Category: mmo-champion

• The amount of Honor awarded for an Honorable Kill has been increased by 100% for characters of all levels. This change will effectively double the amount of Honor received from Honorable Kills, or for completing Battleground and Wintergrasp objectives; however, the amount of experience gained from completing Battleground objectives and the amount of Honor rewarded for completing each Wintergrasp quest remain unchanged.

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Mangle: The debuff from this talent now lasts 60 seconds, up from 12 seconds.

Mage (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Empowered Fire: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.
• Torment the Weak: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Serrated Blades: This talent now allows the rogue to ignore up to 3/6/9% of the target's armor, rather than a fixed amount of armor ignored per level of the rogue.

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Improved Revenge: This talent can no longer trigger a stun, and instead causes Revenge to strike an additional target for 50/100% of Revenge's damage.

Arms

• Trauma: The debuff from this talent now lasts 60 seconds, up from 15 seconds.

Glyphs
Druid

• Glyph of Mangle: This glyph now provides 10% increased damage done by Mangle instead of increasing the duration of the debuff.

Items

• Priest Tier-10 4-Piece Healing Set Bonus: Redesigned. This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster's Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%.
• Shaman Tier-10 4-Piece Elemental set Bonus: This bonus has been slightly adjusted to account for the fact that haste now modifies Flame Shock's periodic damage ticks. The bonus now makes the shaman's Lava Burst cause Flame Shock to tick at least two additional times before expiring.

Technical

• Frame Rate: A maximum capacity of 200 frames per second has been added.

Melee leather: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (rogue, Feral druid)
Spellpower leather: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Balance druid)

Physical mail: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (hunter, Enhancement shaman)
Spellpower mail: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Elemental shaman)

DPS Plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (Fury, Arms, Retribution, dps DKs)
Tanking plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Armor, Dodge, Block, Parry, Mastery, Expertise (Prot, Prot and tanking DKs)
Healing plate: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Holy paladins)

There will be exceptions. There might be some spellpower cloth with no hit or Spirit that healers and nukers may want. There will likely be Elemental tier sets with no Spirit. Jewelry and cloaks will be more class agnostic than actual armor pieces.

I wrote that quickly, so hopefully I didn't mangle anything. EDIT: You get a small mastery bonus for wearing the highest-armor gear capable for your class. Hunters in mail get a bonus. Hunters in leather do not.

Mastery bonus and armor type
There is a small Mastery bonus for wearing "your" gear. So a Balance druid who takes cloth will be essentially giving up free stats. Sometimes that may be worth it to them (just as sometimes it's worth it for a Resto druid to take that piece of +hit gear), but often times it won't be worth it especially if it's an upgrade for you. (Source)

Reforging
Think of reforging like enchants. It's not that you take a piece of gear and turn it into whatever you want. You pick up specific scrolls with specific conversions. We haven't decided on them all yet, but I imagine crit -> parry is not something you're likely to see. Maybe we'd do hit -> dodge for the tank who is full on or doesn't want hit. Maybe we'd do block -> parry to help DKs benefit from more plate.

Rest assured that we're not going to promote a system where Prot paladins want dps plate for tanking more than tanking plate. Part of all of these changes are to discourage behavior like that. We don't want to recreate it immediately in a different form. (Source)

Haste in Cataclysm
Haste will basically remain the same for casters. It is changing for melee classes, however. Haste will also allow melee classes to recover their resources more quickly, effectively letting them hit their buttons more often. (Source)

Gem sockets and item budget
We take gem budgets out of the most attractive stat on a piece of gear, in order to avoid anything with sockets always trumping similar gear without sockets. As such, socketed tanking plate has less base stamina but with gems, you’ll almost certainly end up with more health than dps classes. (Source)

Mastery Bonus
You get a mastery bonus (i.e. free stats) for wearing your gear. If shaman or druids wear cloth, they will do so at a slight stat loss. Sometimes that may still be worth it. (Source)

Spirit
Spirit is currently on a lot of cloth gear because it is considered a healing AND dps stat. We are changing it to just be a healing stat. There will still be a lot of it on leather though, just not every piece. Both Spirit and hit are the kind of thing you want enough of and no more than that. Since there won't be any buffs that boost hit or Spirit, you shouldn't often find yourself in excess. (Source)

[…] If we solve the Spirit -> hit conversion through a talent, it will be tacked on to an existing talent so that you aren't really paying for it. We like the talent approach more than a passive ability because the talents let you tell the game "I'm trying to be a caster, not a healer now."

