World of Warcraft : blue

Daily Blue WotLK Posts & The Harvest Festival

Zyuu — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:21:16 GMT

Like every day since the Wrath of the Lich King beta began, there's a large amount of blue posts which has surfaced today -- we got the summary, courtesy of World of Raids.

Also, since the summer is drawing to a close, the Harvest Festival has arrived!

Quote from: Wryxian (Source)

Summer draws to a close and the leaves of the trees begin to turn from vibrant green to rusty red, reminiscent of the blood of fallen heroes. The Harvest Festival has arrived and adventurers from all over Azeroth are gathering in Stormwind and Orgrimmar to remember those who have passed on into the Light over the fading year. Processions wind their way to Uther the Lightbringer's tomb and to Grom Hellscream's memorial as both the Horde and Alliance take a moment to pause, reflect, and remember the great ones.

To learn more about this festival, please check out our Harvest Festival page.

EU Premades

No dice.

Quote from: Vaneras (Source)

As we're moving ahead with the beta we feel specific testing on high-end PvP balance is required. Hence one (US) realm does have level 80 pre-mades available.

Between internal test realms, (upcoming) PTRs and beta realms for all regions our testing hardware is already fully utilized, and as the main testing needs are still on the vast amount of other content, other realms are kept as is.

While we appreciate everybody's eagerness to test high-end characters and PvP gear we hope you understand the need for having testing resources spread on all parts of the expansion.

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Casters and mana regeneration / Spirit on Naxx gear
All casters are going to need to take mana regeneration seriously again. For too long we let casters just stack +damage stats and fill themselves back up with shadow priests. You also have to consider downranking is also gone now so you can't rely on that to save you mana. Spirit is a seriously good stat now. I realize Dreamstate isn't directly a Spirit buff, but neither does it let you opt out of stat-based mana regen. (src)

As I posted in another thread, some amount of Spirit is something that all casters are going to need a lot more of. You can't stack shadow priests like you used to, and you can't downrank. Mana management is a part of all caster classes, not just trying to maximize the pewpew. We got away from that a little in BC.

We also don't always design gear to be perfectly optimal for everyone. Part of the game is examining a piece of gear, deciding if you need it or not, and how it will really benefit you. If your set pieces are perfectly optimized, it makes it less interesting to look at any other drops until you're at the next tier. (Now I'm not saying we're going to give you Str and Parry either. That said, I will bring up whether we could afford to trade a little spirit for crit on your gear. (src)

Death Knight
Yellow vs White damage
We did consider purposely lowering DK white damage so that the specials could be bigger. But it actually does some wacky things to scaling when melee classes do a much larger proportion of yellow damage than white damage -- 40% white damage is about what we shoot for, though that isn't always realized.

On-next swing attacks are very controversial. They make more sense for classes that need rage dump, but don't specifically help the DK. When we tried them for the DK, there were some people who liked the mechanic, but a lot who didn't.

You can make a compelling argument that the vision of the DK as someone swinging a big two-hander like Frostmourne doesn't jive well with runes as a power cost, since the latter tend to push you towards using more abilities more often (which necessarily pushes the damage down to compensate).

Changing that now though would be a huge setback, and I'm actually pretty happy with the DK rotations at the moment. We just need to get the damage somewhere that feels satisfying while still balanced with other classes. (src)

Druid
Balance Druids needs
What do we want balance to be able to do? What's your role?
You're a caster. Surprise, I know. But we think we didn't always give you the tools to be a good caster before. You need:

Competitive dps. Mages and warlocks just tend to get a lot of attention, maybe because there are more of them, or more races of them, or they are more archetypal classes (in the familiarity sense).
Good AE utility. Encounters and dungeons tend to get designed with the assumption that the ranged dps can do AE. Hurricane is phenomenal now. I healed a run today and did really competitive dps with Hurricane on the ranged pulls. And I wasn't even Balance! I love Starfall. It's a rare spell because it feels new -- it isn't single target and it isn't classical Hurricane-style AE either.
CC. If a group has a choice between a druid and a mage and only the mage can CC, the decision gets a lot easier. With Entangling Roots used inside, problem solved.
Group utility. I think deep balance provides that now. Even Insect Swarm and Faerie Fire have a better role now. Without the vicious cycle of Curse of Shadows buffing warlocks which lead to inviting more warlocks somewhat solved, I think it will be easier for Balance druids to get into raids regardless. We've just opened space for more classes now.
The ability to keep causing damage. I think the oomkin thing was largely addressed in BC, but it's still something we need to keep an eye on, or at least try and banish the stigma that other players still think it has.

So that's it for role. Beyond that, what I think Balance needed was a means not to go insane by mashing the same buttons all the time. My favorite talent for attempting to solve this is Eclipse. Eclipse almost by itself "saved" Balance for me. Several times I tried going Balance in Classic and BC and just couldn't do it. But Eclipse is fun just because sometimes you want to Wrath and sometimes you want to Starfire. Improved Insect Swarm starts to get at this kind of mixed up of rotations too, and even the haste benefit from Moonkin a little as well.

Those are my thoughts. I don't think Balance is done yet by any stretch, but I don't hesitate to go Balance in a dungeon or raid now, which actually says quite a lot. I think the designers have done a good job with the tree so far. (src)

Balance / Feral concerns (src)

There are no tank niches, at least the way they have been defined here. When you ask why would anyone take a druid tank over a warrior tank, the answer is because that player is a better player, not because they have the magic ability that makes an encounter much easier. If you're concern is that the preponderance of warrior mitigation and abilities makes warriors a much more effective tank than druids, then that is a legitimate problem.
We haven't finished tuning numbers yet. If cat dps is low, we'll fix it before Lich King goes live. We haven't focused on that yet because we are still working on talent trees and bugs. But you're starting to see some of it. One thing I forgot to mention is that the raid buff overhaul was a net dps loss to melee classes. We expected that would happen, but we have not yet adjusted their dps accordingly. That might not be all cats need, but I wanted to mention it before I forgot.
I know balance druids feel neglected. My time is limited, and it's totally valid feedback that I don't give all specs or classes equal attention. My choices seem to be post a little or not post at all. I'm not a CM and any time I spend here (while very valuable for me) is time I'm not fixing classes. We'll try to give balance some more love.
I think bears in particular could use a couple more situational abilities. We did lower the cooldown on Berserk and we might even do it again. I assume this doesn't count or you wouldn't be asking for more flashy abilities, but when I did Feral Charge as cat in Utgarde last night, the fight virtually stopped while everyone said "Wait? What did you just do? That looked so cool!"
Feral is going to feel a little bigger than other trees because we are specifically trying to offer you more talents than you can get. The design is that you can choose 2-3 talents to emphasize your bear role over your cart role... if you choose. If you want to try and be relatively good at both, then split the difference between those talents.

Rebirth & Innervate
At the moment we have no plans to give those abilities to other classes. The raid buff stacking change was done because it was disheartening to see players spend so much effort trying to min / max the buffs different classes brought, and understandably so, rather than trying the encounters.

We understand that the risk of having more redundant buffs across classes is homogenization and too much homogenization hurts class diversity. So long as we avoid any fights in which Innervate or brez offer a huge bonus, we don't see a reason to hand them out to everybody. That goes true for similar abilities that other classes have. (src)

Avoiding the daze effect
I believe bears with the right talents can avoid daze now. We discussed an implementation for that. It may not be in the data you have at the moment. (src)

Warlock
Metamorphosis Feedback
This is kind of a specific request, but please give us any feedback you have on Metamorphosis, the 51 Demo talent. Assume that we aren't going to swap this talent out with something else, but other than that, nothing needs to be set in stone.

Please don't use this thread for a lot of other questions or concerns about the class. (src)

Early September Blue Posts

Zyuu — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:50:56 GMT

September is on us, so work-work! Daelo and Ghostcrawler are already on it, as a result we have a lot of blue posts to share. 4 dungeons have been disabled because of bugs or fatal errors in the client. Death Knight, Warrior and Druid concerns are being answered!

This news will be updated throughout the day should more blue posts surface!

Daelo on 8/29 - CoT Stratholme (80) - DISABLED (Source)

Yeah, I've noticed that the crash happens outside when testing the disabling of Stratholme. Still working on this.

Ok, Caverns of Time in Tanaris is getting No Man's Land by tomorrow morning.

Daelo on 8/29 Azjol-Nerub (72-74) - DISABLED (Source)

Ok, I've seen the problem on the beta realms where Krik'thir will seem to randomly despawn during his fight. I'm going to disable the zone for now, and if we can discover a solution we can implement via hotfix then we'll do that.

Daelo on 8/29 Halls of Lightning (80) - DISABLED (Source)

I'll investigate reports of this zone crashing today.

[EDIT]: We're disabling the teleporters. Halls of Lightning will be closed until the next major beta patch.

Daelo on 8/29 - Halls of Stone (77-79) - DISABLED (Source)

We're disabling Halls of Stone by removing the teleporters. This should be fixed with the next major beta patch release.

Ghostcrawler on Feral MT Scaling (Source)

If warriors end up with more armor, it won't be by a huge margin. We still want bears to be able to tank Naxx and Ulduar, and we want as many talents and abilities as possible to scale with end-game gear.

Ghostcrawler on Ferals get Def Stance Mach II? (Source)

Mother Bear is there almost solely to give Ferals a choice to emphasize tanking over dps. It is hard to meet the goal of letting them do competitve end-game tanking or competitive end-game dps if they can do both with the exact same talent allocation.

Ghostcrawler on 8885 Protection: Extremely Disappointed (Source)

Awesome thread. Please keep going. :)

1) I have strong suspicions that death knight dps is completely OP, but I think we can tame that without redoing their trees.

2) We are trying to combo some more of Prot's mitigation talents so that you have room for some of the more optional ones. I realize to some extent there will always be mandatory talents and there will probably always be cookie-cutter builds. But the more we can improve that situation I think most of you agree the better the game will be.

3) Well what did you use the Decapitator for? :)

4) We are trying to have more viable tanking classes but it would be a travesty if we ended up pushing tanking warriors out of groups. That is not our intent and if we see it happening, we'll take steps to correct it. It pained me to see people say in BC 5-mans "Let's just get a paladin. The run will go faster." That sucks and we're trying to improve that situation, not make it worse in 10 and 25 player runs.

5) I know I tend to neglect healing and dps classes specs in the interest of tanking discussions. I apologize for that. I can't be everywhere at once and to some extent we think tanking needs the most help. We know some classes and specs (in various roles) are relatively pleased with how they look for LK and some aren't. We're not done yet.

6) As you can see, making Protection viable for dps and / or PvP is controversial. Some people would love to see it and for some it's a wasted or misguided effort. That's the reason we want to continue to explore the issue and take baby steps without totally burning down the warrior trees and starting over.

Ghostcrawler on A Request for Answers by Blues. (Source)

I can't answer all threads of this nature, but these are good questions that several people have wondered about.

Q u o t e:
- Why was taunt removed from Death Grip?

Death Grip is a very powerful ability and we feared that the day might come when we have to increase its cooldown. Long cooldowns are terrible for taunts.

Q u o t e:
- Why was Dark Command given to us when we had two great taunts?

