World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

We recently added account-level changes to achievements in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, and there’s still a lot of work left before we’re done. The plan here is to illustrate the intent behind our design, which should in turn help you figure out the answers to many of your questions.

Overall, we never want you to play Character A instead of Character B because of achievement concerns. If Character A had the Violet Proto-Drake, then you might not play Character B. If Character A was only one holiday away from the Violet Proto-Drake, then you may not play Character B. If Character A had completed most of the raid achievements from Dragon Soul, you may not want to bring Character B for one fight and miss out on the achievement. Having alts is cool and working on achievements is cool, but we don’t want the two systems to work against each other.

This goal is paramount and drives everything else. If we allowed you to earn extra achievement points from completing an achievement on two different characters, then you might only want to play the character with the most points and you’d feel like you had to grind through all the achievements with every alt, thus defeating the purpose of having account-level achievements.

Most achievements are account-wide

This means you only earn the points once. If you have earned an achievement on one character, you can see it on all your characters. However, and this is important, you will still see the achievement toast (the pop-up notification) if a second or subsequent character completes the achievement. We think it’s still important to recognize milestones like reaching level 80, maxing out a profession, or killing a raid boss for the first time. It's fun to have everyone congratulate you when you get the toast. Nonetheless, this will just be a new character of yours completing the achievement that you’ve already earned on your account. You won’t double up on points.

Most criteria are not account-wide

If you start an achievement on one character, you can't then finish the achievement on another (there are exceptions, so please keep reading). We didn't think it made sense for one character to get level 60 and another to get level 20 and then see the "level 80" achievement toast. If you start to explore Thousand Needles on one character, you’ll probably want to finish that achievement on the same character.

Some achievements are "meta achievements."

These are achievements that require you to get other specific achievements. An infamous example is "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been." These achievements generally ARE account-wide. If one character earned Noble Gardener and another character earned The Flame Warden, then your account would get Long Strange Trip. (Otherwise it would be weird: it would look as if you had the sub-achievements, but you wouldn't have the meta-achievement). Even though you need Explore Thousand Needles on one character, all of your characters can contribute to Explore Kalimdor.

A very few achievements are account-only.

There are two categories of account-only achievements. One is achievements that are not possible to earn on one character. If we made an achievement to level every class to level 90, it would be account-only. (I'm not sure we will, but it's a good example.) The other category are achievements that are just brutal to complete on one character (and you’d never want to do for multiples), such as 2500 daily quests or 250K honorable kills. In these cases, the cumulative work of all your characters on those criteria will count.

We hope that rewards granted from achievements (pets, mounts, titles, and tabards) will be shared at the account level.

I'm not going to promise this yet, because a lot of magic has to happen for that to work, but it's our intent. We have discussed having a character level requirement for some rewards, so that your level-2 gnome couldn’t walk around with the “Defender of a Shattered World” title just because your level-90 shaman earned it. If the gnome made it to level 80, though, you could proudly show off your title. You also won’t be able to use a faction-specific pet, mount, or title on the wrong faction. The achievement wouldn’t go away -- you just wouldn’t be able to show it off on that character. There are probably additional exceptions and details we’ll find as we dig deeper into the system.

This is the kind of system that will evolve over time, and we don’t think this has to be the way achievements work forever. As beta players start experimenting with it and offering feedback, I am certain that we will end up making even more changes.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft. He loves you very, very much. Yes, you.

The World of Warcraft Annual Pass promotion ended May 1, and we recently sent out the remaining Mists of Pandaria beta invitations. Check your games list in Battle.net Account Management for the Mists of Pandaria beta. You can download and install it from there.

Again, thank you for your enthusiasm and feedback. To provide feedback for the Mists of Pandaria beta, we invite you to please post in the Beta Feedback forum.

Cataclysm PvP gear and PvP Power
You will have less resilience on your gear coming into beta. However, you will also have some base resilience and that base should offset the PvP power that everyone is getting. The net result should be that you take about the same damage you do today in a PvP setting, but will take less damage from someone not wearing PvP gear.

Currently on your beta build, I believe the ratio of power to resilience is off. You should have more resilience and less power than you do.

It is entirely possible that some new talents or spell changes will result in too much burst damage in isolated cases, but when giving feedback, it's useful for us if you distinguish between those and survivability in PvP in general. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Druid (Forums)
Druid Level 90 Talents
We're not yet happy with the druid level 90 row. We still like the theme of it playing into the druid's hybrid nature and we want to reassure you (which I think most of you already know) that druids won't do lower damage or healing compared to other classes just because some other class has an unambiguous throughput increasing talent at level 90. Classes are balanced around their whole package.

Nonetheless, we want the bottom row of talents to be exciting. In the next (hopefully) build, you'll see a few changes.

