World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Auction House in Shrine of 7 Stars/2Moons
It might be true that it was the same in Wotlk but doesn't mean it was a good idea. Also, The portal to Pandaria is only in SW meaning that other cities aren't much of an option. If you really want to spread the population out then make a portal to Pandaria in all major cities.
For the most part, we actually feel the method used in previous expansions and again here in Mists of Pandaria works well. We also don't believe it's very demanding asking most players to take just an extra few minutes to access an auction house. Obviously some players will want the most accessibility as quickly as possible, but to avoid overcrowding and to disperse the population, this is the best method of meeting those goals. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvE
Don't want to double dip w/ rep and dungs,so what incentive to run dungs is there at all? Dailies = faster vp AND rep.Not fun.
ilevel 463 gear. The valor from them isn't bad either. (Source)

When will you decide it's not fair that bad players are being excluded from mounts and transmog gear from challenge modes?
Hopefully never. We used to only make content for hardcore. No longer. So it's fine that Challenge Modes *are* for them.
Cool, but why "hopefully"? you also said you will fight hard not to nerf them. Fight against? Someone else make those calls?
No, it's not an internal struggle or anything. I just hate to make promises when the game may feel different years from now. (Source)

Are there any changes planned to make Razorgore soloable in 5.1? He drops a pet after all
Perhaps. (Source)

Hit the "entered too many instances" cap while doing challenge modes, is this intended?
No. I've seen players think that was supposed to be part of the challenge. Heh, but no. (Source)

Why isn't the +300 Spirit food +450 like the Stamina food? Oversight or intended?
We treat Spirit sometimes as a primary sometimes as a secondary. We agree we need to be more consistent. (Source)

Why did valor for LFD go back to 1/day instead of 7/wk? It's a regressive change for no reason as far as I can tell.
We wanted a better catch up mechanism. More folks did them when we had 1/day than 7/week. Latter felt too much like a job.
You are simply loosing out on the bonus. Many of us can't log in every day and capping valor is hard.
Many folks can't log in every day. But some want to. Some want to play a lot on weekends. Cata didn't offer enough for them. (Source)

So from my understanding LFR makes it's decision loot depending on your spec, why am I as a holy priest getting shadow gear?
That sounds like a bug. What specific item did you get?
While you'll want mostly Spirit gear you will see gear as a healing priest without Spirit or Hit on them.
We view +int -hit gear as healer gear. Spirit is good, but the kind of thing you need in every slot, especially in later tiers.
Spirit is a must in the first tier. Any non spirit item IS NOT a healer item in this tier.
Depends on your healing style. I tend to use a lot of the cheap heals so I get away with less Spirit. Not saying ignore it.
Wrists from valor without spirit (no drop from Mogu Shan), Chest from valor withuot spirit. See the problem?
I'd be surprised if you had every piece from Mogu'shan before Heart of Fear opens up. There's a Spirit chest there. (Source)

LFD: Why can Shaman Need on Strength Shields or Warriors Need on Agility gear? Is that considered good game design?
The dungeon loot system isn't smart enough to detect differences in shields. The raid one is. (Source)

Any chance of increasing the time you have to do a bonus roll. it's too short atm.
Possibly, but we want the roll to be personal and immediate, not something you decide on after you see who wins what.
I mean seeing others items they won..doesnt effect anything for anyone else
In a non-LFR raid, legs drop and you wait to see who wins before using bonus roll to try for them. Slows everything down.

A patchnote early october said, that lvl90 could queue normal mop dungeons. Now its crossed over. What changed your mind?
It was a technical problem. Still wouldn't mind 90s runnin Mogu'shan, but we aren't going to make normals of everything.

If I queue for LFR with a wait of ~30 min, and do a scenario for ~10 min, should the time to LFR pop afterwards be ~20 or ~30?
The way it *should* work is that your other queue ticks in the background and is hopefully ready after the scenario.

Lost roll on Hunter DPS trinket 11 times now. Going on 15th hour of non stop holiday boss kills. Losing to Tanks and healers
We could use Raid Finder system for dungeons, but it doesn't support off spec like the dungeon one does.

