World of Warcraft

[Mark8691]

Hell Yeah!!

WOW as changed big time since the new patch!

Play Murloc

I knew WOW was good, but never realised it could be this good!

[The_Rev]

There was a massive Zombie invasion on Orgrimmar last night. I think there were 40-50 zombies at one point. Im not entirely sure what it was, but i assume it was either something to do with Halloween or perhaps a world event to do with Wrath of the Lich King where he was turning everybody into the scourge. There were clouds of green gas about. If you stood in them for too long then you got infected and turned into a zombie. If you became a zombie then you became hostile to everything in the Horde, from players to NPC's and you got a new set of zombie abilities which were about 5 spells from some kind of Mangle through to a zombie explosion where you killed yourself but infected anybody near you.

When Horde players were Zombies you could attack them, so myself, Mugs and Gone spent a good hour beating the shit out of them and getting whined at big time by two or three of them who wanted to make a zombie raid to kill Thrall with.

37,580 damage in about 1.5 seconds. <3 Destruction.

Killing Gone when he got infected. 8)

And they got really pissed off with me too. I got loads of whispers and tells from people calling me a fucktard, several times they ganged up and tried to kill me. They got me here. Braaaains!

[briggaman]

Noticed this today Rev. I used my portal to SW, and as soon as I was in the Mage Tower there were about 6 of them. I killed four of them before getting infected. Then got loads of hate messages. Oh well, maybe they shouldn't have been standing in the Mage Tower...

[The_Rev]

We will killing them for over an hour.

I wanted a whine thread on the Tarren Mill forum but never got one.

[Designer1]

We will killing them for over an hour.

I wanted a whine thread on the Tarren Mill forum but never got one.

Theres one on the General Discussion though.

[The_Rev]

[Sie]

All that zombie high jinks looks like a larf

[Designer1]

Did it all that zombie stuff kick off after we did the Horseman last night Nays?

And is it still going on?

[The_Rev]

Yeah (literally 10 minutes after) and yes, its still going on. You can get infected by the plague at booty bay by opening some crates, or you can just hang around where you know other players will be as someone else is bound to be carrying the plague.

Me and Engorge went to Statholme as zombies. Everything is friendly, but you cant interact with any of the mobs. You can open the gates and stuff though, which you cant do as a regular player. Scholomance is friendly too by all accounts.

We were going to go into AV and infect the bosses, but as soon as you port there you get cured.

Oh, and Alliance and Horde players can talk to each other if they are zombies!

[limpid]

But what would you say? Do you have to learn txtspk to communicate with the children?

[ED]

Cheers Nays.

I'll probably use the Mage and Rogue. I'll probably be nagging you for some pointers on the Mage talent spec.

Sounds like most of the Wars have gone completely prot and my cookie cutter build will be a bit poor as things stand.

I'll be on this evening, so who is still active?

I play occasionally, but at awkward times for you UKers, only bumped into Nays and tarj (briefly) so far.

[The_Rev]

Joined an MC run for nostalgia sake. Because of the achievements we also had a raid of 38-40 people for pretty much the entire time (though people were coming and going throughout)

It was sad to see Ragnaros though. We dropped him in less than 20 seconds, and part of me was really disappointed he is so damn weak now (though he still looks **** cool!)

Sadder still was some Rogue who ninjaed the leaf from the raids one and only hunter. Still, it was the Rogues first MC run, and he got kicked before Rag, so he missed out on seeing the whole Ragnaros summoning cutscene and he didnt get the achievement.

[Designer1]

Must say I'm enjoying my third stint so far. Seem to be levelling at a nice rate and It's good that a few of the old guard have returned.

It will be great to be around for the expansion from day one too. I missed out on the opening of the Dark Portal and have been told the first few days were 'epic'.

[The_Rev]

The first week or two of TBC was awesome.

Blizzard are changing how Wrath works a little bit, as there will be two starting zones to Northrend as opposed to only one in Outland. But its crazy fun when questing zones are so busy. :nod:

[The_Rev]

ive just noticed this stuff. Looks nice.

[Phumfeinz]

I'm determined to start playing my mage again, I really am.

But after playing my warlock for so long it just feels like I have the survivability of a one-legged jew.

[The_Rev]

First time a class ever got hotfixed due to its power, its now the first time (that i know of at least) that Blizzard have directly called a class "overpowered" and probably the first time they have actually mentioned the word "nerf" too. They usually just announce changes in patchnotes and leave it at that.

So, October 2008 was the rise and fall of the Retribution Paladin. The most powerful player class the game has ever seen. Bye.

Blizzard"]

Hello paladins,

Sorry we didn't get a chance to pre-announce these changes before the data were pushed to the beta. I won't try to sugarcoat it -- these are nerfs.