• Disentanglement -- no longer a talent. Shapeshifting for all druids just breaks roots.
• Dream of Cenarius -- increases damage spells by 70% (up from 30%).
• Heart of the Wild -- now also grants 6% passive Agility and Intellect.
• Nature's Vigil -- replaces Disentanglement. Increases all damage and healing done by 30% for 30 sec, with a 3 min cooldown. While active, all healing spells also damage a nearby target for 50% of healing done, and all damage spells and abilities also heal a nearby friendly target for 50% of the damage done.

Let us know how they feel once you get a chance to try them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums)
Protection Paladin Feedback
I can't imagine that blizz intends for paladins to have to get a swing timer addon to effectively micromanage a 3 second buff. I'm waiting patiently for a 'fix'.
Bosses hardly ever attack slower than 1.5 second these days and there is no longer a boss swing timer debuff. We find that when bosses attack slower, they have to hit really hard to do the same DPS, which means tanks risk being two-shot. A Shield of the Righteous should be able to get two hits.

Even if that were not the case, the penalty is mostly on healer mana. Because Shield of the Righteous can't be up all the time, it can't be the case that a paladin will die without it.

The challenge with the current SotR design is that Prot paladins generate Holy Power pretty quickly, which means any 3 Holy Power ability will be used often. We don't want SotR to have 100% coverage, or it starts to feel more like Inquisition or the Hammer of the Righteous debuff and not like a short cooldown. We could slow down Holy Power generation, but we're reluctant to do that, because it feels good coming in quickly and coming from abilities like Judgment. Having Bastion of Glory buff Word of Glory so much is a way to encourage paladins to spend some of their Holy Power on Word of Glory once in awhile so that it all isn't funneling into a persistent Shield of the Righteous shield. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)
Rapture Feedback
While I'm not a big fan of Rapture in the beta environment, I think this is the wrong way to look at it, that if it provides less mana than PW:S, it's not "regen." Assuming PW:S is a spell worth casting on its own merits (and it should be, when MoP is live, or else I think even Blizzard designers will agree they failed), then you'd be casting PW:S anyway and it's part of the total mana-out over the course of the fight. Rapture simply increases the mana-in over the course of the fight, making it regen.

Now, if PW:S isn't worth casting on its own merits and is ONLY used for Rapture, then it's perfectly fair to point out that Rapture doesn't even refund PW:S's cost. But, again, if that ends up being the case, it will mean discipline is truly broken and devs will surely fix it. I don't think anyone believes PW:S shouldn't be a valuable spell just from its effect in mitigating damage.
Yes, this is how we see it. Rapture isn't trying to be Telluric Currents. You shouldn't spam PW:Shield when you need mana. Rapture is intended to offset the cost of PW:Shield when the latter is used intelligently. I said "regen" in the more generic sense of mana returns. I understand the posters saying that it's not increasing your mana over time because you are still casting PW:Shield.

Rapture is a mana increase on live mostly because we scale too well with Int (as a regen stat) and the gear item levels went crazy just like at the end of Wrath. It was not the original plan for the spell, otherwise it would have functioned as a mana-increase at the very start of the expansion.

PW:S is quite probably the most powerful spell in our toolbox, and without a prohibitively high mana cost, it will wind up being spammed to the exclusion of other spells. The Rapture mechanic serves to moderate the mana cost of the spell when tank healing while not interfering with the mechanics that prevent us from just spamming PW:S 24/7. Supposedly we'll have other tools for raid healing, though I personally find these tools lacking.

As far as our overall mana regen goes, we've got 25% passive regen, rapture procs and shadow fiend. I think that'll be enough regen for single tank healing, but not enough at all for raid healing or multi-tank healing. I'm concerned that Mind Bender is going to wind up being a mandatory choice for Disc at this point.
Yes, I agree with all of this as well. The challenge of designing Disc has always been trying to balance the fun of PW:Shield with the power of PW:Shield.

We don't want any talent to be mandatory for Disc (or any spec). If Disc has mana problems in AE situations, or if Holy regens too much compared to Disc during periods of not casting, then that is something we can address.

Our goal is to make mana-management with a fresh level 90 a little easier than it was at 85. It was close at 85, but just a little too punitive. Once you hit 90, let us know how dungeons feel.

