Mage Tier 14, Blue Posts, TCG Art Gallery Update

Account-Wide Reputation
We don’t want to make reputation account-wide. We think that removes too much of the gameplay of having an alt. Harkening back to the blog, the goal is for players to feel free to play their alts. If you have a cool mount on character A, then that might be an issue. Being exalted on character A so that enchants are easier to buy doesn’t seem like the same issue. (What I mean is, it’s a short step from there to saying character A has better gear so you aren’t going to play B).

We can understand where the desire to have reputations function in this way stems from, however. For this reason faction rep is going to work a little differently in Mists of Pandaria and, we think, will feel better for players with multiple characters.

For all intents and purposes, assume that the game doesn't really understand the concept of a WoW license. The account-level achievement system will all be based on the Battle.net account and not each individual WoW license attached to it.

Will this affect reputations associated with mounts?
The best answer right now is we're not sure. We're still discussing some of these details and honestly haven't drawn final conclusions as of yet. So just keep that in mind as you read on.

For Ramkahen, you'll probably just need to buy the mount once by gaining the necessary reputation on one character, in order to unlock it for all characters on your Battle.net account. The challenge comes with the city mounts. If I have a dwarf today, I have to get Exalted Darnassus to buy a nightsaber. But if the nightsabers become account level, then I should probably just make a night elf rather than grind exalted on the dwarf. If that doesn't feel right, we could "fix it" by making the city mounts non-account level. Or we could let them be account level, but make you require the appropriate reputation to use them. If we did THAT, then it might make sense for all faction mounts to require a rep.

But again, the simple answer is we’re not sure yet. I left out your question about reputation-based titles because we don't have an answer as of yet. I guess you could say that also falls within the "we're not sure" category at this stage.(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Account-Wide Achievements
Let’s consider Loremaster of Kalimdor.

• Character A completes Ashenvale Quests for a toast and 10 points.
• If Character B then completes Ashenvale Quests, they will get the toast, but not 10 more points. (It is NOT a new achievement for the account.)
• If Character B then completes Felwood Quests, he gets a toast and 10 points. (It is a new achievement for the account.)
• If Character A never completes Felwood Quests, he will not get a toast, but the achievement will show that the account has the achievement. (It is NOT a new achievement for the account.)
• Loremaster of Kalimdor is a meta achievement, so it is account only. If we assume that Character A complete half of the Kalimdor quest achievements and Character B completes the other half, then Loremaster of Kalimdor will give a toast for whichever character is logged on at the time. The account will get 10 points.
• Any new characters will continue to get toasts (but not points) for doing Felwood Quests or whatever, but . No character on that account will ever see a toast for Loremaster of Kalimdor again.

This sounds more confusing than it is. In the Achiement UI, you will see normal achievements (which are now shared) and account-only achievements, which use a different color and symbol to indicate that you can only get them once. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mage (Forums)
Wizardry Missing
I looked through my spellbook for this guy and a premade and neither have the 5% int bonus, but my priest and lock still have theirs.
Just a bug. It will be back. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)
Priest Feedback
Heals cast during Spirit Shell should benefit from Grace. Mastery affects the bubbles. We built Divine Aegis into the effect by making the bubbles scale with your crit chance.

It sounds like your PoH Spirit Shells are low, but you are often operating a few builds behind us.

Shields are generally smaller than equivalent heals, since there is much less risk of overhealing and the absorbs always go away first. That's just a general tuning philosophy and not a die-hard rule. Shields have disadvantages too (such as at some point you need to get targets back up to a safe health level).

Again, don't focus on the numbers. It's fine to bring up the numbers if they seem off, but don't let simple balance adjustments get in the way of evaluating whether or not you think the mechanic is fun. I know that is hard sometimes with healing, since efficiency and throughput dictate so many decisions.

The beginning of MoP Beta: "We want Discipline to feel different, so we're removing several of the heals you have become accustomed to using over the years and replacing them with absorb mechanics."

Currently in the MoP Beta: "We don't want Discipline feeling TOO different so here's all your old heals back. Oh, and Spirit Shell is now a semi-useful-in-certain-situations cooldown. Enjoy."
We usually start out more bold and refine things as we go along, which often means going to a known fallback position. That direction makes more sense than starting off cautiously and getting more reckless as we get closer to ship.

...what does "making the bubbles scale with your crit chance" mean?
If your chance to crit is 20%, your bubbles are 20% stronger. If your chance to crit is 100%, you get double bubbles.

For Divine Aegis, the heals are 30% times your crit chance, except for PoH which is just +30%.

