World of Warcraft : wow

WoW 5-year Anniversary: Game Informer Interviews Jeff Kaplan

Kody — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:02:15 GMT

Game Informer recently had a chance to interview Jeff Kaplan to talk Warcraft in celebration of the 15-year Warcraft and 5-year World of Warcraft Anniversaries. The interview is a fun read with some great quotes from Kaplan, and sheds a lot of light on why early design decisions were made, as well as the process of evolving the game to what we play now.

I've included some of the more interesting pieces from the interview below. While many know Tigole was one of the first quest designers on the game, did you know there were only two originally, working on many of the early zones? We also get word from Tigole that there will be a cutscene included with patch 3.3, likely related to the defeat of Arthas. Beyond that, Hinterlands was originally planned to be an endgame classic zone, while Burning Steppes was geared for level 30s!

On Kaplan's role

GI: You're primary job with World of Warcraft was world design, right?

JK: That's correct. I actually joined the World of Warcraft team as one of the two first quest designers, specifically to create quest content and to design that system. The other quest designer was a really great Blizzard veteran by the name of Pat Nagel. He and I worked in collaboration with the lead designer to design the quest system and start making some of the first quest content.

As WOW progressed from there, I got very involved with all things PvE with the game. When it came to dungeons, I helped formulate the vision along with some of the other guys as to what our dungeon experience and raid experience might be like. I worked very closely with our creative director, Chris Metzen, who was sort of the keeper of the flame when it came to the lore of Warcraft. I tried to apply his vision in a game design sense to world design and world building. I was kind of a medium between Chris Metzen and our level designers and our environmental artists.

On storytelling in WoW becoming more important with each expansion

GI: One of the things that I've picked up on personally that's been improving with the expansions -- whether you're looking at quests or instances or raids or anything -- storytelling seems to be a more and more important factor with subsequent patches and expansions. This stands out to me, because very few other MMOs have managed to create captivating narrative content, but it seems like you guys are really striving for that and often succeeding in World of Warcraft. Is that something you expect to continue progressing in future World of Warcraft expansions and future Blizzard MMOs, or will narrative always take a backseat to the grind in MMOs?

JK: It's funny, because you said that narrative became more important, but I look at it a little bit differently. The story was always extremely important to us; I just don't think we did a good job of telling it early on. What happened over the years as World of Warcraft progressed is that we had this very seasoned development team. Guys like Chris Metzen, our creative director, were partnering with guys like Alex Afrasiabi, our lead world designer who headed up the quest team. We've got the most experienced quest team in the industry. These guys are masterminds now when it comes to telling a story. They're just much better at doing it than we ever were before.

They really wrapped their heads around the concept of letting the players experience the story first-hand rather than just trying to beat them over the head with text, which is something that's really important. In the early days, we did a lot of quests where we put a lot of time, heart, and soul into designing them. If you go back and look at the "Green Hills of Stranglethorn" quests, for example, there's a lot of text written, and there's actually quite a bit of story there, but the players don't absorb it, because they don't experience it themselves.

If you fast-forward to something like the Death Knight starting experience, our story-telling team has really mastered or refined the art of delivering the story as first-hand gameplay rather than spraying you with the word hose, which is what we did in the past.

On the use of cutscenes in World of Warcraft

GI: I would agree that the game has gotten much better at showing rather than telling, but Wrath of the Lich King also saw the introduction of cutscenes to the game. It's obviously much easier to tell the story in that, but you're also taking the player out of the game. Do you think that those will keep showing up future expansions as well? Is it something you'll use sparingly?

JK: Cutscenes will always be something that we use sparingly, yes. We never want to interrupt gameplay too frequently or for too long of a period of time. The Wrathgate cutscene was a big experiment for us. It was our first foray into in-game cutscenes in World of Warcraft. I don't think we've fully refined how we want cutscenes to work with future World of Warcraft content.

We debate like crazy. We debate the length, we debate the frequency, and we have a lot of theories, but Blizzard is a really iterative development house. I think what's going to have to happen is that you'll see more cutscenes come into the game for us to really refine our strategy with them. We definitely have an eye toward more cutscenes, but at the same time, we don't want to become just a cutscene game.

Even before Cataclysm, in patch 3.3, there's going to be a really exciting cutscene moment that's going to be our next experiment with that.

On the casual-vs-hardcore debate

GI: With the drop to 10-man or 25-man for all raids, another major change was the ability to run 5-man dungeons for badges that you can use to purchase equipment that would normally only drop from raids previously. These kinds of changes seem focused on appealing to more casual players, but I know that some hardcore players complain about them. How do you strike that balance in the Warcraft community between pleasing the hardcore fans but still making things accessible?

JK: It's not even just a casual versus hardcore thing. It's a play style choice. There are some players who just never want to experience the large raids. They're not interested in hanging out with 25 players online. Some of those are very skilled, very hardcore players who play the game more than people who play 25-person raids. Between PvE and PvP, we have these separate paths to the end-game for people to pursue. The same goes for within a game type.

If you take PvE, we have to make sure that five-person groups or solo people or 10-person groups or 25-person groups, that everyone has access to really good gear and progression that they feel good about. We don't want them to feel like Blizzard is only validating one way to play. What we like to remind the hardest of the hardcore 25-person raid groups is that at the end of the day, when it comes to the best of slot items, you're still the only people with it. Just because we're doing a bit of catch-up for everyone else doesn't mean that we're diminishing your accomplishments at all.

I think amongst the players, they also recognize the elite titles and Achievements that those hardcore players are earning. Being a former very hardcore raider from EverQuest, I understand that mentality. The thing those players want most is to attain something that nobody else has, which is sort of an interesting paradox in a game with an 11.5 million player base.

Check out the full interview by heading over to the Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan on Warcraft's Past And Future article on Game Informer.

World of Warcraft Battle Mosaic Tile Revealed!

DoranM — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:13:14 GMT

The World of Warcraft community team has sent us an update on their Battle Mosaic picture posting event! Here's the latest update about the Mosaic:

Warcraft Anniversary: First Battlecry Mosaic Tile Revealed

We've assembled the first part of the Battlecry photo mosaic from your photo submissions! Every 1,000 photos you send us will reveal another part of the mosaic and additional Warcraft artwork. When the full mosaic is revealed, your combined efforts will unlock an epic, exclusive piece of World of Warcraft art as a final reward.

Head over to the Battlecry photo mosaic page to view the mosaic in progress, and keep those photos coming!

