Submit Questions for the Devs, Challenge Mode Gear Procs, Hotfixes, MoP Launch Times

[chaud]

More Information on Patch 1.0.5 Systems, Diablo 3: Finding a Voice, Should Skill Swapping Reset NV Buff - Poll Recap

Submit Questions for the Developers
We are going to have the opportunity to speak with Cory Stockton, the Lead Content Designer for World of Warcraft soon. If you have something you really want to ask him, go ahead and add the question to the comments. We will pick the best questions and add them to our list!

Before posting take a look at the recent developer Q&As to ensure your question hasn't already been asked. (Best Buy / Reddit) Please avoid any very class specific questions about rotations or something similar, as there are other devs better suited to answer them.

Want to talk about the rest of this news post? Head over to this thread!

Hunter and Mage Challenge Mode Gear Procs
Tonight we take a look at a little bit more flare for the Challenge Mode gear! Each set has a special proc that will go off during combat or other actions. Some of the sets even have multiple procs or slight variations depending on what you are casting.

You can find the Challenge Mode set previews on our Challenge Mode Gear page, found in the menu in the navbar. Each class has a proc for their set, so keep checking back to see your class's set!

Sept 19 is Pirate's Day
September 19th is Pirate's Day in World of Warcraft, which means you should head on down to Booty Bay and share a drink with Dread Captain DeMeza for the The Captain's Booty achievement if you don't already have it.

Best Buy Developer Q&A
Several WoW developers answered questions on Best Buy's site tonight. You can find a list of the questions and answers here.

Free Wrath of the Lich King Upgrade
The World of Warcraft Battle Chest now includes Classic, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King, all for $20. Existing Classic and Burning Crusade accounts seem to have been upgraded to Wrath of the Lich King for free! You can purchase all of World of Warcraft up to Mists of Pandaria for $60 now as well.

Patch 5.0.5 Hotfixes - September 18

General

• ​The health of all enemies in Theramore's Fall has been doubled.
  
• Theramore Footmen have stopped using Shield Bash.
  

Battlegrounds
Alterac Valley

• The number of reinforcements in Alterac Valley has been reduced to 500 (down from 600).
  

Classes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• A warrior's Bloodcurdling Shout should no longer affect bloodworms.
  

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Pounce should now correctly consume only one charge of Dream of Cenarius.
  

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Frost Armor now increases spell haste by 7% (up from 5%).
  

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Angelic Feather can now be used by all party members when the priest under the influence of crowd control spells, and no longer require line-of-sight to the priest to work
  
• Penance's base damage has been reduced so that it now deals significantly less damage at lower player levels, and slightly less damage at level-85.
  
• Shadow Word: Insanity should now deal 2667 to 2815 damage plus 290% of spellpower at level-85 (up from 2235 to 2359 plus 243% of spellpower).
  
• Mindbender damage has been increased by 20%. It now does 80% as much damage per hit as Shadowfiend (up from 66.7%).
  

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Shiv no longer generates charges of Anticipation.
  

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Capacitor Totem should benefit from the shaman's +hit bonuses, as expected.
  

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Shadow Bite damage has been reduced by 25%.
  
• Tongue Lash damage has been reduced by 25%.
  

Dungeons and Raids
Tempest Keep

• Solarian's Solarium Priests should again be hitting for expected amounts of damage.
  

Items

• Marksman's Blade should no longer have a larger hit range than expected.
  
• Oracle Talisman of Ablution now diminishes in efficiency as its owner levels up.
  

Quests

• Interacting with Zidormi in Dustwallow Bay no longer requires Mists of Pandaria.
  

Bug Fixes

• Players should no longer retain glyph effects obtained in arenas after exiting the arena.
  
• Players who resurrect at their corpse after being offered a resurrection by another player should no longer receive resurrection sickness.
  
• Worgen characters who are advanced via a Scroll of Resurrection before completing their introductory quest chain and should no longer be stuck in a phased state.
  

