MoP Images on Battle.net, Obsidian Nightwing RAF Mount Live, Blue Posts, The Daily Blink

Behold! The Recruit-A-Friend program has unleashed an all new reward mount—the swift and sleek Obsidian Nightwing. Unlike most other mounts, the Obsidian Nightwing is not a mount you summon, but rather a mount that you become, enabling you to take to the skies with a friend riding on your back. And who wouldn’t want to ride (or transform into) a winged panther?


As mentioned earlier, the previous reward mount, the X-53 Touring Rocket has now been retired from the Recruit-A-Friend program (but those who already earned the vintage rocket in the past will keep it going forward).
Other than the new Obsidian Nightwing, the Recruit-A-Friend program remains unchanged, so you can expect all the same epic benefits as before:

You Get:

• A FREE Obsidian Nightwing mount for a single character - when your recruit pays for their second full month of game time
  
• 30 days of FREE game time - when your recruit upgrades to a full version of World of Warcraft: Battle Chest and pays for their first month of game time.

Your Recruit Gets:

• World of Warcraft: Starter Edition, enabling them to play FREE up to level 20

You AND Your Recruit Get:

• Friend-to-friend summoning, making it easy to travel and adventure together
  
• Bonus experience when grouped together and grantable levels so you can easily maintain a character to level up with your friend.

For more details on the Recruit-A-Friend program, be sure to check out the full FAQ. Otherwise you can start recruiting now and invite a friend to join you on your adventures in Azeroth.

I'm curious about how pets inherit Mastery. Is this just in cases like where Frostburn increases Water Elemental damage directly via Mastery? Or does the pet gain some kind of bonus of its own from mastery. And if so, what kind of bonus? In many cases, the Master's own mastery bonus may not make sense for the pet (e.g., a Water Elemental has no way to gain or benefit from Fingers of Frost, a Succubus summoned by an Affliction Warlock has no use for Potent Afflictions, etc).
Sometimes it doesn’t have a use, but it’s done for consistency across a class. So yes, a Succubus has no use for Potent Afflictions. But a Water Elemental should do increased damage against frozen targets (broken in your current build, should be fixed in the next).

Ghostcrawler: I don't believe this was ever specified in your posts, but our initial tests after this patch seem to indicate that melee pets inherit our melee haste rather than the maximum of our melee haste and our spell haste. We had assumed it would work similarly to crit, where you said it would use the maximum of our spell crit and our melee crit. Is this discrepancy intentional?
Yes. Crit is done that way because Agi and Int give a huge part of your overall crit chance, and are physical and spell crit only, respectively. For example, a Warlock’s melee crit will be significantly lower than her spell crit. But that’s not the case for the different haste types, which are typically within 5% of each other, and most importantly scale together. Additionally, it would be odd if something like the 5% spell haste raid buff increased your hunter pet’s attack speed and focus regen rate.

Is it intended that Increased Critical Damage Meta gems don't apply to crits done by pets?
This is something that we’re keeping an eye on, but for now, yes, that’s intended.

GC, in an earlier post you said pets would inherit the highest % of our crit (between melee/spell/ranged) and use it for all of their abilities; however, the fire elemental appears to be using spell crit for its fire blast casts. As an enhancement shaman, I have virtually no spell crit to speak of (in these solo tests I'm doing, I only have 8.26% on my character sheet => 5.26% chance to crit with spells against level 93 boss mobs).
We’ll investigate. it does appear to current give the highest crit to melee crit, but only spell crit to spell crit, which is a bug.

Death Knight (Forums)
Necrotic Strike doesn't seem worth it, and here is the math that agrees with me.
Great theorycraft. We increased Necrotic Strike’s damage from 100% weapon damage to 150% weapon damage, and its heal absorb component has been increased from 70% of AP to 100% of AP and benefits from PvP Power now. It’s fine that it varies in usefulness based on the damage reduction of the target, but it should almost always be worth using when the heal absorb is going to be fully used.

Is the Gargoyle still bugged or has the guardian fix build not been released yet? It does not appear to be getting any of our spell haste. With 0 gear on, it casts 11 times while up. With gear on and roughly 10-11% haste, it still only casts 11 times.
Make sure you’re looking at spell haste not melee haste? We just verified at least in our current build (and I don’t think this has changed in the last week) that increasing haste from 15% to 66% increased the number of casts the Gargoyle got off from 11 to 16 (that’s obviously a very extreme amount of haste, not realistic).

Druid (Forums)
Now that FR has been reworked, I have some new numbers. Nothing has changed.
Your current build doesn’t have the changes to Frenzied Regeneration and Shield Barrier yet. If you’d like to get a head start on theorycrafting their value, the current formula for their heal/absorb is: 18.6 * (AP/1000)^2 - 0.047 * AP.

