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    Elegon Video, Gem Price Changes, Beta Class Balance, Blue Posts, Pearl of Pandaria

    Patch 1.0.3b Soon, Diablo III Gem Crafting Calculator, Gear Evaluation Calculator and More, Blizzard Timeline Revealed, Treasure Goblin Video

    Mogu'shan Vaults: Elegon
    Elegon finally explains what the Celestial Human and Dragon models were intended for, and is the fifth boss of Mogu'shan Vaults.


    Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
    Mogu'shan Vaults
    The mogu, proud of their supremacy, kept lengthy records of their accomplishments within a great complex of vaults. Guarded by ferocious magical beings, these sacred chambers have remained silent since the mogu's departure.

    Elegon
    • Energy Vortex - An active Energy Vortex transforms any player or creature who stands in it, granting a small taste of the Titan's true power. In Heroic Difficulty, the Energy Vortex prevents targeting into or out of the Energy Vortex.
      • Touch of the Titans - Contact with the Energy Vortex transforms the target into celestial form, increasing all damage done by 50% and healing done by 50%.
      • Overcharged - The Energy Vortex periodically inflicts players with Overcharge, causing them to take 5% additional damage. This effect stacks.
    • Stage One: Entering Defensive Mode - Elegon activates the Energy Vortex, attacking with Celestial Breath and calling for Celestial Protectors to help defend the Engine of Nalak'sha. Stage One ends at 90% and 50% remaining health.
      • Celestial Breath - Elegon's breath inflicts 45,000 Arcane damage to players within a 100 yard long 60 degree cone.
      • Materialize Protector - When Elegon has more than 50% remaining health, he summons a Celestial Protector to attack the players.
        • Celestial Protector - A construct of pure energy, the Celestial Protector serves as primary defense for the Engine of Nalak'sha.
          • Phasing - The Celestial Protector exists in a state of flux, held together by the immense power of the Energy Vortex. When the Protector has over 25% remaining health and exists outside the bounds of the Energy Vortex, players inflict 90% less damage to it.
          • Arcing Energy - The Celestial Protector inflicts 80,000 Arcane damage to two random players and applies Closed Circuit to each target.
            • Closed Circuit - After being hit by the Arcing Energy, the Closed Circuit reduces the healing received by the target by 50% for 20 sec.
          • Stability Flux - Upon reaching 25% remaining health, the Celestial Protector begins to pulse energy and periodically inflicts 50,000 Arcane damage on all players.
          • Total Annihilation - Celestial Protectors explode when near death, inflicting 600,000 Arcane damage to all players. In Heroic Difficulty, Total Annihilation will trigger Catostrophic Anomaly if it hits no targets.
            • Catostrophic Anomaly - With no targets to absorb the excess energy of Total Annihilation, the Engine of Nalak'sha explodes, inflicting 800,000 Arcane damage to the entire raid.
      • Grasping Energy Tendrils - With no targets in melee range, Elegon grabs and pulls all enemies to him, inflicting 50,000 Arcane damage.
      • Radiating Energies - When Elegon reaches 50% remaining health, he becomes dangerously unstable. Elegon periodically inflicts 82,500 Arcane damage to all players not protected inside the Energy Vortex.
    • Stage Two: Primary Power Offline - Elegon attempts to reactivate the Engine of Nalak'sha by creating Energy Charges to energize the Empyreal Focuses. If players destroy all Energy Charges in a wave, Elegon will continue to create more Energy Charges. The creation process permanently weakens his physical form. Stage Two ends once an Energy Charge leaves the Energy Vortex.
      • Draw Power - Elegon attempts to restart the Engine of Nalak'sha by constructing six Energy Charges from his own body, permanently increasing all damage taken by 10%. This effect stacks.
        • Energy Charge - A small part of Elegon himself, the Energy Charge contains enough Arcane energy to restart The Engine of Nalak'sha.
          • High Energy - With each successive cast of Draw Power, the created Energy Charge gains an additional 20% movement speed. This effect stacks.
          • Discharge - Upon reaching zero health, the Energy Charge explodes and inflicts 600,000 Arcane damage to all players.
    • Stage Three: Power Draw Stable - Elegon has reactivated The Engine of Nalak'sha, disabling the Energy Vortex and activating all Empyreal Focuses. Elegon shields himself from all damage. Stage Three ends once players destroy all the Empyreal Focuses.
      • Empyreal Focus - The Focuses activate whenever the Engine of Nalak'sha begins operation, venting energy into the surrounding platform. Damaging all six Empyreal Focuses temporarily disables the Engine of Nalak'sha.
        • Energy Conduit - The Empyreal Focus vents excess energy, inflicting 142,500 Arcane damage to all players touching the energy conduit every 0.5 sec.
        • Overloaded - Upon reaching zero health, the Empyreal Focus deactivates and vents excess energy back to Elegon, increasing his damage inflicted by 20% and casting speed by 20%. This effect stacks.
      • Unstable Energy - Elegon periodically inflicts 25,000 Arcane damage to all players.
      • Energy Cascade - Elegon fires a ball of Titan plasma at the location of random player, inflicting 200,000 Arcane damage on impact to players within 5 yards and creating a Cosmic Spark.
        • Cosmic Spark - Small pure energy constructs created by Elegon.



    Mists of Pandaria Gem Vendor Price Changes
    The last beta build made some changes to the prices that gems will vendor for. Cataclysm gem prices remain unchanged for now. Keep in mind these prices aren't final!

