World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

• Roar of Courage (Cat) - The beast lets out a roar of courage, increasing the Strength and Agility of all party and raid members by 549.32 within 100 yards. / Instant, 45 sec cooldown
• Froststorm Breath (Chimaera) - The Chimera channels a frozen breath attack, causing 2645.41 Spellstorm damage over 10 sec to to all enemies within the area. / 20 Focus, 35 yd range, Channeled
• Horn Toss (Rhino) - The Rhino punts the enemy with its mighty horn, knocking them back a great distance. / 30 Focus, 5 yd range, Instant cast, 1.5 min cooldown
• Burrow Attack (Worm) - The Worm burrows into the earth, shaking the ground above dealing x Nature damage over 8 sec. / 30 Focus, 35 yd range, Channeled, 30 sec cooldown

Heroics are now available.

Furthermore, the Pre-made Character Templates should provide you guys with characters in level 333 Superior (blue) quality gear - which is the minimum expected gear level for succeeding in heroics. I strongly encourage you to copy over a new pre-made if you want to test heroics.

Available character copies should also be reset.

*We're looking in to the issue of not being able to use dungeon finder. You should be able to form up a group the old-fashioned way and walk into a heroic.

[...] Here's a quick list for easy access to active threads on both dungeons and raids. We will be sure to update it whenever something new is available.

• [Heroic] Blackrock Caverns :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18910&sid=2000
• [Heroic] Throne of the Tides :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18911&sid=2000
• [Heroic] The Stonecore :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18912&sid=2000
• [Heroic] The Vortex Pinnacle :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18913&sid=2000
• [Heroic] Lost City of the Tol'vir :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18914&sid=2000
• [Heroic] Halls of Origination :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18917&sid=2000
• [Heroic] Grim Batol :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18915&sid=2000
• [Heroic] The Deadmines :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18919&sid=2000
• [Heroic] Shadowfang Keep :: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...18918&sid=2000

You're too focused on hit alone.

This piece of gear wouldn't exist, but to save me from having to make three versions, consider this series of boots:

Level 83 quest blues with 10 attack power, 10 Stamina, 10 crit, 10 hit, 10 parry.
Level 85 quest blues with 12 attack power, 12 Stamina, 12 crit, 12 hit, 12 parry.
Level 85 tier 1 raid with 14 attack power, 14 Stamina, 14 crit, 14 hit, 14 parry.
Level 85 tier 2 raid with 16 attack power, 16 Stamina, 16 crit, 16 hit, 16 parry.

When yo go from level 83 to level 85 you stay at the same amount of power relative to creatures. Why? Because the creatures are gaining levels. Their health goes up, so you need that extra AP. Their damage goes up, so you need that extra health. Your chance to crit and hit and parry them goes down, so you need those stats as well.

So far, so good.

When you start raiding, the bosses are level 88. This makes them a little harder to hit and everything, so you need that extra budget on your gear to keep up. Still not a problem.

Now let's look at the final piece of gear. You're going from a tier 1 raid to a tier 2 raid. The boss hits harder so you need that health. The boss has more health, so you need that attack power. But the boss is still level 88 like he was in tier 1. This means you crit him more than the previous boss, because your crit went up. You do more damage to the harder boss than to the easier boss. You also hit him more (unless you're hit capped, which you probably are) and you parry him more.

We solved, in an awkward way, the parry problem in Icecrown by putting a debuff on you. That basically allowed the creatures to scale with your gear. We couldn't solve the crit or hit problems, so players just became more and more powerful and eventually capped those stats (or got close to it in the case of crit). Just as players are often very worried (and sometimes rightfully so) about not scaling with gear, the bosses were not scaling with your gear. All of those problems that can happen to players when their damage (or healing or tanking) don't scale were happening to the bosses. You were scaling too well with crit, hit and parry.

