Daily Blue - Class changes, Account Achievements, Blue posts

Your daily compilation of noteworthy blue posts.

Death Knight - Tanking talent changes (src)
After further discussion, and lots of feedback from various forums including this one, we're going to make the following changes:

Vampiric Blood
One Rank
1 Blood, Instant (no GCD), 2 min cooldown
Increases the amount of health generated through spells and effects (i.e. your own or heals from other players) by 50% for 20 sec.

Unbreakable Armor
One Rank
1 Frost, Instant (no GCD), 2 min cooldown
Increases your armor by 25% and your total Strength by 5% for 20 sec.

With these changes, the mechanic ends up being pretty similar, where you have to sacrifice dps or other abilities for a mostly defensive one. However you don't feel like you're wasting Blade Barrier and overall it's easier to understand how you'd use these abilities. The cooldown still needs to be reasonably long in order to save these for the right moment rather than spamming them constantly (we want them to work like new Shield Block, not old Shield Block). You might still sometimes end up having to sit on a Rune for a bit, but probably no longer than a few seconds, and at least you won't have to worry about the ability going off when you don't want it to.

Anti-Magic Shell at the very least can no longer be dispelled, and we're looking at it preventing dots and possibly all magical debuffs while it's up.

We'll continue to massage the numbers to try and achieve rough parity among Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield (Bone Armor) so that nobody feels compelled to go down one tree just because its talent is so much better than the others. Though obviously the 3 talents will still fulfill slightly different niches. We'll continue to adjust mitigation and threat numbers in general to achieve rough parity among DKs, warriors, paladins and druids, while still trying to give each a certain type of battle they excel at.

Death Knight - Blood Cake Blade, Crypt Fever and Bone Armor changes (src)
We took Blood-Caked Blade and Crypt Fever down to 3 ranks each. We need to see if deep Unholy has enough talents now.
Bone Armor (we call it Bone Shield now) is only 1 Unholy. I'm not sure where the Frost cost came from. I may have erroneously stated as such when typing fast, or the talent trees show it wrong. It's 1 Unholy though.

Death Knight - Tanking or Tanking/Dps talent to be added in the Unholy tree (src)
We did prune down some of the talents in deep Unholy and we're hoping to be able to fit another tanking or tanking / dps talent down there to compete with Will of the Necropolis and Acclimation for the other trees.

Death Knight - New Death Strike description clarified (src)
A deadly attack that deals 60% weapon damage plus X (where X varies per rank) and heals the death knight for 100% of the damage done for each of her diseases on the target.

Death Knight - Chilblains (src)
We're still working on the Chilblains duration and placement in the tree.

Druid - Feral Swiftness to be allowed indoors (src)
Seems reasonable to me. Done =]

Druid - Feral Concerns in WotLK (src)
The changes made to things like armor were done mostly to solve itemization problems. We didn't make them to nerf Ferals (or anyone). We did them because we started to consider bosses who needed to drop 30 different pieces of armor (or tokens to trade for them or whatever) because classes and even specs were heading off into distinct niches. You'll get something to make up for it. No, you aren't there yet.

We're not entirely happy with the way the Feral ended up in BC. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid. The problem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and amazing melee, then the rogues were screwed, because they couldn't go respec to tank or heal.

But now we have a chance to add some new talents, and we'd like for some of them to be the kind that let a druid declare that she is more of a cat or more of a bear. It doesn't have to be shoehorning two whole talent trees into one, but even offering a few choices would go a long way.

I didn't mean to sound condescending. The pot example was to offer that we haven't forgotten about bears. My point was NOT: hey, you lost armor but gee you got health stones, so why all the QQing? It was cool to see those big armor numbers on bears, and we have some plans for how to replace them (and not just with pots).

The DK gets a lot of attention because it has a lot of catching up to do. There were no DKs in UBRS or MC or TK or even Arathi Basin. Nobody knows how their abilities and power system are going to work so we feel like we have to cover a lot of the ground that was explored literally years ago for some of these other classes.

We will be really disappointed if there aren't bears main tanking Naxx and later raids, and cats that if not consistently as high as rouges, are at least a lot closer than they are now.

Hunter - Tranq Shot to dispel enrage mechanics and magic effects (src)
Tranq Shot will soon be able to dispel enrage mechanics (i.e. Warrior Enrage, Rogue's Hunger For Blood, etc.). It should also be able to dispel Druids' "Owlkin Frenzy" effect. Also going to lower the cooldown.
In addition, Tranq Shot will also be able to dispel magic effects, and we're removing that from Arcane Shot.

