Patch 3.2 is Out!

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By Lyssa, August 4, 2009 1:42 pm

Patch Links: 3.2.0

World of Warcraft Client Patch 3.2.0 (08-04-2009)

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

Call of the Crusade

  • Since the opening of the Argent Tournament in northeastern Icecrown, adventurers have journeyed from across Azeroth and beyond to prove their worth in the heart of the Lich King’s domain. Under thundering skies the tournament’s participants hone the arts of war and face off in bone-shattering jousting matches to earn the right to be called champions. Yet these heroes have yet to face the greatest challenge of all: the Crusaders’ Coliseum. Formidable Horde and Alliance champions, ferocious beasts, and Scourge lieutenants are just some of the opponents awaiting adventurers in this gladiatorial arena. Few will survive the coliseum’s perils, but the Argent Crusade is confident that the worthy heroes who do emerge victorious will be ready to join the offensive against Icecrown Citadel and end the Lich King’s reign of terror.

Isle of Conquest

  • Off the coast of Northrend, Horde and Alliance forces are locked in an epic struggle for a tiny island rich in resources. Known as the Isle of Conquest, this rocky battleground’s proximity to Icecrown makes it a highly prized base in the war against the Lich King. Both factions have deployed devastating weapons to drive each other from this strategic location. Day and night the ground trembles under lumbering siege vehicles while monstrous airships pummel enemy positions with fiery cannons. The bloody conflict spreads to every corner of the island as new heroes arrive to aid their factions. It remains to be seen whose banner will wave triumphantly over the Isle of Conquest and at what cost victory will be achieved.

General

  • Construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum is complete. New raid normal and Heroic modes for the Crusaders’ Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25-player versions. 10-player (normal), 25-player (normal), 10-player (Heroic) and 25-player (Heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.
    • Trial of the Champion
      • 5-player (normal and Heroic mode) dungeon.
      • Daily quest added to the Heroic daily dungeon quest giver.
    • Trial of the Crusader
      • 10 and 25-player (normal mode) raid dungeon.
    • Trial of the Grand Crusader
      • 10 and 25-player (Heroic mode) raid dungeon.
      • Crusaders’ Tribute: Active on Heroic difficulty only, the tribute system will limit players on the number of attempts the raid is allotted each week. Additional rewards can be earned depending on the number of attempts left in the tribute run each week when the final boss is defeated.
  • Head to the new 40 vs. 40-player siege-style Battleground, the Isle of Conquest, to vie for control of a strategic location with a host of resources sought by the Horde and Alliance.
    • Two level brackets are available: 71-79 and 80.
    • Defend the walls of your keep and protect your general by killing enemy players and destroying their siege vehicles.
    • Capture the Docks, Gunship Hangar, or Siege Workshop for access to destructive siege vehicles or strategic attacks on your enemy’s base.
    • Capture the Refinery or Quarry for their resources to garner reinforcements, a steady flow of bonus honor and a 15% increase to siege vehicle damage for each of these capture points your team controls.
    • To claim victory, bust through the enemy’s keep walls (or find other ways to get inside) and kill their general, or obliterate your opponents until their reinforcements are depleted.
  • The Argent Tournament Expands
    • All new Argent Crusader daily quests and rewards have been added for players with the Crusader title. Rewards include a new Argent Crusader banner and tabard (which can port players to the tournament grounds), a mounted squire (can periodically run bank, mail or vendor errands for the player), a paladin-exclusive Argent Crusader Charger mount and new heirloom items.
    • All new Silver Covenant and Sunreaver daily quests and rewards have been added for players exalted with these factions. Rewards include tabards, new ground and flying mounts and a new pet.
    • Just when you thought you had seen the last of the Black Knight, he makes his astonishing return to the tournament. Wait, didn’t you kill him?
  • New Dungeon Loot Feature
    • Players will now be able to trade soulbound items with other raid or group members that were eligible for the loot. This system will work like the Item Buy Back system and allow 2 hours for players to trade an item after it has been looted. Players who choose to enchant or add gems to the item will get one last confirmation before losing the ability to trade the item.
  • New druid art for Cat Form and Bear Form has been added. There are now five unique color schemes for each form and faction. Changing hair color (night elves) or skin tone (tauren) via the barbershop will change the look of one’s cat and bear forms.

PvP

  • Arenas
    • Beginning with season 7, players will no longer have access to the newest season’s weapons or shoulder armor and will not qualify for the Gladiator title/rewards with ratings from the 2v2 bracket alone. Ratings obtained through 3v3 and 5v5 game play will be required for these rewards, while the rest of the newest season’s items will remain available to players in all brackets (standard rating restrictions still apply).
    • Dalaran Sewers
      • The entire Arena has increased in size by 25%.
      • Mounts can now be used in this Arena.
      • The position and collision of the crates on the central platform has been modified.
    • Ring of Valor
      • The flame wall has been removed.
    • Ruins of Lordaeron
      • Alcoves have been removed from the starting chambers.
      • The collision around the central tomb has been smoothed out to prevent players from becoming stuck on the terrain as often.
  • Battlegrounds
    • Battleground experience has arrived!
      • Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
      • Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
      • Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
      • Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
      • Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would’ve been accumulated if experience gains were enabled cannot be recovered.
    • Battlemasters in major cities affiliated with specific Battlegrounds have been replaced with a Battlemaster for each faction that will allow players to queue for any Battleground. Battlemasters for specific Battlegrounds will still be seen around the cities during corresponding Battleground holiday weekends.
    • When standing at a capture point that you control, you will gain a buff called Honorable Defender. This buff grants +50% honor gained from kills. This currently affects Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Isle of Conquest.
    • Arathi Basin
      • The time it requires to capture a base has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.
      • The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
    • Eye of the Storm
      • The time it requires to capture the center flag has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds
      • The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.
    • Strand of the Ancients
      • The faction starting on attack/defense will now be randomized at the start of each match.
    • Warsong Gulch
      • There is a now a 20-minute timer on this Battleground. After that time, the team with the most flag captures wins. If this would result in a tie, the team that captured the first flag wins. If neither side has captured a flag, then the game ends in a tie.
  • Wintergrasp
    • Against the Odds: This achievement has been removed and converted to a Feat of Strength.
    • Industrial Warfare: This achievement has been removed.
    • To provide players with a more transparent notification of when Wintergrasp battles occur, as well as better control zone population and stability, several changes have been made.
      • Players now have the option to queue for Wintergrasp from a Wintergrasp Battlemaster in any capital city or by simply entering the Wintergrasp zone.
      • Queuing will begin 15 minutes before each battle. If chosen, you will automatically be teleported to the zone. Any players in the zone who have not been chosen from the queue will be teleported out when the battle begins.
      • The queue system remains active for the entire battle. As soon as a player leaves, a new one will be chosen from the queue.
      • Trying to enter Wintergrasp during an active battle for which you have not been chosen will teleport you out. Please note that, as you are now able to fly over Wintergrasp, you will only be teleported out if you try to land and join the battle.
      • Level 80 players get higher priority in the queue than lower level players. In addition, a random selection of queued players will be taken from both the Battlemasters and the zone itself.
      • The queue will accept up to 120 players from each faction, resulting in a maximum battle of 240 players at a time.
    • Wintergrasp factories can no longer be damaged or destroyed.

Dungeons and Raids

  • Dungeon and Raid ID Extensions
    • In order to allow for parties and raids to progress through instances at their own pace, players can now extend an instance ID on an individual basis.
    • Existing or recently expired IDs can be extended via the Social tab under Raid by clicking on Raid Info.
    • The ID of any instance to which a player is saved can be extended. Doing so will extend the instance lock period by the same amount of time as the original lock (i.e. extending an Ulduar instance ID will add 7 days, a Heroic: Halls of Lightning instance ID will add 24 hours, and a Zul’Gurub instance ID will add 3 days to the instance lock time).
    • An ID can be extended more than once.
    • An extension can be reversed on an individual basis provided the player does not do anything in the instance during the extended instance lock period that would save that player to the instance.
  • Emblem System Changes
    • Both the 10 and 25-player instances of the Crusaders’ Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph.
    • Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
    • The Heroic dungeon daily quest will now reward 2 Emblems of Triumph and the normal daily dungeon quest will reward 1 Emblem of Conquest.
    • New achievements have been added to collect various amounts of any combination of emblems.
  • 25-player raids will no longer be referred to as Heroic versions of a raid, as there is a new distinction between normal and Heroic modes for both 10 and 25 player versions of the Crusaders’ Coliseum.
  • The Nexus: The Oculus & The Eye of Eternity
    • Drakes used by players in these instances will now scale in health and damage according to the rider’s average item level.
  • Ulduar
    • Players can now use Blink, Shadowstep, and Demonic Teleport while participating in the illusion events in the Yogg-Saron encounter.
    • Ominous Clouds in the Yogg-Saron encounter are now more vocal about touching players and should no longer sometimes appear to be in the wrong place for certain players.
    • An Immortal Guardian targeted for Empowering Shadows in the Yogg-Saron encounter will now become a ‘Marked Immortal Guardian’ while targeted.
    • Crusher Tentacles in the Yogg-Saron encounter spawn a little slower in 25-player mode allowing a bit more time for players to clear out the Illusion room.
    • Empowering Shadows in the Yogg-Saron encounter now targets a maximum of three Immortal Guardians in 25-player mode.
    • Yogg-Saron’s health has been reduced by 20% in the final stage of his 25-player mode.
    • Winter Jormungars will no longer put everyone in the zone in combat when they emerge from a Snow Mound. Additionally, Snow Mounds will now disappear when all their jormungars have emerged.

Races: General

  • Axe Specialization (Orc): The weapon bonus from this effect now applies to fist weapons in addition to axes.
  • Tauren now have the option of changing skin tone by visiting the barber shop.

Items: General

  • Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
  • Block Value: The amount of bonus block value on all items has been doubled. This does not affect the base block value on shields or block value derived from strength.
  • On-Use Block Value Items: All items and set bonuses that trigger temporary increases to block value have been modified. Instead of increasing their block value amount by 100% like other items, they have all had their effect durations doubled. This applies to Glyph of Deflection, Gnomeregan Autoblocker, Coren’s Lucky Coin, Lavanthor’s Talisman, Libram of Obstruction, Tome of the Lightbringer, Libram of the Sacred Shield, the tier-8 paladin Shield of Righteousness bonus, the tier-5 paladin Holy Shield bonus, and the tier-5 warrior Shield Block bonus.
  • Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.
  • Item Buy Back Feature Revised
    • The Item Buy Back time will now expire if the player enchants or sockets an item. Players will see a confirmation dialog box now when they attempt to enchant or add gems to an item giving them a last chance to reconsider.
  • Items with Triggered Effects: These items generally have cooldowns on how often they can be triggered. Those cooldowns are now triggered each time the item is equipped (example: A trinket has a 45-second cooldown on an effect triggered by player attacks; when a player equips that item, the effect will be unable to be triggered for the first 45 seconds it is worn).
  • Mounts
    • The cast time for summoning any ground mount is now 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
    • Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
    • Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
    • Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.
    • Artisan Riding (Skill 300): Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde).
    • In order to further equalize the number of purchasable mounts available to each race, a new 60% speed ground mount has been added for night elves, and a new 100% speed ground mount has been added for the undead.
    • Flying over Dalaran and Wintergrasp is now possible so long as players keep a healthy distance above the ground.
  • Mana Regeneration: All items that provide “X mana per five seconds” have had the amount of mana they regenerate increased by approximately 25%.
  • Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.
  • Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%.

Classes: General

  • All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
  • Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
  • Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3-second Interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.

Death Knights

  • Due to significant talent changes, all death knight talents will be reset for players.
  • Blood Plague: Damage done increased by 15%.
  • Chains of Ice: Now reduces movement by 95% instead of 100%. The main effect of this change will be that targets of Chains of Ice will not have to re-issue a movement command to continue moving.
  • Frost Fever: Damage done increased by 15%.
  • Frost Presence: 10% bonus health reduced to 6% bonus stamina.
  • Frost Strike: This ability can now be dodged, parried, or blocked. Weapon damage bonus reduced to 55%, down from 60%.
  • Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
  • Talents
    • Blood
      • Bloody Strikes: This talent now provides 5/10/15% increased damage to Blood Strike instead of 15/30/45%.
      • Dancing Rune Weapon: This ability now has a fixed duration of 12 seconds (which can still be modified by its glyph) and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.
      • Veteran of the Third War: Stamina bonus reduced to 1/2/3%.
    • Frost
      • Blood of the North: Reduced to a 3-point talent. Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 3/6/10%. There is now a 33/66/100% chance whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.
      • Lichborne: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.
      • Threat of Thassarian: New 3-point talent. When dual-wielding, your Death Strikes, Obliterates, Plague Strikes, Blood Strikes and Frost Strikes have a 30/60/100% chance to also deal damage with your off-hand weapon. Off-hand strikes are roughly one half the effect of the original strike.
      • Toughness: This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.
    • Unholy
      • Desecration: This talent has been reduced to 2 points for 25/50% snare and no longer increases damage done by the death knight. It has also been moved one tier earlier in the tree and its spell effect has been made more transparent.
      • Desolation: New talent. This talent is in the position formerly occupied by Desecration. It causes Blood Strikes to increase all damage the death knight deals by 1/2/3/4/5% for 12 seconds.
      • Scourge Strike: Weapon damage bonus reduced to 40%, down from 45%. Damage increased by 10% per disease on the target, down from 11%.
      • Summon Gargoyle: The gargoyle now flies lower to the ground, making it susceptible to melee attacks. This ability now has a fixed duration of 30 seconds and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.
      • Unholy Blight: This talent has been redesigned. It no longer deals damage to nearby targets. Instead, when you deal damage with Death Coil, the target will take periodic damage for 10 seconds equal to 20% of the damage done by Death Coil. This damage accumulates in the same way as Ignite and Deep Wounds.

Druids

  • Enrage: This Bear Form ability now generates 20 rage initially, and 10 rage over the next 10 seconds. The armor penalty is unchanged.
  • Flight Form: Can now be learned at level 60. Flight speed increased to 150%.
  • Flight Form and Swift Flight Form: Now benefit from a paladin’s Crusader Aura.
  • Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often.
  • Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient.
  • Mangle: Ranks 4 and 5 base points reduced by about 11%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
  • Rake: Ranks 6 and 7 base points on initial and periodic damage reduced by about 7%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
  • Rip: Ranks 8 and 9 base points and points per combo point reduced by about 6%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
  • Savage Defense: The animation for gaining this buff will no longer make the bear stand upright
  • Shred: Ranks 8 and 9 base points reduced by about 10%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
  • Swift Flight Form: Druids who have acquired a mount able to go 310% flight speed will now also go that speed while in this form.
  • Swipe (Cat): Percent of weapon damage done reduced from 260% to 250%.
  • Travel Form: Can now be learned at level 16.
  • Talents
    • Balance
      • Balance of Power: Now reduces all spell damage taken by 3/6%, rather than reducing the chance to be hit by spells by 2/4%.
      • Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30-second cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.
      • Owlkin Frenzy: Now also restores 2% base mana every 2 seconds for the duration (10 seconds) in addition to its current effects.
    • Feral Combat
      • King of the Jungle: This talent now reduces the mana cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 20/40/60%.
      • Primal Tenacity: This talent no longer reduces the mana cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form.
    • Restoration
      • Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%.
      • Improved Barkskin: No longer provides dispel resistance to all effects on the druid, but now reduces the chance your Barkskin is dispelled by an additional 35/70%.

Hunters

  • Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
  • Deterrence: This ability now allows the hunter to parry spells and attacks from behind as well as in front. Now has a new visual spell effect.
  • The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
  • Frost Trap: Will no longer “fizzle” on targets immune to snare effects, however Lock and Load will not succeed when using Frost Trap if the target is immune to snare effects.
  • Snake Trap: The Mind-numbing Poison effect has been reduced to a 30% increase in casting time, down from 50% to match similar effects.
  • Traps now have separate 30-second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.
  • Talents
    • Beast Mastery
      • Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
    • Survival
      • Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
      • Lock and Load: Now has a 22-second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.
    • Pets
      • Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown is now 1 minute, up from 30 seconds.

Mages

  • Arcane Blast: Mana cost reduced by 12%.
  • Frost Bolt, Cone of Cold, Frost Ward, Ice Armor, Frost Armor, Frost Nova, Ice Lance, and Ice Barrier: The mana cost on these spells has been reduced by approximately 15%.
  • Invisibility: Can no longer be interrupted by a hostile action or damage done during the 3-second Fade time, however an invisible mage is still vulnerable to Stun and Silence effects.
  • Mirror Image: Images will no longer trigger the death sound when their time expires.
  • Talents
    • Fire
      • Empowered Fire: In addition to its existing effects, this talent now also grants a 33/67/100% chance to regain 2% of base mana each time the Ignite talent deals damage.
    • Frost
      • Empowered Frostbolt: Instead of increasing critical strike chance by 2/4%, this talent now reduces the cast time of Frostbolt by 0.1/0.2 seconds.
      • Permafrost: In addition to its existing effects, this talent now also causes the mage’s Chill effects to reduce healing received by the victim by 7/13/20%.

