Baby Murloc Giveaway, Arena Point Reminder, Blue Posts

UPDATE: Live Death Knight Forum

The live Death Knight forum is now available.  It's not in the navigation yet, but you can access it here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=13673870&sid=1

WoW Europe: Baby Murloc Giveaway

Quote from: Vaneras (Source)

If you have finished packing and that you are ready to be part of the official launch of Wrath of the Lich King that will take place in Paris, Rotterdam, Madrid, London, Berlin and Stockholm on the night between November, 12th and 13th, make sure you do not forget to bring your camera!
The Baby Murloc Adoption Committee has decided to reward the players who capture the best pictures during this fabulous evening. The winners of this contest will get the opportunity to look after the famous Gurky. Do not miss the chance to make friends with this rare game mascot…

An online webform will be available soon where you can send your masterpiece to our merciless jury!

Arena Point Reminder Updated

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

We have created this new thread to reflect some updates we have made to the way in which arena points and seasons will be handled as we transition into Wrath of the Lich King.

We wanted to remind everyone that Arena season 4 is coming to a close. During next Tuesday's maintenance on November 11th, all arena teams, as well as ratings, will be wiped and arena charter NPCs disabled. However, arena points will persist until the beginning of the next arena season, or until a player reaches level 71. Thus, Arena points will be rewarded for rated games played this week and players will be able to purchase Arena items that do not require a team or personal rating. Upon the close of Arena season 4, players at level 70 will continue to be able to play skirmish Arena matches against other level 70 opponents even after Wrath of the Lich King launches.

Arena season 5 is currently scheduled to begin on December 16th, and once that happens players who have reached level 80 will be able to compete in rated arena matches where they can gain arena points which can be used to purchase level 80 arena gear, as well as compete for end-of-season rewards. Players who remain at level 70 after Season 5 begins will only have access to play skirmish arena matches against other level 70 players. However, two new skirmish brackets will be made available (71-75, 76-80) for players who wish to hone their arena skills while leveling in Northrend.

Blue Posts

Wryxian @ Webhallen's (Stockholm) Midnight Opening (Source)

Just a little note to let you know that I will be attending the midnight opening at Webhallen in Stockholm. I hope if you are able to, you will come down and say Hello :-) I will probably be wearing a Blizzard Community T-Shirt from the Worldwide Invitational.

Here is some information about Webhallen's midnight opening for Wrath of the Lich King:
http://www.webhallen.com/list_group.php?avd=1&group=1179

Hope to see you there :-)

Circle of Healing and Wild Growth: 6 sec cooldown (Source)

Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We're less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it's not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you'd also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons. :)

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications -- one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don't want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

"Smart" heals and raids (Source)

We're not crazy about removing the smart healing portion of WG (or CoH). That forces the raid to have to pay a lot more attention to who goes into what party and almost mandates the healers to keep their raid frames organized by party rather than class, role or whatever other system they want to use. While we're not at 100% yet, we would like to get the concept of party out of the concept of raid.

As far as reducing the raid-wide AE damage, we would do that as part of the change. However, having to deal with a lot of damage at once is definitely a way to challenge groups and offer diversity in boss fights. As long as AE damage exists, the AE heals are going to look very attractive. Furthermore, we have started to see discussions about using CoH and WG even for single target healing. I'm not sure yet whether that is actually effective in the long run, but the fact that those ideas aren't immediately shot down suggests that the instant component of WG and CoH is so powerful that they may get used even when there aren't Naj'entus-style AE blasts.

50 Mounts Achivement (Source)

Q u o t e:
Why do I have to buy 50 mounts to get a drake? Waste of money for one, and it's not like I'm going to ride them all....?

---

Well, because it wouldn't be an achievement if you didn't have to do something to earn it now would it? It's just an extra bonus and if it's not appealing to you, don't do it.

Also, we have an Achievement forum now so if you wish to share constructive feedback on any of the Achievements there or discuss them, that would be the ideal place to do so.

WoW Armory: Achievements (Source)

If it was really easy to flip a switch and make them appear online we'd have done it already, but it does take a good amount of work actually. We do plan to add that at some point in the future as we continue to update and improve The Armory.

Healing Design Philosophy (Source)

We always prefer to buff things to nerf them, just because it does feel better for the player. But we have to evaluate the magnitude of the changes involved.

To make CoH / WG work in their current form, we would have to increase raid damage on the group, and increase the healing on your other spells to compete, and increase the magnitude of other types of damage so you want to use those other spells. Increasing single target damage means we might have to adjust tank health (which generally means gear) so that you feel like you have a chance to heal them before the e.g. 30,000 point Hateful Strikes land. It is easier in this case to nerf CoH / WG and lower raid AE damage.

This is the classic metaphor of balancing a chair -- you can try and extend three legs or just cut one down to size.

We don't always take the easier way out, but sometimes that is the more responsible thing to do. We'd rather spend a little bit of time tweaking current encounters and more time working on future encounters than the reverse. We'd rather fix other problems with healing than spend our time rebalancing a whole lot of healing spells.

