Ashen Verdict Rings, Dec. 10 Hotfixes, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Update - Added a fairly long post about the Scourge Strike nerf at the bottom of the news.

The Ashen Verdict Reputation Rings
The Ashen Verdict page has been updated with all the reputation rings. A few players farmed trash mobs and are already exalted!

<table class="sortable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" style="border:1px solid #96BC27;margin:auto"><thead><tr style="background-color:#96BC27;font-weight:bold; cursor: pointer;">
<th width="75">Spec</th><th width="220">Friendly (251)</th><th width="150">Honored (259)</th><th width="180">Revered (268)</th><th width="150">Exalted (277)</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="vloot2"><td>Tank</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50375/ashen-band-of-courage/"]Ashen Band of Courage[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50388/ashen-band-of-greater-courage/"]Greater Courage[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50403/ashen-band-of-unmatched-courage/"]Unmatched Courage[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50404/ashen-band-of-endless-courage/"]Endless Courage[/url]</td></tr>
<tr class="vloot2"><td>Phys.DPS</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50376/ashen-band-of-vengeance/"]Ashen Band of Vengeance[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50387/ashen-band-of-greater-vengeance/"]Greater Vengeance[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50401/ashen-band-of-unmatched-vengeance/"]Unmatched Vengeance[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50402/ashen-band-of-endless-vengeance/"]Endless Vengeance[/url]</td></tr>
<tr class="vloot2"><td>Spell DPS</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50377/ashen-band-of-destruction/"]Ashen Band of Destruction[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50384/ashen-band-of-greater-destruction/"]Greater Destruction[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50397/ashen-band-of-unmatched-destruction/"]Unmatched Destruction[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50398/ashen-band-of-endless-destruction/"]Endless Destruction[/url]</td></tr>
<tr class="vloot2"><td>Healing</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50378/ashen-band-of-wisdom/"]Ashen Band of Wisdom[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50386/ashen-band-of-greater-wisdom/"]Greater Wisdom[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50399/ashen-band-of-unmatched-wisdom/"]Unmatched Wisdom[/url]</td><td>[url="http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50400/ashen-band-of-endless-wisdom/"]Endless Wisdom[/url]</td></tr>
</tbody></table>

Recent In-Game Fixes - December 2009 - 12/10

Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

To review previous in-game fixes, please visit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...77858456&sid=1

12/10/09

• Onyxia will now move at a normal at her regular speed when casting deep breaths.
• Onyxia has been cut off from the magic that sustained her invulnerable state.
• Players will no longer die while zoning into Icecrown citadel as the Gunship event resets.
• The Battered Hilt will show it’s appropriate faction-racial restrictions.
• Hunters, Rogues, and Shaman will once again be able to roll need on off-hand weapons when the need before greed looting system is active.
• Earthen Power now properly removes snare effects.
• Hunger for Blood now increases a rogues damage by 10% down from 15%.
• The Ephemeral Snowflake trinket now has a very short cooldown to prevent it from restoring inappropriately large amounts of mana.
• The Shadow damage from Scourge Strike will no longer be able to critically strike. The physical component will continue to be able to critically strike.
• You are now able to recast Mind Flay after missing with the spell without receiving a “This spell is not ready yet” message.

Impending 3.3 hotfixes

After evaluating damage dealt in instances and PvP over the last two days, we are going to deploy three changes. There could always be more along the way. These hotfixes should hit sometime today (Dec 10).

Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%. We wanted to increase Assassination rogue damage, and we were succesful, but we overshot the mark. We buffed Hunger for Blood back when Assassination needed a damage boost, so we're more than happy that this talent won't account for such a huge dps increase. Because of the nature of hotfixes, it is unlikely the tooltip will change to 10% right away.

Scourge Strike can now crit only once. The Shadow portion of the damage cannot separately crit. We wanted to keep the double crit mechanic as a way of making Scourge Strike do more than just being an attack that hits for equal part physical and Shadow damage. The change just proved to be too bursty in PvP and provide too much sustained damage in raids. The Shadow portion Scourge Strike will continue to be increased by effects that currently boost Shadow damage.

Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. This is really more of a bug fix than a nerf. The problem here was that players could inflate the initial cast of Corruption and have the spell tick for that damage indefinitely as long as it was refreshed. This resulted in some "jaw dropping" damage. Technically this was a tricky one to fix but we wanted to keep the Glyph of Quick Decay and were able to ultimately find a solution. When this fix goes live, the hasted Corruption should correct itself to your current haste within a tick or two of the spell being refreshed.

