Episode 40 - Ion Hazzikostas Interview

It's another big week, Mobs and Minions, as Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Game Designer, joins Bay and Ana on Final Boss. They call him "Watcher" on both the forums and on Twitter because of all the various floating gnomes named SomethingWatcher when raid bosses and zones are tested on the PTR. Ion lets us know how our pathetic desire to attribute portions of the game to individual developers betraaaaaaays us when it comes to making the game better, but Ion is in fact to blame for not only Sindragosa's scream but also Thorim and Faction Champions. If it goes wrong in Ulduar, blame Cele--blame Watcher. (Not Zarhym.)

We start off with boss specifics: least and most favorites! The least favorites, Rhyolith and Ambershaper Unsok, mainly had problems with the interactions between players and boss being especially -- should I use the c word? -- clunky. Rhyolith had the problem of too many trying to steer one leg and Ambershaper was an unforgiving repeat of Malygos's surprise! important vehicular combat. The most favorite bosses Ion lists -- Siegecrafter and Lei Shen -- share interactivity with the environment where raid groups can customize a strat to a further extent than usual by selecting which mechanics are dealt with when, much like a Choose Your Own Adventure style of fight.

Speaking of Choose Your Own Adventure, the raid encounters team judges carefully between full-on exploits that trivialize mechanics or true creative uses of game mechanics that just end up doing the fight a different way than planned. Mobs and Minions might play on large monitors, but the raid encounters team literally watches a stream of the bleeding edge raids on a big wall-mounted TV to catch hotfixes like Thok's infinite phase 1.

There aren't any specific plans for special Mythic-only bosses in Warlords a la Ra-den or Sinestra. The bonus-boss idea also works better with the bigger raids. Limited attempts also works better as a bonus boss like Ra-den than as a wing idea like the ICC model. Teams of alts can scout out wing bosses or short raids fairly easily to cheese the limited attempt cap, but ultimate or bonus bosses that require clearing absolutely everything before, thus locking the alt team to a single raid ID, are fine with limited attempts.

The OOPS, OUR BAD of Mists of Pandaria:

• The gating of dailies in 5.0 would be done differently in hindsight.
• The sheer number of dailies was too much up front.
• Randomized orders of bosses (Mogu'shan dog, Spirit Kings, even back to Halfus) is a cool idea to keep farm bosses interesting, but it leads to frustration when the raid is actually trying to progress through the encounter or encounters behind it. Similarly, Heroic Paragons was initially to vary week by week, but was scrapped in favor of not having to memorize a bazillion ways to do the fight.
• It would have been better to have more even gaps in content to avoid the year-long Siege.

The OOH, DO IT AGAIN of Mists of Pandaria:

• The patch 5.1 model of story telling with dailies and scenarios was well done.
• The Timeless Isle's freeform and unstructured exploration-based environment is really cool.

Let's talk healing!

• Healing is too one-dimensional right now. As Bay put it: "DPSing the Grid bars." Specifically, the devs think that Heroic Thok is bananas when it comes to discovering how hard the hits have to be coming in to keep up with player heals.
• The problem with Cataclysm's triage model was the tight mana at the beginning. 
• The new active mana regeneration is meant to be a downtime choice between regeneration or throughput, leading to players planning when to use spells rather than blindly spamming the best spell.
• The new active mana regeneration is also something for healers to do during downtime rather than just stand there (though, they can also do that).
• Absorbs get more important as overhealing happens more often, as absorbs can snipe incoming damage from direct heals before the damage hits a player.
• The devs don't like to nerf healing mid-tier because of how raid compositions can affect encounter strategies.

Let's talk caster movement!