    Gem Quality Old Price New Price
    Uncommon (Cut)985
    Uncommon (Uncut)50 60
    Rare (Cut)?4
    Rare (Perfect Cut)91 10
    Rare (Uncut)3 203 50
    Meta (Uncut)50 60
    Meta (Cut)3 754


    Beta Class Balance Analysis
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    My guess is that it's like that because of how they changed mastery from being x points like in cata for everyone to actually displaying the percent from conversion for each spec.
    We tried to simplify the concept of mastery. Before, mastery rating converted to mastery points which converted to an individual number for your spec (such as Deep Healing for Resto shaman). We cut out the middle man and just have mastery rating and your individual mastery now. It is intended to be analogous to crit rating converting directly to crit percent instead of crit rating converting to crit points which then convert to crit percent.

    Is this very short ICD intended to prevent situations like Normal Cast/Echo Proc/Overload/Overload Echo Proc, or will these continue to occur?
    Those will continue to occur.

    Is it intended that lower levels can now become unhittable through avoidance since the strength to parry conversion change?
    No. We'll look into it.

    Don't get me wrong, I see the DK issue and agree with it, but there's always going to be a theoretical gain of a few percent somewhere on something.
    We can get pretty close in most situations. The examples I was talking about were a Vael-style boss who is in execute range the entire time, or the fact that a talent that improves your AE ability isn't as useful on a Patchwerk fight. If we made some kind of crazy fight where DPS specs had to heal for a short period of time, then they might really want healing talents. But those tend to be exceptions. There will be plenty of fights where a talent choice will be ambiguous or different talents will work better for different players.

    While numbers are part of the argument, they take a big back seat to the fun argument.
    Yes, fun is more important than numbers... but not in this thread.

    If pushback protection is for all healers this will definitely help because for example a good mage could shut out a paladin for 5 seconds enough to completely gut a paladin, die or let the burst down of another team member.
    All healers should have the same pushback baseline.

    Death Knight (Forums)
    Agreed on all accounts. Blood Tap may not be a huge DPS increase, but it is still an increase and players will gravitate towards using BT. Removing Death Rune costs fixes the problem and allows players to freely choose whichever tier 75 talent they want without feeling penalized.
    We're not even convinced it's an increase.

    We don't like to get into the habit of sharing our numbers directly, because among other things, I have found it usually doesn't resolve anything. Instead it just leads to additional questions as players want to delve into rotation details or challenge our assumptions or otherwise grow the discussion broader, and often broader than our typical capacity in which to participate. For that reasons, and a few others, things usually work better if you share your numbers, we compare them to ours, and we decide what to do about any differences.

    However, we will make an exception this time about Soul Reaper.

    I think I originally threw out numbers like Soul Reaper doing 7% of Unholy's damage. Now that the stats on gear have solidified and we have fixed various bugs and so on, we do get higher numbers (see below), but never as high as the 20%+ numbers that sometimes appear on the forums. We do assume pooling a Death Rune for Soul Reaper to generate these numbers.

    • Using ilevel 463 gear, with no talents: 76.5% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.02% of total damage.
    • Using ilevel 463 gear with Blood Tap: 99.75% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 12.88% of total damage.
    • Using ilevel 463 gear with Runic Empowerment: 95.54% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.96% of total damage.
    • Using ilevel 463 gear with Runic Corruption: 87.08% of maximum theoretical uses per second in execute range. 11.09% of total damage.

    So as many people claim, Blood Tap is optimal for maximizing Soul Reaper. But how does that play out in terms of total DPS over the course of a fight?

    • Blood Tap: 12.32% increase over having no talent.
    • Runic Empowerment: 12.41% increase over having no talent.
    • Runic Corruption: 14.02% increase over having no talent.

    Unless you are on a fight with a very prolonged execute phase or one in which the execute phase is what matters most, we don't see Blood Tap as mandatory in terms of DPS. (We're also okay with situationally one talent being "the best" so long as it isn't the best on most fights. After all, an AE talent is useless on a one boss fight.)

    Now, I realize some of you are arguing that Blood Tap is not a DPS increase, but that the rotation is so much simpler with Blood Tap that it still feels mandatory. That is sort of outside of the scope of this, a numbers thread, but we will consider the feedback.

    Why isnt Runic Corruption becoming baseline for Death Knights like it was intended to become during the Wrath Beta?
    Why do we have a talent tier with three talents that do numerically the same thing?
    Your post proved there is no difference what-so-ever between the three and having played with all three on the beta myself I have no change in playstyle.

    We added Runic Corruption in Cataclysm to prevent the DK rotation from becoming too predictable and cyclical. However, it was a controversial change and there were DKs that didn't like it. (In general with an audience of WoW's size, you can find someone that loves or hates any feature, so part of our job is trying to determine when that love or hate crosses some kind of threshold). With the new talent model, we thought it would be a good opportunity to give DKs a choice about what resource model they wanted. If they didn't want a passive but potentially random rotation, they could opt into Blood Tap.

    Hunter (Forums)
    Does your data support the conclusion that Fervor is significantly better than Thrill of the Hunt, or is my experiment flawed? An indication of which statement is correct is sufficient for my purposes. I am willing to return to the drawing board and test these talents again.
    Thrill of the Hunt is weak. We are considering moving Dire Beast up to the "focus tier" and redesigning Thrill of the Hunt a bit.

    Mage (Forums)
    Glyph of Mirror Image may be a bit problematic for a minor glyph. Problem is that if the Mage is Arcane, the Mirror Images benefit from the Arcane Blast debuff; this results in nearly a 40% increase to their damage, which is a pretty hefty improvement. Fire and Frost both seem to get (in 463 blues plus crafted epics) about 200,000 damage out of a Mirror Image cast, while Arcane gets about 280,000 damage.
    We’ll take a look at this. We want it to contribute the same damage, but in a different way. Them benefitting from the Arcane Blast debuff is intended, but need to be tuned with that in mind.

    Monk (Forums)
    Wait wait, hold on. That's not how Roll works so I'm really confused.
    Roll has 2 charges naturally, 20 second cooldown.

