Realm Compensation, Wrath Download, Blue Posts

UPDATE: Armory Maintenance Notice

Quote from: Crygil (Source)

In preparation for Wrath of the Lich King, we will be performing an 8 hour Armory maintenance beginning on November 6, at 6AM PST. The extensive changes and feature additions in Wrath of the Lich King mean that we also have to update the Armory to reflect those changes. As part of the maintenance, all character data will be reset, and character profiles will be repopulated as players log into World of Warcraft. We thank you for your patience during the maintenance.

Realm Compensation Now Complete

Quote from: Nethaera (Source)

2:30 PM PST 11/4- All eligible accounts have now be credited. The credited time is now viewable in Account Management.

Wrath Not Available Via Download At Launch

Quote from: Claudiog (Source)

Wrath will eventually be available for download online, but this might take some time to establish. A working DVD drive will be the only way to ensure you are ready to play on launch day. Otherwise, when we initiated the online download for Burning Crusade it took 2-3 weeks to get up and running. I'm not saying Wrath will take this long (I have no idea, it may) but don't expect it Day 1.

Blue Posts

Note: Some of these posts are from the beta forums.  It's possible they will be going down soon since beta is ending.

Beta Forums

No Stormherald equivalent smithing weapons in Wrath (Source)

There will not be a Stormherald type weapon "high level crafter only". There are however a fair number of epic crafted BoE weapons that smiths will be able to make in LK.

We didn't like the vast number of people who felt they were required to be Blacksmiths in order to get a good weapon. Players should choose their trade skills based on what they enjoy, not what they feel they must do.

Sharpening Stones working on Wrath raid-level items is a bug (Source)

We are having QA look into this now. This is not intentional and clearly we don't want people to have to farm old mats to use Sharpening Stones (which aren't supposed to be usable on high quality items). After this is fixed they will still work on several levels worth of items moving into LK just not the end game and higher end stuff.

Upgrade to Everlasting Underspore Frond (Source)

This is something we may consider doing at a later date but we don't want to trivialize the rest of the food and at the moment aren't planning on introducing an upgraded version of this item.

BoE Raid Drops (Source)

This is actually intended. We want there to be more trickle down items from raids and part of that decision was to give each boss one item that is BoE. It helps add excitement to raids and well as provide raiding guilds another way to help pay for the cost of raiding.

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Live Forums

Stricter moderation on role forums (Source)

We're going out of our way a little bit to try and point out the way we would like everyone to act on the 3 role forums in particular. We're asking for a little more maturity and responsibility here than we've typically tolerated on the forums in the past.

Once the community understands it a little better, you guys are pretty good at self-policing.

Things are a lot better already then they were last week. :)

Ghostcrawler is not a "messenger" to the players (Source)

I’m not the messenger. We have great CMs and moderators who participate on these forums, but I'm not one of them. I am a game designer and lead the team in charge of class balance (though this being Blizzard, a lot of people have input into the design process). I am happy to discuss numbers and utility and anything else about your class. I’m not talking about those things in this thread, because I’m using this opportunity to try to suggest to the community at large how we want this forum to work.

Scourge Invasion [note the sarcasm] (Source)

Oh, yes. It's alllll over. Nothing more to see. Peace and prosperity are nigh. We will now all commence the hand holding and the singing of Kumbaya.

Encounters designed for specific tank class (Source)

While we think many guilds will have one of each type of tank, we don't want to build encounters for particular tank classes. We don't like the idea that you might have to bench 3 of your tanks for those encounters than only require 1. We want you to be able to go raid with whatever tanks you have (assuming they know what they're doing). We actually think the game will be more interesting if different guilds approach fights differently because they have different comps.

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Classes

Paladin

GC on Ret nerfs (Source)

The design was not in truth to nerf Ret pallies into the ground. That should be obvious.

If you are not getting owned by them at least sometimes, then they were nerfed too hard.

If you are still getting owned by them all the time, then they weren't nerfed hard enough.

I think we're in a sweet spot at the moment, but I've also thought that before, so let's just see how it feels for a few weeks. :)

Early Holy & Prot Talents (Source)

We're not sure where we will put it. It might not be in Prot at all. Both Prot and Holy could use some early talent attention.

Rogue

Assassination (Source)

I think you’re reading too much in to what I said. Assassination is giving up some of its “tricks” in order to do more damage. You become a little closer to a shaman or warrior. That means if you get CC’d or something, you are more vulnerable than other rogues, which in turn means you might need your allies to bail you out. We don’t think that makes the spec broken or even inferior – it’s just a different play style.

