Rafting, Paid Character Customization, Death Knight & Warrior Changes

Rafting in WoW

Grizzly Hills is the third zone you reach when levelling on Northrend. That zone is rather cool for a few reasons, it has 10 daily quests, all but one are located in the 3 PvP areas along the main river, and one of these areas called the Blue Sky Logging Camp has a special feature, a unique "flightpath" that can be summed up with one word: Rafting!

Paid Character Customization

It's no secret than World of Warcraft game files often reveal a lot about the current/future patch, and the next features that Blizzard plan to add to his game. By digging into the game files from the current WotLK build, you can find 2 hints pointing to a not yet released feature called "Paid Character Customization", and apparently you would have to pay real money (not the in-game currency) to use that feature since the button is attached to the character selection menu.

From what we know, Barbershops allow us to change the following attributes: Hair styles, Hair colors, Facial hair styles, Piercings, Facial features (confirmed for Undead, at least), Night Elf tattoos, Draenei and Tauren horn styles, Draenei tendril styles. So we are left with a few assumptions to guess what this new feature can let us do on our character: Sex change and/or optionnal character customization interface giving us access to a large panel of extra details for our character(s).  What do you think?

Upcoming Warrior DPS changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

As promised, here are a few dps changes. There will probably be a few more over the next few days.

Fury
- Unending Fury changed to increase damage of Slam, Whirlwind and Bloodthirst by 2/4/6/8/10% (it no longer offers a rage discount).

Arms
- Sudden Death now grants 10 rage, so that following the Execute you have 10 rage left over. In the course of testing this, we also decided Execute by itself wasn't doing enough damage, so it got a buff too (could be around +15%), which will also help the talent.
- Bladestorm breaks roots and snares when initially used. It doesn't break other forms of CC, largely because we suspect that if it did, that functionality in PvP would overshadow the actual cool whirlwindy part.
- Strength of Arms now grants 2%/2%/2 Str/Sta/Expertise per point. (Still 2 points total.)

Upcoming Death Knight Tanking changes

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We have been doing some more tests on DK tanking, this time especially on raid bosses. We think the DK design has some limitations, which weren't showing up as much on tanking 5-player dungeons.

Specifically, as many people suspected, the death knight really suffers when attacks fail to land, especially opening attacks. Having a Plague Strike dodged or parried can throw off an entire rotation, eventually leading to bad Obliterates because both diseases weren't up at the same time. Missing attacks is a fact of life for all tanks since it's hard to stack +hit and +expertise along with mitigation stats. However, existing tank classes have mechanics to let them "burn off rage" (or mana) to make up for those bad strings. The DK plays more like a rogue who can't get enough combo points in play. This had a deadly effect on DK threat generation, which just didn't compete with that of other tanks.

We didn't want to just solve this with more free expertise because A) that has major PvP ramifications, and B) the death knights would start to hate expertise on their gear.

Instead we are making some fairly big changes:

1) Blade Barrier now procs when your Blood Runes are inactive. While the initial implementation of this ability was fun, as we added Death Rune mechanics it became harder to use, and the fast recharge on missed attacks made it even harder. Now it should be up almost all the time.

2) We also found a bug where a naked, untalented death knight only had 2.5% dodge instead of 5% like warriors and paladins. With these two avoidance changes, death knight survivability should be very close to the other tanks, recognizing that avoidance is more dangerous than mitigation for a tank. As an aside, death knights, warriors and paladins currently mitigate a similar amount of damage, and druids may very well be mitigating too much.

3) Frost Strike can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried. Frost death knights were losing too much potential damage and threat when Frost Strike failed to connect, putting Frost tanks in the awkward position of wanting to skip Frost Strike and just use Death Coil.

4) We changed Rune Strike completely. It is now mostly a tanking ability meant to dish out high damage (and therefore threat). Rune Strike can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack. It affects the next swing, so it doesn't compete with global cooldowns and can be spammed to some extent. It hits for 200% weapon damage (remember 100% of that is the white swing you lost) plus a percentage of AP. It cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, and costs 10 runic power (for now). Think Heroic Overrevenge. :)

5) I think we already announced these changes, but just to get them all in one place: Bladed Armor went back to attack power. It was changed only to match the warrior talent, which we changed back. Death and Decay got a decent threat boost to get it closer to the realm of Consecration and the new Thunder Clap.

 
Blue Posts

Weekly Maintenance Update
We will be rolling out some updates to our hardware during the scheduled Tuesday maintenance on September 30, in preparation for the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King. These updates will be implemented on all realms to help deliver a smooth launch and the best experience possible as we prepare for Northrend. (src)

Druid
Upcoming changes
For now, all I've got is that Starfall can't be dispelled.
We are also discussing Mangle (Cat) or Rake buffs so cats don't feel so penalized by positional requirements, particularly in PvP. (src)

Bear Tanking in WotLK
Druid threat is on par or greater than other tanks, and with the Swipe change, that includes group threat as well. Druid dps while tanking is very high. Druid dps while not tanking may still be the highest of the tank classes.

Druid mitigation is so high in Naxxramas that we're worried they may overshadow the other tanks, in which case we might have to change it.

So if you want to make an argument about Feral shortcomings, you'd either have to argue that they won't continue to be great in several raid tiers (which is a valid concern, but one that all the tanks have) or that you don't like their abilities. On that front, we have attempted to juice up several of the Feral's existing abilities, including changes to Frenzied Regeneration, Bash, Barkskin and Faerie Fire, as well as offering a new survival ability and a new burst threat ability, and finally letting you benefit from both consumables and weapon enchants.

You might still argue that the druid abilities are different enough from warrior abilities that it may present a problem, though we'd like to avoid pushing them any closer together if we can help it.

