World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Adventurers will be tested like never before in World of Warcraft patch 4.3 as they take on Deathwing and his minions, emerging from the conflict with powerful new treasures. Please enjoy this preview of the druid tier 13 armor set, as well as a visual guide to tiers 1 through 12 for Transmogrification purposes.


The design called for "phosphorescent mushrooms, reminiscent of Zangarmarsh," so our main concern was avoiding making a helm that looked like a giant toadstool sombrero. We’re always looking to incorporate interesting light sources within a raid set, and bioluminescent vegetable growth certainly provides that. Twisting, organic shapes are often key elements of a druid set, and this tier is no exception, with writhing plant roots providing a frame for the glowing clusters of fungi.

With the final showdown against Deathwing approaching, we’ve been keeping a close eye on players' progress through the current Firelands raid content. Before patch 4.3 is released, we want groups who are working on Heroic-difficulty content to be able to get as close to Ragnaros as possible, and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can. To achieve these goals, we’ll be toning down the difficulty of both normal and Heroic raids through hotfixes in the coming weeks. In general, we plan to reduce health and damage of all raid bosses in both normal and Heroic Firelands by around the same percentage we brought difficulty down for the original Cataclysm raids when Rage of the Firelands (patch 4.2) was released.

We're looking forward to seeing more groups of players face off against the Fire Lord in the weeks ahead. However, before we make these changes, we want to give everyone a final shot at the bosses at their current difficulty level -- so this is a heads up that we’re planning to apply the difficulty hotfixes beginning the week of September 19.

Stay tuned to the Patch 4.2 Hotfixes blog for these and other live updates to the game as they happen.

We’re looking for feedback on your class as we work on changes and adjustments for a future game update. While we may be making some specific class changes in 4.3, what we’re looking for in this thread is overall feeling on the class as a whole for more long term changes in the future.

Here is the kind of feedback that is NOT helpful in this particular thread:

• Concerns that your current damage, healing or tanking is not competitive. While this kind of feedback is often useful, it also is the kind of thing that can change from patch to patch, and so it isn’t as useful for long term vision changes.
  
  
• Concerns that your feedback is being ignored or that we don’t take these kind of posts seriously, or otherwise posting anything that is off-topic or not in the spirit of this thread’s intent.
  
  
• Requests for responses to your suggestions or feedback. The purpose of this thread is to get information to us, not the reverse.

We hope you take these threads seriously, as we’re going to be reading them very carefully. We ask that you take time to think and formulate a useful and objective reply, as this feedback could be used to alter your class in substantial ways.

We won’t be replying here addressing your concerns. This is purely for us to read your answers to the below questions.

Please copy the below questions into your reply and answer each one.

• What type of content do you focus on? [PvE/PvP/Both]
• If PvE, what type of PvE? [Heroics/Raids/Other]
• If PvP, what type of PvP? [Arenas, BGs, Rated BGs]
• What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? For instance, no longer requiring ammo could be considered a quality-of-life improvement for hunters.
• What makes playing your class more fun?
• What makes playing your class less fun?
• How do you feel about your “rotation”? (Rotation is the accepted order in which abilities are used to maximum efficiency.)
• What’s on your wish list for your class?
• What spells do you use the least?