Mastery Enchants on Characters Under Level 80
We're actually modifying Windsong to not proc Mastery for players below level 80. It will always proc either Crit or Haste.
For flat Mastery enchants... maybe don't put them on characters that don't have Mastery yet. (
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Connected Realms and Faction Balance
While faction balance is one of the factors that will be taken into account when deciding on which realms we will connect, we will most likely not see a perfect faction balance on the connected realms in the end. The reason for this is that the Alliance is generally the most popular faction on PvE realms, while it is the Horde that is the most popular on PvP realms... and we cannot connect PvE with PvP realms. (
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Arena Pass Title and Pet
The rated phase has ended, but the plan is to keep the realms up for a while. It is no longer possible to do games that count towards the pet or title.
Just highlighting this to ensure that everyone is aware that the rated phase has now concluded. Any games that are played outside of the rated phase won't count towards the pet or title reward, so you can't gain credit towards either of these anymore.
Just so you know though; the realm will be sticking around for a while yet, so you can definitely feel free to sign up and play some epic PvP action! (
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Shaman (
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Patch 5.4 Elemental Shaman RNG
Isnt half the problem the mastery duplicate coupled with haste induced ticks on their flame shock giving so many free instants? echo of elements was only half the issue.
Several things compounded to create the complaints that we have been seeing for Elemental Shamans, Echo of Elements and Lava Surge procs as well as the mastery spell duplication were all parts of it. We nerfed Echo of Elements to take the edge off of extreme elemental burst situations and we will continue monitoring every class and make changes as we feel they are needed.
RNG in PvP such as the procs listed above for Elemental Shamans is something that our developers are having ongoing discussions about. In the long run what we want to accomplish is to limit the excessive cases when and wherever possible, such as we did with Echo of Elements. The developers recognize and understand that some players would prefer there to be no randomness in PvP at all, but we don't feel that this would result in good gameplay overall.
But there needs to be a limit to it, ele shamans right now aren't fun to play against.
We entirely agree and this is the kind of RNG that we are referring to when I said "excessive cases when and wherever possible". To try and combat that extreme and random burst that comes from Elemental Shamans we nerfed Echo of the Elements and feel that this should help deal with the the extreme cases of RNG for them. We will be keeping an eye on RNG in PvP and continue to discuss ways in which we can deal with any extreme cases that arise. (
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Warlock (
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Chaos Bolt Buff
We agree that Destruction is a bit low in 5.4. We also recognize that, particularly after the Kil'Jaeden's Cunning changes, Chaos Bolt has become a "riskier" spell to cast. To both ends, we think a Chaos Bolt buff is in order. We're going to bring it up by 15% and see where that puts things.
Our general philosophy for Destruction in 5.4 is that casting Chaos Bolt can be tricky sometimes -- working around interrupts and LOS in PvP, or sneaking them in between periods of movement in PvE -- but when the cast goes off, it hurts. A lot. We do have to be careful not to push things TOO far, but we'll see how things go from here.
This change was applied via hotfix sometime yesterday, so it should already be live on the PTR if you'd like to get some testing in. (
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