World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Confirmed that other abilities, like Light's Hammer is not affected by PVP Power -- but Eternal Flame is. Still would like a confirmation on whether this is a bug or not.
It sounds like a bug, but to be clear, PvP Power should do nothing for your healing in a dungeon or raid. When healing someone in a BG, Arena or in the outdoor world, PvP Power should increase your healing. The only exceptions are percent based heals, which does not include Eternal Flame or Light of Dawn. Eternal Flame should work almost exactly like Word of Glory, and I'm not sure what could account for a difference.

Hunter (Forums / Skills)
I have been working on some modeling of my own for Hunters and I would like clarification something GC posted earlier. If I remember correctly, he stated that pets should always have 25% more Focus Regen than the Hunter due to scaling from the same effects and starting at 5 Fps rather than 4 Fps.

While my experience overall agrees with this, I will say that it is not completely accurate. Specifically, Focus Fire for the BM Hunter is a full 40% Haste, giving Focus Regen. It does not appear to affect the Pet however, particularly as the Pet's listed Swing speed goes back to its base value (2/1.1/(1+Hunter's Base Haste %age)). Is the design intention that Pets follow GC's earlier post, or should GC's earlier post be taken as a general design intent that specific abilities can break. I assume the latter, but I would ask the question.
Yeah, allow me to clarify. The pet inherits 125% of the hunter’s focus regen, which is based on ranged haste. It also inherits your melee haste, which increases its attack speed. So, odd as it may be, a buff like Focus Fire or Rapid Fire (yeah, need to correct the tooltip there) which gives ranged gaste only will increase the pet’s focus regen, but not its attack speed.

Paladin (Forums / Skills)
Also, is it intended that Glyph of Protector of the Innocent (shouldn't it be Glyph of the Protector of the Innocent?) not work with Eternal Flame? Shouldn't it work with the initial heal at the very least?
Also a bug.

Prot paladin DPS relative to other tanks should be examined. Most changes to ret, and some changes to holy, affect Protection Paladins directly. EDIT: The bugfix to Eternal Flame make it somewhat unattractive to Protection. I'm a little concerned prot is going to gravitate towards Sacred Shield exclusively, especially because we have better ways to spend our Holy Power.
Prot paladin DPS is in a good place for us internally. The Ret nerfs didn't seem to drop Prot down below other tanks. Eternal Flame should feel like a slightly better Word of Glory for Prot, which is definitely a spell you do want to use. You should be able to figure out if the absorb over time from Sacred Shield provides as much defensive benefit as the hot from Eternal Flame.

Warlock (Forums / Skills)
It's being reported that the .5 ticks from Malefic Grasp & Drain Soul are benefiting from Grimoire of Sacrifice. Is this intended or a bug?
Definitely intended. That’s how we managed to get Grimoire of Sacrifice strong enough for Affliction without making it some absurd number like +200% Malefic Grasp damage. It should be updating the tooltips of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul to reflect that their extra triggered ticks deal 75% and 150% of normal damage, respectively.

Visual Overload for Melee During Raids
It's a very valid concern.

IIRC we just turned on the Emphasize my Spell Effects option on by default. There is probably still a way for mods to hook into it if it really offends you. But ultimately the difference is pretty subtle, probably too subtle.

Furthermore, the main emphasis on that option is chilling out impact effects on targets. At the time spells like Moonfire and Incinerate did very over the top visuals relative to how important it was to convey that information to the group. But much of what you're seeing now are also the effects a player has when they are casting or under the effect of a buff or the ground effects created by a lot of spells. They all make you look cool when solo, but the combined noise is just too much for large group encounters.

This has something I've been working on personally off and on with our technical director and artists. We need to revisit it and come up with some smarter solutions. I agree that we have an obligation to make this experience better.

We could certainly offer players options to tune effects up and down, and this is understandably a solution players often suggest, but we view options as the last resort. What I mean by that is that the game should play well without players having to go find the options.

Another feature we have been trying to get in forever (and are making progress, though probably not in time for 5.0 launch) is treating a target for purposes of spell impacts as the entire model and not just a point in space. Instead of all of your missiles converging on the same point, some could hit the dragon's wing or the ettin's heads. This would just be eye candy. It would have no effect on combat numbers.

If any of you want to contribute to fixing this, it would be helpful to list out specific class abilities that can be chilled out (either when other players are viewing them or sometimes even your own spell). Some visuals should be loud because they convey important information (say a priest's Sanctuary or a palafin's Divine Shield). Others are just loud.

You can list them in this thread if you'd like. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Tuning and Increased Item Drops
Just to touch briefly on the perceived 10 vs. 25 tuning: 10-player testing happened first. In many cases, in response to what we saw there, we increased the difficulty of the encounter overall, in both 10-player and 25-player mode. So now you're seeing 25-player versions that reflect buffs to mechanics that weren't in place when the 10-player versions were tested. (Edit: For a specific example, the current 10H damage of Force and Verve is precisely identical to the 25-Heroic numbers you saw today. We buffed the mechanic after 10H testing.)

