Patch 4.3 Notes Update, Pets and Mounts Update, Jobs at Curse, Blue Posts, Fan Art

Classes
Death Knight
Bug Fixes

• Death and Decay should now function correctly when Anti-Magic shell is active.
• Dancing Rune Weapon will now properly transfer its initial threat to its master.
• Dark Command should no longer trigger effects that proc from melee attacks.

Druid

• Wrath has a new spell effect and icon.

Balance

• Fungal Growth now displays an alternate spell effect when viewed by players hostile to the druid.

Bug Fixes

• Mass Resurrection can no longer be cast in certain shapeshift forms.
• Balance direction and energy should now be properly reset after zoning or switching specs.

Hunter
Marksmanship

• Bombardment now only affects the next Multi-shot cast.
• Resistance is Futile! is now activated by targets affected by Marked for Death.

Bug Fixes

• Point of No Escape no longer affects melee abilities.
• The casting bar for Tame Beast should now always indicate the correct cast duration at high values of haste.

Mage
Fire

• Combustion’s damage over time can now hit critically.

Glyphs

• Mages who apply both Glyph of the Monkey and Glyph of the Penguin at the same time will cause the polymorphed target to be randomly transformed into one of the two forms.

Bug Fixes

• Living Bomb’s interaction with Impact has been cleaned up, and should no longer sometimes fail to spread Living Bomb to new targets. We hope.
• Combustion will now scale correctly with Living Bomb, Pyroblast and Frostfire Bolt, resulting in an increase in Combustion damage.
• The reduced effects of Gladiator’s Silk Handguards and Glyph of Arcane Power via the global cooldown should now stack properly.
• Living Bomb damage over time is now properly affected by Molten Fury.
• Glyph of Invisibility is no longer removed when another temporary speed increase fades.
• Portal spells should now all have the same mana cost.

Priest
Discipline

• Evangelism and Dark Evangelism can no longer be stacked at the same time.

Bug Fixes

• Echo of Light can no longer be triggered by certain spells before it is learned.
• Shadowy Apparitions should now benefit from effects on the priest that increase spell damage.
• Holy Word: Serenity should now properly gain bonus to crit from Test of Faith.

Rogue

• Tricks of the Trade has a new sound effect.

Bug Fixes

• Main Gauche should no longer break effects such as Gouge.

Shaman
Bug Fixes

• Chain Heal will now animate properly when it bounces to the shaman.

Warlock
Affliction

• Jinx now increases the target’s rage, energy, focus, or runic power cost of abilities, rather than reducing their generation.

Warrior

• Several Rage generating abilities now briefly interrupt rage decay when they are cast.

Bug Fixes

• Charge (and related abilities) will now function correctly when used immediately after breaking a root effect.

Battlegrounds
General

• Real ID parties that comprise players from different realms can now queue for battlegrounds together.
• Random and Call to Arms battlegrounds which result in a tie game will now award bonus honor equal to the bonus honor for a loss.

Isle of Conquest

• Siege Engine’s Steam Blast range has been increased by 50%.

Warsong Gulch

• Players spawning at the Alliance graveyard should spawn facing toward the middle of the battleground.

Twin Peaks

• Players should now receive honor at the conclusion of a match that results in a tie.

Races

• The worgen racial Darkflight has a new icon.
• The gnome racial Escape Artist now has a spell animation associated with its effect.

General Bug Fixes

• Many tooltips have been made more accurate.
• Using #showtooltip in a macro should now cause the action bar icon to become highlight at the appropriate times.
• Pet bars will no longer sometimes disappear when zoning.
• Pets should now more reliably keep up with mounted players.
• Reflected spells are now affected by the resilience of the player that ultimately takes damage.
• The process of re-integrating mages into Night Elf society has advanced such that Night Elf Mages now receive all racial bonuses, specifically Elusiveness.
• Secondary debuffs will now more reliably apply to targets which are knocked out of Stealth or Invisibility.

Cross-realm Real-ID parties can queue for battlegrounds. A few reminders about this:

• You're going to see the limitations as you do in Looking-For-Dungeon and Looking-For-Raid.
• If you have Real-ID friends in your group, you can't convert to a raid.
• You can't invite Real-ID friends to a raid.

More Tokens in LFR vs Normal Raids
LFR gear is less powerful than standard gear, and the groups performing those raids don't have any kind of organized loot distribution system to ensure that raid members receive a 'fair share'.

