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By Lyssa, July 4, 2009 11:12 am

Death Knight 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. Death knights are the newest class in the game, the first Hero class, and the only class to be added since the original launch.

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

Ghostcrawler: Death knights are the only current Hero class, which means they are supposed to be the best class in the game.

No, no, I mean that death knights are an anti-magic tank, which means you bring them out for fights like Hydross and curb them for Patchwerk.

I jest again, but my point is that we introduced a new class to a game that didn’t really have a niche that needed to be filled. The closest to a gap that existed was that we wanted to have more tanks available, especially for pick-up groups. But adding the dual-spec feature as well as improving some of the limitations of the existing classes has helped to fill that hole as well. Yet we did want to introduce a new class. World of Warcraft has been going on for several years now, and we thought it was time to shake things up a bit. We succeeded. Perhaps too well.

Players are obviously enjoying death knights for tanking, dps, or PvP and we’d like to think there is more going on there than just power. Some players really enjoy the rune and runic power mechanic, and I think it’s fair to say that the class requires a good amount of skill to play really well. Between Death Runes and all the various cooldowns, there are a lot of opportunities to play less optimally and push the wrong button. We’ve asked ourselves several times if the death knight is overly complicated — perhaps you could accomplish 90% of the design with a 3 rune system instead of a 6 rune system — but we aren’t changing it to that large a degree soon.

In terms of 3.2, we want to chill out the death knight AE damage and defensive cooldowns a little. It’s fine for a melee class to have strong area-effect, but they shouldn’t be so much better than warriors, rogues, and Enhancement shamans. One culprit here is Unholy Blight, which we are considering changing to be more single-target in nature. We are also likely to split Desecration into two abilities: a PvP-oriented snare and a PvE-oriented self damage buff. We are considering shifting some of the damage from Scourge Strike and Frost Strike into Blood Strike, which still hits for fairly paltry amounts for Frost and Unholy. We’ll talk about some additional changes below.

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

Ghostcrawler: Their resource system is very unique. It is impossible for death knights to ever run out of resources. Any kind of benefit that makes rune-based abilities cheaper or finish their cooldowns faster are generally useless to a death knight. In fact, the whole rotation risked being very regular and even boring until we came up with a strong role for the Death Runes.

The death knight can do excellent melee damage, but also better ranged damage than most melee classes, and all three specs deal a large amount of non-physical damage.

Death knights also have a lot of abilities with medium-length cooldowns. This means they can be used multiple times per fight, but aren’t always there exactly when needed. A lot of the skill involved in playing a death knight, whether for PvP, tanking, or doing raid dps, involves using these at the right time.

Death knights also hybridize into a lot of different directions. What I mean is that they have surprisingly high area damage for a predominantly melee class. They have a pet. They have interrupts, (reverse) gap-closers, and strong snares. They are very well-rounded, which has been the cause of many of the balance problems we’ve had with them in PvP.

Death knights don’t have a dedicated tanking tree. Blood, Frost or Unholy death knight tanks are all viable, and each one can be slightly more useful depending on the boss encounter.

And then there is the obvious: they start at high level, showered in blue gear and even a mount. They have some of the best quests in the entire game in their start zone, and their identity is stitched heavily into the story of Northrend and the Lich King specifically.

Community Team: One question in particular that relates to one of the earliest designs of the Death Knight class and has been burning on the minds and tongues of every death knight for quite awhile now.

How do we feel about the current viability of dual-wielding? Are there plans to improve it or have it fit a specific role for the class?

Ghostcrawler: This is a controversial topic because we realize some players just aren’t interested in dual-wielding (or seeing any death knights even do it), while others love the faster strikes that come with it. Our design has always been that dual-wielding should be an option, but that also means that it can’t take over, as it often does for classes in which we provide the option.

Part of our goal with the death knight was not to have a tanking or PvP tree, and we feel we’ve been pretty successful with that. However, adding dual-wield to that matrix just gives us an impossible task, because then you need to have the Blood dual-wield tank spec and the Frost two-hander PvP spec and so on.

What we are going to do with dual-wield in 3.2 is just provide the Frost tree with the talents necessary to prop-up dual wielding, including a new talent that lets Frost Strike, Death Strike, Obliterate etc. hit with both weapons. This will likely mean that Blood and Unholy dual-wield specs just won’t work anymore. It also carries the risk that all Frost death knights feel like they have to go dual-wield. This latter part isn’t necessarily a goal, but could be the outcome. We think in this case our only option is to remove some player choice in order to provide a real choice in other areas.

Community Team: The Blood tree has been quite popular lately, but the players have been actively discussing the 51-point talent, Dancing Rune Weapon, lately. Even with the glyph for it, Dancing Rune Weapon only lasts through about one rotation of abilities while the Unholy 51-point talent, Summon Gargoyle, lasts much longer.

Do we have plans for any changes or improvements to Dancing Rune Weapon?

Ghostcrawler: We tried to make Dancing Rune Weapon and Gargoyle unique, but I think it has ended up causing more problems than anything. I think it’s likely you’ll just see both abilities as flat runic power costs that summon a creature for a flat period of time. This will let us balance the numbers appropriately.

Community Team: Due to their effectiveness while tanking, death knights saw a rapid popularity growth as tanks which caused the reduction of the armor bonus of Frost Presence in patch 3.1.3. Some players are afraid this will push them out of being an option as a main tank as they felt they were when originally implemented.

What are our current thoughts on the status of death knight tanks and do we have plans for further changes?

Ghostcrawler: Almost all of the top raiding guilds considered the death knight to be overpowered as a tank and the only real option for many of the Ulduar hard modes. While the community isn’t always right about everything, they are right a lot, and in this case we think the evidence is overwhelming. We wanted to make the cooldowns the unique part of death knight tanking, and we haven’t given up on that design, but it has also turned out that having lots of powerful cooldowns is just an extremely potent way to tank. Many of the Naxx and Ulduar bosses were dangerous from predictable blasts of damage on cooldowns longer than the death knight ones. Plus the cooldowns could be used to survive just a bit longer. When the other tanks could survive two hits, the death knight could survive three. It’s entirely possible you’ll see Icebound Fortitude on a two-minute timer in the 3.2 patch. I want to reiterate though that our vision hasn’t changed — we still want death knights to be able to tank every encounter. Rather than posting in the forums that you are now doomed and will have to reroll, help us get the death knights in a place where they are an attractive option but not the clear best option on most fights.

Community Team: There have been some complaints among the death knight community about stats on armor pieces, especially set pieces, not benefiting the talent spec that they want to play as much as another talent spec.

