Upcoming Class Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
We have a lot of players at 85 now doing everything from Heroic dungeons to rated Battlegrounds, and the class design team is starting to prepare our list of items to investigate for our next patch.

Before you dive down into the meat below (not really a pleasant image, that), be advised that we’re still early in the preliminary stages. The patch isn’t coming out tomorrow. I wrote this before the end of the year and other things may have cropped up in the meantime. Just because your class or pet problem isn’t mentioned below doesn’t mean we won’t address it.

PvE
We’re happy with damage overall. We have very few traditional tank and spank fights (even Argaloth likes to parry melee) so it’s hard to get consistent numbers without very large data sets. Still, we see Survival hunters and Unholy DKs on top of a lot of single target fights. Arcane, Marksman, and Beastmaster damage is too low. Retribution, Shadow, and Fire and Frost mage damage might be too low, but we’re still watching them. We aren’t seeing a lot of Subtlety rogues in PvE yet, so that sample size is still small. On fights where there is a lot of area damage, Demonology warlocks, Frost DKs and possibly Survival hunters are all too high. Shadow priest AE, mostly due to a weak Mind Sear, feels too low.

Healing in PvE is working out pretty much as intended. There are some Heroic dungeon bosses that are probably tougher than the required item level average permits. In general, you might have a tough time upon zoning into a Heroic dungeon with a bunch of strangers as soon as Dungeon Finder permits, especially if your group isn’t willing to communicate and work together. We want Heroics to be challenging -- if you want to zerg the content, stick to normal dungeons.

Tank balance overall seems good at this point in time. Threat seems to be in a good place -- good tanks don’t have much of a problem, but they can’t “phone it in” either. We’re seeing all four tanks get a lot of use, even on Heroic raid fights. That could change as more guilds are able to make serious heroic attempts.

PvP
The larger health pools, decreased impact of Mortal Strike debuffs, and slower healing are all having the desired effect in PvP. Burst damage has its place, but doesn’t determine the outcome of every encounter. There are several individual abilities that we aren’t happy with in PvP.

We’re keeping a close eye on dispels. We still like the design of making dispels more of a commitment rather than liberally sprinkling around dispel resistance or consequences for every class. Defensive dispels (removing a debuff) generally feel good, but we think offensive dispels (removing an enemy buff) feel too powerful, especially for DPS specs. In particular, Purge and Spellsteal will probably get nerfed.

We’re also looking at crowd control, interrupts, and self-healing in PvP. It’s possible we’ll reduce the durations of some crowd control effects, especially the area effect ones, and decrease the duration of interrupts.

Priests are a little weak in PvP, especially at mobile healing. We have made some changes to glyphs and talents to enhance their survivability and instant healing.

We also want to make sure the epic PvP gear isn’t too easy for just anyone to obtain, given that the PvE endgame content is more challenging than it was in Lich King. We don’t want the player base to just migrate to the most efficient epic delivery mechanism; we want you to participate in what you find most enjoyable.

Stats
We’ll make a pass to make stats that aren’t attractive (but are supposed to be) more attractive. For example, we don’t want Assassination rogues to dismiss crit or Feral tanks to dismiss haste. We are considering making some physical attacks such as Lacerate, Steady Shot, and Slam scale with haste.

Mastery is a new stat for us, and there are a few specs that don’t value it enough. In some cases (e.g. Combat rogues), the design for mastery is fine and we just need to buff the effects to make it more desirable. In others, we don’t think it’s possible to buff mastery enough in its current form. For example, the Retribution mastery, Hand of Light, is fun, but it doesn’t contribute enough damage. To make it contribute enough damage, the proc would need a very high chance, which then can cause paladins to devalue other sources of Holy Power. Instead, we are redesigning Retribution mastery to add a percentage of the damage of Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm as Holy damage (which also plays better with Inqusition). Because Hand of Light is fun, however, we are going to change Divine Purpose as a chance to proc Hand of Light instead of a chance for extra Holy Power (which will also remove a little of the randomness from the rotation). Unholy DKs are another spec for whom mastery just isn’t working out. Our current intent is to redesign their mastery so that their attacks cause more damage to diseased targets (in a similar manner to the Restoration druid mastery).

Potpourri
Some additional class-specific tweaks (keeping in mind this is not the full list):

General
  • We’re making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.
  • We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we’ve seen more PvP.

Death Knight (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.
  • Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.
  • For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.
  • We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.

Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.
  • We’re buffing Wild Mushroom. It’s a cool spell that isn’t getting enough play.
  • Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We’re also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.
  • We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don’t account for too much mana savings.

Hunter (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.

Mage (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • Censure will no longer break Repentance.

Priest (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

Rogue (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.

