World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

After some additional discussion, we've decided to make this change (5 minute Dampening) only apply in the 2v2 bracket. Dampening will remain at 10 minutes in 3v3 and 5v5 arenas.

I had originally written here how World of Warcraft is a really big game, and while we know there are a lot of different types of activities outside of max-level content that people enjoy, we're not always going to be able to focus on each of them all of time. But it wasn't written particularly well and I feel like my points were probably fairly obvious to everyone.

Anyway, in short: we will be address some low-level PvP balance in Warlords.

First off it's worth noting the item squish. While individual brackets might not see a huge change, certainly the power curve between levels will be a smoother one. It'll have a bigger impact on world PvP as it'll be more like it was in vanilla, and relative power between characters won't see these dramatic swings. Back in the day even if you were 10, 20 or even 30 levels lower than someone else, you still had some shot at getting away, if not actually killing them. Of course as people start gearing up again that disparity will grow in the outdoor world, but it should be fun to get back to a smoother character power curve, and it'll at least always hold true for sub level-100 gank attempts.

We recognize that low-level PvP balance just hasn't gotten the attention it needs, and that's largely due to us having to focus our attention on content that the majority of players focus their attention (e.g. max level). In Warlords we're going to be doing a bit of ability shuffling (read: deleting) which is going to result in the need to smooth out the ability-acquisition pacing (when you get a new ability and at what level), and we'll also be taking a pass on low-level balance at the same time. It's difficult because of the spread of people across all levels and ensuring every ability of every spec at any one particular level vs. another character/level/spec of another level have parity. Low level brackets just inherently bring a measure of un-balance with them due to the possible level difference, which is necessary to ensure they can fill up with enough players. Our goal is primarily to smooth out the outlying abilities - and this is hand-in-hand with the item squish - to ensure the base damage of all the abilities before scaling is appropriate. There are just some obvious tuning problems right now that we'll take care of, and then as much finer tuning as we can manage. We'll be looking for feedback during beta.

I thought base damage was being abolished entirely, in favor of pure scaling. At least this was what I have heard elsewhere many times before this.
There has to be something to scale from.

Character / Items
Will Legendary Cloaks be relevant in WoD? I hope so, I'm a little late to the party and don't want to get rid of it.
Legendary cloaks will not stay relevant in WoD. You still have time to get plenty of use out of it. (Celestalon)
This makes me a sad panda.
Think about what it would do during WoD. It would feel terrible to need to go back and do MoP raids in order to get them. (Celestalon)

Art
can you elaborate on these reasons please?some really dislike fist weapons for the same reason as people hating guns.
Bow/gun thing was based 100% on audio issues (I know, weird "solution"), not visual/aesthetics. (Dave_Maldo)

Any chance of seeing strength fist weapons? My warrior would prefer to strap spikes to his fists and punch people.
That would be awesome indeed. (Dave_Maldo)

The item for Hunters pets Kibler's Bits should last alot longer than a mere 5 minutes. Thank you!
There was a push to keep class pet sizes "reasonable" (Monstrous Bite T_T) but 5 mins DOES seems short. Will try to look into! (Dave_Maldo)

I know lots of mages who would give their mouse arm for the broom to be permanent.
Was discussed for Enchanting once or twice, but we're good w/ where it is, for now! (Dave_Maldo)

Any chance of Brazilian Carnival become a world event, with music and allegorical cars to show off each race of the game?
That was proposed back when we were still making new, full-blown holiday events (Brewfest etc.). Who knows; maybe one day! (Dave_Maldo)

is there any chances for adding "White" items become transmogrifiable and even legendaries like illidan's blades?
Very unlikely for the former; it's how many items they don't want unlocked are locked. Less so for the latter. (Dave_Maldo)

out of interest, why? What do you or we gain by this lockout mechanism for white items? struggling to think of any.
The debate revolves around preserving a certain look & feel in the world/player pop for "real" gear (vs fun temp costume). (Dave_Maldo)

Any chance for actual spectacles, such as the ones Lord Crowley wears, to be added to the game? As a transmog item maybe?
Those totally SHOULD have been in the game by now, yeah. We even discussed SFK or on the shore or... anyhow, yes. Yes. (Dave_Maldo)

