Naxxramas Beta Testing, Lvl 80 Premades, Talent changes

Update 20:55 CET: Murmur will be the new Premade realm. Premades will be removed from "Northrend" and "Lich King". (src)
19:15 CET - Beta Realms are now down for a scheduled maintenance and a possible new build.

WotLK Beta - Level 80 Premades are now available

It's not really surprising, knowing that Naxxramas will be available very soon (today?). We now have access to level 80 premade characters to test the upcoming raid content on beta realms.

Wrath Talent Calculator Update - Upcoming Talent Changes

Blizzard updated the Wrath talent calculator for the following classes: Death Knight, Druid, Paladin and Warlock, and as usual they posted the list of changes:
 

Quote from: Blizzard (Source)

Druid (New Talent Calc 8???)

• Nature's Focus - Restoration - Updated description
• Improved Tree of Life - Updated stats/description
• Tree of Life - Updated description
• Furor - Restoration - Minor text fix

Warlock (New Talent Calc 8???)

• Demonic Empowerment - Demonology - Updated icon
• Frailty - Affliction - Updated stats/description
• Shadow Embrace - Affliction - Updated stats/description
• Everlasting Affliction - Affliction - New Icon
• Haunt - Affliction - New Icon
• Improved Demonic Tactics - Demonology - New Icon
• Demonic Pact - Destruction - Updated description
• Demonic Empathy - Demonology - Updated description/stats

Paladin (New Talent Calc 8???)

• Improved Blessing of Might - Retribution - updated stats
• Vengeance - Retribution - updated stats
• Judgements of the Wise- Retribution - Changed stats/description
• The Art of War - Retribution - Removed talent requirement
• Divine Storm - Retribution - Fixed typo
• Toughness - Protection - Updated stats/description
• Shield Specialization - Protection - Updated stats/description
• Avenger's Shield - Protection - added rank 4
• Blessing of Sanctuary - Protection - Updated stats/description.

Death Knight (New Talent Calc 8???)

• Unholy Command - Unholy - Updated description
• Blood-Caked Blade - Unholy - Updated stats/description
• Runic Power Mastery - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Improved Icy Touch - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Chill of the Grave - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Rime - Frost - Talent changed from Frost Rune Mastery
• Frost Strike - Frost - Runic Power updated
• Howling Blast - Frost - changed stats/description
• Frost Aura - Frost - changed stats/description
• Black Ice - Frost - Updated stats
• Lichborne - Frost - Updated cooldown and duration
• Icy Talons - Frost - Updaetd stats/description
• Frigid Dreadplate - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Improved Icy Talons - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Merciless Combat - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Endless Winter - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Guile of Gorefiend - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Hungering Cold - Frost - Updated stats/description
• Blood of the North - Frost - Changed to 3 ranks,
• Dark Conviction - Blood - Updated stats/description
• Might of Morgraine - Blood - Updated stats/description
• Outbreak - Unholy - Updated stats/description
• Scourge Strike - Unholy - Updated stats/description
• Impurity - Unholy - Updated stats

Naxxramas - Beta Testing & Time length concerns

Quote from: Daelo (Source)

The trash has indeed been adjusted. Highlights include:

• Longer trash sections between bosses (to Patchwerk, to Razuvious, to Faerlina) have been toned down.
• Heigan gauntlet is no longer a gauntlet, now there's a very small one AFTER Heigan.
• A few new creatures have been added in a couple places.
• Newer models for many of the creatures.
• Some of the trash encounters have different numbers of creatures for 10 and 25 player modes.

One other thing...

Naxxramas should be available for beta testing soon in both 10 and 25 player flavors, including loot!

Macros & Key Bindings Storage Changes

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

Hello everyone,

We have recently implemented a new beta feature for testing purposes allowing for macros and key bindings to be stored server-side. Those participating in beta will notice that your macros should be saved and your key binding settings remain the same whether you're playing from the same machine every day, switching computers frequently, or logging in for the first time after a fresh installation of the game.

We do not currently have an estimate for when this change will go live for all World of Warcraft players. For this reason we would like to get as much feedback from our testers regarding this feature as possible so we can ensure that macros and key binding settings are being stored properly on our end.

