World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Art Director Chris Robinson spoke on this just moments ago at the BlizzCon Open Q&A panel. It was in reply to an attendee who brought up that, in the art panel, it was explained that the pandaren model has 10 times the bone structures of the classic races, allowing for many more facial animations.

To paraphrase his statement -- which isn't too different from what I've said here on the forums before -- we absolutely plan on updating the existing models. As Chris mentioned, we want to make sure we preserve the look and feel of the original models players have come to know and love, while vastly improving their model and animation quality to be more in-line with the newer races.

We're not going to hide behind the statement that too many players will get mad if we tamper with their models, but it's a concern -- not a concern that's going to stop us from doing it, however. I want to stress as well that it's a massive undertaking to go back and do this. And to a lot of people it's something that won't be considered shiny new content. But not only do we hear the masses of players calling for this update, we really feel it's time to bring them up to par with newer models as well.

The game continues to age, but as we have no plans of slowing down on development any time in the near future, we want to keep updating and polishing it to stand the test of time (again, without sacrificing the look and feel which has brought players in over the years).

(Red Shirt Guy) Thanks for putting a representation of me in the game! In Gilneas, the questlines end with the strong feeling of to be continued and that we are going back, the only zone that had that feel was Hyjal and we went back there too. Are we going back to Gilneas too?
It would be fun to go back to Gilneas, its not on the cards right away but we just love the way the area feels. The zone has its very own story and it's a little hard to integrate to the rest of the world.

You did not mention a world PvP zone for MoP, maybe that could be the World PvP area for MoP?
The war between the Horde and Alliance will really heat up in Pandaria every patch, so we are looking forward to integrating that.

What happened to Arthas's body? What happened to Illidan's body? What about Kael'thas?
It is likely we will bring Illidan back, not so much for Kael'thas, he already had his come back. Arthas's body is somewhere but we don't really know where.

What is the motivation that the Pandaren have for fighting each other?
Something that is hard to get across in the demos is that the pandaren that live on the turtle have been seperated from the pandaren on the mainland for ages. Its almost like a splinter culture. They are the ones that you as players you are going to play. They are going out to the world. You can see these events in the 1-10 experience. By the time your Pandaren gets to 85/90 you have traveled the world fighting for the Aliance and Horde.

When the Pandaren meet eachother on the field they are more of WHATS UP instead of being pissed at eachother. They would probably be drinking beer right after. All the sort of anger, hatred and other negative energies become the Sha. It literally can come and bite you in the butt. They dont want to bring all that bad bagage into a fight. When a Pandaren fights he fights to reach a conclusion. When things are settled you take a beer.

You wrote the book Blood and Honor, are you planning on writing something else in the future?
Writing made me nervous and was exciting, it is different than the writing we have to do for the game but maybe one day I will do another.

This question is regarding Lordaeron, I want to know what happened to Arthas s sister, what happened to her?
We are thinking about it. We dont really have a plan but we have been talking about her forever. There were some hooks in the RPG line but no current plans. While thats on my mind, how many RPers are there in the audience?

We said the RPG line was non canonical but there are some really good bits in those books so all I would say that they are broadly non-canonical but there are lots of bits in there that we want to use. At some point we might put some project together to some ideas that we want to say yes or no on. Admiral Proudmore has some elf baby so that wont actually go through for example.

Why have characters like Krasus, Khadgar, and especially Rhonin that have been directly tied to the Black Dragonflight not been in Cataclysm?
A lot of time we'll have stories in the novel that feel like they should continue in the game but we decide to not include them in the game because it would be really hard to make everybody catch up on the whole story.

Whatever happened to the crown of menethil, or is that something we are going to find out about?
Terenas Crown? Legendary loot drop.

Tyrande was a strong character, but hasn't done anything much recently, why?
Thrall took an entire expansion to add in, we haden't gotten to him before that. Tyrande is the same way, we haven't gotten around to it yet. We don't intend on leaving her being a weak character, she will get her turn when we can get to it.

Jaina proudmoore will also get some love pretty soon. Thrall isn't done yet either, he isn't weak. Champion level Thrall is on the way.

