Freya Hard Mode US First Kill, Blue Posts

[Boubouille]

Freya Hard Mode US First Kill
Exodus killed Freya in hard mode tonight and got the US first kill, the Hall of Fame has been updated accordingly. Congratulations to them.

Blue posts

Top PvE Gear used in PvP
One of the problems we had last season (and the first season when you think about it) was that you need a minimum threshold of resilience to really be viable. A change like this would only make that curve steeper. Having 1000 resilience would be even more powerful than having 500 resilience.

We do want PvE gear to be a decent substitute until you can collect enough PvP gear. The PvE gear was too dominant in some cases in the previous season, we think because:

-- When everyone's resilience is low, doing damage quickly becomes even more important, so gear that doesn't "waste" stats on resilience become more optimal.

-- PvE gear from Naxx, particularly the KT weapons, were easier to collect than the PvP equivalents. That isn't going to be as true in this season because Ulduar is more challenging and the higher item level weapons from PvE are going to be even less accessible. (Source)

Amount of class changes in future patches
That said, I don't think you will continue to see as much class change for the rest of Lich King. Many of the changes in 3.1 were to address problems introduced when we made big changes in 3.0. You can look at the classes that have had the most iteration, and in most cases those are the classes who were restructured a little bit in Lich King: warlocks, hunters, priests, paladins and the new class.

We will continue to tweak numbers up and down as needed, but I would not anticipate as many talent or mechanic changes for the next several patches (though there will be some). (Source)

Class balance and overpowered specs
I don't think it's that formulaic. I'm not going to list the classes or specs that have historically been powerful in the various Arena seasons, because that will just turn this thread into various players jumping in to argue about how they really weren't that powerful. But many of them did not have every item on your list. Sometimes a single powerful ability can make up for a lot of "lacks" and the truth is we like for classes to ultimately have strengths and weaknesses, not just a whole bunch of strengths.

If you look at the classes that are powerful now and those that have historically been dominant, I think it comes down to two things:

-- A mix of offensive and defensive capabilities, especially active (i.e. non-passive) ones.
-- Being a good complement to the abilities, strengths and weaknesses of other classes in order to make a strong comp. (Source)

Warlock (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Upcoming Warlock PTR changes
Fire and Brimstone -- After a lot of feedback and testing, we think we are going to change this again. Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 25%. The first portion of the talent is now a pure percent boost instead of modifying the “bonus” that Incinerate gets. It was too confusing to players and had some weird side-effects, such as Chaos Bolt not scaling well with Incinerate if Incinerate did more damage.

Incinerate and Immolate -- There does seem to be a bug where spellpower is not getting applied correctly. We don't know at this point if this is an old or new bug. Certainly there used to be a lot of spells that didn't scale with spellpower, though we now make an attempt to make sure almost all of them do. It may matter less with the F&B change, but we'll still get it resolved.

Conflagrate -- We still intend to leave this as it currently works on live (not consuming the Immolate).

We understand sometimes players can get whiplash from our rapid iteration. That's just the way we designed, though we perhaps have not always communicated the design churn as openly as we do today. (Source)

WoW Spin-off to be launched in China?
A few weeks ago, Blizzard published a press release to announce the end of their partnership with The9 in China. The9 has been the operator of World of Warcraft in china for the past years and even if their partnership with Blizzard will end in a few months, it definitely looks like they don't plan to give up on WoW yet.

Earlier this month, The9 opened a site for a new game called World of Fight ... The font used in the flash banner of the site is the same font used in World of Warcraft and we can assume that they will try to rename the game and keep the players on their own version of the game.

I'm pretty sure they would break a ton of copyright laws by doing that but it depends a lot on their contracts with Blizzard and if they actually manage to launch the game and start developing new content, we might see another version of WoW on the asian market. As of today, I would say that it's still very unlikely, Blizzard won't give up easily and The9 doesn't really have any experience in game development.

However, Electronic Arts owns 15% of The9 and one of the few possibility is to try to gather as many players as possible on the new site and ultimately change it into Warhammer Online. Of course this is just speculation from my side, but it seems that the background picture looks surprisingly similar to a starting zone from Warhammer.

The new operator of World of Warcraft in China will be Netease.com, you can find more information about that on their site and in the press release.

