Operation Gnomeregan / Recapturing Echo Isles
Players of all levels will be able to take part in some form or another. We'll have more details for you as we get a little closer to the event. (
Source)
Class cooldowns
It's just a matter of degree. Slice and Dice isn't too bad used as every other finisher or so (though even then it's such a game-changer that having it fall off is devastating). Slice and Dice as something you had to do every other attack would be masochistic (and yeah, Hunger for Blood might be close).
Brain Freeze doesn't proc all that often to where you're literally doing Frost Bolt / Fireball / Frost Bolt / Fireball.
Really though one of the biggest differences is the role. If dps specs don't have some kind of rotation or priority system, they become boring to play. With tanks and healers, they have a lot going on in addition to using their abilities. We do ask dps specs to sometimes do really important things in a raid, and they often have to move out of the fire or whatever, but then again, so do the healers and tanks.
I'm not saying tanks shouldn't be hitting buttons often. They need to in order to be fun. But there are two extremes that both sort of suck. One is you have to hit a button constantly that has very little depth to the decision. The other is that you never want to push the button because you're saving it. Cooldown plays into this a lot. On a 15 sec cooldown, any time you're saving the ability, you're probably wasting it. On a 60 min cooldown, any time you use the ability you feel like you're wasting it. Somewhere in the 2-3 minute timeframe you can feel like it's okay to use the abilities often, but you can also hold them on occasion for those scary periods where the boss is bursting damage on you or the healers are repositioning or whatever.
I don't think we're horribly off with the cooldowns today, but I think we are off.
(
Source)
Tanking control and cooldowns
Yeah we think this is a problem. It makes sense that a tank need to spend some percentage of button presses on the "staying alive" component of tanking and not all on the "boss control" part of tanking. We just need a "staying alive" button that doesn't feel very maintenance-y. There is kind of a sweet spot between pushing something on cooldown and never ever pushing it because you need to save it for an emergency that might not ever come.
We've also kind of let tanks (except DKs) opt out of having to manage their resource, and threat by and large isn't hard to maintain on single targets, at least 10-20 seconds into a fight. Tanks always have a lot of responsibility for positioning the mob and everything but that probably still leaves some bandwidth for making decisions about staying alive that we aren't really filling at the moment.
Shield Block (and Holy Shield) will be more meaningful in the Cataclysm block model too.
[...] Just wanted to point out that I used "boss control" specifically instead of "maintain threat." Tanks are asked to turn dragons away from the raid, kite dudes across the room, swap with another tank, get out of the fire without failing to do any of the previous, maybe interrupt (on 10-player raids) and so on. On some fights this is a pretty small piece of the puzzle. On others it's huge. If juggling cooldowns and managing threat take a lot of your attention, then boss control becomes overwhelming on some fights. If doing all of the above is too simple then on say Patchwerk (Festergut?) you're not doing much. (
Source)
Overgearing encounters
There can be something in between Heroic Shadow Labs when it shipped and Heroic Nexus today in your 251 / 264 gear. Stopping to crowd control some of the pulls isn't so terribly onerous, given that the dungeons themselves are a lot shorter than they were in the day when Scholomance was serious business.
I'll still argue some (but not all) of it was the gear. Naxx was available immediately and relatively undertuned, especially in the 25 player version. In BC I spent a lot of time finishing up all of those Shadowmoon quests with blue rewards so that I could handle Karazhan. In Lich King many of us were in Naxx before we saw some of the heroic dungeons. By the time we got back to those dungeons, we totally overgeared them.
Heroic Halls of Reflection isn't a great example because of the nature of the first room, but if you look at something like Heroic Pit of Saron, that dungeon took a bit of learning before it was a milk run. The pulls before the tunnel at the end typically require crowd control until you overgear it with raid drops and Frost badge gear.
But to go back to the Naxx example, if all the Blizzards, Pestilences and Volleys hit for less damage, then you'd single target stuff down more, and it all of the mobs weren't dying at once, then the tank would be in more danger from dying to too much damage. (This will be particularly true when block doesn't scale so well to lots of weak attackers.)
