Hotfixes, Mount Changes, Hall of Fame, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Recent In-Game Fixes - 06/15/09
The Freya Zerg Kill posted yesterday is already hotfixed, well that was fast.

• The additional healing Freya receives, through the Attuned to Nature buff, has been increased.
• Focus Anger, on Yogg-Saron’s Crusher tentacles, will no longer result from pet attacks.
• Pyrite will now disappear after 3 minutes instead of 1 minute.

Upcoming Mount Changes - Updated 06/15
[blizzquote="Zarhym;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/17730154175-upcoming-mount-changes.html][color=white][b]Update 6/15[/b][/color]: We've altered the original text to reflect that the decreased casting time for summoning mounts applies only to ground mounts. Flying mounts still require a 3 second cast time. [/blizzquote"]

Strand of the Ancients Coin Toss in Patch 3.2
[blizzquote="Zarhym;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/17779490786-strand-of-the-alliance.html]I have some news that will hopefully alleviate some of your concerns. The current plan is to implement the "coin toss" for Strand of the Ancients in the next major content patch. We know it's been a long time coming, but the solution to the issues preventing us from originally randomizing who starts on offense/defense is in the works right now. [/blizzquote"]

Ulduar Hall of Fame Update
I finally took the time to update the Hall of Fame with the latest kills. Please note that it isn't complete yet, the hard mode of Yogg-Saron remains undefeated 2 months after the release of the dungeon.

Blue posts

Rogue Mage Priest
We'd prefer to see other comps as dominant as RMPs in 3s. The problem is if we nerf RMP without making other changes, then double melee teams would likely just take their place. The public perception is that at least RMP requires more coordination and finesse than double melee (though we also think there is validity to the claim that just because you have the option of crowd control doesn't mean that bursting someone down makes you somehow more legit.) (Source)

PvP Issues
I'll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.

1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they're not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.

Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can't burst someone down when wounded, they just aren't going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.

But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and "reset" the match. If you fail, you're dead and the match may be over. We'd like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.

Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we're concerned people just wouldn't ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable. (Source)

[...] I probably should have added an additional bullet, which is that in the previous season, starter resilience gear was either too hard to get or sacrificed too many stats. We want resilience to be attractive because of the survivability it brings (and I think that part is working), but we started players too low. You need like 500 before you start to notice its effect and 800 to 1000 before you actually live long enough to respond to attacks (though as I suggested above, perhaps not long enough). (Source)

Burst damage in PvP
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that burst is too high. Imagine we made changes such that getting an 8K crit was almost impossible and 3K or 4K hits were more common. Now consider what would happen. You hit someone. The healer heals them. You keep hitting. The healer heals them. Two strategies then rise to the top as the only way to win a match: keep the healer crowd-controlled forever or drain her mana. Yet not every class has the same amount of crowd control and very few have mana drains. We don’t want every class to have those abilities because then every class feels alike. Furthermore, playing a healer that never gets to, you know, actually play because you’re always sheeped / cyclone or OOM isn’t much fun either.

In the current game, imagine a mage getting beat on to the point where he is near Execute range. He decides to Blink. If he gets the Blink off, he might have just won the match because he can get healed to full before the melee close again. If he fails to get the Blink off, he’ll probably die in the very next GCD. He might have a window of 2 seconds max to win or lose the game. If you have those situations every now and then you end up with a nail-biter match. That’s cool. However, if every single encounter with the other team is like that, it’s just exhausting. Many fights will end in just a few GCDs. Others will go on and on, at least until the healer runs OOM, which is unlikely to happen with abilities like Innervate and Divine Plea. It’s just too extreme in both damage done and healing done. (Source)

Arenas and grinding for rewards
I think some players like Arenas because they are quick, easy to organize (relative to a BG), often have fast queues, and / or they just enjoy the “purity” (for want of a better word) of just trying to kill the other team without having to worry about flags, reinforcements, bad players not contributing to the war effort, etc. However, a lot of players who may not really like Arenas get drawn into them in order to procure the best PvP gear. This second issue is something we’d like to fix, but we need to develop a way to reward good gear through BGs that isn’t based on endless grinding. (Source)

Shaman / Paladin
Patch 3.2 Changes
We have some changes in 3.2 that will address some of the concerns healing shamans and paladins have.

I think the quote some of you are referring to is when I said none of the classes in the game need a complete overhaul. That kind of verbiage tends to come from players who are looking for a completely different class than the one they are actually playing. The kind of changes we're talking about do not involve blowing up the talent trees, core spells or class mechanics and starting over. We almost never do that. (Source)

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Feral Cat DPS
Kitty dps is probably a little too high. It's tricky though because it is a very demanding spec to play well and if nerf it for the best players, the less-skilled ones might really see their dps plummet.