This panel has said that Pandarians have no sense of hatred. How does it make sense for a Pandaren to be a Warlock, but not a druid?
If that is true, I do not like it. I usually get overruled when it comes to game design. These classes, Warlock, Deathknight are not choosing this life. If they can indeed roll Warlock, it is not impossible for them to not hate.

Why cant they roll Druid then? The bear as a bear argument is crap.
Monday morning we will yell at the design dudes. Pandaria was not there during the Sundering so I guess Cenarion was not there teaching them. I still think druids are out, that might change though.

Dragon Soul is inconsistent with a lot of lore or changes a lot of lore, how does that work?
Wait and see.

Arthas's mother was mentioned in the WotLK novel, there was never any mention to what happened to her. Was he a Mamas boy that he did not kill her?
We have not officially -made that up- yet, we have not crafted her fate. My impression from WC3 is that it works better if she would have died somewhere before the fall of Lordaeron. Killing Terenas is pretty striking, I just think it diminishes the moment if he goes on a Charlie Manson spree.

..or you kill her and you get a legendary crown. (Reference to earlier question) ... but probably not!

Is it safe to assume his mum was killed previously by Arthas' corruption?
It is something we need to talk about.

I just read the Sylvanas Windrunner short story, what happened to the Shards of Frostmourne?
It wasn't specifically adressed in the story, I don't think we've adressed it in the lore. Some very smart people in the lore picked these things up and took them somewhere safe and I imagine there might be some shenanigans one day, with some people trying to reforge it one day, and that's all I know about it ...

My question is about Algalon, he kind of goes into a mid-life crisis he seems to wonder how you can differ from the Titan plan, then he decides more than one hour a week to see what makes us tick. What is he up to? Are there more of his kind to see what he is up to?
We don't know, it wasn't addressed in the story or lore. We might see someone reforging it in the future. Good question.. hmm.. the whole titan storyline.. who those folks are, what they are doing in the universe. Are they still alive? Do they have a plan if the world goes south? The titan storyline throughout WoW is something that needs to play out during a long time. Its not like we will have titans in two expansions. They are from somewhere really exotic. Not sure how to leveraget them into the timeline again, I loved what we did with in WotLK and Cataclysm. Ill riff a little bit and tell you that there are things about TBC that I really really loved. Shattered planets in the sky and etherals running around.. but as we talked to the community people wanted to kill kobolds and stuff thats what fantasy means to them...

There is a part of me that just wants to launch into the universe. Are the titans still moving out there? Is the Burning Legion still out there? I want to go to Argus. How badass would it be if there was a shiny fleet of Draenei out there... oh technically thats Protoss. Its just a matter of feeling it out. We have a lot of time with this game. Let me just ask you all.. Is anyone here into the cosmic stuff?

*crowd goes YUUUUS* There is something about Azeroth that is unique within the cosmology and thats why its in the focus of this.

Do you have plans to resolve the Forsaken's strained place in the Horde?
We realize that it is unresolved, we are going to explore the fissures in the Horde more in the future

I love trolls. They are awesome. They are the best race ever created in WoW in my opinion. You gave us the new heroics and they were great and fun to play. But will we ever see a return of the troll empires?
*Chris looks like he got the best idea ever just now* If the troll tribes could ever unite, look out world! We are going to continue the troll storyline in MoP. We will probably actuallize the Zandalari. They are not done yet and they are crazy. They are being driven by something just now.

I like the serious parts of WoW, some comic elements are fun, but will MoP be all lighthearted or will we get some war and darker parts?
You haven't even seen them or the expansion yet, we went back 15,000 years when creating them. We created a rich history and they aren't a joke race. There is a lot of story behind them, we think they are awesome fighers. They love life, play hard, work hard, fight hard, sleep hard. We aren't building an expansion based on an April Fool's joke. The Pandaren had some nice artwork for a long time, we have been thinking about them forever. They aren't a joke, they aren't silly, just a little bit lighter. They are relaxed, but this is part of the growing war between Horde and Alliance. The Pandaren are going to be part of this story.

