Patch 5.4.2 Live This Week, Upcoming Flex Mechanic Scaling Changes, Blizzcon Survey

RoS Hardcore and PTR Clarifications, No Christmas Events in Diablo, Jaetch's RoS Multielementalist Wizard Build

HearthPwn and ManaGrind Team Up, Changes Next Patch, Eric Dodds on ManaCast

Patch 5.4.2 Live This Week
Patch 5.4.2 is going live this week, with most of the changes being small fixes or assets for future use. The two bigger changes are the addition of cross-realm listing to the Raid Browser and cross-realm mailing of Account Bound items. The Karazhan changes are still reverted as of the latest build.

In-Game Store
The In-Game Store will allow you to purchase items from the Battle.Net Shop. It isn't clear if this will be active when the patch goes live, as the last PTR build removed all of the pets and mounts from the store again.








New Items
Keep in mind that Iron Skyreaver appeared in Warlords of Draenor at Blizzcon, so it isn't likely to be appearing in game tomorrow.

Level Type Name
20Companion Pets Treasure Goblin's Pack
20Companion Pets Moonkin Hatchling
1Other Bipsi's Bobbing Berg
20Mount Iron Skyreaver


Achievement Changes
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Feats of Strength



New Strings
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
  • ADVANCED_COMBAT_LOGGING - Advanced Combat Logging
  • AUTOCOMPLETE_LABEL_FRIEND - (Friend)
  • AUTOCOMPLETE_LABEL_GROUP - (Party)
  • AUTOCOMPLETE_LABEL_GUILD - (Guild)
  • AUTOCOMPLETE_LABEL_INTERACTED - (Whispered)
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_CANCEL - Cancel
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_CONNECTING - Verifying...
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_SUBMIT - Submit
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_SCREEN_EXPLANATION - Only an authentic information request from Blizzard will create the blue screen effect with white outlines!
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_DENIED_DESCRIPTION - [PH] You have entered your information incorrectly too many times.
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_DENIED_TITLE - [PH] Authentication Error
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_ERROR_DESCRIPTION - The Shop has encountered an error.|nPlease try again later.
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_ERROR_TITLE - Internal Error
  • BLIZZARD_CHALLENGE_OKAY - Okay
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_BROWSE_EUR - *Taxes Included
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_BUY_EUR - Select
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_ERROR_MESSAGE_ALREADY_OWNED - You already have this product!
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_ERROR_TITLE_ALREADY_OWNED - Already Owned
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_FINAL_BUY_EUR - Pay Now
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_PAGE_NUMBER - Page %d/%d
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_SPLASH_BANNER_DISCOUNT_FORMAT - |cff224f01%d%% OFF!|r
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_SPLASH_BANNER_FEATURED - |cff014879FEATURED!|r
  • BLIZZARD_STORE_SPLASH_BANNER_NEW - |cff014879NEW!|r
  • BROWSER_CACHE_CLEARED - Your cache has been cleared.
  • BROWSER_COOKIES_DELETED - Your cookies have been deleted.
  • CHAR_LOGIN_ERROR_21827 - Error 21827
  • ERR_AUTH_CHALLENGE_UI_INVALID - [PH] Action cannot be completed at this time.|nPlease disable your addons and try again.
  • MAC_OPEN_UNIVERSAL_ACCESS1090 - In order to use this option, you must grant access to %s in Security & Privacy preferences, located in System Preferences. Would you like to open System Preferences now?
  • OPTION_TOOLTIP_ADVANCED_COMBAT_LOGGING - Enables extra logging data when writing the combat log to a text file. This may cause additional network lag when using the "combatlog" chat command.
  • PVP_ARENA_NEED_LESS - Your group needs %d less players; to join this arena.
  • PVP_ARENA_NEED_MORE - Your group needs %d more players to join this arena.
  • QUEST_WATCH_POPUP_CLICK_TO_COMPLETE_TASK - Click to complete
  • RAF_REWARD_SUPPRESSED - You have earned %d |4reward:rewards;, but already have every possible choice. Check back again when there are new choices available!
  • RECRUIT_A_FRIEND_FACTION_PANDAREN_ALLIANCE - Your friend plays for the Alliance faction. Join the Alliance if you want to play together.
  • RECRUIT_A_FRIEND_FACTION_PANDAREN_HORDE - Your friend plays for the Horde faction. Join the Horde if you want to play together.