As above, we changed Death Grip. Blood Boil was also starting to feel like a better AE DPS spell than a multi-step taunt. We want all 4 tanks to be viable and came to the conclusion that some abilities just need to be standard. We don't want DKs to be worthless or even really hard to use on boss fights that require taunt rotations for example.

Q u o t e:
- Is there any plans to increase Death Knight Base Mitigation? If Yes, Can you give us a clue?

If it ends up being too low, we'll adjust it. Death knights do have high parry rates and have a good number of oh snap abilities on short cooldowns. If you look at other forums, some other tanks are worried they don't stack up to DKs at the moment.

Q u o t e:
- Why do i have so many buttons to push and so many CDs to keep track of? (DG, DC, IBF, AMS, LB, BB, HoW, Diseases, to name a few)

We wanted DKs to play differently from other classes. Runes, somewhat like energy, is an infinite resource. DKs are not dependent on being hit, which is a first for a tanking class. To balance that, there are more cooldowns.

Q u o t e:
- Is there any plans to give us spam able Aggro-generation skills back?

Abilities that add too much straight threat don't scale well. Paladins would have been far and away the best tanks for threat in Sunwell if more gear had been available to them. Part of the reason is because their threat scales so well with their dps. We'd like to get away more from +threat abilities for all classes if we can.

Q u o t e:
- Are we supposed to be hitting the Armor Cap? Or an Avoidance cap? Because right now i do not see that happening either way and leaving us kind of… lacking mitigation.

No class should be close to either in Lich King. That was actually a problem in Burning Crusade -- witness bears being unable to improve their tanking gear because of the armor cap and the introduction of "Sunwell Radiance" to work around excessively high avoidance values. We think it's fine for tanks to reach the uncrittable mark, and being uncrushable is no longer an issue. Beyond that, we want you to always have a reason to improve your gear... and always be a little scared of those bosses.

Ghostcrawler on [Suggestion] Blood Tree (Source)

Might of Mograine gets mentioned so often in regard to dps that it may very well be too good.

My hunch is still that a lot of death knight dps is too high, and probably the result of talents that stack too well together. It is the gigantic crits for Frost (and more recently Unholy) that get a lot of attention. The death knight's eventual damage on Live will probably feel a lot more like your sustained dps and not the big crits (though big crits are always fun).

Like I said, just a hunch though. We'll let the actual numbers decide. I might be wrong. :)

Ghostcrawler on Ghost: Warrior Report (8820) (Source)

I don't want to just reply to threads with my name on it or guess what will happen to all the threads.... :)

The problem with the old philosophy of tank A is better at boss A and tank B is better at boss B is that if your group has A but not B then you either hit your head against a wall or end up swapping people out fight to fight. To some extent certain classes will probably remain better at certain fights, just because we're still trying to have different class mechanics. Probably the cleanest way to say it is if you have a druid MT (with a good build, gear and skill) you should be able to tank every boss in the game. You shouldn't feel like you have to recruit a paladin MT for certain fights.

The fifty-one pointers (for any tree) are tough to design because we want them to be compelling or even exciting while still leaving open the possibility that you go halfway down two trees or something. We don't want the last talent to be the best one in the tree and everything else just filler to get there. Shockwave is particularly tricky because we don't want it to be the only way warriors can AE tank. It also gets a little more complicated than that because we don't want to make trees too similar to each other -- oh tier 4, that's the mitigation talent, and then here in tier 5, that's the uber PvP talent.

Briefly, what we're trying to do with Arms is get Overpower into PvE and make getting enraged something that feels like an actual system -- something you work towards.

Ghostcrawler on Druids are having 4 talent trees? (Source)

Cat DPS is terrible on live.

Now I know there are some cats at the tops of their damage meters. It happens. But I also know a lot of players who got the best gear they could, learned their class inside and out, and then cried when they saw how far they were below other melee dps.

If you like the hybrid nature of the Feral and enjoyed switching from tank to dps at a moment's notice, we haven't really done much to take that away from you. And even if you try to max out your cat potential, you're still probably going to be a pretty effective tank in many situations.

Q u o t e:
I expect the intent is for a cat specced druid to tank as well as a DPS warrior or DK or a ret paladin.
I expect this as well but getting a solid "Yes, you will tank as well as a Fury Warrior if you spec for Cat Form."

That sound about right. A cat spec'd Feral made an amazing OT for Karazhan and even Zul'Aman and for the larger pulls in the 25-player content. You were certainly better OTs than DPS warriors or ret paladins in BC. I suspect you will still be a little better than a dps warrior just because the difference between your +dps and +tanking specs is fewer talent points than the difference between a Fury and Prot warrior. But all talents are not created equal and you can't necessarily identify the best tank by the number of talent points they've spent.

Sorry my yes isn't more solid. It's hard to get into the realm of "You can be a 5% less effective tank if you spend 10% fewer talent points but maintain 15% superior dps" or whatever. :)

Part of the Feral design is flexibility. We don't want to lose that.

Wintergrasp changes, Lore, Blue Posts

Zyuu — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:18:39 GMT

WotLK Beta - Wintergrasp future changes

Quote from: Verimonde (Source)

We’re hoping to get the zone into better shape in the next couple patches. Here’s a few things that should be coming in the next build:

All vehicles should be despawn after the battle ends
Demolisher and Siege Vehicle health has been reduced by 50-75%
Demolisher and Siege Vehicle ram attacks no longer knock a player high enough to kill them
Jet & Bomber health has been reduced
Bomber damage has been increased
Players in Bombers should no longer take damage
Reward for holding the keep has been added
The Goblin Workshops in the North and South now also supply players with land mines that deal bonus damage to tanks

We also hope to have a system for rewarding only players that participated in the battle working soon.

WotLK Lore - The truth about the creation of the dwarven race

Don't miss the great article published earlier today, however we want to warn you that it contains Heavy Spoilers.

WotLK Itemization - Level 80 Items #3

Small update today, as we discovered most of them in the past days. Link to the complete list.

Mail: Tornado Cuffs (Bracers), Dragonflayer Seer's Bindings (Bracers)

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Achievements - Spirit of Competition '08 Feat
Great idea. We implemented two Feats... one for the Tabard and one for the Pet. (src)

Achievements - Profession Recipe Collection
We're working on the ability to do these kind of achievements. We wouldn't do anything percentage based but rather choose a flat number and add more achievements as we add more content.

Most likely, you'll see a cooking version like this in the near future. Versions for the primary professions won't go live until account-based achievements are active. We don't want to encourage people picking up and dropping profressions simply to gain achievements. (src)

Shaman
Anticipation & Shamanistic Focus
One change we're doing to Anticipation is changing it to 3-points, and giving it disarm reduction. We are also most likely going to change Shamanistic Focus to make it a flat mana reduction in shock cooldowns. It's too spammy right now, and the class has too many on proc buffs. (src)

Windfury Weapon concern
We'll see if we can make the ability less complicated/"mathy". (src)

Warlock
Upcoming Content Patch
We'll be doing some considerable work on Warlocks before that patch hits. (src)

Warrior
Furious Attacks - This talent will see some revision before retail so don't worry about a world where warriors are dual wielding daggers for MS bonanzas. (src)

BlizzCast Episode 5: Special WWI Edition

Don't expect to learn anything new about WotLK.

Quote from: Wryxian (Source)

This special Worldwide Invitational wrap-up edition of BlizzCast begins with a brief chat between RTS Community Manager Karune, World of Warcraft Community Manager Nethaera, and Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok about their WWI experiences. Bashiok then takes you into the mind of Diablo III Lead Designer Jay Wilson, and the two discuss some recent hot issues surrounding the game. Listen to the show now or check out the transcript to see all the featured artwork.

Download the new episode here: http://eu.blizzard.com/blizzcast/

Transcript for the new episode: http://eu.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode5.xml

WotLK -- Itemization, PTR 3.0, Blue Posts, Comic

Zyuu — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:29:18 GMT

WotLK Itemization - Level 80 Items #2

Here is another batch of newly discovered items, check out the complete list (daily updated).

Wands - Ancient Measuring Rod
Two-Handed Weapons - Hewn Sparring Quarterstaff
Amulet - Chaotic Spiral Amulet
Ring - Dragonflight Great-Ring
Cloak - Cape of Seething Steam
Cloth - Mantle of Electrical Charges, Thundercloud Grasps
Leather - Wristguards of Verdant Recovery
Mail - Kilt of Molten Golems
Plate - Pauldrons of the Lightning Revenant, Arcane-Shielded Helm, Rift Striders

PTR 3.0

PTR forums just got cleaned, meaning PTR 3.0 isn't that far.

PTR - 3.0 & classes
None of the classes are done. They are still being iterated on. 3.0 will be on the PTR's soon. There is still a lot of testing before 3.0 would go live to public servers. If you look back at past patches, we've had patches on the PTR for over 2 months before. (src)

Achievements will be a part of the live 3.0 patch
Originally, the answer was no. We were going to wait until Northrend opened. But we will most likely put the system live for 3.0. This could of course change but the current leaning is to put the system live with 3.0. (src)

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

08/26 - Storm Peaks open
Well I'm flying through it now without No Man's Land, so yeah it does seem to be up. (src)

US Beta Realms - Stability issues
We're currently investigating some server stability issues that have started occuring since we unlocked Storm Peaks. These issues are affecting both Northrend and Lich King servers. We hope to have these addressed within the next few updates. In the meantime, the more you play, the more it will help us narrow down what the problem is. (src)

Feats of Strenght & Realm Firsts
Realm Firsts are implemented in the next beta build although they will be slightly broken due to the fact that we have data issues with existing beta testers. For now, here's the list. We'll probably add more.

Realm First to 80
Realm First to 80
Realm First to 80
Realm first to 450
Realm First 10/25 end-boss kills

Keep in mind, this will be broken on beta realms slightly. For example, in the current build, Realm First Mage to 80 is actually implemented. Well, Daelo, our Lead Encounter Designer, was testing something and leveled a Mage to 80 instantly and got the achievement for the server. On live realms, this will never happen. On live realms, all blizzard employee accounts are not counted toward server-firsts. But this part of the technology was not yet implemented.

Also, when those Realm First achievements go live, they won't be accurate on the beta realms. But on live realms, the data will be pure and the information will display correctly.

Something to note about Realm Firsts:

A Realm First window stays open for 1 minute after initial completion of the Feat Of Strength. This means if 25 people kill Malygos as a Realm First, they'll all get credit. But what this also means is that if two players reach level 80 within a minute of each other, they will both get credit as well. (src)

Flying in Dalaran
For the time being, it is intended that you cannot fly within the city of Dalaran. We want you to be able to fly into Dalaran and fly out of Dalaran (via mounting at the flying landing or in the sewer pipe) but we don't want people flying around the city streets. We do want people to be able to mount on their ground mounts in the city (but not indoors).

This isn't entirely set up properly yet and not all things are working. Most of this will be implemented over the coming weeks. If it's horrible, we'll change it. But that's what we're trying out right now.

