Changes to Ambassador Title in 4.1
If you have the achievement you'll keep the title. The Exalted worked differently because we wanted to move the title to a different achievement altogether (50 exalted).
In this case, if you have the achievement you'll keep the title. If you're close to getting the achievement, you might want to hurry and get it before 4.1 because after 4.1 you'd need to also gain the additional rep to meet the requirements, earn the achievement, and get the title.
Same as it was for Loremaster or Explorer, if you had the achievement you still have the achievement, even though the requirements changed. (
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Zul'aman and Zul'gurub
There's a lot of new content in Cataclysm. There's also a plethora of updated content to advance the story.
Likewise, there's plenty of new content still to come in this expansion. But, we're also going to keep moving existing themes forward when the story calls for it. There were specific reasons for originally entering Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman, but those reasons by no means wrap up the story of the ancient troll empire. These city ruins still serve a major purpose in troll lore, beyond just providing new locations to gain loot.
We're moving the story of the troll nations forward, and hope you recognize and enjoy that. Hakkar and Zul'jin are gone now. Even so, that doesn't make Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman irrelevant as key locations of Azeroth.
[...] Zul'Aman is in Ghostlands, which is in Azeroth, not Outland. It's true Ghostlands didn't receive any terrain changes after the Cataclysm, but that doesn't mean the remaining Amani are unaffected by what's happened.
We'll have more information to share on the return of Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub soon. But for now I'll say this: there is a center of troll civilization yet to be seen in World of Warcraft. There was once an ancient empire of troll tribes united. Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub becoming key points of interest in Cataclysm plays into this. Perhaps something has happened to once again call for the unity of the disaffected tribes. Perhaps a certain tribe with allegiances elsewhere sees this as a very bad thing.
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Archaeology items cooldowns
Sometimes it can be difficult to find a good "sweet spot" when choosing cooldowns for groups of similar items such as those obtained through Archaeology. We don't want all the cooldowns to be exactly the same, but we also don't want it to feel like the numbers were chosen totally at random. We may not always get the values right initially, so knowing what feels good to you and what doesn't -- and why-- is really helpful.
[...] As noted, we didn't want every single Archaeology item to have the same cooldown. Some of the items are pretty unique and provide interesting on-use abilities, so it made sense to us to vary things up a little. This is perhaps a bit different than our approach to other cosmetic or novelty item cooldowns, but Archaeology itself is new and has its own reward structure. (
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Triple spec instead of dual spec?
An oldie but a goodie!
The question used to be, why don't we have a way to keep a spec for PvE and PvP? And to a lesser extent, wouldn't it be great if I could swap roles with my hybrid if needed without having to hearth and make everyone wait on me?
Those are the specific reasons for why we agreed with the sentiment of those questions, and dual spec now exists in the game. It's great (kind of) that some people have found uses for it outside of that, having two slightly variant builds of the same spec for different situations, however, it's not our intent with multiple specs to encourage that type of gameplay, and thus it's not our intent to offer tri or quad or quint, etc. specs.
Obviously having an array of possible specs to choose from would be convenient for any number of reasons, but it would also encourage situations where people are using it to shift their builds around for each individual encounter or task. Those are the kinds of options that quickly stop being options, and instead become a requirement. And as they become a requirement our necessity to design and balance around it changes it from a nice convenience option to a core piece of the game design puzzle.
A lot of people like to throw the phrase 'slippery slope' at us when we make certain changes, and dual spec is actually truthfully one of those systems. Once we have two specs, why not three? If three, why not four? But, we have our hiking boots on, and don't intend to lose footing on this just yet. BUT sliding down muddy hills is a lot of fun, so you never know. (
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Druid (
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Recent restoration changes
We're a bit worried about Resto being too powerful in PvP. We wanted to try out the Lifebloom changes to see if it fixed the problem. We don’t think it's quite the right change though, so we're going to revert the Lifebloom mana nerf, but keep the reduced bloom effect. We'll have to keep watching this.
