Tome of Light Buff
We didn’t actually buff Tome of Light per se. It was just twice as good as the tooltip said it was, and since we didn't think that a nerf was in order, we're just correcting the tooltip for 4.3. You guys shouldn't notice a change to Tome of Light.
You should notice a change to Holy Word: Serenity, though. As you know, that ability hasn't always benefited from the 25% crit bonus that it's supposed to get. It was a little tricky to figure out why that was happening, but we've gotten to the bottom of it. Holy Word: Serenity should be fixed for 4.3, so you should notice a change there.
[...]Sorry for the confusion! The bug came in an earlier version of 4.3 and was fixed recently in 4.3. Please recall that, while you guys are just getting your first look at it, internally we have been working on 4.3 for a long time.
However, this fix has introduced another bug. With the priest tier set bonus, the duration of Sanctuary can be longer than its cooldown. This causes a host of technical problems because that spell just isn’t set up right to have multiple copies, nor do we really want Sanctuary to have 100% uptime in the first place. So, we're likely to revert the change to Tome of Light (restoring it back to 15% / 30%) but we'll also lower the base cooldown of Serenity so that it will have a 7 sec cooldown with Tome of Light.
Note: All of this discussion applies to the 4.3 PTR, where some amount of "design churn" is to be expected; we want to avoid making you to feel like your character is under a barrage of constant changes after a patch goes live. (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Guardian Cub: Legal Gold Selling
TCG Loot card mounts like the Spectral Tiger have been BoE for a long time now (since patch 3.2), and that was and continues to be well-received, and as far as we've been able to tell hasn't had any adverse impact to the game or economy - despite them selling for sometimes astronomical amounts of gold.
It’s potentially worth noting that no new gold is being introduced into the game's economy with those mounts or the new Guardian Cub pet.
Our goal with the Guardian Cub is to provide alternative ways for players who don't want to spend real money to add these pets to their collection. Even though this has been available a while now with the TCG mounts, this is obviously a new kind of way to deliver Pet Store pets, and we're definitely interested to hear your feedback and ultimately see how this will play out. (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
No Orc or Undead Paladins?
[...] We've already incorporated a lot of race/class combos that never existed from the release of the game. I think you could argue we should just make it so every race can be every class at this point, we're pretty much there, and I think you could argue that we should hang on to the few distinctions we have left.
I'll make one argument, it would be a lot of work to scale/fit each class-specific armor piece to two additional models (male/female) of a new race. Not insurmountable, but it'd be a call we'd really have to evaluate and be prepared to take on that extra work for every set that's produced. Aside from any lore-related explanations we want to keep.
Personally I think the distinction that only some races can be some classes adds a lot to the game. It makes it feel more real, even if I don't know what the lore reason is. (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
BlizzCon: Ask the Artists
At this year’s BlizzCon we have a stage dedicated to featuring Blizzard artists of all disciplines and styles, from Glenn Rane (Digital Painting, Creative Development) to Samwise Didier (Traditional Drawing, StarCraft II). Whether you’re attending the event or watching from home, we’re giving you an opportunity on the forums to ask a question of the artists. All you have to do is list the discipline and/or category below which best fits your art-related question and ask away here:
http://us.battle.net/blizzcon/en/for...c/3341766856#1
If selected, your inquiry will be read and answered live from the Artist Stage at BlizzCon! [...] (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)