World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

More raid testing!

I'm going to turn on the following encounters in Bastion of Twilight, and leave the encounters from yesterday for Blackwing Descent open for a bit longer.

The following encounters will be available:

Halfus Wyrmbreaker
Theralion and Valiona
Ascendant Council

The Bastion of Twilight's entrance is located within Twilight Highlands.

Since these are the beta realms, this schedule is subject to change at a moment's notice due to bugs and server issues. More raid tests will be occurring over the next few weeks.

We have pushed a hotfix to improve hunter damage.

Specifically, we increased the damage of the signature abilities (Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot and Kill Command) by 15-25%. This will both improve overall damage-dealing and make sure that these abilities are prioritized higher than other shots. We think this will bring hunters to a good enough state until they hit 85. Aspect of the Fox and Cobra Shot solve some specific issues at higher levels. Marksman hunters may still trump Survival and Beastmaster hunters until they’re 85, since their rotations rely a little on Cobra Shot.

Don't worry, EU can test these bosses tomorrow! I'm not going to turn them off right at 10am our time, I'll keep them up through most all of the day tomorrow.

On a seperate note, 25 player Maloriak currently has a significant bug in place. We're working on a hotfix, but until that goes live it's not functioning properly. 10 player seems to be much better behaved, but we're looking at a despawn issue with it.

Atramedes is testable.

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Armor changes in 4.0.1
We looked into your findings, and the armor numbers reflect an intentional change meant to cover the armor increases players would get between levels 81 and 85. We should have been more explicit with the rest of the announced Cataclysm changes that physical damage would go up. (It only affects creatures higher than level 80 -- bosses in this case -- so this change has no current PvP ramifications.)

Now that our live class balance changes are slowing down* and players are starting to learn their class changes, we can get a better idea of whether players are struggling more on content that they used to be able to clear. We've made some Icecrown and Halion changes already and we may need to make more.

Nice job on the analysis.

* -- We are continuing to make Cataclysm changes for classes. We will extend these to level 80 and / or hotfix when we think it's relevant. (Source)

Resilience Hotfix
My resilience post above was confusing.

We had buffed resilience by 50% and then lowered it by 25%. This is a 12.5% buff from before the patch. To use clean numbers, if you had 40% damage reduction, we buffed it to 60% (a 50% increase) and then lowered it to 45% (a 25% decrease). (Source)

Balance in low-level BGs
So can a blue state whether or not the very, very high damage outputs in low level pvp will be addressed or not? Rogues able to one-shot most enemies in sub-80 pvp: working as intended, or not?
Nobody should be one-shotting at any battleground level, so yes that (and many other class abilities) will be addressed. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Weak mages on Beta
This is a case of having to balance differently between 80 and 85. The original mage numbers were targeted at 85, which made them overpowered at 80. We nerfed them at 80, which then made them weak at 85. We now have two sets of numbers in place so that they should be relatively balanced at both levels.

Mages are not the only class with this problem, sometimes in the opposite direction. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Paladin Hotfix
Yes, we buffed the 5 paladin direct heals (FoL, HL, DL, HS, WoG). This is a change for both level 80 and 85. We are going to tone down Holy Radiance as I described in the other thread. It can be powerful without being 75% of paladin healing.

I know it's customary for players to classify everything as either overpowered or garbage, but we believe there are actual numbers in between say 1 and 100, so give the changes a chance before you dismiss them.

It is possible we will nerf Word of Glory for Prot and Ret at 85 to compensate for this buff since they probably don't need stronger Words. (Source)

Beta update happened and instance servers seem to be up again. I'm opening Blackwing Descent to test Maloriak and Atramedes. I'll leave these two encounters up for an extrended period overnight, including in the morning tomorrow so our non-US regions can try the encounters out.

As always, these plans can change at a moment's notice based on bugs or other issues.

Guild Achievements

• Profit Sharing now requires 100,000 gold, up from 50,000 gold. Now rewards the Guild Herald companion pet.
• Saving For A Rainy Day now requires 200,000 gold, up from 100,000 gold. No longer rewards the Guild Herald companion pet.

