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Quel'Delar Quest Videos

lejeuneking put together another quest video, this time of the Quel'Delar quest chain that is currently available. There are some story spoilers in the video, so if you'd rather save the quest for when it's live, then don't watch it! If the embed isn't working for you, you can find it on YouTube.

3.3 News Followups

I had a few requests after yesterday's news, so I went back onto the PTR yesterday when I could access Icecrown Citadel and was able to fulfill them. The requests were the materials for the raid recipes, and a good screenshot of the sword Darion Mograine is wielding. And for those curious, Primordial Saronite will likely be the tier 10 equivalent to Frozen Orb.

Regarding the Sinister Calling Achievement

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We wanted to take a moment to clarify how the Sinister Calling achievement works for Hallow’s End. The text says that both a Hallowed Helm and a Sinister Squashling pet need to be “obtained”

for the achievement to be complete. More specifically, the pet needs to be learned and become part of your pet spell book for that part to be complete. The Hallowed Helm on the other hand needs to be looted by the character to fulfill that aspect of the achievement.

We apologize for any confusion in this matter and hope you enjoy the rest of Hallow’s End!

Blue Posts

So this isn't really surprising at all, but quite a few of the blue posts from yesterday actually contained more interesting information than the Twitter dev chat. Especially the ones regarding bosses and expertise, and the potential relic changes for Cataclysm. And we really do need a comic created based on this blue post; it'd be pretty funny.

Raid bosses may be given expertise in the future to counter tank scaling (Source)

It's something we actually talk about quite a bit. We won't do it for Icecrown, but it could happen in the future.

The basic problem is that bosses don't scale with gear. Their health and damage go up. That's it. You might avoid a first tier boss 30% of the time and a final tier boss 60% of the time. That means when that final boss hits you, he needs to hit for twice as much (not even counting that he already needs to hit harder to account for your higher health and armor). If you are a dps class, you might crit a low tier boss 30% of the time and a high tier boss 50% of the time. Why should you be proportionately more powerful against more powerful enemies? If anything it just makes us scale their health and damage to extreme points.

Players generally expect the monsters in an RPG to get more powerful as the characters do. Otherwise the game just gets easier over time. WoW has traditionally not scaled any mob stats beyond damage done and health. I think if we always had done it nobody would think it was weird. You don't get disappointed for example that the bosses hit harder as your health goes up, so why should it be any different of the mobs hit more often as your avoidance goes up? Sunwell Radiance felt odd because it was a sudden, unpredictable addition. If things always had worked that way I think players would just have accepted it.

Relics in Cataclysm (Source)

The problem with this item slot is it has now become so spec specific that we can't offer you multiple choices per tier (because we can't make that many items and ship a patch on time). So instead we try and focus on getting you to change up your gameplay, just a little, when a new relic arrives on the scene. This doesn't happen every upgrade, and it really doesn't need to. Constantly jumping around would become as predictable as never jumping at all.

For Cataclysm, we're considering some different implementations of the piece. Perhaps we'll go back to putting some stats on them. It's too early to tell.

Glory of the Ulduar Raider - Drake rewards (Source)

"Currently we have no plans to remove them in the foreseeable future. However, we will continue to evaluate the situation and if a decision is made to remove these rewards at any point in the future, we'll provide a one month warning so players will have time to make some final attempts. "

Cataclysm - Will Teldrassil be a no-fly zone? (Source)

I just thought the subject line was funny as I pictured people flying into a tree trunk and then getting dismounted. Yeah, I think I've seen too many cartoon too.

Just for clarification, this post isn't promising anything and we will have to see how things play out when we are closer to releasing the next expansion.

Druid

Clarification on changes being made (Source)

I'm not sure why so many players who want to disagree with us on class design miss some of those posts where we attempt to clarify our position.

To put it all into one place:

1) Rejuv was too good. We nerfed it. The change got labeled as a bug fix, because technically it was a bug. We didn't mean to buff Rejuv's duration but once we did we didn't think it was breaking anything for a time so we let it stay. For 3.3 we decided it was breaking things and reduced the duration. We understood the confusion this caused with the community by labeling it a bug fix so we changed the patch note to no longer refer to it as a bug fix. It doesn't really matter what it was called -- it was a nerf.