• Hunters are allowed to move on the run because it adheres to the nimble archer fantasy archetype of the class. If, however, a pure Patchwerk boss was done, hunters wouldn't be on the top of the meters. Doing damage on the run is a strength for them; they have other weaknesses to counterbalance.
• Limiting the movement of caster DPS moves the balance bar between ranged and melee back to reasonable.
• Melee can do 100% damage on the run, but have a hard time switching or when out of range of their target.
• Ranged can pivot and switch targets easily (or multidot many targets simultaneously) but their damage drops if they are interrupted by having to move.
• Speaking of multidotting and padding meters, the devs will point out irrelevant damage, but view the damage meter problem as a mostly social construct rather than a game problem.
• Skillful gameplay relates to planning casts around having to move, primarily those who can master the minimization of moving.
• Besides Ion points out that canceling casts when you can cast while moving is the absolute weirdest, and speaking as a warlock I can confirm this.

Running the same LFR wing for 4 months straight is dumb. However, having Mythic raiders run LFR in the first place for specific loot is also dumb. Current LFR solution: don't drop important pieces like tier sets or super powerful trinkets, but increase the loot drops so LFR-style players aren't in there forever.

Proving Grounds: How to teach the next expansion of players:

• Devs took LFR combatlogs to look at what low performing players were doing.
• Surprisingly, low performing players aren't necessarily maliciously trying to fail the LFR. Instead, the leveling game does not adequately mirror or teach what the endgame looks like. (e.g., DoTs don't survive two ticks on most quest mobs, so where do you as a new player get the idea to use it on a raid boss?)
• Proving Grounds can offer an instructional or troubleshooting aspect for new players before entering endgame.
• Silver is trivial to raiders but less so to the audience it is intended for.
• A current flaw of Proving Grounds is the impact of gear downscaling as the expansion goes on, particularly with healer mechanics or when breakpoint-driven stats are adjusted.

The devs regret the long delay of content with regards to the year-long Siege of Orgrimmar, but making an expansion is not like making a patch; the timetable is less obvious to judge. The alpha and beta structures are different than Mists of Pandaria because MoP was weird by itself with the annual pass. The annual pass required a massive beta population size when betas are typically much smaller for feedback purposes rather than to see the content earlier. The developer team also added many more people to the development, so it took time to get those new devs up to speed to produce bigger and better results than before.

More clarifications on garrisons:

• A core feature in WoD, it's highly integrated with questing.
• Having a Garrison is mandatory if you step foot in Warlords, but the game lets you decide what to do with it.
• Mythic raider doesn't do anything with her Garrison? It'll be OK.
• Garrisons are not account-wide because of the Choose Your Adventure style of leveling up and revealing the story per character.
• However, some Garrison things may have account-level caps to discourage needing a Garrison built a specific way on every alt.

Dun dun dun, the big topic we've all been waiting for: raid lockouts & difficulties:

• Keep in mind, the raid content is designed for the raiding population as a whole, not just for LFR or just for Mythic raiders.
• The pressure to run everything will really only occur in the first week when literally everything is an upgrade over all those quest greens or dungeon blues. The first week is always completely bananas and nigh-impossible to counteract.
• From tier to tier, raiders decked out in a Mythic kit will not need anything from Normal aside from the one week you're missing that 4th piece of tier.
• Raiders already clear the old difficulty while starting on the new one.
• The nonlinearity of the new raids will also help with clearing as raiders can choose to not do a particular wing if it has nothing of value for the majority of the raid.
• Ana summarizes it: Raiders won't spend many more hours farming, but they will use their time differently while farming raid bosses for loot.
• Not every repetition of a raid through size or difficulty is the same. A casual alt raid has different vibes than the main Mythic progression race.
• WoD Heroic does not need to be done to do Mythic, but Mythic will be delayed for a week every tier, much like Heroic mode is now.
• The raid leader controls the lockout and mode.

Did we hear a number over 25 players in a raid? Yes! We did! For now, 30 players is the new maximum barring server performance throwing a fit.

At the end of the live stream, Ion made a joke about having fun with the transcript. Poneria has now managed to kill XT's heart and not use Saronite Vapors on Vezax, so it's all gravy. Final Boss's Ra-Ra-Sis-Boom-Ba-Den of information from the After Show is found below!