Ideally, we'd rather make changes while we're still in PTR before a patch goes live, but in the end we'd rather make changes than allow something imbalanced to continue just because we didn't change it pre-patch. To the community's credit, some players predicted these issues might become a problem. We appreciate the feedback as always, even if we don't always immediately make changes suggested by the community.

I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread, but only because it covers three different topics and not because we're trying to limit any response or feedback to this announcement.

Add an Authenticator, Adopt a Core Hound

) will get their very own in-game Core Hound Pup, a fiery and feisty guard-dog pet. Adopting this molten mutt is easy: If you've got any kind of Authenticator attached to your account, you'll find your new canine companion waiting for you the next time you log in.

We've also just released a new Blizzard Authenticator token featuring a Core Hound-themed look and design. Click here ( http://us.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000822 ) to order one through the online Blizzard Store. For more information on account security and the various Authenticator options available to you, check out our Account Security ( http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...rticleId=20572 ) and Authenticator ( http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...rticleId=24986 ) pages.

Core Hound Pup Pet FAQ

Q: How do I get the special Core Hound Pup pet for Authenticator users?
If you have a Blizzard Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator attached to your Battle.net account, you’ll find the Core Hound Pup item waiting for you in your in-game mailbox the next time you log in. Simply use the item to add the pet to your collection.

Q: Can the Core Hound Pup help me in combat?
No, his bark is infinitely worse than his bite. The Core Hound Pup is a non-combat guard dog, trained to intimidate rather than eviscerate.

Q: What if I remove my Authenticator?
If you remove the Authenticator from your Battle.net account, the Core Hound Pup will disappear from the pets collection of all of your characters after you log out of the game. You’ll need to reattach an Authenticator to receive the pet again, at which point you’ll find him in your mailbox once more. If you switch Authenticators while in-game, your pet will remain intact.

Q: Which characters will receive the Core Hound Pup pet?
Each existing character on every World of Warcraft account associated with the Authenticator-protected Battle.net account will receive the Core Hound Pup pet, as will each character you create in the future while the Authenticator is attached.

Q: In what regions is the Core Hound Pup available?
The Core Hound Pup is available to players on realms located in North America, Europe, and Korea. A Battle.net account is required in all of these regions in order to claim the pet.

Q: Do I need to buy the Core Hound-themed Blizzard Authenticator to get the pet?
Nope. Any Blizzard Authenticator or Battle.net Mobile Authenticator product will do!

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Blue posts

Ephemeral Snowflake (Ephemeral Snowflake)
The Ephemeral Snowflake now has a tiny internal cooldown to keep it from being overpowered on spells such as Vampiric Embrance (when dotting multiple targets) and Wild Growth. It will still return mana as expected in most cases. (Source)

Tanking bug in 3.3
There is a known bug that was introduced in 3.3 that can cause tanked mobs to move around in unpredictable and frustrating ways. A fix is incoming. (Source)

Teleporting to instances
We knew the teleportation aspect in particular was going to be controversial. It was something we discussed over and over again. I think there is definitely a risk that the world feels somehow emptier when you are magically transported to a dungeon instead of having to walk through its entrance.

But then you have to take a step back and ask what is better for the player. Does a player get more out of the wonder and grandeur of stepping into a dungeon -- and some of the dungeons are quite epic even from the outside? Or does a player get more out of being able to fight through a dungeon over their lunch hour or after dinner?

We've talked about ideas like making you actually discover a dungeon entrance before you can be whisked there. That may be something we do for Cataclysm. I think the BGs definitely feel less like places in the world since transport to them is seamless. Then again, we've made a lot of steps to make the game easier and faster to play that can work against realism. Ulduar and Icecrown are full of teleporters while you had to hoof it in dungeons like Molten Core and Ahn'Qiraj. Would a lot of players want to go back to the old way though? (Sure you can take that to extremes and say players would have their epics mailed to them in Dalaran, were it up to them. But just because players want things efficient doesn't mean that it's our job as designers to throw up barriers to what they think is fun in any way we can.)

