[UPDATE 5/29: Ghostcrawler responded with a clarification of the Icy Veins interview response; I’ve added his tweets to the bottom of this post.]
Welcome to today’s edition of WoW’s Developers Used Confusing Wording When Responding to an Interview Question, So Let’s See How Badly We Can Misinterpret It. Our topic for this particular WDUCWWRIQSLSHBWCMI is: the success/failure of the rogue Tier 15 four-piece bonus.
Tier 15 is the raid gear that was introduced in Patch 5.2 with the Throne of Thunder. In the first incarnation we saw on the PTR, the rogue four-piece bonus only reduced by 40% the energy cost of abilities we used during Shadow Blades. The designers listened to player feedback and decided to break one of the game’s basic commandments: “Thy global cooldown shalt not fall below one second, howsoever thee may cryeth about it.”
Yielding to concerns about Combat rogues energy capping if they tried to use Adrenaline Rush with Shadow Blades while the four-piece bonus was active, the designers chose to add to the set bonus a .3-second reduction to our global cooldown. That effectively gave Combat rogues a half-second GCD during Adrenaline Rush + Shadow Blades, thanks to the AdRush glyph that is considered all but required for raiding Combat rogues.
Last week, Icy Veins asked the WoW design team how they felt the experiment turned out. The WoWdevs responded:
We always have issues with the server being able to accept input fast enough to support very small GCDs (say less than 1 sec or so). In this raiding tier in particular we unfortunately had some widespread server lag problems, which made it harder to evaluate whether the 0.7 second GCD alone made rogue abilities feel unresponsive. Our hunch is the low GCD solved this specific problem with tier 15, but we’re unlikely to do it often.
I… am unsure what to make of this answer. I read it through a few times, trying to figure out what the heck they could possibly have meant by “this specific problem” — the only problem they refer to is the widespread server lag that occurred on some raid fights, but I can’t see how lowering a GCD could possibly *solve* that problem (it would, in fact, probably make lag problems worse).
I wrote to Icy Veins’ admin, Damien (who posted the interview), to get his take. He was a little befuddled too, but offered this:
My guess is that the specific problem is about rogue abilities feeling unresponsive when you need to spam them (i.e. during Shadow Blades). So they reduced the GCD of abilities during Shadow Blades to allow Rogues to spam their abilities during that time (especially during Time Warp or Adrenaline Rush for Combat Rogues). But, they had server issues and widespread lag, so they are not sure how positive the 0.7s GCD is (their hunch is that it is).
An alternate view was offered by Neïna, a member of the Elitist Jerks’ forums (and an EU rogue player on a top-500 raid team):
I read the problem as being tacitly know as “energy capping during AR”. I would translate it as: They tried a lower GCD to solve Energy capping, weren’t sure if it would work because of the possible lag induced by a low GCD, and can not exactly evaluate the output because much lag is currently induced by other factors, preventing them to measure exactly how much lag is induced by the low GCD.
I think both of these explanations make sense. I don’t necessarily think either is the actual reason the developers were referring to in their interview response. :)
This kind of semantic quibbling is super-extra nit-picky and may not mean much either way. But the risk of energy capping will only increase (especially for Combat rogues) as we move into what’s likely to be the final gear tier of the expansion in Patch 5.4. So the better we understand how successful the designers feel it was to lower the GCD in this tier, the more insight we’ll have into how (and whether) they plan to address the issue for the next tier.
Speaking from my limited perspective (I’m only doing LFR in this expansion, and only got my four-piece bonus a couple of weeks ago), the drastically lowered GCD has been an adjustment. I spent my first few fights spamming my abilities during AdRush+ShB waaay more often than I needed to, leading me to sometimes double-hit Eviscerate with 5+ CPs and do other less-than-efficient things most unbecoming a proper rogue. But the MUST MASH ALL THE BUTTONS panic has matured into a better feel for how long a half-second actually is, and I’m handling my cooldowns a bit better now. I also have only rarely experienced the sorts of lag issues that have been widely reported in this raid tier.
But assuming the verdict on this approach is “we don’t really have a verdict,” then what’s in store for us in the new raid tier? Energy-capping issues are frustrating — and they also near inevitability as haste values increase during an expansion, particularly for the Combat rogue spec, which features high energy regeneration rates and low-energy ability costs. Another GCD-lowering bonus feels unlikely — but so does another bonus that reduces the energy cost of our abilities, which only exacerbates problems when we’re already close to energy capping during our major cooldowns.
Meanwhile, designers may have painted themselves into a corner by crafting the Tier 15 four-piece the way they did. The bonus is basically aimed right at the Combat spec — and as a result, it is *tremendously* powerful for Combat rogues. It may be the most disproportionate tier bonus we’ve ever seen, with ShadowCraft estimates suggesting that the four-piece may be somewhere around nine times more powerful for Combat rogues than the other specs, boosting Combat’s DPS by something like 10%-15%.
So how do you craft Tier 16 set bonuses that will be strong enough to ensure it’s worth it for a Combat rogue to upgrade to the new tier — yet not so strong that they make rogues as a class overpowered in PvE?
————
UPDATE 5/29: In a series of tweets this morning, Ghostcrawler clarified the devs’ response to Icy Veins’ question about the rogue Tier 15 four-piece bonus:
[tweet https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/339753189488345088 hide_thread=”true”] [tweet https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/339753430786658304 hide_thread=”true”] [tweet https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/339753592250593280 hide_thread=”true”]This nicely ties up the “what the heck did they mean by ‘problem'” issue. (And I agree with the “no Street Fighter” approach; Combat is actually my least favorite spec precisely because its spammy style doesn’t fit with my own gameplay preferences.) But it leaves mysteriously unresolved the question of how the design team plans to address energy capping concerns for the *upcoming* raid tier.