A big complaint of Shattrath was that it did not feel like a city. A goal of Dalaran was to re-capture the bustling street feel of places like Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Flying mounts work contrary to this goal. (src)

Netherdrake Mounts
We don't have any current plans to remove the ability to get the Netherdrakes in Outland, we'll let you know if anything changes. (src)

Druid
Typhoon - It's not finished, no. We're still working on the new graphic for it, and also considering a different design path for it. (src)

Priest
Upcoming Penance changes
Some changes to Penance are incoming:

- The first tick will be virtually instant (so overall the channel is now 2 seconds, not 3)
- The mana cost has been cut roughly in half.
- There's a new Discipline talent that will make it more interesting (src)

Warlock
Demonic Circle - The looping and sound issues will be fixed soon, as well as some other random bugs with the ability. (src)

Warrior
Intensify Rage and Precision switched places in the talent tree
As you expressed it Intensify Rage is required for PvP. Therefore Precision and Intensify Rage have now switched places in the talent tree. We want this to be something that a furry warrior has access to without making arms warriors feel they have to have it to be functional. (src)

WoW Comic Contest: Honorable Mentions

Here is the next honorable mention from this month's Blizzard comic contest submissions.

Threatmeter changes, Blue Posts, WotLK Cinematic, Comic

Zyuu — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:04:21 GMT

In the latest Wrath of the Lich King beta build (8770) there's been changes made to the threat meter, among those are several new visual features.

Threatmeter Changes

Scrolling Combat Text

Percentage warnings have been replaced with the following text messages: "Lost Threat", "High Threat" (yellow glow/dot) and "Attacking You" (red glow/dot).

Player/Enemy Frame

Yellow glow on your and the target's unitframe means you have high threat with that mob and you are very close to getting that target to attack you, this is when you have to use your threat reduction abilities (i.e feint, feign death, cower, etc...). when the target starts attacking you, your unitframe will glow red.
Red glow means you are being attacked by a mob, there can be several red glowing unitframes in the party based on the number of targets your party is in combat with. You can reduce your threat with threat reduction abilities (i.e. fade, vanish, feint, feign death, disengage, cower, etc...) or let the tank gain aggro by waiting.

Tooltip

The % threat percentage is still there, however Blizzard added 2 colored dots, yellow dot (you have high threat) and red dot (you are being attacked).

At this point it is unknown exactly at what percentage will you see the high threat warning. Also the threat meter is only active in groups with 3 or more members.

WotLK Blue Beta Posts

Spells Missing

This is not a bug. Also, this was announced. Misses actually miss now, in the log and visually. Misses aren't treated as resists anymore. [Source]

"Cower" emote duration

The current length of /cower is unintended. The animation length has been increased and will appear in an upcoming build. [Source]

Druid

Armor and Bears

Armor is one of the most important stats a tank can have. We aren't trying to keep bears from getting it.

The change to itemization was done solely to avoid having so much diversity in the items we could drop. It's lame when you're leveling up to keep seeing quest rewards that are itemized for your spec (which TBH is still a problem we haven't solved for Feral weapons and idols). It's lame when your raid kills a boss and he drops say elemental mail, healing leather, and a spellpower mace, none of which your group can use. Having bears, cats and rogues all desire the same leather drops isn't a panacea -- it helps some problems, but it creates others. Having bears run around with as much armor as a rogue would be a big, big problem.

Fortunately there are plenty of ways to give bears the armor they need -- through talents (like the crit resistance one) or through Dire Bear form itself for example. Even if another tanking class ends up having slightly more armor than a druid, the differences should be so minor that neither of you is at a significant disadvantage on a boss.

I am glad someone mentioned the hunter example. I am really hoping you guys have the same reaction when you see the next pass on druid talents. [Source]

Hunter

The new "Kill Command"

Kill Command was initially created as a reactive ability, something you hit when an event happened (a critical strike). The problem was that the event happened too often, and players just stuck it into a macro. Kill Command basically just became a flat damage increase. Players are right to assume their DPS has jumped because of shots not interrupting the auto-shot timer (it has, our tests show a ~140 DPS increase in some trials), so I think it's fair to say the class' sustained DPS will be okay. [Source]

Growl

Growl sucks. We'll fix it. [Source]

Boars & Charge

We actually debated this issue quite a bit. In the end it came down to a call about whether it was more fitting to boars to keep Charge or whether it was more fitting for the boar to be a tanking pet. The tanking pets were all going to get Intervene instead of Charge, since it let them be more useful as an OT, and we didn't think it was worth the cost of making changes or exceptions to that design just to preserve boars Charging.

In the end, we decided that boars are feared because they are tough. They have leathery skin, a stubborn disposition and had a reputation for fighting on long after their wounds should have killed them. In short, they felt like a tank. We tried to keep the feeling of the old Charge with the bonus component to Gore.

It was very difficult to come up with a whole new system for pets without losing any aspect of the old system that might be important to players. We are genuinely sorry though if there is a change you don't like. [Source]

Priest

Upcoming Shadow Changes

We're going to do some further tweaks to Shadow soon. [Source]

Shaman

Downranking and Earth Shock efficiency

We're working on a rank-1 Earth Shock equivalent spell. Not sure when it will be in, though. [Source]

Totem of Wrath stacking

Bug. Probably will also get another re-design too. [Source]

Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic will be unveiled at Games Convention 08

The opening cinematic for WotLK will be showcased at Games Convention this year.

Just wanted to let you all know that Blizzard will be unveiling the opening cinematic movie for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King at the Games Convention in Leipzig. The cinematic will be shown at 1:00 p.m., Thursday 21 August at the Blizzard Entertainment booth (D01 in Hall 5). A Q&A session featuring members of the cinematics team will immediately follow.

Blizzard’s lineup of activity will also feature hands-on gameplay with StarCraft II and Wrath of the Lich King, Q&A sessions with members from the StarCraft II and Diablo III teams, and more.

WoW Comic Contest

Yet another comic from the Blizzard Comic Contest.

WotLK Beta and Class Changes

Kody — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:06:01 GMT

It was a busy weekend for blue posts on the Wrath of the Lich King beta forums and we have all of the latest below. There are quite a few Death Knight topics of discussion, as well as information on Druids, Hunters and Warriors. Read on for everything.

Druid

Feral changes - We're not done with Ferals. (src)

Hunter

Camouflage - Used to be the 51-pt Survival, but we felt it was too PvP oriented, and we're really trying to flesh the tree out to be more than traps and melee (we are not done, as you can tell). That said... Camouflage may just come back as a base ability... *maybe* =] (Though a bit different from the against-the-rules data mining version you saw). (src)

Chimera Pet critting for 5k - Because the chimera ability does two types of damage at once (like the new Mage spell), it seems to have some crazy scaling effect. This is the first pet ability with two types of damage, so it's likely that is the problem. (src)

Pet skills & focus cost - I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It's kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It's worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Leting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost). (src)

Exotic Pets - The NYI tag has been removed from Beast Master now, it's completely implemented. Though, we're still working on the pets themselves. (src)

Pet aggro - As you can see, the results are a little inconsistent. Before we just buff pet threat across the board, we need to make sure that there aren't more bugs resulting in spikey or unpredictable behavior. (src)

Pets and spell resistance (src)
We don't want pets to get to the point where they resist nearly all CC effects... though being that this is a board of hunters you will probably disagree. :)

But we don't want your pets to die to a single spell either, which is why we'd rather handle surviving spell damage (especially in PvP) through a percent damage reduction. That is something we are looking at now. There are also talents that can further reduce spell damage.

Because your pets benefit from your resistance, it should still be possible to get them to survive in magic-heavy PvE encounters.

Warrior
State of Protection Warriors (src)
The design is that even a decently geared Arms or Fury warrior can tank a non-heroic 5-player instance. Overall they are probably easier than the BC instances at that level, but it's because we want more people to be able to run them.

You shouldn't need to seek Strength out for your tanking set. The way the itemization is designed, you are going to end up with a bunch of Strength on the tanking pieces you do pick up. We figure it will be more fun to do dailies, offtank and perhaps (gasp) even PvP when you can still do reasonable damage (not Fury damage, but perhaps not 50% of it either). Threat generation will be easier since you'll be hitting harder, and Rage starvation might likewise be a little less. In the past, tanks often had a choice between +threat and +mitigation gear, and typically felt obliged to go with the latter (special situations, such as maybe a ZA bear run or a boss with a short enrage timer aside). We figured we'd try letting you get tanking gear that didn't crater your dps.

Tanking changes are not done (src)
We're not done. When a new build goes out in beta, it happens because someone grabs the data and makes a new build, not because we all stand back and say "There! We've done it. Let's see what they say when they get a load of THIS!"

For that reason, it's tough to compare warrior abilities to any other class' abilities. Maybe the designers just didn't work on paladins that day and were planning on making similar changes across other classes. Maybe they just wanted to see the outcome and feedback on the change before deciding whether to keep it. While it may not be fair, we definitely don't parcel out 10% of our time each week to give each class some love. Some class abilities have the exact same bugs or non-functional status they've had since beta began just because we haven't had time to fix them yet.

I know first hand that many of the changes in the last patch were intended as buffs. Obviously Shield Wall et al. had to come down in effectiveness with such a shorter cooldown. If we overcompensated, we'll fix it next time around. Blood Frenzy is a special case because we're still evaluating what to do with unique raid buffs in general. We're not at all happy with the "fun choice" of deciding whether to take a Fury warrior with awesome dps but no buffs, or an Arms warrior who begrudingly picked up BF just to earn a spot in the raid. If you've read any of my other posts, I don't at all consider warrior tanking to be in a shippable state.

Death Knight

Bloodworms & Death Strike - We might unhook Bloodworms from Death Strike again. Death Strike needs to be useful without the extra talent, so with the extra talent it feels like it might be overhealing much of the time. (src)

Death Strike healing mechanics - Death Strike heals you for 100% of the damage it dealt per disease on the target. If you hit with DS for 500 and have 1 disease it heals you for 500, two diseases would heal you for 1000 and so on. (src)

Anti-Magic Shell - We are looking at Anti-Magic Shell as possibly being runic power or even free. We need to get the remaining bugs knocked out of it to see how it feels. (src)

DK spells & attack power - Note that DK spells are not affected by spellpower and are affected by attack power. We might also allow them to use melee crit instead of spell crit if that gets to be an issue. It may not be an issue since items now always increase both melee and spell crit. Ditto for hit. (src)

Master of Ghouls and perma ghoul - No this is not intended. The ghoul should die at the end of his duration, however we do intend for deep Unholy Death Knights to have the ability to resummon their ghoul almost on a whim. (src)

Killing Machine - It needs to affect Icy Touch since we can't assume you also have Howling Blast or Frost Strike. Granted it's not great for Icy Touch, but that is better than having a talent that doesn't affect your abilities at all. We have discussed adding Obliterate, but our concern is that it would then only be used for Obliterate. Increasing the duration is an easy change. (src)

Build 8770 and bugs - You can find a list of bugs here. Thanks for the report guys, keep the bugs and feedback rolling. Unfortunately a lot of the Death Knight abilities were still in the middle of being updated to their new functionality at the time the beta push was built. Hopefully we can get all of these issues fixed soon. The faster you all make us aware of everything that's not working the quicker we can get it fixed. (src)

Pestilence - We broke Pestilence shortly before the patch went out. We got rid of the chaining effect (the green lines you used to see) in order to make it more of an area effect ability like Thunder Clap (but one that requires a target). This doesn't really change the role of the ability at all. It just makes it more consistent to apply. Unfortunately the timing of the change turned out not to be ideal. (src)

Druid

Feral changes - We're not done with Ferals. (src)

Hunter

Camouflage - Used to be the 51-pt Survival, but we felt it was too PvP oriented, and we're really trying to flesh the tree out to be more than traps and melee (we are not done, as you can tell). That said... Camouflage may just come back as a base ability... *maybe* =] (Though a bit different from the against-the-rules data mining version you saw). (src)

Chimera Pet critting for 5k - Because the chimera ability does two types of damage at once (like the new Mage spell), it seems to have some crazy scaling effect. This is the first pet ability with two types of damage, so it's likely that is the problem. (src)

Pet skills & focus cost - I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It's kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It's worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Leting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost). (src)

Exotic Pets - The NYI tag has been removed from Beast Master now, it's completely implemented. Though, we're still working on the pets themselves. (src)

Pet aggro - As you can see, the results are a little inconsistent. Before we just buff pet threat across the board, we need to make sure that there aren't more bugs resulting in spikey or unpredictable behavior. (src)

Pets and spell resistance (src)
We don't want pets to get to the point where they resist nearly all CC effects... though being that this is a board of hunters you will probably disagree. :)

But we don't want your pets to die to a single spell either, which is why we'd rather handle surviving spell damage (especially in PvP) through a percent damage reduction. That is something we are looking at now. There are also talents that can further reduce spell damage.

