We addressed our views on dungeon difficulty several weeks ago, and in the interim many players have asked for us to comment on raid difficulty.

I chose to use the word “progress” in the title for this blog quite intentionally. We think progression is the key to players having fun. When groups stop making progress, the members get frustrated. When individuals feel like they are stuck, that’s when they start to lose interest. I don’t think it strictly has to do with the flow of loot being shut off. A big part of it is the sense that as you climb up that mountain, you are getting closer and closer to the summit instead of just sliding back down to base camp at the end of each day.

Let’s consider two extremes. If you complete the raid content very quickly and have Sinestra on farm and everyone has acquired their best in slot items, then you’re probably ready to take a break from raiding. If you worked really hard to get to that point, as many of the current “finished” guilds did, then you’re probably pretty happy about resting until Firelands becomes available. However, if that break point happens too soon, too easily, for too many guilds, then the raiding game can feel empty. Players run out of content before they are ready to run out of content, if that makes sense. Now let’s consider the other extreme, where a guild just has no realistic chance of ever beating a boss. This can be particularly demoralizing if it’s the first boss, but it can happen at any time. That guild might not feel like they are making progress. Many guilds are willing to put in a few weeks trying to master a new encounter, but if it gets to the point where they are wiping for months, there’s a good chance they’ll start to see burnout and thinning ranks. The sweet spot in raid balance for us to hit is that everyone feels like they can still make progress. Content that is too hard or too easy doesn’t meet that goal.

Raid encounters, to some extent, nerf themselves. This is because every week, the raid members acquire more and more gear. Secondarily, the community acquires more and more knowledge and experience, which translates into better videos, strategy guides, or even UI mods, as well as just more players who have experienced the encounters firsthand. Each week that you are able to kill any bosses, your group’s gear improves overall, through Valor points if nothing else. When Firelands is available, everyone’s gear will quickly take a step up in quality. This will give you an even better chance to beat those bosses that are blocking you now. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some guilds try the first few Firelands bosses one night, while using the next night to go back to get the head and chests from Nef and Cho’gall in order to complete their set bonuses, that is until acquiring new set bonuses becomes feasible. On some bosses, though, better armor and weapons may not be enough because some mechanics just can’t easily be outgeared. To mitigate that problem, our tendency is to nerf content over time just to make sure a wide variety of players see it. The trailblazers get to see the fights before anyone else, but we don’t lock the dungeon door behind them.

Having said all of that, there are some encounters that still need adjustment. Heroic 10-player modes can often be the hardest to balance, because those groups just don’t have access to the sheer number of tools in one group that the larger raids have. You’ve probably seen some hotfixes go out recently and we might make more adjustments in 4.1. We’ll continue to monitor progress and make adjustments when we feel the time is right.

Overall, we are pretty happy with our current raid balance. Most guilds that are trying seem to be making some progress. On some realms, we’re seeing pickup groups for at least the earlier bosses, which seems appropriate for where we are in the content cycle. The Heroic versions are particularly challenging, though even in that case, there is a gradient with easier and very difficult bosses. For those of you who feel like you are stuck on progression, we’d like to hear more about why. Are you trying to PUG the encounters? Do you have a very casual guild with a lot of different players each night? Is the problem that you’re undergeared or that the mechanics are too unforgiving? What are the mechanics that are really hard for raid leadership to explain or even understand? Are your tanks exploding, or are your healers running out of mana, or are you failing the berserk timers? We have data on all of this, but it’s useful to hear it from your point of view as well. Remember, our goal is that you beat the fight because you understood the mechanics and executed your tanking, DPS, and healing around those constraints. If you’re just kind of powering through a boss ability or phase that you don’t really understand, then it’s going to be a lot harder for you. As always, feedback on which encounters you are enjoying and which ones you never want to see again is also appreciated, though we’ve gotten a lot of that already, and are designing your Firelands foes with that in mind.

P.S. I am as excited about the Firelands encounters as I am about the current ones. We can’t wait for you to wipe to them, er… see them.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer of World of Warcraft. He wipes to the elevator boss.