Mage (Forums)
Assuming they don't already and I just missed it, should pets inherit damage multiplier buffs? This is an issue for Frost and the Mage L90 talents -- the Water Elemental is worth about 20% of our total damage, and if Incanter's Ward is the only L90 talent that benefits the Water Elemental, it's got a big leg up on the other two options; a Frost Mage will pretty much always choose it over Invocation or Rune of Power, even if all three talents are comparable for the other two specs.
In the next build, you should find Incanter’s Ward giving increased spell damage like the others, and the Water Elemental benefiting from the level 90 talents.

Monk (Forums)
So there hasn't been much commentary from Blues lately about Monks compared to the other classes. Does that mean we're perfect already or just that we're still under so much work there isn't much to tell us about?
I believe the build you currently have still has Zen Sphere is way way too strong. For testing content and giving feedback, it’d be helpful if you didn’t use Zen Sphere.

I noticed earlier today while beating on dummies that Xuen seems to be triggering Eminence now. This was as a WW too (which I assume is bugged), so I'm not sure how much healing he would do for a Mistweaver, but it might be something to test out.
Yes, Xuen should be triggering Eminence (but only for a Mistweaver in Serpent stance; always triggering it is a bug in the current build). He also will soon learn a bit about how to tank; increased armor and health, and if you’re a Brewmaster, he gets a provoke and increased threat generation.

Is Shuffle intended to be capped at 12 seconds? Even if it is, Shuffle needs to refresh to that cap if Blackout Kick is used with >= 6 seconds left on Shuffle rather than just wasting the Chi as it does currently.
Yes, the 12sec cap is intended. While you’ll never want to refresh it with >6sec remaining on it, I’ll look into possibly just refreshing it to 12sec if you have >6sec, so that it lessens the pain of that mistake.

What's the intended interaction between Combo breaker mastery procs and Tigereye Brew? Currently Tiger Palm procs do not contribute to generating brew, but Blackout Kick procs do. Which is bugged? Ideally, they should both add stacks.
The free Tiger Palms and Blackout Kicks from Combo Breaker should count toward Tigereye Brew.

Paladin (Forums)
At present it seems that Retribution and Protection Paladins get some sort of extra passive mana regen every couple of seconds that isn't accounted for by mp5. Unlike mp5 regen which is constantly ticking this unknown regen only ticks every few seconds and adds somewhere between 1k and 2k mana. There's no hint of this extra regen in the spellbook or the character sheet that I can see.

Is this extra regen intended? And if so, what are the details of it? i.e. how often does it tick and how much for?
Guarded by the Light and Sword of Light grant 6% of max mana every 2 sec, but isn’t mentioned in the tooltip currently. Guarded by the Light in particular was starting to read like a novel. We can add it back though to reduce confusion.

Shaman (Forums)
Last Build, Feral Spirits had a minimum (character un-geared) damage range of ~555 to ~833 at level 85. In the latest build, their base damage is now 516-517. Is there a reason their damage was nerfed and the range reduced to Base+1?
The base damage may have been reduced to line up with where we wanted the desired scaling rate to put them. The damage range being only 1 is a bug that we’ll get fixed (what you currently see is the average damage).

We also calculated their attack power scaling to be 31%, is this the intended value?
Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t want to get into confirming or listing every coefficient, but yes, Feral Spirits get 31% of your attack power.

The tooltip damage for Spirit Bite is 96-144, but in practice it seems closer to 158-206. Is there a tooltip error at work here?
Where are you seeing the tooltip for Spirit Bite? The one I see is “Bites the enemy, causing Nature damage.” No damage value listed there. Regardless, 96-144 is the correct base damage range, but it also is increased by attack power.

Both normal Elementals and Empowered Elementals benefit from the Orc Racial Command (+5% damage). Why don't Feral Spirits also get this benefit? Is it a bug that the Elementals get the racial bonus?

Normal Fire Elementals benefit from the Enhancement Mastery for ALL attacks, but the Feral Sprit's Spirit Bite (nature spell) does not. Is this intended?
Feral Spirits should benefit from Command and Mastery. This is fixed for next build.

The Totemic Restoration talent does not appear to be working as the spell description indicates on totems with longer than a 1 minute CD.
The examples you gave seem to match what is intended. The cooldown is reduced by half the percentage of the duration that was lost. If your Spirit Link totem is pulled back up after 3sec (50% lost duration), its cooldown will be reduced by 25% of the full cooldown, or 45sec.

Echo of the Elements gains no benefit from Healing Storm glyph.
We’ll look into this. These sort of single-use buffs commonly get consumed by the initial cast and not apply to any proc effects, but I see how you’d want it to. So, it may be intended, but we’ll discuss it.