We give classes a lot of tools and when half of those tools (to exaggerate) aren't ever used, then classes feel shallow. Not every pull will require CC, but more of them will than today. (
Source)
Minor Glyphs
I would disagree and say that all of the minor rogue glyphs are pretty decent in one way or another. So maybe this is just a detachment of what people see as useful for their own play style. They're certainly more subjective than "you must have these major glyphs if you're this spec". But I think that's pretty cool, that you can pick and choose the ones that match what you want to do and not have a clear "omg you HAVE to have these or you're a dumb!"
[...] Bottom line is that some minor glyphs are certainly considered by a lot of people as more 'useful' than others, and obviously not every class has the same spells, abilities, and desire for what glyphs provide so there's not going to be a homogenization of glyph 'worth' through standardized effect (nor should there be). I would disagree that there aren't useful minor glyphs for every class. Are they useful to you? Maybe not. Like any part of the game there's room for improvement, and certainly with Cataclysm and the class changes there will need to be glyph additions/changes to go along with them. (
Source)
Hunter (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Hunter specs in 3.3.3
Judging from a quick perusal of the Internet, my hastily written post up above confused some people. My apologies. The point I was trying to make was that 3.3.3 BM seems pretty close to SV in a lot of cases. We're not going to know more until we see more humans and fewer spreadsheets try it out. Players raid SV today and can be relatively competitive on meters. Therefore hopefully players who like BM can do the same thing. Are all 3 hunter specs within 1% of each other on all gear? No, and I don't think that's a reasonable goal. We'll try to narrow the gap where we can without forcing every player to respec to the whatever the current flavor of the month hotness is or creating balance nightmares in PvP. (
Source)
With my current gear, my BM spec trails a SV spec by 7.8% in potential dps. Compared to MM, BM is 13.4% behind. When I plug in the BiS gear in every slot I find BM trailing SV by 8.9% and the gap between BM and MM increases to 16.7%. I also have to add that I did not gem for anything but Agi in any of the specs so the ArP factor is reduced. I only have 426 passive ArP with my gear. Even without massive amounts of ArP, BM still is way behind MM and considerably behind SV as well.
We didn't obviously compare the gear of every hunter out there. We looked at a few different levels of progression and BM is pretty close to SV in a lot of cases. Eurytos up above thinks BM is pretty close to SV, and in fact I'll quote him in a minute. If you're a BM fan I think you can raid as BM in 3.3.3 without utterly embarrassing yourself. Are there hunters out there who can out dps you? Sure. But there would be hunters out there who could beat you even if you were both MM. Any of us can pull out parses where the Elemental shaman or Shadow priest or Blood DK is topping the meters for that particular raid and still making ICC progression. Let's assume BM and SV are 1500-2000 dps behind MM. At that level, the damage is probably close enough where skill and gear are going to have a much greater impact than your spec for most of you.
Is that acceptable for Lich King 25 hard mode? Probably not. But the guilds at that level of progression are obsessed about even minimal dps gains, and they need to be. I'm not sure we can ever balance all 3 specs of a given class to be within 100 or so dps of each other on the most challenging content given that the specs have different mechanics that produce different strengths and weaknesses on different encounters. Balance at the hardest of the hard core is different from balance at the rest of the game, and much of the community would do well to focus less on maximum dps potential with the best gear and focus more on what they themselves can do. BM in 3.3.2 was unacceptably low in PvE. I'm not sure it is now. (
Source)
Paladin (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Paladins AE Tanking Nerfs
We haven't announced any new paladin nerfs. It's possible we won't make any changes before Cataclysm. We haven't decided yet. (
Source)
Warrior (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Threat and Rage Management
I think they are different though. You are probably not going to die from failing to push Shield Slam, except possibly to a raid wipe very early on the pull when threat is dicey and healers or casters get creamed (and today, even that is unlikely.) The other problem is the resource issue I mentioned before. Back in BC (especially early), warriors had to prioritize rage a little more. If you hit Heroic Strike so much that you lacked rage for a Shield Slam (or a Shield Block), then you were doing it wrong. In today's environment, many Prot warriors might as well take the rage bar off their screen. (Caveat: This does not mean being eternally rage starved is fun. It just means that choosing which ability to use is more fun than hitting them on cooldown.) (
Source)