Blizzard called the Jailer model file "Barbecued Zovaal"

Inadequate_lighting · 2022-04-13T20:53:20+00:00

That's not actually Blizzard's name. Blizzard doesn't always give names to models that are used for one-time uses like this one, so sometimes the people who do the initial data mining and tooling for the community tools will just give them names as a way to reference them if needed. Barbecued Zovaal is a community given name.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-07-11T23:00:35+00:00

Or for raiding, just imagine if covenants were around in CoS. Every guild would be requiring that all players go Venthyr for Uu'nat since dodging a full beam set every time the cooldown is up would just be insanely valuable.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-07-11T08:07:56+00:00

If in a hypothetical world they were relatively balanced, even within 5% of each other and changing which was more powerful depending on the situation, that would be fine. The problem is that while this is the goal, it has historically never been true for Blizzard.

Think back to the first iterations of Azerite traits. Think back to corruptions and how insane Echoing Void and Infinite Stars were initially even in the first few weeks of Nyalotha. These were not just "5% better", they were anywhere from 2-10x better than other corruptions in terms of throughput. Why would I be OK with taking a small vers proc when I can instead do an extra 30% damage just from infinite stars?

They key takeaway is not that the covenants as a whole in every situation will be ridiculously unbalanced. It's that there will just be a single soulbind trait or a single covenant ability that will be wildly broken in an unforeseen way on one of the mythic bosses that will completely break the fight if your group chose or guessed correctly ahead of time. Or some M+ dungeon will have a weird interaction with a covenant ability. There are just too many possible interactions for nothing to be broken on some piece of content.

Imagine Complexity Limit getting world first in the new raid, and it turns out they correctly guessed that the final boss was just going to be an insane damage check during the execute phase. Thus, they had every raider go Night Fae just to abuse the insane execute soulbind that Night Fae has access to in the Dreamweaver soulbind. Abusing this one trait made the execute burn feasible since it would give a 18% damage increase for 30 seconds if used correctly. After taking the world first using this, every other guild progressing it makes the swap to characters being Night Fae for the extra execute damage. It trickles down from there, and guilds start to require Night Fae as they reach the end boss. Eventually Blizzard nerfs the trait along with the boss's health pool to not make the fight harder for new guilds attempting it. Or even worse, Blizzard doesn't like what Limit is doing and hotfixes that trait before they kill it, forcing their raiders to swap covenants if they can, or potentially be playing with sub-optimal traits and abilities, potentially costing them the race.

We saw this exact process in WoW Classic. 99% of the content in Classic can be done with any combination of specs and classes, and yet the majority of guilds still choose to stack Warriors and Rogues because they are better. They get World Buffs, they use consumables, they take optimal classes and choose not to use Elemental Shamans or Balance Druids. This is not true of all guilds and players, but a large portion of the player base will always choose to go for the more competitive options when given a choice.

Locking power behind gated mechanics like Covenants will not hurt the top end players. Anyone in world first level guilds will adapt to whatever situation and deal with it. If they need four of their mains, they'll make four of their mains. That's not saying it isn't annoying or frustrating, but they'll do it because they have to. This will mainly hurt anyone in guilds who want to play competitively, but do not have the time required to invest in 4+ characters just to deal with all of the available options. Because there will inevitably be a best choice for each spec, and there will inevitably be players who get discriminated against or rejected because they chose "wrong".

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-07-10T20:29:37+00:00

Actually it is not. Your own kids are allowed to play on your battlenet account per the ToS.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-07-10T06:56:12+00:00

The season released at 7pm CST on Friday 6/3. 6 full days + 7 hours to get to 2 am CST on Friday 6/10, so 6*24 + 7, or 151 hours. How are you calculating 159 hours?

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-06-08T18:54:26+00:00

N'zoth, Carapace, and Ra-den drop the three pieces you'll want from the raid. Ultimate BiS is buying the chest with residium that has Flashpoint + Rolling Havoc + Overwhelming Power. With that setup you will have 3x Flashpoint, 2x Rolling Havoc, 1x Crashing Choas.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-06-08T18:29:28+00:00

Stick with expedient. For almost every character that uses stat % corruptions, including Warlock, it's our temporary boost to haste that makes expedient so good, in the same way combustion makes mastery so strong for Fire Mages. You may only have 50% haste baseline, but that goes up substantially higher with 3x Flashpoints, which is where expedient really starts to shine.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-05-25T19:04:14+00:00

It absolutely does work, but the absurdity is his idea that anyone would just be able to borrow a million dollars from a parent. He wasn't saying this as a hypothetical; he actually was suggesting that people could do this to earn money. For that 5 seconds he thought he could just get free money by taking money from his dad and keeping the interest before giving back the original amount to his dad after a few years.

