WotLK Download, Arena End, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Update 16:00 CEST - Lyonthori made an update to the post previously mentionned. (Thanks to Ghob for the translation)

Hallo zusammen, ich muss meine vorherige Aussage hier berichtigen: Wir können momentan nicht sicherstellen, dass der Download von Wrath of the Lich King am Release-Tag verfügbar sein wird. Bitte entschuldigt die entstandene Verwirrung.

Gruß, Lyonthri

Translation
Hello everybody, I have to correct my previous statement: We can not make sure Wrath of the Lich King will be available as a download on the release day. Please excuse the caused confusion.

Greetings, Lyonthori

Wrath of the Lich King available for download on release day ?
This is probably the most confusing news post ever if we consider that yesterday, I reported that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't be downloadable on Day 1. However according to an official post on the german forums, Blizzard will make the game available for download on release day! I wouldn't take it as 100% sure before we see an US post about it but it's not the first time we see something announced in europe first.

Original: ein kleines Update an dieser Stelle: Die Downloadversion von Wrath of the Lich King wird am Release-Tag zur Verfügung stehen.

Translation: A small update about this: The downloadable version of Wrath of the Lich King will be available on release day.

Arena End Reminder
The next Arena season will begin on December 16th !

The next Arena season will begin on December 16th, and once that happens players at level 70 will be able to participate in rated matches against level 70 opponents and gain Arena points for item purchases but will not count towards the end of season rewards. At the same time, level 80 players will be able to compete in rated arena matches where they can gain arena points which can be used to purchase level 80 arena gear, as well as compete for end-of-season rewards. Additionally, players at level 70 will continue to be able to play skirmish Arena matches against other level 70 opponents even after Wrath of the Lich King launches. It's also important to note that two new skirmish brackets (71-75, 76-80) will be available for players who wish to hone their Arena skills while leveling in Northrend.

Two New Arenas
[blizzquote="Nethaera;http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insider/11/arena.xml]With the latest patch release, we’ve added two new arenas: the Dalaran Sewers and the Ring of Valor in Orgrimmar. These arenas offer new obstacles and challenges for strategy savvy players. The arenas have been added to the random rotation and are accessible via the queue system as Skirmishes. For more information on these two new arenas, please visit [url=http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insider/11/arena.xml][b][color=orange]http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/insider/11/arena.xml[/color][/b][/url]. Both Dalaran Sewers and the Ring of Valor will also be available for tournament play during Arena Season 5. [/blizzquote"]


Pet Defensive Change

We recently changed the way defensive stance works for pets. In the old design, the pet would not attack a target that you were attacking until it did something to generate threat - typically attacking you. In the new design, as soon as you attack a target, the pet will attack the target too. Our thinking was that this made defensive a little easier to use and you still have passive to override that behavior.

However, we have heard from some players (hunters mostly, though this isn't just a hunter issue) that they prefer the old defensive stance. We wanted to get a little more feedback from players on the issue.

In order to keep this readable, please don't stray into other hunter or pet issues that don't directly affect this topic. Also please don't attempt to redesign the feature (such as having four stances).

Blue posts

Europe - Realm Compensation
We have now credited all eligible accounts with this compensation. You should be able to see this in your Account Management. (Source)

Professions - New recipes
It is very likely that we will be adding more recipes to all trade skills as the content progresses. The reason the crafter only weapons were done away with however was that most people chose to take the profession purely for the purposes of being able to skip ahead of the content or not do the content because smithing provided them with something far easier to attain than anything else they could normally get. While this is ok from time to time with an occasional piece of gear, the concept of crafters making "best in slot" items was more or less considered bad from our end. When many people dropped the trade skills they enjoyed simply because taking a different trade skills made them more powerful (Stormherald, Frozen Shadowweave) than that is clearly not what we intended.

