2009/04/18

DW Explanation

So another Bluepost for DW... great that they are telling us now that they wanted to stop DW completely before redoing it.
Dual-Wield spec nerf
"This is one of those categories, like the Conflag nerf, that we feel like you have options. We needed to kill the DW spec where you pretty much ignore weapons and just try and proc big spells. That was not the DW DK style we wanted. We felt like we had a choice between OP DW DKs and no DW DKs and thought the second was a more acceptable risk.

As we have explained, one of our ideas long term is to give Frost a couple of DW talents. It might not take much more than "Your Frost Striks and Oblits now hit with two weapons." Having 3 tanking and PvP trees is challenging enough. Expanding that matrix by also having DW Blood PvP and DW Unholy tanking gets to the insane level. But having DW Frost PvP, DW Frost PvE and DW Frost tanking (only) may be more manageable. We are not at all sure if this is the approach we will use, but it's an idea.

DKs were overpowered in a few ways. Fixing that was more important thank keeping DW at equal dps to 2H. That does not mean we have given up on DW for DKs in the same way that we no longer support 2H for Enhancement shamans.

We would not turn Frost into a DW tree. We would just make sure all DW DKs were Frost. And again, this is just an idea. We may reject it for some reason. As I have said many times, we want DKs to be a class that uses 2H or DW. We do not want DW to dominate, as it typically does in classes that have that option."

Armor Penetration

So, Ghostcrawler told us how this works:

"Okay, here is a fairly technical explanation we put together for how armor pen works.


We didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against low armor targets, like it had been in BC. We also didn’t want Armor Penetration Rating to be too powerful against high armor targets.

So, we decided on a system where there is a cap on how much armor the Armor Penetration Rating can be applied to. So, the first X armor on the target is reduced by the percentage listed in the Armor Penetration Rating tooltip, and all armor past that X is unaffected. Another way of understanding that is we multiply the percentage in the tooltip times the minimum of the two values: the cap, and the amount of armor on the target after all other modifiers.

Computing the cap is a little tricky unless you are already familiar with how World of Warcraft armor works. There is an armor constant we’ll call C.
C is derived as follows (in some pseudocode):


If (level<60)
C=400+85*targetlevel

Else
C=400+85*targetlevel+4.5*85*(targetlevel-59)

For a level 80 target, C=15232.5.
For a level 83, C=16635.


The cap for Armor Penetration then is: (armor + C)/3.

A level 80 warrior creature has 9729 armor. C=15232.5. So, the cap is (9729+15232.5)/3=8320.5. Let’s say a player has 30% armor penetration from armor penetration rating and no other modifiers that complicate the calculation (talents, Battle Stance, Sunder Armor, etc.). The game chooses the minimum of 8320.5 and 9729, so 8320.5. That is multiplied by 30% = 2496.15, and so that much armor is ignored. The effective armor on the target is 7232.85 (9729-2496.15). From a player point of view, the armor penetration rating didn’t ignore the full 30%, but instead ignored 25.66%. (85.5% as effective as expected).

These equations should help you be able to test and verify that Armor Penetration Rating is working correctly and as we designed. The tooltip is not actually inaccurate, as it states: “Enemy armor reduced by up to 30.00%.” That "up to" is key.

Please be sure to test without any other effects which modify the armor calculation (Battle Stance, Sunder Armor, Mace Specialization, etc.) as they may involve other systems that add additional complexity to the calculation."

2009/04/15

Webvaluer...

Interesting little toy...

2009/04/04

Blue Post PTR

Newest Bluepost on the DualWield Problem:

We want both dual wielding and 2-handers to be viable for Death Knights, balancing both of these inside each tree has been exceptionally challenging and caused an issue or two. If we have to make it so DKs have one type of fighting, it will be the 2-handers.

We are considering something like making the frost tree the dual-wield tree, so some frost specific abilities would hit with both weapons through that tree only, and then have unholy/blood as 2-hand focused. Nothing is set in stone though.

Great, I don't know what they test or how they test, but DW is far away from being viable on the PTR now. It really is a mysterium to me how Blizzard is testing... we will never understand it.

As for that bluepost, I am surprised they picked up my idea I came up with months ago. The problem are the talent trees, so take one and transform it into a DW tree and seperate the talents for DW from Twohand.

If Blizzard would only listen a bit to some experienced players...