As I tried to explain before, we concluded a couple of weeks ago that Retribution was doing too much damage in PvP. We tried to nerf the burst damage through the previous changes to Divine Storm etc. Unfortunately, those changes didn't prove sufficient. Not only were paladins still destroying other classes in PvP, but we also found their PvE damage, even at level 80, was too high. Many classes were concluding they were too weak based on comparing their numbers to paladin numbers (and to be fair, hunters and in some cases mages and warriors).

Here are the new changes:

1) Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained reduced from 33% to 15% of base mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. For example, we did a lot of Patchwerk fights, watching the mana bar to see when and if it ever went down. In BGs, we were seeing paladins able to go from target to target without pausing even when unleashing all of their attacks. While we don't want you to go OOM in a few seconds, we don't want you to ignore the mana bar either. Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar.

2) Judgement of Wisdom: mana gained reduced to 1% of maximum mana and proc frequency cut by 50%. This ability was flat out better than Vampiric Touch when the mana provided between the two really needs to be close in order for the decision between Shadow priest and Retribution paladin to be a real one.

3) Judgement and Seals: Damage reduced by 20%. This is the major damage adjustment -- a lot of damage was coming from these. We do realize this hurts Holy and Protection as well, and that is something for which we are prepared to offer compensation (particularly if it hurts Protection's threat generation).

4) Hammer of Wrath: Now can’t be used until the target is below 20% health. Our rule of thumb is that core "Execute-style" abilities work at 20% and talented abilities work at 35% health. We originally had Hammer at 35% based on some other limitations of the spell.

5) Art of War: Increased damage bonus to Judgements, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm. I'll report back on the exact numbers here when we've settled on them.

I also want to add that the token Blessing of Might change wasn't intended as a joke -- it is designed so that Battle Shouts won't cancel the longer and more expensive Blessing of Might in a group setting.

These seem like pretty severe nerfs, but that was the intention. It is difficult for some players to ever be truly objective with issues surrounding their class, but in this case we felt Ret was severely overpowered. This was not in the realm of small tweaks to fix (though we did try originally). We overhauled the paladin class for Lich King, so it is unfortunate but not too surprising that the numbers for the dps spec require a lot of iteration. The mistake is ours, not the fault of the player base or beta testers.

Nerfing a spec or class is never fun. It means that our initial estimates of numbers were off and we know that the community is going to react negatively (to put it mildly). But we have to try and keep the game in a relatively balanced state and that is going to mean making decisions that are unpopular sometimes. If you need to blame someone for the nerfs, blame me.

As always, if we over-compensated, we'll adjust the numbers again. But as I said, our initial round of nerfs wasn't sufficient. Lest you fear that Lich King is upon as and you won't see any additional changes, that is not our point of view. We changed a lot in the game and we need to be able to recitfy problems. I would expect early patches or even hotfixes to deal with class or balance problems, and hopefully these will slow down as we get closer to major content releases. But nothing is off the table after we ship, down to rearchitecting talent trees if we think that is called for. This isn't to suggest we aren't happy with the state of the game. Rather, my word that we will continue to iterate on problem areas as they come up.

I also want to stress that we do not make balance decisions based on the QQ of other classes. At most, if there is a pretty vocal outcry that will encourage us to rerun the numbers to see if something is amiss. As vocal, and sometimes passionate and even logical as forum posts can be, they represent a fraction of the entire fanbase and it would be foolish for us to clobber one group of players solely based on the whining from another group.

Go ahead and vent if you have to. We won't delete posts or ban posters in this thread unless they are overly offensive. We do ask that you not launch a thousand other threads so that other paladin issues can still be discussed. Likewise, we have no problem with other classes engaging in the discussion but outright gloating or trolling will be frowned upon.

And I do apologize for putting you through this.

[Phumfeinz]

So, October 2008 was the rise and fall of the Retribution Paladin. The most powerful player class the game has ever seen.

And I still didn't have a problem with them.

Damn I'm good.

[The_Rev]

How did you get out of the repentance > HoJ combo? That crowd control should see a Paladin get off his Crusader Strike, Judgement, Divine Storm combo on you, add the white damage and its highly likely you will be beneath 35% health in Hammer of Wrath territory. Pallys in the Dashers are saying their Hammer of Wrath has between a 75-85% chance to crit depending on their gear level. If the Pally wants to use a two minute cooldown then you have Avenging Wrath to deal with too. Yes, you can blow Paladins who arent targeting you up from afar in a BG, but in a proper fight?

I had a hard enough time with blink, trinket and Ice Block. Warlocks dont have a more important decision over what to use the trinket on.

[ED]

Phumfeinz is just uber skilled clearly....

I like this line:

also want to stress that we do not make balance decisions based on the QQ of other classes

lies!