Paragon Levels Now on Character Profiles, Blue Posts, Battle.net SMS Protect: Have You Heard?, The Voices of Diablo III, Part One
Valley of the Four Winds Zone Preview
As we get closer to Mists of Pandaria, now is a good time to take a look at the new zones. You can find this preview again in the menu at the right side of the navbar. Below is an edited video by BaronSoosdon that adds some eye candy to the zone, let us know what you think!
Jade Forest Zone Preview
As we get closer to Mists of Pandaria, now is a good time to take a look at the new zones. You can find this preview again in the menu at the right side of the navbar. Below is an edited video by BaronSoosdon that adds some eye candy to the zone, let us know what you think!
Now Testing Stormstout Brewery Challenge Mode
Blizzard has talked about Challenge Modes a lot recently, so now is your chance to try them out and see how difficult they are!
We've enabled Challenge Mode in the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta for Stormstout Brewery. We'd like to see as many players as possible challenge the dungeon to score your fastest times, and join us in discussing this new aspect of the game in this thread.
Here are the key things to know about this Challenge Mode test:
- To participate, characters must have completed at least one run of the Heroic Stormstout Brewery dungeon.
- Characters that meet that requirement will be able to set the difficulty to Challenge from the contextual unitframe dropdown and zone into Stormstout Brewery with your pre-formed party of five.
- There is no queuing for Challenge Mode dungeons.
- Inside, you’ll experience a more challenging version of the instance, with a timed run that begins the moment you interact with the Challenge Orb in front of you at the entrance.
- Your gear will be normalized to item level 463, even if you have inferior gear on your beta character. (Note: This is only a beta feature. On live realms, gear won’t scale up, only down.)
- Anyone with a level-90 on a beta realm can participate.
- You can reset the dungeon and restart the timer mid-run if you make a mistake and feel you can do better. Simply have your leader right-click on his/her character unit frame and select the Reset option from the contextual drop-down while inside the instance.
This test will likely end late Monday, September 17. We're working on producing some non-official, test-only leaderboards for you, but don't forget -- there are going to be full-fledged, Armory-based leaderboards for Challenge Modes after Mists of Pandaria goes live.
We want players to race through the dungeon and try to get the best time possible. For many groups, simply finishing the dungeon will be challenging and an accomplishment. That’s fine, and we’d love to hear from you. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard EntertainmentWoW Losing Its Social Aspect
I recently did RaF with my girlfriend and I realized how less social WoW is now. I realized this when she kept telling me how boring it was when she was on because she didn't know anyone. Back when I started playing, there was no cross-realm and you had to ask trade chat to join groups to do dungeons, which you actually had to communicate in. You needed to join a good active guild to survive well. My point is you had to be social and make friends to truly play the game. It's difficult to find social groups besides guilds.
To Blizzard: Do you intend on bringing any of this some what mandatory socialization back to the game?
There are still many facets of the game where socializing and communicating are mandatory. While maintaining the MMO nature, what we've been doing over the years is work to provide something for people to do when they don't have a lot of friends online, or not a lot of people on their realm who are willing or able to run a dungeon, or a Battleground.
This game has always had a broad appeal. We're committed to striking a balance between very social gameplay, and progression on a more individual level. We work to create systems to support different play styles so that, ideally, you get to choose how you want to spend your time in the game -- knowing that you progressed your character in some fashion by the time you log out.
The thing is, it's always easy to forget that WoW is a delicate balance of opposing pressures. While we sit here remembering the time when we had long bonding dungeon crawls on realms where people knew each other and reputation mattered... there are also people who post here who just want the quick runs. They don't want to wait on others, they don't want a long crawl, they don't want to teach - they just want to play. Who is to really say who is right?
From my own perspective, I've certainly been in plenty of Dungeon Finder groups were there was virtually no communication -- though sometimes watching avatar body language, rare pets being pulled out, etc. brings about this funny sense of communication even in a virtual world. Yet, even in most of those relatively silent dungeon runs, I still had a great time playing the game. I definitely don't feel like it's the equivalent of playing alone when I'm a group. I still do my part and am happy to socialize if anyone in the group seems down for it. I just tend to be shy and not always initiate conversation myself.