We hear that the raids will be more Ulduar-esque, but what does that mean?

• Environmental integration into encounters, harking back to the comments about Siegecrafter and Lei Shen.
• There's a fight with trains, on trains, with trains going around the raid. 
• There's fighting on an assembly line with stamps coming down on the conveyor belt.

Let's talk about Challenge Modes in Warlords:

• There's a want to get past pure speed running as the main CM format.
• Gear rewards will help get more than just speed runners into CMs.
• It's hard to fix problems in CMs because of leaderboard disruption. 
• Admittedly, mostly hardcore console/PC speedruns involve a good amount of glitching the game rather than smart play within the game mechanic lines.
• CC slows a team down, but want more varied CC (not just AoE stuns) and more methodical pulling rather than clumpy pulling.
• Tank vengeance not being a thing will definitely help.

We talk a little bit about the development and testing of raids:

• Lore and story are usually first when it comes to building a raid zone. Plot lines, major villains, main story chunks to move along are all components that have to be addressed.
• Individual bosses mix it up a little. Lore influenced Fangdral Staghelm in Firelands, but environment vibes and cool mechanics influenced Alysrazor and Beth'tilac.
• For Warlords PTR, players can be scaled up to level 100 in not just gear but also spells, so raids can be tested more easily without having to level a PTR toon.
• Mythic testing will be more focused, but not necessarily more time. The goal is to test, not to learn the strat on the PTR.

Ion's best feature of MoP? Flexible raiding, and it's not done yet showing off how awesome it is. For the majority of the raiding population, it's a massive improvement of time spent in the game. The devs are confident that Warlords' Heroic mode can be tuned appropriately with the spectrum of raid size because the WoD Heroic audience will be much broader in both skill and attitude than the min/maxing Mythic crowd. The pre-expansion 6.0 patch will also be out for 4-6 weeks to allow players to try the new sizes and difficulties out with Siege before tier 17 gets going.

Ion talks about how the legendaries in MoP worked out:

• More upsides than downsides, but lessons definitely learned.
• 5.1 Valor was a flat & boring grind.
• 5.4 pacing was problematic, because having the legendary cloak on Heroic opening week was a significant boost for player performance too early on. 
• 5.3 pacing was better, because the meta gems being achieved halfway through the content acted like a zone-wide buff to player performance.
• Regret having to do grindy parts all over on alts.
• Not retroactive, but would have let alts skip the grindy collection parts, but do the one-shot scenario events.
• The legendary cloak visual is epic in solo or small-group play, but obnoxiously overbearing and loud in larger group play like raids.

Speaking of obnoxious spell effects, we almost missed Ana's favorite gripe!

• Yes, Iyyokuk's dome is meant to mess with the melee field of view.
• Multiple problems involved with spell effect overload.
• #1: Not all spells are equal when they should be. E.g. Holy Sanctuary out-visuals Healing Rain while doing a similar purpose.
• #2: Some spells are louder than what they represent. E.g. Moonfire is a DoT like any other DoT, but it looks like a tactical nuke when it lands.
• #3: Some spells should feel epic to the caster, but nobody else would care. E.g. Only fire mages care about epicly orange meteors. 
• A new programming system lets devs rate spells by priority for visuals (& also for sounds, Celestalon and Zarhym mentioned this before!)
• It's about client performance from computers but also about tactical performance from players.
• It will be default to see the culled appearance of spell effects, but players can toggle back on the overload if they wish to see absolutely everything.

As always, Final Boss and its guests love to answer community questions at the end of the show.  You can ask them via the website: http://finalboss.tv/askaboss/ - via Twitter: @finalbosstv #AskABoss & via Twitch Chat during the After Show!

Final Boss airs on Twitch.tv/FinalBossTV every Sunday at 1pmPST/4pmEST/10pmCET.