I'll say again that we purposely designed Ulduar to have a great diversity among the bosses. Depending on which bosses you look at, the list of whose dps is too low or too high changes. If Ulduar had 3 additional or 5 fewer bosses, the answer would probably be different. (Source)

Hunter (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Ammo is too expensive
We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn't have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now. (Source)

Pet scaling
Pets need to scale better. As soon as you have a hunter choosing say AP over crit because one helps the pet and the other doesn't then that's a problem. (Source)

Traps in PvP
I'm not sure if the healer can out-heal your damage or not. That's a longer discussion about how much damage a healer should have to heal through and if the only healer counter should be CC. But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don't think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We'll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn't too far away. (Source)

Paladin (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Paladin changes in 3.2
We are working on a (long) post to explain some of the paladin changes. I don't have an ETA. (Source)

[...] Think about it this way. We have a design vision for each class and spec. We readily make changes when the tools or mechanics you have when you aren't meeting that vision. Rarely do we change the vision, though it does happen. The end-game paladin in vanilla WoW was intended to be a healer. We now support an end-game dps or tanking role. The Holy paladin has classically been a tank healer. We're okay though with expanding their breadth a little bit for those situations where you have more paladins than tanks or the raid is taking a lot of damage. However we aren't likely to do that by giving paladins a Wild Growth clone, because that doesn't fit the vision. (Source)

Fan Art
10 new Fan Arts have been added to the Official Site.

[michiko]

Kitty dps is probably a little too high. It's tricky though because it is a very demanding spec to play well and if nerf it for the best players, the less-skilled ones might really see their dps plummet.

Unless you use feralbynight/facemauler at which point the complexity becomes trivial (I appreciate it doesn't give you the exact move to use in every situation but until the last few % of a boss there's really not that much thought required) and as I've seen, cats in hybrid spec and tank enchants can beat full time pure dps.

Like guitar hero, but with other people around to hate on you.

[Fyssas]

I'm pretty sure Ensidia got World first Heroic: Glory of the Ulduar Raider on May 20th.

[energycore]

I'm guessing their "fix" to feral dps will be dumbing it down like they did to affliction

[Ontis]

Bullshit.
I want the ones who cry "NERF CATS HYBRID TOP DPS QQ QQ" to reroll a fking cat and try to "press a button and top chart" ©. Then we will fking talk.

[Gilian]

So you need 1k dps more then all other classes because you are unable to press buttons correctly.

Feral dps needs to change. In good guilds they can do 1k dps more then any other classes. And in pvp their damage is also a little high.

[Ontis]

So you need 1k dps more then all other classes because you are unable to press buttons correctly.

Feral dps needs to change. In good guilds they can do 1k dps more then any other classes. And in pvp their damage is also a little high.

Don't play dumb. Two players with equal skill will always have almost same DPS. I used to raid as a hunter, as a rogue and as a mage. Not even nearly as hard as playing a cat. I repeat, every single person who QQ about "too high cat dps" must roll a cat and try to deal some "awesum damage".
Show me AT LEAST ONE PERSON who rerolled a cat AND tops DPS charts. Every single top-damage-cat is a MAIN CHAR, which every single owner played for at least few months.

[Lorshavrel]

I suggest if u wanna find a way for BG players to get good gear well... you might wanna bring back the ranks (example knight-private-chamipon) eccetera so that if you are really good in pvp and u get difficult achievements you have the right to get nice gear... at the end of each season you might wanna reset it. =)

[Nathanyel]

They should change Attuned to Nature completely, e.g. "While this buff is active, all damage taken is reduced by 99%" since people tend to just "improve their DPS" on her when no adds are there (and maybe even then, especially Casters)

Three weeks ago a good mage left our guild because he was accused of "not doing enough DPS" on this encounter.... (There were other conflicts as I heard later, but this was the final straw)

[toes]

Don't play dumb. Two players with equal skill will always have almost same DPS. I used to raid as a hunter, as a rogue and as a mage. Not even nearly as hard as playing a cat. I repeat, every single person who QQ about "too high cat dps" must roll a cat and try to deal some "awesum damage".
Show me AT LEAST ONE PERSON who rerolled a cat AND tops DPS charts. Every single top-damage-cat is a MAIN CHAR, which every single owner played for at least few months.

So what is your point? I'd love to do harder rotations with my rogue if I did more damage using them. But other classes just don't have the choice.
Should every skilled rogue player reroll cat?

[LavaDuck]

One thing they are good at, hotfixing.

