With World of Warcraft Legion, Blizzard committed to regular updates. These updates come in the format of big patches with a smaller “.5” patch in between. Though 7.2.5 is a small patch, technically, there seem to be a decent amount of changes coming. Some of them are fun little events to add more flavor to the World of Warcraft world, while others concern class balance and are significant in the day-to-day performance and competition with other dps / healing / tanking specialization. At the end of the day, even if a spec performs adequately, the community takes issue with balance if any specs fall more than a little behind the top performers. This creates a balancing hell for Blizzard, but they’ve done their best to make sure specializations are performing as well as possible while still retaining the design and aesthetic they intended for the class. The most recent adjustment is to Discipline priests, and the long neglected spec will be receiving some significant buffs that may serve to make the playstyle a little more fluid and effective.
Talents
“In particular, Evangelism is an idea we like, but finding serious competition for it as a raid talent might be hard. It probably needs to be against heavier hitters like Power Infusion (especially if that helps it be less of a one-note cooldown stacking build). There will likely be further iteration on talent arrangement to better accommodate the new additions.”
Mana Costs
“The spell whose cost is most important for balance purposes is Plea, because it is now the most efficient way to convert excess mana into Atonements. We reduced the cost so it would make more sense when compared against Shadow Mend and Radiance, but have to keep an eye on whether that leaves mana as a reasonable limiter on how much Atonement you can spread over the course of an encounter.”
Atonement
This may be more of a nerf than a buff, but it may be necessary considering the changes coming to talents and mana costs.
“The changes in the last build helped fix a lot of mechanical issues, but also added a lot of raw power to the spec, particularly in terms of Atonement spread/uptime. And particularly Evangelism returns a lot of the burst-Atonement coverage that currently dominates Disc raiding. That’s not necessarily a problem if everything else about the spec is working well, and it’s good to continue having a bit of a niche that Disc is used to in Legion. But as discussed in my first post, if it’s as easy to blanket the raid as it is on live, that limits the spec somewhat.”
Discipline priests are in a bit of a weird place right now. In the hands of a player with a high amount of skill, Discipline priests put out gigantic healer numbers and mechanically allow other healers to save their raid-wide cooldowns for more dire circumstances. The playstyle of a discipline priest requires complete knowledge of the damage flow within a fight, and is completely preemptive while all other healers are mostly reactive. The difficulty of discipline priest has led to some situations where the top performers are blowing other healing specs out of the water but the average discipline priest is struggling. Overtuning disc performance would further widen the gap on the high end, but I can’t tell you how many awful discipline priests I’ve run into as a Heroic raider. The design of the class is great in concept, but fails in execution if the vast majority of your playerbase can’t play it effectively.
These fixes feel a little more like bandaids than a robust addressment of discipline priest issues, but it’s a step in the right direction. What do you guys think about Discipline priests? Will these fixes be enough, or does Blizzard has a lot more work to do when balancing the spec?
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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