Paladins

  • Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
  • Charger: Can now be learned at level 40.
  • Crusader Aura: This ability now also grants its flying speed increase to a druid’s Flight Form and Swift Flight Form.
  • Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
  • Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when the target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.
  • Judgements: Some of these attacks were considered ranged and some melee. They are all now considered melee attacks that can’t be dodged, parried or blocked.
  • Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker’s maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
  • Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target’s armor.
  • Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
  • Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal-over-time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.
  • Seal of Blood: This ability has been removed.
  • Seal of the Martyr: This ability has been removed.
  • Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned. Only auto-attacks and Hammer of the Righteous can place the debuff on the paladin’s current target(s). However, while the seal is active, each melee swing or ability (excluding judgements) that lands on the target will deal a percentage of weapon damage as Holy damage to the target. This damage maxes out at 33% weapon damage with 5 applications of the debuff and scales upward evenly based on how many applications of the debuff are active. This Holy damage deals double-damage critical strikes. In addition, the damage-over-time debuff is now considered a melee attack for the purposes of determining its chance to hit, miss, be dodged or parried.
  • Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%. In addition, the benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player’s level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player’s level.
  • Warhorse: Can now be learned at level 20.
  • Talents
    • Holy
      • Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
      • Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
      • Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.
    • Protection
      • Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin’s defense rating (example: a paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent, while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount).
      • Guarded by the Light: This talent will no longer cause Divine Plea’s duration to be refreshed by using Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Justice, or Judgement of Light.
    • Retribution
      • Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant. In addition, this talent now provides notification in the floating combat text when it activates.
      • Crusader Strike: Damage reduced to 75% weapon damage to match the new 4-second cooldown. Mana cost reduced to 5% of base mana.
      • Seal of Command: Redesigned. This seal now deals 36% weapon damage on every swing, and deals substantially less judgement damage.
      • Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

Priests

  • Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.
  • Psychic Horror: This spell no longer has an invisible missile, so there is no travel time before the spell takes effect.
  • Talents
    • Discipline
      • Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.
    • Holy
      • Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.
    • Shadow
      • Dispersion: Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
      • Improved Mind Blast: Redesigned. Now, in addition to reducing the cooldown of your Mind Blast spell by .5/1/1.5/2/2.5 seconds, while in Shadowform your Mind Blast also has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds.
      • Vampiric Touch: The amount of damage done when this spell is dispelled has been doubled.

Rogues

  • After much quiet contemplation, rogues now possess the ability to learn how to use one-handed axes.
  • Talents
    • Combat
      • Sword Specialization: This talent is now called Hack and Slash and applies to axes as well as swords.
    • Subtlety
      • Shadow Dance: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute. Now lasts 6 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Shamans

  • A customizable totem bar will now be available for shamans allowing the storing of 4 different totems. These totems can be placed on the ground at once in one global cooldown for the combined mana cost of all 4 totems.
  • All Shocks now have a default range of 25 yards, up from 20 yards.
  • Base health increased by approximately 7% to correct for shamans having lower health than other classes.
  • Chain Heal: Jump distance increased by 25% to 12.5 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.
  • Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting, but rather reduces melee attack speed by 10% for 8 seconds (exclusive with similar effects such as Thunder Clap).
  • Ghost Wolf: Can now be learned at level 16. While in this form, snaring effects may not bring the shaman below base normal run speed.
  • Wind Shock: Has been renamed Wind Shear and no longer shares a cooldown with Flame, Frost or Earth Shock.
  • Talents
    • Enhancement
      • Maelstrom Weapon: Now also has a chance to reduce the cast time of Hex.
      • Shamanistic Rage: Cooldown is now 1 minute, down from 2 minutes. Successful melee attacks now have a chance to generate mana equal to 15% of the shaman’s attack power, down from 30%.
    • Restoration
      • Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.
      • Cure Poison and Cure Disease: Combined into a single spell, Cure Toxins.
      • Earth Shield: Dispel effects will now remove charges of Earth Shield rather than the entire aura.
      • Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman’s Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.
      • Mana Tide Totem: Totem health now equal to 10% of the shaman’s health.
      • Nature’s Guardian: Redesigned. Now has a fixed 100% proc rate, has a 30-second internal cooldown and increases the shaman’s maximum health by 3/6/9/12/15% for 10 seconds.
      • Nature’s Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
      • Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.
      • Improved Water Shield: This talent now has a 10/20/30% chance to be triggered by Chain Heal, and the charges of Water Shield are no longer consumed by this talent.

Warlocks

  • Banish: Effect will now be cancelled if Banish is recast on a banished target.
  • Dreadsteed: Can now be learned at level 40.
  • Felsteed: Can now be learned at level 20.
  • Shadowflame: The angle of the cone effect on this ability was inadvertently very small, making it difficult to use. Its cone is now the same size as similar spells, such as Cone of Cold.
  • Soulshatter cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5 minutes
  • Talents
    • Affliction
      • Pandemic: Now also increases the critical damage bonus of Haunt by 100%.
    • Demonology
      • Fel Domination cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 15 minutes.
    • Destruction
      • Empowered Imp: The warlock’s critical hit chance is increased to 100%, up from 20% for the next spell cast after the Imp critically hits a target.
      • Fire and Brimstone: Reduced to 2/4/6/8/10% increased damage from Incinerate and Chaos Bolt on targets afflicted with Immolate, down from 3/6/9/12/15%.

Warriors

  • Battle Shout: Radius increased to 30 yards.
  • Bloodrage: This ability now generates 20 rage initially, and 10 rage over the next 10 seconds. The health cost is unchanged.
  • Commanding Shout: Radius increased to 30 yards.
  • Execute: This ability now never costs more than a total of 30 rage. The tooltip for Sudden Death has been revised to remove reference to that maximum, since the ability now behaves that way even when untalented.
  • Shield Slam: The benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player’s level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player’s level.
  • Talents
    • Fury
      • Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor.
      • Bloodsurge: Notification that Slam has become instant now appears in floating combat text.
    • Protection
      • Devastate: Weapon damage and bonus per Sunder Armor on the target increased by 100%. This ability now requires a shield to be equipped.
      • Shield Specialization: Now provides 5 rage on a block, dodge or parry instead of 2 rage on a block.

User Interface

  • The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information. The list of all quests a player has will show in one pane, while the quest details of any highlighted quest will display in the next.
  • Character name auto-completion for the chat frame, pop-ups, and mail interface is now active
  • Character names can now be colorized according to class in the chat frame. This feature can be enabled through the chat settings by right-clicking on a chat window.
  • Casting bars under the target frame, focus frame and nameplates will now display as shielded if the cast cannot be interrupted.
  • Druids will now be able to see their mana bars when shape-shifted.
  • Item Comparisons: Holding the shift key while hovering over an item will now display the stat differences with the item currently equipped in the relevant slot.
  • Item Level: A new option has been added under Display in the Interface Options to show the item level on item tooltips.
  • Macros and scripts will no longer be able to target totems by name.
  • New Feature Icons: Options recently added to any of the options menus will now display a yellow exclamation point next to them to indicate that they are new features.
  • Vendor prices will now be listed on items whether or not players are at a vendor.
  • For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

  • The frame rate for those with Shadow Effects enabled under the Ultra Video settings has been improved.

World Environment

  • Wolvar and Gorloc orphans have arrived in Dalaran and need your help! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District (completing the quests being offered for this event will not count toward any Children’s Week achievements). Players have a limited amount of time to care for these orphans before they take their leave. They will then return again for the regularly-scheduled Children’s Week next year.
  • Portal areas in all major cities now offer a portal to the Blasted Lands near the Dark Portal.
  • Once crossing through the Dark Portal, players can access a flight path directly from the Stair of Destiny to Shattrath.
  • A new zeppelin docking ramp has been added to Thunder Bluff allowing Horde players easier transport to and from Orgrimmar.
  • The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and has decided to install a large number of new mailboxes in Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.
  • Mathiel in Darnassus has finally earned himself enough money from your repair bills that he was able to buy himself an anvil.

Quests

  • The ravasaur trainer Mor’vek has returned to Un’Goro and will offer to help Horde players raise and train a Venomhide Ravasaur as a mount… if they can survive the creature’s deadly poison.

Achievements

  • A Brew-FAST Mount: A new Feat of Strength achievement for acquiring any epic Brewfest mount.
  • Have Keg, Will Travel: Now requires either a Brewfest mount or using Brewfest Hops to transform yours into one.

Professions

  • Alchemy
    • All stackable potions now stack to 20.
    • Added a new pattern for Flask of the North, usable by players with a high alchemy skill. The recipe is purchased from Northrend trainers. Flask of the North increases your spell power, attack power or strength for 1 hour and is usable in Arenas. It is not consumed when used.
    • Endless Healing Potion and Endless Mana Potion no longer usable in arenas. Amount of health and mana has been increased, and the cooldown reduced.
    • Five new epic gem transmute recipes are available from the Northrend trainer. The recipe for transmuting a Cardinal Ruby can be learned from a quest, given by Linzy Blackbolt in Dalaran.
    • The Mixology benefits from Northrend elixirs and flasks have been increased.
    • Rage potions can now be used by druids.
  • Cooking
    • Blackened Dragonfin Recipe: Now only requires 1 Dragonfin Angelfish.
    • Chef’s Hat is now superior quality and allows the chef to cook faster.
    • Increased the drop rate for recipes from the Outland Daily Cooking quests.
    • Increased the chance to get a bonus Dalaran Cooking Token from the Spice Bag.
    • The recipe for Captain Rumsey’s Lager can now be randomly found in the quest reward Crate, Barrel, or Spice Bag from the cooking dailies.
  • Enchanting
    • Values on Northrend ring enchants increased.
  • Engineering
    • Added a new Mind Amplification Dish attachment for helmets, allowing engineers to control other humanoid targets. Some restrictions apply: does not work in Arenas, dish sometimes reverses targets, unable to stack with other stat-improving head enchantments and makes your helmet look… stylish? This attachment provides a passive bonus of 45 stamina.
    • Added a schematic for a Goblin Welding Beam that can heal friendly mechanical or vehicle units.
    • Alarm-o-Bot functionality changed. Materials required reduced.
    • Box of Bombs no longer requires an anvil.
    • The Cobalt Frag Bomb now incapacitates enemies within a 3-yard radius. A short cast time was added, but they are usable while moving. This change applies to any Cobalt Frag Bombs already created. The existing recipe now makes 3 at a time.
    • Engineers can now learn to create a portable Wormhole Generator for Northrend. The Wormhole allows them to travel to different locations in Northrend, although the locations are sometimes in dangerous places.
    • Flying Machine: The level requirement needed to learn how to build and use this machine has been reduced to level 60, down from level 70, and the engineering skill level reduced to 300, down from 350. Material costs reduced.
    • Gnomish Engineers and Goblin Engineers can now switch profession specializations for a fee.
    • Increased benefits from Hyperspeed Accelerators, Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket and Reticulated Armor Webbing glove modifications.
    • Increased the passive bonuses provided by Springy Arachnoweave, Flexweave Underlay and Nitro Boosts.
    • Mote Extractor now has innate tracking for gas clouds while it is in your inventory. Tracking of gas clouds has been removed from goggles.
    • A new repair bot has been added, and his name is Jeeves. He is the ultimate gentleman robot butler, able to perform all the mundane tasks of repairing, selling and buying junk for your entire raid. Additionally, he can open bank boxes for skilled engineers (350+). Jeeves is not destroyed when used, but due to pressing engagements, can only be summoned once an hour. The schematic for this handsome robot was said to be hidden within the parts of another robot – hoping to be found by an engineer one day.
    • Nitro Boosts: Now have a 5-second duration.
    • Potion Injectors now increase the amount gained by 25% when used by engineers. Quantity produced by recipes for Runic Healing and Mana Injectors has been increased.
    • Reduced the materials needed to create all engineering Dragonlings, and reduced their cooldowns, although they still cannot be used in Arenas.
    • Significantly reduced the cooldown on MOLL-E.
    • The Spynocular belt attachment has been changed to a Frag Belt. The Frag Belt periodically produces a Cobalt Frag Bomb that can be used from the belt every 6 minutes (never runs out!).
    • A Steam-Powered Auctioneer has been added to the Dalaran Like Clockwork engineering shop, allowing access to one’s faction Auction House. The Steam-Powered Auctioneer was programmed with a superiority chip, and will only interact with Grand Master engineers.
    • Transporter devices are no longer classified as trinkets and can be used directly from your inventory.
    • The Ultrasafe Bullet Machine and Saronite Arrow Maker schematics have been simplified to create a full stack of the appropriate ammunition. No longer requires an anvil. Reduced the materials required to make this ammunition.
    • World Enlarger: Cooldown reduced to 15 minutes, down from 1 hour.
  • Fishing
    • Players with 300 or higher cooking have a chance to find a Waterlogged Recipe in the Bag of Fishing Treasures awarded by the Northrend fishing dailies. This item can be traded to other players and rewards several Dalaran Cooking Rewards when turned in.
  • Herbalism
    • Increased healing from Lifeblood (Rank 6).
    • Lifeblood now scales slightly with maximum health. No longer affected by global cooldown.
  • Inscription
    • Added a new Glyph of Claw for young feral druids who haven’t yet obtained Mangle. Scribes can learn this glyph from the trainer.
    • Master’s Inscriptions increased.
  • Jewelcrafting
    • Dragon’s Eye gems stat bonuses increased. In addition, these gems are no longer prismatic and must be matched to the appropriate colored socket to activate an item’s socket bonus.
    • New recipes have been added for cutting epic gems and can be purchased using Dalaran Jewelcrafter’s tokens.
    • Icy Prism now has a chance of yielding an epic gem.
    • Raw epic gems can be obtained via the following means:
      • Prospecting Titanium Ore
      • Alchemy transmutations
      • Purchased with honor
      • Purchased with Emblems of Heroism
  • Leatherworking
    • Added recipe for Heavy Knothide Leather to leatherworking trainers (rather than a vendor recipe). Changed several recipes to use Heavy Knothide Leather instead of regular Leather.
    • Fur Lining values increased.
  • Mining
    • Toughness (Rank 6) provides more stamina.
    • In addition to the normal requirements, mining deposits in Northrend now require a minimum character level of 65 to mine.
  • Skinning
    • Master of Anatomy (Rank 6) provides more critical strike rating.
  • Tailoring
    • Embroideries improved.

Items

  • Feral Druid PvP Gloves (seasons 3 and 4): Maim bonus changed from the Interrupt bonus used in The Burning Crusade Arena seasons to the cost reduction used in Wrath of the Lich King Arena seasons.
  • Glyphs
    • Death Knights
      • Glyph of Unholy Blight: Changed to increase damage done by the updated Unholy Blight talent by 40%.
    • Druids
      • Glyph of Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds.
    • Paladins
      • Glyph of Righteous Defense: Now also increases the chance for Hand of Reckoning to hit.
      • Glyph of Seal of Command: Redesigned to cause the Paladin to gain 8% of base mana each time the paladin judges Command.
      • Glyph of Seal of Blood: Changed to Glyph of Holy Wrath, which reduces its cooldown by 15 seconds.
    • Rogues
      • Glyph of Shadow Dance: Now increases the duration of Shadow Dance by 2 seconds, down from 4 seconds.
      • Glyph of Tricks of the Trade: Now increases the duration of the damage bonus effect instead of increasing the damage bonus.
    • Shamans
      • Glyph of Healing Wave: The amount of healing the shaman receives is now based on the entire healing amount, including over-healing.
    • Warlocks
      • Glyph of Lifetap: Duration of the buff from this glyph increased to 40 seconds.
  • Idol of the Corruptor: The agility buff from this idol is now exclusive with the agility buff from Idol of Terror.
  • Mage Tier-7 2-Piece Bonus: Now grants 25% additional mana from mana gems, down from 40%.
  • Non-Combat Pets: 8 new pets have been added (not including Argent Tournament rewards). Raptor Hatchlings can be found on rare and elite raptors throughout the game world. In addition, an Obsidian Raptor Hatchling can be purchased from Breanni in Dalaran.
  • Tome of Cold Weather Flight: New heirloom item. Players who have reached level 80 can now purchase this book for 1,000 gold from Hira Snowdawn, the Cold Weather Flying Trainer in Dalaran. Similar to other heirloom items, this item can be mailed to other characters of the same realm, account and faction. The book is consumed when read training the character in Cold Weather Flying. Requires level 68.
  • Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings: This item’s stats and level have been increased to match the power level of healer weapons coming from the Coliseum 25-person normal difficulty instance. In addition, each time Val’anyr is equipped, Blessing of Ancient Kings will be placed on a 45-second cooldown before it can occur.

