Goblin Cinematic, Spectral Mounts, Sunflower, Cho'gall, Blue Posts

Cho'gall
Cho'gall's sordid history is a testament to his unflinching desire to sow chaos wherever his dark influence extends. The first of the ogre magi, Cho'gall rose to prominence in the old Horde as chieftain of the orcish Twilight's Hammer clan. His dubious loyalties became apparent when he abandoned the Horde during a pivotal moment in the Second War. In retaliation, forces dispatched by Orgrim Doomhammer slaughtered most of Cho'gall's traitorous clan, forcing him and his surviving cohorts into hiding. Over the following years, the ogre mage molded the Twilight's Hammer into a fanatical cult devoted to worshipping the Old Gods -- ancient harbingers of the apocalypse. Cho'gall's obsession with these malefic deities led him to the ruined city of Ahn'Qiraj, where he began efforts to awaken an Old God by harnessing the immense powers of Med'an, the new Guardian of Tirisfal. Ultimately, Med'an thwarted Cho'gall's plans, and the scheming ogre mage was thought slain. The Twilight's Hammer, however, has remained organized, leading to fears that Cho'gall is still alive... and merely biding his time, waiting for the right moment to make his presence known once again.

We are in the process restarting the beta realms to wipe all guilds. There are a number of lingering bugs that can only be fixed by a full wipe. We also want to take this opportunity to see guilds go from level 1 to 25 with a fresh start now that we have everything implemented.

We have also boosted the experience and rep gain for guilds by x5 the normal amount. The daily and weekly caps have also been raised to correspond with this. We are doing this to allow us to get more testing on as many things as we can before ship. Please remember that this increase is ONLY for beta and we will be going back to the normal values when Cataclysm ships.

All of the feedback, reports and bugs that you guys have been posting in this forum have been extremely useful. Please keep the posts and feedback coming!

We'd like to make you aware of the new Real ID-related privacy options we've introduced to Battle.net. These options provide Real ID users with additional tools for customizing the service based on their preferences, enabling the ability to opt in or out of the Real ID "Friends of Friends" and "Add Facebook Friends" features or to turn off Real ID altogether.

To access these settings, log in to your Battle.net account at http://www.battle.net/account. From there, click on the "Settings" tab located at the center of the Account Management menu and select "Communication Preferences" from the dropdown list. The new settings can be found in the "Privacy" section of the Communication Preferences page.

Hunting the unknown, discovering the lost, knowing the forgotten. The Explorers' League of Ironforge is redoubling its efforts to learn the secrets of the past. The league has begun teaching the discipline of archaeology to all members of the Alliance in a bold attempt to procure as many ancient relics as possible. This initiative is being matched by the campaign of the Reliquary -- a Horde faction formed from an unknown council based in Silvermoon. The Reliquary is training members of the Horde in the art of the dig and challenging them to find any and all artifacts of historical significance before the Explorers' League does. Each side now jockeys for position, relishing in the chase, vying for control of time-lost relics, and jealously guarding any valuable information the objects may impart.

Archaeology is a new secondary profession introduced in Cataclysm that can be trained along with Cooking, First Aid, and Fishing. After learning Archaeology from the appropriate trainer in a major city, the newly educated treasure hunter will be presented with an Archaeology Journal to track his or her progress, as well as a surveying tool to facilitate discoveries.

The main purpose of Archaeology, of course, is to find artifacts! Artifacts are items lost to history that carry with them a story of the past. While their worth is mainly obtained from the information they impart and the simple joy of discovering them, rarer artifacts represent treasures of sizeable value. Every artifact has an origin, and these origins can be traced back to the races that now inhabit Azeroth and Outland. Research projects are presented in the Archaeology Journal, categorized by the races they're associated with. The fragments needed to complete each research project can be discovered by visiting dig sites.

At any time, players can open their maps and see these dig sites outlined for them across Azeroth and Outland. Upon reaching a dig site, a player can then search for artifact fragments with the survey tool. The survey tool arms the Archaeologist with two unique devices: a telescope and a distance indicator. The distance indicator will change from red to yellow to green as the treasure hunter gets closer, while the telescope will keep pointing the player in the right direction. When the player locates and digs up the treasure, it will provide the Archaeologist with fragments that are collected in the journal. This process will eventually result in a complete artifact.

Completing the rarer artifacts can reward the Archaeologist with unique items, including epic-quality weapons, mounts, and non-combat pets. In addition to the normal artifact fragments used to finish all research projects, special fragments called keystones can also be found by higher-level players. These fragments are valuable to all Archaeologists because they count as five normal fragments for most research projects, and they can be freely sold and traded. Archaeologists of exceptional skill can also use keystones to grant benefits to their friends in high-end raid instances.

Whether you're an avid treasure hunter with a drive to discover all the world has to offer, someone interested in uncovering the mysteries of the past, or an explorer looking to obtain items of power, Archaeology is your ticket to a glorious adventure.

Blizzcon Tickets Emails
None have gone out yet. We're anticipating them to begin going out early next week. (Source)

Raids & Dungeons
New Raid Lock System
At some point players are going to need to adjust to Cataclysm changing the world, just as you did with the 2.0 and 3.0 patches. We need to release these patches to set everything up for Cataclysm.

