World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Now that the patch is on the horizon, we’ve narrowed down some of the key things you might want to know before the big day. If you want to find out more about everything that’s coming, you can check out the latest Public Test Realm patch notes, or even download and play on the PTR itself.

Be Prepared
Hold on to some of those currencies you’ve been earning over the course of patch 5.2. The gear-upgrading Void Binders are returning in patch 5.3, but it will be cheaper to upgrade items using Valor and Justice Points. Upgradeable PvP items from Season 12 will be eligible for upgrade once again at their original costs. In addition, Heirloom items will be cheaper to upgrade, whether you’re using Justice Points, Honor Points, or Darkmoon Faire tickets. We’re also speeding up the leveling process from 85 to 90. Here are the details:

• The experience required to level from 85 to 90 will be reduced by 33%. Time to dust off those alts!
  
• The Void Binders are coming back!
  
  • Items upgraded with Valor will now cost 250 Valor Points to upgrade per 4 Item Levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 Item Levels per item. This applies retroactively to all items that can be upgraded using Valor.
    
  • Items upgraded with Justice will now cost 750 Justice Points to upgrade for 8 Item Levels. They can only be upgraded once, for a total of 750 Justice and 8 Item Levels per item. This applies retroactively to all items that can be upgraded using Justice.
    
  • Malevolent Gladiator’s Conquest (Season 12) items that have upgrades available will still be upgradable at their original Conquest Point costs (750 Conquest Points per 4 Item Levels, with two upgrades possible).
    
  • Dreadful Gladiator’s Honor (Season 12) items that have upgrades available will still be upgradable at their original costs (one upgrade at a cost of 1500 Honor Points for 8 Item Levels).
    
  • No other PvP items will be able to be upgraded.
    
• The amount of Justice, Honor, and Darkmoon Faire tickets needed to upgrade Heirloom items will be reduced by 60%.

Item Level Requirements
Are you ready to face the Raid Finder, Heroic dungeons, and new Heroic Scenarios? Make sure that you’re geared up to dive right in:

• Heroic Scenarios require an average Item Level of 480; unlike normal Scenarios, you’ll need a pre-made party to enter.
  
• An average Item Level of 440 is required for Heroic dungeons.
  
• An average Item Level of 460 is required for the Raid Finder version of Mogu’shan Vaults.
  
• An average item level of 470 is required for Raid Finder versions of Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring.
  
• An average Item Level of 480 is required for the Raid Finder version of Throne of Thunder.

Lesser Charms of Good Fortune
We’re adding more ways to acquire Lesser Charms of Good Fortune in patch 5.3. In addition to the changes that took effect in patch 5.2, which reduced the number of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune required to purchase three Mogu Runes of Fate from 90 to 50 and allowed players to earn Lesser Charms from Pet Battles, these new sources of Lesser Charms will be available in patch 5.3:

• Outdoor world creatures level 90 and above now have a chance to drop Lesser Charms of Good Fortune.
  
• Rare spawns in Pandaria (except Zandalari Warscouts and Zandalari Warbringers) and bosses encountered as part of the Battlefield: Barrens quest event in Kalimdor will drop Lesser Charms of Good Fortune.

PvP Season Update
PvP Season 13 is still in full swing. We discussed many of the changes coming to PvP gear in our PvP Gear in 5.2 and Preparing for PvP in Patch 5.3 blogs, and the changes below are explained in greater detail there. As a reminder, the 7,250 Conquest Point requirement to purchase non-elite Conquest Point weapons is being removed with patch 5.3.

A number of significant changes are coming to PvP and PvP gear:

• All characters now have a base Resilience of 65%.
  
• Battle Fatigue now reduces the effectiveness of healing and absorb spells and abilities by 45% (was 30%).
  
• PvP Power bonus to healing is now based on class and specialization.
  
  • Healing specializations receive a 100% bonus to healing from PvP Power.
    
  • Damage specializations for Druids, Monks, Paladins, Priests, and Shaman receive a 70% bonus to healing from PvP Power.
    
