Month: April 2010

We're pleased to announce the grand opening of our new Concept Art gallery, highlighting the myriad characters, environments, and other artwork we create during the development of our games. We plan to update this page regularly with a wide variety of never-before-seen pieces of art reaching all the way back to Blizzard’s early days, so be sure to check back often!

We’re pleased to announce that the 2010 Arena Pass service is now open. This service, available to all players with a European World of Warcraft account, will give access to our special Arena Pass realm, designed to give you the perfect platform to prove your competitive abilities.

Players on this realm will have the freedom to equip pre-made level 80 characters with gear of their choosing, including the latest Wrathful Gladiator Season 8 items.

Face enough challengers, and you will receive the exclusive Murkimus bind-on-account pet. The very best Arena teams will contend for the exclusive “Vanquisher” title, bringing great fame to their high-level characters on their home realms.

Sign up on our Arena Pass registration page and get ready for the most exciting Arena matches of your life!

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/esports/arena/arenapass/index.xml

For more information on the 2010 Arena Pass service, check out the Terms of Use and the FAQ.

Terms of Use: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/esports/arena/arenapass/tou.html
FAQ: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/esports/arena/arenapass/faq.xml

To discuss the Arena Pass, please visit the Arena Pass Forum:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/board.html?forumId=3901822

Haste and DoTs/Channeled Spells in Cataclysm
We don't think slight variation on hot durations will mess anyone up. Slight variation on dot durations might mess you up a little bit (in terms of having a very predictable rotation), but since you can just refresh those spells without clipping, that seems okay too. Meanwhile, we think there is benefit in the damage per tick not changing.

Channeled spells are a little trickier to solve. While they technically work like dots, they feel more like nukes to players using them, so changing the duration may feel awkward on those. You may not care about a slight duration change on say Blizzard but you might on Mind Flay when you want to go directly from a channel to another spell. We may end up letting channeled spells just cast faster and finish sooner. We don't want to lower the durations continually with increased haste on hots and dots because it can turn into a real dps or hps loss depending on the situation. Try the Glyph of Rapid Rejuv. It can be useful on some fights but a real pain on others. Tight dps rotations could likewise get screwed up by dots with short durations.

[…] We might lower the cooldown on some of those spells. Alternatively a spell like Wild Growth could stand to have its cooldown raised. The idea of having a single use on some of those spells might work too.

[…] Sorry, I meant that some of those spells have cooldowns equal to their durations to prevent you from blanketing the room with them. You essentially get one at a time. That might become a problem if haste shortened the duration to the point where you had dead time before the cooldown. We don't want to reduce cooldowns with haste though. That is potentially too powerful in a lot of situations. So one answer is that every time you cast one of those spells, it removes the previous version. Thus you still get one. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tanking dungeons in Cataclysm
I feel like you're setting up a situation in which the only acceptable answer is "No cooldown on Thunder Clap." If you just dismiss all your other tools as unreliable or not perfectly suited for the situation, then yeah, you're going to end up in a place where you are waiting 6 long sec fo…