And, ideally, blizzard doesn’t make raids that require anywhere near the “perfect” comp, and let’s the top end players optimize their raid to the point where the content is super easy for them, rather than trying to challenge those players and by extension make those behaviors the norm or the expectation.
1 Like
Or starting in wrath the offer multiple difficulties and you can pick and choose which one you want, which is generally better than trying to force players to do one thing.
Ret doesn’t really scale well though. They are only simming this well because of a set bonus that has nothing to do with stat scaling and a trinket that also has no real stats.
Without those 2 items, even with Shadowmourne ret would be lower middle of the pack at best.
1 Like
To an extent. The multiple difficulty argument for not making hard modes accessible falls apart for me a bit with the hard modes giving better loot than normals.
I personally find yogg 0 a good way to handle that. The best loot is on a manageable difficulty, the super challenge gives a reward, but not one for player power.
Most games on hard give the player worse loot, or the same loot with fewer consumables or other resources. When you start giving the better players better gear because they could beat the harder boss, but lock that away from everyone else by being behind harder content, it creates a weird environment where the best players gear past the hard modes and quickly find it easy, but the lesser players are the ones that needed that gear to engage with that content.
I would be much more ok with hyper challenging raids giving more loot/cosmetics/etc instead of better loot and keeping that exclusivity of “just get better” if you want to do it.
Giving them better loot was always a poor decision, just like gating the good arena gear behind high rating requirements was. It makes the barrier to entry higher, rather than smoothing the path for players to reach the top end content.
2 Likes
But shouldn’t harder content reward harder gear, how is a harder difficulty different than same doing a higher level dungeon?
The arena/pvp argument doesn’t work as you aren’t competing against higher geared opponents in pve but against a static opponent. Which gives you the option to either do the easier difficulty to get the gear or jump right into the harder content.
Most games don’t do that to preserve the difficulty.
If you give the hard modes better gear, they only stay “hard” for a short burst of time (your first kill).
The best players don’t need that gear to beat them, and giving them that gear makes the fights no longer hard.
Meanwhile the worse players get the worse gear, making their transition to the hard modes more difficult than it is for the people playing on hard from the start because of gear differences.
The better players already have an advantage, hard difficulties are supposed to close the gap between what a good player and typical player can complete, not widen it.
Typically you’d see the easier difficulties given the better gear so that they can kill the same boss as the better players that chose to play on hard.
1 Like
I like where you’re going with this, titles/pets/mounts/vanity etc. are good rewards for the high tier gameplay, gear is a nice motivator but the top players play to be the top, you’re just giving the best gear to the people who need it least, making the prestige having access to the content at all, instead of everyone gets a chance but only a few can push the game to its upper limits.
Yeah, pretty much. It also makes the “hard” modes less hard for those already capable of doing them, but harder for those that can’t, as they lack the ability to bridge the gap between their skill level and the tuning with gear.
2 Likes
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t see the problem.
Players would do the harder content just to say they’d done it for cosmetic rewards, but inversely how is giving them better gear a problem? Isn’t being able to smack things harder fun when you have that better gear?
How would removing hardmode gear change that? If a group can’t do hardmodes they still wouldn’t be able to.
Yes, it’s just fun that shouldn’t be reserved for the best players of the game exclusively, as it’s important for weaker players to have that gear to bridge the gap in tuning differences.
The best players of videogames tend to handicap themselves to create a challenge if needed. The weaker ones are the players needing power boosts to experience the tougher content.
Sometimes the gear is the difference. For example: iron council was basically just a DPS check on hard mode. Guilds that could do it early on never needed gear to kill that boss, while for guilds under that level of optimization, gear might have been the only thing keeping them from that boss, but it’s being given exclusively to those that never needed it to succeed.
The hard mode gear makes the game easier for those looking for a challenge, and it makes the game harder for those that needed it to attempt the bosses in their harder, sometimes more interesting forms.
It kind of does the opposite of what hard mode difficulties typically do in games.
I’m generally ok with giving more good loot to hard mode kills. I just don’t think that loot should widely be exclusive to them. (The odd item/boss here and there is fine, I just dislike entire tiers of gear being hard exclusive)
It also creates the situation like we saw in Ulduar…
People begging for the hard modes to be out in their final tuning so that they are accessible and that gear can be earned.
Meanwhile the top skilled players are like “it’s already easy!” As they continue their 12th+ full clear with gear that’s basically giving them the boost the lesser players are asking for.
2 Likes
But you completely ignore my question, how would removing hardmode gear make hardmodes more accessible?
