn't patient, it happens twice in a row, and now my only way out is Vanish. So I vanish, only wait! Someone was still casting a spell at me, so the bugged Vanish fails. Now I have Sprint, and hope that gets me away in time. But everyone one of those escapes is on a 5 minute timer. So for a Rogue to be ready for a failed Sap/Stealth, he may have to wait five minutes, and too many people aren't patient enough to wait with that Rogue.

I really, really don't mean to complain about the current way at all. I'm just saying this is what's already done, and take that into account when you talk about making it harder.

I just asked a level 60 friend of mine who's quite good at being a rogue. I'm not so good, only got a level 10. I ask him, hey man, if a mob breaks your stealth, are you dead?

He says no. Quote unquote "numerous escape methods".

All said above.

I'm interested in how having high detection mobs would be such a horrible problem when rogues aren't exactly out of options. But hey, can I ask if you were one of those that got stung by the Doan fix?
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Hey, look what we have here! Going for the cheapshot! Congratulations, I think you lasted record time. Since you asked, so far I've killed Doan once.

But there's a huge discrepency here. "high detection mobs" are not "stealth seeing mobs". In truth, when I'm playing at my best, I don't care how good (unless we're talking obscene) a mob's stealth detection is. Why is that? Distract. When stealthed, monsters won't even check to see if you're there, as long as you're behind them. Before every mob, I always try to distract to make sure their eyesight is as far away from me as possible.

But high detection mobs would not work for farming. How high are you going to put it? In two videos I've seen (Doan & Ironforge Bankers), both's closest spot involved walking past two people closeby. So say these two have a high detection rate and you want to stealth past them to farm, how do you do it? Distract the one guy away from you, then sap the other guy quickly. Walk past quickly, and when the sap wears off you're not in combat because you never actually attacked.

Since the vast majority of farmers are a decent level above the area they are in, the chances of failure in any of this is quite low. High detection mobs does not prevent farming. However, that's not what people are asking for. They want mobs that see through stealth. Meaning the Distract tactic is useless. Meaning that the Rogue is immediately forced to go into his escape options if he didn't know the mob sees him without a chance. Meaning, the next time he spots a stealth-seeing guy, he claims "Um, I'll open up with ... Throwing Daggers!" If you don't let a rogue walk up to a guy to attack, he has no opening move. No Sap, no Ambush, no Garrote (admittedly only used on bosses), no Cheap Shot. That's a lot of skills killed in the name of keeping farming down.

[Artega]

At least your chosen class is still effective, even if they DID do those stealth-seeing changes <_<

I'm incredibly pissed at Blizzard for doing this. Not because it affects me (I'm a Warrior - any people crying about skills not being worth crap don't know what they're talking about :P ), but because it's representative of a change in the way Blizzard is handling their paying customers.

I've been a Blizzard fanboy since WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, and I've played every single game they've released since then, and all of them have been great games. They've all had issues (except StarCraft, which is - beyond even a shadow of a doubt - the most perfect game ever created); rampant hacking and duping in Diablo, less-rampant hacking and duping in D2 (even on their hyped Realms), hero-rushing in War3, and boredom in War2. WoW is the first time, as far as I can recall, that they've ever released a game when it wasn't complete. If you think WoW is complete, you're an idiot. Blizzard was too busy with the idea of raking in the cash to take the time and properly analyze the "extensive" in-house testing and Beta-stage testing.

Yes, my opinion is highly biased against them. Why? We, the Warriors, are the most gimped class in the game (we're the most gear-dependant in the game, and our skills aren't worth #$%& compared to other classes' skills), and we'll never get a change to the core problems of our class (which vary from person to person - just try stomaching the Warrior boards) because we're Rob Pardo's bastard child, and he thinks we're perfect the way we are.