Bug Fixes

  • Death Knights
    • Anti-Magic Shell: The tooltip for this ability will now reflect modifications from the Magic Suppression talent.
    • Blood-Caked Blade: The damage from this talent is no longer normalized to weapon speed.
    • Chilblains: Icy Clutch can no longer miss when Frost Fever hits, however, when Frost Fever is dispelled Icy Clutch will also be dispelled.
    • Dancing Rune Weapon: The rune weapon will no longer cast Corpse Explosion.
    • Desecration: No longer causes unnecessary combat logging.
    • Horn of Winter: Learning rank 2 of this ability caused players to unlearn rank 1, such that it no longer appears in their spellbook. It is now possible to relearn that rank, and death knights will no longer “forget” rank 1 when they learn rank 2.
    • Lichborne: The buff from this ability can now be cancelled.
    • Raise Ally: Using the Gnaw ability while under the effects of this spell will now initiate auto-attack. In addition, the damage done has been changed from a flat value to a percentage of weapon damage.
    • Raise Dead: This spell will no longer give two errors when the casting player lacks the reagent to cast it.
    • Rune of Razorice: Each death knight can now have his or her own copy of this debuff on the target.
    • Rune of Spellbreaking: Tooltip now indicates the effect from this enchantment does not stack with other effects which reduce the duration of Silence effects (including not stacking with a second copy of this enchantment). In addition, now reduces damage from Holy spells.
    • Rune of Spellshattering: Now reduces damage from Holy spells.
    • Summon Gargoyle: Corrected the inaccurate tooltip which claimed a Gargoyle could last up to 40 seconds, when in fact 30 seconds has always been the maximum.
    • Rune of Razorice: Corrected a bug where this applied to frost damage done by others.
  • Druids
    • Bash: Tooltip now specifies that the Interrupt effect only occurs on non-player targets.
    • Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form: Mana energizes that occur while in these forms will now appear in the combat log and floating combat text.
    • Cyclone: Victims of Cyclone can no longer receive healing from health drain effects such as Devouring Plague while they are affected by Cyclone.
    • Dash: Druids who have not learned Track Humanoids will now retain the benefit of Dash while shifting out of and back into Cat Form.
    • Druids should no longer be removed from a form after using any engineered bombs.
    • Maim: Tooltip now specifies that the Interrupt effect only occurs on non-player targets.
    • Natural Perfection: Now properly triggered by periodic critical strikes.
    • Nature’s Grasp: This talent will no longer be triggered spuriously by some ranged abilities such as Heroic Throw.
  • Hunters
    • All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
    • Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
    • Furious Howl: Ranks 1-5 will no longer give slightly more attack power than is listed in their tooltips.
    • Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
    • Roar of Sacrifice: Damage transferred to pet is now considered Nature damage.
    • The tooltip for Improved Tracking has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
    • T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.
  • Mages
    • Arcane Instability: Tooltip reworded to clarify design intent.
    • Burning Determination: Some Silence and Interrupt effects that did not trigger this talent will now trigger it properly, including Shield of the Templar, Garrote and Gag Order.
    • Combustion: Fire spell misses will no longer trigger this talent.
    • Conjure Refreshment: Rank 1 food will no longer overwrite the drink buff from rank 2 food.
    • Fireball: Periodic damage from this spell can no longer trigger Combustion.
    • Living Bomb: Periodic critical strikes from this ability can now trigger Ignite and Hot Streak.
    • Mirror Image: The mirror images will no longer complete casts of Frostbolt on targets which are Polymorphed at the time their Frostbolt channel finishes.
    • Molten Armor: Critical strikes from the effect on this armor will no longer trigger Ignite.
  • Paladins
    • Auras: Any paladin aura active at the time of the paladin’s death now automatically reactivates when the paladin returns to life.
    • Beacon of Light: Multiple paladins can now have this buff active on the same target. In addition, the beacon target will no longer lose the buff while under the effects of Cyclone or Banish.
    • Blessing of Sanctuary: This talent and Vigilance will now both be able to be cast on the same target without sometimes overwriting each other.
    • Exorcism: Now properly has a 100% chance to be a critical strike when cast on death knights using Lichborne.
    • Eye for an Eye: Now properly triggered by periodic critical strikes. In addition, the tooltip incorrectly stated that 20% damage is reflected, when it is actually 10%. Tooltip fixed.
    • Hammer of Justice: Tooltip now specifies that the Interrupt effect only occurs on non-player targets.
    • Hand of Sacrifice: Casting this spell on a target with Divine Sacrifice active will now generate an error message instead of wasting the cooldown.
    • Heart of the Crusader: The effect from this talent will no longer be removed if a paladin without this talent overwrites the judgement placed by a paladin who does have the talent.
    • Holy Shield: It is no longer possible to have two ranks of this ability active at the same time.
    • Judgements: All paladin judgements are now properly considered as melee attacks that cannot be dodged, blocked or parried. Previously Seal of Light, Seal of Wisdom, Seal of Justice and Seal of Righteousness would cause the judgement to be considered a ranged attack.
    • Judgement of the Just: The effect from this talent will no longer be removed if a paladin without this talent overwrites the judgement placed by a paladin who does have the talent.
    • Judgement of Vengeance: Inaccurate combat log tooltip corrected.
    • Judgement of Corruption: Inaccurate combat log tooltip corrected.
    • Pursuit of Justice: This talent will no longer sometimes be deactivated when leaving a battleground.
    • Sacred Shield: This buff will no longer have any effect if the target is another player engaged in a duel. In addition, the heal from this buff will no longer cause the paladin to stand, and it is no longer possible for two paladins to both have the spell active on one target.
  • Priests
    • Blessed Resilience: Now properly triggered by periodic critical strikes.
    • Divine Aegis: This talent will now work properly if the priest moves out of range of his or her target as the effect is resolving.
    • Divine Hymn: This spell now works correctly with the trinket Illustration of the Dragon Soul. Mana Burn: Fixed a bug where Mana Burn did not cause fear effects to break when the fear victim had an absorb shield on.
    • Mass Dispel: This spell now triggers some types of trinkets it did not trigger before (such as Flow of Knowledge).
    • Pain Suppression: No longer can be cast while under the effects of Incapacitate or Cyclone.
  • Rogues
    • Honor Among Thieves: Periodic critical strikes now grant combo points for rogues with this talent.
    • Killing Spree: Error message when no targets are in range has been changed to “Out of Range.”
    • Master of Subtlety: Being under the effects of Cyclone when the buff from this talent is about to expire will no longer make it last indefinitely.
    • Overkill: Being under the effects of Cyclone when the buff from this talent is about to expire will no longer make it last indefinitely.
    • Shiv: Deadly Poison will now apply properly when Shiv is the attack used to break a Gouge.
    • Tricks of the Trade: Using this ability on a target affected by Cyclone or Banish will no longer place the ability on permanent cooldown and will instead give an error message.
    • Turn the Tables: Rank 2 of this talent will now work properly with raid members, and not just party members.
  • Shamans
    • Elemental Devastation: Tooltip revised to indicate it does not work with critical strikes from periodic damage.
    • Elemental Focus: Tooltip revised to indicate it does not work with critical strikes from periodic damage.
    • Elemental Oath: Tooltip revised to indicate it does not work with critical strikes from periodic damage.
    • Flametongue Weapon: Fixed tooltip error.
    • Frostbrand Weapon: Fixed a bug where rank 9 was not scaling properly with a shaman’s spell power.
  • Warlocks
    • Demonic Circle: The visual for this spell should now despawn when the warlock dies or when the warlock otherwise loses the aura that allows transport to the circle.
    • Immolate and Unstable Affliction: All ranks of these two spells will now overwrite each other.
    • Improved Imp: Each time an Imp is summoned it will recast Blood Pact (if autocast is on), forcing it to benefit from this talent, even if the Imp was not summoned at the time the talent was learned.
    • Improved Shadow Bolt: Redesigned slightly. Instead of a 100% chance to apply a 1/2/3/4/5% critical strike increase on the target, it now has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to apply a 5% critical strike increase.
  • Warriors
    • Berserker Rage: Tooltip clarified to indicate this ability breaks existing Fear, Sap, and Incapacitate effects.
    • Bladestorm: Now properly removes the Snare effect of Desecration in all cases.
    • Blood Craze: Now properly triggered by periodic critical strikes.
    • Execute: Focused Rage and the Dreadnaught Battlegear set bonus will now properly reduce the cost of Execute.
    • Slam: The combat log tooltip will no longer list which rank of Slam was used. Previously it incorrectly listed rank 8 for all ranks of Slam.
    • Vigilance: This talent and Blessing of Sanctuary will now both be able to be cast on the same target without sometimes overwriting each other.
  • Items
    • Adamantite Scope: Attaching this scope to an item will now cause it to become soulbound as intended.
    • Badge of the Swarmguard: Will no longer cause a weapon swing animation when it triggers.
    • Cenarion Set: No longer reduces the (nonexistent) cooldown on Hurricane. Instead, the set bonus increases the damage done by Hurricane by 15%.
    • Commendation of Bravery: No longer useable when player is already at the maximum honor allowed.
    • Deadly Gladiator’s Dreadplate: The set bonus will now trigger properly from Crippling Poison.
    • Death Knight PvP Glove Bonus: The runic power gain no longer appears in the combat log.
    • Death Knight Tier-7 Set: Fingers of the Damned now has a detailed combat log tooltip.
    • Frostweave Net: Using this item no longer causes the user to break shapeshifts.
    • Glyphs
      • Glyph of Beacon of Light: This glyph will no longer grant its duration increase twice when Beacon of Light is cast on self.
      • Glyph of Corpse Explosion: This glyph will no longer cause the model on target dummies to change.
      • Glyph of Death Strike: Tooltip typo corrected.
      • Glyph of Disease: Blood Plague will now last its correct full duration when refreshed by this glyph.
      • Glyph of Freezing Trap: The effect from this glyph will now log properly.
      • Glyph of Healing Wave: The heal from this glyph will no longer benefit twice from the Purification talent.
      • Glyph of Overpower: Fixed a bug where sometimes parries would not trigger the glyph. In addition, this glyph will now only make Overpower available for 6 seconds after a parry, instead of indefinitely.
      • Glyph of Power Word: Shield: The heal from this glyph can now cause Divine Aegis.
      • Glyph of Shadow: This glyph can now be triggered by critical strikes from periodic damage.
      • Glyph of Shocking: Fixed tooltip error on Macintosh game client.
      • Glyph of Shadowflame: The effect from this glyph will now work properly when multiple Warlocks use Shadowflame on the target.
    • Gnomish Mind Control Cap: Paladins who break the harmful effect from this item by using Divine Shield will now properly gain the Forbearance debuff.
    • Goblin Dragon Gun: This item will no longer spam the combat log with cast messages.
    • Heavy Netherweave Net: Using this item no longer causes the user to break shapeshifts.
    • Major Arcane Protection Potion: Vendor price lowered to match other similar potions.
    • Nightsong Battlegear: The 2-piece set bonus will no longer sometimes be triggered by other periodic damage other than those listed in the tooltip.
    • Pandora’s Plea: Corrected a tooltip issue.
    • Randomly generated uncommon (green) and rare (blue) quality items in Wrath of the Lich King had stat values that were lower than intended. All Wrath of the Lich King uncommon and rare items with random suffixes (”of the Bear”) have had their stat values increased significantly.
    • Reins of the Icemaw Matriarch: This vehicle will now leave bear footprints instead of barefoot footprints.
    • Reticulated Armor Webbing: Tooltip corrected to no longer claim that this item only works on plate items.
    • Saronite Bomb: This item will no longer cause threat against nearby targets just outside the targeting circle.
    • Scrolls: Scrolls which grant agility, intellect, spirit, strength, or stamina will now report an error message and no longer consume and waste the scroll when the target has a more powerful buff to that stat.
    • Sif’s Remembrance: Sound and animation added to trinket effect.
    • Sigil of Arthritic Binding: The bonus damage from this relic is now added after diseases have increased damage by a percentage, instead of before.
    • Trinkets: Various trinkets which did not work properly with channeled area-of-effect spells will now work with those spells. This includes (but is not limited to) Illustration of the Dragon Soul, Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and Egg of Mortal Essence.
    • Warrior PvP Glove Bonus: Tooltip reworded slightly.
    • Wintergrasp Commendation: No longer useable when player is already at the maximum honor allowed.
  • Professions
    • Enchant Weapon – Black Magic: This enchantment can now be triggered by some spells it did not previously work with, including Curse of Agony, Blizzard, and Typhoon.
    • Guardian Gloves: Now correctly marked as uncommon quality.
  • Events
    • Hallow’s End: Putting out fires for this event will no longer trigger effects from items, talents and set bonuses.
    • Noblegarden: Loot windows will no longer periodically close while the looting player is transformed into a rabbit.
  • Technical
    • There is a known UI rendering issue with the Intel 965 Mobile Express chipset drivers on Windows Vista prior to version 7.15.10.1559 (December 2008). Please contact your laptop manufacturer for an updated driver if you are experiencing difficulties. In case of continued problems, add the following lines to the Config.wtf file as a workaround: SET fixedFunction “1″.

categories patches | tags

Priest Q&A

comments Comments (0)
By Lyssa, August 3, 2009 4:07 pm

And finally we have the priests, the last in the class Q&A series.

Priest Q&A with the World of Warcraft Development Team

Community Team: Joining us today to close out this round of the Class Q&A Series by addressing questions collected from the priest community is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, Ghostcrawler, who has enlisted the assistance of several members of our class design team to provide the most thorough answers possible. We’d like to begin as we always do by addressing what priests add to the World of Warcraft experience.

Q: Where do priests fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward? What makes them unique?

Ghostcrawler: When you think of the priest in the context of traditional MMOs you think of the token healer, usually part of the “holy trinity” along with the warrior and mage. Many players who picked the priest as their character when they started the game had the expectation that they would be the premier healer, playing the role of support. Certainly in the beginning of World of Warcraft the priest was the class you chose when you were looking for a healer, and the class was adept at filling that role. However, unlike in other RPGs we’ve tried to make healing a role that many classes can fill. This is why sometimes priests can feel that they aren’t balanced correctly, since they aren’t necessarily the best healer.

In World of Warcraft, the priest isn’t a stronger healer than the other classes, but does have unmatched versatility. At its core the priest has two unique talent trees for healing, while the others only have one. Furthermore, the priest has strong heal-over-time spells (HoTs), direct heals, and area-of-effect (AoE) heals. So where the power of the priest comes in is how you use your entire repertoire of healing tools together to overcome a situation, rather than focusing on one aspect. Players sometimes call this the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none role, but we don’t really view it that way. The priest has a big toolbox. That makes you versatile, but at the cost (in player skill) of knowing how to match the right spell for the right job. The trade-off of the healing priest isn’t in trading power for versatility, but in having narrow niches for spells but a lot of spells.

One other way we’ve tried to make the priest class more enjoyable is by fleshing out its damage-dealing talent specialization (spec), the Shadow tree. In the beginning, the Shadow spec was more of a leveling tree and not really viable for high-end content late game. In The Burning Crusade, it didn’t really keep up in damage compared to other classes in raiding but it did bring strong utility. Finally, in Wrath of the Lich King we increased its damage-dealing potential to make it near that of a primary damage-per-second (dps) caster — such as a mage — while also retaining some of its unique utility which made it cool during The Burning Crusade.

Overall, we feel the priest is one of the most versatile classes in the game, and can be the most enjoyable of the healer classes in the game because of its feature of having two different unique talent specs providing two different types of play styles. And for players who enjoy the dps aspect, you always have the option of going to the dark side as Shadow to either melt faces in PvP or help take down foes in PvE. As for moving forward, in a nutshell we’d like to improve the Holy tree’s PvP niche and polish the Shadow tree a bit more for both aspects of the game.

Community Team: Since the role of a priest can vary drastically depending on the type of role the player wishes to fill, let’s focus on Shadow priests and dealing damage first.

Q: What makes a Shadow priest effective in a raid environment versus a PvP environment?

Ghostcrawler: Shadow priests have some start up time to get all of their DoTs going before the damage really starts coming in. This is easier in a boss fight that lasts for several minutes and harder in a really dynamic PvP environment.

Q: Since a lot of the damage a Shadow priest does builds with damage-over-time (DoT) spells, are you concerned about them being well-rounded enough to do adequate damage in shorter PvE encounters, 5-player dungeons, or in the Arenas?

Ghostcrawler: This is a long answer.

First, we want a certain amount of class diversity. We try to make sure that everyone’s single-target dps is comparable to that of similar specs or classes, and we try to make sure that most damage specs can do some amount of AoE damage. But we don’t obsess with say slow group pulls compared with say fast single-target pulls to make sure everyone’s damage is comparable in every situation.

Second, if the pulls are really that quick, nobody is counting on your dps to begin with. What I mean is that if you are pulling and killing groups of mobs faster than every 20 seconds, then the extra damage you might or might not bring isn’t really an issue because stuff is just collapsing anyway. On the other hand, if the pulls take 20 seconds, then you should have plenty of time to get your DoTs up before stuff starts to die.

Third, there is an issue of player skill here too. If your group kills the skull first every time, then maybe you want to DoT the third or fourth mob in the group so that you do have the benefit of time elapsing. DoTs just work differently. The Enhancement shaman by contrast can be at 100% on one target, then switch and be at 100% on the new target instantly. Not every class or spec can do that and class diversity would be a little boring if they could.

Fourth, the issue that we think is most problematic is found in the Shadow talents. Many of them say basically “while your DoTs are ticking.” This means in situations where the DoTs can’t tick (say those very short PvE fights, or sometimes in PvP) you are doubly punished since now those talents aren’t pulling their weight. The Shadow tree could benefit from more talents that affect all damage and not just the DoTs.

Q: Is it too easy to dispel DoTs right now?

Ghostcrawler: In a word, no. Priests of all specs used to benefit a lot more from “junk” buffs and debuffs to “protect” their spells than we typically allow these days. We just didn’t think that was an aspect of the game we really wanted to promote. Realizing how dependent Shadow is on DoTs though, we did recently buff the backlash from Vampiric Touch so you get some damage even if it is dispelled.

I’ve referenced a few times our desire to make the dispel game more fun and less frustrating, especially in PvP. Dispels shouldn’t totally negate your class abilities.

Also remember that all types of damage will be reduced to the current DoT level in 3.2 against targets with resilience. This means that overall the contribution of damage done by DoTs should go up.

Q: Are the developers happy with the functionality of Dispersion and is it considered to be an adequately valuable final talent in the Shadow tree?

Ghostcrawler: I think the key word here is “final” talent. Players have developed an expectation that the 51-point talent should be the best one in the tree; and for damage-dealing trees that means it’s expected these final talents do more damage than anything else the player has. That’s not really the way we design the trees though. Dispersion is a very valuable spell — nearly all Shadow priests take it. It’s one of the best “not going to die now” spells in the game. Early on there was a perception that it was a PvP-only spell since it didn’t buff damage, but really it gets a lot of use in PvE as well (and not just for the mana regeneration).

Q: Would you consider removing the cast time for Mind Blast to make it a more desirable direct-damage spell given that it already has a cooldown?

Ghostcrawler: No. We’d be more likely to mess with the damage rather than the cast time. Obviously if the spell was no cooldown, no cast time then Shadow priests would not ever cast anything else — it’s a great spell. So the trick is to keep it powerful while giving the player space to cast all those other Shadow priest spells as well. We honestly don’t want too many more instant-cast spells. That suggestion keeps coming up to handle interruptions in PvP and having to move in PvE. But we don’t want you to be able to opt out of those situations — they are supposed to be challenges. If you’re looking for high direct damage with no cooldown, Mind Flay is supposed to be that spell.

Since this question was asked, I suspect, we have announced the healing debuff component to Mind Blast as well. That’s a nice PvP buff as well as making the spell in general more attractive.

Q: As many players report that Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch lack viability in PvP settings and Vampiric Embrace tends to generate too much threat in PvE settings, are there any plans you can share to improve the functionality of these spells?

Ghostcrawler: Vampiric Touch does a lot of damage. I’d disagree that it lacks viability, and we even buffed the backlash damage a little more. I don’t think the possibility that a spell can be dispelled should be synonymous with lack of viability. It takes a little bit of set-up time to get all of them working in PvE and PvP, but that’s actually something we’re trying to push more classes and specs into instead of going to just instant, burst damage everywhere.

