Ghostcrawler Interview, Timeless Isle Armor, 5.4 Notes Update, Blue Posts, TCG Art

Hotfix: Gold Stack Size Increased on RMAH, Tips on Trading Safely, D2's Official Forums Still Active

Hearthstone Puzzle #5 - Secrets, Captain Greenskin Strategy, TCG Art Gallery Update

Patch 5.4 - Ghostcrawler Interview
Ghostcrawler was in Asia last week and QQ was able to sit down with him for an interview. Keep in mind that things are often lost in translation or mistranslated! Thanks to ngacnlcq for the translation.

  • The item level squish might take place next expansion. (See tweet)
  • There is still no timeline for the DotA battleground release.
  • The Hearthstone board that was added in a PTR build is just for decoration and there is no plan to add Hearthstone to WoW.
  • The Lesser Charms that may be added to the Asian store are there as a convenience item for players that may not have time to do their daily quests that week or players who just want to save time. There are no plans to add items to the store that will increase player stats.
  • Patch 5.4 is the last content (raid?) patch, but there will be bugfix and balance patches after it, as well as a pre-expansion patch.
  • If a fourth class role was ever implemented, it might provide buffs or support, but it would be a big change to the game and is very unlikely to happen.


Patch 5.4 - Timeless Isle Armor
The Timeless Isle will allow players to obtain item level 496 and 535 gear through drops found around the island.

The items used to create the 496 armor are found all over the island in chests and dropped by mobs, similar to the items used to create armor in Battlefield: Barrens. The Burden of Eternity is a rare drop from mobs, found in the Blazing Chest, or in one of Kukuru's chests.

The item level 535 version of the gear is called "Timeless" and is obtained by using a Burden of Eternity on an item that creates armor, such as a Timeless Leather Helm.

Patch 5.4 normal difficulty gear has an item level of 553, while flex gear is 540, and raid finder gear is 528. This makes the 535 Timeless gear a nice upgrade for players that will only raid in Raid Finder difficulty and a temporary upgrade for players who will be raiding Flex difficulty. It is also an upgrade for players who are currently raiding Throne of Thunder Normal, as well as any Heroic raiders still missing a slot.

Type Role Normal (496) Timeless (535)
Plate ArmorStrength TankElder TortoiseshellElder Tortoiseshell
Plate ArmorStrength DPSCliffbreakerCliffbreaker
Plate ArmorIntellect HealerEverbrightEverbright
Mail ArmorAgility DPSCrimsonscaleCrimsonscale
Mail ArmorIntellect DPS/HealerOrdon Legend-KeeperOrdon Legend-Keeper
Leather ArmorAgility Tank/DPSCranefeatherCranefeather
Leather ArmorIntellect DPS/HealerFire-ChanterFire-Chanter
Cloth ArmorPure Intellect DPSCloudscorcherCloudscorcher
Cloth ArmorIntellect DPS/HealerAmaranthineAmaranthine
Timeless LavalliereAllNecklacesNecklaces
Timeless CloakAllCloaksCloaks
Timeless SignetAllRingsRings
Timeless CurioTank
Strength DPS
Agility DPS
Intellect DPS
Healer		 Resolve of Niuzao
Alacrity of Xuen
Discipline of Xuen
Yu'lon's Bite
Contemplation of Chi-Ji		 Resolve of Niuzao
Alacrity of Xuen
Discipline of Xuen
Yu'lon's Bite
Contemplation of Chi-Ji





Patch 5.4 PTR Official Patch Notes Update - July 29
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Classes
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • General
    • Unholy Presence now grants a flat 10% Haste to all things, up from Haste for melee (attack speed and Rune regeneration) only. The movement speed buff remains unchanged.
    • Fixed a bug that caused Improved Blood Presence and Runic Corruption to incorrectly increase activation rates of some trinkets and effects.
  • Unholy
    • Ghoul's Leap and Gnaw abilities are no longer on a global cooldown, and no longer cost Energy.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Talents
  • Glyphs
    • New Major Glyphs
      • Glyph of Enduring Deceit: Camouflage also reduces spell damage taken by 10%

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Talents
    • Rune of Power now has an increased effective range. The Mage can remain up to 8 yards away from their Rune of Power and still receive benefits to mana regeneration and spell damage (up from 3 yards).

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Brewmaster
    • Fixed a bug that caused the damage of some abilities for Brewmasters with Vengeance to scale incorrectly.

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Holy
    • Judgment for Holy Paladins now costs 12% of base mana to cast (up from 5% of base mana).
  • Talents
    • Sacred Shield for Holy Paladins can now be active on more than one target at a time, but the talent now costs mana, and has 3 charges with a 10-second recharge. cooldown.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Talents
    • Psyfiend health has been reduced by 75%, but fixed a bug where Psyfiend wasn't being affected by base Resilience.

