Month: March 2010

03/26

• The Endless Healing Potion is no longer usable in arenas as intended.
• Warlock’s using a lower rank of Life Tap will receive a reduced benefit from their shadow spell power.
• The damage done by the cannons in the gunship encounter in Icecrown Citadel has been increased and the rate at which their heat decays has been reduced.
• In Alterac Valley, the buffs that the Generals get from the Warmasters and Marshals now grant them negative enemy dodge. This means they will now ignore some of their target's total dodge percentage. The base health of the Generals has been increased and the buff also grants a slightly increased amount of damage and health.
• The cheese items in Dalaran as well as the Kvaldir Berserkers in Icecrown will once again respawn at a faster rate.
• The window that comes up when talking to an NPC should no longer close on its own.
• Some changes to the battleground queuing system have been made to improve performance and group queuing.
• The timer for when the next battle in Wintergrasp will occur should no long disappear.

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Eclipse
The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a "rotation" like that, but you'll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn't play Balance.

Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.

We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.

The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.

We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Action Bar bug when rogues use Vanish while Shadow Dancing
It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. Rogues essentially have 3 bars and there are just some technical reasons why we can't go back to the Shadow Dance bar once we've dropped it.

I think the real solution is probably to make it so you can't / don't want to Vanish while dancing. I assume you're Vanishing to get out of roots or dodge spells, but we could solve those in other ways. The spell dodging part of Vanish has been so frustrating to rogues for so long that frankly I'd rather figure out another way to get the same functionality that would feel better all around and leave Vanish as strictly "you want to go back into stealth." (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Revenge and Unrelenting Assault
We like Revenge on UA and we certainly like the new damage Protection can do with Revenge.

If we make any change at all, it would probably be in the duration of the buff. Currently Revenge operates by giving the warrior 5 seconds in which to Revenge. This works fine when Revenge has a 5 sec cooldown, but UA removes that. Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.

I can't believe all this QQ is getting a response from you. Popping shield block and revenge spaming as arms is not new at all.

Nope. And it wasn't a big deal when Revenge didn't hit as hard as it does now. An alternative is to lower the damage Arms can do with Revenge, but we think in this case it's actually a better design that you can do one big Revenge per block / dodge / parry instead of a string of little ones.

I could understand if you think warriors need some balancing but craving into fotm QQ disgusts me. Why are you soo quick to base nerfs off of the community's feedback but soo reluctant to buff them using their suggestions?
Players often complain that we don't implement their suggested buffs or nerfs. This is nothing new. I suspect the volume of nerf posts exceed the buff posts because of the simple math that there are usually multiple classes asking for a nerf and one asking for a buff. We use player feedback to make informed decisions and we place more emphasis on intelligent or insightful points from players rather than a high-volume of low-quality QQ. "Warrior hit me hard" rage with perhaps an attached screenshot of dubious authenticity (tenacity vs. no resilience isn't uncommon) doesn't qualify as an intelligent or insightful point. (Source)