Thread: Patch 3.2: Call of the Crusade, Hotfixes, Blue posts

Update - Added Recent In-Game Fixes - 05/22 and additional blue posts!

Patch 3.2: Call of the Crusade

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)

The upcoming major content patch, Call of the Crusade, will bring a host of new features for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

• The Argent Tournament Expands: With the help of Azeroth's heroes, the Argent Crusade will finish the Argent Coliseum just in time to call for all brave citizens to prepare for battle with the Lich King. New dailies, rewards, and more will be available at the Argent Tournament grounds to lure adventurers into the coliseum.
• Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside.
• New Battleground: Isle of Conquest, a new large-scale siege Battleground, will be open. The Horde and Alliance will battle head-to-head for control of strategic resources to lay siege to the keeps of their opponents.
• New Arena Season: Season 7 will officially start, paving the way for all-new items and challenges.

A few more details were also revealed in blue posts and Zarhym made an interesting comment about patch 3.3. release date.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Coliseum Raid Instance
Yes, there will be a 5-player version, then a 10/25-player version. The bosses will be different for the two versions. Think Ring of Blood or Amphitheater of Anguish, but more epic. (Source)

Isle of Conquest Battleground
Wintergrasp combined with Alterac Valley with a few more twists. (Source)

Patch 3.2 and 3.3 Release date
Do you really think Ulduar achievements will last a year? Instances become stale after 6 months even with achievements. Yea 3.2 won't be till later this year and by then Ulduar will have been played to death and people will want something fun and new to do and not some small joke instance since we won't see Icecrown till April/May next year probably.
Would it help if I told you your presumed time lines are way too inflated? (Source)

Recent In-Game Fixes - 05/22

Originally Posted by Bornakk (Blue Tracker)

• A bug with the Blood Draining weapon enchant has been fixed to allow the Blood Reserves to restore the proper amount of health.
• Wintergrasp Demolishers should now properly damage all Siege Workshops.
• The bonus damage from spell power on the Druid ability Thorns has been reduced by half.
• The bonus damage from spell power on the Paladin ability Retribution Aura has been reduced by half. The threat generated by that damage has been doubled per point of damage to keep the threat generation about equal to before.

Ghostcrawler explained the reason behind the changes to Thorns and Retribution Aura.
[blizzquote="Ghostcrawler;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/17367876887-rogue-buffs-hotfixed-in.html]Both Thorns and Ret Aura scale with spellpower, which is not in abundance on tanks. On the other hand, on level 80 classes with spell power they could hit an attacker for 1000 or more damage per hit of just passive damage that doesn't even requrie a button press. That's pretty generous. [/blizzquote"]

Blue posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

New zeppelin between Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff
Simply put, every single city aside from Thunder Bluff is connected by a boat or zeppelin. Thunder Bluff has been unique since the latest expansion in that it still requires a run. No, it is not as difficult a run as the old Menethil jog, but it still requires a lengthy trip through over-level, hostile territory for an individual newly made who wants to make use of the facilities in Thunder Bluff.

This addition isn't primarily directed at the people who have the flightpath. Yes, you can fly from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff still, just as you can fly from Ironforge to Stormwind, but that does not invalidate the tram's existence for those starting a new character or starting the game as a whole. And while you may not think of it in those terms, there are still fresh-faced players, new to World of Warcraft, joining us.

As the craft leaves from one of the zeppelin towers in Durotar and is slower than the wyvern flight, I don't believe the population of Thunder Bluff will skyrocket significantly. (Source)

Player vs. Player
1vs1 PvP Balance
I believe we have offered the justification before, but to reiterate it, we designed WoW to be a group-based game. You participate through much of the content, especially the end-game content, as a team. If we had developed a 1v1 game, we would have made some of the mechanics work very differently. In a 1v1 game for example, healing would have to be far weaker such that a single healer could not overcome a single damage-dealer. (Currently a 5-player dungeon or Arena team needs but one healer for the entire group.) Abilities, particularly the crowd-control, would have to be much less powerful because there would be nobody to help you out. It is likely that class abilities and stats would have to be a lot more homogenized because basically you are compressing all of the roles and strengths of the entire team into one player. That's not to say you don't come into 1v1 scenarios sometimes even when you're participating as a team. But we don't expect those to be as balanced as larger group interactions.

