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Ulduar Panoramas
Slade has put together a collection of panoramas of some of the areas in Ulduar. For those of you that don't know what a panorama is, think of it as a 360° screenshot that you can rotate any way you like. I highly suggest checking them out as they're pretty cool, and this is probably the second best thing next to actually zoning into Ulduar.
Freya Video: Undisputed
This video is of the German guild Undisputed versus Freya, from the point of view of a Shadow Priest.
As a reminder, we have an extremely comprehensive list of details on Freya up, including everything about the trash pulls' abilities. Check it out here.
Intel Extreme Masters: Finals at CeBit
For those of you in Europe that want to check out the Intel Extreme Masters, the finals will be at CeBit this coming week. Check the quote for more details.
Quote from: Ancilorn (Source)
In the upcoming week, Season 3 of the Intel Extreme Masters (Electronic Sports League) is climaxing at CeBit in Hanover, Germany (http://www.cebit.com/). From March 3rd to 8th, the Continental Finals Europe followed by the Global Finals of the Extreme Masters, will take place to determine the winner of the 3v3 Arena Tournament.
During the competition, the Electronic Sports League will provide a free non-stop video stream, allowing everyone worldwide to watch all of the matches live with commentary in English. For more details, including team profiles, rules, and the video stream, see the official coverage page (http://www.esl-world.net/masters).
In addition to this tournament, you will also be able to play World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King in the Free Gaming Area.
Blue Posts
Vehicle Mounts Now Take Falling Damage (Source)
This is an intended change to these types of mounts.
Who should be the best healer? (Source)
It should be a five-way tie.
Glory of the Hero: Red Proto-Drake Stays (Source)
No plans to remove the Red Proto-Drake at this time as it is not a 310% mount. We'll post an update if anything changes.
Reason for Black/Plagued Drake Removal (Source)
We want to keep fast mounts rare, so to answer your question in this case, "Yes, both". At this point we are okay with players continuing to earn Red Protodrakes over time and don't feel they need a strong rarity stamp.
Additional class mechanic changes beyond those in 3.1 likely (Source)
This upcoming patch will be the largest one we've ever done with tons of new content and a lot of class changes. However, we still have to pick our battles. We can't get pursue every idea we have and still complete the patch in a reasonable amount of time, and I know I'm getting pretty impatient myself for Ulduar.
These are small steps. If we like the way they turn out, there will be larger steps in time to arrows and shards. I'd love to share our ideas, but they need to bake a little longer and we need to make sure we can actually deliver so players don't feel like we broke any promises.
Player versus Player
Ring of Valor Exploit Fixed in 3.1 + More Changes (Source)
We have this issue fixed in 3.1.0. Sorry for the delay on this guys, I know this has been a terribly annoying bug for a lot of you.
We have a few other tweaks in the works for 3.1.0 Arenas as well:
- We have modified the waterspout effect in the Dalaran Sewers Arena to give players more warning before the water column is fully activated. This should give you a chance to get out of the way or at least let you cancel a cast since you will now know that the water is coming soon. The effect starts up about 5 seconds before the waterspout is fully active. We have a new zone wide sound attached to the effect now also.
- We also added a sound to the Ring of Valor to let players know that the flame wall will be opening up in the next 5 seconds. Again, just more early warning so you can plan accordingly. We cleaned up the art on the gates a bit too. It should be easier to see the gates opening now.
"Bring the player, not the class" in PvP too? (Source)
We're not sure.
We definitely want to get more specs into PvP. However, one of the coolest parts of Arena is building comps with certain synergies. I'm not sure it would be a good design goal to say almost any 2, 3 or 5 classes can form a good team together. And yet the roles in PvP are quite different than in PvE. There are some Arena teams with no healers and some with several. We can't just tell players to pick up a healer and you're good to do, because the healer you get can change things dramatically.
Let's get a little more parity in Arenas first and get in those classes and specs that have historically been underepresented, and then we can start thinking about how much sense it makes to give players more flexibility on how they form their team.
DoTs and Resilience (Source)
I think we can all agree that dots that crit and direct damage spells that crit are affected the same way.
So these arguments basically come down to "It is unfair that dots that don't crit are affected by resilience when direct damage spells are not." But this is arguing against the way resilience has worked for some time and the way it works for warlocks and priests without the talents in question is unfair. You are essentially arguing dots are too weak in PvP on live today, and have been too weak since we first made resilience affect them. Adding a talent that lets them do more damage in some situations should not change the rules for what happens to them normally, at least in our opinion.
You can also argue that warlocks and shadow priests are too weak, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the resilience rules on dots are the problem. Our main goal is that resilience should be something all classes need to contend with regardless of how they do damage.
Now, there is another way to go. We could just say that dots always can crit (i.e. remove Pandemic et al.) and resilience affects them the same way as direct damage spells, and then readjust all the numbers to make sure dots are not too powerful when they don't crit. That would be a valid approach, but aside from being a ton of work, it's just not the direction we want to take the feature.
I agree with the posters who said that the problem with saying "double dipping" and similar phrases is that you risk confusing players who think that dots that crit are reduced twice by resilience, which doesn't happen. They ARE reduced by resilience whether they crit or not, which is our intention and apparently working correctly. I do agree that the mechanics here are fairly technical for players not well versed in them. :(
We do appreciate the numbers though. It is nice to be able double check our own calculations.
Druid
Heart of the Wild Nerf (Source)
In order to keep our goal of having all 4 tank classes capable of handling Ulduar, we need to get tank health pools a little closer together.
While I won't hide that this is a nerf for bears, we also don't want to get to the point of having a "mana sponge" tank, now that we are making mana more of an issue for healers.