Iron Skyreaver Mount
Keep in mind that Iron Skyreaver appeared in Warlords of Draenor at Blizzcon, so it isn't likely to be appearing in game tomorrow.





Treasure Goblin
The Treasure Goblin will be rewarded from Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Collector's Edition.





Upcoming Changes to Flex Mechanic Scaling
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
At BlizzCon, we'd discussed some improvements to our Flexible scaling system that would minimize the existence and impact of any real or perceived "breakpoints." Our design goal has always been for the system to be neutral with respect to group size. Specifically, you should never feel encouraged to turn away interested players whose skill/gear level matches the rest of the group's, basic role composition constraints notwithstanding. But at the same time, you shouldn't feel like you need to go out and grab warm bodies if you have a perfectly serviceable raid already assembled. Clearly we have not yet fully realized those goals.

In general, the existing healing/damage scaling slightly favors larger groups, since boss health and damage scale up more slowly than does raid throughput. To use a specific example, an 18-player raid with 12 damage-dealers will kill a boss slightly faster than a 10-player raid with 6 damage-dealers (assuming equal skill/gear between the two groups). But it is true that currently some specific abilities exhibit breakpoints, where adding an extra player causes an extra add to spawn, or an ability to strike an additional target.

To help smooth out difficulty scaling as you add or remove players from your Flexible raid, we will be implementing one of our planned Warlords changes to the scaling system ahead of schedule. In the near future, several boss abilities that target more players as the size of a Flex raid increases will use weighted randomization rather than strict breakpoints.

An example to illustrate what I mean:

Today, Sun Tenderheart's Shadow Word: Bane ability afflicts 2 targets if your raid size is between 10 and 14, but begins to hit a third target at 15.

Once our upcoming change is in place, if you have a 13-player raid, there will be a 60% chance for each cast of the ability to hit 3 targets, and a 40% chance for it to hit 2. If you add an extra player, and thus have 14, there will now be an 80% chance for 3 debuffs to go out, and a 20% chance for only 2.

In short, with respect to this particular ability, adding an extra player will always give you an average of 0.2 extra Bane debuffs. No more breakpoints!

There will be a handful of exceptions where breakpoints remain necessary. Imprison on Sha of Pride is probably the most notable such example, where you really want to pre-plan who will cover which prisons, and having a random number of targets each cast would cause frustrating unpredictability.

There's nothing wrong with 14-player groups -- 14 players is a great size for a raid. But so is 15. And 19. And 12. And 22. We just want to help make sure that good players aren't being turned away from groups because of the notion that their presence will make things harder for everyone.

A pity, Sha prisons are one of the biggest reasons people go for 14. I want to know how Malkorok void zone spawning area expands as people add, currently that seems to be 10-15 you get half the room, 16-25 the whole room.
That's interesting, since currently the "magic number" for getting a third Imprison target is 18 players.

The way Malkorok Implosions should work is that with 14+ players (yes, 14) you get a fourth spawning, and then an additional one for each 3 players past that. If you're seeing a huge jump in the number of Implosions spawning based on a small change in raid size, that sounds like a bug, and I'd love to hear more so that we can investigate the issue.

Patch 5.4.2 PTR Patch Notes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Patch 5.4.2 is now available for testing on the Public Test Realms (PTR)! Participating on the Public Test Realms lets you test patches before it has been released.

If you'd like to help test and provide feedback, you can start by copying your character and downloading the PTR client. Once you've had a chance to try things out, be sure to visit our PTR Discussion forum to discuss the patch, and the PTR Bug Report forum to report any issues or errors.

