EU WoW Commercials, Blue Posts, Blizzard/ATI Giveaway, Loken Is Your Daddy

"What's Your Game?" European Style

Quote from: Wryxian (Source)

It's not just Ozzy Osbourne and Steve van Zandt who are asking ‘What’s your game?’. France’s favourite knight, Alexandre Astier, and German hiphop stars Thomas D. and Smudo are also checking out your World of Warcraft credentials in the latest series of television commercials to be shown across Europe this winter. In addition we have an exclusive insight from Alexandre Astier, available only on the Web. Take a look at how these icons play the game… it’s not exactly how you might have imagined:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/downloads/commercials.html

The commercials will also be broadcast on the following TV channels:

Blue Posts

Items With Sockets in Northrend (Source)

Generally speaking it felt weird to have an item at a leveling up phase that had sockets in it so you'd be trying to get the gems and the cuts you wanted, get them in, then have it replaced one level later. You will start seeing the socketed items the higher level items after reaching level 80 so after getting the gems and cuts you have a better chance at hanging on to the item for awhile so that it means something.

Naxxramas Difficulty (Source)

A couple more points about Naxx: many of the guilds who cleared it quickly already knew the encounters from 40-player days, AND were allowed to practice extensively on beta. By contrast we gave players very little exposure to Kil'jaeden on the PTR.

But really, trying to slow down worldwide progression by making encounters insanely difficult is a losing proposition. We're in the world now of professional guilds with corporate sponsors and players willing to put in enormous numbers of hours and attempts. We can certainly (and will) make very challenging encounters for which guilds can take pride in server firsts. However, I would not expect to see encounters that are so difficult that the entire WoW community wipes on them for months before achieving success. I just don't know if that game exists anymore.

Death Knight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Death Knights and Defense (Source)

The way we designed death knights, they are going to struggle a little more for defense than warriors and paladins. Our goal is not to make gathering defense a non-issue for them. (By contrast it was a goal to make defense a non-issue for druids.) We just think it's a bit too hard at the moment, which is why the sigil and runeforge changes are attractive.

Rune Strike (Source)

This makes the ability too good in PvP, which as I said, is a problem. I predict it will be something like 150% instead of 200% weapon damage, but 150% threat.

More on Rune Strike (Source)

We don't want Rune Strike to be a big chunck of your dps, because as I have said, it's just not that interesting an ability. Few talents affect it. It doesn't play off of runes or diseases, which are core mechanics to the DK class. If your dps is low (even as a tank) we will adjust that, but probably not through Rune Strike.

Icebound Fortitude: Changed to Scale With Defense (Source)

Again, this makes the ability too good in PvP if it scales of Resilience, which all serious PvP players have in abundance. In PvP you can just use it too often. In long boss fights, being able to use it often is cool. But PvP fights tend to be very short, which means you have IBF available a lot. Scaling it with def isn't intended to force you to stack def for PvP. It allows us to tone down the damage reduction for PvP overall while still ensuring that actual tanks can use it to tank.

I think my reference to the paladin bubble threw a lot of people. Of course the abilities aren't all that similar. What I meant was that IBF is being used too often in PvP to avoid damage. It's just too good an ability for a class with a lot of short-cooldown abilities.

More on Icebound Fortitude (Source)

We don't want Icebound Fortitude to be a button you use whenever it is up. It is designed to be used when burst damage is coming (in PvE or PvP) but the way it was getting used, because of the short cooldown, was to be on an awful lot of the time. That's not really an ability in that case, it's just giving the DKs 50% damage reduction.

Runic Power Generation (Source)

We're happy with runic power. Runes are the core part of the DK. Runic power was an addition to make the rune use and cooldown less monotonous and to give us another way to balance spells. Consider that Death Coil for a rune cost would either be better or worse than Blood Strike and probably used or ignored accordingly. Runic power can carve it its own niche.

Horn of Winter (Source)

We wanted to try the Horn of Winter change versus just giving DKs another version of Bloodlust, because we try to only recycle existing abilities as a last resort.

Blood Tanking Buff (Source)

I don’t know if this is actually the case. I could believe it for Blood on multiple mobs, which is why we need to buff Blood tanking a little.

Bone Shield (Source)

Bone Shield is not fine. When the cooldown is off, DKs are too squishy. If we buff their mitigation then Bone Shield turns them into the best tanks. We do plan on buffing Frost Presence’s armor and magic mitigation to compensate for nerfing Bone Shield. Your incoming damage should be the same, just smoother.

Anti-Magic Shell (Source)

We will also likely lower the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell a little. All of this still needs a lot of testing however.

More Sigils, Defense Proc Sigil, Defense Runeforge Enchant (Source)

We are adding more Sigils. We will likely add a defense proc sigil too and a two-hander runeforge defense enchant. (Dual wield tanks already have lots of +defense weapons available.)