I've read several players say that they like to reach their hit cap and then be done with it. But that doesn't really happen because every tier there is more and more hit on gear, forcing you to either swap out some of your excess hit or avoid the new stuff completely. The new model is more that all that extra hit on higher ilevel gear will have a use.

Plate / Cloth Armor differences
Plate will still possess much more armor than cloth, the difference just wont be as significant as it is now. (Source)

[…]  posted something similar in the Cataclysm forum, but let's look at actual numbers. A level 80 Prot warrior in Icecrown gear unbuffed has like 45,000 health and 30,000 armor. A level 80 mage in Icecrown gear unbuffed might have 20,000 health and 2000 armor. Yes, 2000 armor. We have a lot of room to narrow the gap a little. It's a big gap. (Source)

[…] Someone (Angua?) had a post awhile back that explained this using numbers. Cloth won't have as much armor as plate. But maybe it will have half as much armor as plate instead of one fifth as much armor as plate (or whatever the ratios end up being at higher levels).

Really, cloth isn't the issue, since cloth wearers have spells to buff their mitigation. Leather wearers are the ones who end up the most fragile. Mail would be bad too except that shaman can use shields when needed and hunters typically don't get hit by melee much. We just want to bring things a little closer to each other. It's easier to establish a baseline for how hard a particular attack should hit for when one dps spec isn't literally four times as survivable as another. (Source)

Tanking
Is threat fun?
When threat doesn't matter as a tank, then maximizing your rotation doesn't matter much either. To use the warrior example, you could skip Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam and just autoattack and use defensive cooldowns. Is that fun? On the other hand, many of the requests we see are for harder hitting attacks, especially on the AE front, so that in essence it's less work to tank multiple mobs at once. Is this really what you want?

I would assert in the current game that threat is almost never an issue. It might be an issue in the first few seconds of a fight (including when new adds join the party) or when the dps severely outgear the tank (such as in a Dungeon Finder situation). Especially in a world with Misdirect, Tricks of the Trade, and Tauntable bosses, tanks on single-target raid fights get so far ahead of the dps and healers, that catching them would be almost impossible. We could definitely tone this down a little such that tanks needed to fight for threat a little more than they do now. Some players would welcome that change and some would say that Blizzard hates tanks and makes them work too hard. (Source)

Tank specs in Cataclysm
Tanks will still be required to tank raids and I expect most heroics. You're not in any danger of being …

The most obvious question these changes raise is "Why are stats being changed, and why now?" As the game has matured, we've run into increasingly complex issues with the current stat system. Many stats are inherently confusing, and the way they interrelate can feel convoluted. Attack Power, for example, currently translates to damage, but so does Armor Penetration. Defense provides five different statistical benefits of varying utility. Mana regeneration involves understanding multiple stats and rules and often ends up being irrelevant anyway. In addition, the difference between a "good stat" for a class and a "bad stat" can be extreme. Some casters want Haste but not Crit; hunters want Armor Penetration but not Haste. There are other overarching issues, as well, such as Intellect not being very exciting for casters despite it being a core stat — and these are just a few examples.

Our ultimate goal is make gear a more interesting (and less confusing) choice by making each stat valuable to more players. While the reasoning behind some of the following changes may be clear, we understand that you may have questions about some of the less obvious alterations, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you may have here on the forums.

What You’ll See on Gear

Stamina – Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Spirit – Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.

Intellect – Intellect will now grant Spell Power (more on this below). Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.

Haste – Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you "do stuff" more often.

Block Rating – Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

Parry – Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

Mastery – This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It's directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.

Armor – The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

Resilience – This will only affect damage done by players and critical damage done by players. It will not impact crit chance, mana drains, or other such effects.

Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating – These will all still appear on gear as well. Aside from situations mentioned elsewhere in this list, in general these will function similarly to how they do now, though the details — such as how much Hit Rating you might need to effectively combat high-level creatures (more on this below) — are likely to change.

Being Removed from Items

Attack Power – This stat will no longer be present on most items as a flat value, though it will still show up on some process. Strength and Agility, which will be present on items, will grant the appropriate amount of Attack Power (generally 2 Attack Power per point of Strength or Agility) depending upon which stat a particular class favors. Agility may provide less Crit than it currently does.

