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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: World of Warcraft Classic

« Last post by Fallowgrey on June 16, 2018, 04:53:06 AM »

I thought the cutest part was explaining table normalization as a "new" programming thing.  Like data structure practice just didn't exist in the early 2000s.  (Lemme save you that quick Google: 1971)

But I guess any opportunity taken to educate is a good thing.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: World of Warcraft Classic

« Last post by Marco on June 15, 2018, 08:17:36 PM »

Thinking on this a bit more, I'm particularly curious about macros and addons.  In classic, the API offered less combat log information and could omit events altogether based on range.  But it was also much less restrictive, allowing addons like classic Decursive, or HateMe which created a one-button tanking rotation.  That doesn't sound like data-driven behavior, and it doesn't sound like a small amount of effort to add a "behave like classic" flag to the API.  Allowing precise threat meters and disallowing Decursive isn't exactly faithful to the classic experience.  Of course, we also have much more sophisticated addon authors today, who would likely take the capabilities of the classic API well beyond what people did back then.  AVR (drawing on the field of battle and sharing those drawings with others) will quickly be implemented if it's possible, imprecise threat meters could be made more precise with better theorycrafting, etc..

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: World of Warcraft Classic

« Last post by Honorata on June 15, 2018, 07:09:22 PM »

Hard to tell. I expect by "patch 1.12" they mean "the 1.12 that most of the classic community has gotten used to since that's what all the private servers were based on." I have no idea what sub-build that tends to be, since a quick google shows that MaNGOS (the scripting, etc. of the back-end for most of those servers) is compatible with 1.12.x.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Current code with classic data/behavior was what Talarian (twitter friend) speculated would be the choice they made for development, and it's my understanding this is how Everquest runs their classic/progression servers, so there's precedent for it. Not sure how "true to life" the experience is, although at this point, Classic's been theorycrafted for 14 years so how "true to life" the experience can even be is, uh, up for debate.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Marco on June 15, 2018, 02:38:45 PM »

There was one more bit of new information in the dev Q+A: Azerite armor (head, shoulders, chest) of epic quality will only come from sources with weekly lockouts, and will binned into 15-ilvl increments.  For mythic+, this means it won't drop from the dungeons themselves, but it can come from the weekly chest.  If it does, it will match the item level of drops from one of the current raid tier difficulties, whereas other types of gear from the chest comes in 5-ilvl increments based on your highest mythic+ completed.

The intent is that you won't be spamming mythic+ dungeons to try to get copies of an Azerite armor piece, and you won't be deciding between ilvl 360 and ilvl 365 Azerite armor pieces based on some spreadsheet of their trait values.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: World of Warcraft Classic

« Last post by Marco on June 15, 2018, 12:26:43 PM »

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/21881587/dev-watercooler-world-of-warcraft-classic

This mostly reads as a kind of work blog, which is unusual for Blizzard and maybe not all that interesting.  As far as players are concerned, I think the only big reveal here is that classic will be based on patch 1.12.  I'm not sure if that means 1.12.0 or 1.12.3, and it matters; there were some pretty big changes to riding skill in 1.12.1.

They do say they will be using basically current code with old data, to avoid having to maintain the old code.  I wonder how much new behavior will bleed through from using the current code.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Honorata on June 15, 2018, 11:09:07 AM »

You're unlikely to see much in the way of opposing faction players if you level in the first week or so of the expac, and that's really where most of the benefit of war mode is. The 10% bonus only applies to the individual WQs and not the emissaries, and AP income from individual WQs quickly becomes a "nice but drop in the bucket" thing relative to your overall AP pool. It might be worth turning Warmode on if you're min-maxing your AP income from WQs, but for most players,you won't be super behind if you don't do it. (Based on incomes on beta you're seeing maybe an additional 25 AP/WQ and an additional 5 resources/WQ in warmode, neither of which are gonna break the bank.)

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Snique on June 15, 2018, 07:57:02 AM »

I've just not been motivated to play in the beta, but my experience in trying to get some things finished up on live convinces me I'll never turn on war mode. In particular, the whole notion of shared rares, non-faction-tagging and such goes immediately to sh*t If you're flagged. Lots of specs AOE as part of their normal rotation, which means you're going to be hitting opposite faction players will you or no. It's going to be impossible to tell that from deliberately hitting people, and people are going to hit back.

The boost for war mode now needs to make up for my inability to hit world rares or shared tag targets, as well as the time I'm going to spend running back to my corpse, which may or may not be camped. Nuh unh. Not gonna happen.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Honorata on June 15, 2018, 03:42:43 AM »

Perhaps he meant rp realms don't cross-realm with non-rp realms or rp realms outside our initial crossrealm cluster? because we've always been clustered with kirin tor & argent dawn since they started doing "old zone cross realming." This still puts our zone populations much much lower than it is for non-rp servers.

other notes: bellular pointed out on twitter that current ptr build is a more current build than what's on the beta, including some class changes that aren't on beta.

shaman dps players in particular mad about q&a answer about their specs being "whoops we ran out of time, we'll make those changes in 8.1"

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Marco on June 14, 2018, 05:36:03 PM »

Two things I noted from the Q+A (well, the first half):

* Cross-realm mythic raiding will be enabled once 100 alliance and 100 horde guilds have killed the final boss of that raid on mythic.  I bet that number needs adjusting downward some day.

* Ion said RP servers don't cross-realm with other (presumably non-connected) servers, so in theory the only time you should see players from other realms in the world, including in war mode, is when people have formed cross-realm groups.  I don't know if I believe that given how often I see players from other realms out in the world.  (Although it is consistent with how poorly Argus invasion points worked for us without explicitly using the group finder.)  For example, I just experimentally hearthed to Suramar and I see people from Argent Dawn, Kirin Tor, and The Scryers just hanging around not doing much; it seems unlikely that they were all only here because they're grouped with an Earthen Ring player to hang out at Shal'Aran.

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Outside Azeroth - General Chatter / Re: Battle for Azeroth

« Last post by Marco on June 14, 2018, 10:58:50 AM »

8.0 has hit the PTR.  They haven't announced a release date for 8.0 to go live, although early-to-mid-July seems likely.

There was a developer Q+A which I won't have time to watch until later.  From the mmo-champion summary, I see "It is intended that you aren't able to swap gear while inside Mythic+ dungeons."  I don't think many of us were swapping around gear between trash and bosses, but this will suck if you accidentally start a keystone while in the wrong gear set.  (The same problem already applies if you start a keystone with the wrong talents, of course.)

Another change that floated by recently is that "windowed fullscreen" and "exclusive fullscreen" have been merged into just "fullscreen" in the client (for Windows).  This change is apparently driven by DirectX 12.  The main upshot is that you can't make your fullscreen resolution different from your desktop resolution, and if you want to change the gamma you'll have to do that through your graphics card control panel.