I will note that we are considering retiring Judgment of the Pure. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums)
Warrior Feedback
Since I'm not sure yet when you'll get the next beta build, here are a few upcoming warrior (mostly Protection) changes to try out:

• Shield Slam -- now generates 20 rage. Sword and Board generates 30.
• Unwavering Sentinel -- now grants passive rage generation like the old Anger Management effect. The intent is to make rage generation smoother when a tank is kiting or otherwise doesn't have high boss contact.
• Demoralizing Shout -- a new (old) Protection spec ability, now in the form of a short-term, free cooldown, much like Barkskin. Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec. 60 sec cooldown.
• Shield Barrier -- cost reduced to 20 rage, but consumes up to 60 rage for up to triple the effect. (Total absorb adjusted accordingly).
• Glyph of Thunder Clap -- Not super useful. Redesigned to Glyph of Unending Rage, which increases total rage cap to 120, allowing interested warriors to be able to bank more Rage.
• The sum total of these changes may provide too much rage. We'll have to see. We still want to mess with Berserker Stance and possibly Enrage rage generation as well to make sure warrior rage isn't too static and predictable. We want there to be some Heroic Strike use.

One of the reasons we don't always announce changes before they happen is that things can move pretty fast in beta. Even though I mentioned some Protection changes above, they are already out of date.

Overall, the goal is to mix up Protection's rotation a little more. Prot warriors are used to lots of buttons, and we don't want too much waiting around. (For Arms and Fury, we can just flood them with rage, but with Protection the risk is that we hit 100% uptime of Shield Block, which turns it from being a short cooldown to a managed buff like Thunder Clap.) We also want to make sure tanks who execute their attacks with more skill are rewarded with better mitigation. To make this compelling, we think it needs to tie into Rage generation.

• As part of this, we're going to try Defensive Stance no longer generating Rage from auto attacks at all. Instead we'll have nearly all Rage come from special attacks while in Defensive.
• In addition to Shield Slam, we'll try Revenge and Devastate generating some Rage. Devastate will do so by once again being the ability that procs Sword and Board. For Revenge, we agree that the more rotational version has lost some of its old excitement. Revenge will generate Rage outright. It will no longer proc from blocks but will also have no cooldown so you will sometimes get multiple Revenges in a row.
• We're going to try Shield Block using the charge system that we've tried for a few abilities, such as the monk Roll. This one may feel too different, but we'll see. What it means is you can use Shield Block twice in a row, but then pay a 15 sec cooldown. (The first use will start its cooldown as soon as its used.) This mechanic should let you chain together two Shield Blocks but not keep it up 100% of the time.We think this rotation feels better and more traditionally Prot, but let us know how it feels to you.

I'd find it a bit more comforting if I ever saw actual passion coming from Blizzard regarding Warriors. But I don't see that, haven't seen that. Does anyone really see the passion there? If these people enjoy their jobs, really enjoy working on the game, really believe in their design - then you'd think they could set aside an hour or two to address our concerns about enjoyability.
But two hours times eleven classes turns into a huge time commitment pretty quickly (and that's on top of reading all of the posts in the first place). Believe me -- you want the design team spending time designing the game, not debating players on forums.

We are all very passionate about our designs, but we're also professional game designers who know better than to get too attached to any particular implementation. Stuff changes. Ideas that seem great might not pan out. We've all seen ideas we were really excited about being greeted with indifference by the community. That's just part of the job.

Passion also can come across as being defensive ("they're stuck on their pet feature!") or impartial ("he likes priests better!") when read on forums.

I know I participated in it, but really these discussions would be more useful if we kept to class feedback. I have found as a rule of thumb that any time the discussion strays from the design to the designers, then it is probably off course.

You definitely caught me scratching my head when you said you were moving tanks to 'active mitigation', kept all the passive mitigation skills for prot paladins, and nerfed the only active mitigation skill we had.
No, you are correct. The way paladins were playing with lots of Word of Glory was closer to the new design. We said at the time however that we didn't think it would work for tank balance to let paladins convert resources into mitigation while warriors could not. I think we even said at the time that we'd like for all of the tanks to play more like that, but it required a whole sale design.

That happens a lot in this gig, where class A is working the way we'd consider ideal, while class B, C, D and so on do not. The "pure" design is to keep A working the right way, but the right decision is usually to change the single outlier until we have time to fix everyone.

I'm curious how exactly this is going to work. Does it just consume as much rage as it can (Up to 60) and give you a decent sized absorb based on that? I do like the change though, it makes the move much more interesting.
Right. Assume that spending 20 Rage will give you an absorb equal to 30% of your attack power. If you have 40 Rage, the bubble is 60% and 60 Rage, it's 90%. If you have 100 Rage, you still get the 90% bubble and have 40 Rage left over.

Like Aed said, unless Heroic Strike gives some form of defensive benefit somehow, warrior tanks are basically never going to use it. You guys learnt that lesson with the pre-nerf WoG back in 4.0, remember?
As a few players pointed out, I meant Heroic Strike use for Arms and Fury. Prot will use Heroic Strike when not tanking at the moment, when soloing, when running easy content, or when Ultimatum procs. Tanks have never chosen spending resources on damage when they could spend them on survival.