2) In the same patch, we decided to change Gift of the Earth Mother because it was adding a gratuitous amount of haste and at the same time making druids avoid haste where they could. We have been too generous with some of the haste talents that coupled with gear and buffs are causing problems.

3) While we didn't change Gift of the Earth Mother with the express purpose of nerfing druids, it still had that effect. We considered the Rejuv nerf and the GotEM nerf and decided we liked the second one more and reverted the first one. Rejuv is back to 18 sec for 3.3.

4) We realize the GotEM nerf hurt PvP Resto druids a lot and that is still something we are evaluating.

5) Resto druids have a lot of heal spells. Which ones you go to the most is going to be a function of things like set bonuses, idols, your role in the group as well, as well as the encounters themselves. Druids healing the raid currently seem to use a lot of Rejuv and Wild Growth while those healing tanks use a lot of Nourish and perhaps even Lifebloom. Lifebloom still gets a lot of use in PvP. Regrowth has slipped off the radar a little, IMO, but it has been good at various points in LK and I don't think it would be that hard to bring it back (and we'll see what the GotEM change does). Bringing it back would probably slide something else down the bar, at least temporarily. We're pretty much okay with that. Healing Touch (and maybe Tranq) is the only Resto spell for which we're really not interested in carving off a major raid-healing niche. It still has situational uses with NS or in 5-player dungeons.

Rereading the above, I am making sweeping generalizations a lot. Your mileage may vary and there are a ton of exceptions. One thing that hits me a lot in my position is that players assume the way they do a thing is the way everyone must do that thing. Players exhibit some pretty diverse behaviors and still get the boss down. Keep that in mind whenever you try to adopt the "accepted" or "cookie cutter" spell rotation for any class.

6) Particularly angry druids like to talk about Nourish getting "shoved down their throat" or whatever. We added Nourish because we recognized the druid need for a "Flash Heal." Healing Touch is too long to cast without NS and both NS and Swiftmend have a cooldown. The hots all do great healing, and they can definitely save someone's life, but they just aren't reliable for e.g. someone being focused by faction champions. In the BC era where we basically mandated that druids are just one arm of the healing machine that must also include paladins, priests and shamans it was okay to have a very narrow niche. In a world of 10-player raids, we want you to be able to heal with say 2 Resto druids and a Disc priest. "Hey, I'm just here to hot the raid," is fine if it works for your group, but that can't be the only thing that works. (And this applies to all 5 healing specs.)

Could Lifebloom be changed to let us keep it at 3 stacks during a fight? (Source)

We haven’t yet come up with a design for letting this be an option (and to be fair, it is an option) without rolling LBs on multiple people becoming the best way to heal again. We could do something like let you have 3 stacks total (divided among different people if you’d like) or let you only cast on one person. Those restrictions might not be fun though, and they’d have big PvP implications.

Why not make Regrowth the Flash Heal for druids? (Source)

This would have been another way to go. The main reason we didn’t is it would just put more and more pressure on the up-front part of Regrowth and de-emphasizing the hot part in the name of rapid healing. At some point you'd reach a spell that was basically a flash heal with a trivial little hot stuck on the end for flavor. We tried to get the similar you-care-about-hots vibe with Nourish by making it heal more with hots but still heal all at once.

Gift of the Earthmother - Possible change to reduce the global cooldown of Lifebloom (Source)

A more likely change is something like letting GotEM keep its current (PTR) functionality but also letting it reduce the GCD of just Lifebloom.

Warrior

Warriors and how they scale with gear (Source)

The solution to making warriors scale more appropriately with gear (instead of being bad at first and good later) is to normalize rage more. That's an answer that a lot of warriors hate hearing, which is one of the reasons we haven't done it yet. For many warriors, rage is a limitation to be overcome with enough gear. That's not really our vision of the class though.

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