Because your pets benefit from your resistance, it should still be possible to get them to survive in magic-heavy PvE encounters.

Warrior
State of Protection Warriors (src)
The design is that even a decently geared Arms or Fury warrior can tank a non-heroic 5-player instance. Overall they are probably easier than the BC instances at that level, but it's because we want more people to be able to run them.

You shouldn't need to seek Strength out for your tanking set. The way the itemization is designed, you are going to end up with a bunch of Strength on the tanking pieces you do pick up. We figure it will be more fun to do dailies, offtank and perhaps (gasp) even PvP when you can still do reasonable damage (not Fury damage, but perhaps not 50% of it either). Threat generation will be easier since you'll be hitting harder, and Rage starvation might likewise be a little less. In the past, tanks often had a choice between +threat and +mitigation gear, and typically felt obliged to go with the latter (special situations, such as maybe a ZA bear run or a boss with a short enrage timer aside). We figured we'd try letting you get tanking gear that didn't crater your dps.

Tanking changes are not done (src)
We're not done. When a new build goes out in beta, it happens because someone grabs the data and makes a new build, not because we all stand back and say "There! We've done it. Let's see what they say when they get a load of THIS!"

For that reason, it's tough to compare warrior abilities to any other class' abilities. Maybe the designers just didn't work on paladins that day and were planning on making similar changes across other classes. Maybe they just wanted to see the outcome and feedback on the change before deciding whether to keep it. While it may not be fair, we definitely don't parcel out 10% of our time each week to give each class some love. Some class abilities have the exact same bugs or non-functional status they've had since beta began just because we haven't had time to fix them yet.

I know first hand that many of the changes in the last patch were intended as buffs. Obviously Shield Wall et al. had to come down in effectiveness with such a shorter cooldown. If we overcompensated, we'll fix it next time around. Blood Frenzy is a special case because we're still evaluating what to do with unique raid buffs in general. We're not at all happy with the "fun choice" of deciding whether to take a Fury warrior with awesome dps but no buffs, or an Arms warrior who begrudingly picked up BF just to earn a spot in the raid. If you've read any of my other posts, I don't at all consider warrior tanking to be in a shippable state.

Death Knight

Bloodworms & Death Strike - We might unhook Bloodworms from Death Strike again. Death Strike needs to be useful without the extra talent, so with the extra talent it feels like it might be overhealing much of the time. (src)

Death Strike healing mechanics - Death Strike heals you for 100% of the damage it dealt per disease on the target. If you hit with DS for 500 and have 1 disease it heals you for 500, two diseases would heal you for 1000 and so on. (src)

Anti-Magic Shell - We are looking at Anti-Magic Shell as possibly being runic power or even free. We need to get the remaining bugs knocked out of it to see how it feels. (src)

DK spells & attack power - Note that DK spells are not affected by spellpower and are affected by attack power. We might also allow them to use melee crit instead of spell crit if that gets to be an issue. It may not be an issue since items now always increase both melee and spell crit. Ditto for hit. (src)

Master of Ghouls and perma ghoul - No this is not intended. The ghoul should die at the end of his duration, however we do intend for deep Unholy Death Knights to have the ability to resummon their ghoul almost on a whim. (src)

Killing Machine - It needs to affect Icy Touch since we can't assume you also have Howling Blast or Frost Strike. Granted it's not great for Icy Touch, but that is better than having a talent that doesn't affect your abilities at all. We have discussed adding Obliterate, but our concern is that it would then only be used for Obliterate. Increasing the duration is an easy change. (src)

Build 8770 and bugs - You can find a list of bugs here. Thanks for the report guys, keep the bugs and feedback rolling. Unfortunately a lot of the Death Knight abilities were still in the middle of being updated to their new functionality at the time the beta push was built. Hopefully we can get all of these issues fixed soon. The faster you all make us aware of everything that's not working the quicker we can get it fixed. (src)

Pestilence - We broke Pestilence shortly before the patch went out. We got rid of the chaining effect (the green lines you used to see) in order to make it more of an area effect ability like Thunder Clap (but one that requires a target). This doesn't really change the role of the ability at all. It just makes it more consistent to apply. Unfortunately the timing of the change turned out not to be ideal. (src)

Night of the Dead (src)
Yes, it is a more active ways for players who want Ghouls to have them up a lot. The idea was that you might do more Plague or Scourge Strikes than normal (like even when you had a disease up) in return for having the Ghoul out more. The "next cooldown" was supposed to mean that you aren't permanently lowering the cooldown. You Raise Dead, then work to get the cooldown lower so that when the Ghoul dies, you can get another one up again. Done right, you could have very little down time.

This talent required new technology, which we either got too late for this build or ended up causing bugs somewhere. We'll get it fixed.

You should have 1 Ghoul and he should die when the timer runs out.

Death and Decay changes (src)
The change to Death and Decays cost was intended to allow DK's more flexibility and provide a better flow and wider variety of options during AE pulls.

Pull with Icy Touch, follow with Plague Strike, Pestilience the disease to everything around you and top it off with Death and Decay.

For those Unholy DK's out there you can top that off with Unholy Blight and follow up with a Obliterate on your target (or open if you want) to activate Desecrate for the AE snare and +10% damage.

Health Bonus and Improved Frost Aura (src)
Frost Presence is necessary for Frost Aura, and while Frost is not the tanking tree, Frost Presence is absolutely the tanking presence. We didn't want to create the situation where a DK assigned to dps had to switch to Frost Presence in order to buff party health.

This wasn't intended as a nerf to DK health. If their health ends up too low, we can boost it through talents or the core stamina of the class.

We don't want to have Frost Aura affect threat because we pulled all of the +threat talents from all classes. We didn't want to have to design encounters assuming every tank had those talents.

Death Knight and Raid Utility (src)
Think about it from a high level. Ten classes. Thirty specs. Imagine each spec brings something unique and very powerful to the raid. You can bring 25 (or even 10). What do you do?

Or imagine we didn't change a thing from Burning Crusade. Now we add 3 new specs to the game and give one of them 20% haste and one of them 20% spell vulnerability. Who is getting the boot? The dps warrior? The second hunter? (And this ignores specs like Survival hunter and Moonkin who traditionally didn't merit inclusions in raids, but whom we'd like to improve.)

Or imagine this scenario: you can have a pair of 20% spell vulnerability buffs or a pair of 20% haste buffs. Maybe there isn't space for all 4 characters. Are the encounters designed assuming 20% vulnerability? Or 20% haste? Both? Neither?

You can't have a unique buff from all 30 specs in the raid. You probably don't want to swap specs in and out for each boss. Some guilds probably will, though I doubt you want all the bosses to be balanced with that assumption.

I suppose we could make 5 of the specs just suck for raiding and expect that you bring the other 25, but that feels kind of lame too. There was certainly deflation following the moment when DKs thought Ebon Plague or some other buff would *insure* a spot in the raid. Is there a class and spec who is happy not to have a raid-mandatory buff or role?

All of this ignores the debuff limit, since that is more of a technical issue and not a design one. Though still, do you want to try and understand what's happening when you're looking at a boss with 60 or 100 debuff icons on it?

It's not a trivial problem.

Parry items for DK tanking
Resilience still works in PvE. Perhaps someone was hearing one of us say that the goal was not for druids and death knights to go get resilience gear in order to tank. Resilience gear is designed for PvP, not for tanking, but we aren't doing anything to prevent it from working.

A druid, death knight and warrior tank all need to end up with similar relative survivability. Some may do it with big stamina pools, some may have more mitigation, and some more avoidance (which we realize isn't as desirable as the others).

I'm not sure we'll offer two-handed tanking weapons for DK tanks, but that doesn't mean they all are supposed to dual-wield. Even among warriors, there are some who recommend using +threat weapons for some fights. If we design DKs to use dps weapons even when tanking, we'll make sure to stack their survivability stats in other ways.

Sigils are tricky things to offer as quest rewards because 9 other classes can't even use them.

Also remember Naxx has like 15 bosses and they all drop a lot of loot. The loot table for that place is gigantic. (src)
----------------------------------------------- If we don't create two-handed tanking weapons, that does not mean death knights are supposed to dual-wield to tank.

Unless we change things (and we might), dual-wielding against a boss is not a good idea since you will be on the receiving end of more parry-based fast attacks.

I also would not look at itemization and make any assumptions that we intend for end-game DKs to have lower survivability or threat generation than the 3 other tanking classes. If you end up wearing plate with wasted block and a lot of defense that benefits you less than a warrior, there will be other things to make up for it. Imagine we added a core DK ability that gives you +defense and +dodge whenever you wield a two-handed weapon. We could even make than a runeforge enchant. Imagine that DKs get double the benefit of parry on defense rating since they don't benefit from block. We have lots of knobs to turn. (src)

DK Tanking Issues Q/A (src)
Most of the arguments and concerns on this topic that I see seem to come down to these issues. Correct me if there are any I'm missing.

1) Blizzard doesn't intend death knights to be end-game tanks.
Ghostcrawler: Yes, we do.

2) Death knights don't have the mitigation to tank end-game bosses.
Ghostcrawler: We don't have enough information yet to make that call, but the design is that they do, so if they don't, we'll change the numbers. There are a lot of knobs to turn from Forceful Deflection to Frost Presence to Icebound Fortitude to passive bonuses.

3) Death knights don't have a traditional tanking tree, which feels weird.
Ghostcrawler: Totally valid concern. But we want to try and fix some of the problems with traditional tanking, such as it being not fun enough to attract enough players or utility being marginal when not tanking.

4) Because death knights don't have traditional tanking trees, I can't get all the tanking talents.
Ghostcrawler: True. Also by design. You CAN get all the tools you'll need for tanking in any tree though.

5) Death knights can tank and dps with the same spec.
Ghostcrawler: Maybe. Warrior and paladins can tank and dps with the same spec too, though a hybrid warrior tends to be less than optimal for either role at the cutting-edge of raiding. The same should be true of death knights.

