Thread: Wintergrasp Quests Changes, 3.1.2 Notes

Update - Grunty the Murloc Marine is now confirmed, also added Blue Posts and ... MMO-Champion is now on Facebook!

Wintergrasp Quests now Weekly
Don't worry, Wintergrasp isn't really getting nerfed, the quest rewards are being changed to fit the new frequency. (Yes, you actually get 20 Stone Keeper Shard for a single quest now)

Originally Posted by Crygil (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

given by these quests as well as additional Stone Keeper's Shards. These quests will reset every Tuesday morning at 3:00 AM.

There are two known issues that may occur once these changes are pushed to live realms:

The quest mark will now show as gold, even though the quests are repeatable.
After the quests reset, players near the NPC quest givers may need to move out of line of sight in order for the quests to properly appear.

3.1.2 PTR Patch Notes
The 3.1.2 official notes have been updated once again with the changes from the last 2 builds, latest additions are highlighted in green.

Originally Posted by Dresorull (Blue Tracker)

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

General

• New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion’s Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).
• Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Equipment Manager

• When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).

PVP

• Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator’s gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
• All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper’s Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.

Death Knight (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
• Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
• Improved Moonkin Form: Now grants 10/20/30% of spirit as spell power.

Mage (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied.

Paladin (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.
• Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.

Priest (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
• Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
• Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.

Warlock (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame.
• Fire and Brimstone: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 3/6/9/12/15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25%.
• Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
• Sacrifice (Voidwalker) redesigned: Sacrifices a portion of the Voidwalker's health, giving its master a shield that will absorb X damage for 30 seconds. While the shield holds, spell casting will not be interrupted by damage. 1-minute cooldown.
• Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.

Warrior (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)

• Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.

Items

• Darkruned Battlegear 2-Piece Set Bonus: The bonus critical strike chance for Frost Strike and Death Coil has been increased from 5% to 8%.
• Furious Gladiator’s Staff and Furious Gladiator’s Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.
• Guise of the Midgard Serpent: The base attack power on this item has been lowered to balance it against items of a similar quality.
• Increased the health and mana restored from Northrend food and drinks.
• Most scopes now have a level requirement and will bind the item to which they are applied.
• Nightsong Garb 4-Piece Set Bonus: Chance for Insect Swarm to trigger an instant Starfire changed to 15%.
• Scourgeborne Battlegear 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Conflagrate redesigned: When you use Conflagrate, the damage done by your next 3 Destruction spells is increased by 10% for 15 seconds if the Immolate on the target has 5 or fewer seconds remaining. (Even if this change is still in the official notes, it was reverted in an earlier PTR version and this might be a small mistake in the official note update. In the latest PTR build the glyph is: Your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes your Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.)
• Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.
• Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
• Glyph of Rapid Charge: Reduced to 7%, down from 20% cooldown reduction to Charge.

Professions
Fishing

• Jewel of the Sewers: You can now fish in all parts of the Dalaran sewers for this quest.
• Phantom Ghostfish: Can now be caught from Nettlefish schools in Sholazar Basin.

Bug Fixes
Dungeons and Raids

• Players can no longer become saved to an instance when they aren't in the instance during a boss kill.

Ulduar

• Hodir should now reset in a timely manner if a group fails to kill him.
• 10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs.
• The Spark of Imagination: Characters that release in part of the boss room will no longer be ported to Westfall or The Barrens.

Death Knight

• Anti-magic Shell: Tooltip error corrected.
• Blood Boil: If no target is available for Blood Boil to hit, the spell will now cast and consume a blood rune but generate no runic power.

Druid

• Maim: Rank 2 of this ability is properly considered a stun and can be escaped by Blink.

Hunter

• Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
• Lock and Load: The tooltip has been corrected to display its actual chance to occur.
• Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.

Paladin

• Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.

Rogue

• Shadow Dance: Issues with action bars and ability use arising from using Stealth while Shadow Dance is active have been fixed.
• Tricks of the Trade: To prevent exploits, this ability can no longer be cast on non-player targets.

Warlock

• Demonic Sacrifice: This spell will no longer appear in any Warlock’s spellbook.

Tailoring

• Swordguard Embroidery: Now correctly increases ranged attack power.