    I use Roll once, 20 second timer starts. I have another charge of Roll, so I use that in the next second, just like your example warrior.
    After 20 seconds, I gain one charge and can use Roll again. I have to wait another 20 seconds for the next Roll.

    There aren't any A or B Rolls because each Roll charge regenerates one at a time. This means that outside of the first Roll, you've essentially got 1 Roll every 20 seconds. You're describing Double Time as 2 Charges every 20 seconds that only regenerate after both have been spent.

    No, you're correct. I completely mangled my description. It's one of those deals that works fairly intuitively when you try it, but it kind of a bear to explain. I changed my original text above. It actually works quite a bit like death knight runes (which can also be confusing, so possibly not the best example).

    If you have Double Time and use Charge A, then it comes back in 20 sec. If you use Charge B as soon as you can (which is 1 sec after Charge A), then it comes back in 40 sec. You aren't getting twice as many charges of Charge. You just gain flexibility -- you can borrow a charge from the future.

    If that still sounds confusing, then I invite you just to try it. It is much more intuitive in game.

    Mea cupla. I try to strive to strike a balance between spending time here but not too much time, because, you know, day job. Sometimes my brain works faster (or slower!) than my fingers.

    Charge's Charge A starts recharging when Charge B is discharged, but Charge B doesn't recharge until Charge A's charge has recharged, making it so that after discharging Charge A, Charge's Charge B won't recharge a second charge for 40 seconds.
    I heard you liked charging, so we put a charge on your Charge...

    Can you please comment on Monk hates levels.. in this patched the base energy regen went from 8/sec to 13/sec (and brewmasters getting 30% bonus)
    It is supposed to be 8/sec. As often happens, fixing one bug apparently caused another.

    Paladin (Forums)
    Was the 12% haste Holy pallies lost via removing Judgements of the Pure (9%) and Speed of Light (3%) intended or was it something you guys didn't notice? Also, are Holy Pallies supposed to have 2.4s cast times on HL/DL?
    Intended. We tried to get rid of all of the passive talents and glyphs that just added haste and crit for the purpose of feeling like an attractive talent or glyph. We can add those stats back when needed, but we have been trying to avoid every spec having an arbitrary amount of crit, haste and hit, because it's confusing and complicates stat allocations on gear (a player with tons of crit stops wanting crit on gear). For paladins specifically, we did make Holy Shock crit more often than normal, and we added back Divine Favor recently to get back some "active" haste, and there are still some mechanics like Infusion of Light. If those aren't sufficient (in our minds), we can add more haste.

    Do note however that if you are comparing a Dragon Soul-geared class to one in Mists quest greens, your ratings are going to take a hit. You'll get back up to epic-levels of combat ratings when you are epically geared once again. I have opined recently about the necessary evil of nerfing stat ratings every expansion and how we'd like to find an alternative that is more palatable, but it's a non-trivial problem. (We can't for example have characters going from 50% crit in one expansion to 100% crit in the next and 150% crit in the following.)

    Was the Flash of Light proc removed from Infusion of Light because of Selfless Healer? I'm sure you have read it countless times but that while not so important in PVE was EXTREMELY(emphasis) important in PVP.
    No, it was more about the number of instant heals paladins already have through Holy Shock and Word of Glory. A common complaint we hear about paladins in PvP is: how do I stop them from healing when so many of their heals aren't subject to interrupts because they are instant?

    You guys haven't gotten a build in awhile, but we've made a few changes to make Eternal Glory and Sacred Shield more competitive with Selfless Healer, and we're also likely to design Ascetic Crusader. We also reinstated Divine Favor, as I mentioned. (Unrelated to haste, we're also looking at Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn as well.)

    If Holy still feels too slow after those changes, we'll consider other options, but we didn't want to make too many changes at once.

    On top of that, paladins really don't need a 4th throughput cooldown. They already have Avenging Wrath, Guardian of Ancient Kings, and the level 75 talent.
    That was our thought and Divine Favor seemed the least interesting of the bunch, but it is something a lot of paladins seem to miss (more so than many classes missing abilities that we removed).

    GC, is it intended that paladins can't see their Seals as a buff icon anymore? It's kinda confusing without it.
    They are on the stance bar, so we figured it was redundant to see two icons.

    Priest (Forums)
    I have a question concerning Divine Hymm, why exactly was it removed from all specs except Holy? The holy version was far more powerful at a 3 minute cooldown whereas disc/shadow had it on an 8 minute cooldown.
    Shadow doesn't need a potent raid cooldown and Disc has Power Word: Barrier. It's also not a written rule that every healer needs a certain allocation of cooldowns. We want the healer specs to feel unique yet relatively desirable.

    Shaman (Forums)
    Currently on the MoP Beta servers (and in fact it seems ever since Flurry was implemented for Enhancement), if you can sync your auto attacks to happen at the same time, you are consuming only a single charge of Flurry for most of the synced mainhand/offhand swing combos.
    Good catch. Fixed for next build, and increased the number of charges to 5 to partially compensate.

    Warlock (Forums)
    With my guardian demons, I have been noticing that they have a tendency to stand around and not attack on fights where the boss either changes forms, or in council fights. Is this part of the pet AI overhaul coming, or are they just being stubborn?

    If it is the later, is there a chance that we could get that by applying/reapply a curse to a target causes them to favor that target above doing nothing?

    So to be clear, you are attacking the new target and the guardian is slow to respond? Or that it isn't smart enough to know the new target?

    Warrior (Forums)
    I'm a little confused as to how Bloodbath is supposed to work. The tooltip leads me to think that I pop bloodbath, and 30% of the damage I did at the very beginning of bloodbath is distributed as a bleed over 6 seconds. After 6 seconds, the next attack triggers another set of bleeds based on 30% of that attack.
    Bloodbath is just "your attacks do +30% more damage" in the form of bleeds. It has always seemed a little more confusing than intended though so maybe there is something else going on.

