Gear Requirements increased for Heroic Halls of Reflection
We recently increased the gear requirement for heroic Halls of Reflection which is probably the issue. I looked at the profile you mentioned and it appears to be really close to meeting the requirements, it will probably take one more upgrade on one of those blues and you would be all set (disclaimer: no guarantees as I can make mistakes). (
Source)
Healing in Icecrown Citadel
Now, healing is going to be tough on some of these encounters. This is not Halls of Stone. If it takes a few weeks to beat some of the Icecrown bosses, that's not the worst thing in the world. You might have to gear up a little or look at your normal healing strategy. We see a lot of the same complaints about Northrend Beasts when that content was new, but of course players figured out how to heal through that too. Just make sure you aren't calling every situation in which your healing is being challenged excessive, unpredictable burst damage on the part of the bosses. (
Source)
Rogue (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Rogue nerf and consequences
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.
Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.
I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is. (
Source)
Nerf to Combat rogues
This question keeps coming up despite our making several attempts to answer it, so I'll just sticky it up here. Why did we nerf Combat rogues too?
We thought Combat damage was too high as well, just not as high as Assassination. (
Source)
Hunger for Blood Nerf
I suspect a lot of this talk is just grumbling over being nerfed in general, but I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is over Hunger for Blood. From a design perspective, it's really nice to have a knob that is so easy to tweak like that. You don't have to go potentially break other talents. You don't have to change base points or coefficients in ways that affect other specs or even lower level members of the class. In fact the mastery system for Cataclysm works somewhat similarly, giving us the ability to adjust numbers independently without causing a cascade of undesirable effects.
To use a different example, consider Affliction locks. We want to buff their dps as I said, but we want to do it in such a way without giving them a big boost in PvP where they do pretty high damage. We don't want to over buff Destruction or Demonology (because we want Affliction to be a real choice) so we can't easily touch spells that overlap or talents that those other guys might use. If we had an Affliction talent ("Hunger for Green Fire") that let us easily tweak them up or down, then in turn we could make adjustments more easily and with less risk.
(Let's not turn this into an Affliction thread. I just wanted to illustrate the contrast between an easy to adjust and hard to adjust tree.) (
Source)
Shaman (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Bonus
In the next minor content patch we're making a change to the tier-10 elemental shaman 4-piece set bonus. In addition to lowering Lava Burst's cooldown, this bonus also no longer requires Flame Shock to be present in order for Lava Burst to be a guaranteed critical strike. (
Source)
Warlock (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Buff to Warlock's damage - Details
As Ghostcrawler mentioned in the “Balance Adjustments” thread for 3.3, we would like to buff warlock PvE damage for all three talent trees. We have a few changes in mind we can share with you and welcome your feedback. That being said, of course these changes are not yet implemented and are subject to revision or reversal before the next minor patch.
Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.
Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.
Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.
As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.
Again, these are preliminary ideas. These changes might be revised or reverted before going live. Just the same, these are not necessarily the only changes we are willing to make and your feedback is appreciated. (
Source)
Empowered Imp Buff
The talent would increase the imp's damage by 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%. The other effect of the talent would remain unchanged. (
Source)
Demonic Pact Buff
At top rank, Demonic Pact will provide a base 10% spell damage increase for warlocks. The buff applied to party or raid members remains unchanged. (
Source)
Changes in the next minor patch
One thing to keep in mind is that these changes are intended to be made in the next minor patch. It's much more risky to make drastic changes in a minor patch when we're concerned with it being released in a very timely manner. We're allowed to experiment more in major content patches when we have more testing time, including by the public.
Smaller tweaks to particular coefficients are better, more immediate adjustments we can make to improve the performance of a specialization without more drastically altering talent functionality with little testing. Taking that risk tends to lead to bigger adjustments in the other direction in the future, which is almost always perceived very negatively by the community -- as I would assume could be demonstrated by what you've written in quotes. We try to avoid the practice of "the devs giveth and the devs taketh away" whenever possible.
Another thing to consider is that we're talking about taking steps to keep all three specializations of a pure DPS class viable in PvE, even if it means some of these steps cannot, unfortunately, be taken in the next minor patch. There are other pure DPS classes a lot further away from having three viable PvE specialization choices. (
Source)
Warrior (
Forums /
Talent Calculator)
Warbringer changes in 3.3.2
In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.
We'll see if any further changes come down the pipeline. (
Source)
Potential changes to Shield Slam
We are also considering some changes to Shield Slam to where it won't affect players in normal tanking gear but it will affect the scaling of block value for those who are stacking it. This isn't guaranteed as we still want to make sure it doesn't have a real negative effect on PvE, but in turn we may have the threat caused by Shield Slam just straight increased. We'll see how this goes as we test it internally. (
Source)
Protection warriors in PvP
There are numbers in between 1 and 10. Players have a bad habit of viewing everything in terms of extremes. Yes we want Protection to be viable in PvP and most likely it still will be. Nerfing them because they are overpowered is not the same as them being useless.
Expecting the forum-visiting WoW community to ever come to a consensus on anything is unrealistic. That said, Protection warriors in PvP wasn't one of the arguments where there were a lot of very passionate souls on both sides. Many players suspected or were outright convinced that Prot was overpowered at worst or at least really frustrating to play against. On the other hand, we've posted several times that if the totality of their beef is just seeing Prot in PvP at all, then they're out of luck.
These arguments are somewhat similar to those rogues saying "But we're supposed to do high damage" and seeing nothing wrong with being 1000 to 2000 dps higher than others in their group. Yes you're supposed to be in PvP. You're not supposed to own PvP.
If you're one of those players with no interest in PvP and just don't want to see your tanking potential hurt, then I am slightly more sympathetic, but then again you should know what I'm going to say by now. WoW is a game with PvP and PvE components. Just because one of those isn't of interest to you personally doesn't mean we should neglect it. (And as I've said, we aren't interested in nerfing Prot warriors who are actually tanking.) (
Source)