So let’s let the speculation run wild! Should Sinister Strike get the Shuriken Toss treatment — when Shadow Blades is active, it hits twice as hard but costs twice as much energy? Should the next 4pc tier bonus increase the rogue energy cap? What will they choose? WHAT. WILL. THEY. CHOOSE?
________Energy Increasing Set Bonuses________
I was pondering what an increase in the energy cap would do. Needless to say it would allow people to pool energy for burst better, or in the case of AR, dump energy for burst better, but…well…seems kind of anticlimactic if that were all. Even as a 2 pc, that bonus wouldn’t change our rotation in the slightest – we’d have the same APM, the same rotation in terms of order of abilities, and the same exact playstyle outside of AR for those who are lazy.
If you were to have that kind of bonus it would need to be accompanied by something else that’s actually cool but in the same vein, ie something that has to do with energy, and, ideally, something that is relatively constant (not tied to a CD).
With that you kinda back yourself into a corner. As we all know the easiest way to implement an energy related talent is to simply say “yo, here’s a mechanic to get you extra energy”. Right off the bat we known that is off the table. The one thing I can think of, and actually I would consider it a very interesting set bonus, is to have the bonus go like this:
“Your energy is increased by 100 and all damage you deal is increased by .05 times your current energy.”
At low energy, you get almost no bonus. At 100 energy (50% of your bar) you get a 5% damage buff, and at 200 energy (capped) you get a 10% damage buff. Obviously the numbers are out of my ass.
The 200 energy would help solve the AR issue, while the energy-linked buff would have broad effects on playstyle similar to those of Anticipation and the way it encourages saving CP for buffed phases. Additionally, it would help tone down the “SPAM EVERYTHANG!!!” playstyle that has become prevalent with the fast and unpredictable energy gains we have now. This bonus would essentially reward rogues for being slower and more calculating, giving it a high skill cap. Since this is at the end of the expansion, I don’t think it is unfair to have such a skill based bonus.
________Set (Bonus) Theory________
With all that said, I think the energy issue, as well as everything else, is going to come second to one thing: experimentation.
Our T15 bonuses both increased the proportion of our damage that is dealt actively, and Bliz (iirc) told us that was very much on purpose. Set bonuses are one of the only ways Bliz can try something out for a period of time without the expectation that it will stay forever. Think about how powerful that is as a development tool. Bliz can say, “Hmm, we hear rogues want to do more active damage, but do they really, and how should we go about that?” The answer? Test out two possible solutions (More Eviscerates via fewer over-time finishers; more APM via a CD) using set bonuses and gauge the response! If Bliz decides those are good features, then next patch or expansion they can implement them. On the other hand, if they don’t like them, then the assumption is that they are only temporary, thus removing them is natural and won’t piss anyone off.
With that in mind, consider that this is the last tier of the expansion, and that rogues are probably the least played class excluding monks (It makes sense that monks wouldn’t be played much because they are new and unlike DKs weren’t madly OP at release). While I doubt rogues will get the warlock treatment, we’re still probably going to get some pretty major changes. I have no doubt that those changes are already on the devs’ minds.
With that, I think Bliz is only going to make an energy-centered set bonus this tier if they want to try something new with energy, or they think it will be game-breaking if they don’t. Might Bliz want to do something about energy? Sure! Every last tier we have way too much and every first tier we have way too little, and yeah, big changes (like really having to pay attention to energy to deal more damage as I suggested earlier) would be good candidates.
I guess there’s no real point to this post, but I thought it was interesting and I’d like to see how well the t16 bonuses fit into my theory.
It’s also worth noting that if Bliz avoids having a +energy bonus then they may experience slightly less energy-related bitching in the first tier of next xpac.
Could Haste be just a bit too good?
It provides more “passive” damage, Energy regen, and with the new RPPM mechanic on trinkets (I personally think this is a really interesting and dynamic way to add RNG to our rotations in a rather fun way!)
Maybe Haste needs to be nerfed in some way? Lessening the Energy regen of it would just take it back to only buffing our passive damage, which wasn’t a very intuitive thing. Doing a lot of damage simply because you are near a boss isn’t very engaging gameplay. Making resource generation scale with Haste is definitely a big positive?
So, how about lessening its effect on our passive damage? What if our white hits didn’t scale quite as well with the stat? This would probably be a significant DPS nerf, and would cause a lot of issues, since Rogue damage is balanced around a HUGE amount of semi-passive damage. How could this nerf be offset, then?
I’m thinking we could use a lot of mechanics, that are already in game. Make Poison and Bleed damage ticks scale with Haste. IIRC, don’t some healer HoTs have something like this going for them? What if Rupture, Garrote, Deadly and Wound Poison would tick more times in their duration with higher Haste? This could still keep it very much relevant.
To use Assassination as an example: Mastery would still improve each individual Poison tick, while Haste would give you more of them. Crit could then simply allow for the ticks to be critical strikes. All 3 secondary stats would improve your damage, but in different ways. This would still be semi-passive damage, but at least it would have to do more with your ability to keep the buffs/debuffs up, instead of simple proximity providing the blunt of your DPS.
I don’t know if this would actually solve anything, but that hasn’t often stopped me from wild speculation.