Blacksmithing Epic Weapons
There will not be a Stormherald type weapon "high level crafter only". There are however a fair number of epic crafted BoE weapons that smiths will be able to make in LK. We didn't like the vast number of people who felt they were required to be Blacksmiths in order to get a good weapon. Players should choose their trade skills based on what they enjoy, not what they feel they must do. (
Source)
Sharpening stones not intended for level 80 items
We are having QA look into this now. This is not intentional and clearly we don't want people to have to farm old mats to use Sharpening Stones (which aren't supposed to be usable on high quality items). After this is fixed they will still work on several levels worth of items moving into LK just not the end game and higher end stuff. (
Source)
Upgrade to the Everlasting Underspore Pod
This is something we may consider doing at a later date but we don't want to trivialize the rest of the food and at the moment aren't planning on introducing an upgraded version of this item. (
Source)
Bind on Equip items dropping from dungeons and raids
This is actually intended. We want there to be more trickle down items from raids and part of that decision was to give each boss one item that is BoE. It helps add excitement to raids and well as provide raiding guilds another way to help pay for the cost of raiding. (
Source)
Achievement: A Simple Re-Quest
As an update, there seem to be additional bugs with this particular achievement. 3.0.3 fixes some but not all. We'll continue to research a fix. Apologies once again. (
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Achievement: Champion of the Frozen Wastes
The Champion of the Frozen wastes achievement currently has a bug. There is a "hidden" criteria to kill Malygos in the achievement that is not displaying to characters. This can result in a player thinking that he has completed all of the necessary requirements to fulfill the achievement but not receive credit.
Please be advised that killing Malygos is required for the achievement. In an upcoming client patch (we're unable to hotfix this and it cannot be done for 3.0.3), the Malygos criteria will display properly. (
Source)
Druid (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Starfall Changes
We don't have a problem with Starfall breaking stealth. There are plenty of other spells that do so and Starfall is hard to spam.
However, Starfall is an unusual spell in that it isn't channeled and can even follow the druid around. So we are going to change it so that shifting cancels the spell. Having a druid run around in cat or travel form with Starfall raining down in an attempt to break stealth is not really what we had in mind for the spell.
[...] Yes, we would also remove (or possibly suppress) the spell on mounting. It isn't intended to be used as a minesweeper. If you want to cast it in caster or Moonkin form to try and catch a stealther, that's fine. (
Source)
Upcoming Feral Changes (Repost because I only had a small link in the previous news)
ARMOR
We are changing the way bear armor works so that bonus armor on items does not receive the bear armor multiplier. Specifically this means that trinkets, rings, necks and cloaks with bonus armor will not be multiplied by the bear bonus. The normal armor on leather will still be multiplied by this bonus. We are also going to remove bonus armor from Feral staves. You’ll get your bonus armor from the leather you acquire.
Examples:
1) A ring that grants 100 bonus armor will now grant a bear 100 armor (not ~470 armor).
2) Leather legs with 253 armor will still grant a bear ~1190 armor (not 253 armor).
3) A feral staff will now grant 0 armor.
We are making this change because armor is such a good stat for bears that it makes taking pieces with bonus armor a non-decision and we don’t want acquiring these pieces, which tend to not be common, to be so much of a barrier to a druid who wants to tank a raid.
This change will NOT be in effect when Lich King ships. We are letting you know this now so that you don’t go through heroic efforts to acquire items like the Badge of Tenacity, or Defender’s Code. Defender’s Code, with 850 armor, will still be a good trinket. But it won’t be an insanely good trinket for a bear.
We will adjust the bear armor modifiers so that your net mitigation does NOT go down with these changes. Let me repeat: this is not a nerf to Feral armor. It is a change to the amount of armor you get from gear with bonus armor.
MANA
We are adding an effect to a deep Feral talent (something like Primal Tenacity) to further reduce the cost of shapeshifting into cat or bear by 50%. This talent will stack with Natural Shapeshifter for a total cost reduction of 80%. PvP-focused druids can get both talents to shift easily and often despite, no longer having Int on gear at level 80.
PROTECTOR OF THE PACK
We are removing the group requirements from this talent. The new tooltip will say: “Increases your attack power by X and reduces the damage you take in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form by Y.” The values of X and Y themselves are not changing.