6) Because death knights can tank and dps, it isn't fair to existing plate tanks who have to give up a lot of dps in order to tank.
Ghostcrawler: Also valid. Just remember the design is that any DK or warrior should be able to tank a 5-player dungeon. A dps death knight, with no tanking talents and crappy gear isn't going to be a very impressive Naxxramas MT. Maybe the death knight doesn't have to give up as much as existing tanks, though that may also be something we want to fix in the other classes.

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it's not fair.
Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I'm not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior's best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn't seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That's a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don't know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong. (I've tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren't fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you've seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class' talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn't terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we're onto something. If it isn't your thing, that's cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you're convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn't need to mean inferior.
style="font-size: small;"> Night of the Dead</span></strong></span> (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765780434&pageNo=1&sid=2000#2">src</a>)
Yes, it is a more active ways for players who want Ghouls to have them up a lot. The idea was that you might do more Plague or Scourge Strikes than normal (like even when you had a disease up) in return for having the Ghoul out more. The "next cooldown" was supposed to mean that you aren't permanently lowering the cooldown. You Raise Dead, then work to get the cooldown lower so that when the Ghoul dies, you can get another one up again. Done right, you could have very little down time.

This talent required new technology, which we either got too late for this build or ended up causing bugs somewhere. We'll get it fixed.

You should have 1 Ghoul and he should die when the timer runs out.

Death and Decay changes (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765639658&pageNo=1&sid=2000#17">src</a>)
The change to Death and Decays cost was intended to allow DK's more flexibility and provide a better flow and wider variety of options during AE pulls.

Pull with Icy Touch, follow with Plague Strike, Pestilience the disease to everything around you and top it off with Death and Decay.

For those Unholy DK's out there you can top that off with Unholy Blight and follow up with a Obliterate on your target (or open if you want) to activate Desecrate for the AE snare and +10% damage.

Health Bonus and Improved Frost Aura (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765640415&pageNo=1&sid=2000#6">src</a>)
Frost Presence is necessary for Frost Aura, and while Frost is not the tanking tree, Frost Presence is absolutely the tanking presence. We didn't want to create the situation where a DK assigned to dps had to switch to Frost Presence in order to buff party health.

This wasn't intended as a nerf to DK health. If their health ends up too low, we can boost it through talents or the core stamina of the class.

We don't want to have Frost Aura affect threat because we pulled all of the +threat talents from all classes. We didn't want to have to design encounters assuming every tank had those talents.

Death Knight and Raid Utility (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765638446&sid=2000&pageNo=7#132">src</a>)
Think about it from a high level. Ten classes. Thirty specs. Imagine each spec brings something unique and very powerful to the raid. You can bring 25 (or even 10). What do you do?

Or imagine we didn't change a thing from Burning Crusade. Now we add 3 new specs to the game and give one of them 20% haste and one of them 20% spell vulnerability. Who is getting the boot? The dps warrior? The second hunter? (And this ignores specs like Survival hunter and Moonkin who traditionally didn't merit inclusions in raids, but whom we'd like to improve.)

Or imagine this scenario: you can have a pair of 20% spell vulnerability buffs or a pair of 20% haste buffs. Maybe there isn't space for all 4 characters. Are the encounters designed assuming 20% vulnerability? Or 20% haste? Both? Neither?

You can't have a unique buff from all 30 specs in the raid. You probably don't want to swap specs in and out for each boss. Some guilds probably will, though I doubt you want all the bosses to be balanced with that assumption.

I suppose we could make 5 of the specs just suck for raiding and expect that you bring the other 25, but that feels kind of lame too. There was certainly deflation following the moment when DKs thought Ebon Plague or some other buff would *insure* a spot in the raid. Is there a class and spec who is happy not to have a raid-mandatory buff or role?

All of this ignores the debuff limit, since that is more of a technical issue and not a design one. Though still, do you want to try and understand what's happening when you're looking at a boss with 60 or 100 debuff icons on it?

It's not a trivial problem.

Parry items for DK tanking
Resilience still works in PvE. Perhaps someone was hearing one of us say that the goal was not for druids and death knights to go get resilience gear in order to tank. Resilience gear is designed for PvP, not for tanking, but we aren't doing anything to prevent it from working.

A druid, death knight and warrior tank all need to end up with similar relative survivability. Some may do it with big stamina pools, some may have more mitigation, and some more avoidance (which we realize isn't as desirable as the others).

I'm not sure we'll offer two-handed tanking weapons for DK tanks, but that doesn't mean they all are supposed to dual-wield. Even among warriors, there are some who recommend using +threat weapons for some fights. If we design DKs to use dps weapons even when tanking, we'll make sure to stack their survivability stats in other ways.

Sigils are tricky things to offer as quest rewards because 9 other classes can't even use them.

Also remember Naxx has like 15 bosses and they all drop a lot of loot. The loot table for that place is gigantic. (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765777566&pageNo=2&sid=2000#21">src</a>)

----------------------------------------------- If we don't create two-handed tanking weapons, that does not mean death knights are supposed to dual-wield to tank.

Unless we change things (and we might), dual-wielding against a boss is not a good idea since you will be on the receiving end of more parry-based fast attacks.

I also would not look at itemization and make any assumptions that we intend for end-game DKs to have lower survivability or threat generation than the 3 other tanking classes. If you end up wearing plate with wasted block and a lot of defense that benefits you less than a warrior, there will be other things to make up for it. Imagine we added a core DK ability that gives you +defense and +dodge whenever you wield a two-handed weapon. We could even make than a runeforge enchant. Imagine that DKs get double the benefit of parry on defense rating since they don't benefit from block. We have lots of knobs to turn. (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765777566&sid=2000&pageNo=2#36">src</a>)

DK Tanking Issues Q/A (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765776746&sid=2000&pageNo=7#130">src</a>)
Most of the arguments and concerns on this topic that I see seem to come down to these issues. Correct me if there are any I'm missing.

1) Blizzard doesn't intend death knights to be end-game tanks.
Ghostcrawler: Yes, we do.

2) Death knights don't have the mitigation to tank end-game bosses.
Ghostcrawler: We don't have enough information yet to make that call, but the design is that they do, so if they don't, we'll change the numbers. There are a lot of knobs to turn from Forceful Deflection to Frost Presence to Icebound Fortitude to passive bonuses.

3) Death knights don't have a traditional tanking tree, which feels weird.
Ghostcrawler: Totally valid concern. But we want to try and fix some of the problems with traditional tanking, such as it being not fun enough to attract enough players or utility being marginal when not tanking.

4) Because death knights don't have traditional tanking trees, I can't get all the tanking talents.
Ghostcrawler: True. Also by design. You CAN get all the tools you'll need for tanking in any tree though.

5) Death knights can tank and dps with the same spec.
Ghostcrawler: Maybe. Warrior and paladins can tank and dps with the same spec too, though a hybrid warrior tends to be less than optimal for either role at the cutting-edge of raiding. The same should be true of death knights.

6) Because death knights can tank and dps, it isn't fair to existing plate tanks who have to give up a lot of dps in order to tank.
Ghostcrawler: Also valid. Just remember the design is that any DK or warrior should be able to tank a 5-player dungeon. A dps death knight, with no tanking talents and crappy gear isn't going to be a very impressive Naxxramas MT. Maybe the death knight doesn't have to give up as much as existing tanks, though that may also be something we want to fix in the other classes.

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it's not fair.
Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I'm not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior's best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn't seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That's a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don't know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong. (I've tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren't fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you've seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class' talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn't terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we're onto something. If it isn't your thing, that's cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you're convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn't need to mean inferior. </blockquote></html>

WotLK Blue Posts, BlizzCon 08, Blizzard Authenticators

Zyuu — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:29:10 GMT

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Plans for more debuff slots (src)
We would like to increase the number of debuff slots, yes, and we most likely will. Unfortunately, this is very complicated to do tech wise. It greatly increases the amount of bandwidth for the server, for example, and also for the client (you). When designing new talents, we try very hard to not add more debuff slots, though with the addition of a brand new class it's sort of unavoidable. In a nutshell, yes we realize the debuff slot stuff is an issue now and will be in the future and we're working on it.
Mages Warlock DPS (src)

Warlocks got to crazy land with the % modifiers to their damage output (specifically with Demonic Sacrafice), that's been toned down. Warlocks should never be able to out DPS a Mage with no pet out. Alike a Hunter, their pet should factor into their total damage output. Warlocks that sacrifice pretty much all utility talents should come very close to Mage DPS, but those who invest in group/raid utility should be lower.

Retroactive Dungeon Raid Achievements

Ok, for everything 25-person and above, we added the full loot table checks on BoP items: Gruul, Mag, Vashj, Kae, Illidan, Archimonde, Kil'Jaeden, Onyxia, Ragnaros, Nefarian, C'Thun. Dungeon bosses and anything that requires less than 25 people will check any quests but no items.We can not check the Heroic Daily Quests or Dungeon Daily Quests as they are repeatable and not tracked accurately by our system. (src)
Also, you have to have the items in your inventory or bank. If you deleted them you will not get credit and the GM's will not restore items for achievements. (src)

Tier items bought from BoP tokens are counted. You will get the achievements. (src)
The Quel'Serrar quest counts for Onyxia. You don't even need the sword. The quest is good enough. (src)

No Food/Water vendors in Zul'Drak (src)

This is an issue that should be resolved in our next content update. The Innkeepers should be offering food and drink as normal once the update takes place.

Music of Warcraft (src)
We use as much live orchestra as we can as well as a live choir. Some of the recordings have even been done in places such as a church in order to get just the right sound.

Druid
Lifebloom changes - part 2 (src)

Whenever we change abilities we always consider the outcomes for all aspects of the game, very rarely will we change an ability that will reduce it's effectiveness in PvE or PvP for the sake of the other. And if we do, it's intended.

In the case of Lifebloom, it's too good in both aspects of the game. Again, it's not our intention to merely just reduce the effectiveness of Lifebloom, but to also introduce new healing mechanics (Flourish, Nourish, talents like Living Seed and the improvements to Tree of Life) to compensate.

HoTs are intended to be effective in HPS and efficient, but have the drawback of requiring time to heal. The issue today is that you'll HoT a player who got hit by a big AOE, and some other class will use a downrank direct heal and cause you HoT to be ineffective. This is being addressed through downrank penalties. We want other classes to say "Hey, I could heal that guy back up who just got hit by that AOE, but I'll let the Druid do it instead and preserve my mana." Note that I'm not saying random AOE damage is not what HoTs are only intended to be for, I'm just using that as an example.

Mage

Fingers of Frost - We'll be addressing this by allowing it to work on your next 2 or so spells, instead of just one. (src)

Priest

Empowered Healing - Empowered Healing wasn't intended to have been buffed or nerfed, just be converted over to the new spell power system. We still have yet to do a big pass over all the talents that work similarly in other classes. Sounds to me the change to Empowered Healing wasn't done correctly, it will get fixed. (src)
Serendipity - Serendipity is fixed in the next build. (src)

New Penance ranks - New ranks are also in for the next build. (src)

Inner Fire changes (src)
It will be changed to spell power, so that it's useful to Shadow Priests too. Regarding the charges, they're likely to stay. The spell is dirt cheap because of the charges. If we removed them, we'd have to up the mana cost. A Warrior who keeps his shout up in fights is usually regarded as better than those who don't, similar to a Priest who keeps his Inner Fire up vs those who don't.