Dungeons & Raids

• 1000 Valor Points - Earn 1000 Valor Points
• 5000 Valor Points - Earn 5000 Valor Points
• 25,000 Valor Points - Earn 25,000 Valor Points
• 50,000 Valor Points - Earn 50,000 Valor Points

Player vs. Player

• 1000 Conquest Points - Earn 1000 Conquest Points
• 5000 Conquest Points - Earn 5000 Conquest Points
• 25,000 Conquest Points - Earn 25,000 Conquest Points
• 50,000 Conquest Points - Earn 50,000 Conquest Points

Guild Perks

• Bartering now reduces the price of items from all vendors by 10%, up from 5%.

Companion Pets

• Moonkin Hatchling - Right Click to summon or dismiss a Moonkin Hatchling. / Instant

Enchanting

• Enchant Weapon - Landslide no longer works with ranged weapons.
• Enchant Weapon - Power Torrent now increases Intellect by 500 instead of spell power.
• Enchant Weapon - Hurricane no longer works with ranged weapons.
• Enchant Weapon - Elemental Slayer no longer works with ranged weapons.
• Enchant Weapon - Avalanche no longer works with ranged weapons.
• Enchant 2H Weapon - Mighty Agility *New* - Permanently enchant a two-handed weapon to increase Agility by 130. Requires a level 300 or higher item.
  Creates Greater Celestial Essence. / Reagents: Hypnotic Dust x 3, Greater Celestial Essence x 3, Heavenly Shard x 3

Engineering

• Spinal Healing Injector is now applied to the gloves instead of belt.
• Z50 Mana Gulper is now applied to the gloves instead of belt.

Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Feral

• Rip now scales from 18/37/55/74/92% of Attack Power depending on combo points, up from 8/16/24/32/40%.
• Ferocious Bite now scales from 10.9/21.8/32.7/43.6/54.5% of Attack Power depending on combo points, up from 7/14/21/28/35%.
• Rake now causes scales from 2% of Attack Power for bleed damage, up from 1%. Now scales from 42% of AP for additional bleed damage over 9 sec, up from 18% of AP.
• Mangle additional damage has been increased from 726 to 1136.
• Vengeance - Entering Cat Form will cancel this effect.

Mage (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Arcane

• Arcane Specialization now increases damage of your Arcane spells by 25%, up from 15%.

Fire

• Fire Specialization now increases damage of your Fire spells by 25%, up from 10%.

Frost

• Frost Specialization now increases damage of your Frost spells by 25%, up from 15%.

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy

• Seal of Insight - Unleashing this Seal's energy now also restores 15% of the Paladin's base mana.
• Mastery: Illuminated Healing now only affects your direct healing spells, instead of all healing spells.

Protection

• Touched by the Light now increases spell hit by 8%, up from 6%.

Retribution

• Guardian of Ancient Kings now causes 1750 damage plus 1750 per Application, down from 5250 plus 5250.
• Sheath of Light now increases spell hit by 8%, up from 6%.

Priest (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy

• Holy Nova now heals up to 5 targets.

Shadow

• Mind Soothe now also affects Dragonkin. Does not cause threat.
• Shadow Word: Death now deals three times as much damage to targets below 25% health.

Warlock (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Affliction

• Seed of Corruption now deals 567 to 660 to all enemies within 15 yards, down from 1186 to 1379.

Demonology

• Summon Infernal now deals 438 to 494 fire damage when it lands, up from 29.

Destruction

• Incinerate now deals 579 to 673 Fire Damage and an additional 96 to 112 Fire damage if the target is affected by Immolate. Changed from 540 to 627 with an additional 135 to 156.
• Rain of Fire now deals 2455 Fire damage over 8 sec, up from 1890.

Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Arms

• Taste for Blood will not occur more than once every 5 sec, down from 6 sec.

We are going to take the resilience buff down a little.