Why do they keep failing to realize players will do fights with the least possible number of healers
If we try to make the fight about DPS and not healing, it ends up making the fight about healing because healers get sat. (Source)

Heroic dungeons are much easier in MoP compared to Cata, are you planning on increasing difficulty as MoP goes on?
Nope. That's what Challenge Modes are for. (Source)

Can we see Heroic Stormwind Stockades and Ragefire Chasm anypoint in the future?
We'd love to get more feedback about which dungeons players would love to see us revisit (and which ones need Challenge Modes) (Source)

Mists of Pandaria Flying for Alts
WTB Book of Pandaren Flying (BoA - requires level 90 to purchase) = 2400gold, PST.
We're not sure if we'll be doing this. The tome worked out well enough for Wrath of the Lich King as an experiment, but so much of the experience we spent a lot of time and effort shaping in Pandaria is negated by flying. In addition to the upcoming reputation changes for alts (when a character on the account hits Revered), we'll consider other methods of potentially speeding up the leveling process for alts, but we don't think "allow flying" is necessarily the best answer. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Updated Raid Schedule Heart of Fear & Terrace
Oct 30: Heart of Fear (N)
Nov 6: Heart of Fear Part 1 (LFR), Heart of Fear (H)
Nov 13: Terrace of Endless Spring (N), Heart of Fear Part 2 (LFR)
Nov 20: Terrace of Endless Spring (LFR), Terrace of Endless Spring (H)

This is correct. It's a similar release to what we did with Mogu'shan Vaults.

Neth, any clue as to what the ilvl requirement's will be for HOF LFR?
The iLevel for the Raid Finder will be a minimum of 470. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blingtron 4000
"The Blingtron 4000 will be fully stocked with a variety of fun items such as Party Grenades, but even better than that, it has a chance (a very, very small one) to give the gift of an Engineering mount or pet."

Does that include the Depleted-Kyparium Rocket and Geosynchronous World Spinner
You are perceptive. There is a very small non-zero chance for a mount or pet from the Blingtron 4000 Gift Package. We heard you like bling so your pal Blingtron may be getting some minor upgrades to their bling in an upcoming patch.

With plenty of bling to go around, share the happiness. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Players Botting
But why would Blizzard ban bots?
They have a active subscription and pay money.
Why would any company reduce their own income on purpose?
It doesn't make sense... Allthough I don't like so many bots either.
But for them to actualy ban most of them, and lose out on so much money
from the botter's subscription.. Would they realy do that. I don't know.
I think Nevalistis summed this up quite well: This is one of the biggest misconceptions we have, and I genuinely wish we could permanently clear it up. I'll provide a few hypothetical situations (mind you, these numbers are ENTIRELY made up).

Let's say 90% of botters were compromised accounts. This means that 90% of these botters aren't paying accounts; they're stolen accounts, which are generally fueled by stolen credit cards. These payments usually get disputed and taken back, which actually costs us money. If we're looking to make a purely fiscal observation, it makes no financial sense to let these continue (aside from the fact that we don't like compromised accounts to begin with - we want our players to be playing their own accounts safely and enjoyably).

Let's go on the other side of the fence and say 90% of these botters were otherwise legitimate players paying for their accounts, as you purport. When players bot, other players are inconvenienced by this behavior (and trust me, you guys outnumber the botters, even if you may feel it's the other way around). The inconveniences range from normal players having difficulty farming on their own to struggling to keep up with an economy that's being forcibly fluctuated via unfair advantage. When players are inconvenienced in this manner, they submit petitions.

Every petition submitted goes to a Game Master for review. A living, breathing person that is paid to provide customer service looks over it, does what's necessary for the situation (in botting cases, usually forwarding the info on to our exploitation/hacks team), and provides a response. Let's say 1-2 people are inconvenienced by a single botter (in all likelihood, we probably get many more petitions per botter than that). This would mean each botter is inconveniencing at least as many, and likely more, players that are positive to the community (the kinds of players we like and want to continue to play our game). For each botter we allow to continue botting, we potentially stand to lose more than we gain for a single subscription, just out of the sheer inconvenience it causes other players.

Even if you change those numbers around of legitimate players versus compromised accounts - we only stand to lose more if we don't take action on bots (which we do, regularly).

And that's probably the problem. If I can stand in front of a guy who's botting who has about as many achievement points as me, then the only reason why he dares to bot is because he does not feel there is a risk of losing anything by doing so.