Will we ever be able to dye our gear? This is something I've wanted since we got transmorgryph.
Maybe one day? Not planned for anytime soon though, sorry. (Dave_Maldo)

Old vid, but still applies. -PLEASE- look into it, it has been years now.Iirc noggen scale down now too.
Art mods wep sizes by type, both in-hand & while sheathed, on a per race/gender basis in order to handle a HUGE range of assets. (Dave_Maldo)
Art does this to get weps in-hand as big as possible while still fitting theme and not creating terrible sheathed clipping issues. (Dave_Maldo)

Any chance of a moving sun and real-time shadows?
The tech peeps love working on stuff like that when performance permits. Maybe one day! (Dave_Maldo)

With the new models in WoD, will it mean the end of tabards poking through capes when jumping etc?
It'd be cool. Some clipping (in general) is practically unavoidable but I imagine they'll clean up as much as they can! (Dave_Maldo)

As we've said, we're looking to in essence update the original models, even though in actuality making them completely from scratch. Out goal is to keep the "spirit" of the originals, but increase poly count, texture resolution, and animation (to a pretty amazing effect, we think. What we're not looking to do is change what these characters are and what they've been. We already face a huge hurdle in that we're messing with what is the most iconic and personal part of the game - a person's character. A digital representation of themselves in the game world, even if if that representation is a giant cow-man. Way above and beyond anything else in the game, changing how someone looks is a monumentally delicate task. We want to keep the proportions as similar to the original models as possible, we're going to keep posture and silhouette close to the originals, but all just with a much higher level of detail. When you see your character it should still be your character, and these should still be representative of the player character models we've all been playing as for the past 9+ years.

It's really tempting to want to make major revisions, but someone chose to play a character largely because of the way they looked, and it has come to represent their in-game identity.

That's all well and good! But making her skinnier and more waifish, especially in WARcraft, seems like the wrong direction in which to have deviated.
I would have to respectfully disagree that she deviates to any great degree from the original model when compared side-by-side, except that the proportions are slightly more full.

Here are the two shown in the preview without any alteration. - http://i.imgur.com/VaIphPC.gif

Ok well this is taking all sorts of weird turns, so I'll just close this thread by saying there's no commentary here on anything outside of the game, nor should there be. This is the original model launched with the game with more polygons, higher resolution textures, and better animations. That's our goal, and we think we're creating faithful reproductions of the originals.

My question is, do you have any idea at this time what that demand is going to be? I have signed up for Beta and my computer specs are listed there, but I also know that I get lag in raids and high graphic environments, like flying through heavily colored areas.
We don't, and we tend not to have updated system requirements/recommendations until most content is in, most big changes and engineering are done, and we're looking like there isn't going to be anything else that would greatly affect performance. So we won't really know absolutely until some point through the beta. We're keenly aware of the system requirements the new character models may require, and how that could impact client performance. No further details yet on how they'll be supported on lower end systems, if at all.

Fun fact, the game still supports processors and graphics cards that were released over 8 years ago. To put that in other terms, modern day systems are in some cases 50x more powerful than the lowest end systems the game still supports. Moving us forward graphically in such a dramatic way with the new models is going to require a lot of testing, tweaking, optimizing, and determination of what we can realistically support going forward, but we just don't know what that will look like yet.

Would it be possible to include the old models as a option so that users with older computers can opt out if the new models do cause some frame-rate lag.
That's of course something we've considered as a fail-safe, but again just don't know quite yet.

It probably goes without saying, but just in case: we'll be increasing Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to keep things in line.

So what's next? 80%? 90%? 100%?Are just going to stand there and blink at each other?
We totally agree that having Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue numbers so high is not an ideal experience. We don't like it either. We want to significantly lower, or possibly even remove them in Warlords.

Thing is, doing that requires a lot more underlying work to be done first. Health pools, ability scaling, mana regen... all of those need some pretty substantial adjustments. That's not something we'd consider doing mid-expansion, but in 6.0 (where we're already shrinking numbers down via the item squish), we can.

In the meantime, we want to be able to offer PvP'ers some new gear for the new season, and in order to do that, we need to tone damage and healing back a bit. We have to work within what we have currently available, and that means increasing Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue.