    Blue Posts
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Challenge Mode Feedback
    Thanks for the feedback. Just to be clear, the gear "upscaling" is a beta-only feature, just to level the playing field since most players in beta will not legitimately have item level 463 gear. On the live servers, your gear will only scale down, not up.

    Regarding the use of "cheesy" tactics while running challenge modes, we're looking into ways of limiting some of the most offensive ones while still allowing for planning a tactical route through the dungeon to be a major part of the gameplay. Dodging patrols, using tools like Shroud of Concealment to skip some avoidable enemies? Cool. Training through the entire Armory wing of Scarlet Halls and Mass Resurrecting on the other side? Not so cool.

    As for rewards, the intent is for prestige to be the prize. When you are soaring around town on your Pandaren Phoenix, or showing off as your character becomes engulfed in flames when you /roar, everyone who sees will know that you earned those rewards through expert play, because you cannot outgear challenge modes, only outskill them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Challenge Mode Gear Scaling
    The upward scaling is a convenience measure solely enabled during beta testing, so that all interested players with level 90 beta characters can participate.

    In the live game, any items that are over item level 463 will be scaled down to 463. Items that are lower than item level 463 will be unchanged.

    The system that will be used for challenge modes upon release actually preserves your hit and expertise bonuses, compensating by deducting extra rating from your other secondary stats (crit, haste, mastery, Spirit) in proportion to how much of each you had to begin with.

    This sounds complicated, but it should be relatively seamless and handled behind the scenes, with the intent being to minimize the need to reforge/regem for challenge modes.

    To use some decidedly fake numbers, let's say I have an average ilvl of 500 and I have the following stats:

    Outdoors (Item Level 500)

    3400 Hit Rating (+10%)
    3400 Expertise (+10%)
    6000 Crit (+10%)
    0 Mastery (+0%)
    8500 Haste (+20%)

    When I enter a challenge dungeon, my ilvl scales down to 463, reducing my stats by roughly 30% (rounding for the sake of simplicity). However, the system keeps my Hit and Expertise values unchanged, overcompensating by reducing the other ratings more heavily.

    So my challenge mode stats would be:

    In Challenge Mode (Item Level 463)
    3400 Hit Rating (+10%)
    3400 Expertise (+10%)
    3356 Crit (+5.6%)
    0 Mastery (+0%)
    4754 Haste (+11.2%)

    (Now yes, if your normal gearset is designed to hit-cap you against raid bosses, you'll effectively be slightly over the hit cap against dungeon targets, so people looking to min/max completely may still have some tinkering to do, but unless you're aiming to beat the realm-best time, the cost of being a couple percent over the hit cap is going to pale in comparison to the benefit of precise and coordinated play.)

    Tl;dr version: If you are hit-capped before you enter a challenge mode, you'll still be hit-capped inside. It's magic. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Content Consumption and Difficulty
    Tell me. Compared to now, will the raid content be harder or easier?
    The 4.3 heroic dungeons and Dragon Soul when the patch was released are a good measure to get an impression on how the content will look difficulty wise.

    and over 3 years more than 75% of the EU playerbase have left the EU servers..
    And 97% of the Internet knows that 99% of statistics are made up on the spot!

    Is any chances to see Raids that would bring back people to raid them? And I simply put off LFR.
    LFR is not going away, if that's what you're asking for, it's actually useful for players that can't be part of a raiding guild (or don't want, for whatever reason) to experience the content.

    And new raid content will be appealing to raiders, surely. Will it be appealing to your friends/guildmates? Well, that's really up to them. There's a number of (personal) factors that no amount of raid content will change.

    If the nerfs are "so that everyone gets to experience the instance", wasn't LFR for those purposes and normal mode?
    Not really. Nerfing content doesn't help the same spectrum of players. Players that are struggling on, let's say, Heroic Hagara, will eventually give up if they can't progress further. The only question in that case is, how long before they stop? Might be a month, or six, but if they can't progress, they'll stop. That's the crowd that those nerfs are aimed at.

    Moving forward, the dev team is thinking about using a similar system as the one currently in place for Dragon Soul. A single debuff on monsters for a raid tier that's been out for several months.

    Take it as you like, I'm not attacking you, just strongly expressing my personal experiences versus my worries in the chosen path. I would like to enjoy the game I like. I really would, but you're making it hard for me. Currently the only thing keeping me here are the social bonds, but guess what, they feel the same and are leaving one by one too, effectively eliminating my need to log.
    I'm not taking it as an attack, no worries. I understand you're trying to express yourself. Honestly, I'm unsure what's the message you're trying to give, though. You become bored of the content because it's not hard enough for you? (seeing that you've progressed nicely on Heroic DS). If that's the case, I can tell you that the devs are hard at work to roll patches faster than we've done in the past.

    I also have the feeling (though I'm probably wrong) that some players are underestimating the true value of challenge modes (not necessarily your case). In those modes you're fighting against the clock, so that will always be challenging (you can always try to do it faster).

    But the issue is not exactly the lack of content, but the increasingly lower difficulty of it.
    Ever since WotLK raids get nerfed to the ground so that a very large part of the raiders, skilled or not so, can kill the what should be hardest boss of an expansion. wowprogress.com reports that as of today over 10% of all raid guilds have downed heroic Madness.

    I'm pretty sure at least several hardcore guilds kinda agreed that Sinestra was as difficulty as HC LK, and Ragnaros was harder, so I wouldn't call that an "increasingly lower difficulty".

    You mention 10% of all raid guilds have downed Heroic Madness. There's no reasonable argument to call that a "very large" number.