I'm not sure what the foundation stone of all pvp is to which you refer. Many competitive sports would not be nearly as interesting (nor likely as balanced) in a 1v1 setting. Consider (American) football. Would you put a defensive linesman against a receiver? Does that even make sense? It's designed to be a group sport. WoW is designed for the most part to be a group-based game.

Compared to a lot of MMOs you can experience a lot of WoW's content while solo, but it should be obvious that we don't offer 1 player Arena team or 1 player raids for a reason. (Source)

Professions
is it really that bad to have a "best" profession? (See Jewelcrafting Nerf)
Yes, we think so. A key to games being fun is feeling like you have a choice. If you aren't making decisions then you aren't really playing a game -- you are watching something as a viewer not participating as a player. Game design has proven over many years that when you have choice A and choice B where choice A grants more power and choice B looks cooler or grants almost any other kind of benefit, a vast majority of players will choose A. In their minds there is no choice. It has to be A. Likewise if humans were the most powerful race and mages were the most powerful class then WoW would not be very diverse. We want tradeskills to be a choice. Having a best profession means that choice does not exist. (Source)

Jewelcrafting Nerf
All of the other professions were more or less in-line with each other but we felt Jewelcrafting with the disabling of meta-gem requirements and the easy ability to hit 3 socket bonuses on top of getting stats from the Dragon's Eye gems put it clearly above every other profession

While there is a time to buff things, if anytime there was a balance issue and we only buffed things, the numbers would rise at a rapid rate and get out of control. There is a time to buff things, but when we feel one thing is too far ahead, it's time for a nerf, which we know is never popular, but we feel it needs to be done. (Source)

Itemization
Itemization and stats role
When I say it's a class problem and not an item problem what I mean is that we are relatively locked into how many pieces we can drop. If we drop more pieces, the chance you will get something useful is even less. Therefore we have to make sure the pieces that do drop appeal to a wide variety of specs and classes. When you don't care about a stat that someone you are sharing with very much cares about, that creates a problem that we do not want to fix by just making two different pieces. (Nor do we want to turn even more gear into tokens and badges. That gets lame.)

A great example of this are regen stats. By regen stats I mean MP5 and Spirit. Yes, you can get regen through other stats, but bear with me for a minute. Our basic design is that dps casters generally don't run the risk of running out of mana, assuming they play reasonably well and aren't in over the head. (i.e. this doesn't mean you can point out cases where you ran OOM and claim the system is broken). But we do want healers to face the risk of running OOM. Healer mana and tanks being gibbed are the two main tools we have for ending encounters (and often even PvP). We need for healers to care about MP5 and Spirit as regen stats, but for casters to largely be able not to. We do this in part by converting Spirit into dps stats, but as I said, I'm not sure that's ultimately a successful solution.

(Inhale.) We put MP5 on caster mail because Resto shamans use it. We don't put it on the Elemental tier set because Resto shamans won't use that. Many mana-users can get regen out of Int and crit, but those also improve other aspects of casting. If it benefits you too much to stack those and ignore MP5 or Spirit, you are going to end up being too effective a healer compared to other classes. The design of the Holy paladin is not that you get all your regen from crit and Int. A typical raiding Holy paladin probably gets double from Illumination what she gets from DP or Replenishment. It aint trivial. If a paladin stacks say nothing but crit, then not only is Illumination better, but you heal for more too. We run the risk that as your crit rises, you outstrip the shamans, priests and druids who are having to use MP5 and Spirit too. That's why you can't just say "We do use regen stats, but crit is our regen stat." If none of the healers care about regen stats at all, then mana regen is probably still too good.

I know this is in the damage forum, but we totally agree about block. It has not kept up as a mitigation stat.

