Diablo 3 - Battle.net Item Data to be Updated Monday, Jay Wilson Interview, Blue Posts, Opening of the D3 CE

May 8 Blog Post on Account Wide Achievements
According to Zarhym's recent tweet, we will see a blog post by Ghostcrawler today on Account Wide Achievements!



Beta Leatherworking Items
Recently several Leatherworking crafts were added to Beta, and we now know what the items are! You can craft Rare quality Season 12 PvP gear and Epic Leather Gloves and Chests. You can find the full list of recently added crafts on WoWDB.





Final Annual Pass Beta Invitations Sent
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion ended May 1, and we recently sent out the remaining Mists of Pandaria beta invitations. Check your games list in Battle.net Account Management for the Mists of Pandaria beta. You can download and install it from there.

Again, thank you for your enthusiasm and feedback. To provide feedback for the Mists of Pandaria beta, we invite you to please post in the Beta Feedback forum.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Cataclysm PvP gear and PvP Power
You will have less resilience on your gear coming into beta. However, you will also have some base resilience and that base should offset the PvP power that everyone is getting. The net result should be that you take about the same damage you do today in a PvP setting, but will take less damage from someone not wearing PvP gear.

Currently on your beta build, I believe the ratio of power to resilience is off. You should have more resilience and less power than you do.

It is entirely possible that some new talents or spell changes will result in too much burst damage in isolated cases, but when giving feedback, it's useful for us if you distinguish between those and survivability in PvP in general. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Druid (Forums)
Druid Level 90 Talents
We're not yet happy with the druid level 90 row. We still like the theme of it playing into the druid's hybrid nature and we want to reassure you (which I think most of you already know) that druids won't do lower damage or healing compared to other classes just because some other class has an unambiguous throughput increasing talent at level 90. Classes are balanced around their whole package.

Nonetheless, we want the bottom row of talents to be exciting. In the next (hopefully) build, you'll see a few changes.

  • Disentanglement -- no longer a talent. Shapeshifting for all druids just breaks roots.
  • Dream of Cenarius -- increases damage spells by 70% (up from 30%).
  • Heart of the Wild -- now also grants 6% passive Agility and Intellect.
  • Nature's Vigil -- replaces Disentanglement. Increases all damage and healing done by 30% for 30 sec, with a 3 min cooldown. While active, all healing spells also damage a nearby target for 50% of healing done, and all damage spells and abilities also heal a nearby friendly target for 50% of the damage done.

Let us know how they feel once you get a chance to try them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums)
Protection Paladin Feedback
I can't imagine that blizz intends for paladins to have to get a swing timer addon to effectively micromanage a 3 second buff. I'm waiting patiently for a 'fix'.
Bosses hardly ever attack slower than 1.5 second these days and there is no longer a boss swing timer debuff. We find that when bosses attack slower, they have to hit really hard to do the same DPS, which means tanks risk being two-shot. A Shield of the Righteous should be able to get two hits.

Even if that were not the case, the penalty is mostly on healer mana. Because Shield of the Righteous can't be up all the time, it can't be the case that a paladin will die without it.

The challenge with the current SotR design is that Prot paladins generate Holy Power pretty quickly, which means any 3 Holy Power ability will be used often. We don't want SotR to have 100% coverage, or it starts to feel more like Inquisition or the Hammer of the Righteous debuff and not like a short cooldown. We could slow down Holy Power generation, but we're reluctant to do that, because it feels good coming in quickly and coming from abilities like Judgment. Having Bastion of Glory buff Word of Glory so much is a way to encourage paladins to spend some of their Holy Power on Word of Glory once in awhile so that it all isn't funneling into a persistent Shield of the Righteous shield. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)
Rapture Feedback
While I'm not a big fan of Rapture in the beta environment, I think this is the wrong way to look at it, that if it provides less mana than PW:S, it's not "regen." Assuming PW:S is a spell worth casting on its own merits (and it should be, when MoP is live, or else I think even Blizzard designers will agree they failed), then you'd be casting PW:S anyway and it's part of the total mana-out over the course of the fight. Rapture simply increases the mana-in over the course of the fight, making it regen.

Now, if PW:S isn't worth casting on its own merits and is ONLY used for Rapture, then it's perfectly fair to point out that Rapture doesn't even refund PW:S's cost. But, again, if that ends up being the case, it will mean discipline is truly broken and devs will surely fix it. I don't think anyone believes PW:S shouldn't be a valuable spell just from its effect in mitigating damage.