The intent is for the difficulty to be comparable. While not directly relevant to difficulty or tuning, it may also be worth noting that 25-player bosses drop 6 items in both Normal and Heroic difficulty now, instead of just in Heroic, and that the 25-player versions will drop 3 set tokens, instead of the 2 seen in Dragon Soul.

Now, none of this is to say that our numbers aren't simply off the mark in many cases, but we're continuing to iterate on those numbers. For example, the melee damage dealt to tanks in the 25-player versions of many encounters was excessive, and we've been making adjustments there and will continue to do so. Specific feedback is always helpful.

After we finish with the remaining 25-player Heroic encounters that still need to be tested, we're going to go back and do a second testing pass on a number of encounters, both in 10- and 25-player mode, and in Normal and Heroic difficulty, where we feel that more data and feedback would be of use. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Minimum Item Level for First MoP Dungeons
You need an average item level of at least 358 to queue for the Normal mode of Temple of the Jade Serpent. In general, questing through a given zone should amply provide the item level you need to queue for that zone's dungeon. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Feedback
Totally agree with the second point. If damage is too high, then there is no strategy other than blow all your cooldowns and try and kill someone in 10 sec. If healing is too high, then nobody dies and you have an endless stalemate. The challenge is to keep tuning somewhere in the middle where a well orchestrated kill can overcome the healer but folks aren't just dying faster than anyone can respond. Our hope is that the addition of PvP Power and its benefit on healing will keep healing in PvP scaling with damage being done and mitigated.

For the first question, this was the result of a fix to make Charge and similar abilities harder to cheese. Before, Charge always took you to the place where the target was when you began the Charge, so that even by jumping or dismounting you could place your character away from the charger. The warrior (or whoever else) would have spent the Charge, but not actually benefited from it because you were clever enough to hit your space bar. That felt cheap and frustrating. We implemented a fix so that instead of targeting a position in the world, Charge always hits its target. Rather than freezing you in midair (which would look weird) or teleporting the charger to wherever the target ends up (which would look weird, but more importantly might give charger an exploit to move longer distances than intended) we rubber-band the target back to their location.

You have to think about this from the point of view of a server-client game. For the charger, he executes the Charge on his client, then the server acknowledges it and resolves the command. The problem is meanwhile on your client, you have Disengaged. In order to feel responsive, that happens immediately. However, a very short time later the server says "No, wait a sec. You were charged. That means you can't have Disengaged." And it moves you back in time a moment. (If it's not obvious, we have to let the server be the final arbiter of combat because clients can be hacked or go offline or whatever else.)

We understand the frustration though and it's possible we could try to make a distinction between long cooldown abilities like Disengage jumps and simply hitting the space bar. We would still likely have to teleport the charger to your final destination or retroactively cancel the charge, both of which are also going to feel weird. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums / Skills)
Potential Sudden Death Changes
There are so many suggestions here on the last couple pages that it would be hard to comment on them all. One that caught my eye is changing Sudden Death to white attacks only and increasing the percent chance. I can't think of a downside to that one and it would help improve the value of haste. We'll discuss it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Jade Spirit Enchant Concerns
That's compelling math. We'll check it out. I know we tweaked some enchants lately, and it's possible Jade Spirit was included. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills)
Recent Retribution Changes Feedback
Specifically, why take paladins of all classes and turn them into bursty glass cannons? We're heavily armored champions of the light, capable of healing ourselves and crafting nigh-impenetrable barriers out of our raw will, and yet our mechanical strengths and weaknesses mostly encourage us to sort of hide behind a rock two-thirds of the time waiting for our cooldowns to tick away in the hopes that once they do we can murder the crap out of someone before they have a chance to fight back.
I think glass cannon is debatable for a class with as many cooldowns as paladins. Warriors and rogues can be bursty as well. Anyone can be bursty who lines up a lot of cooldowns and has a full bar of resources, and warriors with Heroic Strike off the GCD and rogues with a 1 sec GCD are just two classes good at delivering on that.

If your question was more about why paladins aren't designed to be high defense, low offense, we just found that it wasn't a very fun model for our game (and tanks rather than specific classes sort of fill it already).

That's why we don't understand why our DPS CDs keep getting buffed while consistent damage goes down when the developers have to know at this point how utterly Ret Paladins can be countered by CC.
Is there a specific CD buff you're referring to? We tried to take damage down across the board, which will include attacks both during CDs like AW and without. If you're referring to buffing Holy Avenger, we just needed to that so that mathematically it was a competitive choice.

There are also a lot of requests in here to increase the damage of Hammer of Wrath, which would still just increase bursts during short windows, even if you only consider execute range and not wings.

HoW does so little damage its not even worth using in the rotation when wings are up.
I would be surprised if that was the case. How about this though: if we find that we need to increase Ret's damage, we'll definitely look at HoW as an avenue for that.

I've enjoyed playing Ret in the beta, not because it's been "OP" but because it feels more fluid. This is a sharp contrast to prot which feels much clunkier with our main attacks going to haste scaling rather than a fixed 3-second cooldown.
Can you explain why Sanctity of Battle works for Ret but not Prot?