Are we satisfied with stats such as Armor Penetration, Haste, and Hit having very different values depending on which talent spec a death knight is using?

Ghostcrawler: No. We don’t want to create multiple types of death knight armor, other than tanking and damage dealing. We already support like 19 different types of tier pieces because for example all of the mail users want slightly different stats. It is a problem that, say, Blood wants armor penetration and Unholy does not. But our answer to that problem is going to be to make all specs regard the stats more similarly, not to provide lots of different armor choices. It’s already hard enough to get a boss to drop what you want.

Community Team: With the recent implementation of the dual-spec feature, players have greatly enjoyed the flexibility of having two specs to switch between depending on what they are currently playing. But this feature has also lead to number of extra requests from players to make things easier for them when transitioning.

Would it be possible to save runeforge enchants to primary and secondary talent specializations or add rune forges to more convenience places than Acherus?

Ghostcrawler: Considering the huge benefits that the runeforge enchants already offer the death knight, it’s hard to argue that they need to be even more convenient. A paladin who swaps from a Retribution build to a Protection build can’t even use the same weapon, let alone have an enchant change out as well. We don’t save gems and enchants as part of the dual-spec feature. The expectation generally is that you have multiple sets of gear.

Community Team: Anticipation is considered a more attractive talent than Frigid Dreadplate because dodge can trigger Rune Strike. Players feel this is a little confusing because Frigid Dreadplate is way more down in the talent tree.

Are there plans to change or improve the Frigid Deadplate talent?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t necessarily consider the deepest talents in a tree to be the best ones. Generally when we push talents deep, it’s because they are of limited interest to other specs or else so powerful that we want to keep them away from other specs. Frigid Dreadplate is a great tanking talent since it adds avoidance. I can’t imagine a death knight tank actually skipping out on Anticipation, so it doesn’t bother us that the Anticipation talent is considered better. That said, we think avoidance is likely too high on all tanking classes, so we aren’t likely to buff Frigid Dreadplate.

Community Team: Death Knights think that only a few players choose Will of the Necropolis because of the proc condition, internal cooldown, and so forth.

Is there any plan to improve Will of the Necropolis?

Ghostcrawler: There was a brief window where this talent was totally overpowered because it just added so much opportunity for a death knight getting beat on to survive. It’s possible we over-nerfed it, but you have to be careful with talents like this. As soon as it slides from “only a few choose to take it” to “most choose to take it” then there’s another talent that is being skipped over.

Community Team: This brings us into some PvP-focused topics. One particular spell that was brought up a lot is Mind Freeze and the ‘delays’ in it taking effect on the target which often causes the interrupt to appear on a combat log but not actually stop the spell.

Is this a bug or something in particular we are investigating?

Ghostcrawler: It is an ongoing research item. We have never been able to duplicate the situation that the players describe, that sometimes it has a delay that other interrupts do not. It is set up similarly to other abilities. However in a game as complex as World of Warcraft, we have learned not to dismiss the possible weird situations that a particular ability can get into. You have to take the combat log with a slight grain of salt — this is a client-server game, and sometimes the two can disagree on when an event occurred. The server thinks the spell went off, while the client thinks you got the interrupt off in time. The server usually wins.

Community Team: A good number of non-death knight players are concerned regarding the healing capability of death knights, especially in the PvP setting, where they can often survive for extended periods of time with no healer and still do lots of damage.

Do we have plans to change any of the death knight’s self-healing abilities?

Ghostcrawler: The healing is one of the core mechanics of the class, and one of the things that helps them feel distinct from warriors. It’s the reason there is a Blood tree and Blood Runes. We have no immediate plans to change anything here. If death knights continue to be good at PvP even after some of the defensive nerfs, we’d likely look at say Chains of Ice, the interrupts or the amount of non-physical damage they can do.

Community Team: To finish off this Q&A, let’s blast through the last set of questions:

Would you consider adding a Mortal Strike-like ability to death knights in the future?

Ghostcrawler: There are two answers to this question. The first is do we think the death knight needs any additional tool for PvP? The answer to that is definitely not. Death knights have been really well represented, if not overpowered, in PvP. The second part of the question is more philosophical though, which is whether or not Mortal Strike is mandatory in PvP. You can currently argue it isn’t because there are teams that feature Retribution paladins or Unholy death knights (or both) that do just fine. However, it is an issue that rises up every few months or so: whether every damage class needs some option of bringing the “mortal” debuff, or at what point we just make it a passive aura upon stepping into PvP.

Will Chains of Ice ever be subject to diminishing returns?

Ghostcrawler: If we need it. It’s not in the plan. Snares don’t currently have diminishing returns, and Chains is limited based on the availability of Frost Runes. It is a possible concern that between Chains of Ice, Death Grip, and the ghoul stun that a death knight can lock someone down for a long time.

Will ghouls ever get their voices back?

Ghostcrawler: We have a long-term plan to add the ghoul voices back. We pulled them because they were using the vendor voices, which sounded weird when your ghoul would ask you to buy or trade. We just need to get some audio made without the vendor text. It’s in the plan, but not super high priority.

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By Lyssa,

I took a few weeks off of playing WoW and I’ve been neglecting this blog.  I’ve got a bunch of stuff to post.

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By Lyssa, June 30, 2009 1:57 pm

Wow, it’s about time!  I still curse some old friends for making us Alliance to begin with.

We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031079410&sid=1&pageNo=1

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By Lyssa, June 19, 2009 12:14 pm

Blizzard recently posted the Mage Q&A, here it is:

Mage Q&A with Ghostcrawler and the World of Warcraft Development Team

Community Team: Joining us today to shed some light on the many questions we’ve fielded from players within the mage 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 by exploring the perceived role of the mage class. A lot has changed since the days when the “glass cannon” description was applied.

Where do mages fit in the current scope of things, and where do you see them from this point going forward?

Ghostcrawler: The mage is the iconic caster — a ranged class that wants to stay at range in order to focus on dealing damage. They can do single-target damage, area of effect damage (AoE), or crowd control. Every group should want a mage because they are reliable, powerful and flexible. Most of the mage’s spells have a cast time and a lot of the gameplay involved in improving your mage revolves around minimizing the limitations of the cast time, whether it’s lowering cast time through talents and gear, getting away from enemies so you have an opportunity to cast, or using the occasional ability to make a spell instant. While all three of the mage talent trees focus on dealing damage, we are pleased with the different feel between Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Arguably mages even have a fourth potential style now that focuses around Frostfire Bolt. We know the stylistic differences work because there are Frost mages who just love Frost and want to see it work in Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Fire mages who want to play Fire in Player vs. Player (PvP). They prefer a play style within the same class over a different play style that would be arguably more effective within a particular aspect of the game. While understandably frustrating for those players, it also points out a success in the class design. We used to call the mage the master of AoE damage, but we’ve since decided that’s not a great niche for anyone. The “AoE class” feels mandatory in situations where you do have large crowds of enemies to contend with, but then the AoE class gets bored when everyone else is maximizing their single-target damage on a boss. Now we try and give AoE tools to all damage-dealing specializations (specs), though we will always make extra effort to make sure mages stay good in that department. Players sometimes wonder why the mage class has seen fewer changes than some of the other classes during Lich King. We think that’s because by and large, the class works. That’s not to say there aren’t areas we can improve, but we think the mage has all the right tools to live up to its reputation.