Yes, this is how we see it. Rapture isn't trying to be Telluric Currents. You shouldn't spam PW:Shield when you need mana. Rapture is intended to offset the cost of PW:Shield when the latter is used intelligently. I said "regen" in the more generic sense of mana returns. I understand the posters saying that it's not increasing your mana over time because you are still casting PW:Shield.

Rapture is a mana increase on live mostly because we scale too well with Int (as a regen stat) and the gear item levels went crazy just like at the end of Wrath. It was not the original plan for the spell, otherwise it would have functioned as a mana-increase at the very start of the expansion.

PW:S is quite probably the most powerful spell in our toolbox, and without a prohibitively high mana cost, it will wind up being spammed to the exclusion of other spells. The Rapture mechanic serves to moderate the mana cost of the spell when tank healing while not interfering with the mechanics that prevent us from just spamming PW:S 24/7. Supposedly we'll have other tools for raid healing, though I personally find these tools lacking.

As far as our overall mana regen goes, we've got 25% passive regen, rapture procs and shadow fiend. I think that'll be enough regen for single tank healing, but not enough at all for raid healing or multi-tank healing. I'm concerned that Mind Bender is going to wind up being a mandatory choice for Disc at this point.

Yes, I agree with all of this as well. The challenge of designing Disc has always been trying to balance the fun of PW:Shield with the power of PW:Shield.

We don't want any talent to be mandatory for Disc (or any spec). If Disc has mana problems in AE situations, or if Holy regens too much compared to Disc during periods of not casting, then that is something we can address.

Our goal is to make mana-management with a fresh level 90 a little easier than it was at 85. It was close at 85, but just a little too punitive. Once you hit 90, let us know how dungeons feel.

I will note that we are considering retiring Judgment of the Pure. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums)
Warrior Feedback
Since I'm not sure yet when you'll get the next beta build, here are a few upcoming warrior (mostly Protection) changes to try out:

  • Shield Slam -- now generates 20 rage. Sword and Board generates 30.
  • Unwavering Sentinel -- now grants passive rage generation like the old Anger Management effect. The intent is to make rage generation smoother when a tank is kiting or otherwise doesn't have high boss contact.
  • Demoralizing Shout -- a new (old) Protection spec ability, now in the form of a short-term, free cooldown, much like Barkskin. Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec. 60 sec cooldown.
  • Shield Barrier -- cost reduced to 20 rage, but consumes up to 60 rage for up to triple the effect. (Total absorb adjusted accordingly).
  • Glyph of Thunder Clap -- Not super useful. Redesigned to Glyph of Unending Rage, which increases total rage cap to 120, allowing interested warriors to be able to bank more Rage.
  • The sum total of these changes may provide too much rage. We'll have to see. We still want to mess with Berserker Stance and possibly Enrage rage generation as well to make sure warrior rage isn't too static and predictable. We want there to be some Heroic Strike use.

One of the reasons we don't always announce changes before they happen is that things can move pretty fast in beta. Even though I mentioned some Protection changes above, they are already out of date.

Overall, the goal is to mix up Protection's rotation a little more. Prot warriors are used to lots of buttons, and we don't want too much waiting around. (For Arms and Fury, we can just flood them with rage, but with Protection the risk is that we hit 100% uptime of Shield Block, which turns it from being a short cooldown to a managed buff like Thunder Clap.) We also want to make sure tanks who execute their attacks with more skill are rewarded with better mitigation. To make this compelling, we think it needs to tie into Rage generation.

  • As part of this, we're going to try Defensive Stance no longer generating Rage from auto attacks at all. Instead we'll have nearly all Rage come from special attacks while in Defensive.
  • In addition to Shield Slam, we'll try Revenge and Devastate generating some Rage. Devastate will do so by once again being the ability that procs Sword and Board. For Revenge, we agree that the more rotational version has lost some of its old excitement. Revenge will generate Rage outright. It will no longer proc from blocks but will also have no cooldown so you will sometimes get multiple Revenges in a row.
  • We're going to try Shield Block using the charge system that we've tried for a few abilities, such as the monk Roll. This one may feel too different, but we'll see. What it means is you can use Shield Block twice in a row, but then pay a 15 sec cooldown. (The first use will start its cooldown as soon as its used.) This mechanic should let you chain together two Shield Blocks but not keep it up 100% of the time.We think this rotation feels better and more traditionally Prot, but let us know how it feels to you.

I'd find it a bit more comforting if I ever saw actual passion coming from Blizzard regarding Warriors. But I don't see that, haven't seen that. Does anyone really see the passion there? If these people enjoy their jobs, really enjoy working on the game, really believe in their design - then you'd think they could set aside an hour or two to address our concerns about enjoyability.
But two hours times eleven classes turns into a huge time commitment pretty quickly (and that's on top of reading all of the posts in the first place). Believe me -- you want the design team spending time designing the game, not debating players on forums.

