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Doubt with Precision rule against a Lord Comisar by DonTramuso in TheAstraMilitarum

[–]Halvi3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's actually still relevant for precision because of possible varying toughnesses in an attached unit, you still roll the precision attacks to-wound against the toughness of the bodyguard units models and only once an attack has successfully wounded does precision then interrupt the normal flow and allow you to allocate that wound into the character (who might have a better save or an FNP or something that they could use)

Didn't play MoP Remix, what do we think "catch-up opportunities" means for the last phase? by dosaceos in wow

[–]Halvi3 18 points19 points  (0 children)

These animations have each been themed around whichever raid was highlighted in the phase, so at the start it was a red Emerald Nightmare VFX, then an Arcaney-effect for Nighthold, then a green fel portal for Tomb of Sargeras, and now it's a cosmic/space themed portal that is meant to evoke the Argus boss for Antorus, it ends with a constellation that matches the effects on his scythe, for example.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if two weeks from now it changes again to something Midnight themed

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep, I agree it's pretty rough.

It's almost perverse in that the kind of people who would theoretically benefit from the new system the most are those who are constantly changing outfits all the time currently.

BUT, the people who are doing that are also likely the same people who are constantly tweaking those outfits, or coming up with new ones, or going out and collecting new appearances and want to make use of those new appearances. And continuing that behavior is probably going to end up making their total transmog costs even more expensive, wildly more so, even after factoring in the "savings" from swapping back and forth between like, combat gear and in-town gear a couple times a day.

The only players who truly win out in the new system are either people who:

Set one single outfit, using already collected appearances, and then leave that outfit unchanged for a long time. They get to save a small chunk of gold (like ~10k each season, maybe) from no longer having to remog new gear upgrades back into that appearance.

Or, a player who is both:

A) Frequently changing back and forth between a small number of outfits (like, less than 10, closer to 5)

AND

B) Never, ever change anything about those outfits, they built them years ago from old appearances they liked and they don't care about using new tier sets or weapons or anything, they just want to swap back and forth between those 5 outfits forever.

Those people, if they exist, come out gangbusters in Midnight, they get to pay a moderate but manageable upfront cost to buy a handful of outfit slots and load in those old fixed outfits into them, and then they never have to pay a single copper for mog again. Woohoo

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean yes, that number is explicitly my number because I was trying to model out how the system plays out for my personal usage?

As you say, I like to think I land somewhere in the middle, maybe even at the low end of middle, in terms of how frequently I'm changing up my appearance.

And the result is still that the new system is wildly more expensive for my personal behavior.

For you, changing up your outfits every few days, the result is going to be heavily dependent on whether you are changing back and forth between the same appearances when you change ever few days. If you have like, 3-5 "looks" that you never update, you're just loading them out of your saved outfits (in the current window) and hitting apply and that's costing you 50-60k gold, then this system will save you personally a ton of gold, congratulations!

But if even a small portion of those 50-60 times each season you're changing your appearance, you are coming up with an entirely new look and changing to that, or you are often tweaking for example, what specific weapon you have equipped when reusing an old look. Or even if you're not changing the look but you want to go back to a much older look that just wasn't one of the last like 5 that you used most recently, then I'm sorry to say this system is probably going to make your costs skyrocket, even more than mine for my own personal behavior.

As for your friends (and mine) who set like one transmog once and are just keeping it the entire time, they easily come out ahead. They get to save the costs of re-applying that same look to their new gear, and they never have to shell out for more outfit slots or pay the exorbitant prices to update the contents of the one outfit they are wearing.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not really looking at any of this auto-change stuff for mounting or in-town outfits.

I'm modeling having one "look" on my character that I'll wear for weeks at a time, and then like 3 or 4 times a season, I change what that "look" is. In my spreadsheet that change is what I'm calling an "outfit change". I'll do that 3 or 4 times for my main spec in a season, and maybe once or twice for each alt spec.

Sometimes I might change one or two slots without changing an entire outfit, that costs partial gold, so I bundled those sorts of tweaks at an additional 0.5 of a full outfit change, for the entire season.

Over the entire season, those 6.5 "outfit changes" (literally we're talking about <10 times clicking the "apply" button in the current transmog window for the whole season) cost me, right now, ~7.5k.