BlizzCon is a behind the scenes look into the development process. We offer that behind the scenes look because we know people enjoy being able to see our processes, and also hear about what we’re thinking about and planning. That comes with the hope that the information is indeed taken as we intend it, which is a candid look at our thoughts and processes. Not bullet points of finalized game features.

Unfortunately those candid thoughts and processes are sometimes interpreted as promises for the development of our games.

The reason we commonly do not discuss our plans until they’re in the process of being implemented, or actually complete, is exactly for that reason. BlizzCon is a huge exception to our rule, and while we’re not going to stop having BlizzCons and offering those behind the scenes looks for those in attendance who come to see exactly those things, it’s really unfortunate to see when they’re referenced as promises.

Hrm, I reckon it’s rewards that ruined world PvP. Everyone harkens back to TM/SS as the holy grail of world PvP, and that was before and maybe slightly after the honor system was implemented (but before real rewards existed from it). I think you can encourage world PvP all you want, and if there aren’t rewards behind it you’ll keep people interested for about as long as it takes them to realize there are other things to do that give real power increases. Why would anyone spend any amount of time just pushing back and forth for no reason when you can spend your time toward actual rewards and character improvement? Maybe there are some of you, but I guarantee it’d be short lived.

I mean shoot, you have Isle of Quel’Danas or even quest hubs in Cataclysm where people are literally forced together, and there’s complaints that they just want people to stop PvPing so they can get their stuff done so they can get their rewards. That’s kind of unfair because I know many did enjoy those situations, but somehow it never meets the awesomeness of TM/SS, and I reckon it just never could again.

The best I can think that you could do is create a specific world PvP zone where you don’t allow flying mounts, give some objective to tug-o-war over, and so you can justify giving some semi-meaningful rewards and keep people interested you’d need to find some way to even up the sides (because world PvP is inherently going to be unfair). I think you do all that and you probably have the best working solution for bringing back world PvP.

“If you want to do a paid name change, consider doing a recustomization instead. It’s only $5 more and you get to pick a different face! Character recustomization includes a name change as well. “

Submitted by: Pallydog

The Tip of the Day is a new feature on WoW Vault! Submit a tip and you could be on the front page!

Classes – General

• Several persistent ground effects now display different visuals for hostile and friendly players. The following spells have the same visual effects for friendly players, but new alternate visuals for hostile players: Ring of Frost, Consecration, Desecration, Wild Mushroom, Flare, Ice Trap, Power Word: Barrier, Smoke Bomb, and Hand of Gul’dan. As a general rule, the alternate effects have a red tint or hue indicating they are created by an enemy player.

Druids

• Efflorescence has been redesigned. It creates a healing zone at the feet of a Swiftmend target, but this healing zone now restores health equal to 4/8/12% of the amount healed by Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every 1 second for 7 seconds. This periodic effect now also benefits from spell haste, but the individual ticks cannot be critical effects. In addition, Living Seed is no longer a prerequisite talent for Efflorescence.

Mages

• Improved Arcane Explosion now also reduces the mana cost of Arcane Explosion by 25/50%.
• Ice Barrier base damage value has been increased by approximately 120%. In addition, the benefit from spell power has been increased by approximately 8%.
• Glyph of Frost Armor (new glyph): Frost Armor also causes the mage to regenerate 2% of maximum mana ever 5 seconds.

Warriors

• Colossus Smash now ignores 50% of a hostile player’s armor (PvP), but continues to ignore 100% of a non-player character’s armor (PvE).