Unlikely also that it will be made undispellable, we're not even sure if we like the Mage/Warlock armors being undispellable. The dispel system in general (junk buffs, RNG resists) is something we'd also like to address as a whole.

Warlock

Imp and Destructive Reach - The Destructive Reach talent is now affecting your Imp's casting range. (src)

Death Knight
Frost and PvP (src)
We didn't touch Chilblains yet because we don't want all PvP DKs to have to go deep Frost. We're considering moving it way up in Frost (though the top of Frost is kinda nice as it is) or doing something else entirely.

One change we did make is to let the slow portion of Chains of Ice be a separate debuff that is physical and therefore not-dispellable. That isn't intended to be the single massive change that fixes any potential DK PvP problems, but I did want to mention it.

Improved Icy Touch (src)

Base Icy Touch: 15% debuff
Improved Icy Touch: 1/2/3% more debuff
Icy Talons: 4/8/12/16/20% melee haste
Improved Icy Talons: 20% melee haste for the raid

I know these things change quickly. It will all settle down. :)

Dk talent trees changes and the 4 diseases (src)

There are 4 death knight diseases: Blood Plague, Frost Fever, Crypt Fever / Ebon Plague, and Unholy Blight. At most you can get a 4 disease multiplier on Blood Strike and similar abilities, but the abilities are scaled for that. Blood and Frost do more damage in other ways to make up for Unholy's extra diseases.

I think the new talent calculator did catch us midway through some Unholy revisions. We fixed up Blood first and Frost second just because that's what you see left to right .:) There is a great new Unholy talent with some nice Unholy Blight synergy.

We have only just begun evaluating the raid stacking issues so it would be premature to comment on all of that. Best guess is that Blood, Frost and Unholy will each bring an awesome raid buff or debuff, but no single benefit that is so good that *every* raid needs one of each. The catch is that the same holds true of every tree of every class. Don't assume that every raid has to have Windfury just out of tradition. Don't assume that an Enhancement shaman is mandatory at all. I'll detail more when the process is farther along. :)

I think they had trouble with the last build but hopefully there will be a new one out soon. (src)
--------------------------------------- I mentioned the only 4 diseases that the death knight gets. All those others have gone away. (Sad face.)

The class was too chaotic, we were using too many debuff slots, and Blood Strike was either going to be terrible with few diseases or insane with tons of diseases. A refinement was in order.

So 4.

Improved Corpse Explosion was cut in favor of more interesting talents. The Frostfever rune was replaced with something like the old Frozen Rune Weapon, now called Razorice. Death and Decay has no disease, which actually lets its damage come up higher (and it has a nice threat multiplier too). Don't worry -- Icy Touch and a single Pestilence can disease almost everyone. The whole thing just clicks better now. You only have to worry about keeping up 2 diseases most of the time, since Crypt Fever / Ebon Plague applies automatically. That just leaves Unholy Blight (see below).

The web team that puts up the talent calculators has done awesome in the face of very rapidly changing trees, but some stuff gets caught mid-change. Improved Icy Talons for example is 20% haste -- same as talented Windfury. Abomination's Might is 10% attack power, same as Unleashed Rage.

Unholy Blight counts as a disease while it lasts. It also causes Blood Plague. So in essence it causes two diseases for purposes of things like Blood Strike, Death Strike, Obliterate and Blood Boil that scale off diseases. If you have Crypt Fever or Ebon Plague, that disease appears automatically so you end up with 3 diseases from Unholy Blight. (src)

Dancing Rune Weapon Unholy Blight and Blood Plague (src)
I believe the Dancing Rune Weapon can refresh your Blood Plague, but it can't apply another stack.

I think I answered Unholy Blight in another thread or two, but it is counted as a disease and it applies Blood Plague. So that's two for one spell, three if you have Crypt Fever. A lot of what we wanted to do with the tree overhaul was apply synergy wherever possible. So Unholy Blight is a great lead-in for Blood Boil, and it works well with Death and Decay (here, cower in my Blight) or the new talent which does something similar (but in a very cool way, at least once we get real art).

BlizzCon 2008 Website Launched

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

We just released the official BlizzCon 2008 website. You can now find new information about this year's panels, contests, and tournaments, and you can also learn more about DIRECTV's special BlizzCon promotion. Make sure to check back regularly as the site will be updated with new event information such as event schedules, floor plans, store info, and much, much more.

EU - Blizzard Authenticators will soon be available

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

Due to the high demand for the Blizzard Authenticators, they are currently sold out in the Online Store. We expect to get new stock in mid August, and will restock regularly as demand for the Authenticators continues. Thank you for your patience.

Tuesday Beta Blues

Kody — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:13:22 GMT

Fresh off the heels of yesterday's beta patch, which included a massive list of undocumented changes, we have quite a few blue posts for you of particular interest. Read on for the full details on everything, and don't forget to stay up-to-date with the latest beta news both here and on World of Raids.

General

Tigole on gold spammer exploit potential with the new calendar (src)

We have anti-gold spam measures in the works for the calendar. Please continue to post feedback or if you find anything that you believe will be exploitable or abusive.

The Zul'Aman Bear Mount will no longer drop after Lich King goes live (src)

The Zul'Aman bear will no longer be available. But the other mounts you mentioned will remain unchanged.
The reasoning behind this is that the Zul'Aman bear is obtained during an event which requires precision and skill at level 70. The accomplishment for those who have legitimately earned the mount would be diminished if we continued to allow players to obtain the mount once the level cap is raised to 80.

Classes

Death Knight: The new Frost Strike (src)

There is a bug right now preventing normalized attacks from doing non-physical damage. Frost Strike will be normalized when that bug is fixed. (Obliterate will also be normalized.)
But, sadly, instant attacks do less damage than next-swing attacks, since an instant attack also lets you get the full benefit from the normal melee swing. That's why Frost Strike does less damage now. The freezing part wasn't even factored into the damage calculation because we want to mess with that some more... as well as get feedback. :)

Death Knight: Tanking impressions (src)

Useful feedback. Thanks. :)
I don't know if this was true in your situation, but one thing I have noticed is that the death knights who have leveled quickly tend to be grouping with veteran characters in epic gear. It's tough to test threat generation of a death knight in Shadowmoon quest blues against dps classes in T4 or better gear.
If you're getting trounced by Ingvar, that is probably a problem with the dungeon and not the guys you're running with. The earlier instances need to be reasonably easy, especially since a lot of players will be running them in Borean Tundra greens.
We haven't made a big pass comparing threat, dps and mitigation among all the classes yet, frankly because the abilities haven't stabilized enough yet. Fortunately with the death knight in particular, there are a lot of knobs to turn.

Druid: Maim no longer stops auto-attacks (src)

Maim will break from the same amount of damage that Fear, Entangling Roots etc. breaks with now.

Hunter: Master's Call to be usable while stunned (src)

Able to use while stunned? Consider it done.

Hunter: Ghostcrawler on exotic pets versus normal pets (src)

The exotic pets will be different from normal pets. Ideally they might even be a little bit better, but we're very hesitant to make them too good lest we see every hunter stampede over to the BM tree. Pets are supposed to be something important to all kinds of hunters, and the BM tree already offers some amazing pet buffs and synergy. We just don't want to overdo it with this talent. :)
At the very least, the exotic pets will have a new family ability that will ideally be really useful in some situations. I'm making this one up, but imagine that since normal crabs have Pin, an exotic pet might have a Pin-like ability that did fire damage. Or imagine that you could tame a drake (you can't, because they aren't beasts) and that instead of lightning or fire breath, it had frost breath that could freeze an enemy, death knight style. Would this be useful? Probably. Does it make the 51-point talent mandatory? Ideally not. Though those 5 talent points aren't bad....
As far as what happens if you have an exotic pet and respec, most likely the pet's talents will just reset. Yeah you get a free pet respec out of the deal, but it's not as if it's free since the hunter has to respec. Any exotic pets in the stable won't be lost, but you wouldn't be able to get them out of the stable either. If you have an exotic pet at the moment you respec, then it will probably be dismissed (but not abandoned) and you won't be able to summon it again, forcing you to go swap it into the stable. (Or abandon it if you're THAT kind of hunter.)

Hunter: Ghostcrawler comments on Pet Talent feedback (src)

Great thread. Because the pet talents are such a new feature, all of this feedback is really useful.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
The bottom talents in particular need to have some pretty stringent pre-reqs so that hunters can't just cherry pick all of the active abilities. We can and will iterate on what those pre-req talents are though.
Active pet abilities in general represent some interesting design challenges. On the one hand, if the hunter just programs the pet and puts it on autopilot, then having unique abilities just sort of blends into a generic +dps for the pet. On the other hand, it would be sad if hunters never took the active abilities because the pet has trouble using the expensive ones and the hunter feels like he already has too many of his own abilities to hit.
This is something on which we'll try to hit a reasonable balance. Warlocks seem to have a pretty decent mix of demon abilities that can be used by the demon AI and some that the warlock specifically needs to use.

Mage: Arcane Blast receiving a revamp (src)

From our internal patch notes:
Arcane Blast effect duration reduced to 3 seconds, now increases damage by 15/30/45% instead of reducing cast time.

Shaman: Paralysis being replaced soon (src)

Being replaced with something soon, along with a few other changes to deep Elemental.

Shaman: Retroactive changes to "some" gear coming (src)

We hope to retroactively change some of the gear on live so the transition is less painful for classes whose core mechanics are changing.

Shaman: Lightning Bolt coefficient nerfed (src)

Lightning Bolt always had a higher coefficient than similar bolt spells. This was because there weren't as much/any nature damage debuffs. Now that they exist, we're restoring Lightning Bolt to it's intended coefficient. Your DPS in a raid setting will if anything be higher with these changes.

Warlock: Master Conjuror changes coming (src)

Master Conjurer will soon be a good investment ;)

WWI In-Game Pet, Blue Posts and Wallpapers

Zyuu — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:06:06 GMT

Worldwide Invitational In-Game Pet: Archangel Tyrael
Add some more Diablo flavor to your WoW experience, with the Archangel Tyreal In-Game Pet.

The code for the in-game World of Warcraft pet that was provided in the goodie bag at the 2008 Worldwide Invitational will be usable at our Pet Redemption Webpage after patch 2.4.3 is released in the near future.
After you have received the in-game code from this webpage, the Alliance will travel to Stormwind and the Horde to Undercity to visit a new NPC where you will be able to claim the in-game pet.
The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.
[Source]

Upgrades to Raid Gear in Wrath of the Lich King
Wrath of the Lich King will work similarly to The Burning Crusade in that higher tiers of raid gear won't be replaced immediately and they may help out the leveling process but a person in blues may get upgrades from their first quest completion.
One thing I have been reminding players of is that we don't currently plan to completely redo a statistic this time like we did with stamina. Where in The Burning Crusade players saw items with a ton more stamina that lead to immediate changes to their gear, in Wrath of the Lich King you should more or less be seeing gear that is just higher level.
[Source]

Blizzard Authenticator, how it works!
A player by the name of Ysgarth over at the official WoW Forums, made a post which contain a lot of insightful information about the new Blizzard Authenticator, which we posted about last week.

