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WoW Re-launching In China
For those of you that have been following the drama over WoW in China, due to Blizzard choosing to change who runs the game in the country from The9 to NetEase, it looks like China has approved the game for re-launch.
There appears to be some questionable content that a government party (probably relatives of The9 executives) wants changed before the game can fully re-launch. However, the Chinese government has allowed NetEase to begin a "closed beta" test of their server cluster and approved all current WoW China players to return to the game, beginning July 30th.
Today NetEase sent out a news release that the closed beta will last one week. Previously it was reported that the servers must remain closed to new registrants until Blizzard is done with the content changes, so what this means for WoW China players after the one week period is still a mystery.
BlizzCon Costume Contest - Rule Additions
Quote from: Bashiok (Source)
We're in the process of updating the legal agreement from last year to also include the following rules for entry into the Costume Contest. These are not final.
In addition to last year's rules, costumes won't:
- Exceed a 10' dimension limit (no wider, deeper, taller than 10 feet)
- Include liquids or messy substances
- Be judged on items that are not worn or held
Blue Posts
One spec being purely for PvP (Source)
We're not crazy about going back to the "this is the PvP tree" design.
But it is hard, and you can argue impossible, to make sure 3 dps trees all perform very similar to each other in a wide variety of encounters such that they feel like real choices. It is easier for say shamans or druids because the alternatives are so different that players aren't as likely to shift en masse from one to another. It depends a lot on what "very similar" means. For some players, they'll play a favorite spec that does 10% less damage than the optimal spec. For others, they only want to know "Who da best?" and could care less if the difference is only 1% (and therefore likely swamped by their own player skill).
Please, don't interpret this as an announcement that we're giving up. It's just an acknowledgement that distinct but equal is pretty challenging, and can even shift immediately once players hit a certain threshold of gear.
I find the topic to be a really interesting one.
Emblems acquired before 3.2 (Source)
Our current plan is not to convert the Emblems of Heroism already acquired, as those emblems will still be useful in a number of ways. We also plan to allow players to trade in their Emblems of Conquest in for Emblems of Valor and their Emblems of Valor can be turned in for Emblems of Heroism. We aren't removing Heroism from the game. We are simply removing these emblems from the dungeons and encounters where they were previously attained.
Hunter
Buffing Arcane Shot (Source)
Yeah that was my point. The solutions are:
1) Give BM a signature shot and try to give Arcane a situational use.
2) Buff Arcane so deep in BM that nobody else will get that talent.
3) Accept that BM needs to be buffed in ways other than shots.
There are good points and bad points to each tree having a signature shot. A bad point is that it makes e.g. set bonuses hard because you can't boost things like Explosive Shot easily. A good point is the trees feel a little more different rather than just swapping Explosive Shot for Raccoon Shot if you were BM.
More on Arcane Shot (Source)
If we buff the holy heck out of Arcane, then every Survival hunter just shoots Arcane and won't take Explosive Shot. Since a lot of the Survival tree is designed to prop up Explosive Shot, we think this would a bad thing. Hence, we have to be very careful about how much we buff Arcane. If we do it in a very deep BM talent, then it's probably safe. If we do it baseline or through a glyph or an upper talent, then we might get into problems. By contrast, buffing Explosive or Chimera is pretty safe because no other hunter can ever use those shots. BM doesn't have a "this is BM only" attack to buff, unless it applies to the pet.
There is a similar discussion going on for DKs about at what point they can stop using Scourge Strike and just use Obliterate instead. That would be bad, because an Obliterate-based Unholy build is a lot less fun or distinct to play. A similar thing happened the last time we tried to buff Devastate. Fury warriors said "Yummy," and gave up a big chunk of the Fury tree in order to get it.
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As I have said a couple of times now, a very deep BM talent to buff Arcane Shot might work. Otherwise, most of the BM damage is tied up in the pet or at least the pet being alive. Perhaps BM could benefit from a totally new mechanic, even it wasn't a signature shot, so that we would have more knobs to turn when we needed to buff BM (and only BM).
Pets and AoE damage (Source)
We did talk about pets taking AE damage. Debuffs would logically fall under that system, though you say yourself that the only example you could come up with wasn’t an actual problem, which makes me wonder why you’d use that as evidence that we missed the boat.
We’re not going to answer every question we get, because there are hundreds of them. We chose some that seemed to be asked over and over. After every one of these Q&As some indignant players have posted that we chose the wrong questions to answer. I’m pretty convinced that would happen almost no matter what.
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As we suggested in the QA, we are more likely to just remove Avoidance as a talent and make pets largely immune to mob AE damage. We did however add more talents to the pet trees specifically because many BM hunters said that they couldn’t get anything really useful with their extra talent points.
Tier 7 4-piece Bonus (Source)
The original hunter bonus was "Your Explosive Shot, Chimera Shot and X Shot do more damage." The lack of an X shot (it couldn't be Arcane or Steady) killed the whole feature. We designed the DK expressly to have an X strike for every build. We could do that with hunters too. Some players are saying that just makes the specs more and more like each other though.
At a high level, you can have a trivial choice among your specs, which means it doesn't really matter which you pick so the decision is not terribly interesting. Or you can have significant differences among the specs, but that means one-size-fits-all balance solutions and even set bonuses are much harder.
Warlock
Demonology in PvE (Source)
The only reason why a warlock would spec demo for endgame is for the demonic pact buff to increase raid dps. Other than that pretty gem I can't think of a single reason why one would ever choose demo over affliction or destro at this point.
That was exactly my point. It's very hard to come up with compelling niches for where a warlock would think "I really want to be Demo in this situation." But I'd argue the same thing exists between Affliction and Destro. Earlier in LK Affliction "won." Now things have shifted back to Destro.
Again, this is not a lock specific problem. For awhile Arcane felt like a better spec for high-movement fights, of which there were many. Now depending on who you talk to, Arcane just flat out "loses" to Fire. The suggestions players tend to make involve the constant tweaking of spell damage, coefficients or talents up or down until everything is within 1% (or whatever) again. I just don't know how realistic that is or if there's a better way to do it.
Lament of the Highborne - Fan Made
This is a fan made rendition of the Lament of the Highborne song which Sylvanas Windrunner sings after completing the quest Journey to Undercity. katethegreat19 does an incredible job singing the song in this video. Enjoy!
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