I read the shattering and the short story and Cairne Bloodhoof seems like he's walking the Sunwalker path.
It can go a lot of ways. The sunwalker thing, everybody had a fit when it came out. It just did not feel all that right. Sunwalker was an attempt to atleast try and realise the lore and make sure it would fit as well as it could fit and the quest designers did a good job figuring that out. I dont think its appropriate for a tauren leader, I like the idea that Baine and Cairne are not supernatural people, they are just Tauren. Im not a huge fan of making them a sunwalker. I dont think we have solid plans yet of where Baine was going to go.

Are we going to see more of the book's events in game ever?
Some big things are coming in Patch 4.3, really big. It completes a very large story. It has been hard to develop the story for the books in real time with WoW, that is why we talked a lot about the past. Moving forward we want to try and do some story in the books that is current with the game. Not everyone wants to go and read books and comics, they want the content in the game. Players feel cheated when it is in a book and not in the game, which is why big current events happen in game rather than in books.

The books provide more details, but we are going to try to get more of the books in game beyond just the big events.

Ive played Alliance for 7 years *crowd woos* you have done a wonderful job with the Horde story, and its really great but when it comes to Varian he is a boring and 1 dimensional characters. Does Alliance ever get to kick ass in WoW?
Heres the deal, part of the Thrall thing I have been pushing, I particularly love that character. I dont see that as a Horde issue but as a Thrall issue. Im biased. Heres what we are going to do: I dont know exactly where its going to drop, we are tyrying to get this for 5.0. Varian has the possibility to be a very awesome char. There will be a really awesome questline where Varian really shines out as a character. You will be his squire and will help Varian be an awesome character. And all the Alliance races WILL worship Varian as a true king.

The Alliance is going to need a king that has his shit together. We are going to need this for MoP. We owe the alliance big time! We are also going to explore the various relationships with Andruin (his son), before Christie Golden wrote the shattering we had no plans for Anduin. Its all thanks to Christie that Anduin has been such an important character.

We got some plans for that boy one day, so there you have it.

Are there any rules to the Val'kyr Resurrection of Sylvanas?
She had nine, used five so far, so there are only four left.

I brought my archive to sign for you. I have 10 Horde 85s on 1 server. One of each class. I have always had a soft spot for Tirion to kind of justify why I loved him so much. Now for my question, Neptulon in the Throne of Tides. What happened to him? Are we going to find out about his relationship to Ozumat?
Maybe we ill just leave that buried under the ocean. I have no good answer for that. What happens in the Throne of Tides stays in the Throne of Tides.

The new Lich King was awesome before, but once he became Lich King he hasn't done anything about the Scourge. Why not?
The Scourge and cult of the damned are independent of one another. The timeline is messy, if we could do it like a book the Scourge would have toned it down and things aren't as bad as they used to be. Clearly the quests are still in the game, it isn't something we can go back and fix right now. Someone picked up those Frostmourne fragments.

In the Gundrak dungeon there is an area with the stone sentinel guys, and if you look over the rig you see a huge snake tail. There is nothing that massive and snakey in .. its a Chris Metzen answer to just go well look into it so I brought a screenshot of it for Chris.
*Chris looks at snake tail*
Dude just showed you his snake, man. -Dave

That is not the thing that is driving the trolls. Its a super secret WoW storyline. Thrall is going to leave Aggra and start dating Jaina.. in all seriousness I have no idea what it is but its really awesome! Sometimes really awesome stuff shows up ingame and we scramble to explain what it is. Welcome to developing video games. We put the WHAT in WHAT.

How will the panda leadership work since they belong to both factions? Can the leader be voiced by Jack Black?
They don't really have leaders like the other factions. There are important pandas, representatives to each faction sure, but no single leader. No Jack Black voices, it isn't a panda movie. We were going to give Alliance pandas in Burning Crusade, but it didn't really fit. We have been serious about doing it for a long time, and it is a good thing we didn't do it then. We can do it much cooler and in a more interesting way now.

