Thursday, May 21, 2009

Blue Post: Ok, GC Has Pissed Me Off

Liessmoor on the WoW forums asked a very simple question.


GC is there any new on the fix to moonkin 4pt8 that you may be able to share, or at least let us know if it being looked into since we have had no discussion on the bug?
Oddly enough GC commented back fairly quickly with this gem:
The reason we increased the proc chance from 5% to 15% is because of the issue where you can lose the proc on an existing Starfire. For a number of technical reasons, we can't apply the proc to a spell already being cast. (source)

My first reaction:

WTF?????

To say the least his comments have really pissed me off.

First off, its a little hard to believe that they are having technical issues that prevent them from making the 4T8 set bonus to work. Nightfall works this way, and the Glyph of Corruption work this way. However, I am not a programmer. I do not work for blizzard. I don't have a clue as to what the technical issues are. If GC says there are technical issues, I will trust that there are technical issues. However, that leads me to my second point.

What is the point of implementing a broken mechanic? If they can't get it to work, they should change it. I'm sure they can come up with other creative ideas for a set bonus. Heck, worst comes to worse they could rehash some old ones. Everyone loved the 4T5 set bonus. Just make it work with the IS and Wrath also. Fixed.

Finally, what has me the most pissed is that when he announced the buff a month back he made it sound like a buff. Instead it was a bandade fix. I feel like I've been mislead.

Thankfully, GC came back and said this:

The problem is that you can't modify a spell's cast time while the spell is already being cast. The tooltip is accurate... if frustrating.

We just talked about it and we might have a solution. It might not be hotfixable, but it shouldn't take until 3.2. We might lower the proc rate if we got it to work however. I'll try and update when we work it out.

I still don't understand the difference between 4T8 and the Warlock abilities, but it is good that they might have found a solution. Hopefully, it will be something worth while.

13 comments:

Unknown said...

hahaha i actually noticed this with my 4 set bonus i just started testing out last night. its an awesome proc provided it doesn't proc during a cast. its ridiculous but i'm glad its been noticed and i'm just not crazy. blizzard tards...


datta- chromaggus

rinku said...

how they would just have it cast instant starfire as bonus when your next cast finishes. like with the shammytalent Lightning Overload.

Vy said...

Well, I play a warlock and... warlock skills, talents and procs have been buggy or weird for aeons. Like when your trinket procs, your dots dont use to get stronger, you need to recast. Like the drain soul execute. And those death embrace talents which increases damage when target is below X% of health. The dumb thing is. Existing dots do not do more damage when target falls below X%. Instead, when you cast your dots and it lands on target with HP below X%, then the talent kicks in and you get the extra damage.

Anonymous said...

Yeah have had the 4p for awhile now. 2p of it still sits in my bank. It's frankly unusable even at 15% chance on IS tick. I just get to watch as every other class increases dps and I fall behind waiting for who knows how long. I don't understand the problem. I do know that the bug was brought up in 3.1 beta testing. That's a long time to go unfixed. My frustration grows daily.

Anonymous said...

So... basically... now it can only be used once (if procced) in rotation with the Wrath->Starfire-Eclipse? Or am I missing something?

Frenzy said...

I don't get his later comment with his definition of next. Both Nightfall and the 4T8 look to have the same meaning from the ingame description?

NightfallGives your Corruption and Drain Life spells a 4% chance to cause you to enter a Shadow Trance state after damaging the opponent. The Shadow Trance state reduces the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt spell by 100%.

Balance 4T8(4) Set: Each time your Insect Swarm deals damage, it has a chance to make your next Starfire cast within 10 sec instant.

Raysa said...

if blizzard would produce cars, we would have a lot of fun with our brakes. sometimes they brake, sometimes not.
BUT BLIZZARD HAS A FIX !!!
just get ur car to their garage, wait 3 month and get ur fixed car with 2 or 3 brake pedals, so at least 1 should work in a case of emergency...............

i play for 3 days now with the 4p bonus and i see myself up in the dmgmeters again, BUT i believe thats the benefit of the new spirit buff. Cause most of my 4p procs were eaten by the casted SF.
in some fights, i.e. ignis, i had some lucky procs while moving or while thrown up by ignis flame jet.
in those fights i insanely topped the meters.
sadly i have no reliable solution on this and i think the mechanic of the 4p bonus isn't a good one. i estimate that some moonkins will take 4pT8 in arenas and hope for a fast proc with a crit following.

Anonymous said...

Looks like GC can't find in his dictionary word 'current' :/

I wander how they plan if their next Friday is today :D

pasqoo said...

So the solution is using a Solar Eclipse instead of a Lunar's one and cast the istant Starfire when it procs? :P

Lissanna said...

Programming fixes for anything is actually really time consuming for them. There is a huge team involved with a ton of code and you can't just make one change to the code without having really strange and dumb problems pop up somewhere else.

I think their internal testing builds are at least a month ahead of what is on the live servers, or even the PTR...

That said, sometimes the developers just don't understand what problem we're having...

Adam said...

I don't know much about Warlocks. How likely is it that they will be casting SB when they get a nightfall proc? If they're not spamming SB the way we do SF, it may affect them the same way, they just would never notice.

Vy, your DoT damage doesn't increase until you recast them because damage is calculated when the spell is cast, not with each tick. You can also cast a DoT at the end of your trinket buff, watch the buff fall off and your DoTs don't lose damage.

Shamad said...

Vy; What you're talking about with the dots is due to how the game calcs these effects. It used to be that no recalcs were done mid-uptime since it's not something that makes sense to do for normal damage spells. However, this was later updated so changes in +dmg effects were recalced during the uptime of DoTs. The problem is this still excludes percentage-based procs and talents, which has lead to interesting effects such as the SPriest exploits of refreshable SW:Pain that maintains a specific dmg effect bonus through refreshes, giving the interesting exploits such as seen on maly phase1 with spark buffs being maintained for the whole phase.

For some reason the seemingly simple and obvious fix of having dots recalc % based modifiers in realtime has yet to be seen.

Anonymous said...

Hi Graylo, I absolutely love your blog. I was watching this forum post and I thought this might cheer you up about our T8 (at least in part):
"Blogs like Graylo's had a lot more influence than this thead (even if I did piss him off). :)
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer"

blue response to the "Any news on moonkin 4pcT8"

Well-deserved fame :)