Hunger for Blood (Source)

Ultimately, I think it will be. If we messed with it now, we would probably have to nerf Assassination somewhere else to make up for it. At this point we want to see rogues at 80 in PvE and PvP. As you can see, some rogues are saying they’re doomed and some are saying they’re fine. If Assassination is weak, then modifying some of those talents will be even more important. We do care about interesting rotations and abilities, but at the end of the day, if dps is too low on a dps class, then nobody will stick around to try the fun abilities, and if the class is OP, that will become the fun part of the class for people. While it’s not true of all rogues by any stretch, I have found the class more willing to spec where the damage is compared to other classes. Some Frost mages just love Frost and will stick with it no matter how it fares. While some rogues do have their favorite tree, a lot of them are willing to respect to whatever is suspected to do the most damage. Because it also tends to be a mathy class, it’s sometimes easier to figure out which build will do the most damage than for other classes.

Shaman

Elemental Int to Spellpower talent (Source)

We’d like to give Elemental either a talent that converts Int to spell power or gives a better spell power to damage conversion (or both). We just don’t know yet if we’ll do this through existing talents or new talents. I’ll announce it when we know.

Totem Discussion (Source)

I do agree totems have some cool aspects and some that can be pretty frustrating.

I'm not sure giving totems more health is the answer. I understand it sucks to lose them to a pet crab or whatever, but I also understand that the person fighting the shaman would be frustrated having to unleash a 3000 damage spell just to remove Earthbind.

But I'm definitely interested in hearing more discussion on the topic from both sides.

Why totems can be attacked (Source)

We want totems to be totems. If totems just become buffs like other classes then we lose a lot of what is unique about the shaman class.

Warlock

More on Affliction changes (Source)

I've mentioned a couple of times that we want to simplify Affliction's rotation a little. Making the dot durations more consistent would help, but so would things like getting a couple of spells (Immolate and Siphon Life maybe) out of the rotation.

I'm not talking about nerfing Affliction, nor making those changes in a vacuum. This would be a redesign so that things felt more natural with ~4 abilities instead of ~6.

Feedback is, of course, appreciated.

Demonology trades DPS for utility (Source)

1) Specs that can do the most dps generally make sacrifices along other axes to get there. Specs with a lot of extra utility or flexibility give up some dps. If dps is all that matters to you, then Demonology probably isn't the right spec for you. We can still make the dps good (and with the recent coefficient changes, we think it is), but specs are ultimately about making choices. Not every choice is between one way to maximize dps and some other way to maximize dps.

Demonology Survivability (Source)

2) The OP seemed to argue that Demo dps wasn't competitive because it was supposed to have more survivability, but that it in fact did not have survivability. Maybe it doesn't have as much survivability as you like and maybe the class as a whole doesn't have as much survivability as you like. I didn't really address either of those points. All I said was that people keep spec'ing Demo for PvP (not 100%, but they do spec it) so it must offer something besides highest dps.

Demonology DPS (Source)

We are looking at Demonology's dps. The coefficient buff did help it more than you might guess. A raid-buffed Felguard can also do 1000 dps or so at 80.

Overall, for any class, I wouldn't say the goal is for any tree to be identical in dps. They can be close, but we are going to take the rest of the tree into consideration.

Warrior

3.0.3 Deep Wounds Bug (Source)

This is fixed now. I don't have an ETA on when you'll get the change. It will be in a patch that comes before the major Ulduar patch.

Titan's Grip (Source)

We still think 12% is the appropriate penalty to make the talent balanced. But when we found Fury's dps to be low, the penalty was an easy thing to change to bring Fury's dps up to par. A 5% penalty isn't a meaningful penalty though, it's more of an annoyance for the sake of having a penalty, so my point was when we reduced it from 12% to 5% we should have just reduced it to zero.

Sudden Death (Source)

Yes, sorry for any confusion. It has been 9% on beta for some time. We experimented with lowering the proc rate to 4% but it didn't feel good that rare.

I remember specifically discussing the issue that we thought Arms warriors who stacked crit at the expense of everything else could hit too hard, and we didn't want cirt (and axes) to be the only way to gear. I thought as part of that discussion, we said that Sudden Death was being changed to a proc per minute from a chance on crit. If I am mistaken, my apologies. It wasn't meant as a stealth nerf.

Jame's WotLK Leveling Guides

Jame is back with leveling guides for Wrath of the Lich King!  For those of you looking for leveling spoilers, you should check them out -- they're completely free and offer great information.  Check out his Death Knight Shopping List (55-70), for example.

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