It has been nearly a week since we launched the biggest content patch for World of Warcraft. Since releasing Echoes of Doom, players have completed over 300 million achievements (we double checked), respecced talents countless times, and the mohawk is now the most popular haircut in Azeroth (if not the most popular, then certainly the most striking). Players are revisiting old dungeons, forming raids on city leaders, and can be found roaming the far corners of almost every zone in World of Warcraft.

We are truly excited about the new patch, and we hope players share our enthusiasm. But with this success, we’ve also seen issues with realm performance that are negatively impacting players’ experiences. Specifically, the large number of new features in Echoes of Doom, combined with the many returning and new players who are playing World of Warcraft, is resulting in issues such as latency and difficulty entering instances, to name a few.

Since the patch was released, we have continued to make improvements to the game and optimize our systems to address the issues that players are seeing. We’ll be implementing further optimizations with this week’s scheduled maintenance, and we hope those changes will go a long way toward addressing many of the issues that players are experiencing. The focus for our team is to review and implement improvements on a daily basis, and this process will continue for the foreseeable future.

Our goal is to allow players to get back to enjoying the great content in Echoes of Doom, and we will provide another update after players have had a chance to participate in the realms following the weekly maintenance. We greatly appreciate your patience, and we’ll see you in Azeroth, Outland, and soon in Northrend.

Reminder - PvP reset for WotLK
Honor and marks = no
Arena points = yes (Source)

Season 3 for honor
There are no current plans to make season 3 gear available through the honor system.  (Source)

Hallow's End
G.N.E.R.D. and other candies duration
We're in the process of hotfixing the duration of these candies; they should soon last two weeks, not a day. If you've already completed your candy bucket runs for this year, you can trade candies among alts, as others have mentioned. (Source)

Forsaken Stink Bombs
We know about the issue and we're working to both alleviate the problem as much as we can this year, as well as talking about solutions for next year. Your distress is not unheard. (Source)

Squashling Pet
The drop rate of the items was raised. It's a good deal higher than what it was last year, and a good deal higher than what third-party sites report it to be. (Source)

Sinister Calling and Squashling pet low droprate
I understand completely that people want to get the achievement, the title, and the mount, and therefore the concept of an achievement that may be intended to be uncommon is not a popular one. I wish everyone the best of luck; while I realize I may have frustrated you today with my answers, but I simply wanted it known that everything brought forth as a concern regarding the Sinister Calling achievement was discussed and the achievement was judged reasonable. We'd read the feedback and we understand where you're coming from but the achievement is still right about where we want it to be in terms of being able to complete it.

That isn't to say we won't make tweaks to the availability of the items in question, but chance will still play a part if we do. We have no intent of making the items use a quest, token, or other guaranteed system to achieve. (Source)


Rogue (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
ETA on Shadow Dance fix
I think I said before that changing the bar won't happen soon. It will be after Nov 13 and Lich King ships. The change to the cooldown on the openers should be in now on beta and very soon on live. (Source)

Fan of Knives and single-target DPS
We'd love to get rogue AE higher if we can do it where Fan is only used for AE and not as a general part of the single-target rotation. Also note that comparing anyone to a Ret paladin recently, and especially at 70, isn't going to be a great comparison. Elemental isn't designed to have an advantage over mage single-target dps, but rogues should have an advantage over warrior single-target dps. (Source)

Combat Potency changes and Fan of Knives
So it turns out the Combat Potency change to nerf Shiv also keeps Fan of Knives from generating Energy. Making the cooldown zero might do weird things to PvP when a rogue stands there and throws out knives to attempt break stealth. But we can probably lower it to 10 sec or so. That's Thunderclap / Whirlwind range. (Source)

Hemorrhage
But the charges are the entire point. Hemo is supposed to be a debuff, not an alternative to Sinister Strike. It in fact yields better damage per energy than Sinister Strike untalented and it's only the talents that prop up the latter ability. Adding more Hemo talents just gives you another high dps, spammable attack.