We can look at the Vampiric Embrace threat. That’s not feedback we hear often. Shadow priests pulling off of tanks doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem.

Q: How about increasing the range of Mind Flay?

Ghostcrawler: The glyph improves the range at the cost of the snare, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. We have discussed bumping damage and range, or possibly just removing the snare loss. It was put in as PvP protection early on in Lich King, but at this point we don’t think it would be a problem if the glyph just bumped the range without the penalty. It’s probably too conservative a glyph.

Q: Since Shadow priests focus solely on dealing Shadow damage, do you feel that they can potentially be crippled more easily than other casters who can focus on dealing considerable damage through multiple schools of magic?

Ghostcrawler: It’s just a feature of the class. Paladins have a lot of the same issues. We have discussed giving Shadow priests a Frost spell to use solely in emergency situations like this, but its niche would be only for school lock-out periods. We don’t want Shadow priests to be doing multiple types of damage overall. Now making it easier for Shadow priests to drop Shadowform and switch to healing or even Holy damage is something that we’ve mentioned lately on the boards. We could reduce the mana cost or the like.

Q: Shadow Word: Death was once a spell that priests used frequently in PvE, but has basically dropped off their bar. Are there any plans to improve this?

Ghostcrawler: We think Shadow priests have enough spells to manage as part of their rotation, so we don’t want to necessarily go back to them using it on cooldown. One thing we considered was having the backlash not fire if used on a target within Execute range. Another fix we’d like to make would prevent the backlash from being affected by boosts that improve your damage, as is typical during boss encounters — your damage would be inflated without the risk of you one-shotting yourself.

Q: Have you considered providing a talent to increase the duration of Shadowfiend as a mana regeneration mechanic for longer boss fights?

Ghostcrawler: Priests don’t seem to have much of a mana problem on long boss fights, and our boss fights are not really all that long. You are supposed to run out of mana at some point. We’d be more likely to reduce the cooldown than increase the duration if it got to be a problem, since the duration would buff Shadowfiend damage as well.

Community Team: I think that last question provides a nice segue to focus on the healing niches priests fill using the Discipline and Holy trees.

Q: While their roles can vary significantly, what makes Discipline and Holy priests effective in a raid environment versus a PvP environment?

Ghostcrawler: The short answer is that Discipline can prevent damage with their shields and do a lot of healing on single targets. Holy on the other hand can group heal with Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing. Despite our adding some PvP talents to Holy, Discipline is still really popular with players because of the survival talents and the way heals like Penance aren’t quite instant but are hard to interrupt just the same. One of the main priest roles in PvP is to use Dispel Magic and Discipline has many talents that key into it. When we go to improve Holy, things we want to improve are mana efficiency and burst healing.

Community Team: Many players assert that Greater Heal becomes less desirable as their gear continues to improve given the cast time and mana cost required, even with talent points in Serendipity.

Q: Do you feel that, given the risks and costs associated with using Greater Heal, it is sufficient in its current form; and are the benefits of Serendipity adequate?

Ghostcrawler: I think the only cost is the long cast time and the fact that the extra healing it provides isn’t often necessary. The scale is just off — Flash Heal is big, so Greater Heal is just overkill. Combine this with the fact that there are other spells that are doing a lot of the healing that Greater Heal used to do — Penance for example. I don’t think many players look at Greater Heal as being too expensive from a mana-per-healing standpoint. They often aren’t in danger of running out of mana. It’s also worth pointing out that max rank Greater Heal has always healed too much. The difference is that priests used to be able to cast down-ranked Greater Heals. We have considered offering say Lesser Heal as a literal 50% mana, 50% healing version of Greater Heal, but at the moment we’re having enough to do getting both Greater Heal and Flash Heal to get used.

Q: Similarly, do you feel that the comparative cast time and mana cost of Flash Heal is appropriate given the amount of healing it provides?

Ghostcrawler: It’s supposed to be an inefficient spell that gives you speed but at a high cost. The intent is that Greater Heal is the default heal a priest might cast, but then switch to a Flash Heal for those “oh snap” moments. Most fast heals in the game use this same model, with the exception of Flash of Light, which is mana-efficient but heals for a very small amount.

The problem is that in the current raid environment, speed is everything while mana isn’t nearly so scary. What I mean is that you are generally at a greater risk of failure through raid members dying than you are for healers going out of mana. The speed of Flash Heal just trumps other issues. Two other things complicate this issue. One is that heals in general are very large compared to health pools. This means that a Greater Heal often just over-heals for more. Second, in a raid in which healers don’t coordinate well it’s easy for other healers to stomp on your big, slow heals. While you are casting, someone heals your target for you. I’m not saying these are bad players — in my experience it’s just the style of raid. Some players are really talkative and coordinated. “Big heal coming.” “I got Jimmy.” Or else everyone has their targets and won’t heal someone else unless something unpredictable happens. Other raids just heal anyone who is injured and don’t have a lot of assigned targets, except for probably the tanks. Both systems can work. The second one is going to get more use out of faster heals though.

Q: Have you considered reducing the 10-minute cooldown on Divine Hymn?

Ghostcrawler: It was balanced like Tranquility. We basically want these to be once-an-encounter spells. We have considered a mechanic that allows you to use the spell again in the case of a wipe, sort of the same way Bloodlust / Heroism works.

Q: Since Pain Suppression can easily be considered the life-saving mechanic of the Discipline tree, are there any possible improvements that could be made to this spell?

Ghostcrawler: Pain Suppression is more or less targeted Shield Wall. It’s really good.

Q: Lightwell isn’t a very desirable talent for most Holy priests given its current functionality; do you have any plans to improve its functionality?

Ghostcrawler: We’ve tried a lot of different implementations so far. The basic root of the problem is that most dps classes seem unwilling to have to take the time or spatial awareness to make use of the Lightwell, even if it provides great healing. Players will use Health Stones, but Lightwell crosses the line. We’re not entirely happy with that phenomenon in the game as a whole. We don’t like that dps characters focus on dps at the exclusion of even their own survival and just assume that’s the healer’s job (this is similar to the problem I mentioned a week or two ago where some tanks focus on survival and downplay threat or damage dealt). To be clear, Lightwell heals for a lot. The problem is just getting players to use it. Encounters currently are very fast-paced, in terms of both dps and healing required so you have trouble finding room to use it. If we do more encounters where healing is more about deciding who to heal (Firemaw or Shazzrah come to mind), then Lightwell would be amazing.

Q: Are there plans to ensure absorption mechanics are properly displayed and stored in the combat log in the near future?

Ghostcrawler: Technically, we can’t attribute absorption to the caster correctly. We know who cast the spell, but we can’t display easily which of the absorptions counts when there are multiple absorptions on a target. The change we made for 3.2 was to show how much damage was left on each absorption effect before and after the damage was done. This should allow third-party addons to figure out which absorb effect goes with which caster and properly credit them for it. The answer, I suspect they will find, is that shields actually prevent a lot of damage. We have seen priests prevent as much damage as they healed.

Q: In the spirit of similar changes made to other class mechanics recently, how about combining Dispel Magic and Dispel Disease into one spell serving both functions?

Ghostcrawler: We think that pushes dispels too far into easy mode. As I said above though, the dispel mechanic in PvP needs work. I suspect the original idea was that you’d want to dispel magic, curses, diseases and poison, but in reality dispelling magic is what you care about most of the time. Poison you might care about were it not so easy to reapply. But again, a somewhat persuasive argument (which doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to do it) is that a superior PvP system might be that you can dispel crowd control and the occasional protective spell, and that’s it.

Q: Is it necessary that dispels can miss?

Ghostcrawler: It really only misses in PvE for the simple reason that bosses are usually 3 levels higher than you. This is annoying and we don’t really want healers to have to worry about being hit-capped. We don’t have an easy change in hand for this problem though — it requires a code fix.

Q: Would you consider increasing or removing altogether the charges of Inner Fire?

Ghostcrawler: At that point it just becomes a passive buff and we might as well just say that priests have the armor of a leather-wearer while wearing cloth. It works a little better for mages and warlocks who are at least making a decision about which armor spell to cast. If we go ahead and add alternatives to Inner Fire (”Outer Fire”! “Inner Shadow!”) then we might take off the charges. Certainly the spell requires a lot less micromanagement now than it used to.

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Rogue Q&A

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By Lyssa,

Time for the rogue Q&A.

Rogue Q&A with Greg Street

Community Team: This segment is all about the rogue; we will delve deep into this class with Greg Street and discuss the elements that make the rogue class incredibly unique.

Q. Where do rogues fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

A: They’re a premier melee dps class — the personification of skulking and swashbuckling flair. It’s their primary and only role — they’re not going to turn into tanks or healers.

Rogues were once the best dps class hands-down, and a lot of the other classes were just there to buff rogues. Rogues were supposed to be selfish and not bring many buffs or utility of their own. We’re not really happy with that design any longer, and have pushed rogues to be a little more normal — great damage in the right conditions, but also some good utility and synergy as well.

Rogues have nearly always been strong in PvP, just because their shtick of coming out of stealth to stun and then unload on an opponent translates so well to everything from Arena to random world ganking.

Q. What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

A: Rogues have a complex resource system with the balance between energy and combo points, and rely on active abilities to respond to situations rather than passive effects. This leads to a very interesting tension between planning out what you’re going to do ahead of time and reacting to proc-based resource gains (energy/combo points from things like Combat Potency, Relentless Strikes, and Ruthlessness), and rationing your active timers and abilities to survive.

Community Team: Let’s look at rogue abilities, the combo point system, and the feedback our rogue community has provided on some of these.

Q. Do we feel the current combo point system is working out fine for rogues, not just for Subtlety, but for all three trees? Are there any plans to improve how combo points are awarded later down the road?

A: Yes, but there’s always room for improvement. Combo points are meaningful in all aspects of the game, and provide a necessary limiter on some of the rogue’s more powerful abilities. Too many combo points runs the risk of completely overwhelming your normal abilities and breaking the natural flow of the class, as Subtlety rogues who raid probably know all too well. I would expect that abilities that modify how combo points are acquired are something we’ll probably be careful with in the future.

Overall, we really like the way the combo point and finishing move system works. If anything, the risk is that we could push too many other classes towards this system, which makes it less unique for the rogue.

Q. Vanish, as you know, is one of the class’s staple abilities that sets it apart from other classes. However, there are times when Vanish doesn’t execute quite as the rogue intends, especially when they vanish right in the middle of some kind of enemy channeling spell or when a class sends their pet after the rogue “mid-vanish.” Do we feel that, in its current rendition, Vanish is working properly in this respect? What variables should be considered when Rogues decide to utilize Vanish to avoid it being negated?

A: No, Vanish isn’t working properly and breaks when you breathe on the rogue funny. There are two problems with fixing it. One is that technically it’s just not easy. We would need to change the ways spells are resolved on the server side. Now that is something we can do, but the outcome would be taking a powerful ability and making it more powerful. We need to solve the frustration part of the ability, but not also greatly buff rogue survivability or damage potential when doing it. The solution we like the most is something like Vanish puts you in stealth for 1 second minimum no matter what else happens.

Q. We’ve seen some changes made to both Mutilate and Overkill; how do we feel these abilities are faring currently and do we believe they require any additional adjustments?

A: Both abilities are largely where we want them — a poisoned enemy is still meaningful to the Mutilate rogue, and the modern Overkill keeps the feeling of being awesome while in or emerging from stealth, while being relatively more balanced than the prior incarnation. The changes seem to have had their intended effect of reducing rogue burst damage.

Q. There has been mention in previous developer responses on the forums about changes planned for Hunger for Blood. Players are interested to know what is in store for this ability in the foreseeable future.

A: The current design for Hunger for Blood is in place to boost rogue PvE damage without substantially boosting PvP damage. It’s not a terribly exciting talent in its current implementation, but it does the job. As such, we do have long-term plans to change it, but we think the current design works for now. Long-term we want it to be a more reactive ability — something you use depending on the situation but use often in a fight, and not just a passive damage buff that requires a lot of management. Long-term we’d also like to get it back into PvP.

Q. Rogues appreciated the original rendition of Shadow Dance and felt it to be incredibly unique. Do we have plans to implement the original functionality later down the road?

A: No. The repeated snare-breaks from chain-Vanish were way too good and basically made the rogue immune to snares and roots for the duration of Shadow Dance. It wasn’t intended to be Bladestorm.

Community Team: Going into the Subtlety spec for a little bit, many rogues are huge fans of the Subtlety spec and have shared similar concerns regarding this specialization such as damage output compared to Assassination and Combat.

Q. Players feel Subtlety captures the essence of a rogue with the majority of its abilities revolving around stealth and utility. How do we feel this specialization is performing currently and where do we see it in the future?

A: The damage is behind the other specs in PvE, and due to all the neat utility tools, Subtlety would immediately become the default spec in PvE if the damage were comparable. In the future we’d like to make it competitive, but it’s an interesting balancing act between too good and not good enough. It has a place in PvP, and should be more compelling in the post-3.2 world where survival talents will be more valuable.

Long-term, we’d love to see more of the utility talents from Subtlety core for the rogue class in general, or alternatively, we’d like to see more of the damage boosts from the other trees made passive so that rogues of all trees were choosing utility versus utility when making talent choices instead of utility versus damage.

Community Team: We would like to touch on various PvE aspects of the Rogue. Let’s get started.

Q. For both groups and raids, utility such as raid buffs and debuffs offer great benefits for improving your party-member’s effectiveness in most PvE encounters. While rogues do have abilities such as Expose Armor, Blind, and Sap, do we have plans for added utility later on?

A: Yes, the question is where we add them and how we do it without unbalancing the tightrope between the specs we walk in both PvE and PvP, and giving them too much access to their PvE damage potential in PvP. We think Tricks of the Trade is a fun utility ability that lets the rogue feel smart when it’s used most optimally. We want to make sure rogues have enough group raid buffs (currently they have Expose Armor, Mind-numbing Poison, Master Poisoner, Wound Poison, and Savage Combat), but rogue damage is sufficient now that they are pretty attractive members of the team.

Q. The majority of a rogue’s damage seems to stem mostly from white damage; we’ve seen devs in the past mention revamping this to avoid it being the main source of damage. Also, with changes made recently to abilities such as Mutilate and Slice and Dice, players would like to know how exactly we plan to change this aspect for rogues.

A: Rogue ability usage is still a very meaningful part of their damage, and rogues who use their abilities and timers skillfully perform much better than those who do not. As such, there aren’t really plans to change this significantly, as it’s an interesting distinction between the rogue and more ability-driven classes such as the death knight. Putting more damage into their abilities also increases the damage on an already bursty class.

Q. Cool-downs are another topic that has been discussed consistently within the rogue community. Rogues understand that they are strong and efficient when they have cool-downs readily available, however on the same token, they feel a bit constrained by the limitation to their class because of various cool-downs. In a dungeon/raid encounter, they feel that they are unable to provide significant damage contributions even when attempting to manage their cool-downs to the best of their ability. How do we currently feel about cool-downs for their damage-dealing abilities?

A: In dungeons they’re absolutely right — one of the disadvantages of scaling so well in a raid scenario is that you need to start at a lower baseline. They’re better than they used to be for dungeons due to a mostly reliable Sap, but they’re still not great compared to a caster or melee hybrid. In a raid they’re great, and the problem exists between the chair and the keyboard if they’re not contributing damage effectively in that scenario.

Community Team: Jumping into some PvP action with the next set of questions from our rogue community, let’s get to it!

Q. Cloak of Shadows is an incredible ability; it helps rogues avoid most incoming spell damage and effects. However, how do we feel this ability stacks up versus classes that possess both melee and spell damaging abilities? Do we still feel the 90% avoidance is sufficient to aid Rogues in PvP encounters against spell casters and hybrids?

A: It’s meant as a tool that’s part of a toolkit, not an I-win button. It’s sufficient, and extending it to 100% would make rogues largely immune to interesting PvE effects they shouldn’t be (e.g. Mimiron’s Shock Blast).

Q. Rogues feel they take an extensive amount of damage against various classes and have very limited abilities with long cool-downs to help combat this, so they rely heavily on their avoidance abilities in PvP situations and have little to fall back on to survive. How do we feel rogue survivability is currently and are there any plans to supplement this?

A: Rogues are probably too survivable when they can apply all of their crowd control to a single target and much too squishy when they can’t. Moving some of the survivability from active abilities to passive ones without losing the interesting flavor of the class is an ongoing challenge, and we’d like to do it in ways like the Feint change rather than simply adding in “takes 20% less damage” to a random talent.

The current rogue design could be described as fragile, but rarely takes damage, since it’s possible to apply so much crowd control. Chaining crowd control and countering crowd control is a huge part of PvP that’s fun for a lot of players and we don’t want to remove that. On the other hand, we often run into problems with the rogue where we can’t diminish or change the DR on crowd control because then the rogue just takes damage and dies. An alternative model is a slightly more tanky rogue than can survive more damage (perhaps only when cooldowns are up or something), but can’t keep someone locked down so long. Also note that this would improve the rogue level-up experience as well. It’s effective and occasionally fun but can get pretty slow and tedious to have to approach every opponent from within stealth. Sometimes you just want to stab a relatively non-challenging mob to death and move on.

Q. So, over the past years, rogues have utilized macros for swapping in/out weapons with different poisons to aid them in different situations, but sometimes it can become slightly cumbersome to swap between weapons to gain added utility where needed. Do we feel this is a suitable approach in aiding rogues in this respect? Are there any plans to change this later down the road to make it easier for rogues to swap poisons mid-fight?

A: We agree it’s clunky to swap weapons and that’s because we don’t want it to be a major feature of the game. We could see making it a major feature, something much more like the weapon swapping of Diablo II. Currently you swap weapons more for macro-ing a shield for Spell Reflect. A rogue swapping poisons feels a little more interesting than that, but it’s pretty much the only example we could think of. Until we can make weapon swapping feel less clunky for more classes we aren’t going to push it as an important feature.

