I’d imagine this game is going to be a more difficult sell than most when you consider the history here. But the Diablo 3 devs are really crazy-balls excited about the game coming to PS4. Mr. Scott Johnson may have an on-going issue with this one… but in the best way:

Sorry folks, but no 5.3 this week. At least according to Bashiok:

.@glommerwort Depends on what you define as imminent… 5.3 will not be released tomorrow, though.

— Bashiok (@Bashiok) May 13, 2013

I’ll have a complete rundown of what to expect in the upcoming patch soon, but for now, enjoy this Blizzard Q&A that Twitch conducted about the upcoming Hearthstone:

Watch live video from playhearthstone on TwitchTV

To serve as a reminder to you all the first round of Blizzcon tickets are going on sale this evening at 7pm PST. Make sure all of your Battle.net information is up to date and ready to go, you can read more via the Ticket Information page and the Ticket Sale Information page. These tickets go fast, like in a matter of seconds, so be sure you show up early and get ready to refresh.

If you aren’t lucky enough for this evening the second round of tickets will be going on sale this Saturady, April 27th at 10am PST. This year’s Blizzcon is a two-day event taking place on November 8th and 9th, and the tickets will cost $175. If you are lucky enough to grab some, consider yourself lucky and enjoy it!

On this episode of The Instance, what ever happened to Dungeons and Heroic Scenarios, there are some tweets that shed light on that subject, 5.3 and the Battle of Razor Hill on the PTR, a good gnome movie and loads more! Also, you may recall some debate regarding the world-first 90 character, which Blizzard eventually rebuffed and forced him back down to 87. This week Blizzard overturned that decision with apologies to the player and anyone affected by this, discussion shall be had!

Our listening audience are an inquisitive bunch, and our team pretends to have answers, and this week we will endeavor to continue to fake our knowledge. Shall there be loot cards in Hearthstone? How does one gem a DK (from an actual DK)? What is the 13th floor?! (dun dun dun!) How does one deal with alts and heroics? All of this and lots more!

Do you have questions? Be sure to email us at theinstance at gmail dot com or leave us a voice mail at (801) 471-0462 (Please note that this number has CHANGED)

Special thanks to our sponsors this week: Audible.com, Doghouse Systems, and Typefrag.com. Get your guild web site going at GuildLaunch.com with the code “theinstance”. Great web hosting provided by ZeHosting! Step Your Geek Up, your number one podcast for all things geek! From Games, to Movies, to Comics, we cover it all! Available in iTunes for FREE. Use Discount code “instance” for 5% off at gametimezone.com

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The venerable Scott Johnson had the distinctive honor of sitting down with the Game Designer and Production Director of Hearthstone. Scott had put out the request for questions among the Instance community and you have all answered in fine style. Good times are to be had in this interview. If you’re at all interested in the upcoming Hearthstone game from Blizzard, this is a must listen. Enjoy!

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I hope you all have been enjoying HotS. There have been entirely too many things going on in my life for me to enjoy it yet, but I’m hoping it will be soon. All of you theorycrafters out there are in for a treat. Greg Street had mentioned on Twitter that they are attempting to clear up RPPM Trinkets.

We also added some protection to the ToT RPPM trinkets to avoid streaks of bad luck and buffed some to boot. Details soon.

— Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) March 12, 2013

And then Community Manager at Blizzard, Nethaera, went into some depth regarding Real Proc Per Minute (RPPM) Trinket Changes.  Personally, I was never much for proc trinkets, even though some are quite necessary. I always felt a bit more in control if it had a firm cool down  Of course, this was prior to having 8 new abilities to keep track of. But, if they make an effort to fix the sometimes chaotic natural of procs, then I’m all for it. And for those interested in building spreedsheets, you have some more math to do.

Summary: 
We added a bit of cheating in the player’s favor to avoid long streaks of bad luck. This change is now live.

Longer explanation:
Traditionally, trinkets and similar proc effects in the game had high proc chances with an internal cooldown (ICD). This made the procs random in theory, but really pretty predictable. You would know that a trinket would proc on the pull and then reliably every 45 sec (or whatever the ICD was).

For 5.2, we made a change to trinkets to make them less predictable and less boring with the RPPM system. Sometimes you can get lucky and get several back to back procs. This feels cool. Sometimes you can also be unlucky, and get long streaks when the trinket just refuses to proc. A trinket that is intended to proc every 1 minute could in theory go 8 minutes or more without activating.

Last night we hotfixed in a change for trinkets that use the RPPM system. Every time your trinket fails to proc, it increases the chance it will proc. Unlucky streaks will be more rare and extremely unlucky streaks should never happen. In addition, we increased the chance for these trinkets to proc on the pull. To top it off, we increased the proc rates of the Agility and Strength trinkets in Throne of Thunder by 10% and the Intellect and Spirit trinkets by 5%.

Painfully detailed explanation for theorycrafting:
As usual, you absolutely do not need to know or understand the following in order to use or best take advantage of these procs. This info is just for theorycrafters who want to understand the exact details of the system, so that they can model and simulate it better.

Calculate the proc frequency as normal. Based on that, you can figure out the expected average proc interval. We also now keep track of time since the last successful proc (this is different from the time since last chance to proc), capped at 1000 sec. Multiply the proc chance by MAX(1, 1+((TimeSinceLastSuccessfulProc/AverageProcInterval)-1.5)*3). For example, if a proc has an average proc interval of 45 sec, and it’s been 72 sec since your last successful proc, you’ll get a 1.3x multiplier to your proc chance. If you’ve been out of combat for a few min, and it’s been 5 min since your last successful proc, you’ll get a whopping 16.5x multiplier to your proc chance.