A different way to go would be that the tier 2 raid boss is actually level 89 or 90 instead of level 88. Then you'd naturally need more crit and hit and parry to face him. That makes intuitive sense, but it does some weird things to our game because creature levels were never intended to be used that way. For example, the boss would get crushing blows and resists. Even worse, it does weird things to the next tier of content. If Deathwing at the end of Cataclysm (spoiler!) is a level 93 boss, then what is the first boss at the end of the next expansion? Level 93? Level 90? Level 96?

Instead, we are just faking the bosses gaining levels. We haven't worked out the exact mechanic yet, but imagine they are level 88++ or level 88.3 or level 88 SKULL SKULL BAD SKULL. As you get more powerful and get better gear, they get more powerful... exactly like all those bosses you handled while leveling up. Rather than critting and hitting the more dangerous opponents more often, your relative power stays about the same. You scale.

Beta Testing
Heroics not Enabled?
We're doublechecking to make sure the hotfix that unlocked the heroics was applied to each PTR. As a separate note, if you are not eligible to enter into a Heroic (ie You are less than level 85) then the error message will still say the instance is disable for beta. That incorrect error will be corrected in a future client build. (Source)

Water Disconnect Issue build 12984
As many of you have noticed, there is an issue when you go in water, you may get disconnected.

This is a known issue for this patch and we hope to have it resolved for the next patch. We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. (Source)

Tol Barad
Daily Quests
Have seen a few people asking if there are more quests that do not rely on winning the battle. There are.

There are 6 random dailies available on the peninsula island every day. These are available at all times, regardless of who wins Tol Barad. (Source)

Raids & Dungeons
Average ilvl in Dungeon Finder
Our average ilevel is there primarily because Dungeon Finder restricts usage and we didn't think it was fair to say "You must be this high to ride the ride" without defining "this." It's there to stop a fresh 85 who has no idea that's he's doing something terribly wrong by queuing right away for heroic Grim Batol. I would not use our ilevel as much of a serious metric. It's very easy to game by sophisticated players. (Source)

Early Cataclysm instances difficulty
So what do we do when we need to AE tank and do not have Inquisition?
You do what level 15 warrior tanks do who don't have Sunder Armor yet. You make do.

We don't spend a great deal of effort balancing the dungeons at levels below max level. We compensate for that by making them pretty easy. You didn't see a lot of tanks posting about how hard Utgarde Keep was at 70 or how hard Hellfire Ramparts was at 60 and I doubt you'll see many paladins complaining about how hard tanking is when they are 82 or whatever.

The level 85 dungeons and to a greater extent the heroics and raids are more tightly balanced because we want them to be more challenging.

If you're having trouble on the PTR with level up dungeons, it's probably because the content isn't finished yet. (Source)

Classes
AE Tanking
It's also highly possible that the abilities just aren't tuned right yet. If you have a reasonable idea how to tank and are feeling that AE tanking is nail-bitingly difficult to generate enough threat, then it's probably just undertuned. We want tanks to have to actually push their buttons and not just autoattack their way to high threat, but it shouldn't be so tight that a hot tick risks pulling aggro.

We recently consolidated a lot of janky threat mods that were on a lot of different abilities into core abilities like Righteous Fury and Defensive Stance. For example, warriors used to have a threat reduction modifier on Battle and Berseker Stance. We took that away and increased Defensive Stance's threat to compensate. You may be seeing data from in the midst of all of those changes. (Source)

[...] I used Defensive Stance as an example. We buffed the threat of Defensive Stance, Righteous Fury, Bear Form and Blood Presence and tried to get rid of any invisible -threat modifiers on other things. It's easier to tune and avoid bugs (in this case) if it's just one number and not scattered eight places in the data. As just one example, when we removed Blessing of Salvation (for LK) we added a separate, invisible spell effect that applied that buff just in case we changed our minds for any reason. Now that Salv as a 100% uptime blessing is long gone, we just added it to the tanking stances.