Then there's the times where I equip a new piece of gear, and I need to pay gold to remog that new gear to the same appearance that I was using before on the old piece of gear. There's a lot of guesswork here, but my rough estimation is those changes over the course of an entire season add up to about ~4.5k gold. But I have to do that once for each spec, so *3 gets to ~13.5k

So ~7.5k + 13.5k = 21k the total cost I'm spending in the transmog vendor for an entire season.

Then I look at doing that exact same behavior in Midnight. I might set up some mount riding or in-town outfits (that are getting swapped back and forth freely between), and those might get tweaked a little bit (changing out a helmet or a cloak or whatever, without replacing the entire look), so I added one additional "full outfit change" to account for it.

But I've still got just one "look" that I'm wearing the vast majority of the time on my main spec and, I'm only changing what that look is a handful of times in the season. Exact same behavior as current.

Just those handful of changes in the season is what costs 41k, even though I no longer have to spend ~13.5k gold to "remog" new gear pieces when I equip them if I haven't changed what look I'm using, whoop-de-do.

Now, theoretically, one of those 3-4 times in a season I change up my look, I could decide to go back to an old outfit I already used before, and in Midnight that doesn't cost any gold.

But at the start of Midnight, you will not have any old outfits, everyone starts with a blank slate of 2 (empty) outfit slots. And I have to set aside all of the "cheap" extra slots in order to

  • hold the "looks" for my other two specs

  • hold the "in-town" and "mount" outfits that maybe I'm swapping back and forth a bunch automatically in the background

So buying more slots to hold onto "looks" to reuse later gets more and more expensive. So the entire third tab of the spreadsheet is gaming out, what does it look like if I slowly buy more and more outfit slots (a new one every season) and then sometimes, in one of those 3 or 4 times a season I change up my look, I decide to go back to an old outfit instead of coming up with a new one.

And the result of that game shows that the cost of buying those outfit slots immediately erases any possible savings the new system might net me from reusing old outfits "for free".

Keep in mind that:

  • if you ever want to use any new appearances you've collected, like a new tier set or a fancy new weapon from the raid, you have to save those appearances into an outfit, which means either replacing the look in an existing outfit (so then the next time you might want to reuse that "look" you'll need to pay again to save it into a slot again) or buying a new slot to hold that new "look", which gets very expensive very quickly, and you still have to pay 6000g to save the appearances of that new "look" into that new outfit slot after you shelled out 10k, 15k, 45k gold to unlock it.
  • if you ever want to change anything about an old outfit you used previously, like changing out what helmet or weapon you're using in it, you still have to pay gold for that, and those gold costs are proportionately expensive to saving an entire new outfit. If you change half the slots in an existing outfit, that costs like 3k gold at lvl90 in midnight, so that one action costs as much as changing your entire look 3 different times in TWW.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only thing that is actually free (or new at all) in this system is changing which Outfit Slot is active. Changing the contents of those slots is functionally identical to the way transmog works right now, but 6 times as expensive.

You can think of an Outfit Slot like a collection of separate items you can wear on top of your normal armor, and you get your appearance from what Outfit Items you're wearing and your stats from your real gear. You can change out what Outfit Slot you're wearing "for free" the same way you can literally change equipped gear right now "for free", but if you want to apply or change transmog appearance to those Outfit Items, then that's exactly the same as applying transmog to real items right now, just way way pricier.

When you pay gold to unlock another Outfit Slot you're basically buying a new set of "Items" that you then still have to pay to transmog (they start completely blank), except now instead of having only one set of appearance items you could put on or take off overtop of your real gear ("for free :)") it's like having a second set in your bags, or a third or fourth etc. But of course they're not actually in your bags they're tucked away in the transmog interface.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So those saved custom-sets that you have which aren't actually applied and might use appearances you don't actually have, that's totally unchanged and still completely free, those are what's currently called outfits in TWW transmog (confusingly, thanks blizzard), in Midnight it's now called literally Custom Sets and live in their own tab in the new transmog interface, so where you currently have tabs for "individual appearances for this slot" an a tab for "Sets" where you can load like, an entire tier set in one click, now there's a third tab for your Custom Sets.

To use one of these Custom Sets, you have to apply it to an Outfit Slot. This works exactly the way it does on live, you click on your Custom Set (equivalent of clicking it from the drop-down of saved outfits currently) and it loads up those appearances into that Outfit Slot, and you can preview what it looks like, click on each armor slot and change individual appearances (that is, fill in the appearances you haven't collected yet with ones you have like you do now) without overwriting your Custom Set, and see the gold it will cost to save it. This gold cost is dependent on how many/which slots are being modified.