I feel all of this retribution "Balancing" has been leaking into Protection Dps specifically threat generation but they're being relatively neglected because there are fewer Protection Paladins than Ret and even fewer of us that have a voice.
I recently mentioned that was a possibility since we had been focusing on Ret, but there were plenty of knobs to bring Prot DPS back up. Since then we tested it and found that Prot's DPS was pretty much exactly where it should be. There were situations, such as AE, where warrior DPS was much too high, but they should all be closer next patch.

I'm also noticing that Glyph of Inquisition is increasing my Crit by 10%, which isn't stated in the Glyph itself but is in the character screen and buff duration.
Inquisition itself increases crit now. Is the glyph doing it as well? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We are changing the new Vengeance model to work on unmitigated damage. This means the number is calculated without regards to armor, stance, cooldowns, etc. The net result is that any given creature should generate the same average Vengeance for all tanks. The conversion has been reduced from 5% to 2% to adjust for this change. (This is not yet on your current build.)

concerning "imortal' buffs (such as Guardian Angel, Ardent Defender) and cooldowns that allow the tank to soak an amount of dmg that would otherwise kill him (Zen Meditation, AMS) ..

how those would affect vengeance?

a) are the "entire dmg" used in the calculation? for example the boss skill does 999k dmg, but we are able to survive that with that kind of cooldown, does it account for that 999k dmg taken, skyrocketing vengeance to heavens ?

b) only the dmg taken is used on the calculation? for example, the tank with 500k hp will take 500k dmg, but the cd/buff prevents his death, and the extra dmg (that is absorbed by the cooldown) is not accounted on the vengeance?

c) while using that kind of cooldown any dmg taken will not account on vengeance?
We're not entirely sure yet of the right call here. You could theoretically dump all your survival cooldowns in order to give your tank an AP buff. Maybe that's not worth it, or maybe it's an interesting decision to help you get through the hard phase of a fight. Obviously we wouldn't want survival cooldowns to no longer be used for survival, but I suspect that won't be the case. Try and abuse it and let us know what you find.

Just wanted to point out that for guardians and blood dks that the vengeance tooltip was not updated with the removal of the 10% max health cap. The new model is in just need the tooltip update.
We just overlooked that tooltip and it is now fixed. There is no cap for any tank at this time.

Just confirming that with the new model, our starting jump up Vengeance (to prevent long ramp up) is: (UnmitigatedHit/3.75) * 50%
Yeah, that calculation should work.

Have you ever considered adding a buff to heal spec DPS that is only active while the healer is not in a group/raid? Probably the same could be asked for tank specs. Then those players are not forced into a DPS spec or slower gameplay while out grinding and questing.
The advantage of tanking when solo is supposed to be that you are very hard to kill. It's a common solo tank tactic just to pull lots of stuff at once. Similarly, healers also don't die. They might not be able to kill something in 3 GCDs, but it shouldn't take 12 either, and then they can throw a heal on themselves and go on to the next pull.

We don't want tanks and healers to do dreadful DPS when solo, and to be fair, I don't think they do. But we also don't want to see leveling guides encouraging Ret paladins or Shadow priests to swap specs just for leveling purposes.

I leveled a Resto druid as Resto through LK, and I could nuke stuff down just fine. The problems I had were with say spellcasters because I couldn't interrupt them. NPCs who could heal just kept healing themselves until they ran OOM.

If anyone feels like their healing or tanking character in the current beta build would have a lot of trouble leveling or completing daily quests while solo, please let us know.

Earlier, you mentioned that swing speeds slow down dynamically if an attack speed buff expires mid-swing. Does this also apply to temporary haste rating effects (say, a trinket proc or the elemental blast buff)? Do swings also speed up dynamically if you gain an appropriate buff mid-swing?
Yes to all of these.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills)
There appears to be a serious problem with DK rune regeneration in the current build. Our apologies. We will work on a solution as soon as we can.

Hunter (Forums / Skills)
I'm noticing that the damage on improved serpent sting seems to not match a logical formula since the patch hit. The best fit I can find to explain it is that it may be using the old serpent sting formula (9.7% RAP + 2030.22) instead of the new one (8% RAP + 1620.19). Applying that and the 100% bonus from the ability description gets me within a few damage of the expected amount, but it's still slightly off.

I can't imagine this is correct, but I was hoping you could clarify if it's a bug or if the mechanics have changed and the tooltip wasn't updated. I'm getting 12615 damage from imp sting with 18528 RAP and 9.84% mastery (and no debuffs on the target).
It was indeed using the old formula for Serpent Sting’s damage in Improved Serpent Sting. This has been fixed for the next build.

Is wild quiver proc'd when ranged attacks cast? or when they impact the target? (on cast)
When the attack successfully hits.

Can wild quiver proc from an attack that misses or is dodged? (yes)
No.

