Winter Veil 2012
The Feast of Winter Veil is here and brings new gifts this year! When you unwrap your present this year, you will find a Foot Ball or The Pigskin inside. You will need them for They're Both Footballs? Don't forget to grab the Battle Pets as well.
This year also adds an updated version of the old Miniature Winter Veil Tree! Not many people have opened this year's Stolen Present yet, but it likely has a similar droprate (~1%) to the old one.
Patch 5.1 Hotfixes - December 13
Classes
Quests
Pet Battles
Items
Dungeons, Raids & Scenarios
Bug Fixes
- Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
- Frost Bomb will now detonate after 4 seconds (was 6 seconds), and the damage it deals to other players has been reduced by 20%.
- Frost Bomb will now detonate after 4 seconds (was 6 seconds), and the damage it deals to other players has been reduced by 20%.
Quests
- Players that leave the area during the ending sequence of "Heart of the Alliance" will no longer be placed into the wrong phase.
Pet Battles
- Players that have earned the Achievement "Taming the World" should now receive a Safari Hat in the mail.
- Lower level pets involved in Pet Battles with higher level team mates will now receive full experience from victorious battles.
- Darkmoon Hatchlings, Red Crickets, and Singing Crickets that were previously of lower quality should now be Rare quality.
Items
- The Sun-Lute of the Phoenix King can now be upgraded using the Item Upgrade system.
Dungeons, Raids & Scenarios
- Heart of Fear
- Grand Empress Shek'zeer
- The Empress now always drops three tier-set tokens and three non-set items in the 25 player Heroic mode version of this encounter.
- The Empress now always drops three tier-set tokens and three non-set items in the 25 player Heroic mode version of this encounter.
- Grand Empress Shek'zeer
Bug Fixes
- The Guild Perk, Ride Like the Wind, should now properly increase flight path speeds by 25% in Pandaria.
- Classes
- Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
- Various weapon procs will no longer sometimes prematurely break the Stealth provided by the Subterfuge talent.
- Various weapon procs will no longer sometimes prematurely break the Stealth provided by the Subterfuge talent.
- Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Pet Battles Updates
We’ve been receiving a few inquiries over Twitter and through email regarding Farmer Nishi, so we thought we’d share our thoughts on Pet Battle experience gains with you.
We will soon be applying a hotfix that causes level-25 pets to no longer “steal” experience from your lower-level pets. Previously, if you had a level-3 and level-25 pet grouped together for a battle, the XP earned would be shared between the two at the end. This resulted in some players doing what they could to kill off their level-25 pet so the level-3 pet would get all of the experience. You no longer need to worry about this as the level-3 pet will now receive 100% of the XP that’s earned, so long as it has participated in at least one round of combat.
With max-level master trainer dailies available for Northrend, Cataclysm, Pandaria, and the new line of Spirit Trainers, you have quite a few endgame battles in Pandaria which you can use to level up new pets. Be sure to wear your Safari Hat to get the most out of your battles! The over-arching goal is to provide a variety of content with which you can level up your pets each day.
We will soon be applying a hotfix that causes level-25 pets to no longer “steal” experience from your lower-level pets. Previously, if you had a level-3 and level-25 pet grouped together for a battle, the XP earned would be shared between the two at the end. This resulted in some players doing what they could to kill off their level-25 pet so the level-3 pet would get all of the experience. You no longer need to worry about this as the level-3 pet will now receive 100% of the XP that’s earned, so long as it has participated in at least one round of combat.
With max-level master trainer dailies available for Northrend, Cataclysm, Pandaria, and the new line of Spirit Trainers, you have quite a few endgame battles in Pandaria which you can use to level up new pets. Be sure to wear your Safari Hat to get the most out of your battles! The over-arching goal is to provide a variety of content with which you can level up your pets each day.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
LFR Feedback.
Reason 1: People can get an item twice, thrice, even 4-5-6-7 times. Why is this bad? If we had normal looting, they would simply pass on the item, and let someone without one get it. Basically, loot that someone COULD use is being vendored, because this faulty loot system keeps giving certain other people an item they already have.
If we were still using a looting system with finite loot drops, I think this would be more of an issue. Each fight, everyone has the same chance to get loot. It could be that many people are getting loot on a single fight, though that's very uncommon.
Because the loot pool isn't finite as it used to be, this kind of duplication isn't as much of an issue in terms of total loot awarded, though I acknowledge that it probably doesn't necessarily feel great. The psychology gets weird: "I got this item, but it could have been *that* item, so this is frustrating."
The loot is meant to be random though, which means the possibility of getting duplicates - but even that isn't necessarily all bad. Sometimes it's worthwhile to gem or enchant duplicate items in a different way for a different application. Enchanters can also benefit.
-Reason 2: The chances of getting loot are spread unevenly. Some people are lucky, others are not. This is a part of how the game has always worked, but I do not think the gap should be so large.
