Patch 5.2 Wrathion Quest Line Audio, Grand Commendation UI Marker, Blue Posts, Video

Lei Shen has consolidated his power on the Isle of Thunder, and if he’s not dislodged, his reborn army will threaten all of Pandaria. But the return of the Thunder King is good news for you, because it means that new challenges and triumphs await you in patch 5.2.

Head over to the Under Development page now for a preview of the major in-development features planned for the next World of Warcraft patch, The Thunder King. Among them: a massive new zone, a new raid, server-wide events surrounding the siege on the Isle of Thunder, new factions, world bosses…and more still. Brace yourself for the storm.

We'll continue adding details of in-development patches to the Under Development page, so check back for more previews in the future.

Nerfing Talents to the ground just to make other talents look more attractive never worked.
There are two issues in situations like this. First, there is the question of whether the three talent options are relatively attractive. Second, there is the question of whether any of them are overpowered. You can't just say the second issue is always part of the first issue, and letting players choose any of three overpowered talents isn't going to be great for player balance.

We do think Shadow needs PvP nerfs, but not PvE nerfs, and we also want to be careful not to nerf any of the utility that Shadow brings in PvE. (For example nerfing Mass Dispel for Shadow, possibly through the glyph is a common suggestion, but we like that Shadow's Mass Dispel can be really beneficial in PvE). Phantasm is particularly annoying to deal with because being untargetable is so powerful. The intent of the talent was to make Fade more powerful as an escape tool, but we just overdid it with the untargeting part.

Glyph of Deep Freeze - now also lowers the stun duration of Deep Freeze by 1 sec in addition to taking Deep Freeze off the GCD.
Base Deep Freeze has a 1 sec longer duration. So a mage with the Glyph of Deep Freeze will see no change, but a mage without the glyph will have a slightly better Deep Freeze.

you seem like a smart guy, explain how this helps our current problem?
We were trying to solve a very specific problem here, where a paladin wants to join an Arena team, and the team says "Can't you just go Holy, because you won't lose anything?" or the paladin looking for an RBG team who hears "We need a rogue and a DK, but don't have room for a Ret paladin." We were specifically looking for a modest buff to group utility that was Ret specific.

On survivability specifically, I feel like we're hearing that DKs are squishy and paladins are squishy and shaman are squishy, which makes me think that once Defensive Stance for warriors isn't overpowered that all melee might feel about the same.

And now you want to take that away too, you're turning the talent into a Hand of Freedom that has a longer cooldown and a shorter duration. Despite the buffs to disc I feel this is a big and unnecessary blow to a spec that's already struggling.
While we want to see more healing priests in PvP, we don't think the right way to do that is through a really annoying defensive mechanic like this.

Single target damage is bad for shadow priests, and the only changes we're getting so far are:
We haven't made many PvE damage adjustments at all. We will. It's possible Shadow lost too much damage while moving in PvE. Nearly all of these Shadow changes were to tone them down in PvP.

The problem is the Feline Swiftness talent. It always has been. But now you're forcing feral PvP into a catch 22 situation. We're either forced to take Feline Swiftness just to stop the out of range errors when trying to use abilities, and lose our gap closer.. or we get inundated with out of range errors when trying to do anything. You know the feral hit box is still out of whack... and the feral speed bonus on the PvP set was to compensate for this.
We fixed the Feral hit box some time ago. Different races and models once had different combat reaches. It has all been normalized at least since Cataclysm.

However, to address your main concern, a different option would be to prevent Feline Swiftness and the PvP set bonus from stacking. Feline Swiftness would just remain a dead talent at least among knowledgeable PvP players.

As an editorial note, we're just going to delete posts that are nothing but whining and if that doesn't send a strong enough message, the moderators will ban you. Try to keep this thread informative. You have plenty of places on the internet where you don't have to be.

Was the damage buff it provided too strong? In almost the exact same gear I'm using, I was doing ~67k sustained single target dps. Seemed fine, provided that I had 0 mobility while doing that. Was the rotation being used to maximize it's effect not what you envisioned? I like how it changed our rotation without actually changing it. We were just hitting DP more frequently.
If you are talking about the version of Insanity where you just use Devouring Plague at one orb all the time, we thought that undermined the entire rotation. It didn't just change it, it made it so you didn't need to build up orbs any longer.

Not really sure what this mean or how this really affect gameplay nor why this change now tbh... mind to explain?
PoM makes the cast instant instead of 2 sec (reduced by haste). This means the ring will appear immediately if PoM'd, but it won't freeze immediately. After 2 sec (again reduced by haste) the freeze happens.