Source - Wall Street Journal

[skojten]

HAHA WoF.
To bad this news dident came out 1 of april.

[Seltheus]

and the truth is we like for classes to ultimately have strengths and weaknesses, not just a whole bunch of strengths.


I guess thats why Paladins got so many weaknesses...NOT <.<

[Archet]

more like world of fail

[Melane]

The background on WoF is the Chaos starting area on WAR...

[TheDesertDragon]

and the truth is we like for classes to ultimately have strengths and weaknesses, not just a whole bunch of strengths.


I guess thats why Paladins got so many weaknesses...NOT <.<

Christ...

He's obviously stating that he wants every class to have strengths and weaknesses, but that he's not there yet. He's not stating the game is balanced.

And WoF... El Oh El. $50 on it shutting down within the next week.

[Izichial]

Sup with that mana regen stat on the cloak from Freya hardmode?

[Herecius]

At World of Fight:
Holy mother of LOL

[Ynos]

Exodus killed Freya in hard mode tonight and got the US first kill, the Hall of Fame has been updated accordingly. Congratulations to them.

No it wasn't updated...

[Nitrax]

WoF is obviously some crappy flash game as is usual with asian markets, for example, consider a manga toon called Paladani bouncing around some 2D arena fighting Arthis.

Thers no chance in hell its gonna be a version of WoW or WAR, it just borrows gfx from them to look "serious".... olol.

[Dewote]

Hahaha WoF ;D
World of Fail

[stupid11]

Holy shit they finally made F&B worth taking?

I've been saying they need to make this talent NOT the shittiest 45->50 point talent in the game for a long, long time. (Ever since early Beta.)

Sounds like I need to go back to destro though. <3 Deep destro, though I've been enjoying affliction recently. Was way better before 3.1 though. :/

[Boubouille]

The background on WoF is the Chaos starting area on WAR...

Good point, added to the news. (Even if technically it doesn't really matter, I just needed an excuse to mention the change of operator in China because I forgot to do it 2 weeks ago )

[Maneken]

My mind says: its breaking copyright, its stealing but just imagine if they really could pull this and make more balance and more atractive game then original wow. Maybe then 1 day will say nihao after log in on some chineese server

[Sting]

Paving the way for Pandaren? Hmpf just wishful thinking prolly

[Jaded1]

i would probably guess it's either WHO or a WHO ripoff

[highwind01]

Top PvE Gear used in PvP
One of the problems we had last season (and the first season when you think about it) was that you need a minimum threshold of resilience to really be viable [...]

Oh yeah, only S1 and S5 had this problem... I mean, who EVER saw a rogue during S3/S4 with dual wargleves and/or 4-T6/4-Glad Parts who was complettely overpowered :



-- PvE gear from Naxx, particularly the KT weapons, were easier to collect than the PvP equivalents. That isn't going to be as true in this season because Ulduar is more challenging and the higher item level weapons from PvE are going to be even less accessible.

Again, this wasnt introduced with Naxx and KT...
Archimonde / cot raid was extremely easy and the 2h sword was so much better than its S3 counterpart.
Illidan wasnt that hard either, Wargleves were ridiciously good (even better than S4 which werent in game at that time) and shard of azzinoth also was better than S3 daggers.

[velourea]

I really hope the chinese aren't going to rip off warhammer as much as they like to do with other mmo's.

anyway, as for little to no more class changes in the future; given up on trying to balance stuff!!??

[Critterbot]

more like world of fail

This.

haha idd :3

[Hypocratus]

"That said, I don't think you will continue to see as much class change for the rest of Lich King. Many of the changes in 3.1 were to address problems introduced when we made big changes in 3.0. You can look at the classes that have had the most iteration, and in most cases those are the classes who were restructured a little bit in Lich King: warlocks, hunters, priests, paladins and the new class.
We will continue to tweak numbers up and down as needed, but I would not anticipate as many talent or mechanic changes for the next several patches (though there will be some)"

On the other words, paladins are nerfed back to where they were supposed to always be (out of any top arena team) and unkillable priests and rogue which unavoidably kill you are back to shining for the rest of WoTLK. And still there are morons who says paladins are overpowered.... The only thing I can't understand is how paladins - class which is born to suck - could have this short time of being good... I am pretty sure Blizzard employees who let that happen have been fired with no severance package.