World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Wintergrasp Balancing
We plan to add an additional balancing mechanism to the Wintergrasp queue system some time after patch 3.3.5. The queue will attempt to match factions at a 1:1 ratio for each battle, down to a minimum of 20 players. If there are less than 20 players on one side, the queue will still try to pull 20 players from the other side. This is to discourage the low population faction from boycotting Wintergrasp and preventing the other faction from being able to participate (i.e. force a game that's 5 vs. 5, or 0 vs. 0).

So in your case, if this system were in place the match would be 20 vs. 10 instead of 40 vs. 10. Tenacity would play less of a role, but players on your faction would have a harder time getting into a battle. This system will also be used for Tol Barad in Cataclysm. The idea is to favor realms with balanced populations rather than favor realms where your faction is dominant. (Source)

Talents vs. Talent Builds
It's probably fair to say that we have focused more on individual talents than builds at this point. We had to remove a lot of talents and slide things around because of the levels at which skills are available has changed, in some cases dramatically. As players start to explore actual builds, we can start adjusting positions of talents on the tree further. (Source)

Mastery Passive Benefit Bonus Cap
The passive benefits cap at 51 points. You can improve your third passive bonus by acquiring mastery rating on gear. (Source)

Utility Talents
The problem with both Lightwell and Riposte in LK has to do with the pace of combat. A small self-heal isn't useful in an environment where the healers either keep you up easily or you die to spike damage regardless of the decisions you make. An attack speed debuff isn't super useful in a PvP environment where players die so quickly. But with the larger health pools in Cataclysm, both of those talents become more useful. Saving priest mana and GCDs by using Lightwell could help turn a failure into a victory. Slowing down incoming damage can help a rogue go toe-to-toe with another melee class.

Counterattack is probably going away. We haven't released new hunter trees yet. Shiv is changing a little bit to be more of an enrage dispel. (Source)

Cataclysm Talent Previews
1) These talent trees aren't done. They're just far enough along that we're seeking feedback.

2) Just to reiterate, we *are* looking for feedback on them. They are considered public information now and you are free to discuss them. While the rest of the alpha is still under NDA, we want feedback on the talent trees so that we have plenty of time to iterate on them. Just keep things in perspective. Nobody at this stage can predict with any accuracy that their dude is DOOMED in PvP or PvE based on these early designs.

3) "Passive talents" is somewhat subjective. We are going to prune out what we can. Some players interpreted that to mean that every talent was going to be something game-changing like Chakra or Grace, but we think a talent tree of nothing but those would be quite overwhelming (not to mention making those cool talents feel less special). We still have talents like Improved Eviscerate, which are passive but more interesting than flat +damage talents . We still have talents like Malice because, frankly, everything else that can be modified in a low-level rogue already has a talent.

We still think the Cataclysm talent trees will be a big improvement over the Lich King talent trees, and your feedback can help us get them there (not that it all has to be confined to this one thread of course).

The only thing we ask is that you not let Cataclysm discussion completely take over the forums. There are millions of players playing the current live game and many of them will still want to discuss the current game instead of only looking to the future.

4) Cataclysm will fix it. (Source)

Threat Talents1) We are getting rid of all "you do less threat" talents. They're just boring.

2) If needed, we will bake that threat into Defensive Stance et al. as we did with Defiance and Salv.

3) We're not convinced we'll need to do that though. Tanks generally maintain sufficient single-target threat on any fight that has lasted more than a few seconds and Vengeance will only help with that.

4) Furthermore, we don't want threat to just not matter. Part of the fun of playing a tank is trying to generate as much threat as possible as quickly as possible. I don't think many tanks like the idea of just standing there, hitting a few defensive cooldowns, and being able to AFK to victory. However, we don't want things to be so extreme that the dps characters constantly feel throttled or the healers are afraid to heal.

5) Two of the primary offenders are Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection. We like when those abilities are used to pick up adds or otherwise direct targets to the tank. That utility makes the rogue and hunter feel useful. What we don't like is the constant threat transfer which adds a lot of slush room to tank threat generation that isn't under the tank's control.