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

Ghostcrawler: All of the mage specs, though less-so Arcane, focus on a single spell such as Fireball. At first glance, and especially to non-mages, this might make the class appear overly simple to play, but really you can have a lot going on. There are chance-on-hit abilities (procs) such as Hot Streak and Firestarter to contend with. Mages have some great tools, like Presence of Mind and Arcane Power, to really kick up their damage on demand. Frost PvP in particular requires a lot of finesse to get the Water Elemental’s Frost Nova at the right time for a Shatter combo. Mages are fragile though (just ask a healer), so they have to make sure they’re staying alive as well and using the tools they have to do so. Even though most of their damage comes from one spell, mages have a lot going on. The damage per second (DPS) difference between a skilled and less-skilled mage with the same gear can be pronounced. Mages still are a glass cannon when compared to priests and warlocks. While all have their armor spells, the mages also have escape mechanisms from Polymorph to Frost Nova to Iceblock to Blink. Mages should never feel “tanky” in a PvP environment. The biggest risk for homogenization occurs with the mage and the warlock, but in this case we think the mage is in a good place and it’s the warlock that we want to move slightly farther away. We’ll talk more about the locks soon, but we need to focus them even more on mechanics like shards and demons. Mages also retain some unique tools, such as the town portals and the (ahem) food and beverage service. Their crowd control is still among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, in the game.

Community Team: A lot of initial questions and concerns we received from mages around the world were concerning itemization. In particular, a lot of the newer PvE and PvP mage or caster items seem to favor Fire spec and, to a lesser extent, Arcane. Do you feel as though mages are being forced to focus too much on critical strike rating (crit) over stacking more haste, spell power, and intellect, stats that are much more beneficial to the Frost mage?

Ghostcrawler: It isn’t in our best interest as designers to have Frost want very different stats than Fire. In a world where we already must add so many new items to the game with every new raid tier / Arena season, we just don’t want to dabble too much with “this piece is attractive to the Fire mage, but not the Frost mage.” We think the value of different stats has just crept too far apart for different specs of the same class. It’s just never going to feel right when one stat is worth double or more of the value of another stat. We’re making a big pass at all of the talent trees and item stats to try and get this a little closer for everyone. Ideally you might be comparing two pieces of cloth and have to decide whether the haste or crit is more valuable to you, and not just write off everything without crit as junk. So to answer the question succinctly, yes mages are being asked to focus too much on some stats. We also understand there are some items in Naxxramas that are superior to items in Ulduar. This isn’t ideal, but is partially fallout from our decision to not have the final boss of Ulduar drop better loot than the rest of the instance, which is a design change from the previous tier. We are looking at the items on a case by case basis as the feedback comes up. While it isn’t our goal to ensure that every drop is automatically an upgrade, it also isn’t our goal that you try and get your group to keep going back to the old content because it provides more upgrades for you.

Community Team: There are some funky cloth legging designs out there that are difficult to truly appreciate unless one wears a tunic.

Even so, will mages get robes, or at least the option of choosing robes, over tunics going forward?

Ghostcrawler: To be totally honest, this is not a huge priority for us at this time. We embrace some level of player visual customization in World of Warcraft, but it’s just not in the design vision to give players as many controls over how their character looks as some players would probably desire. One of the distinctive visual qualities of cloth is that it often looks like long, flowing robes, which is pretty consistent with the iconic fantasy wizard. No doubt some players would prefer to change the look of their weapon or weapon enchant if they could without having a game play effect, so this is just a slippery slope for us. We will keep the feedback in mind though.

Community Team: The next few questions concern the number-one issue raised by mages on the forums as of late: mana efficiency. Mana Gem and Evocation are commonly referred to as outdated mechanics. Many players feel the Mana Gem does not restore enough mana and should not be placed on the same cooldown with a warlock’s Healthstone, while Evocation has too lengthy a cooldown and is typically not a reliable means of acquiring mana during boss fights.

How do you view these mechanics, and are there any intentions of updating mana recovery capabilities for mages in the future?

Ghostcrawler: Our general philosophy, in a very broad sense, is that healers risk running out of mana if they aren’t careful or are in over their heads, but that damage-dealing specs generally have enough mana to do their jobs. That doesn’t mean that you never need to burn a gem or use Evocation, but it does mean that if you are being reasonable about what you’re doing that you should have enough mana except perhaps on very long or unusual fights. What we are more likely to do is just lower the mana costs of the main nukes: Arcane Blast, Fireball, Frostbolt, and Frostfire Bolt.

Community Team: Compared to many other damage-dealing counterparts, mages feel their AoE damage is less reliable and way too costly.

Do the developers feel that the cost to mages of doing AoE damage is appropriate?

Ghostcrawler: It’s close. We don’t want say the Blizzard spell to ever look really attractive to use against a pair of creatures or a single target. It’s taxing on your mana bar to do many Blizzards, but it doesn’t feel inappropriate for the amount of damage you’re doing during that time. The efficiency is still good in cases with a large number of targets, which is the whole point. Now some of the other mage spells could definitely use some improvements to make them as competitive as Blizzard (the spell) in terms of usability, damage or efficiency. Clearly it’s in our best interest to make sure a spell with the name “Blizzard” kicks some major posterior.

Community Team: Spell Steal is a very costly spell, especially considering it can be resisted, an unnecessary buff can be stolen unintentionally or the stolen buff can be dispelled.

Are there any plans to reevaluate the mana cost and functionality of this spell?

Ghostcrawler: We think the core of the problem is that a spell that was designed to let you steal cool buffs from an enemy has sort of fallen into the niche of a general dispel. Rather than make it cheaper, we’d be more likely to let it actually only steal spells that would benefit the mage. This would be a buff in some cases and a nerf in others though, so it’s not a quick and dirty change. We have considered a glyph to let Spell Steal take two buffs at a time. Community Team: Now let’s jump to some questions about specific talent specs. Firstly, the Arcane tree is widely considered too bloated. It seems that, over time, the talent trees of all classes have really evolved to provide plenty of different options with fewer five-point talents to allow for greater customization. There are several flavorful talents in the Arcane tree (i.e. Student of the Mind, Magic Absorption, Magic Attunement, Incanter’s Absorption, etc.), but many players feel that they cannot afford to spend points in such places since many of the most necessary damage-dealing talents require five points.

