Val'anyr - Hammer of the Ancient Kings
The proc is probably better than you guys are assuming (even for druids). I'm not going to spoil it though. (
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Keyring-like bag for Tabards?
While we have the vendor in the game that sells a bunch of them and they are very cheap, it's possible we will add something in the future that is like the keyring, but there is no eta on this at this time. (
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World Bosses in Northrend
We don't have anything definitely planned for these in Northrend right now. They have their pluses and minuses as players are very limited in experiencing them as it only takes a couple of top guilds on a realm to farm them and nobody else ever seems them. At the same time they can be fairly quick and easy to implement and provide an additional thing to do for some players.
It's possible we will add more in the future but we will have to wait and see. (
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Burst damage in PvP
The term "Burst" has kind of taken on a life of it's own, much like "scaling" and "stealth nerf." It's not a bad word. Too much burst is bad, just like too much CC, too much healing or too much mana regeneration are bad.
Burst on demand is a useful mechanic. But we don't think the matches are as fun when someone just crushes your face in while you have very limited options in countering it.
It can be frustrating to be crowd controlled too much, but at least in that situation every player has a trinket, and many classes have additional ways to break out. Being blown up in just a few GCDs doesn't leave you a lot of options, and it often doesn't even require much skill or finesse from the burster. On the opposite extreme, not being able to finish someone off before a heal lands, means that fights go on forever. (
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Druid (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Potential changes to Innervate
A change to scaling % of mana would be good for all the druid specs. A flat non-scaling number is more problematic in the long run, since eventually a new expansion will come out with new #'s, and you'd have to balance how much mana it gave at each rank, and would be a pain in the neck.
I was actually talking more about a flat number (or a relatively flat number). If it’s a percentage then it still risks being too good in PvE and too weak in PvP. In this case the difference in mana pools is the whole problem, so scaling the amount regenerated to the size of your pool doesn’t fix the disparity. (It would be different if say the PvP boomkin had less mana but also cheaper spells.)
It would have small scaling problems for the next few content patches, but I don’t think we are going to see many druids with 40K mana anytime soon. Long-term we could always add ranks (the way Wrath has ranks) to keep it scaling at higher (or lower) levels. (
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[...] The cooldown is long, and that is something we would consider lowering if we continue to see mana problems. We just want to be cautious, because such a change would just mean free mana for a raid. You may not be running out of mana healing Ulduar, but the healers on the hard modes are. (
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Innervate and Balance Druids
I don’t think many Balance druids were stacking spirit for its benefit to Innervate. Crit is almost as good as spirit for regen, and when you consider its non-regen benefits, you probably will want it over spirit every chance you can get. Longer term we might look at something like Lunar Guidance or Dreamstate tying into spirit instead of int. However as I said (was it above or in another thread?) we need to make sure we’re happy with the way spirit works overall before we monkey around with it too much. (
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Paladin (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Changes to Paladin mechanics
I started with "That's a fair point" because the OP mentioned that paladins have more to contend with than just maximizing damage. They do have heals, bubbles, cleansing and similar mechanics going on. That is why I said we can't take something as complex as a rogue's combat system and shoehorn it in for Ret.
But we can (and most likely will) change up the basic Seal, Judge, DS, CS, Exorcism buttons so that they can't all be brought to bear at once AND to make pushing those buttons a little more interesting from the paladin's point of view.
The model of "I bring burst" is not a good one for the game. You can counter stuns and bubbles and heals and even people running away from you. You can't counter someone unloading five digits of damage within just a few GCDs. That makes the combat shallow and frustrating. We're not convinced that is all Rets are about (because they do have heals, bubbles, cleansing and similar mechanics), but if we think the damage mechanics are too easy to counter, then we will compensate in other ways.
This isn't anything you will see get hotfixed in next week. I am more trying to explain our thought process so that the Exorcism change makes a little more sense in context. (
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