Does a wild quiver shot qualify as a ranged attach that could recursively proc another wild quiver shot? (I would think so from the tooltip)
No, it can’t proc from attacks that are procs themselves.

Do non-bow attacks (e.g., trinket procs) trigger wild quiver? (no)
No.

Is murder of crows supposed to trigger wild quiver? (I thought yes but it doesn't)
No.

Ghostcrawler look at these numbers http://www.simulationcraft.org/504/Raid_T14H.html
I think you guys kinda overshot hunter nerfs a lil don't you think? We went from being up top with Boomies and Demo locks before the nerf/patch to dead last now.
I can't debug the Simulationcraft numbers. Those guys are working very hard from what we can tell to be as accurate as possible, but when they're not, I am unable to give you explanations without a lot more information.

If you have some raid parses or something else showing hunters on the bottom, we could discuss those.

Monk (Forums / Skills)
Is Elusive Brew on your radar? I haven't crunched the numbers but I just KNOW everyone's going to be surprised when they see how much more effective it is when you use each charge as you get them.

At first glance, everyone wants to use it like Tigereye Brew (wait till high/max stacks, use it for the burst damage), but I'm theorizing that sipping it like Mana Tea suddenly converts it into a Savage Defense clone given the rate of charges that we can gain. If we time it, we can spend the charges as we gain them (1 or 2 at a time depending on how many Elusive Brew procs) on individual melee swings, greatly improving its effectiveness in a way that probably wasn't counted on considering its previous version.
You might not have the recent change yet, where we added a 9 sec self-only cooldown to the Elusive Brew button. It is still off the GCD.

Paladin (Forums / Skills)
Could we get Sacred Shield to stack?
Yes, it will stack from multiple paladins. It is still limit one per paladin.

Can Sanctity of Battle affect Avenger Shield?
Yes.

Rogue (Forums / Skills)
Recuperate does not seem to be benefiting from PvP power.
Percentage health increases shouldn't benefit from PvP power, since they already scale with your health pool. They were doing this in an earlier build, but we have since fixed it.

Shaman (Forums / Skills)
Is there a possibility you can look at giving the same treatment to Earth Shield? If you are going to allow multiple Sacred Shields on a single target, (in addition to much earlier making a similar change for Beacon and Lifebloom, etc) what is the reason Earth Shield is still limited?
We'll discuss it, but Earth Shield is really powerful.

I am 99% sure healing stream and Healing tide in some way or bugged. Before the bug where they where not geting the + 50% to water totem's they were healing for more then they are now after it was fixed. Seem's like either only geting 25% of the water totem buff or not geting the 25% to shaman heal's buff..
No, you're right. It wasn’t getting the buff to all healing. Fixed.

Elemental Blast tooltip and intention claims 3,500 yet the buff and actual gain is still 3,000 Haste/Mastery or Crit.
It is intended to be 3500. We can look into hotfixing it depending on when the next build will go out.

Healing Rain is currently gaining the buff from Unleashed Elements. Is this a bug?
No, that is intended.

Warlock (Forums / Skills)
A note for Demonology warlocks: There’s a bug in the current beta build which is preventing your Metamorphosis Melee from casting while casting other spells. You should still be able to do that, and it will be fixed for the next build.

So what's going on with Shadow Bolt? The damage it's doing isn't meshing with the spell's tooltip, or what I should be seeing when I math it all out based on my stats, and the damage it's doing is oddly consistent (26,723 to 26,724 with my current stats).
Yeah, the tooltip was wrong. Fixed for the next build.

Destruction Warlocks are once again non competitive and it seems every expansion you try and bandage fix their dps later on and it still doesn't work out. Simulationcraft has they WAY behind not other lock specs but other classes in general. Now you would think hey not every fight is standstill perhaps they will do more on multitarget or aoe fights but.......WAY behind demo and other classes there too. We've had to deal with rain of fire (aka rain of fail) for our aoe now and there still isn't a good aoe option competitively.

Now before you say: hey on single target what if you move your spec might be better there but NOPE; destro is a nuke class and benefits least from moving around. Thus this spec has no use for ANY situation over ANY lock spec. It needs a serious fix now.
I can't debug the Simulationcraft numbers. Those guys are working very hard from what we can tell to be as accurate as possible, but when they're not, I am unable to give you explanations without a lot more information.

If you have some raid parses or something else showing [your dude] on the bottom, we could discuss those.

Also, see the excellent post above by Lokrick. Don't hold up Simcraft or any theorycrafting to unrealistic expectations. Channel your energy towards helping those guys instead. Do their numbers match what your character can achieve? Do you see anything wrong with their assumptions or calculations? Just telling us that Simcraft says you are low isn't conveying any actual information to us.

I am afraid "posts Simcraft and pouts" posts are going to be added to our drinking game.

Fel flame is really expensive that it sometimes because a struggle to even weave it into our rotation. As many have said in the past, is there any possibility to bring down the cost of fel flame a little so it won't seem so painful to cast.... especially when we are low on manner.
Fel Flame isn't intended to be part of your single-target, stand and nuke rotation. It's for movement or quick kills.

