Aspects are now off the GCD. It's true. There will still be a 1 sec cooldown to switch from one aspect to another. It should feel a lot more like warrior stances or death knight presences.

We're also going to be putting a little bit of dodge (~10%?) onto Monkey. I'll update when we decide on a final number.

Just for consistency, paladin auras will probably get the same treatment. These changes should go live before Nov 13. As always, thanks for all of the feedback, and please keep it up now that many of the changes are live.

EDIT: After further discussion, we're not crazy about the "stance dancing" that hunters need to do to switch to Monkey when someone is in on you in melee. As we've said a few times, Disengage and Deterrence should be your go-to abilities at that time. If anything, removing Aspects from the GCD makes it feel like you are supposed to go Monkey every time you're in melee.

Rather than revert the change, we are introducing a new spell!

Instead of getting new ranks of Hawk at level 75 and 80, you now get the new Aspect of the Dragonhawk. This powerful aspect combines all of the effects of Hawk and Monkey. Any talent or glyph that affects either Hawk or Monkey also affects Dragonhawk the same way. The idea is that you retire Hawk and Monkey at level 75 and go to essentially two Aspects: Dragonhawk for combat and Viper for mana regen.

Enjoy.

To be consistent with stances, presences and aspects, paladin auras are now off of the GCD with a 1 sec cooldown. I realize paladins don't switch auras as often as the other examples, but we also saw no reason to keep it the way it was.

The "aura twisting" aspect is actually something we're a little concerned about. We don't want paladins to feel like the right thing they're supposed to do is switch to fire right before an incoming Pyroblast in PvP, or perhaps worse, notice when the dragon is about to breath, shift into fire and then shift out. At that point, the change may do more harm than good.

The Wrath of the Lich King DVD contains the installer for patch version 3.0.1. This means installing the expansion will require you to patch back up to the latest version of the game after installation. Since you will have already downloaded all of the patches prior to Wrath of the Lich King's launch, you will not need to download them again, unless you delete them.

Which means, we highly encourage players avoid deleting any 3.0.x patches until after the installation of Wrath of the Lich King.Of course if you would like to hang on to these patch files just in case you need to reinstall the game at a later date, you're free to do so, as it would save you the time of having to re-download them.

BlizzCon is over, but we still have a few reminders of those that graced the halls. If you’ve lost an item at the event, we may just have found it. We've consolidated the lost and found items collected at BlizzCon and those that are looking for their items can email an inquiry on these to blizzconsupport@blizzard.com.

DoT Crits
Originally, we liked the fact that dots didn't crit. It's one of the things that made them different from other types of spells. In turn, it meant that classes and specs that focused on dots cared about different stats than other classes. We think it's interesting when say a ring drops, and the group has to speculate about who would get the most benefit out of it.

We are changing our minds about that design though, because it does make it hard to keep everyone scaling well with gear. A lot of raid buffs are based around adding things like crit and haste, which not everyone cares about to the same degree. (Source)

ETA for experience rewards in battlegrounds and queuing from anywhere
No answers available. These are features we would like to implement in the future. Queuing from anywhere would likely be the first to come, though I could not say when at this point. (Source)

Paid Character Transfer issues
The paid character transfer and name change services have been temporarily taken offline to relieve database stress. We hope to reactivate them in the next few hours. (Source)

Brewfest Achievement - Binary Brew
It will remain a part of the meta-achievement for Brewfest. As I said, some achievements take time to complete. This is one of them. (Source)

New Glyphs
Glyphs are the product of a trade skill so we want to slowly release more over time. (Source)

Level 80/70 Balancing
L80 is our first priority, but we'll respond to anything that we think needs attention at L70 over the next few weeks. No need to fill up the rest of this thread with what *you* think needs attention. (Source)