As far as "what do I get from profession X", well I think many of the posters in this thread have pointed that out. All trade skills now provide some special benefit to the crafter that isn't just a super item. In the case of blacksmithing it's the ability to add sockets to your gear. Most of the profession perks are relatively equal in terms of what they provide, some are slightly better than others, but not enough so that you should feel ou are missing out by doing the profession you enjoy doing. (Source)

Druid Priest Shaman
Circle of Healing / Wild Growth / Chain Heal
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We're less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it's not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you'd also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons.

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications -- one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don't want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

Didn't you try this before ?
Yeah, we did. We thought it would feel like a big nerf and changed our minds. But seeing the state of healing at 80 makes us think it might be the right call again. When AE healing is so prominent, it also makes specs without great AE heals (Holy paladins and Disc priests) feel uselss.

Assume that we would lower Wild Growth by the same proportion as Circle of Healing. The exact numbers aren't as important to this discussion as the concept that you can't hit the button whenever you want. (Source)

Druid (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Starfall
So this took some digging but apparently there was a change to stealth in between 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 so that the stars would no longer target a stealthed opponent. The AE splash from a star hitting another target will contine to take a stealther out of stealth. Maaven's answer was technically correct. It isn't a bug in that we changed the stealth code.The change to Starfall wasn't intended so we're trying to decide if we want to change it back or leave it in its current form. I'm not sure the world will end either way, but I wanted to provide an update since it was a bit of a head scratcher. (Source)

Hunter (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Autoshot not casting during Volley
That is by design. Even if it wasn't by design, the current implementation is a good idea because Volley does so much damage now. (Source)

Cat pet DPS nerfed and exotic pets balance
We made a big pass on pet dps for 3.0.3 so I'm not sure if your tests are reflecting those changes or not. Cats are still a good dps pet, but they shouldn't flat out beat every exotic. The exotic balance is obviously tricky. BM of all hunters shouldn't be forced to only be able to pick from the relatively small pool of exotic pets. (Source)

Disengage wasting the cooldown/mana when rooted
Is this in 3.0.3 (the most recent patch)? We actually made a change to prevent it from using the mana. You just get a "Can't do that" error if rooted. Can anyone confirm? (Source)

Mage (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Developer Q&A (Source)
1) You fixed Deep Wounds, where is our Ignite fix?
Unfortunately, they are apples and oranges with regard to fixes. Ignite sometimes munching charges has a lot to do with Internet lag. We just can't always tell when one hit lands a split second before another one. We are still working on it though because it's a cool talent. I know I have personally answered this question many times, so I'm surprised you couldn't find that answer.

2) You are spending resources to make Disengage work, where is our Blink fix?
If we can fix the problem with slopes and minor obstructions that will apply to both talents. Disengage has some additional bugs that Blink doesn't have.

3) What's going on with Spirit? It's still a throw away stat.
Strength is a throw away stat. Spirit benefits you, just not as much as you'd like. We're talking a lot about all of the "converts one stat into another talents." Many of those were implemented to solve problems with different specs sharing gear. We're not sure we want to go down the road of providing talents to convert every second tier stat into a primary stat. That list would get long.

4) What's going on with Arcane? Are we going to get a new rotation because we're perceived to be OP in PvP?
We would like to give you a new rotation mostly because Arcane Blast doesn't really work in PvE and because the PvP "rotation" seems to be: something -> something -> bored -> ARCANE BARRAGE!

On the OP issue, here is one of those times where people are calling for nerfs but we don't believe it's a problem. To everyone who thinks we knee jerk based on QQ posts, here is a case where that's not happening.

5) What's going on with Frost? Are we going to see some shatter combos?
You have some. If you mean in PvE, we would like to provide some. The two things standing in our way at the moment are: 1) Frost PvE dps is already high, so we would have to nerf it in order to build it back up through combos (which seems to be fine with a lot of Frost mages, but isn't the highest priority ATM because the issue is "not interesting enough" instead of "broken"), and 2) Frost Bolt just does more damage than Ice Lance. If we buff Ice Lance, then PvP shatters are too high. So we need to rebuild the spells and talents to make the whole thing work -- it's not an easy fix. But it's something we want to do.

