Warrior Mastery + Armor/Block
The value of block now passively increases as you get more and more gear, most notably from shield. Block as a mechanic still scales somewhat linearly throughout the expansion, instead of double dipping with the increased survivability from having higher armor contribution on top of it.
This is the right idea. Since there have been a lot of questions about this--
Block seeming to decrease when you gain armor is mostly an artifact of how we're currently presenting it on the character sheet (which might be worth revisiting). I'll keep using Shield of the Righteous as the example since it's a large temporary armor change.
Block now uses similar scaling to armor itself, for the reasons mentioned in my other post (briefly--it's more gear-driven and makes upgrades matter, and allows content to be tuned around higher block values as you proceed further into the game). When you gain a massive amount of armor from Shield of the Righteous, you're now at a higher point on the armor DR curve. So adding a fixed amount of armor, which is essentially what block is doing, translates to a lower %.
This is no different from how gaining a buff for X armor would appear to add less mitigation (as a %) if you had Shield of the Righteous up--i.e. the way armor as worked for the whole history of WoW. Block just happens to be called out as its own % on the character sheet, so this is more visible. In all cases, gaining more armor will further reduce damage from both blocked and unblocked hits.
We of course could make abilities like Shield of the Righteous increase block value as well as armor, so the "block %" stayed similar. But I'm not sure that's what you'd actually want from a gameplay or balance perspective. That's basically saying we'd give block more value during the time when you're already protected by Shield of the Righteous. That's the opposite of the usual desire (it would increase damage variance). Letting armor DR work using its natural mechanics, causing an effect like block to have more % value when you have lower armor, seems better.
Summing up, I hope that clarifies a bit more what's going on, and so far I think the biggest outstanding question is whether there's a clearer way to present the block information on the character sheet.
The first direction we're likely exploring for Brewmaster is to make Stagger the mechanic that is driven by Agility, and ultimately make sure it has similar scaling to the armor-based mechanics on the other tanks. This would not necessitate any large player-facing changes to how Stagger works or how you use it.
Also, an upcoming alpha build will have a reduced % on all the effects that translate primary stat to armor. They're too high right now because a recent change reduced armor values across the game and didn't change those abilities to conform. It's just a math fix, when it happens. (
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PAX East: Beta Testing coming soon
Yep Beta is soon™! Please make sure you guys have opted in! You can do that in your account management under Beta Profile settings.
Please be mindful of things like phishing scams as Customer Support sees a spike of account compromises around Betas. Currently we're not giving out codes and only flagging accounts for Alpha/Beta access. You'll see some of the usual beta code giveaways as we get farther into Beta and those will be coming from trusted sources via giveaways. (
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Why kill the Web AH?
That's too bad - I was really hoping the AH was going to get an upgrade. It is dated and a very poor interface in the game right now and needs some real work. I find it hard to believe that the AH overall is used by only a small percentage of players, so the excuse to ignore it isn't there - yet they have completely ignored upgrading it for basically the entire life of WoW so far. CRAZY PANTS.
I agree that the in game Auction House definitely needs some updates and Ion touched on this awhile back in a Q&A. While we don't like suggesting addons (as we feel that the default UI should have enough functionality in a perfect world), they were suggested by Ion as a work around in the meantime. I currently don't know of any plans to update the Auction House, but as soon we hear information on any changes, you can be sure we will share it with the community. There was a lot of great feedback in here about the in game UI for it so I really appreciate the discussion about it so I can pass this on. (
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