Community Team: Rogues have a passion for making the best out of most every single one-handed weapon currently available in game and have definitely provided some feedback pertaining to some of these weapons available to them and utilizing them to the best of their ability with the spec they have. Let’s get into a couple of these.

Q. Lots of rogues are fans of the “Combat-Daggers” setup. Do we feel this is a viable option in PvE versus other traditional setups?

A: Not really. It was always a very simplistic spec that only used one finisher and limped along with no combo point income. The “rotation” for this spec, if you can call it that, was Backstab x 5, Slice and Dice, repeat. In sexy Naxx gear with a cool energy-boost set bonus it became Backstab x 5, Slice and Dice, Backstab x 3, Rupture, repeat. It was clunky to play, had massive ramp time (say 30 seconds) and positioning issues, and you couldn’t ever use your combo points or energy on anything but damage or it all fell apart. It might have been effective, but we didn’t think it was very fun and we don’t really want to promote it.

To be clear, it’s always a tough call when players find a creative way to use combinations of gear and talent specs like this. Sometimes we want to reward the players for being creative. Other times they are just taking the design in a direction we’re not crazy about. There are no hard and fast rules to when “unintended” equals “bad” or not.

Q. With the advent of one-handed axes coming into play as another plausible choice of weapons for rogues, why did we decide to add this feature this far into the game? What are the benefits of having one-handed axes versus the traditional weaponry available to rogues?

A: We were in a world where we continued having to drop one-handed maces all the time, because swords couldn’t be used by shamans, axes by rogues, or fists by death knights. We wanted to have more variety in the type of one-handers we dropped. We discussed it quite a bit, and included the world designers and keepers of the lore in those discussions. Ultimately, we settled on axes for rogues. Rogues are supposed to be the masters of melee weaponry and there’s extensive support in classical literature for brigand/swashbuckler/lightly armored warrior types using axes (pen and paper RPGs, pirates, Native Americans with tomahawks, gladiators). If a rogue would pick up a broken bottle to use as a weapon (the infamous Barman Shanker) it seems likely they’d use a good axe. As a result, shamans and death knights should see more axes in the game overall. (Though remember, the 3.2 patch largely focused on the new Isle of Conquest BG, so we don’t have a ton of new raid bosses to itemize. That will change in 3.3.)

Community Team: We’re at the end of our Q & A, here, but we would like to finish this with a couple of unique lore-based questions.

Q. Rogues have definitely embraced the lore behind them, including the Ravenholdt quest-line. Do we plan on expanding into this anytime soon? Players feel this specific lore really defined rogues early on in the game and would like a continuation of that.

A: The problem with class-specific quests is that you’re cutting off 90% (give or take depending on class popularity) of players from seeing the content. Put another way, you can offer 100 class-specific quests per class, or 1000 quests that almost everyone can see. We don’t have any announcements of new content in that quest line at this time.

Q. Are there any other lore-based quests that we will be providing not just for rogues but for classes in general, later down the road? Players feel these provide their respective class with a unique touch and allows for a more immersive feel to their gameplay.

A: As I said above, class quests are expensive from a content-development standpoint. That said, we recognize why they are so popular and can be so memorable. We made a lot of death knight-specific content for Wrath of the Lich King, and it may very well be the best zone of quests in the game. With content like this we don’t operate on a yes or no level, but off of a wish list. We would love to add more class-specific quests, but there’s a ton of other things we want to do with World of Warcraft as well.

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Hunter Q&A

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By Lyssa, July 23, 2009 3:58 pm

Another class that is near and dear to my heart, huntards!

Hunter Q&A with Ghostcrawler and the World of Warcraft Community Team

Community Team: We’d like start this Q&A off by asking a question that players of all classes often ask in regard to the very purpose of their class. In this case, we’re looking specifically at the hunter.

Q: Where do hunters fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do we see them going from this point forward?

A: We solved a lot of perennial hunter problems in Wrath of the Lich King, from the shot clipping problems of Steady Shot, to bringing Survival back to life, and making pet choice and training a lot more meaningful and hopefully enjoyable. Going forward we have several objectives we still want to accomplish. We want to make sure hunters in PvP are as good in Arenas as they are in Battlegrounds. We think their damage is sufficient, so we want to focus on their survival and crowd control. We want to make sure their PvE utility is as good as their dps (especially making traps live up to their potential for crowd control). We want to resolve what a hunter is supposed to do in melee (Raptor Strike? Disengage?). We want to clean up some of the clunkiness that still exists around pet control (both the UI itself and what the pet does on the battlefield). We think hunters have a good niche as the only real ranged damage-dealer that focuses on (mostly) physical damage based on a weapon rather than cast-time based spells. We just want to make sure they live up to that niche.

Q: It was stated that we had intended to remove consumable ammunition from the game for patch 3.1.0, However, due to certain functionality not being ready in time, the change was put on hold. Is there any new information in regards to the functionality of non-consumable ammunition, and also a possible estimate as to when hunters may expect to see these changes implemented?

A: From a technical standpoint, what happened is that the quiver is considered a bag just like other bags on the character but also, most critically, those in the bank. In order to remove ammo we would have to move the location of all of a character’s bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion, and could result in “missing stuff” issues if something went wrong. It was just one of those last-minute show-stoppers.

We still want to make ammo more of a gear choice than a consumable. We’re not sure if this would be as simple as getting the 125 dps arrows to upgrade your 120 dps arrows, or if you would do things like swap between your fire and poison arrows… but that kind of thing is definitely on the table.

I’m not sure when we can do it right. It’s not going to be for 3.2 unfortunately.

Q: On the topic of hunter ammunition, currently, it becomes quite expensive for hunters to purchase Mammoth Cutters and Saronite Razorheads, especially given how much many hunters use in a given week. Are there any plans to reduce the cost, by potentially looking into the materials required to craft both types of ammunition?

A: The problem with upgrading hunter ammo currently is how we work the progression. We don’t want to drop ammo on bosses for what I hope are obvious reasons so long as they are consumed. We need to have ammo improve as other gear improves, however, or the hunter overall starts to fall behind. Therefore there has to be some barrier that stops freshly leveled hunters from getting the best ammo while letting cutting-edge hunters procure it. In Burning Crusade, we handled this through a reputation grind, but it still wasn’t a very satisfying answer. In Wrath of the Lich King, we went with Engineer-crafted ammo and more recently changed the way ranged weapons scaled so that they would keep improving even if the ammo did not. For 3.2 we lowered the cost of the ammo quite a bit — only 4 gold for a stack to manufacture. If you were paying 50 gold a night, that should drop to say 16 gold a night. Long-term this won’t be a problem because arrows won’t be consumed.

Q: While we had previously reduced the range of the hunter’s dead zone, it’s still brought up as a concern. Is it possible to remove the dead zone completely? If this is not something under current consideration, what are the current design philosophies and balance reasons behind keeping this particular mechanic in-game?

A: It’s possible to do so technically, but something we aren’t likely to do. Personally I think calling the current implementation a dead zone is just confusing and trying to sell the problem as worse than it is. Back in the day there was an actual distance at which neither ranged nor melee attacks would work – it was a dead zone. Currently there is just a minimum range for most ranged attacks. The way we want the hunter to work is that when you get into min range with the hunter, then the hunter needs to switch to melee, or more likely escape back to ranged distance again. We certainly don’t want the hunter to unload with both melee and ranged attacks at once – that might make them operate better at melee than range. Casters by contrast don’t have to do this, though it is often in their best interest to do so since their cast can get delayed or even interrupted by melee attacks. You can argue it’s goofy to be firing bows or rifles at point-blank range, but really it gets more into how we want the hunter (and all ranged weapon attacks) to work.

I’ll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don’t run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks. Additional feedback from the community on this sort of thing would be appreciated.

Q: Would we consider allowing auto-shoot to work while moving? If there aren’t plans for that specific change, is there anything in the works that will assist hunter dps in fights where a great deal of movement becomes necessary?

A: Moving should feel like a penalty. We don’t want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one. Moving is supposed to be bad and how you handle it is a test of your skill. We do give instant cast spells to some classes, but it should always be a dps loss when they have to focus on these exclusively. We would consider giving hunters another way to pull off an instant shot or beef up their dots, but we would want to make sure these would only be used in true long-distance movement situations. What I mean by that is we think we’ve possibly already gone too far towards balancing the Arena around instant attacks that can’t be countered before they go off.

Q: Are there any long term plans to possibly removing the need for hunters to rely on a different resource system then mana?

A: I hate to do this to you, but this is a great BlizzCon question. For these Q&As, we’d like to keep the focus on each class’s current status and short-term plans, but at BlizzCon we’ll be happy to go into some more detail on our long-term vision for them.

Q: Are there any plans to increase the benefit hunters gain from haste?

A: There are two ways to answer this question. The more general one, which applies to all classes, is that we want haste to be a useful stat. Rogues, warriors, and some casters like it currently, and we need to get it there for everyone. As I have said in several of the Q&As, some stats have just fallen away from some specs even though they routinely appears on your gear. Sometimes this happens because talents prop up other stats so much that instead of being more attractive, they feel mandatory, and the ones that aren’t supported go from sub-optimal to junk status. We need the ability to put a variety of stats on your gear. We don’t want there to be an uber stat for anyone that trumps everything else to the point at which you don’t even look at the other stats. Gear is supposed to be a choice. I’ll say again that I think the online community sometimes focuses too much on the best-in-slot mentality, to the extent at which they consider everything except those BiS items to be worth skipping over. Remember, if it improves your dps, it’s an upgrade, even if another item would improve it more. That sounds so obvious, but I think there is a tendency for some players to stop thinking that way.

Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited, which creates problems with haste. We’ve driven in that direction in order to give hunters a more interesting rotation, and to be fair, we feel like we’ve done that. But being cooldown limited isn’t necessarily a fun way for the class to play and we think it’s one of those things that makes hunters feel more like casters than like ranged-weapon users. (Hunters are casters in the sense that they’re ranged dps, but we still want the emphasis to be on the gun or bow.) More on this at BlizzCon, too.

Q: How do we feel about the current state of stings? Are there any improvements planned for the way stings work, such as removing them from a shared global cooldown (GCD)? Are there current plans to improve individual stings?

A: The best way to describe stings is we want them to feel like warlock curses. They should be a meaningful part of your rotation and something you should want to keep up. We understand that some of the stings are much more attractive than others (though to be fair, curses have a similar problem) and we need to make the less-popular stings more useful or just end up cutting them. We aren’t likely to remove any damage-dealing ability from the GCD and we’ve even taken a second look at whether we have removed too many defensive abilities from the GCD. It’s there for a reason, particularly in a client-server based game with inherent Internet lag.

Q: Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree. Do we have plans to bring the potential damage the Beast Mastery tree offers to be more on par with what’s currently possible with Survival and Marksmanship?

A: Ideally, we want Beast Mastery to be able to do competitive damage with Survival and Marksmanship. Realistically with dps classes, it’s a math problem, and one tree nearly always edges out the other ones in most situations. That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but it also means we have to be realistic about what it will take to really get the specs to within 1% dps of each other, which is sometimes the point I fear we’d need to hit.

The buffs to Catlike Reflexes and Wild Hunt were intended to boost Beast Mastery a little without causing every hunter in the game to swing back to Beast Mastery the way they all swung to Survival a few patches ago. We don’t necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time. However, Beast Mastery also doesn’t have a signature attack like Chimera or Explosive Shot. At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem? Ultimately the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don’t face the profound dps loss of pet death. And even then, having a pet that is 50% or more of your dps is always going to have design problems, so we can’t go overboard. Beast Mastery and Demonology (and even the Unholy death knight) are going to be at a greater loss when their pet dies. That’s just the cost of having a more powerful pet.

Q: In regards to the survivability to hunter pets are there plans to make additional improvements? The resilience change should help somewhat in PvP, however in end-game PvE environments, the hunter’s pet can die pretty easily, especially given the specific encounter. One suggestion made by many hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the hunter’s pet when the hunter received a heal from a party or raid member.

A: Honestly, we aren’t happy with some of the current solutions to keeping pets alive. In particular, the area damage avoidance mechanics just don’t work well. They are frustrating for other players in a PvP setting when Bladestorm or Arcane Explosion can’t really hurt pets, and they don’t keep pets alive on a 5 million damage Mimiron missile. What we really need is a system where certain PvE attacks just don’t hurt the pet (maybe they can’t set off Mimiron mines for instance). We don’t want players to have to pay the price because the pet AI is in fact just an AI. This is something we’re working on.

We’d rather not have to come up with additional mechanics needed to heal pets or keep them alive. We’d rather just the pet didn’t die in situations where a player that can make intelligent choices wouldn’t have died. Hunters do have abilities to heal or rez pets, and those ideally should be sufficient.

Q: As a follow-up to the previous question, do we have plans to make it easier for the hunter to bring a dead pet back to life, such as reducing the casting time of the base ability?

A: We talk about this a lot, but the trade off would be a much more fragile pet. In some ways we think a system might work better where the pets were easy to kill, especially in PvP, but the hunter (or warlock) could bring them back say every 30 seconds or so without a huge loss to personal dps. But in that situation, we would reduce pet health quite a bit so that the pets would crumple quickly when focused. The death knight (especially with an unglyphed Ghoul) works a little more like this currently – they have like 12K health without the glyph. But to make this change we would have to solve the PvE pet-gibbing mechanics referenced above.

To be clear, this is a hypothetical different model than I’ve been talking about in the rest of this Q&A. I don’t want to confuse anyone by saying pets should both be hard to kill and hard to rez, and easy to kill and easy to rez.

Q: The Cunning pet-type was originally designed to be optimal for PvP use, however, most hunters feel that the Cunning pet-type falls short. How do we feel about the current state of what Cunning pets are offering, and are there any current plans to make improvements?

A: We made an effort in 3.1 to get the Cunning pets up to speed by giving them talents like Roar of Sacrifice, and normalizing all of the pet stats so that Cunning pets had the same stats as the other two types, modified by pet talents. Crabs are still fairly popular and they probably should be a Cunning pet given their crowd control ability, but the carapace also made them feel like they should be able tanks. And selfishly, I had no problem with seeing a lot of crab pets. (No, I’m not serious.)

This is something we would love to see more feedback on. Hunters in the online community tend to focus a lot on overall PvE dps or overall PvP survival and not get too much into pet comparisons. Someone theorycrafts the best pet and then hunters just go and get it instead of discussing what the other pets would need to be more competitive. To be fair, there is some of that discussion, but it’s not always easy to find, and I have looked. It’s not super high priority given some of the other hunter design issues we’re looking at, but we do want pets to be a choice.

Q: Due to the number of abilities available to hunters, many level 80 players have expressed concerns in regards to placing all necessary abilities on their action bars. Are there any improvements coming that will assist hunters with this particular issue?

A: We recognize this as a problem. We need to get more buttons off of the bar. We made some progress with streamlining say tracking and aspects, but we’re not there yet.

Q: Additionally, do we plan to expand upon the number of pet action bar slots? Due to the current number of slots available for pets, hunters frequently have to swap pet abilities in and out of their spell/ability book.

A: Yes, we definitely want to do this. The whole pet bar needs a little work. There are still some bugs relating to which abilities can be moved on or off the bar and whether they default to autocast or not. We want the bar to work much more like character action bars.

Q: Are there any plans to allow Tranquilizing Shot to play a larger role in the hunter’s arsenal?

A: Consider that on the one hand this ability just used to be for Magmadar, and on the other hand I just acknowledged above that hunters have a lot of abilities to manage. Given that, we don’t really want Tranquilizing Shot to be in your rotation like Steady Shot or even Kill Shot. It’s a bit situational, and we’re fine with that. We did make some recent efforts to make Enrages feel more like a major mechanic that you’d want to dispel the way you dispel magic and other effects. Enrages aren’t fully realized that way yet, but we like the way that overall design could potentially work.

Q: Do we have plans to increase the number of stable slots available to hunters?

A: Obviously we increased it a lot in Wrath of the Lich King. We want to try and keep the pet as some kind of decision — they aren’t supposed to be like mounts or titles where you just collect as many as you want. We expanded the size so that players could have say a Tenacity pet for soloing and a Ferocity pet for raiding, but we don’t want every hunter to have every family available here. Now one potential problem are the Spirit Beasts, which are collected by hunters and not trivial to replace. We have also discussed expanding the Spirit Beast concept to have rare skins of other pet families (that otherwise don’t convey a combat bonus). If we do that, we’d probably have to expand the stable slots.

We’ve also considered a model where the hunter doesn’t even need a stable and can work more like a warlock where they can just summon their pets whenever they want — with the remote stable ability from the dual-spec feature, we’re pretty close to that already. If we went this route then maybe the stable could just become pet storage in the same way your bank has all those Invader’s Scourgestones and Zul’Gurub bijous that you don’t use often but can’t bear to part with.

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Wowhead Debut’s their Profiler

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By Lyssa, July 22, 2009 5:08 pm

Apparently I’m a bit late with this news, but I just found out yesterday myself! Wowhead has released their Profiler and it’s pretty awesome.

I’ve already loaded up Lyssa and Ipaq. The Profiler will render your toon in 3D with their gear. Pretty slick.

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Warrior Q&A

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By Lyssa, July 16, 2009 3:53 pm

Woot, it’s time for the warriors!

Warrior Q&A with the Voice of the Class Design Team, Ghostcrawler

Community Team: We’d like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. In this case, we’re looking specifically at warriors, which have been stalwart base for comparisons since the start of World of Warcraft.

Q: Where do warriors fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

A: Historically, warriors have always been one of the most dominant classes in World of Warcraft. In Molten Core and for raids afterwards, warriors were THE tank, no question. DPS warriors could also top the damage meters, and were a very potent PvP force. We think we allowed the warrior class to overshadow some other classes, which is probably to be expected given the iconic nature of the plate-wearing fighter in RPGs that long preceded World of Warcraft. We think they are in a fairer place now, in that there is room on the stage for other classes, yet they are still a very powerful and popular class to play. The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage…), and we haven’t completely nailed that design just yet.