WotLK Beta - Blue Posts

Druid
Q/A Session
What I wanna know is why druid tanks cant parry.
Flavor. Believe me, if we ever hit a brick wall where we just can't make druids work without parry, then guess what will happen.

We scaled EXTREMELY well with the few stats we could stack because we just hit Armor Cap and worked around it with higher avoidance and stamina. Then comes Sunwell and they had to nerf EVERYONE'S avoidance by 25% to get us all back on line lest we do the same to bosses like Brutallus.
Agreed. As far as scaling is concerned, we've made great efforts to scale abilities so that upgrading your gear doesn't totally change their effectiveness. Here's the problem with Feral druids: because they have so few stats (in the sense that e.g. parry and spellpower aren't important to Feral), it's easy to focus on those stats. If those stats scale really well, then we run into problems where druids can either hit the caps or get such high numbers that the content starts to break. Once druids hit the armor cap in BC, they could start improving dps stats which would eventually have overshadowed other tanks in both mitigation and threat. When they stacked agility, agility and more agility, it just improved their tanking and damage really quickly.

Warlocks were in a pretty similar situation with spell damage. They wanted almost nothing else and kept stacking the same thing and pretty soon they outstripped similar classes.

From a design point of view, the challenge isn't making druids amazing tanks and dps. The challenge is preventing them from getting too good too easily. (Note, mean old Ghostcrawler is not saying we're trying to keep Ferals really weak. Just remember that while your goal as players is to get as good as possible, ours as designers is to keep you in proportion to other classes.)

Is Mother Bear as effective at level 80 as it is at level 70? Yes. Does it scale with AP or armor? No. Does getting AP and armor still make you a better tank? Yes. Will you spec out of Mother Bear when you reach a certain gear plateau? Unlikely. Until recently, Sunder Armor did not scale. It was just crappier the better your gear became and was less effective at generating threat as everyone else's threat increased.

As to cats, we don't know yet if their dps is too low or not. We should have a better idea soon. (src)

Hunter
Master's Call to be fixed in an upcoming build
We did a major bug fixing pass recently, a lot of the bugged talents and abilities should be fixed in an upcoming build (including Master's Call). (src)

Future Aspect of the Viper Changes
We're going to be changing it so that procs/hits restore a % of your base mana each time you hit, rather than base it off your actual DPS/damage. While the return of mana based on your actual damage numbers do make the ability a lot of fun (at least I thought so!), it has bad scaling issues. (src)

Lock and load procs
It should proc from Frost and Snake traps, I'll have QA look into it. (src)

Silencing Shot & Interrupt
Yes, it should interrupt now. If you find it not working please report so in the bug forum. (src)

Priest
Broken talents & Naxxramas
I feel ya on the broken talents, these are all working in my local build which should be public very soon. Don't worry too much on talents being broken as why you feel the class is not "polished," no talent should be broken or not working when we're finished.

By the way, I did Naxx 10-man the other day as Discipline and our tank didn't notice any reduced threat with Divine Aegis (with around ~30 spell crit) or Power Word: Shield. It probably did lower his threat, but it was pretty minimal and it definitely wasn't an issue for us. Against a hard hitting boss/mob you hardly even get to see the visual on the tank. One lame side effect is that because a good portion of Disc Priests "healing" is through absorption mechanics, you don't really see that in a healing meter, though that's kind of a side issue. Our tank was excited by how much he was absorbing with Divine Aegis/Power Word: Shield though. (src)

Global Cooldown removed from Guardian Spirit
Oh, and we did remove the global cooldown from Guardian Spirit. (src)

Divine Hymn
Divine Hymn is intended to be PvP utility and an emergency tool in PvE. Accidentally pull 3+ mobs? Hit Divine Hymn, they all fall asleep, and you have some time to get your bearings and set things up. I don't think it will become that useful until you start doing more challenging dungeons/heroics, though. Any and all mobs can be afflicted by Divine Hymn's effect unless they were specifically intended not to by the encounter/raid and dungeon designers. (src)

Talents/Spells Q&A (src)
Blessed Recovery: Broken; refreshes on noncritical hits (via procs from resilience), and the healing is nominal even without this problem. Changing this ability to NOT proc off noncritical hits, and healing for an additional 10 - 15% of the value of a crit would make it more valuable for 3 talent points. Currently its use is just for dispel fodder -- clearly not the intention of the talent.
Agreed this talent could be better.