World of Warcraft US And EU Weekly Community Update!

DoranM — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:10:46 GMT

The World of Warcraft Community team has sent us several forum posts, noteworthy threads, and developer posts of importance over the past week!

Take a look:

EU Forums:

Here are some of the most recent blue-posts made on the EU forums:

·         Poll: Why did you join the Pilgrim's Bounty event?
·         02/12 - Forum Watch
·         Blizzard Entertainment is now on Facebook!
·         Blizzard Entertainment at Dreamhack Winter!
·         Gold cap
·         is this email safe?
·         30/11 World of Warcraft TCG Hero Card Contest
·         Naxxramas 60 level
·         27/11 Community News
·         Fishing from pools......
·         26/11 Community Events
·         26/11 New Fan Art: Blood Elf Mage!

Other noteworthy threads:

· Things that make you laugh in WoW!
· New features you would like to see!

US Forums:

·         Weekend Deal: Gift WoW for only $5.00
·         Flying and cost
·         Free Character Moves for Select Realms
·         More details on sweepstakes
·         Fresh New MVP Look
·         Professions and rolling for ingredients
·         Horde VS. Alliance - Battlecry Mosaic
·         Sharing more information
·         Warcraft Anniversary Celebration Information

Developer Posts:

·         On rogue trees
·         DKs and tanking
·         Mastery & Passive Talents
·         Current Known Issues

World of Warcraft Announces Anniversary Website!

DoranM — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:34:30 GMT

The Blizzard WoW team has sent us this recent update about the 5 year WoW, and 15 year Warcraft, anniversaries! To commemorate the milestone Blizzard has launched the Warcraft anniversary website located at: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wowanniversary/

Here's the official notice from Blizzard highlighting years of Warcraft:

Over the past 15 years, a lot has changed in Azeroth. Valiant heroes have travelled the length and breadth of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, taken wing in Outland to free the Black Temple from Illidan's clutches, and set sail for Northrend to battle the mighty Lich King. Whether you've been part of the adventure from the beginning or are just getting started now, we're glad to have you with us for the five-year anniversary of World of Warcraft and the 15-year anniversary of the Warcraft series.

To commemorate these milestones, we've just launched the Warcraft anniversary website. There you'll find video interviews featuring personal anecdotes from some of the shapers of Warcraft, as well as the Battlecry Mosaic where you can show off your faction pride. Visit the anniversary site now!

Warcraft Anniversary Website: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wowanniversary/

World of Warcraft Developer Chat On Twitter!

DoranM — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:24:18 GMT

WorldofWarcraft.com has announced a developer chat on Twitter! The information on when the event begins and how to participate is listed below:

Developer Chat on Twitter

Join us this Thursday, October 22, at 3:00 PM PDT on Twitter for a developer chat with World of Warcraft’s director of production and game director.

Questions will be taken live through Twitter, so be sure to sign up for a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/signup and follow account @Warcraft in order to participate!

Due to the limitations of providing complete answers within Twitter, all answers will be posted on the forums in a dedicated thread, with links to the answers provided through Twitter.

The 3.3 PTR Patch Notes Have Been Updated!

DoranM — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:53:20 GMT

The 3.3 PTR patch notes have been updated! World of Raids is posting coverage on the new PTR changes during the day so keep them bookmarked!

Here's a look at the latest updates:

General

Level 1 characters no longer start with food or water in their inventory.

Druid

Rejuvenation: The base duration on all ranks of this spell is now 15 seconds.

Hunter

Pets

Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.

Mage

Talents

Fire

Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.

Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.

Dragon's Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.

Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.

Frost

Frozen Core: This talent now also causes Ice Lance critical strikes to reduce the cast time of the mage’s next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt by 0.4/0.7/1 seconds.

Pets

Water Elemental: Waterbolt mana cost reduced by 80%.

Priest

Talents

Shadow

Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff and only generates healing for single-target shadow damage spells.

Shaman

Reincarnation: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 60 minutes down to 30 minutes.

Talents

Enhancement

Earth’s Grasp: This talent now also reduces the cooldown of the Stoneclaw and Earthbind totems by 15/30%.

Restoration

Improved Reincarnation: This talent now reduces the cooldown of Reincarnation by 7/15 minutes, down from 10/20 minutes. Reincarnation cannot be used in Arenas.

Warlock

Talents

Affliction

Pandemic: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of the felhunter’s Shadow Bite spell by 100%.

Destruction

Ruin: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of the imp’s Firebolt spell by 100%.

User Interface

Any party member may mark targets (this does not apply to raid groups).

Unit Nameplates

The range at which players can see unit nameplates has been increased by 40 yards.

Unit nameplates are now subject to line-of-sight limitations in certain situations (this does not pertain to objects like Arena pillars or bridges).

Players can now adjust select unit nameplate display settings listed below under Interface Options via the “Names” tab.

Friendly/enemy pet nameplates can be toggled.

Enemy totem nameplates can be toggled (friendly totem nameplates are never displayed).

Players can choose whether or not unit nameplates overlap.

Unit nameplates for critters are never displayed.

Quests

Brittle Revenants, quest creatures fought for the Sons of Hodir daily quest “Hot and Cold,” no longer cast Shield Slam.

Reputation

The following reputations have been sped up by roughly 30%:

Argent Crusade

Alliance Vanguard

Horde Expedition

Kirin Tor

Knights of the Ebon Blade

Sons of Hodir

Wyrmrest Accord

Sons of Hodir quests now give more reputation overall.

Top-level helm and shoulder faction-related enchants are now available as Bind-on-Account items that do not require any faction to use once purchased (they still require the appropriate faction level to purchase).

Reputation commendations can now be purchased for 1 Emblem of Triumph each.

World of Warcraft 3.3 Patch Notes Released!

DoranM — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:57:12 GMT

World of Warcraft has announced the 3.3.0 Patch and World of Raids has posted the full details of the patch notes which includes Icecrown Citadel updates and changes to classes and races.

Visit the World of Raids 3.3.0 Patch Notes article for the latest information and banter on the changes, and read below for the official notes from Blizzard:

General

Icecrown Citadel

The Forge of Souls, the first wing of the 5-player dungeon, is currently available for testing.

Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds.

Dazed: Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed.

Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Classes: General

Default Equipment: Starting weapons are now more uniform. Rogues now start with a pair of daggers equipped. All other classes except shamans start with a 2-handed weapon equipped and the required skill already known. Shamans start with a 1-handed weapon and a shield, as they benefit more from the shield than they would from a 2-handed weapon.