Sorry for any confusion. (Source)

Getting more powerful over time
That goes straight to customer satisfaction and longevity of the game. The more you play, the more powerful you should become. Not the weaker.
You do get more powerful. You get more powerful in an absolute sense, but not in a relative sense, because the challenges you can face become more powerful too. It is a fundamental pillar of RPG design othat as you get more powerful, you are able to handle more powerful opponents. Games lose their steam pretty quickly if you become more powerful and just use that power to steamroll the same weak opponents. Where is the glory in that? (Source)

Hit rating
Hit will never be an interesting stat as long as there's a hard cap on it.
I know this is an old argument, but this is *why* we think hit is an interesting stat. If you could just stack hit forever, you probably would, because it's a very good stat. Some of the biggest decisions to be made about gearing come when you have to engineer enough but not too much of this one stat so that you can focus on the others. We want you to look at stats other than just ilevel. Otherwise, we might as well just give all the armor and weapons a power stat, and you just pick whichever has the most power. Hit keeps you from just stacking your best stat. Maybe it doesn't add a ton of depth to say "stack hit, then stack your best stat" but it does add some. (Source)

Optimizing talent builds
I appreciate all the work the OP put into that post, but you have to look at your definition of "mandatory." You're taking several talents with no +damage benefit and calling them dps talents because they may lead to higher dps. But under that argument even +health talents are dps because you're likely to do higher dps when you're alive.

My personal philosophy, as I have expressed before, is that the community tends to be over-obsessed with cookie cutter builds. It's somewhat understandable because the WoW community has evolved in a direction where being badly informed is worse than being a bad player. We're all very quick to judge each other based on litmus tests, such as gear scores, achievements, or proper talent builds, that likely don't measure performance half as well as we want them to.

Even many of the so called cookie cutter builds today are honest about those talents that are a toss up. Picking talent A over talent B may be a theoretical dps benefit in the sims or even for the author of the cookie cutter build, but that doesn't mean it will work for you. I have deviated from these sacred builds often on my own characters because I found that I don't rely on certain abilities or mechanics as much as the build assumes I should. Now maybe my dps (healing, etc.) would improve if I could manage to do that, but in the interim using a build that is bad for me just because it's the anointed one doesn't make sense. A- dps with the "bad" build is superior to C+ dps with the "good" build.

If it's a talent that provides a 10% dps increase or offers an ability you'll use constantly, fine. It's hard to argue that won't benefit most players. But when I see players obsess over talents that provide a theoretical 1% dps increase that is vastly overshadowed by the noise of their own performance, I shake my head a bit. Want to see what I mean? Compare a parse of yours on the same boss from week to week. You'll probably see a dps variance of 5-10% or more. That's the role of your skill, latency, bad luck, lacking the perfect raid comp or whatever else. Worrying about that 1% dps talent was a rounding error. Let's not forget that what may be 1% on one boss probably is not on another.

Finally, getting back to a "mandatory" talent, consider what you'd call a talent that wasn't mandatory. You'd probably call it junk, the way many of you dismiss the "PvP talents." If a talent is useful, then it becomes mandatory. If it's not useful, it's dismissed. That narrow sweet spot in the middle where a talent is truly optional is held to be very, very narrow indeed by many in the community.

The Devs may be correct, in theory, that we don't need to squeeze every last drop of DPS out of our talent trees to down bosses. But in practice, you try to get in a raid with a tree that sacraficed 1% DPS for some fun utility, and you don't get an invite. Why would the raid leader take someone that didn't even spec the "right way"?
Posts like this make me very sad. You're portraying yourself to be at the mercy of uninformed yet tyrannical raid leaders who are quick to judge your performance based on perceived "tells." I know you need some basis to evaluate potential recruits or even pug members. But I do wish there was some way to turn around this virtual phobia of inefficiency -- this terror of being WRONG -- that we have managed to instill in our player base. I honestly think it's one of the greatest challenges facing the game.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying GC, but I gotta disagree with one thing you said. It is true that if you look back at parses from previous weeks your dps may vary by as much as 5-10% based on skill, luck, latency etc. However, you can't say that because of that fact, a theoretical 1% dps increase is any less significant than it would have been.
I'm just saying it's not worth it. How many attempts can you name in your lifetime as a WoW player where your doing 1% more dps would have made the difference between success and failure? And how many of those attempts could you have gotten 10% more dps if you had just totally nailed your rotations etc. on those fights instead of worrying about a theoretical 1% dps gain from a different talent?