  • All other specializations and classes (including tanking) receive a 40% bonus to healing from PvP Power.
    

Patching Smoothly
It’s easy to make sure that you’re ready to play when the realms become available on patch day. If you haven’t played in a while, one of the simplest things you can do is open the World of Warcraft launcher and allow the updater to download the latest available game files. If you use user interface add-ons, make sure you have the latest versions and that they’re updated and ready to go for the new patch. This is also a good time to update your video card’s drivers.

If you experience any patching issues, there’s a technical support forum thread all about patching that could help. You can also follow @BlizzardCS on Twitter for the latest support-related news.

Getting Additional Account Help
If you’re having an issue with your account, a number of resources are available to you. If other players are experiencing a similar issue, they may have already posted about it on the Customer Support forum located here, so that can sometimes be a good first stop. If you need more information or direct assistance, the Battle.net Support site will allow you to search through available solutions, submit a support ticket, or contact customer support directly.

A compilation of resources and information can also be found on the Customer Support forum, including information on in-game support, reporting bugs and cheats, submitting suggestions, reporting forum violations, and sharing forum feedback.

Good luck, and we’ll see you in Azeroth!

I'll pass on the Zerg mode aka Challenge mode I don't want to play beat the clock for no reason.
... it's not for no reason, you get rewards based on your time.

Also, no one has ever called it Zerg mode before. And never should again.

it is Zerg mode you play beat the clock to get 15 extra valor and pretty and useless armor that armor should have been a dungeon set or a raid tier not just xmog gear.
Well it's just not really the right way to use the word, but anyway, even if you get Bronze (which is all you need to shoot for) that's 55 Valor, which, for the time investment, is probably the fastest way to get Valor. This thread is about the OP not wanting to do dailies to get Valor, not your personal take on if you like Challenge Modes or not. But now that we're on the subject, cosmetic rewards are actually fairly highly sought after, and considering from tier to tier people may or more not like how their set looks, allowing people to get fairly rare pieces to transmog into has been a pretty popular and appreciated reward. If you don't like them that's cool, there's a lot of content and not everyone is going to like all of it.

If we are sentenced to doing dailies to get rep to get valor gear, can you at least increase the amount of valor you can have total? Or perhaps earn each week? It would grant me more incentive to grind. Nothing too outrageous. Just a thought.
You shouldn't be grinding any reps to get Valor gear. Those items aren't really worth going after any more. There's the Shado-Pan Assault, but you get rep by downing each ToT boss each week, and there's no way to 'grind' that.

If you're working on Kirin Tor Offensive or Sunreaver Onslaught, hitting Honored is pretty quick, buy the belt for 300g and then only continue with it if you want to hit Exalted or want some of those other rewards. If you're just looking to gear up I'd probably stop there.

Check out the Catching Up to 5.3 blog for specifics on how to be gearing right now.

Yes by all means don't grind rep to get gear, BUT do the rep with Kirin tor to get gear??? Do you hear yourself?? Once again Blizz don't get it, the double gate for valor gear SUCKS! It does not matter if it takes a week, 3 weeks or 3 months to get to valor gear, it is the grind that is bad. I ran dungeons and scenarios and LFR to get valor points, now I gotta grind rep to get the gear.
No you don't. If you want to get that belt it's a pretty small time investment to hit Honored, but it's not necessary to hit ilvls to get into ToT LFR by any stretch.

That said, a more interesting question is this: in a loot system where VP gear never degrades to JP gear to enable people to catch up faster or gear alts with BOE's, why do we even bother having JP past the first week at 90? Honor conversion for those that like to pvp notwithstanding, the currency currently has absolutely no purpose in game that I can find.
We've spoken to that a few times, but essentially it was just an oversight in making VP too much of the gearing process at the start, and there's really no point now in trying to force JP into the mix. The current progression works well, it's quick, it helps people get alts into the latest content, and we're not really looking to force a change just so Justice Points can feel better about themselves. (poor Justice Points, so lonely)

I think what they're trying to say is if this is the expansion where you are being encouraged to play the game how you want to play it then valor through dailies is too slow.