    So the developers want the game really to become a "wait and you will breath on the heroic boss and he'll be dead" kind of game.
    If that's how you want to play the game, sure. If it's not, but someone else wants to, how does it affect you? How exactly does what others do in this game impact you?

    LFR should be, the place for the easy kills, and it is. Normal should be place for the top 90%+ of the community, and it is. Hardmode should be the place for the top 10%, which isn't anymore so and gets so less and less.
    So, basically, you're saying that rather than providing an ongoing challenge that you can slowly overcome (or rapidly, depending on your skill), the devs should rather focus on preventing 90% of the players from seeing a difficulty mode. That's one of the best ways I can think of to frustrate a lot of people.

    So in the end, making the game to easy, will achieve the oposite; less people will see the content, becuase there will simply be less people playing the game.
    This is an argument I've seen thrown around plenty of times. Yet, Wrath of the Lich King, which seems to be considered by many hardcore players as the easiest expansion ever, had some of the highest participation rates in dungeons and raids we've ever seen. And, ironically enough, also had some of the hardest encounters to date (I remember the threads and headaches that some hardcore guilds were having at the time with Lich King and Putricide Heroic, as well as Yogg-Saron +0, Sarth 3D, just to name a few).

    Then explain to me why LFR drops epics, when it is for players "to experience the content", specificly better than Firelands-epics as well as the first raids in MoP (yes, that has been datamined).
    LFR was meant for players that can't participate in raiding guilds either because they don't have the chunks of time required for that, or don't enjoy (for whatever reason) being part of those guilds. Let's not mix that with "experiencing the content". Experiencing the content doesn't mean getting a tourist visit around the place.

    I was happy when Blizzard announced LFR, because people finally could be able to experience the content without getting loot they clearly don't deserve. However, as it is now, they DO get loot they don't deserve.
    If they can clear LFR they do. They're already getting lower ilvl gear compared to normal and Heroic.

    You can also ask yourself how long the game will remain interesting when you can do everything with your eyes closed.
    Feel free to go and show us how you and your guildmates kill Spine Heroic with your eyes closed, please

    You wouldn't be able to. Even if the content is easy for you at a given point, it was challenging before, and it's just natural that it becomes even easier over time once you've mastered it. But there are players that are still progressing through Dragon Soul and, believe it or not, are actually being challenged by the content in its current form.

    1. Why are you replacing content instead of adding content?
    2. Why do you believe 3 difficulties of a same raid (a final one at that!) provide people with ample opportunities? I am a casual 6/8 heroic raider and, sorry, I srsly cba to enter DS again unless someone puts a gun to my head
    in before: "Go heroic". For those ... oh .. two extra abilities in the same fight? sorry, that's not right.
    in before: "but, but, but try Spine hc!" sorry, I would be ashamed to have spine heroic achieve when someone cares to check what date I did it and sees the resounding 25% nerf. I'd rather feel good about 5/8 hc at 0% debuff. and 6/8 hc at 5% debuff.
    3. Why are you nerfing heroic content thereby stripping it of any and all sense of achievement?
    4. how do you believe leaving people to dwell on the final fight with DW's fingernails for entire 6 months is right or even remotely fair?

    1. No content is being replaced. Giving players a mean to gear up through alternate means to get up to speed is something we've been doing since the TBC days. If you want to go and finish Firelands, you can go and do it (and completing Glory of the Firelands Raider is no easy task, even if it doesn't require you to kill Heroic Ragnaros).
    2. You mention you would be "ashamed" if someone sees you killed Spine Heroic at the 25% nerf. First, why do you care what some random person on the internet thinks about you? I'd rather put at the front my own enjoyment. And if, for one reason or another, I can't kill Spine before the 25% debuff, well, big deal (as long as I'm having fun).
    3. I've explained that here.
    4. Actually, the developers agree that Spine is harder than Madness in most aspects. In theory, the concept of the encounter was great, but in practice it's kind of just a tentacle fight. They're trying to deliver an awesome encounter with the Sha of Fear at the Terrace of Endless Spring.

    As for the time itself, it's not different than how long other end-of-expansion bosses have been available for.

    Again, dishing indirectly on disabled people isn't cool. And if you want to make such statements (yes, I'm annoyed) then feel free to first youtube/google and see there's actually quite a few doing this. And no, we're not special little snowflakes...
    I'm not dishing on disabled people (that'd be quite inappropriate), and I believe you're reading too much into the piece you've quoted. If you've felt offended, my sincere apologies. At no point I've meant to be offensive to anyone.

    Have some faith in the playerbase instead of just brushing us off as violent trolls who don't come here to make change.
    I don't need to have faith in the playerbase because they've shown me time and time again that they can do amazing things. And if I had the feeling the people posting here are violent trolls I wouldn't bother posting. I can assure you that.

    8 months is not how long content lasts. Content lasts approximately 5 months, i assure you. Noone wants to play in the same 8 boss nerfed raid instance for more than 5 months, And since you don't expect us to run through BWD or BOT anymore, the content lasts even less. Nobody goes BWD or BOT to gear up anymore. Barely anyone goes FL to gear up anymore. The way you are designing content to last is atrocious!

    You may say that we are still having a challenge to defeat all the bosses in the DS on HC, Well newsflash for you blizzard, not every guild is interested in pushing every single heroic boss. Alot of players just want to experience the content on a normal difficulty.

    But the fact is that there's content to be run if you've not killed Madness Heroic. If you're voluntarily stopping because of whatever reason, there isn't much I can do to help fight that feeling. As I've said, the dev team is hard at work trying to put out patches faster, but that doesn't fix current issues. It's a situation that's always happened at the end of expansions so far.

