Roxanne Flowers

I have one question and one point to make, Duks. Question: How can WE help YOU? Point: The first rule of leadership is ... earn respect before commanding it. To that end, you may find that honest/open communications with community members will earn you great respect.

If Detect Hidden is not intended to be a "mini-map reveal" but rather work as an "increased Stealth detection" mechanic, this then begs the question ... Is Detect Hidden actually "strong enough" in effect to actually do the job it has been assigned to do? If not, how much "tuning" would be required in order to allow it to do so? Mind you, the answers to these questions are in part dependent upon NPC Stealth not being ridiculously overpowered/unbalanced, which seems to be the case at present. So if someone has the knowledge (and inclination) to look in the open source core code, please check to verify that NPC Stealth isn't "broken" before considering if Detect Hidden requires a "tune up" in its effectiveness to be able to perform its assigned role.

You're quite welcome ... although at this point I really can't in all good conscience "recommend" this build to anyone interested in min-maxing a Priest, even though I'm rather obviously angling for a min-max of talent points to support a very specific spell offered only to Night Elf Priests. A lot of the stuff that I'm asserting will work in this build remains theoretical, meaning it hasn't been directly tested for results, but I'm fairly sure that the underlying theorycrafting is reasonably sound. The biggest shift you need/want to make with pursuing a build like this is the notion that you have two choices for playing a Priest ... either Shadowform or Holy Healbot ... since this build is oriented around an optimized Damage Per Mana goal, rather than being a Damage Per Second powerhouse, which may very well be the best at leveraging Spirit to its advantage for sustained pressure, rather than spike, damage production. So in that respect, the build plays a lot more like a (shielded) Arcane Mage rather than like the more stereotypical Holy or Shadow Priest. Anyway, if you manage to have fun playing with the build ... please regale us with tales of your adventures and discoveries!

Interesting ...! Yet more proof that stuff like this needs testing. Thank you very much. Original post edited to reflect this new information.

World Enlarger Instant Enlarges the entire world for 5 min or until you attack. Using a weapon on a hostile (PC or NPC) is obviously an attack. Casting a damaging spell on a hostile (PC or NPC) is also an attack, isn't it? Casting a healing spell on a friendly (PC or NPC) is NOT an attack. Are you saying that casting damaging spells on hostiles is not an attack, and therefore won't dispel the World Enlarger effect?

Thread posted in Engineering Forum asking/analyzing which classes get the most benefit from going with Gnomish or Goblin Engineering based on exclusives. My preliminary analysis says that Gnomish Engineering offers a few advantages to a few classes due to particular synergies, while Goblin Engineering is considerably more "class agnostic" in terms of synergies with classes. Feel free to point out what I've overlooked.

Fair enough. Didn't know if you had any deeper insights than surface impressions. I was mainly wondering if there was something in either path that fell into the "this is game changing" category (aside from the Force Reactive Disk of course). Guess the question of "which specialization is best for which classes?" in Engineering properly belongs in the Engineering Forum then. I'll go ask it over there.