If all you like to do is dailies and that's how you choose to play the game then it would take you about a month of just doing Isle of Thunder dailies to be able to purchase one trinket. A little less if you kill rares or participate in non-IoT dailies.
Valor rewards are balanced against the difficulty of the content, and the time and organization it requires. If everything gave the same amount of valor it wouldn't be a choice, there would be 1 fastest and easiest way to get Valor because it would literally be the fastest and easiest way.

1. In game surveys are accessible to everyone with an active account. Due to a myriad of reasons, not all players can or choose to post on the official forums to voice their opinions (ahem, players with "forum bans" or players who simply do not utilize the forums).
Totally agree with you there, the forums, fansites, front page, and even gaming-websites as a whole is just one slice of the playerbase. Most players don't learn about new patches until they log in when it's released. Which probably seems crazy to everyone here, but that's because you're the type of person that would come to a gaming forum, read the posts, and even less likely actually log in and post(!). Most or all of your friends are probably like you as well, because (unsurprisingly) we tend to make friends with people that are like us. It's that projection bias that makes it difficult to understand that there are people out there that are not like us. We love you for being who you are, passionate people coming and giving us feedback is a big reason for why we exist, but we all have to understand (and account for the fact that) most people just don't do that.

Still, I don't think surveys would be as useful as you may think.

2. Surveys allows players to "vote" once per active account on features they would like to see implemented. No more players jumping on alts to voice their opinion for or against a given feature in forum threads!
Surveys can be great on getting individual's perspectives, but it can also be dangerous in creating expectations. As much as some people say they won't get their hopes up, asking people which of three new features they want to see will absolutely incline them to expect the feature they chose to be implemented. Some more than others. And - not to get into it too much, you can find all sorts of papers and articles and such on it - what people say they want and what they actually want are two different things. Sometimes it's interpreted as game developers telling players what they want, and to some degree that's true. It's important as designers to be able to filter things down to their root causes. Sure someone says they want Dance Studio, but in fact what they're really after is ... I don't know, more character customization options, and in fact the Dance Studio is probably a pretty poor way of achieving that, and the development time investment to do it would compromise our ability to ... have unique raid bosses, item tiers, have to cut an entire zone, or etc. etc. Most people don't care to think about dev resource management, and that's good, because it's not very fun.

3. Surveys tied to accounts allows developers a way to analyze a lot of player opinion data very quickly (who does and doesn't like x feature, their pve/pvp participation, subscription history, etc). This way, Blizzard can see what type of player likes which particular features, and can adjust accordingly.
We do have a lot of data already. We know what PvE/PvP participation is, we know how often people are using their farms, we know often often people take talents or glyphs, we know how often people are using specific abilities, we know subscription history, we know how often groups are clearing content, we know queue times, etc. We can anticipate what the majority of players are looking to do, and develop that content. Not too long ago Heroic dungeons were a big thing and a lot of people were upset and wanted more in this expansion, which isn't possible to pull off before the end of this expansion, but we did hurry to put together some challenging small-group content with decent rewards to see if we could scratch that itch with Heroic Scenarios. It will be interesting to see... well first what people think of them, and second how close it gets for people to filling that role, but also just how many people actually try them, considering how loud of an issue that was.

Ultimately though there is no right single way to gather feedback. We use a variety of methods and venues to see and experience how people are playing the game, what they think, and what they want. We're always looking for more, and certainly surveys could be a part of that, but we get so much feedback and data already I'm not sure the pros for surveys outweigh the cons.

Classes

• Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Talents
    
    • Gorefiend's Grasp can now affect a maximum of 4 player targets. The number of non-player targets that can be affected remains unlimited.
  • Unholy
    
    • Festering Strike now deals 175% weapon damage, down from 200%.
      
