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Mining Changes

The Mining changes mentioned in the latest PTR notes are now on the PTR as of build 9438.  Here are some details that I've found from going around to various zones (results included).

  • Cobalt Node and Rich Cobalt Node have been renamed to Cobalt Deposit and Rich Cobalt Deposit.
  • Saronite Node and Rich Saronite Node have been renamed to Saronite Deposit and Rich Saronite Deposit.
  • Titanium Node has been renamed to Titanium Vein.
  • When you mine a deposit, you'll get all of your ores and any crystallized elements in a single hit.  'Normal' deposits seem to provide a minimum of 2 ores and a maximum of 4.  As the notes say, overall ore from a single point should be about the same as previously.  (It can be assumed that 'Rich' deposits will provide 5-8 ores.)

Results

All-in-all, Mining feels a lot more fun than it used to with these changes.

3.0.8 Druid Weapons: Polearms

As most of you likely know by now, Druids will be able to use Polearms when patch 3.0.8 goes live.  As with our Two-Hand Maces preview for Druids, we've also collected screenshots of a variety of Northrend Polearms to give you an idea of the options available to you.  Check them out below.

 Item  Source
 [Deadly Gladiator's Pike]  Nargle Lashcord (4500 )
 [Cryptfiend's Bite]  Heigan the Unclean (Heroic: Naxxramas)
 [Black Ice]  Alexstrasza's Gift (The Eye of Eternity)
 [Wraith Spear]  Maexxna (Naxxramas)
 [Saliva Corroded Pike]  Moragg (Heroic: The Violet Hold)
 [Whale-Stick Harpoon]  Sairuk / Tanaika (82 45 45 )

Icy Prism Details

Over the past few days, I've been creating [Icy Prisms] to get decent data on their results.  Check out my Icy Prism results image for visual info (I also had a result of 2x[Scarlet Ruby] but didn't get a screenshot of it); so far it appears that you're guaranteed at least two gems.  In some cases, you may get lucky and get the high-selling gems on your server, in some... you may get two [Sky Sapphire].

However, according to clemm's post, you can also get [Dragon's Eye] from it, so it may not be too bad if you're really aching for that extra gem a day once you have all your recipes.

Blue Posts

Here's a quick recap of some of the blue posts from today.  A lot of them have been related to the 3.0.8 PTR.  If you want to check out all of the reported PTR bugs you can check the Blue Tracker.

Death Knight (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Talents Favoring Dual Wield

Scaling to infinity isn't an issue per se since we aren't going to hand out weapons of infinite damage (at least in this expansion). It's cool if Necrosis and BCB favor DW. We don't think they will drive all DKs to be DW, at least with gear available in Lich King.

It sounds like something didn't work right with the Killing Machine change, because the intent was to bring down the proc rate and make it more consistent between 2H and DW. We are investigating.

Druid (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Tier 7 Feral 4-Piece Bonus

I believe we changed the 4-piece bonus to benefit both cats and bears.

Improved Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire

I am almost positive the talent is looking at your spells. So if you cast Wrath, it does a check to see if you also have FF up on the target.

The intent of the talent is to encourage you to cast Faerie Fire, compensating you a little for the fact that you are debuffing the target. It isn't intended to just be "here have some crit." The intent is that if you cast FF, even if the debuff is already on the mob, you are rewarded for it.

I suspect it isn't smart enough to detect Feral Faerie Fire now that it's a base spell, so we should probably fix the case of a Balance druid who casts FFF and then goes back to Wrath or whatever.

I am just guessing based on the way spells usually work. I did not try this myself so I could be wrong.

I will also admit that there are some inconsistencies currently in the game between whether you are supposed to apply a debuff again on a mob that already has it (because sometimes you get a "More Powerful Spell" error). This is something we're trying to clean up though.