Are you going to tone down scaling with some classes? WW and rogues scale ridiculously well with agility and damage is insane right now. I know with the increase of resil it should help, but I feel like it's not going to be enough.
We're definitely looking out for any balance changes that will be necessary. I don't have any specifics to share at the moment (we'll know more after we can get some testing in) but there will likely be some. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

I'm 50/50. I'm concerned that PvP gear will be much easier to get than equivalent PvE gear. But yet is indeed harder to acquire than timeless or LFR and should as such be better. I would vote for 540, which is flex level.
It's important to remember that Flex gear can be upgraded to item level 548, and has extra advantages through things like sockets and set bonuses. We don't feel that the extra 2 item levels on Prideful pieces are going to make them more desirable for Flex raiders.

And yet non-arena gear remains the same. So my days of PVP for a bit are over. I have no desire to "Arena" or RBG. Yet I get screwed more and more for PVP
If you're referring to Honor gear, as in previous seasons, we'll be making the last season's (Grievous) gear available for Honor. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Karazhan Crypt
Oh yeah, I remember that! Haven't seen a screenshot in quite a while. Not sure I know the story on it but knowing our development processes back then there tended to be a lot more stuff made that we just didn't use. I can't imagine the game rating rumor is accurate, because if it was content we wanted to use we'd just take out the upside-down sinners or whatever the issue was and use it for whatever it was we wanted to do with that space. It's not like they're permanent fixtures. Fun rumor though! More likely we just changed our minds. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Tyrael's Charger as a Store Mount
The regions are separate ecosystems, and availability of items within one region vs. another aren't usually particularly noteworthy because you're never going to see that player in Taiwan on your server with that rare item you got for logging in during some event, or got through that limited time promotion. We think it kind of sucks that a pet collector in Europe could never hope to get that China-exclusive Golden Pig pet from back in 2007, or that just because you live in a region with a different business model where the Annual Pass didn't make any sense, that you never had a chance to get a Tyrael's Charger. We definitely do not want to undermine the exclusivity of someone's mount or pet between them and their friends, or guild, or server, or region, but we think it makes a lot of sense to have equality of items ... not even their availability necessarily, but just their existing, throughout all regions. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Art
Speaking of holiday event rewards...any chance of a corgi vanity pet like the one in the Greench cave sometime in the future?
Always a chance! Seems to be lots of enthusiasm for more dog breeds w/ both players & designers. (Dave_Maldo)

Warlords of Draenor Stats
Will STR still add parry in WOD or not? Cause both AGI and INT increase crit right now.
Currently, the plan is that yes, Str still gives Parry for Str-users. And Agi still gives Dodge for Agi-users. (Celestalon)

PvP
But to clarify that statement, I think fiddling with DR's is like fiddling with core of arena. I'm afraid of results.
You and me both, but we think it's the right move to make the game better. There will be challenges to overcome. (Source)

dampening imo was a bad fix, you can't tell me that there isn't a better fix that doesn't gimp a specific roll!
One role prolongs a fight. One role ends it. We have to address one of them to avoid a stalemate. (holinka)
a dmg buff would be recieved better then a massive FU healers debuff. It would let the healer contribute more offensively also
I'm not sure about that. I think we'd just see a lot more "what hit me?!" complaints (holinka)

Any plan for a PvP version of Proving Grounds ? Something like arenas vs NPCs to learn the ropes ?
I would love to do something like this. Not sure when/if we'll get to. (holinka)

Is necrotic strike affected by BF the same way heals are? If not what's the reasoning?
Oh no, not this again. Necrotic strike is affected by Resilience because it is damage. It is not affected by Battle Fatigue. (holinka)
I get damage being mitigated by res, but surely the heal absorb should be affected by BF? It has become OP as BF has increased
No it should not be reduced by BF because it is not a heal. It is a damage spell. (holinka)

Please use the item squish to get rid of base res.Balance PvE numbers after PvP.Priorities are different but that would help alot!
We dislike how large base resil and battle fatigue numbers have gotten too. Out goal is to reduce or eliminate both in Warlords. (holinka)

could we ever see a solo queue RBG group finder? i feel like it could use the in-game voice chat that never gets love
You'll be able to use the Group Finder to find RBG groups. Like the idea of someone forming/running groups instead of queueing. (holinka)

