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    Ghostcrawler Joins Twitter, The Swarm Begins, MoP TV Spot, Blue Posts, Blizzard News

    Guide to Effective Paragon Leveling (Alkaizer Method), Blizzard Says There Is Still Room For Improvement, Scheduled Maintenance , Blue Posts

    Ghostcrawler Joins Twitter
    Ghostcrawler has decided that 140 characters is sometimes enough and joined Twitter! The questions he answered today are below.
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Bugs
    I know you must be tired of stupid questions, but is there a reason the Argent Charger is not account wide (I have 3 paladins)
    Other paladins should be able to use it. Sounds like a bug.

    Currently Wands as mainhand weapons are nonfunctional; they autocast "Shoot" which delays regular casts. Bug or intended?
    Intended. We don't want wands to be a DPS increase or casters would never use staves, daggers, mage blades.

    By the way, what's the purpose of the 200 fragment cap for archy? Does it prevent bugs/exploits in some way? Often inconvenient
    We didn't want players immediately solving future artifacts with an endless fragment pool.

    Doing achievements, getting frustrated by "you have entered too many instances recently"... is that limit still necessary?
    The limit is necessary, but it's probably too strict if you're bumping into it in normal gameplay. It's to discourage sploits.

    PvE
    I prefer time delays used for gating instead of attunement quests.
    The ICC delays felt artificial though. Would like for them to make more sense. ICC also had to do with Dec launch (in west).

    What's your view on what looks like yet another tier of presumably 2 months of HC progress for the top guilds?
    Remember, hardcore guilds measure in terms of attempts not weeks. 500+ attempts is a lot of WoW.

    I'm curious as to why we didn't get a "Cataclysm Halion encounter" so to speak to fill the time before Theramore's launch.
    Halion was a cool fight, but it was just one fight and it's hard for a raid that small to really be engaging. We need final tiers with long legs (but don't need to last as long as 4.3 has lasted).

    Will the raid bosses coming after MoP launch be split in to smaller raids or would you like to go back to the single big raid?
    Ideally it will vary. Ulduar felt like one big complex, but still had different "wings." I really like larger tiers (10ish). We're going to try as hard as we can.

    Will we ever see more Hard modes like Ulduar. This flipping the switch just is not very involved
    Check out Terrace raid in MoP.

    Some older bosses have immunities that hinder certain classes, like Void reaver and poisons. what's your stance on this?
    I can't imagine the older bosses give you much trouble.

    Many have wondered why raid size dropped from 40 to 25 rather than to 20? Guild BC transition would have been lot less painful
    I joined for Sunwell. In retrospect, 20 or 15 might have meant we could have had one raid size. Changing raid size now would be very painful for every raiding guild. Asking every raid group in the world to grow or shrink? I think that would not be popular.

    Whose idea was the Darkmoon Rabbit encounter? Cuz that person needs a raise.
    I don't want to call him out without his permission, but he's an awesome designer. Hopefully he sees this.

    Thought Resistance was removed, still seeing & getting partial and full resists. Is it here to stay?
    Res is gone as a stat on gear and buff. It still exists behind the scenes. Where are you seeing partials?

    So why remove the shaman totems? were they gonna be too OP if left to how they were with this new patch?
    Shaman kept telling us they wanted totems to be fun not just the same buffs others had in a more cumbersome package. Fun now maybe.

    Was the decision for the two roll system based around the fact that warriors and paladins can hit 102.4? Was the dmg taken that much less then Death Knight and Bear tanks?
    Less about balance among tank classes and more about keeping mastery as an interesting stat for war / pal.

    World
    Are we going to see a lot of phasing in Mists? Not that I hate it, but it caused issues with helping guildies with quests.
    As Kosak says, it's the most powerful tool in the quest arsenal. Use phasing when we need a big impact, but not too often.

    Hey Greg, nice to see you around here. Will there be a city on Pandaria like Dalaran and Shattrath?
    There are "shrines" in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. They are like small cities but faction specific.

    Do best friendships count towards The Beloved? And if not is Nat Pagle a reputation, or a friendship?
    Didn't intend for friendships to count as reps, but they do. If we fix in the future, we'll just lower the count down again. Nat is a friend, not a rep. Same with Half Hill etc.

    Any plans to eventually unattach Golden Lotus rep from Shado-Pan and August Celestials? 5.1? Because I'm not going to lie, the current setup for dailies is terrible and smacks of "desperate for longer subs from players".
    We can't make content faster than players can consume it. Repeatable content is the best solution we've come up with. Nobody says I want to do Westfall before Elwynn. Think of Shado-Pan after Lotus as the same thing, but at max level.

