Day of the Dead, Weekly Raid Quests, Blue Posts

Day of the Dead

Tomorrow, lasting for two days, a new event based on the real-life Day of the Dead celebration begins in World of Warcraft. Players will be able to complete quests and a new achievement called Dead Man's Party. There's also a new cooking recipe -- Bread of the Dead -- for those of you still working on your Chef de Cuisine achievement. Unfortunately, it looks like the Macabre Marionette cannot be learned and thus will not count towards Lil' Game Hunter.

Type: Memorial Holiday
Date: November 1-2
Locations: Graveyards of all Major Cities: Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, Exodar, Orgrimmar, Undercity, Silvermoon City, Thunderbluff, Shattrath City, and Dalaran City

Dance with Catrina

Come dance with her. Let us cherish and honor those we have lost in their ghostly presence, so that they might eat and drink and smile and know that they are loved. Walk up to Catrina, select her, and type /dance. You will receive an achievement and a 12 hour buff: Honor the Dead, which will change your appearance to that of Catrina or Chapman.

The Grateful Dead

Purchase some Orange Marigold or Bouquet of Orange Marigolds from Chapman and use them to see the otherwise invisible spirit in the graveyard.

It's good to visit with friends and family again, though I may have overdone it... I've already eaten everything they made for me, says the Cheerful Human Spirit. Might I trouble you for some of that delicious Bread of the Dead? I'd be most grateful. Chapman there sells the recipe, I think.

Acquire some Bread of the Dead and give it to the Cheerful Spirit.

Your reward is a Macabre Marionette, a small pet that looks like a skeleton wearing a sombrero and holding a pair of maracas. This pet can only be used during the Day of the Dead event - it cannot be learned and kept like other small pets.

Weekly Raid Quests

It looks like the weekly raid quests were updated recently to provide different rewards than before. Originally they rewarded 10 Emblem of Frost, but now they reward 5 Emblem of Frost and 5 Emblem of Triumph. This was likely done due to the fact that most of the targets for these new quests are in older instances rather than Icecrown Citadel. The nice thing about the quest is that you can complete it in either 10 or 25 player mode (though not both; you can only do this quest once a week).

Possible Quests

Blue Posts

More blue posts, including an interesting one by Ghostcrawler. Do you all agree with him that Anub'arak in Trial of the Grand Crusader may be the hardest boss in WoW?

Quel'Delar quest series... will it truly be epic? (Source)

Somewhere in the middle, this comes from 5-player dungeons so it won't be as gargantuan as the shifting sands or as material heavy as the Hand of Ragnaros, but it will still require running a few instances and some dedication just to start it.

We will post details on the stats before the patch launches, but you'll have to wait for now - sorry, this is the only answer available at the moment.

Icecrown Bosses (Source)

Three points:
1) Bosses won't swing faster. More of their swings will hit.
2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren't just too great).
3) Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That's what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don't like the challenge of healing a tank then I'm not sure why you'd want to be a healer. Now as I've said, we're not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of "Icecrown is too hard because my tank died" posts here when it goes live.

Players find ToC hard too easy (Source)

When I find one, I'll let you know. Most of the raiders I have talked to who have beaten heroic Anub 25 consider him one of if not the hardest boss in WoW.

Item inflation is Blizzard's fault (Source)

Of course it was "our fault." We're not blaming anyone. I was just explaining why avoidance still got so high despite our best intentions. You may have scaled the gear down had you been in our shoes, but we picked the numbers we thought would be enticing enough to get players to try the hard modes while still allowing everyone to feel like they could upgrade their gear.

It wasn't inevitable either. We debated Chill of the Throne long and hard. We easily could have gone the other way. We think the encounters will be more fun with the current implementation though.

High avoidance causes spikes in damage (Source)

I think what you are comparing here is a tank with high avoidance to one with lower avoidance. Your definition of "spiky" here is just that the tank with lower avoidance gets hit more often. That's usually not what players are talking about though. If you compare a tank with 50% avoidance to a tank with 0% avoidance, then the latter guy is taking a ton more damage, but he is taking the same damage every hit. For every unit of time, the incoming damage is the same, which is generally easier for healers and the tank himself to plan around.

When people say high avoidance causes spikes, what they usually mean is that a tank who chooses avoidance over mitigation (armor) will avoid some damage completely but then suddenly get clobbered. That's a spike. By reducing the amount of attacks that a boss fails to land (because of dodge), we can lower the amount of damage that a boss does per hit while still keeping the same boss damage over time. We need to keep the same damage over time because that is scaled to healing over time. If we just nerfed dodge without adjusting boss damage, then we'd just be killing tanks more often.

Why don't tanks stack parry over dodge? (Source)

Tanks don’t stack parry because it’s more expensive to gear for parry than dodge (and usually gearing for armor and health when available are superior to both). The reason parry > dodge (which makes it more expensive) is because parry gives you a slight threat increase over dodge because of the weapon swing speedup. The “parry gibs” phenomenon you are describing was a much bigger deal in the age of crushing blows (which ironically you are nostalgic for). Today, the increased damage that a parry-stacking tank would suffer from parry speedup is pretty trivial. Besides, we turn it off on many bosses for which it would cause a problem.

Small Q&A on Icecrown bosses (Source)

Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?

Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you'd get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.

Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?

The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.

How are you going to handle Chill of the Throne when the pre-Cata patch comes out and we lose another ~18% avoidance when Defense goes away as a stat?

I dunno. I imagine we will just drop it. We’ll have a lot of fixin’ up to do before Cat is ready to go live.

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