Warlock (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.
  • Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.
  • Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.
  • We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.

Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don’t have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.
  • We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it’s a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.

“GC, is this the final list of changes? Does this mean I can expect no changes for my class? Does this mean you don’t care about me?”

No. This is some stuff we are looking at so that you’ll have some context if you see changes on a future PTR. The final list of class patch notes for the next patch will doubtless be much longer.

- Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He uses words like “potpourri.”

Cataclysm Hotfixes - Updated Dec. 27
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)
Here you will find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to the release of patch 4.0.3a and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. While many have already been deployed on all realms, some may not be implemented until the next time your realm is restarted. We will continue to update this thread in the days ahead as additional hotfixes are applied.

December 22 - 27

General
  • Graveyard Rats are no longer considered critters and do not give credit toward the Critter Kill Squad guild achievement.
  • Weekly guild reputation caps should now properly reset at the scheduled time. An error which prevented this reset from taking place if guild experience was earned at exactly 3:00 AM server time immediately prior to weekly maintenance has been corrected.
  • The achievement Saving for a Rainy Day has the same requirements as its predecessor Time to Open a Savings Account. For this reason Saving for a Rainy Day has been temporarily disabled (it will still show in the user interface), as it requires a fix via a client-side patch.

Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • The heal from Frenzied Regeneration was too powerful and has been reduced by 50%.
  • Pounce now correctly shares diminishing returns with other stun effects.

Rogue (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • Cheap Shot now correctly shares diminishing returns with other stun effects.

Warlock (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
  • The Felguard ability Axe Toss now properly shares diminishing returns with other stun effects.

Dungeons & Raids
Blackwing Descent
  • Sweltering Armor is now properly applied to Magmaw's Mangle target once the debuff has faded, regardless of whether Magmaw was successfully impaled or not.

Gnomeregan
  • Mekgineer Thermaplugg no longer sometimes awards dungeon completion prematurely.

Throne of the Four Winds
  • It is no longer possible to disarm Al'Akir.

Items
  • The Inner Eye proc from Heroic and normal versions of Jar of Ancient Remedies was not activating with some priest healing effects. This has been corrected.
  • The Signet of High Arcanist Savor and Gilnean Ring of Ruination now have proper stats.

Professions
Archaeology
  • Vashj'ir dig sites no longer unlock for players. They felt too punishing without additional benefits compared to low-level sites, and were much more difficult to obtain artifacts in due to the way Vashj'ir navigation works.

Cooking
  • Stormwind Lobster Traps now respawn more quickly and can be gathered across all Stormwind quest phases.

Inscription
  • The following reagents no longer have limits and are now available from Una Kobuna and Casandra Downs in unlimited quantities: Deathwing Scale Fragment, Scavenged Dragon Horn, Bleached Jawbone, Silver Charm Bracelet, and Preserved Ogre Eye.

PvP
Arenas
  • Arena ratings are appropriately tabulating for wins and losses. More information on this issue can be found on our forums.
  • Negative amounts of Conquest Points can no longer be awarded after a match win.

Battlegrounds
  • Upon winning a rated Battleground, rating, wins, and Conquest Points are awarded and display properly.
  • Negative amounts of Conquest Points can no longer be awarded after a match win.

Tol Barad
  • Winning as an attacker now rewards players with 1800 Honor Points, up from 180. Winning as a defender still rewards players with 180 Honor Points.

Quests & Creatures
Deepholm
  • Gyreworms, Enormous Gyreworms, and Gorged Gyreworms no longer drop money or elite-level loot.

Tol Barad
  • Cell Watchers in the D-Block area no longer have boss-like immunities. Interrupts, stuns, snares, taunts, knockbacks, Banish, Root, Freeze, Fear, Horror and Death Grip all work correctly.

Twilight Highlands
  • Crucible of Carnage quests can no longer be shared.

Uldum
  • The Unearthing Uldum quest achievement can now be obtained after completing 105 quests in Uldum, down from 108.
  • Players are now granted 250 Ramkahen reputation after completing the daily quest "Fire From the Sky".

Vashj'ir
  • The Luxscale Grouper's Grouper Bite debuff now has a 5-second duration and will no longer sometimes get stuck on characters.