Again, these changes will NOT be in Nov 13 for Lich King’s launch. We will add them in a patch that will come out sometime before the major Ulduar content patch. We're letting you know now so that you can choose quest rewards and loot drops accordingly. (
Source)
Changes to Feral druids
Part of our solution here was to make shifting easier for Ferals, not to just give you more mana. You can find that discussion somewhere in this forum. (
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Wild Growth
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.
Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place. (
Source)
Mage (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Arcane Blast upcoming changes
If Arcane is overpowered at all, it is nowhere near to the level that Retribution was. Sorry. This isn't a contest to see who can get the least or most nerfs.
The degree to which I am talking about changing Arcane Blast wouldn't have been a couple of errors in the tooltip. It would have made the tooltip totally irrelevant for the spell, which would have confused a lot of players. (
Source)
Paladin (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Potential retribution paladin changes
Our eventual plan is to put Divine Shield on a shared 30 sec cooldown with Avenging Wrath. We also plan on changing Divine Shield's attack speed penalty (which isn't really much of a penalty) and have it apply to all damage done while the bubble is up.
Divine Protection would no longer have the attack penalty, but since Prot paladins typically talent out of that penalty, it won't have a big effect on tanking (though obviously that talent would need to do something slightly different).
All of this assumes that preventing AW from being used with DS actually makes the Ret tree a little more balanced. We'll need to monitor that a little bit longer first.
We are going to go ahead and change the mana drains to a percentage of mana so that Ret paladins don't lose so much larger a percentage of their mana than casters with 15K mana.
[...] Seriously, we are strongly considering letting Vengeance stack up to 5 stacks (perhaps for more points) to make sure sustained damage is still good enough. We may still add a secondary effect to Crusader Strike too. Burst is certainly easy to add if we need to, though I really hope we don't have to. (
Source)
Holy paladin changes
We are probably going to modify a deep Holy talent or two to add additional damage (J of the Pure maybe). That’s pretty safe. We’re not hugely worried about Prot, because there’s this thing they can do with their shields that can do some pretty sweet burst damage….
Righteous Vengeance
I looked into Righteous Vengeance, and it is in fact a magical ability. It is Holy damage, so it shouldn't typically be resisted. It can be dispelled. There is a lot to remember about WoW class mechanics, and while I remember a lot of it, I make mistakes like everyone else.
I also misspoke about the affects of resilience. Resilience won't prevent defensive procs but it can prevent offensive ones. The rule of thumb is that my resilience shouldn't make my abilities worse. If my resilience makes the other guy's abilities worse, too bad for them.
As I said, Righteous Vengeance was intended to help Ret sustained damage in PvE. We went out of our way to make it not a dependable source of damage in PvP. (
Source)
Priest (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Circle of Healing
Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are definitely on our radar. This would be a good time to discuss them.
Our concern is that they are turning two classes with a large arsenal of healing spells into single-button healers. Meanwhile, ironically, the other two healing classes have fewer heals to use in the first place.
We have seen raid parses where 75 to 90% of a priest's healing is through CoH. It's a good spell, useful in a variety of situations. But I think you can understand our concern. (
Source)
Rogue (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Developer Q&A (
Source)
- Hunger For Blood is a very lackluster PVP talent that very few rogues go for and for PVE all it does is serve as another button we need to throw into our rotation. While the 9% damage is great, it feels like the new Rampage and it's not really fun because all it does is create something for us to push before every encounter and add in the GCD to press this button to refresh it.
The tree was balanced around the original, much more powerful (and in retrospect TOO powerful) Hunger for Blood. We think it is a little lackluster in PvP and are talking about ways to juice it without overhauling the tree. We can overhaul the tree if that's what it takes, but it will just take that much longer and Assassination seems to be okay in PvP and PvE for the moment.
- Killing Spree is great but many rogues complain that since it doesn't return us to the original target it can actually be a DPS loss when used.
We do hear that complaint a lot. It's not supposed to be the ultimate AE ability. It's supposed to be decent at AE and really good vs. single targets. I do think screwing up your facing is a little annoying though and is something we'll try to fix.
- Shadow Dance is still pretty much a headache to deal with. I know you removed the cooldown aspect on it but is that really enough? When Sap can't be used if the target is in combat, we're left with Cheap Shot, Ambush and Garrote. I don't think anyone fears those three abilities being used in rapid succession as much as say, a Warrior with Bladestorm or Titan's Grip.