- Poneria

Episode 36 - Blizzard Developer Interview

Phew! What a week it's been, Mobs and Minions. Get ready to talk not only about Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes, but about how the developers and community managers are redoing their own methods of getting feedback to and from the players.

This week, Final Boss interviews Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig, Technical Game Designer, and Jonathan "Zarhym" Brown, Senior Community Representative. If you can't find the answers to any questions about Mankrik's wife, just remember: #BlameCelestalon #NotZarhym.

Zarhym is one of many conduits between the community and the company. Community feedback is really important to Blizzard, and Zarhym is one of nine Community Representatives in the North American region of World of Warcraft. Players know these conduits primarily from the Community Managers (CMs), but it extends to an entire team of representatives, and every game and region has its own team. 

A few tasks for a Community Representative include:

• Managing the content in blogs for publishing
• Running Blizzard's official social media websites, including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
• Responding to players via Twitter
• Helping out with marketing or PR campaigns
• Gathering community feedback from the players and distilling it for the developers

Bay notes that Mists of Pandaria was perhaps a big testing ground for this watching and gathering of player feedback, and our interviewees confirm that the new "patch novel" of notes is an evolving new way of communicating changes to the playerbase.

Celestalon is a Technical Game Designer, which means he deals with everything involving the rules of the game. He works on the systems design team with 6-7 other people, a central hub that connection just about every design department to the other departments. The design process at Blizzard is iterative and collaborative with all team members working together on the same projects. 

Celestalon got started at Blizzard through the armor penetration stat controversy in Wrath of the Lich King, when players boasted they could build better spreadsheets than Blizzard could. Celestalon primarily deals in combat mechanics and core concepts of gameplay like talents or Draenor Perks, but he ends up talking with a lot of other game designers on other concepts like:

• Raid encounters
• Itemization
• Programmers with new technologies, like making the game smoother and more responsive,
• Art design for spell effects
• PvP mechanics, as he used to sit right next to Holinka.

Ana notes that it's really cool as a player to see that Celestalon is very direct on Twitter with answering player questions about specific mechanics. Rumor has it that the sparkly dragon never sleeps, as you can often see him still tweeting away at 4am when he's not at work. He wishes that he could understand more languages for even more connection to the player community, but for now will have to rely on Google Translate. Celestalon believes that the interaction helps the community understand what the developers are going for when changes happen and how mechanics are designed.

The recent Warlords of Draenor patch notes are not just an alpha set for the game, but an alpha for a new way of presenting the patch notes themselves to the community. The developers and community representatives are trying for communicating more context behind changes to the players. The team is going for a hybrid between blog paragraphs and bullet points, composing the "patch novel" in both broad and narrow strokes of words.

If players have any feedback regarding how patch notes are presented to the players, be sure to leave them in the blog comments themselves, as primary patch note writer CM Rygarius is watching carefully over there.

Before we jump into the technical questions for Warlords of Draenor alpha notes, here's a quick recap of some upcoming blog posts from Blizzard about the new expansion:

• The next Artcraft post just published today! Check it out for a look at the new male tauren as well as a bunch of insight on how the models get animated.
• A post on professions is coming soon.
• A 4-part series on Garrisons is going to be started on this week by Zarhym and Cory Stockton, Lead Content Designer.
• The patch notes already have updates coming, with more than 5,000 words already!
• Class-specific changes should be coming up later after the above posts.

Item squish
Celestalon thinks the item squish will go smoothly. They were anticipatory about the response with BlizzCon testing, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive or no notice of the difference at all. Bay notes that if the item squish works correctly, it'll be like music in the movies -- it should not distract from the experience of the action around you.

Healing in Warlords of Draenor
Don't let Zarhym hear you say the bad T-word, but we're going back to a style of healing similar to Cataclysm, but without the bad parts, like being out of mana (OOM) all the time. The design goal is to make healing less one-dimensional and more varied in its toolkit use. Tank healing should gain more of a focus with the toning down of smart heals.