    I know many of you want purple ribbons for 16th place, but that is not how it works. This game is about progression and epeen, not pet battles and LFR
    It is for you, sure. You can't pretend it is the same for other players. There'll surely be players that will get immense fun of pet battles, and there are players out there enjoying the LFR system.

    Why should players who just do LFR have better gear than those that cleared 7/7 normal Firelands
    Why not? At some point you just need to move on. By that reasoning, we could go extreme and ask, well, why should players who just buy a new expansion have better gear than those that completed Thunderfury in Molten Core 7 years ago?

    I'd like to ask, aren't normal modes (yes I'm leaving LFR out of this) supposed to be there to experience the content? Aren't they aimed at those raids who don't have the means to do heroics?
    Does every raid that can down a few heroic bosses have to reach and kill Madness heroic?
    Doesn't the content nerf itself slightly already due to the increasing average ilvl of a raid every week?
    Why, in the first place, did you implement the nerfs that early if there hasn't been any content for months, and won't be until MoP?
    if you'd like to achieve that as many raids as possible get to see the endgame content, why isn't there more incentive to do lower tiers? While outdated, they're still part of the endgame and harder than LFR, so shouldn't they be more rewarding than LFR and just farming VP/JP?

    There's something about "experiencing the content" that doesn't feel right. The idea behind the different difficulties is not to let people that want a challenge to go straight to Heroic and have everyone else chilling in Normal (or LFR). The reason there's normal and Heroic is as simple as the fact the playerbase skills are hugely different between the most hardcore players and new fresh raiders. By having normal and Heroic you can progress through the raid tier until you get to that point where you actually start struggling. For you that might be Heroic Blackhorn, for another player, it might be normal Spine.

    As for the other points, if players want to experience lower tiers, they can do at any point.

    That then what should be the very hardest boss of the expasion, Heroic Madness, is killed by 10%+ of all guilds, is just to much. It should be 5%, or even less. Just like Naxx was back in Vanilla, and HC Lich King during WotLK. Don't forget, the whole deal with the end boss on hardmode is that beyond that you can not progress, and not being able to progress for many months makes the game a bore
    So, 5% of the players (in your opinion) should be able to kill the last end boss on Heroic, yet, at the same time, you also say that not being able to progress for many months make the game boring. Do you realize that that's basically what would happen to that 95% of players when, eventually, get to the end boss?

    HC LK was one of if not the hardest bosses out there. Only a few people downed him without the debuff. So basicly the whole dungeon was balanced around the fact that that debuff was there....
    Not at all. And in fact, HC LK was defeated without the debuff not much longer after the initial kill. If memory serves me right, by Ensidia.

    If I don't get any response (which is fine), I suppose this still can be used as some sort of feedback and reflection on my part on Cataclysm
    There's too much too answer there (and some things I can't answer) but it's a very useful post, thanks for putting the time into writing it.

    Yes, sadly this thread was turned in to a Q&A session and people were venting out their frustration on Draztal.
    I'm more than happy to provide answers where I can. Some things can only be answered by the devs though, but we also take care of getting those questions their way so we can get the answers you asked for (even if at times they're not what you'd like to read).

    The artificial 3 tiered approach to raiding was already made to let everyone have a go at their respective tier (and to cut production costs of having to cater for 3 different dungeons for the same purpose). Why blend it further and force the way of thinking in that many more should do HC? What is the reasoning behind this?
    As I said before, people stop playing when they can't progress, with the exception of the truly hardcore and dedicated raiders, that will keep pushing until the brick wall has been destroyed. So, the best guilds out there will get first to the end and finish it, but a progressive debuff system also allows everyone a chance at getting through the content at the pace they can (putting a side example, if someone likes football, would that person enjoy it if he were allowed to play only at the same level of performance that Rooney, Ronaldo, Messi, etc do?, probably not, however he'd surely have plenty of fun playing with his local team, or just with his friends, this is kind of the same, not everyone can perform at the absolute maximum level).

    Keep in mind that there're plenty of players that love raiding and start on normal hoping to eventually get to Heroic and keep progressing. Since we've already said that these players will stop playing when they get stuck, the developers don't feel it's right to tell them that they should just be happy to have made it that far and stay in the LFR, or normal just because they get to see the content.

    We've got from world first guilds that can pull amazing strategies to players that don't have the time for more than LFR with everyone else in between them. That people needs something to keep them willing to progress.

    This is also the case for me, I don't like it when my hard work gets nullified because some random gets the same rewards for doing nerfed content because he waited for a few months to get a higher debuff.
    Someone else getting the same piece of gear you have hardly nullifies your work. It really makes as much sense as feeling offended because other players are getting to level 85 after you did, and with heirlooms, and with guildies helping that person reach level 85 (see where I'm going?).

    The important question (at least in my opinion) should be, did you have fun working to get that piece of gear? If that's a yes, it'd expect then that the experience getting there was worth it (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    I am Afraid
    I just leveled this toon and i just found out that stance dancing is completely removed from the game and so is rend. No stance dancing = no warrior. I am not sure what to think of the class atm. I am not even sure if I will continue to put effort in this char now that MoP is soon to be released.
    /cast Fear Ward
    No no no… no need to be afraid my fellow Orcish friend, Berserker Rage isn't being removed in MoP!

    On a more serious note, I do understand where you're coming from. I've been playing since vanilla and in my opinion it's normal to get attached to the mechanics that you've been using for so many years.
    The thing is, that mix of nostalgia and being accustomed to certain mechanics makes it very hard for us to think in a completely fresh and unbiased way like a good game designer has to.

    Stances aren't going away; they're just being converted to a kind of DK "presence" design, which is, in my opinion, a better design.
    Don't get me wrong, I love playing warrior, it's one of my favourite classes, but having to stance dance to use certain abilities always felt a bit clunky and awkward to me, sure you can get used to it, you can even master it and enjoy having to use additional actions to activate all the different abilities, but let’s be honest here, that’s mostly a matter of having a ton of good macros that one can even just google up and copy paste, that’s not really skill now is it?