Logically, I understand this, but in practice... it's a bit more difficult since sometimes the numbers DO define the fun, or at least what some people think of as fun.
Yep, we get that. When understanding the target numbers is key to understanding how you'd use the spell, we try to get things in the ballpark. On the other hand, it's not a good use of development time to balance a mechanic if we ultimately (and sometimes quickly) remove it. We could have spent many more hours balancing the previous version of Spirit Shell, which we ended up scrapping. Everyone in this business very quickly gets used to "wasted" design time like that, but it's better for the project as a whole if we spend our polish time once everything has stabilized a bit more.

If the numbers go up to something reasonable, then it becomes intensely fun again because it gives a choice. Is there about to be a ton of aoe coming in? Pre-shield. Is there only some aoe coming in? PoH. If I chcoose wrong.. if I pre-shield and it is a little damage.. I wasted absorbs. If I choose not to shield and it is a lot of damage, then I tax myself (and the other healer) trying to get everyone back up. Having options and needing to know when each particular option is the right thing to do is what is fun for me.
That's the intent. Also, because it's not a very long cooldown, you're not overly punished for making the wrong call. It will be back soon enough.

That said, GC, can we get more clarity to the dev team's vision of the mechanic-- specifically how it's meant to stack on itself and refresh?
We're not sure yet. Stacking sometimes leads to behavior where you feel like you have to spam something over and over to the max stack. We wouldn't want Spirit Shell to only be used on a tank for instance. That may not happen, but the mechanic is still in it's toddler stages, so we need to evaluate it some more. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue (Forums)
Rogue feedback/explanation
As I stated this thread is NOT meant to rant on about things I find wrong. I am merely asking for an explanation as to WHY some of these changes have happened. Usually when they make this types of changes I can get a sense as to what caused it/the reasoning behind them even if I think they are wrong.
Totally fair and reasonable. I'll handle some of these. Please be understanding that I am one guy and I have a day job. It's not realistic for me spend equal amounts of time on every class thread every day. We read all of these posts though, because reading is much faster than responding.

1) Sang Vein change to exclude hemo: Currently this SUB ONLY buff excluded hemo….which is SUB's REPLACEMENT for SS. I find it very odd that a spec specific buff would exclude the only spec specific bleed it has.
Honor Among Thieves generates a lot of combo points, so we think having multiple finishers is appropriate, so we want Rupture to be used in the rotation. Sang Vein being used only on Hemo, while convenient, meant Rupture could be skipped over easily. We understand that this has PvP ramifications and we're prepared to buff if necessary, which in this case I think is likely. Note that it is much harder for us to predict PvP damage compared to PvE damage, so it requires a lot more testing and player feedback. (Also note that most classes do have a significant gap between PvE and PvP damage, and that's fine.) We agree that Rupture would feel better as a button to push if it rewarded you with better damage. That's something we're looking at.

2) Hemo DoT buffed: Now don’t get me wrong, I welcome any damage buff….but buffing a DoT (on a skill you recently excluded from SV no less)?
We buffed all of Hemo, not just the DoT. This is partial compensation for the above change, but as I said above, probably not enough compensation for PvP yet.

Hemo is like Mangle -- it's the button you're supposed to use in PvE when you can't get behind the target. It's a dps loss, but not a huge one. It's a minor DPS increase in PvE to use both Backstab and Hemo at the same time, but we'd prefer that to be a niche strategy.

Venomous Wounds not procing on both Garrote and Rupt when both are up.
This was all part of a suite of changes to discourage the use of Vanish (and Prep) as DPS cooldowns. We generally want utility / survival cooldowns to get used for that. It sort of sucks when you are asked to give up your survivability button in order to max DPS. (Yes Shadow Focus still gives a slight DPS increase for using Vanish, but we can live with that.)

Para/Leeching poison mutually exclusive.
It will probably be unlikely for very optimized players to take both poisons. We think they are appropriate in each of their talent tiers though and you have other choices to take in both cases. This seems like it’s on the level of someone who chooses an AE talent for a single target fight.

Versatility: This talent..well has some issues I think.
We don’t want cps on the rogue. That’s not the design. The rogue builds up attacks against a target. We understand though that sometimes the build up can be overly restrictive, which is why we have cooldowns like Redirect, and we understand some players love rogues but just can’t stand the cp target switching limitation. Versatility is for them.

The level 90 tier for rogues is supposed to feel like it breaks the rules (you know, within reason). Shuriken gives a ranged attack to a melee class. Versatility overcomes the rule that cps are on the target. Anticipation overcomes the rule that there are 5 cps.

HaT not proccing unless in combat: First it was not proccing in stealth, then you change it to not proccing out of combat at all. Again I ask…why? What was the purpose here?
First, we don't like players to have to live with burden of building up something before a fight starts. It may be a DPS increase, but it's not a fun one. More specifically though, we didn't want Anticipation and HaT to build up 10 cps before the fight even begins. Obviously, I hope, that just couldn't fly.