One of the things we want to do in the future is take a hard look at the Arms and Fury trees. There are several talents which just haven’t weathered the course of time well and pale in comparison to some of the newer Wrath of the Lich King talents. We’re happiest with the Protection tree — we made a conscious effort to pare down that tree and remove a lot of mandatory talents in order to give the warrior more flexibility to take some more fun or utility-oriented talents. We need to make the same pass on the dps side of things. The reason we haven’t done so yet is that warrior dps is in a pretty good place and we don’t want to have to nerf the class across the board just to make some talents a little sexier. We will eventually do this though. We also need to make some decisions about the difference between Arms and Fury. Traditionally, Arms was the PvP tree and Fury was the PvE tree. We understand some players prefer that model, but we don’t like the way it cuts off such a big chunk of the class from players who might not have much interest in the PvP or PvE parts of the game. However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel “soldierly.” Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger. With the death knight, we allowed all three trees to more or less be able to tank. There is a desire among some players and designers to see Arms tank with a two-hander while Prot tanks with a shield. We’re still not sure that’s the direction we’ll go — it’s a ton of re-design and will never work for say the druid or paladin classes.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

A: The big ones are stances and rage. Other than warriors, only bear druids use the rage mechanic, and that is pretty much just because that form is intended to mimic warriors. Rage is an unusual resource because it is infinite over the course of minutes, but can be very limiting over the course of seconds. While the basic mechanic of rage is interesting, it has caused us lots of balance problems over the course of World of Warcraft — sometimes in the favor of the warrior and sometimes not. It’s probably time to give the mechanic another look.

Stances are intended to be a major battlefield decision for warriors, though we realize it doesn’t always pan out this way. You have access to different abilities in different stances, but pay a rage cost as well as sacrificing the potential to use other abilities. More on this below.

Warriors also have some unusual mechanics like say their ability to move quickly around a battlefield, to survive massive physical damage through plate armor and Defensive Stance, and game-changing abilities like Spell Reflect.

Community Team: Warriors have quite a few abilities that are contingent on certain circumstances like Overpower and Intervene.

Q: What is the reasoning behind this and do we have any plans to change that type of gameplay?

A: We like situational abilities. When specs don’t have situational abilities, it’s easy to fall into a very fixed rotation. We call this the metronome. Push button 1, 2, 3 on your keyboard over and over until the bad guy drops loot. We have made more of an effort in all the classes to have certain moments that require players to pay attention a little more and then reward them when they both cause those situations to happen and then execute on them.

Q: What would be the impact of changing those class mechanics?

A: I think if anything, abilities like this need to be more prominent. You should be less effective at your job if you ignore them, and ideally you’d also be less effective if you just macro’d them in. We like macros (obviously, or we wouldn’t have them in the game), but we like for them to simplify chains of things that you have to do often without making decisions in between point A and B. We don’t like it when playing your class becomes how clever your macro can be to the point at which you are pushing one button to play your class. That’s not playing an RPG — that’s programming a robot.

Community Team: Stances have long been a debated aspect of warriors’ gameplay from the pluses and minuses each one offers to the restrictions they apply on what abilities are available for use.

Q: What is the overall purpose of stances and how are stances intended to be used?

A: The purpose of stances is for warriors to have to make decisions in combat. How badly do I want to Intercept now? Should I pay the cost of Spell Reflect? Ideally, we want warriors to switch stances in combat — not every few seconds, but a few times over the course of a battle. Now we realize it’s going to be harder to enforce this in raid fights unless you have a battle with a lot of movement or other unusual circumstances.

We get a fair number of suggestions from players trying to basically slip the stance concept out of the warrior class: make it not take rage, or let them do more abilities per stance so they don’t need to switch stances so often. That’s not really what the warrior is all about though. You should care what stance you’re in and it should be a decision to change stance. Note that if you pay too high a price to change stances, that counts as there not being a decision though.

Q: Has there been any thought on moving away from restricting abilities based on the stance a player is in?

A: No. The design intent of warrior stances is that you change your toolbar when you go from one stance to another and that that decision isn’t a trivial one. Now, the third part aside from the rage cost and ability limitations is the penalties (such as 5% damage taken in Berserker). We cut those in half recently, and we’d eventually like to get rid of them altogether. We just don’t want to see Arms warriors in PvP in Defensive Stance 100% of the time. We have seen DKs stick with Frost Presence in PvP despite losing 15% damage, so I don’t think you can just argue “Oh, no warrior would EVER do that.”

Community Team: There has recently been a growing number of concerns with warrior damage, as a whole.

Q: What are our thoughts on the overall damage for warriors in each of the three specs?

A: Warrior damage was too high in Naxxramas and then a little low early in Ulduar. We think it’s in a pretty good place now and warriors will get a small damage buff in 3.2. Part of the concern here is we used to exempt warriors from the design philosophy that pure dps classes should do more damage than hybrid dps classes. We try to no longer play favorites here. Warrior damage should look like that of Feral druids, Enhancement shamans, Retribution paladins, and death knights. If their damage isn’t at that level, then it’s possible our numbers need some tweaking. However don’t always assume that you can’t possibly improve your gear or your button mashing either. =) Also remember that some fights just favor one class or spec over another. We’re totally cool with that, so long as it isn’t always the same exact class or spec that gets to shine.

Community Team: Warrior shouts have added some unique utility to the class in the past, but now they tend to be used very sparingly.

Q: What is the reasoning behind their short duration and do we have plans to improve the duration similar to the buffs other classes already provide?

A: The shouts are supposed to be buttons that warriors push in combat. They aren’t intended to be pre-fight buffs like Arcane Intellect or Prayer of Fortitude. We had a discussion about this recently and decided with glyphs and talents that the duration isn’t a problem. If you lack Booming Voice and the minor Battle Shout glyph, it might be more annoying.

Q: Demoralizing shout tends to have a very minimal impact in most situations, are there plans to improve this ability?

A: I think by “most situations” you must mean “PvP.” Demo Shout has a massive benefit against raid bosses. It’s probably 20% less damage from a typical boss and literally like 50% against say Thorim’s Unbalancing Strike. However, removing 400 attack power from a Feral druid with 9000 attack power, or a Shadow priest who doesn’t care about attack power at all is of much more limited use. Monsters and players use pretty different combat formulae (which is one of the weird things about the old design of say Vindication). We would like Demo Shout to be more useful in PvP, at least against characters who rely on attack power.

Community Team: The rage mechanic as a whole is very unique, but sometimes leads to situations where players aren’t able to perform due to lack of resources. A prime example of this is when a tanking warrior’s gear is much higher than the content they are at, by taking less damage they get less rage which results in less threat and therefore cannot perform at a higher level.

Q: Are there any considerations in store for improving this mechanic and allowing more rage generation in these situations?

A: Yes. In 3.2 we changed Shield Specialization to provide a little rage on a dodge, parry, or block. This will help in say the 5-player dungeons or in the first few seconds of a raid boss fight. It does not solve the problem of the Prot warrior who is not being targeted (because they are there to pick up adds later in the fight or something). We want to solve that problem by letting Prot warriors generate more rage through doing damage. It could be in the future that we shift most of rage generation to damage done and have little or none in damage taken (and we would have to change a lot of other mechanics to make this work obviously).

Now, long-term we need a better solution to rage generation. Tying it to damage done is logical in the theoretical world of game design, but has problems in reality. When your gear sucks, you have rage problems. When you have great gear, you are no longer limited by rage. That’s just not a great model, and one of the reasons warriors are overly gear dependent.

Q: Where do we feel warriors fit into the current raid environment and where do we see them progressing in the future?

A: Obviously warriors were the traditional tanks and pretty much the only tank in much of World of Warcraft’s history. Warriors now share tanking responsibilities with three other classes, which can feel psychologically like a nerf. In Ulduar, we think warrior tank balance is about where it should be — death knights were a little ahead, paladins were a little behind, and druids were about even with warriors. We are making a few Prot changes to 3.2 to help in some of the areas where they fall short, such as damage done. Death knights are getting a nerf, paladins are getting a buff, and druids might get a nerf or stay as-is. There are plenty of guilds progressing through hard modes with warrior MTs on almost every fight, and we don’t see that changing in the Crusader’s Coliseum.

We’re happy with warrior dps in Ulduar. Whether you go Fury or Arms probably depends on whether you need Trauma or Rampage, and we know warriors in good guilds who flip between both specs. There is some evidence that Fury may overtake Arms dps once you get really good weapons. Dual-wield yet again shows its propensity to scale very well. Warriors will get a slight dps buff through Armored to the Teeth.

Community Team: Sticking with raiding content for a moment. Many tanking Warriors have felt the there is little value in both Strength and Block Value attributes.

Q: We have expressed an interest in improving Block Value for tanking warriors in the past; do we have any definite plans to update this?

A: Shield Block Value just isn’t a strong mitigation stat these days. However, the amount it would need to be increased is enormous in order to make a difference vs. bosses that can hit for 40K. The problem with improving shield Block Value by so much is that Prot warriors would be nigh invulnerable — they literally might take no damage — against large groups of adds, in easier content where opponents don’t hit that hard, and in PvP. The real problem is that the amount blocked doesn’t scale with the amount of the swing. We think block needs to be a percentage of damage blocked in order for the stat to do what we want. But the trade-off would mean that warriors (and paladins) couldn’t block every incoming hit, especially from large groups. Avoidance might also need to come down across the board, and many talents and abilities would need to be redesigned. This is a major change that isn’t the kind of thing we can crowbar into 3.2 with a clean conscience. It is almost certainly the future for the block stat.


Q: With strength on tanking gear currently providing a very minimal benefit and still using up a lot of stats on items, do we have plans to improve how this stat works for tanks?

A: Strength is good for dps and threat. It’s not a super mitigation stat (through block) but we also don’t know that it needs to be. We have made some big improvements to Prot warrior dps in Lich King, but too many players still view the primary role of the tank to stack avoidance and mitigation and then complain when their threat is low because they avoided all dps stats. Now, we do think the game of survival is more fun than the game of the threat management, but we also need to get players out of the mindset that it’s okay for tanks to ignore dps stats and just do trivial damage. They don’t need to top the charts, but their damage should be a meaningful component of damage done. We’re willing to change the way the game works to accomplish this goal.

Community Team: Let’s jump over to the topic of player-versus-player interaction. Discussions on the survivability of warriors in PvP have been ongoing.

Q: Do we have any plans to make warriors less reliant on healers in PvP conflicts?

A: We have taken small steps with Enraged Regeneration and increasing the healing on Bloodthirst. We don’t want the warrior to be great at healing as say a Shadow priest or death knight. On the other hand, we want healing to be a major part of the PvP experience. We’re okay with the occasional all-dps Arena team, but they need to be rare or a major chunk of the game just gets marginalized.

Not related to PvP, we do think warriors have too much downtime when leveling. Healing may not be the solution to that, but we think it needs a solution.

Q: With strength being the stat that provides the most benefit in dps scenarios, do we have plans to implement PvP gear like cloaks and rings that have strength instead of attack power?

A: Doing that just means the item isn’t of any interest to say leather or mail wearers, which means we have to create twice as many kinds of rings. The problem is that some classes value Strength and some value Attack Power. Things would work better if some valued Strength and some valued Agility, and Attack Power was a useful secondary stat to both. This has the added benefit of solving the whole problem where leather and mail look attractive to warriors. If leather had Agility on it and plate had Strength on it, then it’s pretty clear who is getting what item. Strength for rogues and Agility for warriors wouldn’t be junk stats, but they wouldn’t be as attractive as the other stat. Again, this is a big change. We wouldn’t just gut rogue dps by stripping Attack Power off all of their gear.

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Druid Q&A

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By Lyssa, July 14, 2009 3:45 pm

Another week, another Q&A. This time with those dirt munching, tree hugging druids.  And Ghostcrawler is back!

Druid Q&A with the Voice of the Class Design Team, Ghostcrawler

Community Team: We’d like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. In this case, we’re looking specifically at the druid, which has one of the widest ranges of play styles in World of Warcraft because of the variety offered from the different talent trees.

Where do druids fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler: Much like the paladin and shaman, the original World of Warcraft druid was intended to be a healer for end-game content. Bears could tank Upper Blackrock okay. But honestly, nobody took cats, bears or moonkin very seriously at level 60. In Burning Crusade, this changed a little. Bears could tank a lot more content, and might have even been overpowered in the endgame if it weren’t for Sunwell Radiance. Cats were probably underpowered. You still saw them, but they were there mostly for buffs or because they could slip easily from tanking to dps in a world before dual-spec. They were great for Zul’Aman for example. There were some great Balance druids, but still a lot of Oomkin. Our philosophy at this point in the game was that hybrid classes needed to give up a lot of their power, especially on the dps-side of things, in order to justify their versatility and massive buffs. In Lich King, we set out to change this and make sure all four types of druid had a PvE role in heroic dungeons and raiding. And yes, this meant four roles, because if we were going to let cats do credible dps or bears be able to tank anything in the game then we wanted players to have to commit to one extreme or the other. You can remain a half-bear, half-cat if you want to as well, but you won’t be as good at either extreme and my experience is players rarely choose that route.

In PvP the story is quite different of course. Once Resto druids got enough tools in Burning Crusade, they were very difficult to counter in Arena matches. Cyclone, Feral Charge and running and hotting made druids frustratingly slippery. We wanted to chill this out a little in Lich King, largely by pushing Feral Charge farther away and making Tree of Life a real option in PvP. Unfortunately, high tree armor and dispel-at-your peril hots have still kept druids difficult to counter in PvP. Feral druids have always had a place in PvP, but were never as dominant as the Resto druids. There is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here because while some druids only want to PvP as Feral, others were happy to respec to Resto for PvP. Balance druids seemed even less viable than Feral, which is not ideal and something we want to improve. We tend to take a longer view on some of these things than do the players. We’ve had other balance issues that we’ve wanted to address in PvP first, and getting every spec of every class viable has had to take a back seat on occasion.

What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler: Forms is the big answer. The druid versions are more meaningful than other class equivalents in the game, such as Stances or Presences. One could argue they are too meaningful, because players sometimes don’t want to use any other form but “theirs.” Perhaps the most unusual facet of the druid forms is that they use three different resource systems depending on the form, and these are not reset when they shift. A leveling druid can shift out of cat form to heal themselves, then shift into bear form while their mana regenerates.

Druids also have a couple of other interesting qualities. They actually fit four distinct roles into the class, even though two of the roles share a talent tree. They have some unusual utility spells, including Revive and Innervate. While druids no longer bring many unique buffs, they still pack a lot of them onto one character. Raids are still happy to get druids because of their benefit to the group. Druids also have unique travel abilities, from Travel, Aquatic, and Flight form, to the Moonglade teleport.

It’s also worth mentioning that druids can be only one race each on the Horde and Alliance side. They have the least racial diversity of any class in the game.

Community Team: Let’s take a look at the Balance talent tree. Eclipse is a crucial talent for players who are looking to perform a damage dealing role and invest in the Balance tree. There has been a lot of discussion though regarding the gameplay it provides as there is a lot of randomness involved. The buffs to a solar rotation were very well received, but the lunar rotation still has to wait for a critical strike to happen as well as an additional random proc to occur which can lead to some long gaps of nothing happening. Then when these finally fall into place players have complained about threat issues which force them to slow down or having to move to avoid something which ruins the procs they have and significantly hurts their overall damage.

What are our thoughts on how Eclipse is functioning and do we have any plans to change how this talent works?

Ghostcrawler: The goal of the Eclipse talent in the first place was to give moonkin a more dynamic rotation that involved the player paying attention and responding to the environment rather than falling into a monotonous rotation. The Eclipse in 3.2 should less strongly favor one half of the Eclipse over the other since the cooldowns are independent. Ultimately however the problem we are trying to solve is that Wrath and Starfire are just too similar. In PvP you get a little bit of interest out of the fact that they are in different schools, but in PvE by the time talents are factored in, the two spells just become fairly quick (but not instant) nukes and it’s easy to math out which one to use and which one to ignore. Long-term to fix this problem we need to add another spell, separate out Starfire and Wrath from each other a little more, or make one of the other spells, like Moonfire or Insect Swarm, more dynamic. I’ll give a couple of example of caster rotations that “work” in our opinion: Destruction warlocks want to Immolate before they Conflagrate, Frost mages can proc a Brain Freeze and throw out a fast Fireball.

Community Team: Another aspect of Balance talent tree that has seen a number of discussions lately is the survivability of Moonkins while in a Player vs. Player setting. Many players agree that they have a very low survivability rate and that a spell like Typhoon doesn’t provide enough help to prevent classes like Death Knights and Rogues from doing some serious damage to them.

How do we feel Moonkins are doing in PvP and do we have plans to improve their survivability?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t think Moonkins are quite there yet, though we’ll see how they look after 3.2 ships. Some of their problems are not limitations with the spec so much as they are ramifications in other parts of the PvP environment, such as some classes being able to burst them down too quickly. Of the casters, and as of this writing, only Frost mages really seem to be a potent PvP force, but it requires multiple forms of CC and escape mechanisms to get there. We really don’t want to go down the road of every caster needing that many unique tools – it homogenizes the classes and makes the mage tools less compelling. We understand some players are desperate to play Balance in PvP, but our priority is on getting underperforming classes viable before we worry about the second or third spec of classes that already have a strong PvP presence. We’ll get there.

Community Team: Players have also been discussing how they feel the overall playstyle of a Moonkin is just not very exciting. The best damage dealing rotation for them requires very few spells and a deep Balance spell like Starfall doesn’t help them very much.

Are there plans to make any changes to the general spell rotation for deep Balance/Moonkin Druids?

