Account Wide Mounts, Challenge Mode Valor Rewards, Heroic Scholomance, Blue Posts

We have been discussing this issue the last couple of days and we made the call to make the following mounts account-wide:

• Reins of the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth
• Reins of the Grand Expedition Yak
• Mechano-Hog
• Mekgineer's Chopper
• Vial of the Sands
• Reins of the Grand Ice Mammoth
• Reins of the Ice Mammoth
• Jeweled Onyx Panther (all color variants)
• Cloud Serpents (all color variants)

At this point, the only mounts that are not account-wide are either class specific or rewarded from PVP. We feel like both these types of mounts should still be character specific.

Thanks for your feedback on this issue!

How committed is the development team to having all tanks perform within an "acceptable variance" on all encounters? In Cataclysm we saw several "niches" become severe problems for tank balance on certain heroic encounters. For example:

Deathknights on Yor'Sahj, "Bearcatting" on Madness, Spine, Ultra, and Blackhorn, Deathknight and Druid compared to Paladin and Warrior for Impales on Madness, Warriors for Blood tanking on Spine, Paladins for most of heroic T12 due to Divine Guardian, and Warrior/Druid/Deathknight vs Paladin on Al'Akir.
We don't think any of those cross the line. If it were the same class showing up for all of those bullet points, that would be a problem. Our tanks all have strengths and weaknesses and unusual encounter mechanics may synergize or clash with them, but that's more interesting than extreme homogeneity, which would be the alternative. We like the puzzle aspect of "solving" boss encounters according to the comp and strengths of individual groups. We think it has helped contribute to the fun of killing bosses having such extraordinary legs (meaning that we're on tier 14 now and have made hundreds of dungeon bosses).

If memory serves the first Spine kill was Blood DK / Prot paladin and the second was a pair of druids. Now granted, world firsts sometimes have to resort to unusual strategies since they undergear the fights because they haven't had weeks to farm up better gear. Your mileage may vary.

As a counter-example, paladins on Heroic Major Domo initially were able to solo-soak the scorpion cleave, letting guilds with paladin tanks keep him in scorpion form longer than those without. We thought that crossed the line and we changed the boss mechanics to disincentivize that particular strategy. I fully admit that these calls are subjective.

It was explained that "Expertise will negate dodge and spell miss, then parry". No. I've tested this. Expertise reduces Dodge then Parry. Paperdoll is wrong and hasn't been updated yet.
Expertise does indeed reduce dodge and then parry. The character sheet itself does not appear to update correctly.

You're missing the point. Expertise doesn't help spell miss, which is a huge problem for any melee class that still has abilities on the spell hit table.
As far as we know, it does (and if it does not, it's a bug). You can't trust the tooltip in this case, because as I said, it is not yet updating -- you would have to actually test it in game.

Some follow ups on things that I said we’d investigate. More still to come. This thread has been great. Please try to keep it focused on theorycrafting discussion ("How does Combat Potency’s proc chance work?") and not general Q&A ("Explain your design intent with X"). Thanks!

• Pet Scaling: Still working on a more comprehensive description of our new pet scaling system. Please continue to report things that seem like bugs or inconsistencies.
• Shadowy Apparitions: Looks like this got fixed sometime recently; its damage matches the tooltip now. Not sure which way was correct, but an example data point is that it does 19908 damage with 16334 spell power and Shadowform and no other buffs.
• Gargoyle and Haste: It was incorrectly getting only melee haste from the DK, not spell haste. It now gets spell haste from your highest haste.
• Barrage vs Powershot: We’re currently planning to reduce Barrage’s damage a bit, so that it ends up being on par with the others on the row in terms of overall DPS.
• Frost DK Weapon Twisting: We’re looking for a more elegant way to solve this, but may end up just disabling Threat of Thassarian and Might of the Frozen Wastes for ~10 sec whenever you swap weapons. Obviously, the weapon twisting behavior is not what we want to encourage; we want Frost DKs to choose either DW or 2H, and stick with that choice (and have them be competitive choices).
• Spinning Crane Kick: Will only generate Chi if it hits at least 3 targets.
• Malefic Grasp: There’s another bugfix coming still for this so it won’t match what you see quite yet, but here’s how it should work:
  
  1) DoT hastening of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul back to +100%, from +50%.
  