I agree it can be a headache from the UI standpoint, but it's an neat ability overall IMO. The multiple Ambushes alone can add up. As far as the UI goes, we are trying to implement either a true stealth bar or some kind of pseudo steal bar to make it easier to use.
- Hunger For Blood's PVP viability was completely removed so Mutilate has to rely on Vanish to break snares and Fleet Footed doesn't really help when we're being kited around so easily by just about every ranged or caster class that exists in the game.
Mutilate is in a little bit of a place in PvP where you rely more on your team, but in return you get really high damage. So you don't have as many CC breaks, but you do tend to kill things faster as a trade-off. One change that will help is increasing the proc rate of Crippling Poison to 50%.
- Shadowstep's viability was nerfed with 3.0, but for what reason? We were never given a reason or justification for the removal of using this ability while rooted. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that our 41 point talent is vastly inferior to a Warrior's Intercept which is trainable or a Feral Druid's Charge, which is only a 21 point ability.
We think Shadowstep made rogues too dominant in PvP (similar to the Cloak change). Of course at the same time everyone got new tools to counter the pre-nerf version of the rogue, so it's possible we went too far. We do caution you not to make too much of comparisons in abilities between different classes -- you need to look at your abilities within the context of other tools (e.g. Cloak, Vanish, Crippling Poison, etc.)
- Sprint is an old, outdated ability that has no place in modern WoW. Ask Rogues when they use this ability effectively and you'll get some ridiculous answers. If you're not Combat, you need to wait while you're not snared to use it...,
I think there is some truth here, but we did lower the base cooldown to try and compensate. Part of being a good rogue is knowing when you can safely use your abilities to get the most out of them, and that includes Sprint. That's just part of the kit of the class. But we can keep an eye on it.
3) On Beta and on Live, many Rogues feel that Stealth is very weak compared to what it was before 3.0, as well as enemies targeting us while Vanished. Is there a bug with stealth again?
There are some mob abilities that seem to be causing stealth to break prematurely, but you seem to mostly be talking about PvP here, so I assume that's not it. It's always hard to figure out the state of Vanish and stealth because there are always so many players quick to say "LOLZ VANISH NEVAR WORKS," so we can't always detect if anything has changed. We are definitely hearing more mumblings than usual lately (though usual is also typically really high) so we're looking to see if there are any new problems.
Is Relentless Strikes going to remain as it is currently? This change is still not sitting well with a large number of rogues.
Based on its power, the alternatives where nerfing the talent or getting rid of it. At least having to take 5 points in every tree is better than having to go fairly deep into a couple of them.
I understand that the development team didn't want tanks to rely on avoidance as they have in the past but the recent change to the Agility : Dodge ratio has left rogues with very little dodge and at 80 we're only seeing about 15%.
This is something we're talking about a lot. Melee in general seem to be better at countering rogues, and we probably haven't seen much of the hardest hitting one yet. Rogues won't typically tak mitigation talents that aren't also bundled with dps (except Cheat Death), so we may need to rework a few talents here and there. We definitely don't want rogues just ignoring players that are attacking them so that they can burst down a target. We don't want them to feel like clothies either. Definitely something we have concerns about and we'll watch and see what happens when we get level 80 death knights.
Hemorrhage is not an ability that is not supposed to replace Sinister Strike but it's not useful as it is currently and the Subtlety tree as a whole could use some work. Why does Devastate replace Sunder Armor for Warriors?
Hemo doesn't replace Sinister Strike. Backstab does. We have talked about a talent that applies the Hemo debuff to Backstab (like your Sunder example) just so there's no confusion about which is the right button to push in PvE. We added Hemo to Surprise Attacks mostly for alternate hybrid specs, if that makes sense.
I know there is a fair amount of concern about the future of the class (as there is with every class), but we think rogues are in a pretty good spot for both PvE and PvP. If I don't respond to rogue issues as much as the community would like, it's probably because we aren't as worried about them as much in general (though I did mention some specific areas above).
