Tier 16 Mage & Season 14 Paladin Set, LFR Ilvl, Jun 21 Hotfixes, Blue Posts, HS Patch

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Throne of Thunder
  
  • Ji-Kun
    
    • The Golden Egg can now only be passed to other players.
      
    • The Soft Hands achievement should now be properly awarded to Priests in Spirit of Redemption form as well as players that are dead.
      
• Dungeons
  
  • Resetting a Challenge Mode will now reset the cooldowns for Invisibility and Lesser Invisibility Potions.
    

Items

• Xan'tish's Flute now should properly only able to be used once every 5 minutes and cannot be used while the character is dead.

Isle of Thunder

• Fixed an issue where players were sometimes unable to use incantations to summon bosses.

Qiraji Guardling Spawn Rate
Increase the spawn rate of the pet that spawns only in summer in Silithus please, with CRZ, there are just too many ninjars so there's no point even trying.
It's supposed to be fairly rare. The spawn rate is determined while factoring in things like zone population (including how many people are coalesced cross-realm). Competition is to be expected.

These are things to consider when frustrated by not catching a rare spawn within the first few hours it starts spawning for the season.

There's a difference between "supposed to be rare" and frustrating game design. Frustrating game design is saying we're ok with having 100's of people farming the same location for hours, days, months, years...etc...because...we want it to be rare. Not frustrating game design is when its rare but you're only competing with a few people because you chose a server to begin with that is not high pop - just medium.
You make a good point in your first couple of sentences, and that's something we're evaluating. That said, I don't agree with your conclusion that the "good game design" option is the one where the world is just under populated to the point that competition isn't much of a factor. Having low-pop realms wasn't a design decision -- it's a symptom of numerous variables. It's not acceptable for us to say that game design should be such that players can decide how rare something actually is by choosing the most accommodating realm to play on.

What we want to do is continue to ensure the world feels populated, but that seeing people around you doesn't always feel like a negative thing. You've seen some of this in the way we've been experimenting with mob tapping the last couple of patches. Seeing people from your own faction in the world, especially, should be more of a positive thing. It's part of the fiction that you're supposed to be allies, not nuisances to each other.

We don't have any specific plans to share for how we might change the way rare pet spawns work, though competition is likely to remain an inherent factor. But we'll continue to look for ways we can mitigate some of the annoyances of competing for some types of rare spawns with large numbers of players.

It's important to note, however, that tinkering with these types of design decisions requires a metaphorical scalpel, when most of the feedback we get is akin to demanding the use of a butcher knife. No, we're not going to hastily redesign entire systems in the game because people are interested in catching a rare spawn, and can't all seem to succeed within less than 24 hours out of the (approximately) 2160 hours it has a chance to spawn this year.

Why? What benefit is served by having open world pets be so difficult to find?
There are hundreds of pets out in the world, most of which are easily caught. Rarity is a big part of what makes some pets more valued and desirable than others.

Follow-up questions:

Do you need this one? Should everyone be entitled to obtain any pet in the world with ease?

If it's a pet that spawns during a 3-month window, what percentage of people who try to get it in the first 24 hours should succeed? Even if it's 99%, would this thread not still be filled with complaints from the 1% who keep failing? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Mount Drops
There is a difference between removing a reward without advance notice, which is something we do indeed want to avoid doing, and introducing rewards that are stated up-front as being limited-time-availability (e.g., Gladiator mounts, the Kor'kron War Wolf, WoW Anniversary companion pets, etc.).

We want to strike a balance between permanently available rewards that encourage players to go back and revisit content at a later date, and carving out some things that signify an accomplishment in a particular time and place. Years from now, when people see you riding a Kor'kron War Wolf, they'll know that you defeated Garrosh when he was the biggest threat to the safety of Azeroth. There's something to be said for that.

There will be two other mounts from the Siege of Orgrimmar raid that will be available via more conventional means: First, there's the Reins of Galakras from the "Glory of the Orgrimmar Raider" achievement, which will no longer require Heroic boss kills, and thus be available to any interested players who can pass the various skill checks involved, on Flexible mode or above. (This also lets Heroic raiders who want the achievements or associated mount pursue those goals without compromising their Heroic progression or gear needs, as many of our "kill the boss in an unusual way" achievements have unfortunately tended to be nearly impossible to do on Heroic while the content is relevant.)

Second, there will be a separate 100% drop mount from Heroic Garrosh, which will eventually be reduced to ~2% once the fight can be overpowered, in the same vein as Invincible or Mimiron's Head.

Not a fan of removing the heroic kill requirement from the Glory meta. The glory metas have been a nice reward for heroic raiders in previous tiers when there wasn't a 100% heroic drop mount.
But there is a 100% Heroic drop mount (yes, more than one will drop on 25-player kills). And we'd like to offer those more consistently going forward. I'd say it was a misstep on our part that Heroic Sha of Fear and Heroic Lei Shen did not offer one.

The "Glory of the ____ Raider" achievements honestly have not made much sense or worked out particularly well for quite a while now. That structure was designed in a world with a single difficulty (3.0 Naxxramas), where guilds that had the zone on farm could make things harder and more interesting for themselves as they pursued those supplementary goals for a cosmetic reward.

But nowadays we have Heroic mode, and as I mentioned above, a good number of achievements aren't really compatible with Heroic mode when done at the intended gear level (I'd like to meet the group that did "Like an Arrow to the Face" on Heroic mode during 5.0/5.1). The result is that the people who get Glory of the Raider achievements are a subset of those who finish the entire zone on Heroic while it is relevant. And often those people don't even get the achievement during that tier. Guilds will either take a week off from Heroic clearing after completing the zone and do an achievement run (often to the chagrin of raid members who don't particularly care about achievement points or mounts and would much rather have a chance at a Heroic Thunderforged weapon upgrade), or wait until the next tier entirely, and then go back with a smaller group and get the achievements on Normal. That really isn't what the "Glory of the Raider" achievements were intended to be.

Without the need to worry at all about even the pretense of making them fair or completable on Heroic mode, we can also make sure that the achievements generally require a certain baseline level of execution (a la "Show Me Your Moves!" or "The Mind-Killer") that will keep them feeling challenging and rewarding. The original Wrath of the Lich King 5-player dungeons were not terribly challenging, yet many of the original Glory of the Hero achievements certainly were in their time. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Patch 5.4 Hunter Changes
So what do you guys think of the readiness change? I personally think they are finally tackling the problem and readiness and other class equivalents makes balancing the game extra messy, but I'd like to hear your views!
Having 3 “trinkets” was definitely messy; I think hunters really needed this change. We just need to make sure that this isn’t one of those cases where something was so overpowered that its removal means we have to buff it somewhere else to keep everything in balance.
Feedback from the PTR will be very important at this stage, if you have the time please do tell us what you think, is there a need to compensate for this nerf somewhere else, or is there any other class/ability that you think might be flying under our radar? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)