Warrior (Forums / Skills)
Is enrages while enraged not proc'ing more charges of Raging Blows intended?

It is for the moment at least, but we're not crazy about it. Specifically, using Berserker Rage while Enrage is up doesn't give you more rage or Raging Blow charges. The concern was that Fury would just macro Berserker Rage into every attack. With the previous design, this wasn't worth doing because once you were enraged being more enraged wasn't valuable. Now it is. It's more intuitive (and probably fun) if Berserker Rage always grants a charge, but we want Berserker Rage to be a button warriors actually use, not macro. Another option would be to put Berseker Rage on the GCD, but we thought this would feel even worse. If we become convinced warriors won't macro Berserker Rage, we'll happily revert the change.

Enough smart players have stepped up to the plate to convince us that this probably won't be a problem (in other words, that you could macro Berserker Rage but optimal play is not to), so we are going to revert this change. Berserker Rage will grant a charge of Raging Blow and rage even if you are already enraged.

As an aside, we are also going to try warrior stances off the GCD again, but with a 3 sec shared cooldown. This should allow you to shift stances for short periods without a damage loss because of the spent GCD, but not for individual attacks.

Recent Vengeance Changes
We don't want tanks to do awesome damage just for being tanks. We want tanks to do awesome damage when they are actually tanking. That remains the governing philosophy behind the design.

Remember, Vengeance doesn't exist to give tanks something fun to do. It exists solely to make sure tank threat stays high when DPS characters are gearing for higher DPS while the tanks gear primarily for survival. Tanks only need to generate high threat when they are tanking, and typically threat is the most important on the most dangerous opponents, which also tend to be those who hit the hardest.

As an aside, if I was able to design WoW solely for me, threat would still be an important stat to gear for. Raiders would scoff at tanks who stacked only Stamina as being bad tanks because they couldn't hold aggro. It was fun for me back in BWL to try to generate higher threat than the warlocks. I don't think it was that fun for the warlocks though. I don't think it was that fun for the rest of the raid when I screwed up e.g. my Heroic Strike use and caused us to wipe without them feeling like they could do anything to resolve the situation except stop DPS. Fortunately, I recognize that WoW would have far fewer players if I got to design it totally around what I find fun.

It would be nice if your successful Taunt granted some Vengeance.
We're toying with that idea. It would be a percent of Vengeance of the character you taunted off of, not just free AP.

The scenario we want to avoid is Tank A is tanking, and Tank B taunts off, but then avoids three boss hits in a row. The boss is likely to go back to Tank A. The avoidance wouldn't be a problem if it came later on, because we average things out, but if it happens early on, we have nothing to average.

You could have solved that if you just gave everyone threat drops. Why would that have been such a problem? Even now I run into bad thanks that can't hold threat off my Warrior or DK, and I have to sit there doing nothing because one special attack will rip threat.
I don't think that really solves the problem. If dumping your cooldown regularly was necessary then it would almost become part of your DPS rotation which doesn't seem like it's adding much gameplay. If dumping your cooldown was something you only did when the boss turned to attack you, then it would still be really sub-optimal to have the boss always bolting around, cleaving, breathing or whatever else to the group. I think you'd still just want to keep the boss on the tank and have the raid do slow DPS.

And lastly, Threat being fun back in Vanilla (and it was) was only possible because the dungeons required you to understand and react to it.
I'm not sure it was fun in vanilla. It was fun for me because I was a tank. I see mostly tanks say it was fun. I haven't seen too many DPS players say it was fun to try not to do so much DPS that they caught up with the tank.

I know "scaling" is the fall guy for just about anything, and it's the most over (and wrongly) used word on the forums...
Totally agree with that. The rest of your post was good too, but I believe we have fixed the differing mitigation problem.

I think I started writing a reply to the Vengeance topic earlier, but I deleted it. Just didn't seem like my voice would matter, because I'm fairly sure I come down on the opposite side of Blizz in regard to the topic of Tank damage. My feeling is low Tank damage is one of the contributing factors to the insufficient Tank supply and that many Tanks would enjoy doing much higher damage.
"Every voice matters." I disagree with you a little about tank shortage. I think it is almost entirely because tanks have a lot of responsibility to set the pace of things, know the boss mechanics and often even have to explain them to others.

This game has spectacular framework and is bar none the best game I have played, however sometimes I feel like you really don't understand what we find fun.
A little off topic, but I would argue that perhaps you don't realize that some players find fun things that you don't find fun.

1) Tanks need a way to scale up their threat output as DPS gear up into threat stats only while tanks take primarily defensive stats (even in this new active mitigation model it seems).

2) The current versions of vengence on both live and beta have similar problems and quirks that make it "not fun" to quest in a tank spec, or to have to deal with tank swaps.

