IoT Quartermaster Update, 5.2 Blog, PTR Class Balance, Upcoming Raid Testing, Comic

Legendary Meta-gems
In order to further discourage the use of these in PvP, the effects are dispellable. Not all of them are Spell Steal-able because frankly some of the effects are too complex to work correctly when stolen.

In order to provide feedback on potential changes to rotational priority or damage modeling, please confirm these estimated new values, or provide the accurate value in their place:
Sure. Here are the correct values. Flat amounts are the values at level 90, as you’d expect.

• Howling Blast: 575 + 85.1% of Attack Power
• Frost Strike (motfw): 126% Weapon Damage
• Obliterate (motfw): 386.4% weapon damage, +25% w/ two disease
• Scourge Strike: 633 + 140% Weapon Damage, 25% shadow damage per disease
• Diseases: 187(FF)/223(BP) + 17.9% AP
• Diseases (Unholy): 299.2(FF)/356.8(BP) + 28.64% AP
• Soul Reaper (motfw): 120% weapon damage

…based on modeling I've done (with assistance from Theck and Hamlet), [Gaze of the Twins is] actually a Guardian's best trinket for Rage Generation.
Gaze of the Twins will only proc for Str users.

Thoughts on an Unholy Death Knight using Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen and using Festering Strike to maintain these 100% crit chance diseases permanently?
Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen will only proc for Int users.

The first the comes to mind is on the mage class. In frost spec, taking the rune of power talent, I noticed that the frost pet's waterbolt apparently is double dipping from Rune of Power. The first effect (reasonably) comes from the mage at 15%. But, it has another multiplicative 15% on top of that.
We’re not seeing this. Are you perhaps seeing the result of the Frostbolt debuff?

Rune of Re-Origination
We're going to make some changes to this trinket based on testing and feedback. Our goal was to make it decent if you didn't game it at all but offer some opportunities for enhanced benefits if you did. We're going to try to meet that goal better with these changes:

• 10 sec duration (down from 20 sec) but with double the proc rate.
• Increase your highest secondary stat by 200% of the sum of your two lowest secondary stats. For example: you have 3500 mastery, 5000 crit, 7000 haste. Rune procs, and you get [-3500 mastery, -5000 crit, +17000 haste]. Same logic as before, just double the size of the buff to your highest stat.

Forgive me for saying this....we are high right now? Locks/mages are topping meters and all I see is + + + + + + for them. If you go to raid-bots (shows what people are actually doing with the classes), click on any fight other than Galaron....look at who is on to....mages and locks (speaking 25 heroic).

We did not ask for a buff to haste.

I work for a software company, so I understand you have tools to see things that we don't. But don't friggin cop out and say things like "you are higher than you should be now"
Arcane and Affliction are high on many fights in 5.1, but they shouldn't be in 5.2. It's almost always the wrong argument to compare yourself to the highest DPS specs out there. "Middle of the pack" is actually where everyone is supposed to be.

Also, many warriors did ask for a buff to haste. Feel free to bring it up with them.

I try to always be careful to say "X is where or not where *we* want it." I say that because we pick the target DPS for everyone, not the community. We find that when we phrase it that way, players spend less time (though still a lot) campaigning for DPS buffs.

As someone who's main-specced Beast Mastery through most of his hunter career, these adjustments concern me about the implications for spec balance. Rough estimate, this seems like it's about a 5% adjustment upwards for Survival, and closer to 10% adjustment upwards for Marksman (maybe more if the rotation changes from 5.1 to favour Aimed Shot more).
This is why I added the caveat that you can't just take the 5.1 environment and mentally add buffs or nerfs. My advice here if you can't test it yourself on the PTR is to trust your theorycrafting community and see where they think everyone will end up in 5.2. (Zeherah made a post up above.)

I believe he's saying the damage buffs for pve will harm pvp, as a lot of ptr feedback was already very worried about very high burst and sustained damage ( people being gibbed in a few globals constantly) in pvp in full tyrannical gear with resil gems.
But that's a vague answer. That's not anything I can discuss with my design team. What would be more helpful are as many specifics as possible. What are you worried about from Shadow priests or Frost DKs? Mind Spike? Obliterate? Dots? We can go look at those specific cases where there are concerns. We don't think it's appropriate just to nerf everyone's PvP damage by 15% or something just in case.

GC we've still yet to get a clear cut answer on whether or not Lava Burst will scale (i know you hate that word, sorry) with crit rating (IE More crit chance = higher damage like Soul Fire/Chaos Bolt). Also, Bombay or Tanka Rey?
You used the word correctly, so no worries. What makes me reach for the Bombay are vague concerns about "scaling issues" masquerading DPS buff requests. (If you're worried about your DPS, just be up front and say you're worried about your DPS.)

We are unlikely to add extra crit damage to Lava Burst given the amount of time we have left for testing because we don't feel we can accurately predict what it would do to gear or rotational choices, and there is a PvP burst risk as well. We're not against the idea in theory and might try it at a future date once we have more information about what the 5.2 changes do to Elemental overall.