Dungeon Finder is a new feature for us and like all of our new features we'll have to iterate a bit before we're really happy with it. On the other hand, the response from players has been amazing. I don't think I've been involved with a feature since working here that received so much positive feedback, and you have to consider that in my position, 90% of what I hear from players is negative (which you should not take to mean that 90% of players are unhappy -- far from it). Everything we've heard so far makes me think we made the right call with teleporting. That doesn't mean we should neglect the sense of a gigantic world. It just means we need to work harder at keeping that sense alive without forcing players to do tedious things like slog to an instance portal. Pugs are hard enough. We don't want the logistics of organizing the group and travelling to overshadow the challenge of beating the boss. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Reasons behind the Scourge Strike nerf
Players have made several requests for more explanation on the Scourge Strike nerf. I tried to find a post to respond to, but the ones I found were very angry and I didn't feel like a response in there was going to do anything to discourage more angry posts. So I'll just do it here.

We initially started mucking around with Scourge Strike based on numerous requests and complaints from Unholy DKs that their talented strike wasn't very appealing. At the time a lot of Unholy DKs were just using Obliterate instead, especially in PvE. Their logic made a lot of sense. It's obvious that the tree is built around Scourge Strike to some extent. There are many talents that are less interesting without Scourge Strike.

Side note 1: *You* personally may have been happy with Scourge Strike as it was. We don't take a public vote on these things. When players make a lot of sense, the designers sit down and discuss whether we agree with them and whether than warrants any changes. In this case we thought it did.

Side note 2: We have a design law around the office, named for one of the designers here, that anything overpowered is fun. There was a time when Scourge Strike hit for silly numbers. Many DKs knew it did too much damage. Others were nostalgic for that day, perhaps even subconsciously. I've read several times before something else that makes a lot of sense: too many DKs want a class that hits as often as a rogue but hits as hard as a warrior. You can see the problem there. As long as DKs do so much spell and disease damage, their strikes can't hit for really big numbers. (If you don't care about spells and disease damage, then you're probably playing the wrong class.)

In any event, we tried a lot of different things with the talent. You can probably find my old posts. There were many, which makes these claims that DKs were ignored ring a little hollow. We couldn't make it just hit as hard as a physical swing since it completely ignored armor. The problem was that in a raid environment in which armor was routinely sundered / exposed or otherwise bypassed, Scourge Strike's smaller base damage fell short. Again, you can find more detail in older posts.

That's why we came upon the answer of letting Scourge Strike do half physical damage. Half of the attack would respect armor (and therefore sundered armor as well) but the other half could still benefit from all of the DK abilities that improve Shadow damage. As a side bonus, this made the armor penetration on so much of the dps plate slightly more attractive to Unholy DKs. Players argued that this made the ability less interesting or even compromised. We understood the logic there, so we tried to let the physical and Shadow portions crit separately. We knew there was a risk of it feeling too RNG, and some players brought up that risk. But remember we were still trying to solve two other problems (SS needs to hit hard and not be boring) so we decided to try it anyway.

The parses that came out of the PTR weren't too bad. There were some big hits of course, but they didn't happen too often and in PvP the damage didn't seem out of control. Remember though, our PTRs are voluntary. We get some great players trying things out and sending feedback, which is awesome and much appreciated. We have great internal testers who beat on the raid encounters over and over again before they're ready to go public. But none of that testing compares to the flood of data we get the day something goes live. The handful of Icecrown raid parses grew by thousands over night, and many of those had Unholy DKs doing much higher damage than was warranted. Go check out any parse by a decent guild for the Icecrown raid. Once you skip over all the Mutilate rogues, there are all the Unholy DKs.

Maybe in retrospect we made a mistake messing with Scourge Strike at all. Maybe a superior solution would have been to let some Unholy DKs just migrate over to Obliterate or whatever. Just remember as passionately as you feel about things now, many DKs felt just as passionately back then when they urged us to reconsider Scourge Strike. As another designer commented recently "You rarely see indifferent players come to the forums to post their indifference."

Will it stay this way for long? It's too early to tell. This implementation has a chance of working out, but we also want to see the Icecrown hard modes start up as well as the new Arena season kick in. (Source)

[Durendal]

wow people are exalted already...crazy...

[Naft]

Anyone else that can't press the Exalted tank ring? ???

[Shawaam]

wow people are exalted already...crazy...

Exalted from farming TRASH? That must be 20+ hours of farming trash oO

[Draelan]

Yeah, I noticed that keeping mobs I'm tanking in front of me was noticably more difficult.... Glad they're working on fixing it.