WotLK - Heroic Violet Hold Bug Fixes
The issue where Xevozz would hit the party for huge amounts of arcane damage has been resolved. We also added a behind the scenes spell that will give the tank of Ichoron some additional threat to keep the healer from pulling aggro quite so easily. (Source)

Druid (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Survival Instinct
Survival Instinct is off the GCD now. (Source)

Hunter (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
New Pets
Now that we have a better system for introducing pets, I have no doubt we'll add more per family and more families over time. (Source)

Exotic Pet Balancing
On the exotic pets issue, I have said before that we want to be very careful with the balance here. If the pets are immensely better, then the talent becomes a non-decision (which isn't so bad) but the exotic pets also becomes a non-decision, which means that the tree that is supposed to be all about pets has fewer options to choose from.

At a slight dps increase, the particular pet you choose is still up for debate. On a boss where you need to go all out and the pet's debuff isn't imporant and survivability isn't important, then yeah maybe you take the devilsaur or core hound. But when farming, running heroics, PvP or in other situations you still can bring which pet you want.

We did a big pass at pet dps and found that while some exotics were near the top, others were near the bottom. We made a big numbers pass to consolidate things a little better, and make sure the exotics were all near the top or at the top. Cats and other pets without a strong debuff should also do good dps as well. (Source)

Paladin (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Retribution Paladin Q&A
Since these threads seem to be proliferating, I figure'd I'd just start a new one. Here is a quick Q&A.

Q: Is Ret OP?
A: Perhaps. We think Ret's dps isn't abnormally high in PvE, and may not even be high in PvP over the course of a long fight. Where we are worried is how much damage Ret can do up front. It's also Holy damage, which isn't a big deal when you're considering a fully sundered mob, but can turn into a lot of damage in PvP.

Q: Are we going to nerf Ret?
A: TO THE GROUND BABY. Okay, not really, but sometimes I can't resist. We'll see how much that quote comes back to haunt me. We will probably be making some changes soon, perhaps even hotfixes. We want to be very surgical about what we do. We don't want to overdo it, and we don't want to hurt their sustained PvE damage. When we've decided, I'll make sure you all know.

Q: Why did it take us this long to admit there was a problem when EVERYONE knew about it?
A: A couple of weeks ago there were some bugs with weapon equipping that caused some problems that of course were being exploited. We didn't want to nerf Ret TO THE GROUND BABY only to discover that the weapon problem was causing 90% of it.

Q: Enough about Ret. Unholy death knights are worse!
A: That wasn't a question, but we think we have Unholy in a better place now. We made some changes to a few deep talents (that the DK community is already aware of, so don't fret) to get Unholy's dps more in line. Also, you aren't going to see any PvP DKs for a long time, so we need to focus on paladins for now. (Source)

Priest (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Divine Providence Changes
We are sympathetic to the notion that Divine Providence feels like a second Spritual Healing but with less effect. So we're making this change: Divine Providence now also reduces the cooldown of Prayer of Mending by 6/12/18/24/30%. With 5 points, it takes PoM from 10 to 7 sec cooldown. (Source)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Enhancement DPS
Right now, Enhancement dps is very high. If we changed say UR, we'd have to also nerf Enhancement dps to make up for the extra talent points you'd get to spend. It is something we want to take a look at, but there are also classes and specs right now whose dps is too low that need more attention. (Source)

Warlock (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Demon Form Metamorph action bar
We changed the bar largely because the feedback was that warlocks wanted to cast their own, normal spells in demon form. Once we went that route, we thought it might just be a hassle to have to make a new bar that got turned on only in demon form. Druid forms aren't on a cooldown or timer, so it's easy to set up those bars. We imagined the warlock waiting for the cooldown on Metamorphosis in order to have a chance to set up the bar again. (Source)

Warrior (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9061))
Titan's Grip 12% miss penalty
It should be fixed before Lich King itself goes live. That depends a little on what other issues crop up over the next few days that need more urgent attention. But the plan is to get all of those changes out soon. (Source)