As a 10 man raider there is a lot of difference between 10 and 25 man. When heroic magmaw came out 25 man raiders couldnt do it in 10 man heroic, when are we seeing the difficulty for 10 man being higher?
That's pretty fun because in Korea the 10-man guilds are usually the ones considered hardcore while the 25-man are considered easier. They are definitely hard to balance, 10 players might not always have the buffs they need like with 25 man.

Is there a chance that youll go to a 10 vs 20 man to make balancing easier?
I honestly think that wouldnt make stuff easier, we would still have a lot of problems.

Do you have any plans to implement some sort of spectator mode for raids or battlegrounds?
That's something we've wanted for a long time, spectator mode and replays, but it's just a question of getting around to doing it so ... some day, hopefully.

Do you have any plans on adding more options to the guild leaders UI? So as I can give more options to a banker or to my different officers since Im the only one that can turn guild repairs on and off
Yeah, thats definitely a good reason why we would want to do that. We need to make sure how much control we can give to people that are not the guild leader. It sounds like something that can be useful.

Wouldnt that be the GLs decision?
It is but if something goes wrong it comes back to us to fix it

With the upcoming expansion coming, are all the purple you get from Firelands going to get replaced with greens on first day?
Green is the new purple, so yeah. The problem is if we don't upgrade equipement too much we are cheating those players from the leveling experience, so usually by the 2nd or 3rd zone your gear should be replaced to make sure the content is still a challenge for you. Hopefully in the future we will have a way to "track" your progress in the past and make sure there's a way to record your accomplishements in each expansion to make sure that all your progress isn't "lost" at the beginning of each expansion.

How are you guys going to fit Draenei and the BEs getting monks?
We will probably throw it in like its always been there.... We'll make it work!

Hunters and Crowd Control: Currently with Wyvern Sting having a DOT it makes it a little difficult to quickly Wyvern Sting and then trap something after. Before Cataclysm we had the option of removing the dot with Scorpid Sting but it was removed, is there going to be a way to remove that DoT in the future?
It's probably something we're not going to do in 4.3, and 5.0 is such a big reset for all the talents that I can't really answer that now. It's definitely a problem but we also don't want everyone dotting up their characters before they crowd control, we don't want crowd control to always break on things like that and we'll see in 5.0.

Wind Shear change shouldn't hurt enhancement shamans, but most don't take Reverb. It also hurts Resto Shaman, any plans to fix this?
Raids usually have enough people, so it won't hurt the raid. PvP might force you to make the choice, but it is still an interrupt with a longer cooldown.

Do you hate enhancement shamans? DPS sucks, in PvP they suck, any plans to fix them? / Any plans for Illidan to come back?
Lets answer the Illidan question. Do you want to see Illidan come back? We will think about that.

This is a problem, just like frost mages dont do well in PvE but the difference is you can't tell an enhancement shaman "hey just go elemental". In PvP it will be much easier in 5.0 but for PvE we will try to adress some of the issues in 4.3

Do you want combat rogues to use cooldowns more often or hold off until 30% and use all the cooldowns at once?
You should follow the guidance from Restless Blades.

Is the guild name change service going to be in 4.3 or 5.0? Will it fall to the wayside like Dance Studios did?
One of these days we are going to unleash Dance Studios to the world and it will be awesome. But not today. We are releasing the new guild services within two weeks.

Your design in MoP are you bringing more healers into 25 man raids because there is a new healing class as a monk healer and 25 man guilds will usually have two people per class. Are you going to design your raids to bring more healers into raids?
I dont think we will change the number of healers needed for a raid.

Will challenge modes put us under the hit cap or affect core stats when the gear is tuned down?
There are some details to work out, people should be able to do roughly the same DPS and Healing as everyone else.

Are we going to see account bound mounts?
Hopefully some day, i dont think that will happen in 50 but somewhere down the line its likely.

Can we have an option to require auth on login every time
Soon.

What are your plans for the moonkin form, are you going to do the same thing you did for warlocks?
We are going to update the art on the moonkin form as we see fit. Its too early to tell what we will exactly be doing.