And what of Find Weakness? And Find Weakness's synergy with Preparation? Those alone, at least for Subtlety, introduces the concept of a mandatory talent.
It's fair to say that Prep is going to be more of a dps increase for Sub than the other two specs. Still, there are also fights (in PvE) where the other two talents are just as useful. We're still considering ways to solve that issue though without nerfing the cool aspects of Prep.

To speak nothing of the Shadow Walk glyph in PvP, which will be another forced requirement, since all Rogues will be working under the competitive expectation of squaring off like that.
We understand the concern, but we're not convinced -- yet -- that it will be a problem. Shadow Walk is up such a brief period of time, and you're giving up a whole glyph slot for that brief theoretical "double stealth" encounter against another rogue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue Feedback
It's a wording change, because the dodge chance now applies to shots as well as melee attacks. If anything, it's a buff, now you have 50% against range attacks.
This is correct. I will say that I am totally in favor of complete hyposcrisy from one day to the next (the thread title), just so you can quote me on it from now on. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums)
Glyph of Fel Regeneration
We were a little worried about whether we could balance the glyph for both Destro and Demo with models that supported both mana and fel energy. Can you elaborate on what you liked about it? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Glyph of Lifetap Stealth Nerf
"Stealth nerf" typically refers to changes we deploy on live without telling anyone. To be honest, we don't really do these any longer because players quickly figure them out anyway. Since we barely document any of the thousands of changes going into each beta build, I'm not sure the term applies here.

Regardless, the intent of the glyph was never to let you opt out of the cost of Life Tap. It was intended to let you stay at full health and defer the cost. If you used 4 Life Taps without the glyph, it would cost 4x the health cost. It stands to reason that if you used 4 Life Taps with the glyph that paying 1x the health cost would make the glyph very good. It was just a bug fix to do what the glyph always claimed it did. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums)
Warrior Feedback
For Arms, I want Rend back. And Taste for Blood using Rend. And both of those scaling from Haste.

As a PvPer I don't want rend back. That move was a waste of a GCD and i'm glad its gone.

Right. That's the problem with Rend. We removed it because so many players didn't like it. Some players might like it's return, but for others, we'd be moving backwards. The same is true of cast-time Slam. Plenty of warriors are happy to see it gone.

Enrage would matter more if RB didn't cost rage, but generated it. The ability would be different from BT in that it would still have a cd and still hit hard. Now enrage would grant increased rage gen AND an ability that increased rage/did lots of damage. Frenzied Berserker achieved.
The risk there is you become *even more* dependent on Enrage. Now not only does it provide more autoattack rage, and is your mastery and Raging Blow enabler, but you get extra rage from using Raging Blow.

If you can let Bloodthirst have a decent base bonus to crit it would help with giving us a decent amount of up time on enrage and the use of raging blow for lower levels.
We had that in for a short time, but thought that the newer implementation (where an Enrage becomes increasing more likely) made things smoother overall. Even a high crit chance can still not crit.

Not generating rage in Defensive Stance hurts DPS warriors as well.
That doesn't have to be the case. Defensive Stance has always been a last resort for DPS warriors because it lowers your DPS. It's just a matter of degree. In other words, we're not trying to make Defensive Stance something Arms and Fury want to spend much time in.

I'm not sure if Ultimatum is gone, or if Devastate procs SnB and Ultimatum.
At the moment Ultimatum is from Shield Slam, because Devasate lighting up two buttons was too much.

Before I forget: a parried Rend is an annoyance. Under the new Taste for Blood, a parried Mortal strike means you're SoL for six seconds.
Taste for Blood is applied from using Mortal Strike, not landing a Mortal Strike. This may be a recent change.

On the other hand, there's a lot of damage that won't be affected by this, assuming that it puts a debuff on the target. For instance, the damage from Grasping Tendrils on spine wouldn't be affected. Most of the adds on Zon'ozz would be out of range. If you messed up Alysrazor, it wouldn't reduce Lava Spew.
It's only 20% damage reduction. If you're concerned about missing some adds on Zon'ozz, use Rallying Cry or Shield Wall or have a healer blow a cooldown or all three. It's not critical that all tank cooldowns work the same way, as long as nobody is at a terrible disadvantage. Applying the right cooldown to the right situation is one of the marks of a skilled tank.

They both have a 10 rage generating attack on a 6 sec CD, which sets the timeframe everything falls in.
Yeah, I agree the 6 sec cooldown makes them feel similar. I don't think we'd be excited about a 3 sec Bloodthirst again, but a 4.5 might be worth trying.