I know we have neglected the beta forums. Beta is ending soon and I thought it was more important to try and invest a little energy in getting these role forums off to a good start.

2) "NOOBS PLAY RETADINS AND HUNTARDS..." (of course, I'm paraphrasing)... "AND THERE ARE MORE NOOBS THAN MAGES."
The real reason has to do with the fact that we changed paladin and hunter mechanics quite a bit, so they are understandably going to require more iteration. But I try as a rule not to pay attention to "who has gotten the most attention" issues. That's just a losing battle for me.

Paladin (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Sheath of Light
Sheathe was designed to let Ret make use of the fact that, yanno, the spec actually is part of a healing class. But we can totally understand why a talent designed for someone with low healing stats that isn't healing a lot would be attractive to someone with high healing stats that did heal a lot. (Source)

Sanctified Wrath is not giving us the "bypasses 50% of damage reducing effects" effect when we pop AW. It hasn't been since the 3.0.3 patch.
We think we accidentally broke this effect. It wasn't an intentional nerf, but we're still looking into it. [...] Update: We did break it. We should be able to hotfix this soon. (Source)

Rogue (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Starfall and rogues
So this took some digging but apparently there was a change to stealth in between 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 so that the stars would no longer target a stealthed opponent. The AE splash from a star hitting another target will contine to take a stealther out of stealth. Maaven's answer was technically correct. It isn't a bug in that we changed the stealth code.The change to Starfall wasn't intended so we're trying to decide if we want to change it back or leave it in its current form. I'm not sure the world will end either way, but I wanted to provide an update since it was a bit of a head scratcher. (Source)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Elemental Shaman balance at lvl 70
Fun is very relative. I think shamans are fun now. Obviously other players may disagree. I think the part where shamans aren't as fun is actually at low level when you don't have a lot of spells and are forced to either slowly drop your totems every fight or just live without them.

I think the shaman is definitely playable now. The class doesn't crash your client when you play one and if your damage is low at all, it certainly isn't at 50% of other specs.

Being a good raid member now (and at 60) is important to us, but far, far less important than at 80. The number of raids being done at levels less than max is a trivial number and we would be doing a disservice to most of our customers if we spent too much effort to solve such edge cases. I also think there would be howls of protest if we announced we were slipping LK in order to address balance concerns at 60 and 70. Everyone knows Lich King is going to ship next week. We tried to give you plenty of fun things to do (achievements, raiding EZ mode, zombies) since some of the class changes to prepare for LK started going in several weeks ago. (Source)

[Shadovv]

Hooray for CoH nerf, I will feel useful again

[Volcano]

In the elemental shaman post where you try to make us think they're all fine, and atleast they're not 50% lower in dps than others specs, well that's a great thing isn't it!?
Anyways will get to the point I had to clarify, you typed exactly these words, we gave you plenty of fun things to do such as: (achievements, raiding EZ mode, zombies)

Raiding "ez" mode aint fun.
Neither is achievements, they're basically a waste of time.
Zombie event were just a mess with crashes, you guys had a big problem with some wierd kind of lag when you were a zombie you probably were too lazy to solve.

[Ufalah]

Druid Priest Shaman
Circle of Healing / Wild Growth / Chain Heal
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We're less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it's not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you'd also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons.

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications -- one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don't want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

Didn't you try this before ?
Yeah, we did. We thought it would feel like a big nerf and changed our minds. But seeing the state of healing at 80 makes us think it might be the right call again. When AE healing is so prominent, it also makes specs without great AE heals (Holy paladins and Disc priests) feel uselss.

Assume that we would lower Wild Growth by the same proportion as Circle of Healing. The exact numbers aren't as important to this discussion as the concept that you can't hit the button whenever you want. (Source)

Another humorous post. GG Holy Paladins. Other classes have more buttons and devs are giving them attention in case their raiding is boring. Have they EVER raided as a holy paladin? I mean with downranking for HL out of the picture I'm not even using rank 4 to keep Light's Grace up. Oh well. I love my pally even if he only has 1 heal per release.