Elune's Disciple (33/11/7 Night Elf Priest) An experimental Discipline/Holy/Shadow spec for Night Elf Priests who want to maximize support for their Starshards racial spell. Disclaimers: I played World of Warcraft in the 2005-2007 time frame before moving on to other games, so I do have experience with playing all 8 Alliance classes to Level 50 or so a decade ago. I played on a PvE server then and I'm playing on Darrowshire now, since PvP does not interest me. This is not intended to be a bleeding edge DPS optimized raiding Priest spec that will put everything else to shame. If anything, it is intended to be a viable DPM efficient Priest spec to be played for FUN as a soloist and in 5 man groups in PvE content. I have been lurking these forums for weeks already, and am well aware of the "Play Shadow!" exhortations that have been made repeatedly for leveling builds, particularly for those who are interested in speeding through to 60. I am not interested in speed running to 60 and will be taking my time to enjoy the game, therefore I have no problem with "being slower" than alternative build strategies in terms of XP per hour. The primary purpose of this build is to explore the possibility of a potential off-meta spec which I have not seen anyone show (enough) interest in (yet) to post an actual build for. This post is basically an answer to a question of mine ... which is that IF you were going to design a build to support use of Starshards as your primary damaging attack spell, then HOW would you go about selecting Talents to support that objective? Since Starshards is a Night Elf Priest only racial spell, this question is only relevant to Players interested in playing Night Elf Priests (who seem to be a decided minority of Alliance Priests, for somewhat obvious reasons of hardened Conventional Wisdom). I have to wonder if Night Elf Discipline/Holy Priests are even rarer than Moonkin Druids ... and if so, that notion only increases my desire to follow through on this experiment so as to share my conclusions and experiences with this community. I also know that the prevailing opinion for Mages is "lol arcane" and that what I'm presenting here is in many ways a functional "Arcane Missiles by Priest" sort of build strategy by alternative means, which no doubt plenty of people will look askance at. Talent Tree: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bVgGs0VqobxuZxM Discipline (33 points) Wand Specialization - Rank 5/5 Increases your damage with Wands by 25%. Silent Resolve - Rank 5/5 Reduces the threat generated by your spells by 20%. Improved Power Word: Fortitude - Rank 2/2 Increases the effect of your Power Word: Fortitude and Prayer of Fortitude spells by 30%. Improved Power Word: Shield - Rank 3/3 Increases the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield by 15%. Martyrdom - Rank 2/2 Gives you a 100% chance to gain the Focused Casting effect that lasts for 6 sec after being the victim of a melee or ranged critical strike. The Focused Casting effect prevents you from losing casting time when taking damage and increases resistance to Interrupt effects by 20%. Inner Focus - Rank 1/1 When activated, reduces the Mana cost of your next spell by 100% and increases its critical effect chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect. Meditation - Rank 3/3 Allows 15% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. Mental Strength - Rank 5/5 Increases your maximum Mana by 10%. Divine Spirit - Rank 1/1 Holy power infuses the target, increasing their Spirit by 17 for 30 min. Force of Will - Rank 5/5 Increases your spell damage by 5% and the critical strike chance of your offensive spells by 5%. Power Infusion - Rank 1/1 Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell damage and healing by 20%. Lasts 15 sec. Holy (11 points) Healing Focus - Rank 2/2 Gives you a 70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any healing spell. Holy Specialization - Rank 5/5 Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy spells by 5%. Divine Fury - Rank 3/5 Reduces the casting time of your Smite, Holy Fire, Heal and Greater Heal spells by 0.3 sec. Holy Nova - Rank 1/1 Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 28 to 33 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing all party members within 10 yards for 52 to 61. These effects cause no threat. Shadow (7 points) Spirit Tap - Rank 5/5 Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target that yields experience. For the duration, your Mana will regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 sec. Improved Shadow Word: Pain - Rank 2/2 Increases the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain spell by 6 sec. Starshards: http://db.vanillagaming.org/?search=starshards Rank 1: 84 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 50 mana Rank 2: 162 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 85 mana Rank 3: 288 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 140 mana Rank 4: 414 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 190 mana Rank 5: 570 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 245 mana Rank 6: 756 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 