This has, alas, always been the case. On the up-side, this also eliminates Master Looter scams, and organized groups of players rolling on items for each other, wildly swinging the odds of getting loot in their own favor.
Reason 3: People are switching specs for fights so that the auto-loot-generator will give them spec-specific loot. I cannot remember exactly, but in DS LFR, didn't the rolls there base off what you queued as? I could be wrong.
This is a valid concern. We're looking into the possibilities of implementing an elegant method of letting players decide what spec they would like the Raid Finder loot system to use when providing rewards.
-Reason 4: No Off-spec gear. Bonus rolls were a great thing, but I feel as though the above has already covered this. Simply editing this section to reflect that.
The above solution could help with this. In the meantime, off-spec gearing has always been tricky, and has been the source of significant ire in the community. Nobody likes losing a main-spec roll to someone else's off-spec.
-Reason 5: The excitement factor. Seeing loot drop was always fun, but so is simply getting an item directly after the boss dies. Getting gold bags from ALL the raid bosses in a week severely diminishes a lot of the excitement.
We're actually looking at ways to make getting loot in the Raid Finder more exciting. Both in terms of visual feedback as well as making the Satchels of Exotic Mysteries more interesting.
Any chance we can get other people's loot visible to raid? Its fine if I have no shot at getting it, just feels nice to see the boss drop loot instead of just a bag.
We're not sure. Would that really feel good?
I don't believe we're too keen on allowing players in the Raid Finder to trade loot, so it could feel not so great if someone else gets an item that they don't want, that you've been after, and they can't trade it to you.
That's surely already happening, but currently there's not quite the same cat-and-a-window-pane effect. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Low Level Instance Difficulty
The problem with lower level dungeons is that they are used by many players as an alternative to questing for levelling up.
So they need to be somewhat similar in terms of xp/time, otherwise players would probably skip dungeons altogether and simply quest, only a very small minority would probably be joining dungeons for the sake of curiosity, and some loot.
There’s also the trick about making dungeons easy enough for the less experienced players (new players levelling up for the first time). This becomes particularly important and we need to pay more attention to it whenever we release a new expansion since we usually tend to reduce the amount of xp needed to level up on lower levels or we usually adapt it in a way so that levelling becomes faster on previous expansions’ content.
This has the inconvenient of making players less prepared since they have less time to get to know their characters and their new abilities that constantly unlock while levelling up.
Still, I agree, some do seem a bit too easy, but I don’t know if I would feel exactly the same way if I had just started playing WoW and ran dungeons while levelling up my very first character.
Maybe its a possibility to make heroic versions of those instances for lower lvl's who want a challenge, and get better gear from them. I understand that blizzard's mainly focus is at the lvl 90's but they could atleast do something to make it more challeging.
That’s one possible solution; it’s all a matter of priorities and the amount of resources that we have at our disposal.
Still, while we always strive to make the game appealing and have something for every kind of player to do and enjoy in-game, it seems to me that the amount of players that would actually be running such dungeons would be very small, I suspect most players, even those that would enjoy a more challenging version of the dungeons, would probably still take the easy route simply because it’s there, it’s available and it will make them level up faster. Also, the queues would probably be long and players would tend to cancel them and re-queue for the normal version.
Actually even right now, depending on the level of your character, you should be able to queue for the heroic versions of certain instances, for example, if you’re level 80 you should be able to queue for Cataclysm heroic and normal dungeons, it’s up to you if you want to queue for the heroic version, but I suspect the system only allows you to queue them at very specific levels. Some improvements have also been made regarding allowing more players into older heroics. BC heroics for example, used to require specific reputation levels to queue for the heroic versions, those restrictions have all been removed. (there are no more keys) This change actually happened during Cataclysm. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Alts in Mists of Pandaria
We recognize that MoP is probably not the most alt-friendly of all the expansions and since WoW has been running for so long with its persistent world where characters usually don’t get deleted very often, it’s normal to expect a higher average number of alts per player as time goes on.
Our development team is very aware of this and they are trying to find more solutions for alts in MoP. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Reason 1: People can get an item twice, thrice, even 4-5-6-7 times. Why is this bad? If we had normal looting, they would simply pass on the item, and let someone without one get it. Basically, loot that someone COULD use is being vendored, because this faulty loot system keeps giving certain other people an item they already have.
If we were still using a looting system with finite loot drops, I think this would be more of an issue. Each fight, everyone has the same chance to get loot. It could be that many people are getting loot on a single fight, though that's very uncommon.
Because the loot pool isn't finite as it used to be, this kind of duplication isn't as much of an issue in terms of total loot awarded, though I acknowledge that it probably doesn't necessarily feel great. The psychology gets weird: "I got this item, but it could have been *that* item, so this is frustrating."