How do you feel about revitalizing the Arcane tree to thin out some of these five-point talents?

Ghostcrawler: Arcane is a little bloated. If you take all of the damage and mana talents there aren’t many left to spend on the more fun or cool talents. We recognize that it’s hard, for instance, to have a single Arcane build that can work in both PvE and PvP. To be clear though this is a problem with several of the talent trees and not a problem with Arcane alone. If you look at say the warrior Protection tree or the paladin Retribution tree, those provide a model for where we’d like to take talent trees in the future – fewer talents overall and plenty of points to spend on fun play-style choices that really do feel optional rather than talents you need to make your spec function. Also note that fixing some mage mana issues might make some of the mana talents feel less mandatory.

Community Team: To expand upon the last question, Torment of the Weak is used in several of the most popular mage talent specs for both PvE and PvP, however, the Arcane talents prior to this one are of very little use to Frost mages – and Fire mages to a lesser degree — in PvE.

Are you concerned at all that Torment of the Weak is considered to be so important to mages, regardless of specialization, that a minimum of eighteen talent points must be spent in the Arcane tree to reap its full benefit?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t think it’s must-have for Frostfire builds and it doesn’t strike us as weird that Frost or Fire would subspec into Arcane, since that is generally going to offer them more than say a Frost mage who subspecs into Fire.

Are there plans on the horizon to improve Fire mage representation in PvP?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. It is more important to us though to fix classes that have no viable specs than it is to bring options to classes that already have a reasonable Arena presence. We are more focused on improving hunter and warlock representation than making sure Fire has a PvP role. It’s still something we would like to do, but in a game of this size there are a lot of things we’d like to do. Dragon’s Breath is one spell we think we can improve for PvP. With a lower cool down it could be more like Scatter Shot. It’s not necessarily that Fire is terrible at PvP, just that Frost has a lot more tools.

Is threat generation from Fire mages a concern at all given their burst damage is controlled mostly by proc talents and critical chance?

Ghostcrawler: Threat-generation is a concern. One way we’d like to fix this is through Invisibility. We’ve always been a little cautious with making sure the spell wasn’t too powerful, but we think we have plenty of room to improve it. In PvE for example, it’s really hit and miss whether you’ll take damage that will prevent the threat wipe. Do remember that Mirror Image is quite useful as a threat-reduction spell. Your threat is divided among the images while it’s active. Sometimes it makes sense to blow the spell right at the start of a fight, and other times when you get a spell buff or are otherwise able to go into really high damage mode for a few seconds.

Do the developers still consider it an objective to improve Frost damage for PvE?

Ghostcrawler: Yes. The challenge as always is to make sure we don’t over buff Frost in PvP just to make it viable in PvE. While it would be ideal for all specs to be viable in PvP and PvE, having different PvP and PvE specs at least keeps those specs alive rather than having one tree which is good at everything. We’d like to buff Frost through Ice Lance. Currently another Frostbolt is always better than an Ice Lance in PvE. We experimented with improving this through the glyph of Ice Lance, but it turns out the glyph would have to improve Ice Lance’s damage by x6 or something ridiculous like that.

Community Team: Finally, this wouldn’t be a mage Q&A without a question about Blink. It has been discussed in the past that it’s the terrain that can cause the spell to fail and not necessarily an issue with the spell itself.

While mages do recognize this issue, has there been any discussion about reworking Blink so it’s more intuitive and could recognize a mage failing to teleport any distance forward, wasting only a global cooldown rather than the mana and spell cooldown?

Ghostcrawler: Blink is a movement spell, and anything related to movement can be a little dicey on a client-server game like World of Warcraft. That’s not an excuse for it bugging out, but an explanation for why you can get into situations where it doesn’t seem to work. In the 3.1 patch we made some technical improvements to the spell working on slopes. It used to fail a lot in the portal area of Dalaran for example, but that has been much improved. One of the places where it still seems to struggle the most is entering or exiting the tunnels in Warsong Gulch, which ironically is one of the places where it’s also the most useful. Anywhere there is a change in terrain, such as entering a building, could be problematic. We are working on this issue. If you run into a problem with Blink, the most helpful thing you can do in the Bug Report forum is specify where exactly you had the spell fail. That will let our engineers zero in on solutions.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/mage.html

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By Lyssa, June 16, 2009 3:05 pm

There is a bunch of new tournament info up on the Under Development page at the official site:

With the release of the Secrets of Ulduar, the Argent Tournament opened its doors to heroes from all over Azeroth and saw champions arise from the ranks to take on the challenges before them to prove their worth. In the next upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, the Argent Tournament will be expanding its influence and players will be able to experience all-new dailies, rewards, and areas of interest.

Two New Quest Hubs
A new Cult of the Damned camp now sits overlooking the Tournament grounds and spying on the activity below.

Located on an island north of Icecrown, the former tuskarr village known as Hrothgar’s Landing is a mist-shrouded staging point for Sea Vrykul raids upon the ships of the Silver Covenant and the Sunreavers in the waters between the island and Icecrown.

New Dailies and Rewards
Just when you thought you had seen and done it all, the Argent Tournament throws out the gauntlet once more and adds a new line of quests and rewards for players who have become exalted with either the Silver Covenant or the Sunreavers. Earn seals by participating in three additional random dailies and earn brand-new rewards.

• New Tabards: Alliance characters will be able to earn the Silver Covenant tabard and Horde characters will be able to earn the Sunreaver tabard currently seen being worn by NPCs on the grounds.
• New Mounts: New ground and flying mounts will be available for both Horde and Alliance. Alliance will be able to purchase the new Quel’dorei Steed and Silver Covenant Hippogryph. Horde will be able to purchase the new Sunreaver Hawkstrider and Sunreaver Dragonhawk.
• New Pet: A brand-new pet, the Shimmering Wyrmling, will be available to characters of both factions who distinguish themselves.

Argent Crusader Dailies and Rewards
A new line of dailies and rewards for players who have earned the title of Crusader will be available with two random seal-awarding dailies.

• New Heirlooms
• New Argent Crusade Banner
• New Argent Crusade Tabard: Ports you directly to the Tournament grounds.
• An Upgraded Squire: As any good squire should, this upgraded squire now has a mount.
• New Mount: A new Argent Crusade paladin-only charger will be available.

