The Vortex Pinnacle - Skywall 5-Man Video
TotalBiscuit released a long (28 minutes) video of the new Vortex Pinnacle 5-man instance located in Uldum/Skywall.



Cataclysm Pets - Armadillo and Seagull
2 Companion pets have been added to the game in the latest beta build, the Rutsberg Seagull and the Armadillo. The texture on the armadillo seems to be a little low res but keep in mind that the pet is fairly small.

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Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

LVL 85 Dungeons too hard?
It's not quite that extreme. The problem currently is that some players are tackling Uldum or Twilight Highlands in level 83 gear, or worse, their LK epics (just had to throw that in there ). You will probably want a good mix of level 84 and 85 gear before doing the level 85 dungeons, and certainly the heroics. Eloderung says that he or she now has a decent mix of dungeon gear so the quest gear issue should be skewing things less. There are still overtuned or undertuned bosses and abilities for us to contend with though. (Source)

6% vs. 10% spellpower in Cataclysm
The 10% spell power isn't offered by a ton of specs (nor are there any other specs that we want to add it to), but the buff makes a really big difference to casters. The 6% buff is there so we could make sure you weren't totally without any kind of buff if you lacked one of the 10% guys. (Source)

Mastery Stat
Well, they are shiny and new and pretty much give you exactly what you want, so that response isn't too surprising. It's good that mastery is attractive and fun. We just don't want non-mastery gear to be viewed as junk the way some classes view some stats on Live. (Source)

Spamming the same spell
Right. It's a skill curve thing. If there is a right time to use something and a big penalty for doing something at the wrong time, then there is a bigger difference between good and less good players. If you can pretty much do something whenever, then there is less to learn about your class, less to perfect and ultimately less reward in investing in understanding the character. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Light / Flash of Light spamming
We just don't agree that it worked. What generally happened was either the set bonuses, glyphs and librams all aligned to make either Flash of Light the best spell or Holy Light. In rare cases we got lucky and paladins could choose to gear either for a FoL or HL spam, but they were still choosing one spell over the other. They really weren't using a particular spell for a particular job, so the toolbox felt small and they were hitting the same buttons all the time.

I can almost promise you that a Holy paladin in Cataclysm will use Holy Shock, Word of Glory, Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light, Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn on every challenging dungeon or raid run. That sounds a lot more fun than spamming Holy Light with the occasional Holy Shock on cooldown. (Source)

Mana costs
Mana needs to matter more. Ret (and Prot) generally need to be able to hit all of "their" buttons without being resource constrained, but then should only have enough mana to situationally use things like Holy Light, Exorcism or (untalented) Consecrate.

It's fine to cast one Exorcism at range to pull or something, but it's not something we generally want you doing outside of Art of War procs. We're pretty reluctant to put a cooldown back on the spell though. (Source)

AE Healing
We just don't believe the healing situation and the AE healing situation in particular is as dire as many of you are suggesting. We balance the encounters around the class capabilities, so if many groups are struggling on certain ones, those will be adjusted accordingly. We generally don't give classes new abilities because they have trouble on certain fights. If you're finding that you are just constantly behind the curve on every encounter, even the trash, then you are probably doing something wrong (attempting these dungeons undergeared is something we are seeing a lot) or your class has some kind of systemic bug that is affecting all of the healing you do.

Overall, the dungeons probably will end up more challenging than they were in Lich King. Even if we eventually end up with 10 minute chain pulling 5-player dungeons in Deathwing gear, there is no need to start out that way. (Source)

Holy Mastery
Incidentally, we looked at mastery for Holy paladins today and decided we were happy, for now, with the power it offers, so reforge away if you think that makes you more powerful. We might always tweak things in the future. (Source)

Changing Light of Dawn to only use Holy Power
We thought about a similar implementation a lot, but just worried that would make Light of Dawn harder to use. With a long cooldown, you at least can save it until you think you need it. Sitting on 3 Holy Power (and being unable to use Word of Glory during that time) might be brutal. (Source)

Haste/Crit/Overhealing in Cataclysm
That's an interesting perspective. Typically LK paladins tell us that they like haste because it lets them get a heal out *right now* before a tank dies, but don't like crit because it often overheals. To use a tired cliche, it did feel a lot like Whack-a-mole because you needed to heal ASAP but how hard you healed someone wasn't nearly as important. FoL could often bring someone to full and a HL crit would be tons of overhealing. (I am talking only about the stats in how they affect healing per se, not extra effects like Illumination.) In Cataclysm you won't overheal as much (making the free healing from crits more useful) but you won't be in constant fear of the tank dying in one GCD (making haste less useful). (Source)

Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Secondary effect on Heroic Leap
Adding a secondary effect to Heroic Leap, like a Thunder Clap or letting you get out of roots might be a good role for a glyph. We don't like to glyph new high level abilities immediately because then players don't appreciate what the glyph does for them, since they have never used the ability unglyphed. It's something we could consider for a future patch. (Source)
This article was originally published in forum thread: Vortex Pinnacle Video, Companion Pets, Blue Posts, started by Boubouille View original post
Comments 113 Comments
  1. Zokten's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ikkatsu View Post
    At what point did i say we need focus? Not a single class deserves pure focus and everyone else have abandonment.
    No class has "pure" focus as you seem to think.