Race changing breaks quest progress for some quests, any plans to address this?
We might try whitelisting some quests, like the important legendary quest. We need to be careful to not bog down CS with this kind of thing though.

In the future are you going to make BoA items actually transferable account-wide?
Maybe some day! Probably not in the immediate future. The databases dont do the best job of talking to eachother right now.

The past few patches brought Arcane Mages and Feral Druids that are two button classes, any plans to make sure the Monk isn't easy like those classes/specs?
AoE rotations weren't a big focus at first, we want to make it a little more interesting. Arcane mages do have some mana management gameplay, we are adding back Arcane Missles to their rotation.

Do you ever plan on altering spells or maybe adding a new spell to Arcane mages and maybe nerfing arcane blast a little bit?
In 5.0 Living Bomb is a spell all mages will have.

Will enchanters be able to make epic wands in the future?
Yes

What are your changes going to be for gathering professions in the new expansion? Crafting gives you the best stuff but gathering isnt very useful
No sweeping change has been planned for the perks of these professions but we'll look at it. We dont want people to feel like they need 2 crafting professions.

Will you be able to craft different quivers?
Little visuals like that is something we want to add to all classes, it isn't really clear on how we can add that just yet.

I have a priest with a benediction staff but the quest for that was removed. I am very excited to transmog that. But I am worried that you might open up the models for other players, which would be unfair to the players that worked for it at level 60
One way we have solved that problem in the past is to offer the model with a different texture or something. We did something similar with the ZA bear mount

Ret has one clear choice for the Level 90 Tier in the new talent trees, any chance to balance it better?
We feel like they will be balanced once we tweak the numbers.

You are nerfing wind shear for resto PvP, do you intent to make a trade off or to not let them have it completely?
Ideally we would not want them to have it

In that case why dont you hardwire it into the spec masteries so enhancement and elemental dont have any effect?
That would have been another way to go, but this is a fairly big change and we dont want players to feel like everything is being changed. In 5.0 it might be a good oppurtunity to take away Wind Shear completely but we have not made a decision on that yet.

Will MoP bring us mounted combat?
No

Will MoP bring more craftable mounts?
Maybe a Jewelcrafting mount.

Any plans to fix Heroic Leap?
Heroic Leap has a lot of technical problems, people keep trying to exploit it. Works fine when it is flat, not so much when there is a height increase

Where are the LGBT characters in WoW Lore?
Everything is gravy as long as its just a great character. There is the possiblity of adding them, as long as the story is compelling, might see it in the future.

It seems that in a 10 man model there are huge negatives with class representation and wasted loot. Is there a possibility to change the 10-man model to a 15-man model? If not, maybe make some kind of smart loot system that checks if the loot is useful for your raid?
It might be a good idea to make the loot system slightly more intelligent, but moving up to a 15-man model would be very hard for us seeing existing 10-man guilds would have to recruit 5 more members.

Are you going to add more visuals for druid forms? Will effects such as Fandral's Flamescythe be transferable by transmogrification?
Maybe, we are connecting them with items so that it isn't something everyone has forever. We don't want you to have to go back and get different forms.

As a hunter who has played that class for 5 years I want to thank you for the pet challenges that came out in 4.3, that being said and how much we are so proud of all the pets we have obtained. Its a shame when you cant use these pets in a dungeon without being spec'd beast master, i was kind of hoping this might be a change in the future
We'd like to let hunters chose any pet with Tenacity/Ferocity/Cunning in 5.0. It doesn't solve the problem of MM losing Beast mastery pets but BM DPS is pretty good.

Gallywix is in charge but he's the bad guy, what happens to him? Also, blinding shield for paladins, what happened to that?
We haven't had a discussion about Gallywix in a while, he's interesting but I don't know if we have a core decision about him. Most of our discussions lately have been about pandaren characters and how to make them interesting.

This is not set in stone but Blinding Shield is currently the paladin level 87 ability.

The new shaman talent points seem to be geared for resto and not to a damage point, I know you said you want hybridization is coming more into play but what about DPS?
There are DPS options there, some of the tiers are based around movement, totems, etc ...