Glancing Blows: The mage, warlock, and priest classes no longer have an increased chance for their melee attacks to be glancing blows; and the damage penalty due to their glancing blows is the same as for other classes.

Health and Mana Regeneration: These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters. As a player's level increases, the regeneration rates gradually reduce, returning to normal rates at level 15.

Spell Mana Costs: These costs have been reduced for almost all lower level spell ranks. In general, if a spell decreased in cost with a higher level rank in patch 3.2.0, that spell now has the decreased cost at all ranks. In addition, spells learned before level 20 with reduced cast times and/or durations have even further reduced mana costs, proportionate to their reduction in cast time or damage.

Races: General

Racial Attribute Bonuses: These bonuses have been recalibrated to even out the amount of starting health on the various races. All races start with a standardized level of stamina, except for orcs, dwarves, and tauren who now start with 1 extra point of stamina. For each class, bonuses and penalties to all attributes have been adjusted so that each race has an equal attribute total.

Death Knights

Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.

Talents

Unholy

Night of the Dead: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 45/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Druids

Pets

Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Hunters

Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.

Talents

Beast Mastery

Intimidation: If the hunter's pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet's next swing or attack.

Pets

Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Mages

Talents

Arcane

Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.

Pets

Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Priests

Pet

Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Rogues

Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.

Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.

Vanish: For the first second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Shamans

Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.

Talents

Elemental Combat

Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

Warlocks

Pets

Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Summon Imp: This ability is now available from the trainer for level 1 warlocks and no longer requires a quest to learn.

Warriors

Victory Rush: This ability is now trainable at level 6.

Talents

Protection

Damage Shield: This ability will no longer trigger any chance-on-hit effects from the warrior or the opponent it damages.

User Interface

Quest Tracking Feature

This system is currently under development and is not fully functional.

Looking For Group System

This feature is undergoing several improvements and is not available for testing at this time.

For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

A new feature has been added to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly for Windows XP users). This is currently enabled by default on the public test realms. For more information please visit our Test Realm forum.

Professions

Enchanting

Black Magic: This enchantment now sometimes increases haste rating for the caster rather than inflicting the caster's target with a damage-over-time effect. It is also now triggered by landing any harmful spell rather than inflicting damage with a spell.

Items

Glyphs

Death Knights

Glyph of Icy Touch: Instead of granting additional runic power, this glyph now causes Frost Fever to deal 20% additional damage.

Shamans

Glyph of Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Glyph of Fire Nova. This glyph now reduces the cooldown of Fire Nova by 3 seconds.

Bug Fixes

Druids

Rejuvenation: Rank 15 of this spell was providing a 15-second duration. It has been correctly reduced to 12 seconds.

Mages

Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

A Worgen Hunter Pet? You Bet!

Kody — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:57:41 GMT

For those of you that don't frequent World of Raids (why don't you?!), a few days ago I reported on the fact that it's currently possible to tame an NPC in Howling Fjord, which if timed properly, will allow you to have a worgen as your pet! The news first popped up on Mania's Arcania and spread like wildfire -- taking the Hunter community by storm as everyone who hadn't completed the quest scurried to tame their very own worgen.

The NPC in question is Garwal, a quest target for Alpha Worg, which is part of a series that both Alliance and Horde players can participate in. Unfortunately if you've already completed the quest, then you won't be able to tame Garwal, but if you haven't then you can enjoy having a worgen pet, at least for now. Check out Zarhym's comment below to understand why.

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

As you put it Zennie, we are currently discussing this issue.

It is not intended that Garwal can be tamed while in worgen form and will be addressed via a hotfix in the near future. When we have determined how to handle situations where hunters have already tamed Garwal we will let you know.

If you haven't tamed Garwal yet, you may want to do it soon. It might be an exercise in futility in the long run, leaving you with a normal worg pet, but at least for a while you can enjoy having one of the more unique pets in the game!

What other exotic NPCs have you managed to tame on your Hunter? And what creature types do you wish Blizzard would allow to be tamed?

World of Raids WoW Blue Tracker: Weekend Blues News

DoranM — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:45:27 GMT

WorldofRaids.com has used their WoW Blue Tracker technology once again to bring you some important blue posts for the weekend! There important changes on stealth detection, answers to why the Chopper mount was nerfed, and information on the upcoming armor pen cap. To discuss these changes and more visit the World of Raids Forums!

Here's your Saturday Blues:

Blue Posts

Why the chopper mount was nerfed (Source)

While we have items that slow your falling speed so you can avoid falling damage, a mount that moves you at 100% speed was not intended to be one of those items. The mechano-hog/chopper are very stylish mounts and other players love to hop in the passenger seat when possible - this mount wins on style points alone.

The upcoming Armor Pen Cap (Source)

Even against a fully sundered target, armor pen will still improve your dps. For nearly all reasonable cases, it remains a good stat unless you are a class or spec that does a high amount of non-physical damage. The cases were you could currently go negative are very contrived and involved stacking armor pen at the expense of all other stats and hoping your procs all go off at once. We can’t imagine this will be a nerf for anyone currently in the game.

---

Stacking armor pen at the expense of all other stats is not a reasonable or intended way for warriors to “catch up” to rogues. It’s still a good stat for warriors.

---

We made armor pen a better stat in a previous patch. I am fairly confident that many of the posts above decrying this as a nerf are over-estimating how close to removing more than 100% armor you really were. Even if you have two armor pen trinkets and they both proc simultaneously, that is going to be very low uptime. This is not a nerf. It's a preventative measure to keep things from breaking at future tiers of gear or in really exotic situations.

Direbrewfest; why isn't it retroactive? (Source)

For the most part the only achievements we made retroactive through loot were in raid dungeons. We figured it wouldn't be terribly difficult for a lot of players to get a 5 person group together and do some of the 5 person dungeons. I'm pretty sure Direbrew will be beat up a LOT in this next Brewfest.

Stealth detection changes (Source)

The human racial is still a potential source of concern. We thought the engineering problem was worse because players felt compelled to drop their current profession and grind out engineering just for PvP. While that does happen in extreme cases to races too, you give up so much progress on your current character to reroll that the racial has to be quite overpowered to make that trade worth it. It's a bigger concern on something like the tournament realms where players can change their race easily.

Like I said though, we did a lot of work on racials for 3.0, but that doesn't mean they are completely finished and polished as a feature.