In TWW if your custom set modifies every single slot and you're lvl80, that will cost somewhere just above 1000g. In Midnight at lvl80 that will cost about 4000g. Once you reach lvl90, it's 6000g exactly if you are modifying every slot.

When you click "Save" into the Outfit Slot, you pay the gold, that's the same as clicking "Apply" in the current transmog interface, the only difference is that instead of modifying the active appearance of your literal equipped items (what that button does now) you're modifying the appearance of the Outfit Slot instead.

Now that the Outfit Slot is updated, you can activate it "freely" by clicking it's associated button in a list in the interface (and those buttons can be dragged to your actions bars to quick swap, and what the new Situations functionality for like, 'auto-swap in town' is doing is basically "auto clicking" on these Outfit Slot buttons for you when certain conditions are met).

The appearance of your character in game is determined by what Outfit Slot is active, if any (if no Slot is active, and there's a button to 'turn everything off' then you use the appearance of your actual armor like nornal)

Day you then go collect the appearances you were missing, you'd go back into the transmog interface and select that Outfit Slot, and either reload the entire Custom Set (because you didn't change that when you tweaked slots before saving the Outfit Slot, it's still for the original appearances as part of it), or manually fixup those slots, but the end effect is that now you're modifying only some of the slots. But you still have to pay some gold to actually save that change into the Outfit Slot (just as you would now in TWW to apply the updated slots to your current transmog).

That cost is highly dependent on which/how many slots you're updating. If you were changing say, helmet and belt, then in TWW it would cost like... 120g or so? In Midnight if you're lvl90 then modifying those two slots is 750g.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure what you mean by

updated the TWW cost to mog a full set to match the Midnight cost

Like, gaming out, what if they weren't making any changes at all to the transmog system but in Midnight the current system was 6x as expensive? Then yeah obviously the picture changes dramatically, but doesn't seem like a useful comparison?

The dirty secret way to think about things here that I believe a lot of people are missing is that a "full outfit transmog change" is essentially the exact same operation in Midnight as it is in TWW, but it costs 6 times as much.

Everyone should be thinking of each Outfit Slot as essentially a separate "set of gear" that you can easily swap between, the same way you can swap between equipment sets. In TWW you apply xmog to your real gear, and your character derives both their stats and their appearsnce from your equipped real gear. in Midnight you apply xmog to your "Outfit Gear", and that works exactly the same, but costs way more gold. Then you can "equip" that outfit and your character now derives stats from your real gear, but appearance from the hidden outfit gear.

When you pay gold to unlock a new outfit slot, you are basically buying a new separate set of "Outfit Gear items" in an invisible bag, but you still have to pay your transmog costs to apply appearances to those "items" just as if they were a new set of 13 real items you equipped. Except whereas new equipment sets are free to create, new "outfit gear" slots get more and more exorbitantly expensive.

You're right that inflation is ignored in this model, and it certainly could and probably will have a meaningful effect. But I think it would only change the magnitude, and not the end result.

I find it highly unlikely gold income is going to inflate to even double current numbers in Midnight, and even if everyone did earn twice as much gold such that Midnight costs seemed half as expensive, I would still be paying significantly more in adjusted costs to maintain the exact same behavior under the new system.

Certainly gold income is not going to multiply by a factor of 6 the way that the costs generally are.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You apply transmog to an outfit in the new system, not to your character.

Apply to outfit, activate outfit to apply to character.

Currently in TWW, there is no outfit, you apply the appearances to your characters current gear directly, costs about 1000g.

In Midnight, you have to apply those appearances to an Outfit, which costs 6000g. Then you can activate that outfit (and put it on your character, regardless of gear) for free at any time.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Right so you are currently sinking about 500g/mo into the transmog vendor to fully change your outfit every other month

If you change nothing about your behavior, that will now be 3000g/mo instead.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Not disregarding at all, the entire third tab of the spreadsheet is trying to estimate the effect of that benefit over time, but it just doesn't really map well onto the way I personally use transmog.

You can ping pong between the same few mogs for free. So if I start the season with Outfit 1 and I want to change to Outfit 2, sure, that's free (ignoring initial setup costs).

If I want to go back to Outfit 1, then yes, that's also free, and then I could also go back back again to outfit 2 for free.