Ghostcrawler: As I mentioned above, we do want to improve the spell rotation of Balance. We think the spells are interesting when considered alone (expect for perhaps Starfire and Wrath) but they don’t necessarily play together in interesting ways. You don’t try to save up a Starfall for example for great synergy with another spell. We have no problems with Starfall itself — it is an AE with smart targeting that doesn’t require channeling. It is basically just bonus damage. Often players with a gripe about Starfall are wishing that it still proc’ed stuns with Celestial Focus or was a stealth remover. But those uses meant players saved Starfall for only those specific situations instead of using it when they needed extra damage, which was the original intent.

Community Team: We are going to switch gears from the ranged caster damaging druids to the up close and personal Feral talent tree.

A number of players have brought up questions regarding the over-arching goal of the feral talent tree. In the past they were able to change forms regularly and cast spells and then go back into a Feral form to continue playing. Once we merged their gear with rogues this playstyle was significantly reduced in effectiveness. As it currently stands, even with the low mana pool, they feel their mana regeneration is very poor in comparison to other hybrid classes like Shaman and Paladins which in turn continues to minimize feral druids’ ability to cast spells which they feel is pushing them further and further away from the hybrid playstyle.

What are our intended goals for the playstyle of feral druids?

Ghostcrawler: The druid class overall is intended to be flexible, and we feel that it is. What we don’t want is a class that can do all things with a single spec — do damage like a rogue, then tank if the MT falls down, then battle rez the MT and heal her back up, etc. That might sound like a lot of fun, but that’s because you’re fulfilling the role of half the raid all on your own (which means it’s less fun for everyone else watching you be a superstar). Every cat worth their salt will shift out to cast Rebirth or Innervate. But in order to justify cats doing credible melee damage, we felt like they had to give up some of their ability to tank, cast, and heal. Note than you can still take a more hybrid-focused build. Players don’t often do that though because they’d rather do one thing really well. Now I will say that long term something we’d love to do is get rid of shifting costs altogether. We want to see druids in lots of different forms — more on this in a minute.

Community Team: In order to provide the best damage possible, the rotation for a Feral druid is quite complex. While this is okay in itself, it is nearly impossible to pull off in a PvP scenario so they end up using just Mangle, which they feel drastically hurts their value. To be the most effective they also rely heavily on someone else like another druid or an Arms warrior.

What are our thoughts on the complexity of the Feral druid damage dealing rotation?

Ghostcrawler: If you want to do the best damage possible, you need to be able to master a complex rotation. This is one of the features that attracts players to the Feral spec. However, it’s also pretty forgiving. If you just Shred, you’re going to do decent damage. If you Shred and try to keep up Savage Roar, it’s going to be better. If you can also manage your Mangles and Rips and Rakes, then you have the potential to do very high damage (assuming you don’t have to move around much and can reach the target’s back).

Community Team: Feral druids have also complained a bit about their lack of utility in the PvP environment.

Do we have plans to provide more utility for Feral druids such as a more reliable interrupt?

Ghostcrawler: Feral druids have Bash (which they can improve through talents), Maim and the Feral Charge stun. We think their tools are sufficient for PvP and there are other melee classes that can handle it in PvE. It’s not a strength of the spec for sure, but we’re okay with that. We don’t want all melee to be identical.

Community Team: Bear tanks have often felt inferior compared to the other tanks.

How do we feel druid tanks are doing and do we have any immediate changes planned?

Ghostcrawler: We think bears have felt inferior because for a long time we basically said “You are designed to be inferior.” Sometimes old perceptions die hard. Bears are not inferior tanks in Ulduar and it’s possible their survivability is too high in 3.2.

Community Team: Savage Defense has been the source of a number of debates as players feel it is somewhat lackluster and doesn’t provide enough of a benefit, especially in PvP.

Do we have any plans to change and/or improve Savage Defense?

Ghostcrawler: We’re pretty happy with Savage Defense for now. It accomplishes its goals, which were to make dps stats more useful on leather and to keep bears from hitting the armor cap so easily. You might consider it lackluster if you’re counting on it saving your life, but it does account for a lot of damage over the course of a boss fight.

Are there any plans to change the functionality or cooldown of the Cat form charge to better align it with the Bear form version?

Ghostcrawler: We’re happy with the distinction. We don’t want to duplicate every ability since the druid has access to both forms.

Can you give us the reasoning behind why the Bear form swipe is 360 degrees while the Cat version is only 180 degrees?

Ghostcrawler:The bear change was just a quality of life issue. A bear can wipe the raid if they can’t pick up incoming adds. The cat is much less likely to wipe the raid by not being able to Swipe all the adds. We don’t need for cats to be an awesome AE spec. We just want them to have something to do on big packs that everyone else is AE’ing, which is what cat Swipe gives them. On the other hand, if there is a perception that bears can’t manage adds, they aren’t going to be used on a lot of fights.

Community Team: On to the last of the talent trees now, Restoration.

Can you describe for us what the intended identity and versatilities of the Tree of Life druids are supposed to be?

Ghostcrawler: This is a pretty philosophical answer here. If you only read one answer in this Q&A, you might want to check out this one. The strength of the Resto druid is in heal-over-time spells. They can also do some decent single-target healing through Nourish or group healing through Wild Growth. The tree pretty much used to be a PvE mechanic since “rooting yourself” in PvP to benefit from ToL greatly limited the druid’s crowd control and escape abilities. We made enough changes to the talent to get trees into PvP in Lich King… arguably too well.

Druids overall have a strong niche. We are at a little bit of a crossroads with the Tree of Life however. We are currently wondering if druids sacrifice too much just to be as good as a healer as everyone else. What I mean is that if druids were good healers in caster form but great healers in Tree form, then there might be a decision there. However, we pretty much assume that healing druids are in Tree form nearly all of the time and balance around that. We don’t think it would be fair for them to be the best healers just for taking that talent.

In addition to having to give up utility in order to heal as a Tree of Life, we have become less enamored with druids locking themselves into one form. In fact, you really never see the basic tauren or night elf druid form (you know, the one that actually shows off the awesome armor art) because all druids are in cat, bear, tree, or moonkin form nearly 100% of the time. I’m not saying we would just cut Tree of Life from the game. It’s been around awhile and for better or worse, it’s part of World of Warcraft now. However, we could see taking the druid in a direction where shifting was much more common and easy to do. Maybe you only go into tree form for certain spells but leave for other spells — this didn’t work previously because of the high cost of shifting, but in the absence of power shifting, we’d love to get rid of the costs completely. Another way to go would be to make Tree of Life form a cooldown, more like Metamorphosis. You shift into tree when you need a healing boost, but you don’t stay in it all the time. Now, I am totally waving my arms here. This is not the kind of change you are going to see in the next patch. But it is something we’re thinking about long term, and the kind of thinking we’d love to have more feedback on from the community.

Note to other healers: this is why you are unlikely to see any kind of “Holy form” ever. Giving up healing to do damage works okay. Giving up everything to heal is lame.

Community Team: Both Tranquility and Healing Touch are meant to be strong healing spells but are generally viewed as very ineffective due to their lack of flexibility.

Do we have plans to improve Healing Touch or Tranquility?

Ghostcrawler: Tranquility is a fine spell. You can use it in situations where high amounts of damage are coming in on one group. Ultimately, we’d like to get away from the concept of groups within raids, but that’s not super high priority. Having a talent that promotes a situational spell on a long cooldown though is a problem (for any spell, not just Tranquility).

Likewise, we think Healing Touch is fine. You use it at low levels and you use it with Nature’s Swiftness. Maybe you use it when healing a 5-player dungeon. Druids have a lot of heals and if we made Healing Touch more usable it would come at the expense of another heal like Nourish or Regrowth. The problem again is the talents. It doesn’t make sense to have so many talents support a situational spell.

But GC, you ask, if you know the talents are lackluster why haven’t you improved them? The answer is that Resto druids are in a really good spot now. If we changed the HT and Tranquility talents to boost other kinds of healing, then Resto druids might become too powerful. If we reduced Resto healing to compensate for these talents, then druids might have less flexibility in their talent builds. We would also suffer a lot of player backlash if we weakened spells just to make talents (which you may not be able to afford anyway) any better. We’ll suffer player backlash when we think the change is important. I’m not sure this one is. We’ll definitely rejuggle the talent tree long-term though.

Community Team: The next set of questions are related to the itemization for druids which was the source for a wide variety of questions. For one, Restoration druids feels that critical strike rating is not very helpful for them yet it is often present on the leather casting gear.


Do we have plans to improve the usefulness of critical strike rating for restoration druids?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. We’re fine if some stats are slightly more attractive than others. The problem comes when some stats are considered junk because they are valued so much less than other stats. We don’t have a ton of stats to work with when you consider that things like Int and Spell Power basically improve at a linear rate with item level. That means we need for say Haste and Crit to be attractive to all casters. This is a problem with several classes, not just druids, and was largely caused by having too many scaling talents that over-inflate the value of some stats relative to others.

Community Team: Tanking druids have regularly expressed complaints on how their tanking gear was homogenized but statistics like Block and Parry do not help them and defense provides a very marginal benefit.

Do we have plans to make these statistics more helpful for them since they are on a wide variety of tanking gear?

Ghostcrawler: We think it’s interesting that a bear and a warrior tank might look at the same piece of gear and place different values on it. That’s one of the elements that makes looting interesting and rewards players who understand their class. You shouldn’t take a ring because it says “TANK” on it. You should take it because it benefits you. And really, when players say “wide variety of tanking gear” they really mean rings, neck, cloak, and possibly trinkets. Currently we’re in a world where tanks emphasize Stamina and Armor as much as they possibly can, which makes other stats feel lame by comparison. But that will likely not always be the case, and we kind of doubt it will be as much of an extreme in the Coliseum.

Have we considered providing more tanking leather and to prevent extra loot clutter possibly finding ways for Balance and Restoration druids to use solely cloth item since they often use them already?

Ghostcrawler: No. Druids are a leather-using class. We are just going to have to make three types of leather (melee, ranged and healing). You have to understand that even though we have pushed bears and cats farther apart, we still consider them to be part of the same spec. We can’t get into the business of itemizing for niches within a particular spec or we’re just going to have too many items per tier. I can see the argument for having tanking and dps leather and making the casters use cloth. That’s just a different design and we currently like for certain classes to be associated with certain types of armor. We like that druids look different from say priests or mages (even ignoring the forms thing). We like that we can kit druid tier piece armor to look a certain way.

Also note that if we buffed bear mitigation through more tanking-oriented leather that we’d just have to weaken them in other ways. In my experience, most bears end up with “tanking leather” anyway because they want to gem and enchant their bear gear differently. Having one set of gear that you wear as cat or bear isn’t really feasible in Ulduar.

Community Team: Many players have been discussing relics and how they feel they add a lot of clutter to loot tables since they can have a wide margin of effectiveness and always have a small number of players able to pick them up.

Do we have any plans to improve how players obtain relic items such as a relic token?

Ghostcrawler: The alternative to “clutter to loot tables” is that they go on vendors. We view vendors as an absolute last resort. They are there as a hedge against being very unlucky with drops and to give players motivation to do bosses even when that boss no longer drops any upgrades for them. When the best relics are available on vendors, then every druid will have those relics quickly. They essentially just become part of the core identity of the class rather than an upgrade that you get at some point along your progression. The best solution is probably something where a boss has a 10% (or whatever) chance to drop a relic in addition to its normal loot table.

Community Team: To wrap up this Q&A, here are a couple quick questions from the far corners of druid minds.

Are there any plans for a 310% speed flight form?

Ghostcrawler: At this time we want to keep the 310% flying speed very rare – maybe 5% or less of all players. If we made a flight form that less than 1% of players had access to (since probably less than a tenth of those 5% would be druids) it’s hard to argue that’s a good use of art time.

What do we think about making spells like Warstomp and Innervate usable while in forms?

Ghostcrawler: We like the fact that Innervate requires shifting. We want druids to shift more. Warstomp I could see an argument to allow in forms since it’s nice (but not mandatory) that racial benefits are useful to a variety of classes.

Do we plans to alter how the GCD works for form changing so that shifting into a form is as easy as shifting out of one?

Ghostcrawler: As I mentioned, long-term we’d love to get druids shifting more often, which means shifting has to be less painful. I don’t know for sure that changing the GCD needs to be a part of that, but it could be.

For the official word, do we have plans to update more druid form models at some point in the future?

Ghostcrawler: I know for a fact that the current Travel Form and Aquatic Form are loathed by the artist who redid bear and cat. We do have plans to update additional forms at some point in the future.

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Paladin Q&A

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By Lyssa, July 9, 2009 3:40 pm

Another Q&A is up, this time for the fabulous pallies!

Class Q & A Series – Paladin

Community Team: In this segment, we will be talking with Greg Street about the paladin class and discussing where this class started and where we feel they are going, as well as covering an assortment of topics relating to itemization, buffs, abilities, and other cool stuff.

Q: Where do paladins fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

A: The paladin is an iconic class from fantasy role-playing, and one which Warcraft has been able to put its own stamp all over. Obviously they figure prominently in the lore, up to and including the Lich King himself.

The paladin started out as a defensive buffing class. Early on, buffs were pretty much the entire reason you’d want to group with a paladin. (And if you want to put a fine point on it, it took about all of the paladin’s attention to keep those buffs up).

End-game paladins in vanilla World of Warcraft were pretty much healers, which was disappointing for some players to discover once they reached level 60. As most of our readers probably already know, the paladin class was exclusive to the Alliance. We realized that we kept pushing the paladin and shaman abilities closer and closer together to solve faction imbalance issues, and that process was hurting the classes, so we’d be better off just having paladins and shamans on both sides. In Burning Crusade, paladins gained the ability to tank and could do so quite well in some situations, but were still positioned more in an off-tank role. In Wrath of the Lich King, we finally embraced all three specs of paladins: Protection paladins can tank anything. Retribution paladins are a legitimate dps spec in both PvE and PvP. And of course, paladins could still heal.

Q: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

A: Despite our design changes to share buffs around among more classes, we still kept several abilities unique to the paladin in order to keep a hint of their original role. Thus paladins have everything from their powerful Blessings to their bubbles like Divine Shield, the ability to dispel multiple kinds of debuffs, and utility abilities like Blessing of Freedom or Hammer of Justice. Paladins can wear plate armor in all three roles, which is particularly powerful for a healer. Finally, the Seal and Judgement system is a unique mechanic that works like no other class.

Community Team: We’ve received quite a bit of feedback concerning the current itemization for paladin tier-set gear and the importance of other stats over MP5.

Q: Specifically, how do we feel about the healing itemization for paladins thus far? Do we still feel MP5 is as important as other stats such as Int, Crit, Haste, and Spell Power? Are there plans to incorporate more of these other stats in later tiers of paladin healing gear?

A: In Lich King up until now, MP5 has not been as valuable to most paladins as say Int, Crit, or Spell Power, and really it wasn’t intended to be. It is particularly relevant that you are hardly ever choosing between Int and MP5. However, we also think that MP5 became undervalued as a stat and as most of you know, we are buffing it for 3.2. Furthermore, we think we have allowed paladin mana regen through Int and Crit to get a little out of control. We don’t want to force paladins to care only about MP5, but we also don’t want them viewing it as a total junk stat, like say Agility, either. Crit is just too beneficial to be strictly a regen stat.

From the 3.2 PTR testing so far, it seems like some Holy paladins are taking a second look at Haste and MP5 possibly instead of Crit. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, and we will adjust as necessary, but it’s nice to see paladins at least consider the stats now before making a gear decision.

We have also hinted before that we’ve had trouble developing distinct niches for MP5 and Spirit and are considering collapsing those two stats in the future. This would be a change with a lot of ramifications though — we wouldn’t just replace MP5 on gear with Spirit and call it a day.

Community Team: Paladins provide a slew of powerful buffs and spells that help all classes with tanking, healing and damage-dealing.

Q: How do we feel about raid-wide paladin buffs instead of limiting the buff applications per class, only?

A: We think it works out fine. It’s a different buff mechanic than other classes and helps to ensure that the second or third paladin is still considered valuable instead of letting a single one buff everyone.

Q: Blessing of Sanctuary is designed around providing buffs for tanks; are there plans to re-work its design to provide added benefits for more than just tanking?

A: No, we want it to be a tanking Blessing. However, we want it to be a superior tanking buff than Kings for the Protection paladin. In the 3.2 patch notes, we indicated that Sanctuary will also provide the same Stam buff as Kings, but will not stack with Kings (though Kings would still provide bonuses to the other stats).

Q: Do we feel Flash of Light and the changes in store for it will allow for additional diversification for the existing healing spells available? Aside from Holy Light, Flash of Light, and Holy Shock, are there any plans to provide paladins with other interesting healing spells later down the road?

A: Later down the road most likely, but it won’t be for 3.2 and it won’t be with something that looks like Prayer of Healing or Wild Growth. We do think paladins will have more of a use for Flash of Light now with the extra benefit to Sacred Shield. The changes to Beacon of Light in 3.2 should make paladins an exceptional dual target healer.

Community Team: Now that we’re on the topic of paladin buffs and spells, dps and versatility has been a topic of concern for many players with respect to both PvE and PvP.

Q: All classes vary in dps from one encounter to another; however, some paladins may feel their dps can be less competitive at times in comparison to other classes, more so in straight stationary single-target dps encounters. How do we feel paladins are doing in terms of dps across the board?

A: Retribution dps is too low in PvE in 3.1. We are buffing it in 3.2 through the new way Seal of Vengeance / Corruption will work. This Seal is designed to really deliver damage once the paladin gets five stacks up, which will make it the Seal of choice for boss fights. Seal of Command will be used in PvP or PvE for short fights. We expect overall for Corruption / Vengeance to be the “go-to” Seal much of the time, perhaps even in PvP, provided you can keep the buff up.

Q: Exorcism will be usable in both PvE and PvP once more which is great; aside from allowing this ability to be used against other players, what were the reasons to go down this route in redesigning this attack?

A: Exorcism never did a ton of damage to players, but it was an instant attack which meant paladins could use it while closing with an enemy. It was essentially just free damage and never a decision of any kind. The new approach to the spell prevents it from being used while closing, and also makes Retribution paladins have to pay a little more attention to their combat rotation — you want to use Exorcism when Art of War procs, and generally not at other times.