Mists of Pandaria Launch Times

The official Mists of Pandaria launch times are as follows:

• North and Latin American realms - 12:00 a.m. PDT, September 25
• European realms - 12:00 a.m. CEST, September 25
• Korean/Taiwan realms - 12:00 a.m. KST, September 27

With this expansion, we’re using a new bit of tech that will unlock the expansion content, make the intro quest magically pop up in your quest log, and allow you to begin playing the expansion immediately without the need to log out and back in. If everything goes as planned this will be a smooth transition to the adventures that await you in the new continent.

See you in-game!

Blue Posts

No Honor Reset for Mists of Pandaria
Your character's Honor points will not get reset on September 25th, 2012.

There is a full write up on how Valor/Justice and Conquest/Honor points will work in the weeks leading up to and after Mists of Pandaria's launch in the blog: Currency Conversion Before and After Mists of Pandaria (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Favorite In Game Events
I bet this thread will be entirely "OH AHN'QIRAJ WAS GREAT" or "WRATH OMG WE WERE ZOMBIES <-- rehashed Naxx opening with extras".
I remember these events quite vividly, and I am personally very glad that I got to experience them, but I also remember that not everyone liked them.

The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj was an absolutely massive event, and it was tremendously awesome if you got to see it. It is totally understandable why so many have fond memories of this event, but it is important to remember that it wasn't peachy for everyone. This was a one-time event that was triggered by the player who held the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, so it was easy to miss out on it if you were not online when it triggered, or if you did not have a character of sufficient high level to go to Silithus. There were quite a few players who voiced their unhappiness about not getting to witness this event after having spent all that time gathering war supplies.

Furthermore, as you can maybe get from this video, an absolutely enormous number of players gathered in Silithus to witness the event. This unfortunately resulted in heavy lag for many players, and even realm crashes on some realms, which was obviously very frustrating to many as these things interrupted the fun.

The Zombie Infestation event was much more widely available to players as it was not restricted to high level players only. Since it was also spread out throughout the world of Azeroth over an extended period of time, the chance of missing out on this event was slim to none, which was appreciated by many for sure. This event is remembered fondly, but again it wasn't peachy for everyone.

Many people were very annoyed that they frequently got interrupted while being in the middle of doing things, and those people who did not have much time to play in general found that they had a hard time completing their usual daily routines within their established and regular time frames, so they were extra frustrated that they could not opt out of the event.

The Demon invasion prior to The Burning Crusade was best. Demon's laying siege to the city? Holding the line against invaders? Now that was an event. I didn't even know it was coming, and when Kruul turned up at stormwind?
That one was my personal favourite as well... although I also really liked the Cataclysm pre-launch events

Pre-wrath zombie plague, hands down. It was so damn fun on an RP server. Pity an event like that will never happen again due to all the QQ it caused. The event was like marmite. Either loved it or hated it.
Nobody says that such an event can't happen again in the future, especially if there is a good reason lore-wise to do it, but it would most likely not happen in the exact same format as the Zombie infestation. There would need to be a way to minimise the griefing, which could for an example be done through safe zones, or some sort of immunity buff, or maybe even a way to opt out of the event altogether for those who are simply not interested in it, etc. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria Boxes
Kat Hunter and a Reddit user showed off the Mists of Pandaria boxes today.

Guild Wars 2 Adds Mac Support
ArenaNet announced Mac support for Guild Wars 2 today using Cider. Anyone who has purchased the game can try it out, but keep in mind it is still in beta. You need Lion or Mountain Lion and a machine from the last year or two to play with reasonable performance. See the full FAQ for more details.

[moveth]

This level of communication with the players is impressive.

[Baracuda]

Any plans to reintroduce the plague/black proto-drake as the meta-achievement reward or as rare drop from 10/25 Naxxramas?

[WoWFlame]

Anything exciting you guys working on for Warlocks this expansion?