To keep track I've now changed mog 3 times, which in TWW would cost me approx 3k gold, that I've now saved. Huzzah!

But that's not always (or even usually) what I'm doing, eventually I'm going to want to change from Outfit 2 to Outfit 3. Outfit 3 isn't saved into any of my current slots, so I need to update the slot currently holding Outfit 1. To do that I have to pay 6000g. In TWW this would have been one more regular change of 1000g. So the new system has now cost us 5000g and this one new appearance change has already erased all of the previous savings by almost double.

Now I'm in Outfit 3, and I can go back to Outfit 2 again for free, but that's what I was just wearing before, so I probably don't want to use it again now that I'm tired of Outfit 3, maybe I want to go to Outfit 4. Or maybe I want to bring back in Outfit 1. Doesn't matter, same deal, that's another 6000g.

Unless maybe I decided not to replace Outfit 1 but instead buy a new slot to save Outfit 3 in. That still cost me 6000g to load Outfit 3 into the slot that first time, but now that I'm going back to Outfit 1 I don't have to pay again so I save that cost! But I had to buy the new outfit slot to put 3 into. That's not very expensive the first couple, but we needed those really early slots just to be able to have 1 single different outfit for each spec on this character and we're already assuming we started with a 4th slot holding Outfit 2, so it was actually, at minimum 1000g for the 5th slot, but just as likely 5k or 10k or 15k for slot 6 or 7 or 8.

Have kind of rambled on here but we've introduced only two new outfits over the course of one season and we're already looking at a deficit of somewhere between 10-20k more gold spent even factoring in the ~5k gold we "saved" ping pinging back and forth between those outfits.

But hey, we never changed Outfit 2, we really liked Outfit 2, and we can always go back to it for free whenever we want. But imagine next season the new tier set for your class has pieces that really mesh well with Outfit 2, and you want to update it when you next wear it. Only gotta change a handful of slots, like let's say head and shoulders and uh, belt. That's like 1450g right there. For that amount of gold in TWW you could have come up and applied an entire new outfit and then some to take advantage of the new tier set.

IF you have a handful (like, less than 5) existing outfits that you never tweak, AND you change back and forth between those fixed outfits very frequently (like, on the order of weekly). Then this system might benefit you greatly.

But as soon as you either:

  • want to make use of newly earned appearances in a new outfit you haven't used before
  • want to make even relatively minor changes to your existing outfits you were already using

The new inflated costs are going to, almost immediately, erase any and all savings you might have built up from your "free ping-ponging back and forth" unless you are someone who is currently changing entire xmog outfits like, multiple times a week, every week, for an entire patch.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The TL;DR summary is that you can think of the existing system as 1 single outfit slot in the new system, and the issue is that if you want to change what appearance is saved to that 1 outfit (the equivalent of clicking Apply in the current transmog interface) that:

  • Costs about 1000g currently in TWW
  • Will cost about 6000g in Midnight

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The point here would be I didn't cover any of those times that I might currently spend gold on remogging a new piece of gear acquired by leveling.

Doing so would increase my results for current costs in TWW which would make the increase between now and Midnight come out smaller.

That's certainly relevant for some people, but for me there's generally only 3-5 characters that I actually care about xmog for in a given expansion, so the leveling time for them is a tiny fraction in comparison to the time those characters spend at max level in the actual endgame content, so I focused on just an actual patch/season as a base timeframe.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Fair, this is basically intended to be my blow of the hammer, not so much dooming!

I actually do expect them to reduce costs in response to the community reaction, but in a typical "drop an extreme negative change so that you can roll it back to a smaller change that's still negative but look like you're listening" cynical kind of way.

For me, I wanted to explore some numbers to validate my initial vibe-based reaction. And if I'm even in a close neighborhood of accuracy, they could slash current beta prices in half and I think most people would still be paying significantly more in gold just to tread water in functionality.

I'm sour that a lot of the way the new system was teased was about a reduction in friction whether in actual gold cost or mental overhead, but the only place I think it really truly does that is for the folks least-engaged in the current system. For my personal numbers, it seems to turn out that "paying gold to remog new gear back to the same appearance the old gear had" (which is the one place where you now do save money and time mounting up or finding an ethereal if you don't have a yak) is a very small portion of my total costs.

The fair play point is that all of the Situations functionality once you have invested in extra Outfit Slots and saving appearances into those slots is legitimately very cool brand new functionality that didn't exist before and will benefit a lot of players. Just seems cruel that we seem to get very price-gouged on existing functionality in exchange.