Fury currently needs obscene levels of Crit, Hit, and of course Expertise just to function normally. This leaves no room for Haste or Mastery. We have far less choice in our gear due to this problem.
You are defining "normally" differently than we do. Fury isn't balanced around 100% uptime of Raging Blow. Swinging two weapons is a huge dps increase that is offset partially by missing more, which means having to dedicate more stats to hit and expertise. I don't see the fundamental flaw there as long as Fury's damage is about the same as Arms. You may not like the randomness personally, but we do give you ways to mitigate it (including just playing Arms).

If you try to fix this by increasing Enrage up-time, where does it stop? 70%? 80%? 90%? 100%? If we become capable of 100% up-time, what's the point of Enrage as it currently is?
Off the top of my head, Enrage uptime of 40% in starting gear and 80% in endgame gear is probably a good target. Once something approaches 100%, then whenever you don't get it, it feels like a penalty rather than it feeling like a bonus when you do.

Does anyone actually notice when Flurry is up? Anyone? It's completely random, and with how low Haste is in terms of stats we're capable of valuing, we'll never have any discernible control over it through gearing.
The intent of Flurry is to break up the steady swings of autoattacks, particulary to make Rage income less predictable (which then in turn asks you to manage that situation by deciding when to Wild Strike and / or Heroic Strike). If the effect is too subtle to notice or Fury has enough mechanics going on without it, then we could consider removing it. It has just always been one of those iconic Fury mechanics. (Iconic is in the eye of the beholder of course, because we did kill Rend.)

Later in the thread, there were some suggestions to make Flurry a more meaningful proc that you react to. I'm not sure Fury needs more procs though since it already has Raging Blow and Bloodsurge. Something like Deadly Clam (see below) breaks up the rotation in a more predictable way.

Bring back Deadly Calm in some way for both Fury and Arms.
The class designers have discussed Deadly Calm quite a bit. It's an interesting ability and it changes the rotation in a way Recklessness does not. The problem is that with Recklessness and a cooldown on the level 90 tier (especially Avatar), that's a lot of burst buttons for warriors to use. We could prevent them from being stacked, but that often doesn't feel good. We could give Deadly Calm to Arms and Recklessness to Fury, but I don't think that would go over well.

Strength needs to provide Crit. I've already went over why your argument against this fails - Intellect and Agility are already pretty much the same thing (SP = AP, both provide Crit). Regardless, it's just not fun to not Crit.
I did address this. We just disagree. If you like crit, stack crit. If you like a lot of passive crit, play a rogue. Apologies if that sounds cut and dried, but I'm not sure where else to take that discussion.

I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree with Fury's design being so attached to this idea of being "random" or "uncontrolled" (which is the synonym you're using for random). As I've said frequently, a little RNG is fine, but you have to know when it's too much.
Randomness is also in the eye of the beholder. We like to have a pretty high amount of randomness in class rotations because handling that randomness presents an opportunity for reactive players to perform better than those who try to play their class with a 1,2,3 cadence. You seem to have a different vision in mind for Fury than we do. I'm not sure how to resolve that. And no, it's not going to be a poll.

We did find a bug just now where the combat tables were not exporting correctly. Among other things, this means that warriors, paladins and DKs were lacking 5% of base crit. I was trying to figure out why the crit numbers being reported were so low. (They still may not be as high as you'd like with the +5%, but they should be where we want them.)

Here are some upcoming changes to Arms and Fury:

• Bloodthirst has a 4.5 sec cooldown and generates 5 rage to distance the Fury rotation more from Arms. Bloodthirst’s crit mechanic was redesigned so that you can see the crit chance of your next BT and predict the crit / Enrage a little more.
• Colossus Smash is free. We hope this lets warriors time their rage pooling a bit more instead of spending so much rage on CS that there is nothing left to benefit from CS. Since Arms uses CS more, this will throw more kinks (the good kind) in their rotation than Fury.
• Deadly Calm reinstated as a 60 sec cooldown. It allows the next 3 Heroic Strike or Cleaves to cost 10 less rage, so again you’ll want to time this a bit depending on current rage mechanics. Ten less rage should be the sweet spot to encourage HS use, but it may need to be 20. We don't want it to be free, because then you would just hit Deadly Calm on cooldown rather than timing it.
• Enrage now also increases the rage generated by MS, BT, SS and Revenge. This should make the rage income more noticeable when it’s up.
• Overpower now does more damage with subsequent procs. It was already a high priority button, but this will give warriors an opportunity to time the bigger hits with Colossus Smash or Deadly Calm..

As always, let us know how these feel in beta. These are very much experiments (as are many of our beta changes) so we may decide not all of these changes are good or necessary. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)