Spell Power – Spell Power is another stat that you'll no longer see present on most items. Instead, as mentioned above, Intellect will grant Spell Power. One exception is that caster weapons will still have Spell Power. This allows us to make weapons proportionately more powerful for casters in the same way they are for melee classes.

Armor Penetration – This stat will no longer be present on items. Armor Penetration will still exist in talents and abilities.

Shield Block Value – This stat will no longer be present on items, since the amount blocked is always proportional to the amount of damage done. Talents and other effects might still modify the damage-reduction percentage from 30%, however.

Going Away Completely

MP5 – This stat will be removed from the game completely. Holy paladins and Restoration shaman will be redesigned to benefit from Spirit.

Defense – Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Spell Ranks – Spell ranks will cease to exist. All spells will have one rank and will scale appropriately with level. The levels at which you can learn certain spells are being changed in order to fill in some of the gaps, and we will be introducing some new spells to learn along the way as well.

Weapon Skill – This stat will be removed from the game completely. Classes will start with all the weapon skills they need to know and will not need to improve them.

What Else You Should Know

Combat ratings – All ratings will be much harder to "cap out" at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

Reforging – While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

Gems – We are changing the gem colors of a few stats as a result of these adjustments. For example, Hit is likely to be blue instead of yellow. We'll have more details on this in the future.

Changes to Existing Gear

As with previous expansions, we plan to roll out these changes and modify all existing gear shortly before Cataclysm launches, though it’s still too early to say exactly when. For the most part, the gear you have will still be good for you, though there will be exceptions, such as warriors using leather and mail armor.

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:

• No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
• No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
• You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
• Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

If you are a melee DPS class, druid tank, or hunter, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina. Bear-form Stamina scaling will be lowered as a result.
• Strength if you wear plate. Agility if you wear mail or leather.
• Existing Attack Power becomes Agility and Stamina.Armor Penetration becomes Haste or Crit.
• No Intellect on melee gear. Hunters won’t need Intellect since they will no longer use mana. Shaman and Retribution paladins will get mana and spell damage in other ways.

If you are a DPS caster, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina.
• All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• No Spirit. You won’t miss Spirit, though, because you won’t need it for DPS or mana regen.

If you are a healer, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina.
• All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• Spirit instead of MP…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack

This is still perpetrated by key loggers, and no method is always 100% secure.

We'd like to thank both of our developers for coming, and thank you all for joining us!

General
Q. Are there any plans for more weekly quests (not raid but general) for the weekend only players?
A. I like weekly quests, because they get you to come back to WoW without making you feel like you have to log in every single night. Sometimes Ghostcrawler likes to go to the bar instead.

Q. What happened to the advertised Dance Studio for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion?
A. It's still on the list! We always start an expansion with more than we can realistically do and then shuffle things up and down. WoW is one of those games you just never finish, which is overall a fun thing about working on it.

Q. What is the one thing you're the most proud of in regards to how the Wrath of the Lich King expansion went?
A. Questing in Northrend took on a whole new meaning. I can’t wait for people to see what we have in store for Cataclysm!
A#2. It had a really strong theme with the frozen north and you knew from the beginning that a final showdown with you-know-who was coming at the end. One of the challenges of Cataclysm is not having that really focused theme (cold undead) but Cataclysm still has a great story mind you.

Q. Is there any chance that tabards will eventually get their own tab on the character screen (a la pets/mounts)?
A. Tabard storage is something we have been looking into for the last couple weeks. Hopefully we will be able to get this done for Cataclysm. No promises though.

Q. Will you give us more bag/bank slots and make us able to carry more bags at a time if i say please?
A. We will have larger bags in Cataclysm for sure. The real question is will you buy them from Haris Pilton?

Q. Are there any plans to implement cross-faction/cross-realm mail(for BoA gear and such)?
A. We have cross-faction mail for BoA items now; cross-realm is a work in progress, but we hope to have it done “soon."

Q. Are we ever going to be able to get Frostmourne?
A. Not in game, but you can order a real one!

Classes
Q. Does Blizzard have any plans to give healers "fun" procs and on-use effects, like DPS have been getting lately?
A. Yes. Healer procs are trickier to design though to make sure they aren't wasted. Damage is rarely wasted so it's a bit easier to design.