Player versus Player

Vault of Archavon bosses are intended to rain loot from the sky (Source)

We want the bosses in the Vault of Archavon to be doable by a wide variety of players and that includes pugs. Because of the way Lake Wintergrasp works we want access to these bosses to be the reward and don't want to block players from having access to them and able to defeat them.

Druid

Starfall (Source)

Our two cents is you are working too hard to define Starfall. Many of these threads are of the category of "It behaves like an AE therefore it should also behave like this...". It's a unique spell. It has qualities of AE spells and dots. It's better against small groups than individuals or large groups. It doesn't have to be channeled. It finds targets for its damage. In this case, my suggestion would be to focus more on whether the spell is effective or not and not whether it "breaks the rules."

We think the spell is effective, though it does require a certain amount of finesse to use (meaning you need to use it at the right time). We will acknowledge that Balance isn't quite there yet as a PvP spec, but we don't think Starfall is necessarily the problem or the solution.

Hunter

No plans to nerf Survival for now (Source)

Just to clarify, we have no plans to nerf Survival. We would like to solve some of Marks' mana problems, though some predictions remain that Marks will overtake Survival with the best possible gear. BM is probably a little behind, which is something we also want to address.

I will add my standard caveat not to try and overinterpret Ulduar data. The bosses were designed to be very different from each other. We didn't go boss by boss and say "Okay, this is the one where warlocks will be highest." Put another way, when we make single boss raids, we don't expect to see a 10-way tie for dps. I'm not saying the PvE damage is perfect (though compared to where it's been historically it's honestly not bad). You just have to examine things on a case by case basis and not just link wowmetersonline as conclusive proof that things are off. Take a fight like XT -- it's an almost perfect situation for rogues, while hunters are often asked to help deal with adds. It shouldn't be too surprising that rogue numbers come out very high for that fight. Kologarn and Mimiron are rough on pets.

Paladin

Give Paladins Last Stand (Source)

We're not going to give paladins a warmed over version of Last Stand. We do recognize that they need another cooldown. Our plan is for something slightly different.

World of Raids: Important Blue Posts and Ulduar Hard Mode Weapons Update

DoranM — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:32:34 GMT

WorldofRaids has picked up several important blue posts today and new information about the Ulduar 10-Player Hard Mode Weapons Update coming in the next minor patch! The Weapons Update will raise the item level of any items obtained in hard mode encounters to level 232. Blue posts touch on PVP topics, Raids and Dungeons, Valiant Dailies, and much more!

Here's the official World of Raids Blue Posts and Ulduar Hard Mode Weapons Update:

Ulduar 10-Player Hard Mode Weapons Update

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

In order to better reward players for completing hard mode encounters in 10-player Ulduar, we will be updating weapon rewards from these hard mode encounters to an item level of 232 in the next minor patch. Players already with these items should see an increase in the power of these items to better reflect the new item level.

Blue Posts

Cheese for Glowergold Cooking Daily (Source)

There are no plans to change the Cheese for Glowergold daily cooking quest, he feels it delivers him just the right amount of cheese and wine.

Valiant dailies once you're a champion with all cities (Source)

While you aren't the only one, I turned in my tokens so I have less to do and wanted the Crusader title asap. We do plan to make some changes to how this works in a future patch that will smooth this out a bit.

BlizzCon Stream for 2009 (Source)

I tend not to watch live streams as they are often chaotic and uninteresting for long intervals. Maybe things have changed in the world of live streaming since I last checked but I can't really see how that's possible.

Do you guys plan to dress up your live streams with an MC and filler, or are we just going to be watching unedited human interaction at its finest?

I will say that there's been a lot of discussion around the company about this since last year. We want to make sure those watching from home don't feel isolated by down time, which is an entirely different experience compared to that of someone attending the event live.

Raids & Dungeons

Herald of the Titans in 3.1.2 (Source)

In this minor content patch, we'll be updating this achievement from the item level 226 requirement to an item level 232 requirement.

Bear in mind that the description text of the achievement in the client will likely not be updated in this patch and will still reflect the outdated data.

Too much of the same instance with Ulduar? (Source)

Heroic raids, really? So we do Ulduar 10p, get good at that, do Ulduar 10p hard in conjunction with, perhaps, Ulduar 25p, conquer that, then do even more Ulduar 25p hard mode - Jeez that's a lot of the same instance.

Don't forget there were also a lot of complaints during The Burning Crusade by players not able to enjoy the content like Black Temple because there was no real progression path from Karazhan and Zul'Aman to the 25 player raids. While yes, you may be running the same dungeon in multiple ways with the new setup, we plan to continue to iterate on it and develop for what is best for the player base.

And as some others have brought up, doing both the normal and heroic versions of a raid dungeon is up to the players, it may help you progress faster if that is your goal, but we don't try to make it a requirement.

The goal with Wrath's raiding changes (Source)

For many players they went from Karazhan to pugs for Gruul/Magtheridon/SS then to Zul'Aman as their guild was focused on 10 player raids and not 25 player raids. So that should be added in there as the other progression for players but this is more confusing than we'd like it to be and still ends up somewhat blocking the Hyjal/Black Temple/Sunwell area from a lot of players.

The goal is to open up raiding to more players with a smooth progression line and a setting that they can adapt to easier. I would say the model so far in Wrath of the Lich King does this better, but there is still room for improvements.

Player versus Player

Honor per hour in the battlegrounds; making it even (Source)

This is something we're visiting to some extent for the next major content patch. We want all of the battlegrounds to be as close as possible with regards to honor gains, and we want the length of individual matches in every battleground to be roughly the same.

Wintergrasp in 3.1.2 - is it a failure? (Source)

I think it's a little early for such a prediction based on the announced change to Lake Wintergrasp quests. We're looking into, and working on many different potential ways to keep Wintergrasp and our battlegrounds fun, engaging, and both great means of obtaining honor.

It was referred to as a failure and future ghost town before the expansion released. Clearly that hasn't been the case, but we've learned how the design and appeal of the zone can lead to performance issues if too many players are crowded into a relatively small space. Our ultimate goal is not to make the zone less appealing, but to increase the appeal of battlegrounds and change the way questing in Wintergrasp works to hopefully throttle the participation in any given battle.

We very much like the zone and we want it to be functional above all else. The game play inevitably suffers when performance issues arise and it's our goal to address this from as many different angles as possible, none of which include implementing solutions to ensure "no one will want to go anymore."