• 5 = the magic number of healers in Mythic raiding
• 4-6 = a good range for number of healers in Mythic raiding
• The encounter tuning failed if a fight requires 7+ or only 1-3 healers.
• Player health is doubled post-squish, to accommodate time to heal when below 100% health.
• Tanks will have significantly more health than other raiders.
• Incoming damage will be less burstier; encounters like Thok cannot exist in Warlords and mechanics like Durumu's maze phase would have much less damage taken.

Raidwide Defensive Cooldowns
The use of raid cooldowns to offset healing challenges is out of control now, and the developers want to bring the focus of the raid's health back to primarily healer territory. The goal is to create a standardized amount of raid defensive cooldowns, which involves mostly nerfing or removing existing cooldowns from DPS, with a few exceptions of adding cooldowns to other DPS (e.g. Amplify Magic for mages). Not every DPS spec will bring a defensive cooldown, but the goal is everybody will have something significant to bring to raid.

• Nerfed: Anti-Magic Zone. Smoke Bomb. Demonic Gateway. Rallying Cry. 
• Gone: Devotion Aura.
• Added: Amplify Magic (mages). 1-hour-long Misdirection (hunters)
• "Calm The Eff Down": It's alpha; numbers will be balanced later.

Garrisons
Bay says, "I'm excited to play a Warcraft base in my World of Warcraft." Zarhym's excited as well about the new expansion feature, but it's different from player housing as presented in other games. Garrisons will evolve as you level, tying into the story and quests, even altering how you experience some of the zones when you unlock certain buildings. The developers are keeping a close eye on whether and how Garrisons could affect progression raiders.

• Choose Your Own Adventure style of building up your garrison.
• Garrisons tie into questing story.
• Unlocking a building fully will earn different perks for various zones per character.
• Still debating how to approach garrisons regarding guild housing; garrisons will likely be restricted to parties only for now.
• Zarhym is working with Lead Game Designer Cory Stockton on a 4-part blog series that will introduce garrisons further.

NEW! Melee & Positional requirements
As our hosts are two melee themselves, the favored question was: can we stop having bosses turn around so much? Celestalon replies: what if the boss turns around graphically, but it still mechanically counts as hitting it from behind?! Bay and Ana go wild with that answer! Fights with major boss-facing phases for melee can also have the 3% parry possibly turned off if it becomes that big of an issue.

Stats TL;DR

• Hit and expertise are gone.
• Bosses parry 3% from the front, to keep melee preferably behind the boss.
• Melee aren't nerfed that much; the way weapon damage is calculated as part of the item squish got reworked, so it's just a numbers conversion.
• Changing some skills from based on weapon damage to based on attack power will have a bigger impact than pure number tweaking.
• The devs are shooting for a sweet spot between stat priorities, not equality of all stats for all specs.

Stacking buffs: movement speed and snares
The rules for movement speed buffs and debuffs are clarified by Celestalon:

• Movement speed buffs are additive. Example: 30% buff meets another 30% buff = 60% total buff.
• Snares (movement speed debuffs) are multiplicative.  Example: 150% movement speed meets a 50% snare = 80% movement speed now.
• All self-only passive movement speed bonuses will stack.
• Multiple shared or temporary movement speed bonuses can be applied at once, but do not stack. Highest one works while active.
• Multiple snares do not stack, but follow the highest rule.
• Movement speed bonuses won't overwrite each other. If a higher speed buff fades, the next highest speed buff is what the player moves at (until that fades, etc.).

Draenor Perks are not actually an offshoot of Path of the Titans. Path is a different project that is still on the idea board somewhere. You get all of the perks by level 99.

Profession & Racial Bonuses
Profession bonuses got removed because the min/maxing was detracting from the fun of professions. 

Celestalon says that the initial feedback from the racial changes was the obvious Alliance celebrations and Horde dismay, but as players thought about the imbalance and how the changes corrected some balance, the overall feedback became fairly positive. There are still some issues like Undead don't have any healer benefit, but the changes are still being looked over.

