Lag in Naxxramas / Patch 3.0.8 "imminent" (See how I used quotes?)
Unfortunately, the optimizations we are prepared to make in order to reduce latency and disconnections in Naxxrammas cannot be added in a hotfix. A patch is required. I'm unable to provide a release date for the next minor content patch including these optimizations, but I'd wager it's imminent. (
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Enchant Weapon - Titanguard removed from Patch 3.0.8 (
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Had this enchant gone live it would have become THE enchant for nearly all tanks. It would not have been an interesting choice. We would have had to keep introducing higher tiers of the same enchant, or else players would just keep using this version for perpetuity. We put Stamina already on many items. We don't think your weapon needs one as well. I received messages from several tanks for very prominent guilds asking us to please not go forward with this enchant. They understood why it was bad for the game.
Death knights have access to superior enchants in part because they do not have a shield or ranged weapon slot and the stats provided by those items.
The PTR is for testing. If you find yourself frustrated that things change between the PTR and live, I would suggest you stop paying attention to the PTR notes. Even if a change like this had already gone live, we probably would have changed it anyway. We did not like what this enchant would have done for the game. (
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Future tanking weapon enchants
We'd like to add more interesting tanking weapon enchants, but have to be very careful not to make them fall into the same problem as Titanguard. Ideally we would like to be able to design encounters without the assumption that every tank has X on their blade. It would be nice if even putting something on your weapon to increase damage (and therefore threat) felt like a viable alternative. (
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PvE - Monsters Hit box / Attack range
There are some mobs, and Grobbulus is an example, where there was disagreement in the data between the attack range of the creature and the size of its hit box. This caused the creature to constantly readjust its position. This bug has been fixed in 3.0.8. It might not solve every situation where the behavior your described is occuring, but it should certainly help. (
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Achievement - Collect 100 Mounts
Yes, we like mounts and more will be added in the future making an achievement like mount collecting easier to obtain. (
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RNG Stuns in PvP
Yes, we instituted those random procs on purpose. We knew what we were doing. Sand gnomes did not sneak in and make the changes for us. Upon reflection, and with more player feedback, we have come to the conclusion that it was the wrong decision. Originally we thought getting rid of the mace spec stun was sufficient. Now we think random stuns are probably not good for the game across the board. You don't need to ask about individual talents or spells. If it is a random chance to stun attached to another spell or ability, chances are we will phase it out.
On RNG: As I have said, we are not trying to remove RNG from the game. If your chance to crit is less than 100% and something happens when you crit, then congrats, there is RNG in your Arena. But we don't want RNG to dominate skill and other factors. Randomly proc'd stuns, like the recent changes to the dispel system, are something that crossed the line. (
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Raid instance difficulty and scaling
I think the concern is because we were slow to fix some balance problems in the past so players are concerned that if we don't fix the problem now that they will be dealing with it for many tiers to come. It is a totally valid response given our history, but we are making a big effort to make changes in a more timely manner.
BC launched with more raid content, but I think it's fair to say that it required a lot of polishing after we shipped. Balance was not great. We had to change some item stats. I think the SSC trash respawned in 45 minutes or something.
We designed the current content to be easy and I think we were pretty up front about that before ship. While we can all laugh about Karazhan being srs bzns now, at the time a lot of players wiped on the boney horses and never went back. That's a shame because it was a cool instance and a gateway to a lot of additional raid content. Some of the best moments in WoW occur in these raids. You see unique art (and hear unique music!), scripted events and some amazing lore moments. It makes me sad to think of players who will never even step foot in Naxx. But that doesn't mean all of our raid content needs to be at the introductory level. If you're looking for a challenge, I suspect you will find it in Ulduar.
We know some players can chew through content pretty quickly. It is one of the biggest challenges of MMO development to provide enough content. Players always want more. Always. (
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Threat generation in WotLK
We wanted to make threat easier to manage, especially at earlier tiers of content. However threat generation is still the responsibility of the tank as well as the rest of the group. If your tank has trouble with threat generation, then you may run into encounters where you can't beat the timer.