    Classes
    What's the story behind not having any str polearms (or staves) as a warrior i hate being limited to AXE/SWORD/MACE.
    The answer is a little lame, but the animations for polearms don't work well with Titan's Grip. We want to fix.

    No mage teleports/portals to Pandaria? Oversight or by design? If the latter, why?
    Pretty sure there are.

    Any chance to see BM hunter as melee, MM as today, surv as tank in future?
    If we ever did melee or tank hunter, I'd want them as new specs. Hate to change what current X is. Blood DK transition painful.

    The Paladin change to active mitigation--functional and fine, but what was the motivation?
    Tanks starting to realize that attacking wasn't relevant. They could stand there, hold threat, and just pop cooldowns. Linking attacks to survival made them suddenly relevant to tanks. Active mitigation.

    If I may ask, why the removal of Heroic Fury? It was one of the reasons I went with fury the first time.
    We tried to make spec about rotations and talents about utility. Didn't want Arms or Fury to feel mandatory because of CC etc.

    Can we have totem bar back? I understand taking away dropping the 4 totems at once, but I miss having them on their own bar...
    You can recreate it by dragging the individual totem flyouts down. You may not want to drop some of those at the same time though.

    BM Hunter is viable in PvP but MM and SV are terrible? Plan to make them on-par with BM? It's mainly due to utility BM has etc
    Utility beyond just lots of damage cooldowns?

    Has the WoW team ever considered introducing leather items specifically designed for bears and brewmasters for MoP?
    We talked about tank leather for MoP. We also talked about no tanking gear. Too much gear competition can also be sad though.

    Will we see more veng improvements? taunting is still bad. I could NOT taunt off a tank that had 100k+ ATP last night at all.
    Taunt sets your threat equal. After that, the first tank might have to do something to help out. Did you tank Reaver or Vael?

    Wouldn't it have been a valid option to just add a cast time to holy shock with the glyph active instead of such a huge nerf?
    Denounce is the cast time nuke. We like HS as a shock. The nerf just makes it fair at low level. It hits hard at 85 / 90.

    Character
    When do we get the option to hide weapon enchants?
    We're talking about maybe hiding enchants. Too many weapons spray their own particles now. To clarify, we talked about hiding enchants as a player option

    How about Tabards? Can we get these converted to work like titles too? So we can reduce inventory clutter?
    Need to solve tabards with "on use" abilities, like teleports. Then it's easy.

    As I miss getting achieves on new toons and it would help to show what a player is capable of..on THAT toon and not another..
    If it is not a meta-achievement, most achievements can still be earned on another character. You get the "toast" just no points. If it's a meta, then it has to be acct level. Else, it's weird to see all the sub-achievements (from other chars) but no meta.

    You're adding account-wide pets, mounts achievs. Any chance for account-wide heirlooms?
    My dream = heirlooms work like titles. It's dumb to have to mail your own characters. Getting mail should be fun. No ETA.

    I feel like I shouldn't do this but I'm going to anyway. Am I bad? Does PvP healing stat work in the world?
    PvP Power works in world, just not in instances.

    Does that mean that the healing aspect of PVP Power will now work in world PVP? Or do you mean just the damage?
    PvP Power healing works outside as well.

    Does it work in instances? Because I don't want to have to stack PvP Power on my PvE healers' gear.
    PvP Power does not work in instances. The PvP gear is decent (but not as good as PvE) and may be fine for entry content.

    Misc
    Is Tigole still alive? Don't think I've heard from him in literally years.
    Had lunch with him this week. He is very busy. Just you wait.

    Did you enjoy Cataclysm? I thought the zone separation made it feel too disconnected, rather than having a new continent.
    I enjoyed Cataclysm, but agree about the zone separation. There is a reason Pandaria is a continent.

    Maybe I go a bit too far, but... Is this the last expansion?
    Not as long as you guys keep playing it and having fun.

    Do you read the general discussion forums?
    I do regularly yes, and when I don't rest assured that someone does.

    Any chance you'll remove the annoying requirement that you have to be in a raid group to enter a raid?
    Yes (meaning there's a chance).

    How does one go from a Marine Scientist to working at Blizz? That seems like an odd jump.
    Short story: being on the ocean as a grad student more fun than being at a PC as a professor.

    Vampyroteuthis infernalis or giant isopod?
    I was always a crustacean guy. Both are cool though.