And I'll continue to do that in Mists. But I'm also looking forward to joining with a set group of people, traveling to an instance location out in the world, and zoning in for Challenge Modes. I'll just have more choices on any given night of queuing for something, or joining friends/guild mates to tackle content that requires more of a coordinated strategy. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Theramore Scenario Requirements
You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)
So it could just be 3 dps & we'd be fine?
Any three classes. The speed at which you complete the Scenario may vary based on that (slightly) but they are designed to be run by any class combination.
Your ticket to ride is your level. If you don't have anyone to go into the Scenario with, we can provide people to group with via the queue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Cross-Realm Challenge Modes
Will challenge modes be cross realm?
Yes.
If Challenge Modes can be done cross-realm, I think we need a region ranking system (US, EU, etc) instead of realm. It would make more sense.
Leaderboards will also display information on a regionwide basis as well as by realm. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Challenge Mode Difficulty
Wait, so I cannot queue up Looking For a Challenge (LFC)? Guess I won't be doing challenge modes. Thanks for more content I won't be doing!
If you're looking for endgame content for which you can queue up to find a group, there's more of that for you in Mists than there ever has been in the history of this game.
You will never outgear challenge modes. One of the neat things they do is normalize your gear to a certain item level. Basically how it works is they take all of your gear and set it at a certain item level say 450 and then all of your gear becomes 450 item level (at least if it works same way as normalization in beta).
The format is actually even a little more complicated than that. Just as an example: hit cap. As you surpass the 5-player Heroic dungeon item level you'll eventually cap out hit. If we equally averaged all your stats back down to 90 Heroic dungeon levels, it'd feel crappy. In that scenario you'd be running upcoming Heroic raid content at hit cap without missing, then enter a Challenge dungeon and be missing too much. You'd then have to keep a separate set that stacks a ton of hit to make up for the loss in averages. So your hit won't scale down as much. If you're not missing raid bosses in your epic gear, you probably shouldn't be missing bosses in Challenges either.
But trinkets effects and procs will be scaled down as well and set bonuses will be deactivated.
The automatic queuing systems in WoW come with the built in assumption that those involved will have a reasonable chance of succeeding at the content they've queued for. This is not the case in rated arenas, nor is it likely to be the case in rated challenges.
All the option would do is raise false hopes & risk player frustration when they discover the pug option is guaranteed not to succeed.
Lakhesís, your statements are very in-line with some of our development philosophies regarding matchmaking systems, player expectations in random versus pre-made groups, etc.
My biggest concern about Challenge modes is the opposite. Not that they will be nerfed, but they will be hotfixed to remove semi-exploits.
Let me give an example. In a certain dungeon, it is determined that a druid, shaman and mage can use certain abilities to bust through a dungeon and crush the gold medal time. The symbiosis between those 3 classes causes them to clear the dungeon 5 mins before any other comp can.
The devs know that in no time, Youtube will be filled with vids of how to do this and that soon everyone will know that you must bring a certain comp to even get close to the record time, so they hotfix it the first month of MOP. The original druid, shaman, mage did not cheat.. so probably their record time will stand forever.
If you think I am exaggerating.. look at 75% of world first raid kills. They mostly all involve some ´tactic´ that is ruled not an exploit, but is still hotfixed very quickly to not work any longer. Of course there are other true exploits that are hotfixed as well.
My guess is that there will be a lot of challenge mode top times that come from the first 2 weeks of the expansion and last a long long time.
You bring up some legitimate concerns, Adrena. All I can say is we share those concerns and will be watching things very carefully. There will definitely be some class synergy that will work well for specific dungeons or encounters. That's okay. But we do want to make sure there's integrity in the leaderboards regardless.
If you're raid hit capped, will you be massively over the hit cap in challenge modes (and thus wasting offensive stats) or when it scales you down will it ensure you are right at the hit cap, but not (significantly) over it, and reallocate those points to some generally useful stat.
