World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Armor Penetration
Armor penetration as a concept is not overpowered. We're not worried about Sunder Armor for example. Armor penetration as a stat was overpowered. There was no reasonable mathematical way for us to prevent armor pen rating on gear from just being better and better the more you stack, which has a number of problems, such as making other stats unattractive and making a dude with a lot of armor pen overpowered. (Source)

PvP Damage
Some of those numbers have already come down. If you recall, Fury dps was low with the patch, so we buffed it, knowing that we would have to nerf it again to keep it under control at 85, especially with Colossus Smash and Deep Wounds. Ret had a similar issue with Inquisition.

We definitely want to increase survival time in PvP relative to what it was in Lich King. We are considering increasing resilience at 85 or even bumping health pools across the board even more. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Vanish in Cataclysm
The purpose of Vanish in Cataclysm is to get back into stealth. If you want to avoid harmful effects, use Cloak of Shadows.

We grew tired, as did many players, of "Vanish never works LOL" so we looped back to the original intent of Vanish being about stealth. That is why the tooltip specifically says that harmful effects won't break Vanish, but does *not* say that the harmful effects won't land. We understand some rogues liked using Vanish to "dodge spells" but the ability was never designed to work that way and never was going to work that way very well. The more we tried to let it be a damage negater, the harder time we had letting it guarantee stealth.

There is a current live bug with pets and guardians being able to still target a vanished rouge. That will be fixed in an upcoming patch. Other than that, we are not aware of any issues that keep the ability from working as advertised. Most concerns seems to be rogues who want it to work a different way. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Colossus Smash
The origin behind Colossus Smash was that we realized warriors were at a disadvantage against heavily armored targets because they do no magic damage. We also wanted to put something in their rotation that was more than just another +weapon damage or +AP attack. Finally, we wanted to replace Execute in the Sudden Death talent, since that was keeping Execute's damage low, instead of it feeling like a powerful finisher. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Divine Storm
We've been toying with a change to Divine Storm to make it more like Fan of Knives. Specifically, you could use it whenever you want, for mana, but it would share a cooldown with Crusader Strike. It would have nothing to do with Holy Power (unless Divine Purpose still applied). The idea would be that sometimes you're okay giving up the single target rotation of Crusader Strike -> Templar's Verdict in return for being able to use an AE attack every 4.5 to 3 sec. It's too early yet to know if this design will work out.

Divine Storm has a great visual and many long-time Ret paladins have a soft spot for it, so we'd like to get it back to more common use. (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Searing Totem
As I said a few weeks ago, we're still working on the AI of Searing Totem. If we can chill out its latent homicidal tendencies, then we could consider bumping the range. Currently bumping the range would just infuriate your group leader more often. (Source)

We have a few more changes which have just come through the pipeline we'd like to share. Some of these changes override changes previously announced in this thread.

This is the sort of rapid iteration our development teams excel at, which is why we're sometimes unable to share every single tweak we make with the public. Game balance is an ongoing project, but since we have a good platform in this thread for sharing tanking changes, let us have a look at the latest:

• Guardian of Ancient Kings (talented) – 50% damage reduction, 3 minute cooldown, 12 second duration.
• Icebound Fortitude (talented) -- 50% damage reduction, 3 minute cooldown, 12 second duration.
• Survival Instincts (talented) -- 50% damage reduction, 3 minute cooldown, 12 second duration.
• Shield Wall (talented) – 40% damage reduction, 2 minute cooldown, 12 second duration.
• Shield Wall (talented and glyphed) – 60% damage reduction, 4 minute cooldown, 12 second duration.

For those of you who attended or watched BlizzCon 2010 and claimed a Deathy pet, you may have noticed that he’s acting strange. In fact, he seems to think he’s Grunty the Murloc Marine. This is an unintended consequence of the groupthink from which all murlocs suffer. Deathy will be undergoing an extensive rehabilitation program and should be acting appropriately destructive once his idol, Deathwing, shatters the world in an upcoming patch that will debut prior to the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

Patch 4.0.3 on test realms
The test realms are currently loaded with 4.0.3 data. Most of the content that will be implemented with this patch will not be activated upon its release. That will come shortly after with patch 4.0.3a, which we are likely to deploy at some point during the 4.0.3 PTR phase.

There are a few changes, but the majority of the patch 4.0.3 content is "under the hood," so to speak. There will be a number of bug fixes going in, though some of them will not be active until 4.0.3a either due to the way production on these two patches is being handled. It's somewhat of a unique patching process for us in World of Warcraft's history, so we'll do our best to clarify what is changing and when. (Source)

Early level balance
Very few players raid below max level. All of the tanks will be fully capable of handling 5-player dungeons below max level. It's important that things don't feel too broken below max level, but balance is not exposed to anywhere near the same harsh spotlight it is at max level. You'll be fine below level 79. (Source)

Healing burst damage
I said that dragons don't breath for 100% of tank health. If they breathe for 60% of tank health and your tank dies, then you made a fatal error in your healing strategy. If the dragon breathes for 60% of tank health while simultaneously clawing the tank for 60% of tank health, then we made an unhealable encounter and deserve to be ridiculed for it.

You seem to be implying that you shouldn't ever have to worry about the tank dying, which is not our design intent. You should not have to worry about the tank dying in two melee hits before you can get a spell off, assuming you weren't asleep at the wheel for the period prior to those two hits. When the dragon breathes is usually telegraphed far in advance so that everyone can work together (including the tank) to make sure the tank is topped off and emergency spells are at the ready. (Source)

Survival Talents
Selfish players won't take survival talents. Pug players who don't interact with a regular group might not. But we think organized guilds will. This kind of situation happens already, and we think it will happen even more in Cataclysm:

The raid wipes. The leader, or the officer, or the tacticians or whoever start looking through combat logs and parses to see what they can do better. Ah, the Resto shaman kept running out of mana. They start to look at why. Well, this one rogue and one dps warrior took a ton of damage that ended up wasting healer mana. Maybe they stood in the fire. Maybe they were too focused on dps and not on situational awareness. Maybe they skipped over a couple of talents that could have minimized damage. We don't expect every guild to post damage *taken* logs and tell their guys to fix those problems. But some will. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Warrior changes clarification

• Warriors get 15% block chance for choosing Protection.
• Their mastery stat on gear increases their chance to block and their chance to critical block.
• Shield Block provides +25% block chance temporarily. If any of that chance is wasted (that is it would put you over 100%) the excess counts as critical block instead.
• The Vigilance talent no longer provides 3% damage reduction. It is otherwise unchanged.
• Finally, Shield Wall provides 50% damage reduction on a 2 min cooldown (talented). If you use the glyph, you can have 50% damage reduction on a 3 min cooldown instead.

That clearer? It only sounds complicated because we're trying to explain the difference between the 3.3.5 patch, the 3.9 patch, the current beta patch, and the beta patch after these changes. Those are all different states of the game, so it's often hard to keep track of what change is where. After the big dragon arrives, everything will be in sync. (Source)