In our next major content patch, druids will find a host of new textures for two major forms, cat and bear. There will be five different designs for each of these forms for the Horde and Alliance. Night elves can choose to change their cat and bear look at any time by visiting the barber shop and changing their character's hair color, while tauren will be able to change which look they use by switching skin tones in the barber shop -- a new feature for tauren in the next major content patch. Given that there are more hair colors and skin tones than unique form looks, some colors and tones will overlap with these new textures. The hair and skin colors chosen will, in most cases, correspond with the color seen in the look of each form. Some similar colors that may share a particular cat texture will not necessarily share the same bear texture.

We'd like to share with you this new art for each form and faction in four installments. So without further ado, our first preview is for the five new textures of the tauren druid bear form. We'll also show the current form design so you can easily see the extra detail and textures of the new art. Work continues on new looks for the remaining druid forms and we hope to add them in future content patches.

The Battle.net Account features are now completely live in Europe! Starting today, World of Warcraft players in Europe can merge their World of Warcraft accounts into their Battle.net Account, enabling them to log into the forums, the Armory, and the game with their Battle.net account! The Battle.net Account also allows quick and easy access to all World of Warcraft accounts merged with it as well as providing access to StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo accounts associated with it.

Additionally, by merging their World of Warcraft Account into their Battle.net account, European World of Warcraft players may now participate in the Beta Opt-in, giving them the chance to join in the StarCraft II Beta test if their account is selected!

Head over to Battle.net and create your account or merge in your World of Warcraft account:
http://eu.battle.net/

After successful testing on the PTR, we are pleased to announce that the first Cross-Language Battlegroups have been created today. This new feature combines Battlegroups from different languages into one, expanding the pool of players keen for PvP action in both Arenas and Battlegrounds.

Players from realms of different languages will only ever face each other as opponents in battle and will not be playing on the same faction in Battlegrounds, ensuring that those playing on your side will speak the same language as you. Please note that not all Battlegroups will be joined into Cross-Language Battlegroups, and this feature will not be affecting the Russian language Battlegroups. We will provide more details on other new Cross-Language Battlegroups closer to the time they will go live.

Wondering what Cross-Language Battlegroups are? Check out the FAQ here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9446244539

For discussion and feedback, please visit the following thread in the PvP forum -- thanks! http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9446264862

New Cross-Language Battlegroups

Nightfall, Crueldad
Realms from English Battlegroup Nightfall and Spanish Battlegroup Crueldad will be united as Cruelty/Crueldad. Please discuss this new Cross-Language Battlegroup here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9446264859

Némésis, Hinterhalt
Realms from French Battlegroup Némésis and German Battlegroup Hinterhalt will be united as Embuscade/Hinterhalt.

Q: How is a Cross-Language Battlegroup different from a Cross-Realm Battlegroup?
A: Cross-Language Battlegroups expand the Battlegroups feature allowing you to face players from realms of other languages. Until now, you would only face players from other English realms.

Q: How will the Cross-Language Battlegroups affect the current Arena ladders?
A: The Battlegroups being merged will have their ladders merged as well. Each team will enter the merged ladder with their current ratings.

Q: Does this mean I am going to find players from different language realms on my side?
A: No, each faction will be comprised of players from realms of the same language as yours. You might participate in a Battleground where the Alliance is formed by players from English realms and the Horde is formed by players from realms of another language, or the other way around. You will not find players from different language realms on the same side in the Battlegrounds.

Q: How does this improve over the current system?
A: The addition of more realms to the same Battlegroup means a bigger amount of players are ready to participate, ensuring swifter entry into glorious battle.

Achievements
25 Tabards Achievement - Argent Tournament tabards don't count!
We are aware of this issue and looking to fix it in a future patch. (Source)

Player vs. Player
Burst damage in PvP
All damage specs need burst to some extent. You need to be able to increase your damage for short periods of time to say burn someone down before their healer can get to them. In the absence of burst, the only real way to finish a match is to keep the healer completely CC'd or drained. Heals are pretty big even in Arenas (arguably too big), so if you can't kill a healer who is low, you can expect them to be back at full health shortly.