Death Knight
Q. Two-handed (2H) frost death knights was a really fun playstyle that died when dual-wielding (DW) was introduced. Are there any plans to make using two-handed weapons more appealing?
A. We can't make every death knight tree PvP, PvE and tanking viable and also offer both 2H and DW options for all three of those. We are currently designing Frost as a DW-only tree.

Druid
Q. Is there any ETA on tree / moonkin form graphical update?
A. Moonkin is hard because Moonkin players are so in love with that form. It's tough to change it at all. We currently hope to do a new tree form for Cataclysm, but no promises.

Q. Has there been any thought of changing Eclipse to charges so that Moonkin dps doesn't suffer so much from moving?
A. Yes. Expect a major overhaul in Cataclysm that keeps the same basic idea (alternating from Arcane to Nature) but in a way that is more core to the class. Like everything though, there is the risk that we may decide this idea sucks once we see it in action.

Hunter
Q. The Hunter class has many odd and situational abilities such as Mongoose Bite and Aspect of the Beast – are there any plans for changes to these types of abilities?
A. Mongoose Bite is most likely a goner. Let us weep. We think Aspect of the Beast could have some cool uses for Beastmaster hunters.

Q. Are hunters likely to see more stable slots for their pets in the future? With the current variety of pets, the amount they have right now seems too small.
A. Arm-waving here, but a model I would love to see is dramatically expanded slots (so you can store all those Spirit Beasts) but have a smaller number of "active" pets, like 3. You could summon an active pet from anywhere in the world, when outside of combat. You would swap a pet from active to the stable at the Stable Masters.

Paladin
Q. Is there any info you can share on future plans for holy paladins?
A. I hear they need more healing spells.

Priest
Q. Will there be any upcoming changes to shadow priest anytime soon?
A. We're pretty happy with them currently in Icecrown and PvP. Long term they have some things we want to address, such as having long ramp-up time even on easy mobs when leveling or handling large groups. They also get really punished from school lockout.

Warlock
Q. Are there any updates on the changes for Warlock soul shard mechanics?
A. We've implemented much of what we've discussed at Blizzcon: shards are a UI element instead of an item. You use them frequently, but for great effect. They are all for damage. Summoning and pets just cost mana. I think you'll finally like shards.

Raids & Dungeons
Q. Is the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter a deliberate move towards making WoW more “fun & interesting” for healers? Will we see more encounters like this?
A. We want to make healing more fun, yes. Part of that is letting healers use their whole repetoire instead of just their best spells. Part of it is trying to get healers to look at the battlefield a little more and unit frames a little less, that of course means a little more time in between spamming heals so you can do stuff like that.

Q. What have you learned from this expansion’s emblem system?
A. Having that many different kind of emblems is overwhelming. In hindsight, we wish we had done maybe 2 emblems: the current tier and the previous tier (Frost and Triumph at the moment). They also felt a tad too grindy when 3.3 first came out before all of the sources of emblems were available.

Q. With Illidan you removed attunement to give players more accessibility to the instance, so why have you limited pre-Ulduar geared players from using the Dungeon Finder to enter the new 5-player dungeons that were released in patch 3.3?
A. We feel like players using Dungeon Finder need some reasonable guarantee that the other players they get grouped with are going to be able to pull their weight. We don't yet have a robust system for tracking that other than gear. Gear obviously has its problems though, so we'll be looking at smarter ways to do it in the future.

A#2. Gear requirements are a way for us to help players have an experience that is more in line with their skill level. We would much rather you not be able to get into the instance than to have you get in there with a group and find out that you can’t even tank the first boss. Gear requirements are not locked in stone either — we are updating these as we see fit.

Q. You talk a lot about changing how we heal tanks, but will aggro ever come back as a challenging part of the game?
A. Not sure. This is something we discuss a lot. I even had a meeting on it this week! On the one hand, some tanks really felt like the way to distinguish themselves was to generate maximum threat per second. On the other hand, threat is a pretty invisibile part of the game (it's limited to the UI at best), and I know when I tank that I always feel pretty emasculated when someone actually pulls off of me. It's challenging, but is it really fun? This is the kind of thing we'd love to get more feedback on.

Please include your feedback on large banners to be shown in the background during the Olympics. Failing that, the forums would work too.

Q. How do you feel about the limited attempts mechanic that has been use in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel?
A. We're not crazy about how they worked out. They were designed in essence to save players from themselves. In the past, some people would make 400+ attempts on new bosses. That's not healthy and at some point you're not measuring skill but tenacity. Yet, that's not what happened. Guilds just made alts to get around the limitations, and things like disconnects and accidents make losing an attempt really frustrating. We like gating because if nothing else it lets the community focus on more than just the final boss in the zone. If we do limited attempts again it would probably be limited to optional bosses like Algalon.