The Black Knight Returns
Just when you thought you had seen the last of the Black Knight, he makes his astonishing return to Tournament. Wait, didn’t you kill him?

Paladin-only mount?!? WTF!!!

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By Lyssa,

Blizzard has been teasing us with small tidbits about the new battleground to be included in the 3.2 content patch, The Isle of Conquest.  Finally the blues have pulled back the curtain and revealed the details of this much-anticipated BG.

An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. But as insignificant as it may seem, this is no ordinary place. A sound of thunder as waves crash endlessly against rocky cliffs; a sound of fury as swords clash on the blood-stained fields of this island on the edge of forever.

Welcome to the Isle of Conquest.

The ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance has turned many once peaceful (and some not-so peaceful) places into theaters of constant war. The Isle of Conquest is the latest such place, set to be the location of a battle of epic proportions over the island’s precious resources.

An Alliance and a Horde general are fighting for dominance, overseeing the action from the safety of their keeps. Whichever side manages to eliminate the enemy general first will triumph on the island; failure to protect your leader will bring shame, dishonor, and defeat. There is no peace accord here, and it’s an all-out war between the factions.

Once More into the breach…

Isle of Conquest, a new battleground scheduled to make its debut in the upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, will pitch teams of up to 40 players against each other in a massive battle over this small island off Northrend’s northern coast. To win, your team will need to make use of the island’s unique strategic locations including an oil derrick, a siege workshop, and a fully equipped airship hangar. You will deploy devastating siege weaponry on the field; Light have mercy on anyone caught between you and your ultimate target, the general holed up in the enemy keep.

There are five points of interest on the Isle of Conquest for the factions to battle over. Each one offers its own benefits and strategic value. Which one will you claim for your side, and will it be enough to ensure victory?

Capture Locations

Consider your options before storming out of your keep to confront the enemy head-on. Spread throughout the Isle of Conquest are several capturable locations (as seen on the map), each granting a unique strategic advantage to your team.

The Oil Derrick: Located on the northwestern end of the island, this smudge in the Frozen Sea produces enough black gold to run a thousand siege engines. Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

The Cobalt Mine: This snow-covered assembly, located on the southeastern end of the island, hides untapped supplies that must be harvested. Taking this resource grants reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

The Docks: The western shore’s docks will further expand your selection of siege weapons with the devastating new Glaive Thrower and the Catapult. Unleash the destruction of the Glaive Thrower upon the walls of the keep, or launch your invading party over the walls to assault the keep from within.

The Airship Hangar: This sturdy steel structure stands on the peak of Mt. Conquest overlooking the eastern side of the island, allowing players to board the airship docked there. This devastating weapon of war is capable of raining death upon the heads of your enemies and destroying enemy defenses. Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above.

The Siege Workshop: Situated right between the Alliance base and the Horde base, this siege workshop occupies a strategic hot spot. Seizing it grants the controlling party the ability to utilize an arsenal of siege vehicles perfectly suited to reducing the enemy keep’s walls to dust and ashes.

Graveyards: There are five graveyards in the Isle of Conquest that are attached to different points of interest on the map: the Horde base, the Alliance base, an oil spill island in the center of the map (attached to the siege workshop), the northeast corner (attached to the airship hangar), and the southwest corner (attached to the docks).

Main Objectives

The Keeps: The Horde and Alliance keeps sit at opposite ends of the island. These citadels host four easily accessible defensive cannons set on the ramparts, capable of unleashing hot fury onto oncoming attackers. Additional explosives sit safely stowed in the base of the keep along the back wall. At least, they’re safe as long as they don’t fall into enemy hands. If they do, though, they can be employed to bring the stone walls down from within.

The General: Holed up behind the keeps’ massive walls, the generals command their forces from a position of relative safety. Should the keep fall and the general be slain, the Isle of Conquest will fall to the victor.

Reinforcements: Isle of Conquest uses a reinforcements system similar to that of Alterac Valley. The clock is ticking and every individual counts. If too many of your comrades fall to the enemy the battle will end in defeat. Killing enemy players will reduce their reinforcements by one for each kill, Once your faction’s reinforcements reach their limit, so too does your bid for control of the island and the wealth of resources you’ve fought so hard over.

An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. A test of strength. A chance to prove your might, to crush your enemies, to make a difference, a chance for endless glory and conquest.

Will you seize it?

Considering how much I’ve taken a liking to Strand of the Ancients recently this looks promising.

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By Lyssa, June 11, 2009 5:01 pm

Blizzard finally decided to put a zeppelin route between Thunder Bluff and Ogrimmar.  It’s about damn time.

In the next major content patch we will be adding a few methods of improved transportation to areas of interest while leveling.

It is time for the denizens of Azeroth to witness the full might of the Horde as they do what they do best: employ goblins to construct zeppelin towers and float players across vast seas using sky boats. That’s right, a new zeppelin route is being added in Thunder Bluff and will transport players to Orgrimmar. Isn’t technology magnificent?

Also, brought to you by Azeroth’s greatest users of magic, are all new portals coming to Stormwind and Orgrimmar. These portals will transport players directly to the Stair of Destiny at the Dark Portal. Travel is just so much more convenient when it’s instantaneous! Players will then find that a new connecting flight path exists at the Stair of Destiny allowing players new to Outland easy and direct access to the city of Shattrath.

Keep your seat backs and tray tables in a full upright and locked position, and we hope you continue to enjoy your methods of travel in Azeroth and beyond!

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By Lyssa,

And the game gets easier…

In the next major content patch, we intend to adjust mount requirements to further improve the leveling experience in World of Warcraft. In addition, cast times for summoning all mounts will be reduced to 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds. The following is a breakdown of the upcoming cost and level requirement changes we are making for each riding skill.

Apprentice Riding (Skill 75)

• 60% land mount speed
• Requires level 20
• Cost: 4 gold
• Mount cost: 1 gold
• Mail will be sent to players at level 20 guiding them to the riding trainer

Journeyman Riding (Skill 150)

• 100% land mount speed
• Requires level 40
• Cost: 50 gold
• Mount cost: 10 gold
• Mail will be sent to players at level 40 guiding them back to the riding trainer

Expert Riding (Skill 225)

• 150% flying mount speed; 60% land mount speed
• Requires level 60
• Cost: 600 gold (faction discounts now apply)
• Mount Cost: 50 gold
• Can now be learned in Honor Hold (Alliance) or Thrallmar (Horde)

Artisan Riding (Skill 300)

• 280% flying mount speed; 100% land mount speed
• Requires level 70
• Cost: 5,000 gold (faction discounts now apply)
• Mount Cost: 100 gold

Gee I’m so glad I already spent like 2k gold buying all the rep mounts I was missing as I’ve gotten exalted with the home factions and the regular flying mounts that I still needed…

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By Lyssa, June 10, 2009 11:36 am

Incoming epic quote. The Shaman class Q&A with dev Ghostcrawler was posted up at the WoW site yesterday. Here’s all the text:

Shaman Q&A with Ghostcrawler and the World of Warcraft Development Team

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 shaman, which has seen a variety of changes since the start of World of Warcraft and perhaps doesn’t fit into the original description quite the way they used to.