Every bit helps, totally. I'm not saying throw a dart board at talent trees and expect to be competitive. But at times it's a bit like stooping down to pick up pennies in the gutter because you're about to plunk down six figures on a house. Hey, that's one-one hundredth less dollar I have to pay.

On a stationary fight, those movement boosts are useless. On a fight where you can't AE, those area damages are useless. If you have enough mana, then you have enough mana. Yes, I can understand the argument that it might be convenient to pick all of that stuff up because it might be useful on some fight, but if you're hardcore enough to pick up a talent because you read it was a 1% dps increase, then you should be hardcore enough to know for which fights it applies to and perhaps even be willing to swap specs accordingly. There are players that swap out a lot of glyphs in between fights or even re-gem. Some cutting edge guilds respec for every boss when they're working on progression. They probably coax a 1% dps increase out of doing so. Does that mean you should?

Min-maxxing is fun. It's part of the game. Sometimes (more rarely than is claimed) it's even necessary for progression. Just keep it in perspective. It's probably not going to doom your attempt if you pick up a fun talent instead of a 1% dps increase. If the Saturday pug won't take you because you lack the anointed talent, you're probably better off not running with them.

Interestingly, the community seems to have adopted 1% dps as the trade-off they're willing to make. You don't often see posts or guides advocating a gem or talent because it provides a 0.3% dps increase. There is something magical about 1% for a lot of players.

Hey GC, was wondering if we could maybe drag you back to this thread again to focus a little on the first part of Slant's post. The part I quoted pretty much sums up how I feel right now, and I know a few others who feel the same. Sometimes it seems like Cata is right around the corner and there's just not enough time for everything to happen.
We see this every expansion. Some players start to freak out because their list of demands hasn't been met yet and they sense release is imminent. Then the expansion ships and everyone is focused on some other overpowered ability that was only a blip on the beta radar.

It's inappropriate for me to provide any hints about how close we are or are not to ship. We need to provide that information through certain channels. We're happy with the talent trees given the confines of the talent system. If we were making WoW 2.0 (which we're not), the talent panes might look very different. Perhaps there would be even fewer choices and all centered around utility. Increasingly I think exclusive choices (like Starcraft's campaign upgrade system, or the way Paths of the Titans was going to work) is the only way to make interesting choices without cherry picking. On the other hand, one thing we've definitely learned through this process is that (most) players want a certain amount of safe choice. Maybe that gets back to the whole "terror of being caught being wrong" problem, or maybe the game's just too complicated. We talked about an even more radical overhaul where choosing a spec was a bigger deal and you had maybe 3 talents after that, but ultimately we understood the risk of changing too much a game that some players have stuck with for over 5 years. (Source)

Talents prereq
What we do sometimes is say stick Repentance as a prereq for something you desperately need. The hope is we can count on paladins (in this example) having the crowd control, and the player can pick up the talent guilt free. And yet, we see a lot of complaints about the prereqs. "Why do I have to get that talent that doesn't benefit my dps?" If there aren't enough core dps talents, some players get agitated (and I'm not trying to dismiss that response as inappropriate). But that leaves less room for the utility ones.

I'm not trying to say we're unhappy with the talent trees. By and large, we're very happy with how they are shaping up. I'm just trying to explain some of our reasoning and why some of the alternate talent trees we see pitched are not tenable from our perspective. (Source)

Mage (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Frostfire in Cataclysm
The intent is that for fire mages that emphasize the mastery stat, frostfire bolt with glyph becomes a better option than fireball with glyph (and yes it's a temporary aberration that scorch is better than fireball). (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Judgements of the Pure
Judgement of the Pure lasts for 60 sec and Judgement has an 8 sec cooldown. Even if you missed a couple times in a row, it would seem like you would have ample opportunity to still get the buff up (and even if the buff falls down, your healing doesn't totally collapse). Judgement costs 5% of mana, so it's hard to imagine that's a huge mana loss if you miss.