    Any particular hopes/goals for Twitter communication? Different from forums? An additional avenue, different focus, just fun?
    I want to focus here on work so I can use FB more personally. Good for the little ?s and feedback that gets swallowed by forums.

    Just know that for every one person out there that hates the direction of the game, thousands of others love and appreciate it.
    If they can articulate what about the direction they don't like we can try to address it. But it can't be: make it just for me.

    So I must ask.. do you ever feel like smashing your PC when you read posters who think you solely are responsible for the game?
    I don't mind getting blamed for things. I mind when the 100s of people who work on this game are forgotten. I am but a cog.

    So when mists arrives what will you be doing release night? Assuming you get to go out and enjoy it.
    Signing boxes / shaking hands with players in Paris. I had to give up the midnight login experience when I got this gig.

    I just want to say, thank you for not folding to the people who demand that they know more than you when it comes to the game.
    No doubt they do know more about some aspects of the game. It's a big game. That doesn't mean they should design it though.

    18 days till Mists of Pandaria is live! Can’t wait for you guys to play it. Nothing like sharing 2 years of your life’s work with the world.
    It has to be hard knowing what’s coming & not being able to say anything until a year later when it’s announced. When you say 2 years, is that total or is there more time planning on top of that?
    We start thinking about it before that time frame for sure but most of the work happens in that 2 years on average.

    Here I was thinking they had you locked up at the offices, forcing you to slave away on the forums.
    Haven't had enough time to read the forums much this week. But my colleagues have & we have good things in store for next week!

    Can you clarify the MoP start time? There is a discrepancy on http://battle.net/game management to as to it being EST or PST...
    We're prepping that info for everyone. Stay tuned.

    Patch 5.0.4: Free Seven Days of Game Time
    If you have been looking for a way to try out Patch 5.0.4 and get ready for Mists of Pandaria, now is your chance! People with inactive accounts are getting an email notifying them of a free week of game time if the offer is claimed before September 19th. Be sure to log in to Battle.net directly to avoid clicking any scam email links.

    If you don't have an email in the EU, give this link a try.



    In Game Cinematic: The Swarm Begins
    This cinematic explains where that big hole in the wall between Valley of the Four Winds and Dread Wastes came from.



    First Mists of Pandaria TV Spot Airs This Sunday
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    This Sunday, the first of a series of new TV spots crafted from Mist of Pandaria’s epic opening cinematic will air during the Packers-49ers NFL match-up on FOX (kickoff scheduled for 4:25 p.m.EDT / 1:25 p.m. PDT). Get your DVR ready and join us on Sunday for some football… and Warcraft.

    Pandaria opens September 25 — pre-order now at Warcraft.com, and prepare to get back in the fight.


    Blue Posts
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    Fishing Without a Pole
    With these hippogryph talons, I shall strike out at thee, fish! I am also amused with imagining a druid in bear form fishing for salmon with their bare (get it?) claws.

    The humble Fishing Pole aside, you still get a bonus to fishing by equipping the other fishing poles. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Cross Realm Zone Feedback
    I know there have been a large number of discussions regarding cross-realm zones, especially given that this is a brand new feature in World of Warcraft as of patch 5.0.4.

    Your feedback is being compiled and reported back to the developers. We’re actively monitoring both positive and critical topics expressing issues or concerns players are having with cross-realm zones. We plan to clarify much of the causes for confusion in the near future. Until then, I just want to thank you for taking the time to compile and categorize the common reports for this. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Cross Realm Zones Realm List
    The Cross-Realm Zones have been enabled for a limited number of realms, and more realms will be enabled as we near the release of Mists of Pandaria.

    This feature should have a noticeable impact on the world around you when you level a new character up in Mists of Pandaria.

    Do you know which realms?
    At this moment in time, I'm afraid I will not be able to provide you with a list of realms where this feature is enabled currently.

    It is a feature that is being rolled out on more realms, so if I were able to give you a list now, it would most likely not be long before it becomes an inaccurate list anyway. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Lower-level Class Balance Issues & Solutions
    Since patch 5.0.4 was released, our Class Design Team has been working around the clock to tweak and improve all eleven classes’ damage, healing, and survivability in both PvE and PvP. As those developers look on here (and possibly reply), we thought this might be a good place to talk about balance issues specifically for characters at level 84 and below.

    • In-game today, at lower character levels, what class/spec/playstyle do you feel most needs attention?
    • Which talent/spell/action do you feel is currently overpowered or underpowered?

    We will be participating in this thread as much as possible, and any off-topic discussion will be strictly moderated.

    Thank you for your feedback and enthusiasm!