In End Time, we kill Murozond, is this the last we see of the Infinite Dragonflight? / Any plans to add player housing?
No player housing anytime soon, too expensive in terms of time to make if you still want dungeons, raids, models, and other stuff.

Infinite Dragonflight is done, at least for now, but the concept is cool and useful for the world. The timeways will always exist and there will always be bad guys there, there's no current plans for it but we could bring it back if it's cleverly done.

Jewelcrafting endgame is boring, can we have trinkets, rings, or necklaces?
We want to add some items, not every tier though. We need to keep it balanced compared to the other professions.

I'm pretty sure I understand how you pick Alliance and Horde as a Pandaren, do you guys have any idea how pandaren's factions will be distinguished at higher levels?
We have seen in arenas that the only thing that really matter is the Red Text and stuff, the UI is primarly the biggest indicator to see what faction they belong to. We explored going down the path were Horde Panda's were more feral and wild but it come to that they don't look like Pandaren anymore.

Will we see raid leaderboards, including wipe and kill counts?
There is a lot we could do to track player accomplishments, we could see it being extended to raids in the future.

Theres lots of people wanting the reskinning for old races, I was over at the art panel and the pandaren just looked so amazing. They were talking about being 10-20 in the fact alone, is that also something they are looking into for reskinning the new races?
Its the one thing we really want to see brought up to the pandaren level. There are about 10 times more bones in the pandaren models compared to the current character models. We dont know when this exactly will happen, because we are still not unsure how to roll this out because some people might not like the new models as much as they do the old models.

What will the theme for raid art and gear going to be?
Brewing, bamboo, everything crafted, respecting the Asian feel we have in the starting zone and expanding on that

Why does Ghostcrawler hate paladins?
A ret paladin killed his parents.

Shadow Priests: The wording on the new Shadow Orbs suggests that they're going to be based on a resource, is that true?
We're still working on the details but yeah, it will be a secondary resource kind of mechanic, take out the RNG aspect maybe. The idea currently is that Mind Blast will cost shadow orbs and have no cooldown

Are you satisfied by healing in PvP?
Balancing PvE and PvP healing is kind of a big challenge. Its something we talk about all the time, I dont think we have solved the problem yet and its something we are still working on. We've seen a lot of dual caster comps in the blizzcon tournament and we've buffed Mortal Strike and healing reduction in 4.3 and hopefully you'll be able to bring back warriors and rogues in PvP.

How do the old debuff talents work with new talent tree and tanking model?
We want tanks to do more of the active things to keep themselves alive rather than relying on the healers

My classes are about classes that have a 100 cap on a resource. Currently there are talents that increase these resource, are there any plans for the new talent trees to do that?
It's going to vary on class by class basis, its something that does not really fit into the current talent system as it is currently designed.

I have 10 characters, will you add an 11th slot so we can have all 11 classes?
Not sure just yet, might keep the current character cap but let you have them on any realm, so you can have many many charaters on one realm

For event items like the Scourge Invasion or the Vengeful PvP set, can we get those for transmog account-wide?
We want to make sure that all the times you remember from the good old days are available for transmog. Im happy you brought up the vengeful set, and in Area 52 there are vendors where can you buy these items. Regarding accountwide event items we have to watch out on our side as its kind of resource expensive. We could certainly look into that.

Can feral druids have two fist weapons? / As an enchanter we never got any good drops, are we getting new enchanting item drops?
Nope, working the talents to support it would make a mess. Monk tanks will use staff or polearm. / No plans on enchanting item drops to change.

I was wondering since this next expansion coming out is going to be so faction focused, if we could see faction specific legendaries for maybe a shield like Might of the Alliance or for the horde a Fist of the horde that are completely badass
Legendaries are something we look at on case to case bases, if the stories supports it and we find a cool item possibility. Everything is always possible. (GC loves the idea)

Death Knight tanks are bad right now, stats and talents need some changes. Set bonus is based on us being at low health, which shouldn't happen. What changes will fix these problems?
Death Knights get some love in 4.3 to fix survivability, Blood presence armor bonus is going to 55% from 30%. We don't want Death Knights to get killed in one GCD, but we don't want them to be the best tank by far

A balance druid can be really low on the damage and then theres the problem of sitting on solar when we need to do AoE, is there anything you guys are planning on doing to adress that like the DK ability that generates unholy power
In 5.0 Hurricane will have a new arcane function to make sure you can use it whenever you have to.