The loot is meant to be random though, which means the possibility of getting duplicates - but even that isn't necessarily all bad. Sometimes it's worthwhile to gem or enchant duplicate items in a different way for a different application. Enchanters can also benefit.
-Reason 2: The chances of getting loot are spread unevenly. Some people are lucky, others are not. This is a part of how the game has always worked, but I do not think the gap should be so large.
This has, alas, always been the case. On the up-side, this also eliminates Master Looter scams, and organized groups of players rolling on items for each other, wildly swinging the odds of getting loot in their own favor.
Reason 3: People are switching specs for fights so that the auto-loot-generator will give them spec-specific loot. I cannot remember exactly, but in DS LFR, didn't the rolls there base off what you queued as? I could be wrong.
This is a valid concern. We're looking into the possibilities of implementing an elegant method of letting players decide what spec they would like the Raid Finder loot system to use when providing rewards.
-Reason 4: No Off-spec gear. Bonus rolls were a great thing, but I feel as though the above has already covered this. Simply editing this section to reflect that.
The above solution could help with this. In the meantime, off-spec gearing has always been tricky, and has been the source of significant ire in the community. Nobody likes losing a main-spec roll to someone else's off-spec.
-Reason 5: The excitement factor. Seeing loot drop was always fun, but so is simply getting an item directly after the boss dies. Getting gold bags from ALL the raid bosses in a week severely diminishes a lot of the excitement.
We're actually looking at ways to make getting loot in the Raid Finder more exciting. Both in terms of visual feedback as well as making the Satchels of Exotic Mysteries more interesting.
Any chance we can get other people's loot visible to raid? Its fine if I have no shot at getting it, just feels nice to see the boss drop loot instead of just a bag.
We're not sure. Would that really feel good?
I don't believe we're too keen on allowing players in the Raid Finder to trade loot, so it could feel not so great if someone else gets an item that they don't want, that you've been after, and they can't trade it to you.
That's surely already happening, but currently there's not quite the same cat-and-a-window-pane effect. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Low Level Instance Difficulty
The problem with lower level dungeons is that they are used by many players as an alternative to questing for levelling up.
So they need to be somewhat similar in terms of xp/time, otherwise players would probably skip dungeons altogether and simply quest, only a very small minority would probably be joining dungeons for the sake of curiosity, and some loot.
There’s also the trick about making dungeons easy enough for the less experienced players (new players levelling up for the first time). This becomes particularly important and we need to pay more attention to it whenever we release a new expansion since we usually tend to reduce the amount of xp needed to level up on lower levels or we usually adapt it in a way so that levelling becomes faster on previous expansions’ content.
This has the inconvenient of making players less prepared since they have less time to get to know their characters and their new abilities that constantly unlock while levelling up.
Still, I agree, some do seem a bit too easy, but I don’t know if I would feel exactly the same way if I had just started playing WoW and ran dungeons while levelling up my very first character.
Maybe its a possibility to make heroic versions of those instances for lower lvl's who want a challenge, and get better gear from them. I understand that blizzard's mainly focus is at the lvl 90's but they could atleast do something to make it more challeging.
That’s one possible solution; it’s all a matter of priorities and the amount of resources that we have at our disposal.
Still, while we always strive to make the game appealing and have something for every kind of player to do and enjoy in-game, it seems to me that the amount of players that would actually be running such dungeons would be very small, I suspect most players, even those that would enjoy a more challenging version of the dungeons, would probably still take the easy route simply because it’s there, it’s available and it will make them level up faster. Also, the queues would probably be long and players would tend to cancel them and re-queue for the normal version.
Actually even right now, depending on the level of your character, you should be able to queue for the heroic versions of certain instances, for example, if you’re level 80 you should be able to queue for Cataclysm heroic and normal dungeons, it’s up to you if you want to queue for the heroic version, but I suspect the system only allows you to queue them at very specific levels. Some improvements have also been made regarding allowing more players into older heroics. BC heroics for example, used to require specific reputation levels to queue for the heroic versions, those restrictions have all been removed. (there are no more keys) This change actually happened during Cataclysm. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Alts in Mists of Pandaria
We recognize that MoP is probably not the most alt-friendly of all the expansions and since WoW has been running for so long with its persistent world where characters usually don’t get deleted very often, it’s normal to expect a higher average number of alts per player as time goes on.
Our development team is very aware of this and they are trying to find more solutions for alts in MoP. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
WoWDB Addon Data Collection
How do we know what is inside Stolen Present within hours of an event going live? People like you running the WoWDB addon!
To help out, just install the WoWDB Profiler addon from Curse and check the box in the Curse Client options as seen below. When you are playing the addon will gather data and save it. When you are done playing, Curse Client will see the game close and upload the collected data from the addon.
Curse Weekly Roundup
This week has Jeb taking over Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Metro: 2033 giveaway, The Secret World goes Free to Play, and your weekly Game Forecast.
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