    Basically that just makes it harder for a new player to master a warrior because he will have to understand macros or at the very least become aware of the need to grab them on the internet and use them.

    Shield Wall, Recklessness, Retaliation, Pummel, Spell reflect, Charge, all of these used to be restricted to a certain stance in the past. Now some of them have no stance restrictions at all and others have them more relaxed.
    So, even on live, stance dancing isn’t what it used to be, to me it feels like it has been slowly phased out, so now we can actually do a major overhaul on it with MoP and players won’t have to feel that an extreme change of play style has been forced upon them.

    Now my argument is that this "clunkiness" might make experienced warriors feel like it's a good feature, something that requires skill and that distinguishes bad players from good ones, but that's just a twisted perception in my opinion. It's a case of an old design that remained in the game for far longer than it probably should have, making the balance in terms of abilities, skill and the required learning curve to play each class extremely hard to tune and balance over time.

    As I said, this is my personal opinion, I could play it safe and give you a very politically correct answer that wouldn't cause any stir, but I think you all understand that on top of working for Blizzard, we're also players, like you, we also feel passion for our games and we all have our own different views and criticisms, so please take this with a grain of salt, everyone is entitled to their own views and we in community love when you share your own constructive ideas with us, if for example, most players feel that this change is a bad decision on our part we will make sure to pass that information along to the developers (we already have! But we can always emphasize its importance), which I'm sure will look at it very seriously.

    Dynamic mmorpg's like WoW, that get new content over time are in a constant state of tuning, and there's always going to be situations like this happening from time to time, it's kind of unavoidable, it means the game is evolving, in the end I think that even players that complain a lot about having constant changes to the game probably end up enjoying the fact that the game isn't static, they just don't realize it because they haven't felt the boredom of a static game since WoW has never been that way.

    Also, please note that MoP is still in beta, anything can still be changed, don’t take whatever was discussed here as a sign of a permanent change. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Please Bring Back Attunements
    The only thing we don't have is Pet battles ... and wow is boring as hell for last 4-5 months. You think Pet battles will bring that FUN you are talking about?
    Scenarios and Challenge modes are brand new as well. And LFR will be available on every raid at the release of Mists of Pandaria. So it's not exactly the same scene we have currently.

    No sorry, playing your class well can be easily outlined
    • timings
    • group awareness
    • boss awareness
    • using all your tools
    • positioning
    • maximising your roles...role!

    Any other 'interpretation' is a lazy one, as missing any of those out is not playing your class well. You bring up PVP, this is where it shines the most, someone isn't aware of abilities? They stick at 1500, they learn or they stay they, they do not get boosted to the same level of gladiators simply because they pay a sub.

    That's your perception. A PVP player doesn't care about either boss awareness or positioning (not in the same way a PVE player does, at least); and how well you execute your rotation is probably secondary to them as compared to being able to adapt quickly to what your opponent is doing.

    How exactly are Dailies and multiple versions of the exact same Instance not repetitive?
    If you do just one of those, sure, it'll get repetitive eventually. But if you consider every option, I'd argue there's much more room before you feel you're being repetitive in what you do in-game.

    If blizzard brings back attunements for normal/heroic mode will be fun again i want attunement back again really was fun!
    I doubt it was very fun for the players that were being told "no, sorry, you need to get these attunements to join our guild" and was being rejected when he said "but no one is running these right now because it's not current content anymore".

    Was it fun when it was current content? For some. For some others it was just another unnecesary wall preventing them from getting to the content they really wanted to do (raiding). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Raid Testing Schedule - July 6
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    On Friday, July 6, we'll be testing two encounters.

    Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

    Lei Shi (Terrace of Endless Spring) - 10 Player Normal
    10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

    Sha of Fear (Terrace of Endless Spring) - 10 Player Normal
    16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

    As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session or cancel it entirely, due to bugs, builds, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

    The intent is always to make every encounter available on every server. Sometimes there are technical or logistical issues that make it impossible to test a specific encounter on a specific server. In prior days, a couple of encounters were not accessible on Mekkatorque, for example. We want to get as many people into the zone to test as possible, but it's not always possible to fix problems as they develop.

    All I can say is that we'll do our best, but the beta test availability disclaimers that accompany each schedule posting are there for a reason.

    Pearl of Pandaria
    New York Times best-selling author, Micky Neilson answered a few questions over on WoWInsider, as well as showing off some new art from the upcoming Pearl of Pandaria comic!


    Last edited by chaud; 2012-07-06 at 11:22 PM.

  2. #2
    Brewmaster Bladeface's Avatar
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    nice post ^_^
    My channel: Shirgadirth I used to do let's play's but now I do reviews, but not very often. Far too busy from school. Also too poor to buy games :P

  3. #3
    Deleted
    Well Priests have yet again been done over

  4. #4
    Stood in the Fire Grimalkin of Old's Avatar
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    Wow, haters are getting restless.

  5. #5
    What a fantastic Comic! Can't wait to read more!

  6. #6
    Deleted
    Why do they even answer to those rtarded questions? Makes community looks so goddamn awfull when the first Q is basicly saying how baddies that get LFR-loot don't deserve it .
    Why would anyone who is clearing heroic raids care at all if some random is getting LFR epics is mind boggling...

  7. #7
    4. how do you believe leaving people to dwell on the final fight with DW's fingernails for entire 6 months is right or even remotely fair?