Zul'Drak
  • Due to adjusted health pools, the heal-over-time effect provided by Blightblood Infusion (used by players controlling the Blightblood Troll) during the Overlord Drakuru encounter has been increased.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Upcoming Class Changes, December 27 Hotfixes started by Boubouille View original post
Comments 218 Comments
  1. mmoc9d5ab67e02's Avatar
    well i can say for sure that the guildrep bugs arnt all out of the game i've been doing daily's and getting guild XP like crazy and i've been stuck on 4869/6000 guildrep (friendly) since 16/12/2010 i talked about it to 2 gm's the first one told me blizz is looking into it. the second one i contacted after reading this post and trying it out. he said that blizzard didn't even know there was something wrong with the guildrep. i know its christmas and all but if they didn't want to spend the holidays locked behind a pc getting bugs out of the system they should have brought cata out after the holidays.
  1. mmocda789f6040's Avatar
    Feral going down the drain most likely, as always it's either overpowered or underpowered and these changes will bring us back to underpowered. Oh well just wish they could look into the facts and realize that we don't have snare immunity.
  1. Kartack's Avatar
    With the proposed change to the priest Chakra spell to make the buff even longer, the State of Mind talent is becoming less and less useful. The very first version of Chakra had a 1 min cool down for a 30 second buff, thus to keep chakra up constantly you needed to make use of State of Mind. But a little while ago the cool down on Chakra was set to 30 sec, the same as the base duration of the buff, and since Chakra has no mana cost and doesn't have trigger global cool down there isn't really any reason to want to extend the buff at all at the moment. The only thing you are saving yourself is having to hit a button a little less frequently, which isn't much of a savings since there is a ui display when the buff expires, the State of Mind talent is pretty much useless. If they now want to make the chakra buff even longer by default State of Mind becomes even less useful. It would be nice if this talent were updated to have additional effect or have its effect changed so that it gives a stacking mana cost reduction for the spells associated with your current chakra buff, or a stacking effect increase for your spells associated with your chakra buff. But I guess I now get some talent points freed up from State of Mind that can be put towards other useful effects.
  1. gynshon's Avatar
    Once again, can anyone explain to me why resilience is put into the game? My impression was that resilience was to balance PvP vs PvE for abilities used against players. If so, why change bleeds that affect both PvE (huge nerf) and PvP, but instead change bleed dmg modifiers based on stacked resilience so it only affects PvP.
  1. Kyserorz's Avatar
    Hmmmmm.....lets see shaman's.........purge nerf, ok........anything else? Nope we still don't exist.

    Edit: Also how can you typo dunno? Lol it's not even a real word.
  1. wMw's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Naix View Post
    *siiigh*

    Why does Blizzard do this to Druids? Druids could never come close to dps numbers of a other classes. Now that Druids are doing decent dps they want to nurf us again....
    Awww...they reduce bleed damage and buff direct strikes. So you won't be OP in PvP, and will have the same damage in PvE.

    Got it ?
  1. Bokrin's Avatar
    Odd, I thought assasination rogues were on top
    Well now at least I know for sure that I'll be leveling hunter alt first and rogue one after
  1. taymatt's Avatar
    There are a couple ret paladins in my guild who easily pull 20k-30k dps on single target.
    hahahaha. What a load.

    ---------- Post added 2010-12-28 at 11:40 AM ----------

    I would love to see logs. If that is not available, their names, guild and server would be nice. However, without proof through logs, those numbers I am very skeptical of.
    Exactly, this kid is completely making this up.
  1. indirect's Avatar
    Getting rid of Drain Mana for Warlock? Are you fucking retarded as dick or what, Blizzard...
  1. stonhinge's Avatar
    Pugging and LFD are not the same thing. With a PuG, you can still make sure you have CC. LFD? Maybe. If you're lucky. Oh look, here's your 4xWarr 1xPally group. Welcome to heroics, circa Burning Crusade.
  1. Damntastic's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by indirect View Post
    Getting rid of Drain Mana for Warlock? Are you fucking retarded as dick or what, Blizzard...
    Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about
  1. Rolly's Avatar
    Gotta love this new design team of Blizzard's nerfing iconic spells of classes. Just more proof that this is the B team bereft of any ideas.
    This is the laziest development seen by Blizzard developers. These guys no longer play the game they play the spreadsheets and then spout corporate bafflegab to justify their decisions. Keep repeating a turd is a diamond and eventually you''ll convince a portion of your player base that it is.
  1. Sal's Avatar
    I'm glad to see Blizzard really working out some nice changes especially for PvP for once. Happy with a lot of these changes. Now onto some class specific.