Zarhym lets us know that the new night elf racial is still sending controversial feedback to the developers. Both guests report that in today's world on live realms, the night elf racial can't exist, but in Warlords, the stats are closer together (remember: there aren't haste breakpoints anymore!), so the fluctuation isn't nearly so horrible.

Pruning spell effects
We'll talk about ability pruning below in the After Show, but one of the concerns right now by 25-man raiders, particularly melee, is the overload of spell effects that go on at any given time in a boss fight. Everything from the boss's animations to player cooldowns to guardian pets to healing effects to ground effects can really impact a raider's game by inserting video and input lag. Graphical (& audio!) overload is one of many reasons to prune abilities.

• PvP players need/want to see all spell effects. PvE players, especially in the larger sized raids, want reduction in spell effect graphics.
• There's going to be a priority system for both graphical spell effects and sound effects. 
• Raiders need to see important floor fire, where healing circles are, their own animations, and possibly tanking AoE effects.
• Guardian pets may be toned down or converted to ranged/caster pets.

Initial Raids in Warlords of Draenor
Did you really think a show about high endgame raiding is going to skip over questions about the opening raiding tier in Warlords? If only we could get Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Encounter Designer, on the show for an episode.

• The first raid is Highmaul, comprising 7 bosses. It'll be released one week after the expansion starts, with Mythic to follow one week after that.
• The next raid is Blackrock Foundry, with 10 total bosses released in a layout of 3 wings of 3 bosses each with 1 final boss.
• There will be 3 world bosses: 1 to start, 1 released with Blackrock Foundry, and 1 after that.
• There won't be any special, Mythic-only bosses (no Sinestra, no Ra-den).
• ...but, Zarhym will leave us hanging by saying there are "some surprises in store." Oooooooh!

But what about the class questions?!
Don't worry -- we decided to put all the class-related Q&A in the After Show, so take a look below!

What's up with removing reforging?
Players should get excited about items dropping. Previously, some pieces didn't matter because customization could make up for it. 

Players can always tweak their gear with the original customization method: swapping pieces.

Is the lesser coin / bonus roll system staying?
Bonus rolls could be improved upon, but yes, they are sticking around.

What about the Valor Points upgrade system?
It's gone. It didn't work out as planned, since players got to a point with valor where you could always upgrade an item drop, and then raids would start a whole 6 levels higher than intended.

Then what are Valor Points going to be used for?
Celestalon dodged the question. That's for the itemization team!

Explain the primary stat switching on items when you change specs, please.
OK. Example: all plate items will have both strength and intellect listed. If you don't use strength, it will be greyed out for you; that is, you'll receive the intellect from the item instead. But if you switched to a spec that uses strength, or if you're a warrior and a holy paladin rolls on that item, you can see that the item is still valuable because it has both strength and intellect.

• Plate will have strength/intellect.
• Mail will have agility/intellect.
• Leather will have agility/intellect.
• (Cloth is always intellect, OK.)
• Spirit will be greyed out for non-healers.
• Bonus armor will be greyed out for non-tanks.

Celestalon adds this about stats and item enhancements:

• Gems, enchants, and flasks will be all secondary stats.
• Enchants will have various secondary stats per slot, so if you want a lot of haste, you can have a lot of haste.

What's up with tertiary stats?

• Tertiary stats are little benefits, not for "catching white whales."
• Next tier's regular gear should still win over last tier's items with good tertiary stat rolls.
• Cleave is gone as a tertiary stat because it became a healer stat, since it was too situational for DPS and tanks.

Why is it bad for professions to give combat bonuses, but it's fine for racials to contribute to stats?
Racials feel like they should impact player power; they need to feel important to the gameplay in a roleplaying game (which is what World of Warcraft ultimately is, as an MMORPG). The game loses something if the racials are purely cosmetic.

How do moonkin feel / Will moonkin get many changes?