I also agree Armor Pen is confusing. You can't look at a piece with Armor Pen vs. say AP and have a feel for whether it's an upgrade or not. If you see haste or crit, you have some idea of what that will do for you. Armor Pen may just be damage in a slightly confusing package.

Long-term we could totally see merging MP5 and Spirit into one stat (with all of the class changes that would entail) but we're not ready to pull the trigger on anything like that yet. (Source)

Classes
4 Tanking classes in PvE
My original point was that we don't look at boss fights in terms of making sure that every tank class gets their moment to shine. That's not the goal. We also don't look at the four tank classes and make sure they all have survivability within 1% of each other in all situations. That's not the goal either.

I felt the need to point that out to some of the players who may have unrealistic expectations. If certain classes have an easier time, we're totally cool with that, as long as the other classes are capable of doing it (and that includes the hard modes).

Now, if one class is too good at too many bosses, or we see guilds start to replace their MTs because another tank makes the fight so much easier, then that is something of which we take notice. I'm trying to frame it in those terms so that some player don't feel compelled to respond with "It's already happening in my guild," (because then the rest of the thread just becomes an unscientific tally of who uses what class for their MT) and other players respond with "Oh, great, QQ got us nerfed again." (Source)

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
4 Pieces Moonkin Tier 8 Bonus
We knew if the proc-happened mid cast that you might lose the proc. We tried to design the bonus so that wouldn’t happen often. Unfortunately with the way all of the other numbers work out, Moonkin are still chaining Starfire together a lot. We increased the proc rate to compensate, but that may not be enough, which is why we are looking into a technical solution to make the bonus apply to the next Starfire you start casting instead of the next Starfire that does damage. It might take a few days, but it will be long before the next tier of content is released. (Source)

Paladin (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Mana Regeneration as Holy
I don't think it's the case that paladins don't care about regen. I think it's the case that they don't care about what we would call regen stats, namely MP5 and Spirit. Currently they probably over-value Int and crit. That is a potential problem because it means other healers have to spend part of their stat allocation on those stats while paladins can just stack crit (which also makes their heals bigger) and Int (which also improves their mana pool, as well as their crit).

We haven't made any changes to Illumination or Replenishment at this point in time. We need to see some of the less bleeding-edge expert guilds try hard modes, where by most accounts mana regen starts to matter very much. (Source)

Shaman (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Restoration in PvP
We agree that Resto shammies need a little help in PvP. We are working on a couple of ideas. We'll share them when we've refined them a little more. (Source)

New Battleground: Isle of Conquest, a new large-scale siege Battleground, will be open. The Horde and Alliance will battle head-to-head for control of strategic resources to lay siege to the keeps of their opponents

Please not a fail SotA again ..... im still hoping for old AV like ......................................

Originally Posted by funkeh

who gives a flying fuck about argent tournament, where's nerubian 25man raid :/

You mean the trollish 25 man raid (Don't deny it !)

no new raid dungeon?

3.3 will bring arthas and then new expansion?

That's what I wanted....an entire raid most likely based around dumb 'vehicle' mechanics. Fantastic.


........................

No raid in which we butcher yet another troll empire ? Someone is going to write a skating letter to Blizzard HQ.

yay they nerf JC and then post this, nice diversion!

So basically a WG style instance with maybe a couple bosses inside and a new bad battleground idea instead of just making new maps of CTF (wtb =( )

The long wait for 3.3 begins.

Originally Posted by lustikus

3.3 will bring arthas and then new expansion?

Yes, that's what I've heard from friends in the know.

Originally Posted by Offhand

Erm, you did READ the blue post right?. Argent Colosseum will include 5, 10, and 25 man raids

Did you read it? It did not say raid instances, it just said "5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside." Either some world PvP thing, or maybe a vault type deal. (Although it does not rule out a Sunwell Isle style of dungeon/raids as well)

Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside.

Hyjal 2.0 anyone ?

Hyjal were huge Lore wise, while This coliseum may not be.

Are you blind?

"Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside."

= New 25/10 raid and a new 5 men dungeon