World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

With the next patch to the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta, we will be temporarily removing the Jade Forest zone. We’re going to be making improvements to the zone, and want to put the focus of testing on other areas during this time.

As a result, starting with this next beta patch (which is coming soon™), you will find that you are no longer able to enter Jade Forest. If you have any characters that are hanging out in Jade Forest when the zone is disabled, they will be automatically ported out to the following locations:

• Valley of the Four Winds (for Horde characters)
• Krasarang Wilds (for Alliance characters)

Characters that need experience to continue testing can visit either Orgrimmar or Stormwind. In each faction city, there will be an NPC that provides a quest which will reward enough XP to boost your characters from 85 to 86, as well as send you to Valley of the Four Winds to continue questing from there.

We expect Jade Forest to be offline for an extended period of time; we’ll provide further details as we progress with our updates to the zone. Thank you for testing Mists of Pandaria!

In preparation for the upcoming launch of the real-money auction house, we will be updating the Diablo® III Auction House Terms of Use and Battle.net Terms of Use to cover some key changes related to the account-security measures required to use Battle.net Balance. Later today, the following updates will be made to the Terms of Use available on our website, and when the real-money auction house goes live, all players will be asked to re-read and accept these changes the next time they play Diablo III.

Battle.net Balance and Authenticator Update
With the introduction of the real-money auction house, account security will become more important than ever. To help ensure that players have a positive experience when using the real-money auction house, we’ve made some adjustments to how players can use and access their Battle.net Balance.

Starting today, in order to use Battle.net Balance, players will be required to have a Battle.net Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator attached to their Battle.net account. For clarity, this means you’ll need to have an Authenticator to add to your balance via Battle.net Account Management or to send the proceeds of your real-money auction house sales to your Battle.net Balance.

Please note that players who previously added Battle.net Balance to their account prior to this change will be able to use it to make eligible purchases on Battle.net and in the auction house without attaching an Authenticator. However, an Authenticator will be required to add to your balance in the future, as explained above.

While we understand that this may be an inconvenience for some players, we want to ensure that players feel confident when using Battle.net Balance to make auction house transactions.

You can learn more about the Battle.net Authenticator, Battle.net Mobile Authenticator, and other account security information by clicking here.

Why Not Add Head Enchants to Inscription?
Part of the logic in getting rid of the head enchant was to make it easier for players to use their gear. Gems, enchants and reforges all have their place but too much of that sort of preparation before you can actually use an item gets annoying. I'm not saying freeing up one head enchant solves that problem, but it's a small step. I don't know that enchanting the helmet in and of itself is so much fun that we need to preserve it. I think in the meeting where we discussed cutting the enchant there might have even been a little bit of cheering.

In addition, we're not saying we'll never make head enchants again. Maybe we'll come up with a clever use for them or maybe we'll come up with some kind of system that needs a different kind of reward (this was the original genesis of the enchants back in the day). It would be harder to implement such a design if we had to go take the head enchants away from one of the professions. For now, the idea will just go back in the vault. It may not be there forever. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Testing Heroic Dungeons
We're still investigating the stuck character issue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

New Beta Scenarios Feedback Forum
Hey all! We hope you're enjoying some of the new features we've added to the beta recently. And, to that end, we've opened up a Beta Scenarios forum so you can let us know what you think of this new system.

Don't be stingy with the feedback! We're very excited about scenarios and look forward to hearing what you have to say about them over the course of testing. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Orgrimmar Layout Organization
It's a bit more "organized" since Garrosh took the reins. Though, his organization style may not be the most impartial. After awhile you get used to where things are and how to get there. The same goes for Undercity (even though people say they get lost there.)

They're like any city you visit for the first time. It's going to take you a bit to figure out where the bank is, or where the auction house is, how to get to flight masters etc, but after a bit, it will be like coming "home". (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Death Knight (Forums)
Compendium of Issues
Death runes were designed to provide flexibility to an otherwise inflexible rune resource. By making abilities directly cost death runes, this flexibility is lost.
Only to an extent. (Abilities like Blood Tap were really the intended solutions for flexibility.) Death Runes were also included just to add variation to the rotation so that it didn't become so predictable and metronome-like: Frost, Unholy, Blood, Blood, Frost+Unholy, Repeat.

Adding a Death Rune cost to some abilities is an elegant way to allow all 3 specs to fit an attack into their rotations. Otherwise, you'd see a lot of "Costs 2 Blood for Frost, and 1 Unholy and 1 Frost for Unholy" and so on. Some of these abilities are also talents -- if you hate Death Rune costs, skip over them.

Unholy's execute is much stronger than Frost's. In a vacuum, that sounds OK. You just have unholy do less damage in pre-execute stages, right? Damage is damage, right? But no, actually it causes all kinds of problems.
We just don't agree that these are really problems. Some classes and specs do more damage during Execute phases and some don't. We don't want every spec to perform equally in every possible situation (largely because the only reasonable way to deliver on that would be for everyone to work exactly the same). We just want reasonable players to feel like they can choose the spec they want to play. We don't anticipate a great deal of "Okay everyone, switch to Frost for this fight," or at least not because of Soul Reaper.

Why do 2H frost and DW frost have to play differently, when it has proven impossible to balance? Why can't switching from DW to 2H be a purely cosmetic change?
Because it's boring. Why not make switching from Frost to Unholy spec be purely cosmetic since that would be easier to balance too? We like that dual-wield (for any class) feels faster and that frequency of auto attacks influences your overall rotation. It adds interest for a DK who wants to try something else. It lets a player wonder if that shiny new axe that dropped is worth swapping to a different rotation or not.