It should end up as a 25% buff from where it stood originally, not a 50% buff. For point of comparison, maxing out resilience before our first hotfix reduced damage by ~50%. After out hotfix, the damage reduction with max resilience was 80%. With this most recent change, damage reduction with max resilience will go down to 60%.

Part of what is going on here is that we don't want newly leveled characters to explode in PvP, while still making sure that well-geared characters aren't invulnerable. The current resilience curve makes that a tricky thing to balance. Perhaps in the future resilience needs diminishing returns so that it doesn't keep getting better and better the more you have.

While we don't have any additional announcements to make at this time, there are some additional balance tweaks we're working on. Some of our adjustments at level 80 ended up causing certain classes to be overpowered or underpowered at level 85.

Yet more raid testing!

There will be two sessions, an EU session starting at 11AM server time (PDT), and a US timed session at 4PM server time (PDT). We'll open the zones on all Beta realms (including KR!) for both sessions, and possibly longer.

The following encounters will be tested:

Maloriak in Blackwing Descent
Atramedes in Blackwing Descent

Blackwing Descent is a raid zone with an entrance located along the side of Blackrock Mountain.

Since these are the beta realms, this schedule is subject to change at a moment's notice due to bugs and server issues. More raid tests will be occurring over the next few weeks.

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In preparation for the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we have updated our recommended minimum system requirements. These new requirements correspond with patch 4.0.1. We suggest players check out our related support article for all of the details to ensure your gameplay experience is as ideal as possible.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...rticleId=21054

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What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been 310% Hotfix
The hotfix is scheduled to go live tonight. (Source)

Missing Glyphs in 4.0.1
The missing glyphs we know of are Mage Armor, Long Word and possibly Vanish. The others have been found through discovery as far as we know. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Unshifting clears Vengeance
We could make shifting to Cat clear Vengeance but let it stay on in caster form. We're only paranoid about Cat AP for obvious reasons. (Source)


Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Paladins on Beta
After looking at more of the raid attempts on beta, we are worried that Holy paladins are doing too much area healing and not enough single target healing.

While we definitely want to scoot paladins away from their Lich King monopoly on tank healing and towards raid healing, we don't want to go too far. We're thinking about nerfing Holy Radiance and buffing single target healing. Again, the goal is not that Holy paladins only ever heal the tank, but we want them to actually be able to heal the tank as well.

On Holy Radiance, we think the 20 yard range shifted the spell from one where position was relevant to just blowing it on cooldown. We'll probably keep the 20 yard radius, but have a falloff to where the healing is highest within 8-10 yards of the paladin. This will also help the spell stay relevant in 5-player dungeons without being overpowered in larger raids. The cap for Holy Radiance (and Healing Rain for that matter) also aren't working correctly at the moment.

If we decide to buff single target healing, it would probably just be points on the 5 direct heals. We think Beacon is in a good place and aren't looking to overhaul the overall Holy mechanics. It's just a numbers issue.

Judging Seal of Insight (a change I alluded to earlier) will help with mana problems, especially when Divine Plea is on cooldown or you're nervous about using it. (Source)

Beacon of Light Nerf
We thought Beacon was overpowered when the paladin could literally heal two targets to 100% at once. In that era, there was never a reason to heal the Beaconed target. Not only was it powerful, it was really easy and required little action or decision on the part of the paladin. Having the Beacon splash some healing onto a target who may or may not need it feels balance-able to us. It means the paladin still needs to decide when to heal the Beaconed target indirectly (i.e. use Beacon) or when to heal them directly. It means there is the risk of doing the wrong thing, which could mean switching Beacon when you shouldn't have or healing the Beacon when you should have healed someone else. (Source)

More raid testing!

There will be two sessions, an EU session starting at 11AM server time (PDT), and a US timed session at 4PM server time (PDT). We'll open the zones on all Beta realms (including KR!) for both sessions.

