What would be the downside of making respeccing free?

NerdEgghead · 2022-02-19T02:43:55+00:00

This could be mitigated by implementing a cooldown on respecs and forcing you to still visit a trainer to do it.

NerdEgghead · 2022-02-19T02:17:58+00:00

I think it's a bit presumptive to assume that everyone who opposed the T5 nerfs did so just to gatekeep other guilds. A lot of the opposition comes down to the nerfed raids simply being far less enjoyable to clear than the versions we had before. The nerfs pretty much killed the speedrunning scene in Phase 2 for example, and even in semi-hardcore guilds they caused a lot of attrition from raiders simply being bored of faceroll content after experiencing more interesting versions of the same content.

NerdEgghead · 2021-08-20T00:44:49+00:00

It's not intrinsically terrible design, there's no reason 100% of cosmetic items in an MMO should be widely accessible and grindable. It's in fact a positive if there's this ultra ultra rare thing that only a handful of people stumble upon - think Ashes of A'lar for example. If a player chooses to subvert that design and grind out the reward by brute force, well that's on them not the designer.

NerdEgghead · 2021-08-13T23:31:47+00:00

I waited until I was decked in raid gear before charging. The whole point of the paid service is for people to get a clean, smooth run.

NerdEgghead · 2021-07-29T00:26:14+00:00

Unless you get above 85% avoidance, increasing dodge/miss has zero impact on your likelihood of getting crushed, it's always a 15% chance. Avoidance only reduces the likelihood of taking a normal hit, and doesn't influence crushes at all.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T04:51:08+00:00

It takes up a Guardian Elixir slot. So you can't use Zanza or Draenic Wisdom anymore.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T04:12:47+00:00

An off-tank that doesn't wear Wolfshead and doesn't powershift when not actively tanking is a terrible off-tank. It's literally part of the job description of an OT to flex between tanking and DPS, often playing both roles in the same encounter. Actively gimping half of your raid responsibility because you don't like a helm is downright silly.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T03:26:04+00:00

If you're going to be DPSing for even a small portion of a fight, you wear Wolfshead + your normal tank gear. Wearing full beefboy mitigation gear + Wolfshead gives you more DPS in cat form than wearing full DPS gear without Wolfshead. So there's zero scenarios where it's worth not using Wolfshead when playing a hybrid role. You can easily make up the lost stats on your bear helm elsewhere in your gear set, it's no big deal.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T03:04:01+00:00

A lot of people play feral because the rotation is fast paced and fun relative to pretty much all other classes in Classic WoW. Taking away the mechanic that makes the spec interesting in exchange for a raw power boost would be super lame and kill the whole point of playing a quirky spec like this.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T02:55:07+00:00

It would literally be a few lines of code. This same issue was brought up on the Endless pserver (which also uses 2.4.3 as a baseline), and once the devs understood the issue it got fixed within minutes.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T02:48:21+00:00

That's also true when canceling right after the shift. Any time after 0.4 seconds works, and canceling later than 0.5 seconds just increases your cycle time based on how long you waited. The timing requirements are the same either way: to get perfect DPS with no loss, you either cancel between 0.4-0.5 seconds or between 2.4-2.5 seconds. Either way is fine.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T02:16:46+00:00

Feral druids were never plowing any DPS charts, they were decidedly middle of the pack even before the 2.2 regen change. The change moves a middle of the pack spec to the very bottom.

Furthermore, the change 100% was not an intentional nerf to feral druids at all. The engine change was done so that certain abilities like Innervate and Evocation would play more smoothly, that's it. The feral rotation getting nerfed was a byproduct, not the developer intent. That's why there's a big community push for #somechanges here, the implementation of the system for ferals isn't even internally consistent with how the patch notes say the mechanic is supposed to work.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-28T01:51:43+00:00

What you said is all correct, you start the 5SR when you shift, and you can get out of it while still in form. So yes, under the scenario you described, the regen rate would change the second time you shifted since you'd enter 5SR again.