300 mana Rank 7: 936 arcane damage over 6 seconds for 350 mana Damage Per Mana: 1.68 / 1.906 / 2.057 / 2.179 / 2.327 / 2.52 / 2.674 at 6 seconds of channeling with no buffs, talents or spell power and not including 1 "free" tick of mana regen thanks to the 5 second rule (which I'm not including into this DPM benchmarking). Using Fisher's benchmarks for basic rotations for Holy (1.51 damage per mana) using Holy Fire + Smite x3 and also for Shadow (2.55 damage per mana) using Mind Blast plus Shadow Word: Pain plus Mind Flay x2 ... the Starshards chain of 2.674 damage per mana at max rank (so as to make an apples to apples comparison) would seem to compare relatively favorably to the output of Shadow and be superior (before Resists) to Holy (which isn't resisted, or at least shouldn't be resisted). The real kicker though would appear to be that Starshards, being a 6 second channeled spell, ought to reap maximal benefit from Spell Power while also being extremely favorable to the "5 second rule" of mana regeneration, provided that there is no loss of channeling time due to damage taken. Using napkin math, this would appear to make Starshards possibly the most "efficient" damage spell available to Priests which can be chain cast repeatedly (there is no cooldown in the patches we're playing in) until going OoM. However, unlike the Holy and Shadow rotations, use of Starshards is "slow" enough to permit a far greater mana recovery while channeling than use of a Holy or Shadow spell rotation short of pure Wand usage, which invalidates the comparison. Holy Fire and Smite, as well as Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay all have a casting time under 5 seconds, so if you're casting your way through a rotation with these spells, you're never not casting for 5 seconds until you start using your Wand, so these rotations are "5 second rule" unfriendly. Repeat casting of Starshards, however, being a 6 second channel is very "5 second rule" friendly, allowing you to recover mana while maintaining the channel of the spell to the point of repeated chain casting (you just need to not take interrupt/pushback while channeling). These factors combined to make me ask the question ... why is no one Theorycrafting a Starshards optimizing build strategy for a very high Damage Per Mana output Priest playstyle? Oh ... right. Starshards does Arcane damage, and it requires the caster to channel for 6 seconds, which is a "SO SHOOT ME NAO!" taunt in PvP ... and most of the realms we have available to us are PvP realms. But in PvE ... this shouldn't be (as much of) a problem ... so ... Oh ... right. Priests either play healbot or they melt faces (using Shadow but not Holy), but never both and they CERTAINLY never attack with ... Arcane? And Arcane is for Mages (who don't know any better, supposedly), so ... Which then begs the question, as alluded to earlier ... if you're going to build around Starshards for an efficient Damage Per Mana build, what would that look like? Well I'm glad you asked! Elune's Disciple (33/11/7) The first thing to do is to look for ways to prevent interruption while casting damage spells. That basically leads directly into the Discipline tree, since neither Holy nor Shadow has any sort of prevention of interrupt/pushback while spellcasting built into them. There are basically two (and three-quarters?) things you can "do" to mitigate Interrupt/Pushback on spellcasting: Power Word: Shield Martyrdom -> Focused Casting Silent Resolve Wand Power Word: Shield prevents casting time loss. Martyrdom enables Focused Clearcasting for 6 seconds which prevents loss of casting time. Silent Resolve reduces Threat generated by ALL of your spells, not just the healing or just the damage spells, reducing the likelihood you'll attract aggro in groups (obviously). If you're getting beaten on and taking damage, use your Wand in the absence of Focused Clearcasting. However, to embrace the Goddess Elune as a true disciple, you need to accept the duality of both Light and Shadow. This means being judicious in your selection of talents and optimizing your build for what the talents offer as benefits to your build. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bVgGs0VqobxuZxM The Shadow tree offers two talents that are of use to a Starshards oriented build: Spirit Tap Improved Shadow Word: Pain Spirit Tap is (thankfully) "agnostic" as to what types of damage can proc the buff, so this talent synergizes particularly well with use of Starshards, particularly in light of the interaction between Starshards' channel duration and the "5 second rule" of mana regeneration, especially when soloing or to a lesser extent in 5 man groups. Improved Shadow Word: Pain simply extends the duration of the spell by adding additional damage ticks, but with 2 talent points invested here you can extend the duration from 3x Starshards durations up to 4x Starshards durations, which isn't a bad investment all things considered, although an alternative would be to instead spend those two points on Divine Fury in the Holy tree. Speaking of Holy, there are four talents which would seem most relevant to a Starshards oriented build: Healing Focus Holy