    Unholy DKs doing a bit too much, I suppose I can see this. I ALWAYS stomp every single person in my random dungeons, but I just assumed that was because they're retarded (and they usually are). Mastery is bad for Unholy right now, so if they toned down damage a bit and changed mastery how they said they would, then they should scale much better from gear (mastery being almost useless), and be in a similar spot. I don't really have a problem with DW Unholy, but it's now how Blizzard wants you to play, so I can understand doing something about this. I say move endless winter or something else useful to all specs to tier 1 frost, and move nerves of cold steel down the tree a bit.
    Frost AOE is a bit too high? Well what do you think when you gave them the best aoe in the world? Herp derp. 2H Frost needs something (either attacks scale better with a 2H or buff to might of the frozen wastes) because it's really far behind the other specs. Saying Unholy is way above DW Frost isn't right at all, so I don't see where Unholy really beats it out.
  1. stevethebeave's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by NaitFury View Post
    Feral going down the drain most likely, as always it's either overpowered or underpowered and these changes will bring us back to underpowered. Oh well just wish they could look into the facts and realize that we don't have snare immunity.
    Feral bleeds are stupid good right now in PVP, and waiting 20 secs to fear bomb, while I'm getting Rip-rolled, means I'm clicking "Release Spirit" every time. Removing the fear immunity is a welcome change, imo. Besides, they didn't say they were nerfing damage, they just said they "plan to shift some of that (bleed) damage back to main attacks."


    No one said you had snare immunity. In fact, maybe you're on to something, it would be much easier if they would just give all classes a snare removal that costs 5-8% of base mana, is instant cast, and has no cooldown.

    ---------- Post added 2010-12-28 at 03:57 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Kyserorz View Post

    Edit: Also how can you typo dunno? Lol it's not even a real word.
    Dunno, ask that guy.
  1. Thistlefur's Avatar
    What they really need to do is remove Troll Dig sites from norhtrend. The NE are not of a high enough % but the troll is just nearly making Nerubian impossible. I have been in Northrend now for 5 hours and have gotten only 1 Nerubian Dig site. I'm L525 and have completed Troll and Vrykul. So far since leveling up to this point all I have completed in Nerubian is 3 Common.
  1. CHIARGAN's Avatar
    This game sucks. Why don't all you guys come play a REAL MMO Age of Conan!
  1. Keristrasza's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by goombear View Post
    I'm glad they're buffing up MM and BM, I have no issue with SV's damage, just enjoy MM much more and want it to be more competitive. Thank You Blizz.
    Know how you feel. I've been BM since Vanilla and did decent DPS, was better in BC but then they were nailed with the nerf bat to make SV special. I still remember it being the laughing stock of the hunter class, the "Melee hunter" tree.
  1. thewallofsleep's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Nephyron View Post
    I'm getting sick of this game and it's unbalance, with 12 million subscribers I'd expect a little more effort in balancing this game's mechanics, I've heard that lotro is going to be free, maybe i should give it a shot.
    LOTRO is free already and has been for some time. It is not however a good game IMO. Seems very stiff. I also think the graphics are awful, but that's me.

    Rift: Planes of Telara should be coming out in March or April from what I'm hearing and the videos look great. Interesting class system and a very WoW inspired UI and character control from what Beta users have said. Graphics look beautiful and allegedly it's nicely balanced, though we'll have to see. I'll certainly give it a try, and while I'll never be one to claim a game will make me quit WoW, I'm actually attracted to the idea of a fresh start and freeing myself from Blizzard. I went into the Cataclysm with an open mind and was excited for it, but I'm not that into it so far. The idea that they are making the game harder than it has been in a long time (which is a good thing) but dumbing down the overall experience prior to endgame (ie: tooltips, lack of need for grouping, all quests in dungeons, reducing once elite mobs to normals, etc) seems counter productive. Even if the game isn't perfect, I like consistency. I'd be perfectly willing to live with the game still being easier like WotLK if it were to stay consistent. WoW is constantly making huge alterations to it's mechanics and overall vibe, and it's getting old. I'm looking forward to trying something new.
  1. Swagger's Avatar
    Does Blizzard or no one else realize that if the attacking team gets 1800 Honor from a Tol'Barad win then the quickest way for everyone to get massive honor will be to lose on purpose when you're defending and let the opposing faction win every time when they're the attackers.

    So basically this is just a way to get a free 1800 honor every 5 hours without having to do anything.

    The REAL solution to this problem would be to fix the BG and make attacking and defending the same difficulty, and awarding something like 500 or 1000 to the winner, rather than implementing a scenario where the intelligent thing to do would be to always lose as quickly as possible when you're defending.
  1. Puntar's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by wMw View Post
    Awww...they reduce bleed damage and buff direct strikes. So you won't be OP in PvP, and will have the same damage in PvE.

    Got it ?
    Yeah, ssuuuureeeeee!

    Feral cats do not even top damage meters in PvE and PvP nerf to bleeds WILL ONLY wreck PvE experience. Unless they toy with Mastery alone (or they change it) , Blizz devs WILL AGAIN completely destroy feral for PvP.

    As past already shows us, I do not feel confident that Blizz will actually do it "in proper way". Like always they will completely smash feral spec into the ground, just to please the QQ-ers.

Site Navigation