Actually, though, I have a better solution to all of these problems - reverse the patch changes and completely, utterly remove Maraudon from the game, permanently. Before Maraudon showed up, The Shatterer and Phantom Blade were GOOD weapons for the level. Now we can get Thrash Blade in our later forties without having to farm elementals for essences, so why the hell should we bother? And that's not touching the slew of overpowered items that come from that instance.

[MongoJerry]

They've all had issues (except StarCraft, which is - beyond even a shadow of a doubt - the most perfect game ever created); rampant hacking and duping in Diablo, less-rampant hacking and duping in D2 (even on their hyped Realms), hero-rushing in War3, and boredom in War2.  WoW is the first time, as far as I can recall, that they've ever released a game when it wasn't complete.  If you think WoW is complete, you're an idiot.

Feeling like a broken record here, but how in the world did anyone here come to believe that D2 was complete when it was released? And for a bigger crime, take a look at the release version of D2: LoD. Those two games were pieces of crap when they were released and both needed huge patches to make them even remotely balanced or playable. (And D2's end version of "balanced" was hardly anything close to it. I mean, when mobs in an 8-player hell game have no chance against a solo player, that ain't balanced).

By contrast, despite clear missing items in the game, WoW is by far more functional, bug-free, packed with stuff to do, and far and away better balanced than those two crappy games ever were. And this is coming from someone who wasted 3 years of his life playing those two crappy games.

[Kevin]

Feeling like a broken record here, but how in the world did anyone here come to believe that D2 was complete when it was released?&nbsp; And for a bigger crime, take a look at the release version of D2: LoD. Those two games were pieces of crap when they were released and both needed huge patches to make them even remotely balanced or playable.&nbsp; (And D2's end version of "balanced" was hardly anything close to it.&nbsp; I mean, when mobs in an 8-player hell game have no chance against a solo player, that ain't balanced).

By contrast, despite clear missing items in the game, WoW is by far more functional, bug-free, packed with stuff to do, and far and away better balanced than those two crappy games ever were.&nbsp; And this is coming from someone who wasted 3 years of his life playing those two crappy games.
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Whole hearted agreement (though I wasted nearly 5 years on them). People seem to forget that Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Broodwar, and War3 were made by Blizzard. Diablo II was made by Blizzard North. Blizzard makes solid games thet play well out of the box and generally only need minor tweaking (though pre 1.03 protoss can be said to be the exception that makes the rul). Blizzard North puts out addictively fun, but highly problematic pieces of software. In my mind they have always been two companies with North being the worse for quality control. WoW was a Blizzard product. It acts more like a Blizzard product. The biggest issue was that it looks like they wanted to be out the door with EQ2 and that hurt them I think. They didn't get all the tweaking they wanted. Though it might have just been the early Christmas crowd and not EQ2.

By the gaming industry standards it was releasable and by the precedent set by Diablo II and LoD it was certainly releasable. But it still isn't finished and may never be. Blizzard has the added joy of hiding behind the MMO banner that claims "MMO's constantly evolve and you add content as you go". That is fine by me as well since in my limited experience (only 5 MMO's) WoW is more solid than any other MMO I have played. The "fun factor" is still way up there. Sure it is missing things that I want and sure there were fundamental design decisions that mean things that I would love to see will never happen because there is no mechanisms for them. But they are getting their monthly fee out of me, and no other MMO has done that. They've only gotten the free months and other trials and such (playing on locally maintained servers and such).

I've been a Blizzard fanboy since WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, and I've played every single game they've released since then, and all of them have been great games. They've all had issues (except StarCraft, which is - beyond even a shadow of a doubt - the most perfect game ever created); rampant hacking and duping in Diablo, less-rampant hacking and duping in D2 (even on their hyped Realms), hero-rushing in War3, and boredom in War2. WoW is the first time, as far as I can recall, that they've ever released a game when it wasn't complete. If you think WoW is complete, you're an idiot. Blizzard was too busy with the idea of raking in the cash to take the time and properly analyze the "extensive" in-house testing and Beta-stage testing.