Specialization Divine Fury Holy Nova Healing Focus is interrupt avoidance caused by damage while casting. I honestly recommend taking these two talent points first at Levels 10-11 before investing in anything else, so as to be able to heal (self or others) while taking damage in as reliable a manner as possible. The mix of Holy Specialization and Divine Fury investment could be anything from 5+3, 4+4 or 3+5, assuming you aren't pirating 2 points from Improved Shadow Word: Pain to get 5+5 in both. I chose to maximize Holy Specialization over Divine Fury due to the interaction with Holy Nova. Holy Nova benefits from increased critical hits, but does not benefit from reduced casting time (since it is already instant). The other point is that since a Starshards optimizing build is oriented around Damage (rather than Healing) Per Mana for a single target Arcane spell, the value of Divine Fury for damage output is reduced in practice. The reduction in casting time for Heal and Greater Heal still has value, of course. Finally, Holy Nova is essentially the main area damage AND simultaneous area heal spell available. Although Holy Nova won't be used terribly often, it could prove decisive in circumstances where it does get used in situations of overrun in PvE, so spending 1 talent point here is worthwhile. For tier 1 of Discipline, in a PvE context, Wand Specialization is more useful than Unbreakable Will to a Starshards oriented build, in my opinion. I say this because resorting to use of Wand while taking damage would seem to be a prudent course of action that may occur more often than being the victim of a Stun, Fear or Silence effect in PvE play. For tier 2 of Discipline, I recommend taking all the talents and filling them up to full, which may not be ideal for everyone. For those who feel that Silent Resolve is "wasted talent points" an easy alternative option would be to spend all those points on Mental Agility in tier 4 (which I skipped entirely). Improved Power Word: Fortitude falls into the Nice To Have rather than being Absolutely Necessary, and the Improved Power Word: Shield directly contributes (some) to protecting yourself from incoming damage that would interrupt/pushback your channeling of Starshards. As a side benefit, both of these talents will directly improve the survivability of both yourself and any party members, so it's hard to argue that these talent points are wasted. Martyrdom is something that I see few builds bothering with, but the Focused Casting effect looks like it will synergize particularly well with Starshards since both have a 6 second duration. Martyrdom therefore offers a backup means of preventing loss of casting time when taking damage above and beyond the protection offered by (Improved) Power Word: Shield. For tier 3 of Discipline, Inner Focus and Meditation are fairly "standard" picks for almost any build, so I'll not belabor the point here. In the build that I am presenting here, I decided to skip tier 4 entirely, which I don't see on a whole lot of other builds, since most will take Mental Agility to get past this tier. As previously mentioned, if Silent Resolve is not to your liking, those 5 talent points could easily be reallocated to Mental Agility. Alternatively, either Improved Power Word: Fortitude and/or Improved Power Word: Shield could be dropped to spend those talent points in Mental Agility if that is preferred. For tier 5 of Discipline, Mental Strength is maximized to unlock Power Infusion in tier 7, and Divine Spirit is taken to buff Spirit (and consequently Meditation and Spirit Tap) even further in a Starshards build that is oriented around optimizing not only Damage Per Mana but also mana regeneration every 5 seconds from Spirit, which also increases health regeneration into the bargain, reducing the need/demand for self-healing and the mana costs that incurs. For tier 6 of Discipline, full investment in Force of Will provides a maximal benefit to spell damage and critical strike chance for offensive spells, further enhancing the Damage Per Mana efficiency of Starshards. And tier 7 of Discipline is, of course, Power Infusion, as already alluded to. The sum total of all of these disparate parts would appear to create a most unusual combination ... of an Arcane Night Elf Priest who is extremely mana efficient at producing sustained damage pressure on a single target, and with some ability to apply damage to multiple targets simultaneously. The irony of course being that this is a Priest build instead of a Mage build, and Night Elves are hardly renowned for their ... aptitude ... for the Arcane, having turned away from their arcane studies after the Sundering in a bid for survival. And yet, here is a build that combines Arcane, Holy and Shadow together in what feels like a rather viable balance in, of all things, a Priest. And once I "evolved" the build into the form that I'm presenting to you here, the name just manifested itself before me. This is a talent build that (probably) only an Elune's Disciple could love and follow on the Darrowshire server. Fortunately, that's where I am, standing for the Goddess in the place between the Shadow and the Light. /pray /cast Starshards