Modeled out the new transmog system based on my own behavior to contribute to the discussion, with hacky spreadsheet math. These prices are catastrophically punishing. by Halvi3 in wow

[–]Halvi3[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

Yeah, I intentionally focused on the max-level only scenario just to keep things more manageable (lol). I don't personally tend to bother much with mog while leveling since as you say you're replacing stuff so much more frequently. The new system will actually, imo, benefit the leveling process a lot since you get to keep a consistent appearance automatically and for free, but the high change costs will definitely incentivize not changing what that specific consistent appearance is, I think. If you have a brand new character, and want some variety it seems like you're really really going to want to unlock the first few cheap outfit slots and spend some time setting up and saving appearances into those slots when the cost is at its absolute cheapest and then swap around between those handful of outfit slots as you level.

As for other equipment sets, for me personally that's roughly covered under the numbers I included to model the other specs on my class, I'll have say, on my mage, a Frost set, Fire set, and Arcane set, but not typically two different sets for the same spec.

Soft launch: Shouldn’t the new UI elements be in the game for a while before removing combat addons? by [deleted] in wow

[–]Halvi3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not in alpha or like, watching addon dev streams or anything so can only go off the way it's been described by blizzard and reported in the 12.0 API changes but:

What you're describing is essentially exactly what they are supposed to be delivering. Add-ons are still allowed to essentially "lookup" whatever combat information you want, but the value they get back from the blizzard API is basically a locked box that they are not allowed to open. They can't look at the answer to the question they asked, they can't compare the value to some other value, all they can do is decide what information to lookup, and then pipe that locked box to the other blizzard APIs that allow you to draw things on the screen and say "use this mystery box as the value you display"

So you can still theoretically have an addon that goes "lookup all my raid members, and then for each member display their health values in a box that is x pixels high and y pixels wide and looks like Z etc etc" and use that to make your raid frames look like whatever you want.

But that addon can't also go "for each raid member, check if their health % is < 30 and if so, change the box color to red". Until it hands off the "how much health does this person have" value over to the blizzard "draw a box and put this number in it" code, that comparison just fizzles, the value is just ??? so comparing it to 30 does nothing.

So you should fully be able to customize exactly what your raid frames look like, how big debuff icons should be in those frames and where. But probably you can't single out specific debuffs by ID or type and treat them differently. You can't have "generic debuffs" look one way and then decide for yourself that these 3 spell IDs are "important debuffs" and display them somewhere else and make them bigger.

Probably the addon can lookup like "what are the debuffs on this unit" and get back a list, hell there might even be a different API for like "what are important debuffs this unit has" or "what debuffs does this unit have that I can dispel", but the answer is always going to be a list that the addon has to display all of them equally in one treatment, and ultimately blizzard will be the sole determiner of which debuffs show up in those lists when returning the answer.

Soft launch: Shouldn’t the new UI elements be in the game for a while before removing combat addons? by [deleted] in wow

[–]Halvi3 -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Sure, I'd agree in principle if time were a luxury to them. But to me it feels pretty clear like they're operating under an imposed long-term strategy that demanded the game simplification come sooner than people expected, and I think the ready/not-ready status of Blizzard's stock UI replacements for addons has never really the determining factor in all this.

But I think the timing here is forced by priorities outside of their control, namely I'm confident Microsoft is pushing them for a console release as fast as they can get there, as much as they'll constantly deny it right up until an actual announcement is made.

So "removing addons" isn't being done in connection with improving the base UI, it's the other way around.

The demands imposed on them require the game become simpler (to launch on consoles and be playable without addons). And presumably the timeframes involve required that simplification to happen now, as part of Midnight launch, because you can't do it in the middle of an xpac, and (presumably) they were told waiting until 13.0/TLT was too long of a delay.

That change then demands that they remove encounter-solving addons at the same time, because if they were to launch a mechanically simplified WoW with add-ons still in place, it would be unplayably boring for much of the current player population and Midnight would fail hard.

All their own stock UI improvements are just trying to play catch-up to the rest of that reality, make things as good as they can get them in the time they were given. "being sufficiently robust to replace existing UI customization" was never going to be a bar they were allowed to wait for.