Bad burst (which is the way the term normally gets used) is what happens when burst becomes your whole strategy. "Who cares about crowd control or countering anything? Let's just pick a guy and focus on him until he's dead, which will probably take around 4 GCDs, and then we'll probably have won the match." We don't think that's a fun way to play. There is no decision making beyond the initial "Let's kill him." The victim has almost nothing they can do to get out of it. Someone dies and the match is over in 20 seconds.

Now it's a very imprecise term and it's clear from reading these forums for awhile that some players will define "too much burst" as....

1) Two players ganged up on me and I couldn't handle them alone.
2) I was crowd controlled and died while crowd controlled.
3) I went one-on-one against someone, and they did more damage to me without crowd control and I died.
4) While our healer was occupied, they managed to kill me. I should be able to survive a lot longer without healing.
5) I couldn't heal myself while multiple opponents interrupted my heals.
6) At some point, the match became very fast-paced. A 1 sec GCD melee was beating on me and using stuff and before I could really react, I was dead.

Incidentally, we think that last point happens a lot. When a mage has you in Frost Nova and starts casting, you can pretty much figure out what is about to happen. When a rogue or warrior or DK or paladin are up close and unloading on you, you don't necessarily realize what cooldowns and trinkets are being popped unless you can scrutinize the combat log... which of course you can't. Good players just learn from playing many matches what other classes are likely to do during that window. Less articulate players aren't entirely sure what happened and just write it off as "burst was so high that I died before I could react."

I'm not judging those players are saying it's all fine -- merely pointing out an observation we had today. (Source)

Rewarding Gladiator title based on class-specific rankings
Our main concern is how it would feel. Would you be annoyed at a class who got a Gladiator title just because they played the under-represented class? It is essentially grading on a curve, and that sometimes feels bad both for people at the top (the deck's stacked against me) and bottom (I didn't really earn my points) of the curve.

There is nothing fundamentally flawed with the idea though, and as our recent change to how rating is calculated should suggest, we aren't above iteration on the design. (Source)

Itemization
Tanking Stats
Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

[...] I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes. (Source)

Classes
Healing tanks in PvE
Yes, this is why I said not to assume everything else stays the same. We are in a world where almost any healer can heal a tank to full health in just a few GCDs. When healers can heal half your health pool, then bosses have to hit very hard. The test of survival for a tank is whether they can survive two hits or so without a heal landing. Health pools probably just need to be higher. Currently being the mana sponge tank isn't very scary because healers don't realistically run out of mana on most fights and the only real threat is whether you can get the tank back up to 100% before the next hit lands. Mitigating damage isn't seen as something that preserves healer mana. It is seen as something that might let you live through one more hit.

In a world where taking a little less on some hits and a little more on others doesn't translate into scary spike damage, then we think the block mechanic described above world work in some form, especially if you could force a block for those times when you did get a string of unblocked hits. (Source)

Death Knight (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Frost Presence nerf in Patch 3.1.3
We buffed Frost Presence when we nerfed some DK cooldowns a patch or two ago. However, we were a little generous at that time and we have ended up in a spot where in current available gear, DKs had slightly better armor, avoidance and health than warriors and paladins, and cooldowns that were much better.

We were starting to see many guilds ask their warrior or paladin to step aside so the DK could tank the hard mode encounters. This was not an isolated incident for a few guilds -- this was the kind of widespread phenomenon that really makes us take notice. If it was a boss or two that the DK was the best at, we would have just kept an eye on it. Increasingly though it was every hard mode. I will be the first to admit that the community is wrong sometimes. We don't think that is the case this time. The numbers backed up their conclusions pretty well.

No doubt many of you will attribute this to QQ from other players, and I'm not sure much I can say will change your mind. When players don't think a nerf is justified, that is nearly always their conclusion (the other is that we're out of touch).

This was primarily a PvE tanking nerf, but given the number of DKs who were starting to sit for long periods of PvP in Frost Presence, we don't mind at all that Frost Presence will be less attractive in PvP too.