On 26/06/08, Blizzard announced the Blizzard Authenticator, a device that provides your WoW account with an extra layer of security. They sell this device in their Blizzard Store for €6. You may consider buying it, but is the extra security really worth the money? How much more secure does it make your account? This post will explain how this device works, and exactly why it makes your account more secure.
How the authenticator works
The Blizzard Authenticator is a token that you can put for example on your keychain. It has a little display that, once your press the button will generate a 6-digit number that changes every minute.
This number is used as a 1-time password. This means the password is only valid once. When you use it to log in, the code becomes invalid and any hacker trying to access your account later with the same number won't be able to log in.
A hacker wanting to access your account will now, in addition to keylogging your username and password, have to physically break into your house and steal the authenticator to see what number it displays. But hackers are clever people. Isn't there any way for them to know which number the authenticator is going to display? The answer is no, and here's why.
Every authenticator has a little built-in clock. This clock keeps track of the number of seconds since, for example the WoW release date, Tigole's birthday or whenever. Each authenticator also has a unique key, which it uses to encrypt this number of seconds into what looks like a completely random number. There is no way, without knowing the encryption key, to guess what number is going to be displayed at any point in time. Even if the hacker has all the numbers you entered before, he can't extrapolate that into what number will be showing next.
The hacker also can't hack into the device itself to find out it's key, because it doesn't connect to the computer in any way. Even if the hacker were the mailman who delivered the authenticator to your house, he would have to open it up and extract the hardware that contained the key. These devices are generally tamper-resistant and will purge themselves when opened.
So, if the hacker can't know your 1-time password, how is Blizzard going to know? The difference is, Blizzard has the key for every authenticator they made. When you log in, blizzard looks up which authenticator is associated with your account, and finds the matching key. They then use this key to decrypt the number you entered into the number of seconds the authenticator has been counting. They then verify that this number matches the current time.
Even if the time on your authenticator doesn't exactly match the time on blizzard's server, they still allow you to log in within a minute or so of the defined time, just in case the clock in your authenticator is running a little slower or faster than normal. This still does not allow hackers to use the number from a minute ago, because when you log in successfully, that number is then disabled and prevented from being used again.
If you still think someone may eventually find a way around it, this security measure is used by businesses and government agencies around the world to provide security, and they have a lot more sensitive information to guard than the login information to a WoW account. This is a tested method that has proven itself to be secure.
[Source]

Lake Wintergrasp
There is still much testing to be done in this regard, Dominus. While we're not ready to delve into the more specific details about objectives and time lines for succeeding in Lake Wintergrasp, I can assure you this ambitious new world PvP zone has been given some serious thought and will undergo considerable testing to ensure it's not only successful, but enjoyable.
For me, this new zone is probably the single-most exciting project with regards to Wrath of the Lich King content.
[Source]

Stormwind Harbor and Old Ironforge
Why the decision to add a full new area to Stormwind Harbor before finishing Old Ironforge that's almost done?
There are several areas in Azeroth that have yet to be completed. This is not to say that we never intend on revisiting some of these places. It's all a matter of timing and finding a way to fit in some of our older ideas with some of our upcoming content.
For instance, the Stormwind Harbor makes sense now to provide the Alliance quick access to Northrend beyond flying to Menethil Harbor. Just the same we're opening the Orgrimmar Arena to put it to good use for some new challenges in Wrath of the Lich King.
You may well see other areas in Azeroth of which we've yet to make use come to life some day.
[Source]

Two new Wallpapers, made by fans

Midsummer Fire Festival - Blue Posts

Teza — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:19:09 GMT

Midsummer Fire Festival - Blue Posts

Wild Fires and Light in Dark Places quests (src)
No, the Wild Fires and Light in Dark Places quests are no longer active. If you have them completed but not turned in, you can turn them in, but there are a bunch of new quests and mechanics in their stead this year.

Issue with the sub-65 Inform the Elder portion (src)
For those who haven't seen it -- there is an issue with the sub-65 Inform the Elder portion, and we're working on fixing it.

Torch catching tips (src)
1) Less populated cities are better, as there are fewer torches flying around.
2) Zoom your camera all the way out and move it to roughly top-down, in order to track the shadow better.
3) Follow the shadow, not the torch, and lead it a little bit -- stand a bit in front of where you think it's going to fall.
4) Speed buffs can help. ;)

Brazier of Dancing Flames size (src)
The size wasn't nerfed, actually. If you'll recall, during the Test Realm session when Midsummer was up for testing, there was also an erroneous bug for a while that made non-combat pets much larger than they're supposed to be. As the fire dancer qualifies as a non-combat pet, she too was affected by this bug. She was always meant to be as small as she appears now.

Cannot get the "Striking Back" quest? (src)
As it turns out, there's a minor issue with this that's preventing people under 65 from getting the quest. I cruised into the office and have begun the hotfixing process. I'm on top of it. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.

Scorched Stone not buyable next year (src)
I wouldn't count on the Scorched Stone being buyable next year. I can't really speak as to the shift in loot from year to year. While we have no plans currently to remove the Scorchling from Ahune's loot, next year's still a long way away -- our stance might change in that time.

Mantle of the Fire Festival (src)
The old quest to get the Mantle has been phased out and will not become available. Because the very same item reward is available for purchase on the Midsummer vendor for blossom cost, and because we revamped the holiday, rather.

Blue Posts, Fan Art and Comic

Zyuu — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:41:08 GMT

Nothing overly exciting on the Blue Post front today. Here goes, though:
Will the level cap be increased beyond 80?
A player explain why he rather not see the level cap to get increased anymore past eighty and Bornakk of Blizzard replies with:
We don't have any details to share beyond Wrath of the Lich King.
That said, before we start to think of things that are way down the road, focus on the present. Why have you spent the "countless hours" gearing up your characters right now? For me it is to feel that I accomplished something with the new character. I enjoy knowing I have multiple characters all leveled up and ready to go if I need them.
As for the leveling part. I used most of my AQ40 items a decent ways into leveling to 70 and they made leveling go quite a bit easier for me which I felt was a great reward. Something to keep in mind is that there was a change in item setup in The Burning Crusade to where you saw a lot more stamina on basically everything.
In Wrath of the Lich King we don't currently plan to rework an entire statistic like that, so instead the items will just get more powerful at a more consistent rate. Of course anything can still change so we'll have to see how things turn out.
[Source]
Personally I'm all for more levels in World of Warcraft. Leveling up is quite fast, so more levels usually also mean more content to experience while leveling up. As long the cap is only increased with each expansion, it shouldn't be a big issue, considering Blizzard tend to take quite... awhile.... to release something as major like an expansion for WoW.
What's your thoughts, dear reader? Should the level cap get increased even more after 80, or should it stay?

Heroic Old World Dungeons
I'm sure there's quite a few of us who'd love to see old world dungeons getting heroic mode added to them, but will it happen? Bornakk tell us the current plans regarding this:
We currently have no plans to implement this. Whether we made them tuned for level 70s or 80s they would be left behind again at some point but don't get me wrong, it's a fun idea, it's just that right now we are focusing on all the dungeons we are adding in Wrath of the Lich King, their regular and heroic versions, along with the dual setup of 10 and 25 person versions for each of the raid dungeons.
[Source]
It's a shame that Blizzard have no plans for the time being to add heroic versions of old school dungeons such as Stratholme, Scholomance and Dire Maul. Even lower level dungeons, such as Maraudon and Dead Mines would be amazingly fun to dungeon crawl through if there were heroic versions. Ah well, let's play the wait game and see what the future has in store.

Updated textures with Wrath of the Lich King?
A player is asking if we're going to see updated textures with the Lich King expansion, since he feel WoW is a bit too much "WC3.5" (Warcraft 3.5). Nethaera, a Blizzard representative replies:
We have some really amazing graphics and textures going in with Wrath of the Lich King. I believe the art team is really outdoing themselves as have all of the teams developing the expansion. We are still retaining the style that makes Warcraft, well, Warcraft, but hopefully you'll enjoy the newer elements that are being added in and the design of Northrend.
[Source]
From what I've seen so far, Wrath of the Lich King is dead on with how I picture Northrend like; dark, grim and cold. Burning Crusade was a bit sci-fi inspired and it seems like Lich King will go back to WoW's roots and be more fantasy-like. Time will tell, though.

Are we going to see a change in minimum requirements for WotLK?
This is a question which appear quite often. Nethaera replies:
Sorry. No updates on that end to share at this time. You know the drill. If and when we do have something to share we will.
[Source]
A slight change in the minimum system requirements wouldn't hurt, if we get nicer and more rich and detailed textures. What's your thoughts? WoW is famous for it's incredibly low system requirements.

How will the Closed Beta for Wrath of the Lich King work?
As always, with a Closed Beta for a game, there's several ways to get in. Through friends and contacts and usually there will be contests on different websites and it's possible a sign up form exists. Nethaera share some details regarding the Lich King closed beta with us:
We generally pull from many places so that we have a good variety of people in the beta. Some of it is random and some are winners from contests, or specific groups that we want to pull from. We don't have a specific schedule for you on who we will pull in or when to share with you, but we'll do what we can to keep people as informed as possible.
[Source]
Also, there's no real experience needed to get into the Closed Beta, except that you have a World of Warcraft account in good standing of course...
There is no minimum level of experience needed since we look at a broad spectrum of testers. We want people of all experience levels to be able to share their experiences with us so that we know where we might need to work on something more. We don't necessarily want to make one aspect too hard or too easy on either end of things.
[Source]
Something that many might find interesting is that there will be a sign up process to "apply" for the Closed Beta.
I just thought I'd update this thread with a little extra information to let people know that there will be a sign up process when it comes time for the beta as well.
Please note that that time is not now. Please be aware that there are some scams currently running that are asking people to sign up for Wrath of the Lich King beta. We will let everyone know when it is time to sign up.
[Source]

Comic Contest: Honorable Mentions
Blizzard updated their Comic Contest gallery with a new Honorable Mentions comic.

Impressive Fan Arts
Azazel a very talented artist has released two sexy fan arts, they might not be considered safe for work, take this into consideration please.

Previous recent news

2008 Arena Tournament Phase 2 Has Begun
Most Memorable Moment, Part II
New DC Comic series to reveal Ashbringer’s backstory
Working for Blizzard Europe
Dance and Costume Signups Now Open
Most Memorable Moment
Comic and Slim Jim WoW Commerical Video
WotLK Bestiary Update: Jormungar

Community Tournament, Blue Posts, Fan Comic

Zyuu — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:25:17 GMT

Community Tournament Announced
If you attend to the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, you will be able to watch some of the top players in World of Warcraft Arena, Warcraft III and Starcraft complete.
At the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational, all attendees will have the opportunity to witness some of the world’s top StarCraft, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft Arena players compete in exciting matches. In addition to these professional gaming matches, community player tournaments will allow you to show your skills for fun and glory – and some amazing tournament prizes. Read more on how to compete with other members of the community in Blizzard's upcoming World of Warcraft tournaments and use your skills to come out on top! Check out the Community tournaments page for more information.