Any plans to improve the Death Knight gargoyle melee attack?
Nope, it is designed to work at range, There are no plans to change Death Knight stat weights during this expansion, maybe some balancing in MoP.

I have been playing since vanilla and one of my fav items i have been using up to today is noggaholic elixier, and i am wondering why we cant mount while skeleton
Our animation system does not have animations for some costume models that can be on a mount so we decided to completely disallow mounting while transformed to make it consistent, it was the only way to fix hundred of bugs.

Is there any plan to make solo Holy Priest DPS better? Running daily quests take a lot of time in Holy.
Nope, we have dual spec, it isn't a priority for us to make it viable for raiding or fast daily quests. We have to keep it balanced for PvP as well. In the Firelands some of the daily quests are designed to be actually easier for healers.

I'm a rogue so thanks for the legendary! Regarding the new introduction of the Windwalker monk class and also the formalization of cat druids as an official spec, with all these new melee DPS hybrids what doyou guys have planned as rogues to be competitive as a utilitiy class?
Everyone brings a little bit of everything, reasons to get a rogue now are things like poisons, interrupts and stuns. These will stay important during encounters.

New talents will still be cookie cutter, how is this new?
Most give utility choices rather than damage, this can't be number crunched. We will continue to balance them to make them hard choices.

Quick followup to the noggenfogger elixir question, there have been other places where you get onto something when you lose a transformation and then get it back later
One of the things that make consumables fun is that they are consumables. They can go away. If they were permanent things you are going to lose the impact of what a transformation really is. Fundamentally we want these to be fun things that arent everywhere. Ideally we would have it make an error message if you are near to doing this.

Archeology has been ignored as far as i can tell other than a few things here and there, are we gonna see lower than max level items on max variety?
The archeology items are all over the place, I use the vrykul helm always because I like being bigger than everyone else. We are looking into ways to sex it up and take out the grindy nature of it.

Tanking as a druid, I can go cat and do decent DPS when I am not getting hit. Is the new druid 4-specs model going to let me do that?
Other tanks can't do that and you won't be able to do that anymore, talents are set up this way to keep both seperate for PvP and PvE.

Resto druids have pretty decent single target rotation for healing, but when we want to AoE heal we go back to mindlessly spamming buttons. Are we getting more options for this in the next expansion?
There is one new ability plan like the wild mushroom to detonate to heal people. A lot of druids enjoy that kind of playstyle. When we did try to tone down the HoTs we got a lot of push back there. Some of the healing you mentioned is also needed in an encounter and we will try to not do this as much.

The 4pc bear T13 bonus, you don't want cats to get it but it's also impacting utility for bears?
You can swap to bear, press it, go back. We can't let cats use it because it would just force them to add it their rotation and stack them in raid, we'd just have to change the bonus completely.

Are we getting new spells at like 86, 88 and 90? If so, what are the new mage spells?
We are adding a lot of new spells to fill out the talent trees. One plan we have talked about is to get one new spell at level 87. Pretty sure we are not going to be able to get 3 more spells along the way. We dont know yet what the mage one will be. In the past we said 5-8 new abilties while they level up. Some classes however might get more than one new ability.

Can we have another tank legendary
Legendary needs a story to go with it, we aren't taking turns with the classes or specs, we put them in where they fit in the story. If there is an opportunity you will get one! A legendary shield would be great.

Regarding arcane mage mastery, it created the possibility for really deep gameplay for managing your resource. But we were promised this toolkit to manage our mana and all we got was Arcane Blast and clearing our Arcane Blast stacks. Are we gonna get anything else to help us not be 2 button wonders and make it deeper?
We are really not happy with the role of Arcane Barrage, we have some plans to make arcane more deeper. We would like to redesign so that Arcane Missiles barrage and explosion all have an equal role in the arcane role.

