Raid Testing, Guild Cap, Goblin Easter Egg, Blue Posts

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are extending the maintenance for all realms until 1PM PDT.

Thank you for your patience.

We've been testing raids extensively in-house for months. Beta raid testing will begin very soon. Stay tuned.

And yes, there will be new character templates available and there will be a reset to character copy limit.

[...] Daelo and/or a CM will post a schedule when we are ready.

We will be introducing a new, hard cap of 600 members in a single guild for Cataclysm. This function will go live with patch 4.0.1 and is already live on the beta and PTR's.

As most of you already know, we have supported a soft cap of 500 members in a guild since World of Warcraft launched. We have allowed guilds to exceed the 500 limit up until now since being in a guild really just amounted to ranks and chat channels. With the advent of the new guild system in Cataclysm we are tracking many more things on each individual player in a guild and in order to support that, we need to limit the amount of members to a reasonable level.

The new cap of 600 members is fully supported in the new guild system and that means that everyone will be visible in the ui and able to contribute to all guild functions like experience and reputation gain. We have pulled a large number of statistics to get to the 600 member cap for guilds and we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft.

The small number of guilds that are over the 600 person cap will be able to keep their guilds intact (and fully supported in the new guild system), but they will not be able to add new members until they fall below the 600 member cap.

New race/classes combo availability
They will be available to everyone shortly before the release of Cataclysm when The Shattering takes place. (Source)

Dance Studio - Blizzard promised me a (dancing) pony!
New dances remain a work in progress and we do not have plans to implement them prior to Cataclysm.

[...] We absolutely wouldn't advertise something in a trailer if we have no intention of including that feature. The trailers are virtually always created more than a year prior to the release of what they're advertising. All of the features are planned -- or work on them has already begun -- but we never know until much closer to the release date what features might have to be shelved to ensure bigger features are polished.

We announced new dances for Wrath of the Lich King and a good deal of work went into them, but we weren't happy with the feature overall as we got closer to release. We decided we would hold off on trying to push it out anyway and focus on bigger projects.

This is the nature of good development, even if it leaves some disappointed. (Source)

New Official Website
The new website is still in development and planned for release prior to the launch of Cataclysm. The new forums will coincide with this release. (Source)

Guild Leveling
Guild features in 4.0.1
The user interface changes for guilds will take place in 4.0.1. The actual guild advancement features will be implemented with Cataclysm itself. (Source)

Guild Mounts reputation requirements
The reputation requirement will be shown on the tooltip once the reward is unlocked via it's corresponding achievement.

Both the guild mounts require exalted faction to purchase. (Source)

Guild Experience/Reputation Boost on Beta
The 5x multiplier is currently active for both experience and reputation. Getting stuck around 9k is right around where we expect players to be with the multiplier. The cap on reputation is weekly and will reset Tuesday night at 3am. (Source)

Raids & Dungeons
Mimiron's Head / Invincible in 4.0.1
No changes are being made to raid mounts in patch 4.0.1. (Source)

Realm First achievements - 10/25 Mode
They are available to both 10 and 25 player raids, whoever does it first.

[...] We currently have no plans to change realm first raid kills into separate achievements for 10 / 25 player raids. Our new flexible raid lock system allows players many more choices and opportunities to complete the content in the way that suits them best. Making separate achievements here goes directly against that philosophy.

And just to be clear, these achievements offer no rewards or titles. (Source)

Classes
Ability queue system
If I am tanking on live, and I spamming devastate pre-emptively and I see shield slam light up from my proc, I can easily switch over to hitting shield slam and shield slam will go off.

On beta, if I am spamming devastate and I see shield slam light up. I will be locked into devastate if it's within like 1~sec until the GCD is up. I see devastate light up, I try spam to hit shield slam but it will not go off.
We had to change the ability queue system you are describing to fix an exploit that was threatening to become pretty widespread. It is unfortunately one of those cases where a few bad apples ruin things for everyone.