Now that access has been granted to core software, would it be possible for someone to confirm/deny if there is a bug with the Improved Shield Block talent in the Protection tree? Specifically ... Source Patch 1.6.1 (02-Aug-2005): Fixed a bug where Rank 2/3 of the talent was not granting an extra block for each of the talent points on improved shield block. Source Patch 1.6.1 (2005-08-02): Fixed a bug where Rank 3 of the talent was not granting the extra block. I'm hoping it's just a display error on the talent tree mouseovers ... but ...

Blood Crusade was when your character's stats started influencing Hunter Pets. In vanilla, there was no "cross-talk" of stats between characters and their summons.

Quick update concerning Martyrdom. Got my Priest up to Level 20, put 1 point in Martyrdom and then went out to take down 20 Rabid Thistle Bears and 4 Grizzled Thistle Bears in Darkshore (yes, I'm slumming). At first I didn't even recognize the proc animation for Martyrdom, since it looks like a Faerie Fire that's been put in the wrong location (it animates IN my Night Elf's head, rather than over it) and it then sinks down to shoulder level, which just looks weird. So at first, I didn't even know what the heck was happening until I realized it was Martyrdom proccing on a crit while Power Word: Shield was up and holding. Anyway ... The Grizzled Thistle Bears have a Ravage attack which can Stun for 2 seconds with like a 10-ish second cooldown that I was well aware of, since it had been knocking down and interrupting all my other characters up to this point. I'd also gotten the rude awakening to the fact that this Stun attack could interrupt spellcasting even while protected by Power Word: Shield, which made use of Starshards against these mobs a less than satisfactory option. The Stun would even disable autoshoot with my Wand while shielded, so it was something that definitely needed to be accounted for when trying to deal damage. And then it happened. I just so happened to get a Martyrdom proc while my Shield was up, the Ravage attack hit me and ... there was no knockdown and stun. Autoshooting with my Wand was not interrupted, and I realized that the Martyrdom proc protected me successfully against a Stun attack. So ... yay ... Martyrdom works as advertised, and it works while your shield is Absorbing hits for you.

In that case, if you're going to be off-tanking, you should go ahead and complete the quest for the item. Double proc chances thanks to SoR then make that proc a heck of a lot more reliable for you, enhancing your capability to absorb punishment. And if you get something better later on, it'll only cost you 1 bank slot to hold onto the item. Might not be BiS but it should certainly qualify as "good enough" for a while.

Comments on the database page tend to be favorable, although most of them got posted after Blood Crusade and Outland became available (which immediately invalidated the "worth" of this item due to rampant power inflation in that expansion). One commenter says that although the proc isn't consistent, it does proc more often than Crusader. LOTS of comments on the unique look of the weapon too, including remorse over having ever vendored the item since the quest for it is not repeatable. The +13 Defense alone on the proc yields a +0.52% chance to block (13*0.04=0.52) which isn't exactly awful when using Holy Shield, JotC, SoR and Retribution Aura for being able to add a little bit more Holy damage output while taking less incoming damage yourself from the +300 armor granted by the proc. Kinda sorta depends on what the rest of your gear is as to whether that's "worth it" to you or not relative to an alternative. Bare minimum though, if you can afford the bank inventory slot, you might as well get the item and test drive it for yourself, even if you wind up not using it full time later on.

And that right there is the explanation that both I and everyone else who didn't know this already needed, since it is definitely not an inherently obvious fact. It takes knowing several pieces of the puzzle at once in order to reach that conclusion, due to the multiple variables involved. Thank you for making all of that much clearer. But I have to say, spending 2 talent points for an extra 1.5 seconds of duration to save 1.85 Rage (averaged) makes for a terribly poor yield return on investment. So ... not a bug, just lousy. Wonderful. -_-

I'm playing my Hunter with an Owl right now on Darrowshire, and I have to say that for myself I prefer the sound of Screech to any variety of Bite or Furious Howl or even Growl. It sounds like something akin to an eagle cry style of sound FX on an Owl. Anyway, enough digression into stuff that ought to be said in the Hunter Forum. Back to the Warrior side of the debuffing equation.