We think there is a risk that druids will take the place of DKs now. We think that risk is small because while druid armor and health are high, their cooldowns are nowhere near the DK level. So we'll just keep an eye on it for now.

If we can get block to be a powerful mitigation stat again we realize that will change the landscape and we'll have to evaluate the staying power of all 4 classes again. For now, we hope this change will put the tanks in a much closer place. (Though if you are keeping note, we would still like to give paladins another reliable cooldown.) (Source)

Nerfing Death Knight Cooldowns?
When we were doing tests with Ulduar-geared tanks, the DK took less damage than the warrior even if neither tank used any cooldowns. The DK health, armor and avoidance were all higher. Given that the DK cooldowns are superior, this seemed like a problem.

Blocking contributed something paltry like 2-3% less damage taken by the warrior. To be fair, this is skewed by many Ulduar warriors avoiding blocking stats, and the outcome would be different on a very-fast swinging boss -- Algalon perhaps, though DKs seem really good on him too. (We have another thread on block going, so I would ask that you confine block discussions that don't directly affect death knights to that thread.)

We are not nerfing DK cooldowns at this time, though we might in the future, largely depending on the outcome of this change. A common suggestion is to change Icebound Fortitude to 2 minutes but restore the tanking talents (i.e. Bone Shield, Unbreakable Armor, Vampiric Blood) to a 1 minute cooldown, altering the numbers if needed. This is little more than me hand-waving at this point however. (Source)

Specialized Tanking
Even if you could somehow make certain that paladins were the best at some kind of bosses (so that they didn't just become the trash tank), you are then tied to make sure every raid has a few of those types of bosses. Ulduar becomes 3 warriors bosses, 3 paladin bosses, 4 druid bosses, 4 DK bosses. If one of those bosses is perceived as more difficult, more necessary or rewarding of better loot, then the sense of inequity still exists.

Furthermore, we don't want every guild to have to keep 4 good tanks on their permanent roster and just slide them in for the right fight. While dual-spec makes that slightly easier than before, we still don't think it's fair to demand every guild keep someone on hand who can spec and gear as a Feral druid or Prot paladin.

We're fine with certain tanks having a slight advantage on some fights, because we recognize that's probably inevitable as long as the abilities are different. This is going to always be trickier for the hard modes, but again the goal is that you can have any class of tank as your main tanks. (Source)

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
New Druid Forms Graphics
They are new models and new textures. You can tell by things like how much less blocky the bear's shoulders and rump are. There are more polys now. The difference in detail is pretty amazing and hard to really appreciate from a simple screenshot. The animations are the same as they've always been.

Honestly with things like this we have to be a little careful. While not many people will champion the fidelity of the old forms (because they look old!) players can get very attached to them. We were concerned that if we changed them too much (remove the horns for example), long-term druids might really feel disenfranchised. The artists did a great job of capturing the feel of the old forms while still updating them.

If you have more hair color choices than pelt colors available on the animal then more than one hair option will map to the same animal. Having the art itself upgrade as you improve your gear is still something we'd love to do, but is obviously a much bigger undertaking. We'll see.

And wait until you see the new Tauren cat! That was the one most in need of an overhaul, IMO. (Source)

Model update of other forms
The other forms do remain a work in progress. We decided it best to release bear and cat as soon as they were ready. We started them first because they are the oldest of the form models, and were in desperate need of a revamp and some additional textures to bring them more in line with the higher resolutions we've been using in the expansions. The Art team remains very busy on several different tasks for World of Warcraft, but now that new art for cat and bear are imminent, we'd like to keep pushing out new forms sooner rather than later. (Source)

Paladin (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Protadins playing as healers
It's slightly silly because I agree those "Protadins" are playing as healers. At the same time, we're not sure it's hurting anything and it hasn't yet become the only way to play a healing paladin. So for now, we're willing to call it a creative use of game mechanics and not a problem we need to stomp out.