No PoM: 2 sec cast, 2 sec arming time
5.1 PoM: 0 sec cast, 0 sec arming time
5.2 PoM: 0 sec cast, 2 sec arming time

I can see that 99% of this entire thread is related to PvP, but any chance of some feedback from GC on how he can think a 40-50% nerf to Disc AoE heals is a fair thing, given that at the absolute most we top the meters by 20%. Sure we needed a nerf, but an execution?
It seems like a lot more than 20% to us. In any case, you still have DA on PoH, just not guaranteed any more. You can force DA with Inner Focus. You can toss out PW:Shields on some folks.* You can also still use Spirit Shell with PoH. Using PoH without any of those absorbs will be weaker, but that will be offset by the times when you do have the absorbs. All of that ignores the argument that an absorb is probably stronger than a direct heal so maybe the ratio shouldn't even be 1:1.

* - This seems to be the most misunderstood portion of the philosophy. We want Disc to use PW:S. It's one of their signature spells. We don't want Disc to blanket the entire raid and use nothing but PW:S. But we are so far from that now -- we see almost no PW:S, except for Rapture cheesiness with Mana Tide or to proc Body and Soul. You won't be able to put PW:S on 10 or 25 people before the dragon breathes, but you shouldn't have to. You have other healers backing you up and all of you have several cooldowns (and yes PW:B counts) when you're really in trouble.

Oh, and there's no point in making Fade an escape tool. If the priest is running at 100%, gets slowed, but uses his "escape tool" to go back to 100%; IT STILL DOES NOTHING SINCE THE PERSON COMING AFTER HIM IS RUNNING AT 100%.
"Escape tool" does not mean "nobody can ever catch you." Abilities have counters and pre-counters. Phantasm was a movement ability with a damage avoidance mechanic (that allowed you to go offensive with less of a chance for retribution) on a tier with two movement abilities. The other talents are never going to compete with that.

I'm just offering a general statement here, and I'm not calling any of you out personally, but we see a lot of feedback of the form "X doesn't work because it can be countered." That is the entire point.

PvP works better, in our opinions, when you have to be smart and react to what other players are doing. That means trying to guess what they're going to do next or deciding the right time for a crutch dispel or CC. If you find yourself asking for something to be undispellable, or to punish someone for dispelling it, or you're asking for something to work while crowd controlled, or something that makes you immune to something, or something that overall leaves your opponent no options, we're very unlikely to make those changes. Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered.

Hey, The Balance 2 piece looks interesting, but the 4 piece looks weaker than lots of trinkets I've disenchanted this expansion.
Can you give us some kind of estimate for how much DPS percent you think it provides? I've disenchanted a lot of trinkets too, but that's not much of a yardstick.

what the (insert explicit here) are you thinking nerfing shadow priests this hard? you do realize it all but benches them in pve right? they needed a buff in pve as it stands now, and your nerfing them??? seriously?
How does nerfing Phantasm or Dispersion bench Shadow in PvE? We avoided utility nerfs that would risk hurting them in PvE, as I mentioned, such as targeting Hymn of Hope or Mass Dispel.

GC, it is obvious that the nerf to Mindspike glyph is a loss on dps even if you are just standing and doing damage.
This is a legit PvE nerf, but a very, very small one and as I said, we haven't made any PvE numbers adjustments to anyone yet. This one is easy to fix without PvP risk and it makes a glyph less mandatory for its DPS benefits.

If they catch your cast time spells, which only melee really seem to bother doing these days, then you'll be unable to cast Dispersion until your shadow school is available again. But yes, if a mage decided to wait for you to cast a VT and Counterspell that, instead of using a blanket Silence on you, then they could prevent Dispersion for 6s.
Yes. I predict the Dispersion nerf won't really be felt that much, especially among lower ratings.

you may think you have fixed it - but you have not. Only 3 days ago on life I was pursuing a hunter - I don't have any speed bonus except the +25% from cat - my nose was almost touching his back and I still got "out of range" errors.
The hitbox of a cat has the same hitbox as a gnome or a tauren. The nose of the model doesn't matter - it comes from the center of the model. What you're probably seeing is what all melee deal with, particularly when moving very quickly (+25% counts) and no snares. The two clients just often disagree about the position of you and your target.

That said, we are likely to make the change I mentioned yesterday about reverting the PvP set bonus and having it not stack with Feline Swiftness.

Yep. Frost is a lot better than Ret. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I just think that those saying the Sac change isn't potent are wrong. It's a huge buff to Ret utility.
Yeah, we agree. It's not "Ret mandatory on every 3s team" good, but I think you can understand why we wouldn't want that.

We are considering some other buffs to Ret still. We don't know yet if we will do any or all of these (they are emphatically not promises) but the kind of thing we are considering:

• Glyph of Blessed Life - no longer requires Seal of Insight. You can have any Seal or none active, which puts the glyph in Ret's hands.
• Glyph of Templar's Verdict - damage reduction triggered by Exorcism (or both) instead. That way you aren't choosing TV over a heal.
• Light's Hammer - also snares targets it damages while in range. This one potentially buffs Holy too, but we're not sure that many Holy paladins would give up Prism to take it.

