I just imagine the 10 class designers gathered in a meeting and Koraa spacing out and sending text messages to his/her boyfriend. I don't feel confident that Koraa's protecting our class. If I decide to keep playing I'll switch mains to a DK, but I've got four other 70's I can fall back upon. In a year or so they'll throw shadow priests a bone, and oddly enough it'll originate not from Koraa, but from someone else. My hunch is that they design the game around the pure dps classes, then once those are balanced they slowly backfill importance into the utility classes. In the mean time it's best to set up camp elsewhere and liberate oneself from the frustration.

Trying to belittle one's competence when you don't have the slightest clue isn't the smartest thing to do.
How comes you think that Koraa is "our" class dev? He isn't, as there are no "class devs"; though it's amazing what people complain about..

Yes Koraa did make a mistake in some posts, but oh well he (afaik) is just human - that happens. There is alot more to developing games than answering to QQ on forums.

Well lets see

Shaman Forums


Shaman Forums


Shaman Forums


Priests Forums


Priests Forums


These are mistakes that Koraa has made in just couple of hours. Many of us remember many more of these types of mistakes from Koraa. Another big mistake that Koraa did was saying that the "Balance Team" did these recent changes and not the "Design Team". Later Ghostcrawler was trying so hard to fix what Koraa said convincing people that there is no separate balance team and apparently since it was not enough they made a low level character and posted dozens of other posts trying to say what GC and Koraa said were actually the same.

The thing is I don't see how a class designer can have no clue about classes that he/she is talking about and is supposed to design them. Personally I don't know if Koraa has been around for a while or he/she is new. But the impression that I get from his posts is that :

1- Koraa is new around this kind of stuff
2- Koraa probably hates this job
3- Koraa doesn't care about classes really
4- There is something about priests that Koraa hates

Wow, you're reading a lot into his posts.

All I see is that compared to some other posters he probably doesn't spend quite so much time thinking about putting the right wording on things. On the plus side this means he is able to reply to more questions and we may get small bits of information that we otherwise wouldn't get. On the down side there may be the odd mistake and it can sometimes be ambiguous.

It's just a different style of posting really. Some people will like it, some wont but that's the way with almost everything in life. Personally I think he is fine.

If you found everything you posted being quoted around in hundreds of places and even put in people signatures then I'm sure we would find lots of discrepancies and mistakes too.

Well I was just trying to show why I'm getting those impressions. Personally I prefer Koraa's posts for one reason: When Koraa shows up it means information and changes (somehow not complete and not as informative as it should be but meh ) are coming but when GC shows up usually its gonna be promises and calm down posts (GC is pretty good at gaining communities trust and they know it. Thats why they let him handle these types of posts). Would be better if Koraa was more caring and nice with his/her posts though. After all I'm pretty sure changes to any of classes are not done by just one class designer and a class won't get screwed unless the majority of designers hate that class (seems to be our case lol) hate that class.

So not only is Koraa talking to 9 classes with 3 specs each and a ton of unique abilities, but he/she (?) has to keep track of all those abilites over multiple patches which may already have another patch immediatly in queue.

Yeah, not too worried, I feel sorry for anyone in that position because there is nothing they can say to please everyone. Your information is essentially always changing and there are tons of internet e-thugs ready to overanalyze your every word.

Cut them a break, the alternative is they don't post at all about anything and just do closed beta with internal testing.

It's probably hectic as hell in that office right now. They're trying to get ready for a new Xpac, and probably have their bosses bitching at them about deadlines. The absent mindedness is probably just a side effect from all the herb they've been smokin' to relax

Still not sure how I feel about this but I am leaning towards what you said at the end. Fact is if blizzard DOESNT have the man power to communicate effectively and accurately than all they are doing by attempting to communicate is creating turmoil. I would rather effective communication above all else - but if it's not available then I would say make it a walled garden. Then again part of me fears that if they went back to the walled garden (closed beta with internal testing) they would neglect important class changes, I guess it comes down to how much "trust" you but in blizzard. Afterall they did create WoW - they also created rogues though

Like I said still not sure where I stand but if the communication continues they way it is now I would rather them stop talking and use that time to for other things where the energy will yield results that aren't hundreds of angry forum posts daily.