Ah, so it was an inversion of interpretation thanks to poorly explained word choice in the original patch notes. One of the classic "if you already know the answer it makes sense, but if you don't know the answer then it doesn't and won't" kinds of situations. One of the hazards of using ambiguous language that doesn't guard adequately enough against misinterpretation. Yay. Then yes, in that case, 1/3 is not only the obvious stopping point for investment and going for 2/3 or 3/3 just becomes outright wasteful thanks to poor game design by Blizzard in the first place. Very much a "booby prize" sort of deal. It's dumb, but there it is then. Just about the only value that 2/3 or even 3/3 investment would serve is lower Rage cost (kinda? sorta?) when fighting against slower swing speed weapons where 2 blocks gets stretched out over a longer interval of time (6-7 seconds) ... but that's such a rare edge case scenario all things considered that adds terribly little value for the cost. I prefer to think of it as continuing the search for unrealized potentials, because there are some still out there, even after all this time. You never know when you're going to stumble across something useful when you weren't expecting to. Or to put it another way, "Even the most inept student may still have something to teach the master." In point of fact, I don't expect the community to "do it for me" ... and at the same time I am quite well aware that I don't know EVERYTHING that there is to know about the game. Even better yet, the resources that I have to access for information are at times contradictory, leading to alternative interpretations of nuances, and knowing which is right and which is wrong is not always inherently obvious. There's a tremendous amount of what I think of as "tribal knowledge" about all sorts of things that aren't easily accessible, even with decent Search Fu, and I can't lay claim to having all of it. So when I encounter gaps in what I know, I ask. I question. As you can imagine, not having been steeped in the game's mechanics and lore for over a decade, there's a lot of catching up and learning to do, and you can't do that quite so well just by lurking (or at least, I can't). And although I shouldn't have to explain this, I will simply for clarity. It's not enough to just give the right answer for things ... it's also important to know and understand WHY an answer is the right one, and how it connects to other things, so as to be able to utilize and adapt that knowledge for more than just the question that got asked. Or to put it another way ... you need to know why things work on a starship. This is why I go to such lengths to explain the thinking behind what I assert and/or assume, so as to open up that thought process to peer review and analysis in case I make a mistake of interpretation or in case someone else also finds themselves in the position of not knowing enough about a topic or idea and they want to use any discussion about it to extend their knowledge of the game's mechanics and how it "works" under the hood in addition to finding an answer to a question. Because there's a difference between learning by rote and actual understanding of what you've memorized. The former merely "teaches to the test" while the latter empowers you to ask new questions and seek new discoveries. And it's hard to find and learn new things while staying stuck in the well worn ruts of where everyone has gone before. So I suppose it's fair to say that cookie-cutters just aren't my style, especially when it comes to Conventional Wisdom.

/guffaw Oh that's glorious. ^_^

How convenient then that such "indisputable evidence" doesn't exist ... and even if it did, it would no doubt be disputed ... thereby invalidating the "indisputable" clause. Good game, sir. Well played. /polite clap

Agreed that most likely people will (continue to) skip Screech entirely and continue to bring Wolves for Furious Howl instead, assuming any Hunters are allowed to participate in the first place. But you have to explore the theory before someone will consent to try it out in practice, just to see if there are any advantages to be found, because theory is one thing, but actually playing the game is something else. I would presume that the vast overwhelming majority of raiding parties would have no interest in knowing anything about this possible combo of debuffing ... but a few might ... and the forums here are where the word of things like this gets passed around, and from that inspiration forms to try new things. So even if it doesn't matter to YOU ... it might wind up mattering to someone else ... who presumably would have to be "more adventurous" to even entertain the notion of playing the game in some way other than riding along in the ruts of everyone who has played before. Insert Hamlet quote to Horatio here.

Was it ...? /significant look True. Fortunately, that's not what I'm doing ... and if you're done playing with your straw man ... I didn't "declare" it to be a bug, I'm ASKING if it is one. There's a difference. I'm also not "crying" ... I'm analyzing what the differences are to see if there is any evidence pointing in a "bug-like" direction. I'm even doing a Show Your Work to make sure that everyone can be on the same page with that analysis, rather than just assuming everyone knows what I "know" and that they will all automatically agree with me (which, ironically, is because I'm sure that not everyone will agree with me). At its heart, what we're basically disagreeing with each over here is the phrase that everyone loves to loathe ... Working As Intended. Most people, especially Developers, focus almost exclusively on the first part of that phrase ... Working ... in the context of "is this Working?" ... which usually gets parsed in the boolean sense of "does this induce a fatal crash to the desktop? (Y/N)" as the first check on the "Working" part of the equation. After that, there are various non-fatal error states that get considered, including the somewhat obviously non-functional ones of "this should be doing something but it isn't" ... and so on. However, by focusing exclusively on the "Working? (Y/N)" side of things, which is all about computer programming and making things link up correctly and run smoothly, what often gets lost in the discussion is the INTENT of what the game mechanic is supposed to be doing. What is the PURPOSE and INTENT behind the behavior that is being seen? Does the expression of the behavior match up with the Intended (or even anticipated) Effect? This can result in people talking right past each other. You're saying it's WORKING as intended. And I'm asking if it's working as INTENDED? Note the intentional difference in emphasis. It's the difference between Works But Is Stupid Yet Still Works ... and Stupid But Works Is Still Stupid. Yeah, they sound the same, but the emphasis is different, meaning the perspectives of the two basic assumptions is different. In the former, there's nothing to "fix" because it Works. In the latter, there's something to re-evaluate because something is Stupid when it (really) shouldn't be. Unfortunately, there aren't any youtube videos available (that I can find) dating back to the 2005-2006 era of vanilla to prove me right or wrong either way ... so I'm asking the question. That's not the same as declaring and crying as you assert.