If anything it makes it worse since people who might be able to do an easier hardmode then use the gear to do harder modes can’t do that.
I wouldn’t remove it per say. I’d make the normal mode gear strong enough to make hard modes approachable for the majority, and trivial for the best players with hyper optimized groups (they get the challenge when trying to run it without normal mode gear), and just give them more of it so they can finish off BiS lists more efficiently before the next tier.
not to mention how much more dps ret gets from tiny abom than anyone else gets from it or dbw
Whomever programmed that trinket in Wrath never made a melee trinket before and it shows.
3 Likes
Tiny Abomination in a Jar Phase 4
Item Level 264
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves hit rating by 85 (2.59% @ L80).
Equip: Your melee attacks have a chance to grant you a Mote of Anger. When you reach 8 Motes of Anger, they will release, causing you to instantly attack for 50% weapon damage with one of your melee weapons.
Just something I would like to reiterate, regarding the TAJ numbers:
The SOV changes only gave us one extra chance to proc per Crusader strike and Divine Storm (per target hit on DS, but we don’t usually cleave with SoV). A LARGE portion of the sim DPS that we gained is not from SOV changes in Phase 2, but is from stuff like righteous vengeance and judgment debuff and SoV debuff application and Hammer of Wrath not proccing before on the sim. As it should have. CS and DS proc’ing SoV is two sources in a long list of proc sources added. Only now with PTR could we test all the proc sources and confirm them. Tiny Abomination in a Jar was always going to be strong, and even without SoV changes would have been considerably strong, likely only a couple hundred DPS worse than it is now (currently +1250 DPS over DBW). It’s not like the DPS we gained overnight on the sim is all from the SoV - TAJ interaction. The majority of it is not. The sim just wasn’t properly modelling the trinket, period.
If you don’t believe me, check the GitHub pull request.
Here is our list of CONFIRMED proc sources from TAJ:
(these are BLIZZLIKE, collected from Elitist Jerks then confirmed on PTR)
seal of vengeance damage
seal of vengeance debuff application
crusader strike damage
divine storm damage
righteous vengeance debuff application
judgement debuff application
judgement damage
auto attack
hammer of wrath
CONFIRMED TO NOT PROC:
seal of command damage
vindication
heart of the crusader
hand of reckoning
TAJ cannot proc itself
So as you can see, if you remove the 1 extra SoV debuff proc chance from CS and DS, you are still left with an enormous list of proc sources, and the trinket will still be nuts. It always was. The majority of these proc sources, were NOT on the sim until a few days ago.
Sim developers wanted to wait for PTR confirmation and be conservative and not change things based on old forum posts, which is 1000% understandable, and so TAJ always undersimmed by a huge margin and now people have a mistake impression of how strong TAJ is supposed to be.
If you reverted both the SoV changes (couple hundred dps) and the HoR changes (+1k dps) from Phase 2, Retribution would be simming around the low 15,000s dps range. WITH Shadowmourne, a legendary weapon, TAJ, and our set bonus, full bis. This is a little below the middle of the pack. Without Shadowmourne the HoR/SoV buffs, we would be among the worst single-target dps specs in the game, 14,000 dps or so, even with our set bonus, and you’d probably see all kinds of threads on here asking for buffs.
Just wanted to clarify that bit, since it seems people think that the SoV changes interacting with TAJ is the sole reason it’s insane. It’s more than that.
Also, they are just sims people. They are wrong, like, all the time. Let’s wait for some real raid log data, maybe, before we freak out?
Is it really so bad if Fury and Ret are similar in DPS in ICC? Also, let’s not forget that Fury dominates Ret, and most other classes, on cleave at this point, despite Ret’s set bonus and buffs.
The gap on Shadowmourne damage is close enough on single target, and on cleave Fury wins by a pretty compelling margin, so there are pros and cons. Shadowmourne is not automatically “RET PRIO” because of this.
6 Likes
yeah that was my poor attempt at a joke, ret is god awful on retail the “rework” really did nothing and the passive instruments of retribution is killing ret 
1 Like
whaaaat? nooo waaaayy its soooooo goooood doood
literally told everyone the rework was pointless when it was on ptr but nobody listened
1 Like
Hated it since the holy power rework basically, quit it during BFA when the rotation caused carpel tunnel.
2 Likes
bfa was the only expansion i also quit ret. the beginning of the expansion its rotation was so boring. a ton of open gcds with nothing to press. it only got fun at the end of the expansion