It is only my opinion, and some groups can still make it work, but often the tanks complaining that they can't hold aggro or always asking the dps to slow down are the ones who choose gear and talents solely for survivability over threat-generation and try and argue that they don't care how terrible their own dps is. (
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Stamina enchants for tanks
There are already stamina enchants on many pieces of gear. Casters can go that route of stacking spellpower on as much gear as possible, but if they ignore int and mana regen, that spellpower will be for naught. With tanks, we have found that given the choice between stamina and anything else (assuming you are comparing things of equivalent level) stamina will always win. One of the few enchants where you actually have a decison would be replaced by yet another stamina enchant. I am pretty confident the same thing would happen with a stamina to cloak enchant.
Here is the player's point of view:
Ah, an enchant for my weapon. That will help me survive and help out my healers, therefore making me a slightly better tank. Maybe I'll be slightly better prepared for KT or Sarth + 3 or Ulduar. Awesome.
Except... here is the developer's point of view: Okay, we just buffed every tank in the game by 750 health. That means we now have to make every mob hit slightly harder to compensate. Otherwise we are just buffing tank survivability for no reason. The net effect to you would be pretty negligible in the long run, while any tank who chose not to put stamina on his or her weapon would suddenly be at a disadvantage.
Pet balance and survavibility
It's nearly impossible to make an AI-controlled pet smart enough to always do the right things especially in encounters as complicated as ours. We try to work around that by letting the pet survive when it does the wrong thing (staying out during Saph deep breaths for example).
It may be that for specs like BM (and Demonology) that the pet just too high a percent of overall damage. When the pet does well, you do very well, but when the pet suffers, you suffer too much as well, so that your success hinges a lot more on encounter design. If we nerfed the pet damage, we would buff the character's of course.
Another idea some players have advocated lately is to prevent the pet from getting buffed at all, but let it scale better from buffs on the player. This removes some of the inconsistencies where the pet can't benefit from buffs properly. We don't currently have the technology to do that, but it is something we are exploring. (
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Healer UI
I have mentioned our UI in a couple of threads. To briefly reiterate, some players just like managing mods, which is why we support it. But you should be able to heal a raid without a mod. I have done it, but it should be easier than it is. Incorporating more useful tools into the default UI without overcomplicating it is something we are definitely interested in. An example I use a lot is the ability to view buffs and debuffs on a target at once. For say a Resto druid healing Maexxna who is also doing Abolish Poison, it can be frustrating not to see both. (
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[US] New PvE Realm - Borean Tundra
We have opened a brand new PvE realm, Borean Tundra, for those players looking for a fresh start! As a fresh realm it will not be open to paid character transfers or Death Knight character creation (unless a player reaches level 55 with another character on this realm) for three months, and in-game events like the opening of Ahn’Qiraj will be waiting for players to be completed. This realm will be part of the Emberstorm battlegroup and set to the Central timezone. (
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[US] PvE and RP Free Character Moves
This thread will contain information on the free character moves to and from PvE and RP realms we currently have available to assist in population dispersal. In the event that these realms meet our transfer goals before the scheduled end date, the transfers to these realms will be disabled. We highly recommend that if you are planning to transfer that you do so at your earliest convenience. No characters will be eligible for these free moves once the transfers have been closed.
You can begin your transfer by visiting the Character Move page located here:
https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/character-move.html
These free characters moves are being offered to brand new realms. Players on the realms listed below have the option of moving characters to Winterhoof (PvE) or Wyrmrest Accord (RPPvE). Both realms belong to the Emberstorm battlegroup and are in the pacific timezone.
Please note that the RP rule set applies to Wyrmrest Accord and will be enforced. Only players who are interested in a role-play environment are encouraged to move to this realm. For more information on RP policies, please refer to the following:
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=20458
These transfers are scheduled to close on Friday, January 23, at 9:00 pm PST provided our transfer goals are not reached prior to this time.