    Death Knights are currently broken and unable to tank anywhere near as good as the others with the curreny RUNE SYSTEM OVERHAUL.
    Have to wonder if this is a player problem with our DK MT having no "real" problem, also you seem to think something similar has never happened to other classes. Get over it.

    You believe that a class deserves less tuning because its "new"? Your logic confounds me.
    Not less, just less priority when some things have been broken for a lot longer then the class has been around.
  1. theniffrig's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Deos View Post
    Yeah.. Because paladin walls of text followed by warrior walls of text are accounted for like 80% of all the blue activity from the beginning of beta up until now. This is DISTURBING and ANNOYING for all the rest of us.
    I agree. Sure they got lots of changes, but what class hasn't? A little more balance to the blue posts would be nice.
  1. Ikkatsu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zokten View Post
    No class has "pure" focus as you seem to think.


    Have to wonder if this is a player problem with our DK MT having no "real" problem, also you seem to think something similar has never happened to other classes. Get over it.


    Not less, just less priority when some things have been broken for a lot longer then the class has been around.
    The physical ability to tank is still there for the Death Knight, but the rune system makes it retarded to use cooldowns compared to any other tank class.

    At present, due to blood runes, i can only cast Heart Strike OR Vampiric Blood, every 10 seconds (ignoring Vampiric Bloods seperate cooldown).

    This would be equal to making Heroic Strike and Last Stand share a 10 second cooldown.

    That was just one example of how the new rune system has broken cooldowns for Death Knight tanking.

    Does this make sense to you yet?
  1. Alex86el's Avatar
    i'm gonna get this pet

    and call it Steven =P
  1. booh1992's Avatar
    BC instances were pretty hard, I remember that NO ONE would do Shattered Halls on either normal or heroic because it was sooo bad >.<"
    And what's the use of having CC if we aren't going to use it? I want to use my poly pig more!
    I love the armadillo, he is sooo cuteee
  1. Ryme's Avatar
    Personally, I don't want dungeons or heroics to be difficult. They'll be old boring content in a month, I'd rather that raids get back to hard difficulty and ditch this pathetic Heroic/Normal mode crap they're trying to force.

    I miss Ulduar Ulduar was challenge and then you could make that challenge even harder, and you could do it in really engaging and cool ways rather than pressing just pressing a button on your ui -_-
  1. Zokten's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ikkatsu View Post
    The physical ability to tank is still there for the Death Knight, but the rune system makes it retarded to use cooldowns compared to any other tank class.

    At present, due to blood runes, i can only cast Heart Strike OR Vampiric Blood, every 10 seconds (ignoring Vampiric Bloods seperate cooldown).

    This would be equal to making Heroic Strike and Last Stand share a 10 second cooldown.

    That was just one example of how the new rune system has broken cooldowns for Death Knight tanking.

    Does this make sense to you yet?
    Nope since HS is just a rage dump ability.....does that mean your HS is a rune dump?

    Also have to wonder what spec you are too....
  1. AK_47's Avatar
    The Vortex Pinnacle looks lovely,

    And blizzard once again decided to ruin Heroic Leap ... They just should allow it to be like it always was in WotlK Beta now that we can fly everywhere anywhere !
  1. Sollace's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zokten View Post
    Nope since HS is just a rage dump ability.....does that mean your HS is a rune dump?