Classes
  • Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    • Talents
      • Temporal Shield's healing should now correctly modified by effects that affect healing (Battle Fatigue, Mortal Strike, Dampening).
  • Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    • General
      • Intervene no longer removes movement-impairing effects on use. The talent Safeguard will continue to remove movement-impairing effects.
      • Improved checks on pathing for Intervene and Safeguard to address situations where Warriors may wind up under the terrain.

Quests
  • Catch and Carry: Druids can no longer attempt to catch Sacks of Grain while in flight form.
  • Lost Treasure: Resolved an issue where players may be unable to open Cache of the Legion.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios
  • Cross-Realm raid browser now has new categories for Mists of Pandaria World Bosses (Celestials and Ordos) and Flexible raid difficulty for Siege of Orgrimmar.
    • The cross-realm raid browser is accessed through the 'Social Pane' (bound to the O key by default) and look for the 'Raid' tab on the bottom right.
    • From there you can set the character as looking to join a raid or browse players that are forming up for a raid.
    • For more information on this change, please see the thread titled Cross-Realm Raid Browser on the PTR Discussion forum.
  • Players are now able to place raid markers in the world even while dead.
  • Siege of Orgrimmar
    • Norushen
      • Resolved a situation where Quarantine Measures may sometimes fail to destroy all life within the Quarantine Zone.
    • Galakras
      • Resolved a situation that may cause demolition NPCs to stop opening the door to one of the towers.
    • Paragons of the Klaxxi
      • Resolved an issue where players may fail to gain Hisek the Swarmkeeper's special ability if they were in the middle of casting a spell while interacting with his corpse.

Items
  • Players are now able to mail account-bound items to other characters that reside on a different realm on the same account. To send cross-realm mail: enter the character's name, followed by a hyphen "-", followed by the realm name. Note that cross-realm mail can only send account-bound items, not other items or gold.
    • Additional information and testing discussion for this cross-realm mail can be found in this thread on the PTR Discussion forum.
  • Crashin' Thrashin' Flyers should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area.
  • MiniZeps should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area.

UI
  • The Customer Support button has moved. Customer support can now be reached in-game by selecting Help option through the Game Menu (Game Menu is bound to the Escape key by default).

Bug Fixes
  • Resolved an issue that caused players to not receive credit towards the Drop It! and Drop It Now! achievements.

Blizzcon Virtual Ticket Survey
Blizzard sent out a survey for Blizzcon Virtual Ticket viewers today with an interesting question:

This article was originally published in forum thread: Patch 5.4.2 Live This Week, Upcoming Flex Mechanic Scaling Changes, Blizzcon Survey started by chaud View original post
Published on 2013-12-10 05:54 AM
64 Comments
Comments 64 Comments
  1. Arbs's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Nungamunch View Post
    So does this mean the xp boosts are going to go live this week too?
    It is only Asia, people love to freak out about anything on the PTR. All the store stuff is more than likely Asia. But I do believe the Battle.Net Shop that will be connected to are Battle.net Client is for US/EU though. As the Blizzard Store redirects to that.
  1. eschatological's Avatar
    Cross realm heirlooms, life is good!
  1. Kruncholyo's Avatar
    Flex breakpoints being flexible is cool.
  1. dDic's Avatar
    Karazhan changes reverted... does that mean there are no changes to Karazhan?
  1. videotape's Avatar
    Cross-realm mail for account-bound items. Oh my god. They just kind of slipped that one in there, didn't they?
  1. Idletime's Avatar
    I'm a little miffed they didn't ask about providing possible captioning or signing at the panels, much less for the PPV stream. I have been losing my hearing for years, it's embarrassing to always ask people to repeat themselves (especially in an office environment where people normally talk quietly), and would be nice if they put that in.

    Otherwise, the heirloom thing I was unaware was even coming. That's really rather nice!
  1. mmoc73a3487a09's Avatar
    "Crashin' Thrashin' Flyers should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area.
    MiniZeps should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area."