Dungeons & Raids

• Blackwing Descent
  • Atramedes
    • Searing Flames now causes a 6-second cooldown on Modulation.
    • Searing Flames no longer increases Sound on players.
    • Players should no longer be able to avoid the first period damage tick of Searing Flame, and Searing Flame now ticks every 2 seconds. The damage of Searing Flame has been increased to compensate for it ticking less frequently.
  • Nefarian’s End
    • The damage of Shadowflame Barrage has been reduced by 15% (10-player normal and Heroic difficulty only).
    • The damage of Tail Lash has been reduced by 20% (10-player normal and Heroic difficulty only).
• Bastion of Twilight
  • Dragon Siblings
    • Blackout can now be dispelled on Heroic difficulty.
  • Cho’gall
    • The health of Blood of the Old God on 10-player Heroic difficulty has been lowered by roughly 20%.
    • The health of Darkened Creations on 10-player Heroic difficulty has been lowered by roughly 20%.
    • Corruption: Accelerated on 10-player Heroic difficulty has been lowered slightly.
    • Knockbacks and Deathgrip can now be used to interrupt players that are converted by Cho’gall.

We’re in the process of stepping up our detection and tracking to log and action players that are botting, or habitually AFKing in the Battlegrounds. We’ll be taking aggressive action and removing earned items, Honor Points, and ultimately suspending or even banning accounts of those that are found to be botting or habitually AFKing. It’s a sophisticated level of monitoring we’re undertaking. No one actively playing in the Battlegrounds normally should be concerned that they’ll be actioned.

“Stone Guard Towhide in the Gurubashi Arena gives a quick easy daily. You earn guild reputation and 9-16 gold depending on your level.”

Submitted by: Pallydog

The Tip of the Day is a new feature on WoW Vault! Submit a tip and you could be on the front page!

This is the sort of philosophy we’re going for with phasing, as we do feel it’s an important tool for storytelling. We do recognize issues where we’ve “over-phased” zones in the past though, and we generally tried to take a more minimal approach to phasing in Cataclysm. While there is still a good deal of phasing involved in many of the zones, we tried to make each phase a little more intricate and less intrusive on group gameplay. We want to make sure that, in times when a group is required, phasing doesn’t hold you back from grouping with friends.

(…) [Disappearing Herbs & Nodes] It is an issue we’re aware of and having been looking into. We’ve applied a number of hotfixes to phased gathering nodes since the release of Cataclysm, but this one is still there and is certainly a bugger.

Addon authors that use chat messages should check that their addons still work in 4.1

Authors will need to add calls to RegisterAddonMessagePrefix() in order to receive addon messages of a particular prefix, presumably during PLAYER_ENTERING_WORLD for the majority of addons. Note that this system errs on the side of sending too much; it is possible for addon messages to make it to the CHAT_MSG_ADDON handlers when no addon has registered it.

• RegisterAddonMessagePrefix( < string > )
  

  Returns a boolean if successful (could fail if it hits the client side limit of 512 prefixes).

• IsAddonMessagePrefixRegistered( < string > )
  

  Returns a Boolean if the prefix has been registered.

• < table > GetRegisteredAddonMessagePrefixes( < table > )
  

  Returns a table (or you can pass in a table), that will be filled in with all prefixes that were registered.

Prefixes are limited to 16 characters now, and they no longer take up a portion of the 256 character chat message limit. The server has a 64 prefix limit. If you exceed this limit your client will not filter any messages.

Also: SendAddonMessage() is now allowed for the OFFICER channel.

A developer working on a particularly awesome Firelands boss encounter today took me on a tour of the dungeon. I think you’ll find the layout to be a pleasant change of pace from winged dungeons. Many of the mechanics being worked on that I was shown were quite nifty as well. I’m really excited for this one.

“You can get Going Down and Backdoor Job achievements at the same time, either with a catapult or jumping off the ship, in Isle of Conquest if you click off the parachute before hitting the ground.”

Submitted by: PallyDog

The Tip of the Day is a new feature on WoW Vault! Submit a tip and you could be on the front page!

Ragnaros with legs!

1) Standing next to the full-sized, animated model will give you a very different perspective when you’re looking up from his toenail
2) Knowing that he will only come out of his lava pool to reveal his full figure in a Heroic-only phase of the fight will give you a bit more context

He’s not just going to be running around the moment every raid reaches him.

(…)This is sort of what I was getting at with my first point. The perspective is completely different when a player character is standing near him. The proportions were designed with that in mind, which is why the screenshot of the model really doesn’t do Ragnaros justice at all.