  2) Damage of MG and DS reduced, so that the total DPS gain remains constant (-40% to MG, -13.333% to DS).
  
  3) Since MG once again simply doubles tick rate, it effectively means there should be an additional tick between each existing tick. So, if MG is active during a midpoint between normal ticks, an extra tick goes off.
• Brain Freeze with Multi-DoTing: Brain Freeze will only be triggered by your most recently applied bomb.

Druid (Forums)
Nature's Vigil is currently affecting Frenzied Regeneration. That doesn't seem intentional.
I believe the intention is that the healing amount is increased, but that it does not deal damage based on that healing.

Here are some more incoming changes relevant to Balance Druid theorycrafters.

We are experimenting with some changes to the rotation. No promises that these changes will stay, but we definitely look forward to your feedback (both in terms of theorycrafting and how fun it is). Shooting Stars should occur much more frequently, and Starsurge should be a more important (read: high damage) button. Additionally, we’re adding a new passive that has some interesting implications. Should you choose to ignore it, your DPS will likely be only a few percentage behind someone who uses it optimally, but it should hopefully provide some more varied gameplay. To use some game designer jargon, we’re happy with Moonkins’ macro level rotational gameplay, but think they needs some more mirco-level decisions.

• Shooting Stars chance increased from 20% to 50%.
• Starsurge damage increased by 30%.
• Fae Empowerment: New passive for Balance Druids. When you cast Faerie Fire, you gain Lunar Empowerment and Solar Empowerment.
• Lunar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Starfires within 15 sec by 15%.
• Solar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Wraths within 15 sec by 20%.

Please note that these changes are straight DPS buffs, and we don’t think Moonkin need a buff right now, so we need to reduce overall damage (probably across the board) so that overall DPS stays the same. These nerfs may take a few builds, because we need to evaluate if these rotation changes are worth doing. However, don't be surprised when you see them, and help spread the word when you see the inevitable "I can't believe we were nerfed!" posts.

Hunter (Forums)
I'm curious about the Hunter technique of macro'ing Fox and Hawk into cast time/instant shots, respectively, to maximize uptime with the Hawk AP buff while moving.
We don't consider that fun gameplay. You're basically opting out of Aspects as a mechanic and just always benefiting from the right Aspect because you're "clever" enough to know there is a macro. Usually in this situation we put the "stance" on the normal GCD or make the shared GCD longer.

Barrage: This ability seems to do 400% weapon damage in total but it does not seem to be normalized, unlike powershot which is normalized (as well as just about every other hunter ability). Is this an oversight or is it not normalized for a reason?
Bug (and a slightly sneaky one). The issues you raise with Murder of Crows and Dire Beast are one of the challenges with summoned creatures. It's possible they won't always get the same number of attacks off, but we can balance around the average.

As an aside, we have a lot of abilities that summon extra creatures for hunters, including Stampede. This can create client performance problems on lower end machines, so we may ultimately have to redesign some of them. (We don't want to hear raid or BG leaders asking hunters not to use certain abilities.) Stampede would be the last one we touch.

Nowhere was a promise made that Piercing Shots, Mastery, et al. would be exempt from break CC. "Not a fair requirement" and "probably do need to pause" are not the words of a promise.
If you CC someone (say Scatter Shot, Freezing Traps and Wyvern Sting) and your autoshot gets turned off but Piercing Shots or Wild Quiver merrily break the CC, then that's a bug. If you CC someone and then keep shooting at them, then you're a bad hunter, and it's fine to break the CC. (In other words, you're supposed to choose between CC or damage.) Serpent Sting is a bit of a gray area, because you do have control over whether you put it up. You could be in a situation where you have a dot up and then decide to CC that target, but that situation happens for a variety of classes. We provide the glyphs for that situation. (Like everything else we discuss in this thread, none of that is set in stone.)