Blue Posts
Most recent posts by Blizzard employees.
Leveling from 1 to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King
These things are a possibility, however, I'm unaware of any current plans. As you know we made changes for the 20-60 experience, and more changes could happen, but until we see how things play out a bit more with the addition of the expansion, there isn't anything specific I can tell you in regard to more changes just yet.
[Source]
Choices for the Death Knight
Here's the skinny, the lowdown, the 411 etc on the death knight choice.
First off, it fits in with Northrend extremely well for obvious reasons.
Second off, many people tend to have this strange belief that adding a new class is simple, easy as pie, and a cakewalk all on a Sunday afternoon, but it's not. There is a lot of work that goes into it and many considerations for how it will work, how it will work with other classes, how the lore ties in, how quests and npcs also can tie in to this new class, itemization, and a whole lot more. It takes a lot of forethought, testing, and care to add something this major to the game and for each new class that is added to the game, come the concerns about not maintaining the uniqueness of each class that already exists.
I'm not saying that the possibility of more classes being added in the future isn't a possibility. We had many ideas of what class we'd add in for Wrath of the Lich King prior to settling on the death knight. There are many more possibilities for classes we'd consider in the future as well, but we aren't going to rush to add them in and risk creating a situation where other classes lose their uniqueness and their value within the game.
[Source]
The Death Knight Quest Line
As long as you have a level 55 character on a server, you will be able to unlock the death knight (create one). There will be a questline associated with the death knight, however, so that you may learn how to play it and get into the storyline associated with them.
[Source]
Older areas will be revisited
We would like to revisit some of these older areas in the future, but it's going to be contingent on when we have the time to put into it.
[Source]
Game Time Credit issues in Europe
On May 21st and May 28th technical issues caused a total of 10 hours additional maintenance on the following realms:
Aerie Peak, Boulderfist, Eonar, Frostmane, Grim Batol, Jaedenar, Kazzak, Kilrogg, Outland, Ravenholdt, Stonemaul, Tarren Mill, Vek'nilash, Wildhammer
As a result we will credit all players with an active character on the affected realms with 1 day of game time credit and rested bonus.. This will be credited to the eligible accounts in the next few weeks. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this has caused.
[Source]

WoW Comic Contest Winner for May 2008
Quite amusing.

Arena talk, Blue posts, Wallpaper, Comics

Zyuu — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:24:28 GMT

Gotfrag have interviewed the World of Warcraft designer Kalgan. The article mainly cover aspects of the Arena.

Blizzard has released sign up information for its WoW Tournament; how do you think the community will react to this years event and what turn out are you expecting?
The community’s reaction has been very positive so far. We’ve used the feedback from last year’s event to refine this year’s structure, and we’re expecting a strong turnout for the tournament.
Blizzard’s tournament last year was the focus of the WoW competitive scene, are you hoping for a similar focus on this years Blizzard tournament?
We aim to hold premiere events every year, and this year is no different. Our intention is to continue running topnotch competitive events that players want to take part in and spectators want to watch.
The idea of “eSports” has been a big part of Blizzard’s corporate strategy, what impact do you think eSports has on the success from a business side for Blizzard and other game developers? We understand that Blizzard has established a dedicated eSports group. Could you comment on what that group is chartered to do?
For our company, eSports has been a key to the longevity of several of our titles. With StarCraft celebrating its 10th anniversary, there are still active communities and eSports organizations that support it along with our other titles. The Blizzard eSports group is responsible for developing Blizzard Entertainment’s presence in the increasingly popular eSports scene. Its main role consists of preparing and operating tournaments around the world. Additionally, it provides third-party support for various eSports leagues and communicates balance feedback to the developers.
Read the full interview with all the questions & answers here.

Blue Posts

Rogue 2 versus 2 in the Arena
Slorkuz returns and this time he's posting about his views on the Rogue in 2vs2 Arena.
Well, allow me to give you my personal take on this :)
I believe that rogues in 2v2 have a variety of viable combinations. Before entering into a debate on what partner you should chose though, I want to note that in my opinion, coordination and synergy between yourself and your partner is more, if not the most, important to gaining a winning result.
When you start playing with a new partner, I firmly believe that there is an "adaptation" process where you must first learn to combine your different play styles into one cohesive strategy. Allow me to use an example with Rogues; One Rogue might be a very "aggressive" player and charge out in hopes to get the jump on a target before they get "set up" or perhaps catch an enemy stealther off guard and get the opener. Another Rogue might have a more defensive play style and prefer to wait it out a little bit and perhaps capitalize on your opposing team getting impatient by catching an enemy player in the wrong location at the wrong time.
While both of these forms of "rogue play styles" can and does work very effectively if executed correctly, they carry a requirement of significantly different expectations to their team mates' approach and play style.
This kind of adaptation and team synergy carries over to every team composition, albeit arguably some more than others. Coordinating crowd controls, offensive bursts and positioning in the arena are the keys to functioning successfully as a team.
Personally, when doing arenas, I prefer to discuss with my partner possible matchups and what kind of "game plan" we should execute prior to entering. Then, later, if we encounter a setup or set of plays that left us with a loss, we often sit back and think/talk about what went wrong and what we can do to counter what just happened to us.
That being said;
For 2v2s as a Rogue I believe some of the most common setups are as follows:
Rogue/Restoration Druid
Combining the mobility and control of a Rogue with the survivability and utility of of a restoration Druid, this composition can be very effective while executed correctly. Between Cyclone, Sap, Blind, Roots and feral abilities on the druid's account such as feral charge and bash, a well coordinated set of plays can present your opponents with a tough choice; trinket a Blind in order to heal while risking getting charged/bashed, or eat the blind and hope their partner can stay alive by own merits for the duration of the CC.
Rogue/Discipline Priest
What discipline priests lack in terms of mobility, they make up for in terms of utility and synergy with a Rogue partner. Fears, mana burns, instant heals/shields and both offensive and defensive dispels couple very well with a Rogue's control abilities. A well executed priest fear on an opposing healer while their partner is low health (fear gets trinketed) followed by a Blind by the rogue and subsequently an optional Vanish->Sap can leave the lowhealth target without heals for a healthy duration allowing an opportunity to finish him off.
Rogue/Warlock
This team relies on the tactic "kill before being killed". Between the utilities and CC's of both classes and improved stealth detection from the warlocks felhunter, this combination allows the rogue to very often get the opener on a stealthed target. Add a warlock's survivability to the mix while executing some well timed CC combinations (fear->blind->vanish/sap), this formation is considered one of the most potent "double dps" 2v2 teams.
Rogue/Mage
Similiar to a Rogue/Warlock setup in the sense that this is a 2dps team requiring a quick kill, both classes have an arsenal of CC and survival abilities if they get jumped. The spike damage of a Mage "Shatter Combo" and a Rogue stunlock with damage, this composition can be particularly lethal if the crit numbers are high.
Rogue/Rogue
Also a popular 2dps formation currently, this team composition relies mostly on one thing; Getting the opener on your opponents and controling the fight. If either of the two rogues gets jumped/cc'ed off the bat, it can be hard to recover and pull of a win. Coordinating stuns and CC's is also an important part of this team's strengths. An example is having one Rogue unload a 5pt Kidney in anticipation that the target will trinket while the second rogue holds back ready to re-apply (albeit diminished duration) second stun. Coordinating interupts is also key to this combination.
---
I am sure that there are other setups that can be effective, but I will leave the elaboration on those up to other players. Again, I would like to reiterate my opinion that the most important points to being successful in the arenas is communication, team synergy and executing a plan together.
I hope my opinions and suggestions have been helpful, and I welcome further discussion as always :)
Best of luck to you!
[Source]
"Worldwide Invitational" information
"Worldwide Invitational" relates to the tournaments being held for StarCraft, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft. An invitational is the style of choosing the participants, where they don't necessarily compete in preliminary rounds, but are hand picked to compete solely at the event.
While some contests for wwi may be restricted to EU residents only, our own BlizzCon is planned to have a similar set of contests from previous BlizzCon years and likely similar rules and restrictions. Keep an eye on the BlizzCon site for contest announcements and rules/restrictions as they become available.
[Source]
Will WotLK change profession slots from 2>3?
We have no current plans to add another main profession slot to characters in Wrath of the Lich King.
[Source]

Fan Art Wallpaper

We just added a new fan wallpaper to our World of Warcraft fan wallpapers section. This wallpaper features the dreaded demon lord, Kil’jaeden, facing Illidan, Lady Vashj and Kael’thas.

[Source]

Fan Art Comics

Three new comics by fans have been published on the official World of Warcraft site since our last news post.

[Source]

Limited WoW Operations in China, Blue Posts

Zyuu — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:57:05 GMT

The9 Limited Suspends Game Operations for 3 Days of Mourning for the Earthquake Tragedy in Southwest China
Shanghai, China – May 19, 2008. The9 Limited (NASDAQ: NCTY)(“The9”), a leading online game operator in China, announced today that it will suspend the operations of World of Warcraft®, Soul of The Ultimate NationTM, Granado Espada, Joyful Journey WestTM, and MU® from May 19, 2008 to May 21, 2008, in response to the government's calling for three days of mourning for the earthquake tragedy in Southwest China. The operations of the foregoing games will be reestablished starting from the calendar day of May 22, 2008.
[Source]

Daily Blue Posts

These are via World of Raids

Clarification about the Arena Rating Calculations

There has been some confusion regarding the changes to Arena Team and Personal rating calculations in patch 2.4.2 for those players with 100% participation on their team so we’d like to clarify how the system works now.
The adjustment to a team’s personal rating can vary based on the average personal rating of the other team while team ratings will always adjust based directly on the team rating of the other team. If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating. Adjustments to your personal rating are based on the ratings by which the opposing team was queued.

If the opposing team was queued based on their team rating, your personal rating will be adjusted based on their team rating.
If the opposing team was queued based on their average personal rating, your personal rating will be adjusted based on their average personal rating.

Example:

Team A has a rating of 1550. Team B has a rating of 1750.
Team A has an average personal rating of 1520 for the members participating in the match. Team B has an average personal rating of 1490 for the members participating in the match.
Team A wins. Team A’s team rating is adjusted based off of a win over Team B’s team rating of 1750.
All members of Team A have their personal ratings adjusted based off of a win over Team B’s average personal rating of 1490 but it will be a smaller gain when compared to the rating their team got.

This change promotes having teams compete against players who’s ratings statistically match up best against them. In turn this will help provide the most competitive environment possible in the Arena.
[Source]

Character Slots & Death Knights

We don’t plan to add another character slot with the introduction of the Death Knight, which means that you would have to either delete or transfer a character, if you wish to roll a Death Knight on a realm that already has 10 characters on it.
[Source]

Death Knight making other classes obsolete? No, not really

It would be rather silly to think that the Death Knight will make other classes obsolete, because that is really not the case. The Death Knight will bring its own flavour and style to the game, but at the same time it will be able to share roles with some of the existing classes. We have seen quite a few posts recently saying that there are too few tanks to go around, posts that claim that it takes forever to find a tank for PUGs or that guild progression is being slowed down due to shortage of tanks. By adding another potential tank to the mix, the Death Knight should most surely be considered a helpful addition to the game instead of a threatening one. I don't think Warriors will have anything to worry about in WotLK, because they will not be replaced by the Death Knight. Warriors will still be needed in groups and guilds, as they have always been, and they will still be great tanks. This also holds true for Druids and Paladins by the way.
[Source]

World of Warcraft : blue

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Blue Posts

Fan Art Wallpaper

Fan Art Comics

Limited WoW Operations in China, Blue Posts

Daily Blue Posts

Clarification about the Arena Rating Calculations

Character Slots & Death Knights

Death Knight making other classes obsolete? No, not really