Warcraft II had 5 patches. Starcraft/Broodwar had at least 11, and go back and look at balance before the 1.03 patch. War3 is up to 7? Sure I said they were solid games that just needed a little tweaking and now I'm saying look at all the patches they had to try and indicate nothing was ready for retail. That isn't it though. WoW is as ready as any of the previous games and more so than some. There were some major changes to how the game worked in some of those SC/WC/War3 patches, they weren't all just exploit changes and a few damage here and there on some units. The things that have been done to WoW as far as changes are all less significant in terms of game balance.

The big difference is you are now paying a monthly fee for WoW and you weren't for those other games. I can agree with a some disappointment in how some of that has been handled. They are making more money they should be providing more support. Of course the monthly fee isn't just for support. It is to pay for the larger bandwidth that WoW takes up (OC3 lines are only something like $5,000 a month now, but still dedicated bandwidth isn't cheap) and it takes more than D2 realms ever did (and for SC and Warcraft B.net was just a match making service the games were hosted on the game creators machine with just a small bandwidth connection to the B.net servers for data transmission and to keep the chat up and a few other things). But I can see issues with how the support has been done since they are getting more cash in. Of course I do think the support has been better. The servers have been a lot better than the D2 realms were. But I wouldn't mind seeing better care applied with support. There were some things that could have been handled better.

It also appears that this latest thing was an admitted bandaid by Blizzard and that they will fix it right in the next patch. At least that is the impression I got from the Blizzard posts. I still don't see it as that big of deal, but as Mongo pointed out to me earlier, I was seeing things a bit wrong at first too.

[Thenryb]

Here is what bugs me most about the priest nerf-it shows that some rescources were spent doing something other than fixing things about the game which make it so difficult for many of us to play. I am referring not to server crashes or laggy servers, but rather to individual crashes which many of us have referenced in these threads:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-tech-support&t=569&p=1&tmp=1#post569 and http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...tmp=1#post21810

I have gotten so many of these kinds of crashes since I reinstalled the game a few weeks ago that my error file contained 16.6MB. I am sure my system is not the best nor is it perfectly tuned but it certainly meets the games requirements. (Intell 2800 processor, XPPro with SP2, I gig memory, ASUS P4C800-E mobo, NVIDIA FX 5200 video card). Now it seems to me that I ought to be able to play a retail game out of the box without those kinds of crashes. D2 had the same kind of things only worse if that is possible (C0000005 errors, assertion errors or whatever) and Blizzard North took the same position that Blizzard takes now; namely, it is not our software, it is your hardware. I don't hear those same kinds of problems from players of EQ2. The game may be crap and the servers may lag but individuals don't have these kinds of crashes. I have certainly followed all of the "official suggestions" (the usual pap I remember from D2-make sure all your drivers are up to date, etc) as well as other suggestions such as reinstalling and repatching. Finally, I followed the suggestion of Whit (a Blizzard apologist who posts in that thread) and installed WOW in an additional file which I then renamed. When I get a 131 crash I copy and paste over the data file (sound, texture or whatever). This generally allows me to play a bit longer than if I did not do that. I am fully aware that not every employee works on the same problems at the same time, but when stuff like I described appears to have gotten NO attention, it annoys hell out of me that they are worrying about a few priests "bypassing content" or whether someone's name is appropriate.

[Raziel]

Really, it's like Maraudon was designed to be farmed, and Blizzard is just now waking up and realising that it's a bad thing.

I mean.. a free back door to skip most of the content (!!!), incredible loot, easy kills, no boss tricks whatsoever - each one can be zerged or kited forever - and did I mention incredible loot?

As for stealth detectors.. well gee.. I didn't propose scattering them randomly through the level. Just put them on the most obvious enemies guarding the way to the true loot. Shouldn't the guards close to the pot o' gold be a bit tougher and a bit more canny than the regular dumbos wandering around?

And yes, Blizzard's approach to "customer support" and "community relations" is laughably bad.