We are all very passionate about our designs, but we're also professional game designers who know better than to get too attached to any particular implementation. Stuff changes. Ideas that seem great might not pan out. We've all seen ideas we were really excited about being greeted with indifference by the community. That's just part of the job.

Passion also can come across as being defensive ("they're stuck on their pet feature!") or impartial ("he likes priests better!") when read on forums.

I know I participated in it, but really these discussions would be more useful if we kept to class feedback. I have found as a rule of thumb that any time the discussion strays from the design to the designers, then it is probably off course.

You definitely caught me scratching my head when you said you were moving tanks to 'active mitigation', kept all the passive mitigation skills for prot paladins, and nerfed the only active mitigation skill we had.
No, you are correct. The way paladins were playing with lots of Word of Glory was closer to the new design. We said at the time however that we didn't think it would work for tank balance to let paladins convert resources into mitigation while warriors could not. I think we even said at the time that we'd like for all of the tanks to play more like that, but it required a whole sale design.

That happens a lot in this gig, where class A is working the way we'd consider ideal, while class B, C, D and so on do not. The "pure" design is to keep A working the right way, but the right decision is usually to change the single outlier until we have time to fix everyone.

I'm curious how exactly this is going to work. Does it just consume as much rage as it can (Up to 60) and give you a decent sized absorb based on that? I do like the change though, it makes the move much more interesting.
Right. Assume that spending 20 Rage will give you an absorb equal to 30% of your attack power. If you have 40 Rage, the bubble is 60% and 60 Rage, it's 90%. If you have 100 Rage, you still get the 90% bubble and have 40 Rage left over.

Like Aed said, unless Heroic Strike gives some form of defensive benefit somehow, warrior tanks are basically never going to use it. You guys learnt that lesson with the pre-nerf WoG back in 4.0, remember?
As a few players pointed out, I meant Heroic Strike use for Arms and Fury. Prot will use Heroic Strike when not tanking at the moment, when soloing, when running easy content, or when Ultimatum procs. Tanks have never chosen spending resources on damage when they could spend them on survival.

Although I wish that auto attacks would still generate rage, I understand that we shouldn't be swimming in rage because that makes us imbalanced. I like the idea of our special abilities generating rage much more. It actually feels like I am "actively" working torwards taking less damage.
There may be a way to get some Rage from autoattacks. We were just concerned that so much Rage was from autoattacks that buttons like Shield Slam weren't contributing much so warriors were ending up feeling passive when what we were going for was active.

GS since you posting can we get atleast an idea of plans with Arms and Fury? currently they play way to similar and when I say that I mean they play exactly alike only difference is you don't have something procing to turn Slam into 3 stack 10 rage, and Overpower is proc'd from using your rage generating ability but they still play to alike, I'd just like some info as to what might be the plans with them? thanks
If you say they play similarly because they both have an attack that generates 10 Rage and both have an attack that costs 30 Rage, then that's true. However the similarities sort of end there. Arms has a second attack, Overpower, that is reliable, though it can sometimes chain proc. Colossus Smash sometimes has a lower cooldown. Arms' AE is based around Sweeping Strikes and Blood and Thunder. Arms' Rage income is slower from autoattacks and come in chunkier because of slow weapon swings.

Fury can sometimes use Raging Blow but not predictably. Rather than a proc concerning Colossus Smash, Fury gets to use Wild Strike three times in a row. Fury cares about being Enraged more than Arms for a couple of reasons (RB and mastery). Fury's AE is based around Meat Cleaver procs and using Raging Blow. Wielding two weapons ensures more consistent rage income, even when using two-handers. Fury will probably always have more Heroic Strike use. Overall, Fury's rotation is probably less predictable, which is fitting for their kit of crazed berserking.

I'm just trying to get a feel for what you're looking for. Should Bloodthirst deliver 20 Rage? Should Bloodthirst just be a cooldown? Should Arms have a different cooldown than Recklessness? Should Fury not have Deep Wounds?

I thought we were supposed to be commenting on how it feels now, not coming up with our own fixes.
I feel like most of you have been on the forums long enough to know the difference, but here goes:

Example One: "I think Mortal Strike would feel better with a 9 sec cooldown."
Example Two: "I find myself with not enough Rage as Fury."
Example Three: "I find the rotation confusing. I'm not sure which button to push."
Example Four: "Rend was a fun button. I miss it."
Example Five: "I came up with a new warrior ability. It's called Staple. Staple requires 40 Rage and roots a target. You then get 100% crit chance against the Stapled target. I imagine it would have an icon that looks like a big staple. The glyph of Staple would staple the target to the warrior so you would drag them around with you."