It's lame to accuse a single person for something you//we/they don't like.

I feel dizzy even in the idea of giving a task like "fix and balance 10 classes and their 3 specs in one year or so".
The work that it must be done is tremendous seriously give them a break.

You want for example Mind Flay to crit,i agree, but it isn't like
"ok to make mind flay crits go to the checkbox AbleToCrit and check it"

It needs many hours and many many many lines of coding to fix it.
Everything seems easy from our perspective but it completely opposite.

As mentioned earlier, expecting someone to keep track of all 9 classes and thier 3 specs with all those spells and talents, over numerous patches is quite alot to ask for. I'm assuming they have meetings everyday and dish out different tasks around the office that need coding, I can't imagine any one of the regular developers is able to keep track of everything else thier collegues is doing. People should just be happy they communicate with us and don't get scared off by the bitching.

Every development cycle is the same though, it doesn't matter what a dev says the armchair developers will always find something to nitpick to make the devs look like uneducated monkies......which is obviously not the case.

gc came into the priest forums to calm things down when the patch came out because koraa was probably asleep (hadn't posted since 9pm or so, the uproar was raging at like midnight or so) and gc happened to be on. i doubt he knew enough about priests and why the nerfs went through to be able to hand out explanations of the nerfs; in fact if he had, he knew people would cite them later on. furthermore, he's been doing much more work in regards to tanking and death knights than handling priest stuff.

so of course it seems like gc's playing the "calm the fuck down" guy to us... because that's precisely, and pretty much his only, goal when he came to post in the priest forums.


last of all, these patch notes are applicable only to beta. they're not going on the live servers, and the changes can and do get reverted (as we've seen). sure some changes might not be warranted, but the best place to gather numbers and data is ON THE BETA SERVERS. if you're going to test out your product, it's better to test it out on the testers than the customers.

they gave everyone super good talents, and got a bunch of data for the "this is great and overpowered stuff!" end of the talent spectrum. now they're nerfing everyone into the ground, and getting data for the "this sucks balls" end of the spectrum. give it some time.

Technically from a programmer's aspect of view it doesn't unless they've been coding like retardeds. There are patterns, classes, models and layers. First time you write the code and the rest of the time you just use them unless its something completely new in the game like metamorphosis for example (which I even doubt even this required any coding. Probably some customization to Ilidan). New MF is a copy of arcane missiles with a different graphic. If they actually needed to code for that spell then they have no idea about new technologies in programming world.

To write this game I wouldn't write a separate code for every spell. Simply you define all possible behaviors for a spell then you can add them to any spell that you want. After that its just like a checkbox checking for a programmer.



Only problem is that we didn't get any "this is great and overpowered stuff!" and we got "this sucks balls" more than any other class from what I see.

What an embarrassing thread to read.

I apologise Koraa if you ever see this, but hopefully it will get deleted before then.

i'll apologize when he-she will .
oh wait .. i'll think about it ... maybe a glyph ?

Please stop bitching at Koraa. She's doing her best to improve the state of shadowpriests. I did welcome the introduced changes with hope that things are moving in the right direction. Ghostcrawler's post about nerfs and Koraa's quick reaction shows that she does care about shadowpriests. So people start to recognise a friend in her. Please recognise the fact that the nerfs were removed by her almost immediately.

I urge you guys to help her develop the class in a positive spirit as she's clearly listening to the community and stop those useless threads.

Regards
Phasma/Vivi

P.S. Ghostcrawler's post shows that Blizz doesn't have a class designer clearly and solely dedicated to Shadow Priests. It would be much better if we had Koraa in this position as opposed to Ghostcrawler imho. Just read how arrogant that guy is.