Shadow Resilience: Still not much benefit for 2 talent points deep in the Shadow tree. If the damage reduction added to Shadowform that would be a different story, but multiplied with other damage-reduction mechanics it just doesn't provide much benefit. A secondary effect (*cough*Interrupt duration reduction*cough*) would make this talent more attractive.
Don't think this is a big issue.

Holy Nova: Now practically useless with the downranking change; not enough healing, not enough damage, party-limited. Needs focus or a unique mechanic. This ability will virtually disappear from priest specs in Wrath if it isn't addressed.
Agreed, could improve this spell somewhat. Not an easy one.

Improved Mana Burn: 3 second Mana Burn is pretty much useless in both PvP and PvE these days. This talent is required to make Mana Burn PvP viable, so it doesn't really improve Mana Burn at all. The devs have commented on other classes having talents that are "too required," well, this talent is the definition of "too required" for the trainable spell named Mana Burn.
Fine with this talent.

Surge of Light: It's a nice soloing talent, but given that Discipline is now the tree that scales with crit, its placement is odd, and it does nothing to buff your healing ability. Adding Flash Heal to the instant cast proc would make this talent quite worth it, even in a Holy build which isn't focused on crit.
We've talked about that specific idea before, but not sure the tree needs instant cast flash heals right now.

Blessed Resilience: It's not clear that this talent provides enough PvP survivability for a deep Holy build, at this point. But I suppose that remains to be seen.
It's always been better than Focused Will IMO, it's just that the tree is less popular because of the lack of Pain Suppression. Guardian Spirit can act as a Pain Suppression replacement now, and the tree can hold it's own in PvP. I think you'll be seeing a diverse mix of Holy vs. Disc Priests in PvP from now on (hopefully).

Silence: Somewhat outdated, the cooldown and range are prohibitive. A very modest decrease in cooldown (~5 seconds) and/or a standard range (30 yards) would be a welcome update.
Not a big issue. We'll think about it, maybe a Glyph.


Shaman
New ranks of totems/enchants are incoming
Just built all the new ranks of totems/enchants etc., should be up in an upcoming build. (src)

Warlock
New Affliction talent inc
There will be a new talent in Affliction in an upcoming build.
Keywords: "DoT" and "Crit" (Well, sorta). (src)

Warrior
Tanking concerns Q/A
Here's my #1 concern as a tanking warrior... Our threat scales very, very, VERY badly. If we outgear an instance, we're next to useless.
More dps will definitely help -- it generates a lot of rage. But we're still looking at granting more rage based on dodge and parry too. As far as your threat scaling badly in the endgame content, more dps and AP scaling on things like Sunder and Conc Blow will help with that too.

Why do you feel this Tier 9 talent is any better or different than what we have been doing with intercept and intervene? Managing the rage is easy for both of those so please don't go down that route.
It's up more often, provides a stun and generates more rage. Warbringer will generate rage. Trust me. :)

Can you confirm that we'll be able to do this without having to switch gear?
Yes. That is the goal. Prot pallies too. You won't be doing as much damage as an Arms warrior, but you shouldn't be standing around wishing you had enough rage to have fun. You will likely also keep your shield on when soloing, though some warrirors do this on Live. To be honest, I am a little nervous that when we next do our tests, Prot's dps is going to be higher than Arms. That's probably overkill, and you might laugh at the thought, but that's the degree of changes we're talking about. (And we would certainly readjust if that ends up being the case.)

Paladins cant heal without changing gear.
They can't keep a MT up like a Holy paladin can. But the design is to let them do something when they aren't tanking. The situation should be much better in Lich King (while still making sure Holy healing >> Prot healing).

That's the point, if I'm reading Ghost correctly she's implying that all 4 tanks should have backup options when they don't have to actively tank, so that they aren't useless when their mob dies. Ferals and DKs are already able to switch to effective DPS pretty easily, and Ghost seems to be saying that prot warriors (and I assume prot paladins) should be able to as well. I'm just trying to make sure that this means mid-fight, otherwise the DKs and Ferals have a big advantage in multi-mob bossfights.
I'm not saying you can bring 6 tanks to Naxx and kill Saphiron. But if you have 2 tanks and go to a single tank fight, the other tank should be able to do something other than skill up their trade skills. (src)

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Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

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