Ashhide Mushan and Bloody Coins, 5.4 PvP Changes, Blue Posts, Burdens of Shaohao

[chaud]

BlizzCon Costume Contest Q&A, Community Commentary: DiaBro3, What to Include in Visual Customization

Pandaria Gameboard Audio, Fireside Chat #8 Reminder

Patch 5.4 - Ashhide Mushan and Bloody Coins
Patch 5.4 adds Speaker Gulan, who will sell you a Censer of Eternal Agony, which allows you to become hostile to all players (including your own faction) and kill them for Bloody Coins, which are used to purchase a PvP trinket, pet, mount, as well as a few other items.

Level	Type	Slot	Name	Cost
1	Other		Censer of Eternal Agony	2500 x
1	Other		Black Ash	1 x
496	Trinket	Trinket	Pouch of White Ash	20 x
1	Other		Fire-Watcher's Oath	50 x
1	Other		Vengeful Porcupette	100 x
90	Mount		Reins of the Ashhide Mushan Beast	500 x

Patch 5.4 - Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue Changes
It seems that Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue will be increased in one of the upcoming PTR builds.

Patch 5.3 Hotfixes - August 9

Classes

• Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  
  • Demonology
    
    • Metamorphosis should now properly increase damage dealt by 24% for Warlocks that are below level 80.
      

Quests

• Celestial Blessings: Reduced the health and damage of Neltharion's Tears for players attempting Yu'lon or Xuen's Celestial Challenge.

Website Cleanup Incoming

Like any good webmasters, we look at World of Warcraft site stats on a regular basis, and we're always evaluating which aspects of the site people find most useful. Over time, we've identified a few areas that players don't really seem to visit but that still require a bit of effort for us to keep updated each time we release a new content update. For most of these, it's pretty obvious why they don't draw a lot of attention-they tend to focus on things that are simply more compelling to look at inside the game, are a "given," or are already well-served and readily available elsewhere, like on fansites.

Early next week we'll be doing some cleanup and removing the following rarely visited, higher-maintenance sections from the World of Warcraft website:

Game Guide

• Pets & Mounts Gallery
• Factions
• Professions

Guild Profiles

• Perks and Rewards sections

Character Profiles

• Pets & Mounts
• Hunter Pets
• Professions
• Reputation

Here are just a few fansites that provide a wealth of information on the above topics, as well as a whole lot more!

• Wowhead
• Warcraft Pets
• Warcraft Mounts
• WoW-Petopia

Doesn't WarcraftPets USE the pets section of the armory to update people's collections? You are going to break their site with this decision. Please don't remove the Pet & Mounts section.
To clarify, this cleanup process shouldn't affect the API fansites and other people use to pull game data.

Flexible Mode Testing - August 9-12

We've unlocked the Underhold wing of the Siege of Orgrimmar (Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria, and Thok the Bloodthirsty) for testing over the weekend, continuing into Monday.

Players with a premade group of between 10 and 25 players can queue using the same interface that you'd use for Dungeons, Scenarios, or LFR. Flexible mode bosses have all the same mechanics as the Normal mode versions, but are otherwise tuned to be more forgiving, and will scale in health and damage output with the number of players in the raid. As you go from a 12-player raid to an 18-player raid, for example, some abilities may affect more targets or hit slightly harder, creatures will have more health, and so forth. Difficulty is almost certainly higher than our final target, but we're probably scaling players down a bit too far for testing right now (ilvl 522 for the Underhold wing).

Please provide specific comments and feedback in the dedicated feedback thread.

Blue Posts

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Combat PvE and Patch 5.4
So, like I mentioned earlier in the thread, we upped the energy cost and damage of Sinister Strike to try to cut back on the spam just slightly. Incidentally, it also helps with the issue of energy capping while both Adrenaline Rush and Shadow Blades are active with the Tier 15 4-piece bonus.

We feel that, with the higher Sinister Strike energy cost in place, we can leave the Tier 15 4-piece as it is. It'll still be a good set bonus, but not quite as good as before, to the point that we don't think it'll have an adverse effect on Tier 16 balance.

Now, I recognize that the general sentiment in this thread seems to disagree with that. Part of why I'm posting this is that I'd like to understand why that is. Keep in mind that this isn't part of balance tuning -- that'll be starting soon, but for the moment we're just trying to get Combat to "feel" right. We're confident that we can make the numbers line up properly with how things are currently functioning on the PTR, but if you disagree, we'd like to know why. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.4 PTR - Proving Grounds Bug

We’ve discovered a fairly significant bug that explains why we’ve been seeing such drastically different reports on Proving Grounds difficulty. Simply put, PvP gear is not getting its item level downscaled to 463 the way that PvE gear is; it’s staying at item level 522.

We hope to have this fixed ASAP. In the meantime, if you’re testing out Proving Grounds on the PTR, please try to avoid using PvP gear if at all possible.