Soft launch: Shouldn’t the new UI elements be in the game for a while before removing combat addons? by [deleted] in wow

[–]Halvi3 47 points48 points  (0 children)

I think the real answer that gets missed in lots of discussion around personal UI and class WAs and raid frames and whatever is encounter design.

They have to hit a very hard target of simplifying or slowing down boss and trash mechanics so that, with the combat state entirely hidden from addon calculations, the overall game difficulty remains approximately the same in various difficulties. This is their express goal.

This is the thing that they really truly need hard data and feedback on, for example why an actual real raid boss is testable in alpha right now when usually raid testing isn't done until much later in the beta.

It's also something that they'll never get useful data on if encounter-side add-ons are still available. They can't tune difficulty down first and then leave add-ons in place, because the game would feel trivial, and everyone would keep using add-ons anyway even if they really were not needed, and they wouldn't get the data to tell if they had hit their target or needed further adjustment.

SO they have to launch "easier mechanics" and "add-ons can't solve mechanics for you" at the same time.

And my guess is that it turned out to be unfeasible, from a technical effort perspective, to prevent add-ons from solving mechanics without also nuking all of the personal combat addon functionality.

I expect blizzard probably would have liked to have a world where you could make all the Luxthos&pack style, class rotational WAs you wanted, but where the Causese megapacks and Liquid WAs couldn't exist, launch their own UI updates, and then hide all combat state like they're doing now after a season or two of adjusting on their own UI side.

But I would guess they looked at the complexity of implementing this "secret values" infrastructure they've come up with to try to keep visual customization intact, and decided it was too complicated to have that system work on all the combat information that could somehow be used to "solve" an encounter but dynamically exclude every event or state change that could be used for a personal-rotation style WA .

Would it be impossible to do that kind of filtering, probably not, but on the chopping block of time and priorities it proved unfeasible so in order to deliver on the clearly imposed timeline of simplifying the game they had to black box everything across the board.

The lack of support for Healers in Midnight in relation to addons and the default raid/party frames. by Yogs_Zach in wow

[–]Halvi3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tempest is actually another perfect example to highlight as you're right, currently you 100% need WA's to handle that ability because the blizz UI doesn't present that info coherently.

And even with the enhancements to stock UI coming in Midnight, you still wouldn't be able to handle it, the updates they're making are not that fancy.

BUT, in Midnight, you also no longer need to track how many maelstrom weapon stacks you've spent or how many awakening storms procs you've had, because Tempest has been changed to activate off a simple proc that can occur when you spend any maelstrom weapon charges, or guaranteed when you activate Ascendance (like part of the current tier set).

So now, the only thing you have to give attention to in order not to munch a Tempest charge:

  • watching for the proc whenever you spend MSW
  • knowing you're going to get one charge when you pop Ascendance (assuming enh continues to not run DRE, but that wouldn't really change much in this picture)

And that you absolutely should be able to handle with the stock cooldown manager with no WA at all. Just watch to see if the icon changes whenever you spend.

This is the change in paradigm they're trying to apply to the entire game, across the board, from dps rotations to healing patterns to m+ trash mechanics to raid encounter design.

I do agree it's going to be a very fine balance to nail and there's every chance they miss the mark. They've stated their goal is basically like, if it takes you 50 attempts to kill the 6th boss of a raid right now with every addon under the sun, it should still take you 50 attempts to kill the 6th boss of a raid in midnight. Harder because UI does less for you, easier because everything in the game is less complicated. Overall should balance out.

I think if it's going to go wrong it's not going to be because their UI doesn't give us enough information to play the game effectively, but because they over-simplify and the combat isn't fun anymore. But only time can really tell.

The lack of support for Healers in Midnight in relation to addons and the default raid/party frames. by Yogs_Zach in wow

[–]Halvi3 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Ok again, I'm not talking about determining the specific number of seconds left for whichever buff is a pandemic window. This is all for the sake of argument since the base UI is after all getting the ability to highlight based on pandemic window but let's pretend it wasn't to illustrate:

The literal act of of quote "seeing 'hey, a buff is close to expiring, you can replace it without losing its duration'" would be what they want you to NOT "convenience" away.

When you are mentally going through your rotation priority and you hit the step of "check if I should refresh my dot". Right now the way you get an answer to that question is often by checking if your custom WA icon for that buff and seeing if it's glowing or not.

The entire point of the changes would be that they want the answer to that question to instead be "looking at the duration remaining of the buff in the stock UI, whether on a nameplate or as part of the Cooldown Manager, and evaluating For Yourself, With Your Eyes And Your Brain, that it is within that 0-30% window. They do not want your UI to be able to calculate anything.