    4. Actually, the developers agree that Spine is harder than Madness in most aspects. In theory, the concept of the encounter was great, but in practice it's kind of just a tentacle fight. They're trying to deliver an awesome encounter with the Sha of Fear at the Terrace of Endless Spring.
    Okay, there is no way that people this stupid work in Blizzard. Thats more than not answering a questions. It's like they asked you in Kebab spot "would you like it with mild or spicy sauce?" and you answered "Mild sauce is way less spicy then the spicy one. Moreover, spicy one has hot peppers in it, and mild one has cream. Both of the sauces will make the pancake wet, so a napkin is welcome".

    In other words, after reading dumb answers for intelligent questions in this post I feel some kind of CEO is holding their gun against their moderators heads.

  8. #8
    Deleted
    Feel sorry for the Blizzard representative who had to reply to those crazy raiders. Everything's been answered many times over, yet they keep coming back with them. Seems hopeless.

  9. #9
    In other words, after reading dumb answers for intelligent questions in this post I feel some kind of CEO is holding their gun against their moderators heads.
    Lol oh man, thank you for making my night.

    Nothing that comes out of this community is "intelligent" anymore.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by andreas1999 View Post
    Feel sorry for the Blizzard representative who had to reply to those crazy raiders. Everything's been answered many times over, yet they keep coming back with them. Seems hopeless.
    I sometimes feel sorry for them, but when they start to bullshit about how Heroic version of a boss equals more content, that's where I draw the line and feel sorry for myself and everyone that gives them money for such reasoning - Actually it makes me cry!

    It's sickening to say the least, to assume that people who raided Dragonsoul weekly from when it was released didn't see all the content just because they didn't kill the last boss on heroic mode, because those additional tentacles and a random debuff is so much more content, you could easily leave another year just with that - that's bullshit right there and they know it themselves.

    Also the elusive promise of shipping new expansions sooner is also down the drain, tho they promised that twice already, yet they somehow manage not to be able to do it.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Eggowaffles View Post
    Lol oh man, thank you for making my night.

    Nothing that comes out of this community is "intelligent" anymore.
    By "intelligent" I meant a question that has a statement, that shows someones will to know something, that should be followed by an answer. I don't judge the topic, I just feel there should be more professional approach than making a comedy. That answering a TOTALLY DIFFERENT question.

    And in my opinion, the questioner was right in this matter, players are mostly bored by DS, so am I. But there is nothing Blizzard can do now. They can maybe learn so this situation won't repeat again?

    And again, just saying "AMG community failed, hardcores demand everything" and such won't solve the case. Blizzard already gave "casuals" (hate this word, but hell, theres no better) what should be given - easy HCs, LFR, quite easy normal raids that can be puggable, scenarios, daily quests being a way to improve, more accesible PvP and more. They SHOULD also remember that even tho they satisfied 90% of the community, there is 10% willing to spend whole nights just to sort things out at a certain boss. "Casuals" don't need HC - "Hardcores" do. And now I guess nobody has it. And it's a problem to discuss.

  12. #12
    Really wish they'd just drop the Death Rune costs. It's a clunky mechanic that goes against their stated design philosophy and not many players seem to like.

  13. #13
    Bloodsail Admiral Imhullu's Avatar
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    "As for the time itself, it's not different than how long other end-of-expansion bosses have been available for."

    Except for the fact that they said they didn't want it to last this long, again, didn't they?
    Derp.

  14. #14
    Am I the only one that wants to beat the crap out of whoever asked those "constructive" questions in the Q&A ?

  15. #15
    Elegon = Algalon Lawl the phases whit obs + spirit world are the same stuff , just re design :O

  16. #16
    Epic! Raxxed's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CheeseDoodlez View Post
    Am I the only one that wants to beat the crap out of whoever asked those "constructive" questions in the Q&A ?
    I'd rather beat the crap out of blue poster for the generic and pathetic blue responses
    Quote Originally Posted by judgementofantonidas View Post
    Blizzard offered cardboard cut outs with poster pictures of bosses stapled on them upside down and sideways and many players now feel that is raiding.
    Raxxykins

  17. #17
    Legendary!
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    Quote Originally Posted by Raxxed View Post
    I'd rather beat the crap out of blue poster for the generic and pathetic blue responses
    Ok you take a job as a blue and see how long you last before you start doing what you say the blue is doing. With all the putrid bile that is thrown their way you would eventually do what you say as generic answers.

    ---------- Post added 2012-07-06 at 07:21 PM ----------

    [/COLOR]
    Quote Originally Posted by CheeseDoodlez View Post
    Am I the only one that wants to beat the crap out of whoever asked those "constructive" questions in the Q&A ?
    Yes most of those questions seemed to be more of a I am a special snowflake tirade than anything else.
    Last edited by grexly75; 2012-07-06 at 10:11 AM.

  18. #18
    Deleted
    Elegon looks like an epic boss fight can't wait to see what he is like on Heroic mode.

    I feel sad for the blue poster, most of the questions have already been asked dozens of times and it was filled with stupid QQ.

  19. #19
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    Day 1 of Elegon on LFR - 15 of the 25 people repeatedly fall to their death.

  20. #20
    The Unstoppable Force Granyala's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CheeseDoodlez View Post
    Am I the only one that wants to beat the crap out of whoever asked those "constructive" questions in the Q&A ?
    No You're not. That Person is a moron, and I'm a bit perplexed that he did get so much screentime with his "I'm special and better than that guy! That guy doesn't deserve gear!".

    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    2. You mention you would be "ashamed" if someone sees you killed Spine Heroic at the 25% nerf. First, why do you care what some random person on the internet thinks about you? I'd rather put at the front my own enjoyment. And if, for one reason or another, I can't kill Spine before the 25% debuff, well, big deal (as long as I'm having fun)
    Thank you. Exactly how I see it. Me and my buddies killed spine HC with 25% buff and we're happy about it.

    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    First, why do you care what some random person on the internet thinks about you?
    I just had to quote it again.

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