We'll see where it ends up in a few weeks though. Our answer may be different. (Source)

Hand of Freedom nerf in Patch 3.1.3
Holy and Ret paladins have in some form been on top of the current and previous Arena season. Furthermore, we think part of the reason some players, especially casters, feel like they are dying so quickly in PvP is because they can't use their crowd control abilities without them getting quickly removed. Freedom was a big part of that. It's supposed to be "Get out of jail free" card, not "you can't ever cc me" card. If that makes sense.

It is still a very potent ability, especially talented, which almost all PvP paladins do. To be honest, we're concerned the duration is still too long. (Source)

Warlock (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Chaos Bolt doesn't ignore resilience
There was a rumor, apparently long-standing because I believed it, that things that ignored damage reduction effects also ignored resilience.

When the designers made the change to Chaos Bolt for 3.1.3, they verified that this was NOT the case. Chaos Bolt currently does less damage to targets with resilience on live. They went ahead and made the change to make Chaos Bolt not ignore damage reduction effects (like Barkskin and Spell Warding), since it was never intended to do so anyway and we hoped this would help balance it against the damage increase it received in 3.1.2. I was just misinformed about the final implementation. The post I made last night was in error, and I apologize for any confusion. Sadly, many developers will now have to die as a result of this mistake.

Our intent is that the 3.1.3 change will remain as documented and we don't think Chaos Bolt needs any additional nerfs. (Source)

Chaos Bolt and resistance piercing
Cheat Death is an absorption. So Chaos Bolt can still pierce it. Cloak of Shadows is a resist. So Chaos Bolt can still pierce it.

There are four basic categories of spell resistance here:

• Immunities -- things like Divine Shield. Chaos Bolt will not affect these.
• Damage reductions -- things like Barkskin. Chaos Bolt affects these currently, but not in 3.1.3.
• Absorptions -- things like Power Word: Shield. Chaos Bolt will continue to affect these.
• Resistances -- things like Cloak of Shadows. Chaos Bolt will continue to affect these.

I know it's all a little confusing, but PvP is a system of checks and balances so we often end up in situations where X works against Y but is trumped by Z. (Source)

Chaos Bolt nerf in 3.1.3
I know a lot of warlocks (and maybe some other classes) were expecting a nerf when they saw what the new Fire and Brimstone talent can do. We didn't want to nerf the damage straight up, since that was the whole point of the talent change. We thought actually fixing the undocumented bonus, which felt more like a bug than anything (in the sense that the tooltip never even claimed it bypassed damage reduction) would keep the spell balanced in its current form. You can call that a nerf if you want to, but really it was the change that convinced us we didn't need to nerf CB's raw damage. (Source)

Warrior (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Rage generation lower than intended?
We are taking a look at this as we didn't make any intended changes recently to rage generation. (Source)

Juggernaut nerfed in Patch 3.1.3
The problem was that Arms warriors with Juggernaut still had Intercept. We think it's fine to use those back to back once, which is basically what this change will do. The problem we were having is a warrior could keep bouncing back and forth between a couple of targets, keeping them both stunned which incidentally also interrupted casting. The casters were just never getting a chance to get spells off. Their only recourse felt like crowd control, but of course caster CC is typically magic based and could be dispelled, while warrior stuns and snares are much harder to get out of.

Getting up on a caster quickly is awesome, which is why we created the talent. Using Charge in combat is cool and useful. Using Charge in combat constantly is pretty brutal to casters. We thought about just increasing the cooldown of Charge itself so that the talent didn't feel like it had a drawback (because we have certainly heard from warriors unhappy with the Titan's Grip penalty). However we felt that was an unfair nerf to the leveling warrior or the tank who use Charge regularly just to solve a PvP balance problem.

We knew that removing the in-combat charge from Juggernaut would totally kill the talent and the idea, which is why we didn't do it. That is what I meant by nerfing it into the ground, though apparently some players interpreted that as meaning barely getting nerfed at all.

We knew it would be a controversial change, which is why we wanted to go ahead and get it posted ahead of time. This patch is small so it won't go up on the PTR, yet we didn't want it to feel like a stealth nerf if it just went in one morning unannounced. (Source)