It is true that the rogue personally may not benefit a lot from Hemo when the charges get used up correctly. I think the attitude that that is "bad" just stems from the "winning the damage meters" mentality, not whether the ability helps you beat the boss. I'm not saying that looking at damage meters makes you shallow. I understand a nearsighted raid leader may not take you if your personal dps is low, but we're also not sure what to do about that until we can come up with some kind of "raid contribution" measurement that includes your buffs and debuffs. (Source)

Developers Q&A (Source)
Like what you plan to do with sub?
We recently made some changes to boost it, such as moving Dual-Wield Spec to tier 1 combat.

Why is hemo so bad?
It has a great debuff that boosts raid damage. It’s not intended to be Sinister Strike.

Why is Shadow Dance dagger only?
We agree with the above comment that it can do a lot of different things. You may just be focusing too much on it as a +dps cooldown.

Whether you feel rogue mobility is fine?
Rogues have a lot going for them in the way of stuns, damage avoidance and “get out of jail” cards. When you get up on other classes, they do have a tendency to die. We’re not sure we want rogues to also be zipping around the battlefield like warriors.

What is happening with Lightning Reflexes?
We mentioned this as a possible change (or perhaps we even promised it -- I don't recall) but it didn't materialize because we found other knobs to turn in combat that felt better during playtesting. Because LR is a passive talent, the side benefits would also end up being passive.

What is the deal with the Glyph of Sprint?
If I understand the qustion, I think it's just a tooltip bug. The glyph was made before the base cooldown of Sprint was lowered from 5 minutes to 3 minutes (2 min talented). If that's not the issue, can you elaborate a little more?

Why is there a major glyph of feint?
Basically, rogues have relatively few abilities, and we were desperate for something that wouldn’t have serious PvP balance ramifications. I agree this might be a good candidate for a minor glyph. Remember that we are going to be adding a lot more glyphs over time. You shouldn't view this as one of your very few useful glyphs is less useful, because you'll eventually have a lot of choices.

Why is Fan of Knives so weak with daggers, and even weak with swords?
It's designed to give you a button to hit when you want to AE. It's not supposed to turn you into an AE class, if that makes sense.

Are you happy with Hunger For Blood being horrible for PvP, and like the old Rampage for PvE?
No, not completely. We understand that CC + a short duration limit how often you can benefit from it. Obviously, we think removing MS and Hamstring was a little too good, just because those are generally hard debuffs to get out of.

How exactly are expose, mind numbing and wound major raid utility, when they so obviously are not?
Couple of things here, and forgive me for being a little brief.

First, I am reading between the lines a little here that it would be really nice to have a unique buff or debuff. Everyone asks for that, but it defeats the whole point.

Second, Expose is one of the strongest debuffs in the game. The dps increase can be 30% or more. So I suspect what you're really getting at is that "we'll always have a warrior with us doing that debuff." The whole point of the revamp is we can’t assume you have anyone but we still want you to be able to get the buff. Mind Numbing is a cast speed debuff that is only offered by one other class (that doesn’t even exist in the game at the moment). Granted, it doesn't offer the benefit of Expose. Wounding Poison offers the strongest debuff in the game for PvP, and also offers some dps to not over-penalize rogues who are balanced around poison damage.

Third, ultimately we still want raids to want rogues because they bring good dps. We just don't want it to feel that only the rogues (hunters, mages and locks) are doing the group's dps.

Will there be a mutilate/HFB/cold blood/Assassination oriented glyph made before release?
Probably. We do want to add more glyphs over time, just like new gems started to show up in BC.

Overkill - why is it the pre-req to mutilate?
It's always a hard call to decide what prereqs to what. We do like talent prereqs, and it seems like a good talent regardless. Are you wanting to skip it?

2. It has been stated that there is a plan to still have some poison immune mob/bosses in WotLK, what can a mutilate rogue do during these situations. Mages were helped with frostfire to combat the fire immune/frost immune mobs, but the poison requirement on mutilate still exist and when dealing with poison immune mobs, we're(for the lack of a better term) seriously screwed in our dps. I still don't understand why our signature move(for assassination) still has this requirement when it still cost 60 energy.
Poisons are what the rogues are balanced around, so we need to be pretty careful about that now. I can't promise there won't be any poison immune bosses -- resistance and immunity are things we can change on a boss to make the fight play out pretty differently from the previous boss. But there won't be a lot of them.