    • Scourge Strike now deals 165% weapons damage, up from 135%.
      
    • Unholy Might now increases the Death Knight's Strength by 10%, down from 15%.
  
  
• Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Talents
    
    • Cloak and Dagger now requires the Rogue to be in Stealth. Shadow Dance will not remove the Stealth requirement for Cloak and Dagger. has a range of 20 yards, down from 30 yards.
      
    • Shuriken Toss now deals 100% more damage in the initial ranged attack, damage is no longer doubled when used on targets farther than 10 yards away, and energy cost has been increased to 40 energy, up from 20.
  • Combat
    
    • Revealing Strike now lasts 24 seconds, up from 18 seconds.
  • Subtlety
    
    • Find Weakness now bypasses 100% of armor against non-player targets, and bypasses 50% of armor when used against other players (was 70% armor bypass for all targets).
  
  
• Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Talents
    
    • Blood Horror no longer activates from attacks made by pets.

Quests

• The Strength of One's Foes: All bosses in Mogu’shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, and Terrace of the Endless Spring now have a chance to drop either a Sigil of Power or Sigil of Wisdom

Pet Battles

• Battle Pets
  
  • Tiny Blue Carp, Tiny Green Carp, Tiny Red Carp, and Tiny White Carp are now tradable, and can be caught more than once.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

• Dungeons
  
  • Minimum level requirement to enter and equip items found in the following dungeons via Dungeon Finder have been adjusted.
    
    • Gate of the Setting Sun is now available in Normal difficulty, and accessible to level 89 characters.
      
    • Grim Batol is now accessible at level 84, down from level 85.
      
    • Lost City of the Tol'vir is now accessible at level 84, down from level 85.
      
    • Magisters' Terrace is now accessible at level 68, down from level 70.
      
    • The Mechanar is now accessible at level 68, down from level 70.
      

PvP

• PvP Power conversion ratio to obtain 1% damage at level 90 has been changed from 265 to 400.
• PvP Items
  
  • The amount of PvP Power and Resilience on gems have been reduced by 50%.
    
  • Big Zokk Torquewrench has returned from their leave of absence.
    
  • Glorious Conquest Quartermasters (Acon Deathwielder, Ethan Natice) have returned after refitting their wares.
    

Battlegrounds and Arenas

• To facilitate a more balanced team composition, players now need to select a role when queuing up for a Battleground or Rated Battleground.

Items

• Justice Heirloom vendors now have Heirloom shields in stock.
  
• Kirin Tor and Sunreaver Beacons are now usable from inside the Throne of Thunder.

UI

• Dungeon Journal has been reorganized. The model view has moved into a sub-tab and replaced with a listing of bosses for the dungeon or raid.

Yea, who needs arena spectating when you've got this
The pet battle spectating is not really "spectating" as such. You do not get to watch players versus other players, you only get to see them when they are fighting a wild pets. Before this change all you would see when a player was battling wild pets was them just standing there idly, now the battle will be visible to outside parties and not just to the player battling the wild pets. This means that the "pet battle spectating" is not really a new system for watching pet battles that had to be developed, it was simply a change to make wild pet battles visible to outside observers.

The same cannot be said for an arena spectating mode though. In order for us to create a system for arena spectating we would need to build a system from the ground up. While the ability to spectate arena matches is something that we would definitely love to implement into World of Warcraft, at this current point we have no plans for it.

Its coded message to PvP community "We dont give a fck about PvP or you, pokemon is all that matters"
That's as far from the truth as it gets, there is loads of new content and changes on its way for PvP in patch 5.3;

• Balance adjustments/changes
• New Arena
• New Battleground
• Conquest point catch-up system
• PvP gear changes
• PvP stat changes
• Battle fatigue changes
• And more...

If we did not care for the state or well-being of PvP in World of Warcraft we would say so, however the reality is that we do care for PvP and we are constantly making changes and additions in order to improve it.