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

Ghostcrawler: The shaman class has a pretty dynamic history. In classic World of Warcraft there was a period where everyone viewed shamans as overpowered. I remember one of my earliest experiences in the Barrens trying to group with a shaman to do a group quest. But he just told me was an overpowered shaman (Frost Shock!) and didn’t need the help.

In vanilla World of Warcraft, shamans at the end-game were healers. Period. By The Burning Crusade, we decided that all three of their trees should have viable roles in the end-game. We also decided that hybrid classes (those that can fill more than one role, such as damage and healing) should do less damage than the classes that could only fill the damage role. This philosophy generally worked, in some cases too well, because Sunwell raids were infamous for stacking lots of shamans.

In Lich King, a primary goal for raiding was to give players far more flexibility in which classes they brought and try to de-emphasize “raid stacking” as much as possible. This meant we needed to share the unique, mandatory buffs among more classes and specs so that, for example, a raid wasn’t gimped if they happened to lack a +spellpower or +crit buff. However, we didn’t want say shamans to no longer be attractive for raiding so we brought up their damage a lot. It might still not be as high as rogues or warlocks, but it’s close, and if you have the right gear and really know how to play, you can even beat those classes on some bosses. No raid worth its salt would turn down an Enhancement, Elemental or Restoration shaman for fear of bringing down the raid.

In PvP, especially Arenas, shamans have never really been a powerhouse class and we view this as a problem. Shamans have always had a place in the 5 vs. 5 bracket, where their buffs are most meaningful spread out among multiple characters. Elemental has sometimes had a niche as the “kill the wounded guy” spec. Currently, however, much of the PvP community is very focused on the 2 vs. 2 bracket, where teams that pack a lot of abilities into a single class tend to dominate. This is something we need to improve for the shaman class.

Shamans have three really distinct roles. Enhancement is melee DPS. Elemental is ranged DPS. Restoration is healing. Once upon a time there was a potential tanking role for shamans as well, but we have pretty much phased that out.

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

Ghostcrawler: Totems, totems, totems!

Okay, that’s the obvious answer, but it goes deeper than that. The weapon enchants are an unusual part of the shaman class, as are mechanics like the shield spells (Earth Shield, Lightning Shield) and Frost Shock. Shaman buffs and utility spells are quite powerful, including the infamous Heroism / Bloodlust, but also their self-rez ability, Reincarnation. As envisioned from the start, shamans were also the “offensive” hybrid. Things have inevitably blurred a bit since then, but they are still a counterpart and complement to paladins – paladins have cleanse, shamans have purge; paladins will let an ally move freely to escape or catch an opponent, shamans will snare an enemy to let their ally escape or catch him or her; paladins will make sure their allies’ casts aren’t interrupted, shamans will interrupt enemy casts; and so forth.

Don’t underestimate the gear either. Shamans are only one of two mail-using classes in the game, and the only non-plate wearer that can use shields. Shaman shields provide a lot of defense and stats for the Restoration and Elemental shaman.

One of the other unusual things about the class is their degree of hybridization. An Elemental shaman can easily throw out heals if a group needs a little extra help. A druid, by contrast, would need to shift forms first, possibly giving up other abilities to do so.

Community Team: There is a unique quality to shaman due to their use of totems as a means of protection, healing, and even as an offensive tool. At the same time, there is a strategic element to being able to place the right totems to do the best job and even more important to place them in the optimum possible spot. For some players, totems’ lack of mobility and range limitations seem to be more of a liability than an element of strategy, and some shamans in PvP encounters often choose not to place any totems at all.

Are there plans to look at totems in general, the way they are managed, their uses, and their benefits in the future?

Ghostcrawler: Absolutely. One of the features we have been working on is a way for shamans to drop all four totems at once (on one global cooldown). This will hopefully make the totems more attractive while soloing and will let the shaman in a group environment quickly get his or her totems down again if the group has to move or they get destroyed. We’d like to get this feature in soon, but we want to make sure the user-interface works well and feels integrated to the rest of the game, so we can’t yet announce a date. And of course, this is still in the planning stage, and so subject to change.

In PvP, we want to make sure we end the use of “totem stomping macros” where a pet class essentially programs their pet to automatically kill any totem they see. It’s perfectly acceptable for pets to kill totems, but the player should at least have to make a decision and spend some of their attention to do so. We want to look at the range of the buff totems and make sure you don’t regularly get out of range on say large boss fights.

Finally, as a small quality-of-life improvement, we are going to let low-level shamans trade in the four elemental totems that clutter their bags for a single totem they can equip in their totem slot. Since the four “clutter” totems can’t be destroyed or sold, currently there is no way to get rid of them. This change will essentially give shamans their four bag slots back.

And, what are the possible impacts of considering changes to a system like this?

Ghostcrawler: Sometimes you will see the community suggest ideas that basically write totems out of the game. That’s not what we want. A shaman player should care about totems and use them often.

Obviously being able to drop four totems on one global cooldown is a pretty decent buff to the class as a whole, which will require some balance attention.

We have talked a few times about improving the health of individual totems, but if we did, we don’t want to do it by much. One of our Restoration shamans said he still wanted to be able to whack down enemy totems with his healing mace at the end of the day. The balance for totems being able to cause damage or other effects while the shaman also does is the fact that they can’t move and are relatively fragile.

One longer-term change we are considering is removing the buff totems (replacing them with normal spells) and making all of the totems do something more active, like the current damage or healing totems. We’ve even discussed letting shamans carry a totem on their back (the tauren do it already) but that may be too far out there.

Community Team: To continue down the path of totem questions, there are many different types of totems available, and at times the amount seems to be overwhelming. In some cases, there seem to be some totems that don’t have a clear, obvious use to players, such as the Sentry Totem.

Is there any plan to look at the way totems are being used and either update little-used totems or consolidate totems that don’t seem to be of a particularly great strategic value individually?