Although I wish that auto attacks would still generate rage, I understand that we shouldn't be swimming in rage because that makes us imbalanced. I like the idea of our special abilities generating rage much more. It actually feels like I am "actively" working torwards taking less damage.
There may be a way to get some Rage from autoattacks. We were just concerned that so much Rage was from autoattacks that buttons like Shield Slam weren't contributing much so warriors were ending up feeling passive when what we were going for was active.

GS since you posting can we get atleast an idea of plans with Arms and Fury? currently they play way to similar and when I say that I mean they play exactly alike only difference is you don't have something procing to turn Slam into 3 stack 10 rage, and Overpower is proc'd from using your rage generating ability but they still play to alike, I'd just like some info as to what might be the plans with them? thanks
If you say they play similarly because they both have an attack that generates 10 Rage and both have an attack that costs 30 Rage, then that's true. However the similarities sort of end there. Arms has a second attack, Overpower, that is reliable, though it can sometimes chain proc. Colossus Smash sometimes has a lower cooldown. Arms' AE is based around Sweeping Strikes and Blood and Thunder. Arms' Rage income is slower from autoattacks and come in chunkier because of slow weapon swings.

Fury can sometimes use Raging Blow but not predictably. Rather than a proc concerning Colossus Smash, Fury gets to use Wild Strike three times in a row. Fury cares about being Enraged more than Arms for a couple of reasons (RB and mastery). Fury's AE is based around Meat Cleaver procs and using Raging Blow. Wielding two weapons ensures more consistent rage income, even when using two-handers. Fury will probably always have more Heroic Strike use. Overall, Fury's rotation is probably less predictable, which is fitting for their kit of crazed berserking.

I'm just trying to get a feel for what you're looking for. Should Bloodthirst deliver 20 Rage? Should Bloodthirst just be a cooldown? Should Arms have a different cooldown than Recklessness? Should Fury not have Deep Wounds?

I thought we were supposed to be commenting on how it feels now, not coming up with our own fixes.
I feel like most of you have been on the forums long enough to know the difference, but here goes:

Example One: "I think Mortal Strike would feel better with a 9 sec cooldown."
Example Two: "I find myself with not enough Rage as Fury."
Example Three: "I find the rotation confusing. I'm not sure which button to push."
Example Four: "Rend was a fun button. I miss it."
Example Five: "I came up with a new warrior ability. It's called Staple. Staple requires 40 Rage and roots a target. You then get 100% crit chance against the Stapled target. I imagine it would have an icon that looks like a big staple. The glyph of Staple would staple the target to the warrior so you would drag them around with you."

Five is fun, but less useful to us overall. If it's fun for you, go for it. Maybe it will spur some interesting discussion as players try to explore what design problems (if any) you're trying to address with your brainstorming. The risk is that you grow attached to the idea of Staple and essentially refuse to like any warrior change unless you see Staple implemented. Ultimately, it's just a less efficient way to have a discussion than figuring out what the root problem is you are trying to solve anyway. But I understand sometimes it isn't easy to get your finger on the pulse of what is bothering you. I've been doing game design a long time, and it still vexes me sometimes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue (Forums) / Warrior (Forums)
Rogue and Warrior Ranged Weapons
What I said here still stands true, however, there's a bug currently in beta preventing rogues and warriors from equipping ranged weapons. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

A Lack of Cloth Healing Gear in Dungeons
Our item designers spend a lot of effort making sure there is gear for everyone, so if you haven't seen a specific piece you might have just gotten unlucky.

Note however that healer cloth is any cloth without hit on it. If you are expecting Spirit on every single piece, you might be disappointed. If you did manage to get Spirit on every single piece, you might find that your regeneration is higher than you really need for level up content. We know we can't make the level up dungeons super challenging, or players will just skip them and quest instead (given that even the most awesome level up dungeon gear won't last very long, so it's not possible to offer high reward for high risk).

As you are nearing level 90, and start gearing for end game content, stats for healers and survival stats for tanks start to become more important and you should find more of them.

Also, don't neglect the vendors. Their gear isn't best in slot by any stretch, but can be useful to fill any holes if you missed a piece or have just been unlucky. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter (Forums)
Hunter Feedback
A few points on hunters, gathered from several threads:

We don't want for dots just to ignore crowd control. It's a test of skill for players to decide when to dot and when to CC. However, that's not a fair requirement for attacks that you can't prevent, such as Piercing Shots and MM mastery. Those probably do need to pause or do no damage to CC'd targets.

We're still tweaking focus regen. It does feel a little slow right now.

Stampede needs to appear at the target or you lose too much of the brief duration with the pets moving to the target. It also needs to have a long cooldown and short duration, because it's an awful lot of DPS to have so many pets out. The alternative would be that the extra pets do a lot less damage each, but we didn't feel like that really delivered on the fantasy of "opening the stable."

