Firelands Heroic Disabled, July 1st Hotfixes, Blue Posts, Artworks

[Boubouille]

Patch 4.2 Hotfixes - July 1st / Firelands Heroic Disabled
We're now walking in the land of hotfixes land, with CMs doing a nice job compiling all the stuff Blizzard has been fixing for the past few days. Among other things ...

• Firelands Heroic difficulty has been turned off in all regions until the following week's realm maintenance.

Which somehow confirms what was posted earlier on our forums about STARS being asked nicely to get out of the instance.

July 1
General

• Characters should no longer randomly suffer falling damage.

Classes

• Pets should no longer be attacking new targets at random while a player is under the effects of any crowd control.

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• It is no longer possible to cancel Lunar Shower by right-clicking the buff, or canceling it via a macro.
• Starfall is no longer hitting targets that are within 40 yards if they are not in combat with the druid or his/her party/raid members. It is targeting all hostile characters in combat with the druid’s party/raid members, is not hitting Stealth characters, is not breaking crowd control effects, and is not targeting nearby critters.

Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• All of the Hunter-centric rare spawns in Mount Hyjal and Molten Front are now immune to both Distracting Shot and Taunt.

Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• The Flash Heal from Surge of Light will now correctly activate Chakra.
• The heal-over-time effect from the Glyph of Prayer of Healing now will correctly apply to targets that are within 30 yards of the target of Prayer of Healing, but over 40 yards away from the priest.
• Channeled spells are no longer being interrupted if cast immediately after Shadowfiend.

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Sap is no longer placing the rogue in combat when he/she is visible and the target is sapped.

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Warlocks will no longer fall through pillars in Ring of Valor if the pillar is moving when the player uses Demonic Circle: Teleport.

Dungeons & Raids
Dungeon Finder

• It is no longer possible for two separate guild groups with less than five players each to be matched with any other groups or players in the queue from the same guild.

Firelands

• Firelands Heroic difficulty has been turned off in all regions until the following week's realm maintenance.
• Alysrazor
  
  • Blazing Talon Clawshapers and Blazing Initiates cannot be interacted with any longer prior to them shifting to human form.
  • The Molten Feather power bar is now reappearing when appropriate.
• Baleroc
  
  • Baleroc's gate will now properly unlock itself again after a wipe, even if Shannox is still alive.
• Beth’tilac
  
  • Beth'tilac's trash will no longer respawn after she has been killed.
  • Cinderweb Drones will now add threat to players on the bottom floor (below the web) and not give any threat to players above the web.
  • The Widow’s Kiss will now ignore immunities, including Divine Shield and Anti-Magic Shell.
• Rhyolith
  
  • Rhyolith is now slightly easier to turn in 10-player mode.

Creatures

• Cinderweb Spiderlings no longer drop any loot and their health is restored to full after players exit combat.
• The Flame Archon range of Fiery Torment has dramatically increased.
• Flamewaker Subjugator, Flamewaker Animator, and Unstable Magma health has been reduced. Flamewaker Subjugator damage has been increased for 25-player raids.
• The damage-over-time effect from the Hell Hound ability Rend Flesh now stacks up to 5 times, down from 10.
• Molten Flamefathers had too much health in 10-player mode, and too little health in 25-player mode. This has been corrected.
• Surger damage dealt by Surge has been reduced.
• Unbound Blazing Elementals now have a greatly reduced chance to drop epic items and crafting recipes. They also drop less gold.
• Unbound Pyrelords can properly target banished/cycloned Smoldering Elementals with Ignite Elemental. In addition, Ignite Elemental cannot be interrupted.
• Unbound Pyrelord health has increased, while Unbound Smoldering Elemental health has decreased.
• Neither the Sulfuron Span nor Shatterstone volcano are able to be affected by the siege damage done by a Saronite Bomb.
• The rate at which crafting recipes drop has been greatly reduced.

Quests
Zul’Drak

• Players are again successfully able to complete the quest Betrayal.

Items

• The Heroic and normal versions of the crossbows Arbalest of Erupting Fury and Lava Bolt Crossbow no longer have identical stats.

Blue Posts

Puggable raids
No matter what Blizzard says, making new raid tiers undoable by pugs is total garbage. Personally I have absolutely no problem doing older raids, but seriously is making the first 2 or 3 or maybe 4 bosses of a new raid easy all that much to ask?
We actually do have a measurement of sorts in place like this. It might not be to your expectations if you want to successfully pug half of the bosses during the first week they're available, but it's worth mentioning it does exist.

Whenever designing a new raid dungeon, we have a basic 1-5 scale we use to rate each encounter in terms of complexity. While complexity may not be synonymous with difficulty in some cases, it is in most. So for an example of what we're looking at, every encounter in Molten Core would be a 1 on our scale in terms of complexity, while bosses like Cho'gall and Sinestra are each considered a 5. (For an example of when a complex fight might not translate into difficulty once the mechanics are known by the raid, Flame Leviathan is also a 5 -- there are a LOT of mechanics in that fight.)

So, using those few examples, I'll say we try to create the raids of today with the average complexity of all boss encounters dialed in around 2.5. We have to balance out the really complex encounters with encounters which have more simplistic mechanics. Again though, that doesn't always mean they're less difficult.