We increased the proc rate of the following trinkets by 10%:
• Renataki’s Soul Charm
• Talisman of Bloodlust
• Bad Juju
• Rune of Re-Origination
• Fabled Feather of Ji-Kun
• Primordius’ Talisman of Rage
• Spark of Zandalar
• Gaze of the Twins

We increased the proc rate of the following trinkets by 5%:
• Wushoolay’s Final Choice
• Breath of the Hydra
• Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen
• Cha-Ye’s Essence of Brilliance
• Horridon’s Last Gasp
• Inscribed Bag of Hydra-Spawn
• Stolen Relic of Zuldazar
• Lightning-Imbued Chalice

Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen now has 65% of the normal proc rate for Balance Druids, up from 50%.

Also, here are a few interesting tidbit’s from Ghostcrawler:

@remghar @jangasm We agree. Too much post-modification takes the fun out of getting a new piece. Need to work on that.

— Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) March 15, 2013

 

@sveltekumquat Great question. We tried to prune abilities for MoP without much success. It’s tough to simplify classes in a game this old.

— Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) March 14, 2013

At some point PETA realized that mentioning video games will increase their site traffic. Allow me to contribute to the problem. PETA is calling for the ethical treatment of the violent and vicious species known as the Zerg. I dunno, I still find the cartoony Zerg creepy.

There have been a ton of changes with this patch, not only are they too numerous list but we’ve been discussing them for some time now. Instead I shall refer you all to the best places to get your information and bring up some highlights here.

Mr. Greg Street has begun a blog series involving how things have been changing for each class this patch and what the thinking is behind it. Today, the post included Death Knights, Druids, and Hunters. As far as overall themes, it’s obvious that one thing the team wanted to do was to overall talents that most people didn’t take, either because it wasn’t fun or it wasn’t viable, in a lot of case it’s both. Changing how classes work is not something done lightly and inevitably people are going to have strong opinions on it one way or another. Also, just as a reminder, the man known as Scott Johnson sat down with Mr. Street last week, and it’s an interview that needs to be heard by all.

And now for those gritty details we are all so fond of. The patch notes for 5.2 are mammoth, but at least they look pretty. All of the classes, dungeons, raids, UI, quests, pet battles, blah blah blah, are all here. Obviously we’re looking at the new Throne of Thunder raid with a new tier of item levels. The new item quality levels are LFR – 502, Normal – 522, and Heroic – 535, and Thunderforged items are 528 and 541 for Normal and Heroic respectively. You may be asking yourself, “What the heck is Thunderforged?” Here is the description via the forums:

Each 5.2 raid boss will have a chance of dropping this new designation of a particular item that’s 6 item levels higher than their counterparts. These higher quality versions will be called “Thunderforged”. This means that there will be five variations of some items.

So I guess we’ll see how the community at large responds to this. It would seem that this is essentially a rare-type drop with a slightly higher item level than the rest of the loot. But the intention is that when the first few bosses are just being farmed it will still leave something for people to hope for when killing these guys. It’s a delicate balancing act as to how often these should drop, but I’m sure people will complain nonetheless. Another factor is that Thunderforged items have a high drop rate in 25-man raids. Part of this, I’m sure, is just the nature of having more people in the group. However, some think Blizzard is attempting to make 25-man runs more appealing.

As I said, there’s a ton of other stuff in this patch and I can’t wait to get into it. The mad rush when a new raid enters the fray is always entertaining to watch. May the WoW patch Gods be with you and hopefully you can get some game time in tonight.

So who is running the World of Warcraft these days? We should really talk with him. On this episode of The Instance, we have a HUGE interview with Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street. For those unaware, Mr. Ghostcrawler is the current Lead Systems Designer for WoW. Basically when people say their toon under-powered, they complain to him, and in Mandarin. We get into everything from the upcoming 5.2 patch to his use of Twitter. Folks, this one should not be missed. And, on top of that, we have an Instance episode for you. The Thunder King is in the building, battleground with the Blues, HOTS has a great new trailer, and what you hope Blizzard might be doing with iOS and Android. Fingers crossed for Lost Vikings 3.

The emails have come in and our team does it’s best to work through the Nigerian princes of the world. The check is in the mail, your highness. Why no love for Paladins with 5.2, it’s not that they are being nerfed… more like ignored. Also, hints at the next expansion from a listener, why cities are empty, getting to know the Thunder King better, and lots more!

Do you have questions? Be sure to email us at theinstance at gmail dot com or leave us a voice mail at (801) 471-0462 (Please note that this number has CHANGED)

Special thanks to our sponsors this week: Audible.com, Doghouse Systems, and Typefrag.com. Get your guild web site going at GuildLaunch.com with the code “theinstance”. Great web hosting provided by ZeHosting!

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And suddenly things become clear as to why it’s taking so long this time. Enjoy:

And, for those who would like the text of the poem, (Spoilers!)
well, here it is:

Pandaria, her hills of gold
In dark and mournful times of old
Did once a hopeless horror hold

When from her sacred veil did spring
With storm and flash, a monstrous thing
His name Lei-Shen, the Thunder King

His thunder boomed across the land
And none who dared and fought could stand
Against the iron tyrant’s hand

A palace grand, a walled domain
Such mighty works born of his reign
Built by slaves, their hearts in chains

But seasons change and tyrants die
His fury spent in times gone by
The thunder slept beneath Kun Lai

By Zandalari hands he has been taken
By Zandalari voice he has awakened

Gather heroes, sound the drums
The Thunder King comes
The Thunder King comes