We encourage players to provide us feedback on battleground queues and team balancing (i.e. matches starting with uneven numbers on each faction), and Lake Wintergrasp performance and honor viability once 3.1.2 is released. :)

Alterac Valley (Source)

We did everything but neglect Alterac Valley. We tested and experimented with numerous changes until we got it to a point where we feel matches can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, while the overall zone is still enjoyable and rewarding for the time spent there. We do agree that some of the changes made have diminished the need to engage enemy players a little too much. We also understand that Alterac Valley matches are the most prone to starting with uneven numbers on either side right now, but that's an issue to be addressed via the queuing system and functionality.

There are ways we'll be looking to bring back some pretty epic battles in our next battleground as well as improve the queuing system, but there are no major changes planned for Alterac Valley at this time, particularly not for those who want it reverted to the original version.

Death Knight

Unholy DPS a bit too high; Unholy Blight changes likely (Source)

We think Unholy dps is probably too high on fights with adds, which ends up being a lot of Ulduar bosses. From looking at the numbers, the main culprit seems to be using Death and Decay, Unholy Blight, Pestilence and Blood Boil all together. None of those are a problem alone, but they work really well together. Unholy Blight is the spell we would most likely change. It has never really found a niche.

Warrior

Fury DPS is a bit too low at the moment (Source)

It is. I said above that we think DK AE is too high. The question then is whether DK single target damage is too high. It is probably higher than warrior single target damage, but we think in this case that warriors (esp. Fury) are a little low.

The Ulduar encounters are very diverse. That's actually a good thing because it chills out some of the obsession with "Is his class better than mine?" However that doesn't absolve us with the responsibility of making some changes when things feel off.

Overall PvE DPS (Source)

We are likely to buff warrior dps slightly in PvE. Fury likely needs more than Arms, but our intent for now is also to buff Arms a little. (Our intent could change of course.)

We don't have any specific changes to announce. Do not expect to see a 20% jump in your numbers. Please do not interpret this as the class, stances or rage mechanics being re-designed. Look at our recent change to Lightning Overload as the kind of thing we might implement.

World of Raids: Mimiron Hard Mode Video, Recent In-Game Fixes, Blue Posts

DoranM — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:30:06 GMT

World of Raids has posted a few recent updates regarding a Mimiron hard mode kill, several recent in-game fixed, and the most important blue posts for the past few days. There's only been a single 25-player kill of Mimiron's hard mode, and there wasn't a video for it, but Paragon of EU-Lightning's Blade just made a video of a 10-player kill.

Here's the Mimiron Hard Mode Video, Recent In-Game Fixes, Blue Posts update from WorldofRaids.com:

Mimiron Hard Mode Video - Paragon of EU-Lightning's Blade

There's only been one 25-player defeat of Mimiron's hard mode, with no videos released so far, but Paragon of EU-Lightning's Blade put together a video of their recent defeat of the 10-player version.

(Please visit the site to view this media)
Download from FileFront

Recent In-Game Fixes - May 7th, 2009

Quote from: Crygil (Source)

5/7/09

The Impale ability used by the Iron Ring Guards in the Thorim encounter should now hit the player tanking them and only that player tanking them.

The damage done by Swamplord Musel’ek’;s Aimed Shot ability has been reduced and be more in line for players at the appropriate level to face him.

We have corrected an issue with the two-piece set bonus for the Paladin set, Conqueror’s Aegis. Holy Mending no longer costs additional mana.

We recently made a change to the sell value of Nerubian Legguards. The material costs used to create this item were unintentionally low, and we were prompted to make changes to minimize the impact on the game's economy.

Blue Posts

Reasoning for Arena rating changes (Source)

The balancing between PvE and PvP is an estimate on our side but we figured it was better to make the change now instead of waiting until a good chunk into the season or just waiting for next season. But yes, over time we expect more people than none to defeat Algalon.

Obtaining top Arena weapons vs. beating Algalon (Source)

We had to think pretty long term on this and make the change rather quickly before the PvP 239 items started flowing. The weapons on Algalon were included in other hard mode encounters so it doesn't require an Algalon kill to get them. Over time more than zero people will kill Algalon though and we should see a decent chunk of players with the ilvl 239 weapons, hopefully it's not too much though.

Mana regen for healers in raids (Source)

To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

Healing variety for raid encounters (Source)

Mimiron phase 2 is pretty insane to heal. But phase 1 and phase 3 feel pretty different. Then phase 4 is crazy again. Even in phase 2 a lot of the damage is avoidable. I know some players on this forum have felt before that they are still unfairly blamed when dps die when standing in fires, but in my experience, it's pretty easy to tell when someone failed to move out of the rockets.

Another way to think about it is that in Naxxramas if you brought a healer to the raid for the first time, there aren't too many things you'd have to explain. "Heal the MT," or "Heal the raid," are plenty of advice for most fights. There's nothing wrong with that for the first tier of raid content. But in Ulduar there is more ebb and flow to the battle. You need to know when and where the big damage moments are coming. You need to know when to give it all you've got.

Paladin

Future changes for Exorcism (Source)

We are considering making Exorcism not work against players or pets for 3.1.2. It would be a PvE only ability. In 3.2 we still intend to make it work differently.

Warrior

Potential change to Juggernaut on the horizon (Source)

We may yet make Juggernaut changes, but we don't have any to announce yet.

World of Raids WoW Blue Tracker: Recent In-Game Fixes

DoranM — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:37:33 GMT

WorldofRaids.com has used their super nifty WoW Blue Post Tracker to sniff out some of the latest In-Game Fixes. There's also some newly posted information about the latest Ulduar Tuning Tweaks. You can now talk about these changes and more in World of Raids Webchat!

Here's a look at the recent In-Game Fixes from World of Raids:

Recent In-Game Fixes - May 4th, 2009

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

5/4/09

The NPCs just inside the front entrance of Ulduar (like a repair ogre) should no longer despawn.

The Druid Tier 8 Nightsong Battlegear 4 piece bonus should now properly extend the length of Savage Roar.

The Auriaya encounter has received the following changes: The range of Savage Pounce has been slightly reduced, the impact and periodic damage has been reduced in Heroic difficulty, the Guardian Swarm ability now summons 10 Swarming Guardians instead of 25 but their individual damage has been increased.

The reflected damage done by Elder Stonebark with his Petrified Bark ability has been significantly reduced.

In the Hodir encounter, the time to complete the hard mode has been increased to 3 minutes. (This will be applied during maintenance beginning with North America on Tuesday May 5.)

