Patch 5.3 Mounts, PvP Vanity Items, Flight Path Discovery, Mar 29 Hotfixes, Blue Post

Tyrannical Gladiators Tabard
Just as an FYI, the tabard is not the only aesthetic thing coming.

I definitely recommend that you keep your eyes on the patch notes blog, because there are several cool rewards that we are planning to introduce in patch 5.3 that you can get at certain ratings. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Vanity Items
- Make vanity items for ratings (i.e. 1750, 2000, 2200, 2500, 2800)
We actually have some more of these kind of rewards planned for 5.3. There is currently only a single cosmetic enchant that is appealing to only a few select classes, but we want to widen this range of enchants so that all classes have a use for the 2200 rating required, enchant.

On top of this, we plan to change elite gear back to having a rating requirement in patch 5.4 so that it gets back it's old prestige. We also know that many players like the ideas of having even more rewards; we are looking to introduce some additional cool things that you can earn at specific ratings in 5.3 to give everyone better reasons to work on increasing their Arena ratings, not just to aim on getting their end-of-season rewards. We have lots of stuff on the way in patch 5.3 and the patch notes blog will be updated soon to reflect this. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’ve seen a bit of confusion over the removal of automatic flight path discovery for characters leveling in patch 5.2, so here’s some background on the whole series of events that lead to where we are.

Players have always been required to visit a Flight Master in order to unlock transportation to and from that location. We’ve always viewed this as a fundamental element of exploration in World of Warcraft. Players should feel like they’re in a massive world with vast continents to explore and thousands of adventures to embark upon (because there are!).

With Cataclysm, every zone in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms was changing, flight points were moving, being added or removed, and we needed to make sure people didn’t log in to find they were missing large portions of their flight points. To solve this, characters exploring the world below level 80 were given every flight point automatically to ensure no edge-cases were missed. It was supposed to be a one-time changeover in the old-to-new world transition to resolve what could be numerable bugs due to the vastly altered landscape in the expansion. However, when the change went in, we didn’t realize it was implemented in a way that would affect all characters forever. When we found out it wasn’t an immediate priority, and we began implementing new tech in 5.1 and (more completely) 5.2.

We understand it was very convenient, but it wasn’t an intended change for flight path discovery forever. Over the course of patch 5.1 and 5.2, we implemented new functionality to remedy the original implementation issues. We’ve improved our tech in a way that allows us to remember what flight points a character has discovered, or determine what paths a character should/shouldn’t know on a case-by-case basis. In some cases you’re provided flight points when we’ve determined a character’s foreknowledge of them is important to the experience, but in most cases you will need to brave the wilds, seek out adventure, and visit a Flight Master before you can unlock flight to and from that location.

Classes

• Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Tier-15 Fire/Frost 4-piece set bonus should now properly increase Frostbolt's chance to activate Fingers of Frost effect.
    
  
  
• Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Tier-15 Discipline/Holy 4-piece set bonus should summon a Golden Apparition that now heals for the correct amount and can activate Divine Aegis.
    
  
  
• Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Combat
    
    • Blade Flurry now has a range of 8 yards, up from 5 yards, and will only hit targets that are within the Rogue's line-of-sight.
      

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Ji-Kun's Feed Young ability should now be slightly easier to intercept.
  
• To the Skies!: Fixed an issue where the Hail of Arrows debuff not being removed after defeating Beastmaster Horaki.
  

Items

• Enchant Weapon - Glorious Tyranny can no longer be used on other player's weapons and will cause bind-on-equipped items to become soulbound.
  
• Lightning-Imbued Chalice now has a greatly increased chance to generate Infinite Power.
  

Removal of PvP Stats
I am really not sure but as far as I know, PVP Power/Resilience cost item level, blanket removal of a stat aka make it passive = you should add another stat or increase current one. Now the stat is removed with no other stat boost, I believe that stat boost is needed, specially to PVP Power in order to overcom PVE gear.
Let's look at one example, both items are ilvl 476:

Dorian's Necklace of Burgeoning Dreams
849 sta + 566 int + 399 haste + 340 mastery = 2154

Malevolent Gladiator's Pendant of Alacrity
849 sta + 566 int + 405 haste + 331 mastery + (299 PvP Power + 299 PvP Resilience) = 2151 + (598) = 2749

As you can see, if you simply sum up all the stats without taking into account any sort of relative stat weights (which are irrelevant for this case as the existing PvE stats on both items are exactly the same) you can clearly see that they are pretty similar if you ignore the PvP stats (2154 vs 2151).
So we can conclude that PvP stats (Resilience and PvP Power) do not count towards the ilvl budget of any item.

So, yes even if PvP stats are out of the ilvl budget, the removal of resilience will still mean that PvP items are losing something extra that was exclusive to them, but PvP Power is still there and is still out of the budget, if we find that this is not enough we can always change some of the numbers on PvP items, like turning the PvP Power “knob” up until we are happy with them.

