Category: wow news

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…

Mastery System and PvP Balance
First, it's a powerful new tool, but it's by no means the only tool in the toolbox.

Second, higher health pools and survivability relative to damage means damage output won't be balanced on the same razor edge in Cataclysm as it is now. When increasing damage by 5% means you knock off 90% of a health pool in five seconds instead of 86%, that's pretty risky. When it means you knock off 40% of a health pool instead of 38%, that's not a real big balance changer. Numbers made up, but that's the general principle.

Third, a greater focus on large-scale PvP will also probably help moderate the effects of changes like this.
This.

Pretty sure PvP gear will have mastery.
And this. (Source)

Tanking is (not) hard!
'm just reading a lot of "tanking is so hard" threads, and A) we don't really agree, and B) if it's any less challenging I fear a lot of tanks may get bored and move on to other classes. There are some annoying parts of tanking we need to fix, and we definitely want to fix the threat scaling problem and any major disparities in AE tanking. But if you're looking for an experience even easier than tanking Naxx, I'm not quite sure how to provide that given my A and B above. (Source)

Faction equality on servers
The average alliance to horde ratio for Trollbane is 1.08:1. That doesn't take into account things like player participation, character level, interest in certain activities such as world PvP, etc. but the actual ratio is pretty much even.

We do what we can to encourage faction equality though. If any situations arise that require our intervention we do so. We've had realm transfers that only allow one faction to move, we've shut down character creation for a single faction. We have methods to help balance realms or even battlegroups and we do use them, for all US realms at current and especially in this case though I wouldn't characterize it as needing that level of intervention. (Source)

Arena Tournament in Europe
We will very soon be opening registration to a brand-new service for players with a European World of Warcraft account. The Arena Pass 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 PVP gear of their choosing, including the latest Wrathful Gladiator Season 8 items.

Successful teams will be rewarded! Face enough challengers and you will receive the Murkimus pet, which can be shared with all other characters on your World of Warcraft account. The very best teams will also receive the exclusive Vanquisher title, which can be shared with your high-level characters. All will know of your mighty achievements!

Stay tuned for more information, including pricing, availability and other details, later this week! (Source)

Upgrading the original backpack
We think about this one all the time, be it an upgrade to the backpack, or making it replaceable by larger bags. We'd just have to be careful to not make it possible to have no bags equipped at any given time, because that would get messy. No guarantees on this one, but do know we're considering it. (Source)

Celestial Steed scaling
We acknowledge that the Celestial Steed can seem a little out of proportion when especially some of the bulkier races are riding it, and this is something that is being looked into. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
AE Tanking in Cataclysm
I didn't mean to imply that blowing Intimidating Shout is a swell idea on every AE pull. The context was a scenario that apparently comes up all the time where the warrior has recently used Thunder Clap and Shockwave and a whole lot of Morogrim-style adds pour into the room, leaving the hapless warrior without an AE button to push and solve the whole problem. I was pointing out that there are a lot of things you can do in that situation. Yes, if someone is about to die and you can't wait for Thunder Clap to come back up, then by all means use Intimidating Shout. That's what it's there for.

We're just not crazy about the sound of any of these ideas that have the warrior able to use Thunder Clap and have it tick away on the mobs or on the ground to make sure things will stick to you no matter what.

Warriors tanked for years without Shockwave and with a pretty wimpy Thunder Clap that only hit four adds. Yet, they still managed to handle a variety of fights, including this staggered adds situation that is the current hot topic button for this forum. I played a warrior tank a lot in that time period, and yeah, sometimes you lost aggro and sometimes you wiped. It's a lot easier today. I'm not trying to use one of these "back in my day, we tanked uphill in the snow" arguments, but I am trying to get a sense for how easy you really want tanking to be and still have fun doing it.

(Again, I'm totally bought into the argument that AE tanking on live may not be as easy for warriors as paladins and druids. I'm trying to establish how AE tanking should feel in an absolute, not a relative sense.) (Source)