[Mahtamori]

I hit the source on the Paladin Sheathe of Light quote, and it seems people still don't understand how Sheathe of Light HOT works. While it's awesome for a pocket-healer in a raid (if the Paladin has time to change gear, since a Ret geared Paladin won't be able to cast a meaningful amount of heals to be remotely useful in raids), it's not necessarily a benefit at all in pure healing.
The more you crit the worse the talent get. Assuming 100% crit rate, and Sheathe of Light is just a talent sink for a GCD-to-GCD healing Paladin (since it'll never tick).

(Unless they changed it prior to patch 3 on Live)

[djprada]

I wish Iwould know for sure if WOTLK will be available for download on game release. It would save me a lot of time and driving.

[Rilgon]

I love how unbelievably out of touch Blizzard is regarding professions. Tailoring and Engineering are essentially useless in Wrath. :

[Wilshire153]

pft arcane barrage, you might as well let me have Starfire on instant cast with a cd.

[Octopus]

Give sheath of light to holy paladins.

[spec]

I love how unbelievably out of touch Blizzard is regarding professions. Tailoring and Engineering are essentially useless in Wrath. :

Theyre not out of touch, theyre just changing the games audience.

Like or lump it, blizzard now aims this game at the casual player, theyve removed any difficult or slightly challenging aspects of the game out. Spellpower change / all professions BoE / class homogenisation, all contributing to it.

Its a shame, i really thought WoW was great how it was, instead theyre just trying to make it easier, and collect in some more cash

slightly offtopic there, but i needed to QQ

[Koffie]

Damn, I wish I could reply about the couldown on CoH etc they are intendin to do (some to the druid one). At this moment, as a healing priest, I use CoH a lot of times (could be too much) but Blizzard is telling me now I need to use other spells. OK, sure thats nice but greater heal then? If I ever see a target low on health I cast it but at the time it almost going to land a shaman chainheal, or a spamhealing paladin already landed enough heals to get him back up. Sure we have a flashheal but that is very mana intensive to get people up in health, then we have our imba shield (was imba at MC time) but these days its almost none usable becouse one hit of a target will be more damage most time then the shield will prevent. Our PoM is nice but I have seen that a target is been killed before taking affect (atleast was told to me) and you cant predict where the charges are going. Then our renew, finally a nice spell.
Our two last changes to get people up are lightwell but like a lot of people already telling, why should a dps think about anything different then dps. They simple will not use it.
And last Prayer of Healing: Only our own group and long castingtime for a lot of mana.

If I see it then raidleaders can simple get some shadowpriests in for buffing, paladins in becouse of faster healing then a priest will ever be for lots of damage so you can write of priests as healers. I would even take a druid in aboce a priest simple becouse of innervate and combatress. Also he is way more manaefficient then a priest will be. I am pure negative probably but a couldown of 6 seconds on CoH without a spell between flashheal and greater heal is killing priests. Get us a spell that is as manaefficient and fast enough so we can spam that one (even getting us more a paladin status ). Now I realy need to get only haste and crit these days with the change of Holy Concentrate. Now only crit will be meaningfull

[Killroy]

What about arenas, does he mean ratings will be wiped on tuesday 11th november or tuesday 18th november?
couse i still miss 157 arena points for s4 2h, ty if you help me out )

[Mahtamori]

... or a spamhealing paladin already landed enough heals to get him back up...

Take all healing spells that a Priest has. Then remove everything that isn't single target direct heal. You've got two spells left. That's the Paladin's arsenal.

If he can do it with two spells, you can do it with those two spells and the myriad of extra spells you get. Mana issues aside, be pro-active (start heal before they need it) and don't rely on spammable AOE to get people up.