I also bet you did not test both Titan's Grip and SMF, since both do substantially different in Raids.
We treat SMF and TG (and also DW and 2H Frost) as separate specs for purposes of our testing. Nowhere do we see Execute anywhere close to the percentage of damage you're suggesting.

That said, several warriors have asked us to nerf Execute instead of the numbers we did hit. We might still do that, but Execute damage is a scary thing to mess with at this stage because it can cause relatively-hard-to-predict changes to priorities and damage between TG and SMF. We'll consider it though.

The fact that the reason behind the nerf was totally false.
You're conflating two issues. Stampede had a bug causing it to do too much damage, which we eventually found and fixed. At the same time, we also wanted to tone down all of the "because I'm immune to everything I'm going to come beat your face in" cooldowns. We deeply regret having so many "I'm immune to everything" mechanics. We don't think they are good for PvP overall, even though it can be fun to beat someone's face in while they have no recourse.

Anything uncounterable is probably something we are trying to phase out in PvP.

Blizzard seems to be unable to admit that having Sanctity of Battle as baseline for Paladins was a mistake.
Sorry, we just don't think it was a mistake. If you go back and look at a lot of the feedback about haste for paladins, many players like how haste feels. They like how well it ties into their active mitigation. We don't think there was any mistake here. We just have to make sure (long-term) that avoidance still has some role for tanks. We reduced the proc chance of Grand Crusader because we also allowed it to be caused from dodge and parry, which helps to make those stats somewhat more attractive.

There are numerous, serious issues with multiple different healer specs/classes. All of them are essentially being brushed under the rug so 5.2 can go live on schedule.
If we, the developers, though there were numerous, serious issues with multiple specs, we would delay the patch. We are fortunately in a position where we can do that and we do it all the time (heck, with almost every product we release). There are some players out there with concerns, and that is their prerogative, but it's also pretty par for the course for any of our major patches or expansions. We think things are pretty close.

with buffs to warriors/dks/rogues I only see the gap between us and other melee getting even larger.
We need evidence to evaluate claims like that. Unfortunately, as I've said, 5.1 evidence isn't super useful at this point.

If they make our cooldowns lower, damage without cooldowns becomes less of a concern
Yep. There is nothing inherently stronger about sustained damage than burst damage, provided the end result is the same (and often the opposite is true). There are encounter specifics that throw that out of kilter, such as the frequency of burst windows and the length of the fight, but in general we like those complexities because they help prevent every class from behaving exactly the same way. When CDs are too long, then the risk of things getting out of kilter are increased - consider the example of a 10 minute cooldown, that will rarely ever get used more than once per fight. We think a 2 min CD solves the problem sufficiently. Your DPS at any given second won't be the same as everyone else's -- this is a good thing -- but integrated over the course of a fight it will be close, again taking into consideration that we like variation among encounters.

Even including the 4-piece T15 bonus and boosted stats, I'm simming that 2/2 upgraded T14 gear is outperforming T15 gear of equivalent difficulty levels because of the reduced CD on an incredibly buffed Penance. This is an issue.
We have considered nerfing the priest T14 set bonus to 1 sec off of Penance (under the argument that Penance is more powerful now) and just reducing Penance by 1 sec baseline. That undoes a little bit of the first part of my argument, but Penance is a fun spell and a single-target one at that.

Tiriél is also correct that partially it's just a comparison between upgraded heroic 5.0 gear and normal 5.2 gear ilevels.

No. I can reproduce this consistently (100% of the time) on the live server. Steps to reproduce (at least on live, I will verify whether this still exists on PTR)
Okay, that sounds like it is just the tooltip and not the damage itself, but we'll still check it out. Tooltips can only be so accurate since so many things affect spell points these days.

On Thursday, February 21, through Monday, February 25, we will be testing the 25-player Normal raid encounters in the Throne of Thunder.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Public Test Realms.

Thursday, February 21

• Jin'rokh the Breaker - 25 Player Normal - 11:00 PST (14:00 EST, 20:00 CET)
• Tortos - 25 Player Normal - 13:30 PST (16:30 EST, 22:30 CET)
• Ji-Kun - 25 Player Normal - 15:00 PST (18:00 EST, 00:00 CET)
• Durumu the Forgotten - 25 Player Normal - 16:30 PST (19:30 EST, 01:30 CET)

Friday, February 22

• Council of Elders - 25 Player Normal - 11:00 PST (14:00 EST, 20:00 CET)
• Megaera - 25 Player Normal - 13:30 PST (16:30 EST, 22:30 CET)
• Primordius - 25 Player Normal - 15:00 PST (18:00 EST, 00:00 CET)
• Dark Animus - 25 Player Normal - 17:00 PST (20:00 EST, 02:00 CET)

Monday, February 25

• Horridon - 25 Player Normal - 11:00 PST (14:00 EST, 20:00 CET)
• Iron Qon - 25 Player Normal - 13:30 PST (16:30 EST, 22:30 CET)
• Twin Consorts - 25 Player Normal - 15:00 PST (18:00 EST, 00:00 CET)
• Lei Shen - 25 Player Normal - 16:30 PST (19:30 EST, 01:30 CET)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session, change the boss being tested, or cancel a test entirely, due to bugs, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.