April 2012

Beta is still essentially unplayable. I logged in this evening and, unlike last night, didn't instantly crash out, but did find myself stuck on a kite hovering in midair. Going to have to wait a bit longer to give the latest changes a real shakedown, I guess.

Those of you who have been paying attention have probably noticed a few changes on the site:

• Instead of just a list of some other game blogs, I'm now pulling in their three most recent posts (no more than one per blog, though).
• Fancy quotations are now appearing in the header, so you can be subjected to my taste in such things.
• Site messaging has been turned on.

I got stuck behind a bugged quest NPC on the beta server this weekend, and decided to take a little break and return to my slightly obsessive Dragon Age project. Having played through Origins a few times, and DA2 about twice as many times, I decided I wasn't perfectly satisfied with the full timelines I had established. I then deleted all my characters from both games and started work on four new Origins characters to get the right combination of events and character flags I wanted set going into DA2.

Just a quick rundown of the Mage changes in 15589. Things are still very much in transition; any of these changes might be reworked or revoked in the next build. Still, it gives some insight into what they're trying to do and the directions in which they're heading.

Now that we've taken a look at how the rotations for each bomb spell might progress over the course of a minute, and had a look at the way their damage output increases over the course of the timeline, let's compare all four bomb setups side-by-side for each of the three target scenarios.

Important note: The original version of this post included numbers based on the assumption that Glyph of Fire Blast would spread Living Bomb to five targets, ignoring the three-target limit (behavior that was reported by another tester, and either was incorrect or was a bug). I've been informed by a developer that this behavior is not intended; the numbers and commentary below have been edited to reflect this fact.

Next (and the last one for the evening), a look at Living Bomb used in conjunction with the Fire Blast glyph. Important note: the original version of this post indicated that Glyph of Fire Blast could spread Living Bomb to five targets, ignoring the three-target limit. I have since been informed by a developer that this is not the case (and if he's reading this, thanks for the information!) In fact, Living Bomb is spread to only three targets.

The rotation and total damage is therefore almost identical to standard Living Bomb; as Living Bomb has only a 1-second GCD, using Fire Blast to spread it only saves a half second over casting it three times manually. The timeline chart looks pretty different, because the ticks and detonations of the three bombs are synchronized, and thus the damage with the glyph will be higher than the damage without at some points on the timeline, and lower at others. The timeline will also look much shorter and simpler; since all five bombs will tick at essentially the same time after spreading, I simply multiplied their tick and explosion damage by three and treated them as single events.

So my first post on AOE on Mists of Pandaria was very quick and simple and, as some commenters pointed out, didn't tell you much about how the different abilities could be expected to compare in actual situations. So I'm now working on a series of five posts that will look at the same three scenarios — six, eight, or ten targets with a duration of one minute — for each bomb spell and the fillers it can use.

Having even less time than usual this evening, and feeling a little put off by Frost after the last couple of days, I decided to experiment with a few other characters. I didn't spend long on each, just enough to try out some abilities, individually and chained together, and see how things felt.