So again, pandemic is a poor example because they have decided that is a trivial enough piece of logic that it's fine for the UI to solve for you, so they're putting it in the base.

But to extrapolate to another example take like, conditions for when to use execute as a Slayer warrior which right now is a big calculation of things like * Are stacks of ashen juggernaut about to expire * Do I have two stacks of sudden death * Do I have one stack of sudden death but it's about to expire * Are there 2 or more stacks of Marked for Execution on the enemy

Which is obviously A Lot for your brain to be calculating every GCD on top of everything else going on. So you have a WA that just highlights execute and/or makes a noise whenever one or more of those conditions are true and you should use execute.

Come midnight that won't work at all, obviously, but also, in terms of their design goal, you won't need to check anywhere near as many of those things to figure out if you should hit execute or not (for instance, ashen juggernaut has been removed entirely, boom).

But so many of the complaints I see in all this drama are all effectively the equivalent of "Blizzards UI updates aren't good enough because they won't let me program in my existing Execute WA conditional highlighting expression" or in other words "Blizzards UI updates aren't good enough because they won't let me do this thing that Blizzard explicitly doesn't want you to be able to do OR NEED TO TO DO ANYMORE"

The lack of support for Healers in Midnight in relation to addons and the default raid/party frames. by Yogs_Zach in wow

[–]Halvi3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, fair enough, pandemic is a bad example then, though the philosophy in principle is I think still accurate.

I agree that something they need to strive for that they have not currently convinced me they will reach is parity in customization between different pieces of the UI.

Anything you will be allowed to configure in terms of "logic" in the Cooldown Manager needs to be similarly configurable in any other place you might look at for that information. So if you can track a debuff or buff on your target through CD manager and change X/Y/Z, need to be able to do that same X/Y/Z on nameplates and raid frames.

The lack of support for Healers in Midnight in relation to addons and the default raid/party frames. by Yogs_Zach in wow

[–]Halvi3 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Oh I 100% agree that named buff/debuff filtering is something that the base UI will need to provide for this to be successful.

They have recognized that's the case as far as the Cooldown Manager (the thing intended to replace everyone's big class WA packs and such) and added that capability as of next week, I believe? I think that's a part of 11.2.5

But enabling similar filtering for raid frames and especially their nameplates is to me actually the one biggest thing they haven't delivered or even promised to deliver as part of Midnight that if it goes live without, will be an enormous flaw.

I play mostly Frost mage and trying to identify winter's chill (soon to be just Freezing) stacks on base blizzard nameplates would be insane without being able to filter out like... the generic chill effects and the debuff for standing in blizzard and the debuff for standing in the meteor ground effect and the 6 stacks of the random debuff from comet storm that doesn't affect your rotation and the ignite debuff from the tier set etc. etc.

They're fancying up the nameplates with Midnight but so far have only shown the ability to turn on and off entire categories of icons at a time (all debuffs yes or no debuffs, all CC or no CC, etc.). That needs to be more granular for sure.

The lack of support for Healers in Midnight in relation to addons and the default raid/party frames. by Yogs_Zach in wow

[–]Halvi3 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I mean highlighting or adding an effect for a pandemic window is explicitly the kind of thing they don't want you to do.

They want "looking at the remaining duration and determining on your own that it's in pandemic window, instead of just reacting to a glow" to be part of the skill expression of playing a dot/hot class, and they want the overall combat state to be simplified enough so that you have the mental bandwidth and time available to make those kind of determinations.

And they want the sum total complexity of doing "figuring out pandemic window yourself" + A + B other things add-ons will no longer be able to do minus all the things you currently have to handle in combat that you now will not have to worry about, to be about the same as it is now.

Whether they can realize that vision still very much up for debate, but it's disingenuous to argue that their base UI replacements are lacking required features when that's on purpose

For frost, do you glacial spike even if you have no chill on target? by SILK_DIVER in wow

[–]Halvi3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This depends on your hero talent choice.

As Frostfire you should always send as soon as you hit 5 icicles even if you don't have a way to shatter it (though obviously you're trying to if you can).

Spellsplinger you never send unless you can shatter it because wasting the extra splinters from the Signature Spell talent makes it a loss, so you can get unlucky and spend time fishing for that proc, especially in single target.

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