The following encounters will be tested:

Chimaeron in Blackwing Descent
Theralion and Valiona in The Bastion of Twilight
Conclave of Wind in Throne of the Four Winds

Blackwing Descent is a raid zone with an entrance located along the side of Blackrock Mountain.
The Bastion of Twilight's entrance is located within Twilight Highlands.
The Throne of the Four Winds entrance is in SW Uldum off the coast.

Since these are the beta realms, this schedule is subject to change at a moment's notice due to bugs and server issues. More raid tests will be occurring over the next few weeks.

AoE Balance
You're conflating two different problems, both related to AoE.

Problem 1: Mage uses Blizzard every pull. Starts to wonder what that Frostbolt button is for.

Problem 2: Warrior uses Thunder Clap every pull*. Starts to wonder what that Shield Slam button is for.

* - Yes, I know you need to TClap for the debuff, at least on dangerous pulls. But the debuff lasts a long time. There is a big difference between generating threat with Shield Slam / Devastate / Revenge and using Thunder Clap for the debuff and just using Thunder Clap to generate threat.

AoE balance for both dps and tanks (hell, for healers too for that matter) is very delicate. If the numbers are too low, then it's never effective to use them. BC felt like this for much of the duration. If the numbers are too high, then it's always effective to use them, particularly given how easy it is when you don't have to pick out individual targets.

In both cases, the problems come down to repetition. Most endgame players kill a lot monsters. When every fight feels similar, because you approach it the same way with the same tools, then it's easy for boredom to set in. Ideally, you'd go from say a 5 pull to a 2 pull to a swarm to a single target boss to a 5 pull to a 3 pull to a boss with adds, and so on. But even in that situation, if the pacing is too predictable then you fall back into a pattern and boredom can get in again. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Paladins (I suggest that you read the even longer original post)
I feel like we have done this several times and what many paladins are looking for is not an explanation, but buffs. Nevertheless, I'll take you at your word and try and boil down our design intent.

The Past

The BC and LK design of the Holy paladin was basically to use one or two spells and get a lot of use out of them. This is sort of like the mage dps design, where there aren't a lot of sources of damage, but there are a lot of other factors (cooldowns, procs etc.) that make how you use those spells more interesting. So rather than the paladin having 5 different heals, they pretty much used Flash of Light or Holy Light (depending a little on what gear stats and encounters looked like at the time) but with other spells to boost those heals, such as Beacon of Light and Divine Favor, and then all the paladin support abilities, like the Hands.

Paladins (all three specs really) were designed to be a really passive class, with Protection doing a lot of passive threat generation (e.g. Consecrate) and survivability (e.g. Ardent Defender), Ret doing a lot of passive damage (e.g. Seal damage, Vengeance) and Holy doing a lot of passive healing (e.g. Judgement of Light).

It made paladins play really differently for sure, but it was also kind of boring. Because so much of what the class did was passive, players weren't making a lot of choices. Because they weren't making a lot of choices, there wasn't a huge difference between good and bad paladins except gear. I don't really think any of the specs were as "faceroll" as they often get labeled. However, the deltas between the good and bad player weren't large enough -- great paladins were great and bad paladins were pretty good. Honestly, the group to whom that is the most unfair is the paladin -- you can work and work just for a marginal gain above the guy who just picked up the class.

We made some pretty radical changes to the paladin class for Cataclysm. There is another resource to master. There are opportunities to do the wrong thing. A great paladin will have earned his or her greatness.

The Holy paladin niche, especially in Lich King, was to be the single target healer. In a raid, this almost always meant the tank healer. We designed boss damage to tanks specifically around what Holy paladins could heal. It was okay for paladin healing to be overpowered, because they really weren't competing with anyone for tank healing privileges and we could just make the bosses hit harder. The paladin tree wasn't very sexy though. It came with a lot of passive, boring or downright useless talents. Paladins were at the forefront of our mind when we decided to change talent trees.