We understand this is a small adjustment to Protection paladins, which is why we improved Hand of Reckoning. The 3.2 patch will be pretty good for paladin tanks overall so hopefully they will forgive us.

Q: Consecration seems to utilize a sizable portion of mana per application of this spell; do we have plans on making this a bit more mana-efficient?

A: We think the mana cost is appropriate. Retribution and Protection paladins have enough ways to earn mana back that it doesn’t seem to be slowing them down much.

Community Team: Specifically with the various spells and abilities that paladins have in a PvP encounter, there have been questions concerning regarding survivability and utility, let’s get into some of these.

Q: Do we feel Divine Shield is fine in its current rendition versus other abilities such as Shattering Throw and Mass dispel?

A: Divine Shield is just a very powerful spell, so game-changing that we thought it needed a counter. The problem is that only one class has access to Mass Dispel, which we feel makes priests too much of a “hard counter” to paladins. We understand that classes will to some extent always have other classes they are better or worse against, but we want to avoid extremes. Shattering Throw is an attempt to let someone other than a priest have the chance to break the bubble. We implemented the ability as a ranged attack to help discourage warrior “tunnel vision” in just always unleashing all their attacks on the same target rather than having to switch targets on occasion.

Q: Will it be possible to prevent Avenging Wrath from being dispelled as well? This ability is the means to allow for on-demand maximum dps output for a brief period of time and only affects the paladin.

A: It’s possible but not probable. Really this is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that the dispel game has become too important in PvP. If the other team has a dispeller, then abilities like Avenging Wrath get totally shut down. If the other team lacks a dispeller, then they may be in trouble. This leads to junk buffs and inconsistencies on which abilities can be dispelled or not. We are going to redo the entire system, though not for 3.2. One direction to take dispelling is to give magic dispel to all the healers (since 90% of player spells are magical), but to prevent offensive dispelling of any kind, or at least prevent dispels for “your-class-is-supposed-to-have-this buff” like Arcane Int or Fort.

Q: Do we have plans to introduce a stand-alone interrupt ability for paladins?

A: We would like to add this kind of utility to paladins. First we have to get the burst damage under control so that Ret paladins are not winning PvP encounters by blowing players up. When we accomplish that, we’ll look at finally giving them more tools.

Q: With the slew of options to either “jump into” or “jump out of” PvP encounters for either offensive or defensive purposes many classes receive, do we have any plans to incorporate special abilities for paladins to either help them escape tough situations or quickly get into pvp battle (i.e. Deathgrip, Typhoon, Summoning Circle, Disengage, etc.)? It seems paladins are the only class without a short cool-down ability on the same scale.

A: Players are pretty good at detecting problems, but for solutions they tend to just look around at what other classes have that is working for them. Homogenization is something we fight as much as we can, which is the reason not every class has Death Grip and not every class has Charge. Judgment of Justice is intended to be the gap-closer for paladins. If it becomes a huge liability, we’ll evaluate, but at the moment paladins are doing extremely well in PvP without it.

Q: Ranged attacks are extremely limited for paladins and are not considered a primary form of dps. However, players feel they would like an ability that will aid them in bridging the gap between melee vs. ranged. Do we have any plans to implement something to this extent?

A: We’ve already changed the “no ranged attacks” philosophy on paladins already and don’t feel the need to continue making them better at range.

Community Team: We’re on our last set of questions here, so let’s switch it up a tad and talk a bit about Librams and aesthetics.

Q: Do we have plans to incorporate a larger variety of Librams?

A: We try and make sure the three main paladin roles have their Librams covered. As these are special items that no other class can use, we have to make sure we don’t drop them too often in PvE encounters, but we have no problem putting more on badge vendors. Usually it’s just a matter of time because a new tier of content, like the Call of the Crusade patch, already involves making literally over a thousand new items.

Q: Do we have plans to incorporate Librams as a more prominent aspect of the paladin class? Also, can we expect to see Librams as a physical aesthetic item on the paladin? Much like the quiver is for the hunter (except only the hunter can see their own quiver mounted on their back).

A: This is something players suggest a lot, and honestly something we’d like to do. It’s a pretty iconic image from Warcraft, especially Warcraft III, to have the paladin toting around their libram. Someone at BlizzCon last year asked if they could beat on people with it. This is a big task to put on the art team though so we would want to make sure we do it right. The same answer would apply to shaman totems and hunter quivers. On the other hand, it took a long time to finally update the druid cat and bear art so don’t look for this in 3.2.

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Blizzard trademarks “Cataclysm”

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By Lyssa, July 4, 2009 11:25 am

MMO-Champion has the story:

Blizzard trademarks “Cataclysm”
A few days ago Blizzard filed a trademark for “Cataclysm” on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. Cataclysm was registered for :

  • Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line computer games; providing computer games that may be accessed via a global computer network; and providing on-line information in the field of computer gaming entertainment
  • Comic books, computer game strategy guides, trading cards, coloring books, adhesive stickers, rub-on transfers, notebooks, stationery-type portfolios, posters, greeting cards, calendars, instructional leaflets in the field of computer games, computer game instruction manuals, catalogs in the field of computer games, advertisement boards of paper or cardboard, photographs, art prints
  • Computer game software and related instruction manuals and guides sold together as a unit; downloadable computer game software; interactive multimedia computer game program; mousepads

Below is a small extract of the Latest Status Info on the Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval (TARR) Website

———————————————

LAST APPLICANT(S)/OWNER(S) OF RECORD
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
16215 Alton Parkway
Irvine, CA 92618
United States

GOODS AND/OR SERVICES
Class Status: Active
Computer game software and related instruction manuals and guides sold together as a unit; downloadable computer game software; interactive multimedia computer game program; mousepads

2009-06-30 – New Application Office Supplied Data Entered In Tram

2009-06-30 – New Application Entered In Tram

———————————————

So … What does it mean? Well, Wrath of the Lich King was trademarked a few weeks before the Blizzcon, we’re not going to jump to conclusions here but WoWWiki will most likely give you a few things to think about on their Great Sundering article.

The Great Sundering, also known as simply the Sundering or the Cataclysm was a world event which reshaped Azeroth approximately 10,000 years ago at the end of the War of the Ancients. This event was triggered due to the Well of Eternity being destroyed.

Prior to the Sundering, there was only one continent on Azeroth, referred to as Kalimdor. In the catastrophic explosion, eighty percent of the land mass was destroyed leaving behind the major continents and scattered islands that are known today: Northrend, Kezan, the Eastern Kingdoms, and the remnant still referred to as Kalimdor.

The site of the Well of Eternity became a swirling vortex of power known as the Maelstrom.

A few days ago, one of our user also spotted a test server named “Maelstrom 3 Test” in the US server list (it only showed up for a few seconds, see This post). If the expansion is indeed The Maelstrom/Cataclysm, we can expect to see a few things here:

This is pretty exciting, we’re getting some possible confirmation on all the rumors on the ‘net surrounding the content of the next expansion.

categories upcoming content, wow sites | tags ,

Warlock Q&A

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By Lyssa,

Warlock Q&A with the Voice of the Class Design Team, Ghostcrawler

Community Team: We’d like start this Q&A off by asking a question that players of all classes often ask in regard to the very purpose of their class. In this case, we’re looking specifically at the warlock.

Where do warlocks fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do we see them going from this point forward?

Ghostcrawler: The warlock is a caster — a ranged damage dealer. They can fill only one role, which makes them a “pure” class as opposed to a hybrid. Warlocks have a reputation for trafficking with darkness, and their spells and abilities reflect this — demons, curses, drains, fears. All warlocks rely on damage-over-time spells and demonic pets to some extent. The Affliction tree focuses on damage-over-time spells, curses, and shadow magic in general. The Demonology tree emphasizes the damage and abilities done by demons. The Destruction tree gives up a little of both to become a little bit more like a mage with direct damage and fire magic. Overall, the vision is for warlocks to feel less fragile than mages. They have historically had higher health pools and easier to sustain mana, but fewer emergency escapes. Keeping the mage and warlock feeling distinct is a big challenge. They fill a similar role and share similar gear so sometimes even the profiles of their character art look similar.

Going forward, we want to try and make the warlock experience more different from the mage. Our new plans for Soul Shards will help here. We want to make them a core mechanic instead of a minor feature that can be neglected at best and feels tedious at worst.

We’re happy with the relative damage done by Affliction and Destruction. Depending on which Lich King patch you look at one or the other are slightly on top, but they’re close. Demonology still seems to lag a little behind. We think there is still room for a strong Felguard build in there. It might be that the pets still require too much management or it could just be that the rotation isn’t as interesting as the ones Affliction or Destruction use right now. Demonology suffers from a little bit of the same problem as the Beastmaster hunter, which is when the pet is such a big part of your damage you are crippled in moments when the pet is killed or ineffectual.

Except for a brief moment early in Lich King, warlocks have been under-represented in PvP and we want to see more of them. We don’t want to get there through fear bombs, though. In fact, we think the damage locks can do is in a pretty good place. The problem is survivability, especially when stunned. Now some of the 3.2 changes are going to chill out damage across the board and we are increasing the survivability of pets in PvP. Both of those changes should help warlocks, who historically have been a little better in endurance fights than quick scrums. If those changes aren’t enough, we’re prepared to make additional ones.

Lich King made the warlock pets more interesting but we think there is still a lot of opportunity here. Some of the pets have abilities that just don’t get much use (Imp Fire Shield anyone?) while other pets could benefit from a couple more abilities. The voidwalker for example does all of his damage through just a simple autoattack. While we are slightly positioning the imp as a Destruction pet and the felhound as an Affliction pet, we think we can make the choice of what demon to use at a particular time more interesting. The succubus has too narrow a niche, and the voidwalker is still used mostly as a level-up pet.

Community Team: What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

Ghostcrawler: Demons are a big one. Warlocks are a pet class, but they gain more of their own power from their pets and can make their pets do more than say a hunter or death knight. The way they do damage is different from a mage because a lot of their damage, even for Destruction, comes from damage-over-time spells instead. Warlocks bring some utility that doesn’t strictly increase raid damage, so we feel like it’s fine to keep those abilities unique to the lock — things like summoning and health stones. But again, we think the real way to keep warlocks from feeling like mages with pets is to do more with the Soul Shard mechanic.

Community Team: Soul Shards is subject that has been a constant amongst warlock players since the launch of the game. While we’ve made some minor improvements over time, players still find Soul Shards to be an annoyance. Are there any plans in motion to make further improvements to the warlock Soul Shard system?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. As we have hinted on occasion, we have a revamp of the entire system in the works. This is a big change, beyond the scope of the 3.2 patch, but we are confident — CONFIDENT — that the new system will be something warlocks finally enjoy. (I’m sure I will never, ever regret saying that.) We hope to be able to talk more about it at BlizzCon, but the basic idea is that shards provide a combat boost when needed without becoming a resource that needs to be farmed. Currently too many of the shard abilities are maintenance-like things such as demons and stones. Blowing a shard should be a big deal — an exciting moment. We want to make shards fun and remove the hassle, but we want to make them a core part of the warlock experience and not a marginalized feature.

Community Team: Most DPS classes can spend three (or less) talent points to decrease their threat by 30%, while warlocks must spend four talent points in two different trees to gain a 10% drop in threat. What are our thoughts on this, and why the discrepancy?

Ghostcrawler: There are a couple of situations like this in the warlock tree. The essential problem is we want locks to be able to go down their different trees. When you have something important like threat-reduction or range, it either needs to go very high in the trees where everyone can reach it, or you need to have duplicate talents that essentially accomplish the same thing. The problem with the latter approach is that confusing things can happen when you get both talents — either they stack (which is too powerful) or they don’t stack (which can be confusing or make talent builds difficult). The way we have tried to solve the latter problem is having some talents affect Fire / Destro and some affect Shadow / Affliction. Of course the problem with that approach is that warlocks use both kinds of damage spells. We recognize that we need to solve this problem, but sliding a lot of talents around is not the right way to do it, and also beyond the scope of 3.2. See below for a partial solution for the threat problem though.

Community Team: As a follow-up to the last question, would we consider giving warlocks a better “aggro dump” ability? Currently, their one “aggro dump,” Soulshatter, has a long cooldown and costs a reagent.

Ghostcrawler: We are going to lower the cooldown of Soulshatter to three minutes. We don’t think the shard cost is a big expense in PvE situations. Threat-dump abilities are tricky to balance. We don’t want these spells to feel rotational — you aren’t supposed to do say Curse of Agony, Immolate, Soulshatter, Curse of Agony, Immolate, Soulshatter. They are there for emergencies.

Community Team: In PvP, warlocks feel at a disadvantage against melee classes (and hunters), particularly rogues. What are our thoughts in this, and are there any plans to provide warlocks with a little more help in this area? Additionally, players have often suggested allowing Demonic Circle to be usable while stunned, is this something we’d consider?

Ghostcrawler: The reason we don’t like making Demonic Circle usable while stunned is that changes the ability from a remote evacuation into a stun-breaker. Our concern is locks would never use it except for the stun removal, which makes the spell a lot less cool. Circle is definitely one of those abilities that requires a lot of finesse. Clever locks can do amazing things with it and beginner locks might not get as much benefit out of it. It’s probably also fair to say that stuns (especially chained ones) have become too important in PvP, especially now that we have toned down the impact of some of the other forms of crowd control.

Community Team: Pet survivability is something that comes up often. Do we see this as a concern, and if so are there any plans to increase warlock pet survivability and/or consider decreasing the warlock’s dependency on pets in PvP?

Ghostcrawler: It is a concern. We never wanted it to feel like it was stupid to attack the pet — like they were so unkillable that you just have to endure damage from the pet while you chase down the lock. You have to remember that locks were once really dangerous in PvP (this was back when we added resilience for DoTs) and so everyone was nervous about making their pets too powerful. It’s just incredibly frustrating to be on the other end of that and finally get a pet down only to have to then face the warlock. However times have changed and we think pets are too fragile now. We tried buffing their health a few times, but we think it’s finally time to add resilience to pets and fix it right.

Community Team: Continuing off of the previous question, are we happy with pet scaling currently? One constant request by warlocks in PvP, is to allow scaling for resilience. Would we consider making this change?

Ghostcrawler: Yes, pets are never going to scale correctly as long as there are some stats that affect the master but not the pet. If the lock gains crit and haste, the demons don’t benefit as much as if the lock had gained spellpower. This is a problem. We need to make pets just scale with all stats. Technically, this is not a “flip the switch” kind of change. It’s complicated so it’s going to take some time to do right. We’ll get resilience and spell pen done first.

Community Team: Many warlocks often find it difficult to resummon or switch pets, especially when compared to other pet classes. Fel Domination with Master Summoner is nice for those who have the talents, but still somewhat problematic due to the long cooldown of Fel Domination.

Ghostcrawler: As you probably know by now, we are dramatically lowering the cooldown on Fel Domination.

Community Team: Talents that increase the range for spells is often a point of concern, particularly for PvE-focused warlocks due to the warlock’s mixture of using both Affliction and Destruction abilities. Is it possible that warlocks can be given a merged range talent in a low tier of either tree?

Ghostcrawler: This is the same problem I mentioned above. Moving the talent up higher is one solution, but it would have to be very high and whatever talents are there now would have to come down. This then becomes a pretty significant re-architecture of the talent tree. It is something we want to address, but probably isn’t a 3.2 change.

Community Team: Do we have plans to add a little more burst potential to the Affliction tree?

Ghostcrawler: Yes, and Haunt is probably the right place to do it. Haunt is one of the few Affliction spells that can’t reach the 200% crit level, so we are going to make that change through Pandemic.

Community Team: The spell Hellfire is one that warlocks rarely use, due to that fact it’s channeled, generates a great deal of threat, and has self-damaging properties. What are our thoughts on how this spell currently functions, and what might we consider changing in the future?

Ghostcrawler: We’d agree that the “interesting tradeoff” isn’t that interesting, and in fact it’s hard to find niches for so many different AE spells. Long-term this might be the kind of spell that gets cut.

Community Team: A common concern that comes up regarding warlock players is in regards to their minor glyphs. While they understand that these glyphs aren’t meant to be game-changing, many of the minor glyphs focus on improving spells that aren’t really used at all, such as Eye of Kilrogg. Would we consider looking at the minor glyphs available for warlocks and possibly making some improvements?

Ghostcrawler: We can look at the minor glyphs. We are more concerned at the moment with making sure the major glyphs are interesting without being overpowered.

Community Team: Green fire for spells has been something that’s often requested by warlocks. Would we consider adding this into the game, possibly in the form of a minor glyph so that we’re not forcing it on players who may not desire their fire spells to be green?

Ghostcrawler: We wouldn’t do it through a minor glyph. Originally, we were going to make the minor glyphs mostly cosmetic like this, but as we evolved the glyph feature we found that some spells just didn’t make sense to have a major glyph, so these became minors. We definitely understand some (many? all?) warlocks would love to have green fire and we’ll try and find a cool way to deliver on this. At this point, we’d probably rather do it with a flashy new spell rather than just change up an existing one, but we’ll have to see. As with the new druid forms, after waiting so long, we’d want to do it right.

Community Team: Would we consider adding a warlock-specific flying mount? Warlocks have promised to never complain again should such a feature be added. Okay, not really…

Ghostcrawler: I think it fits the warlock kit pretty well to have some kind of crazy flying demon. We don’t have any art for such a creature yet, but we’ll keep it in mind. You’d have to go back to Dire Maul to get it. Okay, not really…

Community Team: Are there any plans to allow warlocks to slightly customize or change the appearance of their pets?

Ghostcrawler: This is something we are discussing. There are several voidwalker and imp models we could use pretty easily and it might be nice to add more felhounds and succubi. This isn’t a high priority, but something we would like to eventually get around to improving. We are discussing whether this is simply just random variation (like the names) or whether it becomes an even bigger feature.

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