Mage (Forums)
Hi Doctor Street. A question has arisen concerning the mage tier 6 talents and if we'll be balanced around 100 up time on their use for our dps to be competitive with other classes.
Are Mages going to be balanced under the assumption that they have perfect 100% uptime of their level 90 talents? No. Are they going to be balanced under the assumption that they take one of them and use it reasonably well? Yes.

Monk (Forums)
Is that a range Mistweaver or a melee one?
Yes.

Paladin (Forums)
Currently because of the mana cost of spells and how slowly we generate Holy Power, I'm basically relying on Holy Shock and Holy light, with some WoG's / Eternal Flame on the tank. But I'm almost forced to not use Flash of Light of Divine Light because of the mana cost to heal ratio. More than a few casts of either of those will put me in the danger zone of going oom, with not a lot of healing to show for it. Also Holy Radiance doesnt do nearly as much AoE healing as it was in Cataclysm, where i could rely on it to keep the group up during rough raid damage periods.
Holy Radiance is quite overpowered on many Dragon Soul fights, so I wouldn't use that as a yardstick for how spells should perform. Many of the nerfs we have made to Holy paladin healing over the course of beta have come about when our internal raid tests were dominated by Holy paladins (both throughput and efficiency) and Mistweaver monks. We'll compare these results to healers on beta now that raid tests are open.

Priest (Forums)
What was the decision process behind moving Vampiric Embrace from a passive ability to an active one?
In order to balance it, the number either needs to be very small, or the duration needs to be less than 100%. We generally think active abilities are more engaging than passive ones, so we went with the latter.

As far as your other Shadow questions go, I suggest just waiting until the next build so that you can see all of the numbers. It might take a lot of time to explain via text that would just lead to more questions. If the intent still isn't clear at that point, we can clear things up.

Shaman (Forums)
Currently Stormlash totem is scaling to ridiculous levels for certain classes(I've noticed Warlocks, Balance Druids, and Warriors so far) getting almost 400% more usage out of the totem than the myself as Elemental(With 2 back to back totems during heroism it did 300k damage for myself, but 1.2m for the warrior, 1.6m for the demo lock, 1.6m for the Balance druid.) Are you going to balance this down to those classes and then look at Stormlash and balance it around 25m but make sure it'll still be worth it for 10m.
That sounds off. It is possible something is proc'ing it than we don't intend. We don't want the shaman dropping the totem just to make someone else super awesome. It's a matter of degree -- if melee benefit a little more, no big deal. If some specs get 400%, then that may lead to a stacking issue. If it becomes a mandatory raid cooldown, then that's a problem. The benefit should be more like Shattering Throw -- nice to have, but not mandatory. (Mandatory tends to be in the eye of the beholder however.)

GC - you wanted more info on the Earth Elemental dodge thing:
Thanks, we’ll investigate this.

Level 90 Premade Character Availability
We are not planning on making new max-level template characters available in the near future, so if you're looking to participate in testing the Normal or Heroic versions of the Mists raid zones, you'll want to level to 90 in the beta.

By way of explanation: While we're excited about moving into the raid-testing phase of our beta, we're still looking closely at feedback and player behavior across all types of content, including the level-up experience and max-level daily quests. When we make raid-ready template characters available, that inevitably comes at the expense of the quality and quantity of testing in these other areas. In the past, this was an unavoidable sacrifice, since it was unrealistic to ask people to fully gear up for endgame raiding, much less Heroic raiding, in a beta environment. The new item-scaling system we have in place, however, provides an alternate solution. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)