One hundred percent agree that point 1 is important. That was the genesis of Vengeance. We don't think tanks need high damage in order for questing to be fun, and you can even argue that it's not important for tanks to be good at questing. (I'm not arguing that specifically, but I don't think it's a hard argument to make.) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Upcoming Beta Hotfixes
Update on this issue: We'll be applying a hotfix overnight that should fix the Death Knight rune regen issues, and also should address the odd "phasing" issues that were present throughout testing today. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Launcher Now Downloading Data For MoP Update
I'm just popping in here to confirm that the background download for Mists of Pandaria content has begun. It's like September 25 is getting closer every day... (!)

By the way, answers to a lot of common questions about the Blizzard Background Downloader can be found here: http://us.battle.net/support/en/arti...downloader-faq

It's a good read for troubleshooting and general information.

any info as to the end of the pvp season ?
We'll notify you (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists Of Pandaria Leveling Speed
FYI, instance leveling is very very slow compared to questing, so much so there has been numerous amounts submitting bug / feedback reports regarding the XP gained.
The developers haven't done yet the final pass on experience balance for the beta. So some dungeons, quests, etc might feel off. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Conveniences and Things to Do In WoW
You're forcing people to grind the rep to exalted multiple times if you require exalted with the rep to use the mount. If you make the mounts all BoA and don't require the exalted rep on a toon to use said mount, I'd be fine. But until a decision regarding that is made, I'm 10000000000% against this system. On top of this, you made the new dragons mounts require the skill you get from hitting Exalted. There's ANOTHER thing you HAVE to grind to exalted on ALL your toons if you intend to use one of the best looking mounts in game that you ALREADY had to grind to get. It's just ridiculous. You keep talking about choices, but when it comes to rep, A. Not Account Wide. B. You do it this way, or you don't get to do it at all.
I believe all of the faction mounts are account wide.

Our basic philosophy is that you don't have to get exalted to earn the best gear. Earning revered, even with every faction, isn't that daunting for someone who wants to log in and play regularly. Exalted is about prestige and vanity rewards, of which are best are often mounts. We want those mounts to take some amount of effort but they also aren't something you "need" in the game in order to do other content. I don't think it will be a brutal grind, and ideally you'll have fun along the way, but at the end of the day we want the game to be about playing to earn rewards, not just earning rewards, if that makes sense.

This is further reinforced by removing 310% flight from What a Long Strange Trip it's Been. If I spend an entire year getting the achievements on multiple toons (because I don't want cooking or fishing on one toon for instance), then I should get it on all toons. You guys told us LESS THAN A YEAR AGO that 310% was indeed a perk for WALSTIB. So a lot of people have been working towards it since then BECAUSE you told us.
We had to change that design though in order to allow account-wide mounts, which we suspected would be an even more popular feature. With account-wide mounts, every alt you ever made would have 310% flying for free had we not made that change. We want playing an alt to be about playing an alt, and not having that alt immediately as powerful as your main (though there certainly are a lot of shortcuts).

When players start getting forced to play every single day just to keep pace, you no longer have a game, you have a job.
I agree with that overall, but the definition of "forced" is pretty slippery. Some players might feel forced to play because they really, really want a nice mount.

I fundamentally believe, though there is a fair bit of data to back it up, that players lose interest when they can no longer progress their character. There are two main ways you can fail to progress. One is that you finish everything and there is nothing else to do. The other is that the tasks you want to do feel so insurmountable that you lose the urge to try. The former can be a problem if content is too gated and players are held back too often. The latter can happen when encounters feel impossible or the grind seems never ending. The challenge is to strike the right balance where players who can't play a lot feel like they aren't falling far behind, but players who want to play a lot feel like they have something to do. We can't cater to either extreme and just dismiss the other.

Those players who are complaining about nothing to do have plenty to do. Their problem is they aren't doing it. They are generally focused on one type of content (usually raiding) to the exclusion of all other. When they run out of new raid content, when they've received all the loot they want, they sit there and complain about nothing do it.

They could be going back to do the existing faction dailies but they don't. They could be farming old content for fun and maybe items to sell on the AH for transmog but they don't. They could be questing to experience the lore and storylines that have changed since the release of WoW, and especially in the Old World zones for Cata, but they don't. They could be engaging in Archaeology or fishing but they don't. They could be doing Arena or rated BGs with friends, but they don't.

Their complaints are all based on not having enough of one specific type of content when WoW is home to multiple types.
There is always more to do in the game if you look for it. Theoretically, I could tell a player that they could organize a huge roleplaying event on their server, or try to kill every boss in the game in one day, or try to /hug every NPC in Kalimdor, but that may not be anything they are interested in. Players are actually fantastic at creating their own fun -- just look at stuff like the Ironman challenge. But again, that's not going to appeal to everyone.

One of the challenges we have with maxing out professions or completing achievements or leveling alts or playing BGs is that players have done it all before. Sure, with a new expansion they'll have an opportunity to do some of that content again, and if we're lucky some of it will feel fresh, but overall we think we need to offer new plays to play as well. Then, we also have to structure the reward system in such a way that goal-oriented players are interested in pursuing that content in order to earn those rewards. That is ultimately how the endgame of MoP came to be designed.

We understand the concern from players with many alts that while Valor of the Ancients provides a form of Valor catch up for alts, that we could stand to have a Faction catch up for alts. That's a reasonable request and something we will investigate.