• The devs are fairly happy with how moonkin work right now.
• Moonkin problems right now are similar to shadow priests; they are lower on single target and higher on multi-target/multiDoT than they probably should be.
• The Eclipse mechanic will continue to snapshot stats, but it's getting tweaked as well.
• Moonkin AoE is being worked on so that it doesn't mess with the rotation rhythm as much.

Let's talk mobility: what's so special about hunters?!
Movement for ranged DPS is important to the balanced between melee and ranged. Moving is supposed to be a DPS loss, which turns it into a meaningful decision. The point is to be skillful about movement, not overpowered.

• Biggest nerfs: elemental shaman (Lightning Bolt) and warlocks (Fel Flame)
• Raid encounters will be tuned around movement becoming a big deal for ranged DPS.
• For hunters, being able to cast while moving is a perk. A detriment would be that they are more dependent on pet DPS than others or having different cooldown mechanics.

Don't take away my iconic ability, bro!
The goal of pruning abilities is not to dumb down the game. The point is remove abilities that didn't matter, like stacking all your cooldowns together in one macro because why would you ever not use them all at once. There is mostly positive feedback from players over the abilities removed so far, with a few fervent exceptions. A main point players make is the loss of a gameplay feeling or a cosmetic that's been a class staple.

Current controversially removed abilities the devs are aware of:

• Army of the Dead (DKs)
• Eyes of the Beast (hunters)
• Avenging Wrath aka Wiiiiings (paladins)
• Drain Soul (warlocks)

Finally, Final Boss asks each guest what's thing they are most excited for in Warlords?

• Zarhym: Garrisons! (I heard you like Warcraft, so we put some Warcraft in your World of Warcraft.)
• Celestalon: New tech that makes the game more responsive.

As always, Final Boss and its guests love to answer community questions at the end of the show.  You can ask them via the website: http://finalboss.tv/askaboss/ - via Twitter: @finalbosstv #AskABoss & via Twitch Chat during the After Show!

Final Boss airs on Twitch.tv/FinalBossTV every Sunday at 1pmPST/4pmEST/10pmCET.

- Poneria

Episode 32 - The Wrath of Retribution

Mobs and Minions can rest assured that The Firelord and his majordomo did not need to skymirror Ana twice over to get guests for the retribution paladin episode.

This week's "retribution ride" features the world-class Morgeine of <Envy> and forum-frequenter Bear of <Ninth Order>. Bay and Ana note how there are so many EU guilds killing heroic Garrosh, as <Ninth Order> is EU 82nd where Ana's <Something Wicked> for example is US 34th.

After discussing the big IRL changes to come for each guest, we move on to talk about how retribution paladins stand apart from other DPS specs. Bear refers to himself as a paladin, not just retribution, for both guests agree that a ret pally is brought to raid not for his astounding "meter-maiding" DPS but for the plethora of raid utility that resides in the paladin class toolkit.

We know that warlocks are better, but don't think that the three-tribution paladins on this show will leave all the mobs and minions hanging when it comes to better retribution DPS. You'll hear about what 40% haste does to mastery, how a glitch like ability lag can turn an inferior stat build into viable, and that simming it really is the answer to everything. 

Ana leads into talent choice discussion with the unfortunate evolution of the level 15 speed boost talent tier from cool choice to boring default. Does the level 75 talent tier have only one purposeful choice? Does Execution Sentence leave the rest of the level 90 talent tier dead for choice? What abilities should be nixed in Warlords of Draenor? Well, we mean other than Guardian of Kings, Ana.

Packed with pally pride, it's all inside Episode #32: The Wrath of Retribution.

As always, Final Boss and its guests love to answer community questions at the end of the show.  You can ask them via the website: http://finalboss.tv/askaboss/ - via Twitter: @finalbosstv #AskABoss & via Twitch Chat during the After Show!

Final Boss airs on Twitch.tv/FinalBossTV every Sunday at 1pmPST/4pmEST/10pmCET.

- Poneria