We want traps to be good CC. Traps are one of the signature hunter mechanics, and we'd rather make them good than just let players ignore them and do all their CC with shots. Improving CC in this way will also give hunters better synergy with other classes in PvP, rather than the hunter's viability being determined by how awesome their burst damage is.

We're still looking at expertise, dodge and running a lot of PvP tests right now. We do think it's a bit disingenuous to argue that melee are always behind their targets in PvP. Just ask any Backstabbing rogue or Shredding druid. Overall, we're still comfortable with the idea of ranged attacks able to be dodged. It's a little weird to argue any of this stuff based on "reality" but heroes so awesome that they could dodge arrows or bullets certainly exist in literature and cinema. If you can leap through the air towards your foe (or backwards in the case of a hunter), shield block a giant, or cast a fireball, then being able to dodge a shot shouldn't be the thing that breaks the suspension of disbelief.

(As an aside, when I was working on historical RTS games, I read that there was some evidence that Native Americans had some skill in dodging arrows, which may have been one of the things that led to their adopting firearms, given that firearms at the time were pretty inferior to arrows or javelins in most other ways. That still doesn't settle whether dodging arrows in a fantasy game with paladins and mages is reasonable or not.)

If it's an undue burden for PvP, then that's another thing (though we think the jury is still out on that), but arguing it's not realistic is a bit... er... dodgy. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)
Rapture Must Retire
We don't think Rapture is "fundamentally flawed." We also added it back because so many Disc priests asked for it. It's challenging for us to present a design when some players want something and some don't want it.

Discipline would struggle if the spec was designed around flawless Rapture use, but it's not. Meditation is still there and in fact a Disc priest with flawless Rapture use would have more mana return than other healers. A priest who totally ignored PW:Shield would have lower mana return, but why are you playing Disc if you ignore PW:Shield? For many Disc priests who say benefit from Rapture every 20+ sec instead of the minimum 12, their sustainability should be comparable to other healers. Keep in mind what I said in the other thread about considering the entire package; the only real measurement of sustainability is how long the various healers can cast in average (low HPS) and scary (high HPS) situations without going OOM. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Discipline Feedback
In the (hopefully) next build you receive, Discipline again has Greater Heal, Strength of Soul, and Power Word: Shield with no cooldown. We are also trying something really different with Spirit Shell. Let us know how it feels. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums)
Warrior Feedback
Here are some warrior comments from various threads. I know there is at least one very long thread, but in my experience players are less likely to read huge threads. I mean no disrespect to any other posters by posting here.

1) We want rage to be a mechanic. We don't want rage to be something warriors ignore because they can just hit all of their buttons whenever they want. That tends to lead towards the class being cooldown controlled. It's fine for some classes to work that way (Enhance shaman are pretty close), but that's not our vision for warriors.

2) We think the rate of rage income in Battle Stance is currently about right, but we knew that warriors could totally ignore Heroic Strike and Cleave, so we've been tweaking things like Enrage providing more rage, so that being rage capped is more of a risk (allowing smarter warriors to bleed off that rage with HS).

3) The Berserker Stance redesign is still pretty new and something we're adjusting. If we are successful, then warriors will use Battle Stance much of the time, but would consider Berserker for PvP or boss fights with an excessive amount of raid damage. We aren't looking for warriors to constantly stance dance, nor do we want them to be in Berserker all of the time.

4) Your entire class doesn't need to revolve around having X amount of crit. We will balance warrior damage around whatever stats are available at various character and gear levels. We like the fact that warriors will have more Enrage uptime as they acquire more crit. Mechanics like that are the kind of thing that make gearing up more fun, because it can actually impact your rotation a bit rather than hitting the same buttons the same way as you did when you were level 86. Warriors (especially Fury) need some amount of crit and Enrage uptime to function, but giving them too high a crit rate early on leads to devaluing the stat in later tiers of gear. (This goes for a lot of stats on a lot of classes.)

5) We run DPS tests all the time both at level 85 with starter gear and level 90 with end-game gear. The numbers are in a pretty good place, though we'll continue to adjust them as we make class changes and refine rotations. I offer that because saying "My DPS is terrible," doesn't really give us much information. What is your DPS? Who are you comparing it to?

6) Target dummies are great for learning your rotation. They are terrible for trying to predict how your rotation will feel in scenarios, dungeons, raids or PvP, and that is one of the reasons we went so long before adding them. Please try to get a feel for how your class plays in a group setting before coming to conclusions about whether you have enough buttons to hit or are waiting around too long. (Again, this is not a warrior-only consideration.)

