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Druid (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
Typhoon
It's not finished, no. We're still working on the new graphic for it, and also considering a different design path for it. (
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Improved Moonkin Form
The plan is for it to go raid wide. Given the talents avaiable to deep Balance, I hope it's obvious that we are trying to make the Moonkin a very competitive spellcaster. Some of the concerns from BC (e.g. running out of mana, lack of AE or CC, not enough group synergy) should be aleviated by now. (
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Feral spec in WotLK
We do want to give Ferals who want to focus on being cats some excellent melee dps. We do want bears to be end-game tanks. We want to see serious guilds with a bear MT and a death knight OT.
What held us back from that before was that the kitty could turn around and tank almost as well (and sometimes better) than the Prot dudes who abandoned any hope of competitive dps in order to be able to tank for their guild. Clearly (I hope) a class that could do rogue-level dps and warrior-level tanking with the same talent build is the kind of thing that makes other players a little miffed.
But we're reevaluating a lot of old (and some admittedly tired) decisions for Lich King. Not only will tank-spec classes be able to do a lot higher dps (not the highest in the raid mind you, but higher), but we think it's fine for a Feral to nerf their tanking ability a little in order to go for high dps, or lower their dps a little in order to be amazing tanks.
We don't think it will take a complete overhaul of the Feral tree. To be honest, I think it's a pretty fun tree. But it will definitely take some changes to the tree you see on beta today. Imagine 5-10 talent points that significantly increase your survivability but do nothing to your dps. Take those points and you're a tank. Ignore them and you're melee dps. Take a few here and there and you are as flexible as you are today. I'm not saying that is the final or even only sollution. But that implementation gets brought up quite a bit. (
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Paladin (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
Retribution Paladins
I meant that we can't assume Vengeance is up 100% of the time so we can't assume paladins will always have that 15% boost. Yet if we balance them without that 15% (or we try and estimate it at something like 5 or 10%), we'll start to run into trouble when paladins with lots of +crit do manage to keep it up all the time. And if it really is up all the time, is that interesting an ability anyway?
As to the death knight, we only gave them that talent to mirror the paladin one and catch a hint of the "anti-paladin" vibe. Whatever treatment Vengeance ends up, Bloody Vengeance will almost certainly get as well.
I agree there are several things driving Retribution to be bursty. To some degree, bursts can be fun. We all like seeing a crit with a big number flying up. But we'd probably all agree that there comes a point where you feel like you're just rolling a dice -- maybe I'll do crazy dps on my next few hits and maybe I won't. I think we can stabilize Retribution a little bit while still letting you see some big numbers sometime and have very competitive dps. (
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Priest (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
Upcoming Penance Changes
Some changes to Penance are incoming:
- The first tick will be virtually instant (so overall the channel is now 2 seconds, not 3)
- The mana cost has been cut roughly in half.
- There's a new Discipline talent that will make it more interesting (
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Warlock (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
Demonic Circle
The looping and sound issues will be fixed soon, as well as some other random bugs with the ability. (
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Warrior (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
AoE Tanking
I totally agree. It's depressing to see how excited a 5-player group gets with a paladin tank just because they know they're going to get a good experience.
There are plenty of excellent warrior tanks out there -- don't get me wrong. But we think we can make the experience a little more fun for both the warrior and his or her group.
Generating a little more dps will help.
Not being rage starved all the time will help.
Being able to generate enough threat on groups will help a lot.
Having a few more fun buttons to push certainly wouldn't suck either.
We would also love, love, love to be able to merge and pack some of the mitigation talents together so that you have enough points to get some more fun talents*, so long as we can avoid any nerf to warrior survivability when tanking.
* - this is totally true of the other Prot tree too. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8820))
Anti Magic Shell = WIN!
That is by design. Now, it might end up being too powerful and ultimately getting tweaked, but it isn't a bug. (
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