Believe me, if we could go back to a world where equipping an axe felt different than equipping a sword, we'd do that too. It has just been historically challenging for us to provide enough weapons for everyone. Providing 1H Str weapons as well as 2H Str weapons hasn't been a serious issue.

Lastly, DKs already have 4 separately refreshing resources to manage (blood, frost, unholy runes and runic power). No other class in the entire game has more than two. Monks originally had three, but this was reduced to two because it was "too confusing". Asking DKs to manage death runes means we will now have five.
While we continue to tweak it, overall we like the DK resource model. It's definitely not a class for players who don't like resource management. The issue with the monk wasn't the number of resources -- there is nothing inherently magical about having 1 or 3 or 6 resources -- it's that the overall package wasn't intuitive. Players weren't sure if they were supposed to save up black and white chi or just use them as they came in. The monk abilities were also individually pretty complex, which is why we thought the resource model could be simpler. For DKs, several of the abilities are just various forms of damage and it's the resource model that provides the depth. Yet most DKs seem to grasp the basic mechanic of cheap diseases being necessary in order to make the more expensive double rune "finishers" do decent damage.

Frost presence is too good. It forced you to degrade base runic power generation way too far. DW frost is 100% GCD-locked at all times..
We agree this is a problem. We think it would feel better if Frost Presence didn't provide so much Runic Power. The problem is that it has to in order to be competitive with Unholy Presence. It would be goofy if, in order to compete with Frost Presence, Unholy Presence only lowered the cooldown of abilities by 0.1 sec.

One potential solution we might try is just to give Frost and Unholy Presence a 1 sec GCD (or all DKs for that matter), lower the Runic Power from Frost Presence and give Unholy Presence a different bonus. We generally have shifted classes that are resource constrained to having a 1 sec GCD, and most existing DKs are already pretty used to it.

(As an aside, it's interesting from a game design nerd point of view to look at the history of stances / presences / auras / seals / aspects / armors in WoW and even other games. Usually when there is supposed to be a choice between two modes that convey different bonuses, there nearly always ends up not being a choice, or else the answer becomes to stance dance frequently. With the exception of needing to be in "healer mode" or "tank mode" the overall modal design has some non-trivial problems. But I digress.)

While I admire the persistence of my fellow DKs, and agree fully with the above issues, I can't help but look at the plethora of ignored threads that exist and throw my hands up in despair.
Not helpful. You guys have an enormous capacity to influence the quality of these forums. We're not going to ban our way to a higher level of discussion, nor are the busy developers going to post every time someone feels neglected. Post your feedback. If you have done so, then consider your job done. Once you go from posting feedback on the game to posting about about how we have not yet responded to or acted upon your feedback, then you are doing damage to the forum discussion. Think like a good newspaper or magazine writer - make sure the most important part of your message gets across. Don't distract from that message with a bunch of clutter or needless posts (including shameless bumps).

Consider this: it is not in your best interest to make it harder for community managers or developers to find actionable, detailed, constructive feedback.

I try not to make it a habit of posting in really whiny threads, so if you don't get a response, that is certainly one potential reason why. It's far more likely though that we are just really busy and reading takes much less time than responding.

Unholy will have the best execute in the game by a fairly large margin. The spec was balanced around its extremely strong execute. That means that the spec does pretty terrible damage when not in execute range.
Last I looked, Soul Reaper is like 7% of Unholy damage and 4% for Frost. If you guys think the numbers work out differently, then let us know, but it's helpful to provide documentation. (Please understand that the class team doesn't have the bandwidth to debug everyone's theorycrafting - it's nothing personal.) Frost vs. Unholy DPS is pretty close in our internal tests. Once we see more players posting beta fight parses, we'll make sure our internal tests match reality.

Besides, single-minded Fury warriors probably have "the best execute in the game by a fairly large margin."

Could you please address our Level 90 talents as they relate to PvE content? Is it your intention that this is a PvP-only tier?
It's a narrow-minded view, IMHO, to call anything that isn't +damage a PvP ability. There are plenty of raid bosses where crowd control is vital. It's really useful in challenge modes and scenarios as well. If you're running relatively easy content and never crowd controlling anything, then no, crowd control abilities aren't going to be as useful to you, but if every ability in WoW has to be +damage and every encounter has to be only about how quickly you DPS something down, then that narrows our design space quite a bit.

The problem with the DK 90 row when it did damage was then all of those abilities had to be factored into DPS rotations, which meant you were balanced around using them on cooldown, which also meant they likely weren't available when you did need to Gorefiend's Grasp someone. (This point isn't just relevant to DKs either.)

Abilities costing death runes isn't intuitive or even interesting. It's complexity for the sake of complexity.
You're entitled to your opinion of course, but we thought it was less confusing than having Necrotic Strike and Soul Reaper cost different resources for different specs, or worse, having three differently named abilities that essentially did the same thing. We could have tried a Runic Power implementation, but then the abilities would be used more frequently than we intended, so they'd also need longer cooldowns or something else and they'd compete with abilities like Frost Strike. It's just a different design.

What happened with our windfury raid haste buff? Is it gone for good or coming back at some stage?
Yes, it's just a bug that it's missing. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter (Forums)
Ranged Weapon Visibility
Ranged weapons will show up sheathed on your back. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums

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