Day: February 24, 2010

Death knights, druids, hunters, mages, rogues, warlocks, warriors, oh my! For those participating in our public testing of the upcoming minor content patch 3.3.3, look out this week for a host of fascinating new adjustments to these classes. Chains of Ice innately does what? Nature's Grasp has how many charges? Vitalit…y boosts stamina by how much? Stay tuned to find out the answer to these and more questions!

In our continuing expansion of the World of Warcraft five-year anniversary site, we now bring to you an ongoing series of player interviews. We begin today with an intimate look at a unique role-play guild, Shadowclan, which has carved its own niche within the Warcraft universe. Read how World of Warcraft has shaped this guild's gameplay experience in different ways over the years on our anniversary page.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wowanniversary/interview/

3.3.3 World Event Bosses and Dungeon Finder
Just to clarify some misconceptions about this new functionality, the summoning of holiday bosses is going away. Players can queue for these bosses via the Dungeon Finder or special holiday NPCs found in the world. Once the party is finalized, the group will be ported directly to the area where the holiday boss resides. Players can kill the holiday bosses as often as they want for standard loot (epic rings, trinkets, etc.), however, they will only drop one holiday-themed loot trove per player per day. These loot troves will have a chance of containing rare holiday items such as The Horseman's Reins.

Why? I have nothing more to add except to ask the question because there has to be some good reason for this. Otherwise it should just be dropped because it's unnecessary…
The way players were grandfathering in alt characters, scamming others by not having a summon available, and continually soft-resetting dungeons — creating a major load on instance capacity — was never intended.

The change has some positive and some negative consequences, however, we feel it's the best way to make this a better system and more in-line with our original plans for World Event bosses. (Source)

Cataclysm Item Changes
We're working on a large forum post to go step by step with how some of the existing gear will be changing.

Overall, we want everyone's damage, healing and tanking to stay about the same, but given that talent trees are changing at the same time as gear, it's going to take some adjustment. (Source)

Separating the new Plushies from the In-Game Pets (They are now available on the Blizzard Store by the way)
There are no plans to separate the two at this time. It's funny because there were a number of complaints when the first two pets came out that felt it would make more sense if it came with something tangible.

As far as the quality of the physical pets, they are very well made and our previous ones (like the Lurky) got a lot of good reviews from people I talked to so they will be along those lines as well. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Intent of Immolate change
The intent of the Immolate buff was to buff Destro. This is one of those situations where you can't just say that Immolate is used by Demo so it buffs Demo too. It does. But it buffs Destro a lot more because Destro gets so much more benefit from Fire spells.

If you think this is not the case, please provide us some evidence using math, simulations, target dummy parses or whatever. (Source)