Instance Performance, Blue posts, IE Hotfix

[Boubouille]

Instance Performance

We are aware that players on some realms may experience performance issues mainly in instances during peak playing times. This is largely due to the very high number of players in instances, and notably affects Naxxramas the most.

Please be assured that we are working on optimisations to address the issues, and will keep you updated on the progress.

Blue posts

PvP Gear Models
The look of the sets will improve as the seasons continue. If we started the first sets of PvP gear with asteroids orbiting the shoulders, in a couple seasons you'd be wearing Thrall on your head.

Under the current design philosophy, the idea is that in PvE you're killing very rare and challenging creatures of Azeroth, while in PvP you're receiving gear from the crafters (so to speak) of your faction to get you battle-ready. Chances are you're going to be given the gear that'll get the job done rather than the gear that has to be constructed entirely out of the nipples of a 7,000 year-old dragon. (Source)

PvP Gear and arena points/rating requirements
The highest-quality PvP gear is obtained via the arena system. Nothing has changed in that regard. Those who choose to focus on battlegrounds for all PvP engagement still have access to good-quality PvP items. Under the current functionality though, the arena system provides a much better measurement of skill over time investment than battlegrounds. With that being said, we are working to develop a better system for measuring performance in battlegrounds. We have been saying this since Wrath beta, however, we have no additional information to provide at this point.

The guy playing AFKave day in, day out should not have access to the same gear as the guy with a 2000 arena rating. This is mostly our fault and we're working on a better system for rewarding contribution in battlegrounds. (Source)

Level 70 PvP Gear missing
It was not removed. We're aware of the issue of this gear being currently unavailable and plan to make them available for purchase again in the near future. I don't have an exact time frame for you right now. (Source)

Healer shortage
If there is a healer shortage at all, I expect it is because many players are still questing. Even if they are 80, there are a ton of quests in Icecrown, a lot of dailies, and things like Hodir rep to work on. While healing specs are probably better able to solo than they were in BC, we still don't pretend they have all the damage and tools of a dps-focused character.

I also like to think that we made the dps-specs of priests, paladins, druids and shamans all a little more viable and fun to play than they used to be, so some healers may be trying those out. (Source)

Healing redesign
As I have frequently opined, healers who don't like healing is kind of a tough problem to solve.

There are certainly healers who do like healing. That's why they play the game. For them watching health bars IS enjoying the game. We don't want to pull what they enjoy out of the game (at least without a very good reason). The question is are there enough of those players? If they are 1 in 100, then it's a problem.

As I have also said, this is something we are spending a lot of effort to work on, but it is emphatically not the kind of change where a couple of simple tweaks get you there. (Source)

Winter Veil Gifts
There are some quests you can do by which you can receive gifts, but the gifts under the trees won't be available to open until the 25th. No peeking either! The Feast of Winter Veil doesn't end until the 1st (midnight) of January. Hopefully, that will give everyone a chance to get a gift. If not, just think of all the joy you get of visiting your family and friends! (Source)

Fire Seed
Fire Seed is being changed to a gray item, its effect has been removed. (Source)

Druid (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Nourish
I think you should take a harder look at Nourish. We received so much feedback on Nourish that I was sort of going along with the conventional wisdom that Nourish didn't fill a large enough role. Since then a few druids have set me straight. It can be a really amazing spell.

Glyphed Regrowth is also a really good spell, but it is still a hot -- it doesn't get the health out to the target as fast as Nourish.

If you're a big (glyphed) Healing Touch fan, then I can see how you might use it instead of Nourish, especially if you run heroics a lot (and so are filling all of the healing roles yourself). But if I was taking any button off of my bar for raiding, it would be HT and not Nourish.

When Nourish came up in beta, some druids asked "Why would I use Nourish when I have Regrowth?" The answer is that Regrowth is an amazing spell (finally), but it's not a flash heal. (Source)

Paladin (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Judgements Bug
Keep looking. We will too. (Source)

Judgement of Light
One of the changes in 3.0.8 that we may or may not have announced is that we changed Judgment of Light to do no threat in order to fix some of this seemingly random behavior. We aren't trying to nerf Prot paladin threat overall with this change.

The topic came up again recently when Protadin OTs were accidentally pulling off the MT with huge threat spikes while tanking adds etc. (Source)

Priest (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Glyph of Dispel nerf
The glyph was just overpowered. It was meant to be a neat little bonus when you dispelled someone, not a new way to spam heals or to make someone really, really pay for putting a debuff on one of your guys. (Source)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Egg of Mortal Essence not procing from Healing Stream Totem
It won't proc off of items and Healing Stream is a totem. Bad things would happen if it proc'd off of items.

It should work fine with all your other heals. (Source)

Serious security flaw found in IE
A vulnerability has been discovered and the 27% of users of this site using Internet Explorer should probably install this hotfix as soon as possible.

From BBC.co.uk
The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it. Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of the world's computer users.

"Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser. Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.

Browser bait
"In this case, hackers found the hole before Microsoft did," said Rick Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro. "This is never a good thing."