Ghostcrawler:There are still some totems that just aren’t cutting it anymore, and we want to continue to consolidate those so that shamans don’t have any totems that they just never, ever use. Sentry Totem is a possible candidate for the chopping block. It’s hard to really carve off unique niches for Magma Totem and Fire Nova Totem, so those may get merged. Stoneskin is not a terribly exciting totem, so maybe there is a way to just tack that benefit onto another Earth totem. Finally, we are exploring the possibility of the elementals coming out of any Fire or Earth totem respectively rather than to have to drop a new totem just for their temporary benefit.

We combined or cut some totems for Lich King, and you should expect another round of that at some point in the future. As always, we’re unsure of how many of these changes we will get in for the 3.2 patch. We’re trying to keep the list of class changes down compared to 3.1, where some players felt whiplash from so many frequent and sometimes substantial changes to their class.

In addition, many valued enhancement totem relics are only available via random drops, which has been voiced as something that we’ve wanted to avoid in the past. Are there any plans to change this?

Ghostcrawler:The “relics” (the items that fill the ranged weapon slot) are always tricky to hand out, since they can only be used by one class, and are often attractive to only one spec. We have typically put them on badge vendors, and that might be the way to go with them in the future. On the other hand, several “best in slot” items for every character are subject to the inherent randomness of boss loot drops. Typically these upgrades are attractive but not so mandatory that you can’t do your job without them.

Community Team: Shamans currently have the lowest base health of any class, and this often leads to concern over their survivability.

Is there any reason that they start this way or is there any future change in store to address this disparity between their base health and that of other classes?

Ghostcrawler: This is one of those weird legacies that has been in the game forever. Nobody currently working on classes can remember why that decision was initially made, so we plan to revert it for 3.2.

Community Team: Looking into the Player vs. Environment (PvE) aspect of the game, there are various concerns that are brought up. One recurring concern among all shamans, whether they are Elemental, Enhancement, or Restoration, is in regard to itemization. For some, they are looking for better two-handed weapons. For others, they are looking for that better one-handed axe. Others wonder at the choices that are made in relation to the stats or gem bonuses that are placed on items. An example brought up regularly is concerning Armor Penetration being prevalent in Ulduar despite it not being the most desirable stat for shamans who choose to play as Enhancement. In addition, many shamans express concerns that the options for upgrades are more limited for them than other classes.

When itemizing for the shaman class, what are the aspects that are looked at, and are there plans to make additional improvements to the way itemization is done for the class or for specific talent specs?
Ghostcrawler: One of the problems we have with dropping one-handed weapons is the overlap. If we drop axes, rogues can’t use them. If we drop swords, shamans can’t use them. If we drop fists, death knights can’t use them. We are looking at changing one of these restrictions in 3.2, though it likely won’t be for shamans to use swords.

It is our basic assumption that Enhancement shamans dual-wield and Restoration and Elemental shamans go for a one-handed weapon and shield. While we don’t prohibit players from playing with other types of gear, they may not find their damage or healing output to be as high. At this point in time, we aren’t trying to support a two-handed DPS build. That would require a pretty extensive reworking of the tree, and we also want to make sure some class besides rogues are using one-handed weapons.

We got a lot of questions on specific itemization, especially in the new Ulduar tier. The designers do feel like we’ve let the value of various stats get too far apart for the classes as a whole. When some characters want armor penetration and some don’t yet they are supposed to share basically the same gear, it makes the randomness of loot drops even more frustrating. We just need to get Enhancement to where they feel like armor penetration is as valuable as other melee stats.

We’re also in the process of taking a hard look at all the stats in the game. Something that gets brought up in our meetings a lot is that haste and crit are relatively straight forward stats and most players have a reasonable intuition about what boosting those stats will do. When you start to throw something like armor penetration into the mix, it’s hard to estimate exactly what that will do for your character. We’re not sure armor penetration is a rousing success as an interesting stat (though it can be quite good for some characters).

What is the expectation for how shamans choose the gear they use?

Ghostcrawler: Players sometimes have the expectation that everything that drops that they can use should be an upgrade for them. This isn’t strictly speaking the developer view though. We want gear to be a little bit of a puzzle where you have to analyze if that piece is really an upgrade or not and how it fits with your other stats. Remember also that much of the normal versions of Ulduar is itemized at the same level as Kel’Thuzad and Malygos.

There are some pieces that are just inferior to what they should be and we are getting those updated over time. As I mentioned above, we also want to improve the situations where some stats are so superior for your spec compared to other stats that pieces with the latter on them are just perceived as junk.

While we have a lot of bosses in Ulduar, those bosses also drop an awful lot of loot. Having loot drop that is attractive to more than one spec is paramount in making the bosses feel rewarding enough. Otherwise boss loot tables are just too large and your chance of getting what you want is low. (The huge loot table works for Emalon who is easy to reach, but not Algalon.) We have to avoid the situation where say the Elemental shaman only wants one set of shoulders in the whole instance and those shoulders are unattractive to everyone else in the raid. This is why we often say that we need to fix these problems on the class side, not the item side.

This is a situation where the distinction among the shaman specs can hurt them a little. Restoration and Elemental shamans both basically want caster gear, but the healer wants regen and the nuker has no use for it. This means if there is mana regen on mail, it is pretty much only useful for a Restoration shaman. (Healing plate presents the same problem for paladins.) We don’t have a great solution for this problem yet other than just dropping three kinds of mail.

Community Team: Continuing to discuss the PvE element of the game for shamans, the introduction of Ulduar changed the strategies players had employed in the past to account for these larger-than-life encounters. Restoration shamans in particular have brought up a concern for their role as raid healer being diminished in light of their inability to effectively raid heal like they once did with the use of Chain Heal specifically. Many have taken to the role of main target heals and are concerned about their continued effectiveness in a raid environment.

Where do we feel the role of the shaman is in raids now and where do we see that going in the future?

Ghostcrawler: We want all three shaman specs to feel like they can contribute to raids, and to be honest, we think they’re in a pretty good spot certainly relative to some classes that have specs that are perceived as much more viable than other specs. Enhancement can do great melee damage. After the recent Lightning Overload change, we think Elemental can do competitive ranged damage. I know there is some concern about Restoration shamans losing their healing niche of area damage. We think that perception might exist in Ulduar just because recent talents, glyphs, and set bonuses have all propped up things like Lesser Healing Wave over Chain Heal. Chain Heal is still quite useful in some situations and with different gear in the next couple of tiers, we expect to see more shamans going back to it. We don’t want to see them return to just using Chain Heal as was the case in much of Burning Crusade. We do think Restoration shamans are at the risk of running out of mana perhaps more than any other healer right now, and in fact the seemingly unlimited mana in some healers is what leads to Chain Heal getting stomped on by other big heals. This is a problem we plan on addressing.