The change to Efflorescence becoming a smart heal was actually originally just a bug. Since so many of you responded so favorably to it though, we're actually going to redesign Efflorescence to work similarly. We expect the redesign to help the talent be more useful in 5 and 10 player content as well. We'll have more details at a later time. (
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Paladin (
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Word of Glory cooldown in 4.1
The assessment that Word of Glory is meant for more occasional use is rather close to the mark. That's also part of the reason that we're comfortable with employing a cooldown solution in this case. We think that it’s more interesting for Word of Glory to be a reasonably powerful heal that's used infrequently, than if it were a weaker heal used more often. We also like the way Word of Glory interacts with Vengeance because then the heal scales with the content. If you’re taking a lot of damage, the heal is more potent than it would be otherwise.
We also didn’t really think that healing was necessarily a problem for Protection paladins. We just weren't happy with the style of gameplay it was causing players to adopt. We had tanks telling us “I just miss using actual attacks, like Shield of the Righteous. Every time I use SotR it feels like I'm playing wrong.” While technically a tank had a choice between threat and survival, we felt it was an illusion of choice because tanks often (and rightfully) worry about survival first and foremost. You still have the choice between generating threat and healing, but since the healing will be lower overall, the trade off should matter less.
The self-healing ability of other tanks has been brought up in this context. When comparing tanks, we look at the whole package, not individual abilities or talents. Deathknights, for example, are designed with less innate damage mitigation than Protection paladins, but they have a lot of self-healing to compensate. It’s okay, of course, for paladins to have some self-healing (they are a class with healing spells after all), but that has to be balanced against their better built-in damage mitigation. We try to tune tanking classes close enough so that they can all tank effectively, but without making them all function identically.
We're not too concerned with keeping Protection viable in PvP. We know some players enjoy it, but the majority of Prot paladins are more concerned with their ability to tank, and that’s where we spend most of our Protection design effort. It’s a great goal to make all of a class's specs viable in PvP, but it's not always possible to do so and paladins have other options.
I realize that Word of Glory is also on Retribution's platter at the moment, and we have something to share about its role in that spec as well, despite this being the tanking forum.
We think the 4.06 changes overall gave Retribution too great a buff for PvP. We realize that there are those that disagree, but we're pretty firm on that point and we needed to make some adjustments. Given that Ret is primarily a dps spec, we thought it made more sense to reduce their off-healing capacity, which had become quite strong, rather than their damage.
That's not to say that we mind a hybrid dps spec occasionally helping out with healing – that feels cool, and it's appropriate. On the other hand, we want damage focused specs to be primarily focused on dps. It's true that there were other ways we could have reduced Retribution healing. We could have changed Selfless Healer or even Word of Glory itself. As I mentioned earlier, after looking things over, we arrived at the conclusion that having a powerful heal you can use infrequently is more compelling than having a weak heal that you can use more often. (
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Priest (
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Discipline in 4.1
We want Power Word: Shield, Power Word: Barrier, and Divine Aegis to continue to be an important part of a Discipline priest's rotation. We want you to use those spells frequently. The changes we've made through hotfixes and those that we currently have planned for 4.1. aren't intended to remove that element of gameplay at all, but simply refine it and bring it more in line with our design goals for the spec as a whole.
As we've stated in the past (
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...14?page=25#485), we don't want Discipline priests to use their shields to exclusion of everything else -- including, potentially, a more efficient heal. While damage mitigation is what Discipline priests are known for and something that you do very well, we also want you to cast important spells like Penance, Greater Heal, Prayer of Healing, and Flash Heal. Casting those heals doesn't make you a Holy priest, especially if you're using them to leverage other key talents in the Discipline arsenal (like Renewed Hope, Strength of Soul, and Train of Thought).
Even so, we know that a lot of players want a class specialization that does nothing but shield, and that's fair -- but that's not the direction we want to take with Discipline priests right now. We want you to use the spell that's most appropriate for the situation, be that a heal, a shield, or an offensive ability like Smite. Your shields will still have their time and place, of course, and we'll make sure that you have good reason to cast them, but they just won't be the only thing you use to keep an ally alive. (
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Holy 4-piece set bonus
This is feedback we've seen quite a bit, and it's good. With the changes to Chakra in 4.0.6, we realize a lot of players feel that the Holy 4-piece set bonus is currently much stronger than its Discipline counterpart. We don't disagree and it's something we've been actively discussing changing in 4.1 (for example, we're considering potentially removing the Weakened Soul requirement on Penance targets in order for the Spirit bonus to apply). (
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