Build of the Month
Recent Blue Posts
Limited PvP -> PvE Free Character Transfers
The Cataclysm Classic Pre-Expansion Patch Arrives April 30
Recent Forum Posts
Season 4... Just old dungeons and new ilvl?
[WeakAura] Tombstone's Conditions
Did Blizzard just hotfix an ilvl requirement onto Awakened LFR?
People started releasing pretty videos of Cataclysm and I don't think I can do much better than that. The first 3 videos are from TotalBiscuit (CynicalBrit.com) and I might include his videos to more articles depending on the reception of the first three!
Abyssal Maw
Stormwind
Orgrimmar
Zones & Instance Pages Update - Official Previews
I updated some of the Cataclysm pages to include the official previews to add some lore background. I also fixed a couple of layout bugs and tried to improve the readability.
The other good news is, I added Lightbox back to the new instances and new zones pages (the fancy screenshot viewer thing). You should be able to check everything without too much problem now, I will add it to the other pages tomorrow.
New Zones
PvP Zones
Instances - 5-man
PvP Zones
Instances - 5-man
Blue posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Mage (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator)Spell haste and Fireball / Frostbolt cast time
I think the problem is actually with Early Frost. We just think that e.g. a 3.5 sec Fireball isn't really playable. You probably noticed that the low ranks of Fireball are even much faster, because the spell really isn't usable until the cast time is reduced.
We are going to be much more vigilant about haste getting out of control (from talents and gear) to where GCD issues get to be a problem. Simply making non-haste stats more attractive will help as well. (Source)
Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)Discipline
Discipline will still use PW:Shield a lot, but you will probably see less "pre-healing" across the board, because it won't be mana efficient. PW:Shield will probably go back to being more of an emergency button and less of the survivability buff it gets treated as today.
In addition to shielding, Disc will continue to cast Penance a lot, and will probably use Heal and Greater Heal. Flash Heal overlaps in niche a lot with both PW:Shield and Penance, so it may be the least used. (Source)
Rogue (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)Combat Tree
Improved Sprint I will grant you doesn't have a lot of use in PvE.
But Improved Kick and Improved Recuperate do. Improved Kick will be of situational use on bosses that can't be silenced, but Improved Recuperate will keep you alive. In a world where healer mana will be much more precious, minimizing wasted mana is going to be a bigger deal.
We're not going to make trees where every point in a dps tree is a dps upgrade. Those are the kinds of talent builds we're trying to get away from, because they remove player choice. We are trying to engineer points in all trees where you have to choose between non-dps talent A and non-dps talent B, because as soon as A or B leads to dps, then the choice goes away. (Source)
Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator)Weapon Enchants
Enchants are technically really complicated spells in WoW, so what we want to do and what we can do aren't always aligned without investing sometimes weeks of programmer time. I say that by way of heavy caveats, because none of this may actually come to pass.
However, what we'd like to do is: A) Restrict DW to Enhancement only, B) Restrict shaman weapon enchants to being unique (meaning no WF / WF or FT / FT), and C) Remove the internal cooldown on Windfury, since once you can only have one, the proc rate won't be a balance problem. (Source)
Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator)Passive survivability talents
We just think at the end of the day that a warrior needs to look at their his talents and feel like they are making his survivability better. As an example, it's all well and good to have some fun or utility talents in the Disc priest tree, but if there also weren't some bread and butter talents to make you a better healer, Disc priests would feel cheated. Sword and Board is a fun Prot talent, but it doesn't improve your survivability directly in a very noticeable way.
Imagine a new talent that was a 30% chance to lower the cooldown of your Last Stand, or a 30% chance to proc an armor buff on you. It might be an exciting talent, but it could also be really frustrating every time it didn't proc. For the same reason tanks tend to gear for mitigation over random avoidance, they'd probably be really skeptical of a talent that had a chance of lowering their damage taken. There's room for some talents like that, and Critical Block is an example, but a whole tree of them might get frustrating. You might feel like your survivability was out of your control and really at the mercy of encounter specifics or even a random chance for a proc.
Put another way, we want players to have some choices in how they talent, but we don't want the whole tree to feel optional. A Prot warrior who chose to spend no talent points should feel like a really terrible tank, instead of just losing some utility or threat, in the same way an untalented healer should feel like they are sacrificing a lot of healing. Thus we think there is room for a few passive talents, especially for tanks, where having too many non-passive talents risks hurting consistency. (Source)
The MMO Report
This week's MMO Report is the 2nd and last part of their E3 2010 Special.
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