[Idunnowhat]

Don't play dumb. Two players with equal skill will always have almost same DPS. I used to raid as a hunter, as a rogue and as a mage. Not even nearly as hard as playing a cat. I repeat, every single person who QQ about "too high cat dps" must roll a cat and try to deal some "awesum damage".
Show me AT LEAST ONE PERSON who rerolled a cat AND tops DPS charts. Every single top-damage-cat is a MAIN CHAR, which every single owner played for at least few months.

no

[nikkita]

step one kitty nerf, step two tree nerf, step three int/mana nerf and mp5s buff, step four resto shaman buff, step five nerfing illumination and giving paladins more vesatility (oh i hope they don't do that). step six making healing encounters that actually challenge healers and not mana wise.

waiting for the other steps to come

[Ontis]

So what is your point? I'd love to do harder rotations with my rogue if I did more damage using them. But other classes just don't have the choice.
Should every skilled rogue player reroll cat?

If that skilled rogue QQ alot about nerfing cats then yes. Two almost similar classes, he will be just fine. And if he won't, he will never ever dare to say "nerf cats"

Actually, what I'm trying to explain is that if a cat outDPSes you by far, then you're not geared enough/skilled enough/concentraded enough/optimized enough. I am being outdamaged by a rogue in my guild and our gear is almost equal. Others are just less skilled so they deal less dps.

no

Paladin topic other way, mon.

[gilfanon]

step one kitty nerf, step two tree nerf, step three int/mana nerf and mp5s buff, step four resto shaman buff, step five nerfing illumination and giving paladins more vesatility (oh i hope they don't do that). step six making healing encounters that actually challenge healers and not mana wise.

waiting for the other steps to come

The jealousy is strong with this one...

[Nathanyel]

So what is your point? I'd love to do harder rotations with my rogue if I did more damage using them.

That's what we've been suggesting for quite some time now, cat rotation brings back "skill" to DPSing, and should be adapted for other classes, too (paragraph "Why complication is good")
Of course, we can't expect major class changes like that before 4.0

[Michikawa]

Will be interesting to see how they plan to "fix" the PvP.

[toes]

Actually, what I'm trying to explain is that if a cat outDPSes you by far, then you're not geared enough/skilled enough/concentraded enough/optimized enough. I am being outdamaged by a rogue in my guild and our gear is almost equal. Others are just less skilled so they deal less dps.

So in your opinion Tun of Ensidia is so much more skilled then the next best players in the guild that he can out dps them by 1k?

[Debed]

The issue I'm finding is that Pure DPS are getting 'uppity' being that since they're labeled as a 'pure DPS', they should have the 5% above hybrid difference in DPS regardless whereas the Feral Druids are arguing that they're increased DPS is due to the fact they have a difficult rotation.

It seems as though there's a flaw in the design where positions were switched with Pure DPS and Feral. All Pure DPS need attack rotations that matches the complexity of Feral so it doesn't seem like your meant to do 5% above hybrids just because you're labeled as a Pure.

Personally I feel that Feral Kitties should be left alone. If a Feral decides to heal mid-fight then his DPS is going to be average at best. Only time I'll agree with Feral DPS being nerfed is if Blizzard puts a little more thought into the attack design of Pure DPS so if done correctly, you'll earn that 5% above the DPS of hybrids and not a 'right' to do 5% more.

[Deleted]

Ferals van have a hard time no some bossesn, blike bosses with adds like 1-4 when we dont realy get any rotation going since rip is about 30%~of our damage, maybe even having a hard time getting savage roar upp, ferals are very combopoint depandant and if we dont get to use them our dps will fall behind, alot.

we also needs to be behind our target wich will turn out in even more problems, like on freya whenyou have to stand under a fungus or @ kologarn he has not a back at all.

and to be honest i cant think of any other class that need so much strict rules to be able to make some good damage.

*stay behind the target all the time, els no combopoints for you
*keep 4-5point savage roar upp all the time
*keep 5point rip upp all the time
* keep mangle out mangle out 12 sec
*keep rake out 9 sec
and try to get this going with an energypol of 100

shred 42 energy 1-2combopoints (depends on crit or not)
rake 35 energy 1-2 combo points (depends on crit or not)
mangle 40 energy 1-2 combopoints (depends on crit or not)
rip 30 energy finishing move glyphed for 4 sec longer duration. (total 20 sec)
savage roar 25energy finishing move 5 points 34 sec duration.
tigers fury mercy spell so its even possible to have your spells upp and rolling 30sec CD


adds? yeah sure cant do very much there unless they have 600-700k hp plus without gimping my dps totaly.

dont ever never drop any of your abilities since your dps start dropping instantl

pure or hybrid. my point of wiew
hybrid classes what it seems like we had a loooong discussion in our guild other day about this, why would'nt a hybrid class be able to make just as good dps as a pure class? "well its a pure class he cant chose if he want to heal or not". well if i want to play melee dps, i dont want to be forced into a tree because the pure classes is better. just because it is POSSIBLE for my to play a healer does not say i want to play a healer, im playing feral because i want to, but because your class can heal or tank aswell your dps should be worse then mine because i cant tank or heal...

sorry for my very bad english