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • Talents
    • Totemic Restoration has been replaced with a new talent, Totemic Persistence.
      • New talent: Totemic Persistence. Summoning a second totem of the same element no longer causes the first totem to be destroyed. Only one non-Fire totem can benefit from this effect at a time.

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • General
  • Affliction
    • Drain Soul no longer energizes Soul Shards from the pets and guardians of players, and now deals 40% less damage. If other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).
    • Haunt now deals 50% more damage, and increases damage done by all of the Warlock's damage-over-time other spells against the target by 45%.
  • Talents
  • Class Armor
    • Warlock Tier-14 4-piece set bonus now reduces the cooldown of Unending Resolve by 20 seconds. increases all damage dealt by the Warlock by 10% while Dark Soul is active.

Items
  • Indomitable Primal Diamond's chance for the meta-gem effect to activate is no longer affected by the wearer’s haste. Additionally, the chance to activate the effect has been increased by 50%.
  • [PTR]: For testing purposes, Glyphataur, Ph.D (He's a doctor!) will be available near the Alliance/Horde shrines in Vale of Eternal Blossoms selling new glyphs.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Past Legendary Items for Patch 5.4
The legendary meta gem will still function, but Sha-touched gems and sockets will not be applicable to new 5.4 items.

No extra sockets in 5.4? Then why the hell did you update the 5.2 weapons from ToT to be able to use them? This is incredibly stupid and seems like a total oversight. 1750g for a new weapon socket is SO not that expensive.
We updated the 5.2 weapons to allow the additional socket (but not the Sha-touched gems) because a very large number of players were getting their extra sockets just in time for the patch to drop (and thus, would only be able to use their reward for a week or two). That's not the case with 5.4. The 5.2 legendary meta gem will continue to function, and the 5.3 epic cloak will upgrade into the 5.4 legendary.

We feel that, at this point, the Sha-Touched gem and socket have had plenty of time to be useful and it's time for them to go. As Lothrik mentioned, we'll be balancing content assuming that they're not present anyway. That said, nothing on the PTR is final, and we are still open to discussion on the topic. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Proving Grounds Feedback
Just a quick note that we're still doing a lot of tuning for Proving Grounds, and your feedback has been (and continues to be) invaluable. There will be a bunch more bug fixes and tweaks in the next build for testing.

In particular, the next build has a lot of work done on the AI for the friendly party members in the Healer trials. Once it hits the PTR, we'd really appreciate any feedback on how they're acting, especially specific examples of things they do that seem "dumb." I don't have an exact timeframe on when that build will go up, but it should be within the next few days (UPDATE: should be today!) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
RPPMScaling with Rune Regeneration Mechanics
After some investigation, we found that rune regeneration mechanics were, indeed, giving an unintended increase to RPPM proc rates. Unholy in particular gains a significant performance boost from this bug. We're going to fix the bug, but we'll also be compensating Unholy.

In the next build, Unholy Presence will give pure haste, rather than just attack speed. This will allow it to (legitimately) increase proc rates for RPPM mechanics. Runic Corruption and Improved Blood Presence, however, will no longer have an effect on RPPM proc rates. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

TCG Art Update
Blizzard has updated the Trading Card Game art gallery to feature ten new pieces.

This article was originally published in forum thread: Ghostcrawler Interview, Timeless Isle Armor, 5.4 Notes Update, Blue Posts, TCG Art started by chaud View original post
Published on 2013-07-30 11:21 AM
138 Comments
Comments 136 Comments
  1. BatteredSausage's Avatar
    Fucking sweet green fire on my mounts now
    As for item squish, i like the big numbers only from the perpsected that it makes my char feel like its grown over the years, got more powerfull and what not.
    Nothing to do with epeen like someone mentioned before, not sure why they think epeen has anything to do with it when we all level to 90 the same :S
    As long as it doesnt fuck over low level grinding , for me i dont want it , it will take me a while to adjust back down again to it but yea whatever, get on with it i guess.

    i do actually think there will be some sub losses over this, some people will not like the squish simply because of what i put above, it feels like your char would be backpeddling. Most others that leave due to this will be the same old bandwagon riders most prob.
  1. Phaidrae's Avatar
    Screw the revert on the demonic gateways. I don't want a 1min debuff. Fucking lame.

    Also - buying your way out of dailies now? AWESOMELY NOT AWESOME. If this EVER gets put into the US/EU/etc servers I may just quit.

    Seriously...it's crappy enough that they've started putting "cosmetic" armour up for RL$; I seriously believe it's only a matter of time before they start letting players buy their way to success in WoW. They keep saying that they won't put direct character-stat-increasing items up to buy but for real - at least by some point the next expansion you'll be able to pay Blizzard for your gear upgrades to "save your time" coz you don't have time to play every day.
  1. ChetaPaw's Avatar
    that vine/tentacle TCG art... lolwut
  1. mmoc43a108a939's Avatar
    The item level squish is not going to take all that long at all.

