Malygos Video Guide, Ineligible Transfer Realms, Forum Watch, New Site Poll

UPDATE: Added another Warlock post

Malygos Video Guide

Kyth let us know about a great video guide that she put together for Malygos; the video is both narrated and provides visual notes throughout its duration.  If you haven't attempted Malygos yet, we highly suggest you check it out!  While the video is set up for 25-player Malygos, pretty much all of the points are useful for the 10-player version as well.

Character Transfers: Ineligible Realms

There were quite a few US realms added to the ineligible list for the Paid Character Transfer service, mostly due to recent population increases and queue times for those realms.  Check out the Character Transfer Realms list for info on which US realms are open for transfer at the moment.  And of course, a Blue response on the subject:

Quote from: Zarhym (Source: Several servers closed to transfer today!!)

The primary goal right now is to reduce the most severe queues on our realms. At its peak concurrency Dalaran saw over a 400 person queue last night. This isn't the highest queue across all US realms by any means. With that said, allowing transfers to the realm would have a greater negative impact on all players of Dalaran, than allowing Horde to transfer to Dalaran would have a positive impact.

At the largest gap last night between the Horde and Alliance populations of Dalaran, the Horde made up for roughly 40% of the total realm population to the Alliance's 60%. While faction balance is a concern for all realms, overall population and realm queues have the better part of our attention at the moment, particularly as is the case for Dalaran.

Transfers may be reopened to Dalaran if and when the realm is no longer experiencing exceptional wait times at peak hours every day.

Forum Watch: Tank threat in Wrath of the Lich King

There's a very interesting thread going in our Tanks forum related to tank threat in Wrath of the Lich King.  What do you think?  Is tanking way too easy at the moment?  Do you think it'll become more challenging as the expansion progresses?  Join in the discussion!

Blue Posts

Ghostcrawler Doesn't Make Design Decisions Alone

The designers come to a consensus on any change that would be remotely controversial. We also get a lot of input from the rest of the team and the community so we can make informed decisions. If I come up with a stupid idea, someone will call me on it, and they would expect me to do the same. If we come up with a crazy idea, we might talk about it for a little then shake our heads and realize it's crazy. I have never overruled anyone nor have I been overruled. That's just not the way Blizzard works. It's a pretty happy place. People feel empowered to do their jobs.

I have no problem with you blaming me for anything you don't like in the game, but I also want to give credit to the literally hundreds of people that work together to make WoW happen.

Player Contribution to Balancing

We pay attention to player-generated numbers, but you must admit that if we took all player-generated numbers as gospel that the game would end up in a pretty funky state.

Your build will nearly always be behind ours, even in beta and on the PTR. We get the benefit of seeing the combined effects of many changes at once, including bug fixes. To estimate the effect that changes will have, you have to do just that -- estimate. Some players can still generate excellent numbers, and others, whether through mailicious intent or just because they forgot to consider something, do not.

But if we are wrong, I have no problem admitting we're wrong. We were wrong about Elemental shamans -- they are lower than what we thought they would be. We were wrong about warlocks -- they are probably too fragile in PvP. If we nerf hunters too much, we will fix them in later patches. But we can't be so terrified of making mistakes that we don't make changes when we think they are warranted.

Merrymaker Workaround for Bloodsail-Friendly Players?

There was no way around this during this past Winter Veil. We may have a workaround available in 11.5 months, but there are no guarantees.

 

Hunter (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Being Disarmed By Dismantle

I just wanted to comment on this for any hunters who are new to being disarmed.

Weapon chains affect your global disarm duration. They aren't tied to the weapon per se. An offhand weapon chain works on both weapons and your bow.

When disarmed, you lose abilities tied to that item and armor, but not other stats.

Cat and Scorpid Damage: 3.0.8 - New Numbers

We are iterating on the pet abilities I mentioned earlier and we have new numbers for anyone out there who is still trying to theorycraft this. One of the reasons I don't always provide numbers is because we change them a lot.

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison - 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake - 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike - 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.

We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we'd like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community.