Is the change in how shamans are used situational only as we move forward into the next encounters, or is this a shift in philosophy as to the role of the shaman in raids?

Ghostcrawler: It isn’t a philosophy shift. We want Restoration shamans to be a strong group healer with the option of focusing on a single target with Lesser Healing Wave as needed. Restoration shamans have two distinct healing styles now that they can shift between, and we want to preserve that. We don’t want to return to the Sunwell era, where 95% of healing came from Chain Heal. It’s just a boring play style. (And yes, paladins, we hear you.) We suspect that with a new totem or set bonus that propped up Chain Heal a little more, you’d see it getting a lot more use. We’re cool with that. It’s fun when you upgrade your gear from tier to tier and it actually pushes you into a slightly different play style.

Elemental shamans have had a couple of opportunities to shine in Ulduar — blowing up constructs on Ignis is one example. We try to make sure the encounters are diverse enough that the same classes aren’t always in the spotlight on every encounter, but we also don’t want to constrain our encounter designers’ creativity too much. Elemental may suffer from so many fights in Ulduar requiring movement. Also, while we have given Elemental strong AoE in the form of the Magma Totem, some players feel like this comes at too high a cost to their buffs and mobility, so this is something we’ll look at.

We’re pretty happy with Enhancement shamans in raids, though we want to continue to analyze whether their DPS is where it should be and if their buffs are comparable to other classes that can bring the same benefit.

We do hope we’ve finally settled the issue of which weapon enchantments shamans should use with the now normalized Flametongue.

Community Team: Let’s shift gears a little and go into the realm of Player vs. Player. As we spoke of previously, survivability and mobility are a couple of shaman concerns that recur more strongly when in reference to PvP interactions. More specifically, shaman performance and visibility within the top-rated teams in the Arena is a much-discussed topic. Players have noticed difficulties both in being able to avoid stuns and roots as well being able to move effectively in the playing field without losing the benefit of their totems.

Are there any other considerations in store for improving overall performance for shaman in PvP encounters (whether in Arena or in Battlegrounds)?

Ghostcrawler: Mobility is a big problem. One of the designers described casting shamans the other day as “turrets,” which is very apt. You sit and spin and shoot (or heal). We need to get shamans some more mobility, and we have some ideas for how to do that without just giving everyone Blink. We want to see more shaman gladiators soon!

For Restoration shamans, we think their survivability is low, especially while stunned. Teams have learned to kill the shamans first, because if they don’t, the shaman healing output is good, especially in larger teams. In fact, shamans generally are more powerful on the larger teams because of the nature of their powerful buffs affecting more people. In general, we’d like to get the community back to being more focused on the larger Arena brackets, but we realize we have some work to do there first. Earth Shield is too easy to dispel. An idea we’d like to explore is just letting a single charge get dispelled at a time.

Elemental shamans used to have a niche of being able to blow up a wounded target on demand, but we have been trying to back off some of these really high burst moments. We do need to improve their mobility though, which includes not just the standard melee escapes, but also a way to not lose so much DPS when moving. Elemental is a caster and all casters are getting beat up a little too much by melee at the moment.

Players sometimes accuse Enhancement of being too much of a one-trick pony. It’s understandable that saying “I bring damage!” when so many classes have multiple forms of crowd-control and crowd-control breaks may not cut it these days. Players often request more anti-CC in the form of the Feral Spirits, but we don’t want to turn that ability into something that is saved only to be used as a PvP trinket. Again, mobility (both offensive and defensive) will help Enhancement. A lot of the spec’s damage come from procs and sustained effects, while PvP is more about front-loading damage at the right moment. We definitely can make some changes to give Enhancement more of that, but it requires a lot of changes to the talent tree and playstyle and not the kind of thing you can just hotfix in. On the other hand, Enhancement can offensively dispel, interrupt, and use Tremor and Cleansing Totems while still being a melee DPS. They do have a lot of utility — they just need a little help in order to bring it about. They no longer have mana problems in the longer matches.

One of the challenges of designing the shaman class is that we think it is one of the most challenging classes to play in PvP. (Players sometimes call this having a “high skill cap.”) The shaman has to think about defense and offense at the same time, while many classes can worry about one or the other. For example, a Holy paladin can concentrate on keeping his or her group alive while the Restoration shaman has to do that while also keeping totems up, offensively purging buffs from the enemy team, using Wind Shock to interrupt spell casts, etc. The challenge is making it not too difficult for the average player but also not too powerful for the guy who can master all of the shaman’s tools. (Warlocks and hunters have very similar challenges, by the way.)

What considerations are being made for combating the use of totem-killing macros in PvP, and is this seen as a problem currently?

Ghostcrawler: It is a problem. Totems are fragile by design, since they essentially can do their jobs while the shaman does other things. We’re fine with this except in the case of pets being able to target and kill totems via macro without any input from the player. We want the player to at least have to target the totem first before commanding the pet to attack. We have a technical change in 3.2 which will prevent macros from doing this while still giving macros the functionality that players currently enjoy elsewhere. Players have made many suggestions for how to accomplish this technically (a common one is to rename the totems), but the solution is a little more complicated than that. Whacking a totem with your weapon or wand is fine because you are making a choice and spending valuable combat time (similar to dispelling a buff or debuff). Using macros requires no player interaction, and is not working as intended. One totem that is just too easily destroyed is Mana Tide, for which we could see bumping up the survivability. Again, remember that while totems are fragile, they aren’t particularly expensive (especially if we get the change in to drop more than one at a time) and the shaman can do other things while the totems are doing theirs. We’re sympathetic to warlocks and hunters being the two classes most affected by the removal of totem stomping, and we do think their respective representation is low, but we don’t think the way to buff them in Arenas is by letting them be ultimate totem stompers. On the other hand, a reason to just not hotfix in more health to totems is that that change would primarily nerf warlocks and hunters, who need nerfing the least in Arena at the moment.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/shaman.html

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By Lyssa,

MMO-Champion has the instructions up.

Battle-Bots are out in the US … and in EU
I talked about the Mountain Dew Battle-Bots plenty of time in the past weeks and they are now available in game! Even if it is clearly an US only event it seems that the bot is currently available in Europe …. All you need to do is :

• 1. Link your WoW account to a Battle.Net account on the US Battle.net or EU Battle.net website.
• 2. Register on Moutain Dew Gamefuel website and login.
• 3. Click the picture at the bottom right to redeem your pet, login on Battle.net.
• 4. Click the “Redeem Item” button at the bottom of the page, even if it says US only it definitely works for EU players too.
• 5. Connect to the game and just get your bot in the mail!

It was pretty straightforward. Next time I login I’ll have my little robot!