Of course, between your Normal or Heroic raids, you can jump into an LFR to shore up the weak points in your gear load out. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Firelands Nerf
We're looking into the issue with Rhyolith randomly becoming friendly during some encounters. As far as his movement speed is concerned, the animation was changed in patch 4.3 a little bit. He appears to be moving slower, but his speed has not actually changed. We had our QA team verify this to make sure it is just an issue of perception.

Things like Fandral's Flame Scythe and Alysrazor's tornadoes have not been adjusted since our hotfixes in September.

We did remove Magma Geyser from phase 4 of the Heroic Ragnaros encounter. The reasoning behind this change wasn't so much to make the fight easier, but rather because the mechanic just wasn't really playing out the way we wanted it to.

The intent of the mechanic was indeed to require the raid to take turns cycling through the Breadths of Frost to reset their Superheated stacks, and to destroy the Breadth if too many people tried to camp in it at once. As it turned out, players discovered that a very, very precise triangle formation allowed three independent clumps to coexist inside the Breadth without triggering Geyser. All of the initial Heroic Ragnaros kills used this tactic and it became the standard way of doing the fight.

We could have increased the detection radius that triggered Geyser, but in general we try to avoid enacting changes that make an encounter more difficult once that fight has already been defeated. Doing so creates a frustrating experience for players who have to relearn something they believed they had mastered. The adjustments to the health and damage of Ragnaros and his minions in September primarily affected the difficulty of phases 1-3 of the encounter; at that time, we also decided that Magma Geyser should be removed from phase 4, but the change was not one that could be made in a straightforward way via hotfix, so it did not take effect until the 4.3 patch.

So basically, yes, it’s a nerf, but it’s because we weren’t happy with the mechanic and the only two solutions for fixing that were to either make the fight harder or to make it easier. And, as stated above, we try to avoid making fights harder once they’ve gone live.

Despite some of the insinuations in this thread, the change isn’t remotely going to let a guild that hasn’t mastered the encounter just walk in and defeat it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Faction Bias
We recognize that struggle is necessary. We, the Alliance, want the struggle. We want the conflict. We want the fight. We want the hardship.

I think you're speaking for yourself here, because dozens of capped threads have been made on the exact points Dave brought up, and you claim no one is concerned with. I can appreciate if you don't believe those things are important, but many people obviously do, and so they were mentioned in the article. If that's all you took away from what was said though, I'd recommend taking a second read-through.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding as they say, so I don't expect anyone to get super excited over us just saying it's going to get better. We'll have to do the work and make it happen, and I can't really offer you anything other than a request that you take a wait and see approach. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Conquest Points
Conquest points you've earned from Random Battlegrounds after the 4.3 patch was applied shouldn't be going anywhere. It wasn't intended for Arenas or Rated BGs to be available again until the start of Season 11, so those points were wiped intentionally. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Classic Gear and Transmogrification
In the case of the old Honor system it’s no longer available like Molten Core is. We know who participated, what they achieved, when, and we can in this instance restrict those specific items (some of which were arguably more difficult to obtain than any raid has ever been) to the people that earned them when the system existed. It’s also worth noting that people's time investments, even at level 85 and going back and doing these old raids over and over to build a full set, is not inconsequential. It's not accurate to compare raid item drop rates (regardless of character level) now, to current honor gains and their comparison to the original honor ranking system.

We do agree that the restriction to the specific characters that earned those titles kind of sucks. It’s the player that earned those items, really, not any specific character. If we had a way to make them account-wide right now, we would. We can’t, but account-wide achievements are planned for Mists of Pandaria, and we hope to be able to include Feats of Strength with that system, which would open up these items to all characters on that player's account.

It's also worth reiterating the point made in the original reply I made "while keeping the door open to reward them to more people in the future." We'd like to find ways to make these items available to players who didn't earn them through the original system, while keeping them prestigious for those that did.

Lastly I want to apologize that this restriction was not communicated before the patch was released. As much we hope to be in front of messaging any changes before they're implemented to ensure you're well informed and can plan your play schedule with these things in mind, it doesn't always happen. For that we are sorry if anyone was looking forward to using these items for transmogrification and is unable to do so. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Level 60 PVP Gear and Transmogrification
As you can all see, it is our intention at this current point to only allow access to this gear for Transmogrification to those that received the privilege of wearing it in classic WoW. This may not be permanent though, as stated there is still a door there for us to be able to unlock and let other players access it as well at a later date.

We hope that you are all enjoying the new Transmogrification feature though as its great to reminisce by using old gear. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)