Howling Blast (Source)

In the beta, we found that it was hard to get Frost knights to use both Howling Blast and Obliterate. Too often they just went with Howling Blast over and over. The numbers may have changed enough since that time that it’s no longer a problem.

Scourge Strike (Source)

Scourge Strike is one of the strongest abilities a death knight can get, so we’re not convinced it needs to be buffed. Frost Strike can’t be avoided because it competes against Death Coil, which can’t be avoided. Without the anti-avoidance, Frost death knights have trouble with threat. Unholy death knights can do strong Death Coils as well as Unholy Blight, so we don’t anticipate a problem here.

Runeforging: Choice is Intended (Source)

Having a DK choose what kind of enchant most benefits them we think is actually a good thing. It's cooler if there is a legit choice in tanking enchant. While you might "graduate" from defense enchant to parry enchant, you might also decide to keep the defense enchant and replace some of your defense gear elsewhere. But even if all you do is graduate, it's still a gear decision players will make at some point. Bundling defense with parry would make Swordshattering even more OP.

Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Feral Staves: Armor Stays, Bonus Modification Doesn't (Source)

It is the second example. If a staff has 800 armor then your armor value will go up by 800. If leather bracers have 800 armor, then your armor value will go up by much more.

Healing with HoTs (Source)

There are plenty of druids topping healing meters.

I think where the problem comes from sometimes is that you need healers who are good at working with hots. When someone has a hot on them, you have to be able to guess if that hot will heal the dude and if it can do it fast enough. Inexperienced healers sometimes stomp on hots, wasting the druid (or priest) mana and making sure that the hot-healer appears to have not contributed much.

Paladin (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Healing Discussion (Source)

Personally, I have run every heroic with a paladin healing but I realize antecdotal data only goes so far.

There are certainly situations where paladins have to work a bit more. But I haven't encountered anything where I wished we had a priest, druid or shaman healing us instead.

The same is true of nearly every class. Mages are better at CC in a lot of dungeons than other classes. Paladins are still probably better AE tanks than death knights. But that doesn't mean that only the best death knights can handle those dungeons.

Now here's an extreme example. Before druids had an out-of-combat rez, many players did believe it was a liability to bring a druid healer, especially whenever they were going to be faced with a respawn situation. We don't think paladin limited AE healing is anywhere close to this degree of problem, but I'd certainly be interested in hearing more.

Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

PVE DPS (Source)

If you balance rogues, hunters, locks and mages to all do the same dps on target dummies, then what you find in a raid is that the ranged dps comes out on top because the rogue has to spend a lot of potential dps time on positioning and running out of fires. This isn't true of every encounter, but it is true of a lot. (If there is an encounter where a rogue should shine, it's something like Patchwerk.) So rogue dps on a combat dummy probably needs to be higher so that net dps in a raid is about the same as other classes. Make sense?

And once again, if you are taking an inexperienced rogue in blues and PvP gear in a raid, then don't be surprised if expert Moonkin, Retadins, Fury warriors and Enhancement shammies (and all the other hybrids who will Suspect Something Is Up if I don't mention them) blast past him on the meters.

We're not sure if PvE rogue dps is too low. Some players clearly think it is. You can't just average out rogue dps across all WWS reports because you have no idea of the skill and gear involved without a lot of digging. Rogues are very sensitive to buffs and a lot of other factors. It's complicated and the solutions are tricky too. Just buffing rogue damage across the board could do bad things to PvP. Making them better now could make them way too good two tiers from now. These things take time sometimes.

We're also not going to keep anyone weak in PvE just because they are good in PvP or vice versa.

Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Demonic Circle's Use in Raids (Source)

We don't think it's a huge problem. I can't think of any encounters where this rises to the level of exploit. It may be convenient in how many people remain standing, but you're not really getting away with anything that you can't already do with a Soulstone.

It's a problem if warlocks feel like the "right way" to use circle is as wipe prevention, but we've seen some clever use of it in say Malygos and Obsidian Sanctum so I'm not sure that will happen a ton.

We'll keep an eye on it.

Blizzard & AMD Video Card Giveaway

Blizzard and AMD ATI have teamed up to give away 80 ATI Radeon HD 4550's during the Feast of Winter's Veil.  Find out more about it on the rules page, or head over and register.

Loken Triumphs Over Sapphiron

Titans really are the daddies of Azeroth, as it appears Loken is the deadliest mob in WoW for the time being.  WoWInsider originally spotted it, but you can check it out over on the Official Top Lists page.  As of today's tally, Loken is a good 40,000 player kills ahead of Sapphiron.  What do you think?  Is Loken the most dangerous boss you've come across in Northrend?

You can also see that Runecloth is still a hot commodity amongst rep-grinders, coming in 4th on Auctions.  Copper is ranking up there high too -- challenging all those Northrend ores on both Gathered Items and taking 1st for Created Items.

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