Enhancement currently gets the Burning Wrath +10% spell power buff. Spell power buffs do not work on enhancement at all, so is it supposed to be the +10% AP buff?
This is intended. Enhancement themselves do not benefit from it, but the rest of their raid does.

It appears that elemental's primal fire elemental can't glance its auto-attacks, but enhancement's can.
Testing this in our latest internal build, both of them are getting glances, and I don’t see why that would be different in yours. I do note that your log there is attacking a Raider’s Training Dummy, whereas Bink’s log is attacking a “Training Dummy”; not sure which one, but some lower level dummy. Chance to glance is lower on lower level targets, all the way down to 0 on targets lower level than you. I’d guess Bink’s elemental was attacking an 85 dummy while he’s 90.

MoP Burst. Bye bye WoW, have been a great "life"
I am going to reiterate on some of the statement in this thread and just point out a few additional things to clear up possible woes you may have. Yes, this is burst and some classes are doing a fair whack of damage, but there are a few points that you have to remember:

• This is the beta and class adjustments are constantly occurring, lots of changes are still to come. The numbers you see in the video may and probably will change in the future.
• You cannot tell what gear is being worn by either player in the video, so the damage numbers may be under or over what you should be expecting.
• This is a player trying to use all of their abilities to burst down Swifty as quickly as possible with them not having to worry about incoming damage, protecting themselves or many other things that you need to be thinking about during a match.
• There are no defensive cooldowns used in the video as far as I could see and he also had his back to the opponent as much as possible to avoid parries for the melee.

So, this is simply showing the highest possible damage that a class can do under optimal conditions and it does not reflect what will occur in a real match between 2 teams of players.

Oh come on. The start of every expansion has been stupid, please don't try to feed this crap.
I was simply stating that you cannot take these numbers at face value. They do not show how long a player will survive when applying both pressure and defensive cooldowns into the equation. The numbers shown here will also change, you are not able to tell how damage and mitigation will be when the expansion goes live by looking at the beta. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

500 Pets Limit
Yes. You can get one of every pet well within the 500 limit. (Official Forums)

Listing of Pets for Each Zone
The filters in the journal have an option to sort by "Pet Battle". This option will show you all the pets you can capture in the world. The info text (hover over the pets icon in the top slot) will tell you what zone you can catch it in. (Official Forums)

Pet Battle Anonymity
The intention is for queued battles to be anonymous. The next push will remove the ability to chat and will not show the opposing players name. (Official Forums)

Pet Battle Music
This is the final music. Glad you guys like it! We had a ton of fun picking out the tracks and running filters on them to fit the theme of the content. (Official Forums)

Custom Pet Name Visibility
Other players will see the name, that's the point! (Official Forums)

Non-Tradeable Pets
"Most" pets are intended to be tradeable. A pet that is greyed out means that it is either in a battle slot, or has lower than 100% health. We are adding messaging for both of those situations in the next push.

All promotional, CE, Blizzard Pet Store, TCG and quest pets are currently not tradeable. All of the pets that you can catch in the game world are tradeable, as well as a massive amount of the pre-existing pets. (Official Forums)

Collector's Edition Pets
All of the collector's edition pets are not tradeable. These pets hold a certain amount of prestige and we want to retain that. Along those same lines, promotional pets like Murky or Tyrael will not be tradeable either. (Official Forums)

Pet Battle Availability Time
The feature will go live with the box release date of MoP. It will be available to all players, MoP is not required. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Health
Pets heal 50% of the damage they take in a fight after every battle. You can also full heal and revive your entire team every 10m with the Revive Pets Spell.

Going to the Stable Master should be a last resort. If we find that people are going excessively, we will look at the numbers again. We are happy with the balance we have right now though.

At least let us know the purpose of the mechanic. Is it to encourage us to use a wider variety of pets rather than building our favorite go-to team and just using them? I wouldn't think it's a money sink at 10 silver per stable master visit. If it's an obstacle without a clear purpose, it should be changed.
Attrition is built into the system to encourage folks to care about winning a battle and taking as little damage as possible. A full heal after each battle would eliminate that completely.

It also encourages you to use different pets instead of the same ones for every fight. Deathy is down to 68 health? Just swap him out with the Tiny Harvester thats sitting at full health and earn some levels on a new pet. By the time you do a few fights your heal spell will be off cooldown and you can heal your entire team. (Official Forums)

Normal Pets are Weak
This is a known bug and we are working to get a hotfix out for it ASAP. Normal pets have a much better shot at winning the low level fights. (Official Forums)

Pet Battles FAQ
We are super excited to have pet battles live on the beta servers with the new patch today! Before you dive in, we wanted to give a bit of an update on exactly where we are and what you can expect.