Blizzcon 2009 Murloc Pet Now Official!
Grunty the Murloc Marine is now confirmed as the in-game reward from the goodies bag.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)

via DIRECTV will be joined by a new World of Warcraft in-game companion, Grunty the murloc marine. This tiny terror is fully armored and comes equipped with a gauss rifle, which he’ll occasionally fire into the air to make sure no invisible spacecraft are swooping in to attack.

BlizzCon 2009 takes place on August 21-22 in the Anaheim Convention Center. Tickets go on sale on Saturday, May 16, with a second allotment to be released on May 30. For further details, check out the recent press release and the official website.

HTML Code:

<object width="560" height="370"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/VpVDpvg4ct8&hl=en&fs=1&showinfo=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VpVDpvg4ct8&hl=en&fs=1&showinfo=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="370"></embed></object>

MMO-Champion now on Facebook
After the success of the Steam Group I just couldn't stop here. MMO-Champion is now on Facebook! I also have a few ideas in mind for that group depending on how popular it gets.

Blue posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Healing in Raids
On the one hand, when a raid wipes it may always feel like it's your fault because people ultimately died and you're the ones supposed to stop people from dying. I'm not saying we make healing on raid content trivial. We don't. We want it to be a challenge. We want you to have to work at it and feel good when you finally get a new boss down. We want you to feel like the gear that drops is rewarding because you notice the difference.

But I also think you're being a little unfair to dps to tanking. There are berserk timers on many bosses and it's the job of the dps to hit those timers. You can't necessarily solve that through healing expect by virtue of keeping them up and stabbing. On some fights all they are doing is damage, but on others they have to kill the right targets, or maximize their damage at the right moment (say XT's heart). They need to avoid AE damage. Mimiron's rockets do what 5 million damage?! If someone dies in that and asks "WHY U NOT HELZ ME?" you have my permission to reach through Vent and clock them on the skull. Tanking isn't easy either. If your tank fails to pick up adds and they run around one-shotting folks, that is not your responsibility to keep them standing. If they die with Last Stand or Icebound Fortitude not on cooldown, then they might need a tiny nibble of L2P.

I've played all three roles quite a bit, and I don't find one to be hands down harder than another. I think tanking and healing are probably more stressful. You have to be ready from the pull -- you can't take a few seconds before you jump into things.

Healing isn't for everyone. It takes a certain mindset. You aren't always going to be celebrated the way the rogue on top of the damage meters is. But every good guild knows it rests on the ability of its healers. (Source)

Armor Penetration Cap
There are caps to armor pen, but the total amount of armor that can be reduced is not one of them. The numbers you need to really to get armor pen to the point where it feels broken cannot really be done with available gear.

[...] There is a cap per point. You can't ignore more than a certain percentage of the armor per point. This is what keeps armor pen from being better vs. targets with lower armor.

There is no cap on the amount of armor pen from which you can benefit. More points of armor pen always give you more damage (in the way more AP always gives you more damage, but more hit does not).

We are familiar with some of the theorycrafting for how great armor pen might be for fully Ulduar-geared melee. We're not worried about it yet because it's a big improvement over armor pen being a junk stat, which is where it was for many until recently.

We're not too worried about the double trinket proc in PvP. It's impossible to use on demand, you have to give your PvP trinket to do it, and it still isn't better vs. lightly armored targets, which is what we wanted to fix. (Source)

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Feral Cat DPS too high?
The theoretical Feral dps suggested by simulations may be high because the reality is often different -- it's a pretty demanding spec to play and more dependent on attacks from behind than most.

We don't often see cats beating rogues. They do sometimes beat mages, locks and hunters, but that is almost always on fights where we asked the ranged dps to be doing something else, such as moving or contending with adds. There are also some early fights in Ulduar that are very friendly to kitties, such as XT and Razorscale.