Note: Malevolent gear actually has even more stamina than that due to a recent hotfix, but I used the old values just to show that the numbers were correct in terms of correlation between stats and ilvl. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Reduced Difficulty of WoW
WoW has now been dumbed down so much to the point that my Dutch 7 yo. nephew can level up to 80 (mage) without knowing any English, thus not having a clue of what spells do and so on. He doesn't read quests because whatever he needs to click on is sparkly, and what he needs to kill is marked red. Arrows lead him in all the directions he needs to go so basically, he doesn't need to do anything other than spam frostbolt and the occasional frostnova or whatever.

Now when I do questing myself instead of letting my nephew do it while I go play guitar or whatever it just hurts my heart to see the old STV "bosses" for example either be completely gone or they're now normal mobs that I kill with 3 spells.. There's no challenge at all in leveling now.
We didn't read quests back then (well, some of us did, and still do) and could do them just fine. You could also level up spamming frostbolt or frost nova, you just had to be careful with how many mobs you were pulling at the same time. And we had sites like Thottbot to go check where quest objectives where (and map addons to get the coordinates). Now those things are built in the game, but it wasn't nothing that didn't exist before.

The STV "bosses" and many other elite quests were changed some time ago. Among other reasons, because it was getting increasingly harder to find players to do that content as we were moving into newer expansions. So, during The Burning Crusade's launch, it was very easy to find players to group up for the elite quests at Hellfire Peninsula, yet at the end of that very same expansion, it was rather difficult to find alts that would help you go through. As you move forward from that content, new players coming up to the game just can't do them because they can't group with people. What's the point of a difficult monster if noone can kill him because you can't find a group at the appropriate level?

Getting into dungeons, and dungeons themselves have turned into the most impersonal experiences I've ever had. Raid/dungeon finder gets me groups while I can AFK and I don't even need to pay attention to the group or talk or whatever because I can solo every dungeon I enter. When I play my tank monk now for example I just tell the healer to go dps spec because I have enough selfhealing to stay alive and mobs don't live longer than 5 seconds. It's boring, tedious and completely ruins my experience in WoW. The other people might as well be NPCs for me because it doesn't change a damn thing about what happens around me.
If you are having an easy time on 5-man heroics, you're more than welcome to try Challenge Modes. Though, if your party overgears the content it's to be expected that it won't be too difficult (but again, this is nothing new, it was being done in previous expansions as better gear was being released).

I miss having to choose my talents carefully, re-speccing, being different from the rest. I remember having a frostweaving DK and a half enh/ele mixed shaman, was amazing. Right now in arenas when you see what spec somebody is you know exactly what's coming. There's no guessing, observing or adapting anymore (to a certain degree).
How did you choose your talents carefully? I mean, it's an honest question. Because most of the community would go and use the same cookie cutter specs (and using anything else would be a DPS loss on PVE or a survivability loss in PVP).

New raids are cleared within the first 10 hours they're out, no challenge there.
Which one?
Throne of Thunder's Heroic race is still on (and it wasn't released 10 hours ago).

And also, unless you have cleared it, the challenge is there, waiting for you. If you refuse to do it that's entirely a different topic.

So yeah, am I the only person who thinks WoW too dumbed down and is no longer challenging? Let me know.
You aren't, but I would recommend you reading this answer I made about this topic as well as that thread. Might be useful. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvE
Heroic scenarios sound interesting, but is it like challenge mode content or aimed at a broader audience? @Ghostcrawler
It's mostly because current scenarios feel silly in 500+ gear. Not as hard as Challenges, but not face roll. (Source)

Why nerf Oondasta? Not that I am complaining, just curious the mindset behind that change.
When too many players are in one area, game performance is unacceptable. Now he will be dead before your whole realm assembles. (Source)

ToC was an accident rather than a raid or big dungeon. Biggest mistake and no successor for ulduar.
No accident. ToC bought us time to work on 2 raids and 3 dungeons in other patches, but wasn't well received. Trying other options. (Source)

Discuss "How much should we play ?" 3 hours raid 3 times a week is not normal imo when you have a real life.
Ideally, play what you want to play. We offer a lot of content because we have some players who want to play a lot. (Source)

as far as heroic content being the only true dps checks, How many stuck on Garajal, Elegon, or Garalon last tier normal mode?
That said, we agree that the berserk timers were too tight on some of the 5.0 normal raid bosses. They are gentler in 5.2. (Source)
Yet you havent changed the 5.0 enrage timers you agree are too tight, even when its not that hard to do.
We nerfed everything in the 5.0 tier when 5.2 came out. (Source)
In those cases, you could probably improve success more by handling the mechanics better than by respec'ing for a small DPS gain. (Source)
And GC is right, you will get a bigger improvement by just improving your (or the raid's) mechanics
And I'm not saying trying to improve DPS is misguided. I'm saying if you don't want to respec you likely don't need to. (Source)