Q. Are there any plans to allow cross-realm raiding?
A. If we can solve the problems with it, we might give it a try. One of the problems is getting the group back together, especially on the longer instances. Loot drama and stuff like that is always a problem. There is also the ongoing concern about the concept of your realm having le…

Check out BlizzCast 13 now: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/community/blizzcast/archive/episode13.html?rhtml=y

Ever wanted to Pwn a Blizzard employee in WoW PvP? Now's your chance because tomorrow from 4:00PM to 6:30PM (PST) a few of us will be queuing up for BGs via the new Random Battleground Finder on the US realms! Bring your main/alt/premade and show us what you got!

What: Random Battleground Finder
Who: Blizzard Community Team and Blizzard QA
Place: US Servers Broxigar and Anasterian
Time: 4:30 – 6:30 PST
Date: 2-26-2010

(Note: Time/Event is subject to change.)

We like Arena. It isn't going anywhere. We just want to reserve it for people who actually like it, not for those who feel like they have to do it. (Source)

AE Healing
True, but many of those spells require targeting. Even PoH requires targeting. I'm not a big fan of the way Wild Growth has turned out either, but at least its hot prevents it from being the "nobody dies from AE" spell. Again, they are good spells, and they have their place. I wish there was more of a decision of when to use them instead of always on cooldown. I realize part of that is encounter design. Part of it may be that they are still too good. (But we aren't nerfing them anytime soon.) (Source)

Mana management and encounters difficulty
Fights are designed to be hard (to a degree). If you have a proposal for how they can be hard in a different vector, please share. Running OOM is a tool that we lost and want to regain, but I suspect that will lead to a lot of "Healing isn't fun anymore" responses. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rake Bug
Right. It's possible that there is server – client disagreement (because of lag) about what's going on, so that you think you can reapply Rake (because it has fallen off) but get the "more powerful aura" error instead.

We did have a similar problem with Immolate at some point, but we fixed it by letting you clip that last tick. I don't think you would want that with Rake because it would be a dps loss when that happened. (Source)

Nature's Grasp in 3.3.3
That's a bug. You can only cast one Entangling Roots. You can proc the roots on 3 targets with Nature's Grasp. […] They are two different spells that just look alike.

There is a small ICD to keep a rogue from blowing through all 3 charges quickly. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Lightwell
Lightwell isn't okay either. We don't want to turn it into a totem, because the class already has plenty of spells that require little interaction. We're not entirely sure what we'll do yet, but we still like the basic idea (creating something and it does the healing) so we aren't going to just scrap it. (Source)

Questions will be taken live through Twitter, so be sure to sign up for a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/signup and follow account @Warcraft in order to participate!

To submit a question for the Developer Chat, please tweet using the #BlizzChat hashtag between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. PST on February 26. Due to the character limitation on responses within Twitter, all answers will be posted on the World of Warcraft forums in a dedicated thread.

Link to the last Developer Chat: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22418868790&sid=1

We're aware that this temporarily blocks some people from accessing the PTR. Please understand that we're working on getting this resolved in an upcoming PTR patch. (Source)

Top guilds and raid encounters difficulty
Players try to play that card a lot, that skill isn't a big deal because the mechanics are all pretty easy to understand, and therefore it's the class mechanics that are to blame, not the player. I don't buy it. I've seen the world first, or even server first kills of difficult bosses. Those players aren't just good, they are exceptionally good. They are probably ten times better than the guilds who get those kills a month or two later, and that's really no exaggeration. In fact, skill plays such a gigantic role that we have trouble balancing harder encounters. The skilled players can beat them without new gear while the second tier of players can never beat them. Now you can try to argue that all tanks are of about the same skill and it's the dps or healers that really make up the difference, but I don't buy that either. I've seen what the best tanks in the world do. They are really good. Don't dismiss them as being just lucky or dedicated. (Source)

Healers coordination
Now in general I wish there was a little more coordination among healers, but the current damage model we have just doesn't really allow it. I remember when tanking Molten Core, that the priest would say over vent "Big heal coming on the OT!" as he powered up a Greater Heal. You don't have that luxury these days. One of our designers was watching an old Illidan video recently and remarked how everyone was at 50% for so much of the fight. Now days someone is at 100%, will hit 100% in the next couple of GCDs, or will be dead. In that environment, you'd get "Big –" out of your mouth before it would be too late. Players need more health and heals have to be a little more expensive. (Source)