    The water and food for lower levels should be modified to compensate for changed mana and health pools since cata. This is something that really has been asked around a lot and still something to be looked at.
    We did buff these values when we made the mana change, but it’s possible they yet require another look. We're considering making adjustments to them after all of the mana and health numbers have settled.

    I would say the most common issue in this thread so far has been some variation of this:

    I don't particularly mind the damage done by healers right now in PvP, with Holy Shock, Denounce or Penance. What I DO mind is the fact that they can spam these spells endlessly while mixing in Flash of Lights and bubbles and CC and NEVER go OOM. I've been doing some BGs with a couple different classes from 10-54...and I can't say that I've ever seen a player (including Mages, Locks, Shammies, and even Rets and SPriests that spam heals) drop below 50% mana. If even that low.

    I'm not a huge PvPer, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think mana regen rates really need to be looked at.

    We’re working on identifying some tweaks we can make that will address this without throwing everything else off-kilter. Stay tuned.

    Pvp power needs to be introduced to lower level gear. Atleast earlier season pvp sets.
    We’re looking into doing this. It’s a pretty big task that doesn’t have a very high bang-for-buck value, because it’s about putting small numbers on gear that very few players use, and anywhere you add power, you have a lot to consider and balance around it. And it risks exacerbating the healing problems mentioned above.

    But it’s on our radar.

    All this talk about every other class/spec except Warriors. Fury is THE most underpowered spec at the moment. It's damage is so low we're not even able to have achieve 400-rough number-NON crits. It's that ridiculous. There needs to be some focus on this.
    In just the first few pages of this thread, Fury has been mentioned many times.

    We need to figure out if the problem is strike damage itself, or missing crucial abilities like Bloodsurge or Battle Shout, but we’ve heard you loud and clear. We're looking to give Fury some love. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Raid Testing Schedule - September 6
    So, Heroic Ta'yak testing is cursed - it is canceled again due to the forthcoming beta push. We will reschedule. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    FEEDBACK: Terrace of Endless Spring (LFR)
    The Looking For Raid mode for the Terrace of Endless Spring raid zone will be opening shortly, and should remain open until at least the end of the weekend, but likely longer.

    Please use this thread to post any feedback regarding your experiences with the LFR version of Terrace of Endless Spring. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Beta Class Balance Analysis
    Also, Vanish no longer(apparently) has it's +1000 Stealth level anymore. It used to have an Effect # that said something exactly like #2 for Stealth but, 1000. Since that's kind of unrelated, any reason for that if it was intentional?
    Vanish still adds +1000. It's just in another spell now triggered by Vanish, which might be harder to data-mine.

    I don't know off the top of my head why base rogue stealth was changed from 40 to 35, but the same is true of Feral druids and non-Ferals have lower stealth. I *think* this is all working as intended, but will investigate more.

    Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    At both level 85 and level 90, in high-mastery conditions, Rake will outscale Shred for DPE and become the primary filler move for CPs. Shred is still weaved in to extend rip duration and letting tf/proc buffed Rakes roll, but overall the rotations is largely simplified by just spamming rake.
    Yeah, this seems like a valid concern (i.e. the numbers make sense). We'll investigate and try to shift damage around to discourage it.

    Is there any info on Feline Swiftness and Cat Form? Currently, Ferals have no use for Feline Swiftness because it is not stacking with Cat Form at all (except in Org, for some strange reason). Is this a bug?
    We made a change to prevent Dash and Cat Form from stacking (Dash now increases you TO 70% not BY 70%), which inadvertently also made Cat Form stop stacking with Feline Swiftness. To be clear, Feline Swiftness should stack with Cat Form. We will fix.

    Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    Can the dot ticks from the spriest mastery in turn have their own mastery procs?
    Nope.

    Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    This one change though makes it feel wrong, and deprives us of one of the SS ticks. in order to not have to reapply it and miss that initial tick again i feel as if though the way to play is to overwrite this and keep it up, constantly hitting this button. Which i believe is the opposite of your intent. I still want the absorb effect but this change just makes it feel bad =/
    Hmm. It looks like our fix to move the tick to the end did not work so you just lost it. That wasn't the intent. Fixing soon (tm). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    Holy Shock Hotfix
    In a recent hotfix to the game, we reduced the base damage and increased the spellpower coefficient of Holy Shock.

    We were seeing extremely high base damage at low levels, and made the change in such a way that it only has a moderate impact on characters at or near level 85.

