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What I was working on...
...was unfortunately delayed due to post-Thanksgiving meetings about feature development on World of Raids. On the bright side, there's some incredibly cool stuff we're going to be working on for the site leading up to Cataclysm (and beyond), and I can't wait to share more about it. For now you'll just have to trust me when I say it's going to be awesome!
Fresh New MVP Look
If you don't want to brave the official forums to see the new avatar, you can see it here.
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
Many of you may not know this, but it was four years ago this month that green text began filling our forums. When we officially launched the MVP program, we set out to choose capable players to represent their peers as most valuable posters. The first few we selected, many of whom are still here, helped shape the program into what it is today. These players donate their time to these forums to help others, spread information, discuss hot topics, and sometimes even face the flames that come with the territory of posting in colored text!
In order to commemorate the indoctrination of the MVP program four years ago and those who currently participate today, we’ve updated the MVP avatars to something more fitting for Wrath of the Lich King! Don’t be alarmed if you see any drakes huffing about. They’re the same folks I trust you’ve all come to know and love.
Blue Posts
Death Knight
DK tanks are unpopular in high end guilds (Source)
They aren't. If you mean they are less popular than warriors as main tanks, that's true. But that is also the case for druids and paladins, whom some of you claim are self-evidently overpowered.
But DKs are very popular in cutting edge guilds for dps and quite popular as off tanks. This is hand waving, and I don't have any concrete numbers to back this up, but my suspicion is that DKs are either the most popular off tank or else are number two after warriors. Warrior + DK is a very popular tank setup for many guilds capable of clearing heroic raid content.
One conclusion that I think you can draw from looking at what classes and specs the very good guilds bring is that there is a lot of variation, and certainly much more than in BC.
Rogue
Talent trees in Cataclysm (Source)
Ultimately, we'd like for more talent trees to look like Subtlety. Trading utility A for utility B is an interesting decision. Trading utility A for more dps is not an interesting decision; the latter is always going to win.
Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it's likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It's going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. (For some players, losing any dps is unacceptable, but I also know enough hardcore players that I can say with some confidence that you can't just make a blanket statement that all competitive players feel this way.)
I don't think we're there with rogues yet. Assassination is now a serious contender in end-game raiding, but Subtlety isn't and hasn't been since HAT was in a silly place. I think we're a lot closer with mages. Arcane may be the highest dps in a general sense, but there are fights on which Fire will win. Frost is a lot closer than it used to be, to the point where someone who just loves Frost won't feel like they are horribly gimping their group's progress. (It probably still needs to be slightly higher than where it is, but we'll see what Icecrown is like.) We eventually want to get rogues, locks and hunters closer to where mages appear to be in 3.3 (and work on mages more too of course).
Honor Among Thieves was a good attempt to get more combo points, and therefore damage, into the tree. It ended up having the scaling problem that a lot of our abilites have -- it's easy for it to be too weak in a small, 5-player group and to be too powerful when it's scaling off of 25 players. (Restricting it to a group doesn't really help because you can just fill that group full of folks who crit a lot, and raids provide a lot more buffs to guarantee crits.)
I do agree with the general feel of Subtlety being high finisher damage and cps through alternative routes, and that's a kit we want to keep going forward. I also agree that Ghostly Strike, Hemo and Backstab all could use more "juice" (by which I don't just mean higher dps). I'll also add that I think we went a little overboard in emphasizing damage over utility in Lich King PvE, especially in the earlier raid tiers. Who needs a good Sap when you're AE'ing everything down?
PvP-wise, utility can be a lot more useful than in PvE. However, as I've said before we think we've kind of let rogues get into too much of that glass cannon state. They either keep someone controlled and blow them up, or they themselves get blown up. We would still like to tone down some of the rogue CC and increase some of their passive (not cooldown-based) survivability. It's a little weird that leather classes are generally more fragile than cloth.
We try very hard not to give due dates on some of these changes. When you read through threads like this, I think you can see why. The risk of sharing some of our long-term plans is players then get frustrated when the changes don't materialize in the next patch. We have a very long list of changes we'd like to make to WoW, and if we tried to get them all into whatever the next patch is going to be, those patches would just get continually delayed. When I say "long term" I'm trying to say not to look for a change any time soon (because we haven't made the change yet) but that we recognize the problem and have some ideas we'd like to try out. This philosophy is the whole genesis of the infamous "Soon" and "When it's ready."
In other words, it isn't that we don't care -- just that we have a lot to do. If you buy that, then all you can really argue with is our prioritization for what we do first and I totally acknowledge there are subjective elements to that as well as considerations that aren't necessarily transparent to the community. I have no doubt that you might prioritize things differently were you in our shoes.
I know the Blizzard pace of development can be frustrating for some people, but when you look back at the history of the company, it's hard to argue that it doesn't work for us.
Toravon the Ice Watcher Video
I haven't posted a video of Toravon yet because I didn't think he was actually finished due to how easy the fight is. It looks like I was wrong, so here's an example of how easy he is: Alpha of Greymane went in and killed him on their first try with no problems whatsoever. This guy is loot piñata to the extreme!
At any rate, that's it for now. I'll get what I was working on finished for tomorrow, along with the EU version of Guilds to Watch. If you want to suggest any guilds, feel free to do so. I may end up posting multiple articles for each region.
MultiQuote
Our only enhancement shaman went ele recently. Their dps went up despite their ele gear being way lower level (offset stuff they picked up as they could) and not being in practice for ele. Go fig.