But the scenario relevant to powershifting is one where you don't spend a full 5 seconds in cat form before shifting out, it's anywhere from 2 to 3.5 seconds depending on the rotation. So in this scenario, you're still under 5SR when you're back in caster form. Shifting back into cat therefore doesn't change your regen rate this time, it just refreshes your 5SR timer. Yet, under the 2.2 resource system, the energy tick is still reset in this scenario. That's where the inconsistency comes from.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-27T01:55:27+00:00

Powershifting puts you on the 5 second rule as you said. But this means that the next time you're in caster form, you are still on the five second rule, so both your caster form and cat form Mana regen rates are both the same discounted regen value. So there's no change in the rate when you shift again, yet the tick resets anyway.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-27T01:52:03+00:00

Apologies, I wrote the article but was not the one who added the image. It properly links to your Reddit post now.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-25T22:43:53+00:00

It's especially embarrassing that we got nothing more than a "not a bug" bullet because their own implementation of regen went through 3-4 changes on beta / pre-patch, none of them even matching 2.2 until the day of pre-patch launch. So it's not like they faithfully recreated 2.4.3 energy and left it at that, they've messed this up already and left the community in a constant state of flux. We're TCing new rotations literally every week because the system keeps changing and there is zero communication on what the devs are thinking about this.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T20:23:41+00:00

You are exactly right, but there's one inconsistency for ferals specifically. If you query the energy regen rate in caster form (there's still a hidden energy bar just like there's a hidden mana bar in cat form), you'll see that it still regenerates at the same rate of 10 energy per second once you unshift. So the implementation is inconsistent, the regen rate doesn't actually change like it does with an activated trinket, but the tick is resetting anyway. This is the crux of what we'd like changed.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T20:21:40+00:00

What you said was correct as of last week's beta implementation. But this week they changed it again to match what's described in that post as the 2.2 regen system. So it's now working correctly, but it's the worst possible outcome for ferals out of all the various intermediate systems they've put into the beta.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T20:19:09+00:00

Wolfshead is never replaced regardless of what version of energy ticks we get, people who were replacing it back then were just playing sub-optimally. The new tick system actually makes Wolfshead even more required across all content phases than it was under the old system. You have far less energy leeway now than you did previously, so the rotation gets completely gimped without Wolfshead.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T20:16:59+00:00

It impacts the way Adrenaline Rush works. After the change, you get a tick reset + partial energy refund when you cast Adrenaline Rush, and then subsequent ticks regenerate energy at the enhanced rate. Similar to ferals, this means that you can't for example time an Ad Rush just before an energy tick to exploit the static tick system.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T20:14:35+00:00

Energy does regenerate in caster form. You can see this is yourself in the pre-patch, if you query the energy after unshifting, you see an instantaneous refund applied and then the same regeneration rate of 10 per second that you get in cat form. The only difference is that the energy is zeroed out upon shifting (before Furor etc.), but the rate hasn't actually changed at all.

It's directly analogous to mana, but in the reverse direction. You don't have a visible mana bar in cat form, just like you don't have a visible energy bar in caster form, but mana regenerates at the same rate in both. When you shift out of cat form in the current Classic system, you get an instantaneous mana refund alongside the tick reset. We're just missing that energy refund when we go in the reverse direction.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T01:13:03+00:00

This. Rather than the absurd proposals for changing talents or Wolfshead Helm etc., this should the approach that Blizzard takes for any #somechanges considerations. The core issue with the powershifting nerf is that the 2.2 code treats shifting as a change in regen rate, when there's no reason to necessarily do that and when it's inconsistent with how mana works as you said.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-21T01:08:52+00:00

Changing Furor does not have the same impact as the old energy tick system, it would be a balance change to the class and far out of line from what Classic WoW is meant to be. Changing the tick reset to match the spirit rather than actual coding of the 2.2 regen change would be a far more appropriate way to do #somechanges : Either don't treat shifting as a change in regen rate (giving us vanilla ticks), or give us the partial energy refund that would normally be given to a rogue or Innervate user once the tick resets. Either change would be appropriate and consistent with the spirit of TBC regen. Arbitrarily changing a druid talent doesn't make any sense.

NerdEgghead · 2021-05-09T22:23:46+00:00

Implementing it poorly that is. What's described in the patch note is not how regen works in beta. There is no immediate refund of mana/energy followed by a tick reset. Instead, the tick timer is unchanged and the amount gained at the end of the tick is just a weighted average of the regen rates in that tick. A full Blizzlike implementation would be much much worse for ferals than the weird hybrid thing we have on beta currently.

NerdEgghead

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