[...] We want them to be used on initial pulls or when adds join the party. We like rogues being able to Tricks each other. It could be as simple as only transferring threat but doing nothing if the tank already has threat. Or it could be temporary threat so that it acts more for getting the fight started than something that helps a tank make up for generating really bad threat (either because we screwed up or the guy trying to tank is). We're trying out different things to see what feels right. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Perseverance
We think talents like this are good, even in PvE. First, they aren't strictly mandatory. If you think you can get by with taking a little more damage, go for it. Second, you don't have to spend all 5 points for them to be useful. They are good sinks if you need to spend just an extra point or two somewhere. Third, taking less damage probably will be a bigger deal in Cataclysm. If healer mana becomes a factor in some wipes, as we expect, then it wouldn't surprise as all to see raid leaders start linking damage *taken* meters as ways to get everyone to contribute to keeping the group alive. The attitude that nobody takes damage besides the tank or that damage to anyone besides the tank is trivial is outdated even for current content, let alone Cataclysm. (Source)

Restoration Talents
I'm seeing a lot of Resto druids say something like "I won't take talents that buff Nourish and Healing Touch because I won't use those spells." You will probably use those spells more in Cataclysm. That doesn't mean you won't also be using Rejuv, Regrowth and Lifebloom.

Critical heals aren't useful now because they often just result in overhealing. In a game in which your heals aren't always topping someone off, then a critical heal represents a lot of "free" healing which saves you both GCDs and mana. It's in players' nature to want to minimize the impact of random elements, but you should be careful not to marginalize anything that gives you extra healing just because it isn't 100% predictable. (Source)

Starfall
The forums were pretty dense with "moonkins lack on-demand burst damage for PvP" threads just a few months ago.

We think the ability is fine. It does a lot of damage if not countered but has many counters. That's the kind of gameplay we'd rather see more of as compared to just getting tunnel-vision on one target and focusing solely on maximizing your damage on them.

If you can analyze a match afterwards and come up with something you could have done differently (in this case, how you could have countered or avoided the Starfall), then it was probably a reasonably good match because your decision-making, and therefore skill, played a big role. Anyone can push buttons. Pushing buttons at the right time makes all the difference. (Source)

Shred
Shred is indeed 50 base.

The idea is not that you can take every talent point you desire. If anything, the decisions are going to be harder. "Bloat" is what players sometimes say when there are still talents remaining that they want to pick up. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Discipline Tree Design
The basic idea is you can choose to add some damage to your healing if you are soloing, in PvP, or even raiding encounters which aren't particularly demanding for you to heal. For those situations where you really need to heal, you'll do better with a talent build that focuses on healing.

It's something we're likely to try with all the healing specs, or else decide it's a bad idea. (Source)

Shadow Tree
Shadow priests should not be able to pick up every point in Shadow without giving up anything else attractive. That's not how we want talent trees to work. It just looks like that for the time being so that we can get the priest playable.

[...] Right. If there are a lot of choices and you can't possibly get everything, then it's a good talent tree. We'd define bloat as say a tree in which the mid-tiers offer nothing interesting or effective such that you just have to pick up some almost at random to get down to talents you actually want. Really though "bloat" just gets so overused on the boards that you'd be a lot more effective in giving feedback describing specific talent choices that you feel aren't fair rather than the somewhat generic "make this 5 pointer 3 points so I can get more stuff" posts that I'm reading a lot of tonight.

As far as Shadow, I would anticipate a few more talent points in Shadow itself or else some more attractive talents in mid-Disc (it wouldn't take much to make Archangel work for instance), or both. (Source)

Shadow Priest Gear
That was the initial intent, but some Shadow priests thought that felt unfair that they had to have two separate gear sets to swap from damage to healing compared to the druid and shaman, and we thought they had a point. As such it will be slightly easier to gear up as a Shadow priest since they have more gear options. Call it a perk, but probably not as powerful a one as Holy paladins having their very own gear. (Source)


Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Hemorrhage
It's probably safe to increase the Hemo debuff. We modeled it after the old Mangle and then buffed the Mangle duration.

Rogues might use Hemo slightly more than Ferals use Mangle, but really they are pretty similar: use one for the debuff (or often in PvP) and then Backstab / Shred when position allows it (rarely in PvP). (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Enhancement in Cataclysm
Enhancing Totems will be changing to provide an additional shaman-only buff when the buff totems are down. Technically that implementation is tricky so we just haven't finished it yet. In general you are correct that there should not be "buff my buff" talents. There are a few exceptions where a buff is elevated from a minor bonus to a more serious bonus (Elemental's spell power for instance).

Mental Quickness is something Enhancement and Retribution need in order to be a mana-using spec without mana on gear. In general you won't see stat conversion talents, though warriors and DKs might keep their armor conversions. We'll see.