Source - Aggramar (Alliance Transfers Only), Alleria (Alliance Transfers Only), Area 52, Argent Dawn, Azjol-Nerub, Blackhand, , Bloodhoof, Cenarion Circle, Cenarius, Dalaran, Doomhammer, Dragonblight, Earthen Ring, Emerald Dream, Feathermoon, Garona (Alliance Transfers Only), Garrosh (Free Moves to Wyrmrest Accord Only), Hellscream, Icecrown, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Moon Guard, Silvermoon, Twisting Nether, Whisperwind, Zul'jin
Destination - Winterhoof (PvE), Wyrmrest Accord (RPPvE)
For a complete list of free character move options to and from PvP realms, please refer to the following:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14318706743&sid=1
[US] Drak'tharon and Tortheldrin realms
In the short term, our plan is to allow free character moves from Drak'Tharon and Tortheldrin to compensate for the fact that our free character move goals to these realms were exceeded before we shut them down. We do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused players on both realms. It is never our intention to lower the queues of other realms by forcing queues upon previously-low population realms. I do not at this time have a time frame for the opening of free character moves from these two realms, and will get back to you as soon as possible when I have more to provide. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Defense Sigil and Enchant
We added that sigil and enchant because death knights had difficulty reaching the defense "cap" in part because they don't have shields, ranged weapons or often tanking weapons. A DK who gears solely for survivability in this way is probably also going to have threat problems. Part of the reason we make tanks have to manage threat is so their gear choices aren't always as simple as "whatever gives me the best survivability." (
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Free respec in 3.0.8?
We normally only offer respecs to classes that have some significant changes in talent locations and costs. At this point there is no plan to allow for free respecs for death knights. (
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Howling Blast cooldown on 3.0.8 PTRs
Howling Blast was designed for AE dps, for which it was doing too much damage without a cooldown. We totally understand the concern about having a cooldown being awkward to work along with rune cooldowns, which is why we removed it. But that change made the spell too powerful, as we feared.
We will continue to iterate on the design and the ultimate goal is to remove the cooldown. There are some ways we can reign in the damage (such as a smaller AE cap or the damage falling off after the initial target) that will take some more time and testing to implement.
The DK is a new class, and while it is working well overall, you can expect to see some iteration on it compared to the classes that have been tested and upon which players have experimented for four years. (
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Druid (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Starfall intended use
As I said, Starfall is a non-channeled AE. You can Hurricane and Starfall at the same time for instance. It is a dps increase over not pushing the button given that you can do other things while the damage is going off. If the damage is so low that you don't invest in the talent, then we will buff it. (
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Starfall bug
Let me explain this in seed of corruption terms - Our starfall is being applied on the primary target on each star, but the "seedsplosion" is occuring CENTERED ON THE CASTER. Not on the area where the star hit.
This is fixed. (
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Lifebloom not blooming on Death Knight's Blood Plague
Lifebloom not blooming with Blood Plague is working as intended. (
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Hunter (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Balancing BM-51 (Beast Mastery) Talent
We think the ultimate solution to feedback about BM-51 is just to add more talents to the pet talent trees so that the bonus 4 talent points can improve pet dps by an amount equivalent to the cost of the hunter talent point. The exotic pets themselves would be more of window-dressing, perhaps with more utility from some of their special abilities. (
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Paladin (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Blessing of Sanctuary potential changes
I'm going to assume you are getting at Blessing of Sanctuary here. We think that is a valid concern and something we plan to address. It was intended for a nice utility buff for Prot paladins, but we agree that its benefit feels too mandatory, or alternatively that some classes have trouble tanking some encounters without it.
(Rest assured that we are not trying to nerf Prot paladin threat generation or really anything other than the semi-mandatory nature of BoSanc.) (
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Priest (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Circle of Healing
I hesitate to wade back into these waters, but Anathalt's reasoning here is pretty good:
I can give you some pieces here, but not the full picture:
-It starts with the trivial nerf: just reduce the healing output. They tried that, they found the button felt too weak.