There isn’t a singular Blizzard Entertainment art team. Each franchise has its own art department. We don’t just pull resources from one project to give more attention to another in the sense you’re suggesting. This is why we have multiple development teams (which include art teams for each) and can work on multiple franchises simultaneously.

(…)That wasn’t at all the context of the post to which I was responded. That player was suggesting that a singular art team directs their attention away from WoW to work on art for our other games. That’s not true.

Now, if an individual person does move onto a new project, their position is filled. Therefore, the resources are still there (which is why I said “in the sense you’re suggesting”). This is how career advancement works at any company. How else do you account for a company’s growth? You bring in new talent (or move them up from within the company) and train them under the current folks so they can eventually fill the vacancy.

This talk about losing WoW developers, or that WoW is left to a “B team” is getting tiresome. There is no finite pool of talent and we have every intention of making sure WoW development remains very strong.

All of this is practically besides the point anyway. All you’ve been told is some talented people who helped build WoW into what it is today have moved over to another project to help bring it to fruition. You don’t know who those people are, what positions they held on the WoW team, or how many of them have moved onto other projects. Most of them, in fact, are programmers working to develop the systems and tech for a new project. And the programmers WoW has now are amazing. They’ve taken the original systems and improved upon them many times over.

Just as an example, think back to how slowly UI improvements would be implemented in vanilla and TBC. Now there are scores of great UI improvements nearly every patch. That team is incredible and very experienced. Just the same, the class design team has hardly changed in years, save for a couple of additions (read: not subtractions).

Every department at Blizzard has expanded immensely over the years to accommodate the growing playerbase, as well as our ambitions for the future of the company. You can look at our job opportunities page just to get an example for the talent search we have constantly going on.

Bringing in new talent and growing the company from within is far from a bad thing. It’s a great thing and has allowed us to develop several projects simultaneously without short-changing any of them. Anyone who says otherwise is working on an incredible amount of speculation and assumptions.

And even still, the WoW development leadership remains largely unchanged. Every time I stop by to chat with these people — the same people I’ve been interacting with for years now — I’m inspired by their creativity, their talent, and their dedication to making this game mega-awesomesauce.

There definitely is not a hard and fast rule about updating existing content. If we feel revamping existing content makes sense in the current state of the game and lore — and we think it will be fun — sure, it’s a possibility. You definitely shouldn’t expect this every patch though. In the grand scheme of World of Warcraft’s history, we’ve reintroduced very little existing content per patch and expansion.

(…)Is your definition of rehashed content deduced to the names of bosses being the same? There will always be recurring characters in World of Warcraft, as there is in any fantasy story telling.

These forums have always been about players talking to players. We don’t want to foster the expectation that it’s going to get a blue response if someone tries hard enough (lol I’m replying to a thread calling for a blue). While GC added a lot to these forums (and I say ‘these forums’ because he only posted in the North America forums) we think we can reach more players, particularly those in other regions, more directly through the blogs, or concerted Q&A’s. Blogs also tend to be a better medium for getting the message out there loud and clear, but does have downsides that it removes the conversation that we know is appreciated quite a bit.

While forum posts do lend themselves to that conversational approach, they actually have a lot of downsides to them from our perspective of attempting to get clear and clean information to the players. They aren’t very visible is really the first and maybe biggest problem. You can liken forum posts and the information given in them to some of the displeasure surrounding how hotfixes are communicated. I may reply to a thread 20 times and in my #13 reply I say something really important regarding class balance. Who is going to see that? How quickly will that knowledge actually permeate? Will the message be kept clear? Will my clarification in post #17 that explains what people are misunderstanding in #13 be seen by everyone that read #13? People tend not to read past the first blue post in a thread, or skip around and don’t read them all, so if you have a correction/addendum to the first post, or just expound upon a thought, it’s generally lost on the majority of readers. Blue trackers can help with this, but we’re generally not having to explain that “post #13 wasn’t the end of the thought and it’s being taken out of context” to people who just go to blue trackers. Forum posts also tend to be fairly quickly written by one of us without much in the way of peer-review, and anything written off-the-cuff like a reply to a thread can tend to be more precarious than a more substantive outlet that has an official process of review and correction before its posted (like the blogs). Much to the dismay of many forum goers I’m sure, there’s just an infinitely smaller chance we’ll say something stupid or mess up in a fully published blog post.