We are working on an improvement where the most recent command will override the previous one. If for example you are spamming Hamstring, and then succeed in snaring someone, you can switch to Mortal Strike which will clear out the Hamstring queue instead of wasting more GCDs on Hamstring. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Rune Strike
We changed Rune Strike to: after a dodge or parry or whenever you are in Blood Presence.

We can use RS any time we have 20 RP if we are in blood presence, No cd other then GCD. No need for avoidance to light it up.
Correct. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Holy Paladin - Beacon of Light / Protector of the Innocent
Beacon isn't going anywhere. We think the Cataclysm implementation is in a good place between never wanting to heal the tank and always wanting to heal the tank.

We changed Protector of the Innocent to make the talent feel less like Divinity not because we were trying to band-aid any real or imagined paladin problems as some of your conspiracy theories suggest.

If, as some of you think, Holy paladin throughput is low, then we'll buff it before it goes live. It will be easier to make direct comparisons between healing specs once more folks (besides us I mean) are testing raids. And by direct comparisons, I don't mean who wins the meters. (Source)

Paladin Tanking and GCD
As you might have surmised, I spent a lot of time in this thread gathering information because we were concerned about player perceptions of the paladin rotation. That conversation in turn spawned additional, less-public conversations and ultimately resulted in our convening a distinguished panel of experts in our secret mountain hideaway for a discussion of paladin tanking mechanics.

While we still have grave concerns about players being able to fill every GCD, we also don't want to change paladin tanking so much that it is unrecognizable for long-term paladins. Therefore, we are going to try Crusader Strike on a 3 second cooldown for Protection only. Hammer of the Righteous will have the same cooldown. This will allow Protection to fill in almost every gap in the rotation and not be waiting so long on every cooldown, which should help the rotation feel more active. It will also allow Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous to sometimes be up at the same time. That change is pretty significant and will no doubt invite all sorts of theorycrafting on the right way to manage Holy Power. We still have additional grave concerns that once paladins can have both Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous up simultaneously that they will feel underpowered and therefore frustrated whenever they lack sufficient Holy Power for 100% uptime on both. We'll just have to see how that feels.

While we still think an off the GCD interrupt isn't an essential tool for a tank, we also don't think it's going to break anything for paladins to have one either. Our eventual solution is to let Vindication's ability to let HoJ interrupt also take HoJ off of the global cooldown. That change will require new tech, so it's not something you're likely to see anytime soon, but you can know that it's in our long term plans. Again, we don't think the interrupt issue is a critical problem that must be solved today. The rotation one in the previous paragraph is a bigger deal.

I have to add the standard no promises clause to all of the above, because I have learned that I need to do that. (Source)

I'm sorry I disagree with people here, but I don't like bieng GCD locked, its not fun, its not a test of skill, its a test of your ability to get your rotation into muscle memory and alternate CS with other abilities. I see no reason that cast random doesn't fill in the second half of our rotation as it stands...
We agree, Llowelyn. Our hope is that the changes I described above still provide some gaps without crossing the line into too many unpredictable gaps, which is it how it felt for a lot of paladins. I do have concerns that several months from now we're going to see "Stop making me use Judgement! I don't have the GCDs to use it, and I CAN'T delay Crusader Strike, or I am missing out on Holy Power generation and my threat goes to pot!" (Source)

Inquisition
We like Inquisition as an ability for Protection. It means that all your Holy Power doesn't automatically go to Shield of the Righteous. You might sometimes be able to have both layered now. That was a concern we had, but it also may prove interesting as long as one isn't always the right choice and as long as paladins don't start complaining when they don't have enough Holy Power generation to always power both. (Source)

Hammer of the Righteous/Crusader Strike Cooldown
Crusader Strike - 3 sec cooldown. Hammer of the Righteous - 3 sec cooldown. Cooldown shared for both. (Source)

Hammer of the Righteous scaling
We realized that the AE portion of Hammer of the Righteous didn't scale with Vengeance. While it's true that Prot paladins gain some spell power, they get it from Strength, not the attack power provided by Vengeance. We changed Hammer to scale with attack power, which should mean it hits harder with Vengeance. That will provide some of the damage boost you are looking for. (Source)