World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

War Banner
I know a lot of you are concerned about the 30% crit increase from the Skull Banner.

It’s a number we're iterating on, and the ability isn't even finalized yet. Our hope is that the duration is short enough that it doesn’t have the impact of say Bloodlust and the radius is small enough that it might be used to hit melee only. Another variation we're trying is a 10% crit group buff, but and a 20 or 30% buff to the warrior, so that it doesn’t feel anemic to the warrior but doesn’t feel mandatory for the group.

The banner can be targeted and killed, but it has about 33% of the warrior’s health, so it can’t be easily "stomped" as a totem would be, and may not be worth attacking at all, given how long banner durations are.

Anyway, we don’t want banners to feel like totems. Perhaps categorizing “anything I place in the world” as a totem is a slightly narrow perspective? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Protection Specs and PvP
We've always wanted players to PvP as tank specs, and that can be a lot of fun, but tank spec PvP should be effective via an array of defensive and control abilities, not because of damage-dealing potential. It is our design intent that, overall, tanks have to sacrifice some DPS in order to make use of all their other strengths.

For comparison, many players would cry foul if healing specs did as much or more damage than DPS specs in PvP, and we want the same situation for tanks. In Battlegrounds, tanks often carve out a very interesting role, such as running the flag, or teaming up with a healer and capturing a node, or tanking an NPC. In Arenas, it is much harder to provide tanks with a compelling role, since the typical arena match often boils down to which team better executes a strategy of focusing fire on enemies. A tank is ultimately a target that nobody wants to focus down, who also can’t contribute as much to focusing down others. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Press Event
The press event occurs over several days. This allows us to schedule developer interviews (with press and fansites) as well as give everyone we invite the time to get on our demo stations, talk with the developers, and (more importantly) process the information they learn so they can post it in a way that they are happy with. While we could just tell people they’re free to start posting as soon as they get in and see things, it puts pressure on them to do just that, and many media outlets appreciate having some time to craft their stories. It also makes it unfair to other media outlets and fansites that aren’t scheduled to attend the event until the second or third day.

In short, it's not as easy as opening the doors and saying, "Here you go everyone!" These events take a lot of planning not only for us, but for those we invite to attend, and we want to make sure that we give everyone the best opportunity possible to get everything they can out of the event. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria and a Return to Community
This isn't the first nor the last time we will see a discussion about community and the sense of community, I'm sure, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's important though that we keep these discussions constructive however.I'm going to channel some Ghostcrawler for you this morning and see if we can open up the discussion a bit.

Keeping a sense of community while still meeting the needs of the community as a whole is a huge challenge for us. We fundamentally believe that having a sense of community is an important thing for the long-term health of the game. However, we don’t think the way to foster that community is to force players to spam global channels trying to find groups. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder have enabled a lot more players to run dungeons and raids regularly and we’d be very reluctant to ever go back to a world without them.

The trick for us is trying to grow a stronger sense of community despite having global queuing features that will likely pair you with strangers you may never play with again. We believe players generally have more fun and stick with the game longer when they play with friends. The queue systems are a substitute for when you don’t have enough friends (or even enough friends online at the moment) to participate in that content. We aren’t trying to, and wouldn’t want to, turn WoW into a solo game. These systems are merely to facilitate a need to connect more easily with players interested in tackling this content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

War Banner
We made it a banner for a couple of reasons. We thought the demoralizing and mocking mechanics were more useful if the warrior could place them somewhere else. For example, imagine a warrior (and not just a tank) using the Mocking Banner to direct incoming adds over to where the tank is currently standing. Now Skull Banner doesn’t strictly have to be a banner, since the warrior will probably want to benefit from it most of the time, but we left it as a banner for one pretty cool reason: since the banner is an ally, you can Intervene to it (!). That opens up some cool gameplay options.

Ultimately, we wanted to try and expand the design potential for warriors a bit. Increasingly, it seemed that any new ability had to be another type of movement, a weapon strike, or shout, or it wouldn’t feel like a warrior ability. We wanted to try something new, and we're hoping that warriors will give them a shot once we’re in beta and let us know how it feels. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Protection Spec and PvP
We don't have a problem with players choosing to PvP as tank specs, but if they do, then we want them to be effective because of their defensive and control abilities, not because of their damage-dealing potential. It's intentional that, overall, tanks have to sacrifice some DPS in order to make up for their other strengths.

For comparison's sake, we don't think it would be cool if healing specs did as much or more damage than DPS specs in PvP, and the same is true for tanks. In Battlegrounds, tanks often do have a role, whether it’s running flags, defending a node or tanking NPCs. It is much harder to provide tanks a role in Arenas since the strategy ultimately revolves around focusing down enemy players. Nobody wants to try to focus down a tank, and tanks typically can’t contribute as much to focusing down enemy targets.

I'm not so much for debates, because design isn't about rhetorical prowess, it's about making the game the best it can be for all players, not simply those who can make a compelling case on the forums. Because of how personal (even emotional) the experience of playing a character is, sometimes it's hard to see over the fence into someone else's yard. We have to keep an eye on the whole neighborhood. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Still waiting....
There will be plenty of information coming out of the press tour. This week, is all about getting that information to the media and fansites so they can show you what they've learned next week. I am not going to get into specifics of what is going to be covered, but you can be assured, it's what some would call a plethora of information. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)