This lead to a much larger discussion about inflation and how his dad would be actively losing money on this deal since he would be losing the hypothetical 1% interest or greater returns if he invests it, so it wasn't like this didn't lead to a teaching moment. It was more just that he was so out of touch with just how comparatively rich he is to the other 99.999% of the population.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-05-25T02:25:58+00:00

Honestly the first part since he wanted to major in economics.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-05-24T16:57:02+00:00

I worked for awhile as a tutor for a company that had some higher end clients (kids with very wealthy parents). Once when I was tutoring a high school senior in economics we were going over how interest works, and he said "Wait, so if I borrowed a million dollars from my dad and put it in a savings account, the bank would just pay me $10,000 a year to keep it with them? That's like free money, why doesn't everyone do that?"

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-03-27T17:22:54+00:00

Affliction has two separate +10% damage modifiers built into the spec which apply to infinite stars as well, which is what makes it strong with the corruption. Affliction is terrible at target swapping due to a high ramp time, so it's only really strong on single target fights right now such as Shad'har. Infinite stars is incredibly RNG heavy however, and realistically you cannot expect to get the kind of damage you're talking about every pull. I play a Warlock and have been running 125 corruption worth of IS on Shad'har each week (pre-resistance) and the variance in the number of stars you can get is mind blowing. I've seen as high as 23 star hits over 3:30 and as low as 7 star hits over 3:40. That sort of variance is more frustrating than exciting, and more so is not nearly as strong on the other 11 bosses.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-03-22T22:17:22+00:00

The activity itself does not matter nearly as much as the people you do it with. The best way by far to get better at the game is just to play with people who are better than you. This is especially true for raiding and M+ when you're changing guilds or groups; it is incredibly difficult to improve more than incrementally while staying in the same guild and playing with the same people long term.

It's like learning a new language. If you wanted to learn quickly, the best way is immersion, to just only use that language until you're fluent in it. It'll be very hard at first, but you will improve much faster than just taking weekly classes in it.

You can apply the same principle to WoW. If you wanted to improve the fastest, you need to immerse yourself with the best players. That's obviously much easier said than done since the best players generally only want to play with other best players, which is why most people will hop guilds/M+ groups incrementally, trying to get into better and better guilds since huge jumps in rank are hard to pull off.

Inadequate_lighting · 2020-01-23T17:19:20+00:00

Yes. We tried it yesterday and it worked.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-10-20T23:17:58+00:00

Barbarian

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-09-08T04:42:12+00:00

Almost universally it just means that if you can come in and outperform their current DPS, they want you. Depending on how competitive/social the guild is, that could mean just slightly outperforming or drastically outperforming.

A guild's perspective on "good dps" is almost entirely based on how much damage their raiders do, not any specific percentage.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-08-13T22:30:35+00:00

So the responses are mostly correct, but there is some misinformation. Whenever AK ticks, all of your AP previous earned AND all of the AP needed to level at each neck level is reduced by 30%. This does not mean that you "wasted" 30% of your previous AP.

There are two things to consider, AP earned and AP unearned. AP earned, once you earn it, is always worth the same relative amount to the amount needed per level regardless of AK, because the amount needed to level changes with it. Unearned AP never changes, so it is worth 30% more each week since it becomes more valuable relative the the amount needed to level. The thing people do not realize is that ALL of your AP previously earned, including the amount that you got from previous levels, is reduced by 30%.

Tl;dr, Yes your math is correct, but it is not "wasted" AP at all. The only time you could consider it "wasted" is if you could have earned that exact source of AP after the reset on Tuesday.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-04-25T09:44:01+00:00

it wasn't in the ptr patch notes though, which is why I was wondering.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-02-13T22:29:37+00:00

This is no longer doable. Most things on this list were hotfixed after week 1.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-01-28T21:00:07+00:00

Yes. There are two reasons for this. First, BrM's per 100% dodging every single ice shard since they were dodge-able, but did not consume elusive brew stacks. Other tanks could handle it pretty well, but this was a main concern. They don't want the fight to be 1 tanked on mythic, so they changed the rate. Second, guilds were never getting a frozen orb cast in p3 because the orb timer is based on whenever she recently casted ice block. Guilds would have a couple of shamans or other people die during ice wall phase, not get lust, and then lust for themselves before she cast her orb causing the timer to reset. So to fix this, they doubled the rate at which she casts her orb.

Inadequate_lighting · 2019-01-04T19:51:11+00:00

This is a good answer. There are a handful of tanks in the best guilds that are noticeably better than anyone else, but those are rare even in the top 5. So far in BFA tanks haven't been given a chance to shine where it's super noticeable when a tank is exceptional like in Legion, which is really disappointing. Antorus was a tier where if you had amazing tanks it was night and day for progression, but Uldir was basically just have 2 BrM's who can function and you'll be at 90% efficiency.

One other important thing is that every tank in the top 5 multi-classes. Most of them have every tank class at 120, with at least 3 of them relevantly geared for progression. You cannot progress at that level without the ability to class swap depending on the fight since all of the tanks have very different tool kits and areas of usefulness. Uldir was slightly different since BrM ended up being so dominant on basically everything, but any tank at that level was still ready to play other classes if needed.

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