7) I probably sound like a broken record here ("What's a "record," GC?"), but we don't want warriors or any class to be able to just pick DPS talents and forsake all others. If you are a DPS dude choosing a damage talent instead of a tanking talent, then you probably don't really have much in the way of a choice. If you focus on relatively easy content where you never need a survival button, never need to help out an ally, and never need crowd control, then I can understand why the talent choices may not be as interesting to you. On the other hand, try some of those 2-3 pulls in Townlong or run a scenario without a tank before you cement those opinions.

8) For tanks, the goal of active mitigation is to let you translate your resource (rage in this case) into survival. If you use Shield Block or Shield Barrier frequently, you'll be a better tank. If you spam them whenever possible, you'll do fine for scenarios and Raid Finder. To do more challenging content, you're going to want to use them at the right time, which may mean delaying them a few seconds for when a big hit is coming. Shield Block isn't designed to keep you alive all by itself -- fortunately you have plenty of emergency cooldowns. We also don't want players just learning the class or running easier content to crumple just because they failed to keep Shield Block up as much as possible. Many factors go into making you an effective tank -- watch a video of some of the world's best tanks if you don't believe me. Spamming Shield Block isn't going to cut it. Using Shield Block intelligently will help some.

9) I know it's fun to brainstorm new abilities. Just understand that such feedback is much less useful to the designers than commenting on how existing things feel. The frustration of missing a Mortal Strike in PvP and having that shut down your entire rotation (just to use an example) is great feedback and the kind of thing we can easily address. "Hey, I came up with a new ability or resource, what do you guys think?" is cool and all, but less likely to lead to an action item for our team.

10) Please don't expect or demand regular posts like this. The team has a lot to before we're ready to ship this expansion. We will read and take seriously all of your feedback, but we just can't afford to spend hours making forum posts. Just because I made a warrior post today and not a warlock post doesn't mean your feedback is being ignored or that we don't love you.

I don't use mathematics, which seems to be the devs' lingua franca; but I can work with spatial/systemic concepts instead, so that's how I communicate.
It’s not necessary to use numbers if you want to give feedback on how a rotation feels. (Though the community in general would benefit from finding more adjectives than “clunky.”) It is necessary to use numbers if you want to claim your DPS or survivability aren’t competitive, because otherwise you’re just guessing.

We put literally freak, freaking HOURS into trying to help him and his team out for no benefit with only the intent of making their awful, low depth designs work better and he disregards it? Forget that, I'm going to play Tera. At least THEIR idea of AM is actually engaging.
You're going to get disappointed a lot if you're hoping to see developers incorporate your ideas. That’s just no a realistic goal with a player base the size of ours. The reason I took the time to try and address some of the feedback in this thread is to make sure players understand our design intent. The players out there who are trying to turn “active mitigation” into “I have a ton of cooldowns that don’t cost resources” are working at cross purposes with the class designers. It’s not an invalid design by any stretch, but we also feel it’s essentially the design we had in Cataclysm where tanks would spend all of their resources on threat that was all just overkill. Spending resources on defense gets more to the heart of tanking and we think will be more enjoyable in the long run. In the short run it may feel different and weird.

The players posting on this forum do not represent the majority of the warrior population and are practically meaningless to you ('the vocal minority').
The players who post are ALWAYS a minority. By far, most of our players don't post. Some of the most skilled and informed players out there don't post. Does the posting community represent the feelings of the majority? It’s hard to know for sure. That’s why we pay more attention to intelligent argument than we do to any kind of invocation of how "most players" feel. We do read all of the feedback though. We’re not always going to act on all of it. That’s just the reality of game design. We don’t want WoW to be designed by committee, and you probably don’t want us to either.

There are still other issues not addressed regarding our rotation...
Execute is a great button, but it’s not available much of the time. Slam and Wild Strike are better than Heroic Strike. You should always go to them first. If you have so much rage than even several Slams in a row will leave you with excess rage, then you break out the Heroic Strikes as well, since you can Heroic Strike AND Slam in the same GCD. You’ll have to make the call about buttons like Overpower depending on the situation. Overpower won’t help you with rage management if it’s time to Slam, but on the other hand, Overpower is free, and the ultimate goal is to do deliver as much damage as possible. Managing rage isn’t the goal itself; it’s just a strategy to deliver the damage.

The Protection warrior was fun, required rage management and had active mitigation.
There is no active mitigation on live. You can define active mitigation your own way if you’d like, but using our definition, active mitigation is mitigation costing resources. On live, all mitigation is cooldown-driven for warriors, druids and paladins. Resources are for gaining threat (which isn't that hard to generate) or delivering DPS (which usually isn’t very valuable for tanks except on very tightly tuned fights).

Alright, you don't want suggestions on how to fix the many, many problems?
Suggestions are fine and often useful. We are seeing some players brainstorming new abilities or resource systems, which aren’t as valuable to us, and can actually be a little risky to the process when players can get overly attached to their own ideas and end up disappointed or bitter when we don't use them.