    Also have to wonder what spec you are too....
    I think a better comparison would be if shield slam and Shield Block shared a cd. As it is on beta dk tanks have to choose to either use a damaging attack for threat and risk dying or using a cd and risk losing aggro. You than cannot use either for 10 seconds unless you just happen to get lucky and proc a blood rune to be refreshed.
  1. Stixxz's Avatar
    Nice video TB. Are you going to do videos for The Halls of Origination and the Lost City of Tol'vir?
  1. Blur4stuff's Avatar
    DK tanking is messed up. They need to remove rune cost of cooldowns and clean up the AoE abilities a bit. In an AoE situation there's at least 4 abilities you'd want to use and they all cost a blood rune. Doesn't make sense. Although, GC hinted that they are dumping pestilence as something tanks would use.
  1. Tommy2er's Avatar
    Well the news has been crappy today. A tonne of blue posts about pally's like always, a video most of us with a youtube account have seen and 2 new non-combat pets. Yipee.
  1. Katanasteel's Avatar
    And the pallies continue to cry. When am I getting my jetpack?
  1. darkenrahl's Avatar
    ohmygod lvl 85 dungeons are too hard!
    ohwait! maybe it's because you don't have that cranky 30% buff!
    silly little things..
  1. Howard Moon's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Alex86el View Post
    i'm gonna get this pet
    and call it Steven =P
    Great haystacks will be your destiny ^_^

    I'm gonna call mine TotalBiscuit, because it kinda looks like him.

    About CC and facerolling dungeons: some dungeons DO require some CC and other intelligent tactics if you do them in normal mode with a group of < 80's with < 200 iLvl greens and blues. The 3 ICC dungeons are only the most recent and obvious examples, but there are others too.

    The problem was already mentioned above: any ingenious mob mechanic disappears when you have enough gear to simply absorb the damage you are being punished with for not being tactical.
  1. PlatedPriest's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ikkatsu View Post
    They have done this with every fucking expansion though.

    They need to make a decision and stick with it!

    Death Knights have had the entire rune system changed and at present, for tanks, it is quite frankly broken... yet you don't see them posting every 5 seconds about it.
    yea i hate TB's voice too!

    i hate it so much that i have watch almost every single video he has put out this since the beginning of the summer.....

    oh wait i guess that means i think his voice is sexy!
  1. Magnett's Avatar
    To the people saying there is no feedback about anything other than Paladins: lolno.

    There's loads of threads everywhere about DKs and Rogues with 20+ pages and they're all pretty much ignored. There are loads more being created every day because people hope that if they spam the forum GC will eventually say something. He won't (except maybe to post "this isn't the feedback we want! coolface.jpg"). DKs do get some blue posts sometimes, but they're all "nah we think it's okay you're just bad". Rogues don't get any. HaT hasn't been working properly since the beta started and no one can figure out if it's a bug or intentional because despite the dozens of threads about it they've all been ignored. Hell, even Mages are getting some neglect, but at least they weren't completely ignored talent tree wise no matter what their issues were (DKs) or get utterly broken thanks to the new trees (Rogues).

    So glad I don't play any of those classes. But then again I don't play a Paladin or Warrior either, so maybe I'm SoL.
  1. Ikkatsu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zokten View Post
    Nope since HS is just a rage dump ability.....does that mean your HS is a rune dump?

    Also have to wonder what spec you are too....
    HAhahaha... you're serious?

    Heroic Strike and Heart Strike both use the primary resource.

    Unfortunately, our Rune Dump ability to generate threat is only viable after a Dodge or a Parry.

    So yes, theoretically, Heart Strike is our version of Heroic Strike in that is is ALWAYS available as long as you have resources for it.

    If you want to compare Rune Strike to Heroic Strike, then i can do nowt but laugh.

    So again, would you consider it to be fair that Heroic Strike share a 10 second cooldown with Last Stand? Or Devestate share a 10 second cooldown with Shield Wall?

    Cooldowns that require Runes:
    Rune Tap - Blood Rune (Means we can't use Heart Strike for 10 seconds)
    Vampiric Blood - Blood Rune (Means we can't use Heart Strike for 10 seconds)
    Bone Shield - Unholy Rune (Means we can't use Plague Strike for 10 seconds)

    For example, say there is an encounter that does an ability at random intervals (still announces it, but cannot be tracked by DBM or whatever). I've just used Plague Strike & Heart Strike, then the boss announces he is about to use omgwtfbbq attack. I cannot pop Vampiric Blood or Bone Shield due to using my only available runes for the attacks 3 seconds before hand.

    All Blizzard need to do is give those three abiltiies a Runic Power cost instead, like Icebound Fortitude, and everything will be sorted.

    Blizzard seem to want to make the DPS/PvP side of DKs insanely OP, whilst making the Tank side insanely gimped (compared to other tank classes).
  1. crsh1976's Avatar
    They ought to rename the expansion We (heart) Paladins.
  1. Ikkatsu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by PlatedPriest View Post
    yea i hate TB's voice too!

    i hate it so much that i have watch almost every single video he has put out this since the beginning of the summer.....

    oh wait i guess that means i think his voice is sexy!
    I think you quoted the wrong person lol.

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