Could we have planned to release patch 4.0.1 without the new raid system? Technically yes, but patch 4.0.1 is overhauling game systems entirely. The raid system is only one part of all of the systems changes going in. You're going to have to adjust to them at some point so we can release the next expansion with the core systems overhauls in place. It might create an awkward period of time between the release of patch 4.0.1 and the release of the next expansion, but we ask that you embrace it, check out the new features, and let us know what you think. (Source)

Icecrown and Ruby Sanctum loot tables not updated for the new Raid Lock System
In a perfect world the loot tables would be updated in Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum. More importantly though, we want players testing out this new feature and becoming more familiar with it. We feel it's a higher priority for raiders to have a chance to get some experience with this system before entering Cataclysm raids, than it is for Wrath raiding progression to be seamless this far into the expansion. (Source)

10/25-Man Raids and new lock system
The design behind the new system is partially to address this issue. 10- and 25-player raids weren't designed with the intent that players would just do a raid twice a week. It's understandable that this became natural player behavior though given the design and loot system, which is why we're changing it for Cataclysm.

Whether or not you'll be running the same raids for the next several months is pure speculation. Ultimately, the distinction between 10- and 25-player shinies is almost completely null and void when factoring in new items in Cataclysm. (Source)

Classes
Threat generation
There is no reason for paladins to generate less threat per unit healing than other healers. The original concern was that paladins would tank by healing themselves, but that isn't a realistic concern in Cataclysm and probably has not been for some time.

A clever player compared the threat modifiers in the live game to a tax law with all of its peculiar exceptions and shelters and special case rules. We consolidated the whole thing to a modifier on Defensive Stance, Bear Form, Righteous Fury and Blood Presence. (Source)

Threat - Tanking and threat modifiers boosted to 125%
This is not a warrior nerf and has nothing to do with Vengeance. We buffed the threat done by all four tanks because players were having too many threat issues very early in fights. It's one thing to ask the mage not to Arcane Blast until the tank gets a hit or two on the boss. It's another if the dps are all sitting around for several seconds waiting for the fight to begin.

When we removed the passive threat reduction from say Battle Stance and rogues and paladin healing, that left tank threat slightly below where it had been. We suspected we would need to bring it up but just didn't have good estimates yet for how high it would need to go up. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Hunter builds balance
At the moment on our internal builds, Survival is slightly higher than MM or BM. Our builds already have the changes you are mentioning. Before those changes, BM was much higher. (Source)

[...] Aimed Shot's damage is low and will be improved.

As you've noticed, Kill Command is proving a tricky ability to balance. It's pure attack power and doesn't scale with weapon damage and is based on pet attack modifiers. That's why the numbers swing often dramatically patch to patch. For what it's worth, we think the numbers are getting close now on our local builds.

At the moment, Survival actually has the highest dps in raid gear, though the other specs are within 2K or so. It's unlikely we'll juice Survival's damage until we get more empirical data from players. Players sometimes surprise us with gear, rotation or talent choices which lead to different numbers than we predicted. We are going to make Lock and Load reset the Explosive Shot cooldown when it procs.

We changed pet scaling to make all 3 pet types scale with the same amount of attack power, which should bring the 3 pet types DPS closer together (though Ferocity will still do the most damage, as intended). We want Ferocity to do more damage than Cunning, but not by a huge margin. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Mana regeneration
We don't want paladins to be constantly mana starved but we also think it's silly if the blue bar is just taking up space on your screen and irrelevant to anything you do. We recently increased the mana given by Judgements of the Wise, and we could bump that again as necessary.

We want resources to matter for tanks, just less so than for other roles, since tanks have a lot of other things to manage. (Source)

Priest (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Chakra
As a data point, internally we see Chakra Heal used more often in 5-player dungeons and Chakra Renew used more often in raids. There is some subtlety to how Chakra gets used though, so we don't expect it to be one of those "always do X when Y" deals. (Source)

Searing Pain/Mind Spike
The design intent of Searing Pain (and Mind Spike) is for these abilities to be used in situations where threat doesn’t matter, such as soloing, PvP, and where different adds spawn that aren’t really affected by threat (such as Snowbolds on ToC as an example, or when players are ensnared in something that has to be broken out of from damage etc.) Or, alternatively, on those rare occasions where a caster tank is optimal. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Soul Swap cooldown
Yeah, we think being able to instantly apply all of your dots with some bonus front load damage with no cooldown wasn't going to be balanceable. Pestilence for DKs is somewhat of a different situation since the diseases are precursors for being able to do real damage rather than being a lot of real damage themselves. You don't normally see the DK using Pestilence and just letting the disease ticks kill everything, which is a play style often associated with locks.(Source)

Searing Pain/Mind Spike
The design intent of Searing Pain (and Mind Spike) is for these abilities to be used in situations where threat doesn’t matter, such as soloing, PvP, and where different adds spawn that aren’t really affected by threat (such as Snowbolds on ToC as an example, or when players are ensnared in something that has to be broken out of from damage etc.) Or, alternatively, on those rare occasions where a caster tank is optimal. (Source)

Bane of Agony / Pandemic
We agree that BoA is problematic with Pandemic, and we may end up removing it. (Source)

Shadow Embrace / Haunt
Before Shadow Embrace and Haunt, we really couldn’t tune Affliction DPS to be competitive for fights where there weren’t several adds to DoT up. The intent of Haunt and Shadow Embrace is to increase your single target DPS while not making your multi-DoT damage overpowered. This is the same philosophy behind Grace, and most other limit-one, ramp-up effects. The alternative would be to make UA, BoA etc. limit one. But I’m sure that would not be a popular change. We to grapple a little with the perception that these talents are supposed to be an overall dps nerf rather than a single target dps buff. (Source)

Molten Core
We're considering having Molten Core proc from Immolate and just removing the Soul Fire part of the talent. We want to make sure Demo's dps isn't entirely balanced around the execute phase of a fight. (Source)