In which case either Demoralizaing Shout OR Demoralizing Roar should stack just fine with Screech from a Hunter Pet. Demoralizing Shout rank 4 with 5/5 Improved talent is 196 Attack Power debuff ... add 1x Screech rank 4 to reach 296 Attack Power debuff (total). Demoralizing Roar rank 5 with 5/5 Improved talent is 182 Attack Power debuff ... add 1x Screech rank 4 to reach 282 Attack Power debuff (total). Since the "objective" for a Level 63 Boss is 290 Attack Power getting debuffed, either Shout+Screech OR Roar+Screech ought to suffice ... provided that the Hunter Pet can stay in melee and survive without grabbing aggro (Cower on auto works for that) so as to support the Main Tank. Sounds like a legitimate strategy ... assuming there are 2 debuff slots available to execute it (1 for Demoralizing Shout/Roar and 1 for Screech). So ... 8 talent points into Beast Mastery for Pet Stamina and Armor becomes useful on a Screech Pet?

I'm asking what makes good game design sense. It's also why I didn't just go to a single source and cite only that in the first place. There's conflicting information out there, so you have to ask "what makes the most sense" rather than the easy/lazy question of "well how did everyone else do it?" Your turn.

So I'm saying ... And you're saying ... 0/3 Improved Shield Block = 1 block per 5 sec = 1Bp5 = 0.2BPS 1/3 Improved Shield Block = 2 block per 5.5 sec = ~1.8Bp5 = ~0.4BPS 2/3 Improved Shield Block = 2 block per 6 sec = ~1.7Bp5 = ~0.3BPS 3/3 Improved Shield Block = 2 block per 7 sec = ~1.4Bp5 = ~0.3BPS ... and trying to say that's not only RIGHT but INTENTIONAL? Because I look at what you're saying and think "BUGGED!" rather than "yeah, that's how it should be." I mean ... seriously ... the more you invest THE WORSE IT GETS? That's not exactly Blizz-like for their talent tree design. This is why I want to know what's actually going on under the hood of the UI. Is it an actual game mechanical fault, or is it just that the UI doesn't display things right? I know for a fact that some elements of the UI don't work properly thanks to things like Improved Mark of the Wild on my Druid ... where the spell info on the hotbar is right but the buff icon that appears after casting has the wrong info because it doesn't account for the talent effects in the mouseover popup on the buff icon. I remember Improved Shield Block offering +3 extra blocks at 3/3 like I'm asserting here being in vanilla retail, but it's not like I've been carrying around proof of this for the past decade-plus just to pull a "gotcha!" in a thread like this. Your turn.

Shield Block Increases chance to block by 75% for 5 sec, but will only block 1 attacks. 1/3 Improved Shield Block Increases Shield Block duration by 0.5 sec and blocks 1 additional attack (total 2). 2/3 Improved Shield Block Increases Shield Block duration by 1 sec and blocks 2 additional attacks (total 3). 3/3 Improved Shield Block Increases Shield Block duration by 2 sec and blocks 3 additional attacks (total 4). Only if the Improved Shield Block talent is bugged and not doing what I'm expecting it to do after Patch 1.6.1, which is this ... 0/3 Improved Shield Block = 1 block per 5 sec = 1Bp5 = 0.2BPS 1/3 Improved Shield Block = 2 block per 5.5 sec = ~1.8Bp5 = ~0.4BPS 2/3 Improved Shield Block = 3 block per 6 sec = ~2.5Bp5 = 0.5 BPS 3/3 Improved Shield Block = 4 block per 7 sec = ~2.9Bp5 = ~0.6 BPS We are supposed to be playing on Patch 1.12.1 game mechanics ... right?

All the time. You get used to it.