Being in the same role all the time also gets boring. Imagine only one melee class (say rogues) had a reliable interrupt, so rogues were always given interrupt duty. Imagine mages had the only form of crowd control -- every encounter that's what the mage would be doing. When the Holy paladin can only heal the tank, then every encounter starts to feel similar to the poor paladin healer. They never have a chance to offer to stick with the second group or to raid heal or to watch the melee. With our attempt to make 10-player raids feel more legit, we wanted to handle the possibility that you might end up with two paladin healers (or perhaps a Disc priest and a paladin healer). We'd prefer you to run with a diverse raid comp, but we understand that isn't always possible.

There are Holy paladins who are used to being overpowered, because frankly that's the way things were for a long time (again, metered by the fact that your niche was very narrow). For them, anything is going to feel like a nerf. Likewise, there were players who were attracted to the class because it was very simple. We heard for years from the paladins who wanted something more to do, so it doesn't surprise us that now that we're delivering on that, some of the paladins who were fine with the status quo are now voicing their displeasure. Overall, we're very happy with the new design. We think it's fun to heal as a paladin. The numbers might not be quite right yet, but that's the kind of thing we're still tweaking. Perhaps two years from now there will be a lot more going in with Holy Power, but we think we have a good framework from which to iterate.

The Future

We think Holy paladins are good at 85. Holy Radiance is a powerful AE heal. Light of Dawn is too, though it's more situational. It really shines in larger raids. (Maybe we should have switched which was the talent and which was the core ability, but we knew Light of Dawn could have a more dramatic graphic effect since it was instant, which we wanted to reserve for the healer.) Paladins have more choices now about how to heal single targets -- they have a similar arsenal as the other healers when choosing between efficiency, speed or throughput. They can choose to avoid healing the Beaconed target or go ahead and heal the Beaconed target, with different results for each. They still have a little bit of self healing with talents light Enlightened Judgements and Protector of the Innocent to try to keep that feel of them healing two targets at once, as well as being sturdy healers, as fits someone wearing plate and carrying a shield. Mana efficiency is something to keep an eye on, but we have a lot of knobs to turn with things like Seal of Insight and Beacon of Light. We recently made a change to make Judging Seal of Insight provide more mana to the paladin. Paladins can heal fine in 5-player dungeons and are doing great in raids so far, though we're about to get a whole lot more data on that.

The Present

Unfortunately, many of these strengths don't show up at 80. Missing Holy Radiance is huge. Mana isn't much of a problem on live today partially because health pools are still much smaller. There isn't much of a choice about whether to use Holy Light because the comparatively low expense of Flash of Light, coupled with the risk that someone may die at any second makes the decision about which heal to use not too challenging. We haven't seen too much evidence yet that paladins are much poorer tank healers than other classes, though I understand many of you feel that to be the case. (It also doens't help that the popular logging programs and websites aren't showing Holy mastery yet.) If we do decide Holy can't competitively tank heal any longer, then we will buff them. This is tricky though. Too much of a buff and paladins and raid leaders are just going to conclude "Oh, Holy paladin = main tank healer" again. Contrary to what you might suspect, our blue posts reach a very small fraction of even the raiding community. Mana may be a bigger problem at 80 just because we tended in the past to avoid putting regen stats on healing plate, and many paladins are sticking with the old models of stacking spellpower or haste, even when faced with mana problems.

Also contrary to how you might feel, we think we did pretty well with healer balance in Lich King. All 5 healing specs were represented. We think we can erode their niches a little, such that the two druid raid can heal fine, or such that you can put a Holy priest on the tank and a paladin on the raid, without having the healer that nobody will want. We haven't been in a situation where a healer gets sat for a long time. I don't think it will be that way in Cataclysm either.

As a footnote, it's always hard to talk about the "average healer," let alone the "average WoW player." There were paladins struggling for mana before this most recent patch and those who balanced their Flash of Light and Holy Light use. There were probably some who healed the raid and doing an awesome job. We have to look at lots of different players and often talk about you in more general terms than you actually possess. Just because any of the above doesn't apply to you personally doesn't make it an invalid conclusion. Just keep that in mind. (Source)