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Patch 3.3 Background Download
It looks like the background downloader for patch 3.3 is now running. This doesn't necessarily mean it's coming next week, but soon is a good way to look at it. A lot sooner than Blizzard's typical "soon" timeframe. This is the enUS version of the patch as you can see; players in Europe will see a download of around 482mb.
Shadowmourne - No Hunters
I guess Blizzard changed their mind since BlizzCon, because there is no hunter version of Shadowmourne.
Quote from: Valnoth (Source)
The quest requires friendly Ashen Verdict rep to begin. It may also only be acquired by Warriors, Paladins and Death Knights.
Blue Posts
Icecrown frostwyrm mounts (Source)
There will be a Frostwyrms up for grabs for Icecrown raiders, achievable in a similar way to previous rewards such as the Ulduar proto-drake.
Chill of the Throne (Source)
The "Icewell Radiance" is designed to account for very high avoidance levels. It lets us lower the damage bosses do per hit because their hits will connect more often, keeping boss dps the same but lowering spike damage.
However, I also know what that message says to some people. It says that if I go into Icecrown and wipe on a boss all night that Blizzard lied to me about boss damage. We're just sort of bracing ourselves for the inevitable "I couldn't beat Marrowgar because he hits so hard. I thought bosses wouldn't hit hard."
Bosses hitting less hard does not mean bosses can now be facerolled. It just means they hit less hard. To be fair, most of the folks posting in this thread understand the difference. But it's not uncommon for us to see our quotes misused in other forums where we can't necessarily bop in to correct the misunderstanding.
Druid
Feral items in Cataclysm (Source)
We talked about druids in bear form also getting AP from strength. Strength won't appear on leather and no piece should have Str and Agi together, so it's not like they would really double dip. That lets us still have tanking necks, rings and cloaks with strength on them that are attractive to all 4 tanking classes.
Almost all the items in the game are going to have to change. In many cases this is just a sweeping pass we can make on all gear, such as replacing the Agi + AP on leather with just Agi. So don't worry too much about what happens with old gear and talents mixed with the new stat system. The gear and talents in many cases must change.
Mage
Fingers of Frost (Source)
The Fingers of Frost issue is really challenging to solve. It it procs on hit then the procs don't get eaten but you may have to interrupt a Frostbolt. If it procs on cast, the procs can get eaten. Those are really the only ways it can proc though. Mixing travel-time spells and instant spells can muddy things up. Things also get more complicated when you have silly amounts of haste, which through no fault of their own, many mages do.
Fingers of Frost seems to work fine so long as you have Frostbite, but due to some technical limitations, the two talents don't play well apart. A long-term solution might be to make Frostbite a prereq for FoF or just merge the two talents together.
Letting Fingers of Frost display its charges is a good idea. We might not be able to get that in for 3.3 but we'll put it on "the list."
Rogue
Weapon swap addon in 3.3 (Source)
We also killed the addon, but we didn't want to do it without also trying to fix the problem it was trying to fix.
Shaman
Elemental tier-9 nerf (Source)
We don't want players to stick with older tier sets when new pieces become available. (It's one thing if it's a really good trinket -- it's another if it's your entire set..)
We balance some things around absolute values (we're shooting for a target) and other things around relative values (how X looks compared to Y). A lot of shaman were saying they weren't going to upgrade to tier 10 despite the, frankly, gratuitous stats on the new gear. We concluded that was because the T9 set bonus was too good and the T10 set bonus was too weak. We suspected the T9 was too good for some time, but didn't want to nerf it while the T9 was all that was available. We did the same thing with a few other sets (or relics).
We try to pick interesting set bonuses, but that means that they will sometimes end up being over or under-budget once players figure out the best ways to optimize their play style around the bonuses. A little of that is okay -- it's interesting when a new set changes your spell rotation a little bit. But when an older set is so good that players feel like upgrading is a bad thing (ignoring the pain of having to get new enchants and gems or whatever) then we think we have a problem.
From a player point of view, I can understand why the attractive answer is always just to buff the new stuff. But continually buffing an outlier instead of bringing the outlier back into the pack is a good way to lead to power inflation on gear.
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