Tanking homogenization
There are extremes. One is just giving everyone say block and parry and Last Stand and Demo Shout because heck those are useful, and no doubt some players would be thrilled by that. The other extreme is to be so stubborn and so scared of homogenization that we never make a change. It doesn't surprise me at all that when a player finds his dude wanting, then looks around and sees a sexy ability or mechanic on another class that that grass can look awfully green. I'm just pointing out that homogenization is often our very last solution when all else has failed.

A great deal of WoW's depth is because of the differences among the classes and among the various talent trees. We think it contributes to players not getting bored. We think it contributes to rerolling, perhaps trying another class when you get burned out instead of walking away from the game. It was cool for me the first time I healed a Feral druid in UBRS (if you're still playing, you rocked by the way) because she tanked things differently and I had to heal her differently. I felt like I was discovering something new in the game. I would have been sad if someone had pointed out, Ghost, dude, that was just bear art. Mechanically, she was blocking and Sundering (this was pre Devastate) and basically being a warrior.

Resisting homogenization may not be important to you, but it is very important to us. Understand the huge mountain you have to climb whenever you're asking us to put those concerns aside. You're thinking about how to make your character a better tank. We're thinking about how to keep this game popular for five more years, or even longer. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Icy Talons changes clarifications
You put 5 points in Icy Talons. While fighting (and applying Frost Fever), you swing 20% faster. If you have talented Windfury Totem on you, you swing a total of 40% faster.

You now put a 6th point in Improved Icy Talons as well. You have a passive personal 25% haste at all times. When you engage in combat and apply Frost Fever, you now have 45% melee haste. If you have Windfury also, you still only have 45% haste since Windfury and Improved Icy Talons are exclusive.

This is basically a 20% haste buff to any DK who has Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons. (Source)

Will of the Necropolis Buff
As I've said several times now, the Will of the Necropolis change wasn't an "OMG DKs are vanishing – let's buff" decision. A couple of designers looked at the cooldown, evaluated how often it really mattered, concluded not often, and thought the ability would be simpler to understand, less frustrating, and perhaps a small DK buff without the cooldown. The paladin and warrior health adjustments were a result of seeing progression on hard mode encounters, where bosses tend to melee for a lot all the time so health might trump cooldowns. Neither of them were huge changes and you can make the argument that things might have been fine without the changes at all. We thought a small adjustment was appropriate. I concede that these things are often subjective and others might have made a different call than we made. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Starfall Buff
The Starfall change is difficult to patch note because of the nature of the spell, but I'll share the numbers so that the theorycrafters among you can plug them in. It's a significant boost to the spell's damage.

Initially, we had designed the spell to be more AE focused, but that hasn't been super useful for a class that also has Hurricane. Rather than adding another nuke we thought it made more sense to make the 51 pointer something that really delivers on damage. Yes it can be countered. PvP is designed with the intent that things can be countered.

Main shot
Base points 432 -> 562
Coefficient 0.21 -> 0.37

Splash damage
Base points 77 -> 100
Coefficient 0.12 -> 0.13 (Source)

[…] I think I figured out how you all are calculating the coefficient, so maybe this will make more sense. Again, I'm not 100% sure we're speaking the same language here. If I have time, maybe I will just log in with a moonkin and compare the before and after and post numbers.

Main star
Old coefficient: 4.8%
New coefficient: 37%

Splash damage
Old coefficient: 1.2%
New coefficient: 13%

As I said, these numbers are very generous. If Balance druids melt the world we may have to back off of them. (Source)

Nature's Grasp Buff
Nature's Grasp is a self buff that causes things that hit you to become rooted. That effect now has 3 charges. There is a small internal cooldown in between roots to keep say a rogue who hits you twice very quickly from wasting two charges. In your example, both the DK and pet should get rooted. If the DK breaks the roots and gets on you again, they will get rooted again (subject to the 45 sec duration).

The intent of this spell was to be a defensive tool for druids. Since it hasn't quite kept up, we wanted to try to get it to be more useful (i.e. do its job) rather than come up with an entirely new mechanic.