As with anything we do, we never believe we’re perfect. There’s always room to improve. The blogs may not be the best outlet but we’re continually working to improve upon the content we’re delivering, and have some pretty exciting stuff planned. We’re also working to make the comment system for the blogs a bit more like the forums so conversation can be held there more easily, as well. Of course you’ve no doubt see we’re running a recurring global Ask the Devs Q&A. It’s one way where we’re hoping to fill that gap of direct developer interaction that the blogs probably just can’t hit. We think the Q&A’s are going to be extremely popular and fill a big part of what made GC’s interactions on here so useful. And we’re going to continue collecting feedback and posting when appropriate, but we’ll also be trying to come up with additional ways to facilitate the communication between the developers and players.

Also GC wanted me to let you know: “It’s Dr. not Mr., get it right.”

(…) I appreciate everyone’s feedback, it’s actually been pretty helpful and I think we can incorporate more of what you’re looking to get out of the blog into future features.

The blog launching was really a shock to the system for us, and in many ways we’re still adapting to it and trying to find out how to best leverage it. But the world keeps turning and the tasks keep renewing themselves. We’re not going to stop though, and will hit all of our communication intentions one way or another.

General

• A dead player can now be resurrected by targeting them using the Party or Raid Frame even if they have released. No more hunting for corpses.

Druids

• Druids now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Tranquility.
• Malfurion’s Gift now reduces the cooldown of Tranquility by 2.5/5 minutes.
• The troll druid models for Flight Form and Swift Flight Form has slimmed down to be more in scale with other druid flight forms.

Hunters

• Bloodthirsty no longer generates Happiness.
• Carrion Feeder no longer restores Happiness.
• The Feed Pet ability now instantly heals 50% of the pet’s health. Cannot be used in combat. Requires diet-appropriate food.
• Guard Dog no longer causes Growl to generate additional Happiness.
• The Happiness/Pet Loyalty System has been removed. Hunters will no longer have to manage Happiness for their pets, and the previous damage bonus for pets being happy will now be baseline for all tamed pets.
• Glyph of Mend Pet is now Glyph of Greater Proportion, which increases the size of the pet slightly.
• Distracting Shot and Multi-Shot are now properly 40-yard range.
• Multi-Shot now properly has a 1-second global cooldown.

Mages

• Arcane Blast damage has been increased by 13%. In addition, the stacking effect of Arcane Blast now increases the damage done by Arcane Explosion, and Arcane Explosion does not consume that effect.
• Arcane Explosion damage has been increased by 13%.
• Arcane Missiles damage has been increased by 13%.
• Blizzard damage has been increased by 70%.
• Arcane Barrage damage has been increased by 13%.
• Combustion no longer has a global cooldown.

Paladins

• Righteous Fury now persists through death.
• Illuminated Healing shield duration is now 15 seconds, up from 8 seconds.

Priests

• Priests now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope.
• The direct damage portion of Holy Fire can now trigger Evangelism.
• Chakra now lasts until canceled, up from 1 minute.Surge of Light can now also trigger from Binding Heal.

Warlock

• Pets- Lash of Pain (Succubus) damage now scales with level, reducing the damage done at lower levels such that it will deal 50% damage at level 20, and 100% damage at level 80 and above.

Warrior

• Strikes of Opportunity value per point of mastery has been increased by 10%.

Dungeons & Raids

• The Dungeon Finder now attempts to avoid putting damage-dealing classes with the same armor type in a group.

PvP

• Arathi Basin – Flags should now cap in 7 seconds, down from 8.
• Battle for Gilneas – Flags should now cap in 7 seconds, down from 8.

 

Are you content with the power contained by DS? Right now, that ability accounts for our block and a portion of our armor. Is the design goal of blood to use DS over anything else?

