Hey guys
Here are some of the past weeks happenings that you might find interesting
Blizzard make a much clearer explanation of the reason behind the group mechanic relating to the Legendary Ring.
Great post from @WatcherDev about the Legendary Rings, responding to the lively discussion about them. Check it out! http://t.co/g0xstyTJYy
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 11, 2015
Celestalon tweeted the link this morning, direct link here: Legendary Ring Procs Explanation Here is the blue post in full:
A lot of fluff, perhaps, but that’s what got us thinking along the lines of a group effect rather than a personal one. This certainly isn’t a template for all future legendaries, but we find it very fitting for this particular one.
Now, some of the concerns that have been voiced:
1) “It will be used mechanically on cooldown” Sometimes, sure – it depends on the fight. The healing/tank versions certainly won’t be used that way, and the DPS ring also has elements (notably the AoE explosion at the end) that add additional depth to the decision of when to activate it. Let’s consider the fights in Foundry, since those are probably more familiar examples than Hellfire, and imagine how the ring might have been put to best use while progressing on a few of those encounters:
- Blast Furnace: Largely wasted if you use it on the pull; you might save the first activation for the second pair of Operators, and then during the second phase you’d aim for windows of Elementalist vulnerability, since that’s what matters most.
- Operator Thogar: Here we run into some unique considerations associated with the explosion. You could activate the ring in advance of a Man-at-Arms wave, getting a damage burn on Thogar while you build up the potential AoE that will go off just in time to alpha-strike the dangerous enemies right as they jump off a train car.
- Flamebender: If you aren’t running into her berserk, the Cinder Wolves are your main concern. You’d probably benefit from waiting until she’s at 45 or so Energy, and timing the explosion to get a large head start on the Wolves. Especially on Mythic.
- Blackhand: Aside from the obvious uses to speed up phase 1 and phase 3, I could see having your initiating player as the person who’s about to get knocked up onto a balcony with a fresh wave spawn due, timing the explosion to pretty much erase the whole wave of enemies right as they exit the door on the ledge.
Now, on something like Gruul, you probably would just use it on cooldown every time. But I’d say Gruul is more the exception than the norm.
2) “It feels bad to have someone else control my legendary” This is a fair point, and I sympathize. Setting aside the fact that when doing any solo content you have complete control over the activation, there is still more control with this legendary than with nearly any of our prior examples. Procs could occur at completely inopportune times, often wasting them entirely, and whether you got lucky and had Xuen’s cloak trigger just as a large pack of enemies got clumped together, or whether it fired 10 seconds earlier or later, could drastically alter your total damage on a given encounter.
At its core, the legendary ring is a raid item – the vast majority of the content and the collection steps take you through raid content – and players who are part of a raid group are by definition cooperating and coordinating to tackle challenges. The rings add another layer to that teamwork. Even outside structured guild raiding, it’s neither typical nor tolerated in pickup groups for, say, a mage to use Time Warp to maximize personal damage at the expense of the raid, and I’d be surprised if it’s common to see it done with the ring. Now, yes, in Raid Finder, though you also won’t generally be seeing raids with tons of ring-wearers, you’ll probably see some selfish behavior. But even then, the effect isn’t wasted (merely suboptimal), and that action isn’t likely to affect the group’s success or failure on the encounter as a whole given Raid Finder’s tuning.
3) “The effect isn’t fair/balanced and is worse for <my spec> than <other specs>” True. We could have made a perfectly evenhanded ring effect – something like “Equip: Increases damage and healing done by 10%.” That also would have been very lackluster. Nearly any effect with any depth to it will benefit some more than others so long as our classes/specs have varied strengths and weaknesses. (And we don’t feel that class homogenization is the answer, either.) Over the course of a fight, that may amount to a difference of a couple percent damage, if that. Hopefully we continue to make interesting and unusual items, and some of those will favor specs that feel the ring was suboptimal for them
What do I think? Well understanding the motivation behind the design, helps me personally to feel more motivated to see how it plays out. The way they explain how the mechanic might be utilised on different raid bosses? Very, very good.
Venruki posted this really interesting view point on what he feels are the reasons behind subscriber drop-off, in relation to the PVP environment. I’m hardly any kind of expert on PVP, so to hear the opinion of one of the worlds best, is very valuable. I hope Blizzard can address some of these issues for our PVP cousins.
Panser and Perculia did another great job with Wowhead Weekly this week, and it’s become a habit for me to actually take the time to use Airplay to push the video from my phone to the big screen TV, and watch it while I’m busting my butt on the treadmill. Several times, I have nearly faceplanted, due to laughing out loud at something Panser has said. That girl is seriously funny. I love how they both talk with such enthusiasm about things, and while I’m hardly a ‘collector of all the things’ kinda person, I sure as heck am not letting 6.2 go by, without getting my very own Blorp.
What I appreciate most of all, is that neither of them pretend to be these seriously OP players, but they have a genuine love of the game, and everything that it offers. YouTube is filled to the brim with so-called experts, but these two keep it real and fresh. I might even go premium sub on Wowhead, because I think these two are doing such a great job, and Wowhead is SUCH an amazing resource. If you want to subscribe (and lose the ads!) you can do so here.
It was way back in January that I tweeted this:
It’s purple! *begins gathering mog pieces to match*… New mount sneak peek! #want #wow #wod pic.twitter.com/q1w7nLu4Vw — Artenesse (@Artenesse) January 28, 2015
…and the Mystic Runesaber is finally arriving on the 13th of May! Just two more days… I think Panser summed it up perfectly, with “PURPLE KITTY!”
Method have a big announcement planned for today, so make sure you stay tuned to the Method Website, Facebook or Twitter…it’s going to be BIG.
Credits:
Featured Image on Main Menu courtesy of WoWDB
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