    They will script it all about. The most is checking to see if it all works out balance wise.

    You people freak out because they mention something that you may not seem to like.
  1. wowaccounttom's Avatar
    The 4th class would be a Controller-type, similar to DCUO, gone would be most debuffs applied by other players as well as energy/mana regen. That's why they don't want to do it, it would be too much to adjust. They already took a few ideas from that game, why not some more.
  1. Tinykong's Avatar
    The problem with the squish is that unless they switch to linear scaling (say, 10 ilvls per "tier") it's just going to keep happening.

    If it scales exponentially, say in 6.0 launch raids everyone is at 100 ilvl. In 6.4, everyone is at 200 ilvl. That's like going from 489 in MSV to 978 in siege. The power scaling will still be absurd, and unless they continually readjust these levels every expansion, it will just spiral out of control again. That's just how exponential growth works.

    If it scales linearly, then those same people at launch would be at 100 ilvl, and then be at 140ilvl in 6.4. Imagine how cool it's going to feel to replace an item from the previous raid tier and get 9 intellect! Or 15 mastery! HELL YES.

    Mega damage solves the problems without the perceived nerf to player power. If they reduce everyone down to TBC damage levels, people will quit the game. Certainly not everyone, but some. Can they really risk that?

    Seeing a fireball hit for 503k at level 95 and having a tooltip with 12.3k Mastery is a lot more interesting than being 580 ilvl in Siege and doing 250k dps, 6.0.4 dropping and suddenly doing 2500 dps. Not to mention the goofy stuff that is bound to happen because encounters are tuned with an expected player power proportionate to level for a given tier.

    Even if it's not a player power nerf, it will be perceived as one.
  1. Arkenaw's Avatar
    Item level is a problem that can't be fixed in a game with vertical progression. It's pretty ridiculous how they want to try and fix it. Chances are they will end up hurting the game or changing their mind.
  1. mmoccd0ef7e6a0's Avatar
    ...The more I look at that Gnome Warlock artwork, the more I like it. O.o Her eyes are brilliant!
  1. Vaelanor's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ChetaPaw View Post
    that vine/tentacle TCG art... lolwut
    lol my thoughts exactly
  1. mmoc08a488a8e5's Avatar
    Nerf again Shadow Priest, my warrior free all Sp in 3 secondes, gg blizzard.

    45sec for nada !

    /clap

    Activision>Blizzard.
  1. Jk47's Avatar
    The 'character progression' argument against the item squish seems pretty ridiculous to me. The only thing that's changed is the numbers. Your place in the world and what your character can accomplish have not changed one bit.

    Imagine I came from somewhere that uses a currency with big numbers like the Czech Republic. Say I went to the UK and got my money changed to £'s instead. Do I feel poorer because I have 100's of pounds rather than 1000's of koruna in my wallet? No, of course not. I still have the same amount of money just in a more concentrated number. Imagine I buy a pint of Guinness. The numbers have changed but the beer, what I paid for it and the enjoyment I get out of it have remained EXACTLY THE SAME. I don't feel like I'm any less wealthy because everything around me has adjusted to be the same.
  1. mmoc8dd153d350's Avatar
    hmm looks goood
  1. Mazzic518's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Cattleya View Post
    "I and my friends dislike big numbers, therefore the item squish is good" is no more of a valid reason than "I and my friends dislike small numbers, therefore the item squish is bad".
    I agree with the thought on the harmonies... time and time again I have not been able to make something for alts because I do not have the stupid motes yet.
  1. Vesci's Avatar
    Ah WoW. The game of ever increasing cost for ever shrinking amounts of content. Now only 3 raid tiers for an entire expansion (since Cata), cash shop selling skins in a subscription game and a shrinking player base. Anyone left playing has to pay more to make up for all the people jumping ship. Have fun with that.
  1. Serrakin's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Vesci View Post
    Ah WoW. The game of ever increasing cost for ever shrinking amounts of content. Now only 3 raid tiers for an entire expansion (since Cata), cash shop selling skins in a subscription game and a shrinking player base. Anyone left playing has to pay more to make up for all the people jumping ship. Have fun with that.
    Nope. Still costs less than 50 cents a day. Has for 8 years now.
  1. psycon's Avatar
    Psyfiend health has been reduced by 75%, but fixed a bug where Psyfiend wasn't being affected by base Resilience.

    Huh? Dont they have like a miserable 40k already?
Page 7 of 7 FirstFirst ...
5
6
7

Site Navigation

Social Media

Services

My Account

Support

Advertise

Resources

Terms of Service

Privacy Policy

Our Communities

© 2023 Magic Find, Inc. All rights reserved.