The health of the Heart of the Deconstructor in the XT-002 Deconstructor encounter has been reduced.

In the Thorim encounter, the Iron Ring Guard’s Whirling Trip ability will now only hit the tank.

In the Assembly of Iron encounter, the duration of Overwhelming Power has been increased to 30 seconds in heroic mode and the amount of healing that Steelbreaker receives from Electrical Charge has been reduced to 20% of his max health.

The first pack of trash mobs in the Conservatory of Life has been removed, one of the trash packs in the General Vezax room has been removed, all of the humanoids in General Vezax’s room are no longer immune to stuns, the Faceless Horrors will only go immune and summon Void Beasts once instead of 3 times, and the damage done when a Clockwork Sapper explodes has been significantly reduced.

WorldofRaids.com Tier 8 Armor Guidate Updates and Blue Posts

DoranM — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:12:47 GMT

WorldofRaids.com has posted regarding new updates to the Tier 8 Armor Guide and some new posts picked up on the WoW Blue Tracker. The Tier 8 Armor Guide now has a full list of items with their stats which includes mouse-over tooltips so you don't have to click on everything. Blue posts this week focus on some Death Knight Blade Barrier discussion, Heroic Strike problems for Feral Druids, and Hunter Ammo changes.

Here's the Tier 8 Armor Guide and Important Blue Posts post from WorldofRaids.com:

Build 9733 introduced quite a few changes to the tier 8 sets, so I updated the Tier 8 Armor Guide recently. If you haven't taken a look yet, check it out. Here's a list of what the guide offers at the moment. More information is coming soon.

Everything on a single, tabbed page. You can navigate the two tabs to switch between 25-player and 10-player sets.
Race / gender icons, that when clicked, will load an image of the set on that particular race and gender. These are available for every single race that can use the item set.
A full list of items with their stats, including mouse-over tooltips so you don't have to click through if you're only interested in seeing the stats.
Full details on the set bonuses for each set, including mouse-over tooltips.

Blue Posts

Death Knight

Blade Barrier: If you assume it's always up, make it passive? (Source)

I see where you are coming from, but that isn't the model we use very often. We balance around the assumption that priests cast Fort or that tanks are trying to generate threat. That doesn't mean the logical conclusion is just to make all of those passives.

One of the things we like about BB is it rewards the DK for using up those runes and not just sitting on them, yet you can use them on whatever you want like D&D or Vampiric Blood.

If anything, we'd like to have *more* active mitigation abilities, but nailing the cooldown and cost right is tricky. It is easy to get them into the realm of spammy at one extreme or saved for that critical moment (that may never arrive) on the other.

Druid

Do the Heroic Strike problems affect Feral Druids too? (Source)

Yes, it is 100% the same problem in our opinion. Rune Strike suffers as well, perhaps even more since DKs don't even have another high threat option.

You can make an argument that tanks should get very little in the way of resources from being hit. (This would have some PvP implications we would have to solve.) Then we would just balance threat around damage done, which in turn would make +dps gear slightly more interesting to tanks.

Feral Nerfs: No dialogue? (Source)

Often times, we will wait before making a response to a particular change. It depends sometimes on the temperature of the forums. When I see a lot of ranting and QQing, then I suspect making a post then won't accomplish much except making more work for the moderators.

We often benefit a lot from seeing the response from other players. It is natural to see the class or spec that is nerfed express their unhappiness about the change or argue that it was overdone. The response from other players is relevant though, which is why we decided to move these balance discussions to shared forums in which many classes participate. Blue posts can sometimes answer questions, but they can also completely shut off the conversation with a definitive answer, or even worse, derail the conversation into other, often irrelevant, topics.

We made some adjustments to Feral damage in both PvE and PvP settings. Most of the nerfs are pretty straight forward, so it's probably easy to understand what we were trying to accomplish with them.

Specifically on the topic of Arena representation, you have to be careful how you interpret those data. Consider:

1) Depending on which numbers you present, your data can be used to support your argument more or less.
2) When a class has low representation, you have to decide is that because they are too weak or others too powerful. For example, some specs are popular because they counter other popular specs.
3) Popularity and viability have a correlation but it is not 1:1. Druids have never been the most popular class in WoW. There are a ton of DKs right now. Some players will abandon them when their power is more in line, but others will continue to play them because they like the class or have already invested in them.
4) The community mindset typically seems to be: just keep buffing under-represented specs even if that means giving them potentially overpowered abilities. We try to balance from a broader point of view. For example, if you make an ability too overpowered you are just going to have to nerf it later. We try to peer into the future a little bit and address potential balance problems before they get out of control.

Hunter

Ammo: More changes coming long term (Source)

We wanted to do more with ammo than we were technically able to do in the short term.

Rogue

Hunger for Blood and PvP (Source)

I'm not sure we will see many rogues go HfB for PvP for anything other than a gimmick.

However, it is interesting in light of all the posts that claimed rogues would never give up Prep etc. in order to go that deep in Assassination for PvP.

World of Warcraft Valentine's Day Events Re-Cap

DoranM — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:18:49 GMT

Once again the WoW Valentine's Day events are coming to an end! Just like last year we've seen a huge influx of new goodies to play with during the event and of course some special things you can only do during this event. If you didn't get a chance to get in game, or didn't get to check out the event we offer this re-cap:

The first thing that was a little different the past few weeks was the masses courting NPC's throughout Azeroth.....and actually getting a response this time! As you might have noticed you suddenly had a new ability to interact with NPC's and get them to favor you and then of course shower you with goodies. There was, of course, a lot more and we've broken it down into three sections, Gift Exchange, Popularity Contest, and Bouquet of Ebon Roses:

Gift Exchange

When Love is in the Air, adventurers can purchase Perfume, Cologne, and Love Tokens from all friendly innkeepers. Using Perfume or Cologne will allow you to tell which city citizens and guards are looking for love from the hearts over their heads. Male NPCs prefer perfume while female NPCs prefer cologne. If you're wearing the appropriate scent, you can then express your feelings for him or her with a Love Token. If the NPC feels the same way, you'll receive a Gift of Friendship (from citizens) or a Pledge of Friendship (from guards) which will contain several quest items in addition to a cool toy! With a little help from WOWDB.com we've gathered a list of some of the toys we've seen this year:

And of course a video of someone running around and enjoying all the released goodies:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Popularity Contest

Each city has a different set of quest items obtainable through the Gift/Pledge of Friendships. Once you obtain the correct combination of items from a city, you can combine them to create a City Gift Collection. Once you have a City Gift Collection from each of your faction's three major cities, you can combine them to create a Faction (Alliance/Horde) Gift Collection. Turn in the Faction Gift Collection to Kwee Q. Peddlefeet, a...unique...goblin located near your favorite city leader:

Cairne Bloodhoof (Thunder Bluff)
Lady Sylvanas Windrunner (Undercity)
Thrall (Orgrimmar)
Highlord Bolvar Fordragon (Stormwind)
King Magni Bronzebeard (Ironforge)
Tyrande Whisperwind (Darnassus)

By turning in your Faction Gift Collection near this leader, you are casting your vote (and your devotion) towards this person. You can check the standings by asking Kwee to see who has the most votes. At the end of the popularity contest, the city leader with the most votes, on the faction with the most votes, will have the honor of Kwee sticking around for an additional week. Kiss Kwee at anytime during or after the popularity contest to receive a special buff.