    By far, most of our effort is currently on level-90 balance, because that’s what’s important to most players. However, it’s not the only thing that’s important. We’re seeing some Mists of Pandaria changes causing a few balance problems at lower levels, especially in PvP. We’re working on fixing all such imbalances, and this is just the first of many changes. If you’re interested in discussing similar issues, I’ve just started a new thread about it them our class balance forum.

    Details:
    • At level 10, Holy Shock damage has been reduced by 85%.
    • At level 85, with LFR gear, Holy Shock damage has been reduced by 39%.
    • At level 90, with normal raid gear, Holy Shock damage will be approximately equal.

    The healing component of Holy Shock is unchanged. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

    SWTOR Fan Favorite Reward is The Party Jawa
    Roughly a month ago BioWare announced that SWTOR would be going free to play starting sometime in November and allowed fans to vote on a reward for paying subscribers. The Party Jawa beat The Rancor Holoreplica and Carbonite Hibernation Capsule by a significant margin!

    Originally Posted by SWTOR
    BioWare and LucasArts are excited to announce that “The Party Jawa” has won our Fan Favorite voting contest. Over the past month, our Facebook Fans have had the opportunity to choose a favorite item to receive as a reward when Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ launches its new Free-to-Play option this Fall. Although it was hard to pick a favorite, The Party Jawa won by an overwhelming majority! The Party Jawa celebrates a player’s status as a veteran of the galaxy with a unique and fun animation. The Party Jawa will be rewarded to current or previous subscribers as of August 1 and who are active subscribers when the Free-to-Play option launches.

    Check out www.swtor.com/FREE and www.swtor.com/FREE/Features for newly updated information concerning the Free-to-Play option.





    Blizzard Games News
    Pico is back from PAX with a heads up on the Diablo 3 Starter Edition, Mists of Pandaria's upcoming events, and new info on Heart of The Swarm.

    Last edited by chaud; 2012-09-08 at 08:09 PM.

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  3. #3
    Pretty Happy Greg decided to get a twitter. Its an awesome way to communicate.

  4. #4
    Good stuff:

    -Potential for cross-account Heirlooms looking very likely
    -Melee polearms looking like a possibility in the future; hell yeah.

    Bad stuff:

    -Still maintaining the lack of Shaman totem bar; talk about clunky.
    -Phasing; really causes more problems than solutions I feel.

  5. #5
    Ghostcrawler made a Twitter account? Why isn't this the top news on CNN, Yahoo, AOL and every other news site there is? It's extremely important that people know when other people make Twitter accounts!
    "It's clear this is another bash Apple thread. Such things are not conducive to a good discussion."

    WRONG! Those are the BEST discussions!

  6. #6
    rofl GC wants to make FB more personal so he doesn't pull a Jay Wilson

  7. #7
    Deleted
    How long an account has to be inactive to get a free 7days gametime?

  8. #8
    Deleted
    Does this work in EU as well? didn`t get an email about the free 7days. Or haven`t they been sent out yet? Account is inactive for more than a month now

  9. #9
    So they have to make a hole into the wall to fly over the wall?

  10. #10
    The Unstoppable Force
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Location
    Where Thrall and the Horde needs me to be
    Posts
    23,561
    Sunwalker Dezco and the tauren to the rescue!

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  11. #11
    no free game time mail for me

  12. #12
    Titan Yunru's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Nov 2009
    Location
    The Continent of Orsterra
    Posts
    12,392
    You need half a year of inactive accaunt for it too work.

  13. #13
    eu, inactive for 5+ monthes, ineligible for res. scroll(used in spring), no free game time.

  14. #14
    Deleted
    Half of a year can't be true. I hope they didn't send all of them yet. Tho my account was inactive for less than 2 weeks lol....

  15. #15
    Deleted
    6.5 months inactive, still NO 7 days free :/

  16. #16
    Herald of the Titans Detheavn's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    The Nether .... lands
    Posts
    2,670
    7 days free time? Would that not effectively lock people out of an upcoming SoR? :|

  17. #17
    same here, 5 months innactive and no e-mail, maybe it isnt out yet? i couldnt find anything in battle.net

  18. #18
    Can anyone confirm that they actually got the 7 days?

  19. #19
    I can't find anything about this on either EU or US battlenet nor anything attached to my account.
    Can anyone check this out also and if you do find it provide a link or screenshot of it please.

  20. #20
    Deleted
    the info in this: thread works. It's on the WOW facebook page, you have to click on the link there. I did it, got my 7 days instantly. Been inactive since beginning of august. (EU account, didn't get email)
    Last edited by mmoce43bb8e847; 2012-09-08 at 11:56 AM.

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