We may need additional mana restore mechanics than we have now for Enhancement, but that will take some more testing.

We're not sure what we'll do with Ancestral Swiftness. We made that talent before you could wolf indoors, so it may be less attractive now.

The Searing Totem mechanic is obviously something new and will take some iteration.

Someone mentioned Imp Windfury Totem. I think you're looking at an old talent tree.

Enhance is intended as a dual-wield tree. We aren't going to support a competitive 2H spec. We aren't going to prohibit it, but it won't be competitive.

There are going to be some hard choices in all the trees. It's not our design intent that you scoop up every single talent in your tree. (Source)

2H Shaman
Letting the Frost DK go 2H as an option is pretty easy. All of the mechanics already work. It just needs a talent to offset a couple of DW talents. For shaman, it's a lot harder. There is no equivalent for Lava Lash or Stormstrike. DK combat isn't heavily tied into weapon swing speeds, but shaman most definitely are. Sure we could solve all of those problems, but that takes a lot of development time, and if you consider all of the challenges we've faced over the years related to shaman weapon speed and enchant choices, it could be a considerable amount of development time. We'd spend that time if we thought it was really important, but we think the class functions just fine with two weapons and we'd rather spend our effort on other shaman issues. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Cataclysm Q&A (Source)
1) On next swing attacks - Who was it that determined that warriors were not fond of this mechanic ... personally I loved said mechanics as they added a fuid way to convert rage into damage without having to expend an ever so precious GCD that warriors just do not have the luxury of waisting (namely arms).
We weren't fond of the mechanic. It wasn't up to a vote. But we also know a lot of warriors didn't like it either. It takes the most visceral moments of combat -- hitting a button and seeing damage -- and turns it into an autoattack, probably the least exciting moment of combat. (Source)

2) AoE and splash damage - Why is it that whirlwind is being treated like an AoE attack that should only be used on large pulls yet unlike all other AoE abilities in the game is bound to a cooldown ? Also how will the change to whirlwind impact the functionality of Bladestorm ?
You'll do fine on AoE, which will be more rare in Catalcysm regardless. The change to Whirlwind will not affect Bladestorm.

With cleave becoming an instant attack with rage mechanincs similar to execute and whirlwind no longer being in our single dps rotation we just lost an area of dps that we used to excel in... and that was doing well at dpsing smaller groups of pulls
That's not really a great niche though. Nobody says "we need more warriors to handle these smaller group pulls." You'll do fine on AoE fights.

4) Mortal Strike - Once the coveted and iconic warrior ability now handed out like candy to toddlers crying to their parents. It was eluded that strikes would be hitting much harder as a result of loosing on next swing attacks which seems reasonable but why is that with the changes to healing and health pools that classes like shadow priests and frost mages will have an equally powerfull ability when it was intially given to these classes in a WEAKER form as a bandaid fix to help their PVP represnentaion ?

How does it make sense to make all MS debuffs physical damage? Can warriors expect to see some glory returned to our spec defining ability ?
I agree with this. The problem of course is that if only you get the debuff or if only you get the best debuff then warriors are mandatory for anything PvP which might be fine for you but doesn't really feel fair to everyone else. Sometimes I wish we'd just remove the debuff because it's almost impossible to balance around both having and not having it. We can make sure Mortal Strike hits hard but we're unlikely to do anything that improves the debuff.

Will some of the core problems plaguing the class finally be addressed? -Clunky weapon swap macros subjected to weapon resets...
Keep in mind that swapping to a shield is supposed to be a decision. If we wanted it to be effortless we would not make those abilities require a shield. We don't want solving the puzzle to be coming up with a clever macro.

-Latency issues with ppl exploiting charge and intercept , landing 10 feet away from ppl.....
This is just the reality of a client - server based game. Sometimes the client and server don't agree about where you are. We'll keep trying to come up with technical solutions, but you shouldn't interpret it as our being lazy or certainly not because we're out to get warriors.

*-By making sure warriors will no longer scale so much with gear as they have been since the conception of the game what is being done to make sure they stay competitive throughout the expansion from the begining to the end ???*
Scaling awesomely with gear as compensation for doing bad damage when undergeared is not good game design. Warrior damage with great gear is much too high right now, as it is at the end of every expansion. This isn't surprising to anyone really. The current rage model just doesn't work and we need something more consistent. Consistency is the way to make sure you stay competitive from beginning to end (rather than averaging out at competitive because you're too low at the beginning and too high at the end).