Bouquet of Ebon Roses

You can obtain a Bouquet of Ebon Roses that is part of the criteria for the achievement "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose" from the following bosses:

Maiden of Grief (Halls of Stone)
Prince Keleseth (Utgarde Keep)
Prince Taldaram (Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom)

We've also tracked down this 2 man Prince Keleseth video for your viewing pleasure:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Upcoming Priest Racial Changes & Blue Posts

Zyuu — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:55:52 GMT

Many changes to the Priest racial abilities will be coming soon in a future patch. For the details read below.

In an upcoming build all Priest racials have been retired, except the following:

Desperate Prayer - This is now the 11-point talent in Holy, Holy Nova is now a base ability. Cooldown also reduced to 30 seconds.
Devouring Plague - Now a base ability. Cooldown reduced to 30 seconds, mana cost greatly reduced.
Symbol of Hope - Now a base ability. Now restores 5% base mana every 2 seconds for 8 seconds to your party. Renamed "Hymn of Hope."

While this change does reduce the "uniqueness" of different Priests, we feel game balance as a whole will benefit.

Note: These new "racials" are not racials, they are trainable to all Priests. (Src)

Blue Posts

Tooltip enhancements in a future WotLK patch
We have a plan to make smarter tooltips (for characters too) in a Lich King patch. (src)

Patch 3.0.2 - Naxxramas moving to Dragonblight
Naxxramas will be moving to Dragonblight with the release of 3.0.2. If you want to do anything with the current 40 player level 60 version of the raid dungeon, do it before 3.0.2 is released. (src)

Dalaran Update
Here's an update on a couple things...

- The last bits of flying design work are in and you should see it in the next push. We have removed the rocks floating around the city from the dismount zone. The rules are still the same as I explained in my last post. Please test it out and let us know if you find anything unusual.
- The target dummies are going to be moved to a more reasonable area of the sewer. Right now they are smack dab in the middle of the dueling area and it just creates too much congestion.
- We have plans to expands the The Violet Citadel in future patches after we launch Northrend. There is a reason why we put so many doors in there. =)
- Zidormi will offer players a portal directly to the Caverns of Time from within The Violet Citadel. No requirements on the port this time either. (src)

Beta ending soonish? not really
The Beta is not ending soon. (src)

8 piece and 5 piece sets
The reason we moved away from 8 piece sets into the new 5 piece sets was lack of choice. When you have to have every piece of your set equipped for set bonuses it takes away from any decision making process in terms of what to wear.

When we decided we didn't like what 8 piece sets had become we started talking about what pieces would be ideal to pull from the set. The bracers were the first to go, at that point though it didn't make any sense to have a 7 piece set so we cut out the belt as well since it's not a very visual piece. Since we wanted the set bonuses to be attainable while still having some degree of choice to be made we pulled the boots as well in order to make the sets 5 pieces with 2 and 4 piece bonuses. This way players could maintain their set bonuses while still having a lot of customization in gear selection.

All that said, 8 piece bonuses have seen their day and there is no plan to bring them back. (src)

Mount Achievement
Mount Achievement on the way. Reward for the highest level of the achievement is a unique mount. (src)

Tanking in WotLK
Couple of thoughts:

1) You should only face instagib problems when you can be crit since bosses no longer crush targets 3 levels lower than them. The fact that 3 of the tank classes are having trouble being uncrittable by Naxx is something we're look into. Druids can be uncrittable through talents.

2) DKs will probably have lower armor than warriors and possibly health as well. Their avoidance will almost certainly be higher to compensate for the lack of block. DK situational abilities are better than warrior ones. We want to keep these differences as much as possible without gimping anyone. Everyone realizes that a 95% avoidance tank with 10K health is not going to be an effective tank, nor is one that is so dependent on cooldowns that he dies when the cooldowns aren't up.

3) If you are having threat issues, that is concerning. We are trying to get away from +threat modifiers on abilities because they don't scale well with with gear. For those we're keeping (like Sunder Armor) the threat scales with AP. The ideal design is something closer to the paladin, where threat scales off of damage really well. If the DK dps is too low, that would certainly account for lower threat as well. We don't want to have a lot of variance in threat on tanks. It's hard to balance (and not really much fun) to have low threat tanking classes.

Bottom line: the design is that the 4 tank classes are roughly equal in their ability to survive and maintain threat, while preserving whatever differences among them that we can manage. (src)

Death Knight
Improved Icy Talons to affect ranged attack speed
Improved Icy Talons will affect ranged attack speed. (src)

Ravenous Dead to be reworked
We are going to rework Ravenous Dead to not affect the duration. The thinking is that only deep Unholy really cares about ghoul duration and he has Master of Ghouls anyway.
The new Ravenous Dead will provide a bonus to the stat conversion from you to your ghoul, so it should scale pretty well with gear. Other specs can still take it for a ghoul boost, but Unholy won't have a talent that gets less useful with Master of Ghouls. (src)

Why there are no BF or BU skills?
Almost every DK needs to use Plague Strike (U) and Icy Touch (F). That means you can't add a BU unless you also had a BF or you'd be left with an orphan F or U and nothing to do with it but another Plague Strike or Icy Touch.