Plus, since this change will happen after the game is already Live, we do owe it to the customer to attempt to minimze bugs when possible, and in this case that means changing as little as possible. (You can take this argument too far of course and argue we should never change anything. It's a balance, as with most aspects of game design.)

Remember, our ultimate goal is to make the game more fun, not slap you around. I get so many kudos and warm fuzzies when I announce a big buff to a class that I would always prefer to be greeted with that than all the bad feelings that surround a nerf. Nerfing is never fun.

Healers vs. Tanks: Homogenization (Source)

In answer to another question, we haven't applied the same homogenization phiosophy of tanks to healers. Mostly that is because a raid needs 1 tank for several fights but never 1 healer for anything larger than a 5-player dungeon. And for those, we have tried to give you more tools to do your job. However, even in that case, a Holy priest, Holy paladin or Resto shaman should not be mandatory, especially for the 10-player versions. We don't think this change would change that.

On Future Healing Changes (Source)

Yes, that's the kind of thing we're thinking about. Rogues can't just spam one ability (most of the time) because their system is set up to where they want to use one kind of ability then switch to another kind. Or to use a different example, Frost mages want to get freezes and then Ice Lance (in PvP anyway).

We've done a little bit of that with healing. There are clearcasts or spells you can use on cooldown to make your next heal fast or free or big or whatever. But we think we can do a lot more with it.

Obviously we can't just ask you to start looking for a 3 stack of a buff on every target before healing them. The UI doesn't really support that and combat is just too frenetic to be able to parse it. That's why we think those changes would have to be implemented with a more holistic look at combat and healing in general.

Dispel System (Source)

We have also talked about systems of dispel priority, whether every dispel uses the same number of charges, whether you should be able to protect buffs with other buffs, whether dispel chance should improve with each failure, or if you should be able to dispel buffs like Fort at all.

Druid

Starfall (Source)

We are still evaluating whether we like the change to the way Starfall works or not. I will say that Starfall was not designed as the Flare for druids.

 Priest

Holy Spec: Circle of Healing Problem (Source)

The difference in this case is that we agreed Chain Heal virtually *was* the Resto shaman. It was one of their most signature abilities, like Mortal Strike for the Arms warrior, Windfury for the Enhancement shaman or Frostbolt for the Forst mage. While you might like Circle of Healing, and I know it's a fun spell, we never designed the entire Holy tree around it. Our intent for Holy is that the spec uses lots of spells -- Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Renew, PoM, Binding Heal, PWS, Lightwell, PoH, Guardian Spirit and CoH. It's hard to find niches for all of those sometimes, and CoH had crowded out a lot of those others -- even if you were pushing those other buttons, the actual outcome was that many of those clicks did very little compared to CoH.

Resto druid were in a very similar situation -- lots of tools, but everything looked like a job for Wild Growth.

Circle of Healing is too good (Source)

You are correct that Holy is supposed to be the versatile healer. CoH is preventing that because Holy priests are using it for a gigantic percentage of their healing. A priest who used only that spell and a priest who used their whole arsenal probably would not have a significantly different effect on group survival. That's a problem.

Holy Priest Role (Source)

Holy priests are designed around versatility. A Holy priest can be assigned to a tank, or to a melee group, or to general raid healing. While it's possible for a spec in that niche to become the jack of all trades, master of none, we think Holy priests have actually been strongly desired healers throughout most of the history of WoW.

You have fast single-target heals, slower ones, hots, group heals, shields and smart heals. Currently we believe a lot of those other heals look like poo because, to quote myself from another thread, Circle of Healing looks like the solution to every encounter challenge.

Circle of Healing vs. Chain Heal (Source)

This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

Circle of Healing: Copy Arcane Blast (Source)

We'll consider it. I wouldn't necessarily say the design of having Arcane Blast get more expensive with each cast has been a rousing success though. I think the growing expense just feels bad sometimes.

Mana costs are a tricky thing to mess with. It would be cool, in theory, to have players stop and say "Well, I can cast this spell, but it's really expensive so it has to be worth it." We've had a little bit of success with that but typically those spells are either ignored or players use them and hate them.

Another problem with the stacking design is it might make you more compelled to stack priests, since four priests stacking one CoH is a lot more mana efficient than one trying to cast four in a row. (Source)

Shaman

Chain Heal (Source)

We definitely design some specs to have larger rotations than others. The styles just appeal to different kinds of players. But when a rotation is literally one spell, with perhaps a few cooldowns, that is a little too small.

We agree that the Resto shammy rotation is in a better place now. Chain Heal is still the main go-to spell, but there are enough other things to pay attention to that it won't be as boring. If you still find it too boring for your tastes, the Resto druid and Holy priest were designed to have more options for different situations.

Healing Role: AoE Healer (Source)

We're just not seeing Chain Heal doing the numbers of WG / CoH right now. It will definitely go up a little if those other two come down. All of this ignores the fact that we want Shamans to be the big AE healers. It's the role for them, while for the priest and druid, it's just a tool. Currently those relationships are flipped.

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