World
Have you tried making the world feel more alive? Dynamic instead of static? NPCs pacing around feels robotic and artificial.
Yes. In fact, there might even be engineers experimenting w/ tech for that right now. Experimenting, mind you. Maybe. (Dave_Maldo)

The following realms are due to be connected next:

English Realms

• (PvP) Xavius and Skullcrusher
• (PvP) Auchindoun and Jaedenar

The following realms are scheduled to be connected after the realms above:

English Realms

• (PvP) Dragonmaw and Haomarush
• (PvP) Zenedar and Bladefist
• (PvP) Deathwing and Karazhan/Lightning’s Blade

French Realms

• (PvE) Krasus and Eitrigg

German Realms

• (PvP) Blutkessel and Arthas/Vek’lor

As previously announced, we’ve been working toward connecting realms to increase the number of players on low-population realms, and since then have completed several connections. As a part of our ongoing communication, we wanted to provide you with an update that contains a list of completed realm connections, currently planned connections, and any additional future plans in one convenient location.

*Please note this list does not encompass all potential future connections. Please check back for further updates.

Future Connections
We will be connecting the realms listed below on Thursday, January 30th during a scheduled maintenance beginning at 5 a.m. PST through approximately 1:00 p.m. PST. Once maintenance is finished, these realm connections will be complete.

• Alleria and Khadgar
• Anvilmar and Undermine
• Archimonde and Agamaggan/Jaedenar/The Underbog
• Cho'gall and Auchindoun/Laughing Skull
• Eitrigg and Shu'halo
• Mok'Nathal and Silvermoon

We will be connecting the realms listed below on Thursday, February 6th during a scheduled maintenance beginning at 5 a.m. PST through approximately 1:00 p.m. PST. Once maintenance is finished, these realm connections will be complete.

• Hydraxis and Terenas
• Kirin Tor and Steamwheedle Cartel
• Shattered Halls and Executus/ Kalecgos
• Thunderlord and Azgalor/Azshara/Destromath
• Uther and Runetotem

We do not have a date for the following realm connections, but will update this post when we do.

• Alterac Mountains and Balnazzar/Gorgonash/The Forgotten Coast/ Warsong
• Azjol-Nerub and Khaz Modan
• Eldre’Thalas and Korialstrasz
• Farstriders and Silverhand
• Spinebreaker and Wildhammer

*Plans for these connections may change at any time, but we’ll provide additional updates on specific dates for future connections here as we can. Please note that as a part of the connection process realm times may change to match each other.

Creatures

• Celestials now drop Season 15 Prideful Gladiator gear in place of Season 14 Grievous Gladiator gear.
• Rare spawns in Krasarang Wilds now only award Honor Points when they are defeated for the first time each day.

PvP

• Base Resilience for level-90 players is now 77% (up from 72%). Base Resilience for players below level 90 remain at 40%.
• Resilience Diminishing Returns curve for Resilience has been adjusted for the new base resilience value to maintain the same value per point of Resilience as previously.
• Battle Fatigue now reduces healing received while in PvP combat by 65% (up from 55%).

Battlegrounds and Arenas

• Arenas
  
  • Dampening is now applied to an Arena match starting at the 5 minute mark (down from 10 minutes).
• Alterac Valley
  
  • The following NPCs now have more health and deal more damage.
    
    • Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth, Stormpike Defenders, Stormpike Bowman
    • Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek'thar, Frostwolf Guardian, Frostwolf Bowman
  • The following NPCs are now immune to disarm, daze, and Death Grip.
    
    • Alliance: Vanndar Stormpike, Balinda Stonehearth
    • Horde: Captain Galvangar, Drek'thar

Items

• The following items sold by Mistweaver Ai on the Timeless Isle have been raised to item level 489 (up from item level 476). This change is retroactive to all items that had been purchased previously.
  
  • Cloudscorcher Greatstaff
  • Contemplation of Shaohao
  • Daylight Protectorate
  • Featherdraw Longbow
  • Hozen Can Opener
  • Ordon Sacrificial Dagger
  • Pandaren Peace Offering
  • Scavenged Pandaren Dagger
  • Shield of the Eternal Noon
  • Yak-Herder's Longstaff