To state our philosophy very simply, leveling four characters should require a lot more work than leveling one character, but there is no reason it needs to take four times as long. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Content Difficulty and Consumption Speed
extra mechanics. take rogues and druids, stealth through the dungeon. take a shaman healer, use Symbosis or whatever on him / her, they get stealth. run through the dungeon and kill crap. That's basically your extra mechanics.
Except for the fact that there're requirements through the challenge dungeons that force you, among other things, to kill a set number of creatures on the dungeon to complete the objective, so ignoring pulls won't net you anything.

Also, you want challenging content, and your answer to that challenging content is that, rather than doing it you'd just stealth through it...

Why should "bud" have similar rewards than those that dedicate alot more time into mastering the game? Its like paying for a vacation while the next gets maybe a day less of the same vacation but has to pay alot less. I would feel like getting kicked in the balls.
Except he doesn't. Hardcore raiders have heroic titles, heroic only bosses/bosses with heroic only phases, heroic mounts, achievements for those heroic kills. "Bud" wouldn't get that on the LFR.

Curiosity: Initially this mode appealed to me. And then it dawned. Let's say I make my A-team for this, run through it, get gold. What reason is there to go back? In other words, what is the replay value of this extra mode (rehashed nonetheless)?
If noone on your realm ever beats your time, none. If you don't care about getting to the top of the table for that dungeon in your realm, none.

In the other hand, if you want to show that your team is simply the best, you'll probably keep going back many times, as with gear normalization there's just no other way to do it faster than through improving efficiency.

How hypocritical of you, as always. Challenge mode's purpose is to finish the dungeon as fast as possible. That means that any way to do it is to be taken into account in order to do it asap.
If you go out of your way (not you, specifically) to ask for challenging content and speak about how much you love challenging, difficult content, but then proceed to say that you'd just skip the pulls in those dungeons, then something doesn't add up. Because in fact, what you'd be doing by skipping pulls, is making your way through difficult content by just not fighting it, which doesn't sound (at least to me) like actually wanting to face challenging content.

Honestly for challenge modes I was just expecting and wanting really tough bosses/pulls. Not arcade style speed runs.
I'll reiterate it again: Challenge mode is tuned higher than Heroic, there's additional pulls and mechanics, and there's a criteria you need to fulfill (similar to Scenarios) in order to complete the challenge. In that criteria there's a number of creatures to be defeated inside that dungeon. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Legendary Items
I feel like there is a lack of legendary items. Obviously this is because they are meant to be super rare and I understand this...Keep them very hard to get and taking the majority of the expansion to farm for.
Would the legendaries just end up as 'the' weapons to have for each class though? To the point where people wouldn't be considered for guilds/raids unless they have it, assuming the updated stats were as good as they were originally. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Suggestion: White-Worgen
It’s a cool idea and we might consider it for the future, although right now, we don’t really have any plans to implement additional worgen color options. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills)
Retribution Changes
The easiest way to handle this is to tell us:

What was your damage before?
What is your damage now?
What do you think your damage should be?
Is someone beating you that you think should not be?

Numbers are going to go up and numbers are going to go down until launch, and possibly after. It's going to be an exhausting few weeks if every number change we do launches threads that I'd characterize as "Don't nerf me bro."

also about all those damage reductions do you guys do that incrementally while testing or reduce damage now and test later??? Seems to me it's more of a nerf everything now and do testing exclusively later then if it doesn't work bring it back! Correct me if I'm wrong on this!
No, we do a lot of testing and agree on which specs need to come up or down and then figure out the best strategy to adjust that damage. We are doing more across-the-board buffs or nerfs these days (or hitting passives) since we aren't in most cases trying to change priorities or rotations, just hitting overall DPS.

A really typical situation for us to be in at this stage in development is that DPS gradually crept up because inflated damage numbers were covering up for a lot of bugs. Now that those bugs are all getting fixed, and now that things like underpowered talents, glyphs, set bonuses and the like have been adjusted, then DPS has inched up for almost everyone. At this point we have nerfed almost every class except rogues and Feral druids, who just happened to be pretty close to our target numbers already. (I'm guessing Arms will be okay or need buffs, but we're not there yet.)

No, not really. That's why you need numbers. Which you still didn't give. What does middle-of-the-pack dps mean in the context of beta? What if the top half are all the untuned specs?
Yeah. And if middle of the pack is offensive, then who exactly should be middle of the pack? Healers? Then who is at the bottom?

The danger of displaying DPS in a stack rank (which is what World of Logs and most sites do, as wonderful as they are overall) is that it's a stack rank. If you're middle of the pack but the guy on top is 200 DPS ahead of you, that's not really a difference, though it can be arresting when displayed visually.

I'm not trying to sound patronizing, but a strategy we use is to divide things into buckets. Look at the bars that are close together and put those into buckets. If the Shadow priest, Ret paladin and Enhance shaman bars are all close together, then put them into a bucket and call that "high dps" even if the Ret is above the shaman. If the next series of bars looks noticeably smaller, cluster those together and call them "medium dps." There might be one bucket or there might be 5-6, but even in a 25-player raid you don't often see 25 buckets.