As it stands right now though, we have a lot of confidence that bears are going to be excellent tanks. (src)

Feral Q/A (src)
What about Cat DPS? Are you balancing the "tank capable" classes in a category by themselves, or will they have equal DPS to everyone else as per other posts and such?
Cat dps is looking good at the moment. If you get +dps gear and focus on the +dps talents, your dps should be very competitive.

Feral and balance PvP is much more problematic than PvE at this point...
I'm not trying to duck PvP issues, but it has so many different issues and is very sensitive to the numbers on a few specific abilities and to player skill. It is much harder to do PvP tests and determine if things are okay. I will say on the Feral front, we are looking at buffing Rake and Mangle for cats to make up for the positional requirement of Shred.

It seems as though the Druid forums are the only one of the forums in which "HIGH THREAT AOE ABILITY" isn't touted as part of their multi-target ability. Is Swipe going to have the same additional threat modifier as Death and Decay, Thunder Clap and Consecrate?
Making an ability "causes high threat" is a last resort. It's wonky and tends not to scale as well as damage. Sometimes it's the only option we have to keep a tanking ability useful without turning it into the best damage ability available. In our last tests, Swipe's threat per second was very competitive with what paladins could dish out. We don't think at the moment that it needs more +threat to do its job.

Also, please consider the effect on creating Armor pieces in so many slots. Like you said, there's going to be an issue with Mitigation, but also consider that Avoidance is going to be lower because we can't benefit from Parry or split our avoidance between Parry and Dodge to stave off diminishing returns.
Yes, that is the risk. I will say that in Naxx, the bears are just taking less damage overall, which means even with lower avoidance, the huge amount of armor makes up for it, ignoring the fact that druid health also gives them a huge cushion for when they do take a lot of damage at once.
We have done tests at higher tier levels, but if things start to fall apart, we hope to be able to right them in a timely fashion. Remember, it wasn't a stated goal for druids to be able to tank Sunwell. It is now.

Mage
Torment of the Weak
Some talents are just harder to implement than they appear. What we think we can do with Torment of the Weak is instead let a certain number of spells (say the ones you want to use a lot) get the damage bonus. That keeps the basic idea intact in a way that we know will work. (src)

The 3 reasons behind Frostfire Bolt creation
We created Frostfire Bolt for 3 reasons: an interesting new spell that would cause a lot of exploation into which talents, gear and rotations benefited the best, a solution for those fights in which a Frost mage shows up to a Frost-immune fight, and the keystone for a new Frost + Fire "elemental" build. If you want to go respec every fight, you can still do that. But with Frostfire, you should be able to do a lot more damage than if you hadn't respec'd at all. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
Will mages continue to have mana issues as much as they do currently, or is something planned to help?
Yes, we are working on mage mana issues. They seem to run out too fast.

Will mages be expected to be dominant AoE DPS? Or is AoE DPS also being flattened across the board?
Great AE damage isn't a good niche in a game with so many single-target fights. Your AE will be good, but so will that of warlocks and moonkin. We won't keep your single target dps down in order to justify high AE dps.

Will Frost be able to dps as strongly if not more strongly than Arc/Fire in PvE? Or is that still the PvP spec?
We would like to see similar dps from all 3 trees. However, if you go for a heavy PvP build (in any tree), you will probably sacrifice some dps to get there.

Will Arcane Blast be modified so it can be used as a main nuke? Or is that ship sunk?
We want Arcane Blast to be used a lot. It's not Pyro.

Scaling plagued mages throughout BC, will this be closely examined so it doesn't repeat in WOTLK?
Yes. We aren't happy with what happened to mages in BT and Sunwell.

Will Evocation ever be updated? Lowered Cooldown? Made like Innervate instead of channeled?
I don't know the answer to that yet. I think Evo is fine if mages don't run out of mana in 5 seconds. Evo could be part of that solution or not.

Will Frostfire bolt be given a purpose, now that double dipping is gone. Is it simply an "immunity" fight fallback?
No, we want it to be the kind of spell you can use all the time. But we want to get Frost, Fire and Arcane feeling good first.

Will ignite ever be fixed (ignite "munching")?
We are aware of the problem (of course). It's just not easy to fix.

Will the Water Elemental get more survivability? More resist? More +hit? More scaling?
All pets should inherit the hit of the master now.

Will mages have purpose other than dps in raids so that so called "hybrid" classes won't fill in the mage spots after the single obligatory Winters Chill/Food/Scorch mage has been invited?
Just be better / do more dps than those other classes and you'll earn a spot. We're not going to give you a reason other than that that someone HAS to take you.

Is the numbers pass starting soon? We're worried that you may be running short (5 weeks) on time to properly see data regarding the dps passes.
We've been in the middle of it for weeks. Don't worry about the time. We don't. If we looked at the ship date as a deadline, then we'd get sloppy and do dumb things. The truth is that in an MMO, game balance is a process not a destination. Even after the patch goes live, we'll have opporunities to make changes before you can head to Northrend. With all the changes we've made, there are going to have to be some quick patches to fix things we missed. And overall we'd like to address balance problems that do erupt in a more timely fashion - consider, before we could always say "Eh, they'll still take the X for his Y buff even if his dps is low." We can't say that anymore. Now we just have to get stuff fixed.

Warlock
Ghostcrawler on Ruin
I'd agree that Ruin is about as close to a "mandatory talent" as exists. We did talk about changing it, but feared it would only be perceived as a nerf.
To some extent we like what the talent does, because it does encourage some cross-spec'ing into another tree. The talent trees as originally conceived were more about options and less about picking a single tree and trying to stay within it.
Now it's not perfect. Ideally there would be more talents you'd want in a second tree, or more alternatives in general. (src)

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