I would consider that +hit as optional for PvP, soloing or when you just want to burn things up in a 5-player run. (Source)

We're pleased to announce a new feature being added to the Mobile Armory: Guild Chat!

Coming soon in an update to the Mobile Armory app available in the iTunes App Store (http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M...321057000&mt=8 ) and Android Market, this new feature will allow all World of Warcraft Remote subscribers the ability to chat with their guildies right from their mobile device. Access to the guild chat feature is included for no extra charge in the $2.99 World of Warcraft Remote Auction House ( http://www.wowarmory.com/wow-remote.xml ) premium monthly subscription. In addition, soon after the launch of the mobile version we're planning on adding the ability for premium subscribers to use Guild Chat through any browser on the Armory website.

Guild Chat will allow you to chat with your guildmates via Guild Chat, Officer Chat, and Whispers. Now you can stay connected with your guild or update them from anywhere if you're going to be late to a raid! Stay tuned for additional information about this service and the upcoming Mobile Armory Guild Chat beta test.

They are available to both 10 and 25 player raids, whoever does it first.

Greetings,

The early stages of the pre-Cataclysm events have begun on the PTR's.

If you're encountering any problems with the events themselves or have any feedback please post them in this thread.

Enjoy!

Death Knight

• Magma Plated Battlegear - DPS
• Magma Plated Battlearmor - Tank

Druid

• Stormrider's Battlegarb - Feral
• Stormrider's Vestments - Restoration
• Stormrider's Regalia - Balance

Hunter

• Lightning-Charged Battlegear

Mage

• Firelord's Vestments

Paladin

• Reinforced Sapphirium Battleplate - DPS
• Reinforced Sapphirium Regalia - Healing
• Reinforced Sapphirium Battlearmor - Tank

Priest

• Mercurial Vestments - Healing
• Mercurial Regalia - DPS

Rogue

• Wind Dancer's Regalia

Shaman

• Vestments of the Raging Elements - Restoration
• Battlegear of the Raging Elements - Enhancement
• Regalia of the Raging Elements - Elemental

Warlock

• Shadowflame Regalia

Warrior

• Earthen Warplate - DPS
• Earthen Battleplate - Tank

• Bloom and Doom - Survive 100 waves on Endless Mode the Peacebloom Vs. Ghouls quest.
• Dont' Want No Zombies on My Lawn - Survive 25 waves on the Endless Mode of Peacebloom vs. Ghouls

Running Wild / No Worgen Mounts
This isn't a matter of saving time. The animations still had to be made in order to make this feel cool.

It's a matter of preference and creating an immersive gameplay experience. Giving the worgen a distinct creature to ride just didn't feel right, but they can still ride other mounts if they meet the criteria. Right now we're okay with the fact that this particular race is different when it comes to mounts. We feel that makes it interesting, even if the Alliance gets less racial mounts as a result. There are plenty of mounts out there and we can always add more. (Source)

Saturday PTR/Beta Patch and bugs
We didn't have people working Saturday so we could push the patch. People were working Saturday so we decided to push the patch. Given how much work is going into this expansion right now, many changes are added to the system seven days a week. It is better that we collect those changes by creating new builds and releasing them to test the content, at this point, than it is to thoroughly bug test each new build internally. We know it can create various issues each new patch which can be sort of rough on testers, but we appreciate you working through these things with us because it's helping to shape Cataclysm to be the best expansion possible. (Source)

Stats balancing
As an almost universal rule, we don't want to solve "I don't like that stat" problems by just not making gear with that stat. The eventual result of such a design would be that all of your gear looks alike. That's a problem WoW has in general, so we like to actually get the most out of what few stats we have.