[Request] Introduce a Boss Sound Only Mode
Cool suggestion, I must say I personally would use that mode if it was available, but I’d still like to have the option to hear the sounds of my own spells and abilities in addition to the boss.

So murloc here is going to keep running and forward this to the devs (and I haven’t even broken a sweat!). We’ll see what their take on this is, maybe this is a particular design decision where they didn’t want for this to happen or maybe it’s a technical limitation of some sort or… if we’re lucky, they might agree with it and one day you might remember this as the Megafail sound option!
Like always, thanks for caring and for helping us improve our game. If there’s any news on the subject I’ll let you know. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Finder Stacking Buff Feedback
Couldn't you just have someone take one for the team, strip naked, and die over and over to the boss until they get 10 stacks and then people can just super EZ mode clear the boss.
There is a minimum attempt requirement before the system 'credits' you with a wipe. It should always be more time-efficient to not wipe at all, but if it isn't we can tweak the threshold.

Raid Finder needs to be even easier?
We don't think LFR is too difficult, but in order to make it the right difficulty for 25 strangers with little-to-no coordination we did have to trivialize some encounters and mechanics. With a system that can correct for variances in groups, encounters don't have to be quite so binary (trivial vs. impossible). Mechanics can be more meaningful, while encouraging players to stay with groups that run into some difficulty, rather than quit and re-queue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Finder Stacking Buff Feedback
As Bashiok mentioned, there's a minimum attempt requirement before the buff kicks in. The most time-efficient option should be to not wipe at all, and if that's not the case, the threshold can be tweaked.

As if lfr wasn't dumbed down enough already. They may as well just spawn a loot chest on zoning in.
The developers don't think LFR is too difficult, but since the difference in performance between groups can vary noticeably, they had to trivialize some encounters and mechanics. With this system in place, some bosses don't have to be quite so binary (trivial vs. impossible). Mechanics can be more meaningful, while encouraging players to stay together rather than leave as soon as there is a wipe. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rated Battleground Exploit Punishments
After a thorough investigation and liaising with multiple departments, we can confirm that the recent wave of actions taken against Rated Battleground exploitation and win trading are indeed correct. The team of investigators have made sure to avoid any false positives and we will not be overturning any of the actions taken.

We want you all to understand that the spirit of competition and fair play is especially important to us, particularly in regards to rated Player versus Player combat. As a part of this, we have now dealt with the issue that allowed some Rated Battleground teams to exploit the queuing system to gain high ratings and engage in win trading.

These, and all, exploitative activities are expressly prohibited. We are still investigating the situation carefully; any players that have taken part in exploitation or win trading will be subject to the appropriate action against their World of Warcraft accounts. For now however, we are working on resolving any remaining issues that still reside within the queue system so that this behavior will not occur again in the future. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PTR Realm Maintenance - 1/30/13
You'll be happy to learn that the PVP vendors are now available. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

FEEDBACK: Megaera (10N)
Pet pathing issues are fixed in the next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Reputation / Questing
Hey GC, any reason to keep extra Sigils after completing the first Black Prince quests?
No. (Source)
Not a big issue, but why do they keep dropping/get looted past 10 then?
We could have made a limit of 10 but it would have been harder to stop them from dropping, since you're still on the quest. (Source)

You guys said it'd be nice to redo Outlands levelling experience at some point. I like it, what do you think is wrong with it?
You go back in time from level 60 (LK dead) to level 70 (LK alive). Also weird that you do Hellfire and never Shadowmoon. (Source)

Dailies should promote grouping, so the interesting question: Why don't they?
Mostly because the game wasn't designed that way. But it should be. It just takes us a long time to change fundamentals. (Source)

I love how you tried to wrap up dailies with gear just because no one was doing them in the first place
You're making assumptions. It was more like: when you can gear up very quickly, you also quickly lose interest in playing. (Source)

PvP
Why do RBGs have a higher cap than arenas?
To provide rewards commensurate with the extra logistics and time commitment that RBGs require. 2s esp. take very little time (Source)

adding gear upgrades to WOW was a HUGGGGGGE mistake man. you're really killing us casual pvp'ers.
Do you think it's fair to jump in mid-season and be competitive without any catch up with someone collecting gear for months? (Source)

IIRC, a big reason for not doing separate ability values for PvE/PvP was additional complexity. Still true?
We do it when it's needed. Some assume it would be a panacea. We don't think so. Players would demand even more tuning changes. (Source)

The new PvP changes seem pretty popular, except for the elite armor. Any chance of keeping a cosmetic reward for t2 players?
Overall, we think PvP needs more cosmetic / prestige rewards. Still discussing the right options. (Source)

The 5.2 PVP changes are a breath of fresh air but can we see Arena/RBG Point caps being the same I really don't like RBG's
I understand. At the same time, if RBGs aren't generously rewarding, players will just gravitate towards easy and fast Arenas. (Source)