Perhaps it would help to increase the rage cap to 200, so Shield Block would only be a third of our red bar, and warriors can pool enough rage for 2 or 3 Shield Blocks. Or make the first Shield Block less expensive, and later ones more expensive (like Arcane Blast).
I don’t think we’d increase rage to 200, but we could get the same effect by making Shield Block cheaper. The reason we haven’t yet is we were concerned it might lead to feeling like you can realistically have 100% Shield Block coverage. Once you can afford to push Shield Block constantly, then it feels like it’s a maintenance buff (more like Thunder Clap) and not a button with any kind of timing component. It might be worth trying just flooding Protection with rage to see how it feels. Likewise, we could see how much rage it takes before Arms and Fury are using Heroic Strike constantly instead of situationally. Also remember that warriors will get more rage with better gear -- we still want that to occur because it feels fun, so long as it doesn't become a big scaling problem (meaning warriors are weak with bad gear and unstoppable with good gear, which has often been a problem in WoW).

Can warriors get an offensive benefit to strength, much like agi and int gives to the other classes? Defensive benefits do literally nothing for me, considering how negligible they are. It's been a long standing issue of mine that warriors get Parry, while Agi users get crit, and int users get crit and spell power bonuses.
We balance around the stats you have. If warriors received crit from Strength, then we’d have to lower the damage of your abilities as a consequence. We don’t like Strength providing crit, because then it just feels like Agility. There are potential scaling risks if Agi users do more damage as they get more Agi than Strength users do as they get more Strength. With warriors though we usually have the opposite problem because they do so much more damage as they get better weapons (as well as more rage from better gear as well). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Spell Reflect - Why Was It Nerfed?
Spell Reflect is one of those mechanics that always feels weak to the warrior and overpowered to everyone else. We ran a bunch of internal BGs and Arenas and it was pretty universal that the casters were constantly having everything reflected if there was a warrior in the area.

We're still tweaking the Mass Spell Reflect talent. We want it to feel awesome, and we think that is a good way for warriors who want to be great at reflection to be able to make that commitment. Our current thought is that Mass Spell Reflect is a new ability (meaning that you'd have both spell reflects) and doesn't require a shield. We like that seeing the warrior strap on a shield signals to the caster that reflection is a risk -- the alternative is that sometimes your spells just bounce back at you, seemingly at random. That logic works for the core Spell Reflect, but already doesn't work with Mass, because you don't see the shield for the warrior's allies. Decoupling the two spells also lets us individually tweak their durations and cooldowns. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Erm...He's (Thrall) going back to being Warchief of the Horde. Which apparently isn't supposed to bother all the Alliance that have been working with him for the last few years.

I know what was said during the press tour, but don't be so sure yet that you know who the next warchief will be. The information provided during the press tour was... not entirely accurate.

MoP Pet Battle System is Complete Overkill?
And for what? Vanity? Just pure vanity?
For fun. We're adding something new to the game we think a large number of players will enjoy given its accessibility.

You could've worked on character models. You could've worked on more battlegrounds, dungeons, raids, and arenas.
By and large you're not talking at all about the same developers/artists/programmers. The development team isn't just a pool of people, all with the exact same skill sets. That's too big an assumption on your part with regard to what could've been created in the absence of pet battles, not to mention whether or not the payoff would actually be better if development resources were dedicated to other projects.

Pet collectors will be the only WoW players mutually interested in this.
We'll see. That's a bold claim.

Now that you've added it, it's going to be continually updated, continually wasting hours, and continually voiding the biggest issues with this game.
You're entitled to your opinion and we're listening, but you don't decide for the general WoW population what are the biggest issues with the game, nor are you attuned to our production schedule and how resources are distributed to various projects within the design department. Bold claims AND big assumptions.

It would be great if you polled us with a simple question like this: "Should we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on this silly vanity idea?" before taking the initiative to do it. Please do that next time, I guarantee my soul the results will shock you.
We absolutely want to make the best game possible and want people to love it. The means to that end, however, isn't design by democracy. Aside from finding and fixing bugs, there's a reason why we have beta tests. We can't just write a list of feature descriptions down on paper, put them up for a vote, and expect to obtain the best actionable development ideas (yes, even if we framed the questions to be just a little more fair than your example).

We create. You play. You provide feedback. We iterate.

P.S. You're going off of bits and pieces of information datamined from the beta. The system isn't even live yet and we have a lot more information coming to explain how we want it to work. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Why the lack of Patch Notes?
We tend to iterate pretty quickly during beta. It's a luxury we don't have when we're making patches to the live game. We can use beta to try some crazy ideas and then quickly back them out again if we don't like the way they are going.