Several players could get in a state where they were hit capped in LK and then just kept getting more and more hit on higher level items. We are trying to fix that this time around in a number of ways:

1) Making all stats more attractive, rather than having the good stat vs. the garbage stat.
2) Getting rid of so many passive hit buffs, such as the draenei racial and class raid buffs.
3) Requiring higher combat ratings for additional content tiers. What hit caps you for 4.0 won't be sufficient in 4.1, so the extra budge on the 4.1 gear will be helpful.
4) Reforging. If all else fails and you just find yourself over the hit cap (or over-enriched in any other stats) you can remove part of the less desirable stat.

In all of these cases I'm talking about stats that actually show up on your gear. It's fine if mages don't care about Agi or warriors don't care about Spirit. But crit, haste and mastery should be universally desirable, and one of those should not trump the other two by being 2x more valuable. (Source)

Healing (I strongly suggest reading the whole post about healers)
Medium Heals Nerf
As others have pointed out, we nerfed all of the medium heals.

Very early in beta, some healers were freaking out about running out of mana. To counter this, we made the medium heals really cost effective. We probably overdid it, because more recently, healers were able to handle almost everything with just that one heal. We want it to be part of your package, not your whole package. (Source)

Is it intended that our efficient heals only have about 20% more HPM than our big heals? Or should we expect those to be nerfed as well soon?
If healers stop casting the medium heals completely, then it's likely we nerfed them too far. Up until this change they weren't using the big heals enough.

We had the numbers set at what we thought made sense from a cost per benefit standpoint, but reality is always a little more complicated. Perhaps it was just easier using a single heal and being a B+ healer rather than having to worry about which of multiple heals to use in order to be an A+ healer. (Source)

Big Heals
The big heals get a decent amount of use, and they don't seem to run players out of mana unless the rest of the group is taking unnecessary damage (by say ignoring all the encounter mechanics because they can do so when running Heroic Nexus today).

If there's a heal we're worried about, it's the flash heals, but that's partially because so many of the talented or spec heals are also emergency heals that fill a similar niche -- things like Swiftmend, Penance and Holy Shock. (Source)

Triage
You're fortunate if you have to triage. Many healers don't today. The typical experience is to use your fastest heal on everyone who takes any damage. You may get some amount of triage by choosing who to heal, but you won't be losing that either. If you are really choosing today which of your many heals to use, then A) you're in the minority, and B) you won't really have to relearn things for Cataclysm. You'll be ahead of the game.

The Lich King game today has additional problems. Since overhealing doesn't matter, mana regen doesn't matter. Since overhealing is typical, large heals also don't matter, which means critical heals are often wasted. This makes two of the stats that appear on your gear (Spirit and crit) not attractive, which in turn makes the minigame of choosing which piece to use and how to gem and enchant them less compelling as well.

If you just really think it's fun to just cast one heal over and over with no real repercussions for doing so while stacking a single stat on all your gear, then I guess I'll just have to accept that. It's hard for us to understand why you find that satisfying though. (Source)

Healing spam
When we say "spammy" in this context, we mean using the same spell over and over. We're not talking about sitting around on your hands waiting for your mana to come back (and without the five second rule, that won't do much for you anyway).

Think of playing a healer like a real time strategy game. In the Lich King environment, your strategy is basically to crank out infantry as fast as you can and never let up. No matter what your opponent does, your job is to counter him with infantry. It doesn't matter what kinds of units he makes or whether he's going for a fast or slow buildup. Just make infantry. If your race has upgrades that affect things other than infantry, obviously they are of no use to you and you should ignore them. Cost is largely irrelevant too, since you are making one solider over and over.

In the Cataclysm environment, we want you to make a variety of units. Sometimes infantry will do the job well. Other times you may need to mix in some cavalry or siege units as well. In fact, you need to tailor what you're making to the environment. Sometimes you want cheap units. Sometimes you want expensive ones. We want you to consider your upgrades as well. Investing all of them on infantry will make less sense because you have other types of units as well. Yet you won't have enough resources so you'll have to make a decision.

