UI Changes, The Veiled Stair, X-53 Rocket Retiring, Misc Changes, Blue Posts, Comic

Heads up! The current Recruit-A-Friend reward mount, the experimental X-53 Touring Rocket, will soon be cycled out of the RAF program. If you’ve always wanted a Touring Rocket, but haven’t snagged one yet, this is your last chance to get one by bringing a friend to World of Warcraft.

While we don’t have an official launch date to reveal for the new Recruit-A-Friend mount, we wanted to give you an early heads up that the changeover will be happening “soon” (TM). You have a few weeks to claim the X-53 Touring Rocket before it goes away.

We are currently tracking stability issues for some players with the latest build of the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta. We’re currently working to address these issues, and expect to have a fix in place within the next 48 hours.

We will provide further updates when appropriate. Thank you for your patience and your participation in the beta.

Just a reminder: Blizzard has a careful process for identifying issues, verifying and replicating them, coding the fix, and testing the results in a private quality assurance environment -- before deploying new software to users.

While we've received a number of questions and some feedback regarding the pet battle system added in the last beta patch, we're in the process of disabling this feature. We know a lot of you are very anxious to test out pet battles, but it wasn't our intention to introduce them to the beta at this stage, as we don't yet feel they're in a solid enough state to allow for meaningful feedback.

One we're further along in development, we look forward to implementing pet battles and gathering your thoughts on the feature.

Betas are not Guaranteed to Work for All
"A real beta rarely works, and when it does, it doesn't work well."

Unlike a lot of companies who invite players into "betas" that are little more than game demos of stable preview builds, Blizzard brings in players to an ever-changing process where our programmers are constantly making changes to the "guts" of the game.

What does that mean for you?

Betas are not guaranteed to work for individual players, ever. It's entirely possible that some users will receive a beta invite, only to find that they're never actually able to play it. This is simply the nature of a true beta. While we'd prefer everyone to be able to have a little fun while helping us test the content and servers, the purpose of the beta is to prepare Mists of Pandaria for launch, not to provide a gaming experience for beta testers.

Additionally, because of how quickly conditions change in a beta, it is extremely difficult to provide technical support that is specific to Mists of Pandaria issues. If it seems like the help you receive is very general in nature (update drivers, uninstall security programs, etc.) it's because the tech support staff does not have more specific information on the issue you are dealing with. Please remember that Blizzard is under no obligation to provide support for a product in beta, although we do try when possible.

All of that being said, we do hope that most of you will enjoy your sneak-peek into the game design process. Just be advised that trying to play a beta like it's a finished game will likely result in a very frustrating experience. Take care out there! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Beta is Buggy
I just hope they can get it together before they actualy release it.
For sure. What we'll do is release "it" for testing so we can gather feedback and bug reports (also referred to as a beta test). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Tier 14 Set Bonus Feedback
There are a lot of class changes for players to get used to in a new expansion. Immediately jumping into set bonus that make rotations more interesting is sort of wasted design space because players often aren't even used to their normal rotations yet. We typically start an expansion with pretty simple set bonuses and work our way up to more elaborate ones. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Human Racial and PvP
The issue where players are changing to human to get the second PvE trinket is something that we want to address in Pandaria. Understand that we want the human racial to be appealing and at this time it is, but we feel that the main issue is that PvP trinkets do not compete with PvE trinkets well enough to validate their use over being human.

With PvP trinkets having PvP power and defense stats in Mists, they will be much better for PvP than the PvE ones. We would also like to introduce a greater variety of PvP trinkets to increase their appeal even further

We would really like to have a greater variety of PvP trinkets. This means that healers will hopefully have more trinkets to choose from too (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria Beta DPS Changes
I really wouldn't stress about weapon attack or spell damage numbers going up or down at this stage in beta. It's hard to know if arbitrary number going up by 20% is a buff or not relative to how you are on live.

If you think you have a pretty good feel for how the various DPS specs are performing relative to each other on beta, then you might be able to draw some conclusions based on number tweaking, but my suspicion is that not many beta testers are in that boat quite yet. Hopefully you'll see things start to stabilize soon.

Remember, our goal is that your DPS should be about the same when you log into 5.0, though some abilities may shift up or down. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pandaren Faction Visual Differences
This is something we really don't want to do. There's no genetic separation between the pandaren who choose Horde and those who choose Alliance. We also want to avoid a scenario where, if you want your pandaren to look a certain way, you're pushed to one faction. The whole idea behind adding our first neutral playable race to World of Warcraft is that anyone can create and customize a pandaren, regardless of faction.

It's a race we just didn't want to give to only one faction. And prohibiting customization options in any way based on one's faction choice defeats the philosophy behind our decision to some extent.

We're fairly confident there won't be any significant gameplay complications from this either. There are plenty of ways for players to customize their appearance, silhouette, etc. as it is, that nameplates have been the most trusted method of determining friend from foe for quite some time now. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)