Death Strike is a centerpiece of the Blood Deathknight arsenal. It’s your core strike, and we expect that’s where most of your runes go. Still, it’s easy to over-simplify the mitigation picture. Mitigation is always important for a tank, but its value also varies according to the scenario you’re facing. If you’re tanking a hard-hitting boss, or a pack of heavy-hitting lieutenant elites in a dungeon, then survival and minimizing damage are definitely top concerns, and Death Strike is crucial there. But there are plenty of tanking situations where you’re not in any danger of suddenly dropping dead from a huge damage spike. You might be rounding up loose mobs, for example, or trying to get very solid aggro on something that needs to be DPS’ed hard. In those cases, using other abilities might help you meet the objective more efficiently, and doing so involves making effective choices as the situation demands.
 Are you content with the timing constraints on a DK? Premature DS can mean a significant block loss, does the fact that DKs are using a mod to try to guess their shields match your goals? Do you feel that Blood has to pay an overly large amount of attention to their resources to maintain their mitigation?
We changed Blood Shield to stack cumulatively in 4.0.6 to help ease these constraints.

Are you content with the punishment for errors in the DK rotation? DKs that mis-spend a F/U rune are out a descent amount of mitigation. Do you envision mistakes costing DKs that much?

We’re okay with the way this works out. The deathknight class isn’t innately easy to play. We start them at high level and require players to have some familiarity with World of Warcraft (in the form of a higher level character) before they can make one. It’s not intended as a class for beginners. That said, while the best DK tank in the world can do some impressive things, we don’t expect every player to perform at that level to be a good tank. While it might be challenging to execute perfectly, the rotation is also reasonably forgiving, especially for heroic dungeons and normal raids.
 Applying diseases presents a clear danger when you do it by taking runes away from Death Strike, are you content with DKs actively striving not to put up diseases or striving to time them when there is a 0 second grace period?
Outbreak helps with this, and having diseases up helps with threat in general. On the other hand, if you’re specifically in a situation where you’ve got solid aggro on a mob and you only care about your survival, then it’s probably a good idea to prioritize Death Strike over disease reapplication. If you need to handle more than one creature, Pestilence can help by letting you use Blood runes to spread diseases.

Are you satisfied with the healing done by DKs? As it stands, DK overhealing increases with boss damage. DKs on hard modes are healing for about the same as DKs just starting in raids, is that satisfactory? Do you think this healing design will scale correctly into future tiers?

DK healing is intended to scale with incoming damage. A heroic raid boss hits much harder than a normal raid boss and the DK will accordingly self-heal more.

Are you content with the current clarity of DK design? Many Death Knights are literally playing the class incorrectly and have to use outside sources to learn how to get their mitigation up to par with other tanks.

As I mentioned earlier, playing a DK can ask a lot of the player. One thing that players new to DK tanking should watch out for is that you don’t always need to use Death Strike the instant that it cools down. Death Strike’s healing depends on damage recently taken, so it is more powerful when you’ve just taken a chunk of damage and not when you’re sitting at 99% health.

Are you satisfied with the signature strike (Heart Strike) being on such a low use priority?

Heart Strike a good use of Blood Runes in some situations, so it looks okay for now.

Are you content that DKs are willing to dump 5 talent points for lichborne? Are you content knowing that there is very little to do with the remaining 10 talent points after a DK finishes their talent tree?

There are plenty of utility choices available to DKs in all three trees. If DKs want to invest the talent points in Lichborne to help improve their survivability a bit, then that’s fine.

Are you content with RE and other quirky mechanics that DKs are working with? DKs are able to game RE procs by sitting on their blood runes, forcing additional FU runes for Death Strikes. This goes against the design of Blade Barrier, but more importantly is still more powerful.

We anticipated players sitting on some runes in order to make it more likely that runes they want get refreshed by Runic Empowerment. We don’t mind this behavior as a more advanced strategy.

Above all, are you content with the current DK QoL? DKs have been moaning and groaning about a number of things. Many are trivial. Many just want to be heard. Many don’t understand what they should be doing. Does the DK tank class feel polished and smooth to you?