Hunter - Future Chimera Shot improvements and Serpent Sting buff (src)
We'll be doing some improvements to Chimera Shot. We'll experiement with it refreshing the duration of the sting instead of consuming, and adding some base damage to the shot as well. It should act as an Arcane Shot replacement, doing significantly more damage (especially if serpent sting is on the target).
Regarding Serpent Sting, we'll bump the damage bonus you get from this effect up. We also want to make Serpent Sting more usable for Hunters.

Hunter - Mana issues (src)
The mana cost of new ranks is not just an issue for Hunters. We're looking at lowering the mana cost of all new ranks among all classes. We also intend to do some improvements to Aspect of the Viper. Not to mention mana return mechanics in each of the tree's (Invigoration, Rapid Recuperation, Hunting Party etc.)

Hunter - Explosive Shot (src)
Explosive Shot is intended to be three shots in one cast. Imagine Arcane Missiles, but not having to channel it. The spell isn't quite there yet, we're still not sure if it needs the AOE or not. It's not intended to really be AOE utility.

Hunter - Low level pets (src)
We haven't given up hope of fixing up your existing low-level pets.

Shaman - Stoneclaw Totem to protect your other totems (src)
In a future build your Stoneclaw Totem will "protect" your other totems, virtually increasing their HP by a value. We haven't decided how much it will give your totems, but it should be enough to protect them from being one shotted. Totems are intended to be as fragile as they are, it's what balances out their power. If we gave Totems base increased survivability, we would have to give them increased cooldowns, mana costs etc.

Warlock - Pets to get the master's +hit% (src)
Do you know if they have said if the imp getting our +hit rating? Because that seems like it is going to be a problem on boss fights.
We plan to give all pets the master's +hit%.

Warlock - Shadow Bite and Doomguard (src)
We haven't yet tested Shadow Bite extensively to see if it's working as we intend, we'll be doing that soon. Not yet finished on Doomguard, but he's intended as niche pet for group situations.

Warlock - Molten Core (src)
Molten Core was more designed for Demonology, as that spec you have the freedom to switch between Shadow and Fire, or for more hybrid builds.

Warlock - Balancing the trees (src)
We have yet to do number testing, we'll balance the tree's so that their damage is closer together. That said, Destruction has less group utility than Affliction or Demonology has, which can warrant a slight DPS advantage. Even though you'll be casting DoTs as affliction, you'll still be casting Shadow Bolt's in your rotation. Thus haste/crit/death's embrace all benefit you.

Warrior - Blood Frenzy and Raid Synergy (src)
This issue (who gets into the raids?) is something we are spending a lot of time on right now. Blood Frenzy is the kind of talent that could definitely present a problem if it means Arms warriors are really valuable for their debuff potential and Fury warriors have to compete for raid slots mostly on the merit of their dps. At least Fury still has PvP... oh, wait....

Warrior - Changes are being worked on (src)
We're working on it. Don't worry.

Why some class changes are behind (src)
Seriously though, it's easier for to focus on only a couple of classes at a time. We find that way we are more in sync on the direction of the class and its problems. We don't work in an environment where each person goes to their desk, throws in the talents for one class, and then we pour them all into the game. A lot of the time it's 10% actual talent implementation and 90% brainstorming and discussion.

Mages recently got a fair amount of attention and death knights always do, just because they have the most catching up to do to the years of analysis and design that's been done on the other classes.

But even then, you're more likely to see ability changes than number adjusting. We need to feel like the abilities have a chance of working out before we go into the mode of comparing everyone's dps and threat and survival in a variety of situations. The encounter design and item design need to be at that level too. We're still debating things like encounters and raid stacking will work. Think about all the changes: many stats are universal now (meaning melee hit and spell hit are the same as far as items are concerned), most buffs affect the entire raid, we're trying to offer fewer very specialized items as random drops, etc. etc. It ends up being a lot of changes all with ramifications for every class.

Breath (drowning) timer changed (src)
We are experimenting with increased breath duration underwater. Currently, in the beta, most players can stay under for three times as long. Forsaken can stay under 10 times as long as an old, normal character (used to be 4).

Class changes until WotLK release (src)
We'll be doing class changes until a week before release most likely.

Class design and raid spots (src)
Class design isn't done. We are shooting for more parity. Nobody should get a raid spot because their one talent brings a huge dps (or mana or healing or health) benefit to the raid that no other spec can provide.

Guild Bank Tax (src)
This is an interesting idea. We won't be able to get to this for the WotLK launch, but we are compliling a list of future guild improvements that we'd like to make in WoW.

"Quest Givers" tracker (regardless of level) to be added in the next build (src)
Yes. This is in the next build (albeit not very polished yet).

Accounts Achievements (src)
Account achievements are in the works. They won't be in for the launch of Lich King but they are on the horizon.

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