Or to ask it another way, will players want to be aiming for a cap below raid hit cap when doing challenge modes so as not to waste stats (or are challenge mode bosses +3 bosses instead of +2 as is typical in heroic dungeons)?
If you're just at hit cap in a raid, you'll be just at hit cap in Challenges. So if you swap out any hit to stack other stats you'll be dropping below cap. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Challenge Modes and Loot
This is probably a stupid question, but I'm assuming no loot or gold drops off mobs in challenge modes, yes? Otherwise wouldn't gold farmers just endlessly reset them?
No loot or gold drops in challenge modes, though you will get Valor Points for any and all completions (up to the weekly cap, of course). Challenge modes are something you do once you are fully equipped with dungeon-or-better gear.
Because no loot or gold can be obtained, we'll be disabling durability loss in challenge modes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
PvP Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard EntertainmentPvP and PvE Gear Strength in PvP
Great, another PVP season that needs PVE weapons for BiS. Perhaps if enemy players had a low % chance of dropping sub-par/LFR versions of PVP items when you kill them I'd feel better about all of this but pffft, dragon killing is not what I want to be doing.
I feel that PvP weapons will actually be far more desirable than their PvE counterparts for PvP in Mists of Pandaria. This is because 265 PvP power equals 1% increase in damage and healing done and with the large amounts on PvP weapons, they are definitely nothing to be sneezed at.
Keep in mind that this is for the Ilvl490 PvP weapons:
- Caster weapons, one-handed (Malevolent Gladiator's Spellblade), wands (Malevolent Gladiator's Touch of Defeat) and two-handed (Malevolent Gladiator's Staff) have 2874 PvP power increasing healing and damage by 10.84%
- Two-handed melee weapons Malevolent Gladiator's Pike and ranged weapons Malevolent Gladiator's Longbow also have 2874 PvP power increasing healing and damage by 10.84%
- One-handed melee weapon such as Malevolent Gladiator's Cleaver have 1437 PvP power which equals a 5.42% flat increase in damage and healing. And when you equip two, that number doubles
As you can see, equipping these items is a significant increase in the damage and healing that you can perform in PvP. The guide that I linked earlier in the thread explains, much better than I can, why the PvP stats are astounding. I do recommend take a look. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Arena Rewards and Cheating Teams
We did not rely only on player reports for our investigation, however we did look into teams if we were contacted about them. We gathered reports from multiple sources and in the end all teams eligible for the rewards were investigated; any of them that were found to be exploiting or cheating were disqualified from the end of season rewards.
One large point to note is that it was the teams being disqualified and not the accounts of the participating players, which is where I believe the confusion is coming from. Before I go any further I want to make sure that you are all aware that the end of season rewards are account wide. This means that if one team on an account was disqualified for any reason but there was still another legitimate and eligible team on that same account, they could still receive the rewards.
I hope that this clears everything up and ensures that you are all aware that any teams found to be abusing the ladder and queue systems were sanctioned accordingly.
So why are some players on certain teams being punished and not the rest of the team? You're pretty inconsistent with what the Armory is telling us.
How so? As I said in my post, it is the arena team that gets disqualified from the end of season rewards and not its players. So if someone had two teams that were both eligible for the end of season rewards and only one of them was disqualified, their characters would still receive awards from the team that achieved its rank legitimately because of account-wide achievements.
But there are teams with some players who have got the title when it's their only team (which has been disqualified).
I think that you have misunderstood the statement. This is because on their account, another team on a different character has received the end of season rewards legitimately. The Feat of Strength is currently account wide which means that all of their characters have access to the Feat of Strength, but not to the title and mount.
Nop, only the mount achievement is account wide, the actual mount isn't.