Closely related, because we want to iterate on beta quickly, we don't all sit down together and agree on when is the best time to make a beta push. Usually we try to stabilize things for a little bit to make the build, but even then, you're going to see a lot of things that are half-implemented, not quite working yet, or in the process of being backed out because someone realized it was a bad idea.

We understand our betas can be a confusing, bewildering and sometimes frustrating experience. They aren't for everyone. Betas are emphatically not demos. Unless you're really good at looking past all the baling wire and duct tape, it can be hard to get an impression of how the final product will be. Also keep in mind that it's not just the designers who are testing things out, and sadly testing out new code is even less glamorous than testing out new features.

On the topic of account level mounts, we are still evolving our design philosophy, so it's a great thing upon which to offer feedback. We have heard from some players who are thrilled that they don't need to play their "mounty" character to the exclusion of their other characters. We have heard from others who feel like their accomplishments are watered down since they got so many mounts "for free." We're not sure which mounts will be account-level or not. It's weird to have paladin, warlock and DK mounts shared across classes, so there's a good bet those still be character only. What about the others? Let us know what you think.

That philosophy goes for a lot of features. We're all busy working on the game, so we don't have a ton of bandwidth to continually explain our design intent on all of the various features in the beta (keeping in mind that our intent often changes). We'll try to hit some major philosophical points when we can, but if you need a lot of blue explanation or direction for how to beta test in order to get anything out of it, then I can understand why it might be a frustrating experience.

My advice is just to play and let us know how things feel. If we haven't changed a feature in awhile, it could mean that we're happy with how it is, but it could also mean we're just working on other features at the moment. We'll read all of your feedback, but we probably won't have a lot of opportunities to respond. Rest assured that what you say is really important to us and to the development process. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Why is Wow's in-game music so terrible?
This topic title makes me sad.

We put a lot of effort into our music. If you actually go through it and listen you'll find a much broader breadth of styles than you might notice in the game. There are a few photos available via that link as well that provide just a glimpse of the recording and mixing processes. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP and bringing the "War" back in World of Warcraft
We like specifics. We like hearing about your own personal experiences. We like hearing what you like personally (or dislike). We like hearing your feedback. That's more valuable than attacking someone else for their play style or opinions.

Why do PVP players have to be subject to restrictions on pvp realms due to the wants and desires of people who play on pve realms?
The reason (in part) those restrictions have been there is more about development and the additional difficulties that occur in trying to separate the two types of realms too much. You end up (essentially) developing two separate games. That's not what we want to do. If the rule sets diverged too much, that's what we would have ended up with. That's not to say that if we don't have the opportunity or a means to make that less painful on the development team, we won't do it (within reason.)

I'd love to say that all PvPers want the same thing from PvP, but that's not true either. I could talk to ten different people and be told 10 different goals and desires. Some love world PvP. Others won't take part in it unless they know there is some reward for being the victor. Some won't take part if the odds are stacked against them. Others will take part for exactly that reason. They want to prove they can overcome those odds.

To do an analogy (albeit perhaps a weak one), it's like ice cream. All ice cream has similar properties and you'd think that everyone that likes ice cream likes all ice cream. But we know that's not true. People like various kinds of ice cream and dislike various types. So, how do you serve a flavor everyone likes to some degree? That's an oversimplification, but it stands to reason that you have to find something relatively neutral that has the potential to appeal to as many people as possible. You can add in some additional toppings to spice it up as an option for those that want more out of their ice cream.

This is why I'll probably unsubscribe when MoP comes. I hate PVP, I hate being endlessly ganked and graveyard camped and I have better things to do with my time. So, enjoy your design philosophy, because I'm outa here.
Whether you choose to continue to play or purchase Mists of Pandaria is up to you. I'd suggest waiting until you see/hear about the plans first before making any decisions. As I've tried to emphasize, we are working toward making sure we ameliorate your fears as someone who isn't interested in PvP. I think though, that you're putting the cart before the horse in this case and assuming the worst, much the same as those who are on the PvP side of the fence. We haven't even fully discussed the details of the design philosophy with you as of yet for you to dislike it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mogu'shan Palace Corpse Run
There's an NPC in Dawnblossom (he's the Mogu who looks horribly out of place) that will teleport you to Mogu'shan Palace even if you are a ghost. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)
Holy Concentration: what's the plan?
It's not the number of mechanics that is important (so long as everyone has sufficient flexibility). What is most important is what is the overall mana per time regen that the various healers have, taking into account all of their various mana regen systems (and including factors such as paladins casting several mana-free spells).

If you think one healer is struggling for mana compared to another, let us know. One mechanic we are still adjusting a lot is Rapture, because we want to make sure that the worst-case mana regen scenario for Disc still isn't all that bad. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)