[sceptre]

well im only 200 or so points away from brutal head and already bought the gems n shit lol

im guessing lots of ppl have been stocking points for a certain item and then blam end of the week telling us that points are not gonna be added this week and teams are scraped n shit i mean cmon lol.


:-\

[Nubs]

The new arenas are available now in ranked play, so either the blue missed his typo or the blue is incredibly misinformed.

[jjthorne]

and compare the paladins 'Beacon of Light' to the 'Guardian Spirit' the BoL last 1 minute, the GS last 10 seconds, the BoL heals the Beacon for 100% of any healing spell cast by the paladin withing that time, the GS increase any heals cast by the priest by 40% onto that target and that GS stops the target from dying, so yes as a top tire talent, i can say apart from the time limit they balance out, apart from the GS is on the Holy tree with the CoH and if the CoH is getting a cooldown on it, the GS would be better on the Disc tree which is more targeted towards tank healing where the Holy tree is more targeted towards group healing.

[Jeeb]

CoH

Fairly concerned about the CoH nerf myself, ran so many raids recently and yes CoH was doing too good of a job but only when the rest of the healers were basically doing the job for me. What i mean is due to the nerfs in raids atm the fights just aren't as healing intensive (apart from raid dmg) so we can run around like a idiot spamming CoH, but this is ONLY when there are already too many healers. Other raids when i had to keep a close eye on the MT/OT and using predictive heals then CoH was doing its job i can only presume as was intended. Only accounting for 20% of my healing. So when we finally get to 80 and i presume raids will be harder (so i hope lol) we wont have this great heal.

Better sum this up

-Raids are easy atm less dmg and a lot less health
-The reason CoH is doing well now is because we as healers are overgearing instances and can afford the mana and time to not be keeping a close eye on the tanks
-In LK CoH looks to be less powerful anyway with only a small increase in rank and we all know CoH has a low coefficient (not sure exact numbers soz)
-Helaers wont be able to spam CoH in LK anyways not throuhout the fight or we'l go oom and tanks will die
-If a nerf is indeed needed wait til lvl 80 maybe then probably be a good idea to take away the smart heal aspect if any nerf is intended.
-Imagine trying to heal throught the spirit bolts in ZA, raid dmg comes in fast i throw 1 CoH prob increases health by 10% meanwhile spirit bolts is still being cast, i know i wont be sitting for 6secs waiting and using other spells but if CoH wasn't intended for this sort of situation what is it intended for it doesn't heal much that why its spammable and its fairly mana costly to spam it, probably about 15secs of spamming and oom. I was using CoH to keep every1 up in ZA yesterday and CoH only just keeps every up, their health still drops during spirit bolts

excuse my rant but yes i am agreeing its being abused atm but i dont think this will be the case come progressive raids when the fights are more about endurance preserving mana and needed to keep a close eye on tanks

[Jukaï]

Hooray for CoH nerf, I will feel useful again

So I get to spam my underachieving, unsufficient and nerfed Lifebloom a lot more over again, and Priests have a entire talent tree turned useless.

Thank you, Shamans.

: : :

Edit: I don't even get the ludicrous high cooldown they are suggesting, or the lack of feedback about this number either. *If* they wish to slap a cooldown on it, make it the same as the casting time of Chain Heal, since people love to compare (read: whine about) all AoE heals no matter their function/role.

So, not six but a three second cooldown.

[cyzzie]

whats the download good for? as far as i can see you still cannot "buy" Burning Crusade,
only download it ... which means i still need the cd key / go out to shop it

or am i seeing something wrong?

[Razulath]

So its ok that paladins use 1 maby 2 heals and shamans using 1. But Druid and priests have to use 6 different heals before Devs are happy?

Ok I know, shamans and paladins gets confused if they have to change heals and target, better for them to just press one button the entire time, right. Imo, change it so paladins and shamans gets more heals instead

Yesterday in swp i had: 40% WG, 40% LB and 20% HT. Is that so bad?