Aspects Remain Off GCD in 3.0.8

We talked about it, and Aspects on the GCD is not that big an issue for us. We don't think it's a huge balance problem either way. We can understand though why it feels like a nerf to not have the GCD now and to get it back in 3.0.8. So we can keep Aspects off the GCD. No harm done. (They will still have the 1 sec shared cooldown.)

More on Aspects

On the Aspects issue, we don't like taking things off of the GCD. There is a reason we have a GCD and it has everything to do with being a server-client based game. We tried to fix the problem with Aspects being difficult to manage by reducing the need to switch from a defensive aspect (Monkey) and an offensive aspect (Hawk). Enough people (and not just on this thread) said Viper would still be a problem, so we agreed in this case to take the Aspects off the GCD. This is a good example of feedback working.

Hunters Are Doing Too Much Damage

The argument of why you can't just do too much damage until Ulduar is a silly one. Hunters are doing too much damage. Yes, some other specs are also doing too much damage, but we are reigning those in too.

Remember, our tests are not done with the PTR data. Our builds are more recent than that and have numbers, bug-fixes and data you haven't seen. We try and give you a heads up to major changes when we can, but we can't give you an accurate picture of the data with just words.

Survival's Damage in 3.0.8

We understand the concern that Survival's damage is too high relative to other hunters. That may be the case on the PTR but it isn't the case for us. We have some different numbers for Explosive Shot than the PTR has. We understand the concerns about T.N.T.

Rogue (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Mutilate vs. Other Specs

As someone mentioned, Mutilate rogues seem great in PvP and pretty competitive in PvE (and will probably be spot on when some other outliers are brought down). We realize the other two rogue trees aren't keeping up and we definitely want to see them get there. We also want to make sure the rogue group buffs feel competitive. This is a touchy subject because so many classes will claim there is no reason to take them to a raid, or that their buffs are inferior to someone else's counterpart. There is a grain of truth to some of the latter claims, but there is also an awful lot of of hyperbole.

Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

More Warlock Changes Coming in 3.0.8

There are changes in both. We will try and announce the 3.0.8 changes soon (tm). Those changes are mostly PvP survival considerations.

More on PvP Warlock Changes in 3.0.8

The PvP changes are not big sweeping changes but they should help. Depending on when the patch is you might be able to try them on the PTR.

Larger changes will wait for the Ulduar patch. Most of those are what we call quality-of-life issues. Cleaning up some talents that don't quite cut it and some of the spells that don't seem to have a clear role. Destro and Affliction dps look like they are pretty good right now. Demonology needs a little boost.

DOODAD_NAX_DOOR_SPIDER02

Upon hearing of this iconic door going away, I had to do research!  Luckily, Ghostcrawler has responded to a thread about it.  (Yes, this isn't a serious post at all, but his comments are pretty funny.)

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source: GC DONT REMOVE DOODAD_NAX_DOOR_SPIDER02)

We received a lot of feedback on this doodad and the jury is still out. I know a lot of players are very attached to DOOR_SPIDER and I totally understand why. When I was on the other side, I loved that crazy door too.

But remember we have to keep the balance of the entire game in mind and not let any class or spec dominate in PvE or PvP. I know players have presented a lot of evidence both pro and con to changing the door. Some of the numbers you've provided are compelling and some, to be totally honest, are just plain loopy. But we will definitely keep the feedback in mind.

We'll try and announce what if any new name we plan on using for this door in plenty of time for feedback before it goes live.

It's also possible we will add a DOODAD_ULR_DOOR_TITAN02_PLOX in Ulduar so stay tuned.

New Poll: What guides would you most like to see?

Thanks everyone for your participation in last week's poll!  Over 19,000 votes and a staggering 32% of you would like to see Grim Batol as the surprise instance in 3.2.  Uldum and The Emerald Dream were tied for second, at 16% each.  Some interesting other votes included: remake of Blackwing Lair, present day Mount Hyjal, Tor'Watha, Lower Karazhan, Caverns of Time: War of the Ancients, and a few others.  Someone even wants to fight Kael'thas again!

At any rate, it's time to move on with a new poll.  This week's poll is related to a suggestion from yesterday's news:  What guides would you most like to see?  The votes in this poll will directly affect future direction for guides on the site, so please feel free to vote!  The poll is both included in this article, and can be found in the "Latest Poll" box on many areas of the website.

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