To define complexity, we're talking about all of the spells, abilities, scripts, or mechanics triggered during each fight. So if you look at a boss like Lucifron (1) in Molten Core, there are fewer than 5 mechanics in the whole fight. Meanwhile, Beth'tilac (5) in the Firelands has well over 100 mechanics (not just spells and abilities, but triggers for webs, adds, etc.). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Melee Friendly Encounters
Your reinterpretation seems to suggest that we're ignoring the issue when that's not the case. The take away from the quote should be that we were aware of the issues regarding ranged vs. melee, but that didn't mean that warriors got to outclass the other melee dps while we addressed them.

We're certainly aware that encounter design in the previous tier ended up feeling melee unfriendly. As a result, we were careful to include more melee friendly fights in the Firelands raid. We'll also make adjustments if things feel off in this tier of content (though that doesn't necessarily mean that melee and ranged will be tied for the top spot on every boss fight). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Frenzied Regeneration Tooltip
Frenzied Regeneration tooltip is reading 15%. It should be, and is, 30%.
That's a tooltip bug. We got some nifty new (and complicated) tech for tooltips up and running for Cataclysm, which allows us to do things like make tooltips reflect talents and glyphs in a highly accurate fashion, as opposed to the static tooltips we used to have. Overall it's a good thing, but when a system gets more complicated there are more opportunities for bugs to show up as a natural consequence. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Rogue Deadly Poison Stacking and DPS Ramp Up
You've got a point.

While we're unlikely to eliminate dps ramp up time for rogues altogether, we're sensitive to the fact that rogues require multiple methods to do so, when combo points do a pretty good job of handling that job. We will look at methods of streamlining rogue dps ramp time at some point in the future. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blizzard Art Gallery Update
The World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Art gallery has been updated with five pieces representing the Warcraft universe.

[Spl4sh3r]

Lol on Dungeon Finder change

[Irony]

Omg, Sap buff!

[Imhullu]

Sweet I was getting tired of randomly being smitten by the gods.

[Suggs]

Out of all the trash runs we have done , only seen 1 pattern. Thought it was fine tbh :S

[Deleted]

Out of all the trash runs we have done , only seen 1 pattern. Thought it was fine tbh :S

Yday before the hotfix I'd seen 2 patterns + 2 boes in 30 minutes of trash. Plus was able to take advantage of some "soloable" mobs and net myself another boe + pattern. It needed nerfed. Bad =/

Edit: Also nice to see Stars money was well spent lol. I doubt many people will consider it a legitimate kill now too.

[Deleted]

There we go. To bad they had time to get a boss down before they got thrown out.

[Deleted]

Bye bye Stars :3

[Shanto94]

Hope stars get some kind of punishment

[McFrotton]

Hope stars get some kind of punishment

Why?? they did not cheat and they got a legit kill, its not like they cheated on one of the hardest encounter in the current content( Lich King ensidia lulz shot)

[Deleted]

Why?? they did not cheat and they got a legit kill, its not like they cheated on one of the hardest encounter in the current content( Lich King ensidia lulz shot)

Cheat is probably the wrong word, but they abuse a loophole in the system and used it to their advantage, which is further proven by both this hotfix and Blizzard's removal of them from the raid instance. They should recieve punishments, especially since blizzard had to actually intervene and stop what they were doing.

[Matik]

Clearly Blizzard did not intend for Firelands heroic to be done this week, with this recent hotfix + Stars being ported out

@Boub, will you still keep STARS as being the first guild to kill Heroic Shannox in the hall of fame, despite all of this?

[bohapjut]

Hope Blizz refunds their faction changes now that they removed the reason to do it

[Matik]

Hope Blizz refunds their faction changes now that they removed the reason to do it

That's like me faction changing as a Human for one of their racials but then it gets nerfed in the next few days and asking for a refund.... it's not gonna happen. They made the decision + paid the money to do it, regardless of their intentions.

[Deleted]

Hope Blizz refunds their faction changes now that they removed the reason to do it

I dont. They used their money knowing full well what they were doing was exploiting a loophole yet they still did it. They risked their cash and they got caught. I hope they recieve more than a simple "no refunds".

[Qhara]

i lol'd at lunar shower buff right-clicking.sneaky, sneaky eh?

[bohapjut]

Lol on Dungeon Finder change

why was that change made? not really sure whats wrong with it

[Evolixe]

Its only fair tbh, taking an advantage on the progression like that isn't only unsporty.. its a bitch move.

Basically, they have been calling thrash on paragon for stacking classes for #1 Hnef, and now they simply do the same 10x worse. Its essentially the same as Sabotaging someone because they sabotaged you. Endless loop and noone gets better from it.

I thought they were the "Wise guys" the guild that "still knew how to play". Thats their own words, atleast.

[Baygon]

all that this is doing is delaying the inevitable that these bosses on heroic seem to just fall over, a few extra days won't change this at all.

[Arlor]

all that this is doing is delaying the inevitable that these bosses on heroic seem to just fall over, a few extra days won't change this at all.

Heck, Stars may still end up being the legit world first. After all, who knows how to do it better than they do?