First off, this is certainly a beta. Nothing you play is by any means final, try to keep that in mind. Overall though, the feature is mostly implemented and we need your feedback to help us polish it up! A few of the things you can try out in the beta:

• Fight pets around the world in solo, 2v2 and 3v3 battles
• Capture pets in the world of varying quality and strength
• Duel and queue for PvP battles against other players
• Interact on an epic questline to defeat Master Pet Tamers across all of Azeroth
• Buy and sell pets on the AH (not all pets are tradable)
• Earn a wide assortment of Pet Battle achievements and associated rewards
• Browse the new Pet Journal and manage your pets
• Use your pets across any character on your Battle.net account (Battle Pet achievements are account-wide)

Now, we also have a number of bugs and things that are just not finished. You are going to want to post about these things and that’s fine, but here are the ones that we want you to know about beforehand:

• Pets are currently healing to full health after a battle. This is a known bug and we are hoping to hotfix it tonight.
• Pre-existing pets have no stats. Any pets that you acquire new are fine. This is also a bug that we hope to hotfix tonight.
• In certain cases, starting a pet battle with a creature in the world will report an error about the pet being currently in battle, or that the account is locked. Both of these are hopefully on the hotfix list for tonight.
• Some pets will be missing abilites, ability FX or animations.
• The questline is very much WIP. You can get started on it, but we are certainly still implementing it.
• We are tuning the XP curve so any feedback on this is appreciated.
• Spawn rates on pets in the world are WIP. Feedback on this is appreciated as well.
• We have an issue where players are sometimes losing a battle slot. A relog should fix the problem. We are working on it.
• I will update this post as we get more info.

And finally, an FAQ about how most of the basics in the system work.

Battle Pet Trainers

• These NPCs teach players Battle Pet Training, granting the ability to fight and capture pets. The training comes with a pet heal/rez spell and the ability to track pets in the world. These trainers can be found in all the racial start zones as well as Orgrimmar and Stormwind. The guards in the capitals can direct you to them as well. Note that this training is account-wide, so you only need to learn it on one character.
• Pet Battle Training requires level 5 and 100g.

Master Pet Tamers

• These are NPCs for the battle pet questline. You can fight these characters in a pet battle for increased XP, achievements and rewards. Defeating the Grand Master on each continent will unlock daily quests (via an achievement) for all of the other Tamers on that same continent.

Accound-Wide Pets

• Pets are now account-wide. This means that any pet you have on one character will be shared with all of the others on your Battle.net account. Earn level 6 with Grunty on character A? Log in character B and that level 6 Grunty will be there waiting for you.
• If you have multiple versions of the same pet on multiple characters on your account, they will be merged into one. We will place any extras in your bags or mail them to you if you are out of space.

Pet Journal

• Players can have up to 500 total pets and up to 3 versions of the same pet.
• Pets can be named, released, marked as favorite or put in a cage for trading/selling from the journal.
• Filters allow you to sort your collection by family, source, collected/not collected or favorites.
• Source info shows you where to obtain a pet and small lore blurb about it.
• Abilites loadouts for your pets are set in the journal. This becomes available on pets at level 10.
• View stats on your pets. Stats include Health, Speed, Power and Quality.

Pet Quality

• Pets that are captured in the world have varying levels of quality, just like an item would. The quality stat is randomly determined every time a pet spawns. Higher quality pets get a larger stat allotment each time you level. Be on the lookout for Rares!

Pets on the AH

• Most pets can be bought and sold from the AH. A new section is on the AH specifically for this.
• Pets that are sold on the AH retain their stats and levels. Pets that can't be traded will display a warning in their info text as well as having the “Put in Cage” option disabled.

Battles

• PvE battles take place in two ways: against NPC trainers and against pets that you can fight in the world. Pet tracking will let you find pets in the world that you can fight and capture. Keep an eye out!
• PvP battles also have two varieties. You can choose to duel another player or you can queue up and be matched against another player of similar skill. Note that you do not earn XP for duels.
• Pets heal a portion of their health after every fight. The amount healed is 50% of the damage that they took during the fight. You can also full heal all of the pets in your journal with the Revive Battle Pets spell (10m cooldown)
• If one of your pets die in battle you can resurrect it using the Revive Battle Pets spell (10m cooldown) or just find a friendly, neighborhood Stable Master

Capturing

• Pets are caught via PvE battles in the world. Any pet you can fight, you can catch. In order to catch a pet, you need to get it to low health and use your trap ability. Traps upgrade via specific achievements, improving your chance to catch higher level pets.
• You can catch up to three of the same type of pet.

Thanks for trying out the feature and make sure to post your feedback here in the forum! (Official Forums)

On Tuesday, July 17, we'll be testing two encounters.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

Spirit Kings (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 10 Player Heroic
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Will of the Emperor (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 10 Player Heroic
16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session or cancel it entirely, due to bugs, builds, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.