If you missed out on getting your own Mists of Pandaria® Collector’s Edition, here’s your second chance. We have a limited quantity in our warehouse that we will be making available on a first-come, first-served basis on the Blizzard Store for $69.99. We won’t be printing any more of these exclusive sets, so pick one up before they disappear into the mists forever.

In addition to an exclusive art book, behind-the-scenes DVD/Blu-ray set, soundtrack, and mouse pad, the World of Warcraft ®: Mists of Pandaria Collector’s Edition includes all the in-game items also found in the Digital Deluxe version. Take a look at the full contents here.

To upgrade your account with the digital items from the Collector’s Edition once you receive your copy, you can log in to Battle.net account management and enter the game key here.

Reputation / Questing
The problem is when trivial content (dailies) is needed for better content ("bonus" rolls). Would like them removed
We are trying out options that aren't trivial or solo, such as rare mobs or summonable bosses. (Source)
But we do want to motivate players to get out into the world and not just tunnel on instances 100% of the time. (Source)

We've chatted about item squish... Ever considered a level squish? You know, lowering the cap back to 60 and readjusting.
What is the ultimate goal there? To speed leveling? To make it less intimidating? (Source)

23 Wisdoms and 9 Powers. Wisdom isn't the issue.
Wisdom was the issue when everyone ran tons of MSV and less HoF. Now folks run MSV less and so have lots of Wisdom. (Source)

World
Do you guys plan to fix up Silvermoon soon? The Sunwell has been restore since 2 expansions ago.
What new content would you be willing to give up so that artists could focus on Silvermoon? (Source)
It should be done for consistency. How about you make a patch focused on Lor'Themar, Velen/Anduin and revamp both BC zones ^_^
I'm not sure many players get excited about consistency. In a world of infinite artists, I'd totally agree. (Source)

"Would you spend art time on Silvermoon or new raid?" Huge bummer that this is even an "or" question, and it's happening a lot
Why? There are a limited number of hours in the day and we can only hire folks so fast. (Source)
And even if we could double our art team tomorrow, I'd then ask do you want 1 raid + Silvermoon or 2 raids? (Source)
Prioritization is just a part of this or any business. It's not a questions of being cheap. It's a question of bang for the buck. (Source)
I get it can remove the fantasy of the world to portray things in terms of artist hours, but those are very real considerations. (Source)

Does the potential low-pop/imbalanced server solution also address the poor economies of these servers?
Poor economy plus the lack of people for group content are the main problems in our minds. (Source)

Misc
What if raiding was an option, daily questing was an option and dungeons were an option?
Then my expectation is players would choose the most efficient path (not the most fun) and tunnel on that one. (Source)

in comparison to dungeon/raid ,class,race,zones and new features dev time what would it take to give WoW a new graphic engine?
We improve it every expansion. What is your imagined goal behind scrapping it and starting over? (Source)
WoW is more complex, but based on games I've done before, a new engine could take 4-5 engineers 2-3 years - VERY rough guess. (Source)

We have heard what you didn't like or thought could be better. What did you like about Mists? What do you like coming up?
Like: The new talent tree and glyph design. Challenge Modes. Wrathion. Cho. (Source)
Like: Less teleporting; the world feels like a world. Bonus rolls. Large raids. The farm. Brawler's Guild. Pet battles. (Source)

Is there an internal check that can distinguish between interesting for a developers mind vs player or is it metric reliant?
That is a very relevant question. We discuss all the time whether X is fun for the player or fun for the designer. Very easy trap. (Source)
It's not something I can explore via Twitter, but might make an interesting blog. Very common rookie mistake (though I make it too). (Source)

GC,how often do you restrain yourself from replying to some of these tweets with "Stop being bad"?Props for putting up with it
It wouldn't be worth it in the long run. If I don't show respect to players, they have every right to lose respect for me. (Source)

Bring back BC developers please.
Most of them are still here. (Source)

And really an entire continent of NPC’s telling me to slow down so you don’t have to design more content got old fast.
We are releasing patches faster than ever before. (Source)