Priest (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Mana Cost of Heals

One of the best things I got out of all of the CoH nerfing discussion was players pointing out where they thought Renew (maybe it needs to benefit from more talents), Binding Heal (maybe it's too expensive) or PoH (fill in the blank) might be falling short. That's good stuff.

Warlock (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Demonology Improvements

We think we improve Demo mostly by improving demons, which unfortunately takes a little more work. That's not the only thing we want to do, by the way, but it's certainly part of it.

Warrior (Skills / Talents / Glyphs)

Deep Wounds Nerf

Let me back up here. We have not nerfed Deep Wounds yet. We are talking about it. Players saw a nerf to Sudden Death and asked why we would nerf Arms without nerfing Fury, since Fury seems to be dominating Arms in PvE and Arms is not dominating Fury in PvP (not that we want one or the other tree to be the PvE or PvP tree anyway). I responsed that we wanted to adjust dps warrior dps by making Deep Wounds less of an overall contribution of warrior dps, buffing Arms in PvE and possibly PvP, and either keeping Fury the same or slightly nerfing them for PvE.

Deep Wounds Nerf to Hurt Protection Warriors Too?

It will hurt a lot of them, though honestly their dps seems pretty decent and nobody is having trouble on threat. We will compensate Prot if we need to. Deep Wounds should not be a "mandatory" talent for Prot, though honestly this conversation did not start because of Prot.

More on Deep Wounds

We are talking about nerfing Deep Wounds. We haven't done it yet. The reason for the nerf has entirely to do with dps warriors, though we realize it will affect some tanks.

On the one hand, we don't want to nerf Prot's threat generation or dps. On the other hand, we don't want Deep Wounds to be the only way Prot can have good threat generation or dps. I'm not announcing any changes here, only our thought process.

Arms PvE DPS

Arms PvE dps probably needs a buff even on live. With the changes to Sudden Death and possibly one to Dual Wield, this is even more true. We are currently exploring the best way to do that.

We are unhappy with Deep Wounds because it is too large of a percent of your damage. I know that sounds strange to some players who ask "Why mess with it if our dps isn't too high?" Balance isn't just about who is highest and lowest on meters. Having such a high portion of damage come from a persistent, unmitigated bleed we think is a problem for warriors.

Possible Stance Changes After 3.0.8

Longer term, I think the real key to fixing some Arms (and Fury) issues is to take a hard look at stances. But those are beyond the scope of 3.0.8.

Titan's Grip Scaling

This is our POV on both talents. We suspected TG would be too good, and resisted changing in for a long time in despite of so many claims that Fury would never be able to compete with the hit penalty on it. At this point we are going to just balance around TG rather than nerf it.

Clarification on Fury Buffs in 3.0.8

I was referring to TG losing the remainder of its penalty and the WW glyph. They are minor buffs to be sure, but I think many players are scratching their heads about why we would nerf some of the top damage-dealers but buff Fury. The answer is that we aren't done yet.

Sudden Death Nerf

It's RNG but it is less RNG. Now the damage won't be so crazy on some hits, but on the flip side your rage bar won't go to zero either so you can use it for other things.

Overall, this would still probably be a nerf to Arms, but as we are discussing in other threads, this is most likely not the only change.

Is Protection Warrior Threat Suffering?

We have four tank classes, and we want them to be roughly equal. I say "roughly" because I don't realistically think with different abilities and mechanics that their survivability, dps and threat generation are going to be identical in all situations. You may struggle a little more in certain situations and other tanks may struggle more in others. As long as you don't get to the point where the group starts wishing for another class to come tank, we're probably in a good spot.

We haven't seen a ton of evidence that warrior threat or dps are much lower than the other tanks, but it is definitely something we monitor. We don't want to be in a situation where any of the tanking classes feels like the gimped class that nobody wants.

All four tanking classes, as far as I can tell, still have a lot of fear that they will reach a point where they can't do the MT job. That is a totally understandable point of view. We just don't think we're at that point for anyone right now.

 

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