Shaman (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Elemental Shaman
I think I have posted recently (or maybe it was in the beta forums -- I forget -- though you probably read it either way) some of what we're looking at for Elemental:
-- More scaling at very high gear levels (higher than exist in the game now)
-- More damage out of those deep talents that only grant utility now
-- Real AE
But you are right that we have allowed your old utility to be brought by other classes. That was exactly the goal. To compensate, we buffed your damage. We think it's pretty competitive at 80 with a Lava Burst rotation, but if it's not, we'll buff it again. (
Source)
Elemental scaling
You can do things (well, *we* can do things) like make 10,000 spell power gear and then see what the damage numbers look like. Assume Boomkin and Elemental dps was close at Naxx-level gear, but Boomkin pulled way ahead with the 10,000 spell power gear. That means Balance scales a lot better. That’s probably not a problem if it takes 10,000 spell power to get there, because there will be new levels and gear and everything will have changed by that time. If it takes 2000 or 3000 spell power then it probably is a problem.
We’d like to give Elemental either a talent that converts Int to spell power or gives a better spell power to damage conversion (or both). We just don’t know yet if we’ll do this through existing talents or new talents. I’ll announce it when we know. (
Source)
Totems
I do agree totems have some cool aspects and some that can be pretty frustrating. I'm not sure giving totems more health is the answer. I understand it sucks to lose them to a pet crab or whatever, but I also understand that the person fighting the shaman would be frustrated having to unleash a 3000 damage spell just to remove Earthbind.
But I'm definitely interested in hearing more discussion on the topic from both sides. (
Source)
Warlock (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Demonology
1) Specs that can do the most dps generally make sacrifices along other axes to get there. Specs with a lot of extra utility or flexibility give up some dps. If dps is all that matters to you, then Demonology probably isn't the right spec for you. We can still make the dps good (and with the recent coefficient changes, we think it is), but specs are ultimately about making choices. Not every choice is between one way to maximize dps and some other way to maximize dps.
I do disagree (and I know you healers do to) that survivability on raids is only the responsibility of the healers. We have even existing fights (like Naj'entus) where you'll just be dead if you sacrifice everything for dps. I agree that survivability in PvP or when soloing is a bigger concern than on raids. But I disagree that survivability is not a concern on raids.
2) The OP seemed to argue that Demo dps wasn't competitive because it was supposed to have more survivability, but that it in fact did not have survivability. Maybe it doesn't have as much survivability as you like and maybe the class as a whole doesn't have as much survivability as you like. I didn't really address either of those points. All I said was that people keep spec'ing Demo for PvP (not 100%, but they do spec it) so it must offer something besides highest dps.
We are looking at Demonology's dps. The coefficient buff did help it more than you might guess. A raid-buffed Felguard can also do 1000 dps or so at 80.
Overall, for any class, I wouldn't say the goal is for any tree to be identical in dps. They can be close, but we are going to take the rest of the tree into consideration. (
Source)
Affliction revamp
I've mentioned a couple of times that we want to simplify Affliction's rotation a little. Making the dot durations more consistent would help, but so would things like getting a couple of spells (Immolate and Siphon Life maybe) out of the rotation.
I'm not talking about nerfing Affliction, nor making those changes in a vacuum. This would be a redesign so that things felt more natural with ~4 abilities instead of ~6. (
Source)
Warrior (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Deep Wounds bugged (See post)
This is fixed now. I don't have an ETA on when you'll get the change. It will be in a patch that comes before the major Ulduar patch. (
Source)
Sudden Death changes going live
Yes, sorry for any confusion. It has been 9% on beta for some time. We experimented with lowering the proc rate to 4% but it didn't feel good that rare.
I remember specifically discussing the issue that we thought Arms warriors who stacked crit at the expense of everything else could hit too hard, and we didn't want cirt (and axes) to be the only way to gear. I thought as part of that discussion, we said that Sudden Death was being changed to a proc per minute from a chance on crit. If I am mistaken, my apologies. It wasn't meant as a stealth nerf. (
Source)
Titan's Grip penalty
We still think 12% is the appropriate penalty to make the talent balanced. But when we found Fury's dps to be low, the penalty was an easy thing to change to bring Fury's dps up to par. A 5% penalty isn't a meaningful penalty though, it's more of an annoyance for the sake of having a penalty, so my point was when we reduced it from 12% to 5% we should have just reduced it to zero. (
Source)
Limited PvP -> PvE Free Character Transfers
Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - 27 April
Did Blizzard just hotfix an ilvl requirement onto Awakened LFR?
The War Within Alpha - The Ringing Deeps Main Story Quest Preview
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