As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since the vulnerability was discovered, he said.

"What we've seen from the exploit so far is it stealing game passwords, but it's inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals," he said. "It's just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs."

"The message needs to get out that this malicious code can be planted on any web site, so simple careful browsing isn't enough."


New Fan Art
The Blizzard Fan Art Section has been updated with new artwork.

[lu]

naxx lags are insane atm >

[Steeve]

Wait wait wait, your tell me people still use IE? WTF

www.mozilla.org

[thescreensavers]

FF3 all the way

[hurtgen]

Blue posts
[blizzquote]PvP Gear Models

Under the current design philosophy, the idea is that in PvE you're killing very rare and challenging creatures of Azeroth, while in PvP you're receiving gear from the crafters (so to speak) of your faction to get you battle-ready. Chances are you're going to be given the gear that'll get the job done rather than the gear that has to be constructed entirely out of the nipples of a 7,000 year-old dragon. (Source)

Made me actually giggle. RP'ers are all going, ''ahh yes, that makes perfect sense now''

but its no excuse for those shaman shoulders. dear lord.

[Bainz]

Starting to use Mozilla now.
Don't laugh.

I suppose it would be wise to change my passwords?

[Laihendi]

Thank you for posting the security warning here. Today at school this kid at school was telling me about how it wasn't safe to use IE anymore, and I was all "Yeah, ok w/e" because I mean, honestly... who talks about that at school lol. Anyways, now I realize the significance of what he said

Good thing I don't use IE anyways but it seems like most people do. Btw Bainz change your passwords.

[Bainz]

Changed via Mozilla.

[Darksoldierr]

If you feel, you got too many tanks nowdays its becouse 4 class can tank, and prot / feral / frost spec isn't even needed nowdays to the easy mode "heroic" instances.

About te pvp gear looks like, just one word, pathetic, even t4 was nicer. Its like Blizzard run out of the ppl, whos work on designs, 2 leveling gear skin, 1 random lvl 80 epic gear skin for evry armor type, weird looking remaked t3, and now "imba" set from "crafters" for battle, haha , whats next?

"7,000 year-old dragon" oh, sorry, hadn't time to notice it, he died too fast :<

[Schussel]

and yet still nothing for the locks */mourn*

[MagicSN]

Hmmm, have to admit, Tank shortage seems worse to me than healer shortage. Though might be due to
my guild having many active healers. Looking PUG it is mostly "3 DD looking for tank+healer", true. Though
tank-search seems to me the worst part of it. And in the LFG-Tool you usually find tons of DD's (and some
tanks ONLY for Utgarde Tower - often many who cannot manage the harpune boss encounter). And half
of the tanks you find are deathknights with 20k life in frost-stance who have too little experience to do
decent tanking Originally wanted to level my DK DD as primary alt - now I am going to level my Paladin
tank instead as primary alt...

It seems to me though that "we made the DD Spec a little too attractive" is an understatement. It seems to me that 90% at least of Paladins you encounter are DD these days. Not much difference for Shamans. Neither for Druids. And many peole who played Warrior tank on TBC seem to play Fury now, it seems to me.

[Deleted]

Oh my, a security hole in IE, didn't see that coming.

[Qwios]

My server doesn't have a healer shortage, we do have a shaman shortage though. We seemed to have carried over just 1 shaman from our TBC raid team, and we have a noob social member enhancement shaman; and those two show up like once a week.

Someone should tell the BBC that those folks that are stealing game passwords are actually criminals in their own right.

[Melanie]

Hilarious stuff about the gear looks

[Deleted]

The look of the sets will improve as the seasons continue. If we started the first sets of PvP gear with asteroids orbiting the shoulders, in a couple seasons you'd be wearing Thrall on your head


I lolled

[spinlolz]

Ok, I've been lurking mmoc for a long time, but I just had to register to say this:
STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER YOU TWATS

seriously, just stop.

[jkw]

I didn't know Internet Explorer still existed? IE is so the 90's. And if someone still uses it, suite yourself if you get hacked, scammed, banned, your entire bank gets emptied, you get all your family photos exchanged for gnome porn pics, all your documents gets exchanged by ASCII cartoons, you loose 50% of your computers performance bla blah bla blah.

What I want to say is: Do NOT use Internet Explorer.

[Sarevokcz]

When was the last time I used IE? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... Damn. I honestly can't remember.

when i was downloading opera after formating disks and forgot upload opera istaller on external HD

[generex]

Fire Seed
Fire Seed is being changed to a gray item, its effect has been removed. (Source)

...why?! :'(

Seriously, I was so happy to have something else than the "useful" 2k-HoT for raiding of herbalism, as tailoring already doesn't really help me...

[Naargaar]

I dont know if I can trust their word that theyre working on the lag if they cant even spell optimization properly.

Have no fear friend, that is from the European forums, so is spelt quite correctly. We do not have as much love for the letter 'Z' as you lovely American chaps.

As for Lag, 25 man Sath last night was comedy, beyond comedy. Last 10% was like stop motion. Hope it gets fixed soon.