My apologies, I did indeed make a mistake. It is just the Feat of Strength that is account wide for the mount and title, but the mount and title is only usable on the character that received the rewards. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Level 90 Arena Tournament Realm
We hope that we can have the level 90 Arena Pass realm up and active within weeks after the release of Mists. So it might be possible, if the realm is up soon enough, that you can get full Malevolent gear on the Arena Pass before it is even possible to have the full set on the live realms. This is because the Conquest per week cap limits the speed you can get it on live realms, but you can get the full set straight away on Arena Pass.
Wasn't it a promise that we will eventually get one though? I wasn't sure of wording with when we get it though.
Oh yes, there will definitely be a level 90 Arena Pass. Also, If you purchased access to the 2012 Arena Pass earlier this year then you receive free access to the level 90 one!
You can find out a little bit of the information for the level 90 Arena Pass realm in the FAQ here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/game/arena/arena-faq (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Start Date of Season 12
There is no official set in stone start date for Season 12, but it should begin approximately 1 week after the release of Mists of Pandaria. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Class Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard EntertainmentBeta Class Balance Analysis
Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
One of the posters on the Paladin forums theorized it had something to do with Divine Storm and Light of Dawn, but many took it to mean chain procs were basically cut from Divine Purpose. We did a few tests and chain procs were definitely not cut, but just in case, could you clarify the change for us?
It was just a few bugfixes to Divine Purpose, not a functionality change. Here's a more detailed description of what was fixed with Divine Purpose, for those curious:
- Word of Glory was mistakenly giving two chances to proc Divine Purpose (one for the cast, one for the heal / damage). It now only gives one chance, as you'd expect.
- As previously mentioned, Divine Purpose's proc chance is supposed to be reduced to 8.33% or 16.66% if you cast a finisher with 1 or 2 Holy Power. That was also incorrectly applying to casts of finishers with Divine Purpose active. For example, suppose you had 4 Holy Power, and cast Light of Dawn (dropping you to 1 Holy Power). That procs Divine Purpose. You then Light of Dawn again. Previously, it would see that you're at 1 Holy Power, and give that second cast only an 8.33% chance to proc Divine Purpose again. This fixes that, so that casts made with Divine Purpose have the full 25% chance to proc Divine Purpose again.
- Some finishers would proc Divine Purpose instantly when you cast them, and some would have a moment of delay between the cast and you gaining Divine Purpose. Those have been fixed to always proc instantly; it should feel much more responsive now.
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
We have currently estimated that Blood Boil was nerfed by about 40% for Unholy. Does that sound accurate?
No, it sounds like you’re missing the very large increase to its base damage. It should change Unholy’s AoE damage somewhat, but it shouldn’t be huge. At low gear levels, it may be a buff even.
Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
An earlier blue post indicated that Soul Burn: Soul Swap should NOT put soul swap on cool down if you have glyph of soul swap equipped. On live SB:SS is still triggering a cool down. Have you changed your mind on this or is a fix incoming?
We’re seeing it working internally and on live. Can you double-check? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Penance Overpowered
I think it's important for everyone to keep in mind that what you're seeing/experiencing is an incomplete picture. We've been working on maintaining balance through the levels as much as possible, but ultimately, the development team is tuning for level 90.
While there has been a spate of "nerf this/nerf that" threads because of these experiences, it's important to remember that these types of comments (nerf threads) are not generally very helpful. It also leads to flame wars from those that are at risk of being subject to said nerfs.
If there's a legitimate bug that you're seeing/experiencing, that's a whole other kettle of fish. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
15% Discount on MMO-Champion J!NX T-Shirts
From now until the Mists of Pandaria launch (Midnight PDT 9/25/12), MMO-Champion shirts are on sale for 15% off with the code CurseFTW! This code will also work for any of the other Curse shirts.
Guild Wars 2 Sells Two Million Copies
Guild Wars 2 has managed to sell over two million copies already! In other news, GW2Guru has added a ArenaNet Dev Tracker and GW2DB has added over 8,000 new items among other updates.
If you want more frequent updates, check out GW2Guru or find some other players to play with in our Guild Wars 2 forum. If you are looking for a skill calc, items, achievements, maps, or anything else that can be found in a database, check out GW2DB!