[R0ninX3ph]

Question for the devs:

Monks, specifically Brewmasters, have been on a bit of a rollercoaster in regards to their mitigation. With Stagger being adjusted the way it was, Brewmasters currently take more damage on average than all other tank classes. Are there plans to address this? Either with the addition of another active mitigation ability or perhaps a slight reversion of the Stagger change (Not a complete backflip but something that helps address the fact that Monks are taking more damage than others)?

[Melilithia]

Wait... I didn't know GW2 didn't have Mac support until now. Good thing I didn't go out and try to buy it... XD

Nice to see the Battle Chest now including WotLK!


Question: Do they have any plans to increase the character-per-server cap? I was highly crushed when I heard it was only going to be expanded to 1 character.

[Saphyron]

Will there be more scenarios added in patch 5.1 5.2 5.3? And the loot from those will they be upgraded to compensate for higher average ilvl per player?

[nancypants2012]

Now that challenge mode dungeons have been introduced, do you guys have any plans of going back and adding older dungeons to the list?

[R0ninX3ph]

Since there seems to be two versions of the same news post and I seemed to accidentally post in the other I will just repost it here.

"Question for the devs:

Monks, specifically Brewmasters, have been on a bit of a rollercoaster in regards to their mitigation. With Stagger being adjusted the way it was, Brewmasters currently take more damage on average than all other tank classes. Are there plans to address this? Either with the addition of another active mitigation ability or perhaps a slight reversion of the Stagger change (Not a complete backflip but something that helps address the fact that Monks are taking more damage than others)?"

[prossu]

Do you intend to keep older raid instances relevant during the whole expansion lifetime instead of making them completely irrelevant when a new one is released like happened in Cataclysm?

[lancore89]

Well, questions..
I have two: Is there any chance to get an viable warlock demo tanking form in the future? Maybe with 6.0?

Second question:
Cloth loot tables are usually more or less fucked up. Sometimes there are slots without any gear at all for mages/locks, sometimes there isn't even a single spirit item to be found. Most of the caster have some kind of spirit to hit conversion anyways, rendering hit pretty much redundant for almost everyone. The result is that those two classes that don't have this conversion have some serious troubles to get necklaces/rings or similiar shared loot.
Why just don't get rid of those problems and merge spellhit and spirit already?

[Schaapa]

Use this thread to discuss the news

[Deleted]

PVE - Question:

Could you imagine to lock new Raids and the additional Heroic-Instances (that get added to update late entrants to newest content) for players who did not clear previous raid contents of the expansion? Like Pre-Quests back in Burning Crusade.
This would clearly extend the feeling of endgame content, because many people (especially these who join in later content patches) just rush to HighLvL and complete the newest content patch without ever having seen older instances and then start to complain about Blizzard not providing enough Endgame-Content...


(Sry for bad english)

[Katie45]

Now that we have a race that is both in the alliance and horde, will we get more faction specific armor this expansion?

[Deleted]

question for devs
Would you ever consider reducing the damage of mindbinder and making it a full time pet? Keep up the good work

[Deleted]

Do you intend to keep older raid instances relevant during the whole expansion lifetime instead of making them completely irrelevant when a new one is released like happened in Cataclysm?

hah, asked nearly the same #seemycomment

[Tokens]

There's been much debate in regards to the XP requierments going from 85-90. At current standings, there's barely enough quests to get us to 90. That's included getting quite some excess XP in Vo4W/KW and completing all of the three following zones. Are there any plans tuning this prior to release?

[Hinalover]

How many patches are currently planned for Mist? It was known during wrath that we would be killing the Lich King during the third patch. Same can be said about Cata. Would this indicate that you have three patches planned for Mist also?

[vMoPPy]

Honestly, when will we see the old gods again?
I would love to hear about them again, and give N'Zoth a good beating!

[Shadowsedict]

i would like to start by saying that i love the way all the warlocks specs play, however, i highly dislike the new spell renaming/icon changing effects that take place from going from normal to demon form in the demonology spec. i find it annoying. I am not sure what the point of it is at all. I don't see how changing the name and appearance of the icon improves game play at all. Why not leave shadow bolt....shadowbolt in demon form, just change the way the spell behaves once morphed etc.?