That is really what we're trying to get out of the new healing model: making decisions. We think players have more fun when they are making decisions. When you make the right decision based on the information available, you feel smart. When you make the wrong decision, you feel dumb, and you might cause the rest of the group to have to work harder, or even ultimately cause a wipe.

Blizzard is investing a lot into this change... they must have better reasons then that! I want them to sell it! Front page headline "New Improved Healing System". If they can't do that, then maybe they should question all the hard work they are doing. (Source)

[...] For the most part, you'll still be constantly casting. We do want to buy a little bit of bandwidth though. Making decisions takes actual time (fractions of seconds perhaps, but still time). In the LK healing environment even if you had a variety of effective healing spells, by the time you looked at someone's bar, decided what heal would be most appropriate, and started to cast it, the dude could very well be dead.

In Cataclysm, large health pools will keep most players up for a few hits. That gives you the opportunity to decide if someone needs a little heal or a big heal, or a slow heal or a fast heal, or if they are likely to live long enough for a powerful spell to finish its cooldown. If you use the wrong spell, the target is unlikely to die immediately, but over time you'll realize that your mana has really started to dwindle and the boss has a large health bar still left.

I've said this before, but I remember when tanking back in vanilla, a priest would call out on Vent, announcing that he had a big Greater Heal being cast. Other healers might call out when they were healing someone who suddenly took a lot of unexpected damage. That kind of coordination is very hard in today's raids because you'd only get through the B in "Big heal coming," before the target would be dead.

It's possible to slow down combat enough to provide room for decision making and communication without going to the extreme where healers are doing nothing for large stretches of time because they are so paranoid about running out of mana if they cast a heal that isn't at 100% efficiency or doesn't save a life at that moment. (Source)

Healer mana efficiency in solo
Keep in mind that we're not super concerned with healer mana efficiency when not in a group. Fights are pretty short when you're solo and there are a lot of breaks. What I'm getting at is we're not super concerned with how you perform when self-buffed, so long as you're functional. We're more concerned with how you perform when group buffed, since all of the most rewarding endgame content requires groups. (Source)

Val'anyr competitive @ LVL 85?
Let's put it this way... if it is competitive at level 85, it won't be for long. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Runic Empowerment
We think Runic Empowerment is an important mechanic because without it, the rotation becomes very predictable perhaps even metronome-like. We are trying to make sure all specs have some random mechanics so that they need to react to what happens instead of just pressing the same buttons over and over as fast as they can. Some players react badly to random mechanics because they make the rotations less predictable and therefore more challenging to manage. That's the entire point.

However, coming out of LK, Frost had a more random rotation that was more about priorities than set rotations, and Unholy was the opposite. This let players gravitate towards the play style they preferred and made the specs feel more different when you swapped from one for the other (more than just replacing Frost damage with Shadow damage). We are working on an Unholy talent that will essentially turn off the Runic Empowerment system in place of something more predictable, like the runes just refreshing more quickly. Ideally the talent would be optional, so that Unholy DKs could stick with Runic Empowerment if they prefer it. It will still require you to keep on your toes a little bit rather than letting you know for certainty what buttons you will be hitting at second 148 a battle. (Source)

Druid (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Replenishment on Lifebloom
We gave Replenishment to Restoration because we took it away from Survival hunters. It didn't make a lot of sense for a non-mana class to offer mana. We want to make sure Replenishment is easily available, though to be fair it is about half as effective as it was in Lich King. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Protection Damage / Shield Slam damage nerf
We also buffed Revenge back to a 30% coefficient. We weren't trying to nerf Prot's damage overall -- just make sure that the other attacks actually did something besides consume GCDs waiting for the next Shield Slam.

We're happy with Heavy Repercussions. It lets you use a defensive cooldown offensively when you don't need it defensively.

I'm not sure it makes sense for Heroic Leap to hit harder than anything else a Prot warrior could do. It might make you want to do things like move out of melee and leap back in all the time. It might make you use a utility ability only for dps. (I don't think that's the same thing as Shield Block, because you're not literally giving up its defensive uses with Heavy Repercussions.) (Source)