-They looked at increasing the mana cost, but their experience with mana in the Sunwell made them concerned this nerf wouldn't last.
-They concluded that adding a cast time would both not sufficiently nerf the spell and would remove one of the core fun things about the spell.
-They looked at returning CoH to the party heal mechanic, but they didn't like the effect that had on raid positioning.
-They tried the arcane blast mechanic, but that was complicated and not very fun to play.
-I would presume they tried some variant on the diminishing returns mechanics people have proposed, and decided against those because they were too complicated.
The only correction I would make is to mana cost (which includes a Barrage style implementation). From a designer POV, messing around with mana cost seems like it would be an interesting decision. Oh, this spell heals a lot but is very expensive so the player will think twice before casting it. In reality though that doesn't often happen. Instead players tend to use the powerful spells anyway and then struggle to manage their mana and perhaps complain that we didn't design their class to have enough mana regen. I don't think players would have really hesitated to push the button a third or fourth time -- they would have done it anyway and drained their mana. (The alternative is the spell is sooo expensive that it just becomes a joke and good priests take it off their bar.)
When you want players to diversify their rotations, cooldowns are usually the simplest change that guarantees the behavior you want. Setting up buffs, like Arcane Blast, is another.
The design works okay for Arcane Blast because really that spell itself is just a buff working towards your next Arcane spell, kind of like building up combo points. We probably could have developed the priest in that direction, where you hit Circle of Healing a few times to build up a big buff stack and then finish off the heal with another group spell. That is just a pretty different design at that point.
There is also something of a myth that CoH was a perfectly balanced spell until the smart component. We were quite worried about what it was doing at the end of BC, which is why one of the very first changes we made to priests during LK development was to add the cooldown. We listened to players (and developers) who were concerned the cooldown would kill what was fun about the spell, so we did take it off (with some hesitation). But it turns out that was the wrong move and we probably should have stuck to our guns and shipped with the cooldown so priests didn't feel nerfed after LK went live. (
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Inner Fire
Inner Fire is something we are still discussing. We would ultimately like to move buffs with charges to a longer duration but we need to work out a few other inconsistencies with the buff system before we make that call. (
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Warlock (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Merging Warlock Curses
Interesting.... We wouldn't want to do anything that encouraged warlocks to yet spend more GCDs throwing on additional dots, but getting the same benefit from fewer casts is intriguing. (
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Warlock feedback post on official forums (
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Don't over-analyze "never." One player phrased it as "spells I should be using, but am not." That is more of what I was going for. I knew this thread would be long so I wanted to give it more focus than just having players go on for paragraphs on what the warlock class means to them or how they would redesign it.
I am surprised by how many players are referencing spell mechanics that have changed (e.g. stones, Infernal). I can understand if they have been useless for so long that you gave up on them, but really if you are passionate enough to have strong enough opinions on your class to post, you owe it to yourself to do a little research. It just makes it hard for us to know whether you are refering to a LK or BC (or older) mechanic with your feedback.
I am also amused by those cynics who are offended that they are being asked their opinion. We have our own plans for the warlock, but we like to make informed decisions and seeing what players think is always useful information to have.
But on a positive note, many of these posts are very easy to read and comprehend, for which I thank you. (
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Warrior (
Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Deep Wounds
On the one hand, it is cool to see tanks be able to take a talent that improves their dps. On the other hand, we removed Defiance for a reason, namely that it was an uninteresting talent that every tank felt they had to have, and we don't want to see Deep Wounds just become Defiance 2.0.
This is not an announcement of changes, just a clarification of our intent. (
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We don't want to nerf Deep Wounds without increasing Arms damage in PvE and PvP to compensate. We have not made any changes to Deep Wounds so far.
I repeat: Deep Wounds is not a Thaddius / Loatheb issue. You can stop saying that now. (
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