The Burdens of Shaohao
Blizzard released a six part series that looks at Emperor Shaohao as he progresses toward discovering the truth about his future. Today was the release of the final part. If you want to see more like this in the future, be sure to let Blizzard know you enjoyed it!

[Wilhelm137]

"Guys it took us 6 months to purge beta mounts from your armory, we feel we put too much work into it so we're going to kill it off". Exactly what I see when I read the blue post on that, it is nothing less than pure laziness to let fan sites handle even simple armory features rather than possibly making the armory better so more people actually make use of it and it's features. Taking away half of whats there they may as well just kill the armory as a whole, hell fansites can probably do a better job at that too why put any effort into the official website dedicated to the game and let people who want to look on the site for news or guides just walk blindly into the game when not everyone may want to use a fansite or addon for a feature that works perfectly fine on the armory.

For a game as big as WoW is you would think maybe just maybe they would want a high end official site dedicated to it for news/guides/and features. But instead they seem to have thrown in the towel and figure if they can't please everyone on the website they would rather let it burn letting others handle the pieces, can't even rely on it for news anymore outside of patch notes when the vast majority of info is posted on twitter now.

[Deleted]

Could Lorewalker Cho be a Bronze Dragon? It makes sense.

[Soeroah]

Could Lorewalker Cho be a Bronze Dragon? It makes sense.

No, although one of his ancestors can be seen in one Jade Forest quest wearing a Caverns of Time tabard, so his family might be somehow related to the Bronze Flight.

Since Pandaria's races thought Pandaria was the only remaining part of the world after the Sundering, I doubt they knew any Bronze Dragons for the last 10,000 years, but his early ancestors might have met one and had the need for historical documentation impressed on them, leading to the creation of the Lorewalkers.

[Venziir]

Could Lorewalker Cho be a Bronze Dragon? It makes sense.

He's most likely an agent of the flight, like the taunka in Storm Peaks.

[bluspacecow]

API still works fine for extracting that information.

Should go roll our own solution IMHO

[Zannypants]

Stopppp with this PvP nonsense. Worry less about damage and healing, and worry more about the 40 second CC chains.

[MikeBogina]

Love "The Burdens of Shaohao"

Hope Blizzard does more videos with the lore

[Deleted]

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

[Nivena]

If I buy the censor, use it and get killed by another player I have to wait 10mins before I can use it again to gain bloody coins? Doesn't make sense....It should encourage World PvP but when I always have to wait for 10mins after getting killed there is no way I would farm those 500 coins.

[Deleted]

If I buy the censor, use it and get killed by another player I have to wait 10mins before I can use it again to gain bloody coins? Doesn't make sense....It should encourage World PvP but when I always have to wait for 10mins after getting killed there is no way I would farm those 500 coins.

I wouldn't worry about, if you play on high populated server there will be so many people there you will always find someone to kill :P

[Nivena]

My server is dead, literally....after the 50% promotion there is no raiding guild left. We were full up till Wrath of the Lich King

Now that they postponed connected realms, I am not too convinced to even return at all before connected realms is live.

[Zatetic]

so how about that trinket.

only disabled in arenas
5.6k pvp power and pvp resil for 30 secs on a 60 sec cooldown?


gonna be great for bgs

[MikeBogina]

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

"you are now hostile to all players, and killing players grants bloody coins"

Don't jump to conclusions, this probably just makes the user flagged, losing 90% hp to lure pve'rs into attacking them. Don't attack them and you'll probably be fine... on a pve server atleast

[Hawksolo]

I cant wait to make money off the players paying me to let them kill me over and over to get their coins.

[Talyrius]

I don't care about most of the stuff they're planning to remove, but I definitely want them to keep the reputation section of the profiles. I look at people's reputations all the time. What's the point in providing profiles at all if I have to visit a fan site in order to get the whole thing?

[ktoth04]

API still works fine for extracting that information.

Should go roll our own solution IMHO

Warcraft mounts is just not a functional mount solution. I am very disappointed blizzard D:

[Rioo]

Wow removing mounts from the armory is gonna suck. Is there any reason to use the site anymore now?

[Deleted]

Please dont remove "Pets & Mounts". I use that section to check up what pet/mounts Im missing!

[Deleted]

Bloody coins? Great...now pvp guilds will team up and gank every pve player, of the same faction (other faction doesn't exist on our server..)..oh joy!..I should get pvp gear you say? I don't have room in bags for that...ty Blizz for not giving us more bank slots or not giving a crap about expanding void storage "it only would temporarily fix space problem, so screw u guys! -Blizz"

If you are on a PvE realm, I can almost guarantee blue flagging yourself will make you safe. If you are bitching about this on a PvP realm, get off the PvP realm. Your poor choice of home is not Blizzard's problem. Either way, shh.