It's definitely something to keep an eye on. If we made a small nerf to cat dps, nobody should be surprised, but we don't have one to announce at this time. (Source)

Hunter (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Ammo Changes
Those are all still in the plan. We are always very reluctant to provide timelines unless we have some confidence that we can deliver. The community tends to be a tad unforgiving unless we offer a lot of caveats on everything we “promise.” I can understand how it can be difficult to be patient, but just realize the alternative is not that they get done faster but that we keep our ideas really close to the chest until they are about to go in the game. Some players would prefer this method of communication, which is understandable. (Source)

Pets scaling from Crit / Armor Penetration / Agility / AP / Haste
Yes, we agree with all of that (more or less). The barrier in this case is technical -- it's just not set up to work that way, so it's not a quick change. But we would like to eventually get that fixed. (Source)

Pet DPS
We don’t think it’s a strong design to have too much of your dps tied up in the pet, because then you are really crippled when it dies and we aren’t going to provide you with 100% certainty that that isn’t going to happen. (Source)

Steady Shot vs. Auto Shot
We’ve been over this ground before, but it’s actually irrelevant if Steady does more or less damage than Auto since you can use them both together (unless it just offends your sensibilities or something). (Source)

Glyph of the Monkey
We think the Glyph of the Monkey was just too good. It made more sense back when you had to go to Monkey. But we didn’t want to keep that restriction when the whole point of Dragonhawk was to make you not have to shift Aspects all of the time. (Source)

Roar of Sacrifice
We can understand how Roar of Sacrifice was cool because it gave you some utility you could share with the rest of your team. Maybe there is some way to bring back that functionality, possibly in a different ability. (Source)

Comments say WG quests are now 20 shards. Picture says 10. PTR is 10.

I'll go with 10 then.

"10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs."

Wait wat? So now Orbs will be dropping in Ulduar 10?

I

n an effort to better balance the amount of players that are in Wintergrasp at any given time, we are changing the daily quests in Wintergrasp to a weekly format.

How does this balance the amount of players in WG?

Really Blizz, get rid of the monkeys that are doing the thinking for you. It's not working.

We need them to multiply it by at least 5, if it were 5-6k honor per weekly, I would be happy enough.

Another kneejerk reaction from blizzard, most people go to WG because its still decent honor even if you have done the dailys. This isn't fixing anything, its just nerfing the honor you gain from those dailys...

This is not a nerf? lol? It's a massive WG nerf. Not only are you losing the 13 odd gold per daily, your losing honor and shards as well. They are giving you the amount of honor for what 3 days of dailies? should be at least 5, if not 7. This is there solution to fix the lag / imbalanced sides issues?

way to destroy wintergrasp.

blizzards latest decissions are just stupid! i really hope the original team comes back...

Originally Posted by amk

"10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs."

Wait wat? So now Orbs will be dropping in Ulduar 10?

They always did. In hard-modes.

Why say that you aren't going to neff warriors than do it in less than a week. Arms warriors are already trying to catch up/keep with fury than right when arms catches up you trip them making them have to start from the bottom again.

People really go in WG for fun or dailys? Really? I never really go here. I get in, stand there until we win and complete the main daily, then get in VoA, because thats the only reason I would ever be here for.

Originally Posted by SFJake

People really go in WG for fun or dailys? Really? I never really go here. I get in, stand there until we win and complete the main daily, then get in VoA, because thats the only reason I would ever be here for.

This

The only way to get less people into WG is removing the requirement for VoA which would make the entire battle more or less useless. Nerfing dailys will do absolutely nothing.

In an effort to better balance the amount of players that are in Wintergrasp at any given time, we are changing the daily quests in Wintergrasp to a weekly format. This has led to an increase in the honor reward given by these quests as well as additional Stone Keeper's Shards. These quests will reset every Tuesday morning at 3:00 AM.

This has got to be the dumbest move done by Blizzard to 'balance' stuff.

What Blizzard is trying to do is reduce the amount of rewards from WG so as to reduce the # of active participants constantly playing throughout the week.However, the unbalance of the amount of players is due to the population disparity between the 2 faction, not the amount of active participants constantly playing.

(If H:A is 500:700, assuming 10% active participants yields 5:7, a nerf to both sides simple reduces the ratio to a smaller number, not having an evening out the ratio.)

The WG nerf only works if it discourage ONE side from having overwhelming majority. This WG nerfs applies to both side; thus reducing both the overwhelming side and undermanned side. This just spells less people will be playing WG.This does not solve any problem prenerf.

Blizz could have achieve a more balance WG by lessening the advantages of having overwhelming majority( like inc effects of Tenacity...etc). But no.....blizz has to do something stupid....-_-''