Five is fun, but less useful to us overall. If it's fun for you, go for it. Maybe it will spur some interesting discussion as players try to explore what design problems (if any) you're trying to address with your brainstorming. The risk is that you grow attached to the idea of Staple and essentially refuse to like any warrior change unless you see Staple implemented. Ultimately, it's just a less efficient way to have a discussion than figuring out what the root problem is you are trying to solve anyway. But I understand sometimes it isn't easy to get your finger on the pulse of what is bothering you. I've been doing game design a long time, and it still vexes me sometimes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue (Forums) / Warrior (Forums)
Rogue and Warrior Ranged Weapons
What I said here still stands true, however, there's a bug currently in beta preventing rogues and warriors from equipping ranged weapons. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Curse Weekly Roundup
Pico is here with news about Diablo 3, Company of Heroes, MoP, TERA, CoD, and Elder Scrolls Online! Don't miss our preview of Minecraft on the Xbox!

This article was originally published in forum thread: Achievements Blog Post Today, Leatherworking Items, Blue Posts, Curse Weekly Roundup started by chaud View original post
Comments 40 Comments
  1. Freese's Avatar
    Great protection warrior changes.
  1. AncientNecro's Avatar
    hopefully the most common questions get answered, especially with regards to titles, multi-character meta progress, and other similar items.
  1. furydeath's Avatar
    Hopefully we get some news on alter time for mages seeing how it's umm really really bad right now.
  1. Reserk's Avatar
    Interesting. There are so many questions about Account - Wide Achievements (Also Mounts and some on pets). Should be a pretty decent sized blog post.
  1. Lolsteak's Avatar
    Dear god the size of that artbook in the D3CE, i can't wait to get my copy.
  1. Melilithia's Avatar
    No more Tyrael's Charger?

    *goes off into a corner and mopes*
  1. Zokten's Avatar
    LOL, 1500+ stam on a chest pieces jesus......seems blizzard is still hooked on the number inflation tit.
  1. WarpKnight's Avatar
    Sigh, seems like they're going to stick to the same old profession formula. Boring! Let us craft a greater variety of gear for once.

    As for the SotR 3-sec-buff mentioned here, I imagine in MoP the difference between a good paladin tank and a great paladin tank is one that micromanages SotR buff. Not sure if Blizz realise that right now.
  1. iPluto's Avatar
    druids sound great. honestly the changes are getting better and better.
  1. retpally's Avatar
    Wait, why do druids get a better Avenging Wrath?
  1. Sting's Avatar
    It's nice they are addressing the concerns I initially had with warrior tanking, I think I definitely should fire up my beta again to have another go at it.
  1. mmoc62a721aa86's Avatar
    "we want the bottom row of talents to be exciting."

    Yeah, like rogue ones...
  1. Lyctam's Avatar
    What the heck is up with warriors and wanting infinite damage? They are acting like they are broken during live and acting like they are utter .... on beta.
  1. Balir's Avatar
    I think Blizz need to relook at doing the stat squish. Some of those numbers are getting out of hand. What will we be seeing on T16 gear???

    And seriously, wtf is up with all the mastery?
  1. MasterHamster's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by balir View Post
    I think Blizz need to relook at doing the stat squish. Some of those numbers are getting out of hand. What will we be seeing on T16 gear???

    And seriously, wtf is up with all the mastery?
    Around 2200 per stat.
  1. Tokas's Avatar
    omg so much info on rogues once again
  1. Andaja's Avatar
    Those pvp items look pretty decent for pve too O.O
  1. Lemons's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Andaja View Post
    Those pvp items look pretty decent for pve too O.O
    I agree...there's not a single stat on them that suggests pvp, but perhaps they're waiting until they think up a better name for "pvp power" before they start slapping it on gear.
  1. Austilias's Avatar
    I love big numbers, the bigger the better, and what's more an item squish is totally unnecessary and, more to the point, problematic. Good job Blizzard, I want to see myself hitting in the millions soon enough!
  1. mmocd2effbd770's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Alenarien View Post
    I love big numbers, the bigger the better, and what's more an item squish is totally unnecessary and, more to the point, problematic. Good job Blizzard, I want to see myself hitting in the millions soon enough!
    Isn't it sort of silly though that with this kind of stats, you'll be exchanging blows of hundreds of thousands of damage... with boars and rabbits in the new expansion, as with every expansion before? That seems way more jarring to me than any item squish, that the demon army that had ravaged Draenor is no match for a Pandaria bunny. They are just numbers.

    On topic though, good riddance disentanglement. We told you ages ago, Blizz.

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