Dual specialization and itemization
I think that is a valid point. You can come up with a lot of reasons why players might want more than two specs. However this is a new feature for us and we need to see what actually happens to the game as a result before we go nuts. Down below you mention the problem of casters rolling on items without hit and a lot of spirit just because it fits the criteria of ZOMG PURP + SPELLPOWER. Now imagine that someone wants to roll on an item because one of their many specs (assume for the sake of argument that they are all legitimately used) can use it. The whole "I guess I can use that for an offspec" becomes a much bigger deal. (
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Healer UI improvements
I think there is a lot we can do to improve the default UI especially for healers. It won't solve every problem for players who use something Grid and Clique, but it can be a lot better. Just showing buffs and debuffs on the raid UI would be a nice improvement. There is a lot we can do here. (
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Hit cap in WotLK
We didn't put as much hit on gear as we did in Burning Crusade as it was frustrating for players who were already at cap to see tons of gear with more hit on it. There is plenty of hit gear, however. You'll need to do some research on where it drops, and if you're not at hit cap when you enter a raid (with precision you'll need 14% against raid bosses), use food and elixirs to compensate. (
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"Bring the Player Not the Class" and PVP
We would love to get that mantra to be more meaningful in PvP. It's just a lot harder. That is still the goal, but no, I do not think we are there yet. (
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PvP and burst damage
I do not have a great deal of information for you at this point, but I can say we do share the concern specifically regarding burst damage in PvP. There is much discussion amongst the developers about PvP game play at this point. We're going to see how people fare once battles are more saturated with resilience, however, we are well aware this may not fully address the issue. (
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Off-hand slot disparity
Paladins, druids and death knights are designed around the fact that they don't have the stat allocation on a gun (or a shield in some cases) available.
We typically design Idols et al. without say Strength or Stam on them because we don't want them to just be guns with different art that you can't shoot.
If in the overall picture a class or spec is gimped compared to others who fill their same role, then that is a problem. But you can't just lift any single piece out of the whole package and scrutinize it. In those cases we almost certainly have implemented a difference on purpose. It is one of the things you have to do to justify having multiple classes. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Frost Presence armor bonus
Yes, the nerf to druid affects Frost Presence. When we buffed Frost Presence, we increased it above and beyond what was needed to offset IBF and Bone Shield in order to compensate for this change.
Specifically, items with bonus armor (rings, trinkets, necklaces and sometimes capes) do not have their armor multiplied by Frost Presence. Most of your armor comes from good old plate, which never has bonus armor, and thus is always multiplied by the full amount. (
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Druid (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Feral gear changes in 3.0.8
Feral druids were the poster child for normalization. You were dependent on relatively few drops -- if you were lucky, there were 1 or 2 feral staves per raid tier. Get those and you are happy. Fail to get them and you risk losing your spot. In many cases it isn't even an issue of optimization. Ferals couldn't pick up a tanking sword or rogue dagger as a reasonable backup if the staff didn't drop. You are really dependent on a random number generator to be good at what you do.
So what are the options to introduce more of those items?
Simply inflating the loot tables doesn't fix anything. Either we just drop more Feral loot than normal (which ends up frustrating everyone else and makes druids easy to gear up) or we just drop more loot for everyone on every boss (which makes everyone too easy to gear up). Having a dozen armor rings and staves per tier really doesn't do anything to the problem.
Requiring ferals to persue badge or PvP loot (to the exclusion of random drops) also feels lame. You finally kill Kael or Illidan and get... more badges.
These were not strictly feral issues. Several specs and classes had similar problems, especially as we designed gear that was more and more optimized for the particular stats that most benefit you.
Ultimately, we thought the best solution was to be able to have more players benefit from the same loot. The easy way out would have been to make e.g. all tanks care about the same gear, but at some point we think that leads to the only difference between playing a druid and a warrior what art you see. Now when you roll a druid you care about different gear than other tanks do, but it is still gear that is readily available without having to put it all on rep or badge vendors.
We're not completely done with how feral gear works. (As a minor example, we did just allow druids to use polearms.) We have some other ideas to make collecting pieces more interesting than just whatever the melee leather for your current tier happens to be. (
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Nourish
One of the cool things about Resto is there are so many different options to use depending on the situation. The downside is it risks making the niche for some abilities too small.
We think there is some validity to the notion that Nourish is not propped up enough by talents. It will also be getting a glyph at some point. (
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Tanking idols
I think I said recently that we recognized that we needed to add a few more idol options for bear tanking. (
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Shaman (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Windfury
A player asked at Blizzcon if we would consider removing the internal cooldown on Windfury. We honored that request and did consider it, but we concluded Enhancement dps would shoot throught the roof. So I'm sorry, but we aren't going to make that change at this time. We might consider it in the future as part of a series of changes that would nerf Enhancement dps in other ways to justify the WF change. (
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Elemental changes
Shamanism wasn't intended to increase Elemental's damage as much as it was damage scaling. You probably won't notice a big difference unless you are in a lot of Naxx 25 level gear.
Elemental Oath, Elemental Mastery and the Lightning Bolt glyph were intended to increase Elemental dps however. Don't discount the clearcasting portion of Elemental Oath.
We're looking at Flame Shock. Keep in mind that even if it doesn't compete with Lightning spam against static targets like Patch (and we're not even convinced that is the case), there are very few fights like Patch and anytime you need to shoot and scoot, Flame Shock looks like a pretty nice button. (
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Upcoming Elemental changes
Unrelenting Storm and Storm Earth and Fire will both become three point talents, so that should free up a few talent points for you. The new talent will improve damage on lightning bolt and lava burst, so it's one you'll want to take as an elemental shaman. You should be able to grab that talent and still place 14-pnts in enhancement. I'm curious where else in elemental you're spending your talents. (
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Warlock (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Upcoming warlock changes
Look, I know you’re impatient. I would be too. It’s totally understandable. We do have changes in store for warlocks. Changing shards is one of them, of which the new summoning mechanic is but a very early first step. (
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