And the worst part is that right now it's difficult to say that he isn't right.
Those who choose to believe they are above detection range far and wide, I’m sure. Possibly because they may have been getting away with it for a time. However, we investigate every single bot report that comes in. We don't usually deal with the reports immediately because the underlying issue would remain in place.

What we do is study the bots, see exactly how they do what they do, and fix it so that they don’t work anymore. Once we’ve applied the fix, then the ban waves take place. By doing it like this, we can also come up with better methods of detection, and devise systems that are more effective against bot detection and removal.

Having said that, it's an on-going fight. Botters develop new bots by working out what we detected and fixed, and it starts all over again. In the process, we’ve ruled out one way of cheating the system though. I can’t go into much more detail without providing botters with information that would help them (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Death in The Arboretum
Yes, we know it's a little awkward to get back to your corpse here, and we're looking into the placement of the graveyard nearest to the Cloud Serpent dailies. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Warrior Tanking Feedback
would like to know what about it you like over the cataclysm model.
Getting rage when you use your abilities and not when you get hit and not being constantly at max rage.
Cata felt a bit spammy, constantly hitting cleave or heroic strike to spend rage was not my favourite thing. This got to the point where some players simply macro’ed HS to devastate because it was out of the GCD and still rarely got rage starved.

I’m really enjoying tanking with my warrior right now, I did enjoy it in Cata as well I must say, but it’s just better now, revenge and shield slam feel great, and you can use the rage that they generate for when you really need to minimize damage taken, or, if you feel confident about your survivability you can use that rage with offensive abilities like heroic strike, but it’s the decision making process that I enjoy, rage doesn’t feel free anymore, you actually have to think and make a trade-off, or even predict when you need to save more rage and build it up for a moment where you know it would be effective and efficient to use a mitigation cooldown like shield barrier or shield block, that’s just good design in my opinion. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Questing
Remove class specific quest rewards? When none of the items are an upgrade, I would always chose the one that sells for most
They are all worth the same amount now. (Source)

About questing in a raid group: I'm probably missing something, but what is problematic about people forming "questing raids"?
It is so efficient that it would feel mandatory. Every realm would have a continual Golden Lotus raid etc. (Source)

Will we need to be honored with Wrathion or have to have completed the legendary questline to do his new 5.1 questline?
Wrathion's Legendary questline in 5.1 is a continuation of the 5.0 quests, so you'll have to do them all!

Are you guys happy with the daily system playing such a large role in end-game content?
I think the valor and charms feel good because you can cap them. I think rep itself would be better with a cap. (Source)

Are you considering changing the reputation system? So many dailies are burning us down from the game. Tabards back?
When we tried limits, folks said we were playing nanny. When we tried nothing, folks said they didn't have anything to do. (Source)

World
Why can I not fly in Silvermoon? I cry every time I go back...
It would take months to fix, which means you'd get less other stuff. Challenging for us to justify. Org hard but still easier. We feel like BEs have been neglected a bit lately. We won't forget them. (Source)

The problem for me is that it's one of the situations you talk a lot about avoiding; taking an existing toy away from players. (Loss of increased running speed as a ghost)
It's often easy to make players happy in the short term but not the long term, even though the latter is more important.

To help raiders prepare their schedules for next week, we wanted to give everyone a brief heads-up that the Normal mode Heart of Fear will be debuting alone on Tuesday, and the Normal mode Terrace of Endless Spring will now open two weeks following the release of Normal Heart of Fear.

To help players focus on tackling these new encounters without feeling overwhelmed, we’ve decided to stagger the release of the two remaining raid zones. Heart of Fear should prove to be a challenging zone that will take the typical group some time to master, and players must defeat the Grand Empress Shek’zeer at the end of Heart of Fear before they may move on to Terrace of Endless Spring once that zone unlocks.

The unlock schedule for Looking For Raid modes for Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring is unaffected by this change. Heroic Heart of Fear will still be accessible to players who have cleared the zone on Normal difficulty.

We'll be posting an updated schedule when Heart of Fear goes live next week like we did for Mogu'shan Vaults. It should be two weeks between Heart of Fear and Normal Terrace opening.