[Manga68]

Hunger for Blood now increases a rogues damage by 10% down from 15%.

A nerf of 5% , just too much ! :-\

[juggernauth]

Anyone else that can't press the Exalted tank ring? ???

You can find the rings on the Armory (they are fucking sick btw) :

http://eu.wowarmory.com/search.xml?s...ery=ashen+band

[Rensyk]

Exalted from farming TRASH? That must be 20+ hours of farming trash oO

It takes a solid 12-14 hours of trash from Neutral.

[Nightsyte]

Yea, all of the Revered and Exalted Rings are just recursive back to the same page.

[Koldar]

Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. This is really more of a bug fix than a nerf. The problem here was that players could inflate the initial cast of Corruption and have the spell tick for that damage indefinitely as long as it was refreshed. This resulted in some "jaw dropping" damage. Technically this was a tricky one to fix but we wanted to keep the Glyph of Quick Decay and were able to ultimately find a solution. When this fix goes live, the hasted Corruption should correct itself to your current haste within a tick or two of the spell being refreshed.

They FINALLY fixed affliction!!.. and it gets nerfed. In my opinion, the rolling haste on corruption made Affliction for real with the new Glyph of Quick Decay. FINALLY there was a REASON to never allow corruption to tick off. Now.. who really cares? In my opinion, I would rather have had a direct damage nerf of a spell than this nerf. And again.. Blizzard sends Affliction back to the "Only viable on Patchwork" spec. Thanks.

[Jenton]

A nerf of 5% , just too much ! :-\

With the glyph applied, rogues go from 118% to 113%, for a net decrease of 4.4%. The poison change was something like a 20% buff, so the hfb nerf is reasonable.

[superstargoddess]

wow people are exalted already...crazy...

Some people need mental help, amirite?


About the snowflake trinket- everyone figured that it would be nerfed soon. ><

[CaptainArlong]

How nice of them to not include a Plate Melee DPS ring. Would it seriously kill them to put a Strength DPS ring in?

[treston323]

That Scourge Strike change is probably the most stupid of the retarded things blizzard has done to Death Knights this expansion.

And I'm not talking about the nerf.. I'm talking about how they made a change that will change our rotation, spec, itemization, glyphs, etc. without warning.

GG Blizz.. back to blood for me. At least they can leave that spec alone through 1 patch.

[Caradinist]

How nice of them to not include a Plate Melee DPS ring. Would it seriously kill them to put a Strength DPS ring in?

Look at them as Hyjal rep ring 2.0. Those didn't have strength, but the exalted version were the best nonetheless.

That Scourge Strike change is probably the most stupid of the retarded things blizzard has done to Death Knights this expansion.

And I'm not talking about the nerf.. I'm talking about how they made a change that will change our rotation, spec, itemization, glyphs, etc. without warning.

GG Blizz.. back to blood for me. At least they can leave that spec alone through 1 patch.

About the shadow part being able to be crittable? even folks with bad gear admitted it was too much damage, if it was that bad, it was inevitable.

[volrathy]

A few players farmed trash mobs and are already exalted!

"How does one kill that which has no life?"

[Nakkí]

In b4 massive Hunger for Blood nerf QQ :'(

[Nebilim]

This is utter bullshit.

Scourge Strike can now crit only once. The Shadow portion of the damage cannot separately crit. We wanted to keep the double crit mechanic as a way of making Scourge Strike do more than just being an attack that hits for equal part physical and Shadow damage. The change just proved to be too bursty in PvP and provide too much sustained damage in raids. The Shadow portion Scourge Strike will continue to be increased by effects that currently boost Shadow damage.

Apparently GC is retarded.
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| This is greg, greg nerfed my SS
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You are a fucking nerdy whining little bitch aren't you? You had ONE day basically with the new Scourge Strike change, its not like its a change that you've been using ever since you started playing a DK. Get over it.

[Horrify]

About the shadow part being able to be crittable? even folks with bad gear admitted it was too much damage, if it was that bad, it was inevitable.

The new Scourge Strike was OP in PvE, but crippled PvP death knights severely against anything but cloth. Now it's just horrible in PvP and bad in PvE.

[Cryblood]

i like how the tanking ring is garbage till you get revered, and even than the stam is pitifully low for the ilvl, oh well i guess the proc makes up for it.