That's YOUR job and YOUR job only to ensure all classes are on an even plane. It's our job to report our findings with the class we play. This isn't a "Don't nerf me bro." thread idiot.
Are we calling each other names now? That could be fun. Tragically, I have moderators on my side, so I'll probably win.

We're totally comfortable doing our jobs. We have targets for DPS and we strive to hit them. We also appreciate feedback from the community and we give you an opportunity to point out potential problems. However, if you want to convince us that we need to change our numbers, the burden of proof is on you. We're not going to seek permission from the community to balance the game the way it needs to be balanced.

You said "Damage before was higher than damage now." Yes, we know. We nerfed the damage. Is it too low now? Why? By how much? What's your argument? If anyone could just post on the forums "My damage is too low now," and we had to buff based on that, we'd be in an interesting (but perhaps very entertaining) situation.

HoW being usable throughout AW is a key Paladin attribute.
We think using Hammer of Wrath during Avenging Wrath was a fun change for paladins that made wings more than just a percent increase to all damage. I'm not sure we would immediately buff Hammer of Wrath if we left it only as an execute. I understand that Execute and Shadow Word: Death are fun, but we don't really want Hammer of Wrath to be a mirror of those abilities. We have enough mirrored abilities already.

I can appreciate that it's a change you would make if you were in my shoes. I fully acknowledge that this is a very subjective business. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums / Skills)
Double Time Changes
Double Time works like Roll or DK runes. We are still struggling a little bit with how to describe the "charge" mechanic, which works fairly intuitively once you play with it. We're really trying to avoid "Your Charge has two charges."

(We heard you liked Charge, so you can charge while you Charge....) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Over the next few days, we will be testing quite a number of raid encounters.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

Friday, August 10th
Feng the Accursed (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Heroic
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Blade Lord Ta'yak (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Normal
12:00 PDT (15:00 EDT, 21:00 CEST)

Garalon (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Heroic
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

Elegon (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Normal
16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

Saturday, August 11th
Wind Lord Mel'jarak (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Heroic
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Protectors of the Endless (Terrace of Endless Spring) - 25 Player Heroic
12:00 PDT (15:00 EDT, 21:00 CEST)

Gara'jal the Spiritbinder (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Heroic
13:30 PDT (16:30 EDT, 22:30 CEST)

Imperial Vizier Zor'lok (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Heroic
15:00 PDT (18:00 EDT, 24:00 CEST)

Sunday, August 12th
Amber-Shaper Un'sok (Heart of Fear) - 25 Player Heroic
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Spirit Kings (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Heroic
12:00 PDT (15:00 EDT, 21:00 CEST)

Tsulong(Terrace of Endless Spring) - 25 Player Heroic
14:00 PDT (17:00 EDT, 23:00 CEST)

Monday, August 13th
Stone Guard (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Heroic
10:30 PDT (13:30 EDT, 19:30 CEST)

Will of the Emperor (Mogu'shan Vaults) - 25 Player Heroic
13:00 PDT (16:00 EDT, 22:00 CEST)

Lei Shi (Terrace of Endless Spring) - 25 Player Heroic
16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT, 01:00 CEST)

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session or cancel it entirely, due to bugs, builds, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Given the breadth of this testing session, it's perhaps more likely than usual that one of these sessions will need to be rescheduled or switched to a different boss. We'll keep this thread updated with any such modifications.

It’s time to see which arena team reigns supreme in the 2012 European World of Warcraft Invitational at gamescom!

Discover the intense thrill of 3v3 arena combat as you watch eight of the best World of Warcraft arena teams in Europe duke it out to determine the top dog. See as players like Khuna, Braindeadly, and Hoty fight epic battles for a piece of the $30,000 USD prize pool, with the top two teams moving on to represent Europe at the Battle.net World Championship in China!

With ReDeYe hosting the tournament and Azael and Conradical casting the matches, you’re sure to be on the edge of your seat every second.

You can see the action starting at 10:00 CEST on Sunday, August 19 at the Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany. The tournament will take place at the Turtle Entertainment booth and be streamed live on the big screens at the Blizzard booth.

If you’re not able to make it to gamescom in person, don’t worry – you can check out the free 720p ESL stream online. No matter which way you choose to watch, you won’t want to miss the electrifying battles as these pros compete for glory.

Click here for more information on Blizzard’s activities at gamescom 2012, or visit the official gamescom site for info on the event.

We're not making any changes to the way RaF bonuses function, which means monks won't be excluded from receiving the benefits of RaF when Mists of Pandaria is released.

Will they still get realm first achievements?
Yes.

Will Scroll of Resurrection be available to instant level a monk to 80?
No. That's answered here.

Is the World Event for the Attack on Theramore Isle going to be available for testing soon?
We are not currently planning on opening this up for public/beta testing. That may change but for right now we're testing it internally.