    What.. Why should it be able to damage each other?
  1. Regalbeast's Avatar
    Store not working for me....anyone else?
  1. Drejjmit's Avatar
    "Which country do you live in?"
    "Sweeden"
    Love their spelling of Sweden =)
  1. IKT's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Arbs View Post
    It is only Asia, people love to freak out about anything on the PTR.


    I want the exp boost now, I hate leveling >.<
  1. Notos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by amaraim View Post
    "Crashin' Thrashin' Flyers should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area.
    MiniZeps should now be able to damage each other while in a sanctuary area."

    What.. Why should it be able to damage each other?
    Because you can't make them fight each other very well if they can't do damage in the first place.
  1. Fredz's Avatar
    Is there a tab to see where our BoA items are like they said at Blizzcon or whenever I saw that?
  1. mmoc2b5ad7a33a's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Fredz View Post
    Is there a tab to see where our BoA items are like they said at Blizzcon or whenever I saw that?
    No its WoD feature this one will alow us to use mail to send stuff to another realm (finally i waste so much EU)
  1. Duster505's Avatar
    Ingame shop is live. And as I said I would do if it happened... Goodbye and good riddance. You pay sub... and then you should not have to pay for extra content. End of story. Cause if not... then its not a game worth the sub. Never looking back.
  1. Mazzic518's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Idletime View Post
    I'm a little miffed they didn't ask about providing possible captioning or signing at the panels, much less for the PPV stream. I have been losing my hearing for years, it's embarrassing to always ask people to repeat themselves (especially in an office environment where people normally talk quietly), and would be nice if they put that in.

    Otherwise, the heirloom thing I was unaware was even coming. That's really rather nice!
    Didn't they have closed captioning? I had to turn it on just to get rid of the noise from the other stages and actually hear the panels.
  1. Arbs's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Duster505 View Post
    Ingame shop is live. And as I said I would do if it happened... Goodbye and good riddance. You pay sub... and then you should not have to pay for extra content. End of story. Cause if not... then its not a game worth the sub. Never looking back.
    Didn't you quit along time ago or say you weren't coming back - http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...me-back-to-MOP ??, But anyway the only thing on their are the same virtual items from the Blizzard Store anyway, The same old pets & mounts.
  1. Sargiean's Avatar
    Arbs, I think his point is that they charge us 14.99 a month to play a game. They then use the 14.99 that they charge us to pay designers and artists to create things like store pets and mounts, which they charge us for - again. It's double dipping, and WoW is one of the only games that gets away with it without any sort of strong backlash from the community. For example, ME 3 had day 1 DLC (a party member) and people were livid over it.

    If a game is F2P, then selling cosmetics like this is how they pay themselves and their staff. When you're already charging people, it seems greedy. It's the reason why I've voted with my consumer dollars by NOT purchasing anything from the store.
  1. Moradim's Avatar
    the fact that they spent so much time making a shop in a patch with zero content otherwise, annoys me to no end.

    this double dipping needs to stop. are we a sub based game? or a f2p game? blizzard wants to have its cake, and eat it too. the fact that our sub fee went towards content we cant even earn in-game, is ridiculous.

    and people wonder why subs have declined. no, we dont need content, we need more useless shit like vanity mounts.
  1. otarma's Avatar
    Iron Skyreaver is currently bugged with the /mountspecial animation in PTR.

    The floating ice is a Mage-Only item.
  1. risingforce's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Moradim View Post
    the fact that they spent so much time making a shop in a patch with zero content otherwise, annoys me to no end.

    this double dipping needs to stop. are we a sub based game? or a f2p game? blizzard wants to have its cake, and eat it too. the fact that our sub fee went towards content we cant even earn in-game, is ridiculous.

    and people wonder why subs have declined. no, we dont need content, we need more useless shit like vanity mounts.
    The store and now in-game store have nothing to do with sub.

    The revenue from the store and now in-game store if anything subsidise the subscription or at least provides a buffer that has helped keep the subscription fee stationary.

    The 'lack of content' has nothing to do with the store and now in-game store.
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