If druids slip behind as a result of lack of mitigation, avoidance or cooldowns, we will buff them.
Shred Positioning Requirement (Source)
We think the current implentation is fine. When this topic became a concern in beta, we greatly buffed Mangle so that it was a dps loss, but not a huge one, when you couldn't Shred.
The only situation where we could see it being a problem is say the warlock that hugs the wall so you can't get around him. I suggest Maim.
Rejuvenation (Source)
Rejuv is great for is efficiency. That's why you want to cast it. But with such a long duration and a three second tick, it's never going to be a great single-target heal. It's awesome for having a little extra cushion or keeping folks topped off.
The Resto Druid's Role (Source)
Someone asked whether we were intending to change the Resto druid's role. We aren't. All of these changes fall, in our minds at least, into the realms of balance or polish.
Fixing mana regeneration and Lifebloom efficiency are balance problems. Both were too good.
Separating the roles of Nourish and Regrowth a little is a polish issue. They were too close together.
One of the things I still feel works the best about the Resto druid is in how different players can heal using different strategies and still be succesful. We have a long way to go with some classes and specs to give them that level of variety.
Lifebloom Change (Source)
A primary goal for the change is so that restoration druids wont feel as punished when they let a stack bloom, particularly in PvP.
More on Lifebloom Change (Source)
Now it does potentially give you a new healing style, where perhaps you roll the 3 stacks on the MT but do 3 stacks and let it bloom on the OT. You can imagine a Patchwerk scenario where the MT is taking damage consistently and the OT takes it in bursts. The traditional roll is more expensive, but keeps the healing per second high and consistent. Allowing for a bloom is more mana efficient at the expense of having the hot up 100% of the time.
We have done a lot of calculations on this, but we also need to see how it plays out in Ulduar on the PTR in a real raid scenario, as well as seeing if any theorycrafters can poke holes in the model.
Hunter
Explosive Shot and Survival Complexity (Source)
Yes, we did nerf the damage of Explosive Shot a little more. After many of the changes to locks, DKs, warriors and the rest, we felt SV hunters were too high. MM may still be a little too low. BM seems on target at the moment, but we had a few bugs in new pet abilities especially that was making it hard to get accurate numbers.
I'm not sure what you mean about Survival compexity. Are you talking about the shots themselves or the organization of the tree? I think some players are still thinking they are supposed to trap dance in PvE.
Does the haste merge with autoshot mean Steady Shot no longer benefits? (Source)
No. We just wanted to remove the quiver without losing its haste bonus. Except for inventory changes, you should not notice a difference.
Priest
Priests and Viper Sting (Source)
There was a pretty hefty nerf to Viper Sting recently. It should be much less of a priest killer.
Poisons Intended As Priest Weakness (Source)
Yes, that is pretty close to how we feel. Poisons are a weakness of the priest class. We don't want to remove that weakness. However Viper Sting exploited that weakness to a very punishing degree. Poison removal, as many other classes will tell you, does not solve "the rogue problem" and I'm not sure there is "a rogue problem" any longer.
Shaman
Unleashed Rage: Expertise Clarification (Source)
It is 3/6/9 expertise. Not sure where the % came from. It isn't in our tooltips at the moment.
Warlock
Soul Shards and Drain Soul (Source)
Drain Soul will produce enough shards that you should never be without them. Even if you are learning a boss through repeated wiping, you should be able to get the new shards you need each attempt.
In fact, it produces so many shards that we figured you'd end up having to delete them constantly, which would be annoying. The 32 limit will fill up your largest bag (which only holds shards anyway) without spilling over into the rest of your inventory. We figured very few locks carried around a lot more shards than that, and like I said, they are easy enough to replace now for those of you who do manage to go through them quickly.
Pandemic Bug: Allowed Bypassing Resilience (Source)
Yes, I believe this was true. Shadowform was affected by resilience, but Pandemic was not. It was not out intention that the talent let you skip around resilience. Making sure the talent is an appropriate damage increase is important to use, but we won't do it by letting you avoid the damage reduction that resilience is designed to impart.
Warrior
Gaining Rage When Target Absorbs (Source)
Our plan is to allow warriors (probably druids too) to generate rage when being hit while protected by an absorption shield AND also while hitting a target with an absorption shield.
We think we can get this in, but I am reluctant to use the word "promise" ever.
Fury PvP: Titan's Grip nerf not that bad? (Source)
My point was that if I had said:
"Guess what, guys! We figured out a way to make you really awesome in PvP. You'll get tons of team offers and everyone will fear you. We're giving you 10% more damage!"
Then your response would probably have been something like:
"Um, thanks for the damage, but um do you play this game?"
Having a warrior on a team is nice for the damage, but a lot of other classes bring damage too. PvP has a lot more to do with using certain abilities at a certain time. That is probably where warriors need more attention.
Blue Post Recap: Video Style
Over the weekend I was contacted by someone asking for feedback on a video recap of blue posts they put together. I personally thought the video was awesome for those only interested in a brief summary, so I told him I'd get more feedback in a news article. Check it out below, and please head over to his video page to give him feedback.
Creative Corner Spotlight #3: In The Frozen North
In our latest Creative Corner Spotlight, we have a piece by Avedral called "In The Frozen North." It captures the attention to detail Blizzard has put into the Northrend armor sets brilliantly. Avedral has submitted this to Blizzard's Fan Art Program, and decided to upload it here on World of Raids as well. If you have a piece of Fan Art you've created and would like to share it with everyone, you're welcome to upload it to the Creative Corner.
MultiQuote