Can we have some shadowform tweaks so that you can see the gear?
We have a glyph in 4.3 coming to tweak the alpha of shadowform

Where is the Death Knight tier 13?
Its really awesome and you will see it soon

What about new Death Knight gear for transmog? Other classes can go back farther.
That is really expensive art to do. For us its a metter of budget, if we ask for certain armor sets we have to delay patches or expansions to get them. We have to make hard choices sometimes and it's not a matter of just throwing money at the problem, it just takes more time and delays things further.

Can we have strength polearms?
They are awkward right now, we want all Strength classes to be able to use them. Maybe in MoP with the hunter tweaks it will be possible.

Back in vanilla you had the hunter epic questline with Rok'delar and I was wondering if you guys are going to bring that back at all
It's something we are looking at and are considering, if we do something like that it has to be on our level of quality. It's also worth noting that that feel of solo quest/gameplay is something we've tried to re-introduce in 4.2 and 4.3 with the new legendary staff and legendary dagger.

Engineers got cool stuff in the past, can we have more powerful versions or something new and cool?
Yes, we can make powerful and cool stuff but it has to have downsides. We can add some new stuff with restrictions on where you can actually use it, not PvP, so that it is still balanced.

Regarding hunters; you are eliminating the use for melee weapons, are we still going to be able to equip it? Can we also get some mace love?
There are not any plans for that now, we are probably not going to let you equip melee. If it makes you feel better, the rogues wont be able to equip the orange legendary bow either. We do want to change hunters so you can see quivers and or ammo pouches, potentially customize them, etc.

What happened to engineering, you make it very cool once and then added something useless every once in a while. Goggles were very cool, but there are no upgrades, so they are worthless now. Archaeology gives almost as many pets as engineering.
We made engineering too good, then it was not so good. We are trying to make sure it offers cool stuff this time. Post your suggestions on the forums!

How is monk healing going to work? When I played yesterday you had chi and light and dark power. Is it going to be like I choose healing spec and you get a mana bar or something?
When you switch to healing stance you will get a mana bar, and regarding healing, the monk will be less target based and more proximity based. And there is also this mechanics where you can put statues in the raid, and when you melee the boss they give out healing for example. We are challenging ourselves into new ways to look at this.

One of the things WoW doesn't have right now is a melee cloth class. When you announced the monk yesterday I was super excited and I was wondering if there was any discussion to make them a cloth class to make them have a better monk feel?
The main concern was that if we introduce a melee cloth healer, we'd need a whole new kind of item drops in the loot table and you'd have to wait for your specific gear to drop. That's why we went for an already existing loot archetype, you already have the leather agi and leather int/spirit and it was the best way to go without having to create new armor types.

Since we're going to be able to name companion pet, is there any chance we'll be able to name warlock pets?
You're just grabbing a demon for your own use from the Twisting Nether, use it, and then get rid of it, it's not the same emotional attachment as a companion pet or hunter pet. Something we did talk about is a way to reset the name of your pets, for when you get a pet and really don't like the name.

I know that removing the min range for hunters is a great key, but for melee this means we are losing some stats too
Everyone is losing some stats with the ranged slots, relics, etc ... going away. Your range weapon will have stats so you wont lose more stats than everyone else.

JCing and Inscription selling is hard because of constant undercutting from others or gold farmers. Can we have perfect cuts back so that we have something not mass produced to sell?
That is how an open market works. Perfect gem cuts are problematic because nobody would use the regular blue ones. BoP Chaos Orbs help for some professions, maybe we should do something like that for Jewelcrafting.

I got to play the monk, and the play of it feels amazing. Can we expect the removal of auto attack on other classes? If so, hunters will be really confused.
The monk not having auto attack was controversial around the office too, we are not even 100% sure the monk will keep it. And removing auto attack for other classes will just feel like a huge change. We do crazy things on new stuff, not on old stuff. There are some downsides too - if a monkey has 5hp left they have to wait to push a button again were as a Rogue would just kill it with its auto attack.