[…]  The DR hasn't changed. I would suggest go trying it out if you aren't sure how it works. ([url=http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/23425763051-n…

• Gnomeregan Pride – Transform into Gnomeregan Infantry.
• Darkspear Pride – Transform into a Darkspear Warrior.

Achievements

• Zalazane's Fall – You assisted Vol'jin in the final defeat of Zalazane, recapturing the Echo Isles for the Darkspear trolls.

Tracking Stats (These stats will most likely be used internally to identify "bad" players)

• Kicked in LFG (follower) (hidden) – Number of times the player kicked someone in LFG, voting, but not initiating
• Kicked in LFG (target) (hidden) – Number of times the player has been kicked by someone in LFG
• Kicked in LFG (initiator) (hidden) – Number of times the player kicked someone in LFG, initiating the kick
• Abandoned LFG (hidden) – Number of times the player abandoned an LFG dungeon
• Completed LFG (hidden) – Number of times the player completed an LFG dungeon

Companion Pets

• Celestial Dragon – Summons or dismisses a Celestial Dragon. (Screenshot)

Mounts

• Celestial Steed – Summons and dismisses a Celestial Steed.  This mount changes depending on your Riding skill and location. (Note: I don't think the model is in the patch file yet)
• Frosty Flying Carpet – Summons and dismisses a Frosty Flying Carpet.  This is a very fast rug.  Can only be used in Outland and Northrend.  Requires 425 skill in tailoring to ride.

Interface

• CHAR_LOGIN_LOCKED_BY_MOBILE_AH = "You cannot log in while using the mobile or web auction house.";

Jewelcrafting

• Icy Prism now requires Frozen Orb, Chalcedony x 1 (Down from 3), Shadow Crystal x 1 (Down from 3), Dark Jade x 1 (Down from 3)
• Intricate Bone Figurine (Daily Quest) – Craft an Intricate Bone Figurine by combining the Proto Dragon Bone with a Sun Crystal and a Dark Jade. (Old – Chalcedony + Dark Jade)

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Frost

• Chains of Ice now infects the target with Frost Fever.

Unholy

• Unholy Blight now prevents any diseases on the victim from being dispelled.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Chains of Ice – Your Chains of Ice also causes 144 to 156 Frost damage, increased by your attack power.

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Balance

• Typhoon mana cost has been reduced from 32% of base mana to 25% of base mana.
• Starfall damage has been increased. Now causes 563 to 653 Arcane damage (Up from 433 to 503) and 101 Arcane damage (Up from 78) to all other enemies within 5 yards.

Mage (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Fire

• Combustion cooldown has been reduced from 3 min to 2 min.
• Burning Soul now reduces the threat caused by Fire spells by 10/20%. (Up from 5/10%)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Subtlety

• Slaughter from the Shadows now also increases all damage done by 1/2/3/4/5%.
• Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown by 5/10 sec and energy cost by 5/10 of your Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 3 min. /
• Waylay now affects your Ambush and Backstab hits (Old – Only Ambush critical hits). Movement speed bonus reduced from 70% to 50%.
• Hemorrhage now deals 160% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.
• Ghostly Strike now deals 180% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.

Tier 8

• Item – Rogue T8 4P Bonus – Increases the damage done by your Rupture by 20%. (Old – The damage dealt by your Rupture can now be critical strikes.)

Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Glyphs

• Glyph of Flame Shock – Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Flame Shock periodic damage by 60%.

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Demonology

• Demonic Pact's effect now has a 20 sec cooldown.

• Players must use the Dungeon Finder or speak to special holiday NPCs in the world to queue up and access these bosses.
• Upon accepting a queue for any holiday boss, the party will be ported directly to the necessary area for confronting that boss.
• The previous summoning criteria for these bosses have been removed. Players can queue up for and fight each World Event boss as many times as they want for any standard loot that they may drop.
• All rare holiday items (such as The Horseman's Reins) will have a chance of being found in holiday-themed loot troves which will drop once for each player in the party no more than once per day, in the same manner that doing the Random Dungeon daily quest will provide a specific reward the first time it is completed in a day.

Companion Pets

• The Pet Bombling and Lil' Smoky non-combat pets are no longer Bind-on-Pickup.

Death Knight (Forums / Talent Calculator)

• Chains of Ice: The ability now innately applies Frost Fever to a target.

Frost

• Icy Talons: The personal haste benefit provided by this talent is no longer exclusive with other sources of melee haste. This will allow de…