We’re pretty happy with Blood tanking overall. Many of the recent changes in 4.0.6 were really just quality of life issues, not overhauls to the core design. The core of Cataclysm Blood design was to take more damage but offset that with more self-healing. That’s not an easy thing to balance, but we think the results have been good overall. We’re pleased to see Blood DKs out there successfully tanking all the content.

“Take a moment to fish the Shipwreck Debris pools in Tol Barad. You’ll fish up sealed crates which contain gold, volatiles, cloth, leather and other crafting materials! “

If you have the achievement you’ll keep the title. The Exalted worked differently because we wanted to move the title to a different achievement altogether (50 exalted).

In this case, if you have the achievement you’ll keep the title. If you’re close to getting the achievement, you might want to hurry and get it before 4.1 because after 4.1 you’d need to also gain the additional rep to meet the requirements, earn the achievement, and get the title.

Same as it was for Loremaster or Explorer, if you had the achievement you still have the achievement, even though the requirements changed.

March 1

PvP

• Flag carriers in rated Battlegrounds now take 25% more damage from all magical and physical attacks. The 25% additional damage from carrying the flag stacks with the Focus and Brutal Assault debuffs. Flag carriers in normal Battlegrounds are not affected by this change.

Quest & Creatures

• Tol Barad Peninsula
  • The quest “Walk A Mile In Their Shoes” has not always been correctly awarding players with quest credit after completing the escort event. This quest is being temporarily disabled and removed from the achievement criteria for Just Another Day in Tol Barad. This fix will require a realm restart to take effect.

  

“Looking for a way to make a quick bit of gold? Be sure to check the leather section of your local Auction House. Sometimes you can purchase a lower level bit of leather, turn it into a higher level piece of leather and sell it for a profit.”

Submitted by: Manomotes of Hellscream

February 25

Dungeons & Raids

• Bastion of Twilight
  • Blackout will no longer hit players sent down to the Twilight Zone by either Valiona or Theralion.
  • Collapsing Twilight Portal should no longer close faster when a person uses it while on Heroic difficulty. It now has a set duration.
  • Devouring flame maximum damage has been reduced.
  • Theralion’s damage should now be more consistent with Valiona’s on 10-player Heroic difficulty.
  • Twilight Blast damage has been reduced on 10-player Heroic difficulty.
  • Twilight Protection now lasts 6 seconds, up from 3.
  • Players should now always receive the Twilight Protection buff when entering the Twilight Realm.
  • Twilight Sentries have slightly lower health on 10-player Heroic difficulty.
  • Twilight Zone damage has been lowered slightly.
  • Unstable Twilight’s search effect has been lowered to a 1-yard radius, down from 2.

PvP

• Players in Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks who are Neutral with the associated factions should no longer experience issues resurrecting at the appropriate graveyards.

We’re making a number of hotfixes to address use of the Dungeon Finder and vote kick tools. The following hotfixes will require realm restarts to implement, which are likely to be next Tuesday’s weekly maintenance.

 

 

 

• Players who are outside a dungeon for more than a few minutes are now immediately able to be kicked.
• If queuing as a group with a tank or healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) soon after joining, those that queued with them will also be removed from the dungeon.
• If three or more players group queue with each other it will require an additional vote for them to kick anyone they did not group queue with.
• If a group queue of 4 kicks the one person that they did not group queue with they will each receive a more severe penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.
• If someone initiates a vote kick for someone they group queued with they will not incur a penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.

With these changes we hope to reduce some undesirable behavior and annoyances, and encourage greater patience when using the Dungeon Finder. In addition, keep in mind that both initiating and agreeing to vote kick have always carried the same weight to your ability to kick in the future. It’s always best to save your votes for when it really counts to ensure your ability to kick is available when it does.

We’ll of course be watching how these changes work to improve these systems, and always appreciate your feedback.

As these and other hotfixes are implemented, they’ll be added to the hotfix blog – http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2259389#blog