We considered the model where you had BUs and BFs and BBs and whatever, but we already needed to make a base rotation and variants for Blood, Frost and Unholy, and make all the abilities in there feel fun and useful (and we're not even done with that part of it). (src)

Druid
Restoration tree still being worked on
We are still playing with deep Resto a little. One of the concerns (for us, though probably not you!) is that with all the tree talents and some decent Spirit that druids never run out of mana. (src)

Feral Q/A
Please point out how our dps will be tuned to match rogue dps.
We'll eventually figure out how much lower cat dps is than rogue dps, and then we will change some druid abilities to use bigger numbers. It's possible we will buff a couple of talents, especially ones that we suspect you're likely to already be getting. But mostly we do it through tweaking core abilities like Shred and Mangle.

Please explain how shifting cost and mana consumption will work with rogue gear (in pvp/pve/soloing).
Feral mana seems to have taken a big hit. We have some thoughts on how to adjust it.

Please explain if our tanking and dps will scale as we go to harder 25 man content.
Yes, they will. By definition, percentages scale and flat numbers do not. You have a lot of percentages in your talents. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Mother Bear is a scaling talent or not, and I'm not sure I'm eager to enter into that debate again. But we have designed the talents to scale. One of the problems to your mitigation scaling was just hitting the upper limit of armor. Armor and avoidance will be much harder to cap out now. (src)

Hunter
Heart of the Phoenix & Pet bar
We are trying to get Heart of the Phoenix to work in a more useful fashion. We also have a plan to make the pet bars much more customizable. You should be allowed to remove any button you don't use a lot, Stay or Aggressive perhaps, but put it on again like any other attack. (src)

Pet hit
We do have a plan to let pets use the hunter or warlock's hit. Certain talents would need to be adjusted to reflect this change. (src)

Pet attacks and AP scaling
All pet attacks scale with AP now, which is not reflected correctly in the tooltips. We have a plan to make smarter tooltips (for characters too) in a Lich King patch. You will probably do more damage than the tooltips suggest, but you should be used to that because almost all character attacks do the same thing. (src)

Pet leveling
We like pet leveling as a feature, but I agree that the time it takes has grown out of control, possibly because killing mobs doesn't provide the same percentage of your hunter's experience as it used to. We'll try to get it fixed. (src)

Paladin
Holy Paladin armor set changes
I just updated the Gladiator pieces to Crit from MP5. I'm going to leave the honor pieces alone. Between those and assorted other pvp items you should be covered. (src)

Priest
About the new Mindflay animation
The new one targets the face too for proper meltage. (src)

Rogue
Subtelty Tree Feedback
Please post any feedback on the talent tree here. Please try and focus on the talents and not on general rogue issues, or you'll make a soon-to-be-long thread much, much longer. (src)

Shaman
Windfury procs fixed in next build
Fixed for next build. (src)

Maelstrom Weapon 5-Stack Indicator
We're going to be doing something similar (different colors) to that soon (combat text alert), also changing it so that it has a chance to proc from crits each rank (so 20/40/60/80/100%). That way if you get 1-4 ranks of the talent you can still get an instant cast. (src)

Armor Set - Elemental Shaman PvP Bonus
The shaman elemental set bonus has been changed to cooldown reduction on Grounding Totem. (src)

Warlock
Chaos Bolt Damage Boost
Damage is being boosted in the next build. (src)

Pet hit
We do have a plan to let pets use the hunter or warlock's hit. Certain talents would need to be adjusted to reflect this change. (src)

General Q/A (src)
Poorly scaling pets
We've increased the scaling of pets for this expansion. All pets have avoidance (-80% AOE damage), and we increased the numbers on several pets. If we feel they're too squishy, we can increase the scaling. The pet should not be invincible.

MANY wasted talents
Examples? Master Conjurer, Improved Voidwalker, Improved Succubus and Improved Health Funnel are all being tweaked in an upcoming build, if that's what you meant =)

2 of 3 51 point talents being 100% situational and/or useless
Haunt is useless? Metamorphosis is useless? The weaker of the three would probably be Chaos Bolt, which will now be the Destruction Warlock's highest damage/DPS spell in a future build.

Dot scaling poorly
Damage over time spells (Corruption, CoA) output for Destruction and Demonlogy are working as intended. For Affliction we did add Pandemic which makes them scale better.

crit and haste not affecting dots
We feel DoTs scale well for the Affliction Warlock now with Pandemic. If we made haste effect DoTs it would have to reduce the duration of the DoT, which would be a nightmare for DPS rotation/gameplay. Haste still benefits the affliction warlock because of Shadow Bolt, Haunt, UA, and the global cooldown reduction.

Soulshards on active combat abilities.
Intended.

Warlock glyphs being very weak when compared to those of mages.
Some changes to the Glyphs are upcoming, but this seems like "grass is greener" to me.

Affliction having two dots as 41 and 51 point talents with cast times and poor coefficients which do not compensate for these cast times.
The coefficient for a spell matches it's cast time, coefficients are not assigned. If it has a higher cast time, it has a higher coefficient. Lower cast time, lower coefficient. We fixed various spells that had higher or lower coefficient's in this expansion (Lightning Bolt, for example).

Dispel being grossly overpowered (although, this may be addressed)
Grossly overpowered is a bit extreme, but we would like to do a pass of the dispel system in the future.

Warrior
Titan's Grip & DPS
If your dps is 15% lower than a rogue, we're not going to make up for that difference by buffing a single talent to account for such a big proportion of your dps. More than likely we would handle this through adjusting the damage on higher ranks of abilities, improving base stats or stat conversions, or possibly even changing stance or rage mechanics. We could also lower the rogue dps through similar adjustments. It's not always easy to determine whether class A needs to be buffed to catch class B, or if class B needs to be nerfed. (src)

Protection Warrior DPS
Here are some things to consider.

-- Prot warrior damage, at least while tanking, seems a lot closer to bear damage. This is a good thing for both classes. It obviously helps Prot warriors, but it also means we don't have to take away from bears in other places to balance for them being the "high damage" tank.
-- However, even though Prot and Feral bear may be close, we don't know yet if those two are too low or high overall. We also don't know if they are too high or low when not tanking in tank gear, when tanking in non-tank gear, or when dps'ing in non-tank gear. There are a lot of variables in play.
-- Prot warrior dps seems either low or acceptable when not tanking. However, this may be because Prot warriors are still rage starved. That isn't a great balance mechanic and also means that if we fix rage starvation, their dps may be too good.
-- Design-wise, we can make Prot dps a lot more competitive to Arms and Fury. However, until we reach a